by Norman Lock
The Absurdity in the Room
“WON’T YOU SIT DOWN?” asked Margaret.
She had not needed to point me to the chair in which I now found myself sitting, at ease despite the strangeness of the room. Mine was the only chair, indeed the sole furnishing, that could accommodate a person of my size. The maroon horsehair sofa, the armchair, the carved walnut pedestal table, the cupboard, the plates, cups, and saucers were suitable for her diminutive figure. I was the eccentric, the absurdity in a room bright with fripperies and chintz, rose carpets and claret drapes. I felt as if I were sitting in a private box in a theater where a play was about to be performed for my exclusive enjoyment. In my seemingly big chair, I was Gulliver lording it over the Lilliputians or Barnum’s Cardiff Giant among the gawkers. Neither by word nor gesture did Margaret acknowledge the topsy-turvy universe in which we two were speaking to each other as if nothing were amiss. For her, nothing was amiss.
“What a charming room!” I may have sniffed (I hope not) as one might do upon entering a circus dressing room and detecting a lingering odor of greasepaint and sweat.
“Thank you, Ellen.”
“You must be very comfortable here,” I said, instantly going red in the face. I was afraid she would infer from my remark my belief that she must be uncomfortable outside of her “doll’s house.” She did not make an issue of it. Relieved, I glanced at a copy of the New-York Tribune lying open on the table to the theatrical notices, one of which announced the death on July 15 of Charles Sherwood Stratton, or Tom Thumb, as he was universally known. Margaret had drawn a heart in black ink around the engraved portrait of the little man.
“India or China?” she asked, rising from the sofa as gracefully as any society lady.
“China would be grand.”
She smiled and, with a flounce of her pretty curls, went into the kitchen, which I had no doubt was furnished with a miniature sink and stove. I listened to the rush of water surging into the teapot and the clatter of spoons as I perused Tom Thumb’s obituary, learning that he had been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1838, and after six months of ordinary development and having attained a height of twenty-five inches, he stopped growing.
Margaret returned from the kitchen, carrying a child’s tea service on a tin tray illustrated with dogs wearing derby hats and holding in their paws glasses of beer—the sole reminder in an otherwise-decorous setting that the events in my small hostess’s life would not be reported in the society pages. Setting the Tribune aside, she put the tray on the table and poured the fragrant tea into both our cups.
“Do you take sugar?”
“Yes, please.”
“Milk?”
“Not for me, Margaret, thank you.”
Her preparations complete, we sipped the hot tea awhile in silence.
“Did you read poor Tom’s obituary?”
She took me by surprise, and I put down the tiny cup abruptly, causing tea to slosh over its gold rim and into the saucer. “Margaret, I hope you don’t mind.”
“That you took advantage of my absence to read a newspaper? Heavens no, child! I would have hidden it in a drawer if I’d intended to keep it a secret.”
I was taken aback by her having referred to me as a “child,” but looking at her face, I was reminded by the lines time had inscribed there that she was older than I, who was twenty-seven. She would have been in her forties—perhaps the same age Tom Thumb was when he passed on to a miniature heaven: forty-five. At some point, according to his obituary, he had begun to grow again, and at the time of his death, he was three feet tall.
“We called him ‘General,’ you know,” said Margaret—wistfully, I thought. “He was a dear man.” She stood, crossed the room, and beckoned me to join her by the wall, where, at the level of her gaze, a row of framed photographs hung. “This is Tom and Lavinia. It was taken on their wedding day, February 10, 1863. I was the maid of honor. Do you see me here?”
She pointed to a young woman wearing a dress trimmed in satin and silk rosebuds, her dimpled arms visible beneath puffed sleeves, the circumference of her ample skirt kept rigid by an old-fashioned farthingale. Long curls framed her chubby face, which wore a frown. One could easily mistake the bridal party for three people of common stature, if it were not for the Episcopal minister seen towering above them.
“Ten thousand people attended the reception at the Metropolitan Hotel. We greeted them, standing on top of a grand piano, as the Band of Caledonian Pipers played. Afterward, we went to Washington to meet President Lincoln. He was so tall, he had to stoop to shake our hands. He said the fault was his for having stretched the truth more than was good for him. General Tom became a wealthy man. He owned a steam yacht, a wardrobe of elegantly tailored clothes, and a summer house built to suit him on one of Connecticut’s Thimble Islands. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral.”
Margaret sighed, and a shadow stole across her face.
“Tom used to say that he had willed himself not to grow,” she said after a pause.
“Whatever do you mean, Margaret?” I asked in astonishment.
“He liked to say that, having briefly lived among your kind—”
“My kind?”
“I beg your pardon, Ellen, but Tom always used to put it that way. He could be awfully proud.”
I thought Tom’s pride and his claim preposterous. How on earth could a body will itself to stop growing, and why would it?
“He said that six months as a normally developing infant had been time enough for him to conclude that ‘your kind,’ Ellen, were mean and shallow, and he decided to have no part of it.”
“What about you, Margaret?” I asked pettishly. “Did you will yourself to stop growing?”
“I really don’t recall. Tom had a remarkable memory. Besides, I was not half so smart as he. He was a deep thinker, you know. Very philosophical. He always said that the small people constituted a race of its own and that of the two races—yours and ours—ours was superior.”
I could not help feeling resentful toward Tom Thumb and, for a brief moment, Margaret and her kind. I swallowed my indignation and conceded that General Tom might have been correct in his dark view of the majority of men and women, which the world considers normal.
The subject was in need of changing, and I did so by inquiring about another photograph hanging on the wall.
“Is that Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“Yes. He often came to visit Father to discuss Transcendentalism. Sometimes Henry Thoreau would come to Worcester, as well.”
The photograph showed a young Margaret sitting on Emerson’s lap. I could have laughed aloud at how the scene resembled a ventriloquist’s act on the stage of a music hall.
“Mr. Emerson was a very great man and an even deeper thinker than General Tom,” she said, her eyes transfixed by a hypnotic light flaring on the pane of glass. “We all loved him.”
I coughed twice to remind her of my presence.
“I do recall Father’s asking him once if the reason for my stunted growth could be filial disobedience. ‘She is a good child,’ said Father, ‘but inclined to be headstrong.’
“Mr. Emerson smiled and said, ‘I believe Nature to be unfinished and that it will forever be tinkering with its creations, in order to ensure that no single form or design becomes fixed and absolute and, therefore, by immutability, proves unable to respond to a universe whose being is one of ceaseless change.’
“Tom loved to hear me tell that story. ‘We are Nature’s chosen scouts in the vanguard of humanity, searching for perfection,’ he would say. Tom became a Transcendentalist in honor of Mr. Emerson.”
All of a sudden, Margaret laughed hard enough to make her curls shake. “When Father asked Mr. Thoreau whether he thought I was being cussed, he shouted in answer, ‘She is indeed, and I adore her for her contrariety! Hers is an act of civil disobedience that puts mine to shame! Three cheers for little Miss Margaret!’
“It was so much fun, those childhood days in Wo
rcester. Now they’re all dead—Henry David, Waldo, Margaret Fuller, my father and mother—all those kind souls have gone off to Glory, or to annihilation, if we are to believe gloomy old Herman Melville.”
We returned to the sofa and allowed our minds to drift in the currents of nostalgia and regret. I thought of my own dead, especially my poor brother-in-law, Martin. He and Melville—and Mrs. Stanton’s husband, Henry, as I would learn—the three of them had worked in the city for the U.S. Customs Service. Is history a game played by God in which humans are pawns? Or does time whipstitch together people and events, haphazardly catching up this piece or that one in its rumpled cloth?
My thoughts returned to Elizabeth, of whom I’d been thinking during the walk from Bryant Park. Of my two suffragists, she was the elder and worldlier. She had married Henry Brewster Stanton, a former abolitionist, whom I never once laid eyes on, and she had brought children into the turbulent world by “voluntary motherhood.” In this, as in all else pertaining to the dignity of women, she would not allow herself to be “forced” or her belief in her own worth set aside. She and Susan rarely spoke of Mr. Stanton; when they did, it was in low voices and never to me. I was unable to satisfy a natural curiosity concerning him and his whereabouts.
Margaret got up and played something mournful on a miniature harmonium, a gift from P. T. Barnum. As a girl living in Worcester, she had been taught the reedy instrument, and to my ear, she sounded accomplished.
“Do you play an instrument?” she asked, turning her head from the keyboard.
“I play the lyre,” I replied archly.
She finished “The Heart That Is Broken” and took up a sprightly air, “Do, Do, My Huckleberry Do.”
“Is it difficult to master?” she asked.
“Necessity is a great teacher.” In my voice, I heard self-pity and felt ashamed.
As I lay in bed that night, I pictured Margaret in hers, no larger than a child’s. What dreams sweeten her sleep? I wondered. What nightmares disturb it? Does she imagine herself a tiny princess in a fairy tale, waiting for a prince’s kiss to undo a curse and restore her to full womanhood? No! I upbraided myself. Margaret is complete in herself and would hate to be thought otherwise. All the same, I was troubled by the notion that a being lay shut up inside her—a fully grown woman impossible to rescue. It was too sad a thought to entertain. I would not let myself ponder the hopeless desires of so famished a heart, nor would I consider the possibility that Margaret might have reason to lament the death of General Tom apart from camaraderie. I recalled the parlor and its contents, which had been sized to accommodate Margaret’s humble standpoint, with the exception of a chair and an ornate mirror placed above her head—both objects kept for visiting emissaries from the larger world.
An Object of Curiosity
ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, MR. TIPSON, celebrated narcoleptic, delivered a note from Margaret, asking if she might visit on Friday at one o’clock, “if convenient.” “I’d be delighted,” I replied. In the brief time it took to compose my answer, Mr. Tipson had fallen asleep, and I had to poke him with Susan’s black umbrella to set him in motion again.
The appointed hour arrived, and I was looking anxiously out the window onto the street. The cause of my uneasiness was twofold: I worried that my suffragists would unwittingly pass a remark that would embarrass my small guest, and I feared that Margaret might come calling on board an elephant. I imagined her mistaking Miss Redpath’s second-floor apartment for ours and, peering in at her window, startling the elderly spinster into Green-Wood Cemetery. Who wouldn’t be terrified at the sight of a little woman seated on an elephant and rapping on the windowpane with tiny knuckles to attract her notice? In my fancy, I heard Jumbo trumpeting in fierce joy for a reason best known to pachyderms in captivity. (What monumental grudges might they harbor in their gigantic breasts! Now that Lincoln is dead, who is there to emancipate them?)
At five minutes past the hour, I watched as a hansom emblazoned with a seal balancing a red ball on its snout drew up to the curb, driven by David Henry Dode, the world’s tallest man. He unfolded his long legs from under the dashboard and, having opened the carriage door, lifted my petite guest onto the brick pavement. I was surprised to see a second person exit the carriage, whom Margaret would shortly introduce as Frank Ashton, renowned for his “posturing.”
Mr. Dode escorted Margaret upstairs and to our door, while Mr. Ashton, walking behind them, carried a large box done up with string. The brass knocker fell, and I let the strange party inside.
“Good afternoon, Ellen,” said Margaret pleasantly.
“Good afternoon. Won’t you and your friends come in?”
Having delivered his small charge to the door, the tall man turned on his heels and left.
“Mr. Dode will wait outside,” replied Margaret. “Mr. Barnum insisted he accompany me. He’s very protective of me, and Mr. Dode is daunting.” She turned her head to Mr. Ashton, who was standing in the hallway in an attitude of profound deference. In its exaggeration, it exceeded all bounds of polite usage and, in fact, the ordinary limitations of the human frame. I could not help laughing, a rudeness that brought out in him a smile so broad, I feared his lips, thin to start with, would disappear, leaving behind only a toothy gape such as children love to carve on jack-o’-lanterns. “Mr. Ashton, if you please,” said Margaret.
The man, whose parts appeared to have been molded of India rubber and whose face was the color of gamboge, bowed to her and then to me—an obeisance so extravagant that the top of his high hat rested on the floor. It resembled a flowerpot, from which grew a bulbous nose and a pair of ears that could only be described as elephantine. He stood upright and, with tremendous effort, carried the box into the sitting room as though it were packed with cast-iron stove lids. With another scarcely possible feat of agility, he bent over backward and placed the box on a three-legged stool, and then in a fluent movement that seemed to defy the laws of science and anatomy, he shot upright, as if his backbone were a spring, nodded to Margaret, and passed out the door, shutting it behind him with his foot.
Margaret behaved as if this preposterous show were commonplace, which it was in the strange world to which fate, will, or God’s carelessness had placed her. She took off white gloves such as children wear to dancing lessons, looked about for a place to sit, and, having chosen a chair that was shallower in its seat than the rest, ascended, as if to a throne, by the footstool Elizabeth had thoughtfully placed there.
“I was not sure how large your appetites would be,” said Margaret, glancing at the white box, from which a sweet smell escaped that in a graveyard would have made one gag. In that queasy observation lies a truth that can be profound or trivial according to one’s lights. “I have never before bought cake for ladies of substance.”
Susan and Elizabeth chose that moment to enter, their arms outstretched in welcome. “We are glad, Miss Hardesty, to make your acquaintance,” they said as one. “Ellen speaks highly of you.”
I blushed at hearing the word highly spoken within hearing of my new friend, though the remark had been an innocent one.
“I assure you that ‘ladies of substance’ are inclined to eat more cake than is good for them,” said Elizabeth. “And suffer the consequences.” She patted her stomach contentedly.
“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” snapped Susan, for whom temperance extended to cakes, if not to her speeches, which were ardent, even inflammatory.
“Shall I open it?” Elizabeth had picked up the outsize box and set it on a taboret.
“By all means!” cried Margaret, rubbing her hands in anticipation. “I’ve been waiting to try it!”
What a cake! It could have fed Barnum’s leapers, tumblers, clowns, and assorted artistes. I guessed that Margaret had estimated our appetites by our gigantic stature, unless she believed that the provender for grossly fashioned beings like us would be equally gross. The experience of seeing myself and my “kind” through her eyes always disturbed me. I did indeed belong t
o the clumsy race of men with coarse white faces that had shambled among the delicate Japanese in 1853, when Commodore Perry and his men came ashore at Edo. As the comedy of manners played in front of me, I had the curious sensation that I was growing larger, as did Alice after having eaten a slice of cake lettered EAT ME in currants.
Elizabeth and Susan returned to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea. Alone with Margaret, I was timid, as though I were the guest and she the host. I do not know why I should have felt so. Her smile was warm; her goodwill genuine; her manner not in the least haughty or privileged. (Vanity is seldom found in someone who has been looked down on since childhood.) She spoke of her afternoon ride, the loyalty of her two escorts, the consideration of Mr. Barnum, who had arranged for her outing, and of pleasures common to us all. Once again, I admired her wry observations, humor, and good nature, which I supposed had escaped the bitterness and cynicism that blight the hearts of men and women living in an absurd world.
“The ladies seem amiable,” she said. We could hear them fussing at each other, like a pair of hens, as two women will who find themselves occupying the same kitchen. “They’re considerate.” I supposed she was alluding to the footstool.
“They are,” I agreed. “I’m lucky to have found such obliging employers.”
“What is it that they do?” she asked.
I told her of their endeavors, which impressed her favorably.
“I regret only one thing,” said Margaret when I had finished. “That I haven’t any work to do of real importance.”
I hesitated, thinking how best to reply without seeming to disparage her. “You give people pleasure,” I said tentatively.