Introduction

Circus Home- A Novel of Life, Love and New Jersey is one of the most admired novels of 2023.

JUST ANNOUNCED- WINNER 2023 eLit GOLD MEDAL for Literary Fiction! WINNER- 2023 BookFest Book Award for Historical Fiction!

NOMINATED FOR THE Pacific Book Awards in Historical Fiction!
NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 International Book Award for Literary Fiction!
NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 North Street Book Prize for Genre Fiction!

Circus Home - A Novel of Life, Love and New Jersey

Brendan Hardy was a carnival barker. A tummler. A hawker. He spent a long career on the midway, luring people into the lascivious pleasures of the sideshow tent. As he enters old age, his daughter convinces him to move to an assisted living facility. Brendan chooses to live out his final years with his kind of people—in the New Jersey Home for Retired Circus and Carnival Performers. One day he gets an idea. He puts a sign over the coffee maker in the clubroom, asking to collect the detailed life stories of the other residents of the Home. This captivating and magical novel presents those stories—plus his own—as only Brendan can tell them.

The sweeping novel springs to life in New Jersey, of course, along with settings as diverse as 1880s Brooklyn, 1920s Mississippi, 1940s Detroit, 1950s New York City, a west-bound wagon train, exotic Havana, pre-revolution Kiev, and Washington DC on the eve of The Great War. It mixes historical events with brilliantly observed characters, both fictional and real. Brendan’s storytelling ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to magically fantastic to heartbreaking. And it all leads to an unexpected, punch-in-the-throat ending.

This hard-to-put-down novel brims with lively, intriguing characters you will enjoy getting close to. They are good people. Yet, they base their lives in illusion to survive, holding secrets close to their chest until forced into action. Each action presents a turn— often a sharp one— in their life story. Their lies, fictions, half-truths, and flights of fancy have consequences large and small. The novel asks readers to consider the role of make-believe, illusion, and deception in their lives. If your life is grounded in illusion— who are you? When you play a character, where do you end and the character begins? If you tell a lie to change your life for the better— is that wrong?

If you enjoyed the rousing pace of Gower's The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, the spirited characters in Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the literary sweep of Doctorow’s Ragtime, the antic world of Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, it's time you come home to the circus, too.

Pick up Circus Home today!

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Excerpt

PROLOGUE

The Barker

Brendan Hardy

NOW

We call it pretend, yet there is no pretense about it. Those of us who make a living with rouged cheeks, enveloped by canvas, draped in velvet, lit by Surprise-Pink-gelled Fresnels— working the carnival, the circus, the stage, magic — are the most genuine people on earth. So, when the daughter decided I needed assisted living, naturally my choice was to live with guys who can juggle. On the way to my final curtain I wanted to be alongside people who know how to walk a tightrope. Tame a lion. Balance a dog on their nose.

This is my story. And theirs.

Tonight! Cast party in Heaven’s Dressing Room!

“Places, Mr. Hardy…”

…Maestro, the Overture please!

OVERTURE

Today, if you look off towards the western horizon at sunset, all you see is a jumble of post-war industrial skeletons against the summer sky— what remains of the Elizabeth gas fields. The delicate steel spine of late 19th century industry looks quaint— cut black paper silhouettes— against the sky as traffic races from New York to Trenton down the New Jersey Turnpike. Today, the view can be missed completely as mini-vans zip from Elizabeth to Princeton with driver’s eyes on the road, passenger eyes down in Instagram or the marsh grass (Jimmy Hoffa buried here?) bending in the tailwind of passing Teslas.

This road, from (Dutch) Nieuwe Amsterdam to (Quaker) Trent-towne was built for speed. Well, technically it runs from Secaucus to Trenton. And yes, speed. The modern road, built in 1938, was intended to solve the problem of New Jersey. The New Jersey problem. The Joisey Pro’lem. What, you ask, is the Joisey problem? That Jersey exists! New Jersey— the barrier that lies (and always laid) in the way between Philadelphia (a place you want to be) and New York (a place you want to be more). Even the old roads, the ones that came before, were built on the idea that any place was a better place to be than New Jersey.

Then. Original Route Something, the wheel-rutted dirt road that lay between New York and Perth Amboy and later became The Turnpike was rutted to speed travel. Guide your carriage’s or wagon’s wheels into those ruts in Secaucus and speed along in the same ruts until the Shun Pike Road in Amboy. A neat (if hot in summer, slippery and cold in snowy winter) eight hours with driver’s eyes off the road, passengers sleeping, blithely passing dewey deer in frosty January or mosquitos languidly circling in fetid July. Then from Amboy to Brunswick, another day's ride. Then, New Brunswick (the Raritan Canal carried more coal than the Erie in 1929!) through Cinnaminson in a haze of chicken shit to the Pine Barrens of Smithville for the last day and WHAM— Philly…as blousy and suggestive as a whore trying to fill her dance card. As prim and proper and starched as a Puritan’s collar. Plus…the first Continental Congress!

Now. Today, you’d pass through the Brunswicks and Cinnaminson in a rage of maple leaves and a humus-y fecund topsoil to race to Philadelphia without noticing the increasing number of double-wide trailers and abandoned horse troughs spreading out around you. You’d easily miss the teeny farms, subsistence tomato patches, abandoned cotton fleecing shacks. Driving through in the late twenties (or early thirties) you’d have barreled past stills pumping out Jersey Shine, the prohibited tipple made from potatoes and pine needles responsible for a prodigious number of cases of temporary blindness, taking leave of the senses and taking up with Jesus. The savior having been accepted by more than one lady of the evening or drug dealer who, assisted by The Shine, saw the error in her ways and ended up on her knees begging for forgiveness, salvation or sometimes both. Other times the begging came from the closed trunk of a Nash with the headlights blacked out, said vehicle having peregrinated through the Pine Barrens hoping to make a straight deal on crooked hooch but things came down wrong. Find that kind of action and you’d likely come face-to-face with a desperate soul who fell victim to a slow, underfunded game of craps or a lost a marked hand of 21 or simply an unrepentant sinner hankering for a bender. At any cost.

This was the back woods of Jersey. Chicken farm land then. Chicken farm land now. At least where the land is being farmed. What is much more common is that it isn’t being farmed, since no one really farms in this age of Whole Foods. Likely what you see (and mistake for farm land as you pass through) is a scrabble patch of friable land that is empty and being neglected— visited occasionally by a late-model pick up truck with a hoe and rake in the back (along with a rolling container of Lysol wipes) which stops to gather up the newspapers blown against the aluminum legs of what would have, then— in the old days— been the legs of a water-pumping windmill and now— in these days— are the legs of a cell phone tower.

Zoom out: South Jersey. Zoom in: Portage, NJ. 08008.

The Silverson family owned a 700 acre parcel of Atlantic County in 1756, which stayed owned until the civil war when Edwin Forsythe brought a suit claiming the Silverson’s eastern-most 176 acres had originally belonged to his father, Colby Forsythe. If Silverson could not produce a bill of sale, claimed Forsythe, the land was rightly his. The Silverson family suspected this to be a con intended to bring Forsythe his only tract of arable land, seeing that the disputed 176 acres lay inland of the marshes that comprised all of the Forstythe tract. Protest though they did, Silverson’s 700 acres became 524 and a sizable farm became the state’s tiniest incorporated town. Gavanroe Silverson (his headstone reads “At Least We Kept ‘em Out!”) filed the incorporation of Portage, NJ in 1865 and was successful (not only because his brother-in-law Emanuel Porter was county assessor!) at turning his entire farm into his .83 square mile home town.

Portage thrived with an entire, if somewhat inbred, population comprised of Silversons and Porters, two barns, seven homes of various sizes, a smokehouse, a larger than average hen house and a small, muddy pond stocked with Bluegills. This tan-earthed Eden kept steady-state until the mid- nineteen sixties by which time Gavanroe’s Curse (the curse of congenitally low sperm count among Silverson men) had, decade by decade, pruned the Silverson family tree so severely that it petered out completely in 1963 leaving the family without a scion and Portage, NJ without a population.

The land bounced around for a few years between Silversons and Porters, Porters and Silversons, Nana Greta Silverson being the last remaining Silverson with a working liver and enough brain function to realize she had better do something— and had better do it quick. The something she did was to put Portage up for sale— all 524 acres— and move closer to Trenton where there was a nice Del Webb complex with two pools and competitive BINGO every Thursday night.

To save money, the “Welcome to Portage (A Great Place to Come Across) Population: 001” sign was whitewashed and repainted “For Sale - 524 Acres. Cash ONLY.” It faced White Horse Pike so long that it became pocked by bullet holes, veiled by the splat-splat of overripe tomatoes, punctuated by several raspberry-blue Rorschachs inked in 7-11 Slushies tossed by joy-riding teenagers. It blared its simple message in South Jersey sunlight by day and tinny pale light bulb by night.

What it did not do was attract a buyer.

Greta Silverson reduced the price every time she sent someone over to mend the barbed-wire fence, pick up the beer cans and rake in the condoms until it was, in her words,“a fucking fine deal.”

No action.

Then “a fucking steal.”

Still no action.

Then, “my last fucking offer.”

Magic!

For less than she could have sold her Deb Webb “The Retreat” model home, Greta sold Portage, NJ and 210 years of family history to the only cash buyer she could find. It felt bad to sell so short. Yet it also felt good.

“I am selling my land,” Greta told her Bingo pals, “to a charity. A fine charity, which does good work for needy people.”

It was possible to reuse the signposts from the for-sale sign one more time. The Monday following the signing of the deal, a new sign went up on the old posts:

FUTURE SITE OF THE

NEW JERSEY

HOME FOR

RETIRED

CARNIVAL and CIRCUS

PERFORMERS

ACT ONE

The Barker

Brendan Hardy

THEN

As the puller raised the curtain on the stage of the Belasco, Siobhan O’Connell felt a wave of nausea cross her throat and midsection.

“Could this be it?” she asked herself out loud with a sigh.

The hoarse squeak of four-strand hemp, as the rope caught the capstan and the Curtain Puller applied more force, covered the sound of her voice.

The curtain was new, hung two days ago— a job that took 23 men, first loading its hundreds of pounds of red velvet and gold braid into a lorry parked with three wheels on the sidewalk in front of 490 West 33rd Street. This loading alone took the work of 14 stevedores (their afternoon booked for this land-locked project) in addition to the eight movers and one errand boy already employed by Murawski Stage Curtain and Batten, Inc., supplier of curtains to almost every theater on Broadway. It required a blend of pure balance with brute strength to carry the pool of deep Chinese-red Ciselé from the trimming room through the warren of corridors that led to the street. The Murawski men brought strength along with sharps eyes trained on every hang nail, light-switch or door knob to insure none of the gold Italian brocade caught up and tore. Then, all 22 men (and the boy who could maneuver in the tight spaces) arrayed themselves around the folded velvet cargo like pall bearers and hiked it up the makeshift ramp mustered from twenty-four five foot long, six inch-by-six inch ties of Spanish pin oak. They placed it carefully on the truck-bed covered with wax cloth and folded the wax cloth over the curtain for protection. Once loaded, the truck trundled away under the weight of its cargo. The stevedores clung to the sides of the lorry like so many body guards to a king’s carriage as it sputtered its over-loaded way to the Belasco where it blocked the southernmost lane of West 44th Street for nearly three hours to finish the delivery.

Hanging the curtain took 10 men alone, supporting the top hem of the fabric a yard off the stage floor while three other men passed rope through the heavy stamped grommets and tied it to the pulleys. A counterweight of sandbags was hung and a winch was set, with a capstan as emergency brake. It was the squeak of rope tightening around this capstan that masked Siobhan’s sigh, covered her whispered “Could this be it?” and brought her back to presence stage right in the wings of the Belasco.

Surely it could not be. It wasn’t. It couldn’t. Surely it wasn’t.

Back to the task at hand: the “I Want” number (the third number after the Overture) in the score of Broadway’s new musical“Shirley, You Jest.” Siobhan hiked her skirt, ready to sweep onto the stage when she heard her cue. But no. There it was again. A exquisitely clear twinge almost an infinite distance away in her lower abdomen just below her navel. Certainly, she thought, I have enough time.

Siobhan knew she was close and the baby could come any time. Yet, she had been telling herself (and Tom) she would be late and would easily clear opening night. Especially since Daria— Daria Chausable, her understudy— had herself been replaced by the underrehearsed Sylvie Montrose due to Daria’s untimely case of measles. Siobhan simply couldn’t imagine nor willingly countenance a world in which she did not open in “Shirley, You Jest” as planned on November 21, 1938. That was two days away.

This could simply not be final contractions.

Just a ripple. Not a wave. Pregnancy had brought so many odd feelings, strange unexpected vibrations and short-lived weaknesses, abrupt changes and gradual ones. How odd it had felt to be kicked from inside or to suddenly crave the smell of dryer lint and even want to eat it! Siobhan was sure this was just another step in the process— “the twinge stage”— that every woman experiences.

Three bars of musical introduction and the Butler cries out “where ever is Miss Shirley? Why it is almost dinnertime!” That’s her cue. Bar one. Bar two. Eight beats. Bar thr— and the twinge becomes a tightening in her belly.

BUTLER: Where ever is Miss Shirley? Why it is almost dinnertime!

SHIRLEY: Here I am! I had such a time closing my closet door after I changed for dinner!

CLIVE: (crosses to Shirley, extending his arms) Hello, darling. You look magnificent!

Hiram Candy plays Clive. Candy, a stock leading man for the Shuberts joins the cast fresh from “Right This Way” which flopped in late summer, leaving Candy, Joe E. Lewis and a cast of 32 others at liberty to take new roles. Although she had heard of him, Siobhan noticed Candy (and his stock leading man moustache) for the first time during the initial read-through for “Shirley, You Jest” and moved her seat during a pee break to get closer to him. For professional reasons, of course.

“I like your necktie…” led to a bit of banter between the two, which led to Candy spilling a cup of (thankfully) cold coffee into Siobhan’s lap. Reading a line and gesticulating with a grand Stock Leading Man Gesture, Candy (as Clive) threw wide his arms catching a cup of cooled coffee on the cuff link on his left cuff. Seeing the wave of coffee billowing toward her lap, Siobhan jumped back, then up, and away spreading her legs in a most unladylike splay of tweed and stockings, the wave of coffee landing on her knees and the hem of her skirt while sending her Nutria wrap—like a flying squirrel— off her neck and squarely and hilariously onto the stage managers head, akimbo. In the same seconds, Siobhan realized the coffee was cold and her scream of impending horror turned to a laugh of relief. An undertow wave of agitation took over the entire table and during the bubbling confusion of “oh no!” and “whew” and “thank the Lord” Siobhan found her hand being held by Candy whom, in that moment of bonhomie, became simply Hiram.

In the subsequent days this comic brush with calamity flooded the hearts of both Siobhan and Hiram (since the heart is where both love and incaution reside) and the co-stars fell childishly in love. Or lust. Siobhan felt each subsequent morning more and more like a blossoming cherry branch— new, fresh, delicate, pink— in Hiram’s eyes and at the tips of his tobacco stained fingers. And Hiram felt more and more each morning like an old, weathered valise— full of secrets and shame. He hid this (and his longstanding reliance on prostitutes for “love”) from Siobhan (as she hid her marriage to Tom) and they both sailed incautiously onward in the first energetic throes of careless love.

*

Siobhan was hiding her pregnancy from the world. As a stipulation in her contract with The Shubert Organization she would not mention it to the press and the Shuberts would provide the shield of a talented and sympathetic costume designer and a slight rejigger of the time and setting of “Shirley, You Jest.” The play was relocated from Cleveland in 1905 to Atlanta in 1864 to provide Siobhan with an era and location supporting the wearing of hoop-skirts. That allowed her baby to expand as it might while nothing was noticed by her audience. Siobhan’s street clothes were redesigned by her Broadway costume designer and a closetful full of bias cut skirts and materterally flounced dresses was delivered to her Hasbrouck Heights flat. Tom, Siobhan and the costumer believed themselves to be the only ones who knew Siobhan was pregnant.

Hiram kept the fact that he had married four times (the last wife abandoned, drunk, in a corner walkup above a Palisades Park liquor store) to himself as well.

*

Their Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday trysts in the Hotel Edison (on opening day in 1931 the hotel lights were turned on remotely by Thomas Edison from his home in Menlo Park) started with gin/tonic with lime for Siobhan and whiskey/water for Hiram, a lengthy series of romantic kisses and an exchange of humorous stories of theater productions past. Over subsequent meetings, this bonding devolved into less sociable time with less and less water in Hiram’s drink and less and less gin in Siobhan’s. Siobhan had no need to tell Hiram she was pregnant since from the first time they’d met at The Edison until now he had only expressed an interest in oral pleasure (and that only drowsily before napping, unsatisfied). The one time he had remained awake during their afternoon trysts she was able to perform the act fully clothed, keeping her secret for another day. Yet when that (or any other) day came, he would mumble “blow me” seconds before his hand fell to his chest and he dropped into a narcoleptic sleep.

Dead to the world. Snoring.

Siobhan found herself passing the time while he slept by running lines silently in her head and staring out of the room’s only window through a web of crossed telephone wires onto busy 47th street.

*

Then there was Tom. Thomas Hardy covered the entirety of the Bronx and Brooklyn selling Murray Space Shoes, handmade and molded to the wearer’s foot. “The best shoe for your posture, collinear toes and a stout breathing arch,” Tom would say as he stood at your front door in his own pair of Murray’s in the Pebble Gray color, “only Murray’s can boldly face the irregularity of the human foot!” He’d shift on his feet dramatically to show how stable the shoes were, sample case in this left hand and beaver-felt fedora in his right.

“I bet you scrub your floors at least once every other week, M’lady. Tom would say “do you concur?” Of course this was meant to provoke the Lady of the House to protest that she— of course— washed her floors much more often. “If that is true…and [looking dramatically over M’lady’s shoulder] I have no doubt it is, based on the way your floor simply shimmers,” Tom would say in his most concerned tone, “you know how a bent toe can irritate the Plantar’s fascia” — this with his most sincere smile— “and Alan E. Murray knows, too!” Then, Tom would launch into his memorized pitch:

Who is Alan E. Murray? Why, humanitarian and inventor of Murray’s Space Shoes! You might [point down] think these shoes look like they come from space. They certainly do look that way! [Chuckle amiably] We call ‘em Space Shoes for an entirely contradistinctive reason. May I show you? [gesture toward sample case; place squarely in doorway.] It will just take you a moment to see that these shoes provide ample space for the toes inside what we call [step forward into doorway and flip latch on sample case] ‘our expanded digital containment feature.’ It will just take me a moment to demonstrate…may I come in?

At this point the Lady of the House would have either stepped backwards (a sure sign to Tom that she was a mark and might place an order) or held her ground in the doorway (to Tom a sign to move to Remarkable Proof Point #2: Heel Slope).

By the time he arrived at this crossroads in his speech on his first encounter with Siobhan (Tom having walked up eight flights to the door of her Hasbrouck flat) she had distractedly swept her arm toward the green and brown plaid sofa.

“Yes, please do come in,” she couldn’t help but let her eyes alight on the pleated front of his suit pants.

“Might I inquire, Madam,” Tom continued, “how many children grace your family?”

“Oh, well…children?” Siobhan was caught off guard. “Are the shoes for children?”??“Why, no. Not yet. I mean…only for adults at the moment.” Tom looked around trying to apply his Customer Characterization Training to the situation. He could not find a…er…toehold. There were no religious objects or family photos or indicative knickknacks of the sort he typically used to place a potential mark into one of the Murray’s Multiple Buyer Categories (MMBCs). He’d have to use Murray’s Buyer Qualifying Questions (MBQQs). “What sort of housework do you do, Madam?”

“I do no housework!” snapped Siobhan, immediately realizing she was, by saying so, inviting this handsome man with the attractive bulge in his pleated suit pants to leave.

Thinking quickly, although not quite all the way through, she rephrased her answer: “I do know housework! I certainly do! Why I polish the…um…silver every day with these hands!” She held up her hands, the palms towards her and the backs to Tom and wiggled her fingers.

Tom wanted, in that moment to take her hands in his and touch his cheeks with her fingertips. Instead he soldiered on with his Murray’s script:

Any woman, like you, who does housework, knows, as you surely do, the value of a well-lasted, well made leather shoe. This is what Alan E. Murray knows too. We simply measure your feet using our patent pending Murray’s Metrical Measurer [produce MMM from case]. We measure not one way, not two ways, but 17 ways to ensure the best fit…

Looking up from his measurer and noticing her wistful staring at the bannister lintel, Tom successfully identified Siobhan as a Passive Denier (category PD on the Murray’s Multiple Buyer Categories buyer-typing tool). Once this process was complete, he became focused on making a graceful exit.

“Gin?” asked Siobhan standing awkwardly and smoothing her skirt front.

From that day to this she had slept in Tom's arms.

*

Three bars of musical introduction and the Butler cries out “where ever is Miss Shirley? Why, it is almost dinnertime!”

And the tightening in her belly.

SHIRLEY: Here I am! I had such a time closing my closet door after I changed for dinner!

CLIVE: (crosses to Shirley, extending his arms) Hello, darling. You look magnificent.

SHIRLEY: Oh this little thing? I had it made with the summer lace from Mother’s old ball gown. It’s delightfully—

At that moment, Siobhan’s legs seemed to get sucked into her abdomen with her second contraction. She nearly fell forward into the footlights. The orchestra played through twelve bars of introduction and, just where Siobhan was to start singing her first line “the night is warm and wafts of springtime,” instead there was a third contraction and a massive sucking in of breath. She felt her velvet pumps tighten on her feet as if her they had come alive and were seeking revenge. All she saw was white shapes— the milky petals of giant magnolias spinning in the air in front of her.

Then, nothing. Back to normal. As she came back to the Belasco stage, the conductor was feeding her the lyrics in a stage whisper: “…wafts of SPRINGTIME and your ARMS call me to DANCE!”

Siobhan started to sing, her voice wavering at first, then normalizing with each note— her professionalism overtaking nature. She began exaggeratedly tapping her silk-toed foot to show the conductor where to pick up. The orchestra vamped and started the melody from the top.

Siobhan sang:

The night is warm and wafts of springtime ? and your arms call me to dance

My head is light and tells me big time

this could only be rom—

The -ance of rom-ance was swallowed whole as Siobhan’s water broke. She felt the warm then cooling wet in her costume bloomers and thanked heaven for the hoop-skirt she was wearing. The orchestra continued to play The Night is Warm while the conductor spit the lyrics over the footlights to his distracted star.

Hiram took a step toward her.

“Is the night cool and smelly like springtime, my dear?” He asked nodding toward the conductor, followed by a hoarse stage whispered aside: “Sing the goddam song!”

“Bastard!” whispered Siobhan back, cheating a few tentative steps toward stage right where she knew Kelly, her dresser, waited to help make a quick change at the end of the song. If she could make it to Kelly she could explain her missed cue and sit down. At the very moment she cheated stage right came a huge cramp that sent her tumbling indiscriminately and blindly into the stage-right wings and right into the arms of Kelly, who held her Scene Four costume over one arm and a pink tulle-trimmed hat with a six-inch pink rhinestoned hat pin in her left hand.

“What’s wrong, Miss O.?” asked Kelly, with a combination of professional sympathy and unprofessional judgment, “you went up on your song! That’s not a bit like you. Why I—”

“Kelly! I will vomit on your shoes,” shouted Siobhan, “if you don’t get me a chair!!”

By this time the auditorium was buzzing with the unique sound a theater audience makes when something on the stage has gone wrong— a low, buzzing murmur of incredulity.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the sound of Gordon Waxman, the House Manager, was muffled backstage by the fire curtain, which had been wrung down. “Ladies and…”

Hiram presented himself in front of Siobhan, his bowtie askew and his jaw puffing as the House Manager continued to try to quiet the crowd from the stage. “Ladies and…Gentlemen, as you can see a slight indisposition has presented itself…” A ripple of ahh and ooh went through the audience, Waxman bending over the footlights. “Ladies and Gentlemen, as you can see a slight indisposition has presented itself in the form of illness to Miss O’Connell…We will undertake a brief interval of fifteen minutes after which we will certainly resume.”

Hiram (STANDS IN FRONT OF SIOBHAN): “You enter late and then miss your cue! Can’t you memorize a goddam script?!!”

Siobhan’s first thought was that Hiram was drunk.

Kelly came back with a brown bentwood bar chair, nabbed from the saloon scene (Act One, Scene Five). She used the chair as an excuse to step between Siobhan and Hiram, sat Siobhan with a teetering chop to the shoulders and began to unlace the hoops under Siobhan’s overskirt.

“You enter late and then miss your goddam cue!” Hiram was still going at it. “Three nights from opening and you haven’t memorized the goddam script?”

Siobhan was momentarily all focus and composure. “Kelly, be so kind as to ask Mr. Candy to leave the area while I dress, won’t you please?”

The Dresser gestured to Hiram and lilted: “Could y’ please step aside, Mr. Candy?”

Hiram stood his ground.

“I will not have you make a grandstand play,” he said bending and pointing into the cleft between Siobhan’s breasts. “I demand you explain—“

On the word “explain,” Siobhan felt her abdomen tighten like a ball and a wave of pain rippled down her back. She winced and her feet left the floor.

Kelly: “Miss O.— tell me what’s wrong?”

Siobhan kicked off the hooped skirt and noticed a cauliflower of slightly yellow liquid spreading across her bloomers.

Siobhan: “Oh Kelly…I am having a baby!”

“A baby!!” Oddly, it was Hiram’s voice that responded, “that’s impossible!”

“You cannot know. You don’t know, “ whispered Siobhan. Then “YOWWWWWWW! As her fifth (and second major) contraction overtook her. Fuck, that’s powerful she thought.

Then, like a winged horseman of the apocalypse, Gordon Waxman was suddenly in front of her.

“I told them you are indisposed and we resume in fifteen minutes.” He said tapping his watch crystal, “Twelve minutes now! I will call places in twelve— wait— now eleven minutes!”?

“There will be no show!” barked Hiram, “O’Connell says she is having a baby!” Hiram just then noticed the crowd of stagehands and actors gathering, necks stretched to see Siobhan. “Just whose baby none of us could know!” he spit, turning back toward the stage. Then, realizing he was alone in his interest, he raised his chest, and pointed a finger accusatorially. “Goddam show folk!”

“And what’re you, Mr. Candy, but show folk your own self?” replied Kelly, in her most Irish indignation.

“We have a full house of paid preview ticket holders,” continued Waxman, his eyebrows twitching and eyes rolling, “and the Messrs. Shubert frown mightily…I say mightily frown…upon refunds!”

“YOWWWWWWWWW!” Siobhan cried, rocked by another contraction??“Her water has broke and this baby is coming!” Shouted Kelly combining her boldest take-charge tone with resignation. She wanted to help yet, the truth was, she knew nothing about labor, babies or water breaking. She had worked on a production of “The Russian Doll,” a three act drama where in the second act (Scene 3) a papier-mâché baby was “delivered” on stage.

“The Messrs. Shubert do frown upon refunds!” Gordon Waxman said again only, this time, no one was listening. He turned quickly, realized he stood abandoned and walked back to center stage, found the curtain part and stepped in one, downstage of the first curtain, to address the audience, weakly:

“Ladies and Gentlemen…if there is an obstetrician, or a similarly gifted physician in the house, would you kindly make yourself known to me?”

*

In front of the Belasco’s new red velvet curtain the audience made an orderly exit (their passions cooled and negotiations saved for the box office staff). IN a few minutes, the shuffling of feet subsided and the auditorium fell silent.

The theater was restored to its rightful owners— the show folk— and the energy was all behind the curtain.

Suddenly (and thankfully) Siobhan was surrounded by purposeful people doing their job. A crew of stagehands bolstered a lying in area with piled costumes and horsehair-stuffed leather sofa cushions, hastily brushed of dust and ashes, positioned into a makeshift chaise. Kelly, the dresser, undressed Siobhan in full view of everyone (which was normal for a quick change) and replaced her show costume with her dressing gown. Miss Olivia Juness, head of the costume shop, gathered clean rags and cloths in case swaddling was necessary. Jake Reilly, the show carpenter rummaged around the wings for spare, clean 1x1-inch pine for Miss O’Connell to bite on should she need fortification. Backstage in every theater is a double burner gas stove used to boil hoof glue, its resin used to patch, starch and stiffen scenic flats and battens. This was hastily taken over by two carpenters who placed a pot of water on each burner to bring to a boil. Johnny Centrolo, the production’s electrician rang the backstage intercom, connected with the upstairs lighting booth, had them kill the current lighting cue and bring up the work lights. No one but Hiram seemed to question the event at hand. Instead they all pulled together to help.

Only a few minutes passed before a doctor presented himself (actually, to Gordon Waxman’s surprise, herself) at the foot of the stage. Dr. Clarice Heffernan (Obstetrician and General Practice) was ushered backstage by Gordon, who had now accepted the fact that he was going to house manage the birth of Siobhan’s baby. The doctor made her way around several piles of swaddling cloths, a standing ghost lamp and, oddly, a Victrola— two stage hands having lugged it from Siobhan’s dressing room— playing the Seven Dwarves singing Whistle While You Work to anyone who was listening.

Businesslike introductions were made and then:

DR. HEFFERNAN: How long since the last contraction?

KELLY: Less than two minutes

SIOBHAN: (IN UNISON WITH KELLY’S ANSWER) — five minutes at least!

DR. HEFFERNAN: Something more accurate would be helpful. A wristwatch?

GORDON WAXMAN: (STEPPING FORWARD, ARM EXTENDED, NOW EAGER TO HAVE A ROLE) My Howard Repeater went through the great war with me and I trust its accuracy implicitly!

SIOBHAN: YOWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!

“You! Howard! Watch man!” the doctor shouted against the muffling bulk of curtain, “tell me the time it takes from now to the next contraction!” then to Siobhan, “I want you to tell me when your next contraction ends. How long as this been going on?”

“They started about an hour ago,” admitted Siobhan, wishing she were in an entirely different place doing an entirely different thing.

The next contraction came about three minutes later (and was duly recorded by the Howard watch). It lasted about 85 seconds. With this information confirmed, Dr. Heffernan announced what most of the assembled theatre people already knew: there was not time to get to a hospital. The baby would be born on the stage of the Belasco Theatre.

*

What followed for Siobhan was nearly an hour of pushing, hard breathing and name calling. From the generally offered “bastard!” to the specific and refined “Jesu Christo!” (Siobhan was Catholic, after all) there came a panoply of expletives aimed at no one, everyone, her specific condition and life itself. Then there was “YOU BASTARD,” reserved for Hiram when Siobhan’s gaze happened to find the leading man leaning against the casement of the Stage Manager’s booth gazing at his boots and picking at his fingernails. There was also the varietal shriek of “Tom!” Or “TOMMMMMMM!” Or the tenderhearted “Tommy I need you…” This last was followed by the dispatch of the stage door errand boy to a nearby public phone to fetch Tom Hardy (at number GReely-5-141) and Tom’s nearly overlooked arrival at the time when two-thirds of the baby’s head was visible to those gathered close enough to see.

The baby emerged blotchy, smudged and windy with his natal cry precisely at 11PM (actually at 11:04 by the Howard Watch, although the story would always be retold as “precisely at 11pm! He was my 11 o’clock number!”). The baby (Brendan was the name Siobhan and Tom chose and now could use) was the color of Rosalia pink marble and veiny like that, too, with more of Tom’s brown hair than anyone expected, including Tom.

Tom was the first to hold the baby, since Siobhan found mothering, from its very first moment, an overwhelming prospect. Kelly was second to hold him and — oddly— Hiram was third.

Hiram held the baby looking like what he privately wished he was— a nervous uncle— and then, convinced that he had two left hands for baby holding, baby mollifying or baby anything, he quickly passed Brendan to Siobhan to hold for the first time. Hiram unsteadily put the baby in Siobhan’s hands, supporting its neck as best he could without formal training. Siobhan looked into baby Brendan’s pink and puffy face and saw his tiny hands for the first time. She became entranced by her child’s perfect, tiny nails. She settled the baby into the crux of her arms and looked up from her birth bed at the row of work lights in the dark flyspace of the Belasco. As she focused her eyes in the middle distance between her and the lights, she saw a ring of concerned cast members looking lovingly at the rosy gift in her hands.

I can do this. I can, she thought feeling herself put motherhood on like a warm woolen coat.

Hiram leaned over. He blocked her view of her co-workers— her community. He winked at Siobhan and then gave her a peppy thumbs up.

This gesture was responsible for the first two words I heard in my life being my mother saying:

“Fuck You!” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

What is unique about the narrator in this novel and how does his voice impact the reader's experience?

What role does fantasy play in this novel?

What common threads unite the stories of the residents of the home and how do these common threads impact the characters?

What do you think of the moral dilemmas the characters face and the actions they take as a result?

When is it okay to lie in the book and when is it okay to lie in real life?

Is it okay to change who you are in order to make your life better?

When your work is playing a character, where does the character stop and the real you start and what are the advantages and challenges of playing a character?

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