Passage

But even though the answer wasn’t in the Bible, it was somewhere. The feeling that she knew what it meant persisted, and sometimes, listening to Mr. Sage’s interminable pauses or ducking into an elevator to get away from Mr. Mandrake, she felt she almost had it. That if she just had an uninterrupted half-hour to concentrate, she could get it.

But there were no half-hours. Mrs. Haighton called to say Thursday wouldn’t work, and Vielle, and Maisie, to tell Joanna she was back in the hospital. “I went into A-fib again,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been here a whole day. Don’t you ever answer your pages?”

No, Joanna thought. They were always from Mr. Mandrake, trying to find out from her who their subjects were and what they’d experienced.

“I need to see you right away,” Maisie said. “I’m in the same room as before.”

Joanna promised she’d be down right after Mr. Sage’s session. He saw a tunnel (dark), a light (bright), and some people (maybe), which it took an hour and a half to get out of him. It was a positive pleasure to talk to Maisie.

“You never told me why you wanted to know what a Victory garden was,” Joanna said, trying not to look appalled at Maisie’s badly puffed face. Fluid retention, Joanna thought. A bad sign.

“Oh,” Maisie said, “because Emmett Kelly, he’s this clown who has a really sad face and raggedy clothes, I’ve got a picture — it’s the big red book with the volcano,” she said. “It’s in my Barbie bag.”

“I see Ms. Sutterly brought your books,” Joanna said, looking through the bag. 100 Worst Disasters Ever, with the Hindenburg crashing in flames on the cover, Disasters of the World, with a world map dotted with red flags, Great Disasters, with a black-and-white photo of the San Francisco earthquake. Here it was. Disasters of the Twentieth Century, with a garish red-and-black painting of a volcano.

“What’s this?” Joanna asked, bringing it over to the bed. “Pompeii?”

“Pompeii’s the city,” Maisie corrected her. “Mount Vesuvius is the volcano. But this is Mount Pelee. It killed thirty thousand people in like two minutes.” She opened the book and began turning pages filled with photos and maps and newspaper headlines. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the Morro Castle, the Galveston hurricane.

“Here it is,” Maisie said, wheezing a little. With the mere effort of turning pages? Maisie showed Joanna a double-page spread of photos. The one at the top was of Emmett Kelly, with his white-painted downturned mouth, his battered hat and enormous flopping shoes, running toward the circus tent with a bucket of water. There was a look of horror and desperation on his face, visible even under the clown makeup, but Maisie seemed blissfully unaware of it.

“Emmett Kelly helped get all of these little kids out of the fire,” she said, “and there was this one little girl, he saved her, and after he got her out of the tent, he said, ‘Go over there in the Victory garden and wait for your mother.’ So she’d be out of the way.”

“Oh,” Joanna said, “and you thought that was some sort of special place they had at circuses back then?”

“No,” Maisie said. “I thought a victory was a kind of vegetable.” She pushed the book around so the other half of the double page was facing Joanna and pointed at a man in a tall bandleader’s hat, waving a baton. “That’s the bandleader. When the fire started, he made the band play ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Do you know how that goes?”

“Yes.” Joanna hummed a few bars for her.

“Oh, I know that song,” Maisie said. “That’s the duck song, ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends.’ If you’re at a circus and you hear that song, you need to get out of there fast. It means there’s a fire or a lion loose or something.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Maisie nodded wisely. “It’s like a signal. Whenever the band plays it, all the circus people know to come ’cause there’s an emergency. Like when somebody codes. How come Emmett Kelly’s clothes are all raggedy?”

Joanna explained he was supposed to look like a tramp and then, because her humming “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had reminded her of Coma Carl’s humming, went up to see him for a few minutes.

His wife said he was having a good day, which meant he hadn’t yanked out his IV in his flailings and hadn’t been ambushed by the Vietcong, but Joanna thought he looked much thinner. When she went out to the nurses’ station, Guadalupe gave her an index card of his murmurings, saying, “He hasn’t said much lately.”

“Does he still row on the lake?” Joanna asked.

“No,” Guadalupe said.

Joanna looked at the card. “No,” he had said. “…have to… male… patches…,” and underneath, scrawled in a different hand, “red.”