Among the Wonderful (38 page)
Read Among the Wonderful Online
Authors: Stacy Carlson
From invisible perches they sang single long notes and wavering trills. The juncos twittered past again and added
chuups
and
chips
to their recital. Thrushes dropped reedy whistled spirals, which floated down in loose coils and lay among the leaves. Birds sang as they flew, trailing banners behind them. Small choruses came from the shadows, while a puffed-up robin, which Guillaudeu did not remember seeing before, hopped just ahead of them, posing dramatically for his familiar aria. The air brightened quickly and the chorus intensified. Every molecule of air seemed to be used for song. Each exhaled breath was swept up by feathers, transformed into music. Lilian Kipp’s upturned face met the cacophony straight-on, eyes closed. In an action Guillaudeu never dreamed he was capable of, he placed his hands lightly on each of her shoulders and delivered a kiss to her cheek.
She smiled and did not open her eyes. “Your mustache!” she murmured. “Listen.”
And they did, until the day was simply day again and the birds’ work was done.
“I do wish I could stay here. From what people are saying,
Barnum’s got some tricks up his sleeve,” Lilian Kipp remarked as they walked away from the aviary. “It would be such fun to find out what happens, but I’ve got to get home.”
“Home?” This word left him at a loss. “To your hotel?”
“No. Home.” Lilian Kipp smiled. “To London.”
The idea that she would leave had not occurred to him.
“I leave in three days,” she added.
“What! Why?” Guillaudeu sputtered. “So soon?”
“According to the schedule of the HMS
Providence.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? We haven’t — We were just —”
Lilian Kipp straightened her skirt and tightened her shawl around her shoulders. “Why would I want to ruin a perfectly lovely evening? If I had told you, we never would have had such a wonderful time.”
He stared into her eyes until he understood she was right. She stepped closer and faced him squarely.
“I know you are a New World species,” she said. “But perhaps migratory? Passage on the HMS
Providence
wouldn’t be the most difficult thing to come by.”
She regarded him unabashedly and for a moment he saw the voyage with perfect clarity, standing with her on the upper deck, watching a seabird glide against a thickly overcast sky and the open sea spread beneath them, dividing the world cleanly without the obstacle of land.
“I couldn’t possibly.” He was out of breath. His voice was tight. He gestured helplessly at the museum. “My life’s work.”
“It was a ridiculous idea,” she finished briskly. “I knew it was. I just thought I’d articulate it. I don’t know why, other than I enjoy your company. Now walk me to the hotel, Emile, please?”
He delivered her there and they promised to meet again after her day’s engagements. She disappeared into the hotel foyer and by the time Guillaudeu had reached his dark apartment building, the day was bright and he had thought of a dozen things he wanted to tell her.
The tribesman and his brother walked for twenty days, the tribesman marking their path and the keeper guarding the bundle and singing, always singing. They walked across wet savanna, eating goose eggs until the land dried to dusty earth. They walked between termite mounds as tall as trees and made their way into woodland of unfamiliar trees where silent birds followed them from high in the canopy. The tribesman’s mind grew darker, but the keeper’s shone more brightly. The keeper watched the birds above their heads. Good companions, he said, nodding. Good
.
They waded through open fields of wild grasses growing higher than their heads. The tribesman worried that snakes of this unknown country hid at their feet. His brother stopped, half enveloped by the grass. He turned to the tribesman. Brother. The sea shifts under the wind just like these grasses, creating patterns and signs for us to read. Like the clouds, the keeper continued, except that we can immerse ourselves in the water’s moving. He would not stop talking about the sea, but instead of comforting the tribesman with his confidence, the keeper’s words frightened him. What of the people? he asked the keeper. They will be expecting us back. From the direction we went, they think we are at Nourlangie, a two-day journey from home. The keeper dismissed this idea with a wave of his hand. The people do not understand what I understand, he hissed, and went on through the grass
.
It was the only time in his life that the tribesman heard his brother disparage the people, and even recalling it now, from the distance of continents and ocean, the tribesman shudders. As the brothers continued their journey, the keeper spoke incessantly of the sea’s mysteries. It contained, he insisted, the answers to all their concerns. Brother, I dreamed of our people living near the sea. We did not have to move every season; we lived in one place. I have seen it already. When he heard the keeper’s words, the tribesman’s heart screamed in pain, and it screams now, as he lies on his pallet covered
with two blankets and the wool coat given to him by the skin-and-bones man. He shivers, clutching the bundled mulga root to his chest
.
He slips into the song and pouring rain immediately drenches him. Of course, Gudjewg: the flooding time. He tilts back his head and lets the sweet water fill his mouth. Water cascades down the many faces of the stone, flooding the savanna, sending goanna, snakes, and possums into the trees, where they are hunted by eagles or the people. Thunder reverberates across the yellow-gray sky, echoes off the cliffs and back across the wetlands. This abundance fills the tribesman with joy as he sings. He sees tender shoots rising out of the water, sees the tightly curled fronds that will become great lily pads and the plump, rosy buds of lotus flowers. In the distance, he sees the aunts and grandmothers, bare to the waist, and barely covered above except for great bark hats that stream water behind them. They wade slowly across the flooded plain to the sedgeland where the geese are nesting. They squat, gathering the big eggs and setting them carefully in baskets. The tribesman strains to hear their laughter until he is trying so hard to hear beyond the monsoon that he is no longer singing, and he is back in his room at the museum, terrified of the cold, of the walls all around him. He waits for a sign until he cannot bear the emptiness, and then he waits for his breath to return so he can start the song again
.
Finally, after scouring the
Herald
, the
Evening Post
, and most of the
Subterranean
, I found the listing. I saw it only because its small headline was posted underneath the death announcement of one Nicholas Willard. Nicholas, aged ten years, had recently met his end by leaping (for what purpose?) into a large bin of grain on his family’s farm in Newholm, Kentucky. Before he could leap out again, he was smothered to death by a fresh load from the harvester, operated by his father. Was he America’s youngest suicide? Or simply the victim of his own exuberance, killed by love of leaping? Was his father a murderer? Even if the law did not call him so, what did his own heart say as he lay in his bed at night? And how did the report of young Willard come to be listed in the
Subterranean
, a workingman’s newspaper whose aim was the glorification of the agricultural life, not its many perils?
After perusing the papers hour after hour, I had given up any hope of understanding the logic that governed their layout. Notices for the latest inventions in India Rubber ran next to announcements for a newly revised
Atlas for the Geography of the Heavens
, published by London’s Royal Academy of Sciences. The article describing street repair schedules in the fifth ward bumped margins with an editorial written by the mayor of the city in which he took on a peculiarly intimate tone to announce plans for a great municipal park that would not be finished for two decades.
The museum had been closed for three days. The first I spent celebrating with Maud and the rest of the residents of the fifth floor. Then, when we learned that despite the wording of our contracts, our “vacation” had no guarantee of recompense, the celebration turned sour. Jacob and Matthew had drunk themselves into a stupor in Maud’s parlor and no one but I could move them. In the morning they arrived for breakfast with bruises on both of their faces and they would not speak to each other.
I spent the second morning cleaning my apartment and airing bedding on the roof. I soaked my feet in the last of my salts and read the latest installment of
Barnaby Rudge
in the
Herald
, reprinted in honor of Dickens’ recent visit to America. While strolling in the museum after lunch I saw Beebe across the street, kneeling in the chapel yard. I watched him dig in the soil next to the chapel steps; no doubt he was transplanting some seedling or other now that the weather had warmed fully to spring. After a few minutes he saw me and came across Broadway. He joined me in the empty museum, and we walked together for a while. Our time together was slightly awkward; without the crowds wreaking havoc around us, with the museum so quiet it was almost invisible to us, what, really, did we have to talk about? But it was pleasant enough, this man beside me, although I wished he were taller.
That evening I joined a group in Maud’s parlor for our usual pastime. Thankfully, Matthew and Jacob had recovered themselves to the best of their ability and even indulged us after the game by singing a rather astonishing operatic duet from
The Barber of Seville
.
During this third morning, my time had been entirely consumed by newspapers. The listing that I now underlined with my pencil announced a meeting to be held tonight at Niblo’s Garden:
The New York Alliance of Actors and Costume-Makers meets at its usual location for its biweekly gathering at nine o’clock, immediately following the half past six performances
. I had never expected to find a giants’ guild, but I had even given up on finding an organization of acrobats, albinos, clairvoyants,
or human anomalies of any kind at all. Until now, the closest match I had found was the button-makers’ alliance.
Since my confrontation with Miss Crawford, I had been thinking incessantly of how to remedy the issue of the Aztec Children. Maud and I alternated caring for them to the best of our limited ability. We had no way to fathom how deeply their minds were contaminated by illness; all we could do was gauge the patterns of emotion that flitted across their faces like cloud formations. They were unaccustomed to human kindness. They seemed most comfortable spending their waking hours sitting together, usually with their arms entwined around each other, rocking gently, sleeping, and occasionally communicating with each other using an invented language of clucked syllables and intricate gestures. We called the boy Henry and the girl Susan. They were a doleful pair. The only time I saw them smile was once when we brought them chocolate cake.
Thus far, I hadn’t found the solution to their dilemma. The only idea that had come to me was to have a talk with Barnum myself. I wanted to prepare, however, for such an encounter, and this Alliance of Actors seemed to be my best prospect.
It was hours until the meeting, and I was becoming impatient with the other residents of the fifth floor. I gathered up my True Life History and went downstairs to the aviary, for a change of view.
Even the birds seemed to sense that the routines of the museum were disrupted. The aviary was somewhat stuffy so I opened a window before slipping into the mesh tent. Most of the creatures were invisible among the potted trees, but occasional flurries of chirping gave them away, and a few sparrows hopped among the bark chips on the ground. I sat carefully on one of the wrought-iron benches and looked upward into the trees. Several nests were visible among the branches; life goes on and on, doesn’t it? No matter where you are.
Without their usual work, Maud and the others had fallen into a disappointing pattern. All they did was lounge around
in their dressing gowns and sip spirits, smoke their pipes, and talk endlessly about the same subjects: aches and pains, people they once knew, one another, themselves. The fact that I was no different made it even more irritating to be near them. We had all chosen this profession in one way or another, even if our deformities made it seem like the only life available to us. Didn’t they all remember, as I did, the exact moment they chose it for ourselves?
How could I have resisted them? By the time Methuselah and Beatrice Jones stepped out of their filigreed carriage and came through our gate in Pictou, our sideshow had been shut down for eight months and Mother and I inhabited the farm like the ghosts of an earlier generation. It wasn’t even a farm anymore. Now we had enough to buy everything from the mercantile in town and we’d sold all the animals except three laying hens and let the kitchen garden go to seed. It was summer when they came for me; Father hadn’t been home in four days. At the height of the season he spent nights on one of the boats, which was just as well for us since he hated to see me, and Mother hated him for that. The changes, first mine, then his, had corroded her spirit and now she lurked around the empty farm pretending she could still care for me when it was obvious she had nothing left to give
.