There is an intensity about September noonday on Coney Island, aided and
abetted by tin roofs, metallic façades, gilt domes, looking-glass
fronts, jeweled spires, screaming peanut and frankfurter-stands, which
has not its peculiar kind of equal this side of opalescent Tangiers.
Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek, the
sea itself a percolator, boiling up against a glass surface. Beneath the
tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense
density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears.
At one o'clock the jibberwock exteriors of Ocean Avenue begin fantastic
signs of life. The House of Folly breaks out, over its entire façade,
into a chicken-pox of red and green, blue and purple, yellow, violet,
and gold electric bulbs. The Ocean Waves concession begins its
side-splitting undulations. Maha Mahadra, India's foremost soothsayer
(down in police, divorce, and night courts as Mamie Jones, May Costello,
and Mabel Brown, respectively), loops back her spangled portière. The
Baby Incubator slides open its ticket-windows. Five carousals begin to
whang. A row of hula-hula girls in paper necklaces appears outside of
"Hawaii," gelatinously naughty and insinuating of hip. There begins a
razzling of the razzle-dazzle. Shooting-galleries begin to snipe into
the glittering noon, and the smell of hot spiced sausages and stale malt
to lay on the air.
Before the Palace of Freaks, a barker slanted up his megaphone, baying
to the sun:
"Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u! The greatest show on the Island! Ten cents to see
the greatest freak congress in the world. Shapiro's freaks are gathered
from every corner of the universe. Enter and shake hands with Baron de
Ross, the children's delight, the world's smallest human being; age,
forty-two years, eight months; height, twenty-eight inches; weight,
fourteen and one-half pounds, certified scales. Enter and see the
original and only authentic Siamese Twins! The Ossified Man! You are
cordially invited to stick pins into this mystery of the whole medical
world. Jastrow, the world's most famous strong man end glass-eater, will
perform his world-startling feats. Show about to begin! Our glass-eater
eats glass, not rock candy--any one doubting same can sample it first.
We have on view within, and all included in your ten-cents admission,
the famous Teenie, absolutely the heaviest woman in captivity. We
guarantee Teenie to tip the certified scales at five hundred and
fifty-five, a weight unsurpassed by any of the heavyweights in the
history of the show business. Come in and fox-trot with Teenie, the
world wonder. Come in and fox-trot with her. Show begins immediately.
Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u!"
Within the Palace of Freaks, her platform elevated and railed in
against the unduly curious, Miss Luella Hoag, all that she was so
raucously purported to be, sat back in her chair, as much in the
attitude of relaxing as her proportions would permit.
There is no way in which I can hope to salve your offended estheticisms
with any of Miss Hoag's better points. What matters it that her skin was
not without the rich quality of cream too thick to pour, when her arms
fairly dimpled and billowed of this creaminess, and above her rather
small ankles her made-to-order red-satin shoes bulged over of it, the
low-cut bosom of her red and sequin dress was a terrific expanse of it,
her hands small cushions of it, her throat quivery, and her walk a
waddle with it. All but her face; it was as if the suet-like inundation
of the flesh had not dared here. The chin was only slightly doubled; the
cheeks just a shade too plump. Neither was the eye heavy of lid or sunk
down behind a ridge of cheek. Between her eyes and upper lip, Miss Hoag
looked her just-turned twenty; beyond them, she was antediluvian,
deluged, smothered beneath the creamy billows and billows of self.
And yet, sunk there like a flower-seed planted too deeply to push its
way up to bloom, the twenty-year-old heart of Miss Hoag beat beneath its
carbonaceous layer upon layer, even skipped a beat at spring's
palpitating sweetness, dared to dream of love, weep of desire, ache of
loneliness and loveliness.
Isolated thus by the flesh, the spirit, too, had been caught in
nature's sebaceous trick upon Miss Hoag. Life had passed her by slimly.
But Miss Hoag's redundancy was not all literal. A sixth and saving sense
of humor lay like a coating of tallow protecting the surface of her. For
nature's vagary, she was pensioned on life's pay-roll at eighteen
dollars a week.
"Easy money, friends," Miss Hoag would _ad lib_. to the line-up outside
her railing; "how would some of you like to sit back and draw your wages
just for the color of your hair or the size of your shoes? You there,
that sailor boy down there, how'd you like to have a fox-trot with
Teenie? Something to tell the Jackies about. Come on, Jack Tar, I'm
light on my feet, but I won't guarantee what I'll be on yours. Step up
and have a round."
Usually the crowd would turn sheepish and dissolve at this Terpischorean
threat. In fact, it was Miss Hoag's method of accomplishing just that.
In the August high noon of the Coney Island Freak Palace, which is the
time and scene of my daring to introduce to you the only
under-thirty-years, and over-one-hundred-and-thirty-pounds, heroine in
the history of fiction, the megaphone's catch of the day's first dribble
of humanity and inhumanity had not yet begun its staring,
gaping invasion.
A curtain of heat that was almost tangible hung from the glass roof. The
Ossified Man, sworn by clause of contact impervious alike to heat and
cold, urged his reclining wheel-chair an imperceptible inch toward the
neighboring sway of Miss Hoag's palm-leaf. She widened its arc, subtly.
"Ain't it a fright?" she said.
"Sacred Mother of the Sacred Child!" said the Ossified Man, in a
_patois_ of very south Italy.
Then Miss Hoag turned to the right, a rail partitioning her from the
highly popular spectacle of the Baron de Ross, christened, married, and
to be buried by his nomenclature in disuse, Edwin Ross MacGregor.
"Hot, honey?"
The Baron, in a toy rocker that easily contained him, turned upon Miss
Hoag a face so anachronistic that the senses reeled back. An old face,
as if carved out of a paleolithic cherry-stone; the years furrowed in;
the eyes as if they had seen, without marveling, the light of creation;
even the hands, braceleted in what might have been portière-rings,
leanly prehensile. When the Baron spoke, his voice was not unlike the
middle C of an old harpsichord whose wires long since had rusted and
died. He was frock-coated like a clergyman or a park statue of
a patriot.
Of face, a Chaldean sire; of dress, a miniature apotheosis of the
tailor's art; of form, a paleolithic child.
"Blow me to a ice-cream cone? Gowann, Teenie, have a heart!"
Miss Hoag billowed into silent laughter. "Little devil! That's six
you've sponged off me this week, you little whipper-snapper!"
The Baron screwed up into the tightest of grimaces.
"Nice Teenie--nice old Teenie!"
She tossed him a coin from the small saucerful of them on the table
beside her. He caught it with the simian agility of his tiny hands.
"Nice Teenie! Nice old Teenie!"
A first group had strolled up, indolent and insolent at the spectacle of
them.
"Photographs! Photographs! Take the folks back home a signed photograph
of Teenie--only ten cents, one dime. Give the kiddies a treat--signed
photograph of little Teenie!"
She would solicit thus, canorous of phrase, a fan of her cardboard
likenesses held out, invitational.
Occasionally there were sales, the coins rattling down into the china
saucer beside her; oftener a mere bombardment of insolence and
indolence, occasionally a question.
This day from a motorman, loitering in uniform between runs, "Say,
skinnay, whatcha weigh?"
Whatever of living tissue may have shrunk and quivered deep beneath the
surface of Miss Hoag was further insulated by a certain professional
pride--that of the champion middleweight for his cauliflower ear, of the
beauty for the tiny mole where her neck is whitest, the _ballerina_ for
her double joints.
"Wanna come up and dance with me and find out?"
"O Lord!"--receding from the crowd and its trail of laughter. "O Lord!
Excuse me. Good night!"
A CHILD: Missus, is all of you just one lady?
"Bless your heart, little pettie, they gimme a good measure, didn't
they? Here's a chocolate drop for the little pettie."
"Come away! Don't take nothing from her!"
"I wouldn't hurt your little girl, lady. I wouldn't harm a pretty hair
of her head; I love the kiddies."
"Good-by, missus."
"Good-by, little pettie."
A MAN: Say, was you born in captivity--in this line o' work, I mean?
"Law, no, friend! I never seen the light of the show business up to
eight year ago. There wasn't a member of my family, all dead and put
away now, weighed more 'n one-fifty. They say it of my mother, she was
married at ninety pounds and died at a hundred and six."
"You don't say so."
"I was born and raised on a farm out in Ohio. Bet not far from your part
of the country, from the looks of you, friend. Buckeye?"
"Not a bad guess at that--Indiana's mine."
"Law! to my way of thinking, there's no part of the Union got anything
on the Middle States. Knock me around all you want, I always say, but
let me be buried in the Buckeye State. Photographs? Signed photographs
at ten cents each. Take one home to the wife, friend, out in Indiana.
Come, friends, what's a dime? Ten cents!"
The crowd, treacle-slow, and swinging its children shoulder-high, would
shuffle on, pause next at the falsetto exhortations of the Baron, then
on to the collapsibilities of the Boneless Wonder, the flexuosities of
the Snake-charmer, the goose-fleshing, the terrible crunching of Jastrow
the Granite Jaw. A commotion, this last, not unlike the steam-roller
leveling of a rock road.
Miss Hoag retired then back to her chair, readjusting the photographs
to their table display, wielding her fan largely.
"Lord!" she said, across the right railing, "wouldn't this weather fry
you!"
The Baron wilted to a mock swoon, his little legs stiffening at a
hypotenuse.
"Ice-cream cone!" he cried. "Ice-cream cone, or I faint!"
"Poor Jastrow! Just listen to him! Honest, that grinding goes right
through me. He hadn't ought to be showing to-day, after the way they had
to have the doctor in on him last night. He hadn't ought to be eating
that nasty glass."
"Ain't it awful, Mabel!"
"Yes, it's awful, Mabel! A fellow snagging up his insides like Jastrow.
I never knew a glass-eating artist in my life that lived to old age. I
was showing once with a pair of glass-eating sisters, the Twins Delamar,
as fine a pair of girls as ever--"
"Sure, the Delamars--I know 'em."
"Remember the specialty they carried, stepping on a piece of plate glass
and feeding each other with the grounds--"
"Sure."
"Well, I sat up for three weeks running, with one of them girls--the
red-haired one, till she died off of sorosis of the liver--"
"Sure enough--Lizzie Delamar!"
"Lida, the other one, is still carrying the act on street-fair time, but
it won't surprise me to hear of her next. That's what'll happen to
Granite Jaw one of these days, too, if he--"
"Pretty soft on the Granite Jaw, ain't cha? M-m-n! Yum-yum! Pretty
soft!" When the Baron mouthed he became in expression Punchinello with
his finger alongside his nose, his face tightening and knotting into
cunning. "Pretty soft on the Granite Jaw! Yum--yum--yum!"
"Little devil! Little devil! I'll catch you and spank you to death."
"Yum! Yum!"
"It's better to have loved a short man
Than never to have loved atall."
"Little peewee, you! Jastrow ain't short. Them thick, strong-necked kind
never look their height. That boy is five feet two, if he's an inch.
Them stocky ones is the build that make the strong kind. Looka him lift
up that cannon-ball with just his left hand. B-r-r-r-r! Listen how it
shakes the place when he lets its fall! Looka! Honest, it makes me sick!
It's a wonder he don't kill himself."
"Better to have loved a short man
Than never to have loved atall."
The day, sun-riddled, stare-riddled, sawdusty, and white with glare,
slouched into the clanging, banging, electric-pianoed, electrifying
Babylonia of a Coney Island Saturday night. The erupting lava of a
pent-up work-a-week, odoriferous of strong foods and wilted clothing,
poured hotly down that boulevard of the bourgeoise, Ocean Avenue. The
slow, thick cir culation of six days of pants-pressing and
boiler-making, of cigarette-rolling and typewriting, of
machine-operating and truck-driving, of third-floor-backs, congestion
and indigestion, of depression and suppression, demanding the spurious
kind of excitation that can whip the blood to foam. The terrific
gyration of looping the loop. The comet-tail plunge of shooting the
chutes; the rocketing skyward, and the delicious madness at the pit of
the stomach on the downward swoop. The bead on the apple juice, the dash
of mustard to the frankfurter, the feather tickler in the eye, the
barker to the ear, and the thick festival-flavored sawdust to the
throat. By eleven o'clock the Freak Palace was a gelatinous congestion
of the quickened of heart, of blood, of tongue, and of purse. The crowd
stared, gaped, squirmed through itself, sweated.
By twelve o'clock, from her benchlike throne that had become a
straitjacket to the back, a heaviness had set in that seemed to thicken
Miss Hoag's eyelids, the flush receding before doughiness.
A weary mountain of the cruelly enhancing red silk and melting sequin
paste, the billowy arms inundated with the thumb-deep dimples lax out
along the chair-sides, as preponderous and preposterous a heroine as
ever fell the lot of scribe, she was nature's huge joke--a practical
joke, too, at eighteen dollars a week, bank-books from three trust
companies, and a china pig about ready to burst.
"Cheer up, Ossi! It might be worse," she said across the left rail, but
her lids twitching involuntarily of tiredness.
"Sacred Mother of the Sacred Child!" said the Ossified Man, in Italian.
The sword-swallower, at the megaphone instance of the barker, waggled
suddenly into motion, and, flouncing back her bushy knee-skirts and
kissing to the four winds, threw back her head and swallowed an
eighteen-inch carpenter's saw to the hilt. The crowd flowed up and
around her.
Miss Hoag felt on the undershelf of her table for a glass of water,
draining it. "Thank God," she said, "another day done!" and began
getting together her photographs into a neat packet, tilting the
contents of the saucer into a small biscuit-tin and snapping it around
with a rubber band.
The Baron de Ross was counting, too, his small hands eager at the task.
"This Island is getting as hard-boiled as an egg," he said.
"It is that," said Miss Hoag, making a pencil insert into a small
memorandum-book.
"You!" cried the Baron, the screw lines out again. "You money-bag tied
in the middle! I know a tattooed girl worked with you once on the St.
Louis World's Fair Pike says you slept on a pillow stuffed with
greenbacks."
"You're crazy with the heat," said Miss Hoag. "What I've got out of this
business, I've sweated for."
Then the Baron de Ross executed a pirouette of tiny self. "Worth your
weight in gold! Worth your weight in gold!"
"If you don't behave yourself, you little peewee, I'll leave you to plow
home through the sand alone. If it wasn't for me playing nurse-girl to
you, you'd have to be hiring a keeper. You better behave."
"Worth your weight in gold! Blow us to a ice-cream cone. Eh, Ossi?"
The crowd had sifted out; all but one of the center aisle of grill
arc-lights flickered out, leaving the Freak Palace to a spluttering kind
of gloom. The Snake-charmer, of a thousand iridescencies, wound the last
of her devitalized cobras down into its painted chest. The Siamese Twins
untwisted out of their embrace and went each his way. The Princess
Albino wove her cotton hair into a plait, finishing it with a rapidly
wound bit of thread. An attendant trundled the Ossified Man through a
rear door. Jastrow the Granite Jaw flopped on his derby, slightly askew,
and strolled over toward that same door, hands in pocket. He was thewed
like an ox. Short and as squattily packed down as a Buddha, the great
sinews of his strength bulged in his short neck and in the backs of the
calves of his legs, even rippled beneath his coat. It was as if a
compress had reduced him from great height down to his tightest
compactness, concentrating the strength of him. Even in repose, the
undershot jaw was plunged forward, the jowls bonily defined.
"Worth her weight in gold! Blow us to a ice-cream cone. Eh, Jastrow?
She's worth her weight in gold."
Passing within reach of where the Baron de Ross danced to his ditty of
reiteration, Jastrow the Granite Jaw reached up and in through the rail,
capturing one of the jiggling ankles, elevating the figure of the Baron
de Ross to a high-flung torch.
"Lay off that noise," said Jastrow the Granite Jaw, threatening to
dangle him head downward. "Lay off, or I'll drown you like a kitten!"
With an agility that could have swung him from bough to bough, the Baron
de Ross somersaulted astride the rear of Jastrow the Granite Jaw's great
neck, pounding little futile fists against the bulwark of head.
"Leggo me! Leggo!"
"Gr-r-r-r! I'll step on you and squash you like a caterpillar."
"Don't hurt him, Mr. Jastrow! Don't let him fall off backwards. He is so
little. Teenie'll catch you if you fall, honey. Teenie's here in back
of you."
With another double twist, the Baron de Ross somersaulted backward off
the shoulder of his captor, landing upright in the outstretched skirts
of Miss Hoag.
"Yah, yah!" he cried, dancing in the net of skirt and waggling his hands
from his ears. "Yah, yah!"
The Granite Jaw smoothed down the outraged rear of his head, eyes
rolling and smile terrible.
"Wow!" he said, making a false feint toward him.
The Baron, shrill with hysteria, plunged into a fold of Miss Hoag's
skirt.
"Don't hurt him, Jastrow. He's so awful little! Don't play rough."
THE BARON (_projecting his face around a fold of skirt_): Worth her
weight in go-uld--go-uld!
"He's always guying me for my saving ways, Jastrow. I tell him I 'ain't
got no little twenty-eight-inch wife out in San Francisco sending me
pin-money. Neither am I the prize little grafter of the world. I tell
him he's the littlest man and the biggest grafter in this show. Come out
of there, you little devil! He thinks because I got a few hundred
dollars laid by I'm a bigger freak than the one I get paid for being."
Jastrow the Granite Jaw flung the crook of his walking-stick against his
hip, leaning into it, the flanges of his nostrils widening a bit, as
if scenting.
"You old mountain-top," he said, screwing at the up-curving mustache,
"who'd have thought you had that pretty a penny saved?"
"I don't look to see myself live and die in the show business, Mr.
Jastrow."
"Now you said something, Big Tent."
"There's a farm out near Xenia, Ohio, where I lay up in winter, that I'm
going to own for myself one of these days. I've seen too many in this
business die right in exhibition, and the show have to chip in to bury
'em, for me not to save up against a rainy day."
"Lay it on, Big Tent. I like your philosophy."
"That's me every time, Mr. Jastrow. I'm going to die in a little
story-and-a-half frame house of my own with a cute little pointy roof, a
potato-patch right up to my back steps, and my own white Leghorns
crossin' my own country road to get to the other side. Why, I know a Fat
in this business, Aggie Lament--"
"Sure, me and the Baroness played Mexico City Carnival with Aggie
Lament. Some heavy!"
"Well, that girl, in her day, was one of the biggest tips to the scale
this business ever seen. What happens? All of a sudden, just like
that--pneumonia! Gets up out of bed, eight weeks later, skin and bones
--down to three hundred and sixty-five pounds and not a penny saved. I
chipped in what I could to keep her going, but she just down and died
one night. Job gone. No weight. In the exhibit business, just like any
other line, you got to have a long head. A Fat's got to look ahead for a
thin day. Strong for a weak day. That's why I wish, Mr. Jastrow, you'd
cut out that glass-eating feature of yours."
"How much you got, Airy-Fairy? Lemme double your money for you!"
"She's worth her weight in gold."
"Lemme double it!"
"Like fun I will. A spendthrift like you!"
"Which way you going?"
"We always go home by the beach. Shapiro made it a rule that the Bigs
and Littles can't ever show themselves on Ocean Avenue."
"Come on, you little flea; I'll ride you up the beach on my shoulder."
"Oh, Mr. Jastrow, you--you going to walk home with me--and--Baron?"
"Come on was what I said."
He mounted the Baron de Ross to his bulge of shoulder with veriest toss,
Miss Hoag, in a multi-fold cape that was a merciful shroud to the bulk
of her, descending from the platform. The place had emptied itself of
its fantastic congress of nature's pranks, only the grotesque print of
it remaining. The painted snake-chests closed. The array of gustatory
swords, each in flannelet slip-cover. The wild man's cage, empty. The
tiny velocipede of the Baron de Ross, upside down against rust. A hall
of wonder here. A cave of distorted fancy. The Land of the Cow Jumped
over the Moon and the Dish Ran away with the Spoon.
Outside, a moon, something bridal in its whiteness, beat down upon a
kicked-up stretch of beach, the banana-skins, the pop-corn boxes, the
gambados of erstwhile revelers violently printed into its sands. A
platinum-colored sea undulated in.
The leaping, bounding outline of Luna Park winked out even as they
emerged, the whole violent contortion fading back into silver mist.
There was a new breeze, spicily cool.