Among the Wonderful (16 page)

Guillaudeu walked away from Barnum’s office holding his breath, feeling as if he were underwater, not remembering how he’d responded to Barnum’s monologue, or how he had extricated himself in the end, only that he wanted to go home. He emerged from the back hall into the crowded public entryway where the river of museum visitors flowed thickly from William’s ticket booth to the marble stairway. The crowd chattered and formed small whirlpools: families, elderly gentlemen, young girls wearing feathered and silk hats, graceful or tattered dresses. A hive, he’d said. A puzzle. A steam engine. But it’s not a puzzle, because there is no solution; the farther in you go, the greater the mystery. He pushed his way against the current of the incoming crowd and burst onto the street gasping for air.

In City Hall Park birds perched in the maples. Real birds. Robins.
Turdus migratorius
, going about the usual business of building a nest, following the natural law of seasons. Girls pushed carts down the street. These vendors operated under the same natural laws, gathering clams according to the tide, buying corn from people who plucked the ears under a harvest moon. He looked back but the museum was no longer visible through the trees. He continued up Broadway. Produce, picked from gardens. Fruit from orchards. These people lived their lives without a thought for Chinese puzzles and museums of deception and perverted nature. These streets operate under the universal laws of survival, honest
livelihood, and praise of nature’s inviolate order. He turned onto Franklin Street. He said hello to Saul and bought an apple. He ignored three small boys squatting on the sidewalk throwing dice.

Fitting his key into the lock of the building door, his stomach queased. He could stand to be in the apartment, but only if he did not allow himself to think. He could sleep at night, if he did not allow himself to dream. He could work at the museum, if he resisted the changes Barnum engendered. He leaned against the closed door. He felt that he could not go on, but he wanted more than anything to sleep so he pushed ahead, enduring the flickering memory of his dead wife in the shadows.

In the bedroom, he lay down his coat and hat and took off his shoes. He went to the kitchen and started water boiling in the small kettle. He sliced the apple. He unwrapped some cheese from the icebox, and in a few minutes he poured the tea and sat down.

Professors! What fools Barnum had made of them all. And all the hundreds of Guillaudeu’s specimens, the result of a life’s work, now possessed by a false museum and subject to the whim of a madman. He could not bear to think of the animals for long because his mind imbued them with the energy of a trapped herd, charging and hedging in a desperate attempt to outrun a wildfire.

Lusus naturae
. The words came suddenly to him as he lay on his back in his cold bed. Nature’s sense of humor. Guillaudeu stared through the blue night at the ceiling. But wasn’t humankind itself nature’s greatest joke? Created, apparently, in the image of the Divine, man could perceive, even conjure, the weightiest questions: What is the meaning of a life’s work? What is the correct path through this crooked world? But unlike the Creator, whose Divine omniscience leads to decisive, righteous action, man can never answer his own questions with certainty. Guillaudeu lay pondering this for some time in the dark before he realized that no good would come of such an inquiry. He shut his eyes tightly, but his mind had awakened fully. Sleep was no longer possible.

In his socks he stood before the wooden case of books in what used to be his parlor. He regarded them as beloved companions and ran his index finger along the spines, which raised a tiny plume of dust. He sneezed. His finger stopped on a slim volume,
Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick
. Edie Scudder had given him the book for his birthday countless years ago. It contained, among other essays, Linnaeus’ famous inaugural speech, given to the students at Uppsala. Guillaudeu had read only the opening paragraphs before discarding the book; he’d not been interested in an oration “On the Necessity of Traveling in One’s Own Country.” But now, partly out of regret for his quarrel with Edie, and partly out of genuine desire for distraction, he pulled the book smoothly from the shelf. He walked into the kitchen, sat at the window, and lit a candle to read by.

Linnaeus’ words stung. Guillaudeu considered himself anything but an explorer. Any of his own accumulations of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, had been gleaned only in his workrooms, from the bodies of his specimens and his books. Surely this was not the ethereal, impotent specter of Reason that Linnaeus described, or was it? The imagined disapproval of the great taxonomist’s ghost burned Guillaudeu’s pride, but as he read on, the figure of Carl Linnaeus emerged as more and more amiable. Yes, he tramped the mountains
of the northernmost reaches of the European continent, but his aim (and it was obsessive) was to
name
. To create order from chaos. To incorporate species into his newly created but robust taxonomy. Venturing into the unknown, he procured the evidence for the greatest system science would ever see. As he read, Guillaudeu gradually stopped comparing elements of his own life unfavorably with those of Linnaeus. Tales of rugged Lapland, the forests of Dalecarlia, and the groves of Gothland engulfed him. They were journeys into places so strange and magical to the ear that he could hardly believe that to Linnaeus, they were simply travels in his own country. Even as his eyes blurred and his head nodded closer to the page, he followed Linnaeus through field and valley.

He awoke to the shouts of men as they unloaded crates in front of Saul’s grocery. He’d fallen asleep at the table with his arms folded across the pages of Linnaeus. Groggy, he closed the book and stared for a while out the window at the men, all three of them barrel-chested and laughing. Saul appeared, wearing the apron Guillaudeu had never seen him without. The grocer looked up at the sky, marking the advent of another day on Franklin Street.

Guillaudeu rose stiffly, working the knot out of his neck, and went to the bedroom. In the back of his wardrobe he found his old canvas satchel, its buckles tarnished with disuse. He traded his twill trousers for thicker ones. From a drawer he pulled a woolen undershirt and a scarf, which he folded into the satchel. Back in the kitchen, from the icebox, he put a wedge of cheese wrapped in newspaper, two apples, half a pound of smoked sausage wrapped in paper, and a loaf of bread into the satchel. He turned in a circle, thinking of what else he might need. He had no idea. Panic rose in him, spraying the inside of his head with sparks. He ignored it. He put Linnaeus in the satchel. He looked down. The shoes he wore, the same old brown leather Spencers he wore to work, were his most comfortable. He had no others more suited. From his bureau drawer he removed what money he had, folding the bills and funneling the coins into a leather purse that had been Scudder’s, and putting that in the inside pocket of his overcoat. How did he come to have that purse? He
could not remember his own history. He buckled the satchel and put on his tweed cap. Later, he would think of a hundred other things he should have brought, but as he left his home it felt deliciously simple. Hoist the satchel onto his shoulder, turn the key, turn away.

Standing on the corner of Franklin and Broadway that early in the morning, all the carriages and people moved southward as he had done every day for many years. He watched twenty horse-drawn coaches pass by, two omnibuses, and several carriageless riders. Hundreds of bobbing hats and ladies’ shawled or bonneted heads walked downtown, toward the museum, where an office full of his own work waited for him to take it up again. Indeed, he leaned southward, his body starting on its customary track, his mind pushing at the threshold of his daily duties: Which specimens needed care? Did the old cameleopard need extensive hide repair, or was it just getting too old to display? Guillaudeu had noticed it was losing pieces of its coat. He’d need to fumigate it somehow, but how would he —

Guillaudeu walked straight across Broadway, keeping his eyes fixed on Franklin Street sneaking narrowly eastward as if behind Broadway’s back. He was nearly struck by a hackney cab but he didn’t notice. All he felt was fear as he resisted the undertow that would drag him toward the museum. But when he emerged on the other side of Franklin he was suddenly bathed in the light that fell between buildings and he smiled, his face contorting out of its usual creases and angles as he walked into the unknown.

Guillaudeu harbored just two memories of his first day on New York Island. Unlike the predictable images evoked by the Cosmorama salon’s sturdy miniature Paris, these memories shimmered and dissolved; they shape-shifted across the years, and although it wasn’t terribly often that Guillaudeu thought of them, when he did his interpretations inevitably included speculation and unrequited doubt.

He did not remember disembarking from the massive sailing ship that had carried him across the sea. Much later he knew it must have been on one of the piers near Fulton Street. Of the man from the ship who led him into the city, out of kindness or some other motive he did not know, he recalled only the man’s squeezing grip on his hand. It was daytime, he remembered that, and he was very small. Perhaps the man had been a sailor, home after his long voyage. Or he could have been headed to a tavern for the evening, and would return to the ship to sleep.

They must have walked north up Pearl Street, because they ended up deep in the Points, maybe near Cross and Orange. Now, white-haired, with his satchel over his shoulder, and propelled by some obscure but certain need, Guillaudeu walked boldly toward that intersection.

During the years that Guillaudeu had lived in New York, the Points had blossomed into their bloodiest five-petaled glory. The district’s filth now had international standing, and the whole place was buoyed by its own feral pride, which
would have easily deflected Guillaudeu had he not been determined to see a certain building that now revealed itself farther down the block. If Linnaeus could scale mountains, he told himself, then surely an old man could walk another half a block.

This was the only part of the city that had been rebuilt with timber after the great fire, and not by the most skilled carpenters, judging by the precarious angles of some roofs and doorways. There were grocers on every corner, but he saw no sign of food in their windows. Men with faces shadowed by wide-brimmed hats brushed past him, and he heard the hum of voices coming from inside shacks and clapboard warehouses.

The building was still there. Its unmistakable brick façade, notched in the Dutch style, loomed. Guillaudeu stood before it, searching the building for the word that had left the indelible memory, but the sign was long gone.

But I’m not an orphan!
He had screamed when he saw the wooden sign swinging lightly on its two hooks. The word was in English, but the French was similar enough that he knew. The man tightened his grip on Guillaudeu’s small hand. That man could have been laughing, or his eyes could have been resigned, even sad. As the two of them stood there, a woman rose inside the building and moved toward the worn door. She was silhouetted by small lamps that hung on sconces behind her. This was all he saw before he wriggled around, twisting his captor’s arm and flailing against him.

“It’s better than nothing,” the man whispered in French as Guillaudeu writhed against him. He finally bit the man’s hand and ran.

Now he stepped closer to the old brick orphanage. Its two wide windows were glassless holes. The front porch was missing planks and the awning was held by untrustworthy supports. With the sense that he was testing fate, or at least trespassing upon the sacrosanct boundary of memory, he walked up the steps to the narrow porch. The boarded-up door and wooden windowsills were burned to charcoal along
their edges. After the fire, the city had rebuilt itself so dizzyingly quickly that husks like this were rare artifacts. He ran a finger along the vertical edge of one window.

“That’s just about far enough, son.” The growl could have come from the walls themselves; there was something singed, both fallen and constant, in it. “Just be on your way.”

“I mean no harm,” Guillaudeu said weakly.

“But you bring it anyway, don’t you?”

A man disengaged himself from the shadows.

“Scared people bring harm. Usually upon themselves.”

The man’s bright blue eyes gleamed from under thick black brows. With those eyes, his rounded features, and full gray beard, in another life he could have played the part of Irving’s Saint Nicholas. But here, in a decrepit cloak that he had pulled aside to display a handle-less blade at his belt, the man’s potentially jovial face instead seemed to mock credulity itself.

“I know this place,” Guillaudeu said softly, aware that he was in danger but strangely calm. Could he have grown into a man like this if the circumstance of his arrival to this country had shifted ever so subtly? For a moment he reeled in the chaos of the world: Everyone, without exception, is simply an accumulation of choice and chance; each president, each pauper, each Phineas T. Barnum. And chance, it seemed to him, appeared more often than choice. He was a puppet in someone else’s hand.

“Well I live here now,” said the man in the shadows.