Mummers' Curse (3 page)

“I can’t leave before Vincent marches. What if the camera doesn’t come in close enough to see him? How will I tell who’s who?”

“Why would it matter?”

It seemed a debt I owed. Vincent Devaney had let me peek into his world. I could at least witness its day of triumph.

Teaching was important to Vincent. It supported him, his wife, and young son. He seemed good at it and enthusiastic. But mumming was his passion, the world of the Mummers his community and true village, the Mummer’s year his meaningful calendar. He was nearly distraught when rivalries, both personal and financial, surfaced within his club and threatened to end its existence. They’d patched themselves together enough to make it to this day, and it was important that I be here, because nobody was sure they’d survive till the next parade.

Mackenzie’s mournful exhale resembled a dragon’s snort. Then, despite the fat pretzels and the thermos of hot chocolate I’d brought, he went off to find more food. To kill time, I thought.

The light became subdued, as if the sky were on a dimmer, and the wind continued to pick up, blowing a debris-laden swath down the wide wind-tunnel expanse of Broad Street. I thought about the String Bands, the Clubs still back at the starting point with miles to maneuver before they reached the judges’ stands at City Hall. What did they wear under the satin and feathers to avoid freezing?

And then the next banner car slowly approached, and it announced Vincent’s club. His group—several hundred strong—approached with difficulty. A fancy suit is as ornate as its name implies—a piece of handiwork, with towering plumed and constructed “hats,” or backpieces, face masks, ruffed collars, and trains often so enormous they require page boys. And every inch of man and suit is lavishly decorated.

But a Fancy Club member could also wear a frame suit—a hundred pounds of wood and metal covered in silk and lace, like a hoop skirt that begins at the neck. It takes strong shoulders to carry a structure two dozen feet in circumference all the miles and hours of the parade, even with wheels on the vertical struts. And that’s on a still day.

In a stiff wind like the one now blowing, capes can act as sails and frame suits seem hell-bent on either skidding out of control, taking their man along with them, or collapsing into heaps of wood, steel, and fabric.

A frame draped and covered in iridescent panels approached, surrounded by men in silver suits with feather-trimmed capes made of filmy layers of shimmering colors—a rainbow billowing over gold and silver cloth. The frame suit replaced the recognizably human with pure texture and ethereal color. It was a moving octagonal tent with a gryphon head, a glorious monster whose chiffon and feathers blew wildly in the wind.

This, then, was the real descendant of the medieval demons the ancient noisemakers held at bay. Here was the monster, possessed and owned. Under control.

Almost. The suit lurched and bucked, as did another suit, a variation on this one’s mother-of-pearl coloration. It was a mark of pride to be strong enough to endure hours of carrying the weight of a frame, plus a headpiece that could add another hundred pounds, but today, being trapped in the center of one must have felt less of an honor and more of a punishment as the forms waged war with their wearers.

One tent seemed in more trouble than the others. The men around him, capes flapping, helped steer the frame, which careened like a ship in a storm. Civilian helpers crossed the barricade and added their strength to steady the form.

The one visible part of the man was a portion of his face, weighted below with the enormous frame and dwarfed above by an outlandish headpiece that threatened to buckle or take off in flight. He was painted as Pierrot, with dead-white makeup and features drawn in black. Below the right eye was a fifty-carat “ruby” of a red tear.

The head, overshadowed by its costume, looked toylike.

Another frame suit approached. I scanned for Vincent Devaney, but it was impossible to distinguish features with collars and panels blowing every which way. And, in fact, I didn’t know if Vincent was wearing a frame. He had worked on one with a friend, but they had also worked on a regular suit, deciding to toss at the last moment for who would wear which.

Karen’s teeth chattered. I sniffed the hollow smell of approaching snow. Enough was enough. I couldn’t spot Vincent, even though I knew this was his club, but I could nonetheless compliment him on his splendor. Time to go enjoy another all-American tradition, like central heating. “After C.K. gets back,” I said, “it might be a good time to—”

“Not
l-l-leave
,” the wanna-be Mummer wailed. “I’m n-n-not cold!”

“I don’t want us to get sick, and—” I became aware of a rising murmur across Broad Street, a something-is-happening sound. I expected to see an overturned or wrecked frame suit, but I didn’t.

People pressed forward. The noise level increased.

Mackenzie returned, both hands holding hot dogs.

“I c-c-can’t see!” Karen wailed. We’d lost our vantage point as people jostled for a better view of…something.

Mackenzie passed me the franks and lifted her onto his shoulders, making her a human periscope. “Now, can you?” he asked.

“Yes, but there’s only the same stuff.” She’d stopped stuttering, but now she sounded peevish. The noise across the way became less diffused, sharper, marked by shouts. “And people pointing.”

“At what?” Mackenzie asked with more interest than he’d heretofore demonstrated.

“At the barrel-man,” Karen said. I assumed she meant a frame suit. “He’s disappearing.”

“Falling down?”

Mackenzie sounded frustrated. He did not like viewing things secondhand, but at the moment, his sight line was blocked not only by an enormous man who’d moved in front of him but also by Karen’s mittened hands, which she held across his eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “No. He’s not falling down. His head is.”

And then I, too, saw it—just as spectators on the other side screamed and surged onto the street. The gryphon-headdress sank, lower and lower, until the man’s face was swallowed by his frame. His headpiece banged on the suit, ostrich feathers and golden sequins skewed and wobbling. The pearly lace tent swayed but stopped moving, and as if a contagious and debilitating disease had spread out from it, the other marchers, in ragged sequence, slowed, then stopped, and the music of the hired band dribbled to a halt.

I looked at the other Mummers, tried to make them out, but their disguises worked and I had no clue as to whether I was seeing Vincent Devaney.

“Is there a doctor here?” a voice shouted from the ranks of the Mummers. “Heart attack! Help!”

His words carried on the wind. The unnatural silence had slowly spread backward up Broad Street as clubs and spectators realized something was wrong.

A woman pulled free of the crowd, a young boy holding on to her hand. She lifted a silver-embroidered panel and put the boy’s hand on it, as if mooring him, while she ducked under, inside. How strange, I thought, to have to examine a man with a cloth-covered jungle gym on his shoulders. I wondered for how long the noise, the wind, the wheels, and the strong support of his suit would carry along a man having a heart attack, a man who was unable to gesticulate or to be heard above the music and the crowd.

The woman climbed back out, shaking her head. Now, the area grew preternaturally quiet as everyone leaned forward to hear. Mackenzie quietly transferred Karen back to the ground. I could sense his muscles tighten inside the parka.

The doctor’s words rippled across the street, carried on dozens of voices. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

“He’s…”

Dead, dead, dead. The word was passed with dull finality. “Dead” in near-whispers that reverberated as each person took hold and transferred the word to the next.

I wondered how the doctor had reached her conclusion so quickly. Had she tried to revive him? Used CPR? How could she be so sure?

Someone may have asked her that, because she put up a hand. Once again, her words were relayed back and across, making what she said all the stranger and more upsetting.

“This man was shot.”

Shot! Shot! Shot!

It seemed impossible. He’d been in the midst of hundreds of thousands of people for hours, and not uninterested passersby, but spectators watching him, his chest surrounded by steel rods, wooden framing, and cloth.

But it had happened. The Shooter had been shot.

My mother had been right. He’d caught his death.

Two

KAREN AND I MADE OUR WAY THROUGH A SILENT CITY TO THE LOFT. I yearned for a public hue and cry, a real reaction. Something dreadful had happened, and only the air currents—both atmospheric and electronic—seemed agitated.

I turned on the TV for a quick look. “Murder at the Mummers’ Parade,” a voice said on the hour. “Details on tonight’s Headline News.” And on another channel, “The Mummers’ Curse? That’s what some wags are calling today’s tragedy, the second in two weeks involving a Philadelphia Mummer.”

The second tragedy. But Ted Serfi had disappeared, and he hadn’t been mumming at the time. Besides, there were those rumors, suspicions that he was “connected.” That was nothing like being shot dead in full view of watching crowds.

I turned off the TV. I didn’t think Karen needed her day’s horrible images reinforced. We could talk or play games, while I waited to find out if my co-worker was still alive. I was sure they knew by now—his fellow Mummers would have ID’d him in an instant. But there was the notification of next of kin. That sort of thing.

“The parade!” Karen said as I turned the TV off. “You said we could watch it.”

“But that was before…don’t you think…how about a change of scene? We could read, or play a board game, or—”

“The parade! You said.” She pushed out her bottom lip in a clear, if unendearing, she-who-is-peeved pose.

It didn’t strike me as wise to remind her that the parade had turned sour, terrifying, or that she was
upset
. I turned on the television again.

From then on, we snuggled on the sofa and watched while sipping from steaming mugs of chicken noodle soup. Outside the loft’s high windows, loose pages of newspapers and decimated bits of city trees whipped by, reminding me of the cyclone in
The Wizard of Oz
, except that Mummers didn’t get shot in Kansas.

It was a good time to be behind doors, inside walls. It would have been a better time if all three of us were there, but Mackenzie considered finding himself at the scene of a fatal shooting a divine—or a least a legal and professional—sign that he was required to remain. He was correct, but that didn’t make me love the fact.

At the time Karen and I left it, the parade had well and truly stalled. Nobody knew what to do beyond clearing the crowd sufficiently to allow the body to be taken from its awkward cage and moved to a cross street where an ambulance waited.

The Mummers, vulnerable and stricken on their merriest of days, had milled uncertainly, except for the men in the frame suits who did their damnedest to stay upright and didn’t dare any fancy milling.

I wasn’t ready to leave when Mackenzie suggested it. I was still scanning for Vincent, fearing, when I didn’t find him, that he was the caged-in corpse.

But Mackenzie had been right to say we should leave, if not for my peace of mind, then surely for Karen’s. From there on in for a goodly time, the Mummers, from what I could glean, went into limbo, unsure of what was the right, legal, or smart thing to do. They decided to stop out of respect. But before word could travel through all the ranks, somebody realized that the Comic Clubs and one Fancy had already passed City Hall and performed their four-minute routines for the judges. Prizes had probably been decided for the Comics. Stopping penalized this and the two remaining Fancy Clubs, all the String Bands, and the Fancy Brigades. A year’s labor, a year’s passion, gone. Whoever had murdered the Mummer had thereby simultaneously murdered the entire parade.

Or maybe the equation went something like: twenty thousand living marchers, one dead. Besides, even to the corpse of a Mummer, being responsible for canceling the parade would be ignominious, a fate truly worse than death.

So by the time Karen and I arrived back at the loft, the parade was in motion again, and now, the lords of Broad Street, the String Bands, were in full swing. Karen watched TV, her mind obviously only partly with Macavity and me. She kept one hand on the cat’s back, as if securing herself to something yielding, safe, and soft.

I checked my answering machine, hoping Mackenzie had called while we were en route.

He hadn’t. My mother had. I listened to New Year’s wishes and muted distress, commenting that since I wasn’t home to take the call, I had decided once again not to listen to her, and she hoped I was at least enjoying the parade. “Something sad around here,” she said. “Remember I told you about Dr. Landau’s cat?”

I shook my head at the machine. I didn’t remember any of this, nor did I feel guilty about this failure on my part. And in any case, I knew my mother would review the data she felt important. Again and again. Precisely the way Mackenzie said I did about the Mummers. I didn’t want to think about that. “She went away,” my mother’s voice said. “Dr. Landau, not the cat—to visit her married children for Christmas, and hired her regular cat-sitter, Violet.”

If I sped it up or simply walked away, would I be teaching my niece to ignore her elders? I stayed and listened.

“Violet called me all upset. Sid—Sid’s the cat—is sick. Terminally. I’m down as the emergency number. There’s no way to reach Allen—”

Who was Allen? Another kitty? Another kitty-sitter?

“—because they went to somebody’s ski place, can you imagine? Snow!—and the vet thinks Sid needs to be put to sleep, the dear thing. Sid, I mean. Not the vet. Isn’t that awful? In a way, I’m glad she doesn’t know, she loves him so much, and my goodness, she’s a doctor, dedicated to preserving life, she’d be—”

I gave up on who the
she
was, along with the idea of being a role model for my niece, and I fast-forwarded to the remaining message, hoping again that it might be Mackenzie. Again, it wasn’t. It was my least favorite student, Renata Field.