“Make the sound of the hog, Katherine.” I was trying not to worry about the state of my exploding head. Our post chaise startled a flock of bluebirds out of a walnut tree and into the warm afternoon.
“Please, Father,” my daughter said. “I don’t want to.”
“I am sick,” Chang said. Without warning, he threw his hand in front of his mouth and puffed his cheeks, but the sick erupted out of his lips and through his fingers. He strained to his side in order not to vomit on himself, pulling me with him. I nearly lost control of the horse, and had to snap Chang back upright while trying to bring us to a stop. My twin’s head crashed into mine. I held the reins with all my strength, but they began to slip. “Father!” cried Katherine. “Do not worry, Katherine!” I pulled at the reins. Chang’s head banged against my own again and again. His vomit trailed onto my shirt. I kept on pulling; the horse whinnied. My head throbbed, and my twin’s retching affected my body, disconcerting my stomach, giving me chills. But I pulled at the reins. The world was flying by. The inside of my chest felt like someone had dragged a match down the length of my esophagus and lit it at my stomach. I pulled at the reins, and the horse whinnied. He stopped.
We had come to a rest in the shade of a scarlet oak that had leaves of a brilliant royal red, and our horse was still but snorting, raring to trot again.
My daughter looked at pale, shaking Chang with sympathetic eyes. “Does Uncle also have an inflammation of the liver like me?” she asked.
For the rest of the day, Chang was ill, and so, naturally, I too had to lie in bed while he recovered. I stewed in anger that night, beside my wife and sick brother.
When the next night came, and with it the time for Adelaide to join us in bed, no one spoke as my sister-in-law climbed under the covers. She was furious with Chang, more so now than ever because he was a rummy.
Soon ten o’clock crested and fell, and eleven, too. My brother soundly dozed. I, meanwhile, watched Addie, who was lying in bed behind Chang’s back, trying to sleep. It freed a deep memory—as did the nervousness in my heart—and I was remembering my sister-in-law as she had looked years before, at our double-wedding. The memory had to rise so far to surface! Past those early days when I thought I may have loved Sarah, past the births of my children, the hand-holding, to this night, when plumper, even more beautiful Adelaide slept with her hair tucked behind her ears, with wisps that fell about her cheeks and forehead, falling in the same way it used to, though her hair was not gray then, more than a decade earlier.
Now, this mature, pregnant Addie’s nightgown must have been riding up her leg, because I could apprehend over my brother’s hip a moon-shaped glimpse of her skin; jagged shadow patterns covered the tender fat of her haunch, cutting dark lines in the near-dark. I yearned to feel her soft gray-blond locks tickling across my neck.
I reached across my brother’s tired body and, silently, coolly, touched her hand. Slowly I entwined my fingers with hers.
Though this was the prize I had won after working so dearly for it for years, I was not happy with it now. I suddenly considered that this hand-holding was insanity.
Still, I did not dare shake her fingers from mine.
“Adelaide,” I whispered, with a boldness I’d never known in the years since I first touched her in secret. “Adelaide.” My elbow rested lightly on my brother’s arm. Her hand dampened with sweat; the feel of her skin was pleasant. Maybe she did love me, after all. How wonderful! My heart was a flying fish, leaping about my ribs. “Adelaide . . .”
“Shh,” she hissed. And she yanked her hand from my grasp. I went to take it again. She refused it. I lunged at her hand a second time, and she withdrew it fully now, moving both her arms behind her own back. I reached over my brother as far as I could, to try to touch her elbow. She recoiled. “Stop it, Eng!” she seethed. “Never again, do you hear! This is ridiculous.”
“Hmmm?” Chang murmured, waking.
And that was that. I was not in a position to do anything more.
She hates you, I told myself.
My heart withered. I began to weep silently, with my eyes closed, and my tears ran down the length of my face and onto Chang’s.
“What is it?” Chang asked. “What is it, brother? Bad dream?”
“Shh,” I hissed. I had been a terrible brother to him. “Shh.” Remorse and shame had me by the throat.
The next morning my eyes fell upon Addie’s pale, passionless shoulder, illuminated by the hard, melancholy, bright morning sunlight, and I decided that I would do better to find grace elsewhere. That is when Adelaide, I noticed, began to take up crochet seriously, and I joined the North Carolina Ladies for Temperance Society.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Barnum and Our Liberty
1833–1838
New York
In the years I had spent as a young man in New York and London and Europe, I’d never tasted a breath of free air until the night Chang and I set ourselves loose from Mrs. Sachs’s house, sneaking down her wall and into the safe passage of Barnum’s carriage. To this day, I remember the next night clearly, and the party that attended it.
Prickly music from inside Barnum’s huge Connecticut manor muddled out along the Long Island Sound, and most of the party guests flitted unnoticed from the rear foyer to the lawn and back again, like anxious spirits looking for something concrete to haunt amid the chatter and the nighttime sky.
His colossal backyard was embroidered with rows of candlelight: tight queues of glowing candlestands that led all the way to the water’s edge. Running up and down one of the corridors of light, a troupe of servants faithfully replenished a buffet table laden with foods I didn’t yet know by name—bronzed birds of some kind, and glistening desserts the likes of which I had never seen.
This is the first step, I told myself. Toward home and Mother.
Beside the buffet table, at the lip of the twinkling shore, sat a makeshift bar of balsa wood. On the pale, unfinished tabletop lived any number of bottles of alcohol that the smiling bartender would allow you to empty upon request, and for free.
Compared to affairs in the drawing rooms of England, what was most remarkable about this party was not the number of guests; it was the vastness of the setting that made this banquet seem uniquely American. Rather than forty or so aristocrats in an airless old antechamber, here was a swarm of ordinary people under the stars.
An orchestra was stationed inside, near the French windows of Barnum’s red Georgian mansion, playing chamber music poorly out into the night, but—to a man—the crew wrangled at their instruments with enthusiasm, and the atmosphere, saturated with liquor, was charitable to the stalled melodies decaying in the air.
I felt extraordinary standing near Barnum under the sparkly needle bed of the night sky. The furious arrogance that had so distinguished this promoter when we had first seen him years before was now remade into good-hearted camaraderie. His sweeping gestures, his laughter served as an irresistible call to friendship.
“So, fellows, do you like my life ... ?” Barnum said. On his arm clung a ravishing young woman with clammy brown hair. Her actual eyebrows had been tweezed off, only to be replaced by penciled-in duplicates that were—judging by the stubble—more shapely than their natural precursors. The lady, like Barnum, waited for our response. She licked her lips and blinked at us.
Chang lifted his shoulders humbly and smiled. This was his attempt at an answer to Barnum’s question. (Chang had developed little tics that he thought endeared him to the public—raising his shoulders and smiling with a dumb, feigned innocence, for example, and also scratching his head and screwing up his face to show that he hadn’t quite understood the English of a particular sentence; he began after time, unfortunately, to perform these affected gestures often, from force of habit, even when we were all alone.)
“All right, Lara,” laughed Barnum, shaking the girl off. “Leave me and my conjoined friends alone now—but before you’re away,” he said, reaching in his pocket. “Presen
t for you, my dear.” He gave her a closed-up clamshell. The shell hemisected, to the lady’s delight, onto a pair of matched pearl earrings. “Take it and be off,” he said.
“How did they get inside there?” The woman’s mouth was open in wonder.
“Accept the magic and be off.” She was out of sight by the time Barnum beckoned us inside. “All in the presentation,” he told us with a wink.
We followed him toward his mansion. In the promoter’s tanned face, both jolly and all business, I saw nothing unpleasant, nothing to substantiate all the nastiness Hunter had spewed about him. It was Hunter diminishing in my estimation with every inviting smile that Barnum threw our way.
“Cocktail, sirs?” Barnum’s butler appeared at our side suddenly, a small man dressed formally, taking steps that artfully matched the pace of our own. His black hair was pomaded, and the look of the tight skin on his wax-figure-like face—it was the color of blond ash wood—made me think he was Chinese, or maybe even Siamese. I tried to place his nationality—or to elicit a companionable smile—but this servant wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Cocktail?”
“No, thank you,” I said, as we entered the house.
“Yes—drink, please,” said my brother to the butler, whereupon the servant, eyes downward, handed him a glass as big as an urn.
Chang took a sip of the intoxicating drink, his first, and I raised my eyebrows at him in astonishment. A sip, and Chang smiled stupidly as if he’d felt truly scared or his glands had begun to overwork. And the butler departed with tactful stealth.
We were deep inside the mansion now, in a high, large room with oak paneling, far enough from the heart of the party that the noise of the orchestra was drowned out.
One din, though, replaced the other. At the center of the room, a woman wearing a blue dress played the piano amateurishly, a few people clustered around her, laughing as she banged away, and everyone drunkenly began to sing.
In the meadows, fair meadows, I loved a girl
In the meadows, fair meadows, I gave her a twirl,
She was blond, she was blond, my heart unfurled
She was blond, my blond love, my meadows girl . . . .
At the same time, a few partygoers filled the plush chairs at the far reaches of the room, sleeping the belching sleep of the inebriated. Barnum stood with us, fashionably in the far corner, removed from his warbling guests. He held in his hands a sketched poster of Chang and me, an example of the printed public notices he would hang all over the city if we agreed to join with him.
It read: CHANG-ENG:THE UNITED SIAMESE BROTHER. Under the title sneered an American eagle with a shield, and, as legend, there was this quotation: “Union and Liberty—One and inseparable, now and forever.”
“E Pluribus Unum,” Barnum said. “Could mean a lot of money.
“Now I mean it, fellows.” Barnum leaned in toward us, smiling, creasing his wide forehead. “You need to work for me. Need to. I will deliver you into greatness. No freak act would be bigger. None in the wide world.” He smelled like the ocean. Candlelight and shadow bifurcated his face.
More guests, apparently having heard the news that Barnum himself had gone inside, came into this room. Barnum winked at Chang and me and motioned for us to look upon the swelling throng walking in and crowding around the piano. The entering guests pretended not to look at Chang and me.
“All this,” Barnum said, and I found myself staring at the woman playing the piano. Fair-haired, she had slender, fluttering arms. “All this,” Barnum was saying, and by now the room was filled with people. “All this, I can give you.” He rolled up the poster dramatically.
The question of exactly how much he would give was on my tongue. But then a commotion disturbed the atmosphere. Surrounded by angry muttering, persons unseen amid the guests were parting the crowd against its will. With a Siamese inflection the butler was yelling: “You cannot come in here!” But the commotion surged on toward us.
Before long, the agitated crowd dissevered before us, opening up and issuing out the cause of the disturbance: Hunter and Mrs. Sachs.
Hunter stepped up and regarded us through his monocle with a giant half-closed eye. Mrs. Sachs stood behind him, nervously looking at the floor and fussing with her hair.
“You!” said Hunter, and that seemed to be all he could say, because he stood with his mouth hanging open for some time. Someone played a note on the piano.
“Mr. Hunter,” said my brother and I, politely. “Mrs. Sachs.”
But evidently Hunter was not addressing us, because he covered Barnum with his roving eyes. “These are literally my Chinamen, Barnum. I paid to bring them here, I had to look on them for the last years, I gave them a home, they are mine!”
“In fact, they are my Chinamen now,” said Barnum in a soft voice. And then, now our friend, Barnum grinned his best in our direction. The smile was too polished not to have been the result of considerable practice before the mirror; through it Barnum conveyed that he cared more about you than the rest of the wide world—more even than he cared for himself—because the smile understood how singularly wonderful you were, understood it better than you did, and it would be there to remind you of that whenever you needed reminding.
I cleared my throat. “As a matter of fact,” I smiled, “we are no one’s Chinamen.” And I puffed out my chest, straining my bond to Chang. “We are from the Kingdom of Siam, and further, we are each our own man.” I reached over toward the blinking, openmouthed butler and took from his tray a huge glass of whiskey.
I drank a sip for dramatic effect—it was the last burning taste of that baneful liquid I’d ever swallow—nearly spat the awful stuff from my mouth, and began walking with my brother toward the exit.
“Where we going?” Chang asked as we pushed through the crowd, him as fresh-faced as he was at five years old. He poured the rest of his whiskey down his throat, and I was already feeling the sharp black bubbles in my chest. My head was light as a balloon.
“We are leaving,” I said, and Chang asked: “What? Why?”
Walking into the night, I was happy as I could ever remember being. We were going to return home, back to Mother, back to Siam.
After wrangling with the carriage driver Barnum had hired to bring us here (“Do you think Mr. Barnum went to all the trouble of getting us to Connecticut,” I said, “only to make us find our own way home?”), I got the coachman to agree to drive us to New York, though the trip would take all night. Nothing was going to stop me from getting us out of this godforsaken place.
All during the ride back to Manhattan, I could not contain my enthusiasm. Chang wore such an apathetic face as he watched the landscape go by out the window, I wanted to embrace him in my arms.
“What could be the matter, brother?” I pulled lightly on his earlobe. “We are going home.” I tugged again and gently. “Home!”
When he turned to me we were nose-to-nose, and in Chang’s eyes glittered nothing of the happiness I’d seen in the joyful or those about to set off for the happy unknown—but I did not care, because just then I loved my brother, and felt as close to our Mekong past as I did to his breath on my cheek. Chang had made the best of our exhibited life, I knew that, and I felt new tenderness toward his heart, because it was good, and his soul, which was brave.
“I am not go back to Siam.” Chang’s whisper had spittle in it. “No—I am not go back.”
The carriage windows were open and a wind came in mild as a sigh. In a few minutes it would start to rain.
“You hear, Eng?” he cocked his head, not one of his most dramatic gestures—but a gesture nonetheless. “Nothing for us in Siam.” He let a quick breath out of his nose and turned again to the window. He could not stomach the sight of my tears, probably. “I know from the moment we getting off the Sachem that Siam over for us.” He sounded tired. “You very stupid if you think any different, what?” He turned and looked at me with eyes seven thousand, five hundred and twenty nautical miles from where mine were. “Good luc
k going back without me,” he said.
I had my hand on the back of his neck. I pulled my hand away. The quiet was dense and passion-filled. So he would be the difficult one now, I thought, he and not me. The cruel one. My heart was deflated and lowering.
I could have said, But you promised—I could have asked, Why would you forsake your home, your dignity, your nation for this cold place? But I did not break the Silence. The movement of our hearts seems not to coincide.
That I was attached to this selfish cheat made me physically ill now.
I could have thrashed Chang then, walloped him, mauled his head—and I wanted so badly to do that. But it was the memory of Mother, the very mother Chang was now keeping me from—and deference to her wisdom—that restrained me. A double-boy must never fight amongst yourself. Her voice like a soft and light pillow. You may as well cut off your own head. I would never see the Land of the White Elephant again. I had no idea what to do with my towering feelings of disappointment. So I swallowed them. I had no choice but to stay in America.
But we had no place to go in America. After we collected what little we had at Mrs. Sachs’s house (two pairs of black suits, and the first installments of the meager allowance Hunter had begun paying us on our return from London), we spent our first night of emancipation drifting past the few pedestrians who were still about at that hour, men who huddled around fires under the gray sky. We wandered streets that were graced by weeping willows, searching for accommodations. We walked all night, in silent lockstep and avoiding the staring pedestrians, until the last straggling citizens had gone to bed.
I hated him.
Relax, Chang told me. People knew our act by name. As adolescents, we had run a duck business. As young men, we could certainly handle our own act, an enterprise for which people were already clamoring.
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