Astonishingly, Barnum was not in his office on the fourth floor of the American Museum when Jenny arrived for their appointment. It was his train, delayed on its long journey from Bridgeport, in the wilds of Connecticut. Jenny was hungry, but now it was too late for her to eat. As a courtesy to him, Jenny had resisted peeking around the corners at the various exhibits, and now, alone, she was beginning to believe that she should have indulged herself. But then suddenly there was the herald of an arrival, for the floor began to shake, ever more violently, until the vibrations seemed to threaten the building itself. Jenny was about to run for her life when the door of Barnum’s office opened, and Anna Swan, hunching down low, squeezed her way inside.
“Miss Lind!”
“Miss Swan!”
Jenny was standing, but suddenly she realized she could not embrace the woman who was more than twice her size, as big as a grizzly bear. She offered her hand, and when Anna Swan’s enveloped it, Jenny remembered that afternoon in Vienna, when the hand emerged so startlingly from the black carriage outside the Hotel Sacher. Anna Swan made her way to the sofa on which Jenny had been sitting, and lowered herself carefully in it, covering two of the three seat cushions with her enormous, shapeless hips.
“Your performance two nights ago is still the only subject of conversation in New York,” Anna Swan said, her chest heaving for air. “Now I’ve just been told that you spent this morning touring the poorhouses. Truly you are a remarkable Christian woman.”
“Please, none of that. Tell me, what brings you here, to Barnum’s workshop?”
Anna Swan smiled. “Oh, I live here, in an apartment in the back. I’ve just returned from shopping. But I’m waiting for Barnum because at last he has kept his promise to me, and found a suitor—a prospective husband. He sent me a note saying he interviewed a young man from Maine yesterday at Iranistan, in Bridgeport. He is younger than me by more than a few years, and not as tall—but then I’ve never expected to see anyone—well, Mr. Barnum is bringing a letter from him, an invitation, I hope.”
The huge woman was in a state of high excitement, which jarred Jenny’s senses. Barnum a matchmaker, too? Or was this another of his manipulations to promote himself and his crazy enterprises? Jenny was obsessed with him, but she did not think she was fooled by him. He was wily as a thieving mongrel, licking your hand one moment, then stealing your roast the next. He played the innocent, as if saying, What did you expect of me? Money was given to charity, but he made sure the whole world knew it. He was a trickster, shameless in it. The people of this city were his hopelessly bemused audience, gleefully awaiting his next jape or humiliation. Jenny could not look at Anna Swan without wondering how Barnum was going to use her again for his own advantage.
“You’re here to see Mr. Barnum, too, Miss Lind?” Anna Swan inquired.
“He’s invited me for lunch and a tour of the museum,” Jenny replied brightly.
“Oh. I see.” Anna Swan’s face hardened. She was so big that Jenny felt she was before a graven pagan idol. At first she thought the big woman was expressing her displeasure with having her time with Barnum usurped by another—but then Jenny remembered Anna Swan’s reaction on board the Great Western when she heard from Jenny about Lavinia Warren’s misconduct. Did Anna Swan suspect her of illicit behavior? As it turned out, not exactly. Anna leaned forward, causing the floorboards to groan alarmingly. “As much as I love Mr. Barnum, I feel I must warn you as a Christian woman that rumors about Mr. Barnum have circulated for years.”
Jenny wanted to giggle, but she kept her composure. “No!” she cried, with feigned horror.
Anna Swan leaned even closer, and Jenny was afraid that she was going to tumble onto the floor, spilling across the room as if a dam had burst. “There is one persistent story, Miss Lind—but I must say that there has never been an iota of proof—that Mr. Barnum is the father of a child now living with his mother, an actress, on the Riviera.”
Now the door opened. It was Barnum, his face beaming bright. “Buzz, buzz, buzz! A back fence is all you two need to complete a picture of gossip delicious.”
It was almost an hour before they were alone, and it left them barely an hour more for whatever he meant by a tour of his museum. She was concerned about her throat again. For the second time she had choked back emotion, and now she was thinking that she would probably have to take preventive measures later today if she wanted her throat to survive tonight’s performance undamaged.
When he had Anna Swan heading for her apartment and the door closed, he leaned back against it and closed his eyes. “I apologize,” he said.
“For what? You explained about the train—”
“No, not just that. I didn’t know when I left yesterday afternoon that I would be seeing the young galoot from Maine. It turns out that he doesn’t want to work for me, after all. More than anything in the world, he hates his size—”
“Then you’ve misled Miss Swan! You told her that the young man wanted to meet her!”
“He does, he does,” Barnum said tiredly. “It’s more complicated than that. He’s had a horrible life. The local girls are terrified of him, and tell each other the wildest lies. Like most oversized people, he’s a gentle and unsuspicious fellow—”
She put her hands to her ears. “Another nightmare! America is full of nightmares!”
He moved away from the door. “Then I’m afraid I’ve picked exactly the wrong day to show you my museum.”
“You’re so formal, Barnum! Is it because you’ve seen your wife? Are you ashamed of what you have done with me?”
He looked at her oddly, as if—for a moment—he didn’t quite grasp her meaning. “No—no. I don’t want to upset you.” He took her hand. “This place is different from anything you’ve ever seen. Some of the exhibits are frightening—difficult to bear. Some of them are only jokes, but others are authentic—”
“Like what?”
“A two-headed boy—”
“Stop! You are right. Do not upset me. I do not want to cry. My throat—”
He kissed her, gathered her to him, held her close, and kissed her. Jenny struggled against him, Anna Swan’s awful tale still swirling too vividly in her thoughts. A man not much different from Barnum had overwhelmed her mother and turned her into a monster. Jenny believed that her mother’s fate might have been different under a more benevolent, less selfish influence. Jenny’s throat ached. She pushed Barnum away. “No! No—please. I’ve never seen the misery that America showed me today. And then—” She stopped, because she did not want to ask him about the story Anna Swan had told, afraid that it might be true, but even more afraid that it was not, that Barnum somehow could be another hollow figure, without substance, the worst substance.…
The sin of this! She knew she was lying to herself about Barnum. He meant to seduce and betray her. She was lying to herself if she thought she was capable of toying with him. He was too sophisticated, subtle, and skilled, the quintessential American barbarian, his eyes cheerily alight with money and lust. In Europe people assured themselves that they could always best the crude Americans, but here, with Barnum, with a man who acted as if there was no God of Judgment, who acted as if he did not even mind the idea, she knew it was Europe that was deceiving itself. She stood up.
“Show me your museum.”
“Are you sure?”
There was a trace of a smile on his lips, but he was concerned about her, too. Maybe he was concerned about his investment—ah, she loathed his vile heart, but she loathed herself more. She disgusted herself. She gave him a pretty smile. “I am just an emotional woman, Barnum. Surely you know that by now.”
He approached her. She closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.
Anna Swan was not the only resident of the museum. Other freaks, people twisted and deformed, some even maimed, like the hideous Man with No Chin, had apartments in the building. This was the true nightmare, the morning tour only a prelude. It was the center of all of Barnum’s businesses, includin
g her own tour. He did not know what she was thinking, and he kept talking, believing he was explaining things. For her, the truth was more frightening than the elaborate fictions he had built around his “exhibits, attractions, and curiosities,” as he called them. The Wild Men of Borneo, for example, were actually two dull-witted youths from Long Island. Zip, the Pinhead, was not all that rare in nature; insane asylums around the world were filled with men and women with underdeveloped brains.
Barnum said, “When I was just starting out I went around to a poor, unhappy home where there was a four-year-old girl in the opposite condition, with a head as large as a sherry cask. A terrible sight. She was incapable of movement or speech, and the doctor I brought along as a consultant assured me that the child would not live much longer.”
He had started as a store clerk in Connecticut. When his employer went on a business trip, leaving him with the instruction to get rid of some pots and pans that weren’t selling, Barnum traded them to a peddler for twenty thousand assorted bottles. When the employer returned, he found his sixteen-year-old clerk operating a raffle, advertising twenty thousand tickets and twenty thousand prizes. Since the tickets cost only ten cents, they soon sold out, taking in two thousand dollars for bottles worth a penny each, traded for pots and pans worth little more than a hundred dollars altogether. Few people were disturbed by the joke the boy had played on them, and his popularity grew when the story behind the stunt was spread around. The grateful employer gave Barnum a bonus: twenty dollars.
“So the joke was on me, too,” Barnum concluded. They were passing a pedestal on which was mounted a tree root that had grown into the shape of a foot, complete with toes. It was advertised as the remnant of an ancient being. Pointing to it, Barnum said, “I paid a Massachusetts farmer two dollars for that stump and I’ve been showing it for ten years.”
Next was the famous Feegee Mermaid, all-but-invisible in the silty solution in the jar that contained it. “I was in jail once, you know,” Barnum said. “I served almost two months. This was back when I was running my newspaper, The Voice of Freedom, before I found Joice Heth and Charlie. Some fellow claimed I libeled him and the jury believed him. I published the paper from my cell, had my meals sent in, the barber and the bootblack, too.”
“Did you libel the man?”
“Oh, I don’t remember now.” Barnum turned his attention to a woman with a babe-in-arms, the second museum patron to want to greet him. He was an utter scoundrel, but these people seemed to bathe in his glow, they showed such happiness when they were in his presence. She could not help feeling the pull toward him, with so many souls eager to gravitate around him, but too many questions remained—not simply one raised by Anna Swan’s gossip. Barnum made his living exhibiting the torments and debilitations of the abandoned of the world; even worse, he supervised and amplified the idolatry these American ignoramuses wanted to shower on him. Immoral—a completely immoral man. Now he gave the woman’s infant a sopping wet kiss.
“Nothing is beneath you,” Jenny whispered when they were alone again.
“Not if it’s funny,” he said proudly, waving to another passer-by.
“But nothing—?”
“Nothing.” He took her by the shoulders and made her look into his eyes, which he promptly crossed. “My dear, everything is funny.”
“You fool!”
He stole a kiss. “Exactly.” He took her hand, held it, and kissed it, in full view of gawking spectators. “I have a new scheme, but it’s going to have to wait until after the war—”
“What war?”
“The war we’re going to have here in America,” he said. “You’ve arrived too soon—thank God—for the real American nightmare. Here in America we will have Europeans-Americans of European descent, white men—fighting over the historical destiny of Africans, the black men. Hanging in the balance is the future of all human beings, not just white men or black men, but every single desperate creature among us, like my little family here, but never mind. My idea,” he said as if he were introducing the King of Spain or some other illustrious personage, “is based on the great shows—the circuses, descended from the Roman—that you have in Europe. We here in America have traveling shows, some very good—I know, because I own most of them—journeying from town to town just as your shows travel over there, by caravan, wagons drawn by animals. But here in America we have the new railroads, linking New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah as if on a single thread. It is my plan to put together a show, a circus, that can travel not on roads, drawn by animals, but on the railroads, directly and swiftly, animals, performers, roustabouts—”
Now she was sure he was mad. Animals? The Berlin Circus had thirty lions and tigers, a dozen elephants, two hundred performers—he was going to exceed all that, and move it from one grubby settlement to the next on a railroad? But there was more. Everything was funny? What about the lost, impoverished souls she had seen this morning?
“Tell me, Barnum, do you intend to exhibit your freaks in this circus, too?”
“Oh, we never call our attractions ‘freaks.’”
Jenny noted the sudden royal “we.” Apparently he had taken umbrage. Could she goad him into showing anger? Now she was curious about the quality of that anger—perhaps the only true glimpse of a man’s basic character. “Very well, then,” she said carefully. “What do we call them?”
“Ah, attractions,” he said cheerily. “Curiosities. Performers. Stars.”
Jenny could control herself no longer. “I hate this place, Barnum,” she muttered. “I hate these people being exhibited and exploited because of their deformity or ugliness. You make money from that ugliness. You have made your fortune from it. I’m sorry to be a part of it. I’m sorry I took your money, now that I know where it came from. Stars, indeed. Freaks. Or are stars and freaks the same thing to you?”
He had listened impassively, and now he spoke slowly, softly, his eyes nevertheless intense. “I’m sorry, I thought you understood. Charlie told you how I found him, didn’t he? His parents were planning to put him away in a closet. Anna Swan hadn’t seen the light of day for ten years before one of my agents heard the story of the enormous young girl her parents kept hidden in an outbuilding behind their farmhouse. My doctors assure me that she has a disease, or condition, having to do with the regulation of human growth. That’s all. That’s the sum of what’s wrong with her, some tiny mechanism overworking itself like an unattended kettle. But her parents—and many of her neighbors—thought that Anna’s giantism was the curse of God. When she was a child, she was told repeatedly that she had sinned in the womb.”
“But you’re making money—”
He nodded a greeting to another customer. “We all are. Not just you and me, but them, too. Anna Swan is not rich, but she’s comfortably off, with all the luxuries of our wondrous age and a considerable amount of money in the bank.”
“Which is to say that some of your charges are doing better than others. Charlie brags that he’s a millionaire—in dollars, of course, not sterling.”
“Well, either way, he’s richer than I am,” Barnum said mildly. “Are you disturbed that Charlie makes more than Anna? Charlie is a brilliant performer, a joy. Anna merely sits there. Understand, Jenny, I don’t pity these people. Why? They don’t want pity. They want me to treat them as I would treat anyone else. They want normal lifes, or as near to normal as can be arranged, and that means accepting, like the rest of us, that the world pays us what it thinks we’re worth, even if we feel that that is unjust.
“As for the money paid to you, it came not from revenues generated by my other performers, but through mortgages and loans made by institutions and individuals who have learned that I can be trusted in business. The last five thousand dollars paid to Judge Munthe in London came from a clergyman who has some original notions about Christianity—”
“I should say sol You brag about humiliating clergymen!”
He smiled. “Not the o
nes who give me money. Actually, no one loves the story of the overboard razors as much as that man.”
“Not everything is funny, Barnum. I don’t believe that. I fail to see the humor of blind children—”
“I find much rueful laughter in listening to someone argue that anything good can come of slavery—particularly the argument that we have made Christians out of a bunch of previously happy heathens.”
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