by George Hagen
It was to young Oscar Limpkin that Tom confided his mother's story. Oscar was like a brother to him—they were the same age and bound by years of pretend games, jokes, and a shared passion for fiction. Oscar fed Tom a secret supply of Dumas, Scott, and Cervantes to relieve his biblical diet. They reenacted sword fights in the stairwell, banished each other to lifetimes behind the bars of the banisters, and laid siege to the top floor, where the smell of the Witters' cooking was as vile as the sul-furic horrors of Hades. Oscar was an incorrigible romantic and a ham; he cast himself as all three musketeers, or Don Quixote de La Mancha, while Tom played the faithful consort or squire, or the surgeon who arrived in the nick of time to dress the hero's near-fatal wounds.
Oscar's younger sister Audrey was a compassionate girl who seemed always to be minding the Limpkin baby, a pink bundle called the Orfling. His real name had been forgotten, but the nickname suited him. He had a bobbing head, enormous eyes, and a runny nose, and he was always being set down and forgotten—part orphan, part changeling. When he wasn't bleating from hunger or asleep, he was gazing at the chaos of the Limpkin household.
When Audrey could escape her duties, she played another swordsman in their games, which, as they grew older, became more complex. Oscar devised the rules of battle: there were mortal wounds, requiring a cure of love or religious transformation, and injuries, which resulted in a limb becoming inactive. Tom would narrate the sword fights between Audrey and Oscar, dispensing aid to both as they received competing wounds. Audrey began to insist on collapsing in Tom's arms; then she would beg for a kiss to bring her back from death's edge. Tom considered such demands inappropriate—Audrey was as innocent as Sissy was sophisticated, and as flat-chested as Sissy was voluptuous. Her nose was red and pointed—she was still so much a child.
“Please, Tom, one kiss and I shall live,” she would murmur breathlessly.
“But I haven't wounded you yet!” shouted Oscar. “Tom, just bandage her up and get her back into battle!”
It was Oscar's rule that only a stab to the heart constituted victory. He used an old pan lid as a breastplate, which made him as invincible as Hercules—and insufferably confident. To balance the sides, Tom would coach Audrey. “Look,” he said, “you must stab him sideways, in the armpit. It's the shortest distance to his heart.” When Audrey struck her brother under the arm with her broom handle, Oscar issued a bloodcurdling howl that drew all the panicked neighbors into the stairwell and immediately embarked on an extended death scene, which required Tom to administer a lifesaving elixir, but only in short doses while Oscar dictated the distribution of his worldly possessions to an array of countesses and damsels (then staged a miraculous recovery). Afterwards they would wreak vengeance on the washing lines in the shabby courtyard until the toothless spinster squawked from her window, spitting a rain of curses upon them.
One evening, while his mother prepared dinner, Tom persuaded Oscar and Audrey to reenact the story of his own birth, with Audrey playing his mother, Oscar his father, and Tom the ghost of his brother. But the game offered no catharsis for him because Oscar spoiled the ending by attacking everybody with his sword instead of following the plot.
“Start again, Oscar!” insisted Tom. “Audrey must rescue the baby first, or there's no point in the ghost warning her.”
“It's no fun if I can't kill someone,” Oscar protested. At this moment, Audrey, always the conciliator, gently suggested that Oscar take vengeance after he had handed over the baby.
“All right,” her brother conceded. “I'll surrender the Orfling, but then I'll hack all the neighbors to pieces!”
The toothless spinster could be heard slamming her door shut in answer to this proposal.
Tom adored Mr. and Mrs. Limpkin. They were always hugging him and tousling his hair; he received more physical affection from them in one visit than his mother gave in a month. He overlooked their inability to dress or mind their children. They always mixed up the names of their little twin daughters, Elsie and Eloise, and it fell to Audrey to mediate the girls' squabbles and nurse their injuries, whether real or imagined. Mrs. Limpkin was a tall, full-breasted woman, whose pale skin, red nose, and perpetually anguished demeanor reminded Tom of the cuddlesome white rabbits in wire cages at the street market. She never spoke harshly and went about making dinner with a twin anchored, like a lemur, to each of her feet.
Mr. Limpkin, a clerk, was a long-boned fellow with a narrow face and saddlebags of skin beneath his eyes; an unkempt spray of grizzled hair shot wildly from his temples. When he wasn't joyously bouncing his children (and anybody else's) upon his knee, he spent his evenings poring over invoices on a small wooden desk while wringing a handkerchief into the most agonized contortions.
“Oh dear me, oh dear, dear me!” he would cry as Mrs. Limpkin staggered about the kitchen.
“What is it, dear Mr. Limpkin?” Mrs. Limpkin cried, handing the Orfling to Audrey in time for him to spew a streak of sour milk across the poor girl's shoulder.
“We face a surfeit of creditors, my dear, and a paucity in our accounts receivable,” said Mr. Limpkin, throwing his face into Mrs. Limpkin's apron while the children around them wailed and the baby emitted an earsplitting shriek.
Tom and Oscar took refuge under the dinner table. “I wish my father walked the trapeze,” Oscar whispered. “Then I could join him, and leave everybody else at home.”
“It's not a trapeze,” Tom corrected. “He wears petticoats while he walks the tightrope quite close to the ground, in fact.”
“How peculiar!” replied Oscar with delight.
“I don't think he's ever coming home again. And my brother is probably in heaven,” said Tom.
“How tragic!” replied Oscar. He envied the element of drama and secrecy in Tom's life as well as the peace and quiet of the Bedlam home. “Perhaps we could change places,” he suggested, “like Lucentio and Tranio, or something!”
When Tom was invited to dinner, Audrey took great pains to be seated beside him and kept offering him things from her plate, though he always declined. Audrey irritated Tom, but she also made him feel loved (as when she reenacted the role of his mother in the stairwell) and ashamed of himself (with her dismayed expression when he refused her a healing kiss).
Poor Audrey smelled of sour milk—from the curdled white lumps hiccuped on her shoulder by the Orfling. If Oscar engaged Tom in a conversation, Audrey would whisper into his ear her plans, which included their marriage and twelve children (all girls).
Tom was fascinated by the love between Mr. and Mrs. Limpkin; it was a long-suffering, embracing, cuddly, messy alliance; and though financial ruin beckoned at the door, they were united against the world. Any rift in the Limpkin household was quickly mended by Mrs. Limp-kin's warm-breasted embrace.
By contrast, Mrs. Bedlam's affection was offered rarely, her alliance with his father nonexistent, and the bond between husband, wife, and son existed in name only.
Tom certainly couldn't be blamed for imagining his adoption by the Limpkins. He also dreamed of being nestled with Sissy Grimes amid the potato sacks, his hand on her breast. Finally, he imagined bringing his brother back to life through some fantastic miracle, for he dearly needed someone with whom he could share the doubts, questions, and riddles of his own existence.
THE LEMON TART
ALMOST A WEEK AFTER HIS MOTHER'S REVELATION, AUDREY LIMPKIN paid a visit across the landing to Tom's door. When he answered, she placed a gift in his hand with a timid smile.
“What's this?” he asked.
“Open it,” she replied.
Tom unwrapped the paper to find a small, homemade lemon tart. “I don't want it,” he said.
Audrey's smile collapsed. “Don't you?”
“They stunt your growth.”
The girl's eyebrows converged. “They do not.”
“Oh yes,” said Tom. “The queen ate them, and she's tiny.”
The effect of Tom's rejection was obvious: Audrey unraveled the pink ribbon she h
ad placed in her hair and scratched at her shoulder, as if to remove a streak of baby vomit. “I don't believe you,” she said defiantly.
“My father told me so.”
Audrey raised her chin. “Have you ever eaten one?”
When Tom admitted he had not, she pounced on his reply. “My dad eats them, and he's six feet tall.”
Tom was perplexed by this information.
“Taste it,” she said. Then, urgently, she pressed it into his hand. “Please, taste it!”
Tom raised the tart to his lips and took a bite. His face registered dismay. It was delicious—absolutely delicious, both sweet and sour—as was the realization that his father had denied him such a pleasure. He swallowed the rest of it rapidly.
Audrey watched as Tom picked every tiny crumb from his shirt and emptied the last morsels into his mouth. Then, she tempted him with another. “But this time,” she said, “I want something in return.”
“What?”
“A kiss,” she said. “On the lips.”
He agreed.
She returned quickly with another wrapped tart. Tom took it, and Audrey raised her face to him, closing her eyes. Tom delivered payment and disappeared behind his door. Audrey stood quietly in the hall, savoring her reward. She licked her lips, as if to catch every lingering remnant of the kiss, and with ardent satisfaction, returned to her family.
THOUGH THE TART COST Tom only a peck on Audrey's mouth, it was now worth far more. The second one went into his pocket. He took it to work the next day, determined to exploit the pastry for its utmost potential.
“For you, Sissy, if you'll give me a kiss,” he said when they were alone together.
“Oh, Tom,” she cooed, “there ain't nothing more delicious than lemon tart.”
She reached for it, and he drew back the treat, leading her behind the rows of coats and shawls hanging from pegs on the wall of the workshop. Soon they were in near darkness, concealed in the smells of other men and women, and wool dampened by the morning's rain. As Tom placed the tart in her hand, he felt her breath on his cheek.
Then, Sissy gave Tom a kiss no boy would forget. She pressed her lips to his, parted them slightly—simulating the kiss she had been given by an aggressive boy in the warehouse—pushed her tongue against Tom's in a probing circle; then, as quickly, she pulled back, leaving Tom with his eyes closed, and his loins throbbing. Her gray eyes glittered triumphantly as she assessed the desire she had provoked.
Tom leaned towards her for another kiss, but she pressed her hand to his chest with a ruthless smile. “Bring me another tart.”
So, when Audrey Limpkin gave Tom another tart, he rewarded her with the kiss he had learned from Sissy Grimes.
“Oh, Tom.” She sighed with such ecstasy that he felt another throb in his loins, for Audrey had accepted the kiss in the very way he wishedSissy would, with a sigh that provoked him to smile foolishly for days afterwards. And Tom had given Audrey the kind of kiss that inspired a girl's heart to speed up while time—in fact, the whole world's chaotic spin— seemed to slow down to a breathlessly rapturous crawl.
It explained the whole riddle of life.
But after the fourth lemon tart, Sissy still refused to retire to the packing basement, with its dark recesses and soft bags of wood shavings. Why? Because her older sister was abandoned at the age of sixteen and expecting her second child.
Sissy had no intention of being another Mrs. Bedlam.
BILL BEDLAM'S UNDOING
WILLIAM BEDLAM WAS AT THE MERCY OF THE WEATHER. ON SUNNY days, large crowds gathered to see him walk the tightrope. And their generosity was as infectious as their laughter. He had noticed that more than half the crowd would toss him a few coins on a sunny day while on overcast days they were far less generous. The show was the same; the performer, the danger, and the talent were no less remarkable, so why the shallow pockets? Perhaps the damp cooled their generosity—or maybe it was the cost of coal. He knew better than to berate the crowd for this inconsistency; instead, he prayed for sun and made the best of those days when the heavens cooperated.
So after two weeks of rain, he was relieved to have a fine day in late February to perform. People spilled out of the shipping offices at lunchtime to gather around the wooden coffee stalls, baked-potato carts, and oyster vendors. They congregated on the wharves to absorb the scant radiance of a wintry sun, have a smoke or a pint of brew, or merely peer at the human parade—any reason was good enough to stop and stare.
As Bedlam set up his rope between two dock posts, he issued a nod to his neighbor, the doomsayer Paddy Pendleton. Bedlam then donned the grubby skirts of his wedding gown, parasol raised, bonnet secured, and tottered on the rope in merry imitation of an arthritic dowager.
The first and second performances were a tremendous success, the crowd alert, good-humored, and generous. But by the third, a new element was loose on the wharf—the prowlers, the pickpockets, and their shills. One fellow, with a mouthful of teeth and tobacco, and a ripe, rude lip, wearing a boatswain's whistle on a chain around his neck and a cap on his head, took position a few feet from the rope. His lieutenants radiated a short distance through the crowd, then gave him a nod.
As Bedlam performed one of his somersaults, the fellow rested one hand on the rope and yawned a stage yawn. “Me muvva can do better than that, mate!… And she's blind!”
This provoked a scattering of laughter. Bedlam ignored it, but the boatswain, intent on his mission, waited for the next somersault and strummed the tightrope with his stick, causing Bedlam briefly to lose his balance.
Their eyes met.
“Oops!” remarked the boatswain with full-cheeked amusement.
Bedlam seemed to recognize the fellow. “Ladies and gentlemen, I advise you all to check your pockets; it appears that an undesirable element is in our midst!”
This provoked a number of hands to seek their wallets and purses, and a few hands to retract—their owners suddenly gazing innocently upwards, perhaps in evocation of more heavenly virtues.
“You insult me, sir?” replied the boatswain.
“On the contrary, you insulted me, sir,” replied Bedlam. “Perhaps you'd care to join me on the rope, unless of course, your blind mother is available!”
This provoked laughter, and a flash of malice appeared in the boatswain's eye. But before he could respond, Bedlam continued his act, calling to the crowd for objects to juggle. A woman offered a limp bouquet of forget-me-nots, a man presented his boot, but nothing more was offered, so Bedlam tiptoed across the rope and seized the boatswain's hat.
With laughter, the crowd grasped the irony of this gesture while the boatswain glowered, faced with a dilemma, for his mockery was now part of the show, which provided a fine distraction as his confederates proceeded with their darker purposes, though it was at the expense of his hat—or, shall we say, his dignity—spinning arcs through the air with the forget-me-nots and the boot, first clockwise, then in the reverse.
With a final flourish, Bedlam cast the forget-me-nots back to the woman, blowing her a kiss, then delivered the boot to the man. But the crowd was waiting to see what transpired between the boatswain and his antagonist: the former's visage now portended murder, and nothing excited a crowd more than that.
Bedlam spun the hat into the sky, caught it behind his waist, and kneeling on the tightrope, presented it to its owner with an open palm. It was a peaceful gesture. There were aahs of disappointment, and then his audience dispersed as Bedlam extended his own hat for coins.
“Here, I've got something for you,” murmured the boatswain, reaching up with his stick, which parted at the handle to reveal a knife.
Bedlam must have sensed a threat, because he attempted to stand on the tightrope. This may have saved his life—for the arc of the boatswain's blade was trained on his belly, but Bedlam moved back so swiftly that the assassin pierced his right calf instead, ripping a long, red seam from knee to anklebone, and Bedlam fell, swaddled in the now bloody bridal gown, while t
he boatswain dodged away.
ABOUT A MONTH LATER, Tom was sent to retrieve a small statuette of a shepherd boy. Todderman had ordered the item from France (where it was all the rage and thus worthy of urgent replication in Britain). After Tom had wrapped the parcel safely in wood shavings and sacking, he went looking for his father. He had decided that Bill Bedlam should know about his mother's perplexing condition. After completing several rounds of the performers, he recognized his father's neighbor, standing on a small wooden crate, doling out admonitions to passersby Since Mr. Paddy Pendleton had predicted that the absolute end of the world would occur a considerable while earlier, Tom stopped to inquire about the change of date.
Pendleton didn't miss a beat. “My calculations were offset, dear boy” he replied, “by an increase in the faithful, a blessed increase, mark you. You may imagine my relief.” He extended his appeal to a lady in a gray dress with a bustle. “And if you open your heart to the Savior, madam, perhaps we can postpone the apocalypse, or alas, I fear we will be damned by June the third at the very latest,” he warned, slipping the pamphlets into a pocket and now holding out his upturned hat. “Give, that God may see ye are merciful, and withhold the mighty apocalypse that will take down our fair city like Sodom, Gomorrah, and all the godless souls that lie within its unnatural walls!”
When Tom inquired after the tightrope artist, the colporteur lowered his pamphlets.
“Mr. B-b-b-bedlam?” replied the robust fellow, displaying a startled frown. “He succumbed, my boy in a tragic accident!”
“Accident?” repeated Tom.
“It is one of the most grievous risks of public life—one's vulnerability to the wretched sinners of this city, the criminal and the murderous element!”
Pendleton placed his hand on his heart, adapting Mr. Bedlam's fate to his own travails as a public orator. Meanwhile, Tom, whose own heart felt about to jump out of his chest, interrupted to urge the evangelist to explain what had happened to his father.