CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Celebrity
1826–1829
New York–London–Europe
By 1826 my brother and I were almost sixteen years old and still living at Mrs. Sachs’s in New York, our act had become a huge success, and we had seen not one cent from Hunter. The idea came to us that it might be possible to persuade him to give us a better accounting of our prospects and maybe even some money of our own. “And our pet duck back, too,” Chang reminded me. Also, he and I started to talk about another try at escape, a more finely planned attempt than our last effort. I wanted so badly to see Mother again, it was almost all I thought about.
The shows were becoming routine. There is a performance from that time, however, that stands tall in my memory: the day we performed in Tompkins Square Park.
The show was uneventful at first. Our cage was outside, on a hillock, and the sky was overcast. Hunter talked into his cupped hands, as usual, and we ignored him, as usual—from the perspective of our handstand, we watched the people walk by. Then something unexpected occurred. “Are they Christian?” someone boomed in a deep voice.
Hunter stopped speaking for a moment and looked into the crowd. He said: “Yes, in fact they are. They can quote scripture literally, all you have to do is ask it.”
We flipped onto our feet and saw in the audience a man wearing a red silk cravat, a rogue with a drooping double-chin and a hairline receding to the top of his head: Barnum.
He stormed right up to our cage. His face was lit by torchlight. Hunter ran over with skipping, goosey steps to stand between Barnum and us.
“What do you think you are doing, Mr. Barnum?”
“Is he paying you, twins?” Barnum stood on tiptoes to talk to us over Hunter’s shoulder. “Is he?” He bobbed his head around the impediment of Mr. Hunter. Chang and I walked toward the bars.
“All right, now, Mr. Barnum, that’s literally enough.” Hunter leaned against the larger promoter and tried to push him away from the cage.
Barnum shouldered Hunter aside; he leaned his face into the bars. His jowls curled around the metal poles. The skin on his nose showed wide black pores. “I can guarantee you a better life.” Barnum’s voice was almost a hiss, and with that he turned on his heels and left.
Hunter stepped into the space where the other man had been. He was red-faced, and swallowed vigorously for a while. Then, with a nervous laugh—“Can you believe that man? What a liar!”
At home that night, Hunter was locking us into our room when I told him we needed to talk. “Your allowance?” he said. “You will get that. But it is meaningless, anyway, for the next few months. Because you two and I are taking another trip.”
And that is how we found out we were going to London.
Hunter, Chang, and I took a fast steamship to England, but if we had been expecting more perfect quarters than we had been used to, we were disappointed. We traveled steerage, which meant small, unlit accommodations, meals with the crew—a bland diet of potatoes and salt beef—that contrasted sharply with the sumptuous banquets I imagined Hunter was enjoying in the dining cabin. The crossing to England took twenty-six days. Chang and I decided that if any chance presented itself, we would make a getaway and find passage home somehow.
Our first night in London was a silent coach ride along Cheapside, through the runnel of the capital’s gray attractions: Covent Garden theater, the Baker Street bazaar, Grosvenor Square, each hooded in fog and drizzle, and dingy even in gaslight when situated in mind beside the more newly built, fire-specked landscape of Manhattan. We traveled along the cobblestones of Whitechapel Road, among the drovers who walked herds of cattle to Smithfield Market. Soot covered so many faces. Pointing at the stars stood the arch of London Bridge, sickly lighted up in manmade light, and by the time the coachman gave his command of “Whoa, horse,” St. Paul’s was steady up over the mist, unlit, a great shadow in stone.
We stayed at the Beautiful Meadows, a hotel on Drury Lane, near the Theatre Royal where we would be performing. Hunter had alerted his London connections of our arrival in advance, and the Beautiful Meadows was crowded with gawkers: pallid English newspapermen, cringing and quick as a group.
London was another success, professionally. We charged an admission price of one crown. We had no idea, of course, that the one-crown price was—in part—to be responsible for the even greater notoriety we were soon to receive.
London, being so close to the Continent, was more cosmopolitan than anyplace we’d seen in America; along with manifold Englishmen (from the ash-cheeked chimney sweep to the fair-skinned nobleman), a smorgasbord of races came out to see my brother and me; elderly French ladies, voicing a “tsk, tsk” and squinting through their lorgnettes, leaned toward us like flowers curving under a light wind. Russian princesses blushed in front of our bars and mustachioed Spaniards scratched their chins. Our crowds were enormous, countless phantoms huddling by, knees knocking, and like a woman shopping for a dress, I’d imagine trying on one body or another: of that little blond boy, twisting out of his mother’s grasp; or this buxom English woman with her frilly parasol; or that old clergyman, hunched over his cane.
As time passed, theater and throng became no more than a second greatcoat that I would put on with little joy or trepidation, every few nights of my life. I was growing impatient because Chang and I hadn’t yet seen a chance to execute our escape plan.
What did I do when not performing? Back in the hotel, our two single beds pushed together, Chang and I fashioned a checkers game out of the effects located around the room (paper and pen, inkwell, a lamp), we practiced walking on our hands for a while, and ultimately, with Chang napping beside me on the bed, I read the Bible. I was able to recite chapter and verse—usually to an audience of one, and that one quite uninterested.
The Book offered flashes of stinging, personal poignancy: “I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:22); “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9); the story of the child who would have been divided in two by Solomon.
Hunter would stare at my body then, and I could tell he saw in me nothing more alive than money in his pocket. “I know I gave that book to you, boy, but you’re literally reading the Scriptures line by line, aren’t you?” There was shame all over his voice. “I mean to say”—he sucked on his teeth, his rendition of a warmhearted smile; he was embarrassed for me—“I wonder, do you think for a moment that you are going to heaven?”
I was left to question: If God feels the loss of every creature that dies, mourns without exception each pigeon that falls, would He not feel doubly sad at our passing?
The quality of kindness, I reminded myself, is better in Siam.
One dark and foggy morning in London, Chang and I had to give a special performance at the residence of the Duke of Angoulême. “These are more appropriate ensembles in which to meet dignitaries,” Hunter said, handing us two short loose green silk jackets and trousers in the fashion of Siam, or, rather, made by an Englishman to look that way. “We are retiring the sailor’s suits.”
The Duke was the son of King Charles X of France, the monarch who had been dethroned in a coup. As a result, the Duke, who would one day have ascended to the throne had all things gone according to plan, was now living here, an exiled would-be regent suffering from gout, dropsy, and chest inflammation.
The Duke’s residence was a small carriage house by Regent’s Park, and when we arrived a French valet whose little face wore a terrifyingly void expression announced us as “The Chinese Twins.” He ushered Hunter, Chang, and me into a simple drawing room where the Duke had surrounded himself with his ragtag retinue of shaky footmen, untidy devotees, and two sad-eyed little girls in pink dresses. Also, there was a woman in the room, ignoring us and loitering on an overstuffed chair in the corner—a red-haired belle, the long, lissome shape of her an acute reminder of what I was and the suffering it caused me. Three or four men stood around this beauty as she leaned back, as if she were beckoning them to dive
toward her.
The drawing room was carpetless and worn, its one displaced ostentation a crystal chandelier that lingered overhead like some small-scale galaxy, packed dense and glimmering all the brighter for it. A dreariness clung about the place, a deadness to the air like the space between conjoined twins’ faces after one of them yawns.
The Duke idled on an old divan beside a fireplace that was, I was cold and unhappy to say, unlit. “Your Highness,” Hunter bowed. “May I introduce the Twins?” And then our promoter skipped to the side of the room, leaving us before this almost monarch.
The scarlet sash that ran slantways down the Duke’s bosom underscored the outrageous bloat of his chest and great loss evident even in his bearing. I wondered whether it is worse to lose a kingdom than to be born a serf.
Behind Angoulême stood his two little sad-eyed daughters and a man whom I later found out was Dr. Peter Mark Roget, secretary of the Royal Society, originator of the world’s best-known thesaurus, and, at this point in his illustrious life, a dwarfish and balding medical doctor.
“Venez vite,” said the Duke.
A handstand led to flips, and flips to a flawless four-point landing, and Angoulême brought his hands together at a leisurely pace, a sort of half clap, and his people followed suit. All except for the red-haired woman in the corner and her admirers, who disregarded us as they talked between themselves.
“I would like to ask the twin questions, my lord.” Roget bowed to the Duke. “Would that amuse Your Highness?”
The Duke shrugged his shoulders.
“Is the performing difficult?” Roget asked us, talking loud enough to be heard by the group across the room. “The shows, the crowds ... ?”
“Any idiots able to flip,” Chang said. “Every day living is what wears you out, what?”
The little girls beside the Duke clapped—spontaneously and lightly, in a way that displayed both their appreciation of a humorous mutant and their diamond rings. Roget, meanwhile, walked away, as if trying to slip from our notice.
“And you?” asked one of the girls next to Angoulême. She was addressing me. “Do you find the performing difficult?” I was flustered by these girls, this scene, and so heard the sound of her voice but did not register her words as anything but a meaningless fusillade of noises on some limited musical scale.
All of a sudden—over Chang’s far shoulder—I saw Dr. Roget stealing toward us on tiptoes. When he was directly behind my brother, he reached out his little arm and began to tickle Chang’s neck.
“Please, stop that!” I shouted. The girls gasped at my outburst. Roget, grinning, tilted his head at me. The woman across the room still did not seem to realize we were there.
(Roget later published an essay that may explain his actions: “The Twins’ curious intimacy gives rise to a sanguineous communication between the two. I am satisfied that this creature be guided by a single will; it is said that, upon tickling one of them, the second will tell you to desist, as if this untouched one felt the contact itself.” Well, that is absolutely ridiculous; I saw the man. Most certainly I did.)
“And, what, double-boy,” Roget was scratching his chin casually, as if he hadn’t just assaulted us, “do you think of civilization? Of our fair city London?”
I will escape from your pale world before long, I said to myself.
Chang, meanwhile, was moving us toward the fireplace; he bent us down to procure a deadened piece of coal from the hearth. He held up the gray lump of coal before his eye. “This the sun of London,” he said. “This color.”
“Fabulous,” laughed Roget, and he raised his eyebrows at the Duke, who was nonplussed.
Roget pointed at Chang and said, “This half is fabulous.”
And now Roget turned to me, to see if I too was fabulous. “So, lad”—he treated me to an encouraging smile—“you came to the civilized world subsequent to being introduced to an American trader?”
I tried to equal my brother’s quip with one of my own (I was young then, and didn’t know my limits). “You think he’s a traitor, too, then?” I said.
Perhaps my English inflection was not yet as polished as it is today—maybe the distinction between the sound of individual letters was a nicety my intonation could not at that early date support.
Roget looked at me blankly. The Duke stared expectantly, too, as if I was about to continue speaking.
“Why—yes,” I answered, softly and yearning more than ever for the social comfort of a Mekong houseboat. “We first crossed the sea with the trader Captain Abel Coffin.”
Roget sighed. Chang’s expression was similar to the face I must have worn whenever he had one of his onstage extemporizations—openmouthed stupefaction. I felt I was looking at myself, although it was he I beheld. Let my brother be bewildered by my try at repartee, I thought.
“This boy seems more imbecilic than the other.” Roget nodded at me.
Floundering for the right thing to say, I picked the first anecdote that came handy. “Everything about our birth is known,” I began into the story of our origin.
When I finished, I looked up and saw everyone standing around uncomfortably; my narrative had led everyone down the avenue of awkward silence.
“Il n’est miracle que de vieux saints,” yawned the Duke.
Hunter took that to be the end of the show, and ran up to us from the other side of the room. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he said. “Pas mal,” said the Duke. The erstwhile royal opened his hand, palm upward in anticipation, and one of his fawners gave him a little blue pouch.
The Duke addressed Chang and me: “Pour—” He cut himself off, and for a moment lost his royal composure. He seemed to be working out a riddle in his head. “Pour tu,” he said to us finally, and handed over the pouch.
We opened it and saw a few tiny gold baubles, sparkling against the blue cloth. Hunter looked at the gift admiringly. Chang looked up from the pouch and its gold, and—turning to Roget—he said: “Why the Duke gives us gold, is because he has no crown.”
On the overstuffed chair across the room, the red-headed woman’s head reared up, like a deer’s. Three or four people gasped. Hunter turned quickly to my brother, then back at the Duke. Blushing, our promoter said: “The twin is referring simply to the price of admission.”
The air seemed inert, except for the meandering specks of grit that floated brightly along the shafts of sunlight to come to a dusty landing on the floor. The Duke’s face, also, remained almost motionless. But soon he began into the slowest of winces. It started in his eye, a dark gloom. Then it slid down his face, capering around his mouth like a bee about a hive, and soon it crept under his flesh and began to disturb the chin. It darkened his whole expression, like the withering of a flower brought into shadow.
The all-but-king merely stood without saying a word, likely wishing he still had the rule of the guillotine. What he still had the power to do was motion for the valet.
The valet turned us around and pushed us to the door. “Follow me, monsieur,” he said, exposing a row of childlike yellow teeth. Hunter followed close behind.
Halfway through the doorjamb now, with the valet’s hands prodding my brother and me outward, I looked over our shoulders and saw Roget drift toward the woman on the overstuffed chair. The sitting beauty was pursing her lips and scanning the room in front of her in the attitude of a general on his horse. The beauty did not look up to notice our departure, and I had no reason to think we’d ever hear about her again.
Chang and I became the toast of London.
Once Roget published his essay about us, Chang’s witticism was at once immortalized in the London broadsheets, and repeated around town as a catch phrase by everyone from shoeshine boys to parliamentarians. At our performances, the increasing number of people gliding by our pen would repeat it in differing variations—e.g., “he ain’t got no crown,” or, “The regent seems to be one crown short”—and ever more reporters began herding to our cage, as well, busting for another bon mot. I
was described as “the one more like a mute.”
The strangest of reports appeared in the Times of London. Purported to be an “inside account” of our reception in the Duke’s drawing room, the story heaped fiction upon fiction. It was entitled “A Harmony in Three Parts?”
It told of a woman that the paper referred to—"for the sake of propriety”—by the “nom-de-amor” of Susannah of the Meadows, a “ravishing red-headed jewel of London society”; she had, according to this rubbish, “by some unaccountable caprice, fallen violently in love with the twins.”
After ostensibly speaking with us for “a period that could not have lasted more than minutes,” she “loved [us] as one, not as separate men.” She was said to be inconsolable following our departure from the drawing room, because she knew the “impossibility” of her love.
She hated the thought of our being separated, it was said. “How could I be content with either, were the other dear charmer away?” this beautiful “Susannah of the Meadows” supposedly repeated again and again, over tears, while friends tried to soothe her. The article concluded:Situations like this will, considering the sharpness of wit of at least one of this deuce of hearts, occur throughout the expected short life of the double boy. It is not an unreasonable conjecture, therefore, that some female attachment, at a future period, may occur to destroy their harmony, and induce a mutual and paramount wish to be separated; no matter the risks.
This expose, though a fakery, produced feelings both mysterious and frightening in my brother and me. It touched upon a number of undiscussed resignations. The chance that an actual “Susannah” would ever exist was remote enough, but then, faced with the probability that any such Susannah we’d encounter would never be able to consummate her passion, we had to resign ourselves to a loveless existence. Still, so long as we were trapped in our togetherness, I would never stop hoping that some doctor would one day slice us into sections as keenly as the reporter of that article had divided his last sentence by a semicolon; it was not I who feared the loneliness, and the risk. As a man blind from birth cringes from the light upon the sudden gift of his vision, my brother dreaded separation because it represented the unknown. Not I.
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