The Leap

Anna Avalon is the narrator’s mother. She is competent and in control in any predicament. She was adopted by the Avalon family and later married Harry, performing with him as part of the blindfolded trapeze act, The Flying Avalons. Anna is described as so strong that her stomach muscles hid her seven-month pregnancy, and her skill in the air is proved during the disaster. When lightning strikes the tent during the finale of one of their performances, Harry falls to his death, but Anna saves herself by reaching for a hot guy wire. The incident leaves her with hands “burned so terribly that once healed they bore no lines, only the blank scar tissue of a quieter future” (Paragraph 9). Like her apparent status as an orphan, her “blank” hands suggest her capacity to reinvent herself.

Injured as a result of incompetent rescue efforts, Anna has her arm broken, is knocked unconscious, and eventually gives birth to a stillborn child. She meets her second husband, the narrator’s father, while under his care at the local hospital. In an act of exchanging “one form of flying for another” (Paragraph 15), she learns to read from him and trades the trapeze for books. They marry, and she stays in the small New Hampshire town, close to the grave of her stillborn child, loving “the sagging farmhouse with its scrap of what was left of a vast acreage of woods and hidden hay fields that stretched to the game park” (Paragraph 16).

On the night of the house fire, however, Anna steps back into her heroic former self to rescue her child. She shucks off her dress and “and st[ands] there in her pearls and stockings” before ascending to the roof of the burning house (Paragraph 22). The pearls and dress symbolize the respectable small-town life she’s put on. When she reaches the bedroom, the narrator is embarrassed, preoccupied with her mother’s undressed state despite the life-threatening nature of her predicament. Anna, however, is in control, cheerfully “hanging by the backs of her heels from the new gutter” (Paragraph 24).

Harold—or Harry Avalon, as he is most often called—was the first husband of Anna and one half of the Flying Avalons circus act. He is a flat, uncomplicated character, at least in the narrator’s imagination. Associated with sparkles and exuberant physicality, he is a foil for the narrator’s vague and practical father. He is a romantic figure, representing Anna’s past outside the social mores of post-World War II America. As the narrator describes them, “They loved to drop gracefully from nowhere, like two sparkling birds, and blow kisses as they threw off their plumed helmets and high-collared capes. They laughed and flirted openly” (Paragraph 5).

Their trapeze act and the later newspaper accounts of the disaster rely heavily on a performance of their love as a high-risk act, though it is clear that their strength and skill mitigate this risk until natural disaster intervenes. In the narrator’s framing, Harry and Anna’s midair kisses evoke The Unlikely Miracle of Life by symbolizing the unlikely ways in which people’s lives may cross. Harry is killed when lightning strikes the tent during a performance, causing his swing to “continu[e] rather than retur[n] in its sweep” (Paragraph 8). A performer to the last, Harry is ushered out of the narrative by his brothers, who take him to be buried according to his wishes “in the circus cemetery next to the original Avalon, his uncle” (Paragraph 11), leaving his wife to make a new life in the ordinary world.