CALLIOPE

Robert Hill Long

For three nights a cry flew past the upper windows of a boarding house edging the park. For three days--breakfast, tea and supper--boarders met to trade explanations. "It's the spirit of yellow fever orphans," insisted the seamstress twins, passing the devilled eggs. But they themselves were orphans. Anything that bewildered them they blamed on baby abandonment. The postman's widow--a flagrant hypochondriac--said through her handkerchief that the apparition cried "Oh doctor!" in an old-lady voice. Death, she thought, was having a joke at her expense. The bookkeeper swallowed a devilled egg and looked around. A girl, he confessed, had hoarsely whispered "I love you!" through his bedroom shutters. When wings beat the shutter he realized it was the Tempter talking.       By the fourth day strangers argued the spirit's identity up and down the streetcar line, leading to several fistfights and at least one fractured skull. That night, reported the neighborhood policeman, a cry issued directly from the lips of the park statue. (This statue--the nation's first one of a woman who was not a goddess, muse or symbol--commemorated an Irish scrubwoman. She had invested her thrift in a bakery, donated its profits to the city's orphans.) One newspaper declared the statue wept over the failure to find a cure for TB. The other daily seized the opportunity to bewail children left fatherless by the government's foolish adventures in the Philippines. When the policeman admitted--he was in a saloon, collecting for the widow-and-orphan fund--that he'd also heard the statue shriek "Doctor, I love you!", both newspapers solemnly deplored the drunkenness of policemen.       On the fifth day, a Sunday, clowns stepped off the streetcar and waddled toward the haunted park. A man in a ringmaster's top hat, red vest and cutaway coat followed. Behind him a dwarf hauled an empty wicker cage almost as large as himself. After three blocks they were trailed by a crowd suspicious this was all ordained by the Antichrist. "I will demonstrate," the ringmaster declared, "once and for all what spirit has troubled your peace." He approached the statue and bowed. The clowns deployed in a semicircle, the dwarf opened the cage. The ringmaster raised both arms and blew on a tiny silver whistle.       Out of the oaktrees behind the statue flew a large crimson parrot, a runaway, a circus star. "Hello, precious!" the ringmaster shouted. Disheveled, half-starved, it landed at his feet. He bowed, the parrot bowed back. "Oh doctor!" it cried, "Oh doctor, I love you!"

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