Death of A Clown

by Heather Haven

  “No, no. This is another thing you can’t do for me. I have to go, Lillian. I’ll be fine. I promise to walk slowly and be careful.”

  I hear familiar music coming from the Big Top.

  “Listen to that. They’re almost to the Elephant Ballet. Intermission will be here in another fifteen, twenty minutes. I’ve got to go.”

  I release her and glance down at my nightgown.

  “Will you help me get into some clothes? I think I’ve got a full skirt somewhere.”

  She looks at me with a frown. “I will, but I don’t like it.”

  “Then I want you to go be with Duane, Okay? And don’t go anywhere with him yet. Let’s see what we can work out.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  9:00 p.m., Tuesday

  I hobble across the back lot listening to the orchestra and the sounds of the throng inside the Big Top, another kind of music to me. The night offers little breeze, but the temperature has dropped ten or twelve degrees. I shiver in the thin sweater Lillian threw over my shoulders.

  A full moon, brighter than I’ve seen in months, drenches everything around me in an unearthly, white light. The ghostly flutter of flags on poles over the Big Top, glowing but devoid of color, add to the eeriness.

  Dark silhouettes of people stand around the Big Top in waiting mode. Some hold cigarettes, red-orange tips firing up only to go pallid again after the inhale. Exhaled wisps of silvery smoke look like they’re being pulled up by the moonlight to become part of the translucent night.

  In another ten minutes, the intermission will be upon us, the outside lights will come up full, and the concession stands will be dealing with lines of people clamoring for soft drinks, cotton candy and souvenirs. It’s a chance for the circus to fill the coffers and for the performers to take a breather, a good thing all around.

  I enter the First Aid Tent and find it empty. Back at Doc’s office, I see his shadow through the canvas. He's sitting at his desk, leaning over, maybe writing something. I rap on the pole beside the flap and call out. When he hears me, he rises, comes over and throws back the flap.

  “Jeri!” he says in surprise. “I was going to come over to see you in a few minutes.” He scrutinizes me from head to

  foot. “Are you all right? What are you doing here? You don’t look so bad, all things considered.”

  “I don’t feel so bad, all things considered, Doc, so here I am.”

  “Astonishing!” he says, with a shake of his head. “Something like that would have laid me up for a month, at least. Let’s go into the examining room. I’ll check you over in there.”

  He steps past me toward a slightly larger sectioned off area, where I was brought earlier in the day. He opens the flap, stands aside, and gestures with slight impatience for me to go in.

  “Come on, come on. Let’s see what we’ve got. It’s not that I don’t trust Laverne. She’s a fine nurse, but I like to see these things for myself.”

  I walk toward the room, with legs spread slightly apart, trying not to let them rub against one another. Inside I stand with my back to him, listening to him chatter on.

  “Let me see how those wounds are coming along. In a top notch athlete, and that’s what you are, Jeri, the rate at which wounds heal never ceases to amaze me.”

  He turns me around, puts his hands on my shoulders, and pushes me into a chair. “Sit down.”

  I obey, saying nothing. He draws a small stool on wheels from the corner, sits down and rolls over to me.

  I watch him unwrap my legs with great care. I’m anxious, myself, to see how much permanent damage has been done. Relief spreads through me. My inner thighs, red and swollen, have only one or two deep gashes, the rest are scrapes and cuts, easily healed, leaving little or no scars.

  Doc glances up into my face with a warm, professional smile, then bends over to check out my ankles, which are puffy, red, and scratched. He holds each one with a firm but delicate hand, as if they’re made of porcelain, and examines them carefully.

  I try to focus on the top of his head rather than the thoughts swirling around in my mind. Though his hair is still

  full on the sides and back, a pink scalp peeks through the thin brown hair laced with silver. I am struck by the fact that Doc is in the fall of his life, maybe early winter, and it makes my eyes mist over.

  “Do you know the latest on Rosie?” I ask. “Lillian didn’t and I haven’t seen anyone else.”

  He removes my slop shoes and picks up both feet in his hands. I’m not sure he’s heard me and am about to ask the question again when his voice stops me.

  “The swelling should go down in a day or two, just keep your feet elevated whenever you can. What I’ve heard is her back is broken in three places,” he adds, without looking up. “The word is Rosie will be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of her life. That much they’re pretty sure of.”

  I let out a gasp. He stops examining my feet and his eyes meet mine.

  “She’s lucky to be alive, Jeri, falling from that height. You’ll forgive me if I’m not too sympathetic about it after what she tried to do to you. Somebody said she grabbed at one of the tightropes on her way down. It slowed her fall somewhat but she’ll probably spend the rest of her life in an iron lung. She’s lucky at that.”

  Trapped inside your body, unable to move, to feel, to be free, what kind of luck is that?

  “I’m sure she’d rather be gone, Doc. I know that would be true for me.”

  “You’d be surprised the conditions people are willing to live under, glad to be alive. That’s not true for all, but for most.”

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope? That sort of thing?”

  “Something like that,” he answers. He looks up at my face and allows a smile. “For the next few days, come by twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, to have

  the bandages changed and fresh ointment applied. It will give us a chance to talk about philosophy, my favorite subject.”

  I hesitate then say, “I don’t think we share the same philosophy on some things, Doc.”

  He laughs, wheels around on the stool, opens a well-ordered drawer and removes a tube of ointment. He closes the drawer, turns back, and unscrews the cap, all the while considering me.

  “What’s bothering you, Jeri? I know you’ve been through a lot, but there’s an expression on your face I’ve never seen before.”

  I shake my head and look down, not knowing how to start.

  “Come on, Jeri,” he prods. I feel his warm voice washing over me, like a sun shower. “Tell me what’s on your mind. You look like you’re carrying a heavy burden.”

  I lick dry lips and study the hands that don’t even look like they belong to me. My voice comes out in no more than a whisper.

  “I was such a smarty pants. I was going to use my brain to reason things out. I thought, maybe I can’t make it right but I can find out what happened. Absolve the innocent, ferret out the guilty. Something like that.”

  He starts applying ointment to my feet. “Everybody around here calls you 'The Thinker' for good reason. You’ve got a better brain than most.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve made several mistakes, Doc. The really big one was starting at the back of Catalena’s diary instead of at the beginning.”

  “That sounds like a rational approach to me, especially if you want to know about recent events,” he says, moving on to examine my legs. His voice is as soothing as the salve.

  “Maybe I could have saved her if I started reading from the front. Maybe…” I break off.

  Doc thinks for a moment. “Probably not,” he says quietly.

  “Once I started at the beginning, I found out it wasn’t Eddie who made her pregnant. Eddie was just her friend and trying to help her. He paid for it with his life.”

  “I thought Constantin killed Eddie to keep Catalena from running away with him,” Doc says.

  “Yes.”

  He goes on, “And then the sick bastard took his own life
when the horror of what he’d done and his daughter’s suicide was too much for him.”

  “No.”

  Doc shakes his head and pushes back on the stool. Squeaky wheels cry out from the sudden movement, echoing throughout the tent. Doc grimaces.

  “I’ve got to oil this stool.” He reaches for a fresh tube of ointment and a roll of bandages. “So you don’t think he killed himself?” Doc asks.

  “No. That might be the case with a lot of men, but not Constantin.”

  Doc’s hand freezes in midair. Then he smiles, staring back at me. “Why not? Everything says that he did, including his suicide note.”

  “There was the angle of the knife as it entered his body, for one thing. When a person commits suicide, the strike goes into the abdomen from down to up, like this. Better leverage.” I demonstrate with hands that feel foreign and useless to me, gesturing with a thrusting motion into my gut.

  “But Constantin’s wound was much higher than a self-inflicted strike,” I say. “And it went from up to down. Like this.”

  I put my hands together again and hold them over my head. I strike downwards toward Doc’s chest, stopping an inch or two away. Sharp pain courses through the soft parts of my hands, but I ignore it.

  “It would be that way, Doc, if someone else did it.”

  His eyes widen and he looks down at my hands still hovering over his chest.

  “That’s not much to go on, Jeri.”

  “Then there’s the note. It was in English. Maybe it won’t occur to the sheriff, like the angle of the knife. In my opinion, most people would probably write a suicide note in their native tongue, the way Catalena did her diary. But mainly, there’s the structure and words. Phrases like ‘It is only fitting I go the way of my daughter, by my own hand.’ That’s something only a person comfortable with English and probably well-educated, would write. Even though the note appears to be in his handwriting, Constantin had only been in this country a year. His English was negligible. And lastly, as you say, underneath it all he was a sick bastard. He would never take his own life.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. Last night, when we found you covered in blood, you told us you heard Constantin scream and went to his tent to try to help. But later on, you told Tony Ioana had come running to you, that she told you her father had gone crazy. You said you went off searching for him only after you gave her a sedative to calm her down. That you found him already dead.”

  Doc picks up a pair of scissors and starts cutting strips of gauze for bandages. “Is that what I said? I can’t remember, so much happened.”

  “I think what you told Tony is some of the truth but not all of it. Ioana did come to you in the middle of the night looking for help. And there was a scream, the one I heard when I was on my way to get Tony. But it came after you went looking for – and found -- Constantin.”

  “Go on.” He lays strips of gauze on the edge of the desk in careful rows.

  “Possibly the note was written while you were waiting for the sedative to take effect on Ioana here in the First Aid Tent. You’re a good calligrapher. Vince mentioned it in your file. And Constantin’s posters carry his signature and they are everywhere.”

  “You’re saying you don’t think it was suicide?”

  “It was murder. You killed him, Doc. You.”

  Doc stares at me, unblinking. Then he sits back in the chair, bringing his hands together, as if in prayer. His reply is unemotional.

  “You’re being silly, Jeri. You’re always pointing out the need for a motive. A motive is all, you say. Why should I kill that man? What reason could I have?”

  “Because he’d been raping his eldest daughter for months and was about to start in on the younger one.”

  Doc’s face drains of color and he wavers.

  I lean forward. “I think Catalena told you when she was first brought here about her father and what he was doing to her. That’s one of the reasons why you took her death so hard, why you felt you had to avenge her.”

  Doc has a faraway look in his eyes again, much as he does when he talks about the First World War or his wife. A myriad of emotions cross his face, some almost too painful to watch, but I will myself not to avert my eyes. He gulps and snuffles, wiping at his nose and face with a hand. Finally, he extends his other hand palm out to me, as if asking for more time to get himself under control.

  I watch him push on the little stool over to the other side of the room and reach under a sheet-covered table for a half-full bottle of whiskey hidden there. I wait while he unscrews the top and pulls a long drink, my heart racing every moment. He looks down at the bottle in his hand and finally speaks.

  “After Catalena miscarried, I tried to comfort her. She was so…so…” Doc searches for a word. “…desolate. I told her

  she could have another baby someday. She said she was ‘glad it was gone; it was an unclean child.’ I asked her, what does that mean, ‘unclean?’ She wouldn’t answer, just turned her head away. Then it occurred to me what it would take to

  make a baby unclean. There is a higher percentage of spontaneous abortions in cases of incest, Jeri. Did you know that?” He looks at me. I shake my head and he goes on,

  “I asked her outright, ‘Has your father been forcing himself on you? Is he…was he… the father of this baby?’ She wouldn’t answer. I told her I could go to him, make him stop, report him to the authorities, if I had to. She cried and cried. I never saw a more miserable, unhappy girl. But she never admitted it outright.”

  “So you weren’t sure?”

  Doc is silent and I don’t know if he’s heard me. I open my mouth to repeat the question but am cut off by his barely audible words.

  “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure even after she’d hanged herself. The truth is I couldn’t quite believe it, so I left it alone.” He covers his face. “I should have done more when I had the chance, should have seen what he’d done to her, helped her.”

  “You didn’t know. I didn’t know last night, myself, until I read it in her diary. Not many of us think that kind of thing.”

  “The man was a monster,” Doc says, his voice filled with more anger than despair. He gets up and paces around the small, makeshift room. “I should have acted right away. Now that the older girl was dead, he started in on Ioana. She’s only twelve, a child. She wasn’t even sure what he was doing but she told me he kept trying to touch her. She told me that for about a month before Catalena died, her sister had started locking the door between the compartments. Night after night, she would hear her father call out, begging for Catalena to

  unbolt the door but Ioana never knew what was going on.” Doc’s voice falters. “When Ioana came to me and told me all of that, so small, so frightened, I knew what needed to be done. It wasn’t revenge, Jeri. It was protection.”

  “But you could have told the sheriff --”

  “That moron?” Doc explodes. “Maybe he would have believed the child and maybe not. Maybe he would have done something and maybe not. It’s so sordid and we’re too puritanical a country. We don’t want to believe this sort of thing happens.”

  “But there’s the diary. It’s proof. We can show it to the sheriff. It will--”

  “And the little girl,” he goes on, as if I haven’t spoken. “Don’t you think she’d been through enough? Should we cart her family secrets before the world at large like a sideshow, so she has to endure even more shame and horror? Isn’t it enough that she’s lost a mother and a sister?”

  “But now she’s lost her father, too.”

  Doc makes a sharp, hissing sound. “Not much of a father, Jeri, believe me. From what she told me, he was always cruel or indifferent, except after Catalena died. Suddenly he was paying attention to her when they were alone together, stroking her cheek, or her thigh, pressing her to him. She said he came into her room one night and kissed her on the mouth. It was sickening. Ioana was confused and scared. She came running to me for help. She needed my help. I did
what I had to do.”

  He stops talking, his final words resonating again and again until I think I’ll scream from the sound of them. Doc looks over at me, deflated again, his voice sad and far away.

  “Poor Jeri. I’m so sorry. I’d hoped you’d never find out but I should have known. You’re such a smart girl. It’s hard to keep anything from you,” he says with something akin to pride in his tone.

  I try to speak, but my mouth is too dry.

  “Would it make any difference to you if I told you that I only have a few months to live?” He points to the whiskey bottle. “It’s the demon rum or, in my case, the demon whiskey. I saw a specialist in New York last winter. Liver. He told me if I changed my ways, I might have a year. Less if I don’t.” He leans over and takes another swallow. “You can

  see I didn’t.” Doc reaches in a pocket and pulls out a round vial.

  “This is for the pain. It affects your motor nerves, makes you act just like you’re drunk, but when I take it, no one can tell the difference.” His laugh is hollow. “I would say I have perhaps six weeks before I need to be hospitalized. It will be quick after that.”

  I’m breathing so fast, I think I start to hyperventilate. At any rate, I feel dizzy.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” I manage to get out.

  He waves me off. “Maybe you can see why I did what I did. I have nothing to lose.” He rolls over on the small three-wheeled stool again.

  I feel a heaviness in my chest, the unrelenting weight of sorrow. I know it well.

  “So you’re going to die.”

  Doc picks up one of my hands in his, as if it is gossamer instead of flesh and blood, and leans in to me. His voice lightens, becoming almost conversational, as he swathes my hand in ointment.

  “Jeri, it doesn’t matter, because I am content. I finally did something that was enough. That disgusting human being can never hurt another child. I made a difference. If I had the chance to do it again, I would. There’s good news in all of this, too. Ioana’s aunt arrives soon to take her back with her. Constantin wouldn’t let the woman near her before, even though the child has always loved her dearly. She’ll have a good life with her mother’s sister, or at least a chance at one.” He sets my hand palm-up in my lap and studies my face.