Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  First, he forgot Charlie.

  In the years before Charlie met Lavinia, Sunday after Sunday, whenever Barnum was in New York and Charlie wasn’t on tour, Charlie would walk up to the American Museum and join Barnum for breakfast. In the old days, before Barnum reformed, or slowed down, he would forget to tell his teen-aged and worldly wise star attraction that there might be a third at the table—some fair young thing. Even if one of the employees downstairs knew that Barnum was not alone and could inform Charlie accordingly, Charlie would come up anyway, riding up on the employee’s shoulders, more often than not. And since in those days a hangover was usually waiting to pounce on Barnum the moment he opened his eyes, Charlie did not hesitate to climb up on the bed and kick Barnum’s backside until the great man rolled over, groaned, and caught sight of his gleeful little pal.

  All that happened years ago, but the Sunday morning after Jenny’s second concert was the first in two years that Charlie was in New York alone, knowing that Barnum was not in Connecticut for the weekend.

  Of course, given his own frame of mind, Barnum was not surprised that he never gave Charlie a thought.

  What awakened Barnum Sunday morning was the sound of Jenny screaming—and his first sight was of a pop-eyed Charlie, his mouth agape, losing his balance and falling back on his little keester on the bed. Because of his size, Charlie had not been able to see who was in the bed until he was on it.

  “Oh, my God!” he squeaked.

  Barnum could not contain his mirth, as much as he wanted to. Even as he spoke, his belly was shaking.

  “No taking the Lord’s name in vain, mosquito! Not on Sunday, and not in front of this lady!”

  “Stop!” Jenny cried, from under the covers where she had hidden herself.

  Charlie moaned like a hopeful nephew at his rich uncle’s funeral. Barnum laughed out loud.

  “Kill me, Barnum!” Charlie cried. “Step on me like a bug!”

  Barnum eyed the cowering lump beside him. It was a grand opportunity. “I’m going to tear the skin off your face, you little degenerate,” he snarled.

  Charlie sat up, alarmed until he saw Barnum’s expression. “Don’t hit me, Barnum,” he begged, working his way into the scene. “Oh, please, don’t hit me!”

  Jenny’s head popped up, her finger tips clutching the tops of the blankets. “Don’t you hit him—oh!” She saw it was a joke, and buried herself again.

  “Now I am going to hit him!”

  “You planned this, the two of you,” came her muffled protest.

  “Oh-oh,” Barnum said with a shudder. “You better straighten her out, Charlie.”

  “Not a chance, you old rouge.”

  “I hate you both!” Jenny cried.

  Barnum sat up. “Let’s have a song, Charlie. Sing us a song.”

  “You madman!” Jenny tried to curl up even smaller under the covers.

  “Why can’t we have a song?” Barnum asked blandly. “Come on, tadpole, a little tune, if you please.”

  Charlie got himself seated on the footboard. Barnum had no idea of what he was going to do. The little man elaborately cleared his throat.

  “In ancient days there lived a maid,

  Who plied a very ancient trade.

  Her trade was one of ill-repute—

  In fact, she was a prostitute!”

  Jenny came up like a shot, the covers falling down from her shoulders. Charlie grinned. “Good morning, my dear.” He sang:

  “Hi, ho, Cathusalem,

  The harlot of Jerusalem!

  Hi, ho, Cathusalem,

  The daughter of the rabbi!”

  Jenny covered her face again. “You’re both horrible!”

  “That’s enough, mouse,” Barnum said. “Make your exit, if you please.”

  “I’m hungry, Barnum. I came here for breakfast.”

  “Wonderful—but wait outside.”

  “I’d cook it myself,” the little man said, as he lowered himself to the floor, “but I’m too short to reach the stove.”

  Jenny sat up again. “What time is it?”

  Charlie was sauntering toward the door. “Too late for church, sugar.”

  “Worm!” Barnum yelled.

  “Yes, worm!” Jenny shouted, laughing. When the door closed, she fell back on the pillow and looked at Barnum. “I am ruined.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Oh, I am, and I don’t care.” He kissed her. “What do I do, Barnum?”

  “Now? Let me make love to you.”

  She looked startled, her eyes darting toward the door. “Now? He’s right outside. He’ll know.”

  “He expects no less,” Barnum said. “This is the way human. beings are, and he knows it because he’s been in the same situation himself.”

  “It doesn’t bother him?” she asked between kisses. Her arms were around him. “I’m such a stupid woman, Barnum. I’m not a failure, too, am I?”

  “No. And you’re beautiful, a beautiful woman.”

  “I am in pain,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  “Is it normal?”

  “We have overindulged,” he said.

  “Oh, Barnum, you have turned the world upside down—and me as well.” She giggled at her own joke, closed her eyes, and moved to accommodate him.

  Charlie knelt on the counter, buttered the toast as his share of the breakfast preparations, and then sat on the table Indian-style with his plate of ham and egg in front of him while the other two kissed and held hands during the meal. He told them they were both crazy and he should have expected something like this because he had thought they were crazy ever since he’d met them. Barnum could not fail to see that Charlie was in a better mood than he had been recently. When Barnum said as much, Charlie pulled a pink envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it over. The envelope was blank, and there was a single piece of matching pink paper inside. Was Barnum supposed to take it out? Charlie nodded. A line—just one line. No salutation. No signature.

  Do you still love me?

  Barnum recognized the handwriting: it was Lavinia’s.

  “Let Jenny see it,” Charlie said.

  “What do you think?” Barnum asked.

  “She made a mistake. Now she knows it, too.”

  “Lavinia?” Jenny asked.

  Charlie nodded. “Try to understand her. I made a mistake, too—well, lots of them—but the one I’m thinking of right now is drawing you into our problems when we were on the Great Western. The two of you shouldn’t have trouble with each other. I’m going to talk to Lavinia about it, too.”

  “Then you’re going to see her,” Jenny said.

  “I think she wants me to, and I still love her. I love you, too, but you’re too big.”

  She giggled and blushed.

  “I’m going to see her,” he went on. “After all, what actually happened, and how important is it? I didn’t treat her right, I know that. I kept telling myself how much I loved her and how lucky I was, but once I had everything arranged the way I liked it, I didn’t pay much real attention to her at all. I could have married her a year ago, and I should have, except for what I just told you. Being married wouldn’t have made me a more attentive lover.” He turned to Jenny. “There’s the second thing, how important is it anyway? I mean, for everything I say and do, the fact remains that I’m a midget. Barnum doesn’t like me saying this—”

  “In public,” she said.

  “Yes, in public I don’t say it, but I think of it, and it will always be in the corner of my mind—that I’m a freak, a mistake. If I were an ear of corn growing out in the garden, I wouldn’t make it to the table. I’m not important. What happens to me isn’t important. If people knew about this, they’d probably laugh—”

  She reached for his hand. “I know about it, Charlie, and I don’t laugh. Do you know why?”

  Barnum watched him stare. There was a fury in Charlie, and now he was afraid of what she might say.

  “Charlie, I don�
��t laugh because I love you, too.”

  “I told you, you’re too big. Do you see? If other people laugh, then it really can’t be that important. Besides, you have to understand Lavinia. She’s not the kind of person who can say, ‘Charlie, let’s sit down and talk.’ She’s like me. She keeps things in and then she blows her top, like a steam engine. Some people are like that, not even brave enough to speak up when their toes are being stepped on. They have to blow up. It has nothing to do with size, but if you imagine spending your life looking up at school children, then maybe you’ll understand what people like Lavinia and me go through.”

  Now the floor shook, and the building thumped as if reverberating with nearby cannon fire.

  “Here she comes,” Charlie said.

  Jenny turned to Barnum. “Who?”

  “Our prima ballerina,” Charlie said.

  “Anna?” Jenny put her hand to her mouth. “Charlie, when you’re with Barnum, you’re as wicked as he is.”

  He was holding her hand with both his hands, one wrapped around her thumb, the other around her little finger. That was how Anna found them when she shouldered through the door, Barnum holding Jenny’s other hand up to his lips and—what Anna (and Charlie) couldn’t see—his own free hand under the table, stroking the willing Jenny’s ample thigh.

  “Oh. Miss Lind, I didn’t hear you come up. I heard Charlie a while ago—”

  “We both came up hours ago, Anna,” Charlie said. “When you heard me, I was returning from the fishmonger’s. The two of them sent me out for herring.”

  She looked at the table. “There isn’t any herring.”

  Charlie smiled slowly. “I didn’t like what he had.”

  But Anna was looking at the way everybody was holding hands. Barnum was certain he would be able to come up with an explanation that would smother her suspicions—and gag her flapping mouth—but he really thought that it was just a matter of time before the cat got out of the bag, and the real gossip started.

  Jenny was far from happy with so many people knowing her private business.

  “You bastard,” she called Barnum when they were alone. “You fat, old, ugly bastard.”

  “Why is it that that’s the worst thing you can think of to call me?” he asked her at one point, and he regarded her answer as nothing short of amazing.

  “You insist on doing everything your own way,” she said. “You want to turn the world inside out. You don’t believe in right or wrong, good or evil—”

  He wanted to tell her that he did, in his own fashion, but he was too struck by the way she had responded to him. There was no question that she had heard him, but she never looked at him, and merely went on talking, as if daydreaming aloud. It occurred to him that she was not really cursing him, but identifying him with her. He still had his European agents’ reports on her, and Charlie’s letters—she was thirty now, even if she did not want to say so, and had let her birthday slip by unnoticed. According to all his information, she thought she was fat, old, and ugly—on different terms from those in which she had just described him, of course, but the words were the same, said with a smile—and for the first time ever, he was sure.

  Nor was the sudden violence of her speech all that bad a sign, either, for it was part of a great flamboyant outpouring of emotion. Late on Sunday afternoon he had the carriage brought around for a ride up Broadway to the tree-lined suburbs above Longacre Square, that is, north of where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue, at Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. From that point on the island was pleasant country, with yards full of apple trees. Jenny leaned out of the window to talk to the occupants of other carriages; she sang, she returned the shouted greetings of passers-by who recognized her—or Barnum. On the way back to the city, in the dark, the isinglass curtains drawn, he made love to her. She did not protest; she said she felt daring. She was not happy with people knowing so much about her private business, but it was clear to him that the source of her unhappiness was not anything that he or anyone else could control. Her problem was the person she found herself becoming. It was not a question of whether she liked that person; that was to be seen in her eyes as she looked at him while he made love to her. In that sense, she was a bolder woman than she knew. The problem was that Jenny did not know if she could control her, the person her relationship with him was turning her into—control, he could see, had always been her problem. As a child she had been forced to toe the mark and be a good girl, and now she had forgotten the punishment inflicted on her when she had been bad. At this stage, so many years later, it hardly mattered; all she knew was that doing what she wanted to do frightened her, and her fear was the one and only weakness in her entire character. Barnum loved her—loved her! He knew she was a great woman.

  He had not expected so much, or quite believed it still. In some ways she was less mature than all of his four daughters, who were younger than she by as much as ten years. On the other hand, she knew she was a great artist—Barnum’s daughters, bless them, didn’t know the difference between art and Chinese food. But you could not compare people, and women were doubly difficult for Barnum, for in his view, all women were innately wonderful.

  Barnum had spent his life surrounded by women, closer to women than to any man, and he had lived long enough to see the full circle of a woman’s life from several points of view. In his childhood he had thought his mother’s obedience to her father in the face of all common sense a sign of her own personal weakness, and in his youth he had thought his wife’s timidity and inertia a minor matter time would repair; but as he observed the emergence of his daughters into adult life, as he saw their compromises and capitulations in spite of his most urgent advice, Barnum realized that the lot of women was at the center of the tragedy of our civilization. Even Joice Heth, the old black woman Barnum had represented as George Washington’s mammy, just days before her death, wanted Barnum to know that she had had many opportunities to “sin,” but had controlled herself. Looking down at the withered old woman, curled up like an infant in a cradle, Barnum had not been able to imagine what her senile thought processes were pointing toward, or if “sin” was just another reflex word for her, a barnyard command, like “Giddyap, hoss!” There was a little bit of Jenny Lind in every woman, even if the reverse was absolutely untrue.

  There was nothing in history to serve as precedent for what Jenny had accomplished. Barnum had no doubt that there would be women to come after her, actresses, dancers, other singers, perhaps the whole gamut, from lofty inventors to lowly politicians; but for now, Jenny Lind was unique among women, joining those few men, like Barnum, Dickens, or Napoleon, who had invented their lives and themselves. That she should be drawn to Barnum—or Barnum to her—was not surprising; what surprised Barnum was the emotion between them, the massive, overwhelmingly intense emotion. He dared not think of it. In his heart he knew, because he was helpless already, that either way, the emotion was going to make a coward of him.

  On the other hand—simultaneously, as Barnum appreciated later—little Charlie was really strutting his stuff. Throwing money around, Barnum’s little buddy had bribed his way into the kitchen of the hotel up on Fourteenth Street where Joe Gallagher had taken a suite, and where he and Lavinia were scheduled to have dinner that Sunday evening. How Charlie had managed to learn all these details mystified even Barnum, but Barnum knew his friend. If the Charlie underneath the public personality was not exactly a desperate man, he had the capacity to become one in a flash, given the right circumstances.

  These were the right circumstances, and it was just Charlie’s style, assuming he had never done it before, to hire some bowler-hatted private detective to flatfoot around behind a bandy-legged dwarf and a female midget who looked like a four-year-old. Charlie was too wise in the ways of the world to hire a private detective twice, so Barnum could easily imagine Charlie hearing some fat Irishman say that it was a tough case because the subjects were so small … no matter. Sunday evening, when the other two ordered their dinn
er, Charlie saw the waiter’s pad. A desperate man, crazed with defeat and sudden new opportunity. Here, Barnum thought, we are plumbing the very nature of the beast. Lavinia had ordered mousse for dessert. It was not enough for Charlie merely to reclaim Lavinia. No, Charlie had to perform some audacious act; he had to stand on his opponent’s chest and thump his own. God bless him, Barnum’s little friend had to use the knife, at least ceremonially, for an audience of one. Charlie’s move addressed itself to the very heart of man—and the comedy of his dilemma, for the battle-ceremony took place only on the stage of Lavinia’s imagination. So much for the depth of human civilization, Barnum thought. When the mousse was served, the whipped cream on top was whirled in a single word:

  Yes.

  A good stunt, but not the end of the story. Lavinia started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Gallagher asked from across the table on his own built-up chair.

  “Nothing.” She smeared the whipped cream. If he had been able to reach across the table, Gallagher would have been able to confirm his immediate suspicions. No matter here, either, for everything was obvious enough. In her impatience she indicated too soon that she was going to have a headache, and Gallagher, no fool, did not bother to protest. A desperate man, too? He was too far from Barnum’s perceptions for a judgment to be made. It was entirely possible for the deformed San Franciscan to have fallen in love with Lavinia. Lavinia had the stuff, no question of that; if the woman had been full-sized, she might have changed history. Whatever the reason, Gallagher, like Charlie, wanted to know the truth; and like Charlie, he became desperate enough to acquire the means. That night Lavinia was with Charlie and Gallagher found out about it. Barnum was snoozing alone, Jenny having achieved a full measure of sin and soreness. No matter at all: if the rest of the world had known, it might have laughed.

  Barnum saw the denouement the next night at Jenny’s third New York performance—gross: twelve thousand dollars, he was pleased to note. Barnum was in the wings, viewing the audience through a peephole. The miniature collision would have occurred anyway, Charlie apparently having planned to attend all of Jenny’s New York performances. This was the night Gallagher had planned to take Lavinia, but instead she was with Charlie. Gallagher, not having figured out this last part, was making use of one of his two tickets. When Gallagher spotted Lavinia with Charlie, he tried to keep his composure, and for Barnum, it was a poignant moment. Gallagher’s feelings were involved, even if they were only (only?) feelings generated by a lifetime of rejection, scorn, and ridicule. Barnum supposed that Gallagher felt that Charlie had used his superior position and income to devise this humiliation—whatever, from his stageside peephole Barnum saw what was coming, and had his agents in the lobby during the intermission. They leaped in, but not soon enough by the accounts they gave Barnum a few minutes later. Words were exchanged, the lady was insulted, and as the agents were moving in, somebody spat upon somebody else. Everybody in the lobby saw it—hell, the male principals left the field of combat under the arms of Barnum’s men, kicking and squawking like children being rushed from a wedding. A woman came to aid Lavinia, standing alone suddenly, silent, looking dazed.