At this, he took off his hat, bowed to me, and then, as he stood up, backhanded the young boy who’d just said that, who sneezed in surprise, and shouted, Don’t make me fall!
Darling, he said, you’ll need to speak to la ma?tresse. I don’t know if she wants anyone what can read, though. That’s probably more trouble to her than it might be worth.
It can’t have my spot!
Ah, no one’s got their eye on that.
No one’s had their eye or anything else on it in years!
With that, there was again much general laughter.
What does it do? Ask, ask!
Yes, darling, my inquisitor asked. What do you do? That is what we need to find out for you to be useful. It’s better in the circus if you can do many things. So let’s see, simple yeses and nos . . . can you . . . can you sew?
I nodded.
There’s not . . . well . . . we darn our own costumes here. Or we have at least.
Can it tumble!
I smiled at that and nodded again.
Can it tumble from a horse!
I nodded once more.
It’s a kinker, I knew it!
Nah, it’s a chava josser, isn’t it?
If it is, she’s like none I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t bet on it. She’s a kinker, you can tell. She’s got a talent somewhere.
I’m a kinker, to be sure, I said at last. And I’m here to hire you all. But for now, I would speak with Ernesto.
At this they laughed. Ah, so it’s like that, said one of them. It’s coming home, is what it is.
And then Ernesto appeared from behind a corner of the tent and roared as he ran toward me; sweeping me into his arms, he lifted me to kiss my face, my feet dangling at his hips. Oh, sweet girl, thank God, he said. I’ve missed you so.
§
I sat together with Ernesto for a little while at the hotel tent, over mugs of beer, as we waited for Priscilla, now the new boss. When I asked after Flambeau, he only shook his head. His absence like an omen.
You’re lovelier than ever, he said finally. I can’t get over it. Look at you. Who’d have thought you were ever our little Settler’s Daughter? He reached down and plucked at the dress I wore, which swept out around the edge of the booth. You could fit a team of you in there.
He swept his hands up. I can’t fancy that you’re here to come back.
I am, I said.
But you’re a woman of means now, as we can see.
I explained myself.
A hippodrama? he said.
Yes, I said. And I’m paying.
§
I could not vanish as I had hoped I might. I instead needed to put myself once more at the center of the public’s eye as the cursed soprano. News of the curse would be my letter to the police and my escape from the police both.
I sent a statement to the press through Barnum’s agent, asking them to my rooms at Brown’s and saying I would make an announcement concerning my imminent retirement.
All questions would be answered in writing.
I suppose I did not believe what I would do until the appointed hour, when, under the watchful eye of the agent and his assistants, I opened the door to my suite myself, dressed in my best widow’s weeds and the tenor’s emeralds, and welcomed the crowd I found there inside.
I was inside my love’s opera, I knew, very near the ending. If the curse was true, and it did seem to rise up around me, as if it would become the very ship that would take me back to America, then I would sing for Aristafeo at least once more, somehow, before losing my voice forever—perhaps regaining my soul if it had ever really been lost. His opera and its fate for me even protecting what had been true so far of us, may be true once again: Aristafeo delivered to me, his steps away from me once again leading back to me in some way neither of us could imagine.
If not, I would never see him again. But the only way to know was to go away and see.
And I would accept no other role until he was at my side.
Each answer I wrote to the journalists in my room was like a signature on this contract with Fate.
When did I know of my curse? I first guessed after my debut as Amina, when my only love returned to me after I had lost all hope.
The tenor’s death has left me terribly changed. I loved him dearly. But you see, the news of his death told me this curse, it was coming for me next.
In Un Ballo in Maschera, the husband of the soprano Amelia is murdered, his fate sealed by a fortune-teller. I knew I could not take the stage after it was reported he’d died.
In death, then, one last role for the tenor to play with me. And then a last message for Aristafeo, left here.
You may understand then why it is so important to me to per form this last role, to create the role as written for me. The worst that might happen? That I would lose my voice.
When I returned, I went to the desk to pay for Aristafeo’s rooms with some of the new money from Barnum, but he was gone.
Epilogue
LE CHARME OPèRE. The spell works.
The crowds begin at the pier the day we arrive, vast and dark, wet from the rain, like a funeral for a head of state.
On seeing the gangplank lower, they say my name as if singing in a discordant round, Lilliet Berne, Miss Berne, Lilliet Berne, Miss Berne, vive La Générale!
The gangplank lands on the dock and even the crew is cheered by the crowd until I emerge. At the foot of it waits one Mr. Frederick March, Mr. Barnum not in sight.
I’d know later the reason Mr. Barnum hadn’t been there—there’d been one more journalist to strong-arm, one more feature story to run. The morning editions of the New York papers waited for me at my hotel, all with stories of the diva who’d fled the stages of Europe for fear of a curse, here now to perform on her final farewell tour, this circus her first official visit to America. As I stood finally in the air and the cheering crowd roared, I raised my hand to keep out the rain and waved to them.
My name, taken from the little graveyard by the East River, hadn’t sounded like the stolen thing it was in years.
Mermaids and nightingales, Columbus wrote, of what he saw in the New World. Creatures of music, monstrous and fair. I was home.
§
The Americans favor a dark color, at least in New York, the people there colored like crows and sparrows. When I make my first entrance, on a trapeze decorated like a crescent moon, I feel them below me, the heat of them rising through the cold night air, the tobacco, the smoke, the cologne, and the perfume all together. I watch the jewels of the women flash in the dark as I descend. When I look down, the indigo silk panels to the backdrops, hung to make it look like night, are not as dark as the crowd, and so it looks, each time as I enter the ring, as if some of the real night from outside has come inside to wait below me.
My future, then: a traveling show, a hippodrama with a year-long tour featuring two stars, a beautiful young man from Paris who plays the captured angel and me. And now we are in trains, the opera about a circus now a circus opera; and the crowds move in and out, all applause and tobacco, oily smoke off the tapers; and the tents rise, fill, fall. The angel wears taxidermy wings taken from a condor and isn’t, according to the posters, allowed to fly because then he might “escape.” He holds me tightly instead from behind as I ride the horse with him around the tent, the wings flapping in an imitation of flight. The man himself never wants to leave, and sometimes neither do I.
Though there’s only one escape I long for now.
The boy who plays the angel in our show is from Pest. He’s unspeakably beautiful, taller than aerialists usually are, with pale white skin to match my own and long dark hair that flies in the air behind him like a flag. He’s from a family of aerialists; his family has performed in circuses for at least a century. Perhaps since the birth of Christ. He launches himself into the air with only a rope tied to the roof of the tent. The prop master and the taxidermist used three normal condor wings each to make them. No living thing has ever used them to fly.