The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  “Still working on mine,” said Nick. Then: “I’m done with this talk. Give me a poem, huh? She liked how you knew so many poems.”

  The beer tasted bright. Gal placed the cold bottle against his forehead, closed his eyes. He let his mind leave the room and find a place in memory that harbored lines of verse and his ex-wife. “Nah,” he said, “that was a joke with us. I’d recite some moldy sap, ham it up some. She thought it was a stitch.”

  “You’re wrong. She liked it. She said it was beautiful how you spoke.”

  Gal, who had been passing his walking cane nervously from hand to hand, missed a catch and the cane clattered to the floorboards. He studied the cane, his eyebrows bunching. “Did she?” he said.

  “She did.”

  Now the neighbor’s radio reported war news, Allied forces giving the Japs what for in Saipan. In the steamy heat of the apartment the air felt unbreathable. In the circus tent, in Sophie’s last moments, the air itself ignited. Gal had heard that awful fact from a rewrite guy in the newsroom. In a picture in his head Sophie sucked fire into her lungs, but she did it with a leering smile, and that image, though he knew it to be false, distressed him. Gal doffed his eyeglasses and cleaned sweat from the lenses with his handkerchief, then wiped his face from temple to temple. “The heat looks better on you than me, I’ll wager,” Gal said. “Sweat always looks sharp on a boxer. She liked guys with your look, hair wavy and thick, shoulders like a mastodon’s. She’d go for that broken nose of yours, too. If you weren’t her brother.” Nick smiled, a shy grin, compelled more than enjoyed. Gal said, “When do you fight next?”

  “Is this for your column?”

  “No. Just talk.”

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  “Nick, it’s small talk. C’mon.”

  Nick struck the butt of his bottle against the tabletop. “Just give me a poem, why don’t you?”

  Gal clapped his hands once, rubbed the palms together. In the kitchen Lena hummed a vague melody, her voice gentle and clean as a bicycle bell. “Poem. Fine,” said Gal. What came to him first were lines from Tennyson, from a memorial poem that would make Sophie guffaw. He pushed away from the table and stood, breathed deeply and coughed to clear his throat. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” he began. “Two quatrains from ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’”

  My love involves the love before;

  My love is vaster passion now;

  Though mixed with God and Nature thou,

  I seem to love thee more and more.

  Far off thou art, but ever nigh;

  I have thee still, and I rejoice;

  I prosper, circled with thy voice;

  I shall not lose thee though I die.

  Nick nodded his approval. “We’ll always have her,” he said.

  Gal lifted his cane from the floor, flicked away a swirl of dust that stuck to the stump-end where the cane’s wood had worn round and slivered. He edged his way around the table and squeezed Nick’s shoulder. “Some of us lost her long ago,” he said. Shuffling off to the kitchen, he glanced away from something he’d noticed when he first came in: a wall poster tacked over a crack, hung crooked, lower on the right. Nick worked first shift on an assembly line building airplane engines, and the poster came from the factory, one of many efforts to encourage patriotism and munitions work, the twain, these days, being one. “You knock ’em out,” said the pilot on the poster, giving a thumbs-up from his cockpit. “We’ll knock ’em down.”

  Lena stood from a squat, shutting a low-cabinet door. “This kitchen needs me,” she said. “You don’t want to know what I’ve seen. How’s Nick?”

  “Young. Romantic.”

  “I’d never have expected that of a fighter.”

  “It’s not like you think. The boxers are the romantics. It’s everybody else knows the real score. That’s what makes the fighters such patsies for the money boys. I should write that in my column some day. Tell the world about it and every other ugly sore in the sporting news.”

  “I wonder sometimes why you don’t give up sportswriting.”

  He searched through cabinets. “When your body works worse than a Rube Goldberg machine, you’re limited. Have you come across whiskey?”

  “Upper cabinet, left of the stove. Third shelf. Behind the mouse droppings. That’s a cop-out. Roosevelt had polio, too.”

  “And he’s not on the front lines, is he?”

  “Who’s talking about the front lines? I’m just talking about a job change. Something with normal hours. Something so you meet a nice girl.”

  Gal unscrewed the cap on the bottle. He wondered where that bit had come from about Roosevelt and battle, but the more he wondered the more uneasy he felt, so he shifted his attention. “I do know a nice girl,” he said, pouring two fingers’ worth. “Dandy lass. She shares a house with her crippled brother, has since his divorce.”

  Lena snapped a dish towel toward his backside. “And what happens when some Romeo proves smart enough to make me his wife?”

  “There’s room in the attic for him.” Gal’s kiss on her forehead made it clear he did not want to talk about this, and she let him go with the last word. For many years they had shared tea with milk in the morning, and he had grown accustomed to a house strewn with stray bobby pins and confusions of perfume.

  Back at the table, Nick played with the letter from the attorney, sharpening the folded crease between his fingers and replacing the page in the envelope as Gal sat. Gal sipped the whiskey. Its sweetness foretold a morning hangover. He swallowed again. Once upon a time, Sophie had brushed her warm lips against the tops of his ears. Remembering that, he had the sense it was someone else she had kissed, not Galahad Simmons who walked with a cane and who was constructing a hangover in a room with a cheap card table, and chairs with patched cushions, and a wall poster of a grossly handsome pilot.

  “Why weren’t more people here?” Nick said. “Why weren’t more people at the church?”

  “The city’s lousy with funerals,” said Gal. “Sad as it may seem, people can’t get to all of them.”

  “Everybody knew her. Everybody read her column.”

  “Sure they did. But who wants to admit that? Gossip? During wartime?”

  “She wrote patriotic stuff.”

  “That’s when nobody read her.”

  “At least Mr. Brainerd.” Mr. Brainerd published the newspaper. “I thought he’d make it for sure. She covered all his parties, even the big ones at Saratoga or Newport. So why wasn’t he around? Where were his bigwig friends she wrote about? Why wasn’t even one of them at the cemetery or the Mass?”

  “Those people knew her by her pen name,” said Gal. “They rubbed shoulders with Sophie Diamond who wrote gossip but didn’t know Sophie DiFiore who died.” He thought a minute, then smiled. “Brainerd was there in spirit,” he said. “Chatter in the newsroom says he paid off the bishop to get Sophie that spot in the pope’s boneyard.”

  “Shut up, Gal.” Nick pushed away from the table.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Don’t.”

  Nick closed the bathroom door hard behind him, and Gal leaned forward, elbows on the cushioned tabletop. Not for the first time that day he wished he had Sophie to talk with about Sophie’s death. Hearing the bishop-Brainerd story she would have laughed—that cluck of delight she made at the most outrageous scandals—then repeated such an item in her own column, the principals properly disguised so that everyone knew who they were.

  He smelled the flowers before Lena placed the vase of lilies and delphinium on the card table, and he rearranged envelopes and empty bottles to make room. She sat and fingered the stems, talking as she did. “All the way in the kitchen I heard how you upset him,” she said.

  “Sophie would have liked hearing about a bribe.”

  “He’s not Sophie. Sophie’s not here.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “It wasn’t good, Sophie and you together. She wasn’t good for you. You were kinder before.”<
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  His fingers fumbled a moment, reaching to tug an earlobe, then to check a shirt button. Finally he eased the vase out of her reach so that she would look at him, and he smiled in a way he hoped seemed gentle and nonchalant. Ice swirled in his glass, empty now of whiskey, and he sucked a cube into his mouth, bit hard through it. “She was a magnificent woman,” he said. “Always kept a straight part in her hair, you know?” It was all he could say before a shiver overtook his throat.

  She touched the top of his hand, her fingers cool and dry. Her knuckles were a bit rough and her nails smooth but uneven. Sophie’s had been different, with manicured nails, soft skin, hands false in their perfection. Lena said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about her.”

  “No apologies for honesty.”

  Lena continued, though, as if to explain herself. “You never talk about her or your marriage, or why it ended. I’ve always—”

  A crash interrupted, like the sound of a light bulb exploding. Gal hobbled after Lena toward the sound, toward the fire escape. Past her, outside, Nick raised beer bottles overhead and flung them at a concrete walk below.

  The next thing Gal knew he was squirming through the window, dragging his bum leg behind him across the sill. Suddenly stuck, his foot wedged and knee impossible to lift, he called out just as Nick raised his arm to unleash another bottle. Once Nick had yanked Gal through, the men retreated to opposite corners of the platform. Neither spoke, but Nick cradled his head in his big hands, panting as he might after a fight’s last bell.

  Gal lit a cigarette and offered it.

  “I’m in training,” said Nick. “But thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  If there were clouds they drifted high and thin, imperceptible except that the sky looked whiter than usual. The air smelled of overripe pears. The sun had moved from view, and the fire escape now lay in late-afternoon shadow, which seemed to make the heat bearable. Gal pulled up his socks and noticed that the cuff of his pants had ripped when Nick pulled him through the window. “Look at that,” he said.

  Nick didn’t look. “Sophie had enough in savings for the casket and the headstone, the mortuary bills, that sort of thing. I don’t want anything else.”

  “Are we talking about the lawyer again?”

  “I won’t profit by my sister’s death.”

  “No, you won’t. It’s a loss no matter how much the circus pays. A Rockefeller fortune couldn’t change that.”

  Nick nodded in a vague way as if working out that arithmetic and finding comfort in the sum. At the same time, Gal’s crippled leg began to ache. He shook it with both hands to prod the circulation. Nick said, “You ever wish you weren’t 4-F?”

  It wasn’t a question Gal expected. “It is what it is,” he said.

  Nick pointed to his own face. “Every day I wish I had someone else’s eye,” he said. Nick’s left eye, Gal had noticed before, sometimes wandered, and the pupil bled a bit into the iris. A boxing injury. Nick said, “Can you believe this will keep me out of the army but not out of the ring?” He made fists of both hands and gave them a long look. “I’d be a damn good soldier. A damn good soldier.”

  “Sure you would,” said Gal.

  “This one night a year or so ago,” said Nick, “I’m walking with Sophie downtown on Mulberry Street, after she’s bought me a nice dinner, and we’re dressed up, you know? These GIs come out of a bar, start giving me guff ’cause I don’t wear the uniform. Said I was enjoying a pretty woman while they were out eating North African sand and getting shot at. Said I was in the pansy division. I tried to tell them, but one shoved me against a wall. Training took over, you know. I didn’t want to hurt those boys.”

  “Did you hurt them?”

  Nick pursed his lips as if trying not to cry. “Sophie, she loved it. Told me I could lead the march to Berlin if they’d let me fight.”

  Gal tried to imagine the scene. “How many were there?” he asked.

  Nick frowned. “You don’t even get what I’m saying.” He took another bottle from the box and flung it at the sidewalk below. Amber glass shattered into dangerous edges, white suds spreading and disappearing into a dark muddle. Nick kept his back to Gal, facing the city, his head turning slowly as if he searched for the place where men would understand him. Gal rubbed his temples in little circles with his fingertips.

  “Sometimes I think—” Gal said, then interrupted himself to start again. “It’s crazy, I know. But when I heard Sophie had died, I had this sense that if I’d been able to join up, if I’d been a soldier, then she’d still be alive. It’s crazy, but there it is.”

  Nick turned to the box of bottles but this time opened one and drank from it. His face looked different, bruised and weary and even more handsome. He said, “After the fire, they brought the bodies to the armory. That’s where I had to go. They laid them out on the drill floor, each body under a blanket on a narrow little cot. The women in one corner, the children in another. Some of them burned a little, some a lot, some so perfect you couldn’t figure out why they were dead. We stood in line, and we went in a dozen at a time, a nurse and a cop with each of us. The stink—God, it’s still in my nose. Putrid! A woman collapsed from it right in front of me. Priests prayed at cot after cot, mumbling Latin, anointing. One body, it was so burned … I saw this picture once in a magazine, this picture of a dog buried by a volcano. Lava. The dog wasn’t a dog anymore. It twisted back on itself like it wanted to bite its own ass. Its legs looked all shriveled, and its mouth was open a little. You could see one fang, maybe its eye.”

  Nick’s face had reddened, and a pulse throbbed visibly in his neck. Gal thought of dogs and of agony and of Sophie, and Nick’s words, though quiet, sounded like the choking barks of a dog straining at its leash, barely words at all. “Jesus, Gal,” Nick whispered. “That’s what she looked like. That was her.”

  Gal shuddered, closed his eyes, and wiped sweat from his brow with the rolled-up cuff of his shirt. Nick’s pain called to his own as if by name, urged Gal to step nearer to Sophie’s brother, even to hold him and be held, but that selfsame pain repulsed him, too, bullied him into looking away. With the stump of his cane, Gal traced the fretwork on the metal grate of the fire escape. He wanted to say or do the thing Nick needed him to say or do, but what that was he didn’t know, didn’t even know how to learn. He said instead, because he could speak it without weeping, “You know why Sophie went to the circus? She told me before she left.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I just told you? This is all you can say?”

  “Jesus, Nick. What do you want from me? I don’t know anything about this stuff. I’m no good at it.”

  Somewhere in the apartment building a woman laughed, long and without music. Both men looked toward the sound. She laughed again.

  “I guess it’s a million-dollar day, ain’t it?” Nick said, and he spit at the landing, then wiped the spit with the sole of his dress shoe. “Let’s go to a ball game, huh? What do you say? You and me. Who’s playing tonight? You must know. Let’s get seats on the first-base side. We’ll forget all this. Hope to see a double play and catch a foul ball.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Nick.”

  “What then?”

  “Not that.”

  “You ever been punched?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever been punched? Taken a shot. Bare fist. To the face.”

  “No.”

  Nick nodded as if that figured, as if that made all the sense in the world. He held his bottle out far from the fire escape, leaned over so he could watch it drop one, two, three floors to the sidewalk. That sound again, that gentle explosion. “I love my sister,” Nick said. He stepped through the window into the apartment, hanging back long enough to say, “Stay out here a while, okay? Take your time.”

  Gal sat himself on a step and with shaky hands finished his cigarette. He squashed the butt on the sill, then kicked it down the steps and lit another. He knew who was playing, yes. Nobody was playing.
The Twilight League had canceled its games. There was no baseball, no boxing, no bicycle racing—there might as well be no sports page. Hand over the column inches to the city desk for the circus fire or to the wire desk for the war. Gal’s universe called on account of irrelevance.

  He glanced inside. Lena and Nick stood near each other, Nick waving his arms about until Lena reached out and laid fingertips over his heart. A moment passed, and then the two hugged, surprising Gal with their embrace, which seemed to start as consolation but evolved into another sort of tenderness. After, Lena tucked her hair behind an ear and frowned in the most beautiful way. Behind them, the pilot on the wall still gave his thumbs-up. Everything about the scene frightened Gal.

  Downstairs, some gravelly-voiced man was yelling about who made the goddamn mess dropping beer bottles and who was going to clean it up goddammit because little kids like to play out here and what if somebody had been walking along minding his own business he could have been killed some kid could have been killed and hadn’t there been enough people killed didn’t anybody think about that? Crows snickered as they congregated on rain gutter after rain gutter, feathers ruffling, tails twitching. A woman a floor above was stringing out laundry, a child beside her blowing soap bubbles, the wand in the girl’s hand dripping, the bubbles glistening as they tumbled over the railing and drifted out and up, and out and down, following each other, at last vanishing in silent sharp breaths.

  That girl would have questions one day, as would all those her age, and those children not yet born. Questions prompted by a composition for school, a photograph of a long-dead relative, a crumbling newspaper page discovered wrapped around airy glassware. Where were you during Pearl Harbor? When the troops landed in France? What do you remember from that day when the circus fell to ash?