Jenny and Barnum (14 page)

“Better than that, they were Presbyterians. You're a Lutheran?”

The judge nodded. “And you're a Presbyterian, I take it.”

“Preachers are the same the world over,” Tom Thumb said. The three men laughed heartily together. “What did Jenny Lind think of that story?”

“She has a fine sense of the ridiculous,” said Judge Munthe. “She loves a good joke.”

Tom Thumb studied him: what he'd said didn't mean she'd read the book. “You think a lot of Jenny Lind, don't you?”

The judge's old eyes glowed. “The joy of my old age, my young friend. She is a saint and a genius, and it is an honor and joy to serve her.”

Another one, Tom Thumb thought, sitting back. With so many people saying these things about her, it was a wonder that she didn't want to be carried through the streets on a golden throne.

6.

Eighteen forty-four. Barnum was already notorious as the exhibitor of Joice Heth, George Washington's alleged mammy, and Tom Thumb, without doubt the world's smallest human being. Barnum was thirty, and he was on his way to putting together the deal of his life, acquiring the centerpiece of a veritable empire (he hoped) of wonders and fantastical delights, the American Museum on Broadway, in New York. The matter was complicated; he had unscrupulous competitors, and as usual, he was broke.

He had made bad investments with his profits from exhibiting Tom Thumb, investments so bad, in fact, that he knew he did not understand money at all. He had no respect for it, either. The Tom Thumb money had gone into a variety of enterprises, including a giant steamship, an automatic printing press—all pipedreams. Barnum was a chronic dabbler who thought a nickel in his pocket entitled him to a vacation from the labor of getting it. The result was that he leaped from one crisis to the next, never far from the obsession of money-getting. He had kept himself out of the red by going back to what he had done after he had exhibited Joice Heth and before he met Tom Thumb, buying and selling traveling tent shows in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Most of these shows barely supported themselves, much less turned a profit; the money to be made from them, such as it was, came from the buying and selling of performers' contracts, trading on the universal hope that a rare animal, like a lion or a tiger, or a curiosity, like a human skeleton (living) or a two-headed dog (dead) would turn into another bonanza like Tom Thumb. The curiosities ranged from the bizarre and disgusting (a man scalped by Indians, but who had lived) to the outright fraudulent (the Automatic Chess Master, a large wooden box, the arms of which manipulated chess pieces—the box contained a bitter, deformed creature who eventually hanged himself in Philadelphia).

As a business, traveling shows were all hit and miss, small potatoes, plagued by profit-cutting unforeseen events, like bad weather, tent fires, and the like. It was Barnum's notion to bring the best and most interesting of these wonders and curiosities under one roof at the American Museum in the nation's greatest city, New York. No one had ever tried anything like that before.

In 1844 the American Museum was owned by seventy-year-old, retiring Abner Braithewaite, who was taken by such sturdy, earlier developments as the steam engine, cotton gin, and revolving pistol—by near mid-century, all commonplaces for whatever audience Braithewaite thought he was trying to reach. In Barnum's view, Braithewaite had merely gotten old, and the world had passed him by. At one time, a steam engine, cotton gin, or revolver would have drawn crowds anywhere. What one had to do was ensure that the attractions themselves were ageless, immune to time. Braithewaite had fallen in love with technology, mass production, and interchangeable parts. Barnum, who had grown up not far from the brutal mills and factories of New England, saw machines and the power of steam as agents of human misery, not joy, freedom, and happiness.

Barnum
wanted
joy—at thirty, he knew well that that was the secret, dangerous thing about him. Heading up to Boston on the Paquet coastal steamer to connive the last of the $30,000 he needed to buy Braithewaite's museum, Barnum figured he would have to tell his nervous bankers how much like Braithewaite he planned to run the place. The truth of the matter was that the bankers weren't at all interested in what he planned to do with the property; what they cared about was that
land
, and Barnum's ability to pay their mortgages. They wanted to sink their fangs into a piece of Broadway property; for as conservative as they pretended to be, as concerned as they wanted to seem about their present-day pennies, they were really looking down the decades to the millions from Europe yet to emigrate to America. People made land valuable—Europe was filled with people eager to make the great journey across the Atlantic, the leap from past into future, from despair and certain poverty to hope and opportunity. All Barnum had to do was affix his signature, and for as long as the whole multiplying breed could retain their senses, bankers would receive from the “owners” of the American Museum, or whatever happened to be built on that site in the future, as monthly payment, little at first, then more, then more than that, down through time—forever. In the fullness of time, the property would become too valuable to be owned at all, and would pass from trusts to universities and churches, the last two institutions exempt from taxes but not mortgage payments, due and payable, month after uphill grinding month to the bankers succeeding the bankers who had indentured Barnum many generations before. Thanks to the bankers,
this
was the new civilization, the new life, the immigrants were coming to build, whether they liked it or not.

Barnum had his copy of his mortgage—and the precious certified check that went with it—in his inside jacket pocket when he stepped aboard the Paquet steamer in Boston for the return trip to New York. Already aboard were twenty nattering, pietistic Presbyterian ministers who recognized him as the villain who had fleeced the rubes with Joice Heth and was living off the earnings of the child midget, Charles Stratton, the so-called General Tom Thumb.

At dinner that evening in the salon while the steamer churned westward past Narragansett, Rhode Island, Barnum was set upon by the other seven diners at his table, all of them brothers to the black-suited, moralizing Methodist monsters who had terrorized Barnum in his childhood in Bethel, Connecticut. They started in on him at once, as soup dripped from their beards:

“Don't you think, Mr. Barnum, that using a child—a deformed child, at that—on the stage for the purpose of an entertainment is a perversion of God's holy plan? Don't you think you'll have to answer to the higher power for that?”

And while bread crumbs sprayed in all directions:

“Slavery is immoral, Mr. Barnum, but purchasing an elderly woman to show her off in her declining years is a loathsome, disgusting pursuit for a Christian man.”

Then while they belched and picked pot roast from their teeth:

“You're filling the people's heads with wild, unrealistic notions, Barnum. Life is work, not play and idleness. You're doing the devil's bidding. You should be publicly thrashed in every village square in these United States!”

Barnum burned as he listened to all this, figuring it was not worth the trouble to answer. Trouble it would be too, for these men were relentless in their pursuit of anything they opposed. So Barnum sat in silence, polite, as these overfed, self-important, foul-smelling old men berated him, realizing that he disliked bankers because he had learned to hate clergymen first. What he hated was their self-righteousness, pomposity, and eagerness to use their specious powers to control other human lives. These were the Pharisees Christ had run out of the temple, the true sinners and tormentors of suffering humanity. To Barnum it was as clear as the garbage being left to rot in their beards.

Their beards?

At once, in a flash, Barnum saw his opportunity. It would be necessary to speak to several of the ship's hands before he could retire early, which he would have to do if he was to make his preparations in the hours before dawn. Now Barnum began to think of his mother. He brought her face up before him, pictured her standing over the kitchen sink washing string beans she had grown in her own garden plot just outside the back door. His tears began to flow. His mother had died of a horrible, massive tumor—an old woman then, at the end of a full, merry life, but the memory of her unsuspecting youth as she'd raised her family always made Barnum cry.

And one by one, the vile creatures who had spoiled his dinner became aware of Barnum's silent weeping.

“It's true,” he sobbed. “I realized the sinfulness of my ways many months ago. I experienced a sudden, great, white light, full of new hope and promise. I felt loved. I knew at once that I was in the presence of a greater power. I fell on my knees and gave thanks and pledged myself to righting my wrongs. Since that moment I have done everything save confess my past—and the splendid occurrence that brought me to my senses. Gentlemen, your comments this evening made me see that this was the time to humbly ask you to take note of the changing of my ways.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice broke, for his next words were the hardest of all to say: “I am full of gratitude to you all, and I thank you.”

And he stood up, bowed, and marched out, not daring to look back, lest they see the glee surfacing irresistibly on his face.

What Barnum did the next morning as the Paquet boat approached New York became as much a part of the city's legend as Barnum's own. It kept New York helpless with laughter for weeks as people told and retold the story of Barnum's “revenge” upon the ministers—confirming for one and all, if such confirmation was necessary, that Barnum was not only a grand presenter of entertainments, he was an entertainment himself, as pleasurable as anything he could possibly devise. That morning at breakfast, as he put his plan into operation, he was afraid that he was getting himself in trouble with some of the more upright elements of the community, but by nightfall that same day, he knew—
knew!
—the value of his beliefs, his understandings, and not least, his outrageousness.

“Gentlemen,” he said to his seven tablemates at breakfast, as the steamer slipped past Rye, New York, on its way down to dangerous Hell Gate and the safety of the East River beyond, “Last night I reported to you a message I received some months ago. As you know, some people would think little of such an inner event, but for some reason, some
wonderful
reason—” Here he smiled,
smiled
—he had their mouths hanging open, the whites of their eyes visible almost all the way around the pupils. Barnum leaned in, studying them carefully, by his hesitation drawing them into exciting conspiracy. God! Could it be true? A real sinner,
actually
saved: and it was Barnum, the smiling trumpeter of the Evil One's message, P. T. Barnum himself, eyes moist, murmuring, “If I may be so bold, I received a heaven-sent message, not simply to give instead of take, but to do good instead of evil. I was staggered, swept back by the force of this great wave of understanding. A man of my situation, with my special, all-but-indefinable gifts, suddenly
instructed
—yes, but not just instructed,
delivered, handed over
—to create good in the world! After all, it's still Barnum here, changed, yes, but not unrecognizable.”

He stopped; letting their imaginations set upon what he was going to tell them, the wondrous secret he was about to reveal to them. He looked each of them in the eye, in turn; in the eye, and then—
what could he mean?
—looking each in his beard. He slammed his hand down on the table, making them all leap for their glasses, which were suddenly airborne with the steamer rolling beneath them. Through the porthole Barnum could see the green shore line of Westchester.

“There fell into my hands, not long after, a scientific treatise on the menaces to health of facial hair. This document, the result of French researchers, and translated into English by a professor of dermatology at our beloved Kings College, demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that a
beard
, my good friends, is a carrier of diseases of all kinds, including pleurisy, pneumonia, the common cold, pink eye—the list goes on and on. Think of every time you sneeze, cough, wipe your noses! Imagine what clogs in your beard if your stomach should be upset and you vomit—!”

One of the younger men, with a mostly black beard, looked pained. Barnum moved in.

“The gentleman who sent me this tract,” he whispered, “also sent me an appliance of his own devise—ah, but first let me tell who this fellow is. A Polish count, trained in Leipzig, Strasbourg, and the Sorbonne in Paris, a metallurgist who has extracted the formula for—
perfect steel!
” His eyes darted one way and the other. “Do you see yet? A long story, a bit of a mystery, possibly. The author of the original paper on beards was a colleague of the count's. The sinister, powerful influences of the European cartels struggled to suppress the count's secret: a perfect razor! A cleaner, healthier world! Little children will grow up straight and tall without fear of withering, crippling diseases! Why? Because forevermore the race of men will be able to shave their beards without fear of cutting or nicking. The count came to me because he believed I knew how to reach the people. He wants nothing, and because of that, and my newfound desire to serve mankind, I follow humbly in his steps. The cost of manufacturing this precious item can be reduced to twenty-five cents, provided the demand proves great enough. Millions will have to respond to this call to crusade for better health and a cleaner world.”

Barnum sat back. “Last night you gentlemen threw down the gauntlet. I could not sleep. I felt my Christian love being tested. I felt pure inside while I listened to you accuse me—rightly—of sin. I had to ask myself: Could I respond with Christian love? Could I turn the other cheek? Could I follow your teaching and example and ask for forgiveness?