THE SHOW TRAVELED UP THROUGH Cumberland, into Pennsylvania, and on through part of West Virginia into Ohio. We didn’t travel the hundred miles a night we could have, but took shorter hops to reach as many towns as we could play in that richly populated area. We went through the midsize towns, the ones that wouldn’t get the biggest shows—like Ringling Brothers, and Forepaugh-Sells, although the backdoor talk said Marvel Brothers planned to carve a larger niche for themselves, with Barnum and Bailey out of the country for so long on their extended world tour. The advance crews placed ads in the paper, slapped bright, bold posters on fences and walls, and swapped tickets for space in merchants’ shop windows. The neighboring towns were papered also, and the barn sides in between, until everyone in the surrounding communities and farms knew where to come for a day of excitement and amusement.
I continued to serve as Mr. Rose’s target; that was the only way I could enter the ring. Never again did he condescend to watch me throw, and not once did he offer to coach me. How was I going to further my career, I wondered, if I wasn’t helped with my craft? Instead I found the time to practice alone.
If I couldn’t have a mentor, at least I could make friends, I decided. Friends in the business could do me good in the future. However, while the fellows in the show were polite and helpful, they already had their pals. When we spent the Fourth of July—my first holiday away from home—in Muncie, Indiana, the circus was packed. After the show the Marvels put on a fireworks party, but not one of the boys thought to ask me along for a beer.
I always kept an eye out for Marika, the trapeze girl. I was sure she’d be friendly if I could catch her away from her brothers, but this only seemed to happen when I was in conversation with Eddie and Frank, and I couldn’t sneak away to talk to her.
“I think she’s smiling at me,” I confided one day.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Frank. “She just has a cheery nature.”
“And very large brothers,” added Eddie.
“Not thinking of girls already are you, young Abel?” asked Frank.
The Arabian brothers must have thought me a child, and maybe I was. The most success I’d had with women was in my dreams.
Someone must have had regard for me, however, because sometimes I came back from breakfast to find my bed made, or I’d come home at night to discover a piece of fruit on my pillow. This made me feel all-overish because it had to be one of the boys. I hoped that it constituted a sign of friendship and not an intimate interest, because I didn’t want to be put in the awkward position of disappointing a fellow traveler. I searched the faces around me but found none that beamed on me with particular fellowship.
The closest I felt to belonging was during those entertainments before bed.
“What about you, Abel?” said one of the junior acrobats one night. “You say you’re from the theater. You must have a song or two to share.”
A chorus of agreement followed, and I must admit I liked the attention. I rolled from my upper berth, where I found it impossible to sit up and get a deep breath, and took a seat offered me on a lower bunk. The song I had heard on my first night in the dormitory car had put me in mind of another song about a circus queen, one of Jolly Dolly’s favorites.
“‘She kept her secret well, oh yes, her hideous secret well,’” I began in my passable tenor, and fellows nudged one another and exchanged winks.
“We were wedded fast, I knew naught of her past; for how was I to tell?
I married her, guileless lamb I was, I’d have died for her sweet sake.
How could I have known that my Angeline had been a ‘human snake’?”
Some fellows howled with laughter, which I found a little premature, since the funny part came later in the song, but I continued anyway.
“We’d only been wed a week or two, when I found her quite a wreck,
Her limbs were tied in a true lover’s knot at the back of her swanlike n
eck.
No curse there sprang to my pallid lips, nor did I reproach her then;
I calmly untied my lovely bride and straightened her out again.”
I thought the lewd catcalls that the clowns made were uncalled for, but I understood their point. One of the young acrobats blushed.
“My Angeline! My Angeline! Oh why didst disturb my mind serene?
My well beloved circus queen!
My human snake! My Angeline!”
It didn’t take my audience long to catch on to the refrain, and all but a couple of the older fellows joined in heartily, then hushed for the verse.
“At night I’d wake at midnight’s hour with a creepy, crawly feeling,
And there she would be in her white robe de nuit a walking on the ceiling.