George held his breath. It seemed to him that just for a moment, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dark stain where greased, oiled heads had rested against the back of a wing chair glisten and flare.
“So,” Kinsley said, “what do you think?”
What he thought was that it wasn’t the first time. It seemed that someone he knew of was always talking to horses. Perhaps only what they said was different. Or maybe not. Maybe they said the same things finally, choosing language good as any to talk to horses in, trying to get through, past, like Ringlinger, like Kinsley, like all the others in Cassadaga, telling them in words even people would have trouble with what they wanted, who they were.
He had known the secrets of seances for almost a year, had attended, diligent as someone learning a card trick, as almost every spiritualist in Cassadaga had explained his particular techniques, unburdening, trusting him with their mysteries, dragging him into their conspiracies. It was not the way grownups normally behaved with children. Even his parents had said “when you’re older,” putting him off with their “not yets” and “not nows” (filling him in only on this: family history), but the Cassadagans had fixed on him as if he were some kid confidant, inundating him with some need they had to provide the plausible, satisfy logic, purge belief, lapse faith.
If he was taken in by some particularly striking effect, they could become almost shrill in their contempt.
“My God! Didn’t you even feel it?” Reverend Bone demanded.
“My left arm moved.”
“Not that! Didn’t you feel it when we shook hands and I planted the fishhook in your shirtsleeve?”
“You were talking about the spirits being angry. Something touched my sleeve. My arm flew up.”
“Christ, kiddo, it’s a good thing you’re too small and I had to throw you back. Otherwise I’d fry you for lunch. Something touched your sleeve! Yeah, right. My nickel fishhook and my ten-pound line! You were rigged as a puppet, Pinnoch! You were struck as a pompano.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Jesus! You don’t know beans about good manners, do you? When people shake hands hello they usually shake hands good-by.”
“That’s when you took it out.”
Bone rolled his eyes and raised his hands in the air. “Curses, foiled again,” he said mildly.
It was always their mildness which was feigned. All they demanded of him was pure doubt, unrelenting skepticism. It was as if by exposing the five-cent fishhooks and ten-pound lines that were nearly always the simple solutions—they shunned the elaborate, were unreconciled to the complicated; if a seance couldn’t be conducted by a spiritualist and one assistant it was not a clean operation—to what were only tricks, hammering at him with explanation, clarification, cracked code and truth, they were free to contemplate mystery, the wonderful, all the elegant hush-hush of the riddle world.
They were childless of course, or their children were grown, gone, and that may have had something to do with their attitude toward him, but even George, grateful as he was for their attention, understood that at bottom their feelings were neutral, they did not care for him——not in that way. He was no surrogate.
“No,” Professor G. D. Ashmore told him, “you’re no surrogate. You’re it, the real thing. You know why we beat at you with our greenroom shoptalk and regale you with our wholesale-to-the-trade secrets?”
“Because you trust me?”
“Trust you? Why would we want to trust you? You’re a kid. What are you, eleven, eleven and a half? You’re a kid. You walk on the grass. You fish out of season. You’re a kid, you’re nasty to cats. You break a window you say it was an accident. You’re a kid, you play hooky, you mock the deformed. Why would anyone trust a kid?”
“Then why?”
“You’re going to be twelve soon. You’re going to have to make up your mind, George. You’re going to have to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Leave me alone, don’t bother me. I don’t talk turkey with kids.”
This was before he’d seen his sister.
His instruction continued.
“In street clothes, I seem ordinary as a fourth for bridge. Pour yourself some lemonade, dear,” Madam Grace Treasury called from behind the dark, heavy curtain that served as a partition between her seance room and her parlor. “Pour some for me.
“I could be someone shopping, who does dishes, makes beds. In elevators, crowded buses, in all the rush hours, men, women too, find my bearing undistinguished, so like their own that we are almost interchangeable. They can scarcely see me, make me out. It is not prurience or avidity or passion which knocks men against women, which grinds their backs into our busts or makes them lean, close as ballroom dancers, along the cant of our thighs and hips. It is that reflexive indifference to flesh, feature, organ, skin, which sprawls mankind, which, beyond a certain age but implicit at any age, potbellies posture and un-sealegs gait. It is, I think, gravity which opens our mouths like the imbecile’s and mutualizes our bodies and sexes in those elevators and buses, permitting touch touch, skin skin, body body, the coalescing rhomboids and circles of our let-be geometrics like some backward parthenogenesis.
“I have no person, I mean. Few people do. Otherwise we should arrange ourselves, even in buses, even in rush hour, like chessmen on boards before play begins. Otherwise—were I beautiful, were I hideous—I should, even in the most crowded elevator, be given that same jagged fringe of elbow room and breathing space, like a nimbus of limelight, that is granted to drunks and royalty and people felled by their bodies collapsed in the street.”
She came into the room. She was dressed in a sort of robe, dense and massy as a habit, larger than he’d ever seen her, taller, her face, even her hands fuller.
George saw her strange make-up, her blue face powder, her black lipstick, her face blocked off in queer colors, like the hues of a wound or hidden organs suddenly visible. She seemed immense in her turban, her big seance dress.
“Thank you for pouring the lemonade, dear. My,” she said, taking a window seat in the bright parlor, “it’s just so hot. Sometimes I think it isn’t any special favor to us to have all this Florida sunshine. Oh, I know they envy us up North and it is a comfort in the winter, but, gracious, it does get hot, and we don’t get the cooling breezes that folks can at least hope for in other parts of the country. That’s one of the reasons I bought such a large Frigidaire. So I’d always have plenty of ice cubes for my lemonade. When it’s hot like this, I like it cold enough to hurt my teeth.
“Will you listen to me nattering on about lemonade and there you’ve gone and poured me a glass I haven’t even made a move to taste. The ice is probably all melted now. Well, no matter, I like the taste almost as much as I do the chill.”
She crossed the room, moving behind the small coffee table on which the pitcher and lemonade glasses had been set down and lowered herself beside him on the sofa. He felt the cushions and springs compress as if air and all tension had been squeezed from them, himself suddenly angled toward her, his stiffened body bracing, like some cartoon animal unsuccessfully resisting momentum.
“May I have my glass of lemonade?” she asked.
She seemed less than inches off, her body glowing with its presence and weight and power.
“Give me the lemonade,” she said. “I’ve already asked you once.”
He picked the drink up from the table and held it out to her. She made no move to take it from him.
“The lemonade,” she repeated. He pushed his hand closer, but felt reined, checked, doing some strange balancing act of the level ground, some odd, squeezed constraint like a resisted fart.
“Set it down,” she commanded. “Do I look like a woman who drinks lemonade? Stop that whimpering.” She handed him a tissue.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Rush hour,” she said. “My askew totemics.”
“It’s the black lipstick, your blue face powder.”
&nb
sp; She didn’t answer.
“It’s the dress,” he said, “it’s the turban.”
She said nothing.
“It’s my good posture,” she said softly. “It’s my sealegs. It’s my specific gravity and unsprawled essence.”
“You scared me,” George said.
“Ah,” said Madam Grace Treasury.
He was a bit scared of all of them.
Even of Professor John Sunshine, psychic historian and Cassadaga buff, who lectured him on the subjects of Cassadaga, midgets, freaks, and what Sunshine called “the marked race of Romany.”
“The development of Cassadaga and the establishment of the circus’s winter quarters in De Land were almost attendant,” he said. “You could have had the other without the one but not the one without the other. It’s almost as if the town were founded on some debased bedrock of declined, vitiate genes, as if blemish and the sapped heart were to the origins of Cassadaga what a fresh water supply and the proximity of a railroad were to the development of Chicago, say.
“We don’t know either the significance of the name or how the area came to have it in the first place, but in all probability it goes back to that marked race of Romany, that same hampered, degraded, clipped-wing brood which was the town’s reason for being. Perhaps a curse or threat, some gypsy-hissed snarl or deterrent. Perhaps even an ultimatum, some sinister dun, the soul’s dark invoice. So even if I don’t have the literal translation—this would be slang, you see, idiom, some word or words fugitive (Cassadaga. Cas sa daga! Cassa! da Ga!) even to that touring company of the fugitive, double-talk to the ensemble, the swarthy old-timers and pierce-lobed regulars, slang, patter, argot, cant—I have the metaphorical one: some busted negotiation between buyer and seller. Maybe not even language finally, maybe only furious extemporized sound, the clicks and spirants, dentals and velars of Romany rage. Cassadaga! Ca ssad a ga! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
“Nor do we understand why, if the founding of Cassadaga and the founding of the circus’s winter quarters in De Land were practically collaborate, Cassadaga would be fifteen miles from De Land. We may speculate, of course.
“The mark of the marked race of Romany is to a large extent self-inflicted. They are an aloof, self-exiled, stand-offish people, wanderers who carry their ghetto with them, who move through the world like refugees, as if whatever they may have left in any direction in which they are not immediately traveling is either already burning or contagious. Cassadaga wouldn’t have been Cassadaga then. Whatever it was that happened between the gypsy girl and the gadge wouldn’t have happened yet. It would have been a clearing, a place to put the caravan down, at once far enough off from De Land and close enough in, situated nearby the gadge money and opportunity which would have been the marked race of Romany’s equivalent of fresh water and the proximate railroad.
“Of course they fraternized with the stiffs and roustabouts. It wouldn’t even have been fraternization in the strict sense of the term, the stiffs and roustabouts—my God, even the tumblers, acrobats and flyers; even the clowns, wire walkers and animal trainers themselves—barely a step up the evolutionary ladder from the marked race of Romany.”
He looked at George with his intense eyes, examining him as he spoke. He didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t miss anything, and the boy felt Sunshine’s hot scrutiny and wondered if perhaps something shameful weren’t happening on the surface of his skin. Sunshine might have been a G-man, George suspect currency.
“Have you seen them? When you go into De Land with your father or to school, do you take a good look at them? Not just giving them the once-over for ringlets or swarthy skin, for holes in their ears or a garlic in their mouth—hair can be combed straight or hidden under a cap, skin can bleach out in winter quarters; holes fall in on themselves and a clove can be covered by a tongue, though most of them don’t bother—but really looked at them, at their foreigners’ cheekbones like subcutaneous wales or some dead giveaway marked Romany spoor of indefinite half-life, at their scars and tattoos like marked trees or a vulgar postage? Have you looked in their eyes or smelled the smoke on their skin? (It gets into their pores. They can never get rid of it.) Have you seen their bunkhouses? The floors have great wooden wheels under them and the wheels are buried in the ground. You didn’t look at them, you look at them next time.”
All the while looking at George—who hadn’t seen his sister yet but had recently had from his father a bit of the story of the first George Mills—examining him as he’d advised George to examine the roustabouts and circus performers. (And when, George wondered, will I be brave enough to look at another human being the way this strange man is looking at me?)
“Of course they fraternized. Hell, maybe it wasn’t even fraternization, maybe it was just family reunion. But remember what they were there for, too. Marked race of Romany or no, cousins or no, these roustabouts and artistes were just so much gadge gold to the gypsies. (And maybe that’s why you don’t find rings in a roustabout’s ear. Because the gypsies stole them!) They sold them their daughters’ virginity, or its appearance, its raw chicken skin prosthetic equivalency, its family secret recipe cosmetic blood, or sold them to the roustabouts anyway, the artistes having daughters of their own, their own merchandise, and gambled with them, the artistes, too, and told their fortunes and worked spells against their enemies for money, and something which was even of more importance and real value to them, to the artistes, not the roustabouts, than anything else. They sold them magic.
“The marked race of Romany sold the circus people their talent. They sold them magic balance. Before the gypsies came in from Cassadaga, the wire walkers were merely skilled, trained, vaguely equilibriumally inclined, say. Afterward, they were surefooted as mules, as cats and mountain goats, with a gift for recovery and balance like a bubble in a level. There was inner ear in the soles of their feet. They could walk up a tree as casually as you climb stairs.
“They sold strength to the acrobats, infusing their legs and arms with the force of bombs, selling them flexibility, endurance, the tractables of great apes, a lung capacity that was operatic. The pyramids they did now were Cheopsic, Pharaonic. They could hang by a pinkie or stand on their hair.
“And height to the flyers, loft and lift, the tucks, spins and gainers of birds, the timing of salmon.
“And sold to the animal trainers, the lion tamers and bear and elephant handlers, the equerry and equestriennes, a Doolittle knowledge of the beastly heart, some Braille brute feel for fauna that was not so much mastery as plain hard bargaining, actual clausal, contractual negotiation, some stipulate Done! Shake! binding agreement, and the locked cage like a union shop! Selling them not magic courage, because you can’t buy courage, but a gift for magic enterprise, magic haggle—the bull market, the bear—faerie quid pro quo, the tiger’s leap through a fiery hoop knocked down for red meat, the bears and horses humbled for a sweet, extra straw. Selling them not courage but courage’s opposite——risklessness: that watered cement and short-cut materiel of the soul which permitted the purchaser never even ever to need courage again, so that each time he walked into the cage or raised the now entirely ornamental whip in the center ring as the panthers fled past in lively lockstep dressage, it was with the knowledge—his and the animals’—that the fix was in. (Maybe that’s what ‘Cassadaga’ means. Perhaps it’s only Gypsy for ‘Do this trick and I’ll leave you alone.’)
“And even something for the clowns. The marked race of Romany sold the clowns mark, the putty projections, high relief like Nepal on a map, some magic dispensation for the malleable, lending their faces and heads a talent for perspective——for protuberance, salience, jut and cavity, some easy canvas character in the skin itself which permitted their faces to shine like chameleon, to glow in primary colors like a waved flag.
“(Selling all of them the same thing finally, even the earthbound, giftless roustabouts on whom they turned loose their supposititious virgins, dealing in the one legitimate, renewable resource they had going for t
hem, their heritage you could say. I mean their sticky-ringlet swarth and smoked-game stink, their forest-scarred skin and bad breath. Their animality I mean.)”
Why’s he telling me all this? George wondered. How does this show me the tricks of the trade or help prepare me to choose whatever it is I’m supposed to choose?
“Because we’re no better,” Professor Sunshine said. “If we think we are we’re only kidding our——” He broke off. He reached over and grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled it toward his face. George thought he was going to kiss it, but the man only gathered it in and held it there. His nostrils flared and relaxed. He’s sniffing me, George thought, and wanted to cry. “You’re not from around here,” Sunshine said. He released George’s hand. “Where do you come from? I forget.”
“I came from Milwaukee with my parents.”
“Gypsies have parents,” he said. “There are gypsies in Wisconsin,” he said slyly.
“We’re English,” the boy said, and thought: We’re English. Father says Millses go back to before the Norman Conquest. Then he remembered what his father had lately been hinting was their doom: never to rise, never to break free of their class, marked as Cain—my God! he thought, marked!—forever to toil, wander, luckless as roustabout.
Professor Sunshine smiled, no longer looking at George. Some of the edge had come out of his voice. He spoke, George thought, as his teacher sometimes did when she was telling them about some place in the world that neither she nor anyone else in the class would ever see. “The psychics came only after the gypsies had already cleared off, but, like the marked race of Romany itself, settled in Cassadaga. They showed little interest in the roustabouts or circus performers and, except for the occasional seance or consultation, had almost nothing to do with them. From the first their attention and interest, to the extent that they were drawn to the circus at all, was focused on the personnel from the side show.
George Mills Page 17