The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (26 page)

But if I did show you the photo, you'd see a man, handsome in a
well-worn sort of way, smiling, eyes grey blue, skin reddish, moustache
bushy but not ridiculously so, and I guarantee the first thing you'd say
to yourself is, "Jesus Murphy. That mascara?"

I DIDN'T SEE OR HEAR FROM Louis ROTH FOR THREE YEARS.
Even then it was out of the blue, a letter arriving from the
Great Wortham Carnival, a tiny grift show with a menage I'd thought
had up and died years earlier. He wanted a divorce. With three husbands to my name I had no qualms thinning the crowd a little.

The letter went on to propose we sign the papers on May 20,
1920, in Portland, a date coinciding with the arrival of the Barnes show.
We'd do it around eleven in the morning, between set-up and matinee,
before the crowds.

I cabled him back, agreeing to everything.

That morning I awoke early (nerves) and gave Rajah a kiss on the head
and squeezed the folds of his ears together, a gesture that tickled him
and made him generally agreeable. When he came awake I scratched
the downy fur of his underbelly and told him Mama was busy that day
and he'd have to go to his c-a-g-e; was a word he understood even when spelled, so he arfed and made himself sad-eyed and limp in the tail.

"Shoo," I said, reinforcing the point, "you just shoo," and here he
lifted his head off his forepaws and moved off the bed hind end first.

After leashing him I walked him all the way to the lot where he
ran around while waiting for the workingmen to set up the menage.
When he'd had enough, I treated him to some brisket and brushed him
and gave him a big kiss on the snout before putting him in his cage.
Around ten o'clock, Al G. told a gilly driver to take us into town. Ten
minutes later, we stepped out in front of the address Louis had given
me. It was on the wrong side of town, the buildings dirty and the sewers open and a pair of ragamuffins already tugging on Al G.'s arm and
bugging him for pennies. He handed them quarters and said, "Well,
Kentucky, good luck."

"You're not coming?"

His face widened into a grin.

"People to see, Kentucky. People to see...." which was a statement
that shouldn't've surprised me for he was without Dan or Miss Speeks
and Portland was a town he knew well (it being a source of cheap hay
and all). He wandered off, whistling, a tall-backed man in a nice suit
sauntering into a coal-black tenement and if you want an image summing up Al G. Barnes that's about as good as I can do.

I went inside. The steps were rickety and one of the vestibule lights
was burnt out. I was afraid to touch anything, for dirt was everywhere
and back then there were some pretty misguided rumours concerning the
way you get diseases common among the poor. (Scabies, for one thing,
and conditions that make going to the bathroom a horror.) After a bit
of poking about I found the office I was hunting for, on the second
floor just down from the stairwell. Here I opened a door and found a
waiting room that was surprisingly clean and well lit.

I also found Louis Roth, flipping through a paper.

He gave me the thinnest of smiles. In three years his face had
gotten wrinklier and slim to the point of gauntness, gauntness being something that looked bad on a man like Louis: the skin on his face had
to stretch to accommodate his pail-shaped jaw, the effect being skulllike and a little eerie. His thick dark hair had thinned a little and gone
grey at the temples, something that must've bothered him for he'd
always been so vain about it.

"Mabel," he said.

"Louis."

He stood, took my hand and shook it like we were about to sign
a land deal; he even brought his heels together in a click before retaking his chair. Frankly, I wished he'd kissed me. It would've made the
whole thing less weird.

Instead, we sat, staring at the door to the lawyer's office, listening to the dull hum of a ceiling fan. If Louis was thinking what I was
thinking it had to do with the way one minute two people can be close
enough to clean the inside of each other's animal wounds and the next
minute be worse than strangers. It was a maudlin thought, so I passed
the time dwelling on it, for I've always considered maudlin to be one of
the truer ways of feeling.

After a few minutes the door opened and a rumpled little bowling
pin of a man with muttonchops invited us in and handed us the papers.
I'd seen a copy already, Louis having sent one with his letter, and I was
fine with the stipulation we both just walk away with whatever we'd
brought to the marriage, no money or property or ill will changing hands.

"Any questions?"

We both said no by moving our chins. Louis then asked, "Iss zer
anysing else?"

The lawyer shook his head. Louis put his fountain pen back in his
jacket pocket and stood and straightened his jacket and said, "Goodbye,
Mabel. It vas nice to see you again."

He marched out. The sentimental fool in me felt a twinge at the
sound of Louis's boots smacking the floorboards; I suppose I was
thinking if his boots still had the sound of authority there was a better than even chance Louis still carried it around somewhere inside him
as well.

After a few seconds, there was nothing left to do but shake the
lawyer's hand and thank him for his time. I did so, and he informed me
I owed half the fee, which seemed fair so I paid it and thanked him
again and left. When I made it to the street, Louis was nowhere in sight.

The whole thing had taken about five minutes. Both Al G. and I
had figured it would take a whole lot longer, so we'd told the gilly driver to come back in an hour and a half. With time to kill, I caught a taxi
across the railway tracks and had myself a soda float in a nice department store. When I finished my soda I ordered another, my weight or
lack thereof having always been a problem. After that I browsed
through magazines and talked to people who recognized me from my
picture on the posters the advance agents had put up all over town.
Then I left the store and walked for a bit, feeling happy, for I was discovering that a feeling of freedom sets in after a divorce that's not in
any way unpleasant. If only I'd had the same opportunity with hubbies
one and two.

Was a nice warm day with a nice warm breeze. I took my kerchief
off and let my blond hair ruffle up, and when I passed a store with a
bright blue dress I liked in the window I went in and it fitted perfectly.
Because the shop owner was a circus fan he insisted I take it free, so
long as I'd let him put a picture of myself in the window along with a
sign saying "Mabel Stark the Tiger Queen Shops Here."

In other words, I was feeling good, something that normally
makes me nervous but for some reason didn't that day. I walked until
the town started to turn seedy, at which point I hailed a cab and took it
back to the meeting place, where Al G. and the gilly were both waiting.
Al G. was in a good mood, and by this I mean a genuine good mood and
not the good mood he conjured when trying to get what he wanted
from others-he was whistling and smiling and talking sports with the
driver and teasing me about being a free woman. He even told me I ought to smile more often, on account of how pretty I looked when I
was happy. To emphasize this sentiment he put his hand on my knee
and gave me a quick little fresh-bread squeeze, which was the first time
he'd tried something forward with me in ages. I laughed it off and
pushed it away and wasn't the least bothered.

"Mabel," he said, "why is it you and me have never been together?
It's unnatural."

"It's not unnatural," I said. "It's just plain sanity."

This made him laugh hard enough his eyes went into slits, the
wrinkles caused by countless hours of midway sun popping up like
desert crevices. We were both feeling mirthful and younger than our
actual ages-me about thirty, Al G. maybe forty-five-when we pulled
into the lot and Dan came running.

He didn't say a thing. Just gave Al G. his something's-wrong
face, a face Dan wore at the best of times but was particularly pronounced that day. Al G. jumped from the car and went off with him.
Ten minutes later, Dan was marching up and down the midway with his
hands cupped over his mouth calling "John Robinson, John Robinson"
which is circus slang for blowdown weather's on the way so we better
get the show over with quick.

Strangest thing, though. I looked up, and there wasn't a grey
cloud in sight.

Still, orders are orders, the circus being more like an army than
most troupers care to admit (albeit one that doesn't discriminate against
felons, drug takers, dwarves, communists and arse lusters). "The
Conquest of Nyanza" was cut to shorter than ten minutes, just a quick
circle around the hippodrome and we were all back through the blue
curtain. The clown segment was reduced to one pie in the face and one
tiny car sprouting three dozen chubby arms and legs. We omitted the
aerial monkeys and the rube parade and the fabulous bucking mules. Al
G. also killed the spec in the middle of the show-an African hunt with
Spanish stallions and Indian elephants and brown-skinned girls with jewels in their navels and red dots pasted to the middle of their foreheads. Lotus the hippo, the Blood-Sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ,
rode a cart instead of doing his normal lumbering walk around the tent.
No doubt there were other cuts too, though I forget what they were. I
only know when it came to the show's finale I stayed under Rajah for
just as long as it took him to do his business, my having substituted a
white leather uniform for a black leather uniform so as to avoid the
embarrassment I suffered the first night Rajah started using me as a
rubbing post.

After a quick announcement, the after-show was cancelled and
we were done. Two hours and twenty minutes packed into less than one
and a half. By the time I got Rajah back to the train, the workingmen
had taken down the cookhouse and pie car and had made good headway
with the big top. Still there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and as the gillies
started getting poled onto the train, we all stood around speculating
that the real problem was probably some woman trouble Al G. had got
himself into. Maybe a pregnancy or another wife we didn't know
about, Al G.'s weakness being not so much his love of women as his
love of marrying them as a means of being accommodating.

We left Portland before four in the afternoon, a day early, in a
state of high confusion. To fill time before the Tacoma date we made
an unscheduled stop in a place called Cape Disappointment,
Washington, where we did an impromptu night in a field about eight
miles from town-without sponsors or paper up or newspapermen
lured with free barbecue there were no more than four or five hundred
in the crowd. In fact, there were so few people the start was delayed
twenty minutes, all the troupers walking around scratching their heads
and saying, "What's it look like tonight?" when the answer was as plain
as egg on toast. It looked bad.

Was lunacy, this, lunacy pure and bug-eyed and top-of-thelungs raving. The only explanation was we were hiding out, an explanation supported by the fact no one had seen Al G. or Dan. Even the stars were disguised by a sky thick with grey, mashed-potato clouds,
making everything look shadowy. After the performance we loaded
the gillies like normal. In the middle of the night, with everyone
asleep and my arm thrown over Rajah's shoulders and Rajah snoring
weakly, the train sailed right through Tacoma, a town known for
having good crowds and reasonable cops and nice restaurants
besides. Imagine our consternation when we all opened our eyes and
threw open our Pullman curtains and instead of seeing buildings and
lights and the offerings of a city we looked into drizzle and low shitbrown mountains dotted with settlers' cabins. That was looking out
the left side of the train. When we looked out of the right side we
saw potatoes. Saw them for miles and miles and miles, which
would've been fine except a potato field's about as interesting to look
at as a potato itself.

The place was called Sandpoint, Idaho. Though I never saw the
actual town, I heard it was one of those places that isn't a really a place,
just a name given to a naked intersection so folks could get mail. We
played to exactly 180 rubes that afternoon. Each and every one of them,
children included, was chewing tobacco. Afterwards a team of workingmen earned cherry pie by cleaning spittle off the stringers.

We were there two more days, a Sunday and a Monday besides,
the words unscheduled holiday circulating through the cookhouse and
pie car and blue car. Was around then a rumour started that Al G. had
gone mad with either syphilis or stress or a combination of the two. It
wasn't hard to believe, for Al G. was still holing up in his car, seeing
nobody and keeping his mouth shut, behaviour that was normally
against his nature. Dan, meanwhile, turned away any and all visitors.
The closest I ever came to Al G. in those weird two days was seeing
Miss Leonora Speeks strolling down the connection, hips swaying and
cheeks ablaze with colour. She was smiling too, suggesting what she and
Al G. were up to in that fancy rail car wasn't pinochle.