Summer 1935
Wisconsin
The second week of July, everybody got paid. It was like a miracle. No one could explain it, anyway, because it wasn’t as if crowds had increased substantially, or costs decreased at all. Mrs. Sax had come down on the train from Sturgeon Bay to Manitowoc—another small miracle, as Mrs. Sax hadn’t been to a show in years—and right away there was cash for everyone, which Tebow handed out joyfully from a table he’d set up next to the bunk car in the railyard, drawing thick black lines through old IOUs in the ledger and writing in the new amounts. He asked everyone to take only as much as they truly needed, so Cecily took just five dollars out of the two-hundred-plus she was owed. Had the Saxes—again, it would have to be by some miracle, in these hard times—sold their farm? No, that couldn’t be the answer: Where would the circus stay during the winter? What would everyone eat, without the mountains of vegetables Mrs. Sax grew and canned?
But no one knew what the answer was. (It certainly wasn’t Life magazine. Tebow had plain stopped talking about that, without ever even asking Cecily for her set of copies of the snapshots.) And so, for a couple wild hours, it was said “for sure” Sax & Tebow had been sold to Cole Brothers—the rumor’d been flying far more than Cecily knew—and the announcement would come any minute. Cecily’s stomach whirred as she wondered—was she going to be let go? Was Isabelle?
But, before the matinee, Tebow announced instead that there had “absolutely not” been such a sale, and there was not going to be, if he had things his way.
He still wouldn’t explain where the cash had come from. A new silent partner, people agreed—it was the only possibility. Cecily decided that might as well be true; she’d lost any sense of being in the know, as Isabelle hadn’t spoken to her since the third of July, since Cecily’s injury.
Ever since Lucky had kissed Cecily, that night in Superior, he’d been distant, blank-faced, and wouldn’t talk to her at all, apart from the barest exchanges of necessary information. He still helped her at meals, and helped her on and off the train, and on and off of Prince. Still, Cecily had been beside herself, thinking she might never reach him again, not even from inches away.
So it was that, on the day of Mrs. Sax’s arrival, Cecily was balancing on her crutches outside the cooktop, bereft, watching him walk away, when Mrs. Sax came up and said, “Cecily, I admire you for what you’re doing, but I do worry about you.” This was the first time in at least three years that Mrs. Sax had said a word to Cecily, having long ago pegged her as an influence on Nonie and Ted that could not be abided. (It was true that Mrs. Sax considered the entire circus an influence on her children that could not be abided; she had forbidden Nonie and Ted from traveling with it even during their summers off from school, insisting she needed their help at home.)
Cecily figured Mrs. Sax was talking about the new tricks Cecily had been trying to learn with Isabelle to save Sax & Tebow. Or else the fact that she was continuing to perform on her injured knee. “Oh, well, it’s important to so many people!”
Mrs. Sax’s mouth was thin. “I just hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.
The next night, in Sheboygan, Lucky set Cecily down on the vestibule of the caboose and stepped back from her. It was late, and dark—not a lamp burning, even, in the caboose. “You all right now?” he said.
She blinked at the impassiveness in his eyes, which settled on her in a way that made her hopelessness feel heavier than ever. “I’m fine,” she said. She situated her crutches under her arms and turned to go inside, opening the door.
“Cecily,” he said quietly, and she stopped and turned to look at him. She could see the seriousness of his face in the shadows. “You know I’m trying to protect you, right?”
“I don’t need protection,” she snapped.
“You do need it. You don’t understand.”
She tossed her hair. “I don’t want to understand. Why would I?”
He leaned in, speaking through clenched teeth. “Could get us killed.”
She cocked her head. She didn’t really believe that was true—at least, if the world was the way she wanted it, it wouldn’t be. And she thought that vision of the world was an ideal worth standing up for. Anyway, if she’d learned anything in her fifteen years on earth, it was that all of life was a high-wire act regardless. The way she’d felt when Lucky kissed her—like nothing had ever been so real—was a feeling she’d risk anything to have again, to hold on to.
That night in Superior, she’d thought he felt the same. But seeing his tense face now, she realized—maybe not. Maybe he didn’t actually love her enough to stand up for anything with her. To step out onto the wire.
She looked up, searching for the truth in his eyes, but she could see nothing in them beyond the screen of his caution, his nobility. She hated to think he would let his pragmatism rule; that he would hide from her, from possibility, when he had said he knew they belonged together. “What’s life for, Lucky, if all you ever try to do is survive it?” she snapped, and she crutched her way inside, shutting the door behind her, starting to cry.
If it was really true that he didn’t love her enough, she was doomed to be Jacqueline DuMonde forever, inhuman and sparkling, riding in circles in the dust.
The next morning, in Port Washington, as she dressed, she tried to keep her spirits up. He could still come to his senses! She knew she’d been unfair not to appreciate that he was trying to protect her—maybe he just needed a little more time!
But when he didn’t arrive at the usual hour to fetch her for breakfast, she knew he was gone for good. She struggled to hop down the caboose steps, unable to keep her tears at bay, knowing that he would never kiss her again; that she would never again in her life feel the way she’d felt when he did. She crutched straight over to the stable tent and Prince, not wanting anyone to see her crying.
At least Prince was happy to see her, nuzzling her hand, seeming to understand she needed comfort. Only to confirm the worst—that Lucky was really gone—she slid her hand under Prince’s bridle.
There was a note! She brushed away her tears, yanked it out and unfolded it. In familiar thick strokes of pencil, it said:
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
(Langston Hughes)
Her joy was instant, soaring. In the sand of Prince’s stall, where no one but Lucky would see it, she used a stick to draw a heart with a musical note inside, knowing he would know that it meant, Yes. Please. Thank you.
“Someday, I want to go back to Harlem.” They were in Prince’s stall in Racine two days later during the matinee, and Lucky was speaking in low tones as he curried Prince. He’d said nothing to her about the Langston Hughes poem, but had simply gone back to talking to her the way they’d talked before, and Cecily’s relief at having this particular order restored to the world was immense. Also, strangely, absent the pain of Lucky’s defection, she was far more bothered by the pain in her swollen knee, which she was icing now, sitting off to the side on a hay bale. She had managed again not to fall during her act, but, truth was, it all took a toll: the trying, the pretending, the hurting. “And I’m going to build me an empire.”
Sudden delight washed out Cecily’s pain, and she found herself craving, more than ever, to know everything he knew, to feel everything he felt. She grinned. “What kind of an empire?”
He laughed. “‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’”
“What?”
“That’s a poem by Wallace Stevens. Do you know it?”
“No!” She laughed.
Cecily did not know much about sex. She had seen Isabelle and Tebow doing it that one time, and Isabelle had, much later, said she guessed it was a nice thing to do with someone you loved, but that Cecily should never, ever be casual or mercenary about it, the way the peep-show girls were, or let any boy pressure her into it. “Remember, you don’t need them. They’ll try to make you think you do, and they’ll try to make you do all kinds of things on account of it. But. You don’t need them. You’ve got me and Tebow and your circus family looking after you, and if you ever start to feel like there’s some boy you need, I want you to tell me about it, and I’ll remind you that you don’t. Capiche?”
But this had been two years ago or more, and, given the way Isabelle hated Lucky already, not to mention how she wasn’t currently speaking to Cecily, Cecily was not about to confess that she was beginning to feel she needed him. She and Isabelle had, of course, on account of Cecily’s injury, stopped rehearsing their tandem act, and Isabelle didn’t even keep her things in the caboose anymore; didn’t even step foot inside.
Cecily lay awake nights—her knee hooked over a pillow to elevate it at Lucky’s recommendation, though that didn’t really seem to lessen the pain—wondering about all this. What had she done that was so wrong? What could she have done differently?
More important, though—what was need? (And why couldn’t she shake this maddening feeling that she needed Lucky? Even when, regardless of what he might have felt or desired when he’d kissed her weeks ago, he seemed to want only her friendship now! She thought of what he’d written in his notebook: Bittersweet. Would I give my life to reach you? Was it really true that loving each other could get them killed? But it made no sense to her that such a pure, good thing could lead to harm! Everything in her railed against the notion, even as she fought against lingering desires that she could not seem to control.)
It was driving her crazy, too, that everyone in the circus seemed to understand about these things, except her. (Was need one and the same with love? Or simply with desire?) Janey with Ralph Robinson. Mavis with Ron. Little Red with the Bearded Lady, Lorraine LaPointe. (“Love’ll make you do crazy things,” Little Red had said sadly one day at lunch, after Lorraine had climbed to the highest aerial platform in the center of the ring and threatened to jump, on account of something Little Red had said to her; he’d had to kneel in the dust shouting apologies for ten whole minutes and finally ask her to “make it official” before she would come down.)
Whatever the particulars that Cecily didn’t understand, what she did know was that all these people had made things happen in their lives, hearts and bodies tumbling. It was true she didn’t know of any performers who’d fallen in love with a roustabout, but, in the circus, everything was bound to happen sooner or later, even if it hadn’t happened already. Besides, every couple in the circus was an odd one. A trapeze artist and a horse groom; a bearded lady and a three-foot-tall man; a tiger tamer and a clown. She had to think, in the end, she and Lucky could be the same.
Under the sheet in her bunk, her knee propped up, she gazed at the snapshot of Lucky that she’d moved from inside Pride and Prejudice to the book she was reading now, A Farewell to Arms. She traced the lines of his face and prayed to her Saint Jude card, without knowing exactly what she was asking for. (More, she would think, in a prayer that was almost wordless. Please. Love.)
She had only had ice cream three times in all her life, and, even if she didn’t have the experience to know exactly what it was she was asking for, or hoping to receive, she did know that it was Lucky who’d made her realize she was tired of being denied the sweet, human things about living—and that they all seemed to reside now in him; that he was the one with the power to bestow them.
In Kenosha, when Lucky set Cecily down on the vestibule of the caboose, she said, “Tell me about your empire again.”
He grinned. “‘Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’”
She grinned back. Couldn’t help it; the feeling she got when he smiled was a happiness as sheer as a cliff face. “What does that mean?” she said. “‘Let be be finale of seem’?”
He thought for a moment, looking at her with soft eyes that turned her inside out. “I think it means that you make up your mind how things are, and then that’s how they are.”
“Oh,” she said, and, without thinking, she reached for his hand and caught it.
He flinched at first, but quickly gripped her hand in return, even took a step closer. But when he spoke her name, it was with his teeth clenched. “Cecily.”
She shook her head, rejecting the rebuke. “I know you think I’m a fool, Lucky, but I don’t care. If loving you makes me a fool, then I’ll be a fool my whole life.”
He blinked, then, and his whole body seemed to relax. To surrender like a sigh. For a moment, they swam in each other’s eyes.
“Let be be finale of seem, Lucky,” she whispered, squeezing his hand tighter. “If things could be exactly the way you wanted them to be, how would you have them be?”
He swallowed, blinked again. He squared his shoulders, his jaw. He seemed to be making up his mind. “I love you,” he blurted, surprising her in a way that warmed her all through, and his voice was steady, though she could feel him trembling. “You drive me crazy, and there’s never a minute I’m not thinking about you, there’s never a minute when I don’t want to be beside you. I think you’re the only light in this whole dim, forsaken world.”
Her heart thudded. She remembered the fireworks on the Fourth of July, the blooms of brightness raining in the dark sky. She moved closer to him. “I think the same things about you. I love you, too, Lucky. I’ve been lonely my whole life, and now I’m not lonely anymore. Not when you’re here, I’m not. Loving you means more to me than anything.”
A slow smile broke across his face. He gazed into the distance for a moment, gripping her hand firmly in his, then looked down into her eyes. “‘Let be be finale of seem,’ huh?”
“‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,’” she said, then reached with her free hand to click open the door to the caboose. She looked up at him with a question.
He glanced at the cracked-open door, then back into her eyes. “What’s life for, Cecily?”
“You,” she said.
He nodded in his quiet, serious way and said, “You,” then followed her inside.