The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  “I’m hot,” he said.

  Ania’s hands began to shake, and she held them near her mouth. She began to feel hot, too, breathing into the cotton mask.

  “It’s Mama,” she repeated. “It’s Mama.”

  A little before six that evening they made her leave him. Outside Teddy’s room, Ania took off the mask and gown and adjusted her blouse, one that was a Christmas gift from Charlie a few years back. She thought of that morning, of Charlie’s generosity, as she rode the bus home. There, she saw that he had earlier come for his things, stayed a night or two, then left not to return. He had eaten in the kitchen and washed his plate, fork, and knife and set them in the dish rack. She could tell he had slept in their bed, because the sheets were pulled and tucked tighter than she had ever managed. He had taken clothes from the closet and a pillow from the sofa, and her favorite of Teddy’s picture books, about a dog that runs away from home. Also, Ania’s hairbrush was missing.

  The landlord, fearing German bombs, had painted all the building’s window glass black. Ania kept the windows shut, living in shadow, listening in anger to the neighborhood’s sounds: hide-and-seek, kick the can, stickball; a cat in heat; a fruit peddler calling out “Peaches!” Afternoons, she visited Teddy. Always she took care to leave him before supper because the nurses told her that was when Charlie stopped by, and Ania feared seeing her husband, though she thought of him often. She imagined him in a two-room apartment somewhere in the city, eating bread and cheese for dinner. She remembered the photograph of the christening, his arm around her back, and tried to remember how it felt—his touch. She came to regret the emptiness of the apartment, especially during the silent, wakeful nights when she lay in bed and relived what they had called the greatest show on earth, saw again the smiling, painted faces of the clowns who, armed with water buckets, shouted and waved, forever laughing at the flames.

  On a Wednesday afternoon two weeks after Ania left the hospital, she heard a car pull to the curb, then listened to its engine shut down and the parking brake grind. She didn’t leave the couch, not even when the hinges on the downstairs door creaked. No voices, but they were women—Ania could hear high heels clicking at the bottom of the stairwell. She reached for her scarf and opened the door before they could knock. The women fluttered at first like chickadees, their long eyelashes batting, their heads twitching this direction then that—except for Mrs. Patterson, who stood near the back looking at the floor as if she had just misplaced an earring.

  Mrs. Griswold, Mrs. Mawson, Mrs. Bartlett, Mrs. Thompson—the women from Walbridge Road. The brightness of their summer dresses and of the white beads on their purses lit the hallway so that its wood looked poorer, its floor dustier, its wallpaper dirtier. Mrs. Griswold, at the front, offered Ania her hand, rainbow-colored bracelets bunched at her plump wrist.

  “We’re oh so sorry,” she said.

  Ania invited the women in. All passed her quickly and sat—except Mrs. Patterson, who stopped to lay a gentle, cold hand on Ania’s elbow, and whose mouth grew smaller with concern until her red lips formed a carnation.

  Ania found another chair for Mrs. Patterson, then switched on a lamp. She fetched ashtrays for Mrs. Mawson and Mrs. Griswold, offered coffee or lemonade and apologized that there was no food. The women assured her that having refreshments for guests should be the last thing on her mind, that it was presumptuous of them, really, to drop in unannounced—and then the women fell silent. They drank and smoked as if they had done something wrong or were witness to something they ought not see. Ania leaned against a radiator near a window, adjusting her robe to cover more, to hide. Their timidity made her nervous.

  “Dear,” said Mrs. Griswold, “how is your Tommy?”

  Mrs. Patterson whispered, “It’s Teddy, Katherine.”

  Ania smiled. He came to her, not as a picture, but as a memory of touch. She could feel him in her arms, his slender hand nesting in hers, his weight in her lap, his body growing breath by breath.

  “Some days he is better. Others, he is not.”

  “Such a dreadful day that was,” said Mrs. Thompson. “So many died.”

  “All those children,” said Mrs. Patterson, softly.

  “You’re fortunate, Ania, you really are,” said Mrs. Griswold. “It’s a blessing you and Teddy survived.”

  Ania rubbed her hands together, the left caressing the scar on the right, and tried not to smile. Such a silly woman, Mrs. Griswold. No one in the tent was blessed, except maybe the dead.

  When the women declined more lemonade, Ania collected the glasses, each stained with lipstick. “I’ll help,” Mrs. Patterson said, though Ania had all the glasses in hand. The other women remained behind, not speaking.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Patterson stood next to the sink basin. Her eyes, shadowed blue, shone from her face with such intensity that Ania wanted to look away but couldn’t. “There’s a check in my pocketbook,” Mrs. Patterson said. “It’s pay for the month and a half that you’ve missed, as well as pay for one month more.”

  “Your homes must need cleaning.”

  “There’s a nice Hungarian woman,” Mrs. Patterson said, watching as Ania rinsed the glasses. “She has four boys—older—and all live at home. She does good work. It will be difficult to let her go. But we’ve decided—all of us—when you want to come back, Ania, the jobs are yours. Of course.”

  Ania thanked Mrs. Patterson, then laughed without meaning to, without knowing why, and said, “I stole the circus tickets from your desk.”

  “Oh, dear, I know!” Mrs. Patterson said, panic in her eyes. “I should have given them to you. There you were, with poor Teddy, in my house, like a member of the family, and I didn’t even think to … and that night, when I counted the tickets—then I heard about the fire. Oh, Ania, I was so afraid.”

  Mrs. Patterson tinkered with the clasp on her purse, her hands shaking and the clasp resisting her. She pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes, which had been stained by leaking mascara. “If you need a loan—anything, really—of course you can ask me,” she said. “Ask me for anything. Oh, I hate this.”

  When the two left the kitchen, the other women already stood by the door, and on the coffee table sat a small of collection of checks. Mrs. Patterson finally managed the clasp of her purse, pulled out her check, and set it atop the rest. Mrs. Griswold sniffed and touched a kerchief to her nose. Mrs. Thompson stood at the door with her hand on the knob.

  Mrs. Patterson looked down before offering a hand to Ania, reaching toward the hand without scars.

  “You telephone if you need anything,” she said. “Anything at all.”

  As Ania closed the door on the women, as their automobile choked to life, she remembered Mrs. Patterson’s touch, its mercy, its selflessness, its insufficiency. She wandered past Teddy’s room, the bedcovers neat, the sheets unchanged for so long; and then to the bedroom where she slept alone, and she paused before the half-moon table, its candles filmed with dust, the icon still beckoning. Ania turned from it, wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed. She felt nothing. But her flesh was healed; her skin longed once more for contact, for sensation, for texture, for a warmth that would not burn.

  “An astringent,” said Mrs. Patterson, wiping a cotton ball over Ania’s face. “I’m not certain what the word means, but it shuts your pores and cleans your skin.” Mrs. Patterson pressed hard with the cotton, and Ania’s skin stung in some spots and in others lit up as if touched by a breeze.

  Ania sat sideways to her bathroom mirror in a stiff wood chair. Mrs. Patterson stood in front of her, now patting Ania’s cheek with two warm fingers, spreading a liquid that felt dry and seemed to stretch Ania’s skin, touching everywhere but the scar.

  “And this is foundation. I almost can’t believe nobody’s ever done this for you. I suppose that pretty as you”—Mrs. Patterson took a breath—“pretty as you are, I suppose there never was much reason. But we can always … well. There’s always a first time, and I’m glad you as
ked. It surprised me, I have to say, to hear from you so soon. But I’m glad.”

  Ania turned her face to the mirror for a better look.

  “Nothing’s happening,” she said.

  “Not yet. We haven’t even started your eyes. That’s where you’ll notice the difference. Tilt your head back.” Mrs. Patterson pressed gentle fingertips to Ania’s forehead, spread makeup under Ania’s eyes “to get rid of this purple that comes out when you’re tired. You do look tired, dear.”

  Her hands floated around Ania’s face, passing under her nose with the scent of bar soap, fingers skipping, palms cupping the side of Ania’s head as Mrs. Patterson drew lines on the lids of Ania’s eyes, whispering as she worked… Smudge here. That’s good. Make you Cleopatra. Charlie will like this, I think. Don’t move. This might sting. There. Rouge off the cheekbone. Oops. I’ll wipe that. Try again. Yes. Open those eyes. Open. Open. Now powder. Smells like roses, doesn’t it? Just a touch. There. Takes the shine off. There. There.

  Mrs. Patterson’s fingers working on her, working for her, made gooseflesh of the skin on Ania’s arms. Mrs. Patterson’s fingers prodding, wiping, dabbing, sweeping, brushing …

  Her eyes. Facing the mirror, Ania could not stop looking at her own eyes. The rest—her cheekbones, her nose and its bridge, her forehead and chin, her lips—all now subdued by the radiance of her eyes. Even the scar—she remembered the scar and looked at it, but no, Mrs. Patterson made even that less important than the little miracles of her eyes.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Feel?” said Ania, who had only seen. But now she realized her face felt covered in something inflexible or protective, as if Mrs. Patterson had painted her with some magic salve that could resist even flame.

  “It feels hard.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” Mrs. Patterson picked through the pouch she’d brought. “Let’s not forget the lipstick.”

  Ania waited in the hospital hallway, watching the boy and his father, neither of whom had yet noticed her. Charlie sat, still in uniform, leaning forward with elbows on knees, rubbing his palms together, telling Teddy about a pitcher with the Yankees, who was Polish. She hesitated at the doorway to listen and to watch, standing unsteadily in high heels borrowed from Mrs. Patterson, fiddling with the buttons of a linen dress that Mrs. Patterson had lent her, too. She studied Charlie’s hands, how sometimes he raised them in surrender, or made a fist, and once he snapped his fingers. His hands looked clean and vital, so different than when their creases and lines were drawn with grease from the machines he fixed at the factory. She stepped into the room.

  Teddy saw her first. His face changed and his mouth fell open. Noticing that, his father turned. Charlie’s face paled.

  “Mama,” Teddy said, and she could see by his frown, by the fear in his eyes, that he thought something was wrong, that having both Mama and Papa at his bedside meant something terrible.

  “No, Teddy,” she said, rushing to him. “Everything’s fine, Little Monkey.”

  “The nurses say not to touch,” Charlie said.

  But she had waited too long already—more than two months of the longest days. Ania began to tug at Teddy’s fingertips. “Temu dała, temu dała … ” and at the thumb, “Temu nic nie dała,” and she ran her fingers up to his chin, and Teddy giggled and twisted away from her and toward her.

  She let go and faced Charlie. “The nurses will clean him,” she said.

  But Charlie seemed already to have forgotten his warning. He gazed at her, and she saw he was startled by how she looked: not shaved or wounded, not bandaged or shamed.

  She tilted her head, as if to study the bag dripping clear liquid into Teddy’s toe, but really so that Charlie could better see the scars in the midst of the powder and cream and color. “We’re waiting for you,” she said to Teddy. “Mama and Papa are waiting for you to come home to us. You come home,” she said, “to us.” And she reached for Charlie’s hand. She reached with the hand that had been burned so that he could feel the lines there, the raised skin, the smooth, waxen flesh.

  She pulled Charlie’s hand to her face, opened his fingers and let his palm fall on her marred cheek. His ears reddened, making his poor complexion even paler, and she watched his eyes as he examined her the way he might look at a broken engine.

  Teddy squirmed in his bed. “I don’t want to be tied,” he complained, but Ania only said, “I’m sorry, Little Monkey. All the rules we can’t break.”

  Charlie pulled his hand away, and she turned to him, suddenly afraid, but he didn’t leave. He took her by the shoulders and guided her into his large lap, where he wrapped his arms tight around her. She tensed at first, letting him squeeze, and she thought of herself as a dishrag in his hands, twisted until all the pain and fear drained, and then her body loosened and his grip did, too, but he didn’t let go. He didn’t let go. Settled there in the midst of him, the rhythm of her breath matching his, she thought maybe this was love. She hoped so.

  At the door of their apartment, she handed Charlie the key. Inside, she patted his rocking chair. “Sit here,” she said, then brought him a bottle of beer from the icebox and apologized that there was no vodka.

  “There was no vodka overseas, either,” he said. “Some bourbon. Mostly beer, though never this cold.”

  As she cooked dinner she spied on him now and then, but if his gaze turned her way she snapped her attention back to whatever lay before her. Sometimes when she looked up, she caught him looking at her, but he said nothing, and that unnerved her.

  Over black bread and pierogi, he asked, “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” she said. “And the doctors say that after a few years, it will still be purple but not so rough.”

  “I wish you had written about the money. I always kept a little, but I didn’t need it.”

  “You sent enough.” She served him more pierogi. “We survived.”

  With that last word she flinched; for Teddy the doctors promised nothing. And when she looked across the table at Charlie, who fixed his attention on his plate, she knew he suffered from the same uncertainty.

  She washed dishes in the fading light of a late summer sun, handling each plate and each utensil with tenderness, the warm rinse water flowing from the tap without sound, peeling the soap from a plate, then a bowl, then a spoon. Finished, she shook the water from her hands, wiped them in a threadbare towel, then came to him in his chair, leaned over its back, and kissed the lobe of his ear. He stiffened, gripped the arms of the rocking chair so hard that the blue veins rose across the backs of his hands, and she grazed his hand with her fingertips. Tight skin. Callused. Coarse, curled black hair. She dragged her fingertips to his wrist, then stepped away and into their bedroom. With the light off, she began to undress, beginning with the blue scarf. When she heard him behind her, she said in Polish, “Leave the light off.” She was afraid for what he would see of her, the hair nubby and not grown back, the scars that in the bedroom she could not show off to him so proudly as she had in the hospital. Here her disfigurement would mark her as a woman different from the Ania he had known before. She needed to be the same, the Ania he loved, the one for whom he would stay. His shoes clumped to the floor behind her, and she heard his belt unbuckle.

  When she turned to face him, the window and its pale light behind her, she saw in his jittering eyes, in the way he bit his lip, let it go, bit it again, that he was fearful, and she realized how much joy she still gave him and, yes, how much he loved her. So she stood straight, raised her arms, and welcomed her husband home, troubled and relieved by how much his happiness depended on her.

  His lovemaking was familiar and quick, and she knew he had been faithful. Once finished, he whispered, “I love you, I missed you,” hand yet clasped to hers, before he fell asleep. With the thumb of that held hand she rubbed Charlie’s skin, the same spot over and over. She had hoped for more, for something electric with mystery, yet now she felt nothing but Charlie’s skin and, maybe, some gratitude for his weigh
t in the bed, and then a growing unease that all nights would be like this night, that she would forever feel nothing more than skin and gratitude.

  Charlie snored, desperately snatching at gulps of breath. The moon no longer shone through the open window. Clammy in the heat, Ania shifted her legs away from her husband and let go his hand. Through the window she heard a baby cry. The sound scared her, or maybe she had been afraid ever since Charlie stepped into the apartment, hinting at the old, quiet order of things from which so much, still, was missing. But it would have to do, there being nothing else.

  Ex-Husband, Years Removed

  HIS EX-WIFE’S BODY HAD RESTED ONLY A FEW HOURS IN THE CONsecrated ground, a mound of loose dirt above her and no stone yet to mark her place. In an ill-furnished apartment on the edge of Hartford’s Italian ghetto, Galahad Simmons sat at a card table with the brother of his ex, the two of them eating celery sticks and drinking beer from bottles. From where they sat they could hear Gal’s sister drying and storing dishes now that the general mourners had all left. Gal tapped the table with the corner of an envelope torn open by a finger and marked with the return address of an attorney.

  Sweat soaked both men’s shirts. The apartment had good light but no breeze, though every window hung open. A neighbor’s radio announced that early reports of two hundred dead appeared to be high. Latest counts tallied one hundred sixty. “Scores” was how Gal had first heard the number.

  The brother said, “It’s vulgar to sue over this.”

  “It’s vulgar to die,” said Gal. He pushed the attorney’s letter across the table and thumped it twice with an index finger. “But Sophie did die. For Christ’s sake, think this through. You could buy a house.”

  “I’ve heard you. I know what you’re saying.” He began to mimic Gal, his words tumbling faster from his mouth, his voice rising an octave. “It’s how things work, Nick. It’s justice, Nick.”

  Gal raised his eyebrows, put forth his hands as if they held gifts. He said, “There you go. The circus people messed up. That tent never should have burned. So now lawyers sniff a buck. You can’t stop them. The money will be there. If you don’t take it, somebody else will.” Gal pried open another bottle, relaxed with its sigh, then offered the church key to Nick.