Circus (10 page)

I should mention that Jemima never worked, nor was she ever married, so the transition between her childhood and her adult years is not as clear as it might be in some biographies. Sometimes she was called upon to make dolls on commission for local girls, but it was a modest business and she kept no storefront.

Oh, yes. Please do ask a question! Interrupt me any time, by the way.

No. Goodness, no. She was not a diagnosed obsessive compulsive. But thank you for asking. You raise an excellent point, ma’am, and I want to clarify that what you’re viewing is not the product of a mental illness. In public, Jemima was a genial and lively companion, perfectly well versed in the art of conversation. Just ask Mrs. Cunningham. Actually, don’t. She doesn’t like being asked too many questions. I found that out the hard way. Anyway, when Megan was still taking my calls, she told me that Jemima’s research for her various miniatures gave her an admirable expertise in a range of subjects: she knew a great deal about animals, food, European fairy tales, railways, home furnishings from various historical periods, plumbing, electricity, and airplanes. She seemed to think that
Jemima could prattle on a bit sometimes, but I can’t tell you how much I would welcome the chance just to listen to her talk! No one thought her strange, and the church community in particular valued her wit, her generosity, and her famous butter tarts. What you see around you is a collection of the harmless sort that you might find among coin enthusiasts or fanatics of Jubilee spoons, only it was made by the hands of an artist.

Mr. Hendricks never participated in the creation of the miniatures, no, but that’s a very good question. He worked in the cannery until he retired and often took, according to the diaries, “a long walk amidst the cottonwood trees of an evening.” He liked to relax in front of the fire. He never kept any record of his own life, and was not a frequent correspondent, so it is difficult to get a sense of his voice from the historical archive. Our guests do often ask about him, so I wish there was more I could say. At first, he supported Jemima’s hobby by buying her spools of ribbon and wire cutters or, in the case of her fourteenth birthday, a mahogany table, which you see here in the dining room. By the time she reached the age of twenty, though, her father had lost interest in the venture, and tried to encourage his daughter to take up baking, sewing, and other full-sized domestic activities that would translate her skills into appropriate wifely virtues. By this time, Jemima was no longer focused on starting her own family, but on continuing the one she had. Mr. Hendricks and his daughter were thrown together, of course, by circumstance. Sometimes, and this does seem a bit embarrassing when I say it out loud, I even pretend that Mr. Hendricks was my father, and that instead of
living on my own in my basement apartment on Chatham Street, I live here, with a salty, curmudgeonly, aging dad.

I’m thinking about what more I can offer you about Mr. Hendricks. Thirty years went by and there’s almost nothing to say. He was so reticent that he didn’t even speak at his wife’s funeral. It’s safe to say that it was a surfeit rather than a deficit of love that produced his silence. Once, seventeen years after his wife’s death, as the early December snow dusted the frozen ground and he and Jemima strolled past the Christmas displays in the shop windows, Mr. Hendricks expressed his regret that they would not be buying their once-habitual gift of a new tree ornament for Mrs. Hendricks. He nodded at a shimmering silver bauble that caught the crisp white sunlight, and said, “I’d have chosen this one.” According to Mrs. Cunningham, this was the only conversation Jemima ever had with her father about her mother after her death. Jemima looked after him in this house until he died, at the age of ninety-three, in his sleep.

Now, I must warn you all to prepare yourselves for what is to come. Unfortunately, we have reached the inevitable tragic fall at the end of any life story. Have you noticed that all lives are tragic in Aristotle’s sense? No, well, I’m not an expert in the Classics. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about. Anyway, let’s get this bit over with so that you can fully enjoy the rodeo later, free from intimations of mortality, shall we?

Jemima died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism just three days after the death of her father. All of her papers were meticulously in order, labelled, and filed in the study alongside her
microscope and other implements. She donated her home and the miniatures to the city, and we opened the museum shortly afterwards. Some conservation work was done, but mostly the house was left as she kept it, so you’ll see when you get upstairs that the 1001 Nights display is actually in Mr. Hendricks’s old bedroom. That room smells, even still, of the sea.

I hope you won’t think it indelicate if we take a moment to experience the bathroom together. Oh dear. That came out wrong. I can never quite think of how to say that part without it sounding strange, but you’ll forgive me, won’t you? It’s a marvel of petite engineering. The toilet actually flushes! All the plumbing, like the electricity, is functional. Again, this is a chain-pulling operation if you do it by hand, but we’ve also automated it for your enjoyment. So, please, ma’am, why don’t you go ahead and press the blue button to your right?

Please don’t leave! I didn’t mean to offend you or your wife. It was just all intended to be light humour, but you’re quite right that it was off base after the saddest part of the story. I’m sorry. Please come back. The last room is worth it, I promise.

No, sir, it’s very kind of you to say that, but it doesn’t look like they’re coming back. She’s already put on her raincoat. This has only happened once before but I think that time it was an English language issue. How humiliating. I wonder what the
problem was? The bathroom is usually a hit! Normally the tour is a take-it-or-leave-it situation; it seems rude to leave in the middle unless there’s an emergency. Well, I’ll just carry on. No use being put off by the overly sensitive now, is there? Besides, I’m sure we can have more fun now that it’s just the two of us.

Now we come to the last room of this magnificent dollhouse, which as you’ll see is a traditional parlour with a fireplace. I’ve saved it for last and I hope you’ll see why. It’s where the action is happening. It may not map exactly onto the tour as I’ve given it so far, but you have to allow a little wiggle room with history, don’t you? The fire can be lit, but not now, not on the tour. Even I’ve never seen that done. Far too much of a hazard! Can you imagine? Local heritage home set alight by a pinkie-sized stove! Nevertheless, I won’t say I haven’t been tempted. Anyway, the chimney would need cleaning.

Oh, look at me! Getting carried away now that it’s just the two of us. Your eyes are striking, by the way, has anyone ever mentioned that? I can’t decide if they’re so blue they’re a little bit purple or if you just seem like such a good person that I am embellishing them in my head even as they’re staring at me. It almost pains me to look away, but we’ve been here almost half an hour already and we’re still in the first exhibit room, so I guess we’d better get a move on.

I don’t normally tell people this, but for you I’ll make an exception. When I first started this job I used to stay behind after the others had gone home. To clean up, supposedly, but I just used to get out the keys and open up the display cases. If
you reach inside you can run your fingers along the surfaces and come to know all the tiny textures intimately with your hands. Upstairs, there are three different kinds of faux grass on the landscapes, each with its own particular prickliness: soft and barely textured for the undulating prairies; Astroturf of a familiar kind for the football pitch; hard and parched for the Wild West. I can even tell you the eye colour of each figurine, and name the ones with chips and smudges. It seemed so much better than going home, hanging out here and figuring out how each small thing worked. I don’t stay late anymore though. At first I was learning so much I didn’t notice just how quiet it was. I’d even have settled for Cody’s banter when it got really late and all the lights were out on the rest of the block. The figurines don’t do enough talking to make you feel like you’re getting something back.

Now I’m really rambling. But you don’t mind that this is taking a while, do you? You’re having a good time? Since it’s just you and me left I thought maybe we could even grab some fish and chips later, after the tour? There’s a little booth on the boardwalk where they wrap your food up in regular paper disguised as newspaper so you don’t get ink in your system. No need to answer now. Take your time: we still have Venice and the Rockies to cover upstairs! You can think as we tour. No pressure. Just enjoy yourself! Anyway, there’s just one more thing I want you to see before we move on from this house.

Above the mantel is a painting in the style of the artist upstairs, one of his early works, perhaps, although it appears to be a landscape rather than a portrait. You’ll notice that there’s a little girl in a green dress with her hair in French
braids sitting by the fire with a doll. In the corner is a mustachioed man with a potbelly, holding a glass of brandy aloft, gesturing with his free hand as if he is about to win an argument. On the upholstered love seat are a man and a woman. The woman wears blue gingham, and the man has a long, tangled beard. They sit facing each other, touching diminutive noses.

S
USAN
’
S GRANDFATHER WAS A BEAR IN THE
travelling circus. Or, rather, he wore a bear. Actually, she is never quite sure how to put this. He wore a bear suit (made from the skin of a real dead bear) and wrestled someone in a wrestler’s suit (made out of not very much cloth). In his moments of glory, he reared up on his hind legs (which were his only legs) and roared. One of the first organized animal rights protests in the city of Tunbridge Wells was held in 1910 on behalf of Susan’s grandfather, the bear, who happened to be human. This fact was never discovered because the circus was bound to lose business either way: if the ringleader exposed the truth, he would surely lose audiences who took pleasure in watching grappling animals, and, anyway, who wanted to see a man fighting another man in a bear suit? Plenty of people, apparently, as long as they thought at least one of the men was a bear. If, on the other hand, the circus-master kept the fact of Susan’s grandfather’s humanity concealed, the animal rights activists would continue as they were: pelting innocent tomatoes and cabbages at the Big Top and vandalizing the caravans. The solution was that Susan’s grandfather was set free.

To Susan, then, the circus is an Edwardian photograph of cross-dressing midgets with shotguns, whose limbs are being devoured by tigers that are actually people. There are no clowns who make balloon animals in Susan’s circus. There is no cotton candy. There are handlebar mustaches, and perhaps there are bearded ladies with real beards. No Ferris wheels, but Siamese twins joined at the head wearing only one jumpsuit. No fishing for little plastic ducks with prizes on their bottoms, but maybe, if you’re lucky, a fat and monocled man on an elephant, selling tickets at the entrance to the fairground.

You understand the distinction.

Susan hasn’t often fashioned improvisational tightropes out of laundry lines laid out on her carpet so she can practise walking across, as she is doing right now. She hasn’t always needed to walk in a straight line. But she’s changed jobs recently and she feels compelled to leap up onto a concrete ledge beside a flowerbed on Queen Street West on her new walk to work. There’s a sidewalk next to the ledge, sure, but the ledge is just the right height, just near enough to some slightly sad geraniums planted in gravel, to be irresistible. Plus, now that she’s started doing it, she can’t break the habit. Only she’s missed her step a couple of times and it’s bad form to arrive at work in a shiny Toronto office building with ladders in her stockings. She keeps a bottle of clear nail polish in her purse in case the domestic tightrope training doesn’t actually help improve her balance. Susan has a bit of a problem
with perseverance, and already she knows the tightrope phase won’t last long enough to make her an expert ledge-walker. She keeps souvenirs from all her momentary and vehement obsessions in shoeboxes (from the shoebox phase) under her bed. A felting phase, a woodcarving phase, a guitar phase (too big for a shoebox, but she keeps the picks), a drawing phase, a Latin phase, a cooking phase (hundreds of recipe cards), a crack-cocaine phase, and a button phase are all from the last six months. She did a neurotic spring-clean last April and killed two birds that way, by storing the rags and cleaning products in the box from her boyfriend’s basketball shoes. Susan is already thinking of how to coil up the tightrope so it will fit where her sandals used to.