Queen of the Air Page 4

  Leitzel was but a babe in arms that early spring night of 1891 when her mother abandoned her for the first time. Because of her freshness in life, she could not have felt any of the heartache that Nellie suffered.

  Within just an hour or two after her mother left her, though, perhaps even in as little time as minutes, Leitzel may have sensed dimly that a critical matter had changed in her life. Julia, her grandmother, had replaced Nellie as her feeding station.

  Julia, around forty, had been nursing children of her own almost continuously for the last dozen years or so and was still nursing when Leitzel was born to Nellie. Leitzel may not have discerned any differences in the tastes of the milks of her mother and grandmother, but she may have happily sensed a difference in the quantity of nourishment that was now available to her. Nellie was small and barely nubile when she brought Leitzel into the world. Julia was a large woman whose body seemed to have taken form by stacking great spheroids on top of one another. Her breasts, which she took out of her dresses several times a day for feedings, were milk swollen and as fat as pigeons.

  Years later, when Leitzel was widely proclaimed as the greatest performer ever to be produced in her medium, some members of her family would ascribe her preeminence to the diet she had as an infant. And could it be otherwise? Her development might have been quite like that of the goddesses of Greek mythology who took on the attributes of the noble birds and beasts on whose teats their lips had pulled as babies. Not only had Leitzel been suckled by a mother who was a circus artist, but also by a grandmother who had been a circus strong-woman and trapeze performer before largely devoting her life to baby making.

  The gypsy circuses that meandered the Carpathian Mountains, by and large, were different from one another by name only. They were all one- or two-horse, one-wagon enterprises, and almost all of them offered a bareback riding act, along with a tumbler or a juggler or two, and maybe a clown or a dancing dog or plank-walking pig. Dosta’s circus was still a one-wagon affair in 1891, but now it had an attraction that set it apart from all the other roving aggregations. It had a genuine trapeze artist, something only the bigger circuses in the cities featured.

  Town-wide holidays seemed to occur instantly in just about every mountain hamlet where the mud-spattered wagon of the Willy Dosta Circus appeared, drawn by its elephantine white horse. Houses, stores, and even the saloons emptied out, and everyone streamed to the town square, where, immediately upon the show’s arrival, Dosta and the two boys started erecting Nellie’s portable trapeze. There were a lot of kids, of course, but also mothers and fathers, and some grandparents who were so ancient they had to be rolled to the squares on hand-pulled carts.

  “They say they got a trapeze artist just like them shows in the cities,” the townspeople hummed to one another “That’s her over there. So pretty, and they say she flies like a bird. Imagine.”

  As in her tour the season earlier, Nellie appeared first in the shows as an equestrienne. She threw backward somersaults on Reiter’s wide back as the old white horse cantered around and around in a circle. She pirouetted like a prima ballerina on her moving stage. Dosta, standing on the wooden curbing of the ring, held hoops in the air as Reiter circled around and around. Nellie leaped from the horse’s back through the hoops and then realighted on the loping behemoth.

  Willy continued in his role as a strongman, lying on his back and, with his feet, twirling heavy logs like batons, and juggling the show’s two boys in the air.

  There were times during the show when the two young boys also had the ring to themselves. Facing each other from afar inside the sawdust circle, they sent goose eggs and then flaming pine sticks arcing back and forth between themselves. In another of their turns, they chased each other around the sawdust ring in circles while throwing flip-flops and cartwheels.

  But it was always the bird girl that the rustics were most anxious to see. Knowing this, before Dosta permitted her to appear, he sent his wife weaving through the crowds with a pie dish. The coins and bills accumulated more rapidly and richly in the tin than they ever had before at his circus.

  Then Nellie appeared from the wagon, her costume changed from the rose-colored tutu and leotard she wore in her bareback riding act to one of white. She walked to the tower of bolted-together wood beams, and then climbed its rope ladder to the trapeze.

  She gripped the trapeze bar by nothing more than the backs of her ankles, and then, for the longest of moments, hung upside down in the air magically, motionlessly, like a tiny fluff of cloud on a still day. Then she was flying, sailing over the heads of the families of farmers, timber men, and stone masons below. She performed handstands and then a headstand on the bar of the widely arcing trapeze. Sometimes she soared so high that the trapeze turned full circles in the air.

  Finally, at the trapeze’s farthermost forward thrusts, she left the conveyance, and then, after being catapulted twenty or twenty-five feet through the air, landed in Willy’s muscular arms with the lightness of a mother robin returning with a worm to her nest of days-old chicks.

  In many of the towns where the Willy Dosta Circus appeared, the performances ran continuously from early afternoon until the moon nudged the sun out of the sky. Willy’s wife kept passing through the crowds with the tin. When it filled almost to the point of overflowing, she carried it into the wagon, poured the coins and bills into money sacks, and then, like a church usher, returned again to the gatherings.

  Willy, of course, was thrilled at the patronage Nellie’s trapeze performances drew, and what was especially gratifying to him was that he had been able to add the new feature without adding to his payroll.

  Oddly, as bestial and hideous as Nellie had always found Willy, she started to feel some softening of her detestation toward him as the circus continued its push through the mountains. Her own father, she believed, had discarded her. Willy was now the most dominant adult in her life. Her survival, and that of her baby and the rest of her family, were dependent on him. There may have been another reason for the growing closeness Nellie began to feel toward Willy.

  “My mother had been born into the circus world, and it was in her blood,” her son, Alfred Pelikan, would observe years later. “She loved everything about life on a traveling circus—the freedom, the strangeness of the places and the people she encountered every new day, the approval she received from audiences, even the brushes with danger she experienced when she was doing her bareback riding act or performing on the trapeze.”

  For the first time in all the years the Willy Dosta Circus had toured the Carpathians, the show now had a genuine star—and Willy had created her. He decided it was time to descend the mountains to start playing the bigger cities.

  Possibly because his wife was with him everywhere, Willy seems not to have resumed his assaults on Nellie at any time during her second tour with his circus. He was still quick to anger, though, and there were still occasions when he whipped her and the two boys. Dosta’s wife did nothing to discourage the attacks. She was, according to Nellie, a “poor, timid” woman who was as much in terror of her husband as were his apprentices. Dosta was so open about flogging Nellie while the circus was appearing in Königsberg, Germany, that his attack drew the attention of passersby who reported it to authorities.

  “His methods were so cruel that the police got after him,” Nellie said. The police placed her on a train and sent her back to her home in Breslau, 325 miles away.

  But Nellie was not reunited with her family, including her baby daughter, Leitzel, for long. Dosta also boarded a train for Breslau and, in a day or two, was pounding at the door of the Pelikan apartment. He again placed a sack of money before Eduard and told him the money was only a down payment for what he would earn if he ordered Nellie to return to his circus to finish out the season. Dosta and Nellie were together on the next Königsberg-bound train.

  Leitzel was nearly a year old when, late in the year, her old mother, not quite fourteen, returned home from her 1891 circus tour. Nellie was sur
prised at how much her daughter had changed in the time she was gone. Her head bore a cloud of frizz the same orange-red as Dosta’s hair. She had started walking and had learned her first word—not mutter, but großmutter. And clearly she had thrived through her grandmother’s nursing. She was plump and round.

  During her mother’s absence, Leitzel had been doted on not only by her grandmother but also by her four aunts and uncles. She appeared to be at perfect peace in the crowded Pelikan household and regarded her mother as a stranger and an intruder after she returned home. When Nellie tried to hold her, she squirmed and cried until she was freed. She would then toddle over to her grandmother, or another family member, to be picked up. Julia told Nellie it would take a little time for her child to know her and realize she was her mother, but Nellie was desolate.

  What hurt Nellie most was watching her mother unbutton the front of her dress several times a day to bring out her breasts and nurse Leitzel. Nellie was left with no role in the nurturing of her daughter.

  Nellie went on the road with the Willy Dosta Circus yet again in 1892, a third tour. Willy’s wife apparently did not travel with the show this time.

  When Nellie returned to her family later in the year, she was in the same condition she had been in when Willy returned with her two years earlier.

  On March 15, 1893, Nellie, now barely fourteen, gave birth to a second child. The baby, delivered by Julia in the Pelikan household, was christened Alfred George Pelikan.

  Nellie had become a much-changed young woman during her last tour. Her days of performing in weedy fields and backwoods villages before sprinklings of peasants were behind her. Throughout much of 1892, Dosta had arranged for her to make appearances with such popular big top institutions as the Zirkus Althoff in Berlin, the Zirkus Schumann of Denmark, and the Zirkus Renz, which had not only a permanently operating amphitheater in her hometown of Breslau but also others in Hamburg, Berlin, and Bremen, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. Nellie—now more commonly known to her public as “La Belle Nellie”—was beginning to gather recognition as a true circus sensation.

  Dosta spent the winter of 1892 to 1893 counting and recounting his earnings from contracting out La Belle Nellie to the big circuses, those that played in the amphitheaters and beneath big tops that commonly drew audiences of a thousand or more. In all the years he had been taking out his one-wagon show, he had barely earned enough to survive the winters. Now he had more money than ever. He was sure that with just one more season of contracting out appearances by his girl wonder, he would amass enough riches to assemble a truly first-class circus, one with a big top, maybe even a small train with WILLY DOSTA’S GREAT RAILROAD SHOWS emblazoned in gold on all its cars.

  He could not wait for the new circus season to begin.

  CHAPTER 4

  The man Julia admitted into the Pelikan apartment was tall and wispy. He had just ascended three flights and was puffing slightly.

  The younger children in the household drew up to the stranger, Leitzel among them. It was January or February of 1893, and she had just passed her third birthday.

  The visitor to the Pelikans’ apartment reached down to ruffle the hair of the children nearest him.

  “Hallo, hallo,” he said

  He was fifty, but his face was unlined, soft, almost feminine.

  The children just stared. He did not have the appearance of anyone they could ever have expected to see in their drab and crowded apartment. Indeed, in the whole of the gray and decaying section of Breslau where the family lived, it was unlikely that so elegant and dignified a man had ever before appeared in their neighborhood.

  He carried a valise embossed with the initials E. J. L. and wore a three-piece suit. White cuffs fastened with diamond buttons poked out from the sleeves of his coat. His hair, including a luxuriant mustache with its ends curled upward in backward c’s, was of the purest white. It glinted like new-fallen snow brushed in morning sunlight. It was because of his striking hair that those who knew him well—theater managers, the owners of the bigger circuses—affectionately referred to E.J.L. as “The Silver King.” As imposing a figure as E.J.L. was, though, what always first drew the attention of strangers to him, and what drew the attention of the Pelikan children that day, was an article of jewelry. It was a large Christian cross, two or three inches high, that he wore on a silver neck choker. The cross was studded with about twenty large diamonds. He wore it whenever he was in public.

  The caller had come to see Eduard. He had handed Julia his card before she let him into the apartment.

  Prof. Edward J. Leamy, Mgr.

  Vaidis Sisters, Aero Artistes

  New York, San Francisco, London &. Berlin

  Julia waved her arms and shooed the children like ducklings as she led the professor to the kitchen, where her husband was seated at a table. They scattered, but in not much time, most of them had taken places in the kitchen, where they resumed their mute inspection of the caller. Among the children was Toni Pelikan, at twelve or thirteen, a year or two younger than Nellie, and the second oldest in the Pelikan brood.

  “The cross at his neck was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” Toni would remember. “It flashed with light. I was sure it had magical powers. I thought it must be a talisman of some kind.”

  After taking a seat at the kitchen table, Leamy opened his valise and brought out a roll of large drawings. Slowly, one after another, he pushed the sheets before Eduard. In big block letters, each of the papers bore the puzzling title “TRAPEZONE ROTAIRE.” The drawings, the works of a mechanical engineer, were also stamped with the name Bown Company, Birmingham, England, a manufacturer of sewing machines, bicycles, and roller skates.

  Each of the pages was illustrated with various details of a massive mechanical contrivance that was illuminated with dozens of electric lightbulbs, at the time still a new invention. The outer part of the apparatus was formed by four lengths of steel that, as joined together, formed a large trapezoid. The inner part of its frame was filled with a maze of crisscrossing polished steel elements that gave the creation the appearance of a partially complete “giant spider’s web.” As peculiar as the creation must have appeared to Eduard, there was, at its center, a familiar conveyance: a bicycle.

  Leamy addressed Eduard in German, although he himself was American. He had grown up in Syracuse, New York, and, at sixteen, traveled to Europe on a steamer. There he found work as a circus property boy for a trapeze troupe, and then, after some years, started managing trapeze acts on his own.

  Leamy continued pushing the large sheets before Eduard and then finally showed him the largest and most richly detailed of the conceptions. It presented an interior view of an opulent theater, along with an audience that appeared to be in the thousands. The trapezone rotaire was shown high in the air of the theater, the trapezoid oriented in a horizontal position and guyed by cables to the theater’s ceiling. Because lights were glowing from it everywhere, it looked like it might have been the largest chandelier ever assembled. Dangling in the air beneath the contrivance’s undercarriage were two women aerialists, one of them on a trapeze, the other hanging at the end of a rope by her teeth in what circuses called an “iron jaw act.” Atop the trapezone rotaire, shown astride the bicycle, was yet another woman in a leotard.

  Leamy explained to Eduard that the bicycle was connected to the trapezone rotaire through a complex assembly of gears and chains, and, thus, when the bicycle was pedaled, the entire contrivance was set into motion, revolving in space. He pointed an index finger upward and moved it around and around in the air in front of him, tracing an imaginary circle.

  Eduard looked at Leamy, looked at the drawing again, and then exactly mimicked Leamy’s tracing motion. His head was nodding up and down and he was smiling broadly. His expression was one of wonderment. He called Julia to the table. He called Nellie, who had rejoined her family in the fall of 1892, when, at the end of his circus tour, Willy Dosta had returned her.

  The trapezone rotaire was
entirely Leamy’s invention. He had unveiled a simpler, far smaller version of the creation as early as 1884, a few years after he began representing Louise and Lizzie Vaidis, a sister trapeze act that he was to make famous. He had presented the Vaidis Sisters on the trapezone rotaire at venues as scattered as the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, central London; the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.; the California Theatre in San Francisco; and, perhaps most surprising, the Gem Saloon and Theater in Deadwood, South Dakota, a miners’ hangout storied for its gunfights and indentured prostitutes.

  Leamy finally came to the point of his call. The Vaidis Sisters, whom he had been managing for more than twenty years, were retiring. He was preparing now to produce an even more spectacular trapeze act, one employing a trapezone rotaire that would be more than twice as big as the one on which the Vaidis sisters performed, one with more electric lights, one that was already in production at the Bown plant in England. For much of the last year, he said, he had been scouring the major circus houses of Europe, searching for a trapeze artist who would be the star of the new attraction he was already referring to as the Leamy Sisters.

  He wanted La Belle Nellie, Leamy said. He revealed that he had seen her perform under Willy Dosta’s management in several European capitals, including the Zirkus Renz in Breslau. It seemed to him, he said, that she was born with avian instincts. She seemed as much at ease in the air as on the earth. She had grace and flew with lightness. Further, she had an ability to make a connection with the spectators in the most distant seats. Under his management, Leamy assured Eduard and Julia, their daughter would become an international star.

  The financial terms that Leamy proposed are not known, but clearly they must have been more attractive than any Dosta had ever proffered to Eduard. Willy could … well, Willy could just go to hell, Eduard decided. He did not care. He took the pen Leamy held before him and signed a contract right there on the kitchen table.