He wonders if the wounds are in her shoulder or her stomach or if she’s slashed along the palms of her hands. He wonders whether her gashes have been stapled or glued or stitched.
He drives streets near the school, as if he might discover her on a sidewalk—though he wouldn’t know her to see her—and he studies each teenaged girl who plays hooky, looking for one who is hurt, on crutches or in a wheelchair or bandaged. He searches for the name Turner on mailboxes. He drives until he’s driven roads all over Hartford’s North End, until he parks at the spot on Barbour Street where he and his mother came that day to see clowns and prancing ponies. Now it is an elementary school named for a man called Wish. Nearby, a fellow in a hooded sweatshirt taps out an open-palmed rhythm on an upturned garbage can and sings; a gray-haired woman passes by carrying plastic grocery bags overflowing with purple plastic flowers. For a moment he thinks to leave his car, to walk the grounds and hallways of the school and discover whether there is a plaque, some memorial for the dead. But he pictures himself as class lets out, standing in front of such a plaque with scores of children dodging his legs. They’d hurry past, forgetting already how to add fractions or what is the capital of Egypt, ignoring him and that plaque: two throwbacks, obvious and invisible. Imagining all this, he drives on.
At the cemetery, he guides the sedan at a crawl beneath a canopy of leaves brushed gold and red. Marble monuments and tombs. A pyramid in rosy marble. A rifle carved from granite. Grassy mounds seasoned with fallen leaves. He touches a button and lowers the window on his side. He prefers autumn weather. “Yankee,” his wife has always accused. But she knows why summer troubles him, that season when his mother made him wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts no matter how blistering the day, so he wouldn’t be teased about his scars. He had never minded being teased.
He parks at a place he guesses is near his parents’ graves. A decade later, and this part of the cemetery still feels young. Here the names are eastern European and Italian, the memorials plain, designed for the working class. His father wanted a ground plate, his mother an upright stone. She won the argument by dying first; Papa could never deny her. He searches for their marker, passing as he does a fresh grave, dirt mounded and damp, crosses himself, not out of piety or his Roman Catholic habits, but out of some deeper hope.
When he finds Papa and Mama, he squats and with a toothpick from his shirt pocket pokes crud out of the L and the Z. Too many years since his last visit, and their place looks lonely and cold, without flowers, without the warmth that comes with familiarity. He tosses the toothpick aside and promises to visit more often, tomorrow and again the day Rosa arrives. A gust lifts leaves and tosses them around his feet. He thinks of the students handling his mother’s photograph, her likeness passed from hand to hand and tucked now in a folder in his briefcase, between a headline and a shoelace. Mama always let Papa trace the scar on her face with the tip of his index finger. Papa blew smoke rings from a cigar and put polka records on the hi-fi, and Mama danced. Mama always danced.
He sits in the grass and rests against the cold stone, and remembers a day when he was nine. She had run away. This was nothing new. She ran away often. Each time she returned with a gift and a story: a mica-filled rock she said was chipped from a star, a rabbit’s foot that had belonged to Peter Cottontail’s unlucky cousin, a goblet from King Arthur’s table, a fork FDR had used to eat meatloaf. Thank you, he said, and buried the trinkets beneath clothes in his dresser drawers. He didn’t want to keep them, but he couldn’t throw them away, either.
During this time when he was nine, an early autumn as temperate as today, she had been gone nearly a week. Only his father’s manner kept him from panic: Papa’s careful raking of leaves in the backyard; the way Papa tucked him into bed at night, blankets tight around the edges of his body so that he felt wrapped like King Tut. On the fifth day, Papa taught him chess. At the backyard picnic table, Papa lit a cigarette, opened a beer. For the boy, a straw in a cold bottle of ginger ale. He lifted his father’s cigarette lighter, sniffed the tang of its butane.
Papa named the pieces. He explained the pawns and knights and was about to start on bishops when Mama appeared. She smiled her beautiful Jennifer Jones movie-star smile, and she kissed her son on the head, and sat beside him on the picnic bench. His mother said nothing, and neither did his father. He kept quiet, too, because he knew if he spoke, he would cry.
Papa kept on. He spoke of the bishops and the rooks, and then the queen, who was the most powerful. The queen goes anywhere, he said, as far as she wants. Then there is the king. The king is not powerful at all but is the reason for the game. “No piece,” he said, “is more valuable than the king.”
When they began a practice game, Mama left for the house. Through an open window, he heard her draw a bath.
His father guided him through the game, saving him from check-mate by saying, “Good enough for today. Go to Franklin Avenue,” and his father handed over two dollar bills. “Get pastries for dessert.”
He pretended to leave as his father had ordered, but instead hid inside the bosom of a neighbor’s giant rhododendron, then crept back beneath the open bathroom window and crouched against the cold concrete of the foundation.
“Don’t look at me that way!” he heard his mother say.
“I thought this time you might not come back,” said his father.
“I was starving. Mice ate my knapsack and all my rye bread.”
His mother laughed, and his father said nothing. He pictured Papa standing in the doorway, then crossing to the toilet and sitting on the lid. He pictured Mama reaching with a soapy, wet hand to touch his father’s suspenders.
Mama said, “I want you to miss me.”
What his father said next, he couldn’t hear. Then Mama said, “I want you to miss me, and I want you to wonder about me. You must not forget me.”
“How could I forget you?” his father asked.
“You could,” said his mother. “You would want to.”
“You will ruin me,” his father said.
“I might,” she said, and her voice quavered. “I am a powerful queen.”
Huddled outside the window, he listened, oddly sad and comforted. When he grew older, he would wonder why his mother thought it more important to be remembered than to be kind. But then, when he was nine, he promised himself that for her sake he would never forget her. On Franklin Avenue, he bought raspberry tarts.
And now? He loses more of her every day. Already he cannot recall what she wore that afternoon of chess and cigarettes and tub water, and he can’t say for the life of him the color of her eyes. He can’t even remember how she looked on the day she was buried. He remembers a fact: Her hair was tangled. He remembers a fact: He once bought raspberry tarts. He remembers a fact: Long ago he boarded a bus on a summer morning, wanting—and not realizing he wanted—to live where people had never heard the story of his circus afternoon. He thinks of Lydia Turner’s classroom again, and of Topeka, Kansas, and Little Rock Central, and he knows such facts are distant and without temperature. Closer is that raw grave, and somewhere, at some address still denied him, a girl with cuts in her flesh. A warm breeze touches the soft skin between his collarbones, and beneath his boots as he walks: the gentle shush of leaves.
At the inn that night he asks for a telephone book. Under the Hartford listings he finds Lydia’s teacher, who answers the ring.
“Leviticus. I think that’s her father’s name. Leviticus Turner. From Belize or Honduras. I can’t recall.”
Under the Ts, Leviticus Turner on Capen Street. A phone number and a street address. Apartment 2C. But when he calls, he hears a message that the line has been disconnected.
He telephones home, tells Ryan and Amber about his visit to the cemetery. Ryan says “okay,” then asks whether he can drive the SUV while Mom and Dad are up north; Amber asks for intervention with Mom who won’t let her stay overnight at a boy’s house (“But he’s gay, Dad!”). When Rosa takes the phone, he mentio
ns the stabbing. “I don’t know why the line is disconnected,” he says, “but I’ll drive by tomorrow.” She reminds him to bring a gift, something he can return if he doesn’t find the girl, and again he feels grateful for his wife.
Later, in bathrobe and socks, he looks at his mother’s photograph, but the photo is black-and-white after all, so no, it won’t tell him the color of her eyes.
Most apartment buildings on that block of Capen Street look empty and lack address numbers, so he asks the lavender stuffed puppy in the passenger seat what he should do. At the door of his best guess, a boy’s voice sounds from the intercom in answer to his ring. He explains who he is, the e-mails, the invitation to class. “She’s asleep now, but come up,” says the boy, and the door buzzes.
The long hallway smells of cat urine and fried food. The boy who opens the door at 2C looks about fifteen. His Orlando Magic jersey is mended and too large for him. He’s barefoot and in shorts that fall past his kneecaps, and his hair is neat. The apartment is tidy and almost empty, with a red couch, a table and some chairs, and a boxy acoustic guitar in one corner. The only mess is a small one on the table, where packets of sugar and ketchup lie, torn open and shaken and squeezed empty. The curtains are drawn and glowing with sunlight.
“She’ll like the dog,” the boy says as they shake hands. His lilt sounds musical, full of sea spray and sand. As he speaks he turns his attention again and again to the room where his sister must lie asleep. “She talked about you. From North Carolina.” The boy pronounces the state as if the sound tickles him. The boy’s name, he learns, is George. The older brother.
“Have to wake her soon to change her bandages. Maybe she’ll talk to you then.”
Shy to ask more questions, he stays quiet. He’s not her teacher or a doctor, not a family friend. A radiator against the wall bangs twice.
George says, “I hate them that did this. Father says no, don’t hate. The other girl’s just a girl. But I hate that girl. I’d kill her if I saw her. Don’t make it worse, man. That’s what Father says. So it’s good I stay home with Lydia, you see? By her side 24/7, you know? Take care of her and keep myself from doing the thing I’d regret.”
From Lydia’s room comes a whimper, and George goes to her.
Behind at the table, he listens to their quiet talk, the language something like English but more melodious, and a few words he understands. Outside, something shades the sun, and the puppy looks less purple in the clouded light.
“… won’t see nobody. Tell him … go please.”
That young voice, loud with strength and defeat, and he bites the inside of his cheek. George executes his duty, apologizes, receives the purple puppy on Lydia’s behalf.
In the hallway he shuts his eyes, listens, but another voice, a stranger’s, shouts from outside, and even through the door and walls it quiets the memory of her voice to a breeze. The carpet, he notices, is worn in places to the plastic webbing underneath. “You must not forget me,” his mother had ordered, and he promised only to learn too late how cruel she was to ask the impossible, to extract a promise he’d fail to keep no matter how much he loved her. He would rather be kind. He would rather memory be ruined as everything else is ruined. The purple puppy was no kindness if it reminds her. Better to have stayed away.
“Have you heard of the circus fire?”
The innkeeper nods, speaks of how Emmett Kelly the famous clown once stayed at the inn, the stories he told. The men bookend the hearth. The innkeeper charges his pipe, and the tobacco smells of nutmeg. A pair of other guests play a word game on a board. Wind batters the windows, gasps as it forces its way through eaves and around the edges of doors. In his glass of scotch, the ice melts quickly. He sips before he begins.
“The Greatest Show on Earth,” he says, hocus-pocus words to evoke a memory he doesn’t have. “Inside the tent smelled pungent. Animals and perfume and sweat. My mother and I sat in the bleachers near the band.” He tells the innkeeper which marches the band played. Then he describes aerialists, jugglers, dancing bears. The fire surprised us all, he says, swept like wind across the tent, an apocalyptic fury from horizon to horizon, a blanket of flame draped over the sky. And as he creates the scene for the innkeeper, imagining the singed mane of a lion, the garlic breath of a clown, the bleeding mascara of a skirted girl, he finds himself younger, trapped in the tent. His mother screams, grown-ups push and yank at each other, stumbling, and their panic frightens him. He can’t run, can’t avoid the knees and footfalls of people who think of nothing but their own survival. Where is his mother? He yells for her, but the flames make such awful noise. He falls and bumps his head. He stands and loses balance, and suddenly he’s toppling off the bleachers, falling through air, a little boy in summer shorts and shoes with laces knotted twice, plummeting through heat and the rush of air, too young even to imagine that there is something called death. On the ground his body won’t work anymore. Bits of straw tickle his nose. He can’t move. Heat like the most savage cold weighs on him, and the weight eats away his clothes, invades his skin and the skin under his skin. What’s worse is the fear, his trembling heart, the emerging awareness that his mother is not the world, and that the world hates him.
The innkeeper looks gut-shot, staring at the hearth fire. “Is that what you told the kids at the school?”
The scotch tastes too much like ash. He sets the glass on a lace doily on a side table. “No,” he says, satisfied that he’ll tell no one else ever again.
The next day he wakes to quiet rain and sits at the window of his room for half an hour watching it fall. Later, sweatered, he sits in a rocking chair on the porch and reads Hawthorne. After lunch he skims the newspaper and discovers that there’s a soccer game that afternoon between Farmington’s boys and Glastonbury’s. When the rain lets up he drives to the high school and watches the teams compete. Then he’s off to meet Rosa’s plane.
The airport donuts taste stale, but he hurries one down. Rosa comes to him from behind glass doors, eyes bloodshot from travel and not so vivid a green, but she’s laughing and telling of a conversation she overheard on the plane between two young women who had piercings, and the confession of the one who wore a ring through her clitoris. “No,” she’d giggled to the other, “it’s even better.” From there to dinner at what was once a gristmill in Manchester, then back to the inn where they keep each other up late in the warm bed. The next morning at breakfast, their table is a collage of maps and tourist brochures and sections of the morning paper. Rosa asks whether he’d like to visit his parents’ graves one last time before leaving Hartford, and he shakes his head, he’s paid his respects, so she leans over a section of the newspaper and, after a minute or two, reads to him a story about parents in Ohio who want teachers to give their children more homework.
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO JOHN REIMRINGER AND KATRINA VANDENBERG, WHO loved each page as if it were their own. Thanks also to the many writers who have read these stories and offered keen insights, especially those at the University of Arkansas and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Great institutions are so because of their people.
I’m grateful to Michael Griffith, editor of the Yellow Shoe Fiction series, for choosing this book and for his careful attention to its sentences. Thanks, too, to the talented, dedicated people with LSU Press, the best friends a book can have.
A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts helped make this book possible.
For my understanding of the circus fire, I’m indebted to Lynne Tuohy, who inspired me with her reporting for the Hartford Courant nearly fifty years after the event; and to Stewart O’Nan, whose non-fiction book The Circus Fire remains as thorough a piece of historical journalism as I’ve ever read.
Thanks to Esmond Harmsworth for having faith, and to the journal editors who also believed, especially Robert Stewart at New Letters, Megan Sexton and Sheri Joseph at Five Points, and Stephen Corey at the Georgia Review.
And here’s to the ringmasters: Donald “S
kip” Hays, John Duval, William Harrison, Joanne Meschery, and the late James Whitehead.
My greatest love and appreciation goes to Sheri Venema, who walked with me into the tent and stayed for the whole show.
The Greatest Show Page 19