Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Mister John chewed and puffed away on a great panatela as the Wintergarten’s circus spilled out before him, said Alfred.

  “He appeared to be analytically gauging the nuances of each of the performers that appeared—the equestriennes, the acrobats, the aerialists, even the clowns.”

  As the Wintergarten’s headliners, the Leamy Ladies were the last attraction of the evening. Except for the stars on the ceiling, which continued their glimmering, all the lights in the great hall were switched off. Toni took her place on the trapezone rotaire’s bicycle, and Nellie, Tina, and Leitzel assumed places on their trapezes below the great wheel. Then the trapezone rotaire began its slow turning, and at the same time, all its lights started brushing the dark air with color.

  If the Leamy Ladies took any notice of the fat man in the royal box seventy feet below, they likely were as uncertain about his identity as were all the spectators in the house. Their display that night, as every night, proceeded with the millisecond-by-millisecond precision of the circling planets. It was spectacular. Near the absolute end of the Leamy Ladies’ presentation, Leitzel, Tina, and Toni descended the rope ladder. La Belle Nellie was left alone in the air, seated on her trapeze, hanging below the trapezone rotaire. In a moment, she rose from her bar, and then pressed her hands to her breast, as though her heart had just been pierced by an arrow. In the next second, she fell forward into space and dove the sixty or seventy feet into the net. Some of those large paintings of Houdini, Grock, Guilbert, and others might have shifted into cockeyed positions on the Wintergarten’s walls because of the bombardments of thundering applause and cheering.

  Mister John and his aides-de-camp instantly made their way to the office of the Wintergarten’s manager. In minutes, someone from the office was sent out to summon Edward Leamy.

  “My mother, sister, aunts, and I remained in the dressing room after Mr. Leamy disappeared,” Alfred said. “My mother was jittery. It started to seem to all of us that he had been gone for an hour or more, but probably only fifteen or twenty minutes passed. Finally, he reappeared in the dressing room. He appeared more euphoric than any of us had seen him before. He had a rolled-up contract in his hand. ‘The Leamy Ladies are going to New York next spring,’ he said. ‘Madison Square Garden. The Barnum & Bailey Circus. The Greatest Show on Earth.’ ”

  There was much rejoicing. La Belle Nellie, Tina, and Toni were embracing one another, embracing Professor Leamy, and all of them were crying. They were trying to explain to Leitzel what this would all mean, how wonderful it would be.

  Alfred Pelikan sat in a corner of the room, a witness to the jubilation but not a part of it.

  He so wanted to be able to cross the ocean with his mother, sister, and aunts, so wanted to be inside Madison Square Garden on the night the Leamy Ladies presented their premiere performance there. But even more, much more, he wanted what he always wanted. He wanted to be a part of a family.

  In her joy at the news she was going to America, La Belle Nellie kissed and hugged Alfred. She told him that she and Leitzel would miss him terribly, but that they would write often. She told him how proud he had made her, how, through his books and professors, he already had come to know things about God, science, literature, and the world that she could not even begin to understand. He was growing up to be such a fine man, she said.

  Alfred managed not to shed any tears during the dressing room celebration. They may have come later, on the train, and then the boat, as he returned to London to resume his studies in Aristotelian value ethics, Latin, medieval history, and the metaphysical nature of being. Parted from his mother once again, he no longer had to hide anything, no longer had to pretend he was a man. He was a boy again, fourteen, and as had been true almost every day and night of his growing years, he ached with loneliness.

  CHAPTER 8

  So far the show had been going smoothly, close to perfectly, Mister John might have assayed.

  He was seated in a box inside Madison Square Garden. As always, his great stomach was straining against a corseting vest, and, just now, the pickle-thick fingers on one of his hands were curled around the gold ball of the cane he held between his legs.

  There were eight thousand people in the seats, a full house. It was March 19, 1908, the night of the season-opening performance of a brand-new edition of Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth.

  The big new show, with about 350 performing artists and 74 separate attractions scheduled, was nearing at its halfway point. Up to now, the audience had reserved its most raucous cheering for Wotan, a riderless stallion that floated upward in a gas-filled balloon to the Garden’s eighty-foot-high ceiling, and then glided gently back to the floor. All the acts that had already been rolled out inside the hippodrome and in the air—the wire walkers, bareback riders, jungle cat trainers—had also been generously rewarded with great oohing and ahhing and applause, or, in the case of the clown division of thirty-five funnymen, good-natured jeering.

  Still the crowd had not yet seen what Mister John regarded as the show’s greatest attractions, its stunt-driving Sisters La Rague, who, the program advertised, carried on an automobile race in which they “passed each other in separate cars while flying and somersaulting in the air,” and the aerial femmes who had performed in every major city in Europe, the Leamy Ladies.

  Sharing a ringside box with Mister John were a couple dozen of his guests for the night—senators, judges, police commissioners, and other New York potentates, along with their wives and children.

  At his side, too, was Mable, his wife of three years. He had waited until his thirty-ninth year to marry. From all accounts, John and Mable could not have been more devoted to each other, but when they were seen together as a pair, they appeared almost comically mismatched. She was pretty, vivacious, small, and delicate. John, ten years older than she, was homely and lumpy, and towered over Mable by at least a foot and a half, even more when he was wearing a derby, which he was most of the time.

  This was an evening of special importance not just for Mister John but also for his brothers. While the Barnum & Bailey show had operated under the management of its new Ringling owners the previous year, the 1908 spectacle was the first that was actually produced by the brothers. For weeks there had been speculation in the press about whether the farm boys from Baraboo, Wisconsin, really had the goods to produce a spectacle that could live up to the Barnum circus’s long-held honorific as The Greatest Show on Earth.

  Mister John had arrived at the Garden that night with every confidence that the critics and public alike would receive the Ringling-produced Barnum & Bailey Circus with at least as much enthusiasm as they greeted any of the previous nineteen incarnations of the most famous big top show in the world. He himself had handpicked several of the heavily advertised features of the new show, among them “The Balloonist Horse,” the Sisters La Rague, and the Leamy Ladies, who were slated to be the last attraction before the intermission.

  The Garden suddenly became dark, and then the lights on the trapezone rotaire started shimmering like distant stars. Like everyone else in the Garden, Mister John was peering up at the ceiling, his head thrown back.

  Professor Leamy’s massive invention was churning slowly but steadily in the air, animated by Toni, who was on the seat of the bicycle. Suspended from trapezes beneath the slightly creaking creation were La Belle Nellie, Tina, and Leitzel. As the four carried out their assignments, their shadows, three or four times their sizes, moved in unison with them on the ceiling and the walls.

  Nothing like the rotating trapeze had ever been presented in an American circus before. There was much purring from the crowd in the earliest moments of the troupe’s appearance, but then, very soon, in just two or three minutes, the novelty of the attraction already seemed to be wearing thin with the crowd. Now there were only occasional patters of applause as the aerialists went through their routines—cloud swings, handstands on their bars, and two- and one-legged, upside-down suspensions on their swings.

>   Mister John had a reputation for having unerring judgment in discovering acts that proved to be great sensations with the public. How could he have so badly misgauged the appeal of the Leamy Ladies, the costliest single attraction in the circus?

  Customarily, Mister John’s pie-round face never betrayed anything of his emotional state. But it must have been apparent now to Mable and everyone around Mister John that he was suffering perturbation. His face took on the colors of a still-ripening tomato, green, yellow, and red, and it was also dewy with sweat. He was becoming more and more pained by the crowd’s tepid reception to the feature he had been sure was going to be received as the circus’s pièce de résistance.

  There were people in the seats, some of them his guests in the box, who were already looking at their programs to see what act was to follow, and because the program’s intermission was next, some of the spectators were leaving the arena to line up at the concession stands in the hallways.

  Mister John, a prideful man, likely started to wonder what the critics would say about the Leamy Ladies in the morning papers. How could he have been so badly wrong in bringing the attraction to America? He may also have started thinking about scrubbing the act from The Greatest Show on Earth and sending the ladies back across the Atlantic on the next steamer out.

  Then something surprising happened.

  Like dancers in a corps de ballet moving to the sides of the stage to give Anna Pavlova the center position, La Belle Nellie and Tina assumed sitting positions on their trapeze bars. The spotlights in which they had been bathing went dark.

  In the next instant, Leitzel transferred from her trapeze to a single white rope. The only things preventing her from plunging six stories were the small fingers of her right hand, which she had passed through a silver ring to grasp the rope.

  A cry of alarm rose from the crowd. It sounded like a collective plea for her to immediately return to the relative safety of her trapeze bar. Leitzel was seventeen now, but because her face was so delicate and she was so tiny, she still had the appearance of a moppet to those in the crowd.

  Like a mischievous child being scolded by a mother for climbing too high on monkey bars, Leitzel put a free hand to her mouth and chuckled. Her eyes bore a trace of deviltry.

  “Just you watch,” she seemed to say to those in the seats.

  And it may have been just about impossible for anyone in the house not to.

  Her effect on the thousands below was like that of the moon on the oceans. Her pull was gravitational. Everyone with a seat must have felt its force drawing her or his heart up to her.

  Still grasping the rope, hanging from it by one arm in the carefree manner of a gibbon on a jungle vine, she began rocking her body upward, higher and higher. Her swaying, at least at first, was so gentle that her rope hardly moved. Soon, though, her entire body had risen so it was extending out in a position of nine o’clock. She pushed some more. Her body moved higher with each of her forward swings. Now her toes and extended body had risen so high that they were pointing to eleven o’clock. Then, for the briefest of moments, Leitzel was exactly vertical, with her feet where her head would otherwise be. Twelve o’clock.

  She started tumbling downward: one o’clock, three o’clock, five o’clock. Upon reaching six o’clock, she started rising again. Now her return upward was eased because of the momentum she had gained from her rush downward. Within seconds she was spinning heels over head, heels over head, her extended right arm serving as the axis for the vertical, propellerlike revolutions of her entire body.

  In an instant she was turning so fast that she was a blur of white. She was a human pinwheel in a brisk wind. Everyone present seemed to have sucked in her or his breath. The Garden was as noiseless as a sepulcher.

  Leitzel appeared to be on the verge of self-destructing. Her right arm looked like it might tear from its upper socket from the strain. With each of her turnovers, it dislocated from her shoulder for an instant before snapping back into place. With her free hand, Leitzel inconspicuously pulled the bobby pins from the pile of hair crowning her head. Her butterscotch tresses fell and whipped about her face.

  Those in the crowd with opera glasses could see the expression on her face. She was beaming.

  How many one-armed swings did she turn in her premiere performance in Madison Square Garden? Fifty? One hundred? More? How could anyone even count them? Her spinning body was just a white haze.

  The building rattled from cheering, whistling, and applause when Leitzel finally descended the trapezone rotaire’s rope ladder and returned to the floor. Everybody in the crowd was standing as she took her bows. This included most of the circus’s other performers, many of whom, like the Leamy Ladies, had been imported from faraway countries. The bareback riders, elephant trainers, acrobats, and clowns cried out their praises to her in German, Russian, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Surely no one in an American circus audience had ever before seen another performance quite like Leitzel’s. Everyone in the Garden had been instantly stricken with love for her.

  One by one, Mister John’s special guests started approaching him, shaking his hand and patting him on the back. It may be that his face bore at least a trace of a smile.

  Later that night, after the circus was over and Leitzel, her mother, and her aunts tried to exit the Garden, they encountered a long, double-file line of “eager youths and dapper middle-aged men” that had formed near the performers’ rear door.

  It would be the same the next evening, and the next and the next. Many of the adorers had flowers and boxes of candies in their hands.

  Edward Leamy, leading his four charges through the gauntlet, menacingly waved his folded umbrella at the dandies who looked like they might be preparing to move out of the lines.

  “He watched those girls like a hawk,” said Dexter Fellows, press agent for the Barnum & Bailey Circus. “Not one of those stage-door Johnnies ever got closer to them than the vigilant figure of Leamy as he shepherded his charges … to the Preston House just across the street, where they lived.”

  The Barnum & Bailey Circus played exactly a month of its 1908 season in the Garden, finishing its last show there on April 18. The crowds had been great at all the performances, according to newspaper accounts, and despite the earlier concerns in the press and among circus initiates about whether the Ringling brothers were up to the task of continuing the Barnum circus’s reputation as The Greatest Show on Earth, Variety, the most powerful of the show business trade publications, pronounced the first of the Ringling brothers–produced Barnum & Bailey circuses to be its old and “big and bewildering self.”

  No small credit for this could be attributed to a four-foot-nine girl with hair the color of a ripe peach.

  As spectacularly as Leitzel had shown herself in her premiere performances in America, though, neither she nor any of the other Leamy Ladies were aboard the circus’s train when, after the final performance of the Garden monthlong 1908 stand, the show started on a six-and-a-half-month, 150-town, coast-to-coast tour. The four, along with Edward Leamy, were making arrangements to return to Europe to fill engagements.

  Because of a purely practical reason, the Leamy Ladies could not perform in the Barnum circus when it was traveling the hinterlands. The trapezone rotaire could be safely rigged in permanent amphitheaters like the Garden, but at the time there were few other cities that had such arenas, and thus, when the circus was on the road, its shows were presented inside its acres-large big top. Edward Leamy’s massive, multiton, airborne steel trapeze was just too great of a monstrosity to be safely installed in a tent.

  Surely La Belle Nellie, Leitzel, Tina, and Toni, along with their manager, must have been disappointed that they could not accompany the other thirteen hundred troupers to such places as Streator, Illinois, Yazoo City, Mississippi, and San Francisco. At the same time, though, the quintet must have been jubilant.

  The Leamy Ladies had appeared with The Greatest Show on Earth. Their act had been seen by a quarter million
people during their stay in New York City. And, to top off everything, the troupe already had a contract to reappear with the Barnum & Bailey Circus at its opening stand the following spring.

  CHAPTER 9

  Edward and Hortense Codona had been gazing at their future for a dozen and a half years, ever since they began their Gran Circo Codona. Always it was shimmering in the beyond, but they had a sense they were gaining on it year by year, drawing closer. They saw it every day as they meandered up and down and sideways through Mexico with their tiny tent, tight wire, trapeze, wooden Spiral Mountain, and a single horse.

  Then, in an instant, like a star that fell out of the heavens, it was gone. It all happened around 1904 near a small village ten or twenty miles outside Monterrey.

  “Papa couldn’t stop crying,” Victoria Codona said. “There were times every day for weeks when he just broke down.”

  She was twelve or thirteen, the eldest of the Codona children, when the family’s future just seemed to disappear.

  “Papa was a broken man. Everything he had been dreaming of for years for the family was gone. None of us thought he could ever go on with the circus.”

  Edward and Hortense’s anticipated ahead-time had always included a place of their own, a home. It would be planted on green grass and would be in America. Maybe their house would have looked something like the grand white home that Victoria, over and over, from the time she was four, kept drawing in tablets.

  Above Victoria’s imagined house, in a blue sky with mashed potato clouds, there was always a great orange sun with rays shooting out of it like spikes. The earliest of her drawings showed Papa Edward, Mama Hortense, Alfredo, and she posed in front of the house, all of them smiling, appearing so proud of their grand residence. Then, later, her drawings made room for a fifth Codona, Abelardo, or Lalo as everyone in the family called him. He was born in 1895.