5
Santa Monica, California * June 3, 1934
The carnival consisted of a ragtag group of performers that had found a measure of success by setting up shop in the echoing shadow of the Santa Monica Pier. They were a true vestige of the Depression, a company of players starved for a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep; their desperation to survive manifested itself in the way they dazzled their audiences with a riotous, nearly unhinged hilarity. During the afternoons, the sun beat down brightly, and a wet, briny breeze blew in over the festivities.
There were several jugglers, a fire-eater, and a sword-swallower. A strongman lifted various weighty objects and pumped a woman over his head like a barbell. A crone dressed as a Gypsy read fortunes. Another woman danced on stilts, swathed in a diaphanous costume that fluttered in the Pacific breeze like a moth’s wings. In the evenings, they performed by torchlight, everything around them glowing with new magic. Every so often the Santa Monica police would come around, insisting that the carnival perform its entertainments elsewhere, but the carnival had proven itself resilient, taking down their tents sewn from bedsheets and disbanding, only to reassemble not more than an hour later in the same place. They made their money by performing for nickels and dimes, but also through confidence games: There is nothing a man will spend more on than the chance to bet on his own good fortune—especially when he is down and out.
It was in this carnival that Earl Shaw came to eke out a living. He did not perform anything so obvious as card tricks or the old shell game wherein cups swirl on the table in mad figure eights and winning is an utter impossibility. In fact, Earl Shaw did not appear to “perform” anything at all. He went in for a more elegant approach and gave the people what they really wanted: a chance to buy a miracle in a bottle.
There was a special zeal for health products in California. Perhaps it was something in the air, something in the sunshine and water. In earlier years, people had come to Los Angeles looking to reap the health benefits, hoping to cure tuberculosis or stave off rheumatism and asthma, and something of the old desires and beliefs persisted, even as the city built itself up and forsook the soil and orange groves for asphalt and palms. Even as the Depression took hold of the nation—or perhaps especially when the Depression gripped the nation—the people of Los Angeles stubbornly dreamed of becoming better, healthier, more fabulous versions of themselves. Earl Shaw was intimately acquainted with the California philosophy of health: He understood all too well the impulse to be rejuvenated, reborn, and remade entirely—shedding an old, dumpy, failed self in order to shine again as the phoenix rises from the ashes. And, having a keen grasp of this brute desire that stirred in the people who populated that particular state, Earl Shaw endeavored to make his living by capitalizing on it.
Ava and her mother made it to the carnival later than they’d expected; Cleo had slept in that morning and lazed about during the early afternoon. Now late afternoon slipped quickly into dusk. The sky had been slightly hazy all day long, making for a brilliant and bloody sunset over the Pacific. They spent the first hour gaping at the dancer on stilts, the jugglers, the fire-eater whose flames began to glow electric as the sun slipped into the sea. Eventually, they heard a man hollering suavely from a caravan with the voice of a true salesman. They drifted in his direction, boats called to the shore.
“Witness the true miracle of Pandora’s Wonder Tonic!” he cried. “Health, beauty, and happiness will all be yours after a week of taking Pandora’s Wonder Tonic! Just a spoonful twice daily, and in seven weeks you will see incredible results! Cataracts? Cured! Gout? Gone! Blemishes? Banished! Makes your nose slimmer and your eyes brighter! Turns back the clock ten to twenty years!”
He paused and held up two photographs. “A skeptic at heart? Just lay your eyes on the evidence of the effects of the true miracle that is Pandora’s Wonder Tonic!”
Ava inched closer, curious, and squinted at the two yellowing photographs. One was of a grimacing old lady with frowsy hair, lesions on her face, and pustules on her lips. The other was of a young girl, fresh-faced and smiling.
“That’s meant to be the same woman in both photographs?” Ava asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Of course!” The man swiveled his head and took in the precocious ten-year-old girl with a quick head-to-toe gaze. After a fleeting pause, his shiny pink lips broke out in a knowing smile. His white teeth flashed and he reached a hand up to twist the ends of his black moustache.
He turned to look at Ava’s mother, and his eyes lit up as he took in her dark, silky pin curls and shapely red mouth. “I see you’re raising quite the young critic, madame,” he commented. He took off his hat—a somewhat ridiculous old-fashioned top hat with a silk band—and gave a dapper bow. “Unless you are, of course, her older sister . . . a fact which, now that I look at you, I can see is quite possible. Please, mademoiselle, pardon the mistake!”
Ava’s mother laughed and gave a warm smile.
“No need,” she said. “You got us right the first time. This is my daughter, Ava. And my name is Cleopatra.”
Ava frowned. Her mother only introduced herself with her full name when she wanted to impress someone; why she wanted to impress this loud huckster of a man was beyond Ava’s comprehension. When he heard the fanciful name, his eyes widened in appreciation.
“What a fitting name for such an imperial beauty,” he said.
Ava watched with irritation as her mother’s cheeks flushed.
“I humbly submit to you my own name. I am Earl Shaw.”
He bowed to each of them in turn, a pair of smaller, more cursory bows, like punctuation in a sentence.
“I don’t believe they’re of the same woman,” Ava interrupted the introduction, having resumed squinting at the two photographs.
“Ah, yes—I’d forgotten! Our young inspector!”
He leaned over and put his hands on his knees to address Ava directly. This irritated her even more. She was not the sort of child who took comfort in condescension.
“That’s the power of the tonic, girl! Pandora’s Wonder Tonic! I tell you: It works such amazing miracles, people can hardly believe what they’re seeing! It’s quite understandable you have doubts. Why, none of us ever knows what to make of a true and utter miracle, do we? Defies the imagination!”
“Well, that’s for certain,” Ava snorted, still glaring hard at the photographs, almost as though one of the two ladies had come to life and whispered something offensive to her.
“Ava!” her mother snapped. “Don’t be rude to the kind gentleman!”
Earl waved this off.
“Nonsense,” he said. “I have dealt with cynics set in their stubborn, dismissive ways before; by now I do believe I have developed something of an immunity.”
He hesitated and looked Ava’s mother over once more.
“But perhaps your miniature critic would be more reasonable on a full stomach. Might I ply the two of you with dinner?”
He licked his lips. Ava wasn’t sure if this was because he was contemplating dining or was thinking of her mother.
“Dinner?” Ava’s mother blinked.
Was this tonic salesman asking to take her mother on a date? Ava had watched her mother turn down impossibly handsome actors and powerful producers; she was secure in the knowledge that rejection was coming.
“Yes, dinner!” Earl persisted. “Unless, my dear Lady Cleopatra, there is . . . ahem, a Mr. Julius Caesar or a Mr. Mark Antony in the picture who might take my invitation as an affront?” Earl said, probing.
“No,” Ava’s mother said, blushing again. “There isn’t.”
“Then it’s settled. I’ll shut the shop right now. I’m taking you both to the Brown Derby!” Earl added, seeing he would need to up the ante. “My treat.”
Ava looked between the two of them, stunned. The Brown Derby was a famous restaurant in Hollywood. Ava knew her mother had always wanted to go, having read in the newspapers that Clark Gable was a regular. Somehow Earl Shaw had found his way straight to her mother’s Achilles’ heel.
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mother said now, softly, shaking her head. “We only just met you. We couldn’t let you take us out or pay for our meals.”
There now—that variety of response was more familiar. Ava sighed an inward breath of relief. But then she watched as Cleo bit her lip, then understood that her mother was in fact tempted by his invitation and already reconsidering.
“Nonsense!” Earl exclaimed, brushing off Cleo’s refusal in one deft, sure move. “You can and you will! Fret not, for you are in good hands: I happen to be a most honorable and upstanding host. Why, my dears, have you ever seen a more honest face than this?” He pointed to his visage and grinned, his white teeth flashing from under his dark moustache.
Ava thought she absolutely had seen a more honest face, but held her tongue.
That was the first—but certainly not the last—they saw of Earl Shaw. He took Ava and her mother out for more meals at more restaurants, until one day Earl took her mother out for dinner alone. The two of them returned with a bag of leftovers for Ava and a slightly scuffed gold ring on Cleo’s finger.
“Earl and I are going to be married!” Ava’s mother announced proudly. She gathered Ava into her arms and squeezed her daughter tightly. “Isn’t that wonderful news?”
A protest bubbled up in Ava’s throat but stopped at her lips when she saw her mother’s radiant face.
A week or so later, the three of them went to city hall. Once the ceremony was complete, Earl gave Ava a pocketful of rice and instructions to throw it at him and Cleo as the two newlyweds stood grinning together on the city hall steps. Her mother wore a simple white cotton dress and laughed a lot, while Earl’s hair gleamed with even more pomade than usual. Ava threw the rice with an unsure, halting hand.
“You have a stepfather!” Cleo said, squeezing her daughter close as the three of them had their photograph taken. “Aren’t you glad?”
Glad wasn’t exactly the word for how Ava felt. Cautious might’ve been a better word, but Ava reminded herself: Things hadn’t been so swell before Earl came along. For now, at least, her mother was laughing.
The first change came when Earl insisted they all live together in his caravan—which, as he pointed out, offered “rent-free” accommodation. Earl was correct about the lack of rent, but the caravan was hardly fit for a family. An old, rickety wooden contraption, the wagon dated back to the Civil War and consisted of one long, rectangular room, divided lengthwise by a curtain. Two very narrow beds that folded down on lengthwise planks hung from the side of either wall. The straw mattresses were ancient, and over time had turned damp and hard. If Earl and her mother wanted privacy, they drew the curtain, but as this was a poor partition, Ava found herself taking long, rambling walks in the evenings, or hauling a bedroll outside to sleep on the beach under the stars.
Exactly five days after they moved in with Earl, he turned to Cleo, claiming to have had a sudden epiphany: An attractive woman and her comely daughter would likely sell Pandora’s Wonder Tonic better than he could alone! Soon enough, Ava and her mother found themselves spending most of their time working the tonic stand on the beach by the pier. Ava kicked herself for not guessing that this was Earl’s plan all along. All told, though, Ava felt it wasn’t so terrible. She’d always been an industrious child. And besides, they were in the middle of the dog days of summer: The beach wasn’t such an awful place to be.
But Ava hadn’t given much thought to what would happen when the carnival pushed on. As fall approached, she learned Earl intended to travel with it, and expected her and her mother to follow along as well, living out of the caravan. The final pretense of Ava’s old life—a public school education—was dropped altogether. She’d always done well in school; she was angry, but was quickly reminded she had no say. Earl insisted her gain was far greater than her loss.
“What does she need school for, anyhow?” he roared in a loud voice to Ava’s mother one evening, as if Ava weren’t on the other side of the thin fabric partition and plainly able to hear every word. “Why, the world is her oyster now—she’s got the best school of all: the School of Life! She’ll travel to places she’s never been! No education better than that, I guarantee . . .”
They traveled with the carnival from Los Angeles to San Diego, then over to Phoenix and Tucson and Albuquerque. Ava watched her skin turn unusually tan and freckled under the strong desert sun. Living in the caravan essentially meant a life of camping, of not knowing when your next bath might come; it felt like her skin was constantly coated in a layer of dirty, sandy residue.
In Santa Fe, their circumstances changed a second time when Earl came home late one night after winning a very lucky hand of poker. Drunk and merry, his heavy footsteps rocked the caravan as he climbed inside.
He roared to Ava’s mother, “You won’t believe it, my dear! I really hit it big this time!”
Ava’s mother smiled, happy to see him happy. “How much did you win?” she asked in a cheerful voice.
“Not how much but what!” Earl replied. “Come with me!” he said. He grabbed Cleo’s hand and led her through the little fairgrounds where the carnival had set up shop, to a dusty desert field. “There!” He pointed.
Ava, who had followed along as Earl excitedly dragged her mother to the empty field, blinked in the direction of Earl’s pointing finger. It was night out, but a bright, flat moon hung in the sky. As Ava looked, she thought she saw the shapes of two biplanes.
“Airplanes?” Cleo asked, bewildered.
“No more of that Pandora’s Wonder Tonic business for us!” he exclaimed with the sudden force of a man who’d just made up his mind in that very moment. “Why, we’ll break off on our own! Travel as we please, selling airplane rides to old Farmer John and the little missus. There’s money in these airplanes, I tell you!”
“I don’t understand,” Ava’s mother replied, laughing nervously and shaking her head.
“A flying circus!” Earl said. “I’m talking about a flying circus!”
“But . . . do you know how to fly?”
Earl waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll find a couple of pilots, pay them a cut of the profits,” he said, then added as though thinking aloud, “A small cut, that is . . .” He walked over to the airplanes and began to circle them, rubbing his chin and thinking of the best way to plumb every penny he could from the two mechanical wonders. Together they were, without a doubt, the largest windfall Earl had ever chanced upon.
Ava and her mother drew closer, both of them trying to get a better look at the biplanes. In the moonlight, she could see one was red and the other was blue. CASTOR and POLLUX, their names glittered in gold lettering. They seemed so still and heavy; Ava stared at them, slightly awed to picture them flying high in the sky.