The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (47 page)

But I didn’t know what to call them. Because I didn’t know what to call myself. Dwarf? Tiny? Perfect woman in miniature? None of them, all of them; had I ever been simply Lavinia Warren Stratton? To anyone—even myself?

Oh, good heavens—I was late! We were going to be late—and where was Charles? I pushed my way through the crowds until I spied him. Clad in his top hat and frock coat, Charles was nevertheless upon his knees in front of the Punch and Judy show, playing marbles with a pack of dirty children. I hauled him up by his arm and dragged him back to our tent, brushing the dust off his clothing and scolding him. Five minutes later, we were back onstage; he was singing, I was twirling, we were dancing in front of the restless crowd as the pianist played the “Tom Thumb Polka.”

Once, I remembered, closing my eyes as if I could wish myself back in time, this very tune had been played in our honor at Royal Albert Hall. We were the guests of the Prince and Princess of Wales. We rode in the Royal carriage, accompanied by a regiment of palace guards, the Princess of Wales and Minnie both too shy to wave to the crowds.

It really had happened
, I whispered to myself fiercely.
It wasn’t just a dream
.

“What isn’t just a dream, Vinnie?” Charles whispered back. I shook my head and allowed him to lift me up by my waist in time to the music. Someone in the audience clapped; someone else tittered.

When the season was over in November, I wrote a short letter to Mr. Barnum informing him that we would not be returning in the spring.

For once, he did not try to change my mind.

INTERMISSION
 

From the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, May 2, 1882

William Godfrey Krueger, the inventor of a flying machine, and who had spent many years of thought and restless toil over it committed suicide yesterday at his boarding house, No. 186 Forsyth Street, New York. He was out of money and was in daily expectation of getting the first installment of a pension due him from the Government. It came yesterday morning after he had killed himself. Krueger was a native of Prussia, and had been in this country twenty-three years. For fifteen years he has been entirely absorbed in studying out the great problem of his flying machine, and did little more than to write an occasional article for the newspapers. The secret of the flying machine died with him.

From
The Century
, January 1883

W
OMEN’S
W
AGES BY
J
ANET
E. R
UUTZ
-R
EES

I have been looking for some clue to the unsatisfactory relation of women’s work to women’s pay. There are, in reality, two distinct classes
of women who are in the field of remunerative employment: those who desire to add to an insufficient income, and those who depend upon themselves absolutely for bread. Both classes call for consideration, and yet the fact of their existence is precisely that in which the difficulty we are considering has its rise.

[ EIGHTEEN ]
 
A Terrible Conflagration

O
H, WHO IS THAT LITTLE GIRL
?” M
AMA CRIED, PAUSING IN
her rocking. She leaned forward and peered at me, as if trying to remember my name. “Little girl? I spoke to you—who are you?”

My heart squeezed up until my entire chest ached, even as I patted her arm and pushed the rocking chair, lulling her back into silence. How many times had I been mistaken for a child? But to hear my own mother do so hurt me beyond reason—even if it was only the result of a sick, muddled mind.

Charles and I had moved into the old homestead with my brother James and his family, this December of 1882, after letting out our house. Papa had died in 1880, but Mama was still alive. Infirm, growing deaf, content to rock in a chair all day, her hands were now idle, as was her reason. Even as I was glad that she could no longer remember Minnie, and so could no longer mourn
her, I grieved that she could not recognize me. I was a stranger to my mother, to my entire family, really—and in a way, hadn’t I always been? James and his wife were kindness itself, but I felt they were always defensive about the simplicity of their life, comparing it, too often, to what Charles and I had grown accustomed to.

“I don’t suppose the Queen served sassafras tea when you all went calling there, did she?” my sister-in-law would say as she prepared for callers.

“No, Mary, but I’ve always liked sassafras tea,” I would reply.

“Well, it’s what we’re used to around here,” she would say, resentment flavoring the tea almost as much as the sassafras.

Or—

“I reckon they take wine with their meals in France,” James would remark at dinner, passing around platters of good boiled New England beef.

“They do,” Charles would agree.

“Well, we don’t go in for that around here, you know,” James would scold, mildly—as if we had asked for wine, demanded wine, threatened to lock ourselves in our rooms unless we were served wine.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful; my brother and his family did us a great kindness in allowing us to stay with them. But it was uncomfortable, nevertheless. So I did what I always did; I plotted my escape. If my family didn’t know what to do with me, my audience did; they smiled, they clapped, and in the spotlight, up on a stage so that all I could see were faces, not legs, I felt big. As big as my dreams.

But never as big as Minnie, who, after all, had been large enough to carry two beating hearts within her. Next to her memory; next to my sister-in-law, with her brood of children and happy
domesticity; next to my mother, who, even in her confusion, often caressed the finger upon which her plain gold wedding band still resided—I felt insignificant; I felt small; I felt
less
.

So we were going back out on tour again; this time with just the Bleekers. No more circus trains for us! Just a genteel entertainment, singing, dancing, stories of our travels; we were even introducing a new feature, a stereopticon, to project images of the places we had seen. Mr. Bleeker was quite excited about it; it had been my idea. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

“Little girl! Do I know you? Are you Delia’s daughter?” Mama stopped rocking again; she was growing agitated, shrugging off her shawl, kicking at her skirt.

“No, Mama,” I said, placing her shawl back upon her shoulders. “I’m Vinnie. Remember? Vinnie—your daughter.”

“Vinnie?” She tilted her head like a parrot; she was very birdlike these days, the way her hands incessantly plucked at her clothing, and her eyes blinked constantly in any light stronger than a candle. “Vinnie? I used to know a Minnie, once. Whatever happened to her?”

“Minnie died, Mama.”

“Died? How?”

“I killed her,” I replied. Then I ran upstairs to finish packing.

T
HE FIRST STOP ON THIS LATEST TOUR WAS
M
ILWAUKEE
. W
E
arrived there on January 9, 1883, a gray, wintry day, although we barely saw it, getting in late, as usual, and driving straight to our hotel. Starting with our circus travels, it seemed to me that we spent less and less time in a particular city, so that I truly had no sense of place. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Davenport, Sioux City—they all looked the same to me. All had bustling, well-lit train
stations, paved streets, new electric wires going up next to all the commercial buildings in the center of the city. Even the smallest towns had tall buildings now, for elevators were becoming commonplace.

Of all the many marvels of the modern age, the elevator was the one that most changed our lives. Maybe others were talking about telephones and electric lights, but Charles and I never tired of gushing about elevators. A lifetime of taking stairs meant for normal-size legs had taken its toll on both of us; Charles was now forty-five, I, forty-one. Our hips ached, as did our backs. Oh, the convenience—the bliss!—of walking into that wonderful little iron cage, watching the lift boy, clad in a smart uniform with a cap, move the handle, and then miraculously rising up, up, up, past all those awful stairs and landings!

Never before had Charles and I ever stayed above the first or second floors of a hotel, until elevators came into vogue. And so we were particularly excited to find that, upon checking into the Newhall House Hotel, we had rooms on the sixth floor—imagine! The very top floor, and we could get to it easily. Surely there would be a very fine view of the city from there!

This somewhat made up for the fact that the Newhall House was not the nicest hotel in Milwaukee. We could no longer afford to stay in the newer gilded palaces of stone and marble; the Newhall House was twenty-five years old, one of the few wooden structures left in that city just north of Chicago, which had suffered the infamous fire twelve years before. But still, the hotel was clean and bright—new electric lights were in every room—and we were happy to see other theatrical folk there, as well.

“Old troupers, all of us,” Mr. Bleeker said as he waved at one of the members of the Minnie Palmer Light Opera Company, seated across the lobby. “We’ll all die in the harness. It’s a sickness.”

“Speak for yourself, Sylvester,” Mrs. Bleeker said fondly.
We were all four seated in one of the parlors after dinner; it was particularly cozy on this night, as it was frigid outside, but inside, we had the warm familiarity of flocked wallpaper, worn carpet, chipped hotel dinnerware. That was the life we knew, the four of us, and we had shared it for so long. The few times we saw one another out of such surroundings—not on a train, or in a theater or a hotel—it seemed odd; we always acted stiff, uncomfortable, overly formal.
This
was where we belonged—in anonymous hotels, in cities we never saw save from a train window or from a stage door. It may sound depressing, but it was not; rather, the bland anonymity of our surroundings served only to sharpen our identities, making us dear and recognizable to one another—making us a family.

The first stop on a long tour was always particularly full of warmth and laughter, like the first Sunday dinner after a long absence from home. And this night, we were all especially happy, for some reason. Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker sat close together on a plum-colored velvet settee; Mr. Bleeker’s lean face relaxed until it almost looked merry. He had his arm around his wife, who nestled her head against his shoulder without her usual reticence. Generally, Mrs. Bleeker conducted herself so modestly as to be ignored by those too busy to observe her gently mocking smile, her soft brown eyes that were quick to notice the most unusual details—the one man whose topcoat wasn’t buttoned properly, the one flower that poked its nose up through the grass ahead of the others. But tonight she appeared not to care who might see her playing coquettishly with the buttons on her husband’s vest; if I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she had taken wine with dinner!

Charles and I sat close together, as well—the other couple’s playfulness seducing Charles into trying something of the same with me. And tonight, for a change, I allowed it; I allowed my
husband to hold my hand in his, tucking it under his arm with proud ownership. I even sighed, playing my part, and inched closer to him.