Among the Wonderful (50 page)

As he scurried happily from gallery to gallery, carrying buckets of food for the animals and random specimens for various stages, Guillaudeu kept track of the days, and then, when the numbers became manageable, the hours, until Barnum’s torchlight parade. The only thought that dampened his spirits was that Lilian Kipp would not be there to see it with him.

Lilian Kipp’s delight in Barnum’s enterprise had loosened Guillaudeu’s knotted and resistant heart. Twice a day, when he was beneath the aviary’s netted canopy, he allowed memories of her to flood his mind. As he tossed seeds along the aviary paths and trimmed the now abundant hedges, he recalled her laugh and the warm weight of her against his side after she fell asleep in the tribesman’s room. Once, he revisited the table where they had eaten supper in the rooftop restaurant and recalled, with perfect clarity, the edge of her shawl caught in the wind. The abrupt and total sadness that had then engulfed him prompted his decision to think of her only while he was in the aviary. This forcing of his mind did not work, of course, but he could not help trying to impose order where his emotions roiled in chaos. He had written to Lilian Kipp twice since she left on the ship to London but had not yet received a reply. He convinced himself that she’d
forgotten him completely. That her life in London had swept her neatly back into its routines and society, and she would never think of him again, ever.

One afternoon, sitting in his office about to begin his third letter, he counted and recounted the days. Only twelve had passed since she left, which meant she had not yet reached London! And two letters already! He flushed, crumpling the piece of paper in front of him.
What an old fool I am
.

He sat in the silence of his office and looked around. The tidy shelves of bottles and the rows of tools did not arouse the old sense of balance, peace even, that he’d always cherished. His bookshelves were mostly empty, and dust had gathered on his worktable. A few stray leaves of paper still lay on the floor near where Archer’s desk had been, and the whole room now seemed vacant, even though he inhabited it. He searched for something that would trigger the old feeling of home. Instead, for the first time, what fascinated him was the sound of the crowd as it moved into the building, as it dropped its coins into William’s hands, as it started up the marble stairway.

Carried along by the morning crowd, Guillaudeu made his way from one stage to the next. The African savanna glowed in shades of yellow, orange, and rose, with the arching black silhouettes of acacia trees painted in the foreground. The jungle scene was crowded with plants and a vertiginous backdrop that suggested the dense green landscape extended back through the museum wall. The polar stage had been built with jagged edges and the whole thing painted white and gray in the style of an ice sheet.

He looked for the carpenters but they were gone. Outside, the new transparency spanned the length of three floors and bore a luminous depiction of the earth, with several smaller scenes of the world’s exotic civilizations ringing it like a corona. To one side, a fashionable couple beheld the scene. Guillaudeu had wanted to congratulate the young designer, but he, also, was nowhere to be found. The men had disappeared. Barnum’s Congress was two days away and the whole museum, the whole city, it seemed, was poised to receive it.

He had fed all the animals and so he wandered, admiring the carpenters’ handiwork and examining exhibits he had never seen before. He felt no urge to return to his office. For the first time, he bought a paper cone of popcorn from a concessionaire. Miss Ana Swift, the giantess, glided past him, her gaze somewhere above the crowd. When he followed the sound of applause he discovered a glassblowing
demonstration in progress and he stood with the others watching the blowers spin molten, opalescent globules into bowls and slender chalices. When they finished, he turned to leave and couldn’t remember which way led to the main stairway. He walked into the next gallery not knowing what to expect, astonished that he was lost in the museum. Within minutes he had regained his bearings but not the old intimacy he had shared for so long with the place. He felt the distinct sensation that in this brief disorientation, the museum had displaced him completely, and now he was no different from any other visitor.

The Cosmorama salon had not changed at all, and he walked into its depths with relief. The dim lights hushed the crowd, and the circle of metal viewers ringed the gallery just as they’d always done. He wandered across the plush carpet, not looking into any tiny worlds but seeing the salon itself as a timeless capsule that would exist forever.

Someone beckoned to him from across the room. It was an old man, sitting alone on one of the circular velvet couches. Guillaudeu started toward him with a strange feeling and then recognized the face of his old friend. Sudden tears blurred his vision and he fought the urge to flee, but then he saw the man’s expression and he went to him.

John Scudder raised both his hands, as if presenting the salon to him.

“Emile.”

“Yes.” Guillaudeu sat down. Scudder, appearing very frail but wearing a neat maroon wool jacket and a black-and-white-striped cravat, reached over and touched Guillaudeu’s wrist.

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Yes, I suppose it is, John.”

“I knew I made the right decision.” Scudder tapped the top of Guillaudeu’s hand. “They tell me you take care of all these animals. Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Marvelous!” Scudder shook his head, smiling.

Guillaudeu found that he could not look at Scudder’s
broad, ursine face for more than a second or two. He looked at his knotted hands. He sensed Scudder regarding him.

“Do you understand now?”

“I think so, John. I’m sorry —”

Scudder raised his hand and swiped it in a short, abrupt wave. Guillaudeu had been on the receiving end of this gentle dismissal too many times to continue what he was going to say.

“I was
ready
to move on, Emile.”

“I wasn’t.”

Scudder looked around the salon. “It was time for me to retreat to my library, to let Rebecca and Edie care for me. I wanted to watch what that Mr. Barnum was going to do, but from a safe distance. You know what he has accomplished, don’t you?”

“Accomplished? He has just taken his first steps!”

“I wanted our work to be incorporated into this. To be carried forward.”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t know what you wanted, Emile.”

“You’re probably right.”

The two men leaned against the velvet cushions. The crowd emitted a gentle rustling whisper, and the shadows of people paraded across the brocade walls. Guillaudeu settled in beside Scudder and together they watched the ebb and flow of visitors who bent to look through the lenses, who traveled the world.

The Congress and the
Conflagration

I sat in my room, scribbling away on my True Life History. Compelled to record the strands of my life, I did not care that most of them did not twine together into a braid; these strands were not meant for anyone’s eyes but mine. I set down the look on Thomas Willoughby’s face as he turned away from his harpsichord for the last time. Matthew’s slumped posture when he and Jacob emerged from their bedroom each morning. Maud’s expression sitting in her booth downstairs. They Are Afraid of Her’s body, which was still bundled tightly in blankets, lying on one of the cots among the Indians. Tai Shan, eliciting awe.

“Miss Swift.” One of the carpenters stood in the doorway. Breaking the flow of images, cutting the filament between a mind’s scrawled record and reality, this man, holding a hammer, had a simple message: “They’ve come.”

I approached a group of angular, stern-faced women with the leather-bound registry under my arm. The women carried baskets and wore narrow skirts of indigo and canary yellow, their hair wrapped in scarves of the same cloth. One woman spoke for them all. The Bella Luna Sisters, from Hispaniola. I copied their names into the register and explained the communal accommodations. They shrugged and nodded and arched their elegant necks this way and that like dark brown cranes until they spotted a serviceable corner with three narrow beds.

A white-haired patriarch appeared next, followed by two
women at each end of a heavy trunk, their black hair hanging in sheets down their backs. Three children scurried along behind them chattering in English. They were Esquimaux most recently from Philadelphia, with their native costumes in the trunk. Close at their heels were more Indians, these from the northern coast of the Oregon Territory. They wore bark shawls and carried wooden boxes painted with red-and-black ovoid designs. Their manager, a red-bearded voyageur, filled out the registry and then hurried over to speak with Grizzly Adams.

And so out of thin air, Barnum’s Congress arrived. They filed to the fifth floor in a steady stream for two days, Wednesday to Friday. I set up a chair for myself, and a small table, and from there I cataloged them. Warriors from Central Africa: the thinnest, most aristocratic humans I’d ever seen. Roumanian gipsies with tiny mirrors sewn into their skirts, smoking pipes and arranging curtains around their beds. Laplanders in thick woolen pants, sweating and laughing at the beluga. I signed them in, page after page after page, satisfied by this attempt to organize such a cacophony of lives.

It was not as if I’d never seen performers of this sort — I had, of course, at almost every place I’d worked — it was the sheer number that amazed me, that struck me as wonderful, as well as the simple fact that most of them were exactly who they claimed to be. True, some had exhibited themselves in America for years, but many seemed to be new to the continent. A Saharan nomad spread his blankets on a cot beside a Japanese Yamabushi. A group of sunburned men wearing conical felt hats erected a cylindrical tent and disappeared inside. The Congress filled the beluga gallery until it was as crowded as anywhere else in the museum.

Barnum gave a short address on Thursday afternoon, shouting a welcome amid the babble of translation. He explained they would be debuting at the parade, which would begin at the museum entrance on Ann Street at precisely nine o’clock on Friday evening, and progress from there up Broadway.

I became the source of information for the Congress. They didn’t have many questions, though. No one seemed to mind the strange accommodations, and they accepted the food that appeared, carried by a dozen waiters, from the restaurant above.

These people were a new kind of nomad. I hadn’t seen it clearly until now, perhaps because I, too, am one. The city, the venue, the performances, those were all unimportant. By now there were established trade routes for the show business: Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, New York, Halifax. These people created their homes wherever they happened to be. The children of the Congress gave the clearest illustration: Two Chinese boys, the Esquimaux children, and a tiny African child had found one another among the multitude. They made a kind of playhouse underneath the beluga’s platform, with a stool and an overturned washtub for a table. A parent or two would stop by, bending down to pat the littlest one on the head before continuing on. History holds whole cultures like this, which have had to carry it all with them: their homes, their religions, the memory of where they come from. How much more interesting and skillful is this than the average American life, especially a female life, anchored in place, satisfied with one mundane perspective when a kaleidoscope is actually possible?

A group of Chinese monks arrived. Someone from Natchez, Louisiana, wearing bones around his neck and bells braided into his beard. A Pigmy. A druid. A dozen Indian elders.

By Thursday evening I was exhausted; not by keeping track of the Congress but because I’d been talked into looking after several children while their mothers went about various errands in the city. I held two on each thigh and one in my arms. They were peaceable children, content to construct a tent under my shawl and occupy it, giggling, playing patty-pan and occasionally nodding off against my back.

By the time I returned to the apartments of the Wonderful it was midnight and Maud, flushed and fuming, was pounding on the conjoined twins’ door.

“Damn them, Ana. They won’t come out!” She intensified the percussion of her fists. “I know they’re in there. I can hear them scraping around.”

A sound, muffled as if someone was shouting from underneath a pile of blankets, reached us.

“They stole my brandy,” said Maud. She stopped her banging and looked at the door thoughtfully.
“Stole
it. As if they couldn’t buy their own. It’s time for them to move on. What good are they doing anyone here?”

I lay my palm against the door. “Should I break it down?” But wars never end by invasions of kindness, do they?

“I suppose not,” Maud said. “Wouldn’t do any good. Come on, I have another bottle squirreled away. Let’s have a drink.”

An hour later, as I walked back to my room, I noticed the twins’ door was wide open. The creaking of the boards under my feet seemed to echo off the walls as I moved closer. The room was wrecked, with bedding on the floor and books and clothing scattered everywhere. I looked up and down the corridor. Where had they gone?