This was 1954, ten years after the fire.
It was the wet early April of that year when I heard about the elephant. The thermometer said it wasn’t cold, but the wind and the spitting rain gave the air a bite. My nose stung and dripped. Papa waited for me outside the school gate. He never liked for me to walk anywhere alone.
When I drew within range, he spread his arms and scooped me into them. He cupped my head and kissed my brow with cold lips. Without a word, we splashed through puddles to Gray’s.
At the bar, a man with grease-blackened hands and a bandage on his forefinger was introducing himself and a friend to Eddie. “This is Brendan, my birthday buddy,” said the man, and he lit a cigarette. “We got the same birthday, and it’s today.”
“Charlie,” Eddie shouted to my father, “how do you sink a Polack battleship?”
“Same as a Mick ship. You put it in water.”
“Have I tried that one before?”
“A year ago February.”
Eddie slid the vodka and the beer across the bar, and the fizzing cola for me. Papa and I sat at our regular table, which tilted my way if he lifted his elbows. He sipped his vodka, his smiles lasting only a moment. He swirled the glass so ice sang on the edges, then sipped again. I still try to remember whether he chewed his lip or blinked too much or suffered from some twitch that, had I been paying attention, would have shown me that my father was not himself that day. Nothing comes to mind. I wasn’t paying attention to him. Not yet. It was a payday afternoon at Gray’s, like so many others.
“Do kids tease you still?” he said.
“Sometimes they want to touch my skin,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
In the corner, Jimmy Williams played his recorder, each note squeezed to life.
When
you
wish
u-
pon
a
“In Italy,” my father said to me, “I had POW duty. You know what that is, POW? Prisoners of war.”
He rapped his knuckles three times on our table. Eddie brought him another round.
“I was like a guard in a jail,” Papa said. “It was easy most of the time. But we had one fascist—solid-as-bone that guy—kept yelling at us, ‘Goddamn GIs. Bastard GIs. Goddamn GIs.’”
My father never swore when I was around. Yet now he spoke forbidden words casually, as if they had no power. But they did. Dark, gristly power. I leaned nearer.
“He had a mouth, that guy,” my father said. “Over and over. Like a mynah bird. The kind of thing that would drive you crazy, like someone on a Saturday morning trying to start a car, turning over the engine six, seven, eight times. ‘Goddamn GI. Bastard GI.’ This fascist, he’s on us like that until this one fella, this one fella, he picks up a chunk of brick from a bombed-out building, and he breaks all that fascist’s teeth. Bashed him right across the chops. That son-of-a-gun kept on, though: ‘Goddamn GI. Bastard GI.’ Grinning at us with his mouth and tongue swollen. Blood all over his lips. I watched, wishing he’d zip it, you know? Because he was stupid, because all that happened was he got smashed in the mouth again, then again. I hated him for that. Now, I don’t know. Now he’s just a fact of life.”
Brendan’s birthday buddy at the bar was explaining his bandaged finger, how he’d cut it to the bone at the typewriter factory where he worked. He offered to show Eddie the stitches. I had stitches in my chin when I was eight after falling from my bicycle, and of course I knew all about scars from flame. But I had never seen a man whose mouth was shredded by a brick. I ran my tongue over the fronts of my top teeth between the gum and the lip. I imagined my mouth like the stringy inside of a pumpkin, all bloody. Street water from the rubbers covering my shoes pooled with the grime under my chair.
“I read about the fire in an army newspaper,” my father said. He wouldn’t let go of his vodka glass. Now he tapped its bottom against the table. “But I didn’t worry. Your mama and me, we didn’t have much money, not enough to spend on circus tickets. I read about the fire, and I wrote your mother a letter. I asked if we knew anyone who had been there.”
He shook a cigarette from his pack, but didn’t light it. He took off his eyeglasses and chuckled, but the sound was small and sad. He rubbed his eyes and then the bridge between them. My father had deep indentations in his nose because the lenses of his glasses weighed so much. When Papa died, Mr. Kowalczyk at the mortuary suggested masking the indentations with makeup, but I said leave them and have Papa wear his glasses instead.
“There was a fella. A PFC from Waterbury. We never talked much, but his sister had gone to the circus. She’d been burned, though not bad enough for him to get compassion leave. Not like your mother and you were burned. I didn’t know what happened to you yet. I just knew about this fella’s sister. So I bought him a beer. Patted his shoulder. He showed everybody her picture. She was eighteen. Good-looking. A lot of the fellas made jokes about her afterward because she was so pretty.” Papa looked at me suddenly, as if remembering who sat across from him. “You don’t make jokes about pretty girls, do you?” he said. “You and the other boys at school? Your mother was a pretty girl. Never make jokes about pretty girls.”
I nodded that I wouldn’t.
“Your mother’s not a girl anymore,” he said.
He loved her. I believe this. Yet many times I woke to find Papa on the couch downstairs. “I snore,” he told me. “Keeps your mama awake.” His answer never sounded whole. Nor did my mother’s, when I asked why I had no brother or sister. She would kiss my nose and whisper, “God gave us one perfect child.”
Brendan’s birthday buddy tossed peanuts into the air and caught them in his mouth. He suggested Eddie buy a pinball machine to add some whiz-bang to the place. “Whiz-bang’s out that door,” Eddie said. “We like peace and quiet in here.”
Papa lit his Marlboro and shook out the match. He hadn’t looked away from me.
“How was I supposed to know how badly you were hurt?” he said. “I don’t … Jesus. I’m in Italy. A goddamned bastard GI. It took a while for the nurses to get your names. Your mama’s English wasn’t so good then. You … I hate to think it. About a week after I read about the fire—must have been more than a week later—a Red Cross woman took me aside. She held my hand. She told me.”
The army sent my father home. He arrived on a hot, hazy afternoon, stepping out of the Union Station into a city that seemed to him strangely serene. No mortar fire. No screams. No bombed-out buildings. “Queer” is how he described it that day in Gray’s Tavern.
Now when I imagine my father home that first hour, I imagine him walking through the working streets of downtown, amid secretaries and switchboard operators, lawyers and bookkeepers. He pauses at the corner of Trumbull and Pearl to take in the old Hartford Insurance Company building, the stone stag over its door. His khaki uniform is crisp, and he squints into the stark July sun at the building’s cornices and windowpanes that stand intact. An Italian man in a white T-shirt tries to sell him a newspaper. My father breathes cologne and perfume. Women smell clean. It’s a good day to live. It makes no sense. An ocean away is a fascist with his mouth stuffed full of blood-soaked cotton, and my father understands why. But here in this familiar and alien place, this place so at peace it seems not of the world, his wife and son lie alone in hospital beds, their skin peeled. He is home, and he staggers at the horror.
Years later at Gray’s, my father stared at the grain of our tabletop and traced a knot with his hard, thick thumbnail.
“I didn’t visit you for three days,” he said. “I stayed away for three days.”
Then he looked at me as if I would accuse him, as if a thirteen-year-old, knowing only the sting of cola on his tongue and the smell of stale beer and cigarettes, could pass judgment. I was too young to understand what three days meant. All I understood was that my father was tattling on himself, confessing something that made him seem small.
He told me of those three days.
First he re
turned to the apartment. It was mostly as he remembered, though my mother’s jade plant sat root-bound in its pot, and the landlord had painted the windows black in case of air raids. In the room where I had slept, my father opened dresser drawers and lifted out shirts and jumpers and shoes that were too large for the baby he remembered, and—having been gone those two years—he could not imagine the boy who might fit into them. Instead he turned his hand to chores. He swept and mopped the floor, then dusted window-sills and the small shrine my mother had built to the Virgin Mary. He watered the victory garden she had planted in the backyard and had marked with a small penciled sign that read “Ania Liszak” to distinguish it from other tenants’ gardens. He changed a washer in the bathroom faucet to stop a drip, and he patched a torn window screen. He moved from chore to chore as if everything hinged on his labor. Still, he failed. He dropped a light bulb and it shattered. He knocked over an end table and left a gash in the floor. He worked past dark, past midnight, until he couldn’t help but sleep, leaning in the corner where he had yet to finish mending a crack in the plaster. Not until the next morning would he dare step into their bedroom to run his fingers along the sheets where she had slept, to smell her pillow, to touch the hair still twined in her brush.
On the second day he shopped, telling himself he couldn’t visit the hospital empty-handed. He took most of the morning and all of the afternoon to find just the right gifts, wandering shop to store in awe and confusion. He discovered that time and distance had made him uncertain of what his wife and son would most want. Would his boy play that board game? Could he look through that magnifying glass? Would she wear such a fancy blouse? He settled on a box of colored pencils for me; for Mama he chose a frame for a family photograph. To wrap these gifts, he bought silver paper and red ribbon.
Though he wasn’t hungry, he forced himself to stop at the downtown five-and-dime where he sat on a swivel stool at the counter. He ordered a root beer and fried egg sandwich. As he ate, he overheard in the booth behind him a woman in a flowered hat talking to a friend. She was talking about the circus. He listened more closely. The woman in the flowered hat told her friend that most of the circus was still in Hartford—right up there on Barbour Street. Yes, the circus! It can’t leave, she said. There are so many lawsuits already, and no one knows how the circus will pay. Gorillas and lions as collateral, she laughed. It’s true! All the animals survived! I read it in the Times. Not a singed whisker. Why, they’ve even got elephants in Sponzo’s Meadow!
My father left his root beer and a few coins on the counter. He walked out to the sidewalk, surprised by the bright sun. That night at the apartment, he drank too much beer. And then he lay awake imagining me and my mother sitting in the grandstands as fire flashed around us, the animals outside and safe from the flames, and because he did not know the neighborhood a few miles north where the circus tent had burned, he saw instead a war-wrecked Italian countryside where elephants and lions stepped softly through the dust. Twice he left his bed to vomit, but his stomach was empty and the heaves brought no relief.
On his third day home, Papa caught a bus downtown and another north on Main Street. From there, he walked.
The smell struck him first, carried by wind. The smell of dry, sweet ash mixed with animal stink, rich and nauseating, and Papa spit but couldn’t get it out of his mouth. Then he came to the field where the big top had burned.
“It was like an army camp,” he told me. “Except it was like the sloppy camp of troops who’d been beaten. Tents with walls flapping loose—not a proper tie-down to be found.”
He stubbed the butt of his cigarette in one of Eddie Gray’s foil ashtrays.
There were trucks, he told me, parked and rusted and caked with mud. Railroad cars painted red, though the paint had bubbled and split, the fire had been so hot. One car smelled like the kitchen, and another was obviously the latrine. Rough characters lounged all over, their shirts unbuttoned and untucked, their T-shirts stained yellow under the arms. Only a few of them worked, carrying hay by the armful for the animals.
“Gorillas. Lions,” my father said. “Amazing, yes. But I’d seen gorillas and lions at zoos in cages, and this wasn’t so different. But I’d never seen an elephant. Only in picture books.”
He lit another cigarette, letting the smoke ease out of his nostrils before he spoke again.
“These elephants they kept staked and crowded into a meadow, with just a man or two to watch them. You could hardly see the stakes, and it didn’t take much to imagine the elephants running from the lot, trampling a bunch of neighborhood kids playing stickball. But all the elephants did was stuff their trunks into these banged-up barrels full of water and sometimes drink and other times spray themselves like they were their own garden hose. Geez, it was hot. My shirt stuck to my back. I found a shade tree, but it didn’t help. Shade didn’t help.
“The elephants were all the same color—like ash,” he said. His eyes grew wet, and he blinked, his voice quiet as if steadied by certainty. “And they were giants. Bigger than the piles of hay. And those piles were as big as cars. Mountains of hay in front of them, mountains of shit behind them. The stink would make you dizzy. Flies, too, zigzagging near your ears, your eyes. All you could hear was that buzzing. Louder, then quiet; louder, then quiet. And then those elephants would sound off. Raise their heads, their trunks, then blast away. Even on a day hot as that, it’d turn your spine cold.”
Papa told me that he walked around the meadow a dozen or more times, waving off flies and eyeing the elephants. He drew close enough to study where their pigmentation spotted and the flesh became pink or dull white. “Like they had been burned,” he said. “But they hadn’t.” He wagged a finger. “You had, though. You had. I tell you, Teddy, they seemed like something born when the mountains came up from the oceans. Something that survived everything.”
Papa drew close to the elephants, so close that he could see even the bristle of hairs along the bottom of a jaw, the stunted tusks hidden inside an elephant mouth, the depression above and behind an eye.
“But over there was a block full of three-family houses, one with a porch swing. And power poles up and down the street, their lines running from house to house. And there, a ’41 Oldsmobile. Sheets hung out to dry. It didn’t make any sense.” His eyes sparkled with the monstrousness of it. His voice grew loud. “Those elephants, you know, they were just wrong. There weren’t supposed to be elephants in meadows in Hartford. Everything was wrong. Every last thing was wrong.”
I glanced to Eddie Gray, who wiped the bar with a caramel-colored rag. He saw me—it was plain on his face—but he turned aside, started working down the other way.
My father grabbed my arm and hissed, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand? Their stink would peel paint. The inside of my nose was burning.”
He pinched his nose. When he let go, the skin was pink.
Jimmy had stopped playing his recorder. The bar seemed too quiet, as if everyone were listening. But I didn’t dare turn to look.
“You understand, Teddy? These were elephants right here in Hartford. Lounging in a meadow as if this is the way the world is supposed to be. But it’s not. It’s not. So I shot one. I walked up close to the elephant at the end of the row, away from the circus workers. It was so easy. So slow. Its head swung toward me. I fired right into its eye.”
He reared as if I would challenge him.
“There was blood,” he said. “Elephant blood on my uniform.”
Now Eddie approached our table.
“Hey, Charlie, maybe it’s time you headed home, huh?”
“I’m talking to my son,” Papa said. “I’m explaining things.”
Eddie snorted. He took the empty glasses, wiped our table and left the smell of dishrags.
“Did the elephant die?” I asked.
“Maybe,” my father said. “I’m not proud to have shot an elephant. I’m telling you that everything w
as wrong, and that all I could do was shoot the elephant. And then I ran. I’m not proud of that, either, Teddy. I ran.”
I nodded.
“It was a Colt .45, semi-automatic,” he said. “I think the elephant would have been blinded, but not killed. No, not killed.”
I nodded.
“They’re big animals,” he said.
Eddie came back with another cola.
“Here, kid. On the house.”
My father acted as if he didn’t notice. “Time to go,” he said.
In less than an afternoon, my father had become new, different, strange. I wasn’t yet ready to be alone with him. I pointed to the full bottle. “I haven’t finished my soda,” I said.
“Drink fast.”
He stood and walked back to the toilet, his steps sure and deliberate, leaving me alone, heavy with responsibility and adolescent grief because he had shot the elephant on my behalf. Because of an injury I couldn’t even remember, an elephant had been blinded.
Brendan’s birthday buddy said something then, about the tears and soft lips of a sad woman. “That’s what I want for my birthday,” he said. He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Kid,” he said, “never forget that a crying woman is a beautiful thing.”
Papa and I walked home through a dark drizzle. Headlights rushed past, and gutter water splashed over the curb to the sidewalks. When we got home he turned on the radio, then sat in his rocking chair and wiped his glasses clean for a long time.
He never again spoke to me of the elephant he had shot. When I tried to bring it up, he changed the subject. Eventually he did tell me of his first visit to see us in the hospital, how I protested that no, this stranger was not my papa, until a nurse vouched for him. But the nurses wouldn’t let him touch me and wouldn’t let him give me the colored pencils. Neither my father nor the pencils were sterile. My mother, my father told me, wept when she saw the family portrait in its wood frame painted gold. When he told me this, it had been years since we’d spent afternoons at Gray’s Tavern. I saw an opportunity and asked why he took so long to visit. He shrugged and said, “All I know is that I love you and your mother more than God loves you, because He burned you, and I’d never do that.”
The Greatest Show Page 13