Among the Wonderful (43 page)

Barnum raised up his arms. “You can guess the rest of that story!”

When the applause subsided, Barnum returned to the podium. He peered over the heads of his employees and patrons. “I trust that you now understand that my relationship with this enterprise is one of unswerving belief. Mr. Beebe, have you gotten the idea?”

“The only idea that came to mind during your delirious rant is that this place will no longer be the means of my livelihood.”

The other ushers had moved away from him, and he reddened visibly as he spoke. You are already fading from me, Beebe.

“I believe your exhibits are amoral, blind to human dignity, and in many cases mean-spirited. I will have nothing more to do with them, or you.” Beebe turned stiffly and walked through the crowd. There. It is done. You yourself have closed the door between us.

“So be it,” Barnum intoned. “The museum does not ask for approval.”

Because of my height I could follow Beebe’s route through the crowd as he left Barnum’s meeting, and his employ. He weaved between citizens. Some recognized him as the speaker and moved aside, and some ignored him so he had to push against them to gain passage. When he reached the
park’s wrought-iron fence and the relative spaciousness of the street he broke into a run. Good-bye, Beebe. I kept his bobbing head in view as long as I could but soon he disappeared southward on Broadway. Godspeed.

“And now let us turn to the matter closest at hand.” Barnum called his group to order. The journalists suddenly vied for his attention, raising their pen-tipped arms.

“Yes, Mr. Haley.”

“Harper shut down your museum eight days ago. In that time you have not spoken to the press at all. The mayor’s office cites numerous instances of lewd and obscene behavior, including the Martinetti family of acrobats, the Circassian Clairvoyant, and a group of Indians. What really happened?”

“Very good. What really happened is this: Several weeks ago, Mayor Harper attended an elite luncheon cruise around New York Harbor aboard Commodore Vanderbilt’s schooner. Also attending the luncheon were the Duke and Duchess of York, as well as a pair of German aristocrats about to join a Lyceum-sponsored paleontological expedition to Dakota. Conversation during this event was dominated by accounts of my museum. All parties had made numerous visits to see as many of the exhibits as they could, and each guest sang the museum’s praise. I believe the orang-outang was a special favorite among the royalty. The mayor was understandably annoyed that our friends from across the sea were more enamored by a popular entertainment than the city’s ports, its public grounds, its civic buildings!”

“That’s why he shut down the museum?”

“Believe me, morality and so-called lewd behavior are fabricated reasons, merely excuses. Another question? Yes, Mr. Emmett.”

“When will you reopen the museum?”

“I have a team of legal assistants hard at work as we speak. Don’t quote me on this” — here Barnum winked at the newspapermen — “but if the museum isn’t open by this Wednesday I’ll dance an Irish jig in the middle of Broadway, right in front of Saint Paul’s Chapel! And I’m not even Irish!”

The men laughed.

“Another question? Yes.”

“How will you counter Harper’s attack on your museum?”

“A-ha! You’re my kind of man, Mr. Whitman. As Mayor Harper should know by now, depriving the people of New York the entertainments they most enjoy will do nothing but fan their appetite for those very entertainments. In the time the museum has been closed, the attendance recorded at Vauxhall Gardens, the Park Theater, and Niblo’s have increased threefold. Each day a line forms outside these museum walls, even though the sign reads
SHUT
! It was an ill-advised strategy. I don’t mean to give you gentlemen any ideas, now, but he would have been much more successful plotting an assault on my personal character instead of that of my employees.” Here the newspapermen erupted in laughter. “If the good people of this city truly thought me a scoundrel, I guarantee they wouldn’t flock as they do to my enterprise.

“I was going to wait until the museum reopened its doors to make my plans public. However, because of your interest and your willingness to listen to all I have said today, I will let you in on some tremendous news. James Harper is under the backward notion that the citizens of New York City prefer to be kept apart from the diversity of human races that populate the globe. Exposure to exotic costumes and ways of life is not education in his mind. Instead, he views such exposure as
unchristian
. I do not understand it, and from the public outcry I have heard, I trust you do not understand it, either. It is the Sioux Indians who draw the largest crowds to the museum. It is our collection of African weaponry and ceremonial relics. We are a generation fascinated by the diversity of our world as we see it vicariously through the eyes of our national expeditions and glimpse it, however dimly, through the silver eyes of Daguerre.

“And so it is with the aim of augmenting this fascination and contributing to the education of my countrymen that I announce what will become known as the largest and most comprehensive gathering of disparate, uncivilized races ever
seen on American soil; no diplomatic agency or scientific institution has ever done what I am about to do, either here or abroad. It is a veritable human menagerie and my greatest gift to the world thus far! It is the Grand Ethnological Congress of Nations! In just a few days time, my American Museum will become home to members of every primitive race of man now living on the globe. As we speak, representatives of the Zulu, Hindoo, Afghan, Nubian, even Esquimaux from the polar North are aboard vessels bound for New York Harbor. And that is just the tiniest hint of what will come. Prepare yourselves for this tide of humanity, for this cavalcade of Orientals. Get out your dictionaries, my good fellows, because you will need entirely new vocabularies to describe this event in your papers.

“Mayor Harper thinks the people of New York City do not want to open their eyes to the diversity of human cultures. He believes they would rather pay admission to stroll in a dull municipal park filled with man-made ponds, landscaped gardens, and footpaths designed to take them in circles. And he wants his citizens to pay for the park’s construction! I know better. I have no doubt in my mind. But you can decide for yourself. Every one of you is perfectly equipped to decide for yourself. It is upon that simple fact that all my endeavors hinge.”

As we speak, they are aboard vessels bound for New York Harbor. As we speak, Zulu, Hindoo, Nubian, Esquimaux
. I watched Barnum gesticulating and waving his arms, but what I saw were lines of fur- and hide-clad exotics marching up Broadway from the port and pouring into the museum. What I heard was myriad languages spoken at once. Chaos and thousands of dollars in revenue. Barnum described torchlight parades to
Welcome Manhattanites to A New Age of Diversity
. The audience cheered. The Congress was a brilliant, devious plan. It would draw the biggest crowds the museum had yet seen. And we would use it for leverage.

The evening after Barnum’s performance, every door in the apartments of the Wonderful was open and an incredible cacophony of voices and music met me as I came in.

Maud’s room was bright and jumbled. The white-haired albino twins were at the far end against a backdrop of purple and red rugs; the boy jerked in time with his fiddle’s tune and his sister perched on a stool with her concertina on her knee and one small foot tapping. Around them in a loose half circle sat the rest, some clapping, most cheeks flushed with liquor. An abandoned game of whist and the detritus of supper littered the table, where Maud sat talking with Clarissa, whose massive girth spilled over both sides of the chair. I was surprised to see the Aztec Children, Susan with Maud and Henry almost lost in the great landscape of Clarissa’s lap. Susan clung to Maud’s skirt, her eyes fixed on her brother, who had fallen asleep despite the terrific hubbub.

In the eight days that the museum had been shut down, Maud’s apartment had become the official parlor of the fifth floor. People brought the chairs and couches from their own rooms and some of them spent most of their time there, like the conjoined twins, who occupied their usual bench in the middle of everything.

“How did you get so many people in here so fast?” I asked Maud.

“Eight days without work is what did it. It was the fourth day when people lost the last of their inhibitions, and since
then it’s been like this. Haven’t you noticed? Look who even came out to join us.” Maud pointed across the room to where Tai Shan sat in a massive wooden chair a little separate from the others, but tapping his fingers in time to the children’s music.

“Where did that chair come from?”

“We brought it up from a display on the third floor. Placard said it was Elizabeth the First’s. Unlikely. Thomas! There you are, you rascal. Have some cake. We were just speculating about what our old friend Mr. Olrick might be saying, wherever he is at the moment.”

“Gloating, I’m sure. He was certain Barnum’s museum wouldn’t last.”

“The museum will be open again within the week. I have no doubt,” Maud said. “Barnum is losing too much money to enjoy this kind of attention for long, although I’m sure he has enjoyed it. The newspaper stories have been spectacular.”

“Maud, did you see in the papers that the Martinettis really are in the Tombs? That nephew of theirs was here again. Looking for Barnum. He said that without Barnum’s written support they wouldn’t be released anytime soon.”

Maud shook her head, but I could see she wanted to be swept up in the festivities around her, so I let it go. I thought of Beebe, and he appeared again in the rough-hewn church, another world, this time extinguishing candle after yellow candle.

Oswald La Rue, Living Skeleton and supposed father of the albino twins, rose from a couch and joined his children where they played. Mr. La Rue and Clarissa had indulged the public, and greatly enhanced their professional careers, by “marrying” each other in a public ceremony in the museum’s theater, becoming New York City’s first thin-man-fat-lady couple. Their actual relationship was entirely professional and their guardianship of the twins was mysterious in origin, but the children were well groomed and relatively cheerful; no one questioned it.

Mr. La Rue clapped his bony hands as he passed like a
shadow between chairs and people. By the time he reached the twins he was dancing, kicking out his stick legs and cocking his arms with both elbows out. He leaned over and sidled side-to-side, looking like nothing other than a ghoulish marionette, with lips pulled back and the corrugations of his skull visible beneath the thinnest cover of skin. He danced his skeleton dance to the music played by two translucent, squinting children, and we all clapped, urging them faster and faster until he twirled in a tangle of loose limbs, his surrogate daughter shouting French phrases and all of us hooting and calling out for more. Amid this frenzy, in a dimming corner of my mind, Beebe snuffed out the last yellow candle and disappeared completely.

Across the room, Maud waved at me to look. Susan, the Aztec child, was clapping her hands. On her face was an expression I’d never seen: delighted eyes and a droopy smile. Maud grinned ridiculously and put her hand on the girl’s head.

Despite the raised hairs on my nape and the sudden clutch of fear behind my sternum, when the music stopped I stood up. If I didn’t speak now, I would have to endure the even more uncomfortable nagging of the idea on my conscience.

“I have a request,” I began weakly. All heads turned. “We have in our midst two children, billed as ‘Aztecs.’ ” I gestured across the room. Susan immediately lost all trace of her smile and instead stretched her mouth into an unhappy, exaggerated yawn. This was her gesture of protest, normally used when she didn’t want to eat or leave her room. Thankfully, Henry remained asleep, or else he would have mimicked his sister.

“It will not surprise you to learn, if you did not know already, that these children were acquired illegally, in a maneuver that may or may not have been an improvement to their lives. It is not my intention to make a moral judgment about all that. I am here to ask that you sign your names to a petition, to be delivered to Mr. Barnum as soon as I can meet with him. The petition requests a full-time guardian for the
children as well as regular medical appointments, as they suffer from illnesses, both of the body and mind.”

Matthew, sitting below me to the left, held out his hand. “Well, come on then. Where is this petition? Do you have a pen?”

“While we’re at it, we should appeal for guaranteed pay while the museum is closed,” said Jacob.

“It’s a bit too late for that,” I replied. “But we can do better next time. It would benefit us all,” I added, “to understand that we are more powerful together than as isolated individuals.”

“If only I were an isolated individual,” Matthew sighed, and received a sharp jab in the ribs from Jacob.

I retrieved the petition from my room and watched it pass through the hands of the Wonderful. Maud signed and gave it to Clarissa. Clarissa passed it to Oswald La Rue, who put on his spectacles and read every word before making his mark. He passed it over the table to Tai Shan.

Thomas Willoughby was the last to sign, and he returned the now-wrinkled papers to me. “I hope you take this to the Sioux, Ana. Everyone on the fifth floor stands to gain something from your petition’s success.” He bowed and extended the petition.

“Yes, the more signatures the better.”

The sound of the festivities in Maud’s parlor faded in the empty gallery. I looked for They Are Afraid of Her as I neared the encampment, but I did not see her. The elder Sioux, wearing his usual top hat and purple waistcoat, met me at the threshold. Figures stirred in their cots, and it was impossible for me to see if others sat in the recesses of their tent.

“Good evening, Miss Swift.” The man’s eyes blurred out of focus behind the smoke that rose from his pipe.

I explained the petition. The words that had struck the Wonderful as valiant, or at least promising, sounded hollow under the scrutinizing gaze of this man.