Among the Wonderful (15 page)

But the tribesman. He wanted to alert one of them to his presence, and the giantess was the only one he knew by name.

“Miss Swift?” he offered.

Both women turned. He froze at the sight of the outlandish beard on the smaller woman’s face.

“I …,” he stuttered, averting his eyes. He had not seen
her before. He wondered what else might be living on the fifth floor.

“Well?” said the giantess.

But the house lights had begun to dim. Voices around them grew momentarily louder as people finished their conversations and then hushed.

“There’s a man —” Guillaudeu blurted, shrugging helplessly and looking up at the chandelier. The hirsute woman laughed at him and both women turned away. From the wings, someone yanked open the curtain.

The stage was a careful replica of a museum gallery, with rows of paintings high on the walls and cabinets scattered across the broad space. A group of visitors strolled across the stage, laughing at specimens and gawking appropriately. Whoever set it up had moved the mounted polar bear onstage, complete with its velvet guard rope. The players ambled forward and a man disentangled himself from the arm of a companion. A cheer went up.

It had been two months since Guillaudeu had seen the museum’s owner, but Barnum seemed younger than he remembered. Round-cheeked and curly-haired, in a crimson vest and dark blue coat, he looked nothing like the small portrait that hung in the museum’s entryway. He was more like an overgrown boy than an entrepreneur. Barnum stepped to the front of the stage and opened wide his arms as if to take his employees to his breast.

“Since the day my American Museum opened its doors, fifty thousand people have visited us. Word of it has traveled around the globe, confirming that this institution is on its way to becoming an international destination for entertainment and education!

“And so the first thing I’d like to say is thank you.” Barnum extended his arms. Sections of the audience, mostly the restaurant and custodial staff, applauded.

“As some of you know, I have just visited our great southern states, where news of the museum has already proliferated. The reason for this trip, as you might have read in the papers, was an extraordinary young man, whose destiny is
great indeed, and intertwined with that of this museological enterprise. I now present this young man to you, the General himself! My personal prodigy: Tom Thumb.”

Barnum backed up. He stopped next to a glass cabinet that held, Guillaudeu now realized, a very small human being wearing a very large hat. With a flourish, Barnum opened the cabinet and the dwarf leapt out. He wore what appeared to be a pair of long underwear, high black boots, and a cutaway coat with a banner draped around one shoulder. The boy strutted across the stage, kicking up his tiny legs with each step, pausing to execute a sharp quarter turn toward the audience. He gave an exaggerated salute.

“Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell!” Thumb’s voice was loud, confident, and discordantly young. He stalked across the stage. “For twenty years I have constantly accompanied you on the road to honor and glory!” he yelled. “In these latter times, as in the days of our prosperity, you have invariably been models of courage and fidelity.”

Oh God, not Napoleon. Guillaudeu sank lower in his chair. Here was a parody in miniature of the man for whom Guillaudeu’s father had been killed, his family destroyed. The memory spawned the familiar chain of images that had worn deep ruts in Guillaudeu’s mind and now swept him away from the dwarf’s recital: that night, so long ago, how the rain had turned the cobble to onyx as he walked behind his mother, who carried his infant sister, Adèle was her name, in her arms and looked neither right nor left; the way she turned from him with her hand raised to the door of someone’s cousin, the second mate on a ship; the rough paper she handed him with the name of someone in America, an address on Cortlandt Street; her whispered voice near the river:
Where you land, I’ll find you
. And finally, the spiraling realization that the slip of paper had fallen from his pocket somewhere, blown into the river, or even back onto the cobble near his mother’s feet, the folded paper catching her attention like a fluttering moth; she is bending down to catch it and realizing that all of her intention was not enough to keep him safe. Had she followed? Had his sister lived? Forty-eight
years later Guillaudeu still did not know, but it was not for lack of searching the faces of old women on the street. Years ago he had stopped calculating her age.

Applause for the dwarf subsided and Barnum took the stage again. “My friends, there are those in this great city who would destroy us. Already I’ve read articles in some of our … well, not our most respected papers, but papers I know well. These articles describe the American Museum as a den of sin! A nest of immorality where bawdy entertainments are played to drunken crowds. There are quotes from our new mayor, the
honorable
James Harper, vowing to root out the vipers at the heart of our establishment! He says we are no different from the back rooms of the Bowery saloons. Says we are those who would sell idols at the door of the temple! I read these things, friends, and I laugh! I laugh because we are an establishment devoted to the enlightenment of men. Amusement, too, but of a kind that the ancient philosophers would call nature’s sense of humor,
Lusus naturae
. And who are we if we cannot laugh at ourselves? There is no vice in that! Just ask Ashmole, Tradescant, Kircher, and all the others preserved by history who collected and displayed the wonders of our world! I might add that the gentleman virtuoso Ferdinando Cospi employed a dwarf as museum guide in Italy two hundred years ago!

“As an antidote to these accusations, I have hired these men” — Barnum stepped to the side, making way for three figures who now appeared at the back of the stage and walked toward the audience — “to add Scientific Authority to selected exhibits and performances. Please welcome the Professors Wilson, Chatterton, and Stokes.”

Guillaudeu leaned forward in his seat.
Professors?

“Beginning Monday, these learned men will present Scientific explanations of exhibits such as the Human Calculator and the Aztec Royals.” The professors waved and Barnum gave a small bow. “Please welcome them to the fold.” And as the curtain fell around him he gave a final shout: “Onward!”

Guillaudeu struggled to retain his composure as he was jostled in the riptide of people leaving the theater. He felt
that his growing excitement could carry him above the heads of everyone, that his relief in seeing these new professors would float him gently up to the gorgeous ceiling. He waited for the crowd to thin.

Finally, he would have someone to talk with about the problems facing the museum! He could show them the
Ornithorhyncus anatinus
, the sloth, all the anomalous creatures, and they could come up with a taxonomy. They would eat together, they would cultivate a certain strain of their own humor about the museum, in which Guillaudeu’s worries would become manageable, communal. Barnum had finally, of his own accord, realized that a museum without scientific organization was useless to the public and an abomination to history.

When the theater was empty, Guillaudeu climbed onstage. The museum set, which had looked so real from his seat, was made from painted cloth, paper, and spindly planks. His footsteps echoed as he walked into the wings.

“Hello? Are you still here?” Guillaudeu continued past costumed mannequins and various musical instruments arranged on chairs. He heard men’s laughter coming from one of the dressing rooms. “Professors?”

A door opened and one of the men, Guillaudeu thought it was Chatterton, poked his head out. “Who is it?”

Guillaudeu stepped into the brightly lit room, where the other two men sat on overstuffed chairs. They each held a tulip-shaped glass filled with crimson liquid. “I’m so pleased to meet all of you. I’m Emile Guillaudeu. Perhaps Barnum mentioned me?”

“Perhaps.” Professor Chatterton looked to his companions. “Do you boys recall?” One of the others shook his head. Was it Wilson? The third man simply stared at Guillaudeu with a vague smile.

“I’m the taxidermist. I worked for John Scudder here in the museum before Barnum came. Lately I seem to have taken up the duties of Menagerie Attendant. I’m so glad you’re finally here. I need guidance with various issues, not the least of which is developing an underlying philosophic
principle for this collection. It is growing, as I’m sure Barnum explained, at an unsettling rate.”

The three professors looked at one another. Guillaudeu could see something like alarm in their eyes. “Oh, don’t worry,” he continued. “With the three of you, and my particular experience here, we should be able to make short work of it. I’m just glad you’re here.”

“Well, we’re glad to be here, too.” Chatterton seemed to be the spokesman. The other two remained quiet, and Stokes appeared to be laughing into his hand. “But there’s something you should probably know.”

Suddenly Guillaudeu thought he would lose his job. These professors were surely more qualified than he for the monumental task that lay ahead.

“We’ve been hired by Mr. Barnum to infuse the museum with Scientific Authority, as he says. In fact, though, we are actors by trade. I thought he would have told at least some of his staff. We are here to give the
illusion
, so to speak, of science.”

Guillaudeu banged on Barnum’s door. No one answered. Recklessly, he turned the latch and the door slid open, revealing Phineas T. Barnum sitting at his desk reading the New Testament.

“Monsieur Guillaudeu, is the museum on fire?”

The stage had dwarfed Barnum, but now he reminded Guillaudeu of the men he’d seen lifting crates of cargo off ships at the South Street port. He had a strangely graceful bearing, like a hound on point. Jerky, perfectly attuned. Not quite leonine, was he, but what? What does a griffin look like?

Barnum leaned forward and Guillaudeu fought the urge to recoil. “No fire.”

“Then sit down, please.”

He obeyed. Barnum looked at him curiously.

“You know” — Barnum swiveled in his chair toward the window — “when I moved to New York, I had no money. I was living in a pitiful room in a neighborhood I don’t even like to name. By luck I found an excellent job almost immediately.” He shook his head. “I became a salesman. I sold the one thing you can always count on people buying.”

“Food?”

“Bibles.” Barnum tapped the book in front of him. “Bibles, my friend.”

Barnum rose from his desk and pivoted around his chair,
still staring out the window. “Do you remember the story of Peter Cooper?”

“No.”

“When the B and O Railroad opened up, Peter Cooper moved to Baltimore and bought up a whole lot of land near where the rails were going in. He speculated that the rail works would boost the value. He started digging, draining swamps, thinking of building a hotel. And he hit iron. Iron ore. Exactly what the railroad needed! So he set up a forge and started selling rails to the B and O. But lo and behold, the railroad ran into financial trouble. They didn’t have a good enough engine to run these new distances. The value of the company started to drop. So Peter Cooper said he’d build them an engine himself.”

Shaking his head, Barnum turned to Guillaudeu.

The taxidermist found he could not respond.

“And he did! He did. He built a little steam engine in his barn and hobbled it up to some old wheels and musket barrels. It ran eighteen miles an hour. When they unveiled it people bought B and O bonds so fast the railroad didn’t know what to do with all the capital. This museum is my iron ore, you see. I had nothing when I got here except a hunch. You know what Cooper called his little steam engine? The Tom Thumb.

“My point is that I can provide what the people want. But sometimes, I’m finding out, the people don’t yet know that they want it. My job is to show them. That’s what this museum is all about.”

“Show them what, exactly?”

“A few months ago one fellow, a journalist, wrote that my museum was a great hive. To him, all the people streaming in and out were like honeybees. But I’ll tell you, a hive is all symmetry, uniformity! Not so with my enterprise. The purpose of a hive, after all, is the same as a factory: to create order. This museum’s effect is the opposite: to baffle. And listen to this: Another man wrote that it was like a Chinese puzzle. That was in the
Herald
a few weeks ago. He was a little closer
with that one because the museum has untold layers, like the puzzle, and it contains elements of suspense and surprise. But again the symbol falls short because this museum is always changing! There is no innermost layer. A Chinese puzzle may delight us by revealing smaller and smaller interlocking worlds, but the museum offers the opposite: The deeper you go, the smaller you feel because the wonders you encounter grow greater and greater.”

Barnum gestured upward as if addressing the brick and wood of his building.

“How would you define it, then?” Guillaudeu ventured.

“Omne ignotum pro mirifico,”
he murmured. “Most metaphors I’ve heard are too simple for this place. Too limited in meaning.”

Barnum tapped the Bible on his desk. “That’s exactly where the whole thing becomes rather interesting. Are you a religious man? Right here, in the book of Matthew, we meet Jesus, of course. This Jesus is a teacher. He stands on the mountain. He gives us a sermon. Commandments. Instructions for living. Now let me ask you a question: Can you imagine the number of eyes in that audience that must have glazed over? Because who in the world likes to be told exactly how to live or the parameters of what is possible? To me, it is a strategy that ensures only resentment and boredom.

“But in Mark’s story it is not Jesus’ words that instruct us. This Jesus never even confirms that he is really Jesus! He relies on something better to convey his message, something inherently compelling: mystery itself. And public performances, of course: healings and exorcisms, wine from water, all that sort of thing. This Jesus gives you an opportunity to live through the experience of puzzlement yourself. Each individual is invited to rely on his own experience of life to figure out what it all means.
That
is the foundation on which I built this enterprise. Walking through these halls, people encounter nothing but mystery. They interpret what they see according to the patterns of their own lives and relate it to
the larger pattern of our city, of the world. So to answer the question, How do I define this place? I give you this: I never will. It is true that I will hire people to do it. That is the way of our time. But just as in this book, there are many authors; interpretation is infinite. And so mystery lives.”