The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (38 page)

I said a little prayer of thanks and started laughing, something
that seemed to enrage Albert for his eyes popped open and he started
mmmmm-mmmmm-mmmmming in a girlish pitch. The frenzy in his
voice made me laugh even harder, so that after a few seconds I had to
lie down and hold my stomach and laugh away all the pressure of the past year. Fact is, I laughed so hard tears were rolling down my face and
I couldn't catch my breath and my head was exploding though in a
good way. Rajah started arfing, concerned maybe I'd gone crazy. This
went on and on, Albert squealing and me laughing and Rajah arfing.
Around the time the first wagons started coming from the lot I got up,
collected myself and walked off, leaving Albert and his privates dangling upside down for every performer, groomer, menage man and
stake driver to see.

Next morning, he was gone for good.

That day, I caught up to Charles Curley walking down the connection
and said, "I've got to see Mr. John."

He stopped and looked at me and said, "He's busy, Mabel. It's
season end ..."

I put my hand on his forearm and communicated how serious I
was by saying, "Charles ... please."

He nodded.

Course, this took some doing. John Ringling didn't get up till ten
in the evening and refused to conduct any business till after breakfast.
By that point, the train was moving and the only car connected to his
was his brother's, who was still in Sarasota making sure the palaces got
built right. So I had to wait until the next Sunday, a night called insomnia night because the train didn't move and everyone had trouble sleeping without a lot of clacking and jostling underneath. I was told to go
to the Pullman around midnight, by which time he would've finished
eating what he ate every day for breakfast: corned-beef hash washed
down with Old Curio.

I knocked on the door and wouldn't you know it the man himself
answered, cloth napkin still tucked in his shirt collar.

"Mabel!" he cried, as though I was in the habit of dropping by on
a regular basis. "How nice to see you!"

He held out his hand and I shook it, my little white paw com pletely disappearing inside his meatiness. He shook my hand so long and
so heartily it was more a case of my extracting it than him letting it go.

He offered me a seat and I took it while he, for some reason,
remained standing behind his desk. A waiter in black pants, white shirt
and a red velour vest was putting Mr. John's dirty plates on a silver tray,
Mr. John wiping his lips and then tossing the dirty napkin on top of the
dishes. I waited for his valet to go back into the private kitchen at the
end of Mr. John's Pullman before I said, "Mr. Ringling, I just want to
thank you for the way you handled the situation with my husband.
What he had coming was way worse than what you gave him and even
though he's a snake in the grass I still want to say how thankful I am
and that I hope what he did won't affect your opinion of me."

He lit a double corona, so I wasn't sure whether cigar smoke or
the unseemliness of my apology made him squint. When he was finished, he shook the match out by waving it in the air, though at the same
time he seemed to be waving away the conversation topic. From where
I sat he looked about ten feet tall.

"How are you, Mabel?"

"I'm good, Mr. Ringling."

"And the act? How's the act coming along?"

"Fantastic. Been working hard on some new tricks. By next season we'll have a double flaming hoop jumper and a pair of tigers riding a see-saw and with any luck a tightrope walker."

Here John Ringling's eyes widened.

"A tightrope-walking tiger? Really? Mabel, you have to be kidding me? Which one is it?"

"The Himalayan."

"My God, she's a beauty too, isn't she?"

"All my cats are beauties, Mr. John. It's not hard keeping them
that way on this show."

"Oh no, I won't hear it, Mabel. If those cats are healthy it's your
doing and your doing alone." Here he finished a half tumbler of Old Curio-just picked it up and threw it down his throat like it was punch.
Was when he placed the glass back on the table I noticed his hand was
puffy and a little pink.

"Now listen, Mabel, I know I promised you a twelve-tiger act
when I hired you off the Barnes show and you've been very patient and
I want to reward that patience. I've got my eye on fifteen tigers a game
warden's got himself in India. Once he figures a way to, uh, extract
them from the country, they're yours. It's only a matter of time. Think
you could train a twenty-two-tiger act, Mabel?"

"Oh Mr. John could l!"

"Well, good. Good. I thought you'd be pleased. I hope to get them
by the start of winter quarters. Would that give you enough time to
train them before next year's opener?"

"I'll make sure it does!"

"I figured you'd say that too. Good. It's settled. You'll have the
biggest cat act in America. How's that sound?"

"Wonderful, Mr. John. Absolutely wonderful!"

"Good, good, good, I thought you'd say that...."

A few minutes later I left, John Ringling pleading he had a full
night of work to attend to, and we must really get together another time
soon. It'd been my second meeting with Mr. John, and for the life of me
I couldn't figure out how he'd gained a reputation for being so hardassed and fickle, for it seemed like every time he butted his nose into my
affairs my life improved in a way was nothing but dramatic.

Four days later we pulled into Bridgeport, most of us feeling
sickly and green from the last night's party in Richmond, Virginia.
Three days after that, I awoke early and took Rajah to the corner store,
Bridgeport being the one place on earth I could take Rajah for a walk
without raising a stir. Bought myself a Billboard, and would've got
myself a White Tops as well except they hadn't been delivered yet. I sat
at the soda bar with Rajah on the stool beside me, the soda jerk barely
noticing. I ordered a float and looked at the front page.

Suddenly I couldn't draw breath. Read the words over and over
and though they made sense at the same time they didn't.

Seemed John Ringling was cancelling all cat acts in his travelling
show, citing danger to the trainers and the recent picketings by Jack
Londoners. Seemed he'd always felt the cat acts caused a flow problem,
what with the awkwardness of the steel arena. Seemed it was an effective cost-cutting measure, the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey
Circus being the most expensive bit of theatre ever produced in the history of mankind and one that lost money each and every time a ticket
got sold. Seemed he'd still have a wild cat display, but only at the arena
shows in New York City and Boston, and it seemed the display
wouldn't be the one by Mabel Stark, world's best big-cat trainer, but
the one by a tousle-haired newcomer borrowed away from HagenbeckWallace.

Seemed the kid's name was pronounced "Baytee" and not, like
everyone thought, "Beety."

IT HAPPENED. KNEW IT WOULD ALL ALONG, AND YET, WELL,
you hope. Deep down you think, nah, all my fretting's
enough. All my worrying's plenty. You imagine a big scale in your
head-bronze, with fine links and gleaming plates and an overall fineness-and you figure if you weigh it down on the bad side yourself
whoever's in charge will take this into consideration and won't weigh
it down even more. It's a thing we do for order. It helps us pretend
things don't happen at random, which is a pretty frightening concept
and the reason people get nervous when things go well; in all that quiet
they can practically hear it-disaster, lurking around the corner,
breathing heavily, waiting to pounce. Art once told me the Eskimos
have a word for the sensation sets in when you're positive your kayak's
going to tip, even though the waters are calm and there's no wind and
not a dark cloud in the sky. When struck with this suspicion they dump
their kayaks on purpose, the idea being the gods won't then hit them
with something worse.

What makes the whole thing even trickier is I'm starting to
believe the powers above have interesting ideas about how the scale
balances itself out. Though my mother wasn't a believer my father was
Catholic to the core, and when I was little he used to gather me up on
his lap and tell me stories from the Bible. Was lovely, just being that
close to his body, listening to an accent that soft and soothing. On special occasions-Easter, say, or the Sunday before Christmas-he'd
take me all the way to Louisville so I could confess and hear a proper
mass. It was during those trips I learned how belief in a higher order
can help calm you, can help you forget blue mould and early frost and
excess rain and everything else that'll kill a tobacco crop. But then, after
my mother's passing, I got shipped off to my aunt, who was about as
stern and Presbyterian as it's possible to be: black dress, black granny
shoes, pins in her hair the length of fingers, neck as brittle as a twig left
to dry. To her, religion meant thunder and hard words (whereas to my
father it'd meant grace and poetry, proof positive religion is one of
those things that can only give you what you're able to receive). She
sent me to church every Sunday, all day Sunday, and when I came home
from school during the week I had an hour of Bible study besides.
That's why I know the Good Book inside out and that's why I can say
with conviction you'd be hard pressed to imagine a book more chock
full of mayhem, venality, salaciousness and sin. At the same time, it's a
book full of words like judgment, atonement, reckoning, just deserts-I
could keep going. After a while, it's not hard to figure the two concepts
must go hand in hand, so as to even things out in the end.

Remember: I spent my adolescent years in that house of piety,
and I admit there were times I took that book to bed with me and read
the juicier parts by candlelight, and if that was wrong I'll apologize
now. Still, I didn't think it was wrong at the time, for it was something
my aunt never objected to, which I always considered strange as she
did object to pretty much everything else, including dancing, ribald
storytelling and talking above a certain volume. At the same time, she didn't mind me reading a book with an entire chapter devoted to the
goings-on in Sodom.

Naturally, the Sodomites got smited, which I suppose was fair,
given how dirty and foul and overrun with vermin the place was getting. Fun's fun but there are limits and I understand that. What I've
always had trouble understanding was the times the innocent were
smited just so their faith could be tested. Here I'm talking about locusts
or frogs or dust storms so bad they'd blind you, or some weird disease
that killed infants by the score. The point is, just what had they done to
deserve it? Some past sin the Bible skips over, due to its distastefulness?
(Hard to believe, given what's already in there.) Or was it sin enough
just being mortal? If so, that's pretty harsh. Reading those stories, I'd
always imagine how I'd feel after a blighting and I tell you: once those
locusts and frogs and dust storms and baby-killing scourges finally got
called off, gratitude might not've been the thing I'd be feeling. Instead,
I'd be feeling nervous.

Instead, I'd be thinking, Just how in Sam Hill does this system work?

Like all buildings on JungleLand property, Jeb and Ida's office was
made to look like a thatched hut in Africa. It looked real in postcards,
but that's about it.

I went inside. Ida, Jeb and my press agent Parly Baer were there.
I sized up the competition. Parly was an old friend and would be on my
side no matter what. Ida was a snake in the grass and would fang my
eyes out were it not contrary to the laws of California. Jeb was the
question mark, for he and I had always got on, seeing as how he'd
always had some appreciation for who I was and had always treated me
accordingly. So it was hard to say where he'd come down on the Mabel
Stark problem. Yes, Ida was his wife and had undue influence for that
reason. At the same time, he understood I'd been centre ring on the
Ringling show of the twenties, and to fire me would be a slap in the
face of the circus at a time it sure didn't need one.

Course, this was straw grasping, there being nothing but silence
when I sat down and said hello to the three of them. Ida was smoking a
menthol, the smell of which made me want to sneeze. Jeb and Parly
kept shooting glances at each other. Finally Parly spoke, though when
he went to use his voice it came out as a croak so he had to pretend he'd
been intending to cough. He started all over.

"Mabel," he said, "it's not just you. It's Chief and Tyndall as
well. It's your age, Mabel. Damn insurance company thinks you're too
much of a risk. Chief and Tyndall, too. Besides, Mabel, you can't work
your whole life. You have to stop one of these days. You have to take a
rest sometime."

At this I pretty much went hysterical, something that involved
standing and leaning over the desk so my face was in Jeb's and spouting he was a goddamn two-faced liar and if he or Ida ever, ever, tried to
take my kitties away from me I'd come back and let myself in the steel
arena and challenge one of the meaner ones, Mommy or Tiba, say, over
a hippo steak. Hearing this, Jeb sputtered and spurted until Ida hissed a
plume of smoke and said, "C'mon Jeb, we don't have to listen to this."