Jenny and Barnum (3 page)

Hannelore glanced toward the mantel clock. “It's growing late, Miss Lind.”

“Yes, I know, I only want to delay a little longer.” She turned to General Tom Thumb. “I will read your Barnum's book with great care, as quickly as I can.”

Jenny looked to the clock herself: almost three o'clock, five hours to her performance. To prepare properly, she had to stop all other activities almost immediately. Singing exhausted her, sometimes bringing her, she suspected, to the edge of her sanity, if not life itself. For the next five hours, Jenny would have no existence of her own, yielding instead to a regimen so practiced and familiar that she could not think of it, it made her feel so much like a prisoner.

General Tom Thumb moved to the edge of the desk. “I need your help, Miss Lind. Falling from here for me is the same as falling from a second-story window for someone full-sized.”

“I beg your pardon. What should I do?”

“Take me under the arms. I don't weigh much.” His tiny arms extended toward her, like an infant's, irresistible. Jenny could not help laughing at herself, even after her hands were on him, confirming what her eyes had told her earlier: if anything, his body was more knotted with muscle than that of a full-sized man. She wanted to see his reaction to being lifted by her, but as she looked up, he averted his eyes, the act of a gentleman—as if he could see more in her eyes than the other way around. She felt herself blushing—and she almost dropped him. He lunged forward, grabbed the sleeve of her sweater, and stepped onto her knee.

“Queen Victoria did the same thing,” he said, steadying himself.

“Which is how you got into her lap, little one?”

“It was her idea! I wasn't asking for help. She just reached out and I wasn't ready for it.”

Jenny giggled.

“Then the princesses begged,” he said, “and I wound up in their laps, too.”

She was delighted. They were face to face, no more than a foot apart. She held him tighter. He looked into her eyes, and now he was no longer a baby to be played with. “I want you to come to America, too, Miss Lind. That change in you I saw a moment ago, I just saw again. When I'm on stage, that's what I work for, to hold people's attention like that. With you, it comes to the surface naturally.”

“I told you, people make fun of my laugh.”

“Oh, sure, you laugh like a schoolgirl. It's there, too, don't let people kid you, something very fresh and beautiful.”

She was reddening again.

“Do come to America,” he said. “You're a queen in your own right, more important than Victoria, and America is the only country in the world where your kind of royalty really reigns.”

“I do have my questions,” she said, setting him down on the floor. His shoulders were as low as her knees. “Let me commit them to paper. But I must say, in all honesty, that you are a very persuasive little fellow.”

He rose on tiptoe, took her hand, and kissed it with his baby lips. “America will love you. Rest well now, sing well tonight. I would be there, but I'm working, too. In fact, I'm going straight back to my hotel and take a nap myself.”

He was heading for the door, walking in straight little steps, when she asked where he was performing.

He stopped at the threshold. “The Schönbrunn.”

“Why, that's the
zoo!
You told me he didn't put you in a cage!”

“It's also the palace,” he said flatly. “That's why I asked you the Emperor's name. You've got so many dumb kings and queens over here, I can't keep them sorted out. Besides, who plays a zoo on a night in January? I'll let Judge Munthe in Stockholm know how to contact me.”

Jenny started up from her chair, but as the little man made his way out, Hannelore motioned to her to stay where she was. Able to see her mistress' agony, Hannelore nevertheless pointed impatiently to the clock. It was now ten minutes after three. Jenny sat back as Hannelore closed the door. In the last moment of his interview the sweet little man had been insulted—humiliated—by his hostess' stupidity and presumption.
Why, that's the zoo!
She still could hear her juvenile thoughtlessness, and it made her want to close her eyes and weep with shame.

But it was too late to dawdle—she could not afford the luxury of punishing herself. The little General had given her a proper comeuppance anyway. Tonight, while she sang at the Theater an der Wien, he would be performing for Franz Josef. She had not sung for the Emperor since her last performance in Vienna two years ago, and had wondered why he had chosen not to attend this concert—at least that mystery was solved. But why on earth would Franz Josef prefer to observe a troupe of freaks when he could hear the incomparable Jenny Lind?

When she was sure Tom Thumb had left the suite, Jenny went out to the sitting room and found the book he had brought for her, wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough, unfamiliar string.
The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself
.

Forty-one years old when he wrote it? Ridiculous. Barnum absolutely was a madman, a twopenny American Napoleon.

Hannelore re-entered from the outer hall. “Excuse me, Miss Lind, but I wanted to be sure the little fellow was able to make his way down the stairs safely. I've already turned down your bed.”

Jenny would sleep for an hour, bathe, “dine” on clear broth and tea, and then, with Hannelore's help, dress and attend to her hair—all part of the five-hour, carefully paced preparation for tonight's concert. The process was not designed merely to provide the physical rest the singer often did not need, but to create the long interval of relaxation permitting her to gather and focus her concentration.

After five hours of unhurried, methodical getting-ready, her personal weaknesses, ignorance, and stupidity would be swept from her mind, and she would be able to think only of music—as her music.

Jenny had been singing since the age of nine, and the ordinary pleasures of song had faded and vanished years ago. The sublime, rarefied pleasure she felt—when it came—occurred only on the stage itself, before an audience. All the rest was hateful struggle she endured because her art demanded no less. Critics hailed Jenny Lind's voice as an effortless, natural miracle, even though most of them knew that, if she had not studied, trained, and worked for decades, they might not have been able to suffer through a single song. When other little girls were playing with dolls, nine-year-old Jenny was being trained ten hours a day in singing, dancing, and acting; and when those other girls were marrying and having real babies to hold and love, eighteen-year-old Jenny Lind, the young star of Stockholm's Royal Theater, was in Paris learning to sing all over again. Her earlier training had been wrong and was destroying her voice; she'd had no choice but to go back to the beginning, and sing—scales.

Jenny realized that her attention already was withdrawing from her surroundings. “How
is
General Thumb getting downstairs?”

Hannelore, who was a peasant with blue eyes and gleaming apple cheeks, smiled. “On the shoulders of a passing bellman, riding like a tiny maharajah.”

“How tall would you say he is?”

“Two thirds of a meter, Miss Lind. I could not believe my eyes.”

Jenny's mind leaped to the little General's next problem, and she hurriedly crossed the room. Standing in the shadow beside the window, she could see who came and went under the modest marquee shading the Hotel Sacher's main entrance. Where was the little man going? How was he going to get there?

At last he emerged, so tiny he seemed a quarter-mile away, and beckoned to a greatly oversized carriage with wide, heavy wheels. As it rolled under the window, unusual double doors swung open, and a hand appeared. At first Jenny thought that the hand seemed large because she had been just focusing on tiny Tom Thumb, but in fact the hand
was
large, larger than the seat of Jenny Lind's chair. With the carriage still rolling, Tom Thumb wrapped his arms around the index finger and swung himself into the palm. The hand cupped him gently and drew him into the carriage, which kept rolling out into the traffic and down the busy street. One final realization made Jenny Lind drop her book,
The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself
.

The massive wrist to which the hand was attached had been trimmed with frilly, delicate, brilliant white lace.

2.

Tom Thumb was exactly twenty-five inches tall, and he weighed twenty-seven solid, muscle-packed pounds.

The hand belonged to Anna Swan, member of Barnum's “troupe,” a woman he advertised as a giantess nine feet six inches tall, an exaggeration that oppressed and angered her, as Tom Thumb and the rest of the troupe could well understand. Anna Swan was eight feet nine, and weighed over four hundred pounds, which was awful enough—requiring, among other things, the monstrous black carriage that Barnum had arranged to accompany his traveling show around Europe. Anna Swan would be able to see the sights, he had promised; but the carriage itself, specially built on steel rails to be as strong as a railway locomotive, attracted crowds wherever it went. Anna Swan could not step outside, having to keep the heavy black shades pulled down, able only to peep through the cracks at the castles and cathedrals of her half-forgotten childhood dreams.

With the carriage rolling down the block away from the Hotel Sacher, General Tom Thumb, born Charles Stratton, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, stepped across Anna Swan's thighs as if they were felled logs. He was navigating his way not only to the empty space beside her, but through a moment of conflicting sensitivities. She did not like the little people treating her like a female Gulliver: but at the same time he did not really enjoy being handled like a baby, whatever he had told Jenny Lind, and it was Anna Swan's habit to pick up and move the midgets and dwarfs around as if they were her private collection of dolls.

When the little people protested, she insisted she was trying to be helpful, and so there was no way to make her stop. In a group of people as difficult to live with as any on earth, Tom Thumb thought that at times Anna Swan was the most difficult of all, wailing and sobbing uncontrollably, as if she alone among them had problems she could not bear.

But presumably she had seen the General's expression as he'd waited for the carriage to roll up, she and the others aboard. Tom Thumb was deeply unhappy, alarmed, even aghast. It was not just that he was afraid he was going to lose the money he had given to Barnum to invest in the Lind project—no, as far as he was concerned, that money was gone. Once Barnum was determined to do something, nothing could stop him. What General Tom Thumb was afraid of was that his mentor and teacher, the man who had invented him, Barnum himself, had lost his mind at last.

Of course Anna Swan took up most of the room inside the carriage. Opposite her, because he needed no room for his legs, was the only human being in the world Tom Thumb actually hated, the thirty-two-inch Commodore Nutt, né Joe Gallagher, from San Francisco. Thumb loved the name Barnum had given Gallagher. Gallagher was a blue-eyed, brown-haired, handsome Irishman who was more dwarf than midget, a bit of a tough guy under his freewheeling San Francisco charm. Because Tom Thumb loved Barnum, he could accept—enjoy, actually, given the perspective Barnum had taught him—the big humbug's attempt to cash in on Tom Thumb's popularity. What Tom Thumb could not accept was that the attempt was also destroying Tom Thumb's life—or his hopes—and Barnum, with his eye ever on the box office, was unwilling to listen to his little partner's point of view in the matter.

Tom Thumb did not care all that much for the carriage's remaining passengers—or passenger, as they chose to describe themselves, the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng. They were joined together at the abdomen by a rope of flesh so pulled and stretched like dough over the years that they were able to sit side by side, as they were now (sitting opposite Tom Thumb), Chang to Tom Thumb's left, Eng to the right, two almost-separate human beings who hated each other, but refused to speak of themselves as anything but a single creature. When Eng dozed off, Chang would say, “I am tired,” but not without contempt, or self-contempt, in his tone. Together they hated Barnum almost as much as they hated themselves, or each other, or himself, as they would have people say—which people didn't: everybody thought of Chang and Eng as two people, no matter what they—
he!
—wanted.

Chang and Eng claimed Barnum paid too low, cheating them of their full share of the receipts. Tom Thumb knew they simply ignored Barnum's costs of doing business; but more, he knew, too, that Barnum on his side had complaints about Chang and Eng.

“Look at them, a pair of sourpusses old before their time!” Barnum had bellowed. “They don't
do
anything! Who wants to pay to see two fellows in suits sitting in chairs? They won't even put on costumes! I'll tell you, Charlie, the real reason they're griping is because they think they should be bigger stars than you. They want the most money, and they want their name up on top of yours.”

It was all true, but General Tom Thumb knew that Barnum wasn't above manipulating the argument to his own advantage. Barnum really wasn't above very much at all, but he spent so much time looking for advantages in dealing with people that he often forgot some of his more fundamental assets—for instance, the loyalty of people who loved him. When others were involved, Barnum's number one star, General Tom Thumb, was always ready to take Barnum's side. Tom Thumb really did love Barnum—until recently, Barnum had been the only person on earth to call Tom Thumb “Charlie.” Now there were two, and lately Tom Thumb had been afraid he might be forced to choose between one and the other.

This afternoon, Tom Thumb was afraid he had just seen more evidence of
unreliability
in Barnum. First Joe Gallagher; now this.

Joe Gallagher smoked long, thin cigars. He removed the one in his mouth to speak. “Well? Are you going to tell us what happened up there?”