Whistling for the Elephants (5 page)

Alfonso
wore a red apron, a white short-sleeved shirt and the obligatory small black
bow tie. He was very thin with a crew-cut, which made him look like a pencil
with a rubber on the end. Alfonso was quite old by then. He had lines all over
his face like one of his prunes but he smiled all the time. A sort of grandfather
but without the beard or the rocking chair. He was a man happy in his work, for
Alfonso loved fruit.

‘It’s a
wonderful world of fruit, Dorothy,’ he would say, letting me polish some of the
apples with a special cloth. ‘Look at this banana. See this label? That came
from a banana tree in the Caribbean. Can you imagine that? That little yellow
fruit has travelled further to be with us in Sassaspaneck than I have in my
whole life. The Caribbean. Why, they have pirates and palm trees there and
everything.’

Alfonso
stroked the Caribbean product as if it had been entrusted to him by Pirate Pete
himself He laid the yellow offering back on his regimented display and carefully
picked up an apple. He smiled at me. It was a big-toothed smile. Probably from
so much healthy eating. He stood polishing the apple on his apron with pride
while I did another one with a cloth.

‘Did
you go to the zoo yet?’ He leaned confidentially toward me. ‘I do the fruit for
the zoo, you know. Miss Strange used to come in for it but now I go out there.’
He stood to attention as the manager strode past. Alfonso smiled another flash
of teeth and straightened a pineapple before going on. ‘Used to be the main
attraction in town. People came from miles around to see the Glorious Burroughs
Animal Collection. Even after the shoe plant closed down it kept us on the map
for a while. Now pretty much no one is interested. TV, that’s what did it. I
think sometimes families go to the zoo on Labor Day or something, but that’s
about it. That don’t mean the animals don’t have to eat. Every Tuesday, out I
go with the fruit. Course, it’s not as exciting as it used to be. Nothing
really escapes any more. You know, when I was a young man I was going home from
work one evening and a polar bear come right up Amherst Avenue. You see, Mr
Burroughs, John Junior, he was back from one of his trips. He was always travelling.
Seen more fruit growing round the world than I have here on my stand. So he’d
got this polar bear and he thought he would take it fishing down at the river.
It seems people used to do it all the time.’ Alfonso moved a grapefruit for
emphasis. ‘You know, Miss Strange told me, Henry the Third of England, he kept
a polar bear in his menagerie way back in the thirteenth century. He often took
it down to that Thames River in London to catch fish, and he was a king. So it
seems John took the bear down to the Amherst River and took off its muzzle.
This was probably a mistake but it was brave. They can be mean, polar bears.
John was like that. Always trying new stuff. He didn’t care. Well, the waters
move fast down by the old house. They were streaming by and so, pretty soon,
was the bear. It wasn’t thinking about fishing, it just jumped right in the
water and swam off So you know what John Junior did?’

‘No.’

Alfonso
chuckled. ‘Why he thought it was long gone so he just ordered another one. I
called him to say I’d found his bear outside the store. Gave me a start, I’ll
tell you. Not what you expect in Sassaspaneck. You should go out there. To the
zoo, before they close it. Take a banana for the gorilla.’

After
the A&P we would go and fill up the car at Jacobson’s Garage on the corner
of Palmer and Lindhurst. It was really a Mobil station and it had a huge
stopwatch in the window. When Mother drove the Pontiac over the rubber tube in
the driveway the clock would start ticking and Gabriel had thirty seconds to
get out, wipe the windscreen and start filling her up or we got a prize.
Gabriel worked full-time at Jacobson’s since he got out of the draft. Sometimes
he was in the office when we came but mostly he was under some car. Other times
he would be welding and the sparks would shower round him like he was covered
in fireworks. Mother would get out and lean against the car while he twirled
the petrol cap off.

‘Fill
you up, Mrs Kane?’

Then
she would need the bathroom and Gabriel would show her where it was round back.
He would wait for her for ages round there while I stayed in the car. After
that Mother would be tired. One time she was so tired she let me drive her
home. The car was automatic. Sitting on an old fruit box, I found it no problem
to drive.

That
summer, Charles was allowed to go sailing in Greece with a friend’s family, so
Father let me buy a bike. He was busy commuting and Mother was, I don’t know,
in bed, et cetera. Anyway I know I went to Milo’s Toy Store on my own. I spent
ages deciding but in the end I chose a blue chopper bike with a long white
banana seat. It was trendy but not too girly. Milo came out on the sidewalk
with me to watch me take the first ride. As I came out a red pick-up truck was
going by. The sun was shining on the windscreen and I couldn’t see the driver
real well. Old white writing stood out on the passenger door:
Burroughs Zoo.
The back of the truck was empty but wisps of hay and straw blew about
against the sides. A woman was driving with one hand on the wheel and one out
the window holding the edge of the roof. I could see one side of her face but
when she turned the corner there must have been a trick of the light. It was as
if the rest of her head melted away. As if one side of her face didn’t exist at
all. Milo shook his head.

‘Goddamn
freak.’ I didn’t think he was talking to me. ‘You have fun now,’ he said and
went back into his labyrinth of Slinkys, footballs and bikes. I loved that
bike. I felt so grown-up as I rode it away from the store. I felt confident
that it would impress potential new friends. It didn’t. What it did was make me
the Marco Polo of our neighbourhood.

Cherry
Blossom Gardens was off Amherst Avenue. The old railway track ran along Amherst
between the avenue and the river. Where the road left the last houses and
curved away toward the Expressway the railway track took off over the river
into the woods. Once there must have been a bridge there but now the tracks
hung silent, unprotected and naked across the river. They hadn’t been used in
years. Not since the mills had moved south to the cheap labour in Georgia. I
rode my bike down to the crossing most days. Sometimes I would ride along the
side of the track, pretending I was following the line south to freedom.
Sometimes my bike was a horse called Rusty and we lived on the trail eating
baked beans and wearing bandannas. Different games, different people. Never me
on my own. Always exploring.

One
late afternoon I had been playing a particularly complex game in which I was an
ambulance, the ambulance driver, the doctor and the patient when I came to a
halt by the tracks. It had been hot all day and the river looked inviting. I
was too scared to swim but I put my bike down under a tree and stepped out on
to the shiny track. It hung over the water but the metal was still hot. Even
through my sandals. I took my time. I found if I was careful and balanced with
my arms I could make my way slowly across the river. The water was calm below
me and before I knew it I was into the woods over the other side. That was when
I saw the Burroughs House.

I guess
it was beginning to fall down in those days. The world hadn’t yet gone
history-crazy, running around preserving everything more than ten years old in
aspic. The theme-parkization of the world hadn’t started yet. No one knew about
the past as a money spinner. The waterfront was so overgrown that I hadn’t seen
the building from the other side. It was breathtaking. I was ten. I didn’t
know about architecture but I knew that I had found a palace. What I didn’t
know was that it was an exotic Venetian palazzo, an Italian Renaissance villa.
To me, what stood before me was a Sleeping Beauty draped in ivy and long grass.
A princess’s place. They’ve made it into a museum now and not surprising. It
was incredible. Two hundred feet of terrace in green and white variegated
marble ran along the whole of the back of the building. Thirteen steps, the
width of the terrace, ran up to the enclosure of terracotta balustrades.
Between the terrace and the main house lay what was left of a formal Italianate
garden. The careful squares of grass had long since spread, tentacles of green
capturing the attention of the tiled walkways. A group of rather Bacchanalian
men with horns held up a long-rusted fountain. A statue of a fat man stood
above them in the middle of a half-shell, his weight sitting heavily on his
left buttock as he looked over his shoulder in a slightly camp manner.

In the
evening sun the building seemed to be made entirely of gold. A cream edifice
with every inch of every corner picked out in gleaming terracotta brick. It was
an architectural fantasy. At once beautiful and barmy. It was part-Italian,
part-French Renaissance, part—baroque, part-art deco, part-madness. An American
whirlwind tour of Europe in one building. A kind of ‘If this is the east wing I
must be in Paris’ building.

Above
my head an outside staircase rose to a sixty-foot-high square tower encased in coloured
glass and topped by brilliant red barrel tiles. Four Muses swathed in flowing
robes kept guard on each corner, watched over by a selection of cat and parrot
gargoyles. The coloured glass was repeated in all the Moorish windows of the
second floor and all along the western façade. The centre section of the house,
overlooking the gardens, had seven pairs of french doors glazed in a rainbow of
rich colour. Handmade bricks in shiny yellow, blue, green and ivory finishes
flung diamond patterns across the walls. Everything which could have been
filigreed or ornamented was. There was absolutely nothing plain about any of
it. I followed the building round to the front and found the door ajar. With
the idiocy of youth and made bold by loneliness, I entered.

The
door opened straight on to an immense two-and-a-half-story roofed courtyard. I
was inside the tower. The central room rose to a coffered, cypress-wood ceiling
which framed the inner skylight of coloured glass. I could just see ornamental
paintings of mythological figures and signs of the zodiac which covered each
octagonal section of the ceiling. From the centre, a huge chandelier hung down
on a great iron chain, its loops of crystal suspended like a Folies Bergères
headdress. Spectrums of light rained down on the black-and-white-tiled floor. A
room of rainbows. On one wall hung the most enormous oil painting in a golden
frame.

It was
a busy picture, painted in what seemed like the gardens of the house, but the
house itself looked quite different. It was square and plain. Not the fancy
edifice I had just come into. In the middle of the painting stood a large man
holding aloft a golden birdcage containing a single golden bird. He was
immensely tall, with the chest of a sea elephant, the chin of a prize fighter
and an Atlantic Ocean of wavy black hair. No clothing could adequately
encompass him. His what used to be called ‘rude health’ burst from every button
of his dark suit and his brilliantly coloured waistcoat. Nature’s only flaw in
him, her little aside, seemed to be terrible eyesight. He squinted at the world
from behind small round spectacles. Perhaps because he couldn’t quite see
everything that was happening, he stood laughing as a giraffe, twelve lions,
three tigers, two leopards, a polar bear, assorted antelope and a sea lion ran
riot around him, chased by exhausted assistants of various ethnic origins. A
hyena was stalking a peacock on the lawn while a polar bear with a collar,
muzzle and chain was standing on its hind legs trying to reach a quivering
black man up a tree in what looked like a red dress.

In the
corner of the picture sat a young woman in a wheelchair. Her body was withered
by some illness. She was very small and her tiny frame lay twisted in the large
mahogany-and-cane chair. She had no lines on her face so I guessed she was
young, but her hair was thin like an old lady’s. Only her eyes still suggested
youth. She looked like she was having fun. She was dressed for the jazz age — a
beaded flapper frock in pearl grey and a small matching grey feather in her
hair — but didn’t look like she was ever going to be part of it. She was never
going to get up and boogie, that was for sure. The wheelchair woman was smiling
at the man with the birdcage. A man in command of his world and all that was in
it. A small brass plaque was fixed to the bottom of the painting. I read it out
loud:

‘Phoebe
and John Burroughs Junior. 1925.’ Phoebe. His wife? The woman in the
wheelchair. Feeble Phoebe…

‘We
shall have a Chinese Garden of Intelligence.’ I jumped as a voice spoke behind
me. I thought for a second it came from the picture. ‘A Great Menagerie. Like
King George at Windsor or the Duke of Bedford. Tropical princes shall come and
bring us barbaric offerings of tigers, leopards and creatures no man has ever
seen before. We shall have such a collection that the Emperor of Abyssinia will
hear of it and wish to come.’

I
turned but couldn’t see anyone. Then, amongst the great drapes which covered
the walls, something moved. A giant insect woman. All in brown. Its wings closed
about itself. It spoke to me.

‘No
one, not even in Egypt, China, India or Rome, will be able to boast of such
exotica.’

The
huge bug shimmered toward me. She was maybe in her late thirties but when you’re
a kid everyone just looks old. She was probably as old as Mother, just less set
in aspic. She wore brown corduroy pants, a brown turtleneck and a vast brown
cardigan. Her face was plain and thin and looked severe with her matching brown
hair pulled back from her face into a brown rubber band, but she smiled at me
and I smiled back. There was nothing about her which suggested ‘friend’, but I
didn’t think to run. She stood and looked at the painting for a moment.