My grandfather was the last of the freak hunters. In his younger days he traveled the world to find for circus and carnival sideshows the “Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena & Marvelous Living Human Curiosities.” For a man who left school at fourteen to join a traveling carnival he had quite the baroque vocabulary, crammed with superlatives, overflowing with adjectives and adverbs. He could gild a garden of lilies and make a dozen silk purses out of a single sow’s ear. If he had wanted, he could have made his living selling the Brooklyn Bridge many times over. He was the king of bluster and ballyhoo. There weren’t lot lice from Peoria to Paducah that he couldn’t convince to dig into their pockets for four bits to buy a ticket to see the wonders of the freak show. With his booming stentorian voice he could turn the bearded daughter of a poor Alabama sharecropper into the exiled princess of a Hungarian duke or a microcephalic pinhead into the last of the Aztecs discovered in the jungles of Peru.
           When my father was growing up, he was embarrassed by his father’s florid language, his loud voice, his shiny suits and overly polished boots. He never admitted that his father ran the freak show for a carnival. He said his father managed a circus, one that was just a step below Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey. He spent only one summer vacation traveling with his father. After that he stayed home in Kansas City with his mother. In my eyes my grandfather with his thick head of white hair, his monogrammed boots, his starched pink and blue dress shirts and ruby stick pin had stepped out of a technicolor CinemaScope movie. He drove the latest model Cadillac and had a closet full of bespoke suits. I was eight or nine when I pestered my father to let me spend part of my summer vacation with my grandfather. Finally, in the summer of 1956 when I was twelve, my father relented but only for three weeks. My grandfather said that this might be the last summer for the freak show.
           “Let the boy see it before it goes the way of the dinosaur.”
           In 1956 the freak show was on its last legs. That was the last year that the Ringling Brothers circus was held outdoors under the Big Top. That was the year the sonogram was invented; parents could now choose to abort a future Seal Man, Lobster Man, and an Armless or Legless wonder. Pinheads were now pitied not promoted. Veterans of the war in the South Pacific could see through the South Sea cannibal ballyhoo.
           “Who wants to pay to see the world’s tallest man, when they can see Wilt the Stilt for free on TV,” my grandfather groused. “Every Christmas they can watch the Munchkins singing and dancing with Judy Garland. I tell you son, Ed Sullivan is killing us: every Sunday if it isn’t a sword swallower, it’s a fire eater, or some fancy named acrobats from France in sparkly tights. Who wants to see someone eat a light bulb or stick a knitting needle up their nose? That’s not entertainment in my book. The end is nigh.”
           My father agreed to let me travel with my grandfather on two conditions. I had to read at least one book a week – and not a comic book. There was a schoolteacher in the sideshow, my grandfather said, and she would make sure I did my summer homework. The second condition was that I was not allowed to go into the “blow-off” section of the sideshow tent. The circus and carnival sideshows were “ten-in-one.” For one ticket you got to see ten or more curiosities. An added attraction near the exit was called the blow-off. For an additional charge of four bits or a buck you could see a special human oddity in a curtained off cubicle. This mysterious attraction was most often advertised “For Adult Males Only” to reel in the cheap and the hesitant with the promise of something too shocking or sexual for the delicate and the young. Popular blow-off attractions were two-headed babies in jars of formaldehyde, a half-man half women lounging naked like a sawdust odalisque, a woman with pubic hair down to her knees, or a headless woman and a four-legged woman who anyone with an ounce of intelligence knew were fakes or in carnival lingo, gaffs, like supposed Siamese twins connected with a hidden corset. My father wanted to protect me from the disturbing coarseness of the world and the seamy side of sex, though he hadn’t even talked to me about the birds, the bees, and the storks. My grandfather said he would make sure the blow-off was off-limits to me.
           My first day with the carnival my grandfather introduced me to Miss Franklin. Lydia Franklin, whom he always called Miss Franklin, had spent June and July with the carnival the last three years. She was a high school English teacher back East who worked in the sideshow to help support her invalid mother. Details about her life were minimal and vague. She was a prim and proper woman whom I guessed was in her mid-thirties, not much older than my mother. She wore long navy blue and black skirts down to her ankles and starched white loose-fitting blouses buttoned all the way up to the neck. She fit the imagined picture of your typical spinster New England school Marm. But she was a sweet woman with a pleasant face and an easy smile, quite the opposite of my teachers back home who with their gray buns and clunky black leather shoes were sour as lemons and wrinkled as prunes. At my grandfather’s request she had bought me a library of a half dozen books: Hardy Boy mysteries, Landmark biographies of American heroes, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and Just So Stories, and though it might be a stretch she was sure I was bright enough to handle Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Every morning she talked to me about what I had read the day before. She listened. She asked me questions. She guided me to discover for myself what the stories were about rather than telling me what to think. She was the good teacher I never had. Reading was not a chore with Miss Franklin.
           For all my grandfather’s bravado and bluster, he was a decent man with his own code of carnival ethics. Starting out in his teens, he shortchanged a customer or two like many ticket sellers did but never a woman, a cripple, or someone who obviously was a few bricks short of a load. When he ran a rigged game – milk bottles with a lead base or a wheel of chance he controlled by a foot pedal – he never let very old men, children, or women play. He treated all the performers in the sideshow with courtesy. He addressed them as Mr. or Miss, greeted them every morning with a smile, a wink, a pat on the back, and wishes for their best day ever. Miss Franklin he treated with special respect. He watched his language around her. When she came into the cook house, he stood up and guided her to an empty spot. If he heard any of the carnival roustabouts saying anything off color or suggestive about her even if she wasn’t there, he told them to watch their mouths, or they’d be out on the street.
           I heard one of the cooks say “Good morning, Princess Rana” to Miss Franklin. On my first walk through the sideshow, I was anxious to see what was so special about this normal looking woman. She didn’t have a beard like Lady Olga, she wasn’t a huge mound of flesh like Baby Louise, and she only had two legs that I could see. I couldn’t imagine that she could pull her cheeks out like Xandu the Elastic Man. I walked slowly down the full length of the sideshow tent, but there was no Prince Rana. I was about to exit the tent when I heard the booming voice of the blow-off talker.
           “Gentlemen, for only four bits and for your eyes only, Princess Rana, the Third Wonder of the World. Exiled from the mountains of Moldavia by her wicked stepmother who thought her a curse on the women of her homeland. Judge for yourself – Lilith or Esther? She-demon or the wildest dream of every full-blooded man. Four bits and your heart will race, your loins will burn hot as the fires of Vesuvius. Step right up and be ready to be titillated and amazed.”
           I couldn’t imagine what there was about Miss Franklin, this reserved and demure schoolteacher, that was so dangerous and arousing that she was off limits to any male under eighteen. I’m not sure at that age that I even understood what burning hot loins were. All I knew was that Princess Rana was off limits to me, and that my grandfather wouldn’t tell me why.
           My grandfather put me to work.
           “No sitting on your duff,” he said.
           I sold tickets. I helped strap in the kids on the Ferris wheel. I worked at the grease joint grilling burgers and hot dogs with Jake, a grizzled fellow with a mouth full of four-letter words and arms with more tattoos than Constantina, the Tattooed Lady. I sold stuffed animals, plastic whistles, felt pennants, and all kinds of cheap junk at the garbage joint, a concession stand that lived up to its name. I didn’t get paid much but enough to make me feel like what I did was important. Every morning I talked about books with Miss Franklin. No matter how late the sideshow ran the night before, Miss Franklin was always there at breakfast, dressed in a skirt and blouse that looked freshly cleaned and ironed, ready to listen, ready to give me a verbal pat on the back for what I had to say.
           The Monday of my last week, I told Miss Franklin I hoped I could spend the whole summer next year with the carnival. She could make me a long list of books to read I said. She paused and reached out and put her hand on my wrist. She said this was her last summer with the carnival: she was getting married in September. I knew then I had to find a way to get into the blow-off. That night I took ten dollars from what I had earned and slipped it to the talker who let me sneak into the blow-off.
           Miss Franklin, the Third Wonder of the World, sat on a simple wooden chair atop a raised platform four feet high. She wore a small black mask like the Lone Ranger’s, but hers was spangled with silver sequins. She wore black stockings that came up to her waist. She was naked from the waist up. I had seen pictures of naked women in the Playboy magazines my father hid beneath his underwear in the top drawer of his bedroom dresser. But I had never seen a woman with three breasts. They weren’t as big as the ones in the centerfold, but they seemed to my innocent eyes just the right size, “perky” as they say nowadays. The middle breast might have been slightly smaller but didn’t seem like a strange deformity like an extra finger or a third eye. Miss Franklin circled her nipples one after the other with her forefinger. Her mouth was open, and her tongue licked her lips slowly in rhythm to her circling finger. She drew more circles around the middle nipple than the other two. When she did, she leaned her head back, her eyes closed in a look of dreamy pleasure – “sexual ecstasy” was not a phrase in my youthful vocabulary. When she opened her eyes, she stared at each man in the room to make them feel like they alone were the only object of her desire. Though it was only a glance, I knew that she saw me looking up at her.
           I felt awkward the last few days around Miss Franklin. I was certain she knew that I had seen her in the blow-off. I was embarrassed that she knew. Even if she had only two breasts I would have been embarrassed to have seen her half naked. Sunday morning I stood next to my grandfather’s Cadillac and said goodbye to Miss Franklin. She said that getting to know me had made this a special summer for her. Before I could open the car door, she put her arms around me and hugged me tight to her chest. I didn’t know if I really could feel her three breasts, but I imagined that I did.
           We had been on the road for about a half hour when my grandfather playfully tapped me on the shoulder.
           “I guess you and I have a secret that we’ll keep from your father. That blow-off talker is a real talker. Now don’t you think any bad thoughts about Miss Franklin. She’s got a sick mother she has to look after.”
           He told me that she was engaged to a widowed minister with two teenage sons. “She’s a fine woman, and she’ll make a fine mother to those boys.” His voice lightened. “I tell you that minister is in for a surprise on their wedding night.”
           He laughed so hard I thought we were going to swerve off the road. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t old enough to be one of the boys. I hadn’t even kissed a girl, and it would be another three years before I touched Margaret Wornall’s breast in the darkened rec room of her parent’s house.
           I turned eighty last month. I retired twelve years ago from teaching high school English. It has been almost seventy years, and I still remember my summer with Miss Franklin. My grandfather died that winter, and I never traveled with the carnival again. I often wonder who taught me the most that summer. My grandfather who treated everyone in the sideshow with courtesy and respect.
            “No one is born a freak, remember that son,” he said.
           Or Miss Franklin who listened to a young boy and made him feel that what he had to say was important. I can still hear Miss Franklin’s voice, “What did you think about that story? Did that ending surprise you?” Or maybe it was the Third Wonder of the World though I am still trying to figure it out what I learned from her. It wasn’t the third breast that I remember most. Even with that mask, I could see the pleasure in her eyes as she slowly licked her lips and drew circles around her nipples. Her secret life wasn’t her summers with the carnival. It was something more hidden, a deeper and more personal hunger. I didn’t know then that there is more mystery in the human heart than in all the sideshows of the world.
           My grandfather almost wrecked his Cadillac picturing Miss Franklin’s wedding night. I imagine it differently. She stands a virgin before her husband. She wears a long white night gown down to her ankles.
           “I have something to show you,” she says, her voice trembling. She lets her nightgown fall to the floor. Her husband touches her middle breast hesitantly. She shudders. He clutches both of her hands in his.
           “Dear God,” he says, “thank you for the wonders of your world.”

Jeffrey Hantover, whose poetry and short fiction have appeared in various literary journals, is the author of three novels The Jewel Trader of Pegu, The Three Deaths of Giovanni Fumiani, and The Forenoon Bride.