Inseparable
Page 8
The twins arrived in New York on September 18, 1829, after an eighteen-hour journey by sea from Providence. Sailing between Connecticut and Long Island, looking at the low-lying, vanishing coastlines of New England, the twins must have recalled their memorable trip to Bangkok to see the king, or the journey down the Meinam when they left Siam only a few months earlier.
The steamer line between Providence and New York had first opened in 1822. Alexis de Tocqueville, who would travel the same route in 1831, spoke fondly of the sixty-league journey on one of these newfangled steamboats with a spacious interior and several large saloons providing comfortable sleeping and dining quarters for as many as eight hundred men and women. Entering New York by way of Long Island Sound, one could, in the words of Tocqueville, “picture a sea dotted with sails, a lovely sweep of notched shoreline, blossoming trees on greensward sloping down to the water, a multitude of small, artfully embellished candy-box houses in the background.”2
There were, however, no Chinese junks here, or fishmongers’ swift sampans, all of which would have made the twins feel at home. Instead, they saw a spectacle full of hum and buzz, clanking and ringing, a city fast becoming the greatest metropolis in the world.
As it turned out, 1829 was a relatively quiet year in New York, a fact borne out by Philip Hone’s journals. In January, when the social season opened, a few bored residents on Bowling Green cleared an opening between their houses to host a swank fancy-dress ball, the first of its kind in this former Dutch settlement with a population soaring to two hundred thousand. It was soon followed by a masked ball at the Park Theatre, attended by the social swells, including the Hones. The Park had dominated in entertainment that year partly due to the success of new shows, partly because its major competitors, the American Opera House and the Lafayette, had either gone out of business or gone up in flames. The masquerades drew outcries from the city’s more conservative citizens, who lobbied the legislature to outlaw them. In May, two steam locomotives arrived from England for use on the railroad belonging to the newly founded Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. Hone, a partner in the company, went to the foundry to see the first steam locomotives ever used in America—only to find that they were too heavy for the wooden rails with thin iron straps and had to be refitted. The quiet of January 1829 was shattered by June, however, when the steam frigate Fulton, built during the War of 1812, exploded at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, killing more than twenty-five men.3
The greatest thoroughfare in the city, Broadway, stretching for fifteen miles from the Battery in the south to Spuyten Duyvil Creek in the very north, bustled day and night with carts, hackney coaches, and horsemen. Along the street stood fine residences with graceful wooden porticos and pillars, in addition to the sylvan campus of Columbia College and the majestic American Hotel and Park Theatre. In certain sections, one could catch a glimpse of the Hudson’s sparkling water. But most distinct of all, in the midst of all this glamour and splendor, was a sight that rarely escaped observant visitors: the pigs that waddled freely up and down the promenade, their noses always in search of offal. Dickens, in his American Notes, describes for us the stark contrast between the gaudy human scene and the scavenging swine: “Here are the same ladies in bright colours, walking to and fro, in pairs and singly; yonder the very same light blue parasol which passed and repassed the hotel-window here. Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen-hogs have just now turned the corner.”4
Beyond Manhattan, a brand new state prison, Sing Sing, named after an Indian tribe, began receiving inmates transferred from Newgate Prison in Greenwich Village, thus freeing up a prime real estate spot for future developments. On Long Island, the Mosquito Cove revival, part of the nationwide religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening (more on that later), drew thousands of Methodists from hundreds of miles around, who descended on the campground like mosquitoes. On Staten Island, a young man by the name of Cornelius Vanderbilt was managing a seven-vessel Gibbons Line, ferrying between Staten Island and Manhattan. One day, this young man would pick up the epithet “Commodore,” for having built a shipping and railroad empire.
Back in the city, the biggest news prior to the Siamese Twins’ arrival was in the foreign sections of the newspapers—namely, the execution of William Burke in Edinburgh, Scotland. An Irish-born peddler combing the streets of Edinburgh, Burke had partnered with boardinghouse owner William Hare in pursuit of dead bodies. The beginning of their deadly trade was innocent enough: One of the elderly tenants at the flophouse had died while still owing four pounds in rent. To collect the debt, Hare enlisted Burke’s help in hauling the body to a local surgeon who gave dissection lessons to medical students. The surgeon paid seven pounds ten shillings for the corpse, an impressive amount that piqued the entrepreneurial spirits of Hare and Burke. The duo would soon sell the surgeon another sixteen bodies of the newly departed, mostly women. “Newly-departed that is at the hands of the two men,” as the historian David Minor sardonically puts it. “When their lethal venture was discovered and the two arrested, Hare agreed to a plea bargain offer and was spirited away to protect him against mob violence. Burke’s more violent and final departure delighted the huge crowds—some estimates put the number at close to 40,000—gathered for the public execution.” Even after his hanging, Burke still had one more service to perform for the medical profession. In a case of poetic justice, his body was taken to the medical school, where the students watched doctors remove the top of his head for a lesson on the human brain. According to Minor, “Other young fans of the anatomical arts, kept out of the building for lack of space, began attacking the police and it wasn’t until the town council intervened and promised everyone a good look that order was restored.”5 Although Burke’s execution had taken place in January, the violence of his crime and death had put the otherwise hard-nosed New Yorkers on edge. There was widespread terror among women that copycats might commit the same heinous acts in the city by “Burking” them, which was Burke’s modus operandi for producing fresh corpses—smothering.
The morbid curiosity of the Edinburgh mob was relevant in light of the twins’ visit to New York, where the citizens’ ongoing obsession with macabre news and human anatomy had drawn them to the spectacle of the “Canadian Giant,” a man by the name of Modeste Maltacle, who weighed 619 pounds. Philip Hone, not one to miss anything happening in his city, went to see the show with measuring tape in hand. He later confided to his diary that one of the giant’s ankles was three feet five inches in circumference.6 Of course, New Yorkers would have more to chatter about when the steamer Chancellor Livingston arrived from Providence, bearing the spectacle of the United Siamese Brothers.
On September 20, 1829, Chang and Eng’s show in New York opened at the Grand Saloon, Masonic Hall, on Broadway. As the Evening Post reported, the twins presented “a spectacle of great interest, alloyed, however, by those feelings of commiseration which human deformity must ever occasion.” Every day (except Sunday) from 9 to 2, and then from 6 to 9, people flooded into the Masonic Hall to get a peek at what had been advertised as a “wonderful natural curiosity.”
By now the twins had performed in America for more than a month, giving them enough time to polish their repertoire and hone their skills in interacting with an audience. With their English steadily improving, they gained more confidence in improvisation, entertaining the audience with their good-natured country boys’ shrewd, simple wit. According to one report, when a one-eyed man attended their show, the twins insisted that he should be refunded half his admission fee, “since he could not see as much as others.” When they saw a legless person in the audience, they generously offered a refund and a cigar, putatively “to atone for the fact that they had four arms and legs between them.”7 When a proselytizing priest approached them and tested these “pagan” boys’ knowledge of salvation, the twins knew exactly how to return the favor. The priest asked them, “Do you know where you would
go if you were to die?” Chang and Eng pointed their fingers upward. “Yes, yes, up dere,” they said. “Do you know where I should go if I were to die?” The twins nodded and pointed their fingers downward. “Yes, yes, down dere,” they replied.8
It was not entirely inconceivable that among the visitors who thronged the Masonic Hall would be a young man by the name of Herman Melville. Born in the city, the future author of Moby-Dick had just turned ten in the fall of 1829. Living beyond his means on borrowed money and mindful of the city’s way of defining a person by his address, Melville’s father, Allan, had just moved the family to a large house in a posh neighborhood on Broadway. Melville and his brother Gansevoort were sent to the nearby Columbia Grammar School. Herman was a troubled kid, slow in comprehension and suffering from a speech impediment, a disability shared by Billy Budd, the stuttering protagonist in Melville’s last story. Even though we have no record of the teenage Melville visiting the Siamese Twins, his orbit lay in the proximity of the Masonic Hall. Those were the best years of Melville’s childhood, when he was still spelling his last name as “Melvill.” Pretty soon, his father would go bankrupt and die a broken man, leaving behind a widow with four kids and a sizable debt and putting an end to Melville’s formal education. Self-taught thereafter, Melville became a sailor and then an author who would people his fiction with all sorts of human abnormality—one-legged Captain Ahab, fully tattooed Queequeg, stammering Billy Budd, to name just a few. References to the Siamese Twins actually abound in Melville’s oeuvre. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael imagines that he and Queequeg are “united” by an “elongated Siamese ligature” and that the South Sea giant was his own “inseparable twin brother.” In The Confidence-Man, the narrator describes a scene where “the two stood together; the old miser leaning against the herb-doctor with something of that air of trustful fraternity with which, when standing, the less strong of the Siamese Twins habitually leans against the other.” Melville once told fellow author Richard Henry Dana Jr. that they were “tied & welded” by a “Siamese link of affectionate sympathy.” And in Billy Budd, a novella left unfinished at his death, Melville described contrasting emotions by invoking the names of the Siamese Twins: “Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason nevertheless may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster?” Here, Melville, who had given up on fiction for twenty years and worked quietly as a customs officer and a poet, might have been struck by the poetic proximity of Envy and Eng, and the acoustic echo between Antipathy and Chang.9 Anyway, some of these colorful descriptions could not have been made by someone who had not observed the twins closely or with much fascination.
While the twins’ popularity soared, a story, possibly apocryphal, made the rounds and later was picked up by a few biographers. Unhappy with their hotel arrangements in New York and wishing for privacy and independence, Chang and Eng wanted to find lodgings for themselves. But it proved to be a difficult task. No stranger to human varieties in what was often regarded as a morally polluted city, most landlords would be willing, if the price was right, to rent a room to almost anyone. A pair of conjoined twins, however, made prospective landlords feel as if they were harboring some indecent beasts. As a result, the twins were turned away again and again as they tramped up and down busy streets and quiet alleys, looking for a room. They finally got a break when they came to a large house on John Street. The look on the face of the landlady as she opened the door convinced the twins that their effort would be in vain again, but they were wrong. The woman, quickly recovering from her initial shock at the sight of the double men, went on to welcome them inside and showed them a room on the first floor. This was probably the first time they had set foot inside an American domestic space.
Looking around the sparsely furnished room, they felt strangely at home and were eager to take it when they suddenly heard movement over their heads. Alarmed, they asked the landlady what it was. She assured them that it was just a tenant in the room above. With that explanation, their interest in the room immediately vanished, and they asked whether she had any room on a higher floor. The perplexed woman showed them the attic, which they found to be quite to their liking. Even though they had to climb three flights of stairs to get there, it was private, and, most important of all, no one would be walking over their heads. As they later explained to their landlady, in Siam it was considered bad luck to have anyone walk over one’s head; hence, most houses there had only a single floor. This explanation was quite in keeping with some of the ethnographic descriptions of Siam at the time. When the British envoy visited Bangkok in 1822, he stayed on the second story of a house. According to William S. W. Ruschenberger, “To avoid the ill luck and disgrace of having any body for a moment actually over his head, the worthy Phra Klang (a man of some three or four hundred pounds substance) was in the habit of entering the Ambassador’s apartments through a window, by a ladder placed against the outside of the building.”10 For the same reason, even today in many parts of Asia, it is considered a taboo or bad luck to walk beneath underwear or pants hanging outside on laundry lines. An undergarment is a synecdoche for a walking body.
After they moved in, Chang and Eng proved to be excellent tenants—quiet, considerate, and never in arrears for their rent. But the trouble of having to climb the stairs day in and day out eventually got to them. After a long day of work, performing before thousands of noisy viewers and standing at the center of attention for hours—perhaps reminiscent of Archibald MacLeish’s poetic description of Vasserot, the armless ambidextrian performing before “those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes”—they were often too tired to drag their conjoined bodies up the steep and narrow stairs. They eventually gave in to pragmatism and convenience and begged the landlady to let them move to the ground-floor room. Superstition be damned; the Siamese Twins were well on their way to becoming pragmatic Americans.11
Just as the twins were eager to imbibe the nation’s fresh vapors, America was also quick to absorb new elements landing on its shores. Less than two months after their arrival, the Siamese Twins had already entered the lexicon of the American language. The twins might have arrived too late for inclusion in the first edition of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)—a monumental effort to assert America’s linguistic and cultural independence from Mother England—but the ever-changing American English soon adopted the “Siamese Twins” as a metaphor for inseparable unions. On October 16, 1829, two months after the twins’ arrival, the Rhode Island American reported on a cattle show in Worcester, Massachusetts, a festive occasion where a toast was given: “Worcester County and Rhode Island—Like the Siamese Twins united by a cord that cannot be severed with safety to either.”12 This quote predates the earliest citation of “Siamese Twins” in the Oxford English Dictionary by about a month. Soon afterward, the term entered common household usage and made it into the subsequent editions of Webster’s dictionary. One day, on the brink of the American Civil War, “Siamese Twins,” by then deeply ingrained in the national psyche, would be invoked again as a metaphor for a bond that might be cut only at the peril of both sides of the Union.
9
The City of Brotherly Love
Call it love at first sight. Philadelphia—the city that still has Chang and Eng’s fused liver in a tub of preservative liquid inside a museum, where a visitor can see a section of the brain of President Garfield’s assassin as well as millions of other medical oddities and pathological specimens—first saw the conjoined twins in October 1829. After they had taken New York City by storm, Chang and Eng proceeded by steamboat and stage to the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence.
Foreign visitors to Philadelphia often complained about its dull physical layout, a rigidly rectangular grid of streets distinguished from one another, as Tocqueville put it, “by number rather than name . . . of a saint, a famous man, an event.” Fanny Trollope hated its “extreme and almost wearisome regularity,” and so did Dickens,
who visited the city and said, “I would have given the world for a crooked street.” The dreary city planning made Tocqueville believe that “these people know nothing but arithmetic.”1 However, what Philadelphia lacked in physical variety, it made up for in spiritual diversity. Founded by William Penn in 1681, this town on the Delaware River had attracted Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and especially Quakers, who were drawn by Penn’s policy of religious tolerance. Literally meaning the “City of Brotherly Love,” Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century had become a bustling mix of diverse communities and the third-largest port on the Atlantic seaboard, after Boston and New York.2
In some ways, Philadelphians, more than a hundred thousand strong in 1829, were ideal viewers who could best appreciate the kind of exoticism brought by the “wonder boys” from Siam. As early as 1784, the same year that the Empress of China, refitted from a gunboat during the Revolutionary War, had docked in Canton and opened the China Trade route, Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia, the first of its kind in the young republic, had displayed Chinese curiosities among its collection of objects from Africa and India. The legendary founder of the museum, Charles Willson Peale, had started out as a portrait painter, capturing the profiles of many American notables at the time of the Revolutionary War. Peale had developed a strong interest in natural history and had collected artifacts and specimens and displayed them in his own home in Philadelphia before moving them to what would become the nation’s first public museum in 1786. Among the items Peale had displayed, “what attracted the greatest curiosity was the collection of wrappings used to bind the feet of Chinese women and the tiny shoes and slippers that fit bound feet.” By the time the Siamese Twins arrived, Peale’s, now renamed the Philadelphia Museum, had assembled a sizable collection of Chinese artifacts that included wax models of “Chinese Laborers and Gentlemen,” standing side by side with models of Native Americans and other “exotic” people.3 But neither life-groups in dioramas nor life-size wax figures came close to sparking the electrifying sensation that two conjoined bodies in flesh and blood would generate.