1
WHEN A BOY’S FIRST ROMANTIC interlude is with Phoebe the Dog-Faced Girl, he feels a need to get out into the world and find a new life. So I thought as I stood in the wings and watched Colonel Kingston introduce the next act. Not that I had anything against Phoebe. She was a sweet girl under all that fur. “Oh, Abel,” she whispered prettily whenever I brushed her lips with mine, and perhaps she blushed—who could tell?—but I was seventeen and yearned to kiss a mouth sometimes without getting hair up my nose.
Out on the stage, Orlando the Magnificent, star illusionist of the Faeryland 1899 Review, requested a volunteer from the audience. A man of pleasant appearance in a long overcoat rose to his feet amid applause and laughter from the crowd. I smiled. He was my uncle Jack.
Orlando bowed his turbaned head to the volunteer as if he were a stranger and beckoned the man up the steps with both arms, which caused the flowing sleeves of his satin robes to shimmer in the stage lights.
I wish there were other girls my age in Faeryland, I thought as Uncle Jack lay down in a long, coffinlike box on a platform. Maybe then Phoebe wouldn’t assume I was hers for the taking. There were older, unmarried ladies, of course, but none of them took my fancy enough to risk breaking my mother’s heart. Although, I admit, when I was fourteen years old, Miss Makepeace, the Amazing Rubber Woman, came pretty darn close. Anyway, how could a boy take a few liberties in a home where everyone knew his business?
Uncle Jack disappeared from sight as Orlando’s young “Ethiopian” assistant closed the lid. A head appeared through one end of the box and feet out the other, and Orlando reached into his starry case of tricks and pulled out a large saw. There were a few groans and titters from those who found the sawing a-person-in-half trick a mite old hat, but I’d been looking forward to this.
The expected sawing began, accompanied by the usual banter. At one point the “victim” let out a cry, which was echoed by a few delicate and susceptible ladies in the audience, who then laughed along with their friends to cover their embarrassment. When the saw had completed its task, another dark-skinned boy ran onstage to help pull apart the box and show the halves separate—toes wiggling from one, head wagging from the other. Polite applause filled the hall. I grinned, not put off at all by the lukewarm response.
As was predictable, the box halves were rejoined, the magician waved his arms and incanted a spell, the box was opened, and the man rose from the box whole once more. Again there was polite applause and knowing laughter.
The volunteer smiled, waved at the audience, and headed for the steps, accompanied by cheers and bravos, but halfway there he stopped and frowned. He tottered to the left. He tottered to the right. The audience hushed. He cried out, toppled over—and split apart at the waist. His legs scurried off in one direction, and his body crawled off in the other, dragged by his arms.
Gasps and screams filled the air. People rose to their feet. An old man fled up the aisle toward the back doors. At least three ladies slumped, willy-nilly, sideways in their seats as friends and family fanned and patted them. I was still laughing as the torso reached me.
“That was great, Papa!” I said. “Really great!”
“Yes. Perfect,” my father answered, and grinned. “But we’d better put them out of their misery quick.”
He stripped off the doctored overcoat to reveal the evening clothes beneath, carefully tailored and pinned, for he had no legs whatsoever. He trotted back out onstage on his hands in time to meet his other half, a midget, now with the trouser waist rolled down to reveal his head. Someone pointed at them and nudged his neighbor. Then through the rear curtains emerged the original volunteer, my uncle Jack, whole and complete with legs, the spitting image of my father, for he was his twin.
Someone hooted as the joke dawned on him, another joined in, and soon the auditorium echoed with thunderous applause. I put my arms around the boy assistants, who stood to either side of me, and squeezed affectionately. “Magnificent, wasn’t it, lads?” I said.
In the dressing room after the show Colonel Kingston clapped my father on the back and almost knocked him off the wooden stool where he perched, swaddled in his cut-down dressing gown. “Wonderful idea, Andrew! Absolutely wonderful.”
“You should thank Florence,” said my father. He nodded at my mother, who sat in a cozy chair crocheting with nimble toes.
“I would have played the bottom half myself,” she said. “But alas, I am too tall. I’m afraid we shall have to stick to bicycling.”
My parents had an act wherein they rode a bicycle together. He, with no legs, was able to steer; she, with no arms, could nevertheless pedal admirably, despite her long skirts and petticoat.
“How were receipts, Arthur?” asked my father as he massaged Macassar oil into his hair and smoothed his locks into glossy place.
Colonel Kingston shook his head and leaned on his cane with both hands. “Could be worse, my boy,” he said, but his mouth was pinched and his white whiskers bristled. The crowds were smaller these days, and performers had begun to leave and join new shows. The better acts could make more money elsewhere. Colonel Kingston had hoped that the shows at Faeryland would finance him through his old age, but a stationary show needed continued variety to keep the audience coming back, and no new acts had joined us. Lately I had more than once interrupted a worried conversation between my parents.
Faeryland had formerly been a spa where the rich from Washington and Baltimore took the waters for their health. It had fallen into disfavor years ago, and Arthur Kingston, veteran of three circuses and one war, had bought the property for a song to create a resort that would offer the finest educational entertainments and display of oddities to be seen in one place since the great Barnum’s second New York
museum burned to ashes in 1868. I had lived in Faeryland most of my life.
The grounds of Faeryland consisted of a Colonial mansion called the Castle; the Elvin Gardens; and Pixie Village, where the midgets and dwarfs lived in miniature houses, alongside a tiny church and a fire station complete with a pint-size fire wagon pulled by Shetland ponies and manned by a troupe of “pixie” firefighters. When customers walked through Pixie Village at certain times of the day, a bonfire was almost certain to be out of control and in need of extinction for their delighted pleasure.
The rest of us, including three giants, lived in the Castle, where visitors attended matinee and evening performances in the great hall—“an extravaganza of amazing oddities, mystifying the audience with their uncanny skills, death-defying deeds, and wondrous physiognomy.”
After the audience had gone and the theater had closed for the night, I made my way up a back staircase to my family’s apartments, but before I reached my front door, Phoebe’s little brother scampered up to me, yelping my name.
“What is it, Apollo?” I asked. I tousled the twelve-year-old’s silky blond hair. Like his sister and mother, Apollo the Puppy Boy had long hair everywhere. Like his father, he was prone to excitement.
“Violet and Rose are leaving,” Apollo said between gasps.
My gut sank. The Giovanni Siamese twins were stars of the show. I hurried after Apollo down to the main entrance.
In the front hall a small group of performers and staff were whispering and glancing to where Colonel Kingston talked to the Giovanni twins’ father. Apollo bounded over to where the pinheads had gathered with their nurse. All three wore long, colorful shifts, even though two of them were male. Apollo pretended to lift their hems up, which made the simple creatures giggle and grab their skirts around their knees.
Violet and Rose stood by a stack of trunks and boxes, back-to-back of necessity, dressed in their best traveling gown and matching black veiled hats with cherries. Long black gloves graced their hands. Next to Violet stood her dark-eyed gentleman, quiet as always. My mother swore he was sullen—and after her money, at that—but perhaps he was shy.