Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  “Close the curtains,” Hunter hissed as we loped by. “People will literally see you.” I pulled the thick maroon drape across the carriage window.

  “Everything will come in good time, what?” Hunter said, smiling and sucking on his teeth. He was a little deaf. His nose turned upward at its midpoint and aimed high. Like Coffin, Hunter wore a monocle, but unlike Coffin’s, his lens enlarged the view of his left eye to the point where it looked as if he had tacked a giant eyeball on his face. “But now we must get you ready before anyone notices your existence.” He had a high whining voice meant for a frame smaller than his. He kept looking at his pocket watch and sighing.

  We spent our first nights in New York in seclusion.

  Hunter brought us to a place known as uptown, a landscape of isolated farms just ahead of progress, to one of his buildings, on Dutch Hill, at the eastern edge of Forty-second Street. It was a ruined two-story house with a garden—or rather, a dusty plot aspiring to cultivation—encircled by a ditch.

  He escorted us into the anteroom, where we met Mrs. A. C. Sachs, a widow whose sagging, half-shut eyes no doubt exaggerated her age. She had no eyebrows.

  “I’ll be.” The woman gave a little laugh. “These Chinamen sure are a sight.”

  She and Hunter gazed together at us. We stood there, with Chang holding In.

  “Exactly the point, my good widow Sachs; they literally are one of Mother Nature’s blemishes”—Hunter attempted a gentle tone—“and people cannot turn their eyes from Mother Nature’s blemishes.” He handed the woman a purseful of change.

  My brother and I hadn’t seen an American home before. We gazed about the room, examining everything in detail—the doilies on the shining tabletops, the plump couch, the lamps.

  “Two at once.” Mrs. Sachs shook her head. “Look at it.”

  “Eh?” Hunter asked, cupping a hand around his ear.

  “Two at once, I say.”

  “Yes.” Hunter looked at his pocket watch. “Just about time for me to—”

  “And just what are they doing with that creature?” she interrupted, pointing to our pet. My brother was holding In out of its basket, wrapping his arms around the duck so its head relaxed against my chest.

  “Our duck named In,” said Chang, and he petted the animal’s neck.

  The widow Sachs turned to Hunter and tilted her head slightly. The skin where her eyebrows should have been was raised expectantly.

  “I’ll take your pet for now, Double-Boy,” said Hunter. He took a step toward us and flung his arms around In, trying to get a hold of the duck, which reared, looked around, and started to quack. Its wings flapped into my face. Hunter couldn’t get a good grip on the animal. “I’ll have this duck returned in literally no time, Double-Boy.” The man grunted and grabbed, his face flushing dark, his monocle becoming dislodged from its perch in his eye socket. “Just give it here, what?” He smiled through his agitation; he couldn’t get hold of In, and was losing the struggle. “Just give it, please, boys.”

  My brother and I handed over In.

  Finally, duck in hand, Hunter took a moment to compose himself, and to return the monocle to its spot in front of his eye.

  “Ensure that no one hears of the Double-Boy, not even your daughters,” he instructed Mrs. Sachs, as In flapped her wings beneath his chin. Holding our quacking companion, Hunter departed, telling the widow never to allow Chang and me outside. “Never. And speak of this literally to no one.”

  Mrs. Sachs walked us to our room, a warmly lit space on the first floor, cramped with dingy white piles of dirty sheets, linens, bodices, and undergarments. (Later, when first I saw a snowfall in New York, I thought at once of the mouse-colored drifts of dirty laundry in our room at Mrs. Sachs’s.)

  “All right, now,” she said on her way out the door. “Chinamen, that upstairs bedroom is mine.” She shook her finger at us. “I don’t know what kind of Oriental fiddledeedee you’re expecting, but you stay down here.” She drew a long breath. “You sure are a sight,” she said, and left.

  We slept on the floor.

  New York loomed in the distance outside my window, uneven, the buildings in various states of construction. The dim light and the shadow of a cloud chiseled new ridges and hollows into the cityscape, continuously amending their handiwork, to reveal a cleft or conceal a ridge there, revealing and concealing, while five or six disconsolate little fires scattered across Manhattan’s half-lit jagged horizon flickered beneath stars that twinkled with the same lonely intimacy found in the Siamese early morning. (New York before daybreak was constantly alight with at least a handful of small, lonesome fires.)

  “Eng?” asked Chang. He was shaking his head at the preposterous city beyond our window. I pretended to be asleep.

  “I know you are awake,” he said finally, in our native Thai. When I did not quit my snoring imitation, Chang said, “It could be worse, brother.” If my twin was right, I did not see how.

  “We will leave, run away, maybe tomorrow,” he said.

  I opened my eyes. “Let us plan now.”

  Then the door creaked ajar, and with a jerk, we turned and saw two pairs of bright eyes peering into our room from the dark—just two sets of eyes, floating brightly in the shadows, seemingly detached from bodies of any kind; these eyes hovered there a moment, incorporeal, accompanied by gasps. Then the door closed, and through the wall we heard women’s giggling, and the sound of dainty feminine feet running up the stairs.

  Hunter was at our door the next morning. He brought two white sailor’s suits and a pair of sailor’s caps. “For your performances,” he said.

  He rocked his tall, lean frame back and forth and blinked his eyes sweetly. “You can’t just literally stand before the crowds, what? You do have an act of some kind planned, correct? A show?”

  Chang turned to me. We shrugged our four shoulders.

  “I won’t deny that I am a little out of temper,” Hunter said, pulling out his pocket watch and shaking his head. “I do not have the time for—”

  “We play checkers,” my brother said, struggling into his sailor pants. “Do you have the duck, mister?” he asked.

  “Checkers?” His left eye—the enlarged one behind the monocle—was intense, the only sign of life in the drab context of his face.

  “It’s a game,” I said.

  Chang’s eyes were welling up. “You have the duck?”

  “I know what checkers is,” Mr. Hunter said. He smoothed his neck cloth with the tips of his fingers. “And, yes, boys, your pet is safe. We are going to be friends, right? You will see your duck soon enough. Friendship’s the best thing, what—?”

  “So we can have our pet, sir?” I asked.

  “—literally one of the best things, friendship is. One of the very best. Now which side of you is Kang and which is the other?”

  Two minutes later Chang and I were standing on our hands among the linen on the floor, and Hunter was saying, “Yes, yes, Double-Boy—that’s it,” and laughing. “Back tomorrow,” Hunter said on the way out the door. “Excellent, boys, literally excellent.”

  That night, as soon as we made our spot between two piles of linen, we heard gentle footsteps approach. As it had the night before, the door to our room creaked open just a crack, and again two pairs of eyes hovered there, watching. And then two women peeked in through our doorway. One was tall in a golden-brown dress; the other, also tall, but less so, wore gray. In the semidark, it was hard to distinguish anything more. The two women stared for some time, and then they walked toward our bed slowly.

  “They’re horrible,” said the taller one. Her face was a perfect oval underneath black bangs. She seemed almost a grown woman.

  “Shhh,” hissed the other, some twenty years old or so, a shapely girl with the jowls of a bulldog.

  “Don’t quiet me! They can’t understand—they’re Chinamen,” said the first.

  Chang and I said nothing, holding silent with tensed muscles, feigning sleep.

  “I th
ink they are funny-looking,” said the jowly one.

  “Horrible, I say.”

  The jowly one approached. She peered into my eyes and grinned.

  Her companion gasped. “What are you doing?” Then she giggled. “Get back from there, Martha.”

  “It’s my sweetheart,” bulldog-faced Martha said, laughing. “No. My sweethearts.”

  Then the two ran cackling out of the room.

  “Could any woman ever imagine?” one asked the other as they ran up the stairs noisily.

  All women were the same. It was women who were the more frightened of our condition, the more inclined to give voice to nausea when in our company, I thought, and I missed my mother.

  Our first audiences fell into two halves—either they frightened easily, or they did not believe. And then they returned.

  Coffin and Hunter had set up a huge tent next to the wooden palings in one of the meadows of Madison Square and placed a small barred cage beneath it. Beside the tent sat an old cannon that signaled the start of the festivities.

  It was a balmy night, and torch flares flanked the tent; the four poles supporting the canopy each bore a crude rendering of my brother and me standing under palm trees. Inside the cage, we sat down among straw on the ground, dressed in our white sailor’s suits, our band showing through two holes cut into the torso of each of our outfits. Our long hair was tied into braids that we curled atop our heads and tied with silk tassels—his were blue, mine red—and we held each other’s hands as a throng walked by: openmouthed children and nodding adults, frowning old men and blushing young women, paupers wearing ripped blue stockings and rich gentlemen leaning on canes, everyone had to pass quickly to move the long lines that had formed undulating chains and stretched the length of the tent. Chang and I felt the accursed peering eye, the concentrated gaze of a crowd, and I could not stop shuddering.

  Together with the casual visitors there were relays of professional skeptics—doctors, newspapermen—who stepped up to our cage, not content with the dim lighting, like nearsighted proofreaders getting as close as possible. From the front of our cage hung a large and gay placard that read THE MONSTER.

  In full seafaring regalia, Captain Coffin stood at the side of the cage, his jacket bunched and clinging tightly under his arms. For his part, Hunter stood in front of the cage with a speaking trumpet, wearing a tunic stretched to breaking that turned his face an unnatural red. Outside the tent, bare-armed teamsters gripped the halters of horses that reared and neighed; beyond that, the bumpy horizon of New York.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” Hunter boomed through the trumpet, “I should like to treat the civilized world to a creature of Magick.”

  Let’s run and get out of here, I thought to myself.

  “Do you promise we will?” I asked Chang.

  “Yes.”

  “From the shores of a backwater known, good people, as Siam,” Hunter was saying, “this creature literally had two fathers—but one mother . . .”

  I turned to my brother in disbelief. Two fathers?

  Chang looked back at me, his face fallen.

  Hunter brought the speaking trumpet closer to his lips, and he lectured in hushed tones. “But, ladies, gentlemen”—he closed his eyes in ecstasy—“this is a mild-natured beast; in fact it may even be said to be two beasts—both kind, both intelligent—”

  I thought of Father, the good fisherman, the proud fighter.

  “And lo”—Hunter spoke in the pinched tones of a man aware of the money he’s making—“not only do they play checkers, they perform tricks!”

  The promoter turned to look at us. Louder this time, he repeated the words, which were to have been our cue: “They perform tricks”—he coughed a little. Chang and I did not move. “Such as walking on their hands,” Hunter said, and there was pleading in his voice now. Someone—a man, probably drunk—yelled from the crowd that we must be mannequins, he knew it all along.

  The flame from the torches of our cage bowed under a breeze and left Hunter shrouded in darkness for a moment. In that prolonged and transcendent instant, the authority was flowing palpably from Hunter to us like electric power through a telegraph wire.

  Chang and I still did not move. When the flame righted itself, the panic in Hunter’s eyes was unmistakable. And Chang and I, together, calmly and in English, said: “We had only one father.”

  Hunter’s big eye twitched. He swallowed, and began to breathe quickly through his nose. In the darkening evening beyond the torches, the crowd appeared a single gray element.

  “And now!” Hunter achieved a broad smile. “The freak child of two normal parents, Chang and Eng!”

  From our handstand, in the low light, I had trouble making out the audience, but I could hear what seemed like thousands of voices raised over so many noisy feet scrambling to get closer to us, voices raised in shouts and snorts, filling the tent with declarations of disbelief and wonder.

  We flipped, in unison, across the stage, almost losing our synchronicity as my hand came down from one of the rotations onto a sharp rock. I gasped, and shuddered, but we managed to recover, and landed squarely on our feet after three full revolutions.

  The crowd rushed the cage, at least the men did. They pushed Hunter aside—all the while the promoter yelled, “Please, gentlemen, please!”—and they plunged their hands through the bars, trying to grab at our connecting band. We shrank away, leaning our backs against the bars. People were surging forward, screaming, straining to reach us, extending their arms, hands, fingers, inching closer with each attempt; it looked as if they were throwing invisible darts at us.

  A thin teenage boy lost his balance during the push. Caught in the human tide, this blond, nattily dressed young man slammed into the bars with his head. He let out a groan. His face extended farther and farther into our cage with each push of the crowd. His ice-blue eyes opened wide, his cheeks chafed against the bars, and he looked at Chang and me. He tried to say something, but the breath wouldn’t come to his open mouth, so he squeaked.

  Soon there did not seem to be a spot on the boy that was not scuffed or bloodied. Then unseen hands pulled at his back, and he was swallowed into the crowd. And my brother had begun to smile, in spite of—or because of—the peering gaze of the audience. With great effort, Hunter wriggled his way between the throng and the cage, his arms extended over his head, his knuckles white as he gripped the bars behind him; he was moving from bar to bar as a trapeze artist would swing from rope to rope above a net.

  Hunter screamed. “Please!” he said. “One at a time! The queue forms to the left!” The surging continued unabated.

  Then a gunshot, immediately followed by the sound of a ball ripping a hole into the tent. Captain Coffin, still rooted to his spot beside our cage, was holding a pistol in the air, its smoking barrel pointed upward. He stood like that, not moving, and slowly the crowd arranged themselves in a column to the left of the cage.

  The audience, now orderly, filed by until one man stopped in front and held up the line by refusing to continue on. He was old and stood bent over—with his crooked back, fully a foot shorter than anyone around him; he was wearing a black eye patch.

  “A fake!” he said.

  “Please, sir.” Hunter dusted himself off, returning to his place in front of our cage. “I assure you . . .”

  “Fake!” The old man shook his head. “I want my money back.”

  The crowd—which had been murmuring until now—quieted. The old man patted his eye patch nervously. “A fake . . .”

  “Sir.” Hunter gave a disappointed smile. “We cannot extend a ref—”

  “No refunds!” snapped Coffin.

  “Give him,” my brother said, “half money back.”

  Coffin and Hunter whipped around in disbelief. “What’s that?”

  “I say now is this,” Chang smiled, “he only have one eye; he only see half a show. He only pay half!” The crowd exploded in laughter. My brother grinned.

  Though he had hit upon the r
ight tone of unctuous confidence, Chang’s gestures and manner were not as showy as they would come to be. He was young yet. Later on, when he had had years to practice obsequiousness, he became as polished in spurious gesture and speech as in attitude. I had never seen this side of Chang. He had caught the sideshow bug, a temptation as addictive and (almost) as loathsome as alcohol.

  I find nothing wrong with enjoying the hurrah of the crowd, but when one goes about becoming another person in the freak cage—when one has two identities, oneself and one’s stage self—then life has gotten out of hand. Years later, if I had remembered Chang’s first, quick capitulation to the bug, I shouldn’t have been surprised by his affair with the bottle.

  Eventually two young ladies appeared at our cage door, local girls who had won in a newspaper drawing the honor of being Hunter’s assistants for the night—blissful creatures who seemed friendly until their cruel eyes darted from ours in horror. Dressed in red gowns, the ladies took Chang and me and walked us to Coffin’s carriage. The belle at my side was careful not to touch my hand with hers, and so I did not experience her skin as she guided us into the carriage.

  After drawing the curtains, Coffin, Hunter, and we, conjoined, rode off, and the crowd followed, running after us for at least a minute.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Newness of Marriage

  1843–1844

  Wilkesboro-Waveland, Louisiana