The Circus in Winter (24 page)

It was late afternoon on the third day since she'd been stricken. Ollie walked through the shadowed bunkhouse—no fire, no candles, no lamp, only the dying winter's light guiding him to his mother's bed. Perhaps it was the unique quality of this light—a deep, shimmery, underwater radiance. Perhaps it was the unknowable epithets spoken in that foreign tongue. Or maybe it was the sound of water rushing into lungs, or possibly the wide eyes of fear. Likely, it was the combination of these things that made Ollie believe he was being made privy to two deaths—his mother's and his father's. He watched them drown, struggling for enough air to plead for their lives. They were looking up, not at him, but rather past and through him. Ollie turned and looked over his shoulder, wanting to see what they were seeing—a mad elephant or an impatient angel leaning against the wall—whatever it was that filled their eyes and hearts with such horror, such surprise.

Then it was over. He stripped the bed linens, collected all the dish towels and washcloths and blood-spotted handkerchiefs. But he couldn't bring himself to take off his mother's nightdress. It was dark by then, and a new moon hung thinly in the sky. He threw the windows open and went outside to finish the cigar. When the draw became too hot, he held a piece of newspaper to the stub, and then lit the mound of contaminated cloth. Ollie watched the windows of neighboring bunkhouses grow bright with lamplight. The circus people were rising from warm beds, pulling on their shoes and coats, and soon they would come into the bunkhouse and take his mother's body away. Ollie ducked inside and went straight to the Saratoga trunk at the foot of his mother's bed—his parents' old trouping trunk. Kneeling before it, Ollie jimmied the lock. On top, he found his mother's wedding gown of yellowed lace. He left it on the foot of the bed. Someone else would dress her.

AS OLLIE RUMMAGED
around, he let himself hope that the trunk contained the words his mother had never spoken about his father. If Nettie
had
written down all her musings and memories, Ollie would have found a million tiny slips of white paper—every passing thought and long-winded anecdote, accumulated inside the trunk like a pile of snowflakes.

Your father and I met at church.

Sometimes at night, I can see him sleeping in you, in your face and your hands.

The gypsies told me you would live one hundred years, but I don't believe a word they say.

But of course, Nettie didn't write these things down. This is what Ollie Hofstadter found in the trunk:

His father's entire wardrobe of three black suits, starched white shirts, two hats, three pairs of shoes, a pair of mud-stained boots, a graying nightdress, and socks.

A sliver of ivory as slender as a new moon resting inside a leather drawstring pouch. Caesar's, he assumed.

Two photographs. In one, his father standing next to Caesar. A loin-clothed Negro sitting on Caesar's neck. Written on the back:"
Iowa 1900 Hans Hofstadter and his Jungle Goolah Boy.
"Ollie calculated in his head. His mother is somewhere outside the frame of the picture. And he himself is inside her, waiting to be born. The other photograph was very dark. A flower-draped casket resting between two chairs. A picture placed on the casket. Ollie squinted. The other photograph, the one he's holding in his hand. His mother is somewhere outside the frame of the picture, and he is in her arms, just over a year old.

The last thing Ollie found was his father's metal bullhook, bent into a C-shape, handle tarnished, prongs blunted. Holding it in his hand, he imagined the struggle, the force that bent it.
My father fought for his life with this, the last thing he touched.
A cold shiver tingled up his arm. Anyone holding the bullhook might have felt this, but to Ollie, its faint, almost electrical impulse seemed like a telegram that had waited eighteen years to be delivered.

OLLIE EARNED
his keep at the Great Porter Circus trouping as a clown with his best friend Joe Price. Ollie, the smaller of the two, was Mr. Ollie, an Auguste clown in flesh-toned makeup and a giant nose. Joe became Jo-Jo the Clown, a tall white-face clown who teased, harassed, and tortured Mr. Ollie until the blow off, when the tables always turned. They were drunk most of the time, even in the ring. At night, while the roustabouts dropped canvas, they'd stumble around laughing, holding each other up. They found that evening's lineup joint, which was an empty wagon taken over by industrious local prostitutes. Wallace Porter liked to keep a Sunday School show, so he often broke up the lines—they generated too much heat from the cops. So Ollie and Joe sometimes resorted to lonely dancers from the girl shows. Most nights, Ollie and Jo-Jo found what they were looking for, and they always managed to get on the train before they passed out in their bunks.

Ollie spent his twenties this way and thought he was the luckiest fellow in the world.

JO-JO, BEING THE BIG MAN
, played the Cowboy to Mr. Ollie's Indian. It went as so: Cowboy terrorizes Indian. Tables turn. Indian sinks hatchet into the head of Cowboy, who wears a wooden wig. Audience laughs. Simple, so simple they did it blind drunk most of the time.

But one day in Mankato, Minnesota, it went as so: Cowboy terrorizes Indian. Tables turn. Indian sinks hatchet into the head of Cowboy, who has forgotten to wear wooden wig. Audience laughs. Cowboy is just as surprised as Indian at this new end to the gag. Blood running down the Cowboy's head fills his eyes. Then they fill with nothing.

OLLIE WENT ON
clowning solo for a couple more years. He fashioned a skeleton out of papier-mache and rigged its arms and legs to shadow behind him, mimicking his every move. He tried to make the act funny—running in circles to elude the skeleton, hanging a P
LEASE
F
EED
M
E
sign from its ribcage. Wallace Porter shook his head. "Please come up with something else," he begged. "You're scaring the kids." But it was no use—all the gags Ollie came up with were just as maudlin.
I just can't be funny anymore,
Ollie realized.
I might as well get married.

That winter back in Lima, he saw a pretty young woman standing with Wallace Porter at the elephant paddock. Normally, Ollie avoided elephants at all costs, but he wanted to meet the girl. When he approached, Wallace Porter clapped Ollie on the back and made their introduction. "This is Ollie Hofstadter," Porter said, "world-famous clown. Born right here in this elephant barn, isn't that right, Ollie?"

"Right," Ollie said, embarrassed. This was his favorite story, gleaned from various sources (not including his mother, of course). Over the years, he'd polished the scene until it sparkled like a beatific Nativity scene—his mother's dangerous journey to the elephant barn, his proud father presenting him to the assembled animals. But as much as he loved the story, Ollie would never tell it to a pretty girl he was trying to impress.

Wallace Porter turned to her. "Meet Mildred. Harrison. Her folks are Charles and Grace. Live just down the road. You've probably seen her dad around here. Best carpenter in Lima if you ask me."

"I think. Maybe." Ollie nodded, even though he couldn't remember meeting the man.

Porter touched Mildred's shoulder. "Can't believe you're almost sixteen. Doesn't seem possible." Turning to Ollie, he said, "Speaking of curious births, Mildred was born during the flood. Had to rescue the whole family." Porter's voice went soft and faraway, as it always did when he spoke of the Flood of 1913, when he'd lost almost everything. After a long pause, he wiped the memory away like a cobweb. "Mildred here wouldn't stop crying, so her dad gave her apple brandy to calm her down. Showed up at my house one week old and drunker than a sailor."

Mildred went a mortified white. "Please," she begged. "Don't tell him that!"

Porter laughed and bid them good day.

Ollie fancied himself good with the ladies, but he had absolutely no idea what to say after an introduction like that. So he rambled about the weather. Mildred kept her eyes on the paddock, her hands inside a fur muff. An elephant ambled over, and Mildred reached out to stroke its hide. The animal wrapped its trunk around her muff, snatching it away. "Oh!" Mildred cried. "Please get it back for me."

But instead, Ollie stepped away. "Oh," he said.

The elephant put the muff in its mouth, and finding it not too tasty, dropped it into the mud. One of the handlers retrieved it. Ollie was red-faced. "Sorry," he said. "It's just that I can't. Urn."

Mildred laid her hand on his arm. "You don't have to explain. I know who you are."

MILDRED REFUSED
to marry a clown. "I have nothing against the circus, mind you," she said. "Uncle Wallace is a great man. But I want a normal life." Ollie didn't put up a fight about it—he'd already decided to leave the show anyway. So he bought a dry cleaners in town with the money he'd saved trouping (minus what he'd spent on liquor and lineups). If a different kind of business had been for sale, he might have become a baker or a grocer. But a dry cleaners it was, and he named it Clown Alley Cleaners. Ollie painted clowns all over the plate-glass window, and he lined the walls out front with photographs: clowning with Jo-Jo; posing with Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill; his arm around Wallace Porter. He called the
Lima Journal
to see if they'd do a story for the grand opening, a little free publicity. Mildred said it was tacky. "My mother always said that good people should only have their names in the paper three times—when they're born, when they get married, and when they die."

The reporter came anyway and wrote the story: F
ORMER
C
LOWN
C
LEANS
U
P
H
IS
A
CT
. Ollie had it framed and hung it behind the cash register.

OLLIE AND MILDRED
drove to Indianapolis and stayed in the Monument Hotel. He remembered that Wallace Porter, Colonel Ford, and the advance agents always stayed there whenever they traveled to Indy. Ollie had never seen the rooms, but he knew the lobby had red carpet, brass spittoons, and a crystal chandelier. Classy.

After dinner, he drove Mildred outside town to a roadhouse he remembered liking from way-back-when; the beer was cheap and the dancing sweaty. In the parking lot, Mildred took one look at the place and complained, "What kind of girl do you think I am?" Yet she obliged him and went inside. At first, it was like dancing with a mannequin, but after a few beers, Mildred leaned into him. The band played "Stars Fell on Alabama" and Mildred's taffeta dress swished against his legs as soft as a promise.

THE FIRST NIGHT
Mildred cried, begging him to hurry and finish. But he was drunk, and it took a long time. They woke to find her blood blooming red on the sheets. Mildred spent the day in the bathroom, moaning on the toilet, bent over the bathtub, scrubbing out the stains. Ollie spoke softly through the door. "Leave them be, Mildred. The maids will give us fresh ones."

"I will not have anyone see these," she said. "No, I won't."

The next night, Mildred flinched when he touched her hip, so Ollie simply held her, rising once she was asleep to relieve his want in the bathroom. On their last night, he tried again.

"Can't you just hold me?" Mildred begged.

"It gets better."

"How do you know?"

"We just have to keep going."

Mildred drew her nightgown over her boyish hips, over her candy-apple breasts, over her head. "Go ahead then," she said through the fabric.

And he did. Mildred never moved. Ollie closed his eyes and pretended the body beneath him belonged to his favorite lineup girl, the one in Kansas City who had let him take her from behind, the one who'd moaned "big boy, big boy," over and over as they rocked the wagon. When he was through, Ollie pulled down her nightgown, wet with tears. They checked out of the Monument Hotel the next morning with the stained bedsheets stuffed in their suitcase.

Ollie thought it was just jitters, or the fact she was only sixteen, but at the end of the week, at the end of the year even, Mildred stayed stiff under him, seething with contempt. After, she always took a bath. She said only animals and circus trash needed it every night. Ollie found himself staring at men on the street, women dropping off their clothes at Clown Alley. What happened in their beds at night? Everyone else seemed to be moving through life smoothly. Ollie saw no torment in their eyes, no lust, nothing like the reflection in the bathroom mirror that haunted him every night. Maybe Mildred was right. Maybe all those years on the road had made him into a pervert, a sex fiend. He pledged to do better, to try only on Saturday nights.

But he slipped a few weeks later, on a Wednesday. He came home with a bottle of wine for dinner, took Mildred into his arms, and sang "Stars Fell on Alabama" in her ear as they danced. That night, Mildred was not Mildred, but another woman she kept deep inside, the woman he'd felt in his arms for a few minutes as they'd danced at the roadhouse. For the first time, Ollie didn't have to imagine a lineup girl or shut his eyes. This was a new Mildred, and Ollie liked her much better. But in the morning, she became the old Mildred again. "I'm going to church," she said.

"It's Thursday," Ollie said. "Nobody's there."

"God is there."

Ollie laughed, and she slammed the front door. For a week after, she slept on the couch and refused to speak to him.

ON JANUARY THE
second, Ollie turned thirty-five. His father had died at thirty-five. Ollie couldn't imagine his life from that point on. After thirty-five, his frame of reference disappeared. Not that he had much of one before—just a couple of pictures, precious few stories. What would he look like as he aged further? Would he go bald? Would his heart last? His eyes? He had no idea. He took the afternoon off, went home, and sat in a chair to think about it.