The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  My wife died there.

  She had told him she had a ticket to the circus matinee, told him that very day when they arrived coincidentally at the newsroom’s drinking fountain and couldn’t avoid each other. “I want to touch a tiger,” she said, and made a snarling smile and a claw out of her hand to strike at him. So he knew the moment the umpire called the game because of an emergency at the circus in Hartford. He knew. Why then did he do nothing except go home to sit on the loveseat in his house, bent so his forehead almost touched his knees, listening to the radio reports and waiting for Lena to come home and tell him what she’d seen in the city?

  My wife died there.

  He was only an ex-husband years removed, a newsroom crony, the insinuation of what had once failed. Still, he wished Nick had telephoned, asked him to go to the armory, to share that burden. Except Nick didn’t call, and Gal didn’t go, and now he’d never know for sure whether he would have crossed the threshold into all that death to find Sophie’s corpse. “She liked how you knew so many poems,” Nick had said.

  Lena appeared at the window to the fire escape, her face bright and pink and alive. “We’re taking a walk,” she said. “Nick needs some activity.” Gal waved an invitation to her, and his attempt at a smile became a pursing of lips. She looked back into the apartment, but he insisted, so she pulled herself through the window, careful with her skirt so it wouldn’t snag. She slipped off her heels before settling her stockinged feet on the grate.

  Gal reached for his sister’s cool, strong hand, then closed his eyes, and he saw Sophie (in her own black stockings, a hat with sequins, a hair lock lacquered and curling over her jawbone) insisting that he accompany her to a party. It was a dance party, he told Lena, a twelve-piece band with the trumpet too loud, and while he and his cane leaned against the ballroom wall Sophie cavorted with a dozen young men, devastating them with her jitterbug and her foxtrot.

  “We accepted a ride home from one of her dance partners,” he said, eyes open now but his hand still resting with his sister’s. “It was after midnight. Saturday morning. We rode in the backseat. She said good-bye to our driver by gently scraping her fingernails up and down the back of his neck. In the kitchen she dropped her purse on the floor, then leaned against the counter near the knife drawer. I wanted a scotch and asked if she wanted one, too, but she didn’t answer. Instead she opened the drawer, reached in for a long knife. Not a butcher knife. Smaller than that. But bigger than a paring knife. She held it near her face. I always thought she had the loveliest face, a face Max-field Parrish might have painted. She held the knife near her face, and she smiled as she licked the flat of the blade, once, her tongue just curling around the sharp edge, and she pulled the knife along her tongue slowly, and then she just smiled. The next day she asked for the divorce. I couldn’t imagine fighting her.”

  Lena squeezed his hand and looked at him with such pity he wished he had kept silent, and he wanted her to go. He released her hand. “Nick’s waiting,” he said.

  Gal smoked a cigarette to give them time to leave, then crawled back into the apartment. He cracked more ice and poured more whiskey. He drank standing at the window. Down on the street, a tobacco shop, and next door the store that sold fabric and notions. Lena and Nick sat on a stoop across from a stationer’s. They sat a little apart. Nick gazed away from Lena down the street, and Lena looked at Nick.

  In the bathroom he fumbled with his zipper and pissed, then washed his hands and face in cold water and dried with a pebbly towel. Passing Nick’s bedroom, he noticed boxes of odds and ends that must have been Sophie’s: a Turkish bazaar of hats and handbags, knickknacks and ornamental pillows with knotted fringe, and strewn across the bed photographs and journals and letters. Gal set aside his cane and made a place for himself on the mattress edge; the bed springs creaked with warning. Almost all the pictures showed Sophie, and her impatient cursive read out from many of the pages. He shuffled photographs and letters, stopping at a portrait they’d sat for during their honeymoon on the Maine coast. They’d stopped in the studio of an untalented photographer, and Gal had the idea that they should sit with their backs to the lens. Sophie loved the photo so much she’d offered it to her editor on the society page for a wedding announcement, but the paper’s policy allowed only portraits of brides. Now Gal set the picture aside and found, wrapped with a silvery ribbon, letters from when he’d convalesced at an out-of-state spa. “Exquisite Sophie,” he wrote, and “whispers of our embraces …” “the fireflies that glow along the shore of your body …” Every word with which he had loved her proved familiar. Silly now, in retrospect, but still potent: a thread of diction at the end of which he found her. She lay before him in the sawdust of the tent’s floor, quiet and surrounded by flames. A smudge of ash decorated her cheek, and her hair was mussed, as if after a nap. He reached for her hand, and she smiled with gratitude even as fire drew near. He felt no heat, though she did, curling herself into a ball and sometimes kicking at the flames. She kicked and kicked and clenched her teeth and growled, and he tried to lift her into his arms but couldn’t with only one strong leg. Then her eyes closed, she gasped, and out of him heaved a silent entreaty that she stay. He panicked and clutched her hand, and hoped for every hopeless thing.

  On the bed in Nick’s apartment, he cried easily, overcome by something like peace or exhaustion. He put aside the letters he’d written.

  When he could search again through the keepsakes, he happened upon a letter to Sophie from a man named Hillyer. He knew who that was, though they’d never met or even breathed air in the same room so far as Gal knew. But Hillyer was a friend of Mr. Brainerd’s, president of a factory that made horseshoe nails and fielded a bang-up baseball team in the city’s Industrial League. Hillyer’s handwriting was blocky and elegant. The letter’s date placed it in the midst of Gal’s marriage to Sophie. Gal blinked often to clear his eyes as he snatched at paragraphs and sentences—a knowing joke here, unadorned lust there—and he kept his lips tight and jaw locked to resist the tics that seemed intent on taking over his face. And then, not only Hillyer, but also Glazier, Delaney, Salem, Richmond. Some names he recognized, some he didn’t know. She’d kept them casually, not all in one place but scattered amidst department store receipts and birthday cards and the rare recipe, as if they meant nothing, these transactions that proved the day-and-night fear he had suffered through their marriage, and since. Cuckoldry—the suspicion of which had broken him then—mocked him now on another man’s bed, betrayal in words and pictures. Glamorous Sophie. Bathing beauty Sophie. Cold, hard Sophie. Alone or photographed with Gal (that cripple, that mistake), or with young, lovely, tuxedo-clad boys.

  If only he had hit her. Wouldn’t everything have been different? When she drew the knife away from her tongue, if only he had slapped her cheek or knocked the knife from her hand. She had wanted a fight; now he did, too. A rematch. She owed him that, and death did not erase the debt. His eyes felt huge in his head, he could see every moment of his life with Sophie, all the beauty and all the madness. He wanted her with him in this room, on this bed, to test him once again with her cruelties.

  Lena’s voice filled the apartment with his name. He had no time even to stand before Nick appeared, eyebrows raised in curiosity and surprise. Gal scrambled off the bed, seizing his cane and then fistfuls of Nick’s shirt and pushed him against a wall.

  “You’ve read all this,” Gal spit. “You know what she did to me.”

  Too easily, Nick pushed him away, and Gal’s head crunched against the plaster when he fell. Nick shut and locked the bedroom door. Outside, Lena shouted their names.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nick said.

  Gal picked himself up. A constellation of pain at the back of his head shined round to the front, and he staggered, catching himself on a bedpost. He scattered letters onto the floor with a sweep of his arm. “She owes me for this. I don’t care if she’s dead. You call that lawyer, and you get that money.”


  Nick turned and spoke into the space between the door and the frame. “Everything’s fine, Lena,” he said. “Give us a minute.”

  With his cane, Gal pushed himself erect, stepped close again. He forced himself to look at Nick’s face, into his eyes, to accept the challenge made by a broken nose and troubled eye. Gal waited for the blow. He wanted it. “You get that money, and when you’re married you buy Lena whatever house she wants.”

  Nick laughed. “Hey, you know. You’re crazy. I hardly know your sister.”

  “You will. I see this future plain as day, and you’re a fool if you don’t. You buy her the house she wants. You hear me?”

  When Nick opened the door, Lena yelled at them, and the men stepped silently into the main room. Nick circled the card table and picked a bug off the leaf of a lily. The darkness outside had made its way in, and Gal switched on two lamps. He rummaged through the closet in search of his suit coat and decided he would not repair the torn cuff of the pants. It was Sophie who’d picked the suit out and paid for it, insisted he wear it when out with her. Now he deserved a new one. One from Stackpole’s, the swanky store downtown where the likes of Brainerd and Hillyer were fitted and tailored. Every man deserved such a suit.

  When he was halfway into the coat, Lena stepped near to help him find the second sleeve, and she whispered a question, her breath tickling his ear. “Satisfied,” Gal answered, and when she looked puzzled he cupped her chin. He said, “Are you coming along?”

  “Nick asked me to help with things at Sophie’s flat. He’ll bring me home.” She hugged him then, bringing her scents of rosewater and garlic, and he held her a long happy time.

  At the door, Nick volunteered to join him in the walk down the stairs. Gal tried to shoo away the offer, but Nick insisted. For a man with a bum leg the stairs were indeed punishing, steep with unfinished boards, and when Gal slipped he caught himself on the banister and drove slivers into the heel of his hand. “Look at that,” he said to Nick, and grinned, showing the bleeding drops that salted his skin. Nick asked, “You want help?” but Gal answered, “A few splinters is nothing,” and started off, leading the way.

  Outside, in the passing halos of headlights, Gal offered his right hand to shake. Nick’s grip was strong, and Gal tried to match it. When they let go, Nick reached into the back pocket of his pants and held up the attorney’s proposal. A moth flitted around his face, and he flicked it away with the envelope. “Maybe Sophie owed you something,” he said, “maybe not. I don’t know. However you worked your marriage was between the two of you. But she’s my sister, and I love her. I told you before: I won’t profit from her death.” He tore the envelope and its letter in two, then tucked it back in his pants pocket. “I never read those letters, and I won’t. They’re yours if you want them. But let’s not talk about any of this again.” He looked then at Gal, and he winced in the way men do when watching the flash of another’s chagrin.

  Once Nick had left him, Gal crossed Grove Street into a crowd of children playing with a basketball. Under the tobacco shop’s awning, a young man in uniform nearly bumped into him. At home he showered, powdered with talcum, and dressed in his pajamas. He turned on all the lamps so his house glared bright with electricity. A slipper of Lena’s rested on its side near the loveseat, and its mate lay cockeyed by the living room door. She had been in a rush that morning. His hands trembled as he placed the slippers side by side outside her bedroom. Then he switched on a floor fan and pointed it at the couch where he sat with a scotch as the radio warmed up. Gal heard himself say, “I don’t lie. I’ve been a good brother and a loyal husband.” He said, “I tip well at the tavern.” The urgency of those words embarrassed him, and he smiled at such silly candor. But who could hear? Not Sophie. Now sounds came from the radio, words and tones, reports from the war. He listened for a long time to news from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, until he could no longer endure the static and the faraway voices of those British newsmen.

  Ellen at the End of Summer

  FRANK SNAPPED OPEN THEIR BLANKET NEAR ELIZABETH PARK’S rose gardens while Ellen tended to the boy, who was not their boy, who was the age for starting school. He had blue-black hair and ruddy ears, and he stayed near Ellen while Frank opened their picnic basket, freed the sandwiches from wax paper, and took the church key to the soda bottles. Ellen asked for a plate, then arranged the boy’s lunch.

  It was summer 1947, a Tuesday, and Ellen and Frank, late in their thirties, had been married a decade. It was a good marriage. They had lived apart only when he was stationed in England, where he had a desk job and never saw combat. Nevertheless, she worried during the buzz bombing, and throughout his absence she longed for the physicality of him, putting his pipe near her bedside to smell his tobacco, wearing his fedora on nights out with the girls, tipping it as she imagined Katharine Hepburn might. Keeping her upper lip stiff, she tried not to think too much of the reality that he was all she had. Likewise, she tried to ignore the implication of their quiet house on Walbridge Road, but it reminded her with its rooms that were too large and too empty. They had bought it because it seemed a good place to raise children, and for many years she had imagined young voices in the hallways and upstairs bedrooms. She foresaw children as a natural extension of her love for Frank and his for her, as a way to invest the world with their happiness. She dreamed it hard, that perfect future, kept dreaming it even now when it had failed. Their first child would have been eight this summer, and the second would have been seven. The third would have been the first of the victory babies. The fourth would not yet have celebrated his? her? first birthday. With each pregnancy, Ellen’s body had proven insufficient to the task until she and Frank had no choice but to accept the fact of her imperfect womb. And now, everywhere Ellen looked: babies, babies, babies.

  “Careful, Teddy, those thorns will bite,” she called, because the boy had gone to smell the roses, and he fingered the stems.

  “He’s a little old for that sort of talk, I think,” said Frank. “Boys explore until they get hurt. That’s what they’re made for.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But I want to return him to Ania in one piece.”

  When Teddy returned, he staggered toward them, his head tilted back so the plum-colored rose petals he had pressed to his shut eyes wouldn’t fall off. They slipped off anyway.

  Ellen laughed at him. “Teddy,” she said, “what does the sun smell like?” This was a game she had taught him, one she thought was good for his imagination. She thought he might someday be a poet.

  “I don’t know,” said Teddy. He bit into his sandwich.

  “Try to imagine,” she said, screwing a finger toward his tummy. “What does the sun smell like?”

  “Peaches,” he decided.

  “And what color is your name?”

  “Green,” he said as he put the rose petals into his nostrils. She applauded his efforts, and he laughed. “Now,” she said. “What song does a teapot sing? Sing it for Mr. Patterson.”

  This part Teddy always liked. Maybe a song-and-dance man, then. Her little Fred Astaire jumped up from the blanket, away from his sandwich.

  I’m a little teapot, short and stout.

  Here is my handle, here is my spout …

  “Bravo,” said Frank, and he rubbed Teddy’s head. “Let’s eat.” Behind them was clear blue, but to the west there were clouds. The threat of rain only made the day’s heat worse, stickier. Ellen wore her blouse collar open, and she noticed that only one or two women in the park had left their houses wearing nylon stockings. The women fanned themselves and pressed sweating soda bottles against their skin. Some sat on picnic blankets, others beneath the wide canvas tarpaulin the city had installed for the season, around picnic tables draped with flimsy cloths. Near an oak, a father directed children in a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The lawns of the park seemed to sprout children. Tomboys and girls clutching dolls. A boy with two scraped knees. One with a black eye. Brown shoes and white socks. Tennis shoes. Patent leathe
r. A girl missing front teeth. A boy keeping a downy feather aloft with furious puffs. Cowboy fringe. A hair ribbon. A girl playing a lollipop jingle on a harmonica. Freckles. Runny noses. Tears.

  Ellen finished half her sandwich, and Frank sipped his soda. Teddy ate two bites and drank none of his soda. He watched some boys play with a ball, including an older boy who picked the teams, made the rules, and punished rule-breakers with a quick punch to the shoulder. Teddy watched, looking very much as if he wanted to be punched, too.

  “Teddy,” Ellen asked, “what game do the roses play?” Then she said, “I have paper and colored pencils, if you’d like to draw.” He was good: a future Winslow Homer. But he said nothing, only fingered his sandwich, lifted then dropped the top slice of bread. Frank rested his hand on Ellen’s shoulder, rubbed near the puffy sleeve, a message, she knew. They had learned to talk through touch, and she had to admit: He understood Teddy’s boy-ness.

  “All right,” she said to Teddy. “You can play with them. But first—”

  She tugged up his socks, pulled down his sleeves, made certain the white button at his collar was well fastened and that all his scars were hidden. This is what Ania would have wanted, and Ellen loved them both; it was what she wanted, too. How things change! Before the fire, Ellen had liked neither the boy nor his mother. Ania was hired help then, a dreamy Polish woman (almost a girl) who did not clean house well at all, whom Ellen had hired only at Father Dominic’s urging. And later, when Ania’s toddling son broke things, only Ellen’s charity and patience kept Ania employed. But then came the circus of three years past, and the burning big top, and Ania and Teddy inside, and everything changed. Ellen visited them in their separate rooms on separate floors, suffering as their dead skin was peeled off, as grafts replaced it. For weeks Ellen was a link between mother and son, and she lied to both. “Teddy laughs,” she had told Ania, even when he screamed all afternoon. “Your mother is almost better,” she had told Teddy, though sadness gripped Ania so she slept or kept silent for hours. Ellen visited Teddy more often than she did his mother, staying with him as late as the nurses would allow. Most of her prayers were for him. He couldn’t be touched for fear of infection, so she read to him. She brought in hand puppets, and she made up harmless dramas with happy endings. She colored with crayons, letting him tell her what to draw and what color to make the house and the cat and what color to draw his mother and his father (an infantryman on emergency leave; gentle with Teddy but deferential to her—even in his son’s room). Teddy’s favorite color then was blue. Now it was purple. Now Ellen was fond of Ania, and she loved Teddy, and she was glad to entertain him on the many days when Ania, still dreamy but a better worker, cleaned houses up and down Walbridge Road.