The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series)

by Steven Millhauser

  He waited, stepped on the gas, and waited longer; stepped on the gas, waited, stepped on the gas; waited; stepped on the gas. As he waited he noticed water seeping through the doors onto the floor. Quickly he tried again. The water was rising slowly. Mr. Porter opened the door and stepped out.

  He stood up to his knees in water. And for a moment he felt like lying down in the water and closing his eyes, he imagined his body at peace, drifting away in the dark water. Mr. Porter began to pull his legs forward in the direction of the shopping center. He was more than two miles from home. A sudden downpour fell on him—he had forgotten the momentary shelter of the trestle. Through the heavy drops he passed slowly up the incline to the stoplight at Main Street. Across the street the long smear of the shopping center loomed above a deserted parking lot. The vast orange-red letters of the supermarket and the cherry-red letters of the bargain store stained the dark mist overhead and flowed in the gleaming tar. In a far corner of the parking lot stood a glass telephone booth that reminded him of an aquarium and a coffin. The light changed, and as Mr. Porter walked across the street he heard sucking and oozing sounds in his ruined shoes.

  As he stepped onto the parking lot he saw his shoe disappear into a red puddle; when he lifted it he saw the polish dripping away in red-black drops. The rain was coming in sharp slanting lines, driving against his cheeks, his shirt, his shoes. Mr. Porter glanced at his watch. Through the dripping crystal he saw two wavy hands. A faint black smudge was visible on his pale wrist beside the shining black band. Mr. Porter rubbed the band with a fingertip; his finger showed a black stain. Through streaming eyeglasses he peered up at the distant telephone booth. He imagined the telephone ringing in his empty house. The parking lot was streaked with luminous bands of cherry-red and orange-red, and Mr. Porter saw red ripples in his shoes, a reddish glow in his flashing hands. His cat would prick up her ears before slowly settling her chin on her outstretched paws. Mr. Porter tried to walk quickly but he seemed to be walking through a tide. He would never arrive anywhere. His shoes were ruined, his shirt was ruined, everything was washing away. The rain was flooding him, passing through him and coming out the other side. Everything was coming undone. Black drops fell from his watchband onto his hands, blue drops fell from his shirtsleeves onto his arms. Have I wasted my life? The telephone booth was far, far away.

  Mr. Porter stopped. He was standing alone under a dripping red-black sky. Behind him the railway trestle had melted away, nothing remained of the highway but a distant shimmer. His shirt was running down in blue streams onto his pants, his pants were trickling onto his shoes, his shoes were flowing away in inky streams. Everything was washing away. His cheeks were running, his eyeglasses were spilling down in bright crystal drops, flesh-colored streams fell from his shining fingertips, he was dissolving in the rain. In ripples of blue and flesh and tan and black he flowed into the shine of the tar. For a moment on an empty parking lot a bright puddle gleamed, but then the rain washed it away.

  ALICE, FALLING

  Alice, falling, sees on the top shelf of the open cupboard a jar bearing the label RASPBERRY JAM, a yew-wood tea caddy with brass fastenings and a design of handpainted plants and flowers on the lid, and a tin of lemon snaps: the dark green top shows in the center an oval containing a colored head of Prince Albert. On the bottom shelf Alice sees a porcelain dessert plate with a gilt border and a center panel showing a young man in a tilted tricorne, red jacket, and white breeches, standing beside an oak tree; a bread knife with an ivory handle carved to show a boy holding wheat in his arms; and a silver-plated cream jug with a garland of silver-plated leaves and berries encircling the base. So slowly is Alice falling that she has time to take in all the details, to note the pink thistles on the lid of the tea caddy and the yellow buttons on the red jacket of the man on the dessert plate, to observe the faint reflections of her face above and below the label on the jar of raspberry jam.

  Alice does not know how long she has been falling, but when she looks up she has the sense of a great shaft of darkness stretching interminably upward. In the alien tunnel-world she tries to think of the bright upper world, where her sister sits on a bank, under a tree, reading a book without pictures or conversations, but as she falls deeper and deeper it becomes harder for her thoughts to reach so high, as if each thought is a heavy rope that has to be hurled upward in the act of falling. And gradually, as she falls, a change comes about: the mysterious shaft or vertical tunnel through which she is falling begins to seem familiar to her, with its cupboards, its shelves, its lamplit bumps and hollows, while the upper world grows shadowy and strange; and as she falls she has to remind herself that somewhere far above, suddenly the air is blinding blue, white-and-yellow daisies grow in a green field, on a sloping bank her sister sits reading in sun-checked shade.

  The dark walls of the shaft are faintly illuminated by globed oil lamps attached at irregular intervals to wrought-iron wall brackets: each bracket has the shape of an elongated S-curve turned sideways, and on the apex of the outermost curve sits a brass mermaid holding up a cylindrical chased-brass base with a brass adjustment knob; on the cylinder rests the globe of glass, topped by a slender glass stem. The light from the lamps permits Alice to observe the objects that abound on the walls. In addition to the cupboards with their shelves, she passes maps and pictures hung on pegs, including a black-and-white engraving of Scotland showing all the counties outlined in red, and a painting of a lion leaping onto the back of a horse: the horse’s head is twisted backward, its teeth are bared, the flared nostrils are wide as teacups, and dark red streaks of blood course along the shiny brown sides; a pair of oak bookshelves holding Twenty-five Village Sermons, Bewick’s Birds, Macauley’s History, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Life and Works of Edwin Landseer, Pope’s Homer, Coke upon Lyttleton, Rogers’ Pleasures of Memory, Sir Charles Grandison, Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, Bayle’s Dictionary, Ivo and Verena, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Gems of European Art; a barometer in a case of walnut wood shaped like an anchor: the flukes of the anchor support the glass disc, in which is pictured Neptune riding a sea horse within a circle of words (RAIN, FAIR, CHANGE, STORMY); a niche containing a marble Venus and Cupid: the winged, curly-haired boy reaches for his bow, which his seated mother holds away: her robe has slipped to her lap, and one breast is visible above his reaching arm; and a Gothic-arch-topped set of small, glass-fronted shelves on which stand a barefoot porcelain girl holding a basket of flowers over one forearm, a pincushion set in a brass wheelbarrow and stuck with hat pins ornamented with china flowers, a playing-card box with a floral border and a center panel showing a castellated mansion in Tunbridge Wells, two small oval silhouettes framed in ivory and showing, respectively, a snub-nosed girl in a bonnet and a snub-nosed boy in a flat-brimmed hat, a red glass rose with green glass thorns, and a majolica snake devouring a toad.

  Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? Alice has been falling for so long that she is beginning to grow uncertain. If the fall does end, then the vertical tunnel will be a connecting link, a transition, a bridge between the upper world and the unknown lower world; it will be unimportant in itself and, at the instant of ending, it will disappear. But if the fall never ends, then everything is changed: the fall itself becomes the adventure, and the tunnel through which she is falling becomes the unknown world, with its magic and mystery. Alice, looking about uncertainly, tries to decide whether she is on her way to an adventure or whether she is in the middle of one.

  The shaft, well, or vertical tunnel down which Alice is falling has irregular walls of hard earth mixed with outcroppings of rock: granite, feldspar, and basalt. The hard earth is mostly dry, with occasional moist patches; here and there a trickle of dark water zigzags down, passing the edge of a map, slipping behind a cupboard’s open door. Some of the cupboards have small dishes on top, placed back against the wall, as if to catch dripping water. The tunnel is a comfortable width for falling: Alice falls without fear of striking the
walls, yet at any moment she can reach out and remove a jar from a shelf or adjust a tilted picture. Alice wonders how the shelves are reached from below. At first she imagines a very long ladder, but this presents difficulties even if the tunnel has a bottom, for how would such a long ladder get into such a narrow space? Next she imagines small openings in the walls, through which servants can enter the tunnel, but she sees no openings, no doors. Perhaps the answer is small birds who fly up from below, or from nests hidden in the darkness. It occurs to Alice that there may be another answer: the jars, the pictures, the maps, the lamps have always been here, unchanging. But how can that be? Alice, as she falls, feels a little frown creasing her forehead.

  Falling, always falling, Alice closes her eyes and sees her sister on the bank under a tree, reading a book without pictures or conversations. The bank slopes down to a pool with reeds; the sun-shot shadow of the tree, a thick beech (Fagus sylvatica), trembles on the water. Circles of sun and shade move on her sister’s hands. Deep in her book, Alice’s sister scarcely hears the stir of leaves overhead, the distant cries of the shepherd boy, the lowing of the cattle, the rustle of Alice’s dress. Gradually she becomes aware of a disturbance beside her; it is Alice, restless as always. It’s difficult, thinks Alice’s sister, to have a younger sister who won’t ever sit still and let you read. Although Alice’s sister is determined to keep her eyes fixed on the page, she feels that her attention has already been tugged away, it’s as if she is being pulled out of a dream, the words are nothing but words now; irritably she places her finger at the end of a line. Raising her eyes, she is surprised to see Alice chasing a white rabbit across a field. With an impatient sigh, Alice’s sister reaches into her pinafore pocket and removes a scrap of blue ribbon, which she places in her book before closing it. She rests the book carefully against a bare root. She then rises to her feet, brushing off her dress with sharp little flicks of the backs of her fingers, and begins to walk quickly after Alice through the field of daisies. When she comes to the rabbit hole under the hedge she stops and crouches down, pushing away the hedge branches, careful not to kneel on the ground. “Alice!” she calls, looking down into the dark hole. “Alice, are you there?” There is no answer. The hole is just large enough for her to enter, but it is very dirty, and very dark. For a while she looks down thoughtfully into the dark. Then she raises her head; in the distance she hears the tinkle of sheep bells; the sun burns down on the tall grass; reeds stir at the edge of the pool; under the leaning beech, sun and shade tremble on the grass, on the closed book, on a purple wildflower beside the bare root.

  Down, down, down. She can’t really see too much, down there in the dark. She can see the hem of her dress outspread by the wind of her slow falling, and the dark earthen wall of the vertical tunnel, broken here and there by eruptions of rock. The upper view is better, but it makes Alice dizzy: raising her eyes, and bending back her head, she can see the ocher bottom of a cupboard, and higher up, on the other side of the wall, the shadowy underside of a bookshelf supported by two wooden brackets shaped like elephant heads with uplifted trunks. Still higher up she sees a dim glow passing into upper darkness; the glow is from a lamp concealed by the cupboard. When Alice looks down again, she sees the top of a new object rising into view: a strip of dark wood carved with wooden leaves and wooden bunches of grapes. Beneath the strip of carved wood a glimmering mirror appears. Alice sees, at the top of the glass, her shiny black shoes with their narrow black ankle-straps and the bottoms of her blue stockings. The large mirror in its heavy frame of carved mahogany is shaped like a shield. In the dim glass Alice sees, as she falls, the outspread hem of her yellow dress, and then the bottom of her white pinafore with its blue stripe along the bottom border, and then the two pinafore pockets, each with a blue stripe along the top: one pocket holds a white handkerchief. And as if she is standing at the side of a stairway, watching someone appear at the high landing and start to descend, Alice sees in slow succession the white cotton belt, the puffed shoulder sleeves, the outspread yellow-brown hair, the dark, worried eyes under the dark eyebrows, the tense forehead; and already the shiny black shoes and blue stockings and pinafore pockets have disappeared, the bottom of the mirror is rising higher and higher, all at once the top of her head with its thick combed-back hair vanishes from view: and looking up she sees the bottom of the mirror rising higher and higher, floating away, slowly dissolving in the dark.

  If only, Alice thinks to herself suddenly, I could let myself go! If only I could fall! For she feels, in her falling, a tension, as if she is holding herself taut against her fall. But a true fall, Alice thinks to herself, is nothing like this: it’s a swoon, a release, it’s like tugging at a drawer that suddenly comes unstuck. Alice, as she falls, is tense with alertness: she holds herself in readiness, though for what she isn’t certain, she looks around eagerly, she takes in everything with sharpened awareness. Her fall is the opposite of a sleep: she has never been so awake. But if I were truly falling, Alice thinks to herself, then I would let myself go, myself go, myself go.

  It occurs to Alice that she’s of course dreaming. She has simply fallen asleep on the bank with her head in her sister’s lap. Soon she will wake up, and the tunnel, the cupboards, the maps, the mirror, the jar of raspberry jam, all will vanish away, leaving only the bank of sun-patched shade, the sunny field, the distant farmyard. But suppose, Alice thinks to herself, the bank too is a dream? If the bank is a dream, then she will wake up somewhere else. But where will that be? Alice tries to think where she might wake up, if she doesn’t wake up with her head in her sister’s lap. Maybe she will wake up in Lapland, or China. But if she wakes up in Lapland, or China, will she still be Alice, or will she be someone else? Alice tries to imagine another Alice, dreaming: the other Alice has short brown hair, likes rice pudding, and has a cat called Arabella. But mightn’t this Alice also be a dream? Who then is the dreamer? Alice imagines a series of Alices, each dreaming the other, stretching back and back, farther and farther, back and back and back and back and back.

  On the afternoon of July 4, 1862, a boating party of five was to be seen on the Isis, heading upriver from Oxford to Godstow. It was a cloudless blue day. Heat-haze shimmered over the meadows on both sides of the water. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematical tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, and deacon of the Church of England, having changed from the black clergyman’s clothes he always wore in Oxford to white flannel trousers, black boots, and a white straw boater, sat facing the back of his friend Robinson Duckworth, who rowed stroke to Dodgson’s bow. In the stern, facing Duckworth, sat the three Liddell sisters, daughters of the Dean of Christ Church: Edith, age 8; Alice, age 10; and Lorina, age 13. The girls, seated on cushions, wore white cotton frocks, white socks, black shoes, and hats with brims. In the boat stood a kettle and a large basket full of cakes; on river expeditions Dodgson liked to stop and take tea in the shadow of a haycock. “The story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder,” Duckworth recalled some years later, “for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied: ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’” Twenty-five years later Dodgson recalled: “I distinctly remember now, as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” He remembered the stillness of that afternoon: the cloudless blue sky, the watery mirror of the river, the tinkle of drops falling from the oars. Mrs. Hargreaves—as Dodgson always referred to Alice, after her marriage—also recalled the day sharply: the blazing summer afternoon, the heat-haze shimmering over the meadows, the shadow cast by the haycocks near Godstow.

  Alice is growing thirsty, and as she falls slowly past a cupboard she opens the doors. She sees a bottle labeled GINGER BEER and grasps it as she falls, but the bottom of the bottle catches on the edge of the shelf and the bottl
e slips from her fingers. Alice covers her ears, widens her eyes, and opens her mouth to scream. But she sees the bottle of ginger beer falling lazily in front of her and not plunging down like a stone in a well. The bottle is tilted like the hand of a clock pointing to ten; at once Alice reaches out and seizes the bottle firmly. When she brings it close to her face she sees with disappointment that there is scarcely a swallow of ginger beer left. She wonders how long the bottle has been sitting on the shelf, for it simply won’t do to drink from an old bottle, or one that has been used by someone else. She will have to speak to the housekeeper, if she ever finds one. How neat and clean the shelves are! The housekeeper must have a fine feather duster. But it must be a very long feather duster, to reach so high. Alice feels that her thoughts are growing confused, and without another moment’s hesitation she raises the bottle to her lips and swallows the ginger beer. “Why,” Alice says to herself in surprise, “this isn’t ginger beer at all! It is nothing but soda water! I shall certainly have to speak to someone about this. Fancy if all labels meant something else, so that you never knew what you were going to eat. Please, Miss, would you care for more buttered toast? And out comes roast duck and dumplings. But that isn’t what I mean, exactly.” Alice is no longer certain what she means, exactly; when she looks up she can see the cupboard vanishing in the dark. As she falls past another cupboard, she manages to place the bottle inside. At the last moment she realizes that the label is still not right, since the bottle is now empty. But, Alice thinks to herself as the cupboard rises into the dark, it isn’t as wrong as it was before.