The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (15 page)

Catherine turned to May and watched her brother from the corner of her eye to discern when his anger had subsided. “Three or four at least. Have you ever seen one before?”

May shook her head.

“As big as you expect them to be, they’ll be bigger.
I’ve
been to the circus lots of times, so I won’t be surprised. But—”

Joseph smiled, in spite of himself. “ ‘ Lots of times’ is an exaggeration, don’t you think?”

She looked at him, a haughty expression turning down the corners of her mouth. “I’d rather walk the rest of the way than have you interrupting me every time I try to speak and ruining our good time. It is my
birthday,
after all.”

Joseph held up a hand. “Fine, fine. Never mind.” Louisa smiled. Catherine and May certainly seemed to have a few things in common.

 

 

They could smell the animals
before they crossed into Keene, the acrid aroma of manure mixed with the smell of wet fur closed into train cars. The road into town sloped up and then down again, and when they crested the hill Catherine spotted the yellow flags on top of the circus tent. “There it is!” she cried, forgetting for a moment she meant to display a veteran’s disinterest in the novelty of the day.

They descended into town and pulled the carriage into line behind the dozens of others parked outside an old barn. Joseph hopped down and circled around to Louisa, offering his hand to help her descend. Her stomach leapt when she allowed her eyes to meet his. His gaze was unflinching and he seemed to be searching her face, though she wondered at what he hoped to find there. She reached for his arm, her hands feeling constricted in their borrowed gloves.

They made their way across the field. To the left of the main tent stood an elephant, tied to an iron spike driven into the dirt. The beast siphoned water up his trunk, then extended it into the air and sprayed it across the bony ridge of his back. A cloud of flies circled the elephant’s head and it flapped its ears like giant paper fans to shoo them away.

“What a beast,” Joseph said, his eyes wide in admiration as they approached the animal. “Magnificent.”

Louisa assessed the stake: a piece of iron six inches thick was all that stood between a jolly afternoon and a stampede. But the elephant didn’t appear to be struggling against its constraints. “Look at his eyes,” Louisa said. The lashes were long and pale. “They look like an old man’s. Sad.” She wanted to reach up and touch the leathery skin, but she was afraid.

Joseph pulled the gold chain connected to the watch in his vest pocket. “If we hurry we can catch the show starting in a few minutes. Or we can go see the rest of the animals and the marvels tent first, and see the later show.”

“Now, now. Let’s go now!” Catherine said, tugging his arm toward the main tent.

He grinned and turned to Louisa and May. “What do you say?”

May nodded vigorously.

“I am happy to oblige the birthday girl,” Louisa said.

“All right. Let’s find our seats.” May took Louisa’s arm and they followed Joseph and Catherine. A crowd amassed at the wide entrance as a few hundred people streamed up the hill from Keene’s train station and the muddy lot where rows of carriages rocked slightly in the breeze. Catherine’s father had purchased four tickets for the fifty-cent seats, which offered a better view than the spots in the pit that went for a quarter. They climbed the creaking steps of the hastily constructed stands to a bench about halfway up.

“Not too much higher,” Joseph said, glancing toward the rail-less end of the row, which dropped off into the dark. “This is high enough.”

Catherine scoffed but didn’t argue. Joseph went in first, followed by his sister and May, with Louisa settling near the middle of the bench. She turned her attention to the bright center of the tent, where two men on stilts bobbed unsteadily in opposite directions around a circle that had been formed by plowing the earth up two feet high all around. One by one they lit tall torches that marked the perimeter of the ring. In the far corner, half in shadow, a steam trumpet blared out a hypnotic song.

The fidgeting in the audience subsided, and they began to clap as they heard the music. Stagehands closed the flaps at the entrance of the tent, blocking out the last of the natural light. The torches burned a bright amber. Suddenly, off to the left, Louisa saw a flash of white. A small man, dressed in a white tunic and close-fitting trousers covered all over with large red dots, ran toward a springboard that catapulted him, tumbling through the air, into the ring. His head was covered with a cap made of the same dotted white fabric and he had a large black mustache and exaggerated eyebrows painted above his eyes.

The clown stood with his arms outstretched and the quiet audience broke into applause.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and members of the colored population.” Louisa glanced toward the pit, where a small cluster of black audience members stood. She noted that none of them sat in the stands. “I am Billy, but you can call me your fool for the afternoon.”

The audience laughed. Billy turned toward the dark corner from which he had emerged and whistled. After a slight delay, a small pony cantered toward the ring and jumped over the earthen divider. The pony’s mane was long and pale, like straw.

“Folks, this is Blind Jim, my trusty steed. He is mighty faithful, but he can’t see his hoof in front of his face, if you see what I mean.”

Blind Jim pranced in a circle around the clown, then stretched out his front hooves on the ground and lowered his head in a kind of bow. The audience clapped.

“How are you today, Blind Jim?” Billy asked. The pony nickered.

“Is that so?”

The audience laughed.

“You know, Jim, I’m awful tired. What do you say we lie down a moment and have a little rest?”

Blind Jim didn’t take a moment to think it over. He lowered his weight down onto his hindquarters and then rolled onto his side. He rested his cheek in the dirt and swished his tail a few times. “That’s a good friend, Jim,” Billy said. He lay down beside the horse, snuggling against its ribs so that the horse’s left front leg draped across his shoulder in a kind of embrace. Catherine and May giggled, their hands over their mouths. A man sitting a few rows below them cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Why don’t you give him a kiss, Billy?”

Billy lifted himself up on his elbow and looked up at the dark stands, in the general direction of the voice. “What’s that, sir?”

“I said, why don’t you give your pony a kiss?”

“Is your wife there with you, sir?”

“Yes,” the man shouted. “She’s a fine woman too.”

“Ma’am,” said Billy, addressing the shrouded man’s wife, “you have my sympathies.”

The crowd guffawed. “I’m embarrassed to have to tell you this, sir,” Billy said as he scooched back into Blind Jim’s arms. “But the idea of a man kissing a pony is
ridiculous
.” The laughter roared out again and then subsided.

After the clowns succeeded in warming up the audience, a woman rode into the ring bareback, her blond hair trailing loose behind her. She waved her arms and a team of horses loped into view. They pranced according to her demands and leapt through a ring of fire one by one. Next came the jugglers and a team of acrobats who swung and tumbled from lines erected in the peak of the tent. Finally a mournful song played on the steam trumpet, signaling the start of the main event. A small man in formal dress appeared followed by his assistants, two small boys, who pulled a wheeled platform supporting a shrouded box. The boys maneuvered the platform through the opening in the ring and pulled it to the center. Each took a corner of the black cloth that covered the box and pulled as they backed away, revealing an iron cage that contained a massive tiger. The animal blinked as its eyes adjusted to the light. It stood up on four paws the size of platters and began to pace the small confines of its cage.

Louisa felt her chest tighten. May clutched Louisa’s hand and Louisa gave her sister’s arm a reassuring pat. “It’s all part of the show, May,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced. She shot a furtive glance over at Joseph. His eyes were wide, but when he turned to look at her, he smiled. “It’s all right,” he mouthed.

They watched, thunderstruck, as the man opened the door to the cage and ushered the beast out. For the next ten minutes not one breath could be heard in the tent as the audience watched the tamer crack his whip, moving in circles around the tiger. At first the animal reared up on its hind legs, growling, but soon the tamer lulled it back onto all fours, then into a seated position. The tiger lay down, resting its massive head on its front paws. At last it rolled onto its back, exposing its white belly, and purred like a barn cat in a patch of sun. The tamer took a bow and the people leapt to their feet, cheering.

After the tiger was locked safely back in its cage, the assistants wheeled it away and opened the flaps at the entrance of the tent, revealing a triangle of daylight. The show was over. The party made its way down the steps along with the rest of the crowd. Exiting was a slow process, and Catherine and May grew impatient to see the remainder of the attractions. They obtained reluctant permission from Joseph to go off on their own and flitted away as Louisa and Joseph moved through the excited crowd.

Outside they traversed the perimeter of the tent to the back side, where a smaller tent stood, the sailcloth flaps that flanked its entrance undulating in the breeze. A sign on an easel read
Martin’s Marvels
. Louisa looked up and saw that the dark cloud that had seemed so far away was now overtaking the sky. “Shall we go inside?”

A man with hair that sprung from his head in all directions like a mane greeted them and gestured to a semicircle of tables and a crowd of people moving slowly from one to the next. “Welcome, folks. Welcome to Martin’s Marvels, where you will see things that will shock your mind and disturb your sense of the natural order. Be the first of your friends to see the pig-faced lady in her prettiest dress, the world’s smallest man and his giantess wife, the ‘two-headed nightingale’ singing slave songs from her plantation in North Carolina. Ten cents, folks.”

Joseph and Louisa looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. Finally she shrugged and Joseph fished two dimes from his pocket. As they passed, the man turned his attention to a group of boys filing in at the entrance. “One at a time, now, boys, one at a time. The half-woman isn’t going anywhere—she can’t move very fast without any legs.” He chuckled. “Get out your dimes now, please.”

First they passed a table with a basket of eggs. A man held one out to Louisa. “Miss, could you tell me what this is, please?”

She looked at him, uncertain. “An egg?”

“And, if you don’t mind, where do eggs come from?”

“From chickens, sir.”

“Since the egg came from a chicken, would you not expect to find a little yellow chick inside it?”

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“Would you crack the egg open, please?”

Louisa shook her head. “The chick will die if you crack it open before it’s ready.”

“That so? ” He looked steadily at her, then at Joseph, as if to challenge him to question the next bit. He slammed the egg too hard against the tabletop. Louisa winced, then reeled as a full-grown pigeon careened toward her face. Several ladies cried out as it swerved, teetering around the tent, then circled back and landed on the table, folding its wings and pecking at the seed the man sprinkled at its feet.

“Well, that’s a dirty trick,” Joseph said. “You should be more careful.”

“I had no idea that was in there,” the man said. He winked at them and grinned. Three of his front teeth were missing, and he stuck his tongue out at them through the gap.

Louisa moved closer to Joseph and he pulled her away to the next exhibit. A perfectly demure woman sat on a throne raised above the floor on a platform. She wore a vaguely rococo dress from the previous century, made of gold and burgundy brocade, and her waist was tightly corseted so that her bosom nearly spilled out at the top in a way that seemed obscene to the ladies in the tent, though they knew from paintings in museums and their grandmothers’ stories that this had once been the fashion. Members of the crowd stood gaping at her, not because of her décolletage, but because every inch of the woman’s skin was covered in silky black hair. It sprouted from the bridge of her nose, grew in tendrils from her ears, bristled along her shoulders. When she spoke, the people standing on either side of Joseph and Louisa reeled back.

“I am Madame Clofullia. Gaze upon me,” she said, looking around. “I do not mind. I am a real woman, flesh and blood. I have a son. He is like me.” She lifted the edge of her heavy skirt on one side and a small boy emerged from its dome. He wore a dusty black suit and his face was covered with hair the color of corn silk. He removed his hat and took a bow, then stood at his mother’s side, clutching her downy hand.

 

 

“Sometimes I feel like life
is one long string of exploitations,” Louisa said. “Use or be used.” Joseph had sensed that Louisa wanted to escape the disturbing sights of the marvels tent and suggested a walk. They headed out across the open field, their steps rustling crickets out of the grass and up into the air.

“I know what you mean.”

“I listen to my father’s friends talk about their ideas of what we
could
be, how we
could
live, and I feel hopeful. But then I go out into the world. I see a man putting these poor people on display for money. I hear that our own president agrees to let new states decide for themselves the question of slavery, when he should make their entrance into the Union contingent on an outright ban. It just doesn’t end. So much needs to change.”

“I think
we
will change it,” Joseph said. “The men in your father’s parlor—and don’t misunderstand me, because I admire some of them more than anyone in the world—but all those men have done is talk and write, talk and write. Now it’s time to act. It’s going to be up to our generation to act.”