The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (35 page)

Still, you keep looking. You just do. Fact is, you'll do anything to
spot it. I look back on the moment I found Albert's side of the bed
empty and I can't help but see a peak, everything sloping upward before
it and downward from then on. One second prior, I had the best animal act in America. One second after, I was on my way to burning my
bridges with the Ringlings and spending five years stuck in a contract
saying I was to be "generally useful" and not much else. So you think
to yourself, How could so much have happened between those two seconds?
How could so much misfortune squeeze itself in? And then, because you're
a human being, and you're cursed with a brain the size of a toaster, your
mind gets around to the only question that's really worth asking.

Just whose decision was that?

Quite frankly, it's enough to make you dizzy. Besides that it's an
invitation to gloominess, for the other tendency is to look at that line and
see that high mark and paint everything that happened afterwards with
the same dark brush. Course, this is inaccurate, for though my star did
fall after that one crammed-f space between seconds, there were still
plenty of good times after that. There were still plenty of starry nights
and warm days and waterhole swims. There were still plenty of real circus days. Moment or no moment, I remained a trouper, and though the
hours are long and the conditions miserable, the one thing you can say
about circus work is it's long on giddy moments. Hell, Art came along
after that moment, and he was the best thing ever happened to me.

Ooops. There I go again. Nothing like that man's name to get me
off track. Fact is, we're still on the topic of Albert Ewing, Ringling
accountant, a topic I usually work hard at forgetting. The sad truth is,
it didn't take long before Albert burned through his money and my
money and money that didn't belong to either one of us until one night
in Bridgeport I'd had about enough.

"Uh-uh," I told him, "no more, the well's gone dry, the bank's
closed, your loan officer's retired, you want to gamble till all hours, go
ahead. You just aren't doing it with my money."

"Please, Mabel, be reasonable. The game's with rubes. I'll triple
our stake in two hours. Believe me, Mabel, it's the end of our problems.
Two hours and I'll get us back in the black, Mabel. My luck's changing
I can feel it. Two hours, I promise."

"I've heard that one before."

"Mabel, I mean it."

"No."

"Mabel, it's for us."

For a second I looked at him, tempted, for there were nights he'd
go out and do what he was promising, coming back flushed with triumph (the only problem being those nights were few and far between).
Plus the phrase it's for us was put on earth to make women lose their
sense; appeals to our yearning for safety, I suppose, something men
learn right around the time their voices deepen.

"Albert," I finally said, "it's for you and you only."

With that, he stormed out, slamming the door to make his point.
In the middle of the night he finally came back, creeping in, making as
little noise as possible, getting in bed all considerate and sheepish. Had
he won, he would've come bounding in, waking me and Rajah and
recounting every hand and just generally basking in it.

He didn't ask me for money after that. God knows where he was
getting it; I only knew he'd get it and then he'd go out and then he'd
lose it. Made me mad as an orangutan, this did, and for a time this contributed to some mightily frenzied nighttime activity, the kind that can
take the place of jogging or shadow-boxing. Course, it couldn't last.
One night, with Albert slack-lipped and humping, he looked into my
eyes and I looked into his eyes and what we saw was enough to make
blood ice over. He pulled off and we went to either side of our big
bed and that's pretty much where we stayed. I even got in the habit of
taking Rajah out of his shelter and letting him lie between us, something Albert didn't object to so long as I washed the sheets.

Talking went too. I couldn't so much as look at the man without
feeling spiteful so I figured it was foolish trying to communicate
with him. It even got so I'd take my food out of the Hotel (which was
what the Ringlings called their cookhouse) and eat it with Rajah in
the Pullman so others wouldn't have their appetites ruined by our frostiness. And if you're wondering why we didn't break it off right
then and there its because it was winter and troupers have a long tradition of going a little squirrelly between seasons. All that motionlessness
makes us ornery. Though I can't speak for Albert, my game plan was to
wait for the next season and see if things improved.

The arena shows in New York City came a little earlier that year,
the beginning of April, if memory serves, most of the stars showing off
acts they'd been working up over the winter. That first night, May
Wirth did a forward somersault, pretty much a miracle on a cantering
mare. Poodles Hannaford somehow got a saddle on the belly of a horse
and, arms flailing like a drunkard, rode around at full gallop while
clinging to the horse's underbelly (though how he did this without taking a hoof to the head is anybody's guess). Con Colleano did a onearmed stand on a slack wire, once again making the rubes question
what is and what is not possible, something people trapped in townie
lives need once in a while. Not to be outdone, Lillian Leitzel turned 160
left-arm planges, the rubes starting to count off each one by the time
she'd reached 50. To top it all off Alfred Cadona debuted the first
quadruple somersault in the history of the trapeze, a feat that wouldn't
be copied for decades.

And what of me? What of Miss Haynie slash Mrs. Aganosticus
slash Mrs. Williams slash Mrs. Roth slash Mrs. Ewing? The next night,
lying beneath my roaring and rubbing Bengal, I realized the one drawback of working on the greatest circus show ever assembled was that
acts went stale fast. When I finally rolled out from under Rajah, my
leathers as sticky as midway floss, there was applause you could call
mighty. But there weren't screams and there weren't ladies fainting and
there weren't children crying.

A week later we pulled out of Grand Central station, the
Ringling show so big it needed a total of four trains to pull all the cars.
A giddiness took hold, for each year the routing changed, meaning different towns, different scenery, different people. Different surprises, too: that year a Jack Londoner demonstration was waiting for us in
Philadelphia, a lot of angry men, women and children waving placards
and shouting. It was something I didn't take too seriously, the idea that
circus life is hard on an animal being nothing but dreamt-up bunk and
the result of a certain overly privileged segment of society having too
much time on its hands. We had a straw house anyway, and when we
pulled out of Philadelphia it was like those placards had never been
there.

But the best thing was Albert seemed to settle down and take his
job more seriously. He started getting up on time, and he avoided the
poker games that went on nonstop outside the workingmen's cars.
Instead, he played solitaire, betting against imaginary banks with
wooden matches as markers, which I figured wasn't the greatest state of
affairs but a damn sight better than losing real money. As a show of
thanks I veered closer to the civil end of the spectrum. We started eating together again, and since we were on opposite sides of the table I
guess we both figured we might as well start communicating again.

At first the conversations were light. Weather, cat talk, gossip
about who was screwing who. Then one morning, in Baltimore, my
husband slash manager looked up over his coffee and broached the subject needed broaching the most.

"Mabel. I know things have been rotten but I think I've got this
thing under control, I really do, and I know I deserve the way you've
been treating me but now that I'm getting better I think we should work
on liking each other again."

I looked at him, letting my eyes say I was unconvinced but willing to hear him out anyway. He spread some marmalade on toast and
said, "I have a proposition. The Hagenbeck show is routed an hour
away in Annapolis, and I thought we could go see that new mixed act
everyone's raving about. Clyde Beatty, I believe, is his name. I thought
maybe we could go tonight. Maybe we'd get some ideas for how to
steer your act. What do you say?"

"That's all well and good, Albert, but you might remember I
work nights."

He produced a slight grin. "I spoke with Curley and told him you
needed the night off. Professional development. The Argentine will
run your Bengals through their act. You've got those cats trained so
well I could probably do it. So the only thing the crowd won't see is
Rajah but I figure Rajah could use a rest once in a while as well."

I looked at him, wondering whether I'd be able to tolerate my
husband's company for a stretch of several hours, at the same time
weighing this against the fact I really was curious to see what kind of an
act an ex-polar bear man could come up with and why everyone was
yammering about it so. After the matinee, Albert and I got in one of the
Ringling automobiles and so we'd be alone Albert did the driving
instead of a workingman. We talked most of the way there, Albert saying he'd come to the conclusion his gambling had been caused by work
stress and the fact it appealed to his mathematical side and the nervousness caused by us not being able to get in the family way. You have to
imagine how Albert talked: laying everything out in such a precise, logical way that after a while you started to feel irrational for not agreeing
with everything that came out his mouth. Three-quarters of the way
there we stopped at a diner. Over a plate of smothered chicken and
peas, I told him if he kept on the straight and narrow maybe we could
start acting like husband and wife, the key word being if. Just saying
that cheered him so much he whistled and tapped the steering wheel all
the way to Annapolis.

Now. The Hagenbeck-Wallace circus was an old outfit started in
America by a German animal breeder named Karl Hagenbeck. For
years, the Hagenbeck circus had been a respected and honest menage
show, which is of course why it went broke. In a public auction it was
bought by a man named Ben Wallace, one of the sleaziest two-bit grift
operators in a business crammed with sleazy two-bit grift operators. For PR reasons, he kept the Hagenbeck name, a decision causing old
Karl Hagenbeck so much grief he sued to get his name taken off, the
judge deciding the name of his circus was part of the sale and that Ben
Wallace could do with it what he liked. Hagenbeck moved back to
Germany and shortly thereafter died of heart problems no doubt
brought on by extreme humiliation.

By 1923 Wallace was dead, too, and his circus had become about as
reputable as any of the second-tier circuses in America, by which I mean
sort of. About the same size as Barnes and Sells-Floto and John Robinson
and Cole Brothers, it had four rings and a decent menage and, with straw
down, seating for maybe eight thousand. When Al and I got to the
ticket wagon I was recognized and taken in as a special guest of the circus
and placed in the front row of seats with stars painted on the backs.

A few seconds later the lights went down. An Oriental-style spec
was followed by the aerial display, neither of which were as big as the
Ringling counterparts but at the same time not in any way shameful.
Then the tent went dark and the ringmaster bellowed, "All eyes on the
center ring steel arena ..." for by then everyone was following the
Ringling idea of putting the cat display third. With that, the centre ring
lit up and three male lions were fed into the arena. Heaven knows I'm
no fan of lions but these ones were so lopey and unbarbered even I felt
embarrassed for them, a sensation heightened when two snarly, bedraggled tigers were fed in next. All five cats took their seats slowly, and
even just sitting there they looked growly and uncomfortable, taking
little air swipes at one another. Every few seconds a lion would roar,
and I noticed both tigers had gone completely quiet and still, a sign they
hadn't been mixed or seat-trained properly.

Truth be told, I was relieved, for I'd been hearing the
Hagenbeck-Wallace show had itself a mixed act that had to be seen to
be believed. But the moment I saw how irritable and poorly groomed
the cats were, I knew the whole thing was a press agent concoction and
something the crowd would see through in a second.

A spotlight followed Clyde Beatty across the big top. He was a
handsome kid, maybe twenty-five years old, with a strong jaw and
wavy dark hair though like all male big-cat trainers he was a short son
of a gun. He wore a white shirt and jodhpurs and tall black leather
boots, and he carried a whip in his right hand. In his left hand he somehow gripped both a pistol and a wooden kitchen chair, the peculiarity
of which was yet another sure indication of how bad his act was going
to be. Yet the thing that amazed me was just how bad it was; no sooner
had he beckoned one of the lions from his seat than the lion was roaring and taking air swings and generally not doing anything close to
what he was told. Beatty started yelling, and to get the cat moving he
swung his whip over his head and cracked it somewhere around the
cat's shoulder, which got him moving, all right-got him charging
straight at Beatty. Would've eaten him, too, had Beatty not jammed one
of the chair legs down the cat's throat, making the lion gurgle and
choke in a way made me sick. The cat chewed on it for a second and
when he was finished just sat looking cowed and bitter while the other
cats growled and swiped and generally looked pissed off. Beatty indicated for a rollover and again the cat balked and again Beatty cracked
the whip and jabbed at him with the chair leg until finally he did a single sloppy half-hearted rollover, from which he came up swinging and
taking jabs and roaring. (By contrast, I could send eight tigers through
the cleanest simultaneous rollover you ever saw in your life and I could
do it with a single motion of my chin.)