Mummers' Curse (2 page)

“So it’s a closed world, too.”

I shrugged. He was correct, but it was a different sort of closed universe, and there was still a vast difference. And so I had dared Mackenzie to a parade exchange. As a bonus, I tossed the detective a professional incentive, the question of what had become of one Theodore Serfi.

The Tuesday before Christmas Serfi had attended a weekly meeting of his Fancy Club, then disappeared without a trace. Since then, there’d been persistent rumors that he was now being served as a pasta topping, an ingredient in a rival family’s blood sausage. Bus and billboard ads for King’s Sausage had been unofficially augmented, so that they now read
Whose Blood is in King’s Sausage?
The understood, if unverified, answer was
Ted Serfi
.

I had a different theory. “Years ago,” I told Mackenzie, “Mummers kidnapped men and held them hostage until New Year’s morning, when they’d make their captives march with them. Maybe Serfi will reappear with a new brigade. Maybe this is a gimmick, a historical reminder.”

Mackenzie thought Ted Serfi, who was reputed to have been “connected,” had been “Hoffa’d,” as he put it, and at any rate, was a missing person and not a homicide detective’s concern. But in a show of good will, he’d said that if Ted Serfi came strutting along, prisoner of a rival brigade, he’d be happy to apologize for his cynicism.

Another reason for my attending was an article I was writing about the Mummers. Correction: an article I intended to write. As faculty advisor to the school newspaper, I was dared by the editor-in-chief to verify or disprove the expression, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” He was writing a feature about our faculty, based on that dreadful maxim, so what could I do but accept the challenge? I, too, would commit journalism. I would write and sell an article of my own.

Although I’d already prepared my Pulitzer acceptance speech, I actually hadn’t yet had time to write more than notes. What I had done instead was share each interesting factoid I discovered. In the course of doing so, I also discovered that Mackenzie and I did not always agree on what was interesting and what was not.

Even as I watched a ribbon-bedecked passel of comics strut by, I had three-by-five cards at the ready. Unfortunately, it was too chilly and complicated to take off my mittens and retrieve the cards from my bag.

“Are those men Druids?” Karen asked.

“Aunt Mandy will answer all your questions in her article,” Mackenzie said. “That is, when she finishes it. Which will, of course, be some time after she begins it.”

“Your mean streak is wider than Broad Street, Comus.” I gestured at the parade route.

“Mean?” Mackenzie said. “Comus?”

A year and a half of guessing what the damned C.K. stood for, and I was no closer. “Comus was the god of revelry. Of mirth. Song, dance, and wine. But you’re too mean to have that name.”

“He isn’t mean,” Karen said.

He wasn’t either mean or Comus, simply the unbearable sort who did what he said he was going to and who thought everybody else should do the same. He expected me to write the article, wanted me to because I said I was going to and because I wanted to. And he knew I was afraid to actually do it, to risk proving that nasty adage true. And so he tweaked and poked, and I acted outraged and found excuses galore, and the article continued to pend.

“Are they Druids, Aunt Mandy?” Karen asked again, giving me a reprieve.

“No, but they might be the great-great-how-many-great-grandsons of Druids. And of a whole lot of other people who brought their New Year traditions to the new country. The Finns masqueraded, and the Swedes started the year by shooting off guns—in fact, the people we call Mummers really call themselves Shooters.”

“But they will
not
be shooting today,” Mackenzie said. “They don’t do that anymore. Haven’t for a long time.”

Karen looked relieved.

“The English put on a Mummers’ Play, Scotch-Irish men dressed in women’s clothing—”

“Like that,” Karen said, pointing at a male comic dressed in the traditional Wench style, with a flouncy dress, golden shoes, and long pigtails. She and her male counterpart, The Dude in a sequin-trimmed tuxedo, were out of the minstrel show tradition, but Mackenzie shot me a look and I didn’t say that out loud. Instead, I stayed with the European influences. “As I was saying, the Germans wore masks and disguises, including one as an early kind of Santa, called a Belsnickle.”

“He was one mean Santa,” Mackenzie said.

I beamed at him. He wasn’t sneering, or yawning, he was participating.

“I think maybe I could write your article myself,” he said. “In fact, maybe I should.”

I turned off the beam.

Karen looked wide-eyed at the idea of a mean Santa.

“Like Santa, the Belsnickle wanted to know who’d been naughty or good,” I said, “but unlike Santa, when he found the naughty ones, he whipped them.”

“And the good ones?” Karen asked. “Did they get presents?”

“Their present was not getting whipped. Santa quality control has improved a whole lot over the years. And looks. He had ugly, strawy hair and beard, and a mean face and plain clothes, except for his fur-trimmed pants…”

Fur. I shivered. Even the nasty Belsnickle got to wear it. It was not P.C. to think of it, but I did. However, the only fur I own was home, meowing and clawing the furniture.

In all honesty, it would have been nice if those Scottish, Irish, English, and German people had decided to celebrate the spring solstice. Then, I might not feel as if a Phillips screwdriver had been inserted in my forehead.

How had New Orleans known to pick up on Lenten traditions instead? I flashed with irrational resentment—those rich Southern folk had snatched the good season and left the freezing cold for poor, hard-working Philadelphians.

“Anyway,” I said, “people have been celebrating this time of year, and in ways like this almost forever, but in Philadelphia, all the separate traditions combined and became this very special parade.”

Mackenzie looked near-comatose. He spoke in a flat voice, as if telegraphing news to me. “You needn’t feel obliged to tell the child everything you know.”

“She asked.”

“When kids ask why things are the way they are, grown-ups say, ‘Because I said so,’ or, ‘It’s how we do it, that’s why.’”

“That’d save a lot of time in the classroom as well.” Suddenly, I’d become The Woman Who Tells Too Much. My desire to share ideas hadn’t annoyed him until we were living together. “And you say you love history,” I muttered.

“I do. As well as the saying: ‘Everything in moderation.’ And that includes Mummers and exposure to foul weather.” He pulled up his parka hood and faced a group of comics who were ridiculing none too subtly some national political leaders.

We stamped our feet and rubbed our hands while our breath made smoky patterns. Savvy Philadelphians cultivate friends with apartments or offices overlooking the parade route. I resolved hereafter to base friendships on real-estate access, not compatibility.

I had been concerned about how a six-year-old, conditioned to special effects via TV, movies, computer screen and control pad, would react to an ancient, handmade spectacle. We’d come after the Police and Fireman’s bands had passed, and a goodly portion of the enormous comic division as well. Since then, we’d inched forward as early-arriving spectators left. We watched, as best we could, a troop of comics in season-denying hues—intense apple green, hot pink, butter yellow, and electric blue—both on their satin and sequined costumes, their triple-tiered umbrellas, and often on their faces.

Before the civil rights movement of the Sixties, many of the clowns would have been in minstrel’s blackface, but nowadays their makeup was less offensive and more interesting.

And years ago, whatever the color of their faces, the comics and everyone else in the parade would have been male. Dressing in drag was and is a favorite way of clowning around, and female impersonators were still preferred to the real thing, but female-females, after their own struggle, could also now participate.

The family in front of us—friends and relatives of the springtime group—called it a day and we moved up to the barrier. Karen giggled as a straggler comic—his face something other than human behind its frosty lilac glitter—reached out his forefinger and painted a lilac stripe down her nose.

And all of a sudden, the chilly nonsense on the street seemed the only right way to bring in a new year and I understood its evolution and rationale. Outside beyond us, the forest was deep and frightening and frozen. Anything could happen in its dark recesses. But not here, with its insistence on bright color and sound, its smiling music and clowns. Not here.

“How soon will your buddy be on?” Mackenzie was not a parade person. To me, there is something magical about people putting their hearts and imaginations on display, turning their raucous happiness into music. And there’s something mystical about living behind a mask, creating an entirely new identity, not necessarily human, if only for a few hours. So much of our lives seems devoted to insisting on who we are, on asking to be noticed—and then, this, an encasing, removing, reversal, one day of the year.

All that leaves Mackenzie cold, no matter the temperature. He fidgeted much more than Karen.

The buddy he referred to, Vincent Devaney, was a Philly Prep teacher who’d helped me with my research. He had, in fact, suggested the topic, and he was the main reason we were shivering our way through the first day of the year. Four months ago, he’d joined the faculty, after majoring in biology at Temple University and, as far as I could tell by his interests, minoring in Mummering. Or maybe it was the other way around. A third-generation New Year’s Shooter, he was bent on educating people about things both scientific and mummerific.

“Vincent’s in a Fancy Club,” I said.

“And that means?”

“There are four divisions. We’re still watching the first, the clubs in the Comic Division.” I waved toward the street, where more comics, the Mummers closest to the original carousers, the least organized, the most spontaneous, and the most numerous on New Year’s Day, strutted by.

“And the Fancy Division is second—next?”

“Yes. The Fancy Clubs, the ones with the frame suits.”

“Which means Vincent will be on soon, then?”

It was like talking to a child, except that the real child was less of a pest.

Mackenzie pulled a paperback out of his pocket, looking up only when a new group approached, and sometimes a second time because of the quality—as in excellent or horrifying—of the band hired to accompany them. The Comics and Fancies are allowed to have music played—but only on instruments not used by the String Bands. The combination of bongos, bells, and whatever else was left, was often less than pure delight.

Nonetheless, Karen, mouth half-open, eyes wide, watched a very young boy done up as a stylized Harlequin. His small suit was a mosaic of spangled diamond shapes that made him look like a fluid stained glass window topped by a glittery cap. “I would like to do that.” Her voice was hollow; she sounded like a possessed baby in a horror movie.

“It probably looks like more fun than it is,” I said. “It’s even colder out on the street, the suit’s heavy with all that stuff sewn on it, and they still have a long way to go before they reach the judges’ stands.”

“I would like to do that,” she repeated in her lovesick, mesmerized voice.

No wonder. The splendiferous boy glittered and sparkled. He wasn’t bundled and huddled on the sidelines. He was the center of attention, a star, making merry, dancing to the music. High on his life and not yet, presumably, on the spirits that reputedly kept his elders warm this winter’s day.

“Yessss,” Karen said.

My sister would probably never let me see her daughter again. I was supposed to support the idea of a Main Line life, beige and tailored, not one featuring feather boas and golden slippers.

Mackenzie was less entranced. “Wish they’d speed things up,” he said.

“Why? Does the Mardi Gras rush by at Mach speed?”

By way of answer, he took a tissue out of his pocket and blew his nose. “This is on TV,” he said softly. “The whole thing. We could go home, light a fire, make a pot of coffee, snuggle on the sofa and see it. Or better still, tape and fast-forward it. Make them strut double-time. One turn and twirl per man allowed. It’s not like you’re takin’ notes or doin’ anythin’ you couldn’t do at home.”

Guilt, guilt. Didn’t he understand that my hands were too cold to hold a pen? “You Southerners are hothouse flowers,” I said. It wasn’t a rational answer, but it was my only counter-argument to his irresistible idea of being comfortable.

But just as I felt on the verge of retreating, the first Fancy Club’s banner car arrived. Not Vincent’s club, however. People applauded as they sighted the sea of approaching figures, hundreds of undulating feather-trimmed jewels.

I, too, felt a rising excitement. I hoped I never became too sophisticated to be dazzled by the pure extravagance of the spectacle.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Karen announced. “Bad.”

“We’ll have to hurry,” I said.

“Don’ I wish,” Mackenzie said. The speed of the parade had not picked up, which was lucky, because it felt a very long time making our way out through the crowd. “Excuse me, excuse us,” I said repeatedly, weaving through the now-deep throngs. Mackenzie remained at the barricades, holding our space. After we’d tripped over dozens of feet and annoyed countless spectators forging our way out and around the corner, we waited in line near urban outhouses rocking in the wind. And despite the distance and bluster, we could hear the pleasant cacophony of the music. I kept one ear tuned to it, trying to tell if a new group was nearing.

The music was temporarily stilled when Karen had completed her task, so on our way back, we stopped for hot pretzels with mustard for all, but mostly for Mackenzie as a peace offering.

We munched, stomped feet, and waited for the next group, timing the wait with puffs of frosty breath. Mackenzie, with no subtlety, looked at his watch. “How about lying and saying you sat through the whole thing?” he asked behind Karen’s back.