“I know it sounds ridiculous. But, truly, the young ladies were as perplexed as any in the room.”
Barnum wags his head. “Caution, old friend. Heaven is the show of all shows. I ain’t doubting that. And I ain’t doubting we’re all happy as the larks when we’re with the Good Lord. But for now we’re in the waking world. Stick with corruption. Stick with unmasking human wretchedness in all its shapes and guises. That’s where you hold sway.”
“You think them charlatans?” There is no challenge in Horace’s tone. Only curiosity. He adds, “You of all people would know, Phineas.”
“Oh, the good grief,” Maggie mutters as her view of Horace and Barnum is blocked by a party of what must be factory-men, given their ill-fitting jackets and caps, given that one man wears an eye-patch, another is missing three fingers and a third has an ear burned away.
“What is it, Maggie? Katie?” Mother calls. “Is it the Rubber Man? He is just wondrously dreadful, isn’t he?”
The girls ignore their mother and circle round the factory-men to pick up the conversation.
“… so, in truth, Horace, I rather think they’re geniuses. I’d pilfer their show, that I would, but for the matter of a conscience.
Maggie shams interest in the antics of the Rubber Man as Horace and Barnum approach. Katie does likewise. The hall of human curiosities near empties of spectators, as if Barnum has given some silent command. He approaches and makes the slightest of bows. “Ladies, I am intrigued. And Horace here makes a swell case for you.”
Leah smiles, her dimples on full display. “We shall need your lecture hall, of course. This sort of general display is not seemly for our dear girls.”
“Gracious evers. Not at all!” Mother puts in.
“The cost of entrance can be divided and …” Leah pauses as Maggie taps frantically at her throat, a signal for quiet.
“I don’t recall talking up an agreement,” Barnum says.
Leah frowns. “But Horace has assured us that you were a man of perception and—”
Barnum holds up a hand. “My friend vouches for you, no falsity there. But to work upon grief? To presume Heaven? I do no harm with my humbuggery. But you, ladies, well, you risk giving charlatans a bad reputation.”
“If you are attempting humour, you are failing, sir. Utterly,” Leah says. “The most reputable people in New York are eager for our acquaintance. We are highly spoken of and in the … highest circles and … grandest places.” Leah is as imperious as ever, but Barnum has unsettled her. Maggie can tell by that hitch in her voice, that throb in her temple.
Barnum chuckles. “No doubt. But I needn’t pilfer my Madame Forer’s crystal ball to scry your coming infamy, nor to know that a contract will never share the names of Barnum and Fox.”
“You are too forward, sir. Entirely,” Leah says, and in her coldest voice.
“Hah! Better than backward, ma’am. Now, do excuse me, ladies … Horace. I’ve business to attend to. Oh, and ladies, I hear you’ve booked into my cousin’s hotel. Do bid him capital day for me if you espy him about. He’s doing a bang-up business, but then ain’t every self-promoter and showman keen-set on taking rooms at a Barnum’s Hotel.”
Horace gives Leah a helpless shrug. Leah, chin raised, takes a step towards Barnum. Maggie grips her elbow. “We thank you so much for your time, Mr. Barnum,” she says hastily.
“Yes, we really, really do,” Katie adds.
Mother echoes this. Leah inhales, gathers herself, says, “Yes, our thanks. And I agree: it is best we work in separate spheres.”
And best we not make an enemy of Phineas T. Barnum, Maggie thinks. Why in tunket can she see this, but not Leah? A surprising idea comes to her: Perhaps Leah is not as all-knowing as she seems. Perhaps she needs Maggie to keep her steady, just as Maggie needs Leah for all manner of things. Perhaps Leah needs Katie and Mother too. Somehow, this comforts Maggie.
“I’m near starved to death,” Katie says. “Can we lunch at Delmonico’s again? Can we, Leah?”
“Certainly. Delmonico’s is a finer establishment than this by far. Horace, will you join us?”
Horace will. “Follow me, dear ladies,” he says solicitously, and leads the way out of Barnum’s museum. They are soon lost. The crowds have become too thick. The corridors and rooms and distractions too many. A dead end here. Confusing signage there.
They stop short. Maggie looks about in astonishment. They are in the hall of curiosities. Again. The piebald boy hollers, “You’re back!”
Zip the Pinhead nods his tiny head. The giantess has, improbably, vanished.
“Stay a while,” suggests Mr. Nellis the Armless.
“Stay forever,” adds Mr. Diwali the Snake Charmer.
“It’s like a dreadful maze,” Maggie says to her mother and sisters, to Horace. “That’s what’s wrong with this place. That’s what so blamed distressing about it all.”
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN SIGNS, Mrs. Mellon?”
“As in, from Providence?”
“Well, yes.”
I considered this, then said, “I suppose that like anyone I believe in signs. And portents, yes, and auguries and omens, but only when they suit my purposes.”
My patient gestured to the garret’s three linked windows. “They are why I chose this garret, Mrs. Mellon, I took them as a sign.” She did not say more about this. One did not need to be an oracle sort, however, to see how they might have represented to her the Fox sisters three, the two outer windows being small and squared and discreet, at least compared to the centre window, which was fat and arched and seemed in command of the garret’s variant light.
“Did you want some air?” I asked. “The centre window is fixed as the firmament, but those outer ones should crack open with some encouragement.”
She chuckled at this and then talked again of Chauncey Burr.
“IT’S CLOSER THAN a bloodyo tomb in here,” Chauncey declares to his brother Heman, and hauls up the boarding-house windows in defiance of the landlady’s orders to keep them shut fast. He thrusts his head out and “takes the air,” as they say, this air that is shot with August heat, with manure dust and coal smoke, with gnats and bluebottles, and with that high din of banging, rattling and shouting that is so particular to New York and that reminds Chauncey of a desperate, enraged leviathan shaking loose its shackles.
He pulls his head back into the room. “I say again, Heman: Gotham is a cesspool of the ignorant and the arrogant. Mark you the cousined soundings of the words.”
Heman chews a plumbago stick. Does not look up from the heaps of papers and periodicals, likely because Chauncey is using his stage voice, the one that discourages a two-way conversation.
“A ‘spirit sitting’ packed with a baker’s dozen of blue blood hotty snot literati? Oh, oh, it must be ghosties since we fucko geniuses of the age can’t figure the why of it. Did that Cooper’s romantic blather about doomed Indians gives him a tinker’s worth of credibility? And what ho the grand historian, Bancroft? Surely he knows that any pea-brain can get intelligence about the high-up dead. Isn’t their every mutter and fart inked on broadsheets and chiselled on their damnedo crypts? Phineas T. was bang-bang and righto! There’s a sucker born every minute, and not one of them ever dies.”
“That wasn’t Barnum that said so,” Heman ventures. “He’d never insult his paying public. Nope. Besides, he couldn’t figure how the Fox women were doing it neither. I heard it pissed him off to China. That’s why he wouldn’t contract them for the museum. He couldn’t figure it. Nope.”
Chauncey studies his brother. He’s got the eyes of a porker, he thinks. And look how he wallows in his clothes. Look at his pig-piggy nose. The bristles sprouting. God’s holy slippers, but why won’t he cut them? Surely he’s seen his visage in a looking glass. Not for the first time, Chauncey thanks Christ and all his cronies that he doesn’t resemble Heman in the least. He sighs. He misses Theophilus Fiske. Fiske understood the moods of Chauncey Burr, the firecracker nature of this thoughts. A
nd he could take a ribbing, unlike Heman, who scowls at the least jest at his intelligence. Ah, but Fiske Fisko is dead as a dodo, of cholera that killed him so quickly it was as if the disease couldn’t be bothered to make his carcass suffer. And as Chauncey’s older brother, Edwin—the sharp, sporting one—died over a decade ago, there is only his younger brother, Heman—the slovenly, bacon-brained one—to assist Chauncey with his mesmeric electro-biology demonstrations. But people are not attending such demonstrations as they once did. The enthusiasm for science lost ground along with the shutdown of the theatres and lecture halls during the last cholera epidemic. No enthusiasm was lost for the ghost-talking, mind. The papers groused on about it, even before the Fox sisters arrived in New York in the summer. Reported every exhibition and “lecture” in Auburn and Troy and the lesser towns. Worse, this idiotic superstition is being further wrapped up in scientific cant—Chauncey’s cant.
“What ho, Hemano! Spirit telegraphs? Spirit vibrations? Invisible forces? The four laws of spirit attraction? Next they’ll be reeling up that fish-eyed Newton from the damnedo River Styx to explain old wives’ tales in fugging equations and—”
“Great God!” Heman cuts in. “They’ve made a conquest of Horace Greeley himself. And convinced him. Yup.” He shakes his head and circles a column in the Tribune.
Chauncey snatches the paper from Heman. Reads aloud, his voice rising with incredulity:
“Their conduct and bearing were as unlike that of deceivers as possible, and we think no one acquainted with them could believe them at all capable of engaging in so daring, impious, and shameful a juggle as this would be if they caused the sounds. And it was not possible that such a juggle should have been so long perpetrated in public, yet escape detection. A juggler performs one feat quickly and hurries on to another. He does not devote week after week to the same thing in view of hundreds. A deceiver naturally avoids conversation on the subject of his knavery, but these ladies converse freely and fully with regard to the origin of the rappings in their dwelling years ago, the sensations they caused, the neighborhood excitement created and what they have seen, heard, and experienced from first to last …”
Chauncey hurls the paper to the floor.
Heman gives a telling smile. “They’re hiding in plain sight. That’s what. Plain sight. And in the open. Yup.”
Chauncey stuffs his pirate-head pipe. Half listens as Heman suggests rethinking their lecture. At Chauncey’s insistence, the Fox Sisters’ Fallacy (as he has dubbed that segment of his demonstration devoted to this growing preoccupation) has gone from being a comedic aside to a lengthy warning about the raising of the dead in general and the Fox sisters’ spirit sittings in particular. A warning of how the “ghosts” are created by legerdemain and by mesmeric forces—the person’s own mind, that is, hearing and sensing what it chooses. Chauncey can prove that part. His whole lecture is proof. The science of electro-biology is proof. But, yes, as Heman is harping: “If we had a true expose, folks would come in spades, sure, Chaunce. In spades and aces. But it can’t be an expose if we don’t know the trick. Nope. Then it’s just a rant. A canard. And we’ll be accused of envy and the like—like, jealousy.”
“Envy? Hah!” Chauncey laughs, but has to admit his brother is righto for the once. Yes, and Chauncey is touched by envy. A new religion is not as easy to fashion up as one would think. Takes a confidence that gives even Chauncey pause. And she has played it so damnedo well, that Leah Fox Fish, that conductress of it all. No set doctrine. No new text daring to supplant the holy book. No single person claiming Godly powers. Because all can channel the dead, apparently, with a cup or two of practice, a dash of faith, a fat lot of dim light. Spread the damnation around. That’s the trick. Never give the mob a set thing in which to sink its fangs.
He surveys his brother, his saggy linen shirt that would better suit a labourer, a sailor. “Give me that damnedo rag off your back, Hemano. I’ve a plan.”
Heman pretends absorption in the Tribune and the predominant sketch of a ship being smashed by monstrous waves, the shore in sight, the passengers waving all-forlon from the listing deck. “They never did find the body of that learned lady … that Miss Fuller, that’s it, nope, nor her husband, just the babe’s corpse washed up. Sure was some spectacular wreck. There’s got to be some lesson in it all, or something like it, like a warning or a sign.”
Chauncey snap-snaps his fingers in front of Heman’s nose. Heman swats them away. “Give it up, is what I mean, Chaunce. Better men than us have tried to find those females out. Yup, they have.”
“Better fucko men than you. Not ‘us.’ ” Chauncey now snaps his fingers against Heman’s periodical. The sound is a cracker shot.
“Stop it. Just … stop! Goddamn it and God help you, or I’ll—” Heman’s shout dies away as Chauncey cracks his knuckles. Such a tremendous loud sound for such a small action. Heman eyes Chauncey’s balled fists. Slinks back.
Chauncey hauls his brother up by his lapels. He towers over the younger Heman. Has since they were both boys. A great benefit in their situation. “God helps those who helps themselves, brother mineo. So says the scriptures, and so says I.”
Heman, released from his brother’s grip, rubs his neck, says warily, “Wasn’t that Benjamin Franklin? I heard that, anywise.”
“Not God? Well, Benji was a damnedo American, wasn’t he? And that’s the next best thing.”
CHAPTER 15.
“Again you hit the mark,” I cried, as if my patient were five years of age and not (as she had confessed) a year shy of sixty. We were spitting cherry pits into a tin bowl—a good exercise for weakened lungs. My patient spat out another blood-red stone. I thought of my son just then. I should have insisted, I realized. Insisted he practise his marksmanship. But he had no desire to shoot birds out of the blue air, raccoons out of green branches. “What a ninny-man he’ll be,” Mr. Mellon sneered. “What a lily-liver.” But my son wasn’t lily-livered. He was kind.
“Mrs. Mellon? It’s your go.”
“We’ve played enough, duck. No more,” I said hastily. I brought out her medicine then, as well as some blancmange and white-cake. I should add that she was feeling particularly fine this day. Had even stood up just before we began our cherry-spitting game and, with my help, walked one turn about the garret.
Now, back in the safe confines of her little bed, she said, “Come, let’s pretend we’re at a charming hotel. New York is at our feet.” She chuckled. “Yes, our very feet, and the moment is full of happy talk and harmony, the future full of triumphs.”
I did not generally advise false optimism, but there seemed no harm in it that day. And the sun, as if in agreement with our fantasy, buttered those three linked windows and nearly encompassed us in its fleeting warmth.
LEAH TAPS STACCATO BEATS on the table. “Now did any of you attend That Man? The one with a spade beard? He came to the afternoon sitting. He asked not a single question. He merely smirked. I have seen him before. I am certain, but who is he?”
The girls shrug and laugh. Maggie reaches for the champagne. “I’ve not a glimmer, I was too busy dancing attendance with Madame Hippopotamus. Dash-it, but my toes still ache … from her tromping.” This elicits much laughter, then Katie says, “But all Madame Hippo wanted to know was if spirits get to eat anything.”
“And do they?” Mother asks, her question suggesting honest bafflement, as usual.
“Surely! Chocolate eclairs and sherry trifle,” Maggie says.
“With water-ice and quince preserves,” Katie adds, and both girls chortle.
Leah gently admonishes, “The spirits were being naughty. A good spirit would have declared the love of Our Lord sweeter than any food.”
Church bells strike the tenth hour of this August evening. The last of the sitters have only recently left the sisters’ suite at Barnum’s Hotel. Really, Leah thinks, there should be a sign explaining this is not P.T.’s establishment but his more worthy cousin’s. Indeed, Leah is glad she decided against wo
rking with the churlish P.T. himself. She is busy enough without his cheap-john promotions.
Leah turns at a swishing sound. Her mother has begun sweeping the peanut husks from the carpets. At the sideboard Calvin is arranging the offerings from all the gift baskets. Oranges and grapes. Brandy and champagne. Tins of biscuits and chocolate. In the anteroom, Alfie is taking account of the ledgers. And how much account does he take of our conversations? Leah wonders, and looks at him sidelong.
“Capital, don’t you judge, Leah?” Calvin asks, and indicates the pyramid he has made of the oranges.
“Very clever. And pretty. But, my spirits, how precarious,” Leah says, and thinks again of That Man. He wore a linen shirt with the collar open in sailor fashion, wore his trousers tucked into his knee-high hessian boots, and no waistcoat under his Albert coat; and yet his black spade beard was immaculately cut, and his movements had a surety, even a grace for one so tall and heavy-built. Several times he pretended to fumble and drop items—a pirate-head pipe, a key, a copper token—items that he then bent to pick up, looking all about the floor as he did so. He apologized gallantly each time, and the tessatura of his voice was a rich baritone verging on the bass, the like of which Leah had never heard. She kept discreet watch on him as he rose to leave. A good idea, for just before That Man exited he gave a triumphant smile, as if confirming a suspicion.
“You look fit to gasp your last, Leah,” Katie says.
Leah presses her temple. “My head-pain. It is starting up again.”
“Here, let me get you some tonic.” Katie jumps up, jostling a candelabra. The flames hiss as wax sloshes onto the table. The candles themselves have been lit so long they have melted into a menagerie of grotesque little shapes.
“What? Ah, yes, but only a half-glass for now,” Leah says as Katie proffers a bottle of Bertucci’s Finest Cinnamon Laudanum, a gift from an admirer. “There, that is sufficient, Katherina. Now, who was the lady who asked about a dog?”
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