THE
HATBOX BABY
by Carrie Brown
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
333 pages.
Now
that America’s popular culture has come shuddering to a bloodless,
synergystic, cash-glutted halt, it is small wonder that more novelists
are scouring our past for compelling subjects. For The Hatbox
Baby, Carrie Brown has a found a beaut—the story of Dr. Martin
A. Couney, a German-born pediatrician who pioneered the use of
incubators for premature babies, around the last turn of the century.
Spurned by the medical establishment, Couney ended up displaying
his "premies" out at Coney Island’s Dreamland park,
and eventually in world’s fairs and amusement parks around
the globe.
Ms.
Brown, author of the previous novels Lamb in Love and Rose’s
Garden, has redubbed Couney Dr. Leo Hoffman, and made him a little
younger, but otherwise she has hewed close to the realities of
the "Infantorium"—one of the many virtues of her
poignant and well-crafted novel. Best of all, she has managed
to avoid the two great banes of American literature, ironic detachment
and magical realism; no small feat, considering the exotic story
she has chosen to take on.
What
Brown seems to understand is that if anything, American history
suffers from a surfeit of the fantastic—always a lethal threat
to good fiction. She has set herself instead to telling a limited
story, to telling it directly, and to telling it well.
The
year is 1933, and Dr. Hoffman has set up shop at Chicago’s
Century of Progress Exposition—an especially loaded event
and title for a city groaning under both the Great Depression
and a typically oppressive, Midwestern summer. Dr. Hoffman is
showing signs of wear and tear, too, in his long battle to win
recognition for his life-saving innovations. His incubators are
still considered little more than another freak show, and he has
been shunted off to a location next door to the fabulous fan dancer,
Caroline Day. Some of the fair’s stuffier organizers, who
would just as soon let premature babies quietly expire to preserve
their "dignity," spend the summer trying to shut down
his Infantorium altogether.
The
baby in question immediately becomes Dr. Hoffman’s toughest
case. It is a tiny little boy, "it’s head no bigger
than a small orange," born three months early to a local
couple, and delivered to the Infantorium in the hatbox by a dazed
and luckless father. The man then wanders off before anyone thinks
to get his name, stops to take in Caroline Day’s show, and
is stabbed to death in a senseless melee.
Only
St. Louis Percy, Caroline’s cousin, confidant, and major-domo—and
once a premature baby himself—realizes the dead man’s
connection to his infant son. Percy is a gregarious, middle-aged
carny and "almost a dwarf," a short, homely man with
an ugly face but one that people tend to trust. He also an extremely
resourceful fellow; a clown, a master of sleight-of-hand tricks,
and an occasional pickpocket, who is nonetheless feeling weary,
literally sore-footed—"He’d never had a really
good pair of shoes"—and at loose ends after a lifetime
spent on the road. He is looking for something else, but reluctant
to leave the beautiful cousin "Caro" he adores and whom
he has followed through innumerable fairs, shows, and amusement
parks since he was a teenager.
This
would seem to put all the midway stereotypes in place—and
it’s not giving away too much to reveal that Caroline, the
stripper with a heart of gold, starts an affair with Dr. Hoffman,
or that Percy, comes to think of himself as the hatbox baby’s
special protector. Or that much of the rest of the plot revolves
around who will end up with Hoffman’s latest charge—presuming
he survives at all.
But
The Hatbox Baby is much more nuanced, and more satisfying than
these elements might suggest on their face. For one thing, it
helps that Brown’s work is suffused with a warm and sympathetic
intelligence—yet one that never slops over into sentimentality.
Her characters are vivid, believable, and engaging, but never
maudlin—right down to the infants, fighting for life in their
incubators.
For
another thing, it helps that she can write. The Hatbox Baby fairly
glitters with descriptive jewels. Brown does a superb job of reproducing
a whole world. Here, for instance, is Evie, the hatbox baby’s
aunt, watching his mother, Sylvie, at her job as a movie ticket
taker: "From the sidewalk, where Evie stood in the shadow
of a tree and hesitated in the warm, penetrating darkness of the
street, she could see Sylvie in her illuminated glass ticket booth,
a distant figure, a squat, bored idol on her makeshift throne,
her round shoulders slumped, one hand held up before her mouth,
which was opened in a yawn like a cat’s, a pink hole laced
with white teeth."
Or Caroline and Dr. Hoffman, watching a storm from high atop a
Ferris wheel: "Dull, soft, shuddering flashes of distant
lightning broke somewhere over the flat, soaked fields of Illinois,
illuminating her face near his own as they sat side by side on
one of the bench seats, holding on to the silver bar before them."
Or the fair itself, remembered from a distance: "Far away
in Chicago, the music swelled, the colored lights swung crazily
over the lagoon, the jewel-collared leopard at the feet of the
Ethiopian princess sprang up and paced against its tether, the
crowds pressed together at the entrance to the fan dancer’s
show, and inside, Caro stepped into the blue smoke onstage behind
her waving ostrich-feather fans."
Some
readers may be disappointed by the ambiguous ending, or the author’s
decisions not to delve deeper into the era of the fair, or, again,
to tack some kind of mystic significance onto these babies-turned-sideshow
attraction. But Carrie Brown weaves plenty of magic on her own.
She has made the best choice, which is first and foremost to tell
a good story.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel, Dreamland.
© Copyright The Chicago Tribune 2002
