Lives of the Circus Animals Read online

  Molly finished eating and went upstairs to look for a nice dress, nothing too fancy, but not too casual either. This was another reason why she never got into the city. She didn’t know what to wear anymore. Fashions changed so quickly.

  But she refused to give up so easily. Here was a nice wool skirt that would go well with any blouse. And here was a blousy shirt that didn’t look too dressy. And earrings. Good simple earrings would make her look nice without turning her into a dowdy old lady.

  Piece by piece, she put herself together. She tried not to notice the flutters in her stomach, the coldness of her hands. It was a warm spring day, but her hands were freezing. She sat at her dressing table and brushed her hair. Good thing she’d been to the hairdresser this week or she’d use her gray hairs as an excuse. You are such a ninny, she told herself. What are you afraid of anyway?

  Finally, she was ready. She went downstairs. And the flutters in her stomach became painful, like ice butterflies. She grabbed the car keys in the dish on the table, telling her body that this was no different from going to the supermarket. Her body should behave, dammit. It wasn’t her head that was silly, it was her body. She clutched her black leather purse and thought a moment. She went back upstairs to her bedroom. She took what she wanted from the nightstand beside the bed. She felt foolish, yet calmer, safer, as if she were putting a lucky rabbit’s foot in her purse, nothing more.

  She drove straight to the station. She walked from the parking lot to the ticket window and out to the platform without pause or hesitation.

  The day was lovely. Newburgh looked so green and pretty across the river. It was three o’clock already. She couldn’t understand where the time had gone. The next southbound train arrived. She stepped aboard. It was only a train; it wasn’t like flying.

  She stopped being afraid, but the only thing she’d been afraid of, she decided, was being afraid, was going into a panic. Now she was fine.

  The other passengers seemed safe. There was even a white lady Molly’s age at the other end of the car, reading a book in hardcover. Molly wished she’d brought something to read. A murder mystery was even better than cigarettes for keeping one occupied. The river flickered and flashed in the windows. Mountains rose on the other side. The Hudson Valley really was beautiful, wasn’t it?

  Molly must have ridden this train a thousand times, but when was her last trip? A year ago? Ten years? All she could remember today were the Saturday trips when she took the kids into the city to shop for clothes. Her son was forty now, so that would have been twenty-five years ago? Surely she had been to the city since. But the trips with her kiddos were her favorite visits, her best memories. Rockefeller Center at Christmas, Fifth Avenue in the spring. They sometimes visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but Molly had had too much religion in her childhood—know-it-all priests, fish on Friday, Lives of the Saints—and she wanted to spare her own children. She took them to the theater instead. They saw shows like Hello Dolly!, No, No, Nanette, Follies, and even Grease. Jessie might have been too young, but she was just as tickled by the singing and dancing as her mother and brother. They were all so happy together. Their father stayed home. Bobby hated New York. The city had been his job for too long, and he knew only its dark side, the crime scenes and courtrooms. He said it was no longer the wonderful Oz across the river that they both knew as teenagers.

  Molly grew up in Queens, in Sunnyside, a petty Irish village of snoops and snobs and too many aunts. She had dreamed of moving someday into the larger, freer world of Manhattan. Instead she married Bobby Doyle and escaped to the good life of the suburbs, first on Long Island, then north to Beacon. Only rich people could afford to live well in the city. But she could still visit, she could take her kiddos there.

  Then one day she stopped. She couldn’t remember why. Because it was too much trouble? Because her kids were old enough to go alone and didn’t want her along? Or because of the stories on TV or in the newspaper or told by Bobby’s cop buddies? Everything went to hell in the 1970s. New York was not safe for old ladies.

  Which was ridiculous. She wasn’t afraid of New York. She loved New York. She missed it. She just had no reason to visit it until today.

  The train was passing through the Bronx. The projects began to appear, ugly brick boxes packed full of people. Nobody, black or white, deserved to live like that. Then older buildings, five and six stories tall, crowded around the train. There were the dead eyes of empty windows. A huge Technicolor face painted on a crumbling wall swung toward her. She expected to hear police sirens from the half-deserted streets below but heard nothing except the chuckle of wheels under her feet.

  They plunged into a tunnel. Her heart was racing. Don’t, she told herself. This is your hometown, this is where your children live. You have nothing to fear.

  The lights flickered. Everything went dark. Then they came out into a dingy electric brightness. People quietly gathered their things. The train ground to a stop.

  Molly slipped the strap of her purse snugly over her shoulder. She followed everyone out of the car and up the ramp.

  And she entered the city of her childhood. Back in the days when everyone wore a hat, Grand Central was its gateway. The ceiling was still painted with an aquamarine sky full of constellations. Molly marched through the enormous room, feeling more confident, like she was young again and her whole life was ahead of her. Then she noticed the people talking to themselves.

  They weren’t the crazy black men of twenty years ago. They were white people, corporate men and women talking on those tiny new phones. The things looked like transistor radios or sometimes just a wire. And people talked at them. They talked, talked, talked, talked, talked. What could they possibly be talking about? Did they really have so much to say to each other?

  Molly snorted at their foolery. And before she knew what she was doing, she stuck a finger in her own ear and said out loud: “Hello? I just got off the train. I’m in Grand Central Station. You wouldn’t believe how crowded it is here. Why, it’s a regular Grand Central Station.”

  Nobody noticed the crazy lady talking to her hand.

  “What the heck were you afraid of?” she told her palm. “This city is a riot. This city is a hoot. And you, Molly Doyle, are a nut.”

  She dropped her hand and laughed. She stepped more briskly. She couldn’t wait to see the faces of her smart-aleck son and daughter when their scaredy-cat mother showed up at their big-deal party.

  56

  You love your wife and daughter, don’t you?” said Dr. Chin.

  Kenneth hesitated. “Well, yes.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest you don’t,” Chin gently added. “I’m just trying to establish what are the things you truly care about.”

  It was five o’clock on a Friday and Kenneth was back at West Tenth Street, sitting on the sofa, a pair of cold hands in his lap.

  “I do love my family,” he said. “I’m not always the best husband or father. But I try.”

  “You do things for them? You do things with them?”

  “Absolutely. Yes, well, I’m not the chief breadwinner anymore. Gretchen’s law work brings in a bit more than I make. And Rosalind is at an age where she no longer wants to do half the things we used to do together: go to movies or shoot hoops at the gym or even play chess. Her friends told her girls don’t play chess.” Yet he was never as good a father as he wanted to be. “But I’m hardly one of those art or theater types who has no other life. How does the Yeats poem go? ‘Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of’? That’s not me. No. I love the real things.”

  “William Butler Yeats?” said Chin. As if there might be another.

  “Yes. From ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion.’ A major poem. It’s the one with the line about ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’”

  Chin looked disturbed, puzzled, amused. Then she went back to her notes. “You and your wife have been married—fifteen years?”

  “Yes.
I love her, I trust her, I listen to her.” He hoped Chin wouldn’t ask about their sex life. “I mean, it was Gretchen who convinced me to continue seeing you when I wanted to stop.”

  Chin looked up. “You wanted to terminate our sessions?”

  “Uh, yes.” He hadn’t intended to tell Chin that.

  She appeared concerned.

  “Because you said some things last week that made me feel you weren’t the right therapist for me.”

  “Which were?”

  He moistened his lips. “You said you hate theater. That you have a phobia about it.”

  “I can’t believe I said ‘phobia.’ That’s a clinical word, Kenneth. Not one I use lightly.”

  “You said you were embarrassed about seeing actors onstage.”

  “Oh that.” She shrugged, as if it were perfectly natural.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Chin. But it struck me as a confession of weakness. It undermined your authority.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “You see me as an authority figure?”

  The question threw him. “You’re my therapist,” he said. “You must have some authority.”

  “You believe in authority figures, Kenneth.”

  “When it’s earned. When it’s deserved.”

  “You see yourself as an authority figure?”

  “Not really,” he claimed. What were they doing here?

  “But you’re an important critic.”

  “Only because I write for the Times. As I said last week. I’m nobody as an individual.”

  “That’s like me saying that I’m nobody except for my certification as a psychiatrist.”

  He wondered what kind of certification she actually had.

  “I’m an employee,” he insisted. “Only an employee. Nothing more. Tonight, for example, I have to interview an actor. It’ll be after dinner when I’d rather be at home with my wife and daughter. And I’m not a reporter, I’m a reviewer. But they give the commands and I obey. Like a good dog.”

  “And you resent that?”

  “Not at all. I’m glad of it. Because it keeps me humble. It reminds me who I really am. It keeps me real.”

  Chin sat back, her mouth knotted in a skeptical rosebud. Had he said something particularly absurd?

  “So?” she said. “Do you want us to continue? Or shall I recommend a new therapist?”

  He was startled. “Because I feel your authority is compromised?”

  She shrugged. “You’ll feel that way about any therapist. Because you have authority issues. But if you want to try someone else, I don’t mind.”

  Was she rejecting him? She wanted to get rid of him? Why?

  “It’s not about you,” he insisted. “It’s me. It’s my problem.” He laughed to signal he was making a joke. “I want you to be perfect.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  She said it so flatly that he didn’t know what to say for a moment. Then: “Maybe I should continue? For a little longer? We barely know each other, do we?”

  She took her legal pad back into her lap and wrote something. “Good. I was hoping you’d stay. It could be a very interesting experience for us both.”

  She spoke as if keeping him were a challenge, a complication that she’d rather not have. Was he really so difficult?

  “Let me toss out a few ideas regarding you and authority,” she proposed. “You want to have power, but not be hated. You want to be king, but treated like an equal. You want to be loved but not loved too much.”

  Kenneth regretted that he hadn’t taken the chance to escape.

  “Have you ever considered quitting your job at the Times?”

  The question took him completely by surprise. “What? And give up show business?” he said.

  He waited for her to recognize the antique punch line of the ancient joke and laugh, but she gave it only a pained smile.

  “You haven’t mentioned your parents yet,” she said. “Is your mother still alive?”

  57

  The sun burned low in the hazy sky over the billboards on the other side of Sheridan Square. It was only six-thirty. The party was not scheduled to start until seven, nobody would arrive before eight, but everything was ready. Jack and Michael had come and gone and come again. The undertaker/caterers were very proficient. A drinks table was set up in front of the television. On the terrace outside, under a square canvas umbrella, stood a trestle table covered in a pastel rainbow: green melon slices, orange cheeses, pink ham, and good brown bread. Plates of raw vegetables and bowls of dip were scattered around the rooms. The little kitchen was stuffed to the ceiling with backup food.

  “And there we are,” Jack declared when he finished showing it all to Caleb. “Except for the music. Is there anything in particular you wanted? For an outdoor party like this, I suggest a mix of Cole Porter and Gershwin.”

  “No music,” said Caleb. “It just makes people loud. It makes them think they’re having fun.”

  “You don’t want that?” said Jack.

  “No. If they want fun, let it be real fun. None of this fake fun.”

  And he laughed. He was not in the right mood to host a birthday party, was he?

  The telephone rang: Irene. She was downstairs in a cab with the cake from Cupcake Cafe and needed help in bringing it up. Michael went down. He returned a few minutes later with Irene and a white box as big as a computer monitor. Inside was a cake covered like a gaudy Victorian dress in butter cream flowers.

  “Makes my teeth hurt just to look at it,” said Caleb.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Irene. “Hmm. No room for candles.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  Michael carried the cake to the kitchen.

  Irene circled the room, then stepped out to the patio. “Wow, Jack. You’ve outdone yourself. This looks great.” She threw an arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Didn’t I tell you he was amazing?”

  Jack hung his head in mock humility, then went back indoors.

  “So beautiful up here,” said Irene. “Aren’t you glad you decided to go ahead with this party?” She looked at Caleb. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  White dress shirt, blue jeans, moccasins, no socks.

  “Awfully California,” she said. “It needs a tan to work.”

  The buzzer softly buzzed.

  “It’s not even seven,” Irene clucked at her watch. “There’s always one. The person who didn’t get the time right or who comes early to monopolize the host.”

  They went inside. Michael had already buzzed the guest up.

  “So everything’s set?” Irene continued. “You got your food, you got your drinks. All you need are your guests. Oh, and music. Hey, Jack! Put on some music.”

  “No music,” Caleb repeated. “I don’t want any music.”

  There was a knock at the door, which was already propped open. A small, middle-aged woman stood there, timidly peering in. She had wavy beige hair, no makeup, and a big purse. She looked like a retired schoolteacher. Then she said, “Hello, dear.”

  “Mom?”

  She was smiling, but it was a confusing, contradictory, I-told-you-so/what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here smile.

  Caleb was doubly startled: first that she came, second that he did not immediately recognize her.

  “Mom!” he cried. “Oh my God.” He threw his arms around her before he remembered that they weren’t a huggy family. She felt remarkably small and light against him, like a bird. He promptly released her. “Wow. You came. Welcome. Wow.”

  “Oh yes. Your old mother came,” she said, glancing around, not quite able to face him. She produced a snippet of laugh like a hiccup.

  She looked as small as she had felt, which was stranger than it should have been. But Caleb had not seen her outside the home in years, not since he’d been a child. His mind’s-eye mom was a larger, more timeless figure than this flesh-and-bone woman at his door.

  “Mom. This is Irene Jacobs. My agent and manager and one of my best friends.”

  “
Mrs. Doyle. So glad you could make it.” Irene cut her eyes at Caleb in a satirical look of pity. She didn’t understand that he was overjoyed to have his mother here.

  Mom indifferently shook Irene’s hand and looked around the room again. “Where’s your sister?”

  “She’s coming,” said Caleb. “She said she had to work late.”

  “I thought she’d be helping you with your party.”

  “Oh no. I’ve hired people for that.”

  She pulled a face like she’d never heard of such a thing. “What time do you think Jess’ll get here?”

  “Uh, later.”

  “Not too late, I hope. I need to catch the train back to Beacon.”

  But Jessie was bringing Henry, which meant she wouldn’t come until after his show, which could be very late.

  “I could give her a call and let her know you’re here.”

  “No, no, no. I want to surprise her.” She shrugged. “If she doesn’t show, she doesn’t show. But if she hears I came to see you but didn’t wait for her—” She frowned. “Well, you know how your sister can be.”

  Yes, he knew. And Jessie was right. The mother-daughter bond was heavier and more tangled than the mother-son bond, even when the son was gay. I have it easy, thought Caleb. But he couldn’t help feeling a little excluded, a little hurt.

  He should call Jessie soon, on the sly, so she could visit the party before she picked up Henry and they could send Mom home.

  “So this is your new apartment,” said Mom. A wary, querulous tone took hold in her voice.

  “Oh yes!” Caleb cheerfully declared. “Let me give you a tour before people start arriving.”

  “Your real home.”

  He said nothing for a moment, then, “As real as any home can get in New York.”

  He showed her the rooms: the kitchen—“Awfully small”—the bedroom—“Not much privacy with that window”—the bathroom—“That old brass is hell to keep clean.” Then he took her into the extra room that was his study. She said nothing for a moment while she stood in front of the wall where a dozen framed photos were hung.