These were thoughts I was pondering as we strolled dark, emptied Manhattan until sunup: Maybe I could persuade Chang to return to Siam by the following year. Maybe one day a doctor would come along who could cut off my burden from me.
Soon morning had come, bright and warm, but it proved disappointing at first. Though we stopped at every boardinghouse we came across, landlords were wary of us. Finally, though, my brother and I came to the older sections of town, and there we saw a little theater that had a fence on three sides, the Kay Playhouse. It looked more like a two-story home than it did an auditorium.
“Stop here for a minute,” Chang said.
“Why? I want to find sleep.”
“For just a minute.” His smile made me want to punch his teeth out. We walked the footpath to the white-painted door, which was locked shut.
“Stop your knocking!” said a man’s voice from behind the door. It was too early for the box office to be open, the voice explained, and in any event the theater did not host any shows until the following Thursday.
We knocked again. I looked at Chang as if he were crazy; I was sure I was going to use the Gung-Fu tiger claw on him in a minute.
“I said to quit that bang—” The man froze when he opened the door. He was white-haired and very short. His ravaged face looked poignantly good-hearted at its confused tilt.
“That twin . . .” he said, and gestured. “Inside, inside.”
The theater itself was modest; about twenty seats hunkered beneath a low ceiling, the stage was little more than a soapbox.
“We want to bring show to theater,” Chang said. “We are that twin. You heard of Chang-Eng?”
“To bring your show to my theater?” Mild amusement flushed this man’s raw-boned cheeks. He had a fishy body odor that conjured the stink carried up from the muddy banks of the Mekong when the day’s catch had been left to molder in the heat.
I came to understand what was happening. “We will split all proceeds with you,” I said, “at any rate you deem fair.”
“You mean”—he squinted—“you want to bring that show of yours to my—”
“Are you interested in the offer?”
“Interested, yes, sure—sure, I am, I am interested,” the man muttered. “It’s just, we are a small—”
“Providing, of course, that we can stay here,” I said.
“Providing, of course—? What do you mean, stay?”
“Live,” Chang said. “For a short time,” I added.
“Why, I live here,” he said. “There’s but one small bed in the second dressing room, and I already . . .” The old man scratched his head. Sleep still crusted the corner of his eye. And I just now realized it was a nightshirt tucked haphazardly into a pair of trousers that made his legs seem theatrically undersized.
“We can sleep on the stage,” I said.
The three of us turned to look at Chang’s and my future sleeping area; it certainly would not be too big a home.
“Pillows,” the man said, preoccupied. “I can provide you with some pillows, sure, sure. Blankets. I can live with that. Split the proceeds, you say. Split the proceeds . . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut and licked his lips, no doubt enjoying the new taste of his future. Then he frowned. “Promotion. Getting the word out. You’ll have to handle that business, I have no money for it.”
Chang said, “Hang sign, people come.”
With that, and the pair of handshakes that followed, we began our extended arrangement with Robert Kay, and the Kay Playhouse.
It was there that we truly cemented our professional reputation in America. After a few months of our own exhibitions, my brother and I were the biggest attraction in New York City. Money came in, and we saved it. “One year,” I said, “and we go back.” He did not answer, which was fine, because I was not asking him.
And then, one wet day, after a few months back in New York, we had a visitor from our past.
Chang and I were alone in the theater, exercising by walking on our hands across the small space of the stage/sleeping area, when someone knocked on the bolted front door of the playhouse.
We opened the door to an old bald little Siamese man. He sported the shoe leather of a Manhattanite, but as a coat he wore a cotton Siamese peasant’s frock. “Hello,” he said, and his accent was thicker even than my brother’s. “Perhaps you no remember me?” It was raining on his head.
It took me a moment to place him, with his weak neck and his now-wrinkled thin face. Our visitor was Dr. Lau, the Siamese physician who had come to our bedstead when we were children. It had been years since we had seen him at the Irving Wallace Medical College, when he and Barnum had interrupted Hunter’s presentation. Dr. Lau no longer boasted front teeth.
A hasty step across the threshold, and Dr. Lau, shaking the water from his sleeve, walked past us and into the theater. He halted at the benches in the back row, and spun around to look at my brother and me. The doctor held a black leather medical bag.
“You endure together,” Lau said in Thai. “There is power and glory in togetherness, but happiness in liberty.” He bent to put his medical bag on the floor.
Light on his feet for an old man, he sprang toward us and laid a hand on our band, which issued between the buttons of our coats. He squeezed it casually, but not without ceremony; he ran two fingers across its five inches. This old doctor had about him the lighthearted gloom of an undertaker.
Neither Chang nor I bothered to ask what he was doing.
“I separate,” he said in English without looking up from the band.
It did not take me long to register his words. Yes! I thought. Yes! Daring to ask no questions, needing no explanation, I thought, Yes.
“What?” said Chang, who I hoped would not say anything to dissuade the surgeon, to break the spell.
“Let us talk Thai,” said Dr. Lau.
And he told us his story. Ever since Barnum had brought him to the United States to disrupt our meeting with Dr. Rosen, he had been living in New York, tending to the city’s growing yellow-skinned population with his brand of ancient medicine.
“Why us?” Chang asked, in English. “Why now?”
Watching Lau narrow his eyes—deciding how much to tell us—led me to remember when Mother had chosen just which facts of the world were appropriate for our four ears half a lifetime ago.
“I came to find you,” the doctor said in our native tongue. “I admit I did it because it will make me famous, this hazardous operation.”
“Hazardous?” said Chang.
I will not let my brother ruin my chance at happiness, I told myself. I will make sure this happens.
“Brother,” I said, “I am positive the doctor knows what he is doing.”
“I do not mean that it is dangerous.” Lau was rubbing his hands together nervously. “I mean”—he winced—“tricky. Medicine has changed since I saw you last.” He held his palms up and spread his fingers—a gesture meant to calm us. “I will do it for you, free of charge.” How benevolent his smile was! “We both have some Chinese blood, after all.”
“American doctors saying it kill us,” Chang said in English.
Lau, too, switched languages. “I not American doctor.”
“How would you do it?” I tried to cram assurance in my voice, and indifference.
The doctor grimaced. “Let me have a look.”
He seized our ligature and leaned all his old weight into it. He held our “tzon” as if it were something precious. He tapped the brown leathery birthmark midway across it and ran a finger over the little brown dot to the lower left of the larger discoloration. The birthmark tingled pleasantly. Then he simply cupped the band, kneading the clusters of cartilage below its flesh, patting it as gently as a mother with her baby.
What do you need, Doctor? I thought. I will chew through the band for you.
Lau stared at the ligament for minutes, and with his face gradually falling, he looked like a lover realizing his mistress is unfaithful, but realizin
g it slowly—
The doctor was muttering to himself, “Hanging from cord, gradually cord cut through....”
Chang asked, “Do you think cutting would kill us?”—I did not want to hear the answer. Hope had come to dangle before me so unexpectedly, so wonderfully. Let the doctor try to dissever. No matter the risks.
Chang smiled nervously at the doctor. Would my twin even want to do it, if it was proven safe? I did not care; I would do it! The very thought of my brother got me so angry I was sort of blinded. I shocked myself: I wished him dead.
Plants thrive when a weaker offshoot is removed, I thought.
Maybe the doctor will stand over us with a knife, I thought. You could grab the doctor’s hand, I told myself. You could seize the knife.
It may be that you would gain all of Chang’s strength, I thought. Have the energy of two men.
I would never really have done it, of course. We all sometimes have unfortunate thoughts—but they are only thoughts and nothing more, and we are better than them.
“No, no, no—it would not kill you,” the doctor said, but he stared so sadly at our band, holding onto it with the slightest touch, as if he did not realize his palm was still against it. He looked at Chang and at me, going from face to face—he must have seen one hesitant expression and one overwhelmed by anticipation—and very softly, he said, “It would kill you.”
He turned away from us and picked up his bag. “I have wasted your time.”
I felt tears gathering. I wanted to do something—but what was there to do?—or at least to say something.
“Have you been back to the Land of the White Elephant?” My voice shook like a schoolgirl in wet weather.
The physician looked at me and chuckled slightly. “No, I have not.” He started to walk past us and toward the door. “Not for years.”
I began to speak quickly, trying to find some place to put my hope. “Wait,” I said. Mother would now be gray-haired and fragile. “Doctor, wait.” She would still be lovely. She had been ravishing in our childhood, her teeth excepted, and so petite. How our money would help her!
“Do you know the best way to get in communication with people on the Mekong?” My speech surprised me by being steady. “I want to send a message to our mother.”
“I am sorry. Your mother is dead,” he whispered. “I saw her soon before the end, but I was not able to help. She died weeks after you came to America.”
My arms and legs seemed numb. I said nothing. Chang let his hand touch mine a little. We walked Dr. Lau to the door. I did not open it for him. The doctor opened it himself and left. After a while we went over to the benches and sank down onto one of them.
Alone with my brother in that theater, I could not bear the sight of him. His face was trembling. If he had said anything I might have kicked that face in. All I wanted in life was to be alone. All I had ever wanted. We sat in tearless silence.
We did not stop performing. I had lost my spirit, true, but after a few far-flung theater owners approached us, Chang convinced me that we could take our show to nearly any playhouse we wanted, nearly anywhere in the country. And we did.
And so it went, year after year. We grew rich, and we grew into men, but did not carry on like rich men. We stayed most of the year at the Kay Playhouse, and in low-priced hotels when on the road. Privately I often read books for escape. Though it would be years before Chang would begin to drink, we started to fight more often. I did not know that I could forgive him—I had the irrational belief that if we’d gone back home when I’d wanted, we would have found Mother alive.
Our show visited Europe, on a tour set up by our old acquaintance Barnum. Back in America, we took our spectacle to the Western frontier. And that is how it went year after year until we met our wives.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Secession and Reconstruction
November 6, 1860–March 1868
Wilkesboro, North Carolina
Though the breaking apart of the nation had been forewarned in trickles and rumblings, its sudden violence seemed as abrupt and unexpected as would be the ocean across the land after the rupture of a dam.
November 6, 1860.
Seven months after I found out I’d never hold Adelaide’s hand again, a Northerner named Lincoln was elected president. He had declared that government could not “endure permanently half slave and half free.” I remembered the red-headed Jeff Roda who’d invited us to Kansas, and knew how men like him would react.
We learned of Lincoln’s victory when Parson Hodge, wearing a black churchly suit, dropped by to give us the news. He was trying to drum up opposition to the new president from all his parishioners. We talked politics in our living room—in keeping with my recent policy, I did not look much at Adelaide. Hodge was beside us, and our wives sat opposite, while my children Julia and Stephen (my first boy child, he was now six) played with Chang’s Christopher, who was nine. The children ran laps around the room as the adults talked.
“Is it as bad as all that, Parson?” asked Adelaide, crocheting something—making one of the pillows that had begun to show up everywhere around our home. She knocked her knees under her dress.
Hodge frowned, creasing his pink cheeks. “They may as well have elected Greeley, Mrs. Bunker.” The man of God managed to wink at young Stephen as the boy ran by.
And then an odd thing happened. Adelaide smiled all at once in my direction, a very sly grin, I thought, full of more obvious endearment than she had ever before dared to throw my way.
What is she doing! I said to myself. Why is she so bold now?
“You must be fixing to stay out all night, Parson,” Adelaide said, “telling everybody about this Lincoln and such.” It was not until she spoke that my poor heart realized it was Hodge she’d been smiling at.
“This, this is my last stop,” the Parson said. He noticed Adelaide’s eyes, too, because he peered at her nervously through his Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses.
“Well.” She continued to smile as if there were only the two of them in the house. “We obviously are glad to see you, Parson, we haven’t in some time.”
I told myself that I’d replaced the hunger I had known for her with the more prudent attachment to the anti-alcohol movment. Addie was still smiling.
Chang looked as if he was dozing. He had a drink in his hand; when a man yearns for an unrealizable love, a jagged black seed sprouts in his head to crowd any sense from him, and he can go either of two ways. He can do what I did, and plunge himself into some alternative pursuit. Or everything may die for him, clearing room for his great sour need. Chang’s palm was sweaty on my shoulder.
My daughter Julia, little and wearing pink, tripped over her feet not too far from Chang. Everyone looked at her to see if she would start crying.
“It’s all right.” I reached out to my daughter. “Come sit with your father and your uncle.”
“No,” she said, standing.
Chang coughed. And my son came to stand next to his sister. “Stephen,” I said.
“No.” He withdrew by a step. I looked to my wife for assistance.
“That’s all right. Come here, babies,” Sarah said, and the children ran to their mother. She sat one child on each knee, an exertion that seemed to exhaust her. She turned back to Hodge. “Makes me sick to my stomach, Parson, literally, this man in the White House.” As she spoke, she took her hand from Stephen’s knee and rubbed her stomach and pouted extravagantly. “Really, I shouldn’t even be talking about it. I’ll just cry thinking about this mess, you’all,” she said.
“I wish tears would help set things right, Mrs. Bunker.” When Hodge frowned, his whole face went to pieces. “But we need more than women’s sobbing now. We need action.”
Action was forthcoming. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas all dislodged themselves from the Union, and at 4:30 A.M., April 12, Southern soldiers let the fire of fifty cannons loose upon a U.S. Army fort in Charleston, South Carolina. Soon after,
the Confederate States of America was formed—without North Carolina, for now—and Jefferson Davis was named its president. Everyone in Wilkesboro pondered what our state should do.
Meanwhile, this editorial ran in the Winston-Salem Spectator:Friends, vindicate the Southern character against the aspersions cast upon us by our enemies at the North. Remember, what is as true of us as of any other people on the civilized globe, we must show that we utterly detest and abhor barbarity. We talk of fighting for our individuality, and we have an unnatural union within the frontiers of our very state—in Wilkesboro! A barbarous union can also describe an unnatural union of the flesh! Do we not have the duty to catechize the validity of all that happens inner to the borders of North Carolina, prior to any external unions we may wish to reweigh?
Earlier, if I had never been welcomed in the South, at least I had not felt rejected by it ever since we and our wives fought off those ruffians the night before our wedding. Traits of North Carolina—a genius for repose that is not ignorant of current events, a humor that is sharp without stooping to cruelty, and the lovely sense of isolation—had always made the South preferable to New York and her Northern sister cities. I feared that would change with the coming conflict. I feared we might have to fight our own neighbors.
On the seventeenth of April, a general named Robert Lee resigned his commission with the United States Army and assumed command of the Confederate armed forces. On that evening I caught myself looking at Thom while he cleared the dinner plates; he didn’t notice my stare. Bent over the dining table, his face black and gaunt like a carving on an Indian’s totem pole, the Negro did not look especially unhappy. I certainly did not want to lose his service. I wondered what he thought, or if he thought at all, about Union and freedom.
“Excuse me, master.” His face was rigid as he took my plate away from me.
Soon after, President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Blockade against Southern ports.
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