This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  “Now, those days,” said Eva Chase in a reedy drawl, “my dear Carl had a marvelous gift for limerick which kept all the troupe in stitches when it rained and there was no show. He was the handsomest man I ever knew, yet so devoted to theater that only the feebleminded thought him capable of performing his tragic soliloquies in a fusty Barnum exhibit. And, oh, those dreadful drafty halls Mr. Forepaugh thought to hire for Carl’s famous Gilbert & Sullivan stunts, quite unimaginable! I remember once in Nanty-Glo, the entire troupe went out after midnight and left free tickets on stoops all over town for the coal miners. Carl had such a fervid audience the next evening, he sent a telegraph to Jimmy Armstrong and another to the Manhattan Opera House. I was so hopeful for him back then.”

  Still drowsy from his nap, Alvin watched Virgil Platt scoop a warm helping of mutton and croquettes onto his plate and pass the silver platter to the Szopinski twins. Percy Webster slurped the ox-tail soup. Russell James examined his water glass for spots.

  Mrs. Burritt remarked, “Love is deception’s most potent elixir, darling. You see, few men truly intend anything remarkable in life. Distinction is much more the result of circumstance and good fortune than we’ve all been led to believe. Why, if Adam hadn’t forgotten his breakfast that day, I’m quite certain none of us would’ve drawn our first wicked breath in the world.”

  “That’s silly,” said Eugene Szopinski.

  “Entirely absurd,” his brother Samuel added, cutting into the mutton.

  Careful not to burn his fingers, Alvin took the serving plate of sweet rice croquettes while the dwarf poured himself a steaming cup of peppermint tea. He was starving to eat again, which meant he was sicker than ever.

  Unbowed by Mrs. Burritt’s needling observations, Eva Chase continued, “When I was still a girl of sixteen, Carl traveled down from Baltimore to see my performance of ‘Evangeline’ in a nickel tent show and he brought purple lilacs and champagne and offered to marry me once the show left Pearl River. He paid two dollars for a photographer to record my image on glass, and purchased a lovely old brass frame and a scented teakwood box to store it in. Later we had our fortunes told by a blind swamp gypsy who took Carl’s hand by candlelight and traced upon it with a yellow fingernail a path of starry dreams and love priceless and pure.”

  “No such thing,” Percy Webster interrupted. He set down his soupspoon. “Dreams, that is. Why, I’ve been in love so often, quite naturally I know it like sunshine. But dreams are mere rumors, untrustworthy ones at that, scandalous and wretched insinuations that serenade our bed chambers with such fevered promises as only children and canaries ever endure.”

  “Eternal love is a figure of speech,” said Mrs. Burritt. “If I’d been born mute, perhaps my girlhood room on Summer Avenue would yet host private teas and slumber parties for the fragile of heart.”

  “Oh, I just adore slumber parties,” the dwarf interjected, stirring sugar into his tea. Alvin smothered a rising cough with his cotton napkin, far too intimidated to utter a word. He had never been around folks like these before and didn’t want them to think he was a dumbbell.

  Russell James said, “Well, of course, Percy is far too reckless a fellow to admit a fault, but nobody who has actually dismembered on Phineas Barnum’s own stage a creature as delightful as May Wallace ought to expect his sleep to be blissful and unadorned.”

  The farm boy quit chewing.

  “Such a tragedy,” lamented Eugene Szopinski, as he cut apart the sweet rice croquette with his fork.

  “Utterly grievous,” Samuel Szopinski agreed, raising a stained napkin to his lips.

  Virgil Platt ate supper vigorously with eyes locked firmly on his dinner plate.

  After enjoying a sip of hot coffee, Eva Chase began again. “Once long ago, I traveled around the world with Father’s old steamer trunk and my mother’s lavender parasol and felt happy as a lark. In a hundred foreign cities from Rangoon to Constantinople, my sweet Carl was hailed as the greatest performer on earth. He danced in silver shoes with shiny green buckles and plucked emeralds and rubies out of thin air and sang like a nightingale, and one impossibly marvelous evening at the Maryinski Theater, he received a white rose bouquet and a private note of admiration from Empress Alexandra herself. When we left Paris to sail again for America, my desperate heart became so haunted by joy and fear, I counted every star fleeing heaven for the nightblack sea and scribbled secret wishes onto tiny scraps of paper and scattered each upon the cold waves. No girl ever born loved as I did then. By August, we’d traveled up the Mississippi to Memphis where Carl performed sixty-two lantern shows aboard a grand old Dixie paddle steamer that floated like a fancy wedding cake on the summer twilight river. There I was struck down by fever, pitifully bedridden two floors above a garden café of sweet blossoming honeysuckle and Spanish guitars. For half a month, I suffered that awful delirium alone lying prostrate beneath a frayed scrapquilt of calico rose petals, nibbling on overripe tangerines until juice stained my gown. Each night, flamenco melodies and mad fluttering moths tortured my dreams, those few that I recall because so wicked a fever inebriates the brain with rustling murmurs of unspoken desire, and once engaged these cruel phantasms fly about like ghosts. I remember rising from bed to stare into a beveled mirror on the chamber suite where I saw my reflection dressed smartly in diamonds and lace for a honeymoon trip somewhere, a wayward angel in waiting. Desolate with need, I called out for my precious Carl, but by then, you see, a vagabond circus had come down from Cairo toting flying-act rigging and tightwire, and he’d gone whispering across the water by moonlight.”

  “He’d met the pretty aerial ballerina,” observed Eugene Szopinski, stabbing at another forkful of mutton.

  “Miss Alice Vandermeer,” Samuel Szopinski added, smiling wanly as he sipped his tea.

  Mrs. Burritt put her rice plate aside and poured herself a cup of coffee. Somewhat theatrically, she remarked, “Who among us is not born to tragedy and sorrow? Love withers and our hearts dry up. Milk-white skin shrivels and goes gray. Disappointment hounds our every step. Who wakes each morning unaware of this?”

  Quietly, the dwarf reached for the serving bowl of ox-tail soup, while Alvin listened to Virgil Platt chew his food, a most unpleasant noise like boot heels in mud.

  Russell James said, “My beautiful daughter Lulu quit Ringling Brothers to go traipsing about with a vacuum cleaner salesman after her marriage to Mr. Zû had rotted away. She became so disagreeable I was forced to throw her wormy old chifforobe into the street and nail the back door shut.”

  Percy Webster lowered his fork. “Well, honey, you wrote her such nasty letters, what on earth did you expect?”

  “Aggravation,” said Eugene Szopinski.

  “Impertinence,” his brother Samuel suggested.

  Eva Chase tasted a rice croquette, then dabbed her rosy lips delicately with a cloth napkin. She spoke in a voice sweet as ether: “Once when I was a girl, I slept for a whole year believing I’d been locked away in Mother’s musty old cedar wedding chest, blessedly hidden from a grown woman’s delicate powders and rouge and a gentleman’s ardent correspondence. Instead, I’d drowned in leagues of sorrow more common than autumn rain, that awful solitude, and true hope no more than pale dewdrops. Too often I’d dreamed of a lovely white dove in a spangled cape dancing on the aerial rigging high in the big tent above a thousand delirious upturned faces, my dear Carl’s adoring eyes among them. Then, one day, Mother hired a detective to poke about muddy carnival lots, eavesdropping at tent flaps for clues. He relayed news a month later from Louisville of a terrible accident at the matinee tightwire performance, a perfect swan dive to the sawdust, a mangled beauty. I rode the train all night guided by vaporish tea leaves and prayer. Arriving by dawn at a wet tent-littered fairgrounds, I worried that my memory of our journey around the world together was only a pierglass hallucination, a rhymeless delusion, for which a renowned artist such as he had no natural use. Hugo the Strong-Man sent me to a painted wagon by the Big Top where a plum-colored
pygmy named Missus Bluebell guarded the door. Hearing my story, she shed a tear for both of us, then showed me inside. My belovéd Carl lay shrunken in the smoky shadows beside a burning oil lamp on a cot of embroidered pillows, dressed for theater footlights in green silk sashes and Chinese slippers, a chewed sprig of deadly nightshade and an ivory fan from Singapore on his red satin chest. A note in India ink waited for me atop his costume portmanteau, scribbled perhaps when I was still aboard the train. He wrote that love was ruthless, discordant, unworthy of our defenseless hearts. Be quick now and flee it. Forget its deceitful embrace. I buried him on a grassy hilltop in Vicksburg facing the summer Ferris wheels and the happy crowds.”

  A parlor clock chimed the half-hour as Alvin poured himself a cup of hot coffee to soothe his throat. Finished with his croquettes, the dwarf gingerly sipped peppermint tea. The spicy aroma of warm raisin pie under a checkered cloth on the walnut sideboard filled the narrow dining room.

  Eugene Szopinski said, “We fell from the highwire at Buffalo when we were thirteen years old.”

  “Too young to appreciate the distance to earth,” his brother Samuel explained as he cut up his last bite of mutton. “Now we’re both scarred for life.”

  “Indeed,” Russell James said, “one evening in my own youth, a passing mesmerist persuaded me that my heart had become a cold desiccated husk decaying within my chest, utterly devoid of normal human inclinations. Thus entranced, I toured for years with SellsFloto as the Fossilized Man until Lulu’s mother purchased me from the sideshow and brought me home with her.”

  “You see, my dear, that far perch eludes us all now and then,” said Percy Webster, folding a napkin beside his supper plate, “yet blindfolded we proceed across heaven’s great expanse determined to prove ourselves worthy of this brief moment.”

  Mrs. Burritt added, “I’ve always been grateful for those blessings that seem to come to us from far away.”

  Carefully, Virgil Platt put down his cup of coffee onto a polished china saucer. He rose from his chair at the head of the supper table and turned to Eva Chase. He said: “Only the empty-hearted lament those days of carnival and renown once they’re gone. A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men. This, I believe, is the elation for which he was born.”

  The farm boy and the dwarf stalked through the damp woods four blocks from the rotten stink of old stockyards west of town. Lights burned yellow in the upstairs of houses behind them. A cold wind rustled early autumn leaves and Alvin felt a rising chill in the dark. He heard the lilting gaiety of a carousel somewhere up ahead as he followed the scurrying dwarf along a rutted path, sidestepping ripe clumps of poison ivy and fending off errant branches as he went. Lights from the circus glowed like will o’ the wisps across the hidden wood. Up a short hill they went crouching Indian-fashion through patches of elderberry and silky dogwood. Alvin stopped to catch his breath at the top as the carnival wind gusted. The dwarf’s chirping voice was senseless and joyful as he trampled tall stalks of grass toward the distant circus tents. Crowds of people from town swarmed the bright showgrounds entrance. Alvin, too, ran as best he could toward the sparkling galleries of merriment.

  A hundred yards away he smelled hot roasted peanuts and fried onions on the evening wind. The greeter’s call drew him closer still. Colorful flags and banners rippled and flapped. Pipe music shrieked. Two pairs of painted clowns clasping colored balloons danced a silly jig beside the ticket taker whose booming voice carried across the dark.

  “STEP RIGHT UP! STEP RIGHT UP! WONDER OF WONDERS! MIRACLES, MYSTERY AND MAGIC!”

  Burning ash from the fellow’s cigar scattered on the wind as Alvin purchased tickets for himself and the dwarf and joined a line of people from town at the entry gate. He watched one of the green balloons escape a clown’s idiot grasp in a gust of wind and rise drunkenly into the cold black sky. A plaintive cry rang out from a pack of children by the steaming popcorn stand as another clown on stilts attempted to catch the fugitive balloon, but already it had wafted up too far and soon vanished beyond the fancy circus lights and the fluttering banners high away into gray evening clouds. Wherever Alvin looked, people jammed exhibits and canvas tents. Pinwheels and Roman candles fizzed and sparkled in the night sky. A troupe of clowns on unicycles wheeled toward the Big Top. Jugglers in jester hats and Nubian sword swallowers performed feats of grand dexterity near the chariot cages and gilded Museum wagons. Bombastic sideshow talkers shouted above the crowds. Alvin stopped briefly to buy a fluffy stick of pink cotton candy next to a dart-throwing booth, then followed the dwarf past the Topsy-Turvy House toward the carousel where giggling children mounted high on regal steeds went round and round to a Strauss waltz while smiling mothers and fathers stood by in the sawdust admiring the painted wooden horses and the gilded poles under the electric canopy.

  Wiping his sticky mouth on a shirtsleeve, Alvin watched a top-hatted midget in a painted sandwich board advertising a dog and pony show march past the carousel, yelling: “COME ONE! COME ALL! COME ONE! COME ALL!”

  More skyrockets exploded over the tent circus.

  Alvin felt a tug on his shirt.

  “Look,” the dwarf said, directing the farm boy’s attention between tent exhibits to a collection of circus midgets fixed out in medieval silks: seven noblemen and a charming lady-in-waiting. They appeared to be gathering for a performance of some sort. One of them carried a lute and another held juggling pins.

  “What of it?” He’d witnessed plenty of freaks acting up already. They made him jittery.

  “My goodness,” Rascal sighed. He crossed his legs oddly and bit his lip.

  “Let’s go see something,” Alvin said, feeling impatient. He didn’t know how long he had until fever wore him out or another coughing fit struck and he wanted to have some fun for once.

  “You go along, if you like,” the dwarf said, his roaming eyes stilled by the tiny maiden. “I believe I’ll stay here awhile.”

  “Maybe we ought to have a look in that funhouse back there,” Alvin suggested, reluctant to go off alone. What if he had a coughing fit like he did at that carnival in Galesburg last summer?

  “Isn’t she a knockout?” the dwarf remarked, as the darling midget performed a short melody on the penny flute while executing a dainty pirouette for her audience. “Yeah, sure,” Alvin replied, beginning to feel febrile and wobbly again. He watched one of the midgets breathe fire through a golden ring and another strummed the lute. “But what do you say we go have ourselves a good time? Why, I’ll bet there’s something doing in one of them big tents. Let’s go have a look-see.”

  “No, thank you,” the dwarf demurred, sounding moony now. “It’s plenty wonderful right here.” He sucked in his breath and folded his fingers together in a squirmy knot.

  “Well, I ain’t coming back for you,” Alvin groused. “I’ll be too busy hunting up some real fun.”

  A dreamy smile on his lips, the dwarf replied, “I’ll look you up later on.”

  Disgusted, Alvin went off on his own, hoping to find the girl from Spud Farrell’s boardinghouse. Without the dwarf to keep him company, nobody paid him any notice at all as he walked alone under the gusting banners and electric lights. The farm boy jostled and shoved with circus-goers at tent openings and game booths, and grew dizzy admiring the mechanical Whirly-Gig and the bright electric Ferris Wheel. He ate a steaming hotdog and a bag of popcorn while watching Tessie the Tassel Twirler perform for a noisy crowd of men in a 10¢ tent behind the marionette show (“She wiggles to the east, she wiggles to the west, she wiggles in the middle where the wiggling is best!”). In the Topsy-Turvy House, he chased a gang of kids tossing half-chewed Crackerjack at each other through the dizzying Rolling Barrel and the Mad Tea Party in candlelit Upside-Down Room and out the slippery Shoe-Chute where Alvin tripped on the Crazy Stairs and skinned his knee. Outdoors again, more children ran past, screeching like wild animals. Fireworks boomed overhead. A cold wind blew across the sky, chasing the farm boy deeper yet in
to a glimmering sawdust land.

  The citizens of Icaria swarmed the high-grass circus, clustering at Laswell’s mysterious tent shows and cage wagons, awed by his Chinese magicians and Egyptian mummies and ferocious Bengal tigers, his wild black cannibals nine feet tall. A thousand tales of wonder in a single evening of blue fire and rolla bolla. For a nickel a head, the curious pack Charon’s Tent of Sorcery to see a pale spook in a silken cloak grace Cleopatra’s throne whose fragrant apparition roils from clouds of purple smoke by the bleak light of the sideshow conjurer’s font. No sad angelfaced harlequin in pearls, but a proud Ptolemy rid at last of Antony and the asp. Tent flaps rustle as she strums a golden lyre: white doves fly forth: flower petals fall. Women faint and a few men yell “Cheat!” and “Humbug!” and half a dozen red-hot cigar butts are hurled across the amber haze of burning candle wax. A trio of fresh towheads who’d wriggled under the tattered canvas walls for a peek, crawl back out of the dusty shadows and race down the windy night to the elevated platforms under the square tent of Laswell’s torch-lit Hall of Freaks where the gathered crowd is restless but timid.