Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (20 page)

Isley walked off, stopping briefly in front of three midgets: two men and a woman. The men wore Stetsons, probably made for children, although I couldn’t imagine who would buy a
Stetson for a child. A black dog trotted by and licked the woman’s face. She soured and slapped its nose.

Isley shouted across the room, “Come and get me if Moss Hart shows up. Or Fay Wray or the DeMarcos or the Brown Bomber. Show that girl the heart of the mongrel king, Eppitt!” Isley’s dress was too short, exposing his ankles, clean and thin as a woman’s. He was still holding my blue wrap over his shoulders.

I was thinking about Fay Wray, the DeMarcos. Would I meet Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber? “I like boxing,” I said. “I’m a fan of organized brutality.”

“Better than the unorganized kind,” Eppitt said.

I followed Eppitt to the mantel and he pulled down a silver box. “Are any of those people really coming?” I asked.

“Huey Long could walk through the door in his pajamas.”

“Huey Long is dead!”

“That’s what I mean.” Eppitt popped open the box’s silver lid. Inside lay a small dark object, like a piece of desiccated fruit nestled in velvet.

“What is it?”

“A heart.”

“Whose heart is that small?”

“I think it was once big. It’s the heart of a mongrel king. A Wesler family heirloom.”

“Why would anyone want someone’s shrunken heart?”

“Maybe it’s a spare.” Eppitt shut the box and put it back on the mantel.

I heard the clattering from upstairs now. “Whose voice is he drowning out?”

“His mother is an invalid. She can’t move a muscle except to write checks for him and bang on the floorboards with a broom handle.”

“He’s lucky to have a mother.”

“I don’t think he’d agree.”

In the corner, a woman in a black shawl and plumed hat was taking photographs with a new Kodak. She winked at Eppitt. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s make a picture.”

Eppitt asked me if I wanted to and I nodded. There was only one chair. He sat down in it.

“Get on his lap,” the woman told me.

I did. “Our wedding portrait,” I whispered to Eppitt.

Eppitt looked at me and smiled. “Gride and broom.”

“Which one are you?” I asked.

“We’re both both.”

The photographer had a notepad. “What are your names?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Eppitt Clapp,” I told her.

She disappeared suddenly behind the lens. “Look here!” She lifted her hand in the air. My eyes snapped to her hand. Eppitt patted my rump, the fleshy bit hanging off his lap. It shocked me, this little pat. My eyes opened wide. I wondered if Eppitt was drunk. His glass was already gone. The camera’s flash went off. I looked around the room, and the flare pulsed each time I blinked. I was drunk now too. I felt hot and the room wavered.

We stood up, and Eppitt went to find the woman with the drinks. “Stay put,” he said, but I wandered through the crowd. I was making up for lost time. I could be anyone.

I overheard a man say, “Did you see
Baboona
? Actual filming of baboons escaping from these wild cheetahs.”

A woman with a tightly pursed mouth said, “No. But I saw Greer Garson in
Accent on Youth
onstage. Nicholas Hannen! Now there’s a baboon!”

Near a punch bowl, another woman said, “Dear God! Can you imagine? Wax heads. Mussolini.”

“Where’s this?” I asked the woman. I could be someone who jumped into conversations.

“Madame Tussauds! I hear Mussolini looks quite handsome.”

Dr. Wolff. For some reason, he appeared in my mind. Maybe because Mussolini’s mug shot from 1903 had surfaced in newspapers—his young arrest for vagrancy—and he looked a bit like Wolff: dark hair and eyes, tender in a way that you wouldn’t expect. “I guess so,” I said. Wolff, Wolff. Drunk, I felt a rush of love for him. He was dead and it felt almost new.

Where was Eppitt? Had he left me? I decided that if he was gone, I’d stay. I’d stay here forever. I stood near one of the glowing Philcos like a lonesome moth and fluttered my hands, dancing a little. The asylum lawn was the only place I’d danced before.

A teenage girl with a ragged puff of hair held feebly by a ribbon tugged at my sleeve. “Do you have any Mistol Drops?” She rubbed her nose. “The fiends are in the yard. Kuda Bux is going to walk on hot coals. Do you have any Mistol Drops or don’t you?”

“Hot coals?”

“Hot coals,” the girl said. “So? Mistol Drops?”

“I don’t,” I said, “but I’d like some.” I’d never heard of them before.

“Oh,” the young woman said. “Get in line!”

I found double doors leading to a patio and a wide lawn. A crowd had formed around a path of lit coals—a garden of fiery blooms. “A fire in the flower bed!” I said aloud. Isley was back, wearing a gas mask, his voice so muffled one could barely hear him. He led a dark-skinned
man to the coals—Kuda Bux, I guessed. Kuda was barefoot, wearing slacks and a pressed white shirt. As he walked the coals, the crowd clapped, louder and faster. He was serene. Once on the other side, he gave a small bow.

The fat pianist wanted to give it a go. He stepped on the heel of one shoe with the other, teetering, and then squatted to peel off a sock.

“Har-low! Har-low!” the crowd shouted.

Isley rushed at me, suddenly standing much too close and panting raggedly through the mask. He looked like an enlarged insect, his hair a wispy plume on his head. He was carrying an armful of gas masks. “They’re all the rage in London!” He handed me one. “Try it!”

I strapped it on. It was too tight so I took it off.

“Do you like me?” Isley asked me through his mask.

“This is the most marvelous party I’ve ever been to!” I said.

“You know I saved Eppitt’s life. He’d be dead in a trench, if not for me!”

“You were in the war together?”

“Of course not! I got him out of the war. I got him on with burlesque and provide his current employ. He’s not bad with mobsters. When you grow up like him, without, you’ve got nothing to lose, right? He was a milksop before he met me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Eppitt told me he wasn’t a war hero, but had he not served at all? Burlesque? Mobsters? We could be anyone here. Eppitt was someone else. I said, “I’ve done some dancing myself, you know.”

“The boards? You? Really?”

“Of course!”

“Maybe you could put on a little demonstration later.”

I spotted Eppitt across the lawn, looking around, maybe for me. “Okay,” I said, and I winked, puckered my lips, and unbuttoned the top button of my high-collared dress.

Eppitt bounded over.

Isley said, “I had no idea about her, kid! No idea.”

“Where did you go?” Eppitt asked me, with jangled alarm. “I couldn’t find you.”

“Eppitt doesn’t like people leaving him,” Isley said. “Tell her you’ve forgiven me for all that old business. Tell me all’s forgiven.”

Eppitt reared a little. He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, sure!” he said. “Of course all’s forgiven, Isley. What are you talking about? Our time in the war?”

“Oh, that!” Isley sighed wearily. “Are you still singing that old song, Clapp? She knows. I told her,” he said. “Here, take a gas mask.” He shoved it at Eppitt with such force that he had to take it. “You might need it. You never know!” He walked back to the crowd at the coals.

Eppitt was holding the gas mask gently with both hands like it was a kitten. I was dizzy. He was blurred.

“Tell me the truth,” I whispered.

“What truth?”

“Pick one,” I said.

“Will you love me no matter what?”

“Of course.”

He looked over at Harlow, who was tripping over coals, and then veered quickly and landed on his rump in the grass. His face, a deep purple, pursed, and then broke into a howl.

“I wasn’t in the war. Isley bribed someone to fail me on the physical. I might have failed anyway. He got me working burlesques. Security. One time he left me on a rum run and I got in trouble with the law. I did some jail time. He got me the hiding job afterward because I took the fall for him.”

I understood jail, in my way. “Mobsters? Is that who needs things hidden?”

“Mobsters and some regular folks.” He put his hands on my hips and then worked them up my waist. “But all that is okay here. We can live on the edges of things. No one cares what people on the edges do.”

“I feel like a killer,” I said.

He laughed. “Who’d you kill?”

“My mother.”

He looked at me. “Tell me, Harriet, are you sure about that?”

“She was a shut-in and then I arrived and we went out. She died of contagion because of me. And then I was in the crazy house. Sheppard Pratt.”

“You didn’t kill your mother, Harriet. Not at all. You brought her to life. Don’t you see that?”

I hadn’t before.

He went on. “And around here, an asylum stint is something you could brag about. Jesus, did you know Zelda Fitzgerald has done time at Pratt? Isley had Scott and Zelda out for a lawn party. They fought over a game of croquet.”

The edges. That’s where we were. The girl looking for the Mistol Drops must have found the fiends. She was smoking something with them beyond the coals, along with the midget in the Stetson and one of the Communists. I could smell the sweet smoke.

“Let’s dance,” Eppitt said.

Inside the house, the dancers were frenetic. Beryl was swooped up by some man, and when she landed, one of her breasts popped up enough to show a nipple. She stuffed it back in, and left with a toady little man whose Adam’s apple was more prominent than his chin. Eppitt and I tried a few steps but were unpracticed. Our hands slipped away from each other, and Eppitt was swarmed by a group of shimmy girls. When I spun and turned toward him again, his nose was crooked, his brow too dark. It wasn’t Eppitt at all.

The stranger smiled at me. “Hello there,” he said.

“Harriet!” Eppitt was calling me. I turned, but I couldn’t find his voice. “Harriet! Here!”

Then I saw him behind the piano. I pushed through the dancers. When I reached him, I was breathless. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, feeling sick.

“Upstairs!” he shouted.

I climbed the stairs to a dark landing with four closed doors. A light shone underneath one so I knocked.

“Taken!” a man shouted.

I knocked on the next door. “Isley! Isley Wesler!” It was an old woman’s voice. “I hear you! I can hear everything!” I remembered my wrap. I’d last seen it on Isley’s arm as he headed upstairs to talk to his mother.

“It isn’t Isley,” I said through the door.

“Come in! Come in!” the old woman shouted.

I closed my eyes. Walls spinning. I grabbed the knob, to steady myself, and then turned it and opened the door. The room was dimly lit, the bed high. There was the smell of old bed linens
and something else familiar. The old woman lay in the bed. Her partially closed eyes were wet, the lids tight and small, as if it were the lids that kept her from being able to see. Her eyeballs shifted, exposing milky sky.

“My name is Harriet Clapp.”

“Are you after my son?”

“No, I’m married.”

“Keep your purse strings tight. Take care of your own. Or you’ll end up destitute. Men die, Harriet Clapp. Men die. Men leave. Men are untrustworthy. But money. Money is tried-and-true. Do you have children?”

“No.”

“Really?” Her eyes seemed to stare through me. The woman wasn’t blind so much as I was invisible. “Pray for daughters, Harriet Clapp. Boys are worthless. My Isley is a menace. I’d strike him if I had a good chance.” She clapped her hands violently and one of the walls fluttered. I could now see birdcages strung from the ceiling—Isley’s doves. I smelled the bird shit, and again the familiar smell: newspapers. They lined the cages.

“I’m going to go,” I said.

“Go, then. Leave!”

I backed out of the room and shut the door lightly. I went to the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was large, with a claw-foot tub. On the wall opposite the mirror, an enormous sword was mounted. Beneath it hung a photograph of a soldier—undoubtedly a Wesler, with his pale porky face and skinny legs—holding the decapitated head of a native by the hair, quite proudly. Sitting heavily on the seat, I peed. While washing my hands, I saw the sword and the framed
photograph behind me in the warped mirror. I was too tired to go on. I sat in the tub, just to rest, and then lay down in it.

Eppitt found me asleep in the tub, picked me up, and carried me downstairs, where the dancers jerked wildly, like things made of wire. They bared their teeth and shook epileptically. I remembered the children at the Maryland School who were prone to fits.

“Our angels!” I said to Eppitt. “Look!”

“Hush now.” He took me into the open air and sat in a wooden chair with me on his lap.

Isley sat down beside us on the ground like some fallen queen, his gown frumped around him. “Don’t you want to stay all night?” he asked.

“It’s almost morning,” Eppitt said.

“I want to stay and stay,” I said.

“Cole Porter didn’t come! Neither did Luigi Pirandello. Aren’t we three characters in search of an author? And Halliburton, that fellow crossing the Alps on an elephant like Hannibal. He didn’t show. Perhaps he isn’t back yet. I heard he had troubles with customs. And I didn’t invite the Duke of Gloucester and his fiancée. There was a garden party at Bowhill, I hear. My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail!”

“It’s a great party without them.” Eppitt sighed.