Hidden Places (42 page)

‘‘What do you want, Yvette?’’ he asked. ‘‘Didn’t you get the money I sent?’’ For a reason I couldn’t understand, he seemed afraid of us.

‘‘Is there someplace we could go and talk, Henri? I could use a cigarette.’’

Daddy stood and stripped off his costume and funny shoes, stuffing everything into one of the wardrobe trunks. He wore an undershirt and a normal pair of trousers beneath it. He never said one word as he put on his jacket and street shoes and led us across the trampled grass to a long line of rail cars, parked on a sidetrack at the edge of the field. Night had fallen and it was way past my bedtime. I don’t remember much that happened after that because I was so worn out from all the excitement of the circus that I curled up on Daddy’s tousled bunk and fell sound asleep while Mama and Daddy smoked cigarettes and talked and shared a bottle of her medicine.

The tiny train compartment was dark when I awoke. I didn’t know where I was. I cried out in fright and Mama came out of the darkness and scooped me up in her arms. ‘‘You know I love you more than anything in the whole wide world, don’t you, Sugarbaby?’’ she whispered.

I nodded and laid my head on her bare shoulder. She wrapped a blanket around me, then laid me down on the little banquette seat by the fold-down table where she and Daddy had sat earlier. ‘‘Go back to sleep now, Sugar.’’ Her breath smelled like medicine as she kissed me. I went back to sleep.

The scream of a train whistle woke me next. I sat up and looked around the moonlit room. Instead of the familiar, crackedplaster walls of the boardinghouse I saw the dark, wood-paneled walls of the train compartment. An overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle of Mama’s medicine sat on the table alongside two sticky glasses. My daddy’s jacket hung on a hook on the back of the door, but the rest of his clothes lay in a heap on the floor. The rail car lurched suddenly, then slowly began to move.

I looked around for my mother, but only my daddy lay sprawled on the rumpled bed. His head and one out-flung arm were all that showed above the sheet. The bottle and glasses on the table began to clink and rattle, then the entire room began rocking from side to side as the train gathered speed.

‘‘Mama? Mama, where are you?’’ I called. Whenever I would wake up alone in our room at the boardinghouse, Mama always came running from somewhere down the hall as soon as I called her. This time she didn’t come. The whistle shrieked again, a lonesome, mournful sound.

‘‘Mama!’’ I wailed.

My daddy groaned and slowly sat up. He looked around groggily, then stared in disbelief when he saw me. ‘‘What the—! What are you doing here? Where’s Yvette? Yvette!’’

But it was useless for either one of us to call her. Mama had no place to hide in the tiny cubicle. I saw fear in Daddy’s eyes, like I had seen the night before. He tried to climb out of bed, winding the sheet around himself, but the movement of the train, racing at full speed now, made him unsteady on his feet. He fell back onto the bed again.

‘‘Oh, God...’’ he moaned. ‘‘Yvette, how could you?’’

‘‘Where’s my mama?’’ I cried.

Daddy scrubbed his face with his hands, then slowly lifted his head. ‘‘She left us. She’s gone.’’

I was too young to understand death at the time, but a year or so later when Carlo fell off the high wire and died, and I heard his wife Bianca moaning and weeping, ‘‘He’s gone...he’s gone...how could he leave me,’’ and crying out to God just like my daddy had that first morning, I finally understood that my mama had died of her terrible illness. She had vanished, never to be seen again, just like Carlo. The circus train had moved on to the next town leaving no trace of either of them.

Later still, when I learned all about heaven in a Lutheran church in Lima, Ohio, I knew that Jesus held my mama safe in His arms. I felt relieved that she would never be sick or wobbly-legged again. But on that first terrible morning as my daddy sat with his face in his hands, weeping for her, all I could do was cry along with him and hold on tight to Mama’s silver tiara, which had fallen from my head during the night.

Daddy had no idea what to do with me. For the first three days he barely looked at me, let alone held me or consoled me. ‘‘Here...eat this,’’ he would say, and he’d slide a plate of food across the table to me, pushing it with one finger. He took his own plate outside to eat on the rail car step with his back to me. I slept on the banquette seat as the train rattled and swayed through the night, then knelt on that same seat and watched out the window as farms and woods and towns streamed past in the early dawn light. I didn’t leave the car for three days, still wearing the clothes Mama had dressed me in.

When the train stopped I would watch the city of tents go up in a vacant lot somewhere or in a farmer’s field. ‘‘Stay here,’’ Daddy said in his mad voice each morning as he left for clown alley to put on his costume and makeup. I knew there were probably tigers outside and elephants with heads that looked like snakes and I was too terrified to leave the car. Thank goodness Aunt Peanut finally took pity on me, or I don’t know what might have become of me. She happened to walk by and see me looking out the window just as Daddy was leaving one morning.

‘‘For crying out loud, Henry!’’ she said in her squeaky, midget voice. ‘‘You can’t keep the kid cooped up in here for the rest of her life! She’s a living, breathing human being! And your own flesh-and-blood, to boot!’’

‘‘You’ve got to help me, Peanut,’’ Daddy begged. ‘‘I don’t know what to do with her...or what she needs.’’

‘‘Well, first of all she needs a little lovin’ now and then, just like we all do.’’ Aunt Peanut climbed up on the seat beside me and gathered me into her stubby arms. She was not much bigger than I was, a tiny creature with a woman’s body and lipstick and rouge on her face. Such a grotesque stranger would have frightened me if I hadn’t been so lonely for my mama. Longing for comfort, I hugged Peanut tightly and wept.

‘‘See, Henry?’’ she said. ‘‘See? That’s all the kid needs...just a little lovin’.’’

‘‘Her mother’s gone, Peanut, and I don’t know what to do with her. Will you take her for me?’’

‘‘Take her? She’s your daughter!’’

‘‘I know she’s my daughter,’’ Daddy said angrily, ‘‘but there’s no room for her here, no place for her in my life.’’

‘‘There’s more room in here with you than there is in my sleeping car. You want her crowded in there with no light or air and bunks full of women stacked clear to the ceiling?’’

‘‘I don’t want her here at all,’’ he said, pacing in the tiny space.

‘‘A circus is no place to raise a child.’’

‘‘Lazlo and Sylvia have children, and so do—’’

‘‘That’s not what I mean. I know there are children here, but they’ll all grow up to perform in the circus—they’ll marry other performers. I don’t want her to have a life like her mother’s or mine. I want a real life for her, not one spent on the road ten months a year, living out of a steamer trunk.’’

Aunt Peanut stroked my hair. ‘‘That kind of life isn’t going to fall out of the sky, Henry. You have to give it to her.’’

‘‘I can’t!
This
is what I do! I’m a circus clown, not a shopkeeper or a clerk in a bank. I had no intention of becoming a father. It happened by accident...so I married Yvette, and now she’s gone and—’’

‘‘And you’re a father,’’ she said sharply. ‘‘And unless you’re planning on leaving your kid in an orphanage somewhere, you’re going to have to be a father to her, Henry.’’

‘‘I don’t know how!’’ he shouted. The sound made my skin prickle. It was one of only half a dozen times in my life that I ever recall my daddy shouting. Aunt Peanut released me and hopped off the banquette to go to him, laying her hand on his arm to soothe him.

‘‘Didn’t you have a father of your own?’’ she asked gently.

‘‘He died when I was eight.’’ Daddy snatched his derby off the table and jammed it onto his head. ‘‘I don’t have time for this, Peanut. I’m going to be late for the parade, and I’m not even in costume yet.’’ He yanked the door open.

‘‘Just be the daddy you always wished you’d had, Henry.’’

Daddy froze in the doorway, then slowly turned to stare at her. He looked as though he’d been slapped. ‘‘What did you say?’’

‘‘That’s really all there is to it. If you wished your daddy had tucked you into bed at night, then tuck her in. If you wished your daddy had taken you on his knee and told you stories, then tell her stories.’’

He took his hat off, raked his fingers through his glossy hair a few times, then jammed it back on his head again. He seemed unable to speak.

‘‘Teach her right from wrong, Henry. The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule. You
have
heard of those, haven’t you?’’

‘‘Yes...my mother was a good Christian woman.’’ He spoke so softly I barely heard him. ‘‘She raised us by the Good Book. That’s why I married Yvette after...when I found out she was in a family way.’’

‘‘Then you’ll do just fine,’’ Aunt Peanut said, patting his arm. ‘‘Go on now, before you miss your wagon. I can probably skip the parade for once. I’ll take the kid around with me today.’’

‘‘No! Not to the freak show—’’ ‘‘Why not?’’ She was suddenly angry. ‘‘If the circus is going to be her home, then she needs to learn that freaks like me are people, too. Or are you ashamed to have her meet your ‘family,’ Henry?’’

‘‘I’m sorry...Ididn’t mean—’’ ‘‘Get out of here before I lose my temper.’’

She pointed her stubby finger at the door. Daddy left. Aunt Peanut packed an awful lot of explosive for a tiny little woman. But she also had a heart that was twice as big as most other people’s. She reached for my hand.

‘‘What’s your name, honey?’’

‘‘Eliza Rose.’’

‘‘Mmm. Your name is as pretty as you are. Come on, I’ll show you around your new hometown.’’

I soon saw that it
was
like a town—a self-contained city of tents that magically moved from place to place during the night. There was the cookhouse where the chefs prepared all our meals; two dining tents, one for the performers and the other for the laborers; a wardrobe tent; a barbershop and laundry; tents for the elephants and other livestock; and a huge, elongated tent called the pad room, which had the men’s and women’s changing rooms on opposite ends and a stable for the performing horses in the middle.

These were the private areas of our tent city, but there were also public areas—the tents that were part of the show, such as the Big Top and the Midway. The marquee was the main entrance to the Big Top and the menagerie tent, where ticket holders could view all the exotic animals. The Midway had the sideshow tents on the left, the concession stands and ticket wagons on the right.

‘‘My main job is here at the sideshow,’’ Aunt Peanut explained that first day. She pointed to the bannerline that advertised the attractions inside the tent, and the huge picture of Peanut looked taller than she was. ‘‘I’m Queen Lily,’’ she said with a humorless chuckle, ‘‘the world’s tiniest woman and Queen of the Lilliputians. Then I change costumes for one of the clown routines with your father where I’m called ‘Peanut’—but that comes later in the show.’’

She boosted me up on a little stage near the entrance to the tent. ‘‘Now you’re on the bally platform,’’ she said. ‘‘They’ll stand one or two of us freaks out here to give the people a free look. That always makes them want to spend their money to come inside.’’

Aunt Peanut lifted me off the platform with a grunt and reached for my hand, but when I saw where she was about to lead me I stopped short. Mama had taken me inside the sideshow tent a few days ago and my first glimpse had frightened me so badly I’d buried my head in her shoulder and refused to look.

‘‘What’s the matter, honey, you scared?’’ Aunt Peanut asked. ‘‘You don’t need to be. The Abominable Snowman is really a dead stuffed Alaskan bear that’s so old and moldy we have to keep pasting his fur back on.’’ She took both my hands in hers and dragged me inside against my will, talking the whole time in her squeaky voice. ‘‘The two-headed calf was real once upon a time, but see? It’s dead and stuffed, too.’’

‘‘Is the snake real?’’ I whispered, hardly daring to look. A huge boa constrictor lay coiled in a glass box on the stage beside the calf, miles and miles of the scaly creature, as big around as a man’s arm.

‘‘Yeah, but it won’t hurt you. Sylvia keeps it so well fed it just sleeps all the time. She drapes it all around herself for the show and the thing’s as sluggish as the Mississippi. Let’s go around to the back and I’ll introduce you to the others.’’

I was glad to get out of that tent, but the little group of people standing in back, talking and smoking cigarettes, looked every bit as scary as the creatures inside.

‘‘Hey, everybody, this is Henry Gerard’s daughter,’’ Aunt Peanut said. ‘‘Her name is Eliza Rose and she’s going to be traveling with us for a while.’’

They all smiled at me and greeted me with, ‘‘Welcome, Eliza,’’ and ‘‘Nice to have you, honey,’’ but my heart pounded with fright as I tried to hide behind Aunt Peanut’s skirts. Sylvia the snake woman was covered from head to toe with tattoos. Gloria the fat lady was the most enormous person I’d ever seen, with legs the size of tree trunks and a dress that could fit an elephant. One of the men in the group was so grotesque I hid my face. He had pure white hair on his pink scalp, and bulbous pink eyes, and skin that was nearly transparent. The bannerline claimed he came from a rare tribe of underground people, descendants from a marooned spaceship from Mars, but I learned when I grew older that Albert was really an albino. The only ordinary-looking person in the whole group was the rubber lady—a contortionist who looked fine standing still, but as soon as the sideshow started she would twist her body into knots like a pretzel.