The Greatest Show Read online

  The

  GREATEST Show

  YELLOW SHOE FICTION

  Michael Griffith, Series Editor

  The

  GREATEST Show

  STORIES

  Michael Downs

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael G. Downs

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  First printing

  Designer: Laura Roubique Gleason

  Typefaces: Minion pro, text; Art Gothic, display

  Printer and binder: McNaughton & Gunn

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Downs, Michael, 1964–

  The greatest show : stories / Michael Downs.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8071-4452-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4453-4 (epub) —ISBN 978-0-8071-4454-1 (mobi) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4455-8 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS3604.O9524G74 2012

  813′.6—dc23

  2011037858

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  Stories in this book originally appeared—sometimes in different forms—as follows:

  Georgia Review: “Ania”; Louisiana Literature: “Ex-Husband, Years Removed” (as “Go Forth, Christian Spirit”); Gettysburg Review: “Ellen at the End of Summer”; Five Points: “Mrs. Liszak” and “Elephant”; Alaska Quarterly Review: “Son of Captain America”; Missouri Review: “At the Beach”; Oxford Magazine: “Boxing Snowmen”; New Letters: “The Greatest Show”; Kenyon Review: “History Class.”

  “Elephant” was republished in High Five: An Anthology of Fiction from Ten Years of “Five Points” (Carroll and Graf, 2006). “At the Beach” was republished in City Sages (City Lit Press, 2010).

  for Sheri

  and for Judy and Ed Downs

  If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

  If we should stumble when musicians play,

  Time will say nothing but I told you so.

  —W. H. Auden

  Contents

  Ania

  Ex-Husband, Years Removed

  Ellen at the End of Summer

  Son of Captain America

  Mrs. Liszak

  At the Beach

  Elephant

  Boxing Snowmen

  The Greatest Show

  History Class

  Acknowledgments

  The

  GREATEST Show

  Ania

  THEIR COURTSHIP BEGAN IN THE SUMMER OF 1936 WHEN SHE WAS seventeen and he was twenty. He worked as a logger, and one evening he came from the woods wearing muddy boots and carrying a basket of common mushrooms he had gathered as a gift for her. His hands were chapped and shy, but he was strong, and though she did not believe him when he promised to take her to America, the idea thrilled her. When winter came Ania and Kazimierz married. Soon after, they left their Polish village in a loud railcar bound for the Baltic coast, then endured endless days in the cramped depths of steer-age, and because he had kept his promise, Ania knew Kazimierz loved her. In that new land, he changed his name to Charlie and found a job in a typewriter factory; he learned English so he could teach her and the child she carried. Ania recited after him—“Hello, how are you?” and “Good-bye!”—and she thought her husband so worthy that she must love him.

  Every morning and every evening, in gratitude, Ania prayed. She lit penny candles, crossed herself, and gave thanks—for Charlie who worked one shift at the factory and another at a warehouse, for their new life away from the war just started in Europe, and later for their boy, Teddy. After each “amen,” she kissed her fingertips and touched them to the face of the icon from home, a black-and-white picture of the Blessed Mother, the shadow-faced Black Madonna of Częstochowa. Then Ania would pinch the wicks and slide into bed beside her husband. Some nights, Charlie would caress her forehead and her cheeks with callused hands that smelled of machine oil until she whispered, “No. Sleep now.”

  Ania kept the picture of the Black Madonna enshrined on a half-moon table in the corner of the bedroom and decorated with ribbons and dried flowers. She dusted the picture and the table every day and sometimes added freshly cut blooms of dandelion or forsythia.

  The family attended Mass each Sunday, and it was through the church that Ania met Mrs. Patterson, who had volunteered when the priest announced that a couple from Poland needed help adapting to their new country. Mrs. Patterson, married to a young lawyer, lived in West Hartford on a street where servants used hidden staircases, but she was not much older than Ania, and her casual manner allowed Ania to believe the food, the books, and the spare clothes were gifts, not charity. Mrs. Patterson even hired Ania to clean house, and later arranged for her to work for neighbors until Ania knew every banister, every pane of beveled glass, every marble ashtray on Walbridge Road—knew them so well they bored her. Then, what interested her were the pieces she never cleaned, such as the desk where Mrs. Patterson kept letters, calendars, and newspaper articles. Each time Ania passed the desk, she spied on Mrs. Patterson’s life.

  And then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; the following summer, Mr. Patterson enlisted. His wife threw a farewell picnic party, paying Ania a few dollars to make food and lemonade. On that muggy August afternoon the guests ran out of ice for their drinks, and Mr. Patterson’s father at the horseshoe pit was calling, “Can’t we get ice in this country anymore?” Ania searched for another block in the kitchen and in the basement, and finding none, looked instead for Mrs. Patterson.

  Dance music swung through the halls from a radio upstairs, and though Ania did not then know Benny Goodman, his “Jersey Bounce” would later remind her of that other noise she had heard as she climbed the Pattersons’ staircase, a sound obscured by the band’s mellow reeds and snapping brass. Someone crying. No, worse than that. Someone gasping—swallowing whole chunks of grief. Unable to resist, Ania crept to the open door of the bedroom.

  On the floor, in sunlight, Mr. Patterson sat holding his wife, her sobs fierce, her fists clenching bunches of his starched uniform, her face pressed against his ribcage. Ania hid, but she could not look away. Something in Mrs. Patterson’s grief seemed terrible and pure, something that reminded Ania of only one thing: how on first seeing Teddy, red and squalling, she felt as if she had touched the electric nerve where everything begins and ends, so far from this world it is nearly forgotten.

  Ania watched the Pattersons and saw nothing of herself or her husband; this surprised her and made her think of him. She pictured his face—so often surprised, so rarely delighted—and she felt neither the pain nor the love Mrs. Patterson poured into the summer afternoon, but only—and this for the first time—a bloodless pity. Later, after she sneaked away to scrape ketchup from plates, she worried that she had never loved Charlie at all, that she had only agreed to accept his passion because it pleased her, then had mistaken her decision for something more.

  The next morning she made pancakes—Charlie’s favorite breakfast. She fetched aspirin for his vodka headache and laid a hot cloth on his forehead. When he came home from the factory the following Monday, she unlaced his boots and washed his feet with a soft, warm rag. As days and weeks passed, she worked to be a loving wife, to hide her deceit and atone for it. Nights, after Teddy fell asleep, when Charlie came to her shy and wanting as a teenage boy, she fooled him with false enthusiasm, but that only made him seem a fool. She began to resent him, and though she still made him pancakes, she mixed less sympathy into the batter. She no longer pretended. Wounded and confused,
he brought home cut flowers or a pastry from the Italian bakery. Ania could think of nothing to say—there was nothing worth saying—so kept silent, and then Charlie spoke only to Teddy, in English, about baseball and the Yankees, and sometimes when Ania was in the room Charlie told the boy how fortunate he was to have such a beautiful mother. They lived this way for a few months. Then, in December—a year after Pearl Harbor—Charlie quit his two jobs and enlisted.

  When he left for induction, a gunnysack over his shoulder, Ania stood in the doorway of their apartment holding Teddy, who played with her dark curls. Charlie cupped the back of Teddy’s head with his hand, whispered in the boy’s ear. Then he stepped back off the landing, one foot lowered to the first stair, his face docile and sad.

  Because it was her duty as his wife and cruel to do otherwise, Ania kissed him quickly on the lips. He seemed startled, hurt; but then he was downstairs, and then he was gone.

  Charlie wrote long letters, addressing them to “Dearest Ania and Teddy” and signing them “With affection and love—Papa.” He included in each letter a portion of his pay. Ania answered his letters with long ones of her own, each ponderous with detail and empty of affection. But those letters took so long to write, and there was so little time now that he was gone. She gave whole afternoons to standing in lines for meat or for heating oil, and prices had risen, so she cleaned even more houses on Walbridge Road. Her letters grew shorter by a page, then by two, and then her replies became sporadic. His continued, long and intimate, describing wakeful nights with no word spoken louder than a whisper for fear of drawing fire, and daylong marches through parching heat. In one envelope he included a photograph of himself sitting on a rock beside trees that grew small and twisted. “Show this to Teddy, so I am not a stranger later,” he wrote.

  He continued to send money. When she spent it, Ania felt dirty, like a thief, and then she hated his money but had no choice. Prices rose every day. Even with Charlie’s pay, she could barely make the rent. To save pennies she took thread from old clothes to mend others. She sold her ration cards on the black market for a little extra and that way could afford meat for one meal a week. No one chastised her when she failed to drop a coin in the collection plate at Mass, but the looks of pity from other parishioners embarrassed her. She sat with Teddy farther and farther toward the back of the church until it became habit to arrive late and leave early, and then they did not go at all.

  The first time she prayed to the Black Madonna—Our Lady of Częstochowa, Our Most Chaste Queen of Poland—Ania was seven years old and her own mother had just died from fever. They buried Mama in a cemetery near the river that ran through Królik Polski, their village, and a priest came to say the words over her grave. The next day, Papa and Ania folded the church clothes of the two younger children, stuffed them into sacks, and the family started a walk that would last more days than Ania could count. It was autumn: cold and rainy, and the roads out of the foothills were thick with mud; Papa gave each child a turn on his shoulders. When any of them complained, he would say, “I know you miss her, but soon it will be better.” Now and again farmers in horse-drawn wagons offered rides, which Papa would accept, though Ania sat to the back to avoid the drivers who stared at her. “Such a pretty mane,” they might say. “What beautiful skin.” Those who said nothing frightened her the most.

  On clear nights, Papa lit cooking fires and the children slept in tall grass or in piles of hay, limbs tangled, dirty fingers in mouths, warm beneath their pierzyna, the goose-feather quilt their mother had made. When there were clouds, the family took shelter in barns damp with manure. Ania often thought about her mother and tried to imagine heaven, which frightened her, because she could only picture constant light and summer heat and all the angels wearing the same white robes.

  One afternoon, Ania saw in the distance that the road led to a field with a tower at its center, surrounded by leafless trees. Closer, she marveled at the walls that surrounded the tower—walls as tall as the trees, built from rough gray stones each as large as a cattle trough, and with wooden doors three times Papa’s height. The clouds broke, and Ania saw how parts of the tower caught the sudden light and juggled it. Only that, and she wondered whether she had been wrong about heaven; if it looked like this tower, that would be all right. She imagined her mother waiting inside.

  Papa helped them change into their wrinkled church clothes. Then they passed through the tall doors into a garden where priests walked about, then on to another building—a church. A tower bell rang three times.

  Inside the church, Ania heard birds and, looking up, saw them sweep across the radiant faces of men painted on the faraway ceiling. Papa made the children hold hands, and they walked deeper into shadows, past things that glowed and things that shined and past big, light-swallowing things. Ania could name none of it: not the drapes or tapestries, not the wooden pews chipped and polished from hundreds of years of use (prettier than the benches in their small church back home), not the mosaics of saints lit by flickering candles—but all of it seemed a gift.

  The littlest cried, and Papa lifted him, bouncing him until he was quiet. They joined a line of people waiting to enter a room. A woman chewed at her lips and bobbed, hands clasped, working beads through her fingers; a one-legged man leaned on a stick, his eyes wet, his beard flecked with crumbs; another man clothed in rags scratched his arms and chest, which were covered in bleeding sores. This was no heaven, after all.

  Ania left her father’s side to peek into that other room, but with a hiss he called her back. When it came their turn to go in, Papa again warned the children to be quiet. Hat in hand, he squatted beside them as they looked upon a woman painted on a board, her right cheek gashed twice so that wood showed behind the paint, her face blackened by smoke from the constellation of candles before her. Around her head shone a circle of light like a crown, and in her lap a boy with a crown like his mother’s waved two fingers at Ania. The woman’s nose seemed to Ania too long and her mouth too small to eat anything but berries, and she did not smile, so Ania thought the cuts in her cheek must hurt. Still, the woman’s hand beckoned as if there were room in her lap for one more, and Papa touched Ania’s back, nudging her forward.

  “Children,” he said, “Our Lady is your mother now.”

  Crossing Walbridge Road toward the Pattersons’ house through the high torch of a July day, Ania could feel the soles of her shoes stick to the asphalt. Her thighs slapped together under her skirt, and her blouse plastered itself to her back. Teddy’s small hand sweated in hers. Inside, Ania shouted “Hello” over the roar of the electric fans, and Mrs. Patterson appeared in the entry hall, a gaunt, talcum- powdered ghost clutching a damp handkerchief at her neck where her dress hung open. In the nearly two years since her husband had left, she had lost too much weight, as if grief consumed her from within.

  “Ania,” she sighed. “Nothing special today. No one will visit in this heat, except maybe Ruth Bartlett, and she’s not the sort to notice the top of the icebox.”

  “I have Teddy.”

  Mrs. Patterson paused as if considering how best to hide her concern. “You know I love Teddy,” she said, and she rubbed the boy’s head. “Just keep an eye on him, would you?”

  In the kitchen, Ania helped Teddy into a chair at the table. “No moving from this seat, Little Monkey,” she said. She lifted his hands in front of his face and shook them. “No touching, either.”

  He pouted, looking so much like his father, and Ania—sorry for Teddy and a little guilty—let go one of his hands and opened the other, tapping the palm with her finger as a sparrow pecks seed from the grass. Then she tugged at the end of each of his fingers as the mama sparrow fed her little ones, saying, “Temu dała, temu dała, temu dała …” and then, at the little finger, the bad chick got none, but instead Mama Sparrow snatched off his head—“Temu nic nie dała”—and flew away, and Ania wiggled her fingers up Teddy’s arm to his ticklish neck. He squealed, squeezing her hand between his butter-soft cheek
and shoulder.

  She swept the entry hall, dusted in the furnace-like heat of the sun-room, and polished the empty space on the buffet where a week before Teddy had broken a vase. Since then, all the Walbridge Road women looked at Teddy with nervous eyes that worried Ania, who could not leave him home, but could not afford to lose any job, either. The landlord had raised the rent again, threatening eviction if Ania did not pay, and everything cost so much …

  She rested on a footstool near Mrs. Patterson’s desk in the study, pulling her skirt’s hem high over her knees and taking deep breaths. She leaned near the desk, looking for a magazine to use as a hand fan, but there was none, only a train timetable, a letter from Maine, a blue-penciled note on the calendar: “Junior League @ 7 p.m.—circus tickets to orphans.” On the blotter, tied with string, was the stack: two dozen or more, each stiffer than a playing card and printed with the words “Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows (Good afternoon only July 6).” Ania touched them, wondering why Mrs. Patterson hadn’t offered tickets to her. She had never seen a circus. Teddy had never seen one, either. But how could she expect anything when Mrs. Patterson had already given clothes and food and money, when Teddy had broken the vase?

  Fast as she could, Ania fluffed the study’s curtains and retied them, remembering Teddy trapped in the chair. She swept a spider’s web from beside a bookcase, then peeked at the circus tickets again, wondering how long she and Teddy could last through the heat and work of summer, heat and work and heat and work and her little boy never to leave his chair. What difference would one day make, one day away? She climbed the servant staircase to change Mrs. Patterson’s bed, to shake sheets that billowed weightless as air, to wipe a hot iron over lacy pillowcases.

  Then, with chores complete and sweat stinging her eyes, she sneaked back to the desk, slipped two tickets from the bundle, and hid them in the waistband of her skirt.