The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (56 page)

About a week after the killing, Charles Curley visited me in my
Pullman suite.

"Can we talk, Mabel?"

I stood away from the door, not particularly caring whether he
came in or not. He did, and though I can't say for sure whether I offered him tea or coffee, to the best of my recollection I didn't. We sat in my living room. It was a horrible mess, papers everywhere and dirty dishes on
the coffee table, and because I was known for being such a neat person it
was a mess Charles Curley noticed. He looked around, uncomfortable.
Then he cleared his throat.

"Mabel, I was talking to John Robinson this morning. He'd heard
about your efforts during the outbreak and said you must be a real
trouper."

I was noticing a stain on the wallpaper above Curley's left shoulder, not because I had any inclination to clean it but because its shape
was curious.

"Mabel, he told me he's put you on John Robinson paper. He says
we've wasted you here, which is true, and that it's high time someone
made you a star again, and that someone's going to be him. He says
he's promoting your arrival like you were the second coming. He's
going to personally ensure you have a comeback."

I stared at him blankly.

"You're going to be a star again, Mabel. You hearing me?"

"Yes," I answered. "Was there anything else?"

A month or so later, I caught up with the John Robinson show somewhere in the south: Georgia, I seem to remember, or maybe across the
border in Alabama. I was thirty-eight years old, and everything I
owned fit in a single steamer trunk. Soon after, I started getting
acquainted with the Robinson cats, who like all show animals preferred
work to lollygagging. It didn't take long before one of the Bengals, a
wiry specimen named Khan, was leaping through the double-flaming
hoop. Along with Boston and Beauty, my Ringling twolings, I now had
three cats who knew the trick; with one more I could send them all
through in a continuous circle, a solid ring of black-and-orange
through a tunnel of flame. Not long after that, Pasha took her first
nervous steps along a single thick rope stretched taut, and I knew in no time I'd have a wire walker. The only problem was me. Here I was, the
first person in the history of the world to teach these tricks, and I didn't care. For a while I thought it was the neurasthenia talking, and that
one day the fog would lift and I'd be mightily impressed with myself. It
didn't happen.

What did happen was I started hearing Art's voice in the back of
my head-Flash, it said, flash, da~~le and ra~~mata~~-and it was this
voice got me to thinking. One day in late February, I put my cats in the
training arena and I signalled Boston through two hoops and while he
soared through I figured why not? and I watched it sideways. What I
saw was such a surprise I could barely catch my breath. Looking out the
sides of my eyeballs, I did see beauty, but I didn't see it in Boston. What
I saw there was hours and hours of rewarded behaviour. What I saw
there was science. But I did see beauty in the way the other tigers were
all sitting on their pedestals, with the same posture and the same proud
tiger expressions, all facing in the same direction, not caring whether
they got a piece of meat and not caring whether I yelled "Good kitty!"
but just up there, exuding true noble tigerness. They weren't doing it
to please me or an audience or anyone else. They were doing it for
themselves.

That day, I dropped the hoop tricks and the wire-walking trick
and started mixing the Ringling cats with the John Robinson cats. Over
the next week, there were some minor flare-ups though nothing serious. Mostly I wished Art could've seen it: they were like streams of
orange and black, their green eyes like stones catching light. I began to
think of my display as ballet rather than a cat act, and instead of doing
idiot stunts like ball rolling, I had them move around the steel arena in
swirls, in patterns. As I stood in the middle of the arena, the cats would
flow around me. I taught them snail patterns, figure eights, waves of
movement, all of it a pure ode to Art which I figured was the least I
could do. I had them sit in pyramids so unusual in shape they really
weren't pyramids at all-more like shapes created by tiger. I brought down a gramophone and became the first big cat trainer to use music in
a display. Sure enough, the cats learned the score and took their cues
from it, so that after a while I barely needed my voice or my buggy whip
to trigger the next movement. Mainly I acted as a centrepiece, my blond
Eton crop a place to look when the rubes didn't know where to rest their
eyes, and believe me when I say that was a startling way for a cat act to
work. It got so I started thinking the ultimate act wouldn't even have the
trainer in the ring (and though there were a thousand reasons why this
was near impossible, it was what I was working toward). Course, word
got round I'd whipped together a new kind of tiger display. One day
John Robinson himself came down to the training barn and asked to see
what he was taking on the road. I geared up the player. Afterwards he
stood there, staring straight ahead, cigar puffing and looking fat. Also
not saying a word. Later that day, I caught up to one of the managers
and asked him if the boss had said anything about my act.

"He did. Said it was wondrous. And that he wished he'd seen it
in someone else's circus."

I debuted the act on July 26, 1927, in Toledo, Ohio. After the peanut
pitch, the matinee started with a spec called "King Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba," which they billed as "A Massive and Exotic Spectacle
of Ancient Days." Display number two was a polar bear act, flanked by
unrideable mules getting ridden. Display number three was dog acts.
Number four was ponies. Number five was tumblers doing a knockabout.

Then: the largest group of Siberian, Royal Bengal and Sumatran
tigers ever assembled in a circus arena, presented by the incomparable
Mabel Stark. I entered the ring, alone as always, blond hair glimmering,
one hand on my hip and one hand holding a whip. This confused the
rubes, for there wasn't a cat in sight. I stood under the spotlight just
long enough for them to get fidgety and bored. The orchestra started
up. And as it played, Old Dad, the cage boy, lifted the tunnel door and the cats filed in, and with sixteen tigers it wasn't hard to make it look
like a river of tawny fur flowing into that arena. They formed a giant
snail-shape pattern with me in the nexus. Was a change in the music and
the tigers started moving around the arena in circles, the smallest ring
and the biggest ring moving clockwise, the tigers in the middle ring
moving counterclockwise. After the audience had gotten a good long
eyeful of this the tigers took their seats, though instead of each one
going directly to his own pedestal they filed in from two sides, leaping
from seat to seat, slowly filling in the pyramid like black-and-orange
liquid filling a vase. I even had two tigers share the pedestal at the summit, something that wasn't supposed to be possible seeing as tigers are
so territorial. I held the pyramid through a swell of music, and then
with nothing more than a tilting of chin I had the tigers forming the
sides of the pyramid come down and do a simultaneous rollover, first
one way and then the next, each cat so close he was in danger of rubbing the fur off the cat beside him. When they were done, they
reformed the pyramid in time for my finale: with all sixteen tigers on
their seats I turned my back to them and lifted my arms in the air, and
as I lifted my arms in the air each and every one of those tigers sat up,
in unison, just because they all wanted to be looked at. Believe me. Was
beauty at its most honest, whether you looked at it sideways, frontward
or through slits in the back of your head.

The orchestra crescendoed and I waited for the applause and it
was: respectful. At most, hearty. My throat box went achy. The cats
were already filing out through the tunnel. As I stepped outside the
steel arena I had myself a comforting thought: maybe the small house
was to blame, for if there's one thing a crowd does is breed excitement,
and it occurred to me vacant seats might've caused the rubes to miss
what was going on in the ring.

Display number seven was the aerial show, featuring most of the
girls who'd seashelled their chests during the opening spec. Then came
display number eight, performing camels in rings one and three, with the all-new John Robinson fighting act in the centre ring.

Back then, he went by the name Capt. Terrell Jacques, though
later he'd poke an eye out with his own whip and change his name,
becoming the famous one-eyed Terrell Jacobs. His act was a complete
steal of Beatty's, the one wrinkle being he used four black-maned
Nubians instead of lions and tigers mixed. Was a drum roll, and
Jacques swaggered in with his animals, all of whom looked like they'd
bit into something bad at lunch. What followed was an excess of
snarling and charging and air swipes and pistol discharges. The lions
fought so much among themselves I understood why they all had scarring on their snouts and foreheads. It took all eight minutes for Jacques
to get his cats seated, though after a second and a half they came charging off the pedestals so he flung open the cage door and hurled himself
to the tanbark like he was dodging shrapnel on the beaches of
Normandy. Then he stood, not as drenched as Beatty would've been
but close. For a few seconds, he pretended to be humbled by the neardeath he'd just faced. Then he bowed and the lights came up on the
rubes sitting on the risers.

Only they weren't sitting. Standing, they were. Standing and
cheering and giving an ovation.

We played a few more shows before heading into Canada via Detroit
and making our way northeast along the St. Lawrence. It was cold and
wet the whole time and everyone got tired of shivering in the mud. You
can imagine how I was feeling. In a word, distractable. Mine was the
kind of act that needed constant polishing, and I confess there were
days I was just too heavy feeling to squeeze in extra practise. After a
couple of weeks, the tigers stopped filing into the steel arena in that
beautiful snail pattern; instead, they started to look like commuters filing into a train. My concentric circles stopped moving concentrically,
and when the tigers bumped into one another there were little fights I
barely had the energy to break up. One day in a town called Cornwall, Ontario, I was feeling particularly foggy. Midway through my display,
I forgot where I was. To get my attention a cat named Sheik, who'd
been beaten by a previous trainer and carried a meanness in his bones,
came up and ran his claws down the right side of my uniform. Wasn't
a bad wound, the costume taking most of it, though it looked bad and I
could hear the rubes draw breath. Sheik roared, and it was clear he was
fixing on finishing the job when he noticed I wasn't showing fear or
concern. Not one smidgen. I was just standing there, looking at the
wound as though it belonged to someone else. This chilled him, and he
stepped back into the confusion of tigers circling around me, though as
he did he looked back over his shoulder and glared, which was his way
of saying Next time.

That afternoon, I got word from John Robinson he liked how I
was developing my act.

The weather. Wasn't the driving rain that helped me murder Art
Rooney but the chilling wet misty kind that gets in your bones and
refuses to go away. It followed us all through eastern Canada, into
Quebec and round the bend into New Brunswick, where the mist
turned into actual rain, hitting the ground and turning into a wet haze
that rose up frigid. A quiet fell on the lot, people sticking to their bunks,
though when they did go out they looked hunched and miserable.
Management ordered a new shipment of rubber boots, and they turned
out to be just as leaky as the ones they replaced. The paraffin sealing
the canvas started to soak off, the big top springing leaks. There were a
lot of colds, and people feeling blue. One of the spec girls, a darty-eyed
thing who suffered from real daffiness and not just everyday circus
daffiness, started complaining she saw leprechauns, playing in the
damp, fearsome ones with sharp teeth. The next day she was given a
train ticket home.

Sometime in late May, we crossed back into the United States at
a place called Houlton, Maine. As usual, we were held up for hours, the border officials combing the train for gypsies, opium takers, fugitives
and distempered livestock. Finally they let us go, having arrested a
cookhouse helper who turned out to have plugged his wife somewhere
in Mississipi. We all hoped the change of country might stop the rains,
as if rain clouds pull up at borders too.

A day later, we pulled into Bangor.

Finally we had nice weather, sunny and hot and sticky as a Danish,
though with all the rain of the past few weeks the fair grounds were mud
and nothing but. The guy-out elephants kept getting stuck in the earth,
and the workingmen kept losing their boots. The big top steamed. By
the time the tent was up and the cookhouse serving coffee, it was after
six in the evening, management furious the matinee had been cancelled.
Everyone else was tired and hungry, including the animals.

My cages pulled up just moments before the show began, so
instead of going to the menage where the cats would've been fed and
watered, they got lined up directly behind the arena tunnel. A blind
man could've seen the cats were in no mood-no surprise, seeing as
they'd spent a full day on wet bedding. They were growling and displaying teeth and trying to swipe each other through the cage bars. I
went on anyway. Fact was, I was eager.

Once inside the steel arena, I signalled Old Dad to send in the
cats. They filed in looking slinky and tough, heads low, panting and
barking because mud was getting between their claws. Sensing a melee
was about to break out, I didn't cue the orchestra; instead, I called,
"Seat," and when this didn't work I called it again though louder. One
of the dumber cats, a female named Belle, settled on the wrong seat and
of course that seat belonged to my mean cat Sheik. Seeing this, Sheik
blamed me, and he came up and gave me a swipe on the left leg that
wasn't in any way a warning: his claws tore through bone and pretty
near took the leg off above the knee. I dropped like a sack. When I got
up, the left side of me felt wobbly, like it couldn't be trusted.