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.
“But that business of gripping the wire between her great and second toe …”
“Definitely out. We’ll have to buy her a nice pair of buffalo hide slippers …”
“… and slather the soles with molasses to limit the torque.”
When the circus cast off from the Memphis levee to make for more southerly ports, almost no one in the Pinch was aware that La Funambula had gone with it. For them, anyone who strayed beyond the neighborhood was instantly lost to memory. Of course the Rosens knew she was gone, Mr. Rosen attempting to comfort his wife as she shed a torrent of tears over the nearly illiterate scrawl of Jenny’s note. (The note, with its clumsy profession of gratitude, was so damp from the combined tears of Mrs. Rosen and her foster daughter that it was later pinned pennant-wise to the highwire clothesline to dry.) Pinchas Pin was also aware of her departure, since it was Jenny who’d informed him — cradling his inconsolable head in her lap before saying good-bye — that his Katie’s suffering was finally at an end. But Muni Pinsker, in the fever dream of his chronicling, remained unmindful of her absence while dedicating every word he wrote to his precious girl.
9 Hide and Seek
I was carrying away a stack of books that comprised the better part of Avrom’s Judaica collection, when his lizardy eyelids snapped open.
“It makes you feel good that you steal from an old man?”
“I’m borrowing them,” I said, slightly chagrined. But Avrom’s income came mostly from Social Security and the odd reparation from Germany; from his shop with its phantom clientele he got bubkes. Besides, I knew I had only to ask, but theft lent my relation to the books an element of intrigue.
Avrom squinted over his thick lenses in an effort to make out the titles. “What are you, becoming a yeshiva bocher?” How to tell him that perusing The Pinch meant resorting to no end of reference materials? That becoming Muni Pinsker’s ideal reader involved the assimilation of a whole history and culture. “Maybe you should go instead in synagogue,” he suggested, this from a skeptic who cursed God at every turn.
“I went already,” I said (I was starting to sound like him). “They confirmed me at sixteen; I thought I was a Methodist.”
Avrom studied me with rheumy eyes that seemed to be struggling to focus. Was I starting to disappear? “I’m laughing,” he said, though he showed no signs of it. He hawked some phlegm into the coffee tin on his desk and peered inside to examine its contents.