But when Jenny descended from on high, she was often made aware that she wasn’t the only one who’d grown disenchanted with the Carnival of Fun. There was talk in several quarters that the circus was hexed. It was a notion Madame Hortense corroborated in her readings, assuring La Funambula that the Hanged Man card lay athwart her immediate future.
“The hanged man I saw already yesterday!” Jenny snapped at the stronglady, who had, come to think of it, not one womanly feature and was maybe, she surmised aloud, “what they call a morphodite?”
As she spoke Professor Hotspur, having come to their cabin door holding flowers, turned turkey red and beat a retreat. Then seeing a bangle-sized tear stream down the cheek of Madame Hortense, Jenny relented. Nevertheless, she threw the cards overboard, though they blew back in her face like in that story she’d read under Bonkers’s tutelage, the one in which the little girl falls down a rabbit hole.
A week or so later, just south of Herculaneum, the boiler blew on the Yellow Wen. In the hope of reaching Cape Girardeau before morning, the rousters had allowed the pressure to rise beyond what the safety valves could contain. The needles on the gauges spun like teetotums and the middle boiler exploded, launching the pilot house like a missile over the wooded shore. The packet was blasted to splinters amidships, sparks from the resulting fire raining like phoenix feathers over the midnight river. There was no time to lower the lifeboats, leaky at best, and performers and crew alike jumped overboard from the decks just ahead of the flames. Some, already alight, sizzled in the current, while those that weren’t pulled under by the suction from the sinking vessel clung to crates and tea chests amid the burning debris. Set adrift, the Floating Palace continued careering downstream with the menagerie scow wallowing behind it until it ran aground on a sandbar. The scow plowed into the rear of the Palace, causing the cages and stalls on board to be smashed apart, releasing in turn a stampede of terrified animals, many of whom promptly drowned. But in the years following the disaster, hardshell religionists from the nearby towns might spot in the surrounding scrub a camel or rhinoceros, a Barbary horse or a Nubian lion with a nettle-snarled mane, and believe that Noah had unloaded his cargo thereabouts.
Jenny, who’d started life in America after having been fished from the wreckage of a steamboat, realized that she’d come full circle. But that didn’t mean it was time to go home. Instead, she thanked Madame H. for saving her life, as she had the lives of a dozen others, and parted company with her for good. (The stronglady had elected to join what remained of Professor Hotspur’s pachyderm act on the vaudeville circuit, where she became known as “the Human Bridge” over whose chest the elephants routinely paraded.) Along with a clutch of survivors from the Carnival of Fun, who’d clung to one another since the calamity, Jenny took up with the Great Southern Circus, which was no more than a flivver-drawn mud show. Tracked down by a scout from the Sells-Floto Spectacular, however, she was offered a contract and once more given a spot above the center ring. The sadness that dogged her in the back lot and the pie car and invaded her Pullman berth still couldn’t touch her on the wire. But the dreams that seemed to belong to someone else continued to disrupt her equilibrium during her more death-defying stunts. Especially the dream in which the earth is propelled through space by means of a paddle wheeclass="underline" when its blades are sideswiped by the wheel of heaven, which turns in the opposite direction, they interlock and both wheels come to a grinding halt.
14 Artist in Clover
Mine is a wild and savage heart that cannot be confined by this airless dungeon, was what I was thinking, as I sat ensconced among the soiled cushions in Avrom’s office chair. Still dopey from having read late into the previous night, I was hidden from view of the customers (of whom there were as usual none) by the books stacked on top of the broad metal desk. Outside was Main Street, whose heyday had come and gone, its commerce bled by suburban shopping centers to which the white citizens collectively flocked. They’d abandoned downtown Memphis, leaving it in its decline to the poor colored populace whose prophet had come to the city to lead a march. The march would be composed of the persecuted and dispossessed, and shouldn’t I — who paid such lip service to championing the underdog — be in their number? But that would involve leaving Avrom’s deep-cushioned chair where I was nestled so comfortably, and despite my wild and savage, et cetera, I was at peace for a change.
I’d read last night with that intensity that obliterated the distinction between being inside and outside the book. I attended the marriage of Twinkl Saltzman and Firpo Belzer under a canopy fashioned from the giant Og of Bashan’s foreskin. I inspected Jakie Epstein’s scrapbook in which the revenants in his group portraits, photographed with a Buster Brown box camera, figured more prominently than the living subjects. I kibitzed a debate between Doc Seligman and the pharmacist Mendel Blen concerning the virtues of natural versus unnatural miracles, and the means of measuring the half-life of love. It broke my heart when Katie and Pinchas Pin pulverized one another in their erotomania, though after that I confess the narrative began to sputter a bit. At the point where the municipal workers come with their crosscut saws to level the upstanding roots of the inverted oak, the story seemed to limp to a standstill; it receded from eyewitness experience back into a fable I could scarcely believe, and released from credulity, I fell asleep. I woke in the morning at the rear of the shop with a sense of tranquility I hadn’t known since my pill-popping days. When had I stopped popping pills?
Just then the telephone rang, which came as a surprise; I couldn’t remember ever having heard a phone ring in the Book Asylum and wasn’t even sure where the thing resided. As the ringing continued, I located a jack in the wall and followed a wire that trailed under a bale of sheet music and led to a dusty pedestal atop which sat an ancient ebony instrument. Lifting the receiver as gingerly as you’d defuse a bomb, I heard a voice it took me a second or two to identify. “So you found me,” I conceded, because I’d assumed that in Avrom’s shop I was as good as incommunicado.
It had after all been some thirty-six hours since I’d spoken with Rachel, whom I admittedly hadn’t tried to contact, since after sending me packing it was up to her to make the next move: I had my pride. And while I didn’t realize how much I’d missed her till that moment, I nevertheless perceived the call as an interruption.
“Were you lost?” she inquired, only slightly sardonic.
“Since the Creation.”
“Listen,” ignoring my emphasis, “can you meet me at the B’nai B’rith Home across from the park in an hour? There’s something I want to show you.”
Ordinarily a summons from Rachel would have spurred me to immediate action, but her peremptory tone — she spoke as if nothing was altered between us — left me feeling frankly mutinous. Moreover, the shop itself seemed to hedge me in, its shelves quiescent as a library at the bottom of the sea: Prospero’s drowned library which you had to dive fathoms to read. Above the surface all bets were off; uncertainty was the order of the day. But there in the depths of Avrom’s shop I’d developed the knack of breathing the submarine atmosphere.