The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (48 page)

It was settled. I'd become Mrs. Art Rooney on Friday, November
20, in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the guests in rented suits and
too-tight shoes and no doubt trying to control their shakes. No one had
ever had a wedding like that, which I suppose is why the idea had
occurred to Art. There'd be lilies of the valley and streamers and
spruce garlands. Sounded perfect. I couldn't wait. I went down to the
menage and told Rajah, who took the news about as well as could be
expected from a cat gone irascible with age and jealousy.

That fall, the circus wound its way up through the southern states
toward the last dates in Virginia. By the time we hit the Carolinas it was getting cool during the evenings, the flyers warming their hands over
Bunsen heaters so they wouldn't miss a pass due to numbness. I started
working my tigers again, letting them in the ring and practising their
old tricks, which should tell you something about my mood in general.
Seems life travels in ups and in downs and this was an up, for way down
south in Florida, in the basement of a mansion called House of John,
one of the richest men in America was opening himself a package.

It's true I wasn't there. It's also true I didn't know the man well, except
to say whenever he came in contact with yours truly my life either got
a hundred times better or a hundred times worse. But with his riches
came fame, and with fame came a general broadcasting of the way he
lived. So I can imagine. I can picture how it happened.

His day starts at ten in the evening. He has a breakfast of cornedbeef hash and eggs washed down with tumblers of Old Curio. Then he
takes his meetings, which goes to show if you're one of the ten richest
men in America you can schedule a meeting for midnight in a town didn't exist ten years earlier and still expect people to show up. While his
wife sleeps his servants stay up, for someone has to serve him sherry
glasses filled with the German schnapps he has bootleggers drop in the
bay outside his home.

Throughout the night, he works and he broods and he wishes,
vaguely, with no real conviction, that he could take a vacation from
being John Ringling. Decisions, are the root of it. Decisions, decisions,
decisions-if only they'd stop coming for one blessed minute.
Railroads, oil fields, stocks and bonds, real estate, an art collection worth
millions, the circus-all of it needs tending. While it's true he'd once
felt energized every time he dashed off his signature, that was back
when there'd been five of them and an empire a fraction of the size.

So he wanders. Thinks. Broods. Admires his art. Watches the sun
rise from the cliffs outside his mansion. If he comes across a servant, his
manner changes and he's John Ringling again, smiling and saying good-evening and maybe having a little conversation about nothing.
The evening wears on. The whole time he fights the urge to get on a
boat bound for Europe in the morning, a place where demands and
decisions have a tougher time finding him, though in the end he doesn't,
for he's smart enough to know the thing that's chasing him is the same
thing chasing all successful men, that being the fear that in some elementary way he isn't good enough. So he drinks. He sighs. He wishes
the world weren't so damn beautiful all the time. In his spare moments
he attends to business matters in the same way a gun treats a scatter of
shot-without order, reason or even a care about the results. When
something occurs to him, he scribbles his wishes on a little flip-over
notepad he keeps in the breast pocket of his robe. Come 9:00 a.m. he
hands off the day's pages to a handler, whose job it is to make sense of
the scrawl and dispose of the more lunatic ideas.

Then, to his private room in the cellar, where John Ringling
pours the first of twelve pints of German lager he has every morning.
His mail is brought there, in a pile next to his desk, thousands of letters
and bills and demands and decisions. Much of it he ignores, some of it
he answers, the bulk he sends straight to lawyers or accountants. This
morning there's a package, wrapped in string and brown paper, near
the top of the mound, tweaking his curiosity. The big man tries to
unwrap the package with his fat, jointless fingers, in his drunkenness
finding it hard to manage the tightly wrapped string. A flash of frustration. He grabs a letter opener, the one with the handle made from
Kenyan ebony and finely honed Pennsylvanian steel, and jerkily rips
the package open.

It is: an album of some kind. Mabel Stark. Hmmmm, name
sounds familiar, though he can't remember from where. Opens the
pages. A tiger woman of some sort and not a bad-looking one at that,
what with those schoolgirl locks and those tight leather bodysuits. Got
to keep the fathers interested though what I wouldn't give for a good
old-fashioned flat-out cooch. Hmmmmmmmm. Stark. Stark, Stark, Stark. Of course! Mabel Stark-little blond wisp of a thing, backwoods way of talking, had a good wrestling act and if I'm not mistaken a bit with a jaguar. Hmmmmmmm. Where did I see her? What show
was that? Broke the cats herself, if I'm not mistaken. Jesus, Mabel Stark.
Now there's a name from the past.

Wonder whatever happened to her?

Seems John Ringling got on the telephone and had a conversation with
his circus manager, Charles Curley. It also seems John Ringling flew
into a rage when told I already belonged to his circus and that I'd been
demoted to riding High School, despite it being a decision he himself
had made. By the time Charles Curley called me to the ticket office, he
looked tired and fed up, a way people often looked when dealing with
John Ringling.

"Mabel," he said, "have a seat."

Curley rubbed his temples. "I've been on the phone all morning,
making some arrangements."

Here he paused, giving no indication whether those arrangements were for my benefit or detriment. Could've been either. His fingertips moved to his eyes, and they had a good pressing as well. He
spoke through his hands.

"Next season you'll switch to the Robinson show. He's got eight
tigers that are going to need a new trainer come July. Rajah gone
rogue yet?"

"Uhhhh ... no. No sir. Not at all."

"Then he's going with you. The Ringling cats, too."

I left feeling tingly. Found Art in the menage, where he was
singing a lullaby to a chimp who'd taken to tearing at sleeves through
the cage bars. Art noticed me and nodded, still in mid-song.

I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around him, settling
the side of my face into flannel. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes
and a picture came and what I saw was ...

Well.

Was pleasing.

One week prior to season end, on a day off, with the trains parked in a rail
yard outside Columbia, Art returned, whistling, to our Pullman suite. He
had with him a cardboard box, which he plopped on our fold-down table.
Then he handed me a pair of scissors and said, "Take a look, Mabel."

I snipped the string holding the box flaps and pulled out one of
the invitations. Art's fancy writing was printed, embossed and silver,
on linen paper the colour of creme fraiche. The envelope closed by slipping the pointed tip of the upper flap into a little silver sleeve built into
the lower flap.

"Art," I said, "how many of these things have you made?"

"How many workingmen are there?"

"About six hundred."

He grinned, and I had my answer. We spent the rest of that afternoon slipping invitations inside envelopes, which at first was giggly
work but after a bit became chore-like, and a bit later still downright
onerous: I remember my hand muscles getting sore and my finger
joints feeling like they'd been tromped on. Throughout, Art kept me
entertained with songs from that time, like "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and
"I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store,"
which he sang in a voice more than capable of carrying a tune. Finally
we finished, and I asked when he planned on handing them all out.

"No time like the present. Got to strike when the iron's hot.
Never leave for tomorrow what you can do today. Carpe diem, as the
Romans said."

In other words, we headed off to the sections of train containing
the workingmen cars. They were at the rear of the fourth section,
meaning it was a bit of a walk, and throughout I couldn't help smiling
at the ridiculousness of it all. "I know you suggested we have a hamand-potato salad buffet," Art was saying, "but I think maybe we better get some chicken slices as well. Not everyone likes ham because of the
salt. And macaroni salad. Lord love a duck but sometimes I like a nice
helping of macaroni salad. Of course, if you're going to have macaroni
salad there's no point going without a vat of gherkins...."

On and on he went, regaling me with the finer points of buffet
eating, and I was just about to impart my feelings on devilled eggs when
we reached the workingmen compartments. As always, most were sitting around outside, playing cards on overturned trunks, the makeup of
their foursomes indicating the division that existed within their trains.
There were the Negro workingmen, most of whom drove stakes or
otherwise helped with the big top. These were the ones I felt the most
sorry for, seeing as how their only problem was the fact they were poor
and southern and saddled with the wrong skin colour for that particular time in America. The rest were white workingmen, who were
groomers or train builders or maintenance men or cookhouse help.
Unlike the Negro workingmen, who were beaten down more than anything, the white workingmen seemed to suffer from a smorgasbord of
afflictions, the most common ones being alcoholism, craziness,
syphlitic diseases or criminal obsession, a good many of them suffering
from all four.

When fights broke out, it was generally between these two
groups, for when misery wells up and makes men hunt for an excuse to
fight, a difference in skin tone works about as well as anything. The one
thing they all had in common was the fact they were taken advantage
of. Because circus workingmen weren't generally allowed in local bars,
and wouldn't've had the time to go drinking if they were, management
sold them beers in the blue car against future wages. The theory here
was by the time payday rolled around, their money would already be
spent, and a broke workingman was far less likely to run off than a
workingman with two weeks' worth of breathing room jangling in his
pockets. On top of it all, they were looked down upon, the common
wisdom being they deserved their lot seeing as how they were lacking in imagination. Course, this was something I never held against them,
for it's always been my belief that when your imagination can't so
much as picture a way out it's probably better just to shut the damn
thing off altogether.

So.

Art took four envelopes out of our box of invitations and headed toward the nearest group of card players. All shuffling and dealing
and betting immediately halted, for if a boss or performer approached
a workingmen it generally meant one of two things. Either the workingman in question was going to have to do something hard and distasteful-hosing the latrine cars, for example-or he'd been caught
out doing something wrong, and believe me when I say that damn
Mabel Ringling had rules forbidding every last workingman pleasure,
from fighting right on down to stealing shirts off townie clotheslines.
Even gambling was technically against the rules, though seeing as the
workingmen bosses all partook themselves, the rule generally went
unenforced. Still, every once in a while Mr. John's wife would come
down and there'd be a sacrificial lamb, which explained why all four
card players went wide-eyed and stiff when the menage boss
approached. Their body language would've even been funny had it not
indicated their defeated stations in life the closer he got, the more
they angled their shoulders away from his general direction, so that by
the time he reached their overturned crate at least two of them looked
like they were leaning into a curve.

"Good morning, fellas," Art said, beaming.

"Morning," a few of them grumbled, fearing the worst, those
fears half confirmed and half not when Art dropped those funnylooking envelopes in front of each one of them. For a time the cards
just stayed there, untouched, the four men in a clear state of agitation
tinged with curiosity. I watched them mull over possibilities.
Meanwhile, Art confused them by smiling and not offering up any
clues. Finally, and I mean finally, one of the workingmen reached out. I remember his nails were dirty, and a scar ran crossways over the tendons and veins on the back of his hand. He took the envelope, opened
it and pulled out what was inside. He turned it over a few times before
narrowing his eyes and spelling out the words. Judging by the movement of his eyes and lips, he read it a second time and then a third
time for good measure. Was then a look of relief passed over his
features, though you could tell he didn't want to surrender to it totally
in case he'd somehow gotten the meaning wrong during all those
read-throughs.

"What is it?" said one of the others.

The workingman looked up at Art, and then back to the card, and
then up at Art again, before letting the corners of his mouth creep up
toward his eyes. Then he looked at the others.

"I think," he said, "we're going to a damn weddin'!"

On November 17, 1926, the Ringling Brothers show pulled out of its
last date, in Richmond, Virginia. Art and I skipped the last-night party,
preferring to stay in, reading books and talking. The next day, the trains
pulled into winter quarters. While normally the workingmen would've
scattered to all four corners of the country, this time they hung around,
camping down by the rail tracks, sleeping under railway bridges,
having three-day-long games of poker, scurrying about parts of the
city the clean and respectable citizenry of Bridgeport probably didn't
know existed.

Three days later, on November 20, I woke up in my Pullman
suite, where I'd spent the night not with my fiance but with my grumpy
old cat, Rajah. Upon waking, I rubbed his muzzle and tickled his underbelly, which normally would've brought him awake happy to be alive.
Instead, he burped a cloud of meat-smelling air in my face and growled
and moved closer to the edge of the bed, all of which I took to mean he
was not in any way pleased with what I was about to do that day.