After our visit to the Duke’s drawing room, and others like it in Britain and Europe, we toured the Continent with Hunter, the months advancing as the shows kept coming, every night another show. Back in England, we met little Victoria, the soon-to-be queen who described us as a “delight” and a “true medical treasure.” She was twelve.
But there comes a time when reputation reaches an unrealistic level, and the anticipated thing is not so much welcomed as taken for granted. In St. Petersburg, an imposing city with an elegant stillness unknown in America, Tsar Nicholas clapped politely at us, and he gave us a present in two parts. But he was not enthusiastic about it. And that was when Hunter told us it was time to leave Europe.
Though our manager still treated us like children, we were no longer childlike: now eighteen, we had been away from Siam for four years. With the constant travel, we had had no way to escape, and we decided that when we arrived in New York, we would immediately take our leave. On our next landing in America, we resolved, we would attack Hunter, who had only now just begun to give us any money (we were unsure he had been sending checks to Mother, and he never even returned our pet duck In), and we would demand what was ours. And then, home.
The trip home was again spent in steerage. On a dark night near the end of the journey, when we were sleeping in our cramped quarters, a young sailor woke Chang and me by shaking us.
“Who?” I said. “Are you?” Chang said.
The young man looked over his shoulder, then thrust out his closed hand in front of us. We looked at his hand, which hovered there in the dark, and for a second the sailor looked at his hand, too, then he rolled his eyes. “Take it!” he hissed.
“Take what?”
He made a clicking noise with his tongue, and then he leaned in close to us—close enough for me to smell his toilet soap. And he grabbed my hand; he placed a note in my palm. Once I took his gift, he looked over his shoulder, then walked away.
We had to wait until the light of morning to read it. “Meet me,” it read. And below that were instructions on where and how to rendezvous secretly with Barnum once we arrived in New York.
Two nights later we were back in Manhattan. A crowd of reporters met our boat. Americans did not have the type of confidence that fosters the independent decision-making process, and so it was no doubt the acceptance we had found in England and Europe that prompted our newfound stateside esteem. We were now the most celebrated attraction in the world, more famed than anything in Barnum’s show.
Still, we were brought again to Mrs. Sachs’s house, as Barnum had known we would be. It was late, a humid summer’s twilight. We were on the second floor, in a dark cramped roomlet with one window overlooking the street. We had not slept well; Chang’s eyes were red-rimmed, and I would have guessed mine were, too. We had only to decide now whether to listen to the famed promoter’s offer, or to try to return home to Siam on our own, which was what I proposed.
“What else we should do?” Chang asked in a whisper. We were standing by the window in our little cubby, looking out at the street below, and we did not want anyone in the house to hear us. A carriage clip-clopped by. “We swim to Siam?” he asked.
I said, “We can demand what we are owed by Hunter—”
“Barnum saying, ‘I give you a chance,’ ” Chang said. “Barnum saying, ‘I make you money.’ ”
“Don’t you want to go home?” I asked.
Chang smiled at me like I was a child and he was my father. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “I wanting that more than anything.”
“All right,” I whispered. “Me, too.”
“We should listen to what Barnum have to say,” Chang said. “Then we go home. Soon.”
“Maybe Mother has gotten enough from Hunter to pay for our return,” I whispered.
“You want to go back to Siam like we just did? Making trip in steerage? If we go back like that, we are failure. We go back rich men, we go back winning.” With this my brother unfastened and pushed open the small taut window. He leaned us forward, out into the humid night air. We remained like this—in no mean discomfort, leaning out the window so the window stop dug into our chests—and heard far-off conversation, and saw a few twinkling fires in the distance, downtown. A horse and buggy came to a stop at the corner of Forty-second Street, near the Sachses’ house.
“We go back to Siam in two, three week,” he said.
I have been the more difficult one, I told myself. I know that.
Your brother has been better at finding the best in this, I told myself.
Chang has been the more fit Mekong Fisherman, I told myself. Diminishing the influence of fate. And you should thank him.
“All right, Chang,” I said. I held onto his elbow as if he could protect me from falling. “We will listen to Barnum’s offer. But if we don’t like what he has to say, we will go home immediately.” I would not let him look away. “And we will go home within a few weeks, regardless.”
“Yes,” he said. "Yes.”
We hoisted our double-bulk out through the opened window.
Our four hands grabbing onto the sill, we twisted our buttocks and sat—half in, half out, and face-to-face. Then, together, we raised our hands to the window frame over our heads, and we crouched to our feet. Once we had crept out onto the ledge, we positioned ourself side by side, clutching the wall and easing like a double-insect toward the apple tree that was beside the far edge of the house.
We leapt together and grabbed the top branch. We shimmied our way down, and into Barnum’s carriage, which was waiting.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Adult Contentments
December 6, 1847–April 9, 1860
Wilkesboro
The winter of 1847. A year had passed since I’d held hands with Addie, and I had not had the opportunity ever to repeat that covert activity. She took no note of me now, ignoring my company when we were together as if I were a slave or a tree. Except when she did smile slightly at me from across a table, which was rare and almost more disturbing.
But I became a father.
Poor little Katherine was my first, and the first child born to either couple. Though my marriage was now stagnant, Sarah had continued to want children, as did her sister. And so, as Adelaide and my brother did, my wife and I had engaged in bloodless attempts at baby-making. And so it was that my sad, small Katherine was born.
Wilkesboro’s Dr. Cottard rushed over as soon as my wife’s water had broken. He did not want to miss a chance to make history, the possibility that he could deliver a double-baby.
It was a cold night. My brother and I stood beside the birthing bed, which was in the secondary bedroom of our house, and Adelaide—who was herself now a few months pregnant—was holding her sister’s hand. Sarah lay under the sheet, her thirty-five-year-old belly a globe beneath the white linen. She held her legs raised and bent at the knees, her position making a tent of the bedding that covered her thighs and higher. The cool air was frosting gooseflesh on her uncovered shins. She was crying, from stomach pain or anxiety I knew not.
Even as he was delivering my child, Dr. Cottard stared at us whenever he thought I wouldn’t notice, a flicker in his eyes that did not make one think of Hippocrates and the medical arts. In the room’s large swinging mirror, I looked a mess, leaning nervously into my brother. A long shaft of moonlight ran from the window to the bed, like an inquisitive apparition.
“Why don’t you twins leave us alone in here, now.” Dr. Cottard patted Chang on the shoulder. “I know you must be nervous, son, this being your firstborn child,” he said to my brother, mistaking Chang for the father. “But men should not be in here, even men such as yourself.”
There is the cliché of the nervous expectant father, of the pacing ninny nervously awaiting the birth of his son. But there was nothing clichéd about my fears as Chang and I left the birthing room to walk to and fro in the main bedroom. For the first time I understood the revulsion that others felt toward my brother and me, and it was n
ot a pleasant discovery. As we walked, Chang’s feet were getting in my way—when was the last time that had happened? If the baby ended up having no abnormality save a five-inch tangle of cartilage, flesh, and viscera like the one I shared with my brother, that little idiosyncrasy would punish it to a life of the accursed peering eye that never blinks, and to an existence devoid of even a whit of privacy.
“Please do not worry, Eng,” Chang whispered. I felt his warmth on my ear. “We work hard our whole life, and long besides. And now your Sarah is having a baby,” he said. “Smile, brother. Smile.”
“Thank you, Chang,” I said.
I walked us back to the birthing room, and we pushed through the door. Cottard noted our entrance with a glance over his shoulder, and then went silently back to his job of bringing my child into this world.
Chang and I came to stand beside Adelaide, who was still holding my wife’s hand and whispering encouragement. Five months of pregnancy had given a wonderful blush to my sister-in-law’s cheeks, and a fetching heft to her frame. She did not return my smile or even notice me, at least she acted as if she did not. Sarah held her hand. I felt I could not live a minute without looking at Adelaide’s blond hair and light eyes, as gorgeous as ever. To conceal my stare only made the state of my emotions more chaotic. Had she cared for me, would she ever?
“Gently, my girl.” The doctor sounded nervous now, his hands working under Sarah’s sheets. “Gently.”
“Can you see it?” My wife was panicky and close to tears. “What is it?”
My daughter Katherine was a slight child, and one girl, thank heaven. Nevertheless, she never would approach beauty, nor even fitness: a bony slender neck and soot-colored hair forever in knots, skin like old parchment, and a poor, faint soul—this was my daughter Katherine, slow to grow and needful always of a compassionate word.
I was unlike her, I did not cower when in the presence of people, but I would always recognize my own sorrow in Katherine, in her darting eyes and her awkwardness.
Holding this sad, skinny child, happily bouncing her negligible weight on the band I shared with Chang, I knew my daughter would never grow to be admired, but at least I had fathered a girl who was unconjoined, who looked reasonably American. She would never be hampered from speaking with the one she loved for the nearness of some twin, would not face the accursed peering eye, and she had in me a parent who wouldn’t allow a foreigner to take her to a strange land for display. I counted these as blessings. To my everlasting amazement she had whitish skin and round eyes.
In time Katherine, my favorite, was followed by other children: Julia Ann and Roslyn Etta, and Georgianna, each, like poor Katherine, now passed away, God bless all of them; and my surviving posterity James and Stephen, Patrick and Robert, and William, Frederick, and lovely Rosella.
Chang and Addie, too, made a family: Christopher, Nancy, Susan, Victoria (named after the Queen), Louise Emeline (deaf and voiceless), Albert, Jesse (also a deaf mute), Margaret Lizzie, Hattie, and Josephine Virginia, who had the exquisite blond hair of her mother, and who was the only one to die in Chang’s lifetime. I loved each of them; in their veins flowed Addie’s blood.
But I decided to try forgetting Adelaide’s touch. Concentrating my willpower on being a good father gave me new eyes to see the rest of my family, and I dedicated myself to being a better husband and brother.
The birth of our children intersected with an odd time for America. A decade of crisis began with the Compromise of 1850, which was a threadbare patchwork of capitulations that began to fall apart as soon as it was stitched together. The most frayed corner was the concession of popular sovereignty, which made a battleground of each new state. Heedless Northerners, unable to hide from slavery any longer, had to choose sides. Much as enhancements to the telegraph system ran alongside new-built roads and canals and rail lines to shorten the distance between states, these troubles proved that when sections of a nation are perforce tied closely together, one side cannot feign indifference to the other for long.
I was learning of the sure delights to fatherhood, of the specially adult contentments that I would not have known about before Katherine. But—and this may have been the way my father first saw Chang and me—I had trouble regarding this single child as from my own flesh. I knew it was real now, however—my life in Wilkesboro, my connection to my wife, to America, the toils and holds of everyday existence.
When Katherine was still our only baby and the familial revival within my heart was at its highest point, I used to sneak with Chang to look at my child sleeping in her little berth. He and I always did this at night, and always alone. Through the lattice of branches outside the window the moon dribbled glitter on my child, silver pieces winking across her frail little body. “Can you believe that we have done this?” I asked Chang. And he would rub my back and say no, he could not. The small girl seemed a tonic to relieve my grief and longing.
A few years after Katherine’s birth, when we were still awaiting our second child, I got to do that which I had been trying not to think about—I touched Adelaide again, once.
It was early one dark morning and quiet except for the chatter of night bugs. Chang was asleep and I had just woken up when I became aware that Adelaide was crying. I do not know how I knew it, she was not making noise enough to rouse me. But I felt it to be true, and when I opened my eyes and looked over my twin’s face to see Adelaide in a darkness as pervious as a ratty black veil, my sister-in-law was facing away from us, her leaky eyes pointed toward the ceiling.
My hand was resting on my brother’s side, and, careful not to wake him, I stretched my fingers far enough to graze Adelaide’s hip. She turned with a start to look over her shoulder, and she gaped at me. We stared, blinking, like two bright-eyed deer studying each other in the heart of a dark wood. She began to smile. Whatever it is you are crying about, I wanted so badly to tell her, I can help. I swear she moved in my direction, and then Chang pitched toward me in his sleep, my hand came off her, and that was that.
Soon Sarah and I had our second child and named her Julia; I watched my brother become a father to babies Josephine and Chris, and our house grew full with these four children.
For a time Chang and I taught Josephine and Chris and my Katherine Gung-Fu on Saturday mornings. Katherine was now about five, Josephine four, and plump Chris a blotchy, almost neckless three. In the grass behind our home, under a river of fine sunlit mist, the children fidgeted like timid echoes of themselves, a row of three youngsters challenging their legs with the low postures of the “horse-riding” stance, which had them all squatting atop imaginary midget horses.
“White Crane spreads wings,” I commanded in a tone that pleased me, a tone that reminded me of both my father and who I was when I had affection for myself. My brother and I were in the Seven Star stance, shifting our weight to our back legs and holding all four of our hands in front of our faces.
The children brought their right palms up, facing outward, while swinging their left hands toward the ground. Katherine lost her balance like a fledgling chicken that hadn’t yet found its equilibrium. She looked at me with those sad eyes and I had to check my impulse to run and caress her. “Now, now, Katherine,” I said, remaining in my pose chest-to-chest with my twin.
“Grab the bird tail,” said Chang, sounding pleasantly like Father, too. The children stepped to their left and lowered their right hands. They all moved in that way, that is, except little Christopher, who punched to the right and into his sister. “Ow,” she said.
From behind us, I heard a feminine voice: “You’re going to have them kill each other with that slanty-eyed mumbo jumbo.” It was Sarah, my wife, watching us from the porch and smiling at me, which had become a rarity.
“No,” I said. It was sunny and I was occupied with happy memories and domestic pleasures, and through that side door, tenderness for my wife sneaked into my heart. “This will teach them not to fight, my dear.”
“Oh, Eng,” she said. I’d forgott
en how nicely her face could brighten, and also how good it felt to hold a smile.
Little Katherine got out of her stance when I wasn’t looking. “Can we stop now, Mother?”
“You’re going to have them kill each other,” my wife said with what sounded close to tenderness before she turned back toward the house, “with that slanty-eyed mumbo jumbo.” When her gray dress twirled up, it exposed a sliver of the whiskered pale skin of her ankles. Before she reached the door, the children ran inside with her.
Chang and I had now entered our forties, as had our wives. Sarah and Adelaide had grown more plump with the years and pregnancies. What had been a fresh taboo—hand—holding with Adelaide—was now settling into a ritual, never clarified but repeated every few months, whenever we could, until the dawn of the Civil War.
Years passed, and I did not become fettered to the South and her cause until the very day I realized secession was inevitable. It was a man, a stranger I met only briefly, who was to show me this fact.
One afternoon in April 1856, after we had sold two slaves to a local widow by the name of Catalin McAdoo, a still young and wealthy dowager known for her beautiful blond curly hair, Chang and I had to file papers at the Law Office Building in Wilkesboro, and afterward we saw a strong-looking young man standing outside, broad-shouldered in the sun, just beyond the office’s pressed metal facade. His red hair spilled out from under the little coonskin cap pulled impetuously over his brow, and though his face was dirty, his mild eyes and the whiteness of his smile suggested the temper of an angel.
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