Jenny and Barnum (46 page)

Of course.

Mrs. Barnum returned, wearing a fuzzy gray sweater buttoned to her neck. Her eyes were clearer now, as if she had washed her face. “What has he told you about his mother?”

“Little, actually. He seems to be full of wonderful memories of her.”

“He is. She was a wonderful woman, in her way. What did Barnum tell you of his grandfather, his mother's father, Phineas Taylor, for whom he was named?”

“How do you say it? He was one of the great trick-players of his time.”

“Practical jokers, they're called.”

“I know that Barnum learned the shaving trick he played on the ministers from his grandfather.”

“I'm not sure the world is a better place for that.”

Jenny almost smiled. If Mrs. Barnum's “lost innocence” was what Jenny saw as Barnum's gift to the world, then the conversation was over. Jenny would simply humor the woman until it came time to leave. The world was not a better place for humiliating the ministers? On second thought, Jenny was not so sure—the second thought being that Barnum had done it only to promote himself, out of the same instinct that had made him tilt his contract with her so much in his own favor.

Charity Barnum said, “In those days, playing tricks on people was the chief entertainment here in New England. People had to devise all their own amusement, and these practical jokes, as they're called, are spontaneous, or easily improvised. You have to remember, Miss Lind, that in those days this was still a new country, not just a young one. Barnum's grandfather Phineas Taylor fought in the Revolution, and when we were born many of the founding fathers, like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, were still alive. We were a new, raw, rough country.

“Barnum's father was a practical joker of some note, too. He lent a man a horse he described as a former champion racehorse when in fact it was a broken-down sickly plug. When the poor horse fell over in a stream and drowned, Barnum's father insisted that the man pay what
he
thought the horse was worth—well, you see the point: Barnum's father was trying to humiliate the other man by demonstrating his ignorance about horses. Humiliation is the key. If a joke made people laugh, no matter how cruel, the joke-players would do it.”

“I do not understand. Why would people want to do that to each other?”

“Only a very small minority were involved. Life was full of rules then, and practical jokes were a way of rebelling—sometimes an angry, nasty way.”

“You people are full of rebellion. With you it is like a cancer.”

The older woman sighed. “Before Barnum was born, Phineas Taylor conceived what he thought was the grandest joke of his life. It involved dozens of people, not merely Barnum's family, and most particularly his mother.

“The Barnums and the Taylors were reasonably well off, descended from generations of successful colonial farmers. All through his childhood Barnum was the envy of the town of Bethel, and especially of his own peers, the other children, because he had already been provided for by his great-grandfather, who had made the boy sole heir to Ivy Island, a huge estate thirty or forty miles from town—”

“There was no Ivy Island,” Jenny said.

“Yes, there was, but as a boy Barnum never went there. No one would take him, and he was too young to go so far alone. In those days there were still bears and wolves in the area, but we're rid of them now, thank God.

“In any event, when he was eleven, Barnum could resist his curiosity no longer, and insisted on seeing his inheritance. The whole family made the trip, and the whole town knew they were going. The town wanted to hear from the boy himself about the place. It was quite a lot of land, hundreds of acres.

“Grandfather Taylor let the boy walk the last few hundred yards up the dirt track alone. It was part of the joke that went back a dozen years, a joke an old man contrived to play on an innocent child before he was born. When our children were told of it—by me, in the effort to help them understand their father, who is often a difficult man—I saw the shock in their eyes, the sudden fear of betrayal. It had never occurred to them that parents or grandparents could do such a thing to a child for nothing more or less than the malicious glee of it.

“Ivy Island was a worthless swamp. At first Barnum didn't understand, thought he had taken a wrong turn, but there was the sign, ‘Ivy Island,' planted at the edge of the muck.

“He still didn't understand what was happening when he ran back to report his discovery to his family. He didn't understand even when they began to laugh, and when he looked bewildered, they pointed their fingers at him and laughed louder. Then he understood. He didn't cry, he told me. ‘No,' he said. ‘I saw at once that that would only make it worse for me. I had to go along with the joke. I dreaded going back to Bethel, because it meant another wave of laughter. But there was nothing I could do but go along. I don't know what went through my mind, but it was with a shock that I saw it, almost instantaneously—'”

“He weathered it well,” Jenny said.

“No, there's more. In public he never said a bad word against his grandfather or any of the other conspirators, including his mother, but there was no doubt—he knew, he told me—that they had cut him to the quick.

“He told me all this years later, but when he was still a young man, and after we had made our first terrible mistakes with each other. He cried. He told me that he would never forget the simpering, idiotic look on his mother's face that day, and that he resolved, in a flash, never to trust her again. That was the measure of the shock he sustained. His own mother had betrayed him from birth. For a joke. He told me, ‘I never said a word to her, but I promised myself that I would never take her into my confidence again, and I never did.'”

The light was fading. Mrs. Barnum was very nearly a silhouette, motionless as a statue against the window frame and the tree beyond thrashing in the stronger wind signaling the advance of night. It was going to rain. Charity Barnum leaned forward. “That has been part of my life for almost thirty years. I know he didn't tell you what his life was like before you came to America, before he first started scheming to bring you here. His life was quiet. Orderly. He went to New York and ran his museum and tended to his other businesses and then, more nights than you would believe, he came home. If there was a part of his life that I don't know about, it is because it didn't affect his life here.”

Jenny could see the thrust of this comment, and there was an obvious answer to it. Whatever Charity Barnum wanted to believe, her husband had been an unhappy man—but Jenny did not want to think of him before their own meeting.

“Now you must go,” the older woman said. “You've seen what you wanted, whatever it was. You're such a naïve young woman that it's almost possible for me to feel sorry for you. I can certainly see how Barnum is drawn to you. He has never really put away the dream of Ivy Island he was allowed to build all through his childhood. His museum full of all its ridiculous junk is only what a child wants the world to be. Ivy Island—in you he's found the little girl fit to be its queen. He thinks.” She stood up. “No, I do not want to hear you sing. You are a naïve young woman but no child. You knew Barnum was a married man. This is what you've disrupted and probably destroyed forever. My life. Another human being's life. You will understand if I do not tax myself with the burden of forgiving you—at this point, it is just too easy to imagine cursing you with my dying breath.” She was at the door. “Let yourself out the way you came in, if you don't mind, and Caesar will drive you back to the railroad station.”

The rain began after dark, when the train was still far north of the city, traversing the now-familiar farm land. The orange glow of oil lamps in farmhouse windows gleamed on the beading drops of rain on the cold glass of the rocking, clattering railroad car. The car was stuffy and smelled of kerosene. Jenny was not thinking of Barnum. There was nothing to think about. Charity Barnum's revelations about her husband's childhood were not as terrible, in Jenny's view, as the way the woman herself saw so much of her husband's life and works. If the American Museum was full of a child's dreams, wonder, and awe, that was not ridiculous. You could not appreciate Barnum unless you were on the side of laughter. Barnum was for foolishness and humbug—from his point of view, that he was also for shrewd business and money-getting were not significant. You were supposed to ignore that side of Barnum and accept him on his own terms. That was not
lost
innocence. And that made Barnum his own kind of genius. In inventing his life, Barnum had accepted nobody's definitions but his own. Jenny had her own vivid memories of Barnum, her joyous, exuberant lover. Jenny had not been completely gulled by Charity Barnum's self-righteous, wronged-woman posings. What brought down Charity's wrath was the fact that Barnum had been happier with Jenny than he had ever been before. For a while, he had made her feel like the Queen of Ivy Island, which was not so bad to have been, for a while. Jenny did not know when it had begun to slip away. Love had slipped away, like nothing important. Perhaps that was the reason she had resisted love for so long, the hidden foreknowledge that it would slip away. That it was not important. Perhaps failure had been inevitable. In her heart she knew that her talent and position made her more than the simple girl she liked to pretend to be. Jenny supposed that Charity probably saw Barnum as much a villain in this as Jenny, but Jenny herself was not so sure. It was very odd, because she could see that, when she took Barnum as he wanted, she loved him still—even though love had slipped permanently, irretrievably away.

It was almost midnight when she directed the carriage driver to take her around to the rear entrance of the hotel. There was no crowd out front these days, even when the weather was fair, but she did not want to be seen or intercepted by anyone. Hannelore was up waiting for her, and Jenny had her wake Miss Holobaugh, put on some tea, and go to bed.

Jenny had letters to write—just two. The first, to Barnum, went rather faster than she had imagined, and the second, to Waldo Collins, was more difficult to compose and set down. She put the letters in envelopes and sealed them with wax embossed with her monogram. She gave them to Miss Holobaugh.

“Take these downstairs for delivery promptly in the morning. On the way back knock on Mr. Goldschmidt's door and tell him I want to speak to him. I am going to change my plans, Miss Holobaugh. I have made up my mind.” She did not look up, afraid that Miss Holobaugh might be smiling—or worse, that she was not.

IV

18.

Barnum cried.

The letter gave itself away before he opened it. Why should she write to him? He locked the door before he broke her seal. She was making the mistake of her life, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He had seen it coming. He had been too cautious with her, too close-mouthed. Well, he had not known how to behave. As she had shown him so vividly, he had never been in love before. No. Not really. He had lived forty-six years without ever having been in love. He cried; he could not help himself. He wrote a letter to his lawyer listing the conditions he would accept to terminate Jenny Lind's contract, and then he left instructions that people were to be told that he had gone to Cape May for a week's rest. Finally he returned to the apartment on the top floor of the museum and locked the door again. People could think what they wanted, even that he was drinking again. But he wanted to be alone in familiar surroundings, the middle of his own little world.

He could see right away that he would never be able to confirm his suspicion that Jenny had gone up to Connecticut to call on Charity. Upon his return to New York, Barnum had gone straightaway to the Irving House to find Jenny gone and Miss Holobaugh nervous and evasive. With the conclusion of such a visit completely predictable, the irony of the situation had become apparent at once. He had just told Charity that he was leaving her, that there was money to provide for her for years and more to come. He was prepared to sell the American Museum, then his contracts with his performers. Whatever it took. He had to do it. He could not imagine not doing it—until Jenny's letter arrived.

Barnum understood. Finally, a life with him was more than she had imagined. There were too many differences between them—culture, age, inclination. In self-defense he wanted to think that it had never been much more than an adventure for her, but he remembered far too much that told him otherwise. He loved her. Her character was not flawed. She was simply not perfect, which was something else again. He did not want her presence to recede from him, but he knew the natural process had to begin. He still did not know if she had honestly mistrusted him or had been overtaken by greed. He liked to say that there was no humility or gratitude, that they were figments of mankind's more simpering imaginations. What John Hall Wilton had handed over to Judge Munthe was more money than any of them had ever seen in their lives, and Barnum's preliminary calculations showed that Miss Jenny Lind, in the months she had been in America, had earned money at a rate four times the figure she had ever achieved before. Before deductions for the obligations she did not want to fulfill, Jenny had earned more than two hundred thousand dollars.

There would be deductions. Barnum had instructed his lawyer to accept nothing less than full indemnifications for all the concerts she failed to perform. If there was a complaint from Waldo Collins, he was to be told that Barnum still had the alternative of sitting on what was due Jenny until such matters as return of her accompanists' fees were settled—pure, nonsensical nitpicking meant to keep Waldo Collins from becoming too belligerent. Business was business, and the sooner performers learned that they would pay heavily for running out on contracts, the better. Jenny could go home to Europe, but Barnum had to stay behind and make his living—but not if he had the reputation of a producer who couldn't put on a show.