by Nick Arvin
He fell limply when she released him. She ran forward, trampling the body. Bones cracked. Henry rolled away and covered his head with his arms. He heard the elephant’s heavy steps receding, then she seemed to be gone. Henry raised himself to his knees. The elephant was trotting past some of the smaller tents of the circus from which men emerged and fled or shouted and gave chase.
A line of spittle leaked from the corner of Fielding’s mouth. He lay twisted and misshapen, his neck crooked strangely, blood leaching into his shirt in several places. The first people to gather and stoop over Fielding’s body ignored Henry. In their cages several of the African cats roared and paced. Henry sat among some barrels near the big tent, and curled himself tightly so his knees pressed into his eyes and he saw white-hot stars of pain.
After a time someone tapped Henry on the shoulder. The knife thrower peered down, the shaving nick on his cheek still raw. “Weren’t you with him?” he said, inclining his head toward Fielding’s body, now covered by a multicolored tent canvas. Henry nodded. A police officer, silently gripping his arm, escorted him back across the East River. When they reached the apartment on Fifteenth Street, the officer stood in the parlor, clutching his hat in his hands, and attempted to explain to Henry’s parents what had happened. Henry sat to one side, silent and small.
Aunt Emma did not emerge from her home for a couple of days after Fielding’s death. But she came to the funeral, and with her tall proud posture she looked splendid dressed in black. Fielding had been well liked and a crowd of neighbors and friends and coworkers gathered at the grave. This seemed to please Emma and she accepted their condolences with grace and calm.
After the funeral she began to get out again. She had some money left, but she talked about finding work to support herself—perhaps she could return to teaching. She came over for dinner at Henry’s mother’s invitation. Henry watched her quietly and she seemed a little more distant than usual—she did not have any sweets or coins for him, did not ask him about his schoolwork—but otherwise she seemed fine.
She didn’t ask him about the elephant until a couple of weeks after Fielding had died. What had happened to the animal? Henry didn’t know. The last he had seen, it was running away. She asked if Henry might accompany her to the circus and although it was not clear what she planned to do there—she said only that she wanted to talk with the manager—Henry’s parents consented.
For the trip Emma wore a new dress with ruffles down the sleeves and skirt. She tied a red silk ribbon around the collar and wore a wide-brimmed hat with a matching red ribbon around the crown. She even bought a new hat for Henry, a bowler that was too large and settled just above his eyebrows. “You’ll grow into it,” she assured him confidently, as though she expected he might well grow into it that very afternoon. At the circus they were taken to a heavyset man with quick black eyes named Grieling. He spoke to them inside a small, lime-green tent with a straw-scattered floor, a few crates filled with papers, and a desk of boards laid over two sawhorses. Emma explained who she was and inquired after the criminal elephant, Topsy. She said that, in her opinion, the most severe justice should be brought down on the animal. This boy—she indicated Henry—had witnessed the most horrible and unwarranted murder of his own uncle. Something ought to be done.
Grieling sat behind his makeshift desk with steepled fingers. He glanced at Henry, then stared at Emma, allowing the silence to grow obvious and discomforting. “I would like to help,” he said. “However, the animal in question is no longer here.”
Emma tapped her foot. “What do you mean? I don’t suppose she just flew away?”
“No, ma’am. We sold Topsy along with a couple older elephants to”—he riffled through some papers, then held one up—“Messrs. Thompson and Dundy. Seems they’re building a new amusement park in Coney Island, adjacent to Steeplechase, and they’ve retained some elephants for the heavy lifting.”
“You let the beast go?”
“Certainly. That seemed like a good place for her.” He smiled. “After all, it’s well away from where passing drunks might attempt to feed her lighted cigarettes.”
He allowed another of his pauses, and Emma drew herself up. “My husband loved animals. If that beast got a cigarette from him, she must have snatched it from him, stole it right from his lips, I expect.”
“My knife thrower said he saw your husband offer the cigarette to her.”
“Your knife thrower is a liar.”
Grieling shrugged and looked at Henry. “You were there, son, right? How was it?”
Henry looked at the man a second, then stared at the ground. He felt the two adults gazing at him. Their silence seemed to exert an enormous pressure, forcing words from him that he did not want to speak. As he opened his mouth, however, Emma interrupted: “Let the child be. He has nothing to do with it. The indisputable fact is that your animal murdered my husband. It’s a matter of justice.”
Grieling shrugged. “Regardless, on Coney Island the elephant will be strictly employed as a beast of burden, for lifting and carrying and such. The only people she might hurt would be the men working with her, professionals.” He flipped through some of the papers on his desk, glanced up. “I’m sorry. I cannot help you with the elephant. Was there anything else?”
Emma strode out so quickly that Henry had to run to catch her. He was sweating and breathing heavily by the time they arrived at home, but his aunt appeared still fresh and unbent, as if she had merely crossed to the other side of the room and back. Henry’s mother asked what had happened and Emma said, “Tomorrow I’m going to Coney Island,” and she stepped outside again, leaving Henry to explain, which he did, slowly, laboring through a growing sense of inadequacy. And later, alone in his room, listening to the endless, battling cries of the newspaper boys in the street below, he sat wondering—if Emma had not interrupted, how should he have answered what Grieling had asked him? He did not know himself what he had been about to say.
The next day Emma went alone to Coney Island. She returned greatly agitated. She said she had found Thompson and Dundy on the site where they planned to build Luna Park, in a small office crowded with blueprints and documents waterfalling from cabinets, off shelves and desks. Dundy greeted her graciously and cleared a chair for her, nodded and sighed with empathy while she spoke. Thompson, working at a sketch on his desk, did not appear to be listening. But when she finished, Thompson looked up, Dundy glanced over, and Emma could see between the two men, without words, a decision being formed. Thompson returned to his work, and Dundy said, softly, “You have to understand, we paid a considerable sum for that elephant.”
She protested that the elephant was a man-killer, a murderer. Dundy said Topsy was only hauling lumber now. She was a very useful animal. He began to touch Emma’s arm in a most inappropriate manner, and he made his points with perfect, infuriating unctuousness. Emma, to her own aggravation, grew shrill. Thompson finally broke in from his desk, loudly, “I understand, ma’am, that your husband fed old Topsy as lighted cigarette. Seems like you would expect an animal to react in some way or another to that, wouldn’t you?” Emma said she was so upset she nearly cried. Dundy took her by the elbow, led her to the door, and gave her a pat on the behind as she went out.
Emma decided to write appeals to the editors of the New York dailies, to the mayor’s office, to the police commissioner, to lawyers and local officials and state politicians. She asked Henry’s mother to proofread these for her, and together they stuffed and stamped the envelopes. They mailed the flurry of letters in a single day, and Emma seemed pleased with the accomplishment. That evening she stopped in Henry’s room and said to him, “Tell me, Henry, what’s the truth? About the cigarette?”
Henry was relieved by the question, relieved by Emma’s casualness and to be able to say what he knew. He said, “I think Uncle Fielding thought the elephant wanted to smoke.”
“Ah.” Emma looked away. “Well, that would be like him, wouldn’t it?” She seemed to intend this as
a small joke, but her voice didn’t quite manage the joking lilt.
Henry understood, suddenly, that he should have lied. He said, “I mean—”
“Well!” his aunt said, but then she did not seem to have anything more to add. She said, again, “Well,” and turned away.
The replies to her letters trickled in slowly, or not at all. No one was interested; her problem was too odd and morbid. One official, the only correspondent who seemed to have gone to the trouble of looking into the matter at all, brought up the issue of the lighted cigarette. Emma’s efforts to locate work were also unsuccessful, in large part because her health began to fail—she complained of dizziness, shortness of breath, weak limbs. She took to bed. Henry’s mother started delivering soups and jarred fruits to her, did her housecleaning, and after a month decided to simply move Emma into their apartment and save all the walking back and forth.
Henry slept on a cot in the front room while Emma took his bedroom. Sometimes in the night he heard a moaning so soft that he was not certain if the sound was only a delusion of the late, restless hours. Frightened, he never did get up to go and check. A doctor came once a week and peered at Emma through a pince-nez. His reports were terse. He said, “The main thing appears to be grief. Give her time.”
The Edison phonograph Emma and Fielding had once danced to was moved into her room and Henry was often given the task of sitting beside it and turning the crank. They had a number of cylinders and he went through each of these, one after the next, Emma insisting he should not skip any. When he changed cylinders he could hear through the curtained window the rattle of hooves and the general call and babble of conversation from stoop to stoop and window to window. He imagined his school friends playing in the sunshine while he labored in this grim room. He turned the phonograph crank, and with a sick feeling he recalled the accelerating music from the big tent at the circus.
One day Emma beckoned him to her side. She was feeling particularly poorly at the time, and he stood awkwardly while, as if to verify his presence, she probed with her fingers at his belly. Then she gripped his arm and shook it weakly. “Tell me,” she said, peering at him. Her eyes seemed glossy with fever. “Really. Did he feed her that cigarette?”
Henry stared at her. Had she forgotten she had already asked? He stepped back. “No,” he said.
She turned away. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”
Emma had not been out of bed for weeks and a gossamer of snow lay in the streets when a letter arrived from Thompson and Dundy. Without explanation they announced they had decided the man-killer elephant should be executed and a large gallows would be built to hang her. They extended to Emma and any other immediate family members an invitation to attend and witness. The day’s papers carried the same news. All of them mentioned Fielding “who had fed the elephant a lighted cigarette.” They noted that Topsy had recently threatened a group of Italian workmen involved in the construction of Luna Park. The elephant was beaten off with two-by-fours and no one was hurt but this, apparently, now provided the impetus for killing Topsy.
“Ugly showmanship,” Emma said. She seemed caught between her hatred for the animal that had killed her husband and her newer but equally powerful hatred for Thompson and Dundy. They were executing the elephant, she said, only to get their new amusement park in the news. “I can’t possibly go,” she said at last. “I’m much too weak.”
In the papers, letters appeared from members of the ASPCA protesting that among civilized peoples death by hanging was now recognized as an inhumane form of execution. Surely it was equally cruel as a method of execution for elephants. Thompson and Dundy ignored their pleas initially, then abruptly conceded the point and announced that the Edison Company would electrocute Topsy on the same scaffolding where they had originally intended to hang her.
This roused some interest from Emma. “Henry should go,” she said. “It will be very educational.”
On the day Topsy was to be executed the weather had turned harshly cold. Luna Park still would not open for several months and it presented a bleak, unfinished landscape; the towers, pagodas, and minarets of its rococo fantasyland were only half-built and the park’s electric lights in their hundreds of thousands had not been installed. In attendance were just a few reporters, three men from the Edison Company, and a handful of interested persons, Henry among them.
The electrocution, scheduled for 1:30, was delayed when Topsy balked at mounting the ramp to the execution platform. She stood with her legs stiff, leaning slightly backward against the pull of her trainer’s rope. She ignored coaxing and offers of food. No one was willing to apply much force.
Henry was both cold and sweating. He stood some distance behind the other observers. Their breaths puffed and swirled and partially obscured the elephant. She looked smaller than he remembered her to be, yet still massive.
The electrocution apparatus was very simple—two flatplate electrodes for Topsy to stand on, one for her right front foot and other for her left hind foot—so finally the Edison men simply moved the equipment to an open yard and the trainer walked Topsy over. They fed her two cyanide-laced carrots to make her death certain. A technician with a highpitched voice called, “I’m going to turn the switch now.” Then he did. Topsy lifted her trunk briefly. Smoke billowed from under her feet. She sagged and keeled rightward. The only sounds were the heavy impact of the elephant against the frozen ground, then a smatter of applause—gloved hands clapping. The smoke and the smell of burned elephant flesh dissipated quickly in the open air.
Henry found he felt neither joy nor relief. He understood this to be justice and important, but, shaking in the cold, he was not certain what justice was supposed to feel like. It seemed wrong of him to feel so cold and miserable, to feel so sorry for the elephant and somehow guilty.
One of the men from the Edison Company recorded the entire sequence with a moving picture camera. He stopped filming as soon as Topsy was down and began packing the camera away. The other two Edison men retrieved the electrodes. The reporters jotted notes, then chatted a moment or set off for someplace to warm against the chill. A gentleman who had paid for the elephant’s remains sent in a couple of skinners to strip the hide. He announced to the reporters that Topsy’s head would be preserved for mounting, her organs sent to a professor of biology at Princeton. My grandfather walked alone to the ferry that would carry him back around Brooklyn toward home. He stood at the rail in the stinging cold, looking down at the white scrim of the boat’s wake, at the gray peak and trough of the water. It seemed he saw there, again and again, the elephant’s quiet death and collapse.
His aunt wanted him to describe the event in detail. He told her how the elephant’s feet had smoked, described the noise of it hitting the ground. “Oh, I wish I could have seen it,” Emma said. “I wish I could have.”
It was a relief when she started to emerge from her bed more often. She ate more and the color returned to her face. She began to talk again of finding work, of getting an apartment of her own again. It made Henry happy to see his aunt improving. Tending to his aunt’s illness forced him to ponder endlessly his uncle’s death, and the death of the elephant as well, all of which caused him an anguish that he would have liked to have been able to forget. He had never spoken about it with anyone, for he knew his father would only scoff and his mother would tell him, kindly, that he must drive such thoughts from his mind. Now he had more time to go out on his own to play, and his aunt also pointedly drew his attention back to his schoolwork, and with these distractions, and the passage of time, the images of the deaths of his uncle and the elephant lingered less before him.
Then one day Henry was out on the streets and he noticed a handbill advertising a public lecture and demonstration by the Edison Company. It said: SEE FOR YOURSELF: THE MORTAL PERILS OF WESTINGHOUSE CORPORATION’S HAZARDOUS ALTERNATING CURRENT! Among other features, the handbill promised a presentation of the moving picture of Topsy’s electrocution. Henry remembered w
hat his aunt had said—that she wished she could have seen it—and, struck by the thought that this might further hasten her recovery, he ran to tell her.
The day of the demonstration she wore one of her best outfits and told Henry to retrieve his new bowler. They walked several blocks to a small auditorium and got seats near the back, behind well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who whispered quietly and gripped pens and notebooks. Henry felt very young, and Emma had to remind him to remove his hat. The stage curtain rose and silence followed. Near the front of the stage was a table sprouting various straps and thick wires that ran offstage. A silvered screen for the moving picture hung at the back of the stage and beneath this were three animals in cages—a cat, a dog, and an orangutan. The cat sat and stared at the crowd while the orangutan hunched in a corner of his cage and picked meditatively at his fur. The dog looked familiar. “Marie?” whispered Emma.
A man in a dark tie and coat strode onstage and introduced himself as a personal friend and assistant of Mr. Edison. He explained that the Edison Company and its competitor, Westinghouse, were engaged in a national debate about whose technology was superior for supplying electricity to the home—Edison’s direct current or Westinghouse’s alternating current. The Edison Company wanted the public to be fully informed regarding the dangers of AC. “As you will see,” he said, “even the slightest exposure to Westinghouse’s AC can lead to instantaneous death.”
Henry was straining forward, trying to make out the dog’s features. He saw Emma glance at him. “No,” he whispered to Emma. “That can’t be your dog. It doesn’t even look like Marie.” This was a lie, however. Whether it was Marie or not, this dog looked very much like her, with her black and tan coloration, with her dark, curious eyes.