Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  And then he held Jenny’s hands, looked into her eyes, his gaze never wavering, as if the other two did not exist at all. They could only stand and gape. Jenny was aware of them, and he could see that she knew he had made a game of their situation.

  “Have a good rehearsal tomorrow.”

  “Come listen—”

  “No, now I know I should wait until Thursday night.” He was actually thinking of inviting her to join him for lunch on Wednesday, but he could see that it would only lead to more trouble. That was how he viewed it. He was not sure he felt anything for her. Of course he had been curious. Now that this had happened, he had to hope he could hold it down to a pleasant—and perfectly manageable—flirtation.

  Thus ended Tuesday night. By Thursday evening, sitting beside her in the open carriage in the triumphant procession under the dark spring twilight, while he struggled with his desire to reach for and hold her hand, Barnum believed, in spite of his evident insanity, that he understood the Nightingale, as his imagination had begun to call her, better than ever. On Wednesday, her calendar open, interestingly enough, she had sent a note down to Charlie and invited him to lunch.

  She’d wanted to conceal her real reasons for meeting him, Charlie had reported later to Barnum, but she’d been all too transparent. She’d wanted to talk about Barnum—Barnum, Barnum, and more Barnum.

  “She wanted to find out what I thought of you,” Charlie had told him. “Now she wants to believe that you’re some kind of misunderstood saint.”

  Barnum laughed. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea, if we could figure out how to make people buy tickets to see it.”

  Charlie was sitting on a pile of books on the desk. He sighed and leaned forward. “Barnum, she never read the copy of your book that you had me bring over to Europe for her.”

  “Well, don’t that beat the bugs off the billygoat’s balls!”

  “I told her to read it,” Charlie assured him.

  “Why didn’t she read it, d’ya think?”

  “She told me that she thought that only a self-deluded egomaniac would have the gall to write his autobiography at the age of forty-one. Now that I see how interested you are in whether she read the damned thing when you could be getting into the biggest trouble of your life—Christ on the Cross, Barnum, it makes me wonder how close to the truth that is.”

  “No one is ever going to top you for ego, you talking paperweight. Well, shit, I’m happy that she’s revised her opinion.”

  “She’s going to read the book, Barnum, so don’t be surprised if she revises it again. The trouble could start right there. You don’t fool around with a woman like her without first making certain things clear.”

  Barnum eyed him. “You’re being chivalrous, Charlie. You’re a victim of Lindomania.”

  “Be warned, Barnum. The disease is just as progressive as the lady wants it to be.”

  So much for Wednesday, and on Broadway the next evening Barnum had reason to reflect that little Charlie’s comment probably was true. With the crowd outside the Irving House reportedly growing again, Barnum had made it his business to get around there on time and in good order. Jenny was not ready—in fact, he had expected that. John Hall Wilton had told him that she was often late and that the gossip in Europe was that she grew moody before a performance. Nothing so difficult for Barnum to understand; even Charlie, undeniably a masterful performer and the most beloved figure on the American stage, even above Edwin Booth, had his moments of gawking into the abyss.

  But no: she was cheerful, bright, even chirrupy. She was absolutely radiant, her hair in perfect curls, her dress white lace and silk, showing her full figure to breathtaking advantage. She so surprised him that there was no concealing his abject delight. If what transpired between them from this night forward was to be compared to a war, she clearly, decisively had won the first battle. Before speaking, she kissed him quickly on the mouth.

  “For shame, Barnum. You should have told me you were married. With four daughters!”

  “I thought I’d told the world.”

  “You are utterly insane, a complete lunatic.”

  He beamed. “I proudly proclaim it. Don’t I say as much in my book?”

  “I haven’t finished it. It’s hardly literature, you know. It reads as if a lunatic had written it. Where is your wife? And your daughters?”

  “My wife is at our estate in Connecticut, Iranistan,” he said quietly. “She has never been interested in my business. Everybody knows that.”

  “Your daughters know it, too?”

  “They’re all grown. Two of them have children of their own.”

  “Ah! All you men marry too young,” she said, showing her distress at last, and turning away from him. He decided it was prudent to be quiet. The truth of her remark as it applied to him not withstanding, he couldn’t help being curious about what she meant by “all you men.”

  When she was ready to leave the hotel, however, she made it clear that she wanted to pick up their game again, calling him a madman as she swept past him out of the suite into the hall, which had collected a smaller version of the crowd amassed downstairs. These people applauded—she was in public again, she belonged to them. Barnum kept a step back, like a prince consort. In the lobby he had another kid, this one from an orphanage for sure, with an armful of roses, which made Jenny smile. People were cheering themselves hoarse. She waited until the carriage was rolling before she spoke again.

  “Please do not think that I believe you lied to me. I know you did not.”

  “I apologize for causing you any unhappiness.”

  “I should have known anyway,” she said with her head almost turned away. It was as much a confession of her feelings as a woman like this could muster, he saw. He thought she was finished speaking, but then suddenly she turned to him and smiled. “I am going to sing well tonight. I can feel it. I can always tell.”

  For Barnum, it was a moment of the most stark and unimaginable amazement, for it was as if in some magic way she had seized the problem with her bare hands, turned it inside out, and was now prepared to present it, thoroughly remade, to her public. As she had devised it, whatever he had become to her in the past few days, whatever he had been able to offer, had become part of the raw energy she planned to unleash on her audience, an energy he could only faintly imagine. That was true. For all the other things she was, including an old maid, a bit of a pest, and even a little childish, she was a special creature capable of extraordinary feats, and she knew it. She was going to sing well tonight—she could not lie to herself about that.

  According to Charlie and others, she had made her peace with the size of Castle Garden, if not the number of people who were going to be crammed inside it. In that regard, of course, she had her completely renegotiated contract to comfort her—she was happy with it, if Waldo Collins transparently was not. In abeyance, Collins was, thanks to Barnum’s shower of treasure and joy. Barnum understood that he was not done with that jackanapes; it remained, but only for the time being, that she was happy. She had agreed to one hundred dates, nothing like his original pipe dream of a hundred and fifty dates—after the tickets had begun to sell before her arrival, he’d moonily estimated his potential profit at nearly two million—but enough, when one added his guarantees and the deductions for the amounts she already had been advanced.…

  But at the end, that was all poppycock. What counted was this terrible anticipation, the sudden inevitability of the original decision. Barnum had no idea what was coming. When his hand found Jenny’s at last, on the seat under the orphan’s roses, and Jenny eagerly grasped his hand in return, he felt grateful, but not reassured. This was the most incredible adventure of his life and he could face it with nothing but naked terror. For her, it was a commonplace. Certainly she was having her terrors, but that was exactly the point. No one in history had ever gone through anything like this. Not even Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine had faced a more demanding mob. After all, Antoinette only had to d
ie, and well or badly made no difference. Jenny Lind had to sing in a way not one of the thousands had ever heard before—and every one was a self-appointed authority on song.

  Perhaps he was a lunatic, just as she said, Barnum thought. What did he have to offer these howling savages but a simple musicale? Their heroine would sing only six songs, two before the intermission, and one of those a duet! The first two pieces belonged to Goldschmidt, playing the piano and conducting the orchestra—all sixty musicians were on two tiered platforms on the stage facing the audience. After that, Minelli, the tenor, would step out and sing alone. Then Jenny would join him, and finally she would sing the last song alone before the intermission.

  The program indicated that the promise of the first part would be fulfilled in the second, when she would be on the stage alone almost an hour. Barnum was uncertain about that—everything, in fact. He could appreciate the esthetic considerations that had gone into the program, but his own inclination was to get her out on the stage as quickly as possible and get the show under way. Barnum was afraid he would be torn limb from limb by the exasperated music lovers long before she set foot on the stage—by his reckoning, about the time the crowd figured it was finished with Otto, only to have Minelli appear.

  But Goldschmidt turned out to be an engaging performer, getting the audience’s attention at once with an amusing little speech in which he thanked everyone for spending so much money to see him. He knew the virtue of brevity, and launched straightaway into conducting the orchestra through a vigorous, brief salute to the new nation, his own composition, and it gathered cheers, sudden and unexpected shouts of excitement.

  Feeling the emotions of the crowd, Barnum could not help wondering again how he had dared. He had never brought so many people together under one roof—he had exhibited Joice Heth, George Washington’s mammy, in storefronts and from the backs of wagons, rarely seeing more than thirty people at a time, even at ten cents a head. For Tom Thumb, Barnum had started with a puppets’ stage, for an audience no larger than would attend a Punch-and-Judy show. Publicity had put Tom Thumb over; within months, he and Barnum were down to Washington, off to Europe, sensations. No doubt, what he had been able to do with Charlie had sent Barnum on his way.

  The piano at center stage, up from the limelight. While Goldschmidt played the second piece, the noise of the audience rose to a clamor. Nothing was happening; people were growing restless.

  Most of them were men, all but five hundred of them. When Barnum had come to New York in his youth, women weren’t allowed in theaters at all. In 1830 a riot over a production of Hamlet killed more than a hundred men—God knew what any of them had had on their minds. When Barnum happily confessed to having hoodwinked the public with Joice Heth, it was as if no one had ever heard of a practical joke before. It was as if no one had ever laughed before—at least, not in public.

  Mercifully, Goldschmidt made quick work of his sonata or whatever-it-was, and Minelli appeared on the stage. As Barnum understood it, his song was going to take a while. Barnum rocked on his heels—what else was there to do? Being honest with himself, he knew exactly why he despised Minelli. Minelli was so completely without dignity that he had made himself the most difficult of Jenny’s lovers to dislodge. Her worshipers, actually—perhaps even her toys. Apparently her genius was of such a high order that as a woman she was deliriously unsatisfied and unhappy. Barnum could accept that. Barnum could even accept Minelli’s allegedly noteworthy Italianate attractions, however little use the saintly Miss Lind made of them. He could even accept that she expected all her admirers, Barnum himself included, to crawl over broken glass from New York to Newark for her. He was more than she bargained for, with his own cunning, calculated effort to drive off all her other courtiers, win her most serious respect—and then push her skirt up around her neck for his own pleasure. He wanted to feast on her.

  No doubt: he loved her, like all the other fools; what made him doubly foolish was that he understood why he loved her, the exquisite delicate mechanism at work.…

  All that saved him from utter ridicule was his age, the grand perspective that came with tipping into the grave. Given all the things that had happened to him in his life, he could resist her as easily, perhaps more easily, than he had ever resisted any woman.

  The thing was, he did not want to resist her.

  Minelli was a marvelous singer, rich and warm, a tenor who could jingle the chandeliers. The crowd was quieter, and not simply because the power of Minelli’s voice could shush them, but because the program showed that Jenny would come on stage to join him momentarily. Even those in the audience who could not read could recognize the letters of her name.

  Barnum had almost given his life to create the public’s awareness of Jenny Lind, but in the final analysis, his work had been only a minor point of all that had transpired. He had started the movement with one giddy, magnificent insight, that of promoting her goodness—selling her virtue, as it were. More important, the public had bought it, fashioning her into the image of the Perfect Christian Woman. Perfect Lunacy was more like it.

  But now even the skeptics’ doubts of her talent had been swept away. All week long critics and commentators had been run in and out of Castle Garden during her rehearsals, and their advance notices were nothing short of mind-boggling. A prodigy, they were calling her; the wonder of the age. Now that he knew the woman as well as he did, Barnum had difficulty connecting the human being with such grandiose praise. It did not seem possible. She was too flawed—or too much the alleged Perfect Christian Woman—to be capable of artistic miracles.

  Barnum was standing in the wings, not twenty-five feet from Minelli and Goldschmidt. Minelli hit his final note, and the entire five thousand were on their feet, cheering. Minelli and Goldschmidt exchanged small smiles: the cheering was not for what Minelli had done, but for his having finished doing it.

  Now Jenny was standing beside Barnum: he had not seen her since their arrival—after the thousands lining the route, sixty policemen guarding the bridge over the moat, and a flotilla of boats around Castle Garden for more than a mile. It was a panorama the likes of which had not been seen in America “since the British burned and sacked Washington,” as one wag had it the next day. That was the next day, when a thousand troubadours strummed and sang beneath her window, the newspapers bannered her name, and Barnum was offered $350,000 in cash for her contract.

  Barnum was still coming to understand what a delicate instrument a voice like hers actually was. She had been resting and preparing all afternoon; during Goldschmidt’s and Minelli’s turns on stage, she had been in her dressing room, vocalizing—singing vowels in the different musical tones. Exercising her voice, the way an athlete exercises his body before competition. The public did not want to know of the work a Jenny Lind had to do; no, people wanted magic, wanted to believe in magic—and Jenny Lind, even a Jenny Lind, had to give it to them.

  As Barnum understood it, the plan was to have Jenny “appear” beside Minelli at the appropriate moment in their duet-singing, in response to his singing. But now the crowd was so rowdy and restless that Barnum was sure that her first notes would be lost. This had been her fear, of course. There was nothing he could say, but he turned toward her anyway, in his helplessness—but she was already gone.

  Minelli and the orchestra started up again, hurling themselves against the rise and fall of the babble from the audience as if against the roaring of the ocean tide. In spite of the music and the noise, Barnum could hear his heart beating; in his anticipation he would have stopped it, if he had had the power.

  Suddenly the audience rose to its feet, five thousand people, and screamed. If Jenny Lind had sung at all, no one could have heard her, including the singer herself. From where he stood Barnum could not yet see Jenny between the rows of musicians. Minelli turned and extended his hand to her; Goldschmidt was standing, applauding, as all the rest on stage joined him. Flowers were being thrown up from the orchestra, which in turn was being floral
ly pelted from the balconies above. Jenny took Minelli’s hand and then he stepped back to leave her in the center stage alone. Barnum could not believe his ears, the noise was so intense; his eardrums seemed to be rattling in his skull from the clapping, cheering, whistling, and stomping that ricocheted around the old wood-paneled, stone fort. A naval bombardment could not damage the place, yet the floor under Barnum’s feet shook as if the entire building was about to collapse from the hysteria inside that it clearly could not contain. This was pandemonium. Even from the wings Barnum could see the fiery glow in the eyes of the audience as it attended the presence of the object of its worship. She smiled fetchingly, flushing, and her lovers cheered her louder. They began to chant her name and clap rhythmically. She looked over to Barnum, who realized that he was clapping along with all the others—everyone loved her, no doubt of it.

  The noise went on for another full five minutes. It still wasn’t clear to Barnum that this was only the beginning, or the end of the beginning, that tomorrow Lindomania would seize the heart of the country. Barnum had only the reports of the critics to sustain his belief in her magic—yet she and Barnum were still looking at each other, two human beings at the center of the most incomprehensible man-made hurricane. She extended her hand to him, inviting him to join her. At once he could see the inappropriateness of the act, but he could not leave her gesture in mystery for the audience. He stepped out on stage, bowed to the audience and her, extended his hand to her in salute, and moved back into the wings. For once, an audience did not seem to notice him, or want to; in another moment, flowers were vaulting onto the stage again.

  Then the applause began to fade, and people sat down again, with a noisy scuffling of chairs. People shushed each other and cried for quiet. Then there really was quiet, and all eyes were on Jenny Lind, alone downstage in the limelight. She was still smiling. When she looked around to the others on the stage standing behind her, and to Barnum in the wings, Barnum could see a sparkle in her eyes.