The Pinch (41 page)

Jenny had never meant to outshine her partners. After all, the Piccolomini Brothers—not really brothers but comrades involved with one another in a way Jenny didn’t at first understand—had voluntarily taken her under their wing. Impressed with her natural ability, they helped develop her talents until she was equally proficient on the bounding wire and the tightrope. Dubbing her Mimi Piccolomini, they broadened their repertoire to accommodate her, introducing various properties: unicycles and stilts. But Jenny, a quick study and already accomplished after her years of self-taught endeavor, soon surpassed the skill of her mentors and, without trying, upstaged them. Finally the Piccolominis, complaining of chronic seasickness, took their injured vanity and left the Carnival of Fun at Vidalia for a spot in a circus that thankfully traveled overland.

After that Jenny retired Mimi and, graduated now to center ring, carried on solo as La Funambula, Mistress of the Air. There were other mistresses of the air: Rosa Bunch in her hourglass corset, spinning like a whirligig from her swivel loop, and Yvette, who hung from a single trap by her fuchsia hair. Each regarded herself as a prima in her own right and in that capacity snubbed all other claimants to the title. La Funambula was snubbed as a matter of course, but never wholly integrated into the circus community, she was spared much of the usual venom. In any event, so preoccupied was Jenny with the demands of her midair ballet that she scarcely noticed the cold shoulders she received on the ground.

Marital status notwithstanding, the lordly ladies of the floating circus each had her circle of admirers, sometimes several at a single destination. The sons of senators and cotton barons showered their favorites with flowers and bonbons after every show. Heated competition among these young gallants sometimes moved them to fistfights and even duels, outrages that translated into boasting rights for the ladies in question. Naturally the young men gave their offerings in the hope of receiving favors in return, and while a few of the ladies did reciprocate amorously, all were deft at keeping their suitors at bay. Such artful teasing, however, only increased the tensions that stoked the disorderly atmosphere of the
Yellow Wen
, and many an embarkation was marked by jealous husbands flinging bouquets and bijouterie overboard.

Jenny, who shared tight quarters with Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, had no room for housing her own gifts, the loving cups and potted viburnums she gave away to the sideshow performers. She had no more need of tchotchkes than of romance, the pain of which she had not the least wish to repeat. Besides, Madame Hortense (whose weightlifting apparatus increased the steamboat’s draft by a foot) had conceived a maternal fondness for the wirewalker, and as Jenny’s self-appointed protector kept the predators at arm’s length.

It was the last of its kind, the Carnival of Fun, a relic from the days when showboats featured canebrake troupers in temperance comedies like
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room.
While nearly every other touring company or tent show had taken to the rails, Forepaugh and Broadway persisted in the novelty of their riverborne spectacle. With hyperbolic publicity and the promise of shared profits they’d lured a boatload of bally broads, kinkers, and clowns on board the
Wen
and the
Palace
that followed in its wake. Later on, as the carnival evolved into an authentic circus, first-class animal and aerial acts were added to the ranks. But in the end, for all its variety the floating “argosy of wonders” was a losing proposition. Salaries aside, the maintenance of the porous packet absorbed the lion’s share (sometimes literally) of the season’s revenue, and even the draw of a loop-the-looping automobile could barely compensate for the cost of steam-heating the amphitheater. To say nothing of the repairs to damage caused by the river itself—the fogs that led to collisions with driftwood, the runnings aground on islands and sandbars. There were medical bills due to accidents and injuries incurred in attacks by the natives of the towns where they played. No matter that the circus went to excessive lengths to convince the yokels of the show’s inherent morality, going so far as to label the menagerie living relics from biblical times: the hippopotamus was “the blood-sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ,” and so forth. Let there be a rumor of godless fornicators among the troupe, and the citizens, under the influence of sanctimony and drink, would rise up to punish the heathen. This was especially the case south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the show people were often assumed to be of a debased Yankee persuasion. Then pitched battles would ensue, when the company had to defend themselves with guy stakes against knives and firearms.

Nor were the townspeople always satisfied with directing their malevolence toward the human performers. There were the boys that threw pepper between the bars of the gorilla’s cage or fed plug tobacco to the black bear. There was the time in Morganza, Louisiana, when Celeste the elephant, spooked by urchins who poked a broom in her hindquarters, bolted from the parade and crushed an alderman’s wife underfoot. When the town demanded vengeance, the circus had no recourse but to bow to public sentiment. Perfectly tractable now, Celeste was led by the bull handlers to the railyard, where a seven-eighth-inch chain was wrapped round her neck and she was hoisted into the air from a railroad derrick. The chain snapped and Celeste fell to earth in a stupor but made no resistance as a second chain was secured. When she was raised again, she sighed, died, and in keeping with the age-old protocol of lynchings, was dismembered, her bones and tusks displayed as trophies in the courthouse and barbershop.

As a first-of-May performer (and a Jew), Jenny was no stranger to the role of intruder. What bothered her more was the clamorous adoration of her fans, which could throw off her timing. For even a run-down riverboat exhibition was hailed by the rustics, starved as they were for entertainment, as heaven-sent. (Never mind that its artists might be judged pariahs from hell.) As La Funambula, who danced on a rope woven from a witch’s hair in the caverns of the djinn—or so claimed the ringmaster, Mr. Ephraim Peavey—she was viewed as a magical creature, and courted acordingly by hayseeds and gentry alike. What jerkwater Galahad wouldn’t want to pluck the sylph in her chiffon kilt out of the air and fetch her back to terra firma for a souvenir? (Even if on earth she was a bit of a klutz.) But Jenny had no truck with magic: the wire was the wire, the earth the earth, or anyway the promenade deck of a coal-belching steamboat. Unlike the ethereal La Bunch and Yvette of the iron jaw, who held court in their staterooms, she was content to hobnob with Madame Hortense in their stuffy cabin. There the lightly mustachioed strongwoman would read her tarot cards and massage her feet, which were always sore. (The thin doeskin pumps that allowed her toes to grope and steer along the cold-drawn steel left her soles sensitive to the sharpness of the wire.) At home with marginal types, she cultivated the company of various ten-in-one oddities, some with topknots and plates in their lips, a fraternization that consolidated her outlier status.

So Jenny enjoyed the best of two worlds. Though Mr. Peavey might assure the audience that the upper atmosphere was her exclusive element, it wasn’t. True, there was nothing quite like a romp on the wire; few planetary pleasures matched the rapture of executing a midair flifus or one-wing crab. But Jenny took similar solace in reclining in a canvas deck chair watching the children and diapered chimps swarming over the boat. She liked observing the kingfishers perched on a floating bough: how they scattered like roof shingles flung by the wind when the paddle wheel walked over their perch with a crunching racket. During nights that the rousters said were dark as the inside of a cow, they passed timber rafts and coal barges, vessels visible only by the light of their bull’s-eye lanterns, and by lantern light Jenny conned the poetry that Bonkers the clown was teaching her to read. Above the ring she suffered the yearning of her admirers below, though she remained proof against their overtures even when they belonged to her own touring caste.

He had christened himself Bonkers in an ironic counterpoint to his melancholy mien. During the specs, when the clowns disported themselves about the ring en masse, he wore a chimney-pot hat and tattered swallowtails like some ruined aristocrat, which in point of fact he was. His original name was Marmaduke Fortinbras Armbrewster the Somethingth, black sheep offspring of the potted meat Armbrewsters of Davenport, Iowa. Cut off without a sou after his expulsion from Princeton, he’d discovered in himself a talent for confidence swindles; but when his face became too familiar to the local constabularies in the river towns where he plied his trade, he boarded a steamboat hauling a cargo of gaudy misrule. He exaggerated his decadent pallor with greasepaint, accentuated the soot-gray bags under his eyes (from one of which leaked a diamond tear), and donned a sponge rubber nose. While his detractors (and there were many) claimed he’d merely swapped one bogus identity for another, the more sympathetic believed that in Bonkers the young wastrel had found his true nature.

As it turned out, he had an aptitude for clowning. Athletic despite his dissipation, he incorporated complicated pratfalls into his gags; he climbed ladders that leaned against invisible walls and, during the walkarounds, carried a board on his head that remained fixed even as he reversed direction. But what made him a favorite with the crowds was his acquisition of a mangy goat he’d won in a crap game from a farmer in Vicksburg who’d already forfeited his shirt. He called the goat Medea and claimed she was a sorceress transformed by a rival into a unicorn. (She had, projecting from her shaggy forehead, a single off-center horn.) Bonkers was seldom seen without Medea, who nipped at his backside during his act and employed her horn in rude ways to impede his progress—this to the shock and delight of the audience. But outside the ring the goat was as brooding and aloof as her master. There was even something menacing about her that caused the circus folk to keep their distance and the big cats to recoil in their cages. Tethered to the pipes on the boiler deck, Medea would bleat disconsolately throughout Bonkers’s all-night larks ashore, from which he returned in the mornings weak-kneed and ruddy-eyed.

Perhaps it was her own detachment in the midst of such knockabout company that drew Bonkers to Jenny Bashrig. Or was it the challenge of breaching her self-possession? Owing to his doleful eyes and buttery tongue, he was accustomed to easy conquests, but Jenny seemed immune to his charms. When he learned she was unlettered, however, the clown may have thought he’d hit upon a source of vulnerability and offered to school her. Jenny’s watchdog, Madame Hortense, was skeptical, having lately seen ominous signs in her tarot spread.

“Your Star, which is among the greater secrets, is crossed by your Magician card (sometimes called the Juggler), and the Wheel of Fortune is in opposition to your trump card, known as the Fool …”

“What are you talking about?” asked Jenny, who’d already advanced from the
Whiskers and Wagtail Primer
to a poem that Bonkers had translated himself. It was written, he alleged, by a French poet under the influence of opium.

In answer to Jenny’s question Madame Hortense, whose relation to cartomancy was purely instinctual, had to admit that she really hadn’t a clue.

Nevertheless, when she wasn’t playing footsie with Professor Hotspur (whose pygmy elephants she lifted above her head in her act), the stronglady kept a weather eye out for anyone or thing that might endanger the equilibrist. This included the danger of falling from the wire, beneath which she took up her self-assigned station during Jenny’s cynosure turns. Still wearing the full Wagnerian regalia from her own act, she would stand in the darkened ring far below the girl in the dancing amber spot. She was often joined there by a loitering Bonkers and his goat, though the latter was clearly impatient with her master’s vigils. To this unallied company was eventually added another, a more furtive figure in top boots and flared trousers, who—while he lingered on the ring’s perimeter—was nonetheless braced for any mishap.

The third party was Lem Kelso, whose nom de guerre was Captain Cumberbund, though he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t any kind of a captain. A trainer of wild animals who could face down a Burmese panther with perfect aplomb, he was pathologically shy of the ladies. In consequence the ladies took every opportunity to tease the tow-haired lion “tamer” (who would assure you the beasts could be trained but never tamed), flaunting their attractions in ways guaranteed to raise a cardinal blush on the young man’s cheeks. The blush would persist like hives for days, embarrassing him so that he kept to his berth on the menagerie scow. He was in any case more comfortable in the company of his cats and beyond the allure of the women, who were to his thinking a puffed up and immodest lot. Then Jenny Bashrig arrived with her infernal blend of earth and air, and the lion tamer was entranced; while for her part, Jenny, a connoisseur of every variety of daredevil, was largely indifferent to the animal acts.

He’d hired on to the Carnival of Fun as a candy butcher and might have remained content in that role, such a far cry from digging potatoes on a dirt farm. But always fond of animals, he offered his assistance to Giacomo Bondi, the cat man, and quickly progressed from being useful to indispensable. Bondi styled himself a member of the school of “bring ’em back alive” white hunters, whose every encounter with jungle beasts was staged as a life-and-death conflict. He was liberal in his use of the bullwhip and viewed his act as a demonstration of the power of his will over that of the brutes in his charge. He was also a drunk whose cruelty extended beyond the ring, so that his sullen animals smoldered in their resentment. Then it wasn’t wholly unexpected when, audaciously sticking his head for the thousandth time between the jaws of a Bengal tiger, he emerged without it.

In the succeeding mayhem young Lemuel presented himself as not only prepared to take over the care and feeding of the cats, but ready to exhibit them in a caged act as well. He’d closely observed his mentor’s methods and learned from his example everything that one ought not to do. Given the go-ahead—as what choice did management have?—he set about culling the broken animals from the spirited, overseeing the sale of the “seat warmers” to zoos. Having picked the brain and plundered the medicine chest of the resident vet, he ministered to the ailing and abused: he dosed Oliver the costive Nubian lion with an aloes physic, then borrowed a shovel from an elephant handler to remove the results, and he nearly lost a finger rubbing cocaine on Ethelred the tiger’s toothachey gums. In teaching them tricks he substituted reward for punishment, and was sensitive to his critters’ mercurial moods. He nursed their offspring with warmed bottles when a mother’s milk ran dry. For having turned a brood of sulky and unpredictable felines into a pride of obedient beasts, Lem Kelso was dubbed Lancelot Cumberbund by Ringmaster Peavey, and promoted from fairy floss peddler to captain of the cats. He still carried the whip and pistol into the circular cage, but an occasional flick of the wrist was sufficient to signal a lion to fake an assault, and the blanks in the revolver (which the animals were used to) made a crowd-pleasing bang. Such confidence did Captain Cumberbund demonstrate in the cage that his bashful countenance outside it made him something of a figure of fun. That and the general suspicion that he was a virgin.