Authors: Steve Stern
Impatiently she interrupted Asbestos’s discourse and appealed to him for help. As he listened, his prune face collapsed behind its smoked lenses and he cautioned the girl in his emery voice, “You ain’t want to do that, honey.” He was right, she didn’t. Nevertheless she threatened to pursue independent means that included certain cunning medieval devices if he refused her. In the end the Negro downheartedly relented and agreed to arrange everything. A few nights later they set out for Beale Street by an overland route, since—thanks to the pillowslip ramparts—it was now possible to travel along buckling sidewalks all the way to Main Street proper.
Asbestos led the way with his tapping cane, and Jenny fatalistically followed the blind man. Despite his bias against aboveground travel, he seemed to know every lamppost and crosswalk on the way to Beale. Straggling together past the department stores and specialty shops, they raised eyebrows; a blind nig and a gimpy jew girl, they may even have invited some vulgar remarks. But Jenny, for all her trepidation, felt a slight sense of relief to be back in an ordinary precinct where everything was more or less finite. People window-shopped, trolley lines clacked, wires sang; the air smelled of horse manure and roasted peanuts. The weather was appropriately autumnal; there were newspapers with headlines announcing the opening of a canal in Central America and the imminence of a war in Europe. Everything proceeded according to rational categories without the least intimation of eternity.
After Asbestos had asked her for the umpteenth time if she maybe had second thoughts, they turned the corner onto Beale Street and proceeded under dangling pawnshop globes. A black man in a turned-around collar tipped his homburg to the fiddler and spoke his name, while Jenny wondered: Who tips his hat to a blind man? Farther along, a street-corner band—washboard, bull fiddle, and jug—left off the spirited number they were playing to strike up what sounded to the girl like one of the fiddler’s own funereal scores. Pausing, Asbestos flashed a rare grin, took his instrument from its sack, and sawed a few collaborative chords. So it seemed that the schnorrer of North Main Street, upon whom Jenny had condescended to bestow her benevolence, was a dignitary here on Beale. Why was she not surprised? They pressed on through a fine mist of frying pigs’ snouts from a vendor’s oil drum grill. The pavement was crowded with peddlers hawking stink killers and hair straighteners, vials of Oil of Gladness and packets of Come-To-Me Powder. A couple of undertakers quarreled over a corpse being stretchered from a barroom into a horse-drawn ambulance. Through their open doors Jenny could see the yellow-skinned ladies gyrating to barrelhouse pianos, their buttocks rolling like juggled melons beneath the fringe of their hobble skirts.
Despite the many looks askance, Jenny didn’t feel the fear take hold until Asbestos asked if they’d come yet as far as the Monarch Club. “See mens roll they bones in Pappy Haddum’s horn,” he advised. “Sign say,
No Dozen Here.
” She peered through a smoky door toward a bar on top of which men were tossing dice into a large leather funnel, saw the sign above the bar, and confirmed that they had arrived. The fiddler directed her into an alley and up a steep flight of stairs on the outside of the building, where their knock at a paint-blistered door was answered in due course.
“Howdo, Mizriz Barbee,” Asbestos greeted the imposing woman, who cordially invited them in. Her moon face was buffed cordovan, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from a meaty lip, a knit fascinator tied toothache-fashion round her bulbous head. Her breasts inside the gingham housedress might have helped to fortify the North Main Street seawall—which was the last antic thought Jenny would entertain that night. Suddenly struck by the enormity of what she was about to do, she was reduced to the condition of a tongue-tied little girl.
“Chile, don’t be skeered,” said the midwife in a voice like warm butterscotch. She waved a hand as if to introduce her patient to the reassuring tidiness of her apartment—the antimacassared armchair, the pot boiling on a wood-burning cookstove. But when she shambled forward on her thick ankles to pull back the curtain on the alcove she called her “surg’ry,” acrophile that she was, Jenny grew queasy and fought against falling into a swoon.
There was a table with an oilcloth and, in the corner, one half of an upright packing crate, painted red, which could serve as a modesty screen. A portrait of a bronze-skinned Jesus adorned a wall whose floral paper was unfurling from the plaster to reveal the thin laths beneath. On a stool beside the table was an orderly array of items—crotchet needles, curling irons, a catheter—in an emulation of clinical instruments, though their pitilessness was salient. The midwife was wiping her hands in her apron in what the girl assumed was a sanitary motion, but when she held out a pink palm Jenny realized she’d misread the gesture.
“I take y’all’s donation now,” showing ivory teeth interspersed with gold, the cigarette remaining somehow glued to her lower lip.
Jenny fished in the pocket of her middy skirt and surrendered the agreed-upon sum, a wad of cash comprising a year’s worth of tips. Mizriz Barbee fanned herself with the bills—as if the breeze whispered their amount—before stuffing them into her prodigious bosom. Obedient to his instincts Asbestos chose that moment to make a discreet exit from the apartment, while Jenny silently mouthed the word
coward.
A fly buzzed, a mouse skittered, the piano from the honky-tonk below played a syncopated rag. The girl was handed a clammy sheet with a hole in it to slip her head through and invited to undress behind the screen. Disrobed, Jenny glimpsed her tight belly, which had not yet begun to “show,” unkneaded dough that would never rise.
When she reappeared, the midwife pressed a tin cup into her hands, saying, “Swallah this yere medicine.” The words had a sacerdotal authority, and utterly passive now Jenny did as she was told. She breathed fire and began to cough from the scorching bite of the red-eye, while the midwife slapped her back and guffawed. Reclaiming the cup, she allowed the butt to drop from her lip into the liquid with a sizzle then swilled the rest of the contents herself. She enfolded the girl in her hammy arms and lifted her with an affable grunt onto the table. Still reeling from the whiskey, which had somewhat cut the fear, Jenny squirmed from the feel of the cold oilcloth on her bare buttocks. But if the dram did anything to diminish the pain of the midwife’s procedure, you couldn’t have proved it by the girl. The pain was its own voluminous province, with zones and latitudes and turbulent moods; her cries sounded like some far-off opera to her own ears. When she’d finally come through it, Jenny recognized the room and the woman with bloody hands, the fiddler returned to poke his head around the packing crate—which is not to say that she wasn’t still lost and a long way from home.
She had sufficient focus to take note, once she was helped to sit up, of the pail at the foot of the table and the mess it contained, which caused her to retch down her front. On the streetcar rattling north toward the Pinch, white passengers in rush seats craned their necks to glower menacingly at the girl. It wasn’t bad enough that she was seated beside a Negro in the Colored section, her head tilted onto his shoulder, but the scent of her sick was pervading the car.
And so Jenny joined the handful of citizens who remained impervious to the enticements of North Main Street’s unending fling. The discontent she’d expressed over the years had been mostly for the sake of conversation; she understood that now, understood what it really meant not to belong. Her desperate action, she felt, had disqualified her from participating in the everyday life of the old neighborhood, not that much of the everyday had survived the quake. When she’d recovered her strength, Jenny was stony in her resolution. She took in the clothes that hung on the line suspended between the delicatessen and the general store, then clamped shut the lock securing the pulley and, barefoot in her muslin chemise, mounted the rope. It was neither entirely static nor loose enough to qualify as slack. The tightrope was for the classic equilibrist, the slack for the clown, but the unevenness of her legs since her accident had left her—the girl discovered—peculiarly suited to both types of performance. Once her joints were again lubricated by movement, it seemed to her that none of her gifts had been lost in retirement. She was versatile, could enact her routines with or without a weighted pole; she could balance on a chair, prance (notwithstanding her limp) like a ballerina. With gymnastic maneuverings she could swing in giant circles, executing twists and airborne releases. The transports she enjoyed upon experiencing once again her body’s death-defiance of gravity rivaled, she’d have wagered, the loftiest spiritual acrobatics of ben Yahya’s disciples. It went without saying that she didn’t deserve to feel such exhilaration.
Of course nobody paid attention to her efforts, least of all the sedulous Muni Pinsker outside whose window she performed. Ineffable occurrences having become so commonplace in the Pinch, what interest had her neighbors in the perfectly natural phenomenon of a girl on a wire?
It was Asbestos, traveling back and forth at his leisure between the great world and North Main, who alerted Jenny to the fact that the circus had come to town. The news came as no surprise to the ropewalker, who’d seen the gaudy posters on hoardings during her journey to Beale. Hadn’t they helped spur her motivation to take up her art again? This particular circus, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun, had sailed downriver from north of St. Paul and was docked at the foot of the levee. Its quarters were composed of a steamboat that doubled as a menagerie, which towed an ornate wooden “palace.” The palace sat astride a huge flat-bottomed barge and housed an extravaganza of several rings. If they knew of its arrival, the North Main Streeters, enjoying a floating carnival of their own, were not the least bit curious about such a flea-bitten exhibition. Though the piping of its steam organ could be heard in the Pinch, it was nearly drowned out by the music of the Shpinkers’ improvised niggunim, their chants tweaked in turn by the blind man’s soulful cadenzas. But for Jenny Bashrig, so out of place in the old neighborhood, the circus calliope was a siren song she had no choice but to follow to its source.
Lacking the price of admission, she avoided the matinee and evening hours and made her way down the bluff to the riverfront on a breezy October (was it?) morning. The wind was whipping up whitecaps on the surface of the mile-wide river, compared to which the grand canal of North Main Street—thought Jenny—was a ditch. The broad floodplain on the Arkansas side flashed light and dark beneath the scudding shadows of clouds like wandering atolls; and the girl felt her perspective beginning to shift, her own drama starting to shrink to a shameful inconsequence in the presence of the wider world. The sideshow tents erected at the foot of the levee flew banners displaying crude images of Siamese triplets and the monster rats of Sumatra. The trunk of an elephant and the neck of a camel protruded through the open portholes of the wallowing steamboat, its promenade deck perched upon by grooming chimpanzees. A lion shuddered the planks of the pier with its deep bass roar, and Jenny, brightening, couldn’t help but think “Noah’s Ark,” though she rejected the thought as the kind of association her neighbors might make.
As the ticket booth was empty, she ascended the creaking gangplank onto the deck of the barge unobserved. She entered the so-called palace via a draperied companionway that led between tiers of bleachers into a tawdry, tabernacle-sized amphitheater. An animal pungency stung her nostrils. Painted tapestries, gilt mirrors, and carved woodwork ornamented the interior in a faded pastiche of Gilded Age splendor; raffish sunlight, invaded by flitting barn swallows, slanted through the high windows to illumine three sawdust rings. In the nearest a stocky equestrienne in a tatty leotard stood erect astride the back of a cantering steed. The spotted horse circled a midget with a whip, his stance duplicating the bareback rider’s as he balanced upon a pig in full harness. The middle ring was vacant, but in the farthest from Jenny a pair of men in matching dressing gowns were inspecting a heavy net that lay folded in the sawdust and sand. Jenny’d seen the trawlers of Happy Hollow examining their seines with a similar diligence, but it thrilled her to think of the bigger fish this net was designed to catch. The rigging above them was hung with the properties of various aerial acts like a playground for weightless children; a rope ladder extended upward to a platform from which a taut cable was stretched.
Members of the ring crew were lugging in, anaconda-fashion, a large rolled tarp through the wide-open carriage doors. In the stands a bald man with a handlebar mustache was playing cards with a giantess in a pinchbeck tiara whose tights appeared to be stuffed with cannonballs. Could that be Professor Hotspur of Hotspur’s Pantomimic Pachyderms, and the woman Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, as advertised on the panels outside? Jenny wondered even as she shed her peacoat, kicked off her shoes, and toddled over to the farthest ring. There she mounted the wooden curb, grabbed hold of the narrow rope ladder, and began to clamber up its jittery length.
Nobody noticed when she stepped from the lofty platform onto the polished steel cable, until a roustabout happened to look up and inquire, “Why ain’t that gal wearin’ her mechanic?” Another, shading bloodshot eyes, offered the stunned reply, “That’n ain’t even with the show.” Then the laborers shared a collective groan: they’d seen this kind of thing before—circus-crazed civilians sneaking in after hours to enter a tiger’s cage or dangle from a trapeze. The bad ends they came to invariably spelled trouble for the whole company. Dropping their burden, the crew scrambled into the ring to begin frantically hoisting the safety net to catch the harebrained girl when she fell. The two men who’d been contemplating repairs to the net took their time in moving out of their way. Standing at the side of the ring, they began blithely discussing the girl’s technique, commenting on the relation of her center of mass to her base of support. “Not too wide in her lateral acceleration,” judged the taller, his arms shoved into the silk sleeves of his robe like a Chinaman. “Nor too narrow in her sagittal direction,” remarked his partner, arching a brow over a drowsy eye.