The Invisible Circus (5 page)

Remembering her father, Phoebe pictured a man always struggling to carry too many things at once, children, briefcases, rolls of un-stretched canvas. She saw him leaping up the garage stairs late for dinner after a poetry reading by one of the Beats he so admired, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure—all were his acquaintances. He’d even been present on the legendary night when Allen Ginsberg challenged a heckler to take off his clothes, then flung off his own before a stunned audience. Often their father painted late at night, stealing an hour or two when they’d all gone to sleep. He’d be up the next day before anyone, clean-shaven, smelling of limes. With dark circles under his eyes he kissed them all good-bye and drove downtown to his other life, the one he despised.

Weekends, he would haul his easel and canvas and paintbox to the cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge. If Phoebe walked slowly enough, her father would sling her into his arms and carry her, too. Their mother followed with the blanket and camera and picnic basket, herding Faith and Barry. Only when they’d all finished eating would their father set his canvas on the easel and stand before it anxiously. Often he couldn’t paint, couldn’t make himself even begin and finally gave up, resting his head in their mother’s lap. But occasionally Faith would wander over and hand him a glittering purple flower she’d picked from the ice plant and something would hit him just right. “Baby, can you stay there a minute?” he’d ask, and always Faith would; Phoebe couldn’t remember her sister ever refusing in favor of some game or a fort she and Barry were building, though there must have been times when she’d wanted to. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing of her own could compete with their father’s need of her, her unique and seemingly bottomless power to save him.

Now and then Barry would emerge after hours alone in his room holding a machine, which he would show their father. Phoebe always dreaded these occasions, for try as their father might to look alert, machines were his work, and he loathed them. “You made this stuff in school, right, Dad?” Barry would say, always hopeful at first. “You got any ideas of how I can make this go backwards?” When he realized their father was only half listening, Barry would fall silent. “Forget it,” he’d say, and storm off, leaving their father startled, with no idea what he’d done wrong. No! Phoebe wanted to holler outside her brother’s door. No, no, no! He made everything worse. She felt such a terrible pain, knowing what would happen, unable to stop it. It left her sick. She pitied her brother and wanted no part of his weakness.

Their father was always struggling, always tired, but there came a time when he struggled harder to do what he’d always done, when suddenly he was exhausted. The circles under his eyes turned dark and moist as clay. Even his skin seemed weaker, bruising at the smallest impact. Phoebe and Barry and Faith no longer wumphed against him when he tottered home from work; now they seized his legs and held them tightly, filling him up with their strength, replenishing what IBM had drained away.

When Phoebe was five, she looked across the dinner table one night and saw her father sleeping. Her mother crouched at the oven with Faith, easing a toothpick into a chocolate cake. The kitchen was warm, an arc of steam on each windowpane.

“Daddy,” Phoebe said softly. He didn’t move. His lips were white. “Daddy?”

Barry sat beside their father, pouring salt on the tablecloth and arranging it in piles with his fork. Normally their father would have stopped him—the salt mounds were a regular battle between them—and Barry wore a smirk of incredulous triumph at what he was getting away with. He looked up at their father, whose head hung to one side. They heard his labored breathing. Barry grinned at Phoebe and pulled a few hairs on their father’s arm.

Faith galloped back to the table holding her cake between two red potholders. At the sight of their father she stopped. “Mom,” she said.

“Good Lord,” their mother said, dropping into a chair and gathering their father to her, so his head lolled against her shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed.” He nodded, rising slowly from his chair.

When their parents had left the room, the three of them stared at one another, unsure how to react. Barry’s grin still hung tentatively on his face. But Faith looked afraid and Phoebe felt it, too, like ice water down her spine. The cake plate still hung in Faith’s hands, forgotten.

The next day was Sunday. Monday their father would go to the doctor. There was a false heartiness in the air, too much loud, bright laughter.

After church they went to Baker Beach. Normally the waves were bloated and sodden, pulling away from the gritty sand with a sound like deep-frying. But today the sea was flat, silvery as a lake.

Their mother leaned against a log, one arm around their father. Faith and Barry rolled up their pants to wade and Phoebe ran behind them, shrieking when the icy water touched her feet. Barry wanted their father to walk with him to the far end of the beach, where giant mussels and purple starfish clung to the rocks.

“Don’t think so, Bear,” their father said. “Not today.” Barry looked crestfallen, and their mother offered to go. They set off, paddling over the thick sand.

“Want me to sit for you?” Faith asked.

“I’m beat,” their father said. “You draw me for a change.”

“Okay,” Faith said with energy. She sat, the big pad covering her legs. She held the stick of charcoal between two fingers and looked at their father. They both laughed shyly. “It’s hard,” Faith said.

“Damn right it’s hard,” he said, closing his eyes and resting his head against the log. “Just draw what you see.”

Phoebe leaned against her sister. Together they took in their father’s pale, spent face. Faith made a few lines, charcoal trembling in her fingers. The longer their father’s eyes stayed shut, the more nervous they became. They had to keep him awake.

Faith stood up. The pad dropped to the sand, and their father’s eyes snapped open. “I’m going swimming,” she said, slightly breathless.

Phoebe looked up, surprised. This was not a swimming beach.

“In your clothes?” their father said.

“I wore a swimsuit.” She pulled off her sweater, hurrying, whipping off her stretchy pants to reveal a blue one-piece with a white ruffle along the bottom. The wind made her shiver.

Their father sat up. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “If you’d told me, I would’ve worn mine.”

“But you’re tired,” Faith said.

“Not that tired.”

Phoebe felt relief. Faith moved nervously on the sand. “Will you watch me?” she asked.

“Sure I’ll watch. Just don’t go too far out.”

“But watch.” Faith was always asking to be watched, having reached that age when nothing seems quite real without an audience.

Faith walked toward the sea. “She’s nuts,” their father said, and laughed. “Your sister is one hundred percent crazy.”

They watched Faith slowly enter the water. She was twelve, fragile in her adolescence: small breasts that astonished Phoebe whenever she caught sight of them, the slightest indentation at her waist. Phoebe saw from how slowly her sister walked that the water frightened her. So what, she thought anxiously. Get in.

Her father leaned against the log and gathered Phoebe into his lap. The top of her skull fit perfectly under his jaw. Together they watched Faith wade deeper into the water. “It must be cold as hell,” he remarked.

Faith turned to look back at them. “Are you watching?”

“We’re watching,” he yelled. “We’re wondering when you’re going to dunk your head.”

The instant he said it, Faith dove underwater and began to swim. With careful strokes she moved parallel to shore, first the crawl, then the breaststroke. She turned around and came back the other way, doing the backstroke and sidestroke. Now and then she paused, calling out to make sure they were watching. Phoebe fattened their father’s yell with her own—she was happy, Faith was keeping him awake.

“You must be freezing to death,” he shouted.

“I’m not,” Faith cried through chattering teeth. “I’m warm as a desert.”

But gradually Phoebe felt her father’s head grow heavy above her own. Faith did the butterfly. “You see that?” she called. But the wind had risen, her voice was faint. Their father’s eyes must have fallen shut.

“Daddy?”

Phoebe raised her arm, but apparently her sister couldn’t see it. “Dad?” Faith called again. When there was no reply, she resumed swimming, faster now and away from shore. Go on, Phoebe thought, Faster! She felt unable to move, as if she could act only through Faith, as if her sister’s movements included her. Go, go, she thought, watching Faith’s shape grow smaller. Good! He would have to wake up now.

The next time Faith stopped, she looked tiny. If she called out, Phoebe couldn’t hear. Faith lingered there, looking back toward shore as if waiting. Phoebe felt ready to explode with the urge to run to the water, shout that their father was sleeping again and Faith had to do something. But he rested so solidly against her, pulling long, deep breaths, and Phoebe felt paralyzed—not frozen so much as absent, without a body of her own. Go, she thought, Keep going. And as if hearing her, Faith began swimming again. It became hard to see her sister through the cold glitter of sunlight on the ocean. Phoebe thought she stopped once more, but couldn’t be sure.

It worked. To Phoebe’s vast relief, their father stirred behind her. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked out to sea. He looked up and down the beach. “Where’s Faith?” he said.

“Swimming.”

He leapt to his feet, holding Phoebe under her arms. He set her down on the sand.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Where is she?”

It hadn’t occurred to Phoebe that Faith herself might be in danger. Now a sick, guilty feeling swelled in her stomach as her father bolted to the water’s edge. She followed slowly.

“Faith!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Faith!” His voice cut the wind, and the force of yelling so loudly made him start to cough. “Faith,” he cried over and over again. Then he stood, one hand shielding his eyes, and stared at the water. “I think I see her,” he said. “I think she’s out there.”

He turned to Phoebe, who waited timidly at his side. Her father’s pants were soaked to the thighs. He took Phoebe’s arm and walloped her behind so quickly and efficiently that she hardly knew what was happening until it was over. “How could you let her get so far out?” he shouted helplessly. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

Phoebe began to sob. She had no idea why.

Their father resumed calling out to Faith. He hollered until he had almost no voice left, then he coughed and coughed, unable to stop, until, to Phoebe’s horror, he doubled over and vomited into the water. Afterward he wiped his mouth and began shouting to Faith again.

She was swimming back. Phoebe saw her sister’s tiny arms plowing the sea. Their father’s face was gray; he looked on the verge of collapse. He stood back from the water, breathing hard. Phoebe clung to his leg, and absently he cupped a palm over her head. “She’s coming back,” he said. “You see her?”

Finally her sister emerged from the water, frail and exhausted, nearly gasping for breath. From the look on their father’s face, Faith must have known she was in trouble. “You said you’d watch,” she said, without confidence.

Their father slapped her across the face, his palm making a loud, wet noise against her cheek. Faith looked stunned, then tears filled her eyes. “That didn’t hurt,” she said.

He hit her again, harder this time. Phoebe, standing to one side, began to whimper.

Faith was shaking, her thin limbs covered with gooseflesh. With each breath her ribs stood out like a pair of hands holding her at the waist. “Didn’t hurt,” she whispered.

He hit her again, so hard this time that Faith bent over. For a moment she didn’t move. Phoebe began to howl.

Then he lifted Faith into his arms. She clung to him, sobbing. Their father was crying, too, which frightened Phoebe—she’d never seen him cry before. “How could you scare me like that?” he sobbed. “You know you’ve got my heart—you know it.” He sounded as if he wanted it back.

Phoebe put her arms around whatever parts of them she could reach, her father’s wet pants, Faith’s slippery calves. A long time seemed to pass while they stood like that.

Finally their father lowered Faith onto the sand. She looked up at him, her teeth chattering violently. “Daddy, are you going to die?” she said.

There was a pause. “Of course not,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“You’re not scared?”

“No, I’m not scared. Why, are you scared?”

Faith took a moment to answer. Phoebe thought of her father coughing, vomiting into the waves. She wished she hadn’t seen it.

“No,” Faith said slowly, “I’m not scared.”

He was dead within the year.

four

After her father died, Phoebe sleepwalked among the other second-graders, cut off from the high spirits that buoyed them through games of jump rope and tetherball and two-square. Her own legs felt so heavy. Even her head felt heavy. She wanted to take it off and leave it somewhere.

She had never believed their father would die. After he became sick, she went to church with Faith every day, lounging beside her sister on the pew, content to swing her feet and gaze at the dangling Savior and pretty candles while Faith took care of the praying. Phoebe hardly bothered to pray, and when she did, it was often for some greedy purpose; much on her mind were those Kiddles that came inside plastic perfume bottles, each with its own scent. She had Lilac and Lavender, but was desperate for Rose. She didn’t worry much about their father. She was powerless to help him and therefore not responsible; Faith was acting for both of them. Phoebe left the church feeling cleansed by her sister’s feverish prayers, satisfied, as Faith seemed to be, that whatever cure she was working could only result in their father’s recovery.

After he died, Faith stopped brushing her hair and a giant rat’s nest formed in back. She didn’t care. Loose, soundless tears slipped from her eyes when their mother tried to comb it. She was racked by stomach pains, prompting Dr. Andrews to limit her diet to boiled rice and saltine crackers. Weight fell from her like layers of clothing. She disappeared. And only then did Phoebe realize what a brilliant, magical world the old Faith had granted access to. Neighborhood games had formed around her spontaneously—statuemaker, spud, capture the flag—lasting over days in the rapturous hours between school and dinnertime. Their house had been a labyrinth of secret passageways Faith never tired of searching for, tapping floorboards, prying at moldings in the zealous belief that any moment a wall would slide away to reveal underground cities, treasure chests gorged with pearls and silver. Barry tried to fill the gap of their sister’s absence, tried rallying the neighborhood for a treasure hunt one Saturday, but the effort fell flat. He wasn’t enough. Gradually the neighborhood gang began to disperse, and Barry retreated to his room, stung by his failure.

A deadening sameness bore down on them. The floorboards and walls of their house no longer trembled with hidden passages—it was just a house. Their street was a street, Phoebe’s room a room, not a honeycomb of hiding places. Their mother was constantly hugging them, smoothing their hair, but she moved like someone underwater, so pale that Phoebe saw blue veins on her temples. In losing their father they had somehow lost one another—Barry’s door always shut, Faith drooped alone before the TV set. Try as they might to be cheerful at dinner, eventually the silence always won, snuffing out conversation like the fog that overwhelmed their house each night, obscuring every other house from view. Phoebe wanted to scream, kill that silence for good, but she felt buried under the ordinariness of everything in her life—a carton of milk, a stick of butter—they were bricks being laid on top of her one by one. She began closing the door to her own room, losing herself among
The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan
, magic worlds that seemed to Phoebe far less magical than Faith’s had been until their father died.

Retracing the steps of their father’s life was one of the few activities Faith still found worthwhile. Phoebe liked going with her to prowl his North Beach bachelor haunts. “Dad sat on this same bench,” Faith said in Washington Square, across from the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, whose white façade he’d loved to paint. “He lay on this grass.” And Phoebe shared her sister’s awe at touching the very things their father had touched. He was gone forever, but he was everywhere. It felt miraculous.

Nowadays young people lounged in Washington Square wearing colorful outfits, smoking, playing guitars. Faith was too shy to approach them, but they fascinated her. She speculated that they must be painters, or the Beat poets their father had so admired. She used Phoebe as a prop, piggybacking her around Washington Square for a better look at its bohemian occupants. After their father died, these were Phoebe’s happiest times.

The following March, 1967, their mother went on her first business trip to a film festival in Tucson. She departed with great misgivings, leaving Phoebe and Barry and Faith in the care of an old friend of Grandma O’Connor’s named Mrs. McCauley, sweet but hard of hearing, who insisted they eat everything on their plates. With a knowing flap of her plump hand, Mrs. M. (as they called her) dismissed Faith’s lingering stomach ailments and ladled extra corned beef hash on her plate. Faith was slowly getting better; though still frail and rather quiet, she’d started high school and even had a boyfriend, Wolf, at whose house she ate dinner the remaining nights until their mother came back.

After dinner Phoebe would pace nervously up and down the silent hallway past her brother’s door, which was always shut. One night, in desperation, she knocked. Barry opened the door an inch or two and peeped out. “Heya, Pheeb,” he said through the crack.

He turned and went back in his room, leaving the door ajar. Phoebe hesitated, then decided this must be an invitation to enter. Barry’s room looked unfamiliar, its red rug and bubbling fishtank. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen it.

Barry sat at his desk. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

Though she and Barry were only seven and twelve, there was a wariness between them that seemed always to have been there. “What’re you doing?” Phoebe said. “Homework?”

“Nah, I finished.” He was scrutinizing something on his desk. When Phoebe approached, Barry hunched protectively over whatever it was, so she went instead to the fishtank. There were eight or nine fish, two frilly black with ugly bulbous eyes, her favorite. “Can I feed them?” Phoebe asked.

“I already did.”

“Okay.” Phoebe watched the fish in silence, overcome with despair. Plants fluttered in one corner of the tank, jostled by silvery bubbles that rose to the water’s surface and vanished.

“Actually, Pheeb?” Barry said. “You can if you want. Feed those guys.”

With a tiny key he unlocked a drawer beneath the tank, where, to Phoebe’s surprise, his fish food was kept. She sprinkled a few flakes on the clean water, anxious not to abuse her privilege. Only when the fish had gulped these down did she dare add more. “See, Bear?” she said. “They’re hungry.”

Mysteriously, the tension between them eased. Phoebe began exploring her brother’s room, which, despite Barry’s savagely guarded privacy, was arranged as if for an audience. An ant farm, a Southern plantation house with a field of miniature corn, some creature’s brain inside a jar, plastic dinosaurs romping among miniature trees and cottonball clouds—shelf after shelf of displays.

Phoebe sensed her brother’s dark eyes following her, his pleasure at having captured her attention. She grew bolder, moving close to the shelves, even touching things, filled with a desperate wish to please him. She inquired about the cargo planes and battleships he’d built, animating her voice as she remembered their mother doing when Barry was younger and would still show his projects to the family.

“I’ve got something that’s better than everything else put together,” Barry said, moving back toward his desk. “But it’s a secret. You’ve got to swear not to tell.”

“Swear on the Bible,” Phoebe declared. She followed her brother to the desk. Spread across it were thin sheets of creased, rather ancient-looking paper covered with cryptic blue sketches. Phoebe heard her brother breathing behind her.

“They’re Dad’s,” he said in a hushed voice. “From engineering school.”

Phoebe stared at the sketches. She felt Barry poised to spring at her reaction, and it made her nervous. “Are you going to try and make one?” she asked.

His whole face lifted in a grin. He unlocked a desk drawer and, with a flourish, removed a wallet-sized board with a frazzle of knobs and wires erupting from it. A black electrical cord emerged from one end like the tail of a rat, and Barry plugged this into a fixture above his desk. He turned a switch and a small blue light winked on, accompanied by a shrill siren-like noise. Grinning feverishly, Barry raised the volume. He made the siren a buzzing noise, then turned to Phoebe in triumph.

She looked at him questioningly. “What is it?”

“A sound generator,” Barry said. “Back when Dad was in school, you needed vacuum tubes to make these things. Now you can use transistors, so they’re a lot smaller and they don’t break so easily.”

“How did you make it?” she said over the buzzing.

“It was hard,” Barry told her with relish. “I had to order the parts from this store in New Jersey, Edmund Scientific. Then I just figured it out, you know? Studied Dad’s sketches.”

He was flushed, dark eyes fastened to the small machine. He turned a knob and the buzzing sound became a loud ringing. “Think about it,” Barry hollered over the racket. “You know? I mean, think about it, Pheeb.”

Phoebe was overwhelmed—by the whispery trace of their father, which seemed caught against its will in this shrill contraption; by her own fragile closeness to Barry, which seemed in constant jeopardy.

“I’m going to make them all,” he said rather grimly. “Every single one.”

Phoebe nodded, smiling at her brother. Her head ached. Much as she longed to share in Barry’s awe, she wished he would turn the thing off. She tried to imagine their father here—his reaction to the leftover drawings, even Barry’s machine. And she knew that he wouldn’t give a damn.

“So, what do you think?” Barry said, leaning close.

“It’s great,” Phoebe said. She felt a panicky urge to get away from him.

“Really?” With his neck thrust forward and thin, smudged hands, Barry looked so meager, so peeled away. Phoebe felt an ache of pity, for herself and Barry both. “Really, Pheeb?” he said. “You’re not just saying that?”

“It’s the best,” Phoebe lied. She felt ready to cry. “Daddy would be so happy, I know he’d be so happy.”

“You think?” He was grinning now.

Phoebe nodded miserably. The tortured machine whined on. A faint smell of melted plastic tinged the air. When Mrs. McCauley tapped on the door to announce Phoebe’s bedtime, Barry unplugged his treasure and spirited it away.

The dullness of Phoebe’s bedroom met her like a blow: polar bear wallpaper, rows of faded stuffed animals, a wicker chair that crackled when you sat in it. Mrs. McCauley tucked the sheets tightly around her, as if fastening Phoebe in for a violent ride. “It’s nice, you and your brother keeping company,” she said. “He needs it.” Phoebe turned on her side, eager for sleep. Mrs. McCauley lingered a few moments in the wicker chair, humming faintly, then departed in her slow, stiff gait.

Phoebe woke in darkness to noises downstairs. Her bedroom was over the kitchen, and for some minutes she lay still, fearful that thieves had broken in through the back door and were heading upstairs to murder her. Then she heard music. Curious, Phoebe rose from bed and crept barefoot down the back stairs in her nightgown, hugging the banister. She heard unfamiliar voices; then, to her astonishment, she heard her sister’s laughter.

Phoebe stopped in the kitchen doorway, amazed. The room looked like a church, pitch dark except for dozens of white Christmas candles spilling their syrupy light across its walls. Organ-like music snaked from the radio. Faith and Wolf leaned at the stove, their backs to the door, surrounded by unfamiliar people who appeared to be in costume: a slim, dark-haired girl like the Queen of Spades in her floor-length purple dress of crushed velvet; another girl with ropes of white-gold hair and a sparkling white pants suit. The man nearest the door wore a top hat, his cut-off jeans exposing an abundance of deeply sunburned flesh. It was he who first noticed Phoebe.

“Greetings,” he said, tipping his hat. “Your hair wants cutting.”

Phoebe stared at him, jarred by the familiar phrase. Then she remembered: the Mad Hatter’s first words to Alice in Wonderland, a scene she’d read only that morning.

“It’s rude to make personal remarks,” Phoebe said, reaching for Alice’s response. “Don’t you know that?”

The man’s face went still with surprise. Then he threw back his head and laughed, mouth open, his round tongue the same pink as his sunburned legs. Everyone turned. “Who is this groovy kid?” said the sunburned Hatter.

Faith went to Phoebe and knelt beside her. As Phoebe clung to her sister, she felt the rapid pulse of her heart. “Is it morning?” she asked.

“Almost,” Faith said, breathless. Her cheeks were flushed. A tiny painted rainbow began above her left eye and curved around her cheekbone. “We’re making breakfast to eat on the roof and watch the sunrise.”

“What about Mrs. M.?” Phoebe said.

“She’s sleeping,” Faith whispered, crossing her fingers. “I told her I was staying overnight at Abby’s house.”

The strangers watched Phoebe very kindly, as if the mere sight of her standing there in her nightgown were somehow pleasing. Finding herself at the center of attention gave Phoebe a jittery pleasure. One man wore a magician’s crimson velvet cape and held in his palm two silver balls, which made dense clicking noises as he rolled them together. Another man looked like Jesus, in his thick beard and sandals. He’d been rolling skinny yellow cigarettes; now he lit one so the tobacco sputtered and crackled, took a puff, then offered it to his neighbor. “What a beautiful kid,” said Jesus, breathing odd, sweet-smelling smoke. Phoebe blushed to the neck.