Among the Wonderful (20 page)

But what of the trivial pleasures, the ones I observe over and over standing here? I appear as emotionless as a statue, but each couple who passes, each pair of clasped hands, each buoyant look is a dart pricking my skin, a rash spreading, itching to the point of distraction as I compulsively imagine all the rest, the hidden pleasures.
Concern yourself with practical matters. Then love will surprise you. That is the joy of it as much as all the rest
.

I felt for my bottle of Cocadiel’s Remedy in one of the hidden pockets of my skirt. I took a drink. I wanted to improve
my life, expand my scope, but how? I looked over the heads of the museum patrons and turned to this lofty matter, hoping to banish the rest from my mind. I would not leave the security of my profession. But a civic life, something outside the business of spectacle, would provide a necessary balance. Serve somewhere, something larger than myself, if such a thing existed. Where? A hospital? What do people do? Or was I just being a fool to think I could have a life outside of … this? The inky waters of Lake Ontario lapped at the edge of my thoughts. To slough off this weight, this world.

“Ana!” Thomas’ fierce whisper saved me the stress of having no idea what a civic life meant, or how to achieve one. “She’s here! Did you see her? She must have passed in front of you. Which way did she go?”

Thomas hopped and whirled in front of my booth, his ragged jacket flapping as if he were a crow half caught in a trap. He paused for a valiant attempt to tame the unruliness of his hair before resuming his hysteria. “Am I presentable?”

I looked down at his upturned face. “In the name of God, Thomas.”

“It’s Mrs. Corbett.”

“Who?”

“She’s here. She’s much older! You must have seen her.”

“I see approximately eight percent of what passes in front of my eyes. And that’s when I’m feeling generous. Who is this person?”

“Mrs. Corbett. My teacher!”

“Fate knocking on the door?”

“Yes.
Yes!”
Thomas lunged toward the balcony, turned one hundred and eighty degrees, and made for the entrance to Gallery Seven. At the last moment he pivoted to the right and disappeared into the main hallway and stairwell.

Ten minutes later he bolted back into view, triumphant. “She’s up from Boston!”

A woman, presumably the infamous Mrs. Corbett, appeared behind him. She regarded Thomas with flushed attention. She was an impressive sight, her generous proportions wrapped tightly in a flame-orange gown. Her dark,
oiled hair was piled into sea-froth wavelets around her face, which showed the first embarrassed melt of age. As a finale, pinned to her head was a silk hat with a tiny red parakeet perched upon it. The bird, I observed, could have been stolen from one of the museum’s own taxidermy collections. Mrs. Corbett stared at Thomas, who awkwardly introduced us before leading her to the balcony. Then he was back.

“She is here until one o’clock, when her husband will fetch her! I want to ask a favor. It is so crowded here.”

“It’s a muse —”

“Do you think I might presume to ask … it would be nice to have a quiet place to sit together. Even the rooftop will be crowded. And cold,” Thomas complained, looking at the floorboards. “Could we sit in your room for an hour?”

I glanced toward the balcony, where a fiery orange shape stood at the railing.

“Isn’t she marvelous?” Thomas breathed.

“Go.” I handed him my chatelaine with its single key. I waved him away.

The gallery filled up and emptied out again. Bright beams of light divided the room and then diffused. Similarly, my mind flickered with thoughts, some vivid enough to blind me to the passing crowd before snuffing out. Memory replayed itself endlessly and would have driven me mad if I were not adept in skimming above my mind’s meanderings with no fear of miring in the muck. At some point in the afternoon Thomas returned to his harpsichord and played an entire melancholic repertoire to the oblivious denizens of the street.

When the museum closed I went directly to the whist table, where Maud proceeded to interrogate me about the previous evening.

“What did you see?” she asked, with all the intensity of someone addressing a polar explorer.

“A whole room of bearded ladies,” I said.

“You are so
sour
, Ana.”

There had been no sign of Olrick the Austrian Giant at the whist table since the evening of Helen Barnum’s death, and
Maud had managed, through sign language, to convince Mrs. Martinetti to bring her daughter as the fourth. The daughter, a long-limbed acrobat specializing in contortionism, sat straight-backed in her chair and stared at Maud and me. We dealt the cards.

I was partnered with Mrs. Martinetti the elder, and she spoke to her daughter in a conspiratorial tone throughout the first game.

“They could be cheating,” whispered Maud. “Do you understand English?”

The women shook their heads.

“You don’t?” Maud reiterated. They shook their heads again. “But you understood that. Perfect.”

Mrs. Martinetti the elder spoke rapidly. Her daughter nodded and patted Maud’s hand, giggling softly behind her cards.

“It would be so much
easier
if English were required,” Maud huffed, studying her cards. “How are we supposed to have a decent game?”

I surveyed the Martinettis’ faces. A single, ripe idea arrived. I could teach them English. Why not? It would give me something to do other than make a fool of myself for money. And it was helpful. Was it a step toward a civic life? It was at least a diversion. I began composing the handbill as Mrs. Martinetti and I lost the next three tricks.

When the game finally ended, I rushed back to my room.
ENGLISH LESSONS
.
WEDNESDAY EVENING
,
IN THE APARTMENT OF MISS ANA SWIFT
{
GIANTESS
}. I would write up the bills, hand them out … but those who needed my class would not be able to read them. I resolved to write them up anyway. I walked toward the drawer where I kept a sheaf of paper, but halfway there I turned. I sniffed the air. I scanned the room. Some unfamiliar muskiness hung in the air. Vague unease tugged the edge of my consciousness and I suddenly remembered my dream of the night before, of wading over the tide flats of Pictou. Warm seawater around my knees, my toes sinking in the rippled sand, I was a girl, just like every other, walking among the driftwood and the empty clamshells. I
smelled the stench of drying seaweed and snails rotting in tide pools.

My bed had been disrupted, rumpled. Even the multicolored chaos of my quilt could not disguise the fact that more than sitting had occurred upon it. The stagnant air smelled of sweat and unknown brine. I ran my hand across the quilt. Was that a touch of dampness? And then I saw the evidence, right in the middle of the bed: a bright red feather. I held it up between two fingers. It curled incriminatingly. I twirled the feather and brushed it along my cheek, seeing flame-orange skirts spread wide across my bed, ample flesh spilling from silken constraints, and the particular ecstasy of long-imagined coupling.

I saw my own reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall, the red feather against my cheek, and also a scarlet blush rising there. My expression was unforgivable: slack-lipped and misty-eyed.

“You!” I growled at the image. “Always watching, aren’t you? Is this what you want to see?” I lunged across the room and ripped the mirror from its hooks. I threw it as hard as I could and it exploded against the wall.

In the silence that followed, I knew Maud and everyone else was listening closely; they wondered if the mirror was the beginning of my rampage, or whether a single act of self-annihilation would suffice this time.

In front of me, cupped gently on the air, the red feather drifted sideways. I lunged for it, but the draft from my body whisked it away.

The fifth floor was at its busiest at half past nine in the evening, with doors opening and closing, conversations audible from rooms away, and the heavy footfalls of the Wonderful going up and down the hall. I started with the Indians.

There had been some excitement when the Indians arrived because they refused to divide themselves into groups of two and move into the three apartments the museum had prepared for them. After mysterious negotiations, the Indians — they were Sioux we discovered — made themselves a sort of camp along one wall of the beluga’s gallery. The whale, whose tank was still not complete, and who received meals consisting of buckets of fish, did not seem to mind. The Indians had constructed some small shelters from blankets draped over clothesline, and as I approached, I saw that they’d made their camp into a rather cozy affair. Seven cots in two tidy rows, each made up with a woolen blanket and sheets. Men lay on two of the cots, apparently asleep. Two others sat on the floor just inside the blanket structure, and a white-haired man wearing a violet waistcoat and a top hat stood at the top of the ladder. He leaned over the side of the beluga tank, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a fancy hardwood pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth. He held the handle of a horsehair push broom over the water. When I reached him, I peered over the lip of the creature’s tank; the whale was lolling on its side while the old Indian
scrubbed its back vigorously. The whale emitted a long, continuous whistle and raised one fin lazily.

“Good evening,” I said.

The elderly man glanced at me. One of the younger men came out of the tent and walked to where we were. He wore black trousers and an indigo shirt. He watched the older man and said nothing. One of the others sat up on his cot.

“My name is Ana Swift,” I continued. The smell of wood smoke emanated from the Indians’ blankets in a spicy tang, confusing me with a memory of my mother’s house, my home, that place I’d never see again, a place of questionable existence.

“I’m hosting an English class. Wednesday evening. The night after tomorrow.” I held out one of the yellow flyers. “To learn English.”

The beluga croaked with pleasure, which made the old Indian smile. I gave the flyer to the younger man, who did not look at it. Another Indian appeared from somewhere on the far side of the whale’s tank. She was a woman whose age I could not immediately tell; perhaps it was close to my own. Her hair was shorn close around her ears, and the planes of her cheeks were softened by two creases running horizontally, not denoting exhaustion but giving her face an unusual, wizened quality. Her look was a challenge, and curious. As she came close, I saw that the creases across her cheekbones were scars, made by what must have been an extremely sharp blade. The younger man started to shoo her away, but the elder one gestured to her, and she smirked at the young man as she drew closer.

“She will be the only one,” the elder said. His English, muffled by the pipe, contained a faint British accent.

The other man gave her my flyer. She snatched it and scurried away.

I bypassed the apartment of the conjoined twins. The Martinettis took two flyers, nodding and clucking and waking their youngest son to translate. The Chinese giant, Tai Shan, answered his door wearing a brown silk tunic embroidered with turquoise peonies.

“I am teaching an English class, here in the museum,” I said. “I presume you are not in need of such a thing.”

“No,” the giant said softly. “My English is excellent, as is my German. My French, however, could stand improvement.”

“Well.” How irritating.

I had seen this Chinese giant only once before. He obviously found better things to do with his time than spend it with the rest of us, so I did not go out of my way to befriend him.

I passed Olrick’s closed door, and the albino twins and their parents, who came from New Orleans. At the end of the hall was a door I’d never noticed before. It was probably empty, but I knocked anyway. No sound from within. I slipped a flyer under the door and as I turned away I heard something move inside. I tapped the door again. “Hello?” I thought I heard a voice, and then I definitely heard the thump of something hitting the floor. As I turned the doorknob it occurred to me that whoever it was might not want to be disturbed.

A tribal man, an old African, probably, lay curled on his side on the floor of the empty room. He clutched a satchel of some kind to his shirtless chest. His face was ashen, his eyes closed. The window was wide open and dead leaves had blown in; a few of their tatters were caught in his hair and on his trousers. He was whispering something I could not understand. He seemed to be ill.

“Are you all right?” I went to him, ambushed by the pungent odor of his sweat and unwashed clothes. His eyes snapped open, revealing yellow whites and black irises. He continued to whisper and raised one of his hands in a gesture that appeared to beckon me. He must want food. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

“Where is your manager?” The man didn’t answer. He looked terrible, so I hurried to the restaurant and returned with two plates and a pitcher of water. He had moved to an upright position, sitting cross-legged. His satchel had disappeared. He did not move but accepted the first plate when I
pushed it to him. He ate slowly, carefully, the pieces of boiled carrot. He dipped his finger into the mashed potatoes and ate those. He did not touch the sliced beef, but drank all the water.

“Where is your manager?” I asked him. “Who is your guardian?”

Most of the savages with whom I’d shared the stage were not authentic, or if they actually were from Borneo, or South America, or wherever they claimed, they were long accustomed to the entertainment business. There had been a “Batu Pigmy” in Jones’ show who had worked as a barkeep on the nights he wasn’t performing. He was just a dwarf born to slaves in Georgia. Most performers of this type traveled with managers, but from the look of this one, he did not have the benefit of such a relationship. Someone would have to be notified.

By Wednesday evening I had brought four chairs from the restaurant, a small stack of paper, and four pens and inkpots. I set the chairs in a tidy row. I waited in my room, but no one came. I opened the door and looked up and down the hall. I waited ten minutes and then I went to collect them.