Fifty-six
Below us a new transparency snapped against the building. Unlike most of the illustrated sails Barnum hoisted from the side of his building, this one was ocean blue. On it floated a familiar white shape.
“Can you see the date?”
“It’s moving too much. They haven’t secured one of the corners yet.” Tai Shan leaned over the railing of the aerial garden.
“Ah! June fifteenth. I think. Or fifth.”
“The fifth! That would be the day after tomorrow!”
“Fifteenth. Yes, I can see it now.” Tai Shan righted himself, adjusting his sleeves and collar. “It’s about time they finished the beluga exhibit.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But imagine what will happen when the fifth floor’s open to the public.”
“They won’t be able to get into our half of the gallery.”
“But they will be right outside our doors! They will drown us with their noise and their obnoxious chatter!” I was half joking, but the prospect was truly alarming. “We hear them. We feel them. We see them as soon as we open our doors. There is something necessary about walking across the empty gallery before we descend to the crowds each day. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know that it matters to me,” Tai Shan said.
“You don’t notice the hundreds of people passing before your eyes each day, gawking at you incessantly.”
“I notice lots of things about them.”
“Well isn’t that convenient for you. I only notice how horrid they are; and then I notice my own reactions to them.”
“This is a museum, Miss Swift. And as far as I know, you are here of your own accord.”
“True.” Whining to Tai Shan was embarrassing. “Here’s a question I’ve been wondering about: Is a whale really a spectacle? Do you think it will draw?”
Tai Shan shrugged. “Why wouldn’t it? Hasn’t it been a draw for us all these months?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Some children moved along the promenade in a straggling mass, following a figure I recognized as the taxidermist. Beside him, attached by a lead, toddled a large monkey with long red hair. The children screamed and ran behind them.
Thomas sidled up to the table. He had returned to his usual haggard self.
“How quickly love fades,” I teased.
“I must speak with you,” he whispered.
“Go ahead, Thomas,” I told him. Tai Shan resumed eating his lunch, kindly showing no interest in Thomas’ intrusion.
“Not here. Would you come with me, Ana? I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s urgent and I don’t know what else to do.”
“All right. Forgive us, Tai Shan,” I rose and followed Thomas as he scurried across the rooftop garden. Tai Shan waved us away and pulled a book from one of the many hidden pockets of his tunic.
Thomas would say nothing until we had returned to the fifth floor. He passed the Sioux Indians without speaking, without even looking in their direction. The Absarokee, if they were in their shaded camp, were silent. He led me to his room.
Thomas had inherited the largest apartment of all, and the only objects inside it were a heavy wooden bed, one foot-locker that had a corner of flannel hanging out, a broad expanse of bare floor, and an array of strange musical instruments strewn around the room. I guessed that most of them were borrowed from the museum’s collection.
He led me to a small pile of things in the far corner: one striped wool blanket, a basket, and a folded dress.
“Something’s happened,” Thomas repeated, still whispering. “Something is definitely going on. I can’t figure out exactly what it is, but she’s involved. She would be so angry if she knew I was telling you.” Fearfully, he peered down at her folded clothes as if they were, or could become, animate.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what you’re trying to tell me,” I reasoned. “It’s better not to meddle in certain kinds of conflicts.”
“She’s in danger. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Or she’s dangerous.” Thomas lifted the sleeve of They Are Afraid of Her’s dress. “I don’t know what to do! I woke up in the middle of the night last night. I opened my eyes just in time to see her slip out the door. She was barefoot. I followed her.”
It sounded like the beginning of a fairy tale.
“When she reached the door to the stairwell, she turned back. She could have seen me, I don’t know. I ducked behind the beluga’s tank. I waited until I heard the door close behind her. I followed her down to the second floor.”
“What could she want on the second floor?” I wondered out loud. Besides Pa-Ib, the Egyptian mummy, and my own gilded cage, I could think of nothing that might interest her.
“She moved so quickly among the cabinets. I am convinced she didn’t know I was there. If she had wanted me to follow, she would have slowed down a little bit, just to be sure I could keep up with her.
“Eventually, she stopped in front of a large case. I’d never noticed it before, it’s just one among a hundred identical cabinets. She used the hem of her dress to wrap her hand. So quickly, Ana! She wrapped her hand and then sent her fist through the glass. It splintered like an iceberg and then crashed with a terrible sound. I sprinted back to the stairwell. I was certain the commotion would call the night guards in from the street below. I climbed the stairs and ran back to my room. I hopped in my bed, calming myself as best as I could. She returned a few minutes later. I watched her put some object among her things and change into a fresh nightgown. Blood had stained the first one, you see. From her hand.
“My breath had not yet returned to normal by the time she joined me in the bed. Maybe she knew I followed her. But maybe not. What do you think?”
Thomas stared somewhere in the vicinity of my neck.
“If she had wanted you to follow, why would she set up such an elaborately subtle ruse? You can speculate all you want, Thomas. But it will be an endless convolution, and a fruitless one.” I pointed at the pile of her things. “Well?”
“Yes.” Thomas knelt and put a hand inside the basket, keeping his face turned away as if something might bite him from inside. He pulled out an object and cupped it in both hands.
“It’s made out of an … organ.”
And it was. Inflated and dried, the membranous gourd had an unmistakable shape.
“It’s a heart.”
Inside the translucent pouch, something rattled. It was decorated with strips of buckskin and black glass beads.
“What is it?”
Thomas turned the thing over in his hands. “I don’t know.” His voice trembled.
“Look, Thomas, this clearly doesn’t have a thing to do with you. Whatever this thing is, and whatever the reason is for her to steal it, it’s beyond your control.”
“But I love her.” He was like a little boy and for a moment I felt weirdly maternal. I forced myself not to reach out and touch his cheek.
“I love her. So it does have something to do with me. That’s how I see it, Ana. For better or worse. God’s will must take me into account.” He scrutinized the heart in his hands.
Fifty-seven
The next afternoon, on my way to my booth, I found They Are Afraid of Her’s broken cabinet. One of the custodians had nailed boards over the hole and swept up the shards, but the artifacts still lay on exhibit. There were a pair of beaded buckskin slippers, some spears and arrows, an object that seemed to be a rattle, and a sheath decorated with geometric designs. Next to where the heart had been, a small label: PAGAN IDOL. Very informative.
Thomas did not appear on the balcony at all that afternoon, but his musicians stumbled along without him. The ophecleide player was very drunk and the fiddler, though sober, barely kept a tune. The music that resulted from their ineptitude served to elongate the hours, and I, trapped within earshot, did my best to become a statue.
When I returned home for supper, I saw that someone new had arrived and set up camp near the Absarokee. A stained canvas tarpaulin ob
scured the contents of a large cage. Beside it a lone figure lay wrapped in blankets. Some distance away Gideon, the ticket-man’s nephew, sat on a wooden stool. Oswald La Rue, the Living Skeleton, was talking with the boy; when he saw me coming, he loped across the beluga gallery in his silent, wraith’s gait.
“He’s asleep. Can’t even get a good look at his face. Snoring like a forest of falling timber.”
“Who is it?”
“That’s what I was trying to find out.”
“What’s the boy doing there?”
“Apparently Barnum sent him to stand watch. Told him to fetch him when the stranger wakes up. I don’t like standing over that side of the gallery,” Oswald continued. “Those Indians could freeze hell over with their evil eye.”
“Have you seen Thomas?”
“Been in his room all day. One of those Sioux finally got shot by an arrow, did you hear? Savages.” Oswald shook his head.
We stopped at the Sioux camp.
“Who got hurt?” I asked, searching their faces for They Are Afraid of Her. She was not there.
“Joseph,” the old man said. It was one of the younger men. We knew “Joseph” was not his real name. Several of them used that name when speaking to white people, just as they called their women “Mary.”
“Joseph” sat on the floor, his back against the wall and his upper arm bandaged and bleeding. We asked if they needed any medical supplies or help of any kind. They didn’t. Oswald went whistling off toward Clarissa’s room and I knocked on Thomas’ door. When he finally answered, he looked worse than Joseph: pale, unable to look me in the eye. He did not invite me in.
“She won’t speak to me,” he whispered. “They’ve shot her cousin. They think he stole the … that thing.”
Behind him They Are Afraid of Her sat on the floor facing the window.
“What are you going to do? Have you considered telling Barnum, or the police?”
“No. What would they do?”
“Well, that thing is Barnum’s property, and it was stolen.”
“Then she’d be punished.”
“But it might scare off the Absarokee.”
“No, no.” Thomas dismissed my suggestion with a cringe.
“Thomas, you can’t just hide up here. The band —”
“I won’t leave her like this. She needs me here.”
“Does she? She doesn’t exactly look like she’s crying on your shoulder.”
“She needs me, Ana.” Thomas lowered his voice. “I’m going to speak to them.”
“Who?”
“The Absarokee.”
“But they just shot someone.”
“It’s the only thing I can do. Her people won’t listen to me.”
“Do the Absarokee speak English?”
“I’ll find out.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea —”
“Good night.”
He closed the door softly.
Tai Shan was not in his room, and neither was Maud. I wanted their opinion on what to do about Thomas, but in the end I returned to my room alone.
In order to manage the members of Barnum’s upcoming Congress, I must keep a registry. I had obtained a ledger, wherein each performer (or should I call them participants?) would give his name and a description of himself, including rate of pay. I could start with the newcomer, the one who slept by the side of that cage.
Later, as I lay in bed, the murmuring of the protesters outside the museum lulled me comfortably as if their cries were waves lapping the sides of some great ark. They stayed late each evening, sometimes sounding more like a celebration, singing hymns and shouting prayers, than the band of righteous hypocrites that they were. Didn’t they have some better cause to promote? Didn’t they know it was exactly Barnum’s strategy to keep the museum in the papers?
I woke later than usual. I was afraid I’d missed breakfast so I hurried across the gallery. I was into the stairwell before I realized that something was different: The Absarokee camp had disappeared. I walked back. Their corner was empty. Only the newcomer remained, wrapped in blankets beside his draped cage, with Gideon curled up on the floor next to his stool, also asleep. The Sioux sat in a circle eating food and talking. I turned back toward the apartments.
This time Thomas didn’t answer my knock so I opened the door myself. They were both on the bed. The blankets had been thrown off and the sheets were in such disarray it looked as if they’d been fighting. Thomas squatted on the mattress wearing a ridiculous nightshirt with puffed sleeves. He hovered over They Are Afraid of Her, who was obscured from my view until Thomas shifted his position to regard me. He clutched one of her arms.
“How did they do it? How did they do it?” His was the compulsive voice of a parrot. “I told them nothing!”
I came to the bedside. The woman was dead. Thomas scrutinized her arm again. He pushed up the sleeve of her nightgown and examined three rows of parallel scars near her shoulder. He looked dumbly at the skin. He rolled her body slightly to one side to look at her leg. She had the same scars above her knee. Three rows, like dashes across the plain of her flesh.
“Thomas! Stop that.”
“How did they do it? There is no wound, Ana.”
“Thomas. Stop. Come here.” I reached for his arm but he slapped me away. They Are Afraid of Her’s eyes were still open, her ashen lips ajar.
“I talked to them last night because I thought it would help but they would not speak to me. They just stared, Ana. It didn’t help …”
I did not try very hard to pry him away from the body, but I cradled his shoulders with one arm. He leaned into me, still clenching They Are Afraid of Her’s arm. “We can’t know what is between those two tribes, Thomas.”
“They came in here. I locked the door and held her, but that didn’t matter. I fell asleep and they got in. How? Why did they kill her? How did they do it without hurting her?” His voice had reached a level of hysteria. Someone walked by outside and Thomas leapt up, standing on the bed, almost to my height.
“They’re gone, Thomas.”
“She’s gone.”
Across the room, the pile where she’d hidden the heart looked exactly as it had when Thomas showed it to me.
“It’s gone,” he whispered.
“That’s what they came for.”
“Yes.”
I straightened the sheet around They Are Afraid of Her and closed her eyes, grimacing at the cold putty of her skin.
Tears now streamed down Thomas’ face.
“Will you come now? It’s time to tell her people,” I coaxed.
“Those aren’t her people,” Thomas hissed, wiping his face with a corner of bedspread. “I have nothing to say to them.”
I lifted him from the bed and placed him gently on the floor in a gesture that felt natural in the moment but would have been bizarre in another circumstance.
“Then you stay here and pick out a dress for her to wear.” I pointed him toward her pile of things. “When you are finished, come downstairs and find me. All right?”
Thomas wept and nodded. I left the room.
“She’s dead.” I spoke directly to the grandfather, who was eating his breakfast from a wooden bowl.
“We are aware,” he replied. One of the men beside him burped.
“You are aware? Did the Absarokee give you a report on the murder before they left? Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Why? You yourself said she is dead. There is nothing to do.”
“Where did they go?” I jerked my head toward the empty gallery behind me.
The grandfather shrugged and lifted the bowl to his lips.
“Why did they kill her?”
The old man drank his gruel then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He regarded me. “I don’t think you have time for that story. I don’t think you can understand it.”
“You are a terrible old man,” I managed to say. “I know they killed her because of that … thing. That heart.”
I had been standing in my booth only a few minutes when Thomas started playing on the balcony. At first, the sound resembled music, but the chords stumbled. Not out of clumsiness, I was certain of that. Thomas was too good for that, even in his current state. A recognizable melody hovered at the edges, but it was as if randomness, instead of measurement, structured the sound. A lilting phrase was knocked away by a pounding cacophony from the lower register. Bars of a familiar waltz tipped into an unrecognizable storm of half notes. It was precarious music, unsettling and hypnotic. I left my booth and stood in the balcony doorway.
These sounds sputtered out of him and he played in his shirtsleeves. The two other musicians stood in the opposite corner of the balcony, banished and looking as if a wind had swept them there. I leaned against the door frame to listen. Thomas watched the sky, as if he were totally removed from the movement of his arms.
The protestors circled below us with their useless signs, keeping up their vigil against the museum like a wake of vultures beside a mountain of carrion. Beebe and Miss Crawford were not among them today, but I had seen them often, flushed and triumphant, walking around and around, caught in the eddy of their own righteousness.
“You won’t get rid of us with that racket,” one of the sign-carriers shouted from the street. “We are not so easily dissuaded of our convictions!”
Thomas’ song soared. Two disparate melodies converged. I walked to the railing and leaned over the edge. Several people below stopped walking and turned their faces upward.
“You should be ashamed,” I called down. “Why don’t you go home?”
“Barnum’s Congress is an abomination! It must be stopped!”
Thomas finished the song and pushed himself away from the piano with a look of disgust. Whether the expression was directed at the protestors, his instrument, or the failure of love to prevent the death of They Are Afraid of Her was a mystery. He stood at the railing for a moment, clutching it with both hands as if we rode the swell of an oceanic storm. He brushed past me, walking swiftly into the gallery, hands stuffed deep in his pockets. I called to him, but he didn’t heed my voice. He disappeared, and I had no doubt that this image of his slumped and receding form would be my last glimpse of him.
Among the Wonderful Page 37