The Circus in Winter (2 page)

At her new home, Irene inspected the sitting room and dining room by the light of a kerosene lamp. She stared at the black kitchen stove and announced that she full well intended to learn its mysteries. Of the four upstairs bedrooms, two were full of clothes, furniture, and paintings—Porter's accumulated New York booty, much of it still in trunks or wrapped in brown paper. Irene laughed. "The king's treasure rooms," she said. Another room Porter used as a study; pipe smoke had worked its way into the walls. She walked on to the simply equipped bedroom—just a dresser, nightstand, and a bed draped with a patchwork quilt.

Porter went to the window to pull down the shade. In the glass, he watched his new wife unfasten her gloves and take down her hair, then remove each piece of clothing: dress, bustle, corset, stockings, chemise. Irene welcomed the night; she had been preparing herself to sleep in that humble bed, in that modest house, for a lifetime already. In the morning, she'd ask her husband to take her for a ride; they'd go until his horse tired then choose a fresh one at one of his stables and ride on, like the Pony Express. At that moment, there was not a single thing lacking.

But what Porter saw reflected in the shivering glass was a woman too lovely for that humble bed in that modest house. He blew out the lamp and said, "I'm going to build us a new place."

"I like this house."

"We need a bigger one. For children."

That night, Porter built a house of words: cut-stone paths crisscrossing the lawn, weaving their way around trees and an English garden with a lily-padded pool. A two-story gray mansion with white columns and twin verandas half hidden in ivy and rosebushes. For Irene, he would make a temple, a repository of his New York excess and hungers.

He could not see that she was tired of temples. Neither knew that already she was dying. There was a lot Wallace and Irene Porter could not and would not see.

 

ALTHOUGH HE
pleaded with her, Irene refused an invitation to join a local ladies' circle. "I've had my fill of circles, thank you very much."

Although she pleaded with him, Porter refused to allow Irene to accompany him on the road. "Some of these towns don't have proper hotels," he said.

"I don't mind boardinghouses. Aren't there other women at these places?"

Porter looked at his shoes. "There are women, yes. But no ladies."

He relented, however, when business took him to Chicago or Indianapolis. There, he bought Irene tokens of his affection: rugs, coatracks, clocks, crystal chandeliers. She accepted these gifts with despair and stored them in her husband's cluttered treasure rooms. To Irene, a chair was the price of a rail ticket, a dresser was a week's stay in a hotel, and with each purchase, the broad future she'd imagined shrank just a little bit more.

Construction of the mansion began in the spring of 1884. Porter chose good ground—a grassy hill a few hundred yards from his farmhouse. From that vantage point, he and Irene would be able to look out over the countryside and the Winnesaw River. Each night, he read mail-order catalogs in bed, choosing what furnishings to order. He asked her what she preferred: Chippendale or Hepplewhite? Pineapples or grapes as a scrollwork motif? Red portieres or white? Invariably, she chose whichever was cheaper and plainer. One evening the subject was bathtubs. "This one will do just fine, Wallace," she said.

"But it's not nearly as big as that one," he said.

"Choose whichever you prefer then."

"It's important to me that you like it."

Irene smiled. "Don't be silly, dear. What's important is that
you
like it."

Even though it smarted to hear her say that, he could not stop spending money on the mansion. Its unfinished skeleton appeared in his dreams, and every night, he walked through its bones.

 

IRENE HAD SPENT
much of her first fall behind the reins of a small buggy, taking long, solitary drives until daylight gave out. Then her first Indiana winter arrived. She paled indoors, and by summer, she was still a tint of gray. Gradually, she began keeping to the house, rarely venturing farther than the front porch. One night after dinner, Porter found Irene there, embroidering in the bright glow of the setting sun. He said, "You don't look well, Irene. Are you feeling all right?"

"I can't seem to get warm," she said, "even sitting here in the sun." It was August.

He asked her in a near whisper, "Is it a child?"

Irene smiled into her lap. "Perhaps. I'm seeing the doctor tomorrow."

But the doctor said no child grew in Irene's belly. "Plenty of time," he said, and blamed her pallor on the adjustment to a Midwestern climate. "It will pass."

Then one morning Porter woke up in a shaking bed. Irene lay on her back, panting, wet with sweat despite the chill that had crept in overnight. Her body was a curled fist, and her own fists were digging into her belly, her eyes shut tight. He tried to straighten her, but the pain had locked her muscles in that pose. He repeated her name, kissed her palm, but in return got three long fingernail scratches down his cheek. When it was over, Porter laid a wet washcloth over her forehead, and Irene opened her eyes. "What's happened to your face, Wallace?" she said, taking the cloth from her head and daubing it at the hardening blood on his cheek.

"I got scratched I guess."

"Yes, well, stay clear of whatever it was next time," she said without looking in his eyes. Because she had seen fit to warn him off, he knew this had happened before.

By the next winter, Irene's gray skin stretched tight over sharp bones. Blue veins pulsed in her thin flesh. The fits of pain came with no warning; the beast fed on her and stole quickly away. Irene asked Porter to keep the lamp burning all night long, and he obliged, although it bothered him that his presence alone was no longer enough to sustain her. He asked, "What's wrong?" She said, "Nothing." She said, "Nerves." She said it would pass. Irene made herself a cocoon of their quilt, and when she did have to leave her bed to eat, bathe, or use the water closet, she moved slowly, almost in stealth, as if she was trying to sneak past her pain. One night as he shadowed her through the house like a ghost, she crumpled on the floor. He carried her limp body back to bed.

For too long, Porter had abided by her desire to pretend nothing was happening, but finally, he could no longer pretend. The next morning, he shook her awake. "I've had enough," he said. "You will see a doctor."

Irene yawned. "Why?"

"Stop it, Irene. This isn't going away. I thought it would, but it hasn't."

She kissed him on the cheek. "Well, honey, if it would make you feel better."

Doctor after doctor came by train. From the hallway outside the bedroom, Porter heard them murmuring, asking Irene where it hurt. None was ever present, though, when a spell occurred. The doctors opened the door, rubbing their beards or their heads, whispering that they wanted to open her up, some to look at her liver or her intestines, others her heart. One even thought the problem was her lumpy skull. It was the ague, some doctors said, caught from one of the mosquitoes hatched in the fetid summer waters of the Winnesaw. Others called it severe dyspepsia or yellow fever. The last doctor, the best in the country, came by train all the way from Boston, and even he was puzzled. All of them left (as a kind of apology) pills and syrups. The castor oil and calomel turned her stomach inside out, so Porter threw them out and began spooning tiny drops of morphine and laudanum onto her tongue. She slept soundly, at last. The bottles stood like sentries on the bedside table, guarding her from the beast's return. Teaspoons became tablespoons. Trickles became rivers. She was flooded with opiates, floating away.

Then it was spring again, and he was no closer to finding a cure for Irene than before. Porter mounted the stairs to wake her from a nap and found her already up. The red curtains were open, and she gazed out the window at the unfinished mansion on the hill.

Without turning her head, she said, "They'll be coming back soon, I suppose."

"No, the doctors are gone."

She pointed out the window. "I meant them."

"Next week. Foreman says it will be finished before the snow flies."

"Yes, I'm sure it will." Irene said, "I never wanted it."

He sat down on the bed. "I didn't know that." Even as he said it, Porter knew it wasn't true.

Irene's laugh was brittle. Turning her head from the window, she said, "I married you because I wanted to live differently. I wanted my life to be an adventure, but you wanted me to live as I was accustomed." She spat the last word from her mouth.

Porter felt his failure sitting like a gargoyle on his heart.

"You must promise me you won't let those doctors operate. They don't know what they're looking for anyway. I can just see them gathered around, cutting here and there. A bunch of pirates digging for treasure without a map."

Porter didn't recognize the cynical, sharp-edged woman in the bed, but he gave her his word. It was, after all, the only thing she wanted from him.

 

THIS IS
HOW
Wallace Porter became a circus man, but not why.

Not long after the doctors stopped coming, the Hollenbach Circus Menagerie came to Lima, a locomotive followed by fifteen red and yellow railcars. They pulled into the siding along the Winnesaw, and the overalled roustabouts led twenty horses needing new shoes to Porter's livery stable on Broadway—conveniently only a block from the railyard. It would be a fateful day.

Porter hadn't been out of the house in over a month, leaving his stable manager to attend to his daily business affairs. The winter days had flowed one into the next and nothing had changed except the color fading from Irene's face. When Porter sat in her room, he talked to her whether she was asleep or not. He imagined his life devoid of Irene's illness. In that other world he maintained in his head, he discussed financial transactions with his banker, bartered with a hostler over the price of a new foal, exchanged pleasantries with Irene as he took his dinner alone in the kitchen. One night as he inspected the building site, he finally heard himself chattering away and began to fear for the state of his sanity and soul. He woke Irene and said, "Tomorrow I'm going into town. Will you be all right alone, or do you want me to send someone out to sit with you?"

Irene shook her head.

"You don't want me to go, or you don't want someone to come?"

She nodded her head yes.

"I'll leave your lunch next to the bed. You won't even have to get up."

Irene squeezed his hand. Only then did he realize that he hadn't heard her voice in weeks.

The next morning, Porter rode into Lima, inhaling deeply the wet spring wind. He saw the circus train sitting on the siding as he came into town, and not long after he arrived at the stable, a stumpy, balding man in an unkempt suit walked into his office. "Excuse me," he said, taking off his hat. "Clyde Hollenbach of Hollenbach's Menagerie." He pointed his walking cane. "I've got me some horses need shoeing. Folks say this is the place for it." He dressed in black, like a minister turned to the Devil—florid, rumpled, and red-eyed. His breath smelled of whiskey, his clothes of smoke sunk into the threads.

"Are you here to put on a show?" Porter asked, but the man shook his head no. Circuses passed through Indiana sometimes, stopping in South Bend, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis, but never before in Lima. Too small to attract a big enough crowd, most likely. Over the years, Porter had read news stories about Barnum bringing Jumbo the elephant from England, and just two years earlier, Tom Thumb had died with sweet elegies printed in most every paper.

Hollenbach lit a cigar but didn't offer Porter one. "We're due in Carolina in three days, but these horses need tending to. Normally, I've got my own men to do the work, but I'm a bit shorthanded this season." He puffed at his cigar and stared at the wafts of smoke drifting in the air.

"Things are slow now. We could have all those horses taken care of by tomorrow," Porter said.

"Fine." Hollenbach stood to leave.

"Where are you going to put all the animals? All the people? If you don't mind my asking."

Hollenbach waved his hand. "Oh, we'll find us a lot to make camp. Sometimes I board them all in hotels and stables, but..." He didn't seem to know how to finish.

Porter understood that money troubles don't only show up on ledgers, but also in the smell of whiskey and worry on a man. Hollenbach's eyes were slightly frantic, and his fingers twitched and twiddled. What the man needed, he decided, was a good lunch.

At Robertson's Hotel, Hollenbach ate the beef stew and Boston brown bread offered, but seemed to enjoy the scotch more than the food. By the end of the meal, Hollenbach was soused. "Take it from me," he said, "this is the craziest business there is. Sucker born every minute, my foot. I'm the sucker!" He brought his fist down on the table, shaking the dishes and glasses. "Damn that Barnum anyway. I read that book of his and should have known better."

"Known what better?"

"A man can't expect to get anywhere in life when his livelihood rests on the actions of those he cannot control." Hollenbach slugged the last few fingers of his whiskey in a single gulp and poured himself a fresh glass. "They get sick. Have babies. Get lazy and pull on the wrong rope and down it all comes. And what can I do about it? I pay these people a decent wage. They have a place to sleep, and believe me, it's a better life than some of them had before." Standing up from his chair, Hollenbach said, "Allow me the honor, sir, of showing you what I'm talking about."

They stepped out into the muddy street and walked down Broadway to the river. The railroad tracks of the Chesapeake & Ohio snaked along its banks. From the siding, the smell of campfire smoke and roasting meat drifted toward them. Porter wasn't listening to the circus proprietor's complaints, only the fiddle music ahead. The rising steam from cook pots smelled of mysterious spices, and he inhaled deeply the aromas of cooked meat, animal dung, moldy hay, and liquor. The circus people gathered in warm circles, spoke toasts with rough tongues and laughter. The doors of the railcars yawned open like black mouths, and from within, yellow and green eyes blinked, animal or human Porter could not discern. The circus people called out greetings to Hollenbach, who raised his hand and nodded in return. As Porter walked through the siding, he found a certain respect for the man beside him, who despite his swilling and swearing, made his way among this strange retinue like a general making a friendly inspection of his troops.