The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

by Melanie Benjamin

  From The Century, January 1883

  WOMEN’S WAGES BY JANET E. RUUTZ-REES

  I have been looking for some clue to the unsatisfactory relation of women’s work to women’s pay. There are, in reality, two distinct classes of women who are in the field of remunerative employment: those who desire to add to an insufficient income, and those who depend upon themselves absolutely for bread. Both classes call for consideration, and yet the fact of their existence is precisely that in which the difficulty we are considering has its rise.

  [ EIGHTEEN ]

  A Terrible Conflagration

  OH, WHO IS THAT LITTLE GIRL?” MAMA CRIED, PAUSING IN her rocking. She leaned forward and peered at me, as if trying to remember my name. “Little girl? I spoke to you—who are you?”

  My heart squeezed up until my entire chest ached, even as I patted her arm and pushed the rocking chair, lulling her back into silence. How many times had I been mistaken for a child? But to hear my own mother do so hurt me beyond reason—even if it was only the result of a sick, muddled mind.

  Charles and I had moved into the old homestead with my brother James and his family, this December of 1882, after letting out our house. Papa had died in 1880, but Mama was still alive. Infirm, growing deaf, content to rock in a chair all day, her hands were now idle, as was her reason. Even as I was glad that she could no longer remember Minnie, and so could no longer mourn her, I grieved that she could not recognize me. I was a stranger to my mother, to my entire family, really—and in a way, hadn’t I always been? James and his wife were kindness itself, but I felt they were always defensive about the simplicity of their life, comparing it, too often, to what Charles and I had grown accustomed to.

  “I don’t suppose the Queen served sassafras tea when you all went calling there, did she?” my sister-in-law would say as she prepared for callers.

  “No, Mary, but I’ve always liked sassafras tea,” I would reply.

  “Well, it’s what we’re used to around here,” she would say, resentment flavoring the tea almost as much as the sassafras.

  Or—

  “I reckon they take wine with their meals in France,” James would remark at dinner, passing around platters of good boiled New England beef.

  “They do,” Charles would agree.

  “Well, we don’t go in for that around here, you know,” James would scold, mildly—as if we had asked for wine, demanded wine, threatened to lock ourselves in our rooms unless we were served wine.

  I don’t mean to be ungrateful; my brother and his family did us a great kindness in allowing us to stay with them. But it was uncomfortable, nevertheless. So I did what I always did; I plotted my escape. If my family didn’t know what to do with me, my audience did; they smiled, they clapped, and in the spotlight, up on a stage so that all I could see were faces, not legs, I felt big. As big as my dreams.

  But never as big as Minnie, who, after all, had been large enough to carry two beating hearts within her. Next to her memory; next to my sister-in-law, with her brood of children and happy domesticity; next to my mother, who, even in her confusion, often caressed the finger upon which her plain gold wedding band still resided—I felt insignificant; I felt small; I felt less.

  So we were going back out on tour again; this time with just the Bleekers. No more circus trains for us! Just a genteel entertainment, singing, dancing, stories of our travels; we were even introducing a new feature, a stereopticon, to project images of the places we had seen. Mr. Bleeker was quite excited about it; it had been my idea. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

  “Little girl! Do I know you? Are you Delia’s daughter?” Mama stopped rocking again; she was growing agitated, shrugging off her shawl, kicking at her skirt.

  “No, Mama,” I said, placing her shawl back upon her shoulders. “I’m Vinnie. Remember? Vinnie—your daughter.”

  “Vinnie?” She tilted her head like a parrot; she was very birdlike these days, the way her hands incessantly plucked at her clothing, and her eyes blinked constantly in any light stronger than a candle. “Vinnie? I used to know a Minnie, once. Whatever happened to her?”

  “Minnie died, Mama.”

  “Died? How?”

  “I killed her,” I replied. Then I ran upstairs to finish packing.

  THE FIRST STOP ON THIS LATEST TOUR WAS MILWAUKEE. WE arrived there on January 9, 1883, a gray, wintry day, although we barely saw it, getting in late, as usual, and driving straight to our hotel. Starting with our circus travels, it seemed to me that we spent less and less time in a particular city, so that I truly had no sense of place. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Davenport, Sioux City—they all looked the same to me. All had bustling, well-lit train stations, paved streets, new electric wires going up next to all the commercial buildings in the center of the city. Even the smallest towns had tall buildings now, for elevators were becoming commonplace.

  Of all the many marvels of the modern age, the elevator was the one that most changed our lives. Maybe others were talking about telephones and electric lights, but Charles and I never tired of gushing about elevators. A lifetime of taking stairs meant for normal-size legs had taken its toll on both of us; Charles was now forty-five, I, forty-one. Our hips ached, as did our backs. Oh, the convenience—the bliss!—of walking into that wonderful little iron cage, watching the lift boy, clad in a smart uniform with a cap, move the handle, and then miraculously rising up, up, up, past all those awful stairs and landings!

  Never before had Charles and I ever stayed above the first or second floors of a hotel, until elevators came into vogue. And so we were particularly excited to find that, upon checking into the Newhall House Hotel, we had rooms on the sixth floor—imagine! The very top floor, and we could get to it easily. Surely there would be a very fine view of the city from there!

  This somewhat made up for the fact that the Newhall House was not the nicest hotel in Milwaukee. We could no longer afford to stay in the newer gilded palaces of stone and marble; the Newhall House was twenty-five years old, one of the few wooden structures left in that city just north of Chicago, which had suffered the infamous fire twelve years before. But still, the hotel was clean and bright—new electric lights were in every room—and we were happy to see other theatrical folk there, as well.

  “Old troupers, all of us,” Mr. Bleeker said as he waved at one of the members of the Minnie Palmer Light Opera Company, seated across the lobby. “We’ll all die in the harness. It’s a sickness.”

  “Speak for yourself, Sylvester,” Mrs. Bleeker said fondly. We were all four seated in one of the parlors after dinner; it was particularly cozy on this night, as it was frigid outside, but inside, we had the warm familiarity of flocked wallpaper, worn carpet, chipped hotel dinnerware. That was the life we knew, the four of us, and we had shared it for so long. The few times we saw one another out of such surroundings—not on a train, or in a theater or a hotel—it seemed odd; we always acted stiff, uncomfortable, overly formal. This was where we belonged—in anonymous hotels, in cities we never saw save from a train window or from a stage door. It may sound depressing, but it was not; rather, the bland anonymity of our surroundings served only to sharpen our identities, making us dear and recognizable to one another—making us a family.

  The first stop on a long tour was always particularly full of warmth and laughter, like the first Sunday dinner after a long absence from home. And this night, we were all especially happy, for some reason. Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker sat close together on a plum-colored velvet settee; Mr. Bleeker’s lean face relaxed until it almost looked merry. He had his arm around his wife, who nestled her head against his shoulder without her usual reticence. Generally, Mrs. Bleeker conducted herself so modestly as to be ignored by those too busy to observe her gently mocking smile, her soft brown eyes that were quick to notice the most unusual details—the one man whose topcoat wasn’t buttoned properly, the one flower that poked its nose up through the grass ahead of the others. But tonight she appeared not to care who might see her playing
coquettishly with the buttons on her husband’s vest; if I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she had taken wine with dinner!

  Charles and I sat close together, as well—the other couple’s playfulness seducing Charles into trying something of the same with me. And tonight, for a change, I allowed it; I allowed my husband to hold my hand in his, tucking it under his arm with proud ownership. I even sighed, playing my part, and inched closer to him.

  To the casual observer, we were simply two old married couples, happy in one another’s presence, perhaps on holiday together. I enjoyed thinking that was how others might see us tonight, this restful, contented night.

  “What do you mean, Julia?” Mr. Bleeker looked fondly down upon his wife, who blinked up at him with eyes that crinkled at the edges, like a fine piece of lace.

  “I mean, I don’t want to spend all the rest of my life on the road. I love you all, but I want a little farm, up in Albany near my family. You may be an old trouper, Sylvester, but I’m not. I only married one.”

  “You’ve been talking about that farm for years,” Mr. Bleeker scolded, but his eyes kept smiling.

  “You’ve been promising me you’d give it to me for years,” his wife retorted.

  “You know we could never go on without the two of you,” I interposed, but not anxiously; I could not take this talk seriously. Mrs. Bleeker often mentioned that farm but always stood ready, her worn portmanteau in hand, the next time we met at Grand Central Station. “Why, who would ever change my costume so quickly as you? Who would lace me into my corset? And who would keep track of us all?” I turned to Mr. Bleeker. “Remember how calm you were back in sixty-nine, when you outsmarted those bandits in Nevada?”

  “Why, sure, don’t you remember?” Charles squeezed my hand excitedly. “How you told them we would be on the stage, and then you got us all out of there early?”

  “Oh, that was a time!” Mr. Bleeker laughed. “I do wish I’d seen those varmints’ faces when they held up the coach and we weren’t there!”

  “That was a lovely trip,” I said, remembering. “All the places we went!”

  “It was a tiring trip,” Mrs. Bleeker insisted. “I just wanted to get back home safe and sound!”

  “But the things we saw—the Pyramids! The temples in Japan!” I closed my eyes, as if I could conjure up those long-ago sights. They were fading from memory, little by little; I could no longer recall the entire settings—I didn’t remember how we got to the Pyramids, for example, but I did remember, vividly, how it felt to stand in their ancient shadow. Unreal, almost, as if we were standing in front of a flat backdrop painting of them, instead—until I noticed the clouds moving across the sky, throwing gently changing patterns of light across them, making the rough, uneven surfaces suddenly stand out, almost reaching toward us. Only then did I know they were real.

  “Remember, Vinnie, how I said to you that I knew exactly how you must feel, for the first time in my life?” Mr. Bleeker chuckled. “Because I felt about two feet tall next to those things?”

  I was about to reply, but to my surprise, Charles answered first. “I do,” he declared, decidedly. “I heard you say that to Vinnie, and I wanted to tell you, old fellow, that you couldn’t possibly know how we felt. Because none of those desert chaps, the ones working there digging in the sand at the bottom, were pointing to you and laughing.”

  I was stunned. I remembered that—I remembered thinking exactly that. I was nodding to Mr. Bleeker but watching those brown men pointing at our party, holding their hands down to the ground to approximate our size, and doubling over with laughter.

  What I didn’t remember was that Charles saw them, too—and that he felt the same way. I studied my husband now; he was older, his face so puffy, his beard still rather ridiculous. But there was something in his eyes that I’d never even bothered to look for before—and that I recognized, for I saw it in my own in those rare moments when I paused long enough to stare into a mirror. Hurt and determination, both: That’s what it was. Hurt at the cruelties the world sometimes threw at us; determination not to let anyone notice.

  Perhaps I had also recognized it in the eyes of those misshapen little women from the circus; perhaps I hadn’t wanted to, and so made myself forget I’d seen it. Until now.

  I shook my head, even as Charles looked at me with a new, understanding smile. I did not know what to say—so I squeezed his hand and smiled back. For a moment, we were miniature reflections of Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker, seated opposite.

  For a moment, it didn’t even feel as if we were pretending.

  We passed the rest of the evening like this, four friends reminiscing about old times. When the clock struck ten, we all rose and took the elevator up to the sixth floor. Mrs. Bleeker knelt down to give me her usual good-night kiss, and Mr. Bleeker shook Charles’s hand. Then we turned and went to our respective rooms—theirs farther down the hall than ours—shutting the doors behind us.

  Once Charles and I changed clothes and climbed my steps up to bed, he immediately rolled over to the far side, leaving me the space I always desired. But I did not roll over; I lay upon my back, conscious of his presence in my bed in a way I never had been before. His warm, steadily breathing presence; the way his nightcap got twisted about, even before he closed his eyes; his feet sticking out of his nightshirt, pink and sturdy as a child’s but with little tufts of hair upon his toes—like a man.

  I had never felt my husband’s bare feet against mine. We had never slept that closely; our bodies had never been so entwined. There was always so much distance between us, and I had put it there, from the very beginning. Charles, ever-pleasing, ever-pliable, had not once questioned why I had. Neither had I—until tonight.

  Holding my breath, I stretched my right hand toward my husband. Yet I could not reach him; the bed was too big, and I was too small; suddenly, delicately, femininely small. Afraid to disturb him, afraid not to, I inched even closer and reached out again.

  Sighing with a soft, unexpected snort, Charles rolled over in his sleep and moved tantalizingly closer toward me.

  That wasn’t what I expected; I snatched my hand back as if he were a hot coal, something dangerous, something that could hurt me. Rolling away onto my own side, my heart racing so that it was pounding in my ears, I held my breath, waiting to see what he would do next. But he did nothing; he simply continued to sleep, unaware of my turmoil on the other side of the deep, linen-covered—and dream-littered—chasm between us. I almost laughed at the absurdity, the feminine timidity, of my behavior—why, I was forty-one! I had been married for twenty years now. I was behaving like a blushing virgin—

  Which, of course, I was. I wouldn’t have known what to do even if I had touched my husband’s shoulder, turned him to me, welcomed him with a smile. Beyond that, I couldn’t imagine; my horror of everything that had happened to Minnie would not allow me to think further than an embrace, perhaps maybe a kiss.

  I plumped my pillow and told myself, sternly, to get to sleep; we had three performances on the morrow, and we had to get to the theater early to try out the stereopticon. Even though I tossed and turned and couldn’t get comfortable, my nightgown unusually hot and heavy against my tingling skin, I did finally go to sleep that night.

  And when I did, I later remembered, I was thinking of my husband. For only the first time in our marriage; also, as it turned out, the last.

  “VINNIE! VINNIE!”

  A hand was upon my shoulder—my husband’s hand. I snuggled down into my pillow and smiled; hadn’t I just fallen asleep, imagining this, his hand upon me?

  “Vinnie! Wake up!” He was shaking me, not tenderly but forcefully. “Wake up! I hear people in the hall! I smell smoke!”

  I opened my eyes; Charles was kneeling beside me, his nightcap all twisted about, his eyes, even in the darkness, wide with fear. I yawned—and swallowed a faint trace of smoke.

  Then I heard the footsteps in the hall, the confusion. Someone was banging on our door; someone was banging
on all the doors in our hallway.

  Someone was yelling, “Fire!”

  I sat straight up, my heart pounding. Charles continued to hover over me, wringing his hands. “Oh, what do we do, Vinnie? What do we do?”

  “Get dressed!” I barked, jumping out of bed—forgetting to use the steps, so that I fell with a thud to the floor. Scrambling up, I threw on a dressing gown; Charles did the same. Then I ran to the door and opened it with my usual difficulty, the doorknob large for my hand, and too high; I felt my shoulder strain as I wrenched it open.

  The hallway was filled with people, frightened people, their faces still creased from sleep while their eyes were blank with panic. Everyone was in dressing gowns or nightshirts, some with shoes on, most in bare feet. It was utter pandemonium as people ran to and fro like confused mice, simply following their instincts. And their instincts told them to get out—for there was smoke, hazy right now in this part of the hall, but someone shouted, “It’s coming up the elevator shaft! The smoke is coming up the elevator shaft! We can’t use it!”

  And over and over, on everyone’s lips, the one word—“Fire!”

  My instinct was to run to the Bleekers’ room: Did they know? Were they awake? But I took one step out of the doorway and was nearly knocked off my feet; there were so many people, now some of them were carrying portmanteaus, or dragging trunks that were much bigger than I was. One almost smashed me even as I stood in the doorway. Everywhere I looked were legs, legs running back and forth, dragging things, holding things—sharp things (umbrellas, walking sticks, even one man with a sword), heavy things. There was no possibility of pushing myself through that stampede without being trampled to death. I couldn’t even shout my presence; the din was far too great, as the air was filled with panicked cries and shouts of confused directions: “The elevator must be working!” “No, the flames are coming up the shaft!” “I think the stairs are this way!” “A man said we must be prepared to jump!”