My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth—
Evelyn threw the book on the floor: it was rainy October and the ground was brown and barren; her former beloved was bone and ash and no one called her name. There were no flowers anywhere. She cried herself to sleep.
Only in the morning, having slept all night in a structure without wheels attached to it, did it occur to her that she had at last done the thing she had for so long dreamed of doing.
By accident, without premeditation, she, Evelyn, had left the circus.
She would not turn around and go back.
That afternoon she found work doing manicures, the same job her mother had done during the winters when the circus didn’t travel. The Hollywood House of Beauty, with its cracked linoleum and acetone fumes, sat squeezed between a convenience store and a prostitutes’ hotel. For a week she went between the salon and the room she’d rented a few blocks away, with its stained sheets and smelly halls. After eight days of this she was almost ready to go back to Jones and Wallace after all; she was worn out with pretending she knew she would be all right, pretending she had anything that looked like a future, pretending she was not a circus freak. But then, walking home from work on Friday afternoon, she saw the poster, plastered to a telephone pole. An elephant draped in an American flag, a tiger leaping through a ring of fire, and at the top, the famous typeface:
RINGLING BROTHERS & BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
And in smaller letters at the bottom: FINAL WEEK
She could not afford it; she could barely pay her rent. But there it was. Not just any circus, but the epitome of all circuses. And she had never seen it.
Thinking she might at least talk to some of the clowns after the show, and hating herself for being so desperate, she bought the least expensive ticket there was for the Saturday matinee and went to Boston Garden in the rain.
Laaaaaaaadies and Gennnnntlemennnnn!
And there she met Ray Shepard.
At a circus? And by himself? Ray?
He had gone under protest. Driving into Boston on a rainy weekend to watch elephants parade around was not the last thing in the world he wanted to be doing, but it was low on his list. He would never have been there—never have met Evelyn—were it not for his boss, George Dunlap, and the caprice of a client that Dunlap was trying to win.
In Ray’s first decade at Dunlap and Scott, the firm had been known for contextual architecture—designing buildings that looked as if they’d always been there, as Ray put it, as opposed to buildings that appeared to have been plunked down from an alien universe. But after Scott died, things began to change: first a commission for a Stalin-era style bank in the center of an old mill town, then a convention center whose smoked glass walls and boxy construction reminded Ray of a dirty fish tank.
Ray had so far managed to avoid these projects, working instead on zoning-sensitive renovations in the North End or on Beacon Hill. At the firm he was considered brilliant but impractical: an architect with a striking gift for design that was undermined by flagrant disregard for the realities of twentieth-century budgets. He had advanced perhaps not as much as he should have after fourteen years, due to his inability to finish a job without cost overruns, but this hadn’t bothered him, much: his over-budget designs, when allowed to be built, had won preservation awards and once gotten a photo spread in the Boston Globe Magazine; to Ray, this more than made up for his otherwise mediocre standing in the office. It also helped him avoid projects that offended his aesthetic sensibilities. But then Dunlap made him project manager of the Westbrook College sports arena.
Ray had protested. “Every one of Westbrook’s buildings is a windowless concrete blob,” he told his boss. “This isn’t the kind of work we do.”
“Yet we are, in fact, doing it. Thus there is a flaw in your reasoning.”
“But why put me on this? I specialize in period restoration, not the nadir of Brutalism.”
“You specialize in—but are not limited to—period restoration at the firm of Dunlap and Scott. I’m your boss, Ray. Remember me? George Dunlap.” Dunlap offered his hand; kept it there so long Ray was finally compelled to shake it. Dunlap’s hand was as cool as his expression.
“That’s all settled then,” Dunlap said, as if they’d been shaking on a deal. “Now listen, Ray. You’ve met Fergus Keeley, the Westbrook alum whose donation is funding this arena. Keeley played for the Celtics all of one season back in 1958, and he has some rather specific ideas about the structure that will bear his name. We’re going to humor him. I’m having Joanne get the two of you tickets for a Celtics game at Boston Garden. Let him tell you what he wants built.”
That must be a joke, Ray thought, though he’d never known Dunlap to make one. He might ask Ray to have dinner with a client, perhaps, but a not a basketball game. Surely it was a joke? He went out to talk to Joanne, the receptionist.
“Oh dear,” Joanne said. “I think this is my fault.”
“Yours?”
Joanne had been at the firm for fifteen years, even longer than Ray had. She was somewhere around forty, was unintimidated by office politics, and besides being an excellent secretary, she knew quite a bit about architecture—more, Ray thought, than some of the newer architects. She had conveyed, without coming out and saying it, that she shared Ray’s dim view of the direction Dunlap and Scott was headed.
Now she took off her big-framed glasses, a habit she had when she wanted to say something she considered important.
“My fault. Yes. The other day I was taking dictation for Dunlap about the Keeley arena. And then out of the blue, he asked me who around here was a good listener. Besides me. And—well, I said you were.” Joanne looked away, embarrassed.
“That’s kind of you,” Ray said, “but how do we get from there to my having to sit through a basketball game with Fergus Keeley?”
“Keeley likes to talk,” Joanne said. “A lot. I didn’t know why Dunlap was asking, but then when I said you were a good listener, he said, ‘in that case, I’ll have Shepard take him on.’ I’m sorry, Ray—I know the Keeley arena’s not your kind of project. I even tried to tell Dunlap to give it to someone else.”
“Dunlap should make you partner,” Ray said. “And it’s not your fault. But does it have to be a Celtics game? I don’t follow basketball at all.”
“Well, the point is to go see something at Boston Garden. I think Keeley wants his arena to look just like it.”
“Dear Lord, this is not why I became an architect. Tickets to anything but basketball, all right, Joanne? You owe me that. Just get me out of having to listen to Keeley talk sports for three hours.”
Thursday Joanne handed him a Bostix envelope.
“The circus?” Ray was baffled.
“To you men, Keeley talks about his basketball court injury. To me, he shows pictures of young Gus Keeley the third, and the other one—little Larry, I think it is, named after Bird. So I told him you wanted to meet his grandchildren. What’s wrong?”
“The circus? Screaming children, sticky cement floors, agoraphobia-inducing crowds, aggressive vendors—”
“You said, ‘Get tickets for anything but basketball.’ Besides, you have two tickets. So you can bring a guest.”
“That’s true,” Ray said absently, not seeing Joanne’s hopeful smile.
He was thinking