Among the Wonderful (12 page)

“Which war was it, where you fought, Mr. Olrick?” I couldn’t help myself, though I knew it was cruel. “I see a nice row of medals on your lapel.”

“Well.” Olrick reddened again. “The truth is, none.” He paused to play the four of clubs. “This is a costume.”

“Ah, a costume,” I agreed.

“You see, my clothes, and all of my belongings, were lost somewhere en route from Chicago. If it had happened in the past, my manager would have taken care of the arrangements for a tailor. But Mr. Barnum has been unresponsive to my predicament. It was only yesterday I found the name of a tailor, so it will be another week, he said, at least, before I have something else to wear. Until then, I’ll just have to feel silly in this.” He was clearly embarrassed. I let him take the next trick, as reparation.

“You know what I’ve been wondering.” Maud leaned in and lowered her voice. “Ever since I saw them — or him — I’ve been suspicious. The conjoined twins. Have you met them yet?” We hadn’t.

“They live next door.” Maud nodded in the direction. “Ever since I saw them, something has rubbed me the wrong way. A certain awkwardness in their movement.”

“Well,” said Olrick. “Given their condition that’s hardly surprising, isn’t it? Are they conjoined at the usual place?”

“Yes, but that’s just it. Usually conjoined twins are quite graceful. They move as naturally as we do. They don’t know any different. But these two, they seem … clumsy. And they fight.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Olrick

“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen a gaff.”

“A gaff couldn’t have made it past Barnum’s scouts, Maud.” I had seen two or three instances of a relatively ordinary person impersonating an oddity over the years, and I’d always wondered at their motivation. There had been a dog-faced boy who actually attached his fur with epoxy. My mind always drew a blank when I considered what might drive a normal person into the life of a performer of that sort.
“And one of them would have to be deformed already. How could they move like that if each of them had two normal legs?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, is all I’m saying.” Maud took the next trick with the ace of diamonds. “That makes a game. I believe Mr. Olrick and I have made two points.”

Mrs. Martinetti silently and sternly dealt the next hand, and we had taken two tricks before Charity Barnum glided into the room without knocking.

I hadn’t seen Mrs. Barnum since I visited her apartment. She wore the same dark dress with a thick lace collar, and her pale hands clasped at her waist. She walked to the center of the room and stopped, swiveling her smooth and oddly boneless-looking face toward each of us, one after another. She even opened her mouth slightly, and a frightened look came over her, as if she had just realized she did not know how to speak. She bore a striking resemblance to the automaton on the fourth floor.

“Mrs. Barnum!” Maud rose. “I thought you would never accept my invitation, so I filled the fourth seat.” She gestured helplessly at Mrs. Martinetti.

Olrick jumped up, looking vaguely relieved. “Madame, please. Please, sit. You may take my place.”

Mrs. Barnum glided to the chair and sat down. She picked up Olrick’s discarded hand. Her hands shook terribly.

“Mrs. Barnum, is something the matter?”

“Are you unwell?” Maud leaned forward.

Mrs. Barnum put down the cards and tried to steady one hand with the trembling other. “I’m afraid …” She looked into the eyes of Mrs. Martinetti. “She’s been so ill, my daughter. I thought it would be all right, but” — Mrs. Barnum turned in her chair to look at the hallway, now shaking uncontrollably — “I think she’s not. She appears to be …” Her jaw hung open as if she were waiting for the last word to emerge of its own accord. She pointed out the door. “She’s in there.”

Olrick went to find a watchman while we followed Mrs. Barnum to her apartment. The rain pounded against the
windows. Mrs. Barnum led us into the small nook of a room behind the kitchen. Helen lay on the narrow bed, her blankets flung back as if she’d dreamed her way out of them. Damp tangles were stuck to her forehead, and Mrs. Martinetti went to the bed and peered into the girl’s half-closed eyes. I expected her to still be alive. Mrs. Martinetti felt the girl’s forehead, then her wrist. I waited for Helen to cringe, to flick her hand away from the old woman’s grasp. Instead Mrs. Martinetti snatched her hand away from the child.
“Morto.”

Maud put an arm around Mrs. Barnum.

“I didn’t think it would be so fast,” Mrs. Barnum said, her voice high, piercing. “I thought I could call the doctor in the morning.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Maud whispered. Mrs. Martinetti pulled the blanket up over the child, and Mrs. Barnum leaned heavily against Maud. I watched the lump of Helen’s covered head for a toss, an awakening. She was dead, though, of course.

“Mrs. Barnum?” A watchman in a dripping overcoat appeared in the doorway with Olrick behind him. When she saw this man, Mrs. Barnum jerked herself away from Maud and nearly tumbled into his arms. “Thank God someone has arrived. Have you found a doctor?”

“We’ve sent two men out, ma’am. They should be back shortly.”

“Thank you.” Mrs. Barnum turned from her new position, held up by the watchman, and appeared to see us for the first time. A bearded woman, two giants, an elderly acrobat, and a dead daughter.

Maud moved toward the watchman. “You won’t need a doctor, sir. She’s —”

“Get out!” Mrs. Barnum shrieked, waving her arm toward Maud. “All of you!” Only the watchman was startled by Mrs. Barnum’s outburst. We filed out of the room. As we crossed the living room, Caroline emerged bleary-eyed from the other bedroom in a wrinkled blue flannel nightgown. “What’s happening, Ana?”

“All of you … people. Just get out!” Mrs. Barnum’s voice held the slick edge of delirium. Caroline froze as she heard it.

“Well if this doesn’t get Barnum back to the museum,” hissed Maud in the hallway, “I will certainly doubt his humanity.” She paused before going into her room: “At least now he’ll finally pay us.”

Back in my room, I could not sleep. I listened to the hooves and the mostly drunken voices rising from Broadway. A child had died; the fact itself was oppressive. I considered going for a walk. What better time than now, when I would be a phantom among night-walkers: transients, nocturnal workers, people perhaps more accustomed to strange sights in the darkness. But they would flinch when they saw me, and strip me of the dark’s camouflage. And where would I go from there? The idea of leaving the museum had only a fleeting appeal that dissolved in these details. What was the point of going? Instead, I got out of bed, lit a candle, and took up my pen.

Nature seems to have no fixed standard by which to fashion and shape her works, and though we are compelled to believe in a design, to the careless observer every living thing seems to come and go by chance
.

Certainly no visitor to the museum would pay money to read the words of a philosophizing giantess, especially on the subject of “careless observers” whose association with the reader would be clear. Frustration stilled my hand, as it did every time I thought of writing a True Life History. But my booth would be finished tomorrow. I had to sell something. I needed the revenue. I forced myself to continue.

The truth is that Nature’s design contains every extreme and variety, and everyone must fashion intuitively in her mind a standard of comparison, based upon her own experience. When she finds something outside the limits of that standard, she at once views it as a curiosity, and her mind is chained with astonishment
.

But if we follow one of these anomalies all the way back to her genesis (and I don’t mean Genesis 6:4) we do not find her breaking out of an egg, or, like a golem, bursting from the bowels of the earth. We find her kneeling by her father’s side in the village of Pictou-by-the-sea.
She is a homely but spirited girl of unequivocally average stature, untangling nets in anticipation of mackerel season
.

Why not? Why couldn’t the True Life History begin in Pictou?

At first my father thought my gasps were a simple ploy; the day was fragrant with blossoms and he knew I would rather be out among them instead of working on the nets. But real pain cannot be faked and it spread, filling every socket and cavity, ricocheting off the slats of my rib cage, the agony flowing down each appendage and up my neck to explode as brightly murderous rosettes in my brain
.

I awoke in my bed, where I remained for the next eleven months, the pain my intimate companion. To the bewilderment of my parents, I grew at a rate of one and a half inches per month. Finally my body stabilized enough for me to stand. I looked down with exuberant joy upon my mother’s neatly parted scalp and the upturned face of my father, as if I were ascending to heaven. I reached down and lifted them both into my arms. Releasing them, I ducked under the door frame. I gulped delicious, frozen air into my huge lungs and marveled at the miracle of God’s will. I strode away from the farm, crunching through old snow, leaving monstrous footprints behind
.

Exhilarated, I paused. It surely could have happened this way, if only I had cultivated that first bloom of incredulous pride that had, in fact, faded so quickly. That story had been one possibility.

Finally my body stabilized enough for me to stand. As I rose to my new height, I recognized gravity as my mortal adversary, my body as a tomb that I was forced to pilot through the years. Instead of living out my allotted time under the added weight of the world’s stare, I waited until midnight and left the farmhouse. I found the nets laid out in the field and dragged one down the hill to the sea. In my father’s boat I rowed myself to the mouth of the bay. The current then carried the boat out farther, while I wrapped myself tightly in the net and strung on as many weights as there were in the boat. My final thought was to curse the steady moonlight as it illuminated my plunge into the frigid sea
.

This was an account that would never sell, but it was one that I had imagined many, many times. It deserved to be recorded in this True Life History.

Finally my body stabilized enough for me to stand. The first thing I saw from my new perspective was a crowd of people from town gathered outside my house. They wanted me to touch the hands of their sick relatives, to heal them. It was then that I realized how eagerly people believed in nonsense. We built a booth in our yard and charged people ten cents to see me. We made enough money in three years to buy a new boat. One day a man with strange eyes wearing a violet waistcoat appeared. I did not refuse his offer, and under his guardianship I traveled to Halifax and began my career as the only professional Giantess in the world
.

Lusus Naturae

Guillaudeu pretended to study Cuvier’s treatise on
Pongo pygmaeus
. Supposedly, he was searching for clues to explain why the museum’s wispy-haired red ape refused to eat. The creature’s voluntary starvation was a problem: Its ribs poked out in a most unbecoming manner and the visitors were noticing. But Guillaudeu’s show of flipping through Cuvier’s thick pages was just that. He absolutely could not concentrate on anything other than the unfortunate situation in which he now found himself: Mr. Archer would not move out. The ad man was pacing around the office with the end of his pencil stuck in his mouth.

“But surely” — Guillaudeu began in a renewed, but still evasive, effort — “surely a
writer
, an artist such as yourself, needs quiet, needs … solitude to work.”

“Artist! You can’t be serious.” Mr. Archer laughed as he always did, from the belly, with his shoulders shrugging upward and his head bobbing as if he had no control over his body. “I am anything but an artist, Monsieur Guillaudeu.” He continued to pace.

“But why would you want to stay here, with the specimens … and me?”

“It’s true that the stench of your glues and preservatives are disagreeable,” Mr. Archer considered, giving Guillaudeu a flash of hope. “But this location is perfect. I can peek out at everyone who comes and goes. I may even have a window built, just here, looking out to the entry hall” — Mr. Archer
pointed to the board-and-batten wall — “it will allow me to see every face that passes into the museum. Last Saturday, Commodore Vanderbilt reserved the entire rooftop restaurant for a late-evening soiree and if I hadn’t been right here, in this very spot, I wouldn’t have even heard about it. I would be a fool to lock myself up in some attic somewhere and miss all the excitement.”

“The office we found for you is on the second floor, Mr. Archer, with a clear view over the balcony to Broadway. You would have an even better view from up there.”

“Nonsense! I’ll have nothing to do with it. If anything, monsieur,
you
should move. After all, nothing about your work necessitates your proximity to actual people.”

“I have been in this office for sixteen years, sir, ever since they hung the door on its hinges. I designed this room for my work and I will not be crowded out. Now, if you will excuse me.” Guillaudeu walked stiffly to his bookshelf and pulled out the sixth volume of Cuvier. “Unlike some I could name, I have work to do.”