He took off his hat and put it on the piano. One million electric light bulbs, Roger had told Marie. Carousels, clowns and babies that grow in incubators.
“Babies?” Topsy and Eloise squealed.
“Little babies no bigger than the size of your fist. And midgets. Elephants, tap-dancing ducks —”
“Now, now,” Mother interrupted through her teeth, in which she held several hairpins. The twins were squirming on their older sister’s lap, rustling the tulle of their skirts against Marie’s stockings. Marie shifted to balance both of the girls on her knee, careful not to snag her dress on the bureau. Mother stood over them in her dressing gown. In one hand she held a small pot of rouge while her other hand was smudging the color into her daughters’ cheeks. “Hold still, Topsy. Those ducks aren’t going anywhere.” But Marie knew it wasn’t the ducks, even if they did dance. Since the advent of radio and now with the threat of moving pictures, their audience had been gradually dwindling and it was not uncommon for the once widely acclaimed Abbot Sisters to share the bill with a juggling Jack Russell terrier or troupe of bicycling miniature horses. That was to say, if one of the Dancing Ducks of Denmark was going to impress six-year-olds Topsy and Eloise Abbot, it had better come with a wedding gown and a saxophone.
Roger stood at the window and buttoned his vest in the reflection, his white suit especially stark against his African skin. For a somewhat reasonable rate, he had managed to get the family a room on the top floor of The Elephant Hotel. Though The Elephant was not renowned for its luxury or opulence, he knew Mother would appreciate its proximity to town, and Marie would love the view. Topsy and Eloise, on the other hand, would be delighted with the décor. The walls were covered in cheap turquoise wallpaper and patterned in gold-leaf elephants. Pink paint chipped along the crown molding and baseboards, while the tapestries and bedding were done in complimentary shades of teal and rose. Mother liked it so much that she hadn’t stepped outside for the entire week. Or at least that was the reason Roger had given the girls.
Poor Mother. The last four years had certainly taken their toll. She had gradually grown cold and resistant to the change around her; watching her daughters grow up in the footlights of the cruel Vaudeville stage without a father and sometimes even less of a mother, counting on their earnings to cover their expenses. Trapped in an endless of cycle of working continuously to afford the train tickets to Chicago, Pittsburg, San Francisco, St. Louis, Seattle and back to New York only to do it all over again the moment the curtain fell. Now it seemed that with the new film industry, America had grown as tired as she had of the old song-and-dance. And it was because of them that she had been forced to drag her family back to the city she hated most, the one place she vowed never to return.
When Roger’s older brother had died shortly after the twins were born, leaving Mother a tired widow and the three girls without a father, Roger stepped up to help care for the family while they were on the road. Having once been a child variety performer himself, he was familiar with the circuits and knew how to work with the bookers and stage managers of the big-time venues. But when the shows had more recently become fewer and further between, The Abbot Sisters had been moved off of the big-time Broadway marquises and onto hand-printed A-signs outside of storefronts. It’s not so bad, he used to tell Marie. The twins can’t even read their own name anyway.
“Alright dolls, go rehearse with your uncle,” said Mother, and in a flurry of ruffles and lace, Eloise and Topsy leapt from their sister’s lap and raced across the floor to the upright piano. Their tiny patent-leather shoes clicked enthusiastically against the aged hardwood as the girls beamed in anticipation of their first performance at an amusement park. Although not the main attraction, their act was to be put on outside the Opera House next to Midget City in order to promote the New Don Magnavita’s Magic Show inside the theatre. It would also be the day they premiered their new stage moniker, The Abbot Twins, since they were for the first time in their lives requested to perform alone; that is, without Marie. Roger, in attempt to cheer her up, joked to Marie that the circus industry would likely be more interested in the two little girls, what with it being in Midget City and all. Marie knew better than that. She knew a black girl onstage would still sell tickets. A black girl and her two whiter baby sisters would not. In any case, a week later, Roger landed Marie her very own spot performing four times daily at the Eiffel Cinema in between showings of the new motion picture film, A Tale of Two Cities.
“I don’t understand,” Marie complained to Roger. She got no satisfaction out of sitting and watching faces and places flash on a screen for thirty minutes. To her it seemed artificial. It’s all claptrap anyway, Roger would tell her. At least, he offered, she wasn’t one of the poster-girls for Don Magnavita, the charlatan magic-man from El Salvador. But magic was more real than moving pictures, Marie argued. That might be true, said Roger. If you believe in that sort of thing.
But I don’t believe in anything, anything, anything, he sang.
Marie moved to sit on the radiator by the window, its cast iron casing chilled from the balmy Spring morning. She could smell traces of spun sugar and sea salt. This had been her home for the first seven years of her life, but she remembered nothing besides the fatal roller-coaster accident of 1901.
“Roger,” Mother opened the top drawer of the bureau and removed a comb and a box of satin ribbon. “Will you fetch me the water basin?” She hoped it was still warm. Mother parted Marie’s coarse hair with her long, knobby fingers. Accompanist’s hands, she used to tell her daughters, even though she hadn’t touched the keys since her husband was alive. After the twins, her joints had grown stiff and swollen, and the coastal climate didn’t help her condition. That was part of why she had left Coney Island in the first place.
Mother gently pulled a tortoise-shell comb through her daughter’s dark, wiry hair. At thirteen years old, Marie was the oldest of the three sisters, and the only one whose hair grew straight out of her head in a wild, unruly fashion like her father’s. Topsy and Eloise both had their Mother’s light hair that fell straight down to their chins, cut sharply into matching bobs, a more appropriate style for show-business. Marie’s hair had to first be tamed with hot sugar water, twisted and pinned into wet ringlets until Mother finally fastened each individual curl to Marie’s pearl embroidered bodice. This process took quite a while and often called for more hands than were available, but Marie was patient and actually looked forward to what had become their only quality time alone together as Mother and daughter. After all, it had taken Mother a long time after her husband’s death to grow the strength to, at the very least, touch her firstborn. Marie knew what it was her mother saw in her, her exotic features and textured hair—the painful memory and spitting image of her father. Sometimes Marie wondered if she’d ever be able to look into her own mother’s eyes without breaking her heart. But for now, the warmth of her Mother’s knuckles on Marie’s neck and her familiar dusty lavender scent was good enough. Marie looked into a silver hand mirror, smiling quietly at the remaining frizz that hung around her face like a dark electrified halo. Yes, she thought, this was good enough.
At forty minutes till curtain, the twins were growing fussy. Mother sat silently on the foot of the bed and slipped on her gloves. After Marie helped the girls into their coats, Roger hoisted Topsy onto his hip and pointed out the window. Across the tops of buildings and sweeping power lines, Marie could see a distant glow on the horizon. She could make out the top of its Beacon Tower, outlined and illuminated with one million electric light bulbs. Like a million brilliant tiny stars, Roger told his nieces. More than God had put in the sky.
Mother studied the wallpaper. She doesn’t believe in God.
…
Topsy and Eloise, now nine years old, were sitting side-by-side in identical white fluffy rabbit fur coats, their feet swinging gaily from the bench in the police department. Marie had been in the wings of the Eiffel for the last Friday four o’clock matinee showing at the cinema until it re-opened tomorrow morning for the holiday weekend when a policeman approached her moments before she went onstage. The twins had been taken into custody for violation of the law under the National Child Labor Committee.
“But what about what we practiced?” Marie whispered so harshly to her sisters it was more of a hiss. As soon as rumors started circulating about these child exploitation laws, the girls had been strictly trained and prepared. Already, Marie’s head was swimming with worst-case-scenarios of what Mother or Roger would say. Somehow this would turn out to be her fault. “Didn’t you tell them you were sixteen?” Eloise nodded ardently, explaining that they were given a physical exam, and then pointed to Topsy, who held open her mouth as wide as she could.
“No molars.” The twins shrugged.
For a nickel a piece, Marie bought them each a bag of peanuts for the walk back to Dreamland. The twins didn’t usually work on weekdays, but today they had performed all morning and afternoon due to the anticipation that the Memorial Day Weekend crowd would be bigger than ever. It was also for this reason that the park would close early for renovations. Already, Surf Avenue was bustling with automobiles and carriages carrying fine ladies and gentlemen whose children clutched their coattails and gestured wildly to any of the magnificent attractions that glittered over the garish front gates. There was a railway that ran through a Swiss-Alps landscape, imitation Venetian canals that you could experience aboard a real gondola. Hell Gate was a ride that took you on boat through rushing waters in dimly lit caverns, and there was also a live re-enactment of New York Fire Fighters putting out a replicated New York neighborhood set aflame.
But Marie still came for the babies. There were six of them, twenty-four weeks old, and each of them slept in their own incubator that was no bigger than a shoe box. They had their own exhibit next to Bostock’s Amazing Animal Arena, where the infants were kept in a row behind a glass encasement. Every Friday after the cinema, Marie secretly took the train from Culver Depot to check up on her babies. When it was crowded, she would have to carefully maneuver herself through the mass of spectators, sometimes crouching low to push through the skirt hems and elbow her way to the front. She had even given names to each of them. Violet was her favorite. She was the biggest one.
Meanwhile, the wind was picking up, stirring the smell of sawdust, wet plaster and fresh paint, carrying them across the Island to The Elephant Hotel. It is nearly dusk when Roger smoothes the thin white tablecloth across the tea table in front of the fireplace. Mother smiles to herself as she spreads egg salad across slices of fresh white bread. She thinks Roger has hands that are too big for his wrists. She watches them arrange and rearrange the place settings on the table, his gangly appendages fumbling with the delicate flatware. A gust of wind blows through the open window, sending sheet music flying off the piano. Roger drops a butter knife, and Mother’s focus darts to the table, but otherwise there are no feeble attempts between them, no scrambling from either Mother or Roger to catch or pin the fluttering papers to the ground. Instead they remain still, watching the pages flap and flail belligerently about the room until they float soundly to the floor.
Eloise and Topsy’s foreheads were pressed against the window to the babies’ side-show exhibit, their breath making small clouds of moisture on the glass. Marie decided it would be best to cut through the carnival rather than walk around the perimeter of the park like they did when they had entered. On their way out, they slipped past Midget City while a couple of its miniature citizens smoked cigarettes with the Gypsies outside the Ballroom. The twins smiled and waved hello to familiar faces and employees while Marie kept her gaze fixed downward. The lions’ growls were muffled behind their circus tent; the workers were rolling down the awnings to their booths, painting final finishing touches to the enormous signs and locking up their exhibits. The lights were turning on.
Marie winced as they passed under the roller-coaster, the wind howling through its wooden skeleton. The Rough Rider. You would think they would have shut it down after the accident nearly ten years ago, but they hadn’t even changed it. Marie shuddered, haunted by the memory of that day. She could still hear the grating on the track, the jerking and creaking on the chains heaving and pulling until, unexpectedly, the chains snapped and sent two rear cars soaring sixty-feet in the air to smash into Surf Avenue. It was this incident that had taken her father away from her, and why Mother wanted to keep the children as far away from Coney Island as possible. Marie pulled her sisters in close and kept walking.
…
The back of Mother’s head rests on his lap, bouncing lightly as Roger taps his heel in time with the piano. She reaches up and traces the chicken pox scar under his chin. “Tell me the story again.”
The last time he remembers Mother laughing was the night they arrived in New York four years ago at a lounge next to the Casino Theatre on 42nd. It was darkly lit, loud with the sounds of ragtime and casual conversation. The twins were thrilled. It’s a celebration, she told her daughters.
Roger asked Mother what she would have to drink.
A martini, please.
Roger approached the bartender.
One martini, please.
The bartender did not look Roger up and down. He did not look at his expensive white suit. He did not look past him to the velvet booth where two white toddlers sat with their white mother and a black teenager. The bartender looked Roger directly in the eye.
That will be one hundred dollars.
Roger’s ears burned as he quietly opened his pocketbook. He came across an old photograph of him and his brother as children on the Pier. A creased handbill for the Abbot Girls, all three of them, in their Easter dresses. The hotel key, and four crisp hundred dollar bills.
One at a time, he laid them flat on the bar.
Four martinis, please.
Mother laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed till she cried.
…
It was in the fragile place between awake and asleep that Marie heard Roger clear his throat.
“Erin.”
Mother felt a hand on her cheek. She forced open her eyes and squinted against the dark early morning light.
“I need to show you something.” He slipped one arm under her shoulders and took her hand. The hardwood floor was icy under her bare feet. Roger led her to the window where they could hear sirens wailing in the distance. Power lines snapped and sent sparks flying in all directions before they were swallowed by columns of black smoke and massive clouds of ash rising from the collapsing buildings. The dark fog blanketed the cityscape, but the blazing Beacon Tower pierced through its veil like Lady Liberty’s torch. One by one, the tiny windows of the surrounding tenements lit up and inhabitants poked out their heads to catch a glimpse of the most spectacular show. One million electric lights, Mother remembers him saying.
Beneath them, a policeman escorted a parade of three nurses down the sidewalk to the Elephant’s lobby entrance, where they were taken in by the concierge. Pressed against their chests they gripped six tightly-wrapped bundles, one in each arm. Out of every bundle poked two tiny legs and two tiny hands that wriggled and clenched at the soot-blackened aprons and faces of their rescuers. The concierge held the door open for the policeman, who paused to politely tip his hat and usher in the last member of their procession: a white-feathered duck wearing no less than a red vest and straw hat.
It should have been awkwardly peculiar, but nothing about him seemed out of place. His orange feet slapped against the pavement and with every waddling step he opened his beak to squawk, Believe in everything, everything, everything.
