Among the Wonderful (25 page)

The woman took in his ragged clothes and tousled hair.

“Good morning,” he offered.

“Yes,” said the woman, brushing a brown-and-silver strand of hair away from her pursed mouth. She wagged the roll toward the gulls. He watched her.

“I don’t know why they won’t take the bread. They insist on fluttering around and endlessly bickering.” She was irritated, her voice surprisingly gruff. And British.

“Maybe they’re not hungry,” he offered.

The gulls dipped and hovered. The woman tossed the bread into the air and recoiled from the screaming tangle of gray wings that dived upon it. Guillaudeu leapt back too, shielding his head with his arms. She pulled another roll out of her handbag and started again. Without turning from the
gulls, she tore the roll in half and offered a piece to Guillaudeu. He ate it.

The ferry appeared, chugging northward toward them. The woman tossed the rest of the bread over the water and the gulls attacked it as it floated. She was older than he’d thought at first. Maybe even fifty. Her hazel eyes were attentive and her movements decisive. She looked him over again.

“I’m hoping to catch this ferry,” Guillaudeu said. He felt oddly calm, unafraid of speaking frankly. “But someone stole my money several days ago.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have anything to spare.” She brushed the crumbs from her hands and started to walk away.

“Please wait.” Guillaudeu hoped he didn’t sound too desperate. He fumbled with his satchel. He had only one thing to offer.

“Here,” he said. “This is all I have to offer.”

“A book?” She stopped, curious.

“Linnaeus.”

She came over and took the book from him. “The 1812 edition. The best one.” She opened it up and scanned a page or two. “How much?”

“Two dollars.”

“Enough for the ferry.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a deal.”

He handed over the book and took her money. For him the transaction was strangely intimate: She now held the pages that had spurred his journey in the first place, and her money would get him home.

“It’s true what he says, you know.” Guillaudeu pointed at the book. “You must have experience, real experience, to complement reason and book learning. That combination makes one a wise observer of life.”

“The combination of experience and reason
is
life,” the woman said. “Experience, reason, and perhaps a little stubbornness. Yes, that ought to do it.” She laughed then, her
face creasing to wrinkles around her eyes. “An observer of life is trapped in the margins, probably taking excessive notes.”

Struck mute, Guillaudeu helplessly returned her not-unfriendly gaze.

“What a lovely coincidence to be presented with Linnaeus by a wandering philosopher,” she said, shaking her head. Given a few more moments Guillaudeu probably would have thought of something to say, but the blast from the approaching ferry rattled his brain, and within seconds a small crowd of people poured out of the ferry landing’s tavern and streamed onto the dock. The woman hurried toward the gangway.

The whole way back, Guillaudeu stood outside, his jacket wrapped tightly around him and his cap pulled down. He watched the passing landscape and gradually the thickets, orchards, fields, and villages of New York Island lost their intricacies and shrank smaller and smaller, until they fit into a foot-long diorama and could be seen only through the lenses of a brass Cosmorama viewer.

She Stands Up Again

My wooden booth stood twelve feet high by six feet wide and five feet deep, with a door built into the side for me to duck through and a front counter the height of an average person’s waist. The two carpenters had regularly disappeared from the job, probably called to some remote region to build animal cages, so the booth had remained unfinished until now, and I had occupied it without the benefit of paint or a sign. I had requested red and gold, and it had (finally) been admirably done in pinstripes all the way around, with a kind of faux gilt around the front. At my request the sign simply read
MISS ANA SWIFT, THE WORLD’S ONLY GIANTESS
.

The counter held stacks of new lithographs and a basket of Giant’s Rings, given to visitors in exchange for a nickel. I had requested shelves underneath the front counter so I could stow a few things for my convenience: a shawl, several bottles of Cocadiel’s Remedy. On a specially built ledge at my eye level, out of sight of the visitors, I put a volume of poetry. This was a luxury I had never yet known while working, and it was a great relief to think of reading a few lines as the hours passed.

The True Life History was already fifteen pages long and swerved hopelessly back and forth in its chronology. Eventually I would revise it but for now the simple act of writing mesmerized me: the symmetry of a stately
H
, the
r’s
small plateau, the continuing scrawl that could include any fancy,
true or otherwise, that my mind could spawn. I had not written anything since my letters to you, Mother, and it was a strange relief, pouring memory into the imprecise mold of words. Writing is an imperfect alchemy. Why manufacture phrases to describe thoughts and imaginations that have nothing to do with an alphabet, with these scratched signs? Words have histories that span centuries, and what does that have to do with me? On the other hand, writing is a manifestation of our pathetic, inborn determination to leave a trace of ourselves, no matter how flimsy, to persevere beyond death. The journal is the simplest of legacies, the most intimate reflection of the supreme foolishness and arrogance of man and evidence of his most valuable illusion:
I matter
.

I recalled the recent story of Captain McCaffrey’s failed attempt to reach the North Pole. After enduring countless dreadful hardships and exposing his men to his own acute case of polar mania, McCaffrey led his crew, one after another, to icy death. Near the end, after everything else had been abandoned, the captain sacrificed the lives of his last two men in an attempt to drag a trunk full of his journals onward, over the endless ice. One year later a team of Norwegians on skis found Captain McCaffrey’s body draped dramatically over the trunk in a permanent, frozen embrace. So the journals were recovered, but the problem remains: All the valiant determination described in those pages was made ridiculous and void by the absurdity of McCaffrey’s fate.

Despite this example, I squeezed pleasure from the act of transcribing my thoughts and also the simple momentum of the pen filling page after page. I wrote as if the True Life History were my last will and testament. I hunched over the front counter of my booth, staining my fingers with ink, until the visitors came in great numbers and began to whisper, wondering what a giantess could possibly have to write about, and I hid it away.

Out on the balcony Thomas played Lanner’s Separation Waltz, one of my favorites. I affixed my gaze to the shaggy musk ox head mounted on the opposite wall and prepared to succumb to the hours. Randomly, a young couple danced
across the gallery, disregarding everyone else on earth. I followed their progress without moving my head. They bumped Pa-Ib’s glass casket and sprang away in a whirl and laughter. Envy misted my sight, but the lovers were not its object. It was Thomas who had conjured my reaction, sitting out of sight in his threadbare coat, the vagabond prodigy with ragged stubble across his chin and his eyes perhaps closed. His particular magic, his contribution to humanity floated, bodiless, on the air. It emanated from him, but it did not depend on the spectacle of his person. He had no idea of the waltzing lovers, but here they were, the consequence. He provoked the classical feelings of love and rapture, a range of emotions captured in the music of the masters. I, on the other hand, was responsible for (indeed, made my living by) the basest emotions: voyeurism, astonishment, and weird taboo. And I accomplished this by doing nothing, just providing my body.

Two hours later, this rumination led to my humiliation. It was a small leap from the effects of music to those of poetry, and from there it was a very small distance indeed to reach my beloved volume,
Collected Poems for a New Age
, on the shelf below me. I had arrived at the awful idea of sharing a few lines with the world.

Into the river of brightly colored bodies and the cacophony of voices in the gallery, I added my own. I put on my shawl, stepped out of my booth, opened the book to page seventy-three, and funneled my voice into a booming, yet, I hoped, inviting, timbre:

Christopher Smart had long been my favorite poet, partly because he produced what the world considered his finest
work only after he had been caged in a debtor’s insane asylum for years.

Under Mr. Ramsay’s tutelage I had learned oratorical techniques and had recited countless passages, mostly from Shakespeare. Though I never detected much of a response from the audience, they always gave me a polite applause, and reciting a few verses never failed to excite me. Even now I felt heat rising into my face and a nervous constriction of breath. I didn’t look up from the page, but I heard the silence spreading.

“Look at ’er!” It was the hoarse voice of an old man. “She’s red as a apple!”

“And tall as an apple tree!” a second voice responded to the call. The crowd then released an alarming amount of laughter. The sheer volume of it was more than I thought possible for a group of twenty people, and as I stood there, momentarily stunned by the wave of voices, I could hear each one individually: a woman’s cackle hovering above a child’s thoughtless squawk. And men’s voices, so many of them, all twisting together into a thick, ropy sound. Their vulgarity was a shame: The poem was actually very good, and funny, but they didn’t hear it.

Then I saw Beebe among them. He was looking straight at me, gently jostled by the crowd. He wouldn’t approach me,
would he? Don’t make it worse, Beebe. As the din quieted, I realized he was clapping. My oppressors dispersed quickly, but Beebe remained, giving applause that I appreciated until it went on too long and I gestured for him to stop.

“Was that something you wrote?”

“Oh, no, and I hadn’t even gotten to the interesting part yet.”

“I’ve been wondering when I’d see you.”

“I’m not terribly hard to find,” I snapped, suddenly aware that I was standing in a glorified box. I could just nail up the front and save people the trouble of making a coffin!

“You know, tomorrow evening the choir is performing hymns. At Saint Paul’s.”

“Oh? What’s the occasion?”

“It’s the eve of Easter Sunday.” He appeared to be examining the Giant’s Rings.

“Is it Easter again already?”

Another familiar figure entered the gallery, leading what appeared to be a miniature army. Elizabeth Crawford, patron saint of orphans. She gestured her charges toward the balcony and, catching my eye, gave a little wave and swerved toward my booth.

“Oh, Miss Swift! How do you do?” She tipped her head, which had a tiny velvet hat upon it. Beebe responded with a barely audible
Ma’am
.

“Miss Crawford. Who have you got today?”

“They’re from the Bowery Boys’ Home. Most of them” — she lowered her voice — “are
criminals.”

“Exciting,” I said.

“But I notice that even they, hardened as they are, have become quite pale in the presence of Pa-Ib.”

Miss Crawford had made it a habit to seek me out whenever she visited the museum, which was at least twice a week. She was always gracious and seemed genuinely interested in the trifles I came up with when she asked me how I fared. She curtsied gracefully and let two little boys jerk her deeper into the museum.

Beebe stood blinking at me, one of his hands jingling a handful of Giant’s Rings. “Would you like to come?”

“Where?”

“To Saint Paul’s. Our choir is quite good. And Easter is one of my favorite holy days.”

“Do you sing in it, Mr. Beebe?” Certainly, attending a church would be an abhorrent act, but the prospect of poor Beebe singing in a choir somehow melted me.

“Well, I’m not the star performer, but yes, I do my best.”

“Then I’d be honored to attend. Are you sure it’s all right with your superiors?”

“Everyone is welcome at Saint Paul’s, I can assure you.”

“I may not be able to sit in a pew,” I warned.