Girl and Five Brave Horses, A (20 page)

As I stood there listening to the music, I could follow the progress of the Falcons out front. I had watched them so often in previous years that I knew almost to the instant what they were doing. Orville would be working from the cradle between the two poles holding the trap bar and rings for the girls to perform on. His feet would be hooked between the two parallel bars of supple metal that ran from one perch pole to the other, and from these bars he would be hanging head down, flexing, unflexing, doing a few tricks while the girls climbed the ladders up to him.

Both girls’ lives depended on him completely, for if he ever lost his grip on the trapeze or the rings they would plunge down onto the deck 104 feet below. They worked without a net, because if they fell from that height the fall would kill them anyway.

After a few minutes the sweep of “The Skater’s Waltz” swung onto the night air and I pictured Roxie in trap-bar routine. She had several tricks—a bird’s nest, a foot-and-hand change, and a split in the rings. After each of these the audience clapped, and then there was heavy applause and I knew she had stepped back onto her pedestal, giving Irene a chance to perform.

Up until the past week Irene had been doing an especially complicated foot-and-hand change, which is difficult to describe but so dangerous that Orville had cut it out of the act. The danger lay in the fact that for a split second she was completely free of contact with anything at all, and if in coming from the poles to the rings she didn’t catch hold of Orville’s hand she would fall free. Irene loved that particular routine because she loved flirting with death. When Orville forbade her doing it any more she threatened to quit but finally settled for a belly roll, which got more screams from the crowd anyway because it appeared more dramatic. The foot-and-hand change was too subtle and too quick for most people to follow.

The belly roll was performed on the trap bar and was a real chiller. Irene would put her stomach on the bar, swing back and forth on it a minute, and then fling herself forward and scream. As she shot down she would appear to have lost control, but at the last minute she would catch herself with her feet and hang swinging head down. When I heard “Springtime in the Rockies” I knew Irene had begun and that she would soon have the audience standing up in their seats.

I smiled to myself as I stood against the wall, still waiting for Elsa to come. The audience exhaled their usual gasps and “Ohhhs” and “Ahhhs,” signaling the end of that part of the act. Now while the girls climbed to the top of the perch poles, Orville would descend, ready to help the four men who paid out the rope which brought the girls down to the ground at the end of the performance.

In my mind’s eye I could see Irene and Roxie as they climbed, their little bodies moving upward, one a bright flash of silver, the other a heavy glitter of gold. Swiftly as twin spiders they would climb up and up until they reached the top, 125 feet in the air. There they would pause to wave to the crowd below, and as they did so the little bits of glitter they wore in their hair would catch in the spotlights and wink down at the crowd. Then they would fasten their feet into the slings and begin their gymnastics, swaying back and forth on the poles, half flinging themselves out and up and down and with their exertions bending the poles to almost forty-five-degree angles.

This part of the act usually took about ten minutes, and during that time, except for occasional gasps, one could hear a pin drop. Every face, I knew, was glued to the girls on the poles and a good many mouths had dropped open. Then the brazenly jubilant strains of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” broke on the night air; the act was finished and the girls were coming down.

The audience burst into wild applause. I had a clear mental picture of the two girls: Roxie, with her auburn hair tossed back, clamping her teeth tight on the rubber bit in her mouth, arms flung behind her body like some beautiful silver bird; Irene, above her on the same rope, frozen in an arabesque, a golden butterfly, her body forward, one leg thrust out in a graceful arc. Then suddenly there was a terrible scream, not from one throat, but from eight thousand.

I was accustomed to hearing the audience scream when the girls did their tricks, but this was different. It was long and drawn out and laden with terror. I turned cold at the mass scream, and almost simultaneously there was the sound of a dull thud on the deck outside. It made me physically ill.

Behind and a little to the left of me a dice game had been in progress, and I was dimly aware of incoherent, animal-like noises from the players as they scrambled to their feet. Above the seemingly endless sounds of screaming I heard the slow creaking and grinding of metal, as if it were being twisted and bent. Then another heavy thud. I waited with a feeling of terrible suspense for the sound of a third body, forgetting momentarily that Orville was already down.

Behind me I heard Harriet, one of the Hawaiian divers, shouting and realized, as in a dream, that she was shouting at me. In the confusion of that whole dreadful moment my ears registered her warning but not her words. Responding to them, I turned and ran a few steps and bumped into a bench. I did not fall completely over it but I did fall forward. The thundering crash of metal breaking and wood splintering seemed very close, and then there was a final crash.

Almost immediately someone grabbed my arm and rushed me across the area to my dressing room. “Stay here,” he said. “You’ll be safe.” As he spoke and pushed me inside I knew that it was Marty.

The sound of shouting voices and running feet was rising tumultuously as he opened the weatherproof telephone box that hung on the wall outside my door and called frantically for an ambulance.

Roxie was the first to be brought backstage, though she was the second to fall. This was because PeeWee, the first person to reach Irene, had started toward the front of the pier with her in his arms. Somebody caught him and headed him backstage, but Roxie had been carried there in the meantime and was put on the only cot in the first-aid room. Between cries of pain I could hear her say, “My back! Oh, God! My back!” and then, as if she had lapsed into a partial state of consciousness and with less agony in her voice, “What’s the matter? Is something wrong? What’s happened?”

PeeWee finally arrived with Irene and laid her on a bench outside my door. In contrast to Roxie, Irene was silent, too silent. I wondered which was worse—Roxie’s cries so full of pain or Irene’s silence. Then someone said, “Here’s a nurse. She was in the audience,” and someone else said, “Where’s Mrs. Pallenberg? Tell her to take care of Emile. He’s sick.”

A new voice, a woman’s, spoke after a minute and said, “I can’t do anything for this one,” and then I heard her going into the first-aid room to see about Roxie.

Little Dirbima Pallenberg seemed to be wandering around lost. “Is somebody dead?” she was asking. “Did somebody get killed?” and I thought, “Why doesn’t somebody take the child away from this?” I opened my door and called, “Dirbima, come here,” but just then Mr. Pallenberg spoke up. “Never mind,” he said, “there isn’t anything I can do, so I’m taking her home.”

I closed the door again, but it was opened immediately by Harriet. She was crying as she entered, “Oh, I’m so glad, so glad!” For an instant I felt shocked and then thought, “She’s hysterical. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

I said, “Tell me what happened, Harriet,” and she began, “Irene—she—“ But her voice broke and she began sobbing more violently. I made no effort to comfort her. I had no words.

I remained at the door, wondering why the ambulance was taking so long. Outside I could hear Orville speaking—crying, really. He was saying, “I’m through. I’ll never build another rigging as long as I live.” I felt vaguely surprised that he wasn’t hurt, until I remembered that he had been on the deck at the time of the accident rather than in the cradle. Then somebody shouted, “Here come the stretcher-bearers.”

A few seconds later Al dashed in, kissed me, and said, “I’m going to the hospital with Orville. When Arnette gets dressed, go on home.”

Harriet got up and went out, and in a minute I followed her. I moved toward a group of voices, and as I did so Pee-Wee stepped up and placed his hands on my shoulders. “Thank God,” he said, “you’re still with us.”

It seemed such an odd thing for him to say that I asked, “What in the world do you mean?”

“If it hadn’t been for that bench,” he said, “you’d have been killed. The rigging crashed down less than a foot above your head as you fell.” Listening to the story of my close call, I understood for the first time what Harriet had meant when she said, “Oh, I’m so glad.”

The theory that the show must go on was ignored by the spectators, making it totally unnecessary to call it off. Many of the spectators had fainted, but those who were able to left the grandstand, and as Arnette and I passed by on our way out it was deserted, she reported, except for a few who had not yet recovered, their friends and the ushers who were helping to revive them.

As we walked along the corridors of the pier, usually so thronged with pleasure seekers, it was strangely empty, and the few late-comers who had bought tickets after the accident wandered about seemingly bewildered and lost. At the front end of the pier somebody told us that the horror of the spectators who had seen the accident had been translated to those who had not, and crowds had left the pier like refugees pouring from a doomed city.

Some of the performers went home, but others, anxious for news and knowing Al would bring it when he came, followed us to our apartment. We gathered in the dining room and sat down around the table, miserably unhappy.

The differences in the characters of the individuals were revealed by their reactions. Those who felt compelled to talk discussed the accident in all its phases, and as I listened I gradually gained an idea of what had happened. Apparently Harriet had been the only one who was watching. “When Irene got on the rope,” she explained, “instead of spreading out into the arabesque, it looked as if she went into a back bend.”

The instant she said it I remembered hearing Irene talk about a back bend. She said she was tired of the arabesque and wanted to try something different. It was conceivable that she had decided on the spur of the moment to do it without having first figured out that she would have to wrap her leg around the rope in a manner directly opposite from the pose required by an arabesque. When she pushed back with her weight instead of forward, the rope would have come unwrapped from around her leg and she would have fallen. That was and still is the best theory any of us has been able to offer. No explanation of the accident really makes sense, because Irene was such a marvelous performer, but it seems unlikely that it could have happened any other way.

As Irene fell she struck two wires, one at sixty feet and another at fifty, which caused the anchor hooks to straighten out. This sudden and forceful release of the two supporting guy wires on the same side that held Roxie’s weight was too much of a strain, and the rigging collapsed. The men couldn’t pay the rope out fast enough to let Roxie down easy, so she had fallen from about seventy-five feet. Marty said that when he got to her he found one of the bones in her ankle had broken through the flesh and was sticking into the planking of the deck. He and the others who lifted her had to pull the bone out of the wood and in the process broke part of it off.

After Marty’s description everybody was silent for a while, and then Kelsey began talking about other accidents and continued for some time in this vein, piling up harrowing and gruesome details. Finally someone threatened to throw him out if he didn’t shut up, and the threat was backed up by a chorus of “Yes, for heaven’s sake!” Then there was another silence.

Finally Al came home about four o’clock in the morning and told us that Irene was dead. The surgeons believed she had broken her back when she hit the first guy wire and her neck when she hit the second one. She never regained consciousness, but her vitality had been so great that she had lived for nearly two hours. Roxie’s injuries were compound and still not definitely catalogued. She had a badly fractured ankle and a broken foot. Several vertebrae in the lower part of her spine had been crushed, and the doctors didn’t know whether she would live or not.

Finally we went to bed, and I fell asleep almost instantly, taking refuge in the only place where I could keep from thinking.

When I woke about nine the next morning I felt drugged, and as I struggled to overcome the sensation I became conscious of a sense of guilt, and the atmosphere seemed heavy with vague desolation. I couldn’t think why at first, and then I remembered; Irene was dead and Roxie was in the hospital. She too might be dying or dead by now. But it was impossible! It was just a bad dream. In a few minutes we would all get up and have breakfast together.

I opened my eyes, and the simple act brought with it the realization that it was all true. I got up, slipped on a robe, and went out into the hall. Arnette met me and said, “Al has gone to the hospital. Mrs. Van Myers is here.” Her voice was dull and even, and I felt she had spoken less for the purpose of giving information than to appear balanced and in control of her emotions.

In a little while Al came back with Orville and made him go to bed. Roxie’s life was still hanging by a hair, Al said. We tried to eat breakfast, but it was no use; empty chairs around the table were as visible to me in my mind’s eye as they were to Al and Arnette. We gave up and went down to the pier.

The wreckage had been cleared away, and many who had been too stunned to weep the night before were weeping openly now. Arnette expressed the feelings of us all when she said, “It’s hard to tell whether it would be worse looking at all the wrecked rigging or the empty space where it stood. It’s horrible, that wide empty place on the deck.”

During the next few days Roxie fought for her life and Orville was seldom at the apartment. Orville’s mother arrived from Des Moines in time to attend Irene’s funeral. She hadn’t known Irene, but her presence comforted Orville. Of course the whole thing was worse for him than for anyone else, but the aftermath of the tragedy had its effect on all of us.