The Circus in Winter (10 page)

 

WITHIN TWO WEEKS
, Mrs. Colonel had visited every bunkhouse but one, a small cabin on the far side of the winter quarters, half hidden by trees. She heard no sound within and was turning to leave when she noticed a blanket draped over ropes strung from the eaves. Behind the curtain, Mrs. Colonel found a young man sleeping in his suit, collar unbuttoned, an open book on his chest. Mrs. Colonel studied him carefully, noting his smooth pink cheeks, aristocratic nose, curly brown hair and long fingers. He reminded her of a sleeping prince from fairy tale books, perfectly formed and beautiful. Most circus men, Mrs. Colonel had found, were either hulking brutes or skeletons with bad coughs.
Oh, but this one,
she thought,
this one is a gift from God.

He awoke then with eyes wide. Mrs. Colonel said, "I beg your pardon. How rude of me."

The man jumped up and straightened his coat. He closed a small suitcase sitting on the chair next to his bed. Before the lid snapped shut, Mrs. Colonel caught a glimpse of starched white shirts and long underwear. "Please excuse me," he said. "I wasn't expecting company."

"I'm Mrs. Colonel Ford. The Colonel is my husband," she said drawing out the last word,
huzzz-band.
She offered her limp, black-gloved hand.

"Jeremy Trainor. Painter." He bowed ever so slightly.

Mrs. Colonel noted how gently he'd taken her hand, as if it were a flower he didn't wish to bruise. She thought a firm handshake very common. "I brought these," she said, pulling out a bundle from her drawstring bag. "Peanut butter cookies. I'm trying to acquaint myself with everyone."

Jeremy Trainor asked, "Won't you have a seat?" but Mrs. Colonel blushed, since the only place to sit was on his bed. He offered her his arm. "On second thought, please join me, my lady, on the veranda." She laughed. They spent the better part of the afternoon sitting on the bunkhouse stoop, eating the cookies and talking. He'd been with Porter's circus for over a year, painting the advance posters and touching up the calliopes and wagons with gilt daubings. He shared the bunkhouse with six other men, carpenters and blacksmiths, coarse and crude. They found him sissified, so he'd strung up the partition to keep himself separate.

Mrs. Colonel sighed. "I did the same all those years traveling on trains, but I suppose I've resigned myself to the fact that these are my people now." She told him how she'd ended up the wife of a circus man—the Waltz at the Cotillion Story—and he told her how he'd ended up a circus painter. He had been raised to farm his family's patch of stony soil. As a child, he'd drawn pictures in dirt and ashes, the only medium available. But when his father and brothers saw his work, he was whipped and sent to his room without supper. "I ran away two years ago to be an artist, and look how far I've gotten."

Mrs. Colonel remembered then that first ladies performed another important function. She said, "I have a whole house in need of an expert's hands. It's just the thing to get your career off the ground." Their relationship began that day, that old and regal association called patronage.

 

INSTEAD OF WALLPAPER
, Mrs. Colonel Ford wanted to cover the walls of her house with murals by Jeremy Trainor. "Imagine," she said. "Floor to ceiling. Every wall. It will be magnificent." She sent a note to Jeremy, and the next morning, she waited for him on the porch. A fog had risen from the Winnesaw, and she saw him walking through that low-hanging cloud, dressed in overalls. Mrs. Colonel imagined all those winter days, standing at the foot of his ladder, sending up words of praise. She imagined for a moment that the young man walking through the mist was actually her lover. It had been years, even decades, since she'd felt that old ache, and it surprised her that her body was still capable of producing such a want.

Inside the parlor of ghost furniture, they drank coffee and discussed what Jeremy would paint. "I thought a nice lawn scene would work well in the dining room," Mrs. Colonel said. "Lords and ladies. Croquet. As a girl I visited a plantation in South Carolina that had a fox hunt." Her expression turned dreamy, faraway.

Jeremy shifted in his chair. "I was thinking of something more local, like the circus."

Mrs. Colonel laughed. "You already paint the circus."

"I want to do portraits, paint the landscape." Jeremy Trainor swept his hand wide across the room.

"I thought you weren't fond of the land?"

Jeremy took a sip of coffee. "I'm not fond of
farming
the land." He sat forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, staring earnestly into the eyes of Mrs. Colonel. "I have a vision."

She patted his leg. "Well, honey, of course you do."

He took Mrs. Colonel's hand and squeezed it softly. "I paint posters. Do you understand?" She did not, and Jeremy explained that when the circus paraded through towns, he saw people along the sidewalks sitting on his posters. "They fold them like accordions and fan themselves." Later, he said, the posters littered the streets and fluttered on fence posts. The wagons he painted chipped in the wind and rain and had to be restored with the same colors year after year. "But your house will last," he said. "It's very important to me."

Mrs. Colonel swallowed hard. "What would you start with?"

"Hofstadter and the elephant."

She knew that at least one room of her house would be dedicated to the memory of the elephant keeper and the awful circumstances of his death.
Oh dear,
she thought.
What will the Colonel think?

The Colonel was not amused. He bellowed and roared. "This idea of yours has gone far enough. I'll not have my house turned into a maudlin museum by some two-bit artist." Mrs. Colonel tried everything. She stroked his hands, played their favorite waltz on the Victrola, held the match as he lit his pipe, and brought him brandy sours, his favorite drink, on a silver tray. All the while she spoke in soft tones about increasing the value of the house, about posterity, but the Colonel would hear none of it.

Mrs. Colonel nurtured her longing in private. She took naps every afternoon with the door closed, and before sleep, imagined the Colonel had relented. Jeremy came to the house each day to paint and to see her. She acted the story out in her head, complete with dialogue, long afternoon teas, shy looks, and passionate embraces. Often when she awoke, she found that her hips moved of their own accord.

Finally, she resorted to the means by which she usually got her own way; she locked herself in the bedroom and refused to open the door, even for meals. She sobbed and choked on tears. The Colonel couldn't understand what was so important. "Why are you doing this, dear?" he asked, standing at the door on the third day. Neither of them had ever held out so long.

"You said I could decorate the house however I wanted. You've never let me cultivate myself. Never."

The Colonel finally relented. "It will look godawful hideous, but have your way."

He was right. The house would be hideous, but that was no matter. Mrs. Colonel knew her body was doughy and shapeless, her hair grayed. She could never hope to seduce Jeremy.
He will never love me, but if I let him paint,
she thought,
he will at least have to appreciate me.

 

THE FOLLOWING WINTER
, Jeremy began, as he'd said he would, with the death of Hans Hofstadter. Mrs. Colonel brought an easy chair into the study and sat amid the tarps and ladders. She allowed herself only momentary touches—a pat on the arm to call him to lunch, a stroke of his face to wipe off flecks of paint. He painted the brown Winnesaw, the trees, the gray sky, the elephant that held a small man in its trunk and lifted him like a prize. The keeper's red shirt was the only bit of color on the entire wall. When Nettie finally realized what the mural depicted, she yelled something in German that Mrs. Colonel couldn't understand. She refused to enter the room again and later forbade Ollie to enter as well. But for years, Mrs. Colonel would sometimes catch him in there, staring at the death of his father.

Each time Jeremy finished a room, Mrs. Colonel stuffed a roll of bills into the chest pocket of his overalls and turned her cool, powdered cheek to him for his thank-you. From the window, she watched him trudge home through the evening snow. She imagined him lying awake in his cot, hands folded over his chest, waiting for the snores of his bunkhouse mates to begin so that he could steal into the night to bury her money, their money, in a secret place.

It took him two winters to finish the first floor. In these rooms, Jeremy painted exactly what lay on the other side of each wall. The side of the house that faced the winter quarters was a mural of the barns—zebras and elephants ambling in their paddocks, camels grazing in fallow cornfields, horses going through their paces in practice rings, and enormous cats jumping through fiery hoops. On the side of the house that faced the countryside was an Indiana winter—clods of earth powdered with snow, the sky gloomy and oversized. So accurate was Jeremy's work that during the winter, if Mrs. Colonel squinted her eyes almost shut, the effect was as if there were no walls on the first floor at all. But in the summer, she was left in the lonely house of winter walls broken by window squares of green.

 

THIS IS
WHY
they call it the heartland:

In the summer, the fields on either side of Mrs. Colonel's house glowed a brilliant green, rippling in the wind. The air stretched above like miles of blue canvas, and Mrs. Colonel pictured a center pole rising up from Indianapolis's Monument Circle to hold up the endless sky. Sometimes as she sat on her front porch in the evenings, Mrs. Colonel felt her heart swelling up as big as the horizon. Only then could she say that Indiana was almost as beautiful as her Virginia. During these lonely months, Mrs. Colonel fancied herself shipwrecked and stranded. Outside her windows was a green ocean dotted by islands of trees, and on each island stood a farmhouse, sheltered from the sun and the prairie winds by those blessedly spared shade trees. Each island looked remarkably the same, and sometimes she thought about walking off the porch, diving into this ocean, and swimming to the next stand of trees. Maybe there, she'd find another woman waiting for her men to return, a woman as heartsick as herself.

 

THE THIRD WINTER
, Jeremy started on the upstairs and decided to devote each room to a different performing act—the Fukino Imperial Japanese Acrobatic Troupe, the Great Highwire-Walking Worthingtons, even the Boela Tribe of African Pinheads, whom he brought to Mrs. Colonel's house, "for sketches," he said. Colonel Ford came home one afternoon to find the Boela Tribe sitting on his sofas, drinking from his crystal. Bascomb Bowles, the elder of the family, was stooped over the pianola, plunking out "Amazing Grace." "For god's sake," he told his wife later, "did Jeremy actually have to bring them here?" Mrs. Colonel secretly agreed, but Jeremy was insistent. For a week, she kept watch for the Colonel while Jeremy studied the Boelas in an upstairs bedroom, which he locked at the end of the day. "A surprise for you," Jeremy said. "My masterpiece." When he finished, he covered her eyes and led her into the room. "Voila!" The room was a jungle of vines and trees, glowing eyes peering out of the night, and around a fire danced the Boela Tribe in loincloths and bone necklaces, shaking spears. Mrs. Colonel almost fainted. When the Colonel saw the room, he screamed, "Holy Mary, Mother of God!" and stayed up all night whitewashing the walls. To spare Jeremy's feelings, she kept the room locked from that day on. "The Colonel is quite progressive on the Negro question," she explained, "but this might be too much for him, I'm afraid."

After the Boela Tribe incident, the Colonel almost put an end to the painting, but Mrs. Colonel assured him their bedroom would be to his liking. She invited Jeremy to dinner so they could discuss the matter. "Why are you asking me my opinion all of a sudden," the Colonel asked, pushing back his plate and lighting his pipe.

"I assume," Jeremy said, "you'll want something you don't mind looking at a lot."

Mrs. Colonel said, "Yes, what would you like, dear?"

The Colonel took two thoughtful puffs off his pipe. "The prettiest thing in this whole goddamn place is Jennie Dixianna. If I'm going to have to look at something every morning, I'll look at her." Then he stood and left the room.

Mrs. Colonel felt her face pinching and tears welling up, but she kept her composure in front of Jeremy. "I believe that I'd like you to put Alberto Coronado on the other wall of the room. His triple somersault is just lovely. Yes. That will do nicely." She walked to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

The east wall of the Ford's bedroom captured the somersault in all its stages: Coronado posed before takeoff with the trapeze bar in hand; Coronado in midflight, tucked and spinning; Coronado triumphant, hanging in the strong arms of the catcher. "See how lifelike it is," Mrs. Colonel said to her husband, pointing out the raven hair and mustache, bronzed skin, and tight leotard. The Colonel only nodded his head.

That night, the Colonel walked into his newly painted bedroom and sniffed. "I can't sleep in here. The smell makes my head hurt." For a week, he tested the room every night, and still found the smell too strong. Then, he did away with the formality of testing the room altogether and continued sleeping in the Fukino room. By the time the circus left that spring, Mrs. Colonel had grown accustomed to the spacious bed in her half-painted room.

Dear,

Hope all is well with the show. It's been most quiet around here, with notable exceptions. Nettie's boy Ollie is getting to be a handful. Yesterday, he broke the antique vase. Nettie gave him a good lashing. Caught him drawing on the walls in the study, but didn't tell her. You know how she is about the study. Weather humid, but not bad for this time of year. Hope you've been enjoying good weather on the road. I will write more next week.

Fondly,
Your loving wife