The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series)

by Steven Millhauser

  Just going. As Mr. Green hurtles into the BALLROOM he sees, on a corner of the distant window seat, Miss Scarlet sitting with her hands in her lap. Ten feet away the Colonel stands with his back to Miss Scarlet and his hands clasped behind his back. Miss Scarlet looks up, the Colonel turns his head: they are waiting for an explanation. Mr. Green cannot speak. His cheeks are aflame, his heart is pounding, he feels light-headed with embarrassment. The Colonel goes to the window, picks up a dark object, turns sharply on his heel, and begins striding toward Mr. Green. The Colonel is going to strike him. The Colonel is going to murder him. Mr. Green cannot move. “I say, Green,” the Colonel says, striding directly up to him. “Forgot your book.” The Colonel thrusts out the book. Mr. Green feels a bursting sensation in his heart; tears of gratitude prickle his eyes. “I am so terribly sorry,” Mr. Green says. “I mean happy, of course. I do hope I haven’t—” “I was just going,” the Colonel remarks.

  The black envelope. The black envelope is a little larger than the cards it contains and is open at one of the narrow ends. In the open end is a shallow semicircular notch intended to ease removal of the three hidden cards. On one side of the black envelope appear the words CLUE CARDS, printed in dim silver. On the other side the structure of the envelope is visible: a single sheet of black paper has been folded in such a way that narrow strips overlap the side and bottom; the overlaps are glued in place. Years of use have caused the black envelope to tear at the corners of the open end; minuscule black hairs of paper twist from the splits.

  In which the Colonel is thirsty, and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water; and what he finds there. The Colonel feels a slight dryness in his throat after his late exertions and, as he passes the KITCHEN, decides to drink a glass of water before proceeding to the BILLIARD ROOM. When he enters the KITCHEN he sees, in the middle of the room, buxom Mrs. White, standing sideways and holding in one hand a tilted but unspilled glass of water. She is staring straight before her, with her lips slightly parted; her cheeks are wet with tears. Her slumped shoulders, her gleaming cheeks, her loosening braids of hair, her air of desperate disarray, all these form a pleasing foil to her ample well-corseted bosom and handsome high posterior. “Pray forgive me for disturbing you,” remarks the Colonel, and closes the door gently behind him as Mrs. White turns her dazed wet face in his direction. The Colonel makes a quick calculation. There will still be time for a game before dinner.

  A sound of shattered glass. The Professor has counted seven tiers of crisscrossing passages, but he is no longer certain of the number because many of the passages dip and climb, attaching themselves to higher and lower tiers without the evidence of steps. The multiplying passages cannot be endless, the Professor reminds himself: that is a delusion born of anxiety. Evidently the builder, or series of builders, desired an impression of extravagance, of freedom, as if a single SECRET PASSAGE moving from one known locus to the next were a form of intolerable constriction, for attempts have been made to disguise or blur the intermingling of passages and create confusion in the unwary wanderer. Passages scrupulously resembling other passages have been introduced, so that the illusion of having returned to familiar ground is continually created, only to be disrupted by a deliberate change in the pattern; passages containing shelves, furniture, and paintings lead suddenly to primitive passages where large rocks lie on the earthen paths and water trickles along the stony walls. It occurs to the Professor that perhaps he has been ceaselessly retracing a small number of cunning passages. Or it may be that he has been following a slowly widening and deepening series of passages, a series that he has far from exhausted, a series that has barely begun. His legs are growing tired, and despite the cool air he is perspiring. He stops for a moment to wipe his eyeglasses, which slip from his fingers to the hard path. He hears a sound of shattered glass. He crouches and pats the ground; grains of moist dirt cling to his fingertips. When he picks up his eyeglasses, he brings them close to his eyes and sees that the lenses are unbroken. He stands up quickly. I am imagining things, he says aloud. You are talking to yourself, he says aloud. His voice is very clear. He puts on his eyeglasses and begins walking briskly. This is not happening, he says aloud. Ahead of him, the path divides in two.

  Is it possible? In the mauve dusk Miss Scarlet sits in the corner of the window seat smoothing her crimson dress, black in the twilight, over her knees. The Colonel has escaped through the door. Already the late episode is fading, becoming implausible. Is it likely that she? Is it possible that they? The Colonel, after all, has never seen her. He experiences women solely as a series of banal erotic images; he transforms real flesh into figments of his imagination. The Colonel is a magician: in that dark, unseeing gaze, women vanish. Miss Scarlet cannot have been present at the unlikely scene at the window seat, because the Colonel’s lovemaking is strictly solitary. The thought is somehow bracing. In the violet gloom Miss Scarlet pinches herself on the forearm and gives a little gasp of pain. She looks up suddenly. “Mr. Green?” she asks, straining her eyes. But Mr. Green is no longer there.

  Jacob raises his glass. Jacob rolls a three: two short of the DINING ROOM. The game is almost over. He raises his wineglass and says, “Happy birthday, Davey.” David looks down, flushing with pleasure. Marian places a hand on his hand. “Hey. Happy birthday.” David looks up to see her smiling at him; her tired, sorrowful eyes brim with tenderness. Susan pushes back her chair and stands up. She steps around the table, bends over suddenly, and kisses David on the cheekbone. “Happy birthday, David,” she says. He can smell the clean scent of her blouse, mixed with a tang of something else: skin? hair? The kiss was a little high, just under his eye. He hears her sit down. David looks quickly at Susan, at Jacob, at Marian. His sister’s hand is warm on his hand, his cheekbone still feels the pressure of Susan’s lips, his brother’s greeting sings in his ears. He would like to tell them that they can count on him, that he will take care of them, that everything will be all right: Jacob will be famous, Marian will be happy, Susan will marry Jacob, Dad will never die. He knows that the words are extravagant and says them only to himself. “Thank you,” David says. For a moment, it’s as if everything is going to be all right.

  In the attic. It is late, on a summer night. In the Ross attic, light from a streetlamp passes through a window-screen, makes its way past the spinning, misty blades of an exhaust fan, and falls dimly on a narrow stretch of floor flanked by old bookcases filled with childhood toys. One shelf holds an uneven pile of abandoned board games (Sorry, Parcheesi, Pollyanna, Camelot), a puzzle showing on the cover a three-masted ship with billowing sails plunging in black-green waves, a pile of Schaum music books with colored covers and miscellaneous sheet music such as “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “O Mein Papa,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and “Old Black Joe,” and a shoebox with crushed sides that contains wooden red and black checkers pieces embossed with crowns, a notched Viewmaster reel called “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” tin play-money coins, a wooden slice of watermelon the size of a section of orange, a three-lobed puzzle piece showing rich blue sky, an edge of red roof, and a corner of yellow chimney, a small flip-book featuring a mouse who picks up a sledgehammer and cracks open a gigantic egg from which emerges a frowning chicken with a bump on its head that grows longer and longer, a green rubber grasshopper, a blue fifty-dollar Monopoly bill, and Professor Plum. Beyond the bookcases, in the dark part of the attic, Marian’s old German school, a gift from her mother’s mother, Rebecca Altgeld, lies under the slanting front wheel of a fallen bicycle. The teacher sits tilted at her desk with raised arms, the six pupils lean in different directions on three wooden benches. Deeper in the blackness, old wooden barrels stand among cardboard cartons and dress boxes. On the floor Pierrot sits with his head against a barrel, his blouse torn, his face stricken with sadness, dreaming of Columbine beside a trellis in moonlight.

  Finale. It is late, and in the mansion a tiredness comes over things. The books in the LIBRARY book
cases have lost their depth, and in their flatness can no longer be removed. The billiard balls and the billiard table form one unbroken surface, smooth as paper to the stroking thumb. In the KITCHEN cupboard a mouse knocks over a fragile upright plate, which begins to fall slowly, as if through water, and dissolves in shadow. Miss Scarlet, alone on the window seat in the melancholy BALLROOM, feels a stiffening in her limbs: she is slowly turning to wood. Colonel Mustard will stop, his arm held out toward Mrs. White, who, already beginning to lean toward the consoling hand, will pause on the threshold of a momentous decision. Mrs. Peacock will enter the DINING ROOM and freeze in an attitude of disdain, Mr. Green will remain with one foot raised in a shadowy corridor, Professor Plum is already fading among his fading passageways.

  BEHIND THE BLUE CURTAIN

  On Saturday afternoons in summer my father took me to the movies. All morning long I waited for him to come down from his study, frowning at the bowl of his pipe and slapping the stairs with his slipper-moccasins, as though the glossy dark bowl, the slippers, the waiting itself were a necessary part of my long-drawn-out passage into the realm of dark. I savored every stage: the hot summer sunshine outside the ticket booth, the indoor sunlight of the entranceway with its glass-covered Coming Attractions and its velvet rope, the artificial glow of the red lobby, the mysterious dusk of the theater, the swift decisive darkening—and between the blue folds of the curtain, slowly parting, the sudden shining of the screen. Gravely my father had explained to me that the people on the screen were motionless photographs, passing quickly before my eyes. It was like my black-and-white flip-book from the candy store: a smiling mouse leaped from a diving board toward the water as a frowning shark rose up, opening its jaws wider and wider. And when you did it the other way, see!—the sinking jaws close, the upside-down mouse rises through the air and lands on his feet on the high board. My father was never wrong, but I felt he was trying to shield me from darker knowledge. The beings behind the curtain had nothing to do with childish flip-books or the long strips of gray negatives hanging in the kitchen from silver clips. They led their exalted lives beyond mine, in some other realm entirely, shining, desirable, impenetrable.

  One Saturday afternoon when my father had to drive to the university on business, and my mother lay on two pillows in her darkened room, rasping with asthma, and my best friend was spending the day at his cousin Valerie’s, it was decided that I could go to the movies alone. I knew that something forbidden was happening, but I greeted it with outward calm. After the second feature I was to go directly to the front of the theater and stand outside under the marquee, where my father would be waiting. I felt that the decision had been arrived at too hastily, that the careful, repeated instructions only revealed the danger in this sudden violation of the usual. I wondered whether I should warn my parents, but I remained silent and watchful. My father dropped me off at the ticket booth, where a short line had formed, and as I watched him drive away I felt an anxious exhilaration, as if in the pride of his knowledge he had failed to reckon with the powers of the dark.

  Past the blue velvet rope on its silver post I stepped into the well-lit lobby with its red rug and glass-covered candy counter. The glossy wrappers brilliant under the counter lights, the high popcorn machine with its yellow glass that turned the popcorn butter-yellow, the crimson glow of a nearby exit sign, all these expressed the secret presence of the dark, which here made itself felt by the intensity of the effort to banish it. Behind me, through the open door leading back to the entranceway, I could see sunlight flashing on the glass of a Coming Attraction: in a green-black jungle a man in a pith helmet was taking aim with a rifle at something invisible in the blaze of obscuring light. I turned to the darkening corridor leading away from the candy counter. There the lights grew dim, as if they were candle-flames bending in the wind of the gathering dark, there the world was bathed in a reddish glow. I bought a box of popcorn and made my way along the glowing night of the corridor. The aisle surprised me: it sloped down more sharply than I had remembered. As I passed the arms of seats I felt a slight tugging at my calves, as if I were being pulled forward against my will. Impulsively I chose a row. I slipped past four chair-arms and pulled down a red, sagging seat. I leaned back eagerly, waiting for artificial night to fall, whispers of ushers, the cone of a flashlight beam in the darkened aisle.

  Soon the lights went out, on the luminous curtain bright letters danced, the blue folds began to part; and sliding down, far down, I rested my popcorn on my stomach and pressed the back of my head against the fuzzy seat.

  And suddenly it was over, the lights came on, people rose to go. Legs pushed past my knees, a coin clinked and someone bent over sharply, slapping at the floor. A foot kicked a popcorn box, a seat came up with a bang. Was it really over? The rolling coin struck something and stopped. A heaviness came over me—I could scarcely drag myself to my feet. Outside my father would be waiting under the marquee: one arm across his stomach, the elbow of the other arm in the palm of the first, the bowl of his pipe supported with thick fingers. I felt that I had let something slip away from me, that I had failed in some way, but my thoughts were sluggish and kept sinking out of sight.

  At the top of the aisle I hesitated, looking with disappointment toward the band of sun streaming in through the open door. I went over to the drinking fountain and took a long swallow. At the darkening end of the corridor I noticed a sign that said REST ROOMS, with a red arrow pointing down. Perhaps my father had not arrived yet; the out-streaming crowd was dense, oppressive; I would only be two seconds. Slowly I descended the speckled stone steps, sliding my hand along the dark brass rail. In the men’s room a teenager with slicked-back yellow hair and a black leather jacket stood wiping his hands on a soiled roller-towel. I slipped into a stall and listened with relief to the departing footsteps, the banging door. Two people entered without speaking and left one after the other. I felt weary and restless. I didn’t know what I wanted. I did not move.

  I must have fallen into a stupor or reverie, for I was startled by a clanking sound. I opened the door of the stall and saw an old man in droopy pants standing with his back to me beside a bucket of soapy water. He was slowly pushing a mop whose long gray strings moved first one way, then the other. The mop left glistening patches on the white-and-black tiles. I tiptoed out of the bathroom as if I had been guilty of something and began climbing the stairway, which seemed darker than before. It was very quiet. At the top of the stairs I came to the corridor, now empty and still. At the other end the darkened candy counter was lit by a single bulb. The theater appeared to be deserted. I was nervous and calm, nervous and calm. Nearby I saw the row of closed doors leading to the entranceway; under the doors I could see a disturbing line of sunlight. And clattering around a turn in the spookhouse, suddenly you see a sliver of light at the bottom of the black walls. My father would be striding up and down, up and down, looking at his sunny watch. He would talk to the girl in the ticket booth. All at once a desire erupted in me with such force that I felt as if I had been struck in both temples.

  I stepped onto a downward-sloping aisle and plunged into the soothing half-dark, penetrated by the odor of old dark red seat cushions, butter-stained cardboard popcorn boxes, the sticky sweetness of spilled soda. On one seat I saw a fat rubber nose with a broken elastic string. At the end of the aisle I stepped over to the wall and reached up my hand, but the bottom of the great curtain was high above my straining fingers. It was set back, leaving a ledge. The thick dark folds looked heavy as marble. It seemed to me that if only I could touch that curtain, if only I could push it aside and stare for one second at the fearful blankness of the screen, and perhaps graze the magic whiteness with my fingers, then my deep restlessness would be stilled, my heart would grow calm, I could turn away from the theater and hurry back, quickly quickly, to my waiting father, who at any moment was going to burst through the doors or drive away forever. I walked along the wall, desperately searching for something to stand on, say a popcorn box
or one of those tall ashtrays with white sand that I had seen near the blue velvet rope. I saw nothing but an empty, carefully folded silver gum-wrapper with its phantom stick of gum. High overhead the curtain stretched away. As I approached the end of the curtain the lower wall curved slightly and I saw a narrow flight of six steps going up. The stairs were cut into the wall. The top stair was half concealed by the final fold of the curtain.