her. I can just picture Lya now.
She was always a sharp dresser. As a matter of fact, that morning Lya was the best dressed person in the place. She wore a conservative knit suit of gray wool, a black cloche, and gray and black gloves. When Lya stretched her three-and-one-half-foot self to reach the necessary paperwork for a money order, I noticed her black patent leather high heels and her finely shaped, tiny calves.
Lya was so intensely involved with trying to get ahold of that form that, unlike the others, she hadn’t even noticed me come in. Encountering my little friend was a pleasant surprise on what was already a most unpleasant morning. Just the sight of her gave me a lift; Lya had that way about her.
I was relieved that my mood lightened a bit. I didn’t want my friend to see my dark side. In those days I still worked particularly hard at hiding it. It must have made me feel a bit ashamed. That probably explains why when my gloominess would descend I’d disappear for a few days. Thankfully those times had been few and far between. But recently they had been increasing. I wondered how long I could keep my moods a secret. Up to that point the worse thing any of my chums in Ringling Bros could say about me was that I was shy. My conversation with Harry the previous day in the dressing room was the first time I had ever spoken frankly with any of the other freaks about my melancholy.
I reached over Lya’s head, down onto the counter, and took a hold of the form she was struggling to reach. “May I be of service, fräulein?” I asked, clicking my heels together just behind her.
She spun around and glared up at me. “I don’t have time for foolishness, Jake,” Lya said in her strong German accent. Then she grabbed the form out of my hand in a way that put me off more than the stares of the people in line. I wasn’t used to that kind of rudeness from her. Normally when we met she was the first one to smile. She was typically playful and even a little coquettish, but never curt like that.
Lya Graf was another one of the sideshow’s little Germans. When she first came to Ringling Bros two years before, Daisy Doll—Harry’s sister—had introduced us. After that, the Dolls, Lya, and I became inseparable. When we went off the lot to dinner or the movies we always got stares. I guess the coming together of opposites always draws attention. It’s magnetic. One reporter in Chicago saw Lya and me together at a fundraiser for orphans at the Palmer House. The picture his photographer snapped of us turned out to be front page news in the next day’s Tribune. The headline that accompanied it read, “The Oddest Couple: World’s Tallest Man and World’s Smallest Woman.” When my friends pointed it out and teased me, I laughed to cover my embarrassment. But Lya didn’t think it was so funny. She got angry. “You think it’s a joke?” Lya asked as she stomped away from the rest of us.
She was an exotic, brunette beauty with prominent cheekbones, porcelain skin, perfectly proportioned features, and an exquisite, curvaceous figure. Sometimes she moved with a combination of elegance, grace, and earthiness. At those times she seemed absolutely sultry. But at others she seemed asexual, like a kid sister.
That morning in the Western Union office, I was surprised by her angry ebony eyes. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’d seen her that angry since the incident with the newspaper headline in Chicago.
That wasn’t the first time we’d run into one another in a telegraph office, each of us wiring money; me to my family in Texas and her to her people in Dresden. I guess family obligations are cross-cultural.
“I know it’s just a little every couple of weeks,” she said once in the Davenport telegraph office, “but my family depends on me.” Her father was a tailor and her mother an accountant, but they barely made ends meet for themselves and Lya’s two younger, normal-sized brothers who still lived at home. Things were tough after the Great War in Berlin. “I wouldn’t think of not helping them out,” she had told me that day. I knew just what she meant.
Though Lya was easy to talk to, we never talked about anything too personal. Still, she was one of those people that make you feel special. Lya was more than a friend. She was intuitive and smart. I imagined her to be a shrewd counselor who, if the need arose, could help me get a different take on things. Sometimes I observed people asking Lya’s advice. When they did, I noticed that she never told them what to do. She just listened. But the way she listened was different than when others, even my friends, listened. Lya listened more deeply. So far I had resisted the temptation to do so, but when she listened to me she made me want to open up more. There’s something unique about her that’s much more impressive than her diminutive size, I concluded back then. It wasn’t only me. Others recognized her wisdom as well.
“She has the gift,” Harry had said. He told me how she had used a dream he shared with her to help him make the right decision about a movie offer to star in an upcoming Todd Browning feature film. That movie turned out to be the smash hit Freaks. It made him a bundle and led to a role in The Wizard of Oz. At the urging of Harry and Daisy, Lya began to use her forte to make a few extra dollars in the sideshow as “Madame Lya, Fortune Teller: Seer of the Stars and Reader of the Crystal Ball.”
Looking back on it, Lya was one of my closest friends in Ringling Bros. I miss her. Yet back then, the thought of telling her about my plans to leave the circus made me nervous, so I kept putting it off. But something told me she already knew. She was such an old soul, with insight beyond her years. It’s too bad what happened to her.
I fondly recall the time we spent together and I wish, I really wish, I had appreciated it more. There were late nights over coffee and cigarettes while playing gin rummy in the pie car, and conversations in the backyard before our shows began and after they finished. When you have the perspective that comes with time . . . oh perspective; it can be a blessing or a curse. Anyway, with hindsight you know what was important and what was a waste of time. You look back and you realize you had people around that you took for granted. You see that you were never as alone as you thought you were.
But that morning in May of 1936 in the Western Union office in Manhattan all I could focus on was Lya’s intensity. She was a freak, like the rest of us in the sideshow, but Lya was a freak in a different way, too. But it’s not what you might think. The word freak had a special significance for all of us in the sideshow. It meant we were troopers, earning a living in the circus. But that word meant even more than that to me.
When I think of that word, I remember an incident with my parents’ dictionary while I was home on a break from Ringling Bros. One day during that trip, it must have been in the winter of 1932, I was sitting at Papa’s old, oak, rolltop desk at Geneva Loan and worrying if I was going to break his uncomfortable office chair. I was thumbing through my folks’ dusty Webster’s Dictionary. They hardly ever used that damned book; it seemed brand new. But that day they finally did have need of it. They were addressing a letter to my mother’s brother, Uncle Label, who had immigrated to Scotland. My parents had asked me to look up the correct spelling of Glasgow. I think the dictionary intimidated my folks. I wondered why they ever bought that book in the first place. Looking back on it, I think they were, like many immigrants, insecure and sensitive about their use of English. They wanted at least the semblance of a reliable literary resource, a linguistic weapon they could call upon in case the need arose to defend themselves. Unlike the pitches of other snake-oil salesmen who preyed on immigrants, when it came to the huckster who sold them their first and last dictionary, they were easy prey.
That morning, sitting in Geneva Loan as I tried to find the correct spelling of Glasgow, I accidentally—if you believe in accidents—came across the word freak. Among the synonyms and dictionary definitions, I found that a freak is someone who has special, other worldly, magical powers.
Well, my friend Lya was the first freak I met who fit those words. There was, indeed, something magical and other worldly about her. As a matter of fact, I had been thinking that maybe some of her other worldly magic might help me interpret the dream I
