Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  He was the penultimate speaker. She was required to say a few words of salutation, and she was never very comfortable speaking for herself in front of large numbers of people. She conveyed the greetings of the King of Sweden and the Queen of England, from whom she had received notes of godspeed and good wishes before her departure from London. Beyond that, what more could she say? She was a singer, and since they had not yet heard a song, she could not assume that they would like her. In some small way, she said, she hoped that her tour would strengthen the bonds of their common Christian culture. The mayor was present, judges and senators, a dozen members of the clergy. She thought she was saying the right thing, but it was as if they did not know what to make of her. Their response was only polite. In the carriage returning to the hotel, she thought she could sense Barnum’s disappointment and concern.

  “I am only a woman, Barnum. You cannot expect me to entertain a restaurant full of men with extemporaneous remarks.”

  “No, you did well, believe me. You’re a modest woman, Jenny, and that came through. You’ve whetted their appetites. They’re profoundly curious now.”

  “Ah, they wonder if I can sing! That’s only natural. Tell me, Barnum, where did you hear me?”

  “Me? Oh, my! In point of fact, I’ve never had the pleasure!”

  She sat up. “Never? My God! What made you dare to pay me so much money to come to this madhouse?”

  “Your reputation. I’m much better on matters of reputation than singing anyway.”

  She regarded him carefully. He could not know it, but what he had just admitted made her shiver with an awful shock and dismay. She was a stranger here; for all she knew, they did not even know what singing was. “You’re mad,” she said, and looked out the window at the unfamiliar wooden buildings passing. “You’re quite mad.”

  Barnum didn’t answer, and after a while, when she sensed his attention turned elsewhere, she risked a glance in his direction. He looked like he was containing his glee, perfectly satisfied with himself. Perhaps he really was mad!

  Upstairs in her suite, she could not sleep. She had not been able to nap in the afternoon, but she was still wide awake, excited, unnerved. All this time, she had thought Barnum a true impresario, a connoisseur in his own right—but if she had heard him correctly, he was actually a connoisseur of reputation, a trafficker in gossip and publicity. What was the substance of such a man? What was the accomplishment of such a life?

  More important, what was he drawing her into?

  There was a soft knock on the door—hardly Minelli’s knock, even if he was awake and sober. She peered through the crack. It was Otto, looking chipper, smiling saucily. Under his arm was an ice bucket containing champagne and a bowl of caviar. She felt bold, even giddy, and opened the door wide.

  He was kissing her before she mustered the courage to tell him that was what she wanted.

  From the hotel Barnum went directly back to his quarters on the top floor of the American Museum. Late as it was, he still had much work to do. Tomorrow after lunch—and her first rehearsal, which would take place in the morning—Jenny would be interviewed by the gentlemen of the press, representing all fifteen New York newspapers, and several from Boston, Hartford, Newark, and Philadelphia as well. After years of dealing with Barnum, the journalists expected him to do most of their work for them, providing them with handouts bearing all the pertinent information. Barnum wanted to be in the newspapers, and they needed stories to fill their columns; if their relationship was too painfully obvious, Barnum always made sure it was happy. He was concerned about Jenny Lind’s naïveté in such matters, afraid she was going to have some moral objection to what was, at least to the participants, nothing but a symbiotic business relationship.

  A minor point. Nagging at Barnum since he’d boarded the Great Western—almost a full day ago; he’d been without sleep now for thirty-four hours—was the notion that the trouble in the Tom Thumb troupe had been the result of Barnum’s neglect while he’d been attending to the Lind tour. Now the situation was beyond anything he could do—although he could see that the principals could work together no longer. Another factor, too: Barnum had heard only Charlie’s side of the story. As much as Barnum loved Charlie, he knew Charlie suffered the same curse as everybody else, that of being human, and that the story could have elements not yet revealed to Barnum. At least Charlie was not quitting. He had taken a suite at the Astor House, and planned to remain in the city through Thursday night, when Jenny Lind would give her first concert.

  The poor woman still didn’t know that she was going to have to sing the prize-winning “Ode to America,” the result of Barnum’s wildest scheme to stimulate interest in her arrival. For a grand prize of $100, twenty thousand entries, most of which went into the rubbish immediately upon receipt. If that was not enough, keeping Barnum’s clerks and accountants busy for weeks of worthless labor, now some five or six of the losing poets were crying, “Foul,” claiming that the verdict had been rendered even before the contest had been announced. (Barnum only wished he had thought of that, for it would have saved a lot of labor; and if he’d been able to have a hand in the composition, he certainly would have come up with a better song!)

  And sometime in the next few days, Barnum had to talk to Anna Swan. The young man found in Maine’s backwoods was an almost: he was almost tall enough, almost old enough. He was twenty-four years old, five or six years her junior, and seven feet nine inches tall—not the full eight feet Barnum had said. Apparently he was an unhappy lad, sick of his isolated life and not much use to anybody else. The agent who had interviewed him reported that the prospect of working for Barnum and being put on exhibition had left the big kid thoroughly depressed. Still—and almost needless to say—the young man was willing to journey down to New York at Barnum’s expense to see for himself that the promise of a better life was not a hollow one. He had been apprised of Anna Swan, and she interested him. (The agent indicated confidentially that the coltish giant had the girls of his neighborhood quaking with terror.) There was a chance, the agent said, that the fellow could be fobbed off as a strong man, or modern Goliath—but the problem with that, as Barnum knew too well, was that in every village in America was some burly lunatic ready to challenge man, horse, or elephant to any kind of test of strength, including mortal combat. Given the role Barnum hoped Anna Swan would play in the whole business, just about the last thing he could do was send the young man out to the boondocks to be torn to pieces by some local man-mountain who chewed bear meat for breakfast.

  It was becoming clear to Barnum that he had been wise in scheduling the Lind tour for the seaboard cities first, where perhaps she would be spared an untimely encounter with one of the country’s more rough-hewn types. Barnum already knew enough about the lady to shudder at the prospect of her first meeting with a savage redskin. Still, there would be the Cajuns of New Orleans, the slave-dealers of Charlestown—Barnum could only hope she was adaptable.

  Ah, but whatever her limitations and fears, Barnum was more than satisfied with Jenny Lind. She thought she had done poorly at the dinner at Delmonico’s, but in fact she had done just as well as he’d said, in exactly the way that he’d said. Present at the dinner had been a substantial cross section of the leadership of the community, all so-called reputable people, and she had given them something legitimate to talk about. Barnum could understand why men fell in love with her. She seemed completely vulnerable and in need of protection and care. He had felt the attraction of it himself, but in spite of what the idiot Minelli had said, something in Barnum didn’t believe it for a minute.

  More important than that, she had stood up to terrible pressure today, every bit as professional as Charlie. Barnum was thrilled. Signore Minelli might yet prove to be a problem, but finally she could only blame herself for that. If Minelli caused a commotion on the tour, Barnum would see that the press treated him as comic relief. The real problem for Barnum promised to be Waldo Collins, who was attempting to glue himself to t
he entourage at every turn. Barnum had an idea about how to deal with Collins, but there was no way to tell in advance if it would work. In that regard, Barnum had done himself no good at all in letting Jenny Lind know that he had never heard her sing. She had been offended, no question of it, but the alternative had been to lie to her outright; and because he spent so much of his business life shading the truth one way and another, Barnum was morally and esthetically put off by anything so gross and blatant. He had done the only thing he could accept, and now all he could do was allow the passage of time to reveal the consequences.

  They came the next day, quickly, tumbling over each other pell-mell, a small, simple problem heralding the whole ghastly, cackling parade of woe—the presence of Miss Holobaugh, Jenny Lind’s traveling secretary, at the American Museum shortly after nine in the morning. The museum was open, but in his quarters up on the fourth floor, Barnum clearly was not, catching up on his lost sleep and quite content in his bed. Miss Holobaugh, a peasant type and unswervable once she had set her course, puffed up the stairs with Barnum’s people just off the pace, and pounded Barnum’s door and his consciousness until the last sweet fragment of a sweet, sexual dream floated out of reach, like a feather wafted on the air pushed by the motion of his own hand.

  Miss Holobaugh, bosom heaving, caught her breath while Barnum blinked her intimidating bulk into focus. Miss Lind had sent her, she gasped, because Barnum had scheduled the meeting with the press at the same time Miss Lind was to confer with Mr. Collins, the attorney. Barnum’s brain was still unhinged by sleep, but he could see that he had to be bold.

  “So late in the game, I don’t think it will be possible to notify all the gentlemen of the press of a new meeting time,” he said carefully. “As much as I regret the inconvenience to Miss Lind and Mr. Collins, I must respectfully ask them to accommodate me this one time. In the future, we’ll have much better liaison between us.” She did not look happy. Barnum was thinking of Collins, too. Collins was nosing around for any breach between Barnum and Jenny, and this would fuel his passion, if not actually present him with the situation he was looking for. Barnum took Miss Holobaugh to be a simple, God-fearing woman, and he had to be glad he was not still drinking and apparently suffering the effects of a hangover. “More than anything I want Miss Lind to believe and understand that I am eager to do anything and everything to assure that her visit to America is happy and comfortable.” He looked intently into Miss Holobaugh’s eyes, his face washed of what he reckoned was all adult emotion. Miss Holobaugh had never seen a snake-oil salesman or a revivalist preacher, all piety and innocence, and now she looked as if she wanted to take Barnum in her arms and cradle him against life’s pains. “You don’t know how awful I feel about all this,” he murmured, showing as much of the whites of his eyes as he could. “Miss Lind is a wonderful, wonderful woman. My hope is that she will bring to this troubled country a new moral uplift. I can only hope that you sense the goodness radiating from her—I feel the call of destiny to serve as the instrument to present her to America. You do understand what I’m struggling to say, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, misty-eyed and snuffling.

  So much for Miss Holobaugh.

  But after a complete breakfast of eggs, sausage, and waffles, coffee and juice, and a leisurely carriage ride down Broadway to the crowd gathered at the bridge over the moat that led out to Castle Garden—a crowd had even followed Jenny to rehearsal, Barnum noted happily—another cataclysm, this one somewhat more natural and therefore that much more difficult to contend with.

  It was not that Jenny had been confronted with the lyrics of the winning song in Barnum’s contest. No, that she had already seen and turned over to her piano player, Goldschmidt, who was to set it to music—any kind of music. She was all business today, wearing a dark, plain dress and her hair braided in a work-a-day bun. Barnum did not have to ask her what she thought of the winning song, for she told him: it made her gag. But she could live with it; there were worse songs, although she could not think of any. What had the blood in her eye was Castle Garden itself. When Barnum arrived, Jenny was in her dressing room, waiting for him.

  “What is this place?”

  He told her that it had been a fort years ago, abandoned by the Army in 1824 and converted to peaceful purposes. “It’s the largest auditorium in New York.”

  “Exactly! How many people can be seated in here?”

  “I mentioned it yesterday, five thousand.”

  “You said five thousand tickets. I thought that was for two or even three performances. My dear Barnum, I have never sung in an auditorium as large as this in my life. I have only occasionally sung in buildings half this size. I will be disgraced. No one will hear me in this monstrosity! My voice will disappear into the rafters, people will begin muttering and then more will be lost. They will yell and shout and cry fraud. What are you going to do to prevent this from happening? I warn you, I will be on the next ship to Europe—”

  He was staring at her. For a moment she had reminded him of the little girl with the curl in the nursery rhyme, who, when she was good, was very, very good—and when she was bad, she was horrid. He thought she was about to throw a tantrum like a child; the further she went with her complaint, the more uspet she became, until she was very nearly hysterical.

  At least he was learning something about her, the depth of her commitment and identity as an artist. The notion was almost dangerous, not just because few people could understand it, but certainly because it was not what people expected of her, the Christian virgin young woman—not a girl any more, sadly, but an aging flower at the other edge of princesshood. And if her temperament scared Barnum, then the common upstairs maid would think Jenny Lind a raving bitch.

  So there was his “destiny” or whatever it was: to keep this relatively fierce beast concealed from its adoring public. Barnum could not help seeing that what the public believed of her was exactly what she wanted to believe of herself. Could she possibly imagine that she had less in common with geniuses like madmen Byron and Shelley than with the Self-inflated Christian Henry Ward Beecher (not exactly the example Barnum was reaching for, since Barnum, like every other man privy to the city’s gossip, had heard stories of the adventures of the lusty, well-equipped Beecher). If the woman could sing as her celebrants said, then by God and by right (yes, by right, earned, through her effort: Barnum could see the almost secret ravaging under her eyes) she defined and illuminated the artist and her art. Barnum smiled: if she could sing.

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “I am marveling,” he lied. “Come with me.” He winked. “Trust me.”

  “I am not interested in games—”

  “Please.”

  He led her from the dressing room out onto the stage, where on the piano Goldschmidt was plunking a tune for the winning song. The great rotunda of Castle Garden was dark, the curved rows of molded wooden seats marching upward to the back walls.

  “Professor,” Barnum called to Goldschmidt, “if you don’t mind, would you hotfoot it up to the back of the room so I can conduct a little demonstration?”

  “Certainly.” Goldschmidt seemed to be in a chipper mood; with Signore Minelli still out of commission from the welcoming celebration, it did not take a detective to understand why.

  Jenny stepped back from the footlights. “I do not like this stage, Barnum.”

  “Wait until Otto gets in position.”

  “I’m not happy with having to resolve today’s scheduling conflict myself,” she said. “Your assistance in getting a message to Mr. Collins would have been appreciated.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” Barnum answered. “The fact of the matter—and I’ve hesitated to tell you this—is that Mr. Collins has treated me with such suspicion for so many weeks now that I doubt that a message from me would carry much credibility with him.”

  “I have become aware of a mutual antipathy,” she said. “Certainly you do not object if I give my attorney t
he opportunity to present his case to me?”

  “I have nothing to fear.”

  “But you will admit that you showed him only the minimal courtesies yesterday.”

  He smiled. “I am a humbug, I freely confess it.”

  “I told you not to play games with me, Barnum—”

  “Ready!” Goldschmidt yelled. He was up in the darkness, invisible.

  “Do you know your Shakespeare?” Barnum called.

  “Passably well, Barnum!”

  “Tell me what comes next.” He turned to Jenny and recited in a normal speaking voice:

  “O speak again, bright angel, for thou art

  As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,

  As is a winged messenger of heaven

  Unto the white-upturned wond’ring eyes

  Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,

  When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds

  And sails upon the bosom of the air.”

  Her eyes flashing, Jenny raised her hand to keep Otto from speaking.

  “Oh, Barnum, Barnum, wherefore art thou Barnum?”

  He grinned. She had recognized the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. She stepped toward him and suddenly jabbed her forefinger into the middle of his vest. She was directly in front of him, and she spoke as if they were alone, but with fire, taunting him.

  “What’s Barnum? It is nor hand, nor foot,

  Belonging to a man—except perhaps a belly!