Jenny and Barnum (32 page)

Now Jenny was standing beside Barnum: he had not seen her since their arrival—after the thousands lining the route, sixty policemen guarding the bridge over the moat, and a flotilla of boats around Castle Garden for more than a mile. It was a panorama the likes of which had not been seen in America “since the British burned and sacked Washington,” as one wag had it the next day. That was the next day, when a thousand troubadours strummed and sang beneath her window, the newspapers bannered her name, and Barnum was offered $350,000 in cash for her contract.

Barnum was still coming to understand what a delicate instrument a voice like hers actually was. She had been resting and preparing all afternoon; during Goldschmidt's and Minelli's turns on stage, she had been in her dressing room, vocalizing—singing vowels in the different musical tones. Exercising her voice, the way an athlete exercises his body before competition. The public did not want to know of the work a Jenny Lind had to do; no, people wanted magic, wanted to believe in magic—and Jenny Lind, even a Jenny Lind, had to give it to them.

As Barnum understood it, the plan was to have Jenny “appear” beside Minelli at the appropriate moment in their duet-singing, in response to his singing. But now the crowd was so rowdy and restless that Barnum was sure that her first notes would be lost. This had been her fear, of course. There was nothing he could say, but he turned toward her anyway, in his helplessness—but she was already gone.

Minelli and the orchestra started up again, hurling themselves against the rise and fall of the babble from the audience as if against the roaring of the ocean tide. In spite of the music and the noise, Barnum could hear his heart beating; in his anticipation he would have stopped it, if he had had the power.

Suddenly the audience rose to its feet, five thousand people, and
screamed
. If Jenny Lind had sung at all, no one could have heard her, including the singer herself. From where he stood Barnum could not yet see Jenny between the rows of musicians. Minelli turned and extended his hand to her; Goldschmidt was standing, applauding, as all the rest on stage joined him. Flowers were being thrown up from the orchestra, which in turn was being florally pelted from the balconies above. Jenny took Minelli's hand and then he stepped back to leave her in the center stage alone. Barnum could not believe his ears, the noise was so intense; his eardrums seemed to be rattling in his skull from the clapping, cheering, whistling, and stomping that ricocheted around the old wood-paneled, stone fort. A naval bombardment could not damage the place, yet the floor under Barnum's feet shook as if the entire building was about to collapse from the hysteria inside that it clearly could not contain. This was pandemonium. Even from the wings Barnum could see the fiery glow in the eyes of the audience as it attended the presence of the object of its worship. She smiled fetchingly, flushing, and her lovers cheered her louder. They began to chant her name and clap rhythmically. She looked over to Barnum, who realized that he was clapping along with all the others—everyone loved her, no doubt of it.

The noise went on for another full five minutes. It still wasn't clear to Barnum that this was only the beginning, or the end of the beginning, that tomorrow Lindomania would seize the heart of the country. Barnum had only the reports of the critics to sustain his belief in her magic—yet she and Barnum were still looking at each other, two human beings at the center of the most incomprehensible man-made hurricane. She extended her hand to him, inviting him to join her. At once he could see the inappropriateness of the act, but he could not leave her gesture in mystery for the audience. He stepped out on stage, bowed to the audience and her, extended his hand to her in salute, and moved back into the wings. For once, an audience did not seem to notice him, or want to; in another moment, flowers were vaulting onto the stage again.

Then the applause began to fade, and people sat down again, with a noisy scuffling of chairs. People shushed each other and cried for quiet. Then there really was quiet, and all eyes were on Jenny Lind, alone downstage in the limelight. She was still smiling. When she looked around to the others on the stage standing behind her, and to Barnum in the wings, Barnum could see a sparkle in her eyes.

“Thank you for welcoming me so warmly to New York and your wonderful country,” she said to the audience, which cheered again. To Barnum her speaking voice seemed alarmingly small, barely reaching the first rows of the dress circle and the balcony. In the rear someone yelled for silence. Jenny appeared confused suddenly, as if no one in her previous audiences had ever expressed himself before. But then there was quiet again.

“Perhaps it would be happier if we changed the program,” she said. “With your permission, we will forego the intermission, and I will begin my portion of the program with the ‘Casta diva' from
Norma
. Signore Minelli will return for our duet—”

The rest of her words were lost, for the audience had risen again to cheer, louder than before. She turned to Minelli to speak to him briefly, then kissed him on the cheek. Minelli came offstage, in Barnum's direction. He did not look unhappy.

“What could we do?” he asked Barnum, taking a position beside him. “They are in a frenzy for her.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

“Never—but you must understand, you Americans do not know how to behave in a theater.”

Barnum smiled benignly. “If that is true, signore, perhaps you should be grateful that the audience did not react badly to your work.”

If Minelli's reaction showed any terror, Barnum didn't see it, for his attention was drawn to the stage, where Jenny nodded to Goldschmidt, who raised his baton. The crowd was still not settled. Jenny waited; Goldschmidt waited. At last people grew still. There was silence. The orchestra began to play.

The “Casta diva” was a prayer for peace, a supplication to the goddess of the moon for the tranquillity reigning in heaven. Of course Barnum thought that the aria fit this situation neatly enough, but now he wondered if the long, mood-setting introduction—which would have set her on the stage alone after her originally scheduled duet with Minelli—might prove wrong now. No. The attention of the audience, like his own, was on the young woman on the stage still finding her own mood in the swaying of the violins behind her, an oboe leading her as if through the woods in which the scene was set. She was Norma. And she sang.

Barnum understood the mystery from the first sound. Her voice was so gorgeously pure and clear, so perfectly controlled, so brilliant it seemed to sparkle, that it filled not only the great round hall of Castle Garden, it physically penetrated every living being inside it. She knew it—she was a consummate artist with years of study and practice behind her. She
meant
to do this, however inadequately she understood it. Everyone was simply helpless to do anything but listen to the perfection of her singing.

There was no doubt that she felt the effects of it herself. Her face was radiant, transformed: she and the audience were bound together in an incomparable physical experience. Barnum knew why writers did not seem to like her. They could not describe an art that was felt, not merely heard,
felt
, ever more deliciously, throughout the body, down the spine, ever more intensely downward, until the legs weakened and the knees buckled so that even Barnum—already called by many the Master Showman because he knew his suckers so well (knew them because in his heart he knew he was one of them, through and through)—Barnum, the great Barnum himself, thought he would faint.

Jenny Lind was a virgin, to be sure. Her beauty, the beauty that surfaced in her singing even though she was almost thirty, was the beauty of the unknowing, of not knowing the last still-disappointing secret of the bad bargain that was life. At thirty or thereabouts, she was still sweet and believing. Every man listening to her carried the full crushing weight of her purity.

Art? Study and practice? Oh yes. Even the most heavily burdened, those who thought they alone could see into her soul, were fully aware that her control—
mastery:
mastery in
fact
—of her voice, of her material and its meaning, was absolute, and as responsible as any other factor for their squirming and woe.

Nightingale? Barnum thought that demeaned her. He thought she could sing better, more pleasingly, more interestingly, than any bird that had ever lived. The aria could have been written for her, although that had not been the case—Barnum knew the story of her brilliant reinterpretation (at the age of seventeen) of the role of the Durid priestess, Norma. “Casta diva” meant Chaste Goddess, and Jenny had fashioned Norma's character after the character of the goddess herself. Jenny was Norma, the goddess and the poor illegitimate from Stockholm devoted to her own God all at once. She made that very plain—Jenny Lind stood before her audience as she had done so many times before, made herself vulnerable, and allowed her audience to enter the soul of her art, her humanity and womanhood, the last two still unrealized—she knew it all, and she let the audience see that, too. The effect finally was innocence, and innocently the betrayed youthful priestess sang:

“
Chaste goddess, who dost bathe in silver light

These ancient, hallowed trees,

Turn thy fair face upon us,

Unveiled and unclouded.

Temper thou the burning hearts,

The excessive zeal of thy people.

Enfold the earth in that sweet peace

Which, through thee, reigns in heaven.
”

That Jenny was singing in Italian was inconsequential; knowing from her own experience the price of war, hatred, and deceit, Norma was pleading piteously for peace, surrendering herself faithfully to the will of a higher power. A girl, singing, her arms outstretched, her expression enchantingly pure, her perfect soprano rising and falling so clearly and forthrightly that one feared for her—Jenny
was
fearless, subjecting herself to the most complicated trills and shakes, her voice itself never faltering, so clear it shattered the imagination, each note more vivid and penetrating than the last. Tears streamed down Barnum's cheeks from an ecstasy so intense he would not have wished it for himself.
Every
man was in tears—and the few women in Barnum's view as well. With the last suddenly dying note the audience erupted in a great, galvanic shout, and Barnum was capable only of joining the throng. He knew he could not talk. She was beyond any reasonable expectation—a miracle, a wonder of the age. She shyly nodded her gratitude as the flowers again began to pour onto the stage.

Her conquest of the audience continued. She had told Barnum she would sing well, and now she wanted to go on singing. At the end of each song the crowd rose to cheer. Minelli came out for his postponed duet, and
he
was cheered. And when Jenny was on the stage alone again, the cheering went on so long that Barnum had to wonder if the audience would let the concert finish.

Her finale was the unpleasant and prize-winning “Ode to America” that Goldschmidt had only finished putting to music late that afternoon. Somehow he had fashioned a decent song of a thoroughly wretched exercise—at least, a vehicle that allowed Jenny to thrill the audience once more. Barnum loved her, he could not help himself. After her final ovation he went on stage with the list of charities to benefit from this, her first, concert in America. He called the mayor from the audience, and together they read the list, starting with the Orphans' Home and the Colored Orphans' Home and working down to the tree-planting societies. Everyone was standing, weeping unashamedly.
Everyone
loved her. Tom Thumb, in a white suit again, came down from his seat in the dress circle and presented Jenny with a dozen white roses. Now all words were lost as the cheering erupted again. Charlie began doing cartwheels and handwalks around the befuddled mayor. Minelli came out and took his place beside Goldschmidt, who held Jenny's left hand. Barnum was on her right, and it was his hand she was squeezing significantly. After a first glance, he dared not look at her again, the love-light in their eyes seemed so obvious to him. The thousands at her feet noticed nothing, they were so enraptured with her. Barnum was at one with them, and like a boy in his first long pants, he found her interest in him the most astonishing thing of all. When he squeezed her hand, she held onto him ever more tightly. As he wrote that night, alone with his fantasies, still enraptured, more in love with her than ever, her triumph was complete.

13.

In the morning, Jenny's concert was the only subject anyone in the city wanted to talk about, and even Barnum's competitors and critics were forced to admit that he had scored an unprecedented coup. Privately, two Wall Street syndicates sent Barnum word that they were interested in buying Jenny Lind's contract. But it was nothing doing, as he told Jenny before leaving for the train for Bridgeport, Connecticut.

This new scene was played on the sofa in Jenny's suite in the Irving House, accompanied by much sweet, passionate kissing. Here was a man! She knew she had said that far too many times in the past, about Lindblad, Mendelssohn, and even her English officer, but it applied to Barnum more than it had ever applied to any of the others. Barnum was quick-witted and charming; he made her laugh. He did not moon or mope or press his case even when she was most eager for him to do so, always making a game of their feelings for each other. Without doubt he knew he was intensifying those feelings. He acted as if she was as mature as he was, as experienced, but she knew she was not, and she kept to herself her deeper confusion and distress.

She was intoxicated with him, him married with four grown daughters—married twenty-eight
years!
The marriage was dead, if his book was to be believed. He had installed his wife in one elaborate Connecticut mansion after another, each one reflecting his increased—or reduced—circumstances, all the while conducting his business, and keeping himself, mostly in New York. Signore Minelli had told her that there had been rumors about Barnum and other women, although nothing had ever been proved; but now that she had been with Barnum, and experienced the subtlety of his kisses, Jenny knew that those rumors were true.