“I wouldn’t want to barge in on your family situation. Isn’t it delicate?” I ask. “You know, on the home front.”
“It’s just me,” he says. “Edie died three years ago. Pancreatic cancer.”
“Edie,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” And then, just to underline the fact that George hasn’t been in my life for many years, I add, “That was your wife, I take it? Edie?”
“Yes, yes,” he says. “Do you want a drink? Celery with cream cheese?”
“Um, no thanks.” I’m angry now. Had I expected him to be more contrite? What happened to Marie Cultry? “Tilton wants to see you,” I say, hoping it will sting a little. “I mean, I have vague memories and saw you briefly that one time. But Tilton, well, for her you don’t really exist. And Eleanor has had some recent health problems.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” I say. “She’s, you know, Eleanor.”
“That’s what I always liked about her.” He smiles warmly.
“Are you drunk? If you’re drunk, I can come back later.”
“No, no. Sober as a church mouse, more or less.”
“How would you feel about coming to the house?” I ask bluntly.
“With Eleanor there? She’d hate the idea. I thought you’d all hate the idea. Persona non grata!” Chauncey runs to the other side of the yard, barking at a squirrel. “Chauncey!” George yells. The dog doesn’t listen.
“Tilton doesn’t leave the house much, but I can probably get her out, for this kind of thing.”
“Doesn’t leave the house much? You mean, like Harriet was?”
I shrug. “I guess. Can we not go to a Steak ’n Shake this time?”
“Of course not. Jesus!”
Chauncey’s still barking. George yells the name again. His loafers are worn at the top, over the big toes, which protrude from his shoes ever so slightly, perhaps because no one has loved him enough since Edie died to help him keep his toenails clipped. Is this my future if I leave Ron? Long toenails?
“Your mother,” George says. “She has a presence in the world! I’ve always known that I’d be able to feel it when she died. Not a blackout—just a dimming of the lights.”
He swirls his Scotch, takes a sip, winces. “I wanted to stay in it, you know, but she wouldn’t have it. I might have been able to get partial. Weekends or some shit. But that would have killed me, seeing you being torn apart again. I was forced to become otherwise engaged.”
He’d wanted to stay in it? “What about after I turned sixteen? You knew I wasn’t under her thumb anymore.”
He stretches out his hands, mea culpa. “What could I do?”
“Edie,” I say. “I get it. It was delicate. And it’s been delicate with her dead too? Three years now? Do you know how I found you? A Google search. A couple of seconds. Why haven’t you tried to get in touch?”
“What would we have to talk about?”
“We’re talking now,” I say. But then the conversation stops. I look around his yard, the leaves in the pool, the tall brick house. “You never had any intention of trying to make this right. Did you?”
George squeezes his forehead with one hand. “I can wear a suit and tie. We can do dinner. I clean up nice.”
“Well, it’s got to happen quickly,” I tell him. “I’m leaving town soon. I’ve got a life to return to, I think. Either that or I have to make one up, which will be time-consuming. This is how we would have talked, I guess, if we’d worked this out sooner.”
“I don’t really know what you’re saying, what you mean.”
“And you’re problematic for me on many levels,” I say.
But then, almost as if he’s actually responding to a fatherly instinct, he reaches over the chain-link fence and puts his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t know he was capable of it. “Your mother is going to pull through,” he says. “She isn’t going to die. It’s not her style.”
“We’re all going to die one day,” I say flatly.
And he pulls his hand back and holds his glass with his fingers knit. He looks at the deep end of the pool, at Chauncey nosing the nearby shrubs, and then back at me, as if I’ve hurt his feelings. “Don’t tell the collie,” he says. “They’re a sensitive breed.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Tuffy
Harriet
I never met Mrs. Dobish. Mr. Dobish said, “She’s not right, not right in the head, and it’s not her fault. Not a bit.” The subtext was that she’d driven herself mad—in circles—in the Motordrome with a lion in the sidecar. Not a problem. I was already not right in the head.
The lion should have alarmed me, but I was past alarm. Born dead, brought back to life, deadened, brought back again…I couldn’t fear injury or death, teeth or claws. I’d been blindsided by Eppitt’s disappearance. Any notion that this job was a strange turn for my life to take went unnoticed by me. I had no eye to recognize it; in this way, I saw no better than the milky, half-lidded eyes of Isley Wesler’s invalid mother.
The lion was named Tuffy. He had an incomprehensible girth, massive paws, and a thick rope of tail. More than three hundred pounds of him, and yet he seemed to barely touch the earth. His mane was coarse but the thick wrinkled fur covering his knotted backbone was soft. He’d been born and raised in captivity and treated so roughly growing up that by the time Dobish got him, Tuffy was submissive and, as Dobish put it, easy to boss around with the promise of some meat. Tuffy and Dobish worked together with the same resignation.
Dobish taught me how to ride a motorcycle out in a field, then on the streets of Wildwood, and finally in the circular hold of the Motordrome. One day I showed up, and Tuffy was already locked in the sidecar.
Dobish gave me an old apron, told me to raise it up behind my head and stand tall. “Look him in the eye,” he whispered. “And talk to him.”
“What does he want to talk about?”
“You can tell him anything you want. He’s better than a priest like that. Just use a firm voice. Say it all with conviction.”
Dobish was right. I rode in circles, confessing with great conviction to a lion. No one could hear over the roar of the engine what I was saying, and so I was honest. You know what I said by now—all I was holding on to. Guilt and more guilt. I loved that lion because he took it all in, and when he roared—so loudly I felt it in my own ribs—it wasn’t an admonishment, but a recognition of my suffering. He understood suffering. Wearing a strap-on bowler and bow tie and sitting in a sidecar, the lion was forced to deny his true self, as it goes.
The Motordrome was a wooden, circular pit. We drove in circles, nowhere else to go. I wore lipstick and Mrs. Dobish’s tight pants and a jacket with lots of hooks and eyes. (How long would it fit? At some point I was bound to start showing.) I also pulled on a pair of high shiny boots each day and carried a riding crop. I was part doll and part lion tamer.
When Tuffy roared, the crowd screamed—even the men. They taunted him too. But their faces were blurs, a pattern of quick pulsing color over our heads.
Often dizzy, light-headed, I vomited a few times.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I was the one with the giant girth, the one who wore the strap-on bowler and didn’t seem to touch the earth.
On breaks, I made the rounds through the boardwalk. Families were gliding down the giant slides and zipping around in Custer cars. Fake guns popped round after round in a shooting gallery. I loved to idle near the Live Bunny and Bird Village, where children pawed at the mesh cage. The brightly colored birds paced the little walkways and picket fences, squawking loudly while the bunnies pressed their ears flat to their heads and hid beneath the bridges.
The African curios exhibit had no Ota Benga; he was dead. Instead there were shrunken heads, spears, and monkey skulls.
I would take my time at the live monkeys. Unlike Tuffy, they drove their own cars on the Monkey Speedway. The summer before, thirty-five of them had escaped, and it was said that the town called in Boy Scouts to gather them.
r /> I passed the tunnel of love, called Ye Olde Mill, and the Ferris wheel that, like every Ferris wheel I’ve ever seen, desired only to pull up its stakes and roll out to sea. Fishing boats that doubled at night as moonlight cruisers glided on the horizon, like distant bulbs. Glenn Miller’s band played at the Ocean Pier. I walked past, heard the bass, the horns, the shivering cymbals, the drums.
Major C. Nowak, the thirty-five-inch-tall policeman, greeted people in his small cop uniform, while Mario Lanza was discovered on the electric trolley cars. Still just a kid named Cocozza at the time, Lanza would sing the upcoming stop in a sweet tenor. I heard him once. If you hear something like that, you never forget it.
The girly shows, the ruckus, the beer gardens, the fortune-tellers. Freaks, in one way or another. And I was on display amid all of them. Margaret Shipley. Unlike the marathon dancers, I was alone in my exhaustion, no one to hold me up.
Time marched on. Summer wore down. A chill popped into the night. The town atrophied. Shops closed up, and the beach emptied out. The trolley switched to an abbreviated schedule. Meanwhile, I started to feel bloated. Mrs. Dobish’s outfit was getting taut.
And then one day I noticed a man following me. He was overdressed for the boardwalk. He sipped colas and kept his eye on me. I thought it was my imagination, as if I wanted Eppitt so badly that a man had appeared. The wrong man. But there he was. I also feared he wanted to kill me because of something Eppitt had done. I thought of the Black Hand, the mafia, the war over bananas, docks, laborers with cleavers. Was someone going to light two sticks of dynamite under my cottage—which wasn’t even mine—and blow it up? Did he want the money in the hidden box? I would have given it to him, but I didn’t want him to know that I’d noticed him at all.
I’d still know him, if I saw him today. Wiry, small. A chin that nearly curled upward. Sunken cheeks. He’d eat from folded napkins while he followed me. He ate so quickly and angrily—his cheeks puffed like gladiolus bulbs—followed by large gulping swallows, that I feared he’d swallow his own tongue. I hoped for it too.
PEGGY PEG-PEG
One night that fall, after the last show of the season, I was in the dressing room. I was still barely showing—it wasn’t something someone else would notice—but it was getting clearer to me. I’d heard that first pregnancies in particular could remain hidden for months, but still the costume made me claustrophobic. The changing room was a little closet with a mop, a bucket, and bleach. I stripped quickly and threw on my dress.
Mr. Dobish knocked. “Man here to see you.”
I’d given up on Eppitt appearing again. I was sure I would be Margaret Shipley for the rest of my life. As for the man who’d been following me, he didn’t seem the type to come calling.
I opened the door, and there stood Isley Wesler, dressed the same way that Eppitt had said he’d dressed in the pool hall the day they’d first met—in a full-length coonskin coat—though it was too early in the season. I hated Isley Wesler, and hadn’t realized how much until this moment. But he was the one who might bring Eppitt back to me, so I also felt like throwing my arms around him. Dobish was standing there too, wringing his apron, darkened by dried blood. He’d fed Tuffy recently.
“Sweetheart!” Isley said, all smiles. “Look at that hair!”
I was sure he was here to tell me that Eppitt was dead.
“We were just talking about a friend Mr. Wesler and I have in common,” Dobish said. “An important friend who made your job here possible.”
I was surprised to learn that Isley Wesler himself wasn’t the mutual friend I had with Dobish. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“Ramagosa,” Dobish said. “The king. Who else?” Ramagosa was the king of the boardwalk. He owned everything.
“A friend of Ramagosa,” Isley said, clapping Dobish’s shoulder. “That’s a friend of mine. You too, right, Peg-Peg?”
“I’m thankful for the job,” I said, though the mention of Ramagosa had made me nervous. I wanted news of Eppitt, but not in front of Dobish, of course.
“So! Show me this lion,” Isley said. “I’ve been to Africa. Big game.”
I doubted this. Dobish led us to the back lot, past large bins, oil drums, a row of mini cars under a tarp. Tuffy’s cage had thick iron bars and just enough room for him to pace. He was lying down, his haunches worn, his fur patchy.
“That’s a real beast,” Isley said.
“A real beaut,” Dobish said. “But sweet as sweet can be.”
I bent down and looked into Tuffy’s eyes—wet, goopy, maybe a little infected. Tuffy looked at us as he always did—a gaze filled with both love and sorrow. He had no other expression. Tuffy understood loss. All he had was loss.
“He gives me the shivers!” Isley said.
“Really?” I said. “After all the big-game hunting?”
Isley gave an insulted sniff.
“He ought to give you the shivers,” Dobish said. “He could gut you with one claw.”
“I’ve got a car,” Isley said, looking around, his coonskin coat flapping at his boots. “You want me to give you a lift home, Peg-Peg?”
“I can take you home, Margaret,” Dobish said. Clearly, he didn’t trust Isley.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll take the ride.”
Isley’s car came with a driver, but not Gerald, thankfully. We sat in the backseat. I ran my hand over the leather. “Where’s Eppitt?” I asked.
“He’s on the mend.”
“Why isn’t he here?”
“Part of the deal. I worked it as best as I could. He’s alive, Harriet. That’s the good news.”
The driver kept tabs on all of the car’s mirrors, nervously.
Isley tapped a cigarette on the window. We were passing stately old Victorians now. “It’s a good thing you two never made it official!”
“Made what official?” I said.
“The marriage,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Your pact at the feeble-minded school?” he said. “C’mon, Peggy, Peggy, Peg-Peg! Eppitt told me everything.”
The driver stopped for a passing trolley car. Dark profiles glided past.
“Just tell me what you came to say, Isley.”
“Someone within the circle of influential people to whom Eppitt is now indebted—as they kindly didn’t kill him outright—had an indiscreet relationship with a woman. She got in a family way. The actual father of said child is already married. So Eppitt? Let’s just say he could do this favor, and it would make everything right again.”
I turned from Isley and leaned my head against the window. We bumped along past a row of small houses. Someone was walking a pony down the street. I thought of my mother’s hand against mine just before she died. I thought of myself on the porch—wild with grief. “Does he love her?”
“You can’t ever see him again.”
“Does he love her?”
“He has to.”
“What about me?”
“Well, you had a nice run here. But now Eppitt and his wife are getting set up in town. They’re very family-oriented, these people. Don’t make a mess, you know? Don’t cause any trouble.”
I clamped my hands over my ears. “Shut up, Isley! Shut up!”
“I don’t care to be spoken to in that manner!”
“I didn’t like you telling Gerald to rape me.”
“That was a misunderstanding. I didn’t tell him to go after you like that. I wanted him just to scare you—for your own good, so you’d know how serious it was. Did you bite him? Is that true?”
I closed my eyes and spoke in a low voice. “I won’t believe anything unless I hear it from Eppitt.”
Isley grabbed my wrist. “Don’t fuck with this, Harriet. They’ll cut you up and feed the pieces to that lion. This marriage has to be pristine! Completely clean.”
I ripped my wrist from his hand and rubbed it. The car stopped in front of the cottage, all its windows dark.
“I have some things for
you,” I said. “Inside.”
“Go ahead and get them.”
I walked quickly to the house, to the bedroom, got down on my knees beside the bed and felt for the strings, my hands shaking. When I stepped out of the house, there was Isley’s pale, chubby face in the rolled-down window. While walking slowly to his car, I again saw that wiry man, lit by someone else’s headlights.
“Why’s he following me?” I said to Isley. “He’s been following me for a week.”
Isley glanced in the man’s direction. “Never seen him before.”
“Does the driver know him?”
“Nah,” the driver said.
I assumed they were lying. I handed Isley the blood brothers pact. “Here.”
“Jesus. We were kids once.”
I also had a pact with Eppitt, the one marked “E. C. and H. W. 1913. Marriage.” I unwound the thread—old and worn from decades in Eppitt’s wallet—and pulled until it broke in half. One half I gave to Isley, and the other, the one with the tape, I kept for myself.
“Give it to him,” I said. “I’m only asking this one thing.”
Isley took the string and shoved it into his breast pocket. I wondered where Eppitt, the great illustrious hider, had tucked away his thin red ribbon. Sterbe nicht.
“I want to report that you’re going to be a good girl,” Isley said. “That you’re not going to try to contact him. That you’re cooperating.”
“Or what?”
“Or they’ll send you an unpleasant message.”
I leaned down and clamped both of my hands on the car door. “I could do anything! Tell them whatever you have to.”
Isley stared at me a moment, coolly. “Your choice.” He shouted at the driver, “Let’s go!”
The driver put the car into gear and drove off.
I looked down the street at the man who’d been following me. Hands in his pockets, he was slouching, his eyes hidden by the brim of his hat. My heart was pounding in my throat and ears. “Hey you!” I shouted.
He looked up.
I ran toward him. Was I allowed to run? A mother-to-be? “What do you want?” I shouted.