The Flying Circus (26 page)

Because he looked like one. From up north.

17

G
il was true to his word. When they gathered around the table for Thanksgiving dinner, he was sitting right next to Reece’s pa—and directly across the nice juicy turkey from Cora. Considering the circumstances, they were both behaving pretty well. Anyone who didn’t know them the way Henry did probably wouldn’t even get a whiff that anything was amiss.

The Althoffs’ house had most likely been grand at one time. It had big rooms with fireplaces, a fancy stairway in an entry hall, and a large porch across the entire front, but much of the white paint had baked to a ghost of itself in the Southern sun, and the old wood floors had lost their finish on the regular paths traced by those who lived there. Two of the most magnificently twisted trees stood in the front yard—live oaks, Reece had called them—a hundred years old. Surrounding the lawn on three sides and across the road as far as Henry could see were broad, flat, harvested cotton fields. He’d never seen cotton growing. Reece had shown Henry pictures and had given him a cotton boll, which looked and felt nothing like he’d expected.

When Reece’s pa offered the blessing, Henry said his own silent prayer of thanks for this new life. He prayed for the strength and guidance to help Gil find his way back, and for a boost in his own immunity against his attraction to Cora. If they were going to survive in the circus, they had to keep things friendly.
Just
friendly.

Then he asked for the strength to do what was right, to atone for his weakness. It was a lot to ask of even the most generous God.

After Mr. Althoff had said his amen, Henry looked around the table and offered one more prayer of thanks for these people. Peter had said Ma believed prayers should always end with thankfulness, not requests.

The dining room table had fancy, spindly legs that looked too frail to hold the bounty that was spread upon it. With just the six of them around it, they had to extend their reach to pass the serving dishes. This wasn’t exactly the family meal Henry had spent hours imagining, but he realized he’d probably set his expectations unnaturally high. He’d pictured a crowded table with bumping elbows, happy chatter, and boisterous laughs. This was a bit more serious, with fancy china and monogrammed silverware. Even so, sitting with these people felt like a salve to a burn. All families had rough waters at times. And he committed himself to helping Cora and Gil get through theirs. For years, he’d longed for people to call his own; he wasn’t going to give them up without a fight.

Gil worked to be a good guest, talking even when not asked a direct question.

“Wonderful meal, Mrs. Althoff. Best cooking I’ve ever had,” he said as he buttered a biscuit.

“Please, call me Nell. And it’s probably just because you’re a hungry bachelor. Just wait until you get a wife. Food cooked with love always tastes better.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Henry saw Cora sit up straighter. Her fork paused halfway to her mouth.

Henry watched Gil, waiting for his response.

He kept his eyes on his food and mumbled, “Yes, ma’am.”

Although Henry had lived alongside Gil day in and day out for months, he didn’t know him at all. Married. The man was
married
. And still sitting there pretending he wasn’t—even though Cora already knew.

That must be what he was going to go do in the off-season, see a wife. The money he’d mailed had likely gone to her. But why keep it such a secret?

Gil was quiet, sure. And initially Henry had had to dig to get anything out of him about his past. But these months with the circus had
opened him up some. He still didn’t discuss his years in the war, but he did talk about growing up poor in southeastern Ohio, where coal mines and potteries were to him what farming had been to Henry—the only possibility the future held. He talked about how he’d bought the Jenny from the army and his first days barnstorming. In addition to this glaring opportunity to fess up, there had been plenty of campfire talk about homes and wives and children. Gil had been involved in most of them. But never a breath about a wife.

After dinner, Henry followed Gil out onto the front porch. It was chilly, but after all of that food and deception, the air felt good.

“So,” Henry said, “your train leaves tomorrow morning?”

Gil nodded as he lit a cigarette.

“Home to Ohio? Or are you going to look for a plane?” The double question camouflaged Henry’s intent. Jennies weren’t as cheap as they used to be; lots of them had been rebuilt by Wright Aeronautical with new Hisso engines. But Gil might have a lead on one he could afford—if he hadn’t secretly been sending most of his money to a wife. Of course, as far as Gil was concerned, Henry didn’t know about that.

Gil’s sharp gaze cut from the fields to Henry. “I’m not looking at a plane.”

“Ah. I’m sure your family will be glad to see you. It has to have been a long time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you going to be gone the entire break? Or are you coming back here to help me overhaul the engines?”

“Not sure.” Then Gil looked at Henry in the dusky light. “Will you need me?”

“I’ll have plenty of time to handle it. Even with the trip to California with Cora.” Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gil, watching for the slightest reaction.

But Gil’s reaction wasn’t slight at all. He stopped leaning on the porch post and jerked to his full height. “California?”

“She wants to look into moving-picture stunting. Something to do in the off-season.”

“You’re joking.”

Henry pressed his lips together and shook his head. “You know how she is when she gets something in her head.”

“She doesn’t have the skill to be a stunt pilot. She’s never done the simplest of maneuvers. She doesn’t even
like
piloting.”

Henry crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against his own post. “Apparently all irrelevant.” Then he asked, “You knew Jake taught her to fly?”

“Yes.”

Well then, Henry had missed more than one thing that had been right under his nose. It irritated him enough to motivate him to say, “After that little scene on the field the other day, I’d have thought you two would be going to California together. And yet, you’re going off somewhere else and I’m headed West.”

“That ‘little scene’—” Gil sighed. “It’s not like that.”

“It looked
exactly
like that. What’s going on? You’re likely to ruin everything.”

“Jake gave me the ‘romantic hoo-ha’ lecture the other day, so save your breath.”

“You told me you didn’t love her.”

“That doesn’t matter one way or the other—”

“Oh, I think it might. Because even if you
say
there’s nothing going on, even if you only break down and kiss her twice a season, the undercurrent you two are putting out there is exactly what Jake doesn’t want.”

Gil took several puffs from his cigarette; he kept his eyes on the oak trees when he said, “If I have to leave the circus before I can buy my own plane, I will. But I’d rather stay.”

Henry looked directly into Gil’s eyes. “Why would you make that choice? I mean, if you love each other, do something about it. Keep the drama out of it. Marry her, for God’s sake. Jake didn’t forbid nice, quiet married people.”
Tell me. You’re not wiggling off this hook again.

Gil rubbed his forehead as if he was getting a headache. “That’s not . . . it’s just . . .”

I trusted you.
Suddenly Henry went cold. What in the hell was he
doing? Trust went both ways. And he wasn’t about to stand here and tell Gil that he was wanted for murder back in Indiana. “Forget it. I was way out of line.” Henry started back inside the house. “It’s none of my business.”

“I’m already married.” Gil sounded resigned, worn, and sad.

Henry stopped and closed his eyes.

He turned back around. “I see.”

“Hardly. It’s complicated.”

“Men tempted to stray always say that. But usually to get the sympathy of a half-willing woman.”

“Can you see if Reece has anything to drink around here? . . . I don’t mean after-dinner coffee.”

Henry went inside and came back out a few minutes later with a dubious-looking mason jar of moonshine and two very fine cut-glass tumblers. Gil was sitting in a frayed wicker chair. He’d pulled another one close and indicated Henry should sit.

After Henry poured them both a drink, Gil took a sip and stared into the now pitch-darkness that surrounded the house. Henry held his drink in his hand, unsure if he was going to risk drinking it.

When Gil finally started to talk, it wasn’t about young love or a wife. “My whole childhood it was just me and my mother. She worked in a pottery.” He shook his head, and when he spoke again, he sounded distant, lost in the past. “The dust of that place clung to her no matter how much she washed her dried-out skin. When she hugged me, it came off her clothes. I remember that fine grit in my teeth.” His voice grew more focused. “I don’t know who my father was. Mother did the best she could after her father turned her out—I only knew him by sight, after some kid at school told me he was my grandpa. The whole town knew more about me than I knew about me.” Gil paused and seemed to grow more distant again. “She was so thin. What I remember most about her was that she always seemed . . . faded. Translucent. More gone than attached to this world.”

Henry thought of his pa, more gone than here; life seemed to do that to a lot of people.

Gil ran his fingers across the cut glass, as if memorizing the pattern with his fingertips. “She left me with a neighbor lady when she worked. But that lady had eight kids of her own. I don’t think she noticed if I was there or not. I just remember it being chaotic. I didn’t like all of that motion, all of that noise. So I generally just stayed away.”

He paused and took a long sip from his glass.

“When I started school, I met John Andrews and Mary Keating.” Gil’s voice was still a little hoarse from the burning alcohol. “Being poor didn’t make you stand out in our town, but being a bastard and being Irish Catholic did. The three of us were bound by our exclusion.”

When he stopped for a moment, Henry said, “Bound by exclusion. Maybe people like us are always drawn together like that.”

Gil looked over at Henry and smiled thinly. “Of that I have no doubt.” Gil raised his glass. “To misfits one and all.” He drank. “I’m not sure why I told you all of that . . . unless it’s to make you understand why I did what I did.

“When we got to high school, John and I pledged neither of us would ruin it by changing things with Mary. She was like our sister. There was a time when I nearly broke that promise. No one knew me like she did. But it meant more to me to keep us all together.

“I quit school at sixteen. By then, Mother’s health had gone from bad to worse. She was confined to bed. I earned enough at the mine to feed us and keep a couple of rented rooms. Working long hours on a night shift kept me away from John and Mary most of the time. That’s when things changed between them. They hid it from me for months. And then I found them together. John and I fought—I beat the bloody hell out of him, all the while Mary screaming for me to stop. That night he drank too much and fell off the railroad trestle where he and I used to sit at night, smoking and drinking and planning how we were going to get the hell out of that town. I found his body after Mary came to tell me John’s mother said he hadn’t come home the night before. It was the first place I looked. Mother died the next week. I decided to go to France, determined to make it through flight training. I figured
if a German got me, at least I’d be out in the daylight, not buried in a collapsed mine tunnel.

“The week before I left, Mary told me she was pregnant. I was the reason John was gone. All because I was too selfish and too jealous to grow up and act like a man. So I married her; at least I could keep John’s child from being branded a bastard. She cried through the whole ceremony. And then I left to make her a war widow. But that just refused to happen. It only took one day after I got back to see that she could not look at me without wanting John—without blaming me. One look at that baby and it was obvious John was the father, cowlicked red hair and all. People had been willing to ignore that fact while I was gone, but my presence started tongues to wagging. She and the baby had a life, a decent life that didn’t include me. Divorce was out of the question. It wasn’t fair to her for me to stay; I didn’t want to, not and face that every day. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Well. Hell.” If there was one thing Henry understood, it was the lengths a lonely soul would go to in order to hold on to family. In his own desire to do that, he’d probably just ensured that Gil would go away and never come back.

And if he did come back?

Henry had demanded trust. Families and friendships were based on it. Gil’s own story proved it.

“Did you tell Cora all of this?”

“Only that I’m married. That’s all she needs to know.”

Henry nodded. Gil was a more honorable man than he. Preventing Cora from learning the hopeless truth about Gil’s marriage kept her from throwing convention out the window and justifying a relationship that was guaranteed to go nowhere.

Henry finally took a drink of the moonshine, welcoming the pain of the burn. He punished himself by holding his breath, not allowing himself to cough, to gasp.
Hold it in. Suffer
.

Gil had told Henry his secret, laid his pain naked for Henry to judge. He’d proven his worth as a friend. And Henry could never,
never
, do the same.

He sat there in the dark long after Gil got up and went into the house. Long after the lights went out.

After quite a while, it struck him. He never even asked Gil about the child. Son or daughter?

When had he become such a selfish hypocrite?

18

T
he sun sat high, hot on the top of Henry’s head, even though it was December 12. This, he supposed, made Southern California a perfect place for Northern-born people who didn’t want to be reminded it was the holiday season. He stood with his pants legs rolled up, the cold water of the Pacific breaking against his shins, Point Dume’s craggy rise behind him. He’d been prepared for the size of the water, but not its constant motion, its power, or the blindingly white sand that fought against the greedy waves. The water surged and receded, each pass trying to knock him off his feet while simultaneously burying them deeper in the sand. He wondered how long he’d have to stand here before his entire body would be buried. A year? A decade? A lifetime? The wind blew steady against his face. He tasted the salt of the ocean on his lips. He was standing in the
Pacific Ocean
. Impossible.

His life was offering wonders he’d never dared to dream of. All because of the death of a girl. As he watched the hypnotic rolling of the water, he thought on that for a while. It was an ugly truth, but one he couldn’t ignore. Time had passed. He’d traveled far. But the reality was, he was a wanted man. He was managing to stay inconspicuous with the circus. If movie stunt flying was in his future, anonymity would be easy to maintain. No one ever saw the stunt pilot’s face on-screen, or in the newspapers—until he killed himself during a stunt. In that case, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

How would Cora and Gil feel if Henry’s death exposed his deception?

He had betrayed the trust of the people he cared about most on this earth—Cora, Gil, and Mr. Dahlgren. But another issue was taking chunks out of his insides with razor teeth. He needed to go back. To face the consequences. But it would be worse now. Now that he’d run. Now that so many months had passed. If he returned, his story would be even less credible than the day it happened. The jail door would slam. The sentence would be read. And he’d be dead.

“Henry!”

He turned. Cora was headed back his way, her hands clasped at her waist. The wind blew her short hair across her face, even though she had a scarf tied as a headband. The long ends of silk whipped like banners behind her.

When she got close, she held out her cupped hands. Several shells, swirls and ridges of tans and pinks and grays, were in them. “Almost all of them are broken.”

When Henry looked into her eyes, he suddenly felt as tumbled and broken as those sea-tossed shells. He’d been a fool to convince himself he could come out here with her and not be drawn deeper in love. Neither of them had spoken of Gil, not since they’d left Mississippi—not of her anger over his disappearance, or why he’d left, or if he’d come back. Without the shadow of his presence, Henry and Cora had grown closer—but he had no idea how deep her affection might run. They never spoke of feelings or futures. They just
lived
. He had fallen harder and more deeply than he’d imagined a man could. Watching her talk to the movie people inside studios so new they still smelled of fresh paint, Henry’s heart had actually ached—he’d always thought that was just a silly phrase, but it
happened
.

Yesterday they’d been at Warner Brothers Studios on Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest buildings Henry had ever set eyes on, gleaming white with a soldier’s rank of tall columns across the second story. The man they met with wasn’t overly interested in adding stunt pilots to his roster. Instead, he’d taken them to watch a picture being filmed on one of their massive sets in an attempt to convince Cora to try her hand at acting. Henry’s heart had nearly stopped when the man
made his proposal. Everything about Hollywood was shiny and new and exciting—and on such a massive scale. And Cora was a woman who admitted she was searching for her place. She needed excitement. How could she resist?

“I’m not an actress.” She’d laughed lightly. “Wouldn’t have the patience for the tedium. I’m a stuntwoman. Let me know when you need one and we can talk.”

After they’d left, Henry had made himself ask, “Are you sure you don’t want to take a stab at acting?” She could easily be more famous than Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, two women this town seemed wild over. Cora needed to think about it and not be blinded by her single-minded stubbornness.

She’d shaken her head. “Really, Henry. Why would I contract my life over to a movie studio so they could tell me what to do? Might as well have gone ahead and gotten married.”

The tone in her voice set off a flash of memory. “Those trunks, the ones you kicked on your uncle’s back porch, were yours. Packed to leave. You were
that
close to getting married?”

“It wasn’t like the wedding was supposed to be the next week, or that I broke anyone’s heart. I’m sure he just moved on to the next lady in line to marry his money. Besides, what does it matter now?”

“I suppose it doesn’t.” But it had given him pause. She’d given her word to the man she was going to marry. Didn’t that mean anything to her?

She’d looked him in the eyes. “Henry. I see what you’re thinking. Let me ask you—if you were about to be locked up for the rest of your life just because of the misfortune of your birth, wouldn’t you stop it any way you could? And for the record, I wasn’t involved in any of the negotiations, so
I
didn’t break any promises.”

Her choice of words had given him a little shiver, and not just because of the mention of being locked up, jail. He’d had the bad luck of being born with the wrong name at the wrong time. Seems they’d both run from their misfortune of circumstance. At least Cora admitted it.

Right then and there he’d decided he wasn’t ever going to ask her about the marriage or her mother again. He had no right whatsoever.

Now, under the shining sun of this windswept beach, looking at her smile as she stared down at the shells she’d spent the better part of an hour gathering, Henry’s heart got the better of him and he reached out to touch her face.

When she looked up at him with surprise, his panic nearly choked him. “Sand on your cheek.” He made a show of brushing his hand on his pant leg. “All gone.” Then he looked at the shells. “Do you know what any of them are?”

“No. I’ve always just liked them for their artistry. If I think of them as houses for now-dead sea creatures, it kind of takes away the pleasure.”

“Reality has a way of doing that.”

Her eyes met his again. “What’s wrong, Henry? You’ve been moody all day.”

The flood of emotions nearly fell out of his mouth. Had they, they would have been incomprehensible, broken as the fragments of shells in her hand. The only one perfect in its wholeness would have been
I’m in love with you.

He had no right to love her. He was just as unavailable as Gil. At least the reason Gil couldn’t marry her wasn’t because he was an impostor hiding a brand of
murderer
under his shirt.

He shrugged. “Guess it’s Christmas coming. Always makes me a little sad.”

She gave a soft smile that squeezed his heart so tightly he had to look away. Then she said, “Maybe the picture show will cheer you up.”

Cheer? They were going to the Egyptian Theatre to see
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. Cheer hardly came to mind. But it would be Henry’s first moving-picture show, so that was something. He forced a smile. “I’m sure it will.”

She tossed all of the shells back into the waves, brushed her hands against each other, then slipped her arm through his.

Every step Henry took back toward the stop for the bus that would take them through the Cahuenga Pass and back to the Hollywood Hotel was filled with the certainty that he was going to have to stop running—and not just from the law.

I
t was quite easy to get around. The Pacific Red Cars, electric trains like the interurbans back home, got them most places. Buses did the rest. Henry and Cora had been working through her list of things “we ab-so-lute-ly
must
see.” They’d taken a bus up to see the fancy houses being built in Hollywoodland. Cora said most of them were influenced by European or Mediterranean architecture. Whatever kind they were, they were unlike any Henry had ever seen, with exposed timbers, irregular bricks and stone, stucco, and steep roofs with sharp peaks. They were built on steep hillsides where the winding road had been cut in and shored up with twenty-foot-high stone walls. A string of giant letters up on the top of the far hills spelled the Hollywoodland name. Advertising that could be seen for miles and miles. The promoter in Henry applauded the ingenuity.

One town pretty much led right into the next. Cora said the area around most big cities were like that nowadays. Hollywood and its surrounds gave Henry the impression that it had only recently sprung up out of the orange groves. Everything was gleaming white. Steam shovels rumbled everywhere, taking chunks out of dry, rocky hills, carving new roads and leveling areas for new buildings. Red-tile roofs, towers, and arched windows and doorways were everywhere—Cora told him that was the Spanish influence. Even the trees looked as if they’d come from faraway lands—tall, naked trunks topped with huge, fanlike leaves. Palm trees. Now they walked into the courtyard of Grauman’s Hollywood Egyptian Theatre. It was like entering another country—which he supposed was the whole point. Wide columns lined the sides, etched with lines of pictures and symbols, which Cora explained were Egyptian hieroglyphs, an ancient form of writing. On the walls around them were primitive-looking paint
ings of brown men with funny headdresses and white cloths wrapped around their waists. Giant pots filled with strange-looking plants sat around the concrete courtyard. There was a statue with a man’s body and a dog’s head twice as tall as Henry. They entered the wide doors to the lobby. The open air overhead became a ceiling. He was suddenly part of a herd funneled into the slaughterhouse. So many perfumes and hair oils. So little air. The Egyptian decorations inside this confined space felt oppressive.

Then the usherette led them into the auditorium. Henry stopped dead. A man bumped into him from behind.

“Sorry,” Henry and the man both said at once.

Cora took Henry’s hand and led him down the aisle and into a row of seats. When she stopped in the center, she said, “Now you can look. Magnificent, isn’t it?”

She said
magnificent
, not
monkey’s eyebrows
or
cat’s pajamas
or
bee’s knees
.
Magnificent
. Even Cora was impressed.

She said, “It’s like being inside a pharaoh’s tomb.”

If this is what a pharaoh’s tomb looked like, no wonder Cora had wanted to discover one. Four giant, decorated columns flanked the draped stage, supporting a pair of overhead beams with layered step backs, each crowded with hieroglyphs. More people were on the side walls, looking like statues just emerging from the stone.

But the ceiling amazed most. In the center of the first header over the stage was a large gold beetle sprouting wide, eaglelike wings with a circle between its antennae. Above the beetle on the ceiling was a shiny gold half circle that bloomed line after incredible line of carved intricacy, each detail outlined in gold, the inner details painted in yellows, oranges, and bright blues until the arc reached a point where it looked to explode in spikes and shafts of gleaming gold.

Henry leaned close and whispered, “So beautiful. Why ruin it with a giant bug?”

She giggled and leaned close to whisper back, her breath sending tickling shivers across his body. “It’s a scarab. Has something to do with Egyptian gods pushing the sun across the sky, or something like that.
See”—she looked up and pointed—“it holds the sun in its antennae.” Then her hand swept across the graduating arc. “Sunrise.”

“Sunrise,” he repeated, but he was looking at her. He realized she was still holding his hand.

People had taken seats on both sides of them. When Henry looked around, he and Cora were the only two still standing in the middle of the theater. He sat and tugged her down beside him.

He thought of her comment that the movie would take his mind off his melancholy. Now she sat with happy eagerness on her face. It struck him that she didn’t know the story. It had been one of the more tedious books Henry had borrowed from Mr. Dahlgren’s library, and parts of it were lost on him entirely as he had no clear frame of understanding, but Henry had pushed through until the horribly depressing end. He looked at her, sitting there with innocent anticipation on her face. All of her fancy education, and he’d read a book that she had not.

He leaned close and whispered, “You do know this doesn’t end well?”

She turned to him, eyes wide and mouth a questioning
O
. “You said you’ve never seen a moving picture. It was just released this year.”

“I read the book.”

She raised a brow. “Really?”

“I
can
read.”

She reached across and put a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t mean I didn’t think you can read—”

At that moment the lights went out, the curtain opened, and the Fox newsreel came on the screen. Henry sat, unblinking for fear of missing something, as the words
Here’s the great ball-game giant himself in action!
gave way to Babe Ruth running the bases. Babe Ruth! And that crowd! Yankee Stadium was rows and rows of people packed like pickles in a barrel. The next pictures showed “the Bambino” visiting the children’s ward of a New York hospital. It was incredible to see the man, moving in real life.

The credits for
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
passed and the cathedral and its square came on-screen. The people moved about the Festi
val of Fools just as if he were watching them in life, although drained of color and sound. For over an hour and a half the orchestra accompanied the photoplay. The words between the moving pictures were brief and used much simpler language than the book. Henry watched, enthralled most by the miracle of mechanics, science, and light that moved on the screen.

Then the end was upon them. The moment when Esmeralda would hang. Only she didn’t.