“Come quickly to the portrait gallery, and bring two more men.”
“What is it? What happened?”
“Just hurry.”
The twins had not moved and Jacob was no longer laughing. I stood just close enough that I could grab them if I needed to, but we did not speak in the minutes it took for the watchmen to arrive. For a few seconds these three men, all dressed in dark blue uniforms, just stared, their faces in shifting configurations of shock. Fear probably followed, but before they let that show on their faces they ricocheted back to the safety of their assigned jobs. They dragged the twins away.
“Take them somewhere safe,” I called, knowing that no such place existed. A hospital? What butchery would follow? A crime had been committed, but one unknown to the laws of ordinary man. My breath constricted in my lungs. I walked to my booth and sat down on the stool. Jacob should have finished the job here while he could, and quickly. But instead he had relinquished the power to end it himself, the only thing left to him. Now he would meet his end somewhere in the crowded city, alone for the first time in his life.
I imagined the watchmen returning to their homes after this night. I watched them enter their small apartments, places as bewildering to me as the museum was to them. They stroke the cheeks of their sleeping children and listen to the even breathing of their wives. They look out their windows over their domain and thank God for their sweet, simple life.
Sixty-two
Of all the fifth-floor residents, only the albino children and Tai Shan had been asked to join the torchlight parade. I suppose the rest of us were not considered eligible for an Ethnological Congress. Our draw was exoticism, but of a more local flavor.
The parade would begin at nine o’clock. For the hour leading up to it, I sat in Maud’s parlor draping the children with scarves and bangles from Maud’s supply. Clarissa hovered over them, scolding and brushing their colorless silken hair until it stood up in its own electrical storm. Through the thin walls came the sounds of a hundred newcomers also preparing for the parade.
Tai Shan came in wearing a dazzling robe of bright red silk embroidered with serpentine dragons in green, purple, and black. From his days at the Imperial court, he said.
“I would die for a gown made from that,” breathed Maud, fingering the fabric.
“I’ll ask my uncle where to find it here. Are the children ready?”
“Thank you for looking after them,” Clarissa said. “I wouldn’t trust them with just anybody out there.”
“I won’t let them out of my sight,” Tai Shan said. The children twirled in front of us, two white dervishes. We applauded politely.
After they left, Maud, Clarissa, and I finished our tea, listening to the fading sounds of the Congress as people filed down the stairwell to the bottom of the museum and out to Ann Street to begin the parade a few blocks north of us. When it was time, we headed for the balcony. The only light still burning in the apartments of the Wonderful was coming from the tribesman’s room.
“Shouldn’t he be in the parade?” whispered Maud.
We heard him singing inside the room, the song punctuated by clapping.
“Apparently not,” said Clarissa. “That little fellow seems to do what he pleases. I know for a fact he hasn’t performed a single time since he came here.”
“Like the beluga,” I said as we emerged into the fifth-floor gallery.
“But the beluga is next,” Clarissa continued. “After the Congress, Barnum will open up this gallery.” We strolled to the beluga tank and climbed the steps to the viewing platform. “It’s about time this whale started earning its keep.”
The creature hovered motionless in the middle of its tank, its knobby back like a small white island.
“It surely must miss the sea,” Maud said.
The whale sighed through its blowhole and floated nearer, but it did not raise its head.
“Perhaps it prefers a finite world,” I said, though I didn’t believe it. I would miss the whale once it was surrounded by a crowd, once it was no longer just ours.
“Come on, the parade is about to start.”
Barnum’s employees crowded the balcony. I spied a group of ushers and automatically searched for Beebe’s face among the red caps and jackets. Stupidly, I also looked for Thomas at his usual place; of course he was not there. But the harpsichord was, having weathered several rain showers on the balcony since Thomas’ departure. Now two men sat on its smooth wooden back. I wondered that the instrument did not cave in. Maud and Clarissa shoved their way to the railing, but my line of sight was clear so I stayed at the back.
Broadway was a sea of tightly packed bodies, faces like fields of nodding sunflowers along both sidewalks. Boys had climbed the lampposts, as they will in times like these. Figures leaned from the windows of every building as far up and down the street as I could see.
Barnum must have paid the lamplighters to ignore Broadway tonight. Twilight’s mauve web spread the perfect atmosphere, a dimming, anticipatory pre-show lull. Light breezes came off the harbor, refreshing but not strong enough to snuff the candles people lit below, a hundred fireflies blinking into their short lives. I shut my eyes for a minute, sensing the crowd shifting around me. How often had I been among an audience? Usually on display myself, I tended to watch the museum patrons as a spectacle unto themselves.
The sound of drums reached us first, a faint pulse felt before sight is possible. With my eyes still closed, the percussion emerged beyond the clumsy sounds of the people on the street, the clattering noise of each isolated life. Without eyes, I perceived with a strange clarity. The drums, two of them, emitted a unifying rhythm, connecting those lives on the street with the life of the cosmos. Then the drummers lost synchronicity by half a second and the planet tilted, all imperfection, sin, cruelty, and death suddenly apparent. Uniting again, they regained symmetry and the invisible mathematic of the universe coalesced into the movement forward, always forward, of time. Then the crowd saw something and their reaction was a hiss slithering toward us, gaining volume and energy as it approached the balcony, and when it was upon me I opened my eyes.
Two behemoths rounded the corner and ambled heavily, trunks swaying, backlit by a dozen torches. Their great domed heads moved side to side, the mirrors and gilt of their headdresses glinting. Ears flapping like sails and pierced with thick gold loops, the elephants approached on painted legs, riderless, impenetrable creatures of daunting grace. As they passed I smelled a hot, grassy scent and heard their footfalls echo between the buildings. I watched their tasseled tails disappear with a sharp feeling caught in my chest.
Phineas T. Barnum appeared in a lacquered black carriage driven by a masked figure wearing a black cloak. He waved and shouted. “If you have ears to hear, then listen! Mandatum nuovo, a new commandment I give unto you!” They were grand words, but his voice was barely audible; he’d been dwarfed by his creation.
Next came the five Haitian women in jewels and bright swaths of cotton, walking straight-backed, tall as alders, their expressions obscured by the flickering shadows cast by the torches they carried. The Esquimaux family followed, wearing costumes of sealskin and feathers. Their patriarch lunged and turned circles while his women struck small leather drums, chanting and tossing their hair, their children running along beside them. Here came the pale twins, tripping along holding hands and waving at their admirers, ushered by Tai Shan, elegant as ever. Some groups were lit brightly, smiling and addressing the crowd, while others came and went in the shadows. The gipsies appeared, wearing layered skirts embroidered with bells. Behind them came a lone Indian dressed in bark and wearing a huge wooden mask, lunging and dancing. One by one, region by region, Barnum’s Grand Ethnological Congress ceremonially passed and the crowd was unable to contain itself, shouting, clapping, shrieking, gasping. And on the balcony, for once we were no different.
Four bearded torchbearers dressed in deerskin presented Grizzly Adams. He stood atop the bare back of a sorrel mare with
his arms folded across his chest. The mare walked slowly, pulling a high, planked cart that bore Adams’ now uncovered cage.
“Behold Orthrus!”
Unlike Barnum’s, Adams’ voice reached the balcony with force. “Behold the Geryon Dogs!”
“Orthrus!” echoed the torchbearers in a fierce chorus.
Inside the cage, bracing itself against the motion of the cart with four splayed legs, a great white wolf glared at the horde. The beast swung its head to reveal a second, twin face; another jaw with bared teeth came into view, another pair of black eyes reflected fire. Sprung from the same body, another skull filled with menace. The creature used both pairs of eyes to regard spectators on either side of the street, and both sets of twitching ears to listen.
What kind of entertainment was this? Released from the realm of nightmare, the creature’s claws scraped against the flimsiest barrier, threatening to burst through our notion of what is possible. I shivered, transfixed by its splendor. For a moment, the only sound I heard was a child crying somewhere below. But Barnum’s wonders overtook one another in quick succession, and by the time the cage disappeared into the shadows the next spectacle had already taken its place in the glittering lamplight and the crowd roared with pleasure.
Sixty-three
The Japanese Yamabushi was an ageless man with a long, thin beard growing from the point of his chin. His face had weathered many seasons outside, although his shoulders were narrow and his torso, made half visible by his loosely draped white robe, was soft and frail. He wore a coarse rope belt and from it hung a whorled conch, spiny and white with an obscenely flesh-like pink interior. He stood with his walking stick firmly planted in front of him, perched in a spot of bright sunshine atop one of the stone benches along the aviary path. Visitors moved past him, but he stood motionless, smiling up at the branches. Some people craned their necks to see what he was looking at, but they could not see what it was. I opened the registry and noted the Yamabushi’s location next to his name.
I had seen the museum crowded before, of course, but nothing like this. In the morning after the parade, people walked shoulder-to-shoulder through the tented aviary and a line had formed at its entrance. Visitors were pressed together at each gallery door; I had already witnessed two scuffles between men shoving their way in. Barnum had outdone himself. It was only ten o’clock and already the museum was at capacity and it was the hottest day yet of the year. People fanned themselves with hats and handkerchiefs and the air was already sticky and stagnant.
In every gallery a demonstration was in progress. I found the Esquimaux at one end of the portrait gallery with an audience of fifty, holding up first a delicate coat made of salmon skins stitched together, and then a thick suit of wrinkled walrus to wear while out to sea. On the other side of the gallery were the Roumanians, teaching the New York masses a complicated jig while their ancient grandfather kept time, playing a rough-hewn fiddle with violent passion. In one gallery three Laplanders exhibited their native costumes, in the next, a group of Africans carved small throwing spears. In the theater Professor Stokes introduced the Great Chiefs of the Plains Tribes. The Congress had even reached the Cosmorama salon, where a single Asiatic monk sat motionless on a cushion chanting strange syllables in the half-light.
Incredibly, all members of the Congress were accounted for. I reviewed each page twice, but every group was in its assigned place. I could not help but feel delighted that I had a part, maybe even an important part, in this success. I wandered the galleries as an overseer. It took me fifteen minutes to make my way from the Cosmorama salon to the second floor. I waited as patiently as I could while families shuttled themselves forward, children carrying their jackets in front of them, pushed along by flushed mothers with bonnets flapping against their backs by the ribbons. Friends called out to one another, and people jostled forward, some stopping for lemonade or sarsaparilla sold in conical paper cups. Among the visitors, I was startled to see Oswald La Rue, his back to me, watching the Haitian sisters clapping and shuffling, dancing on a rickety stage. I waded through the crowd to him.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” I whispered, tapping his shoulder.
“I should think not!” The irritated man who faced me was not Oswald at all, but another Living Skeleton. “This is my day off,” he snapped, shaking his head and stalking off on his spider legs.
The Haitian sisters were singing an odd, reedy tune in nasal voices as they danced, faces sweating and their bodies dipping low, revealing glimpses of smooth skin below the loose necklines of their light dresses. Around me, visitors rolled up their sleeves. One woman even lifted her skirt well above her ankle and fanned cooler air underneath with her hem.
I returned to my booth, enjoying the breeze coming from the open balcony doors. I heard the faint sounds of the picketers outside. Mayor Harper had officially sanctioned a boycott of the museum. I could hear shouts and heckles from below and imagined Miss Crawford fuming prettily with Beebe perhaps beside her. But the Congress swept on, gaining momentum. Its voices ricocheted off every wall and its different rhythms blended and rose, lifting upward. I didn’t see how the mayor could stop it.
Without warning, the chandelier above me swung in a wide arc. Its light swerved crazily around the gallery and bits of ceiling plaster fell to the floor. Dancers. Above us. Museum patrons ran from my gallery laughing and shrieking until only the South American Pigmy warrior remained on the stage opposite me. We watched the ceiling. I perceived the museum quaking, bursting at the seams, not just here but in every gallery and salon. It creaked like the Ark itself, slowly lifted by the rising flood. I imagined Barnum standing at the helm in those first seconds: Will it hold? Will it burst? Where are we headed? But this ark carries a stranger menagerie. You again, Mother. You come, laughing with sad eyes, standing on a stool to wipe away my tears. The fish do not know the ark, Ana. Remember? The fish swim where they will. Always.
Sixty-four
In the beluga’s gallery, tattooed men wrestled each other to the floor. Near them the Roumanian grandfather played his fiddle while a dozen anomalous pairs of dancers swung wildly. Maud wore a frilled red Spanish gown and danced with the Esquimaux patriarch. In his robe of silk dragons, Tai Shan twirled a reedlike Haitian sister. Groups of torches cast changing light across the dancers; shadow was full dark since the moon was just a sliver. I sat cross-legged in my nightgown near the Sioux camp. This carnival had woken me; I hadn’t bothered to dress, but a giantess in her sleeping clothes aroused no attention here.
I had encountered this before, in almost all the traveling shows where I’d worked and lived. A single night buoyed up by some charged current, an unexpected exuberance among the performers that carried us crackling and sparking through the night. On these occasions some would fight. Some would succumb to passions that normally lay dormant. Someone would sing more beautifully than she ever had, bringing someone else, who hadn’t cried for decades, to tears. Some would turn from the lamplight and walk away, never to return. A carnival loosened us from the calendar’s stricture. Tonight, among the Congress, was such a night. No costumes here and no stage tricks. It was neither show nor celebration, but a simple pouring forth, a departure from the ordinary bounds. A carnival, indeed. Carne vale. O flesh, farewell.
The wrestling match ended in a roar of laughter. The defeated man lay on the floor with his heaving, blue-inked chest to the ceiling. His adversary helped him up and handed him a bottle. Four children scampered out of the darkness, their faces greased in black-and-white geometric patterns, transformed into grinning skulls of the dead. They brandished sticks, coming straight at me. One of them screamed and leapt into my lap for protection. The others stampeded away.
I felt no urge to dance, sing, or even stand. I felt strangely light, and that was enough celebration. No longer a lone fortress towering above, I sat comfortably like one of the children, eagerly looking instead of being looked upon. The bright blood on the fighters’ knuckles. The shouts of the dancers. Th
e drops of sweat glistening on the back of the child in my lap. My vision became elemental. I was aware that this carnival articulated a joy unknown by most people. It is a necessary mechanism, this joy, for without it none of us could persist in our public and, more important, in our private lives. The shifting orange flames of a hundred lamps blurred the delineations of the Congress itself; all Representatives of the Wonderful had dissolved into one grinning, spinning population. And I was anonymous, hidden from view, small. I remained as still as possible, not even daring to reassure the wild-eyed child on my lap.
On the other side of the gallery someone fired a gun. It might have been Grizzly Adams, who I knew was over there, or it could have been someone else. A group of people, including one figure wearing a huge wooden mask painted to resemble a bird or a dragon, ran over to the wall and plugged the bullet hole with a cork, cackling and shouting. Music never ceased, but changed hands often. Oswald La Rue danced a jig to the bells and metallic notes of an African instrument.
Near me, two figures emerged from the Sioux camp, where I knew They Are Afraid of Her’s body still lay wrapped in blankets, now with several woven storage baskets set atop her. One figure was the Sioux grandfather, wearing his usual top hat and dark vest. The other’s face was in shadow but my heart jumped because I thought it was Barnum. When he turned, I still wasn’t sure because his face was painted like the face of the child in my lap, with black and white grease. He leaned down to speak into the Sioux grandfather’s ear. It was Barnum, or was it? He turned from the grandfather and disappeared into the crowd. The Sioux shook his head and stepped out onto the gallery floor. A younger man hurried after him holding an uncovered oil lamp and a wooden crate. He set the crate on the floor, and the grandfather stepped up to face the Congress.
Among the Wonderful Page 40