Loosed from the cares of this Earth
the incomparable Cavalcade of Circus Stars!
Roustabouts whirled the spotlights helter-skelter across the hall, and the procession began—as it always does—with the elephants. Stepping slow. Following the oval track around the rings, their trunks swinging to and fro, their diadems flickering in the starry lights of the disco balls. And then the performers. Alice the Sword Swallower. Frankie the Escape Artist. Clowns with ruby-painted skin. Violetta with angel wings. Mist from dry ice wafted across the rings, changing colors as spotlights flashed red, purple, and blue, green and orange, as if the mist were thunderheads concealing popsicle-colored lightning. Sasha’s yellow horse cantered forth with patriotic streamers tied to its tail and a rooster riding in its saddle. A clown with donkey ears played accordion. Even Renato’s family, who had not performed on high, came tumbling across the floor, human pinwheels of color and light. From the loudspeakers played a piano waltz that might have issued from a tawdry French café, not our usual finale theme but no mistake, either, chosen by a roustabout who understood the day, who gave us a delicate and awkward tune, one sad and off-balance, teetering, uncertain, played as if it resisted playing but had no choice. Ted and Rosa waltzed in slow time with the music, and for a moment a roustabout caught their elegant ease in a spotlight. As the last performer marched into the hall, Fritz strolled behind him, his high collar buttoned and his stovepipe hat tall, and he became the end of the procession and its beginning. We started a second turn, then a third, a fourth, a slow-motion merry-go-round, cheering and waving toward the surrounding shadow.
Then Fritz led us into the rings. We made such an assembly of wonder. He took his microphone from his pants pocket, and he called out his traditional farewell …
That’s the show, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Thank you for coming. Please drive safely. Go now, and remember to make every day a circus day. Good-bye! Good-bye, and Godspeed! Good-bye!
We waved as if the exhibition hall were emptying soul by soul of grandparents and grandchildren, of young mothers, of toddlers and teens, of faces we loved and would miss. We waved to Ted and Rosa who waved back, smiling, standing. An ovation. We could have stayed in those rings forever.
But house lights came up, glaring and harsh. We blinked away our blindness, let the exhibition hall regain its shapes.
“Holy Lord Jesus,” said Schmautz.
People in the stands stood, and some applauded, people who were scattered in all directions. We saw children and parents holding children. Thirty people, maybe, or forty. More were coming. They stepped from the concourses and searched the hall for seats, or they looked at us and pointed, whispering in children’s ears. It was near eight o’clock, almost show time. A man wearing a Red Sox cap and carrying a toddler with pierced ears came near Hezekiah and asked if he needed tickets. Hezekiah shook his head, and the man nodded, turned back toward the seats and said into his cell phone, “Free show, man. I’m telling you. Hustle your ass down here.”
So eight o’clock came, and a crowd filled the hall’s lower level. We didn’t argue. Ladies! shouted Fritz. Gentlemen! Boys and girls!
Schmautz mimed for children, and Mad Dog roared up the high wire. Fritz told the roustabouts not to charge for elephant rides at intermission, but yes for cotton candy. We still had no trapeze, and Hezekiah—thinking his bears had endured enough—kept them in their cages. We were distracted, yes. We felt the burden survivors feel, the juggling act of pity and grief and celebration for the good that’s left. Violetta finished her hula-hoop dance, then she and Ursula embraced in the darkness at the edge of the rings and sobbed.
Now it’s hundreds of shows later. Late nights, after Fritz and Hezekiah and Mad Dog are back from billiards, or when we take a break after we’ve set up for another show, we sometimes tell each other stories of that day. We shake our heads in disbelief and try to gather the parts we’ve lost, trying to remember—for example—which of us discovered the next morning that someone had torn down our postponement signs and crumpled them into trash cans around downtown Hartford. Chico has since quit our circus, and Schmautz retired to a trailer near Destin, and we’ve lost what they would have remembered (we can’t always remember what we want to remember), so the stories change. Violetta insists she rode the park carousel that day, and Ursula says no. Fritz can’t remember how much he paid for his TVs. Our sense of the day fades. We’re left with a few facts, a recollection of dread and joy, and a sense that every damn thing disappears too quickly. Lucky us.
In the hubbub of that second show, we lost track of Ted and Rosa. That was okay. We figured they’d left the arena, just snuck away with the crowd. We cleaned elephant shit from inside the rings, laundered sweaty leotards, paused to watch on TV where news camera lights still shined on vivid faces.
But later, when Hezekiah went to the staging area to check on his bears, he found Ted and Rosa sitting near the cage, a step or two from where Daisy Mae slept, tranquilized and snoring, her singed haunches waffled against the bars. Hezekiah had come in quietly, not disturbing the black plastic sheets, and Ted and Rosa hadn’t noticed him. They sat on wooden stools pushed close together, him on the right, her on the left. They leaned so their shoulders touched. They watched Daisy Mae breathe, and they talked, but what they said Hezekiah couldn’t hear. They held hands. With his free hand, Ted twirled his eyeglasses by the earpiece. Once, he pointed at Daisy Mae’s haunches, then left his stool to touch her fur. When she didn’t wake, he pushed his hand deeper into the fur and petted her. Hezekiah tiptoed away softly as he’d come. Later, when he remembered again to visit his bears, he found Daisy Mae lapping water from the cage’s tank, and Rosa and Ted were gone.
History Class
THE RESERVATION COMPUTER AT THE LOBBY DESK OF THE OLD Farmington Inn has forgotten him, and he can’t find his confirmation number in his briefcase. Where are his reading glasses? “My wife’s the organized one,” he explains. He squints into a pocket of his luggage. The light’s too dim, part of the inn’s nineteenth-century decor: imitation gas lamps, paneling darkened as if by wood smoke, hardcover editions of Hawthorne and Webster on the shelves, and a big-faced innkeeper whose lips work the stem of a lit pipe as he fingers his own drugstore glasses from a vest pocket and hands them across the counter. The lenses are smudged and scratched but magnify well enough.
After signatures and keys he settles into his room, charges the cell phone (too late to call Rosa and the kids), slaps his face with icy water from the bathroom faucet, unpacks. He checks inside a folder, assuring himself once more that he remembered everything. Antique circus tickets sealed in a clear plastic bag. A photograph of his mother that shows the scar on her face. A shoelace singed brown, also in plastic. A sixty-year-old headline, laminated on yellowed newsprint, that reads, “Circus Blaze Kills Hundreds.” Copies of e-mails he’s exchanged with a high-school sophomore named Lydia who first wrote: “I am working on an honors history project about the Hartford Circus Fire and I understand from newspaper articles that you are one of the last living survivors …”
Outside, a dog barks, then barks again, and somewhere a chime is agitated to a jangle by the wind. He had wanted to lodge in Hartford, but this place is more pleasant than any he could find in the city. A quiet country inn for a quiet country town, which he remembers as full of apple orchards and money. The New England of Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives, and the room looks it. A four-poster bed. A checkerboard table. A framed print of tall ships in Hartford’s long-vanished Dutch Point harbor. He grew up with a different Dutch Point, one where retired Italian men took fishing poles and coffee tins of worms or corn kernels on weekday mornings, the motors of their small boats leaking oil into the Connecticut River. Hartford, not New England. But he’s here to visit both. Tomorrow, the city: Lydia and her history class, then his parents’ graves. Rosa arrives Wednesday from North Carolina, and the next day they’ll begin their autumn leaf tour of Massachusetts and Vermont. He returns to Hartford every few y
ears, can’t seem to stay away, and Rosa has visited with him for a funeral and for a birthday a few years back, but she’s never seen the New England where farmers stain their barns red and innkeepers wear Abe Lincoln beards.
In bed, with a room-service tumbler of scotch brought by the innkeeper (“One day at a time myself,” the innkeeper said, “expecting miracles”), he braces on stiff pillows and rereads Lydia’s most recent e-mail to review the details. “Turn left,” she wrote, “after you pass through the metal detector.” Back home, as he headed for the door with luggage in hand, Rosa pinched his cheek and needled him for having a crush on the girl. “If she’s tall and sexy, you run fast as you can,” Rosa said. He wanted not to blush but did, because it’s true: Lydia has charmed him. The formal tone of her notes, her address of him as “Mr. Theodore Liszak of North Carolina,” the precision of her questions, the easy and excessive use of exclamation points to thank him for his answers. The invitation to visit her class flatters him, because it has been years since anyone—even his own children—showed interest in his dramatic history, but it troubles him, too, because he knows how little he has to say.
He was three years old. His mother brought him to a circus matinee. The tent ignited, then burned, and the fire peeled his flesh from ankle to collarbone.
He remembers none of it. He has never remembered. In his mind, he was born with the scars that crisscross his body. “It’s a blessing that you don’t remember,” his mother used to say. For years he believed her and never pushed for more than the spare details she offered, settling instead for glimpses he dreamed that vanished as he woke.
One weekend afternoon in North Carolina, by the swimming pool, his own children asked about the fire. He’d forgotten his sunglasses indoors, so he lay on his stomach on a towel on the warm deck, beads of water sliding off him, his eyes closed and hot from the chlorine. He felt little hands on his skin, pressing, poking. Little breaths. Little gasps. He pretended to sleep until they shook him awake. They asked, and he answered, a conversation that he hoped could last forever but ended after a few minutes with a shoulder shrug. “I don’t remember,” he’d said, too many times. Then Ryan and Amber hurried off as if they’d only come for permission to color with crayons. He watched them go, squinting against the sunlight that glared off the water’s surface, off the whiteness of the deck, off the metal flashing on the house’s roof, all so blinding he had the sense that the light had erased him.
At breakfast, he watches an English setter gambol about the yard, a soggy rope in its mouth, bits of leaves tangled in the fringe of its tail. Beyond the dog lie gardens with mums still blooming autumn’s colors, but the vegetable plants have frosted black. He sponges runny yolk into a piece of soft bread, and memory interrupts, surprising him with Lanie Chaponis who in second grade saw how the fire had marked him and who wouldn’t put her fingers in the finger paint after he had touched it. And who, years later, in high school, opened her blouse and let his hands follow the curves of her breasts, and who kissed his scars hungrily. But another teenage girl intrudes on the memory, a live one carrying a coffeepot, asking about a refill.
A few hours later, past the metal detector, past a perfumed security guard whose upper arms are thick as fire hydrants, he arrives at the school office. “Lydia Turner,” he says and learns that she has missed school today. Nevertheless, arrangements are made, and in the classroom the teacher tells him the story of an after-school fight. The other girl, troubled, used a knife. Lydia’s wounds required surgery. She’s home now from the hospital, but the teacher doesn’t know when she’ll come back to school. Maybe a week, maybe two. Maybe never. “Students sometimes vanish, yes,” he says. “Change districts. Move back to the West Indies or New Haven, wherever they’re from.”
The teacher offers him a chair near the front, a place to wait until it’s time to talk about the fire. The chair, made for a younger, more pliable body, pinches skin on his right hip. The teacher orders a girl in the back row to put away her headphones.
He remembers that in high school a nun once pointed to his scars and told him that God marks little boys for the wickedness He finds in their souls. Every boy in this classroom wears sneakers that look like carnival rides. Some girls do, too. The carpet is stained and littered with gum wrappers and paper bits sloughed from spiral notebooks. The ventilation system wheezes. Near the back a fat boy in a football jersey rests his forehead on the desk. The teacher reviews the history of school desegregation. “Topeka, Kansas,” answers one student. “Little Rock Central,” says another. “Sheff v. O’Neill,” gargles a neatly dressed girl who sounds ill with pneumonia and barely holds her eyes open. The teacher’s name, he sees, is written on the whiteboard, and he hopes a student will say the name so he learns how to pronounce it.
“Lydia’s guest,” announces the teacher, “survived Hartford’s great circus fire. I wish she were here to introduce him, and I hope you all keep her in mind, and pray for her, and yourselves avoid violence. We must walk other paths, yes? Walk away from foolish trouble with our heads high. Walk away, yes. Walk away. Lydia began studying the Hartford circus fire for her honors project at the start of the school year. Yes, it is an important part of Hartford’s history and as bad as it sounds. A circus tent burned with a crowd of women and children inside. Lydia’s guest was a little boy at the circus that day. She has written him e-mails, yes, and he’s come from North Carolina to share his experience with us.”
Another nun had proclaimed him God’s miracle, said that a guardian angel walked into the flames to rescue him, as Lord Jesus will one day stride through infernal perdition to free all sinners. “Dear Mr. Theodore Liszak of North Carolina,” Lydia wrote. “Please if you come to Hartford …” He imagines the other girl’s knife cutting into soft belly. The teacher, near the back of the room, makes violent, surreptitious hand signals to the fat boy in the football jersey, and the boy sits straight. The teacher wears a tie. Gold paisley.
Back home, he had decided against a tie because he thought the students might find it stuffy. Now, standing before this array of faces that show no hint of anticipation, his hand rises to his collar and he fiddles with the spot where a knot should be.
“High-school buddies called me Lizard Liszak,” he says.
Lydia had declared the nickname “most interesting!!!!!” but the faces of her classmates remain static. No one even coughs. He says, “I’ll explain why later.”
Because it is easiest, he begins with facts: July 6, 1944. No known cause, no arsonist ever arrested. Fire rushed up a wall of the tent across the top and down the other side. The band’s musicians blew their horns until smoke scalded their lungs. Women died. Children died. More than one hundred fifty people. But no animal suffered, not a whisker singed.
“It was near here, a couple miles to the east. On Barbour Street.”
Then his story: How his mother brought him to the circus that day. How his father was absent, off to fight the Nazis in Italy. The weeks he lay in the hospital, the surgeries to patch his skin. The scar his mother carried on her face throughout her life.
He remembers the photograph and passes it to a girl in front. She looks a moment, hands it to a girl behind her.
His own scars. He bunches up his sleeves to show them. “Lizard Liszak,” he says. But the football boy’s head is again flat on the desk. The pretty girl who gargles her words fishes in her purse. He looks at his arms and sees what they see: aged flesh. The fire’s markings, old friends to him and in his youth a startling sight, look less exotic set against coffee-stained teeth and liver spots and sagging, withering skin. He notices a boy with his own scar, pencil-thin and running the length of his forearm.
“I don’t remember the fire,” he says. “I was three years old. But I have read about it, and people who were older told me stories. They said they’d never forget that day.”
The boy with the forearm scar gives back the photograph.
“Oh! and I have the actual circus tickets. And this is a shoelace I
wore that day.”
The souvenirs make their way around the room. Students shift in their seats, glance at their cell phone screens. The teacher prompts them for questions. Finally a boy asks, “Do you know Alonzo Smith? He’s my uncle, and he lives in North Carolina,” and the students laugh.
On display at the front of the room, the scarred relic smiles through his failure. When the laughter quiets, he asks, “Which desk belongs to Lydia?” and a few students point. The empty seat holds a place in the middle, shading to the room’s left, between a boy with handcuffs on his backpack and a girl with fingernails long and curled and painted pink, white, and orange.
“How is she?”
The students ignore the question. Instead each looks elsewhere: at a notebook, at a dropped comb on the rug. The boy with the scar pinches the wound along his arm.
“Please,” he says.
A few students turn to the teacher, who nods permission.
“Not good,” answers one.
“She got cut bad.”
“Girl who did it’s in jail.”
He asks what started the fight. Too many voices answer, then grow louder, and he can’t make out anything through the din. The teacher quiets them, then picks one.
“Her brother got in a fight with this other girl’s brother and beat him pretty bad. So this other girl wanted payback.”
His hand worries the absent knot once more. The students wait for another question. God, they’re so beautiful, and he fears his eyes might tear. The bell saves him. Smiling students politely return the tokens of his one-time troubles, which now seem to him old beyond reason and foolish. After Alonzo Smith’s nephew apologizes to him at the teacher’s insistence, he asks the teacher about Lydia. He wants to visit. Is there an address? “Maybe at the office,” the teacher says. But no, the woman at the counter won’t release students’ records. Privacy laws. Perhaps he’d like to send a get-well card in care of the school that they might forward to her? Yes, he’ll do that. “And do you have a phone book?” He looks up her last name, Turner, finds too many to call. On the way out he waves to the security guard with arms like fire hydrants. “Thanks for visiting,” she says.
The Greatest Show Page 18