Among the Wonderful (22 page)

Sometimes I listened to him make his way in from the barn late in the evening. I knew he kept a bottle of whiskey out there and I could tell by his footsteps that he’d been into it. I pretended to be asleep, and when he stopped in my doorway my heart pounded so loudly I thought he must surely hear it
.

The bright cold day I finally sat up and swung my huge legs off the edge of the bed, I knew I had to move or die. I was groggy from laudanum — I hadn’t needed morphine in a month — but determined. When I lurched to my feet I thought I would faint from the pain but I wobbled ahead, reaching the kitchen door in just a few steps. I staggered outside in just my too-short nightgown, the cold turning my bare bruised legs pink. Cold air hit the weeping sores on my back as I came down the few steps to the snow
.

He was in the barn and I started toward it. I was so curious what
he’d been doing in there every day, since the nets were long stowed and the boats out of the water. The snow numbed my feet deliciously, and gooseflesh prickled my skin. I heaved in cold air and walked through the clouds of my breath. I smelled wood fires and frost as I squinted dizzily in the sun. I ducked through the once huge doorway of the barn
.

He was building a large wooden box with one side cut out. I did not recognize it as an exhibition booth until later, when she told me they’d read about a giant who made seventy dollars a week in London. We could pay off the boat, she said. Can you imagine that?

When my shadow filled the barn entrance he looked up. His eyes widened and he stumbled backward, tripping over his tools. He fell. My father
.

He shouted for my mother, but she was gone to a neighbor’s house. He was trapped
.

“Da,” I said. “I can walk again.” The barn spun in front of me and I clutched the wall. Explosions of light blocked my sight. “I think I might —”

“Ana!” His voice reached me from very far away as I toppled from a new, great height
.

A sound pulled me away from Pictou and those people now lost to me. I stared at the door to my apartment, listening, but all was silent on the fifth floor of Barnum’s museum. I wondered if I’d actually heard anything at all, but it came again, and this time I thought it must be Beebe, and my blood rose dreadfully. I put down the True Life History.

Poor, awkward Beebe, burning his tongue and laboring over his coins. I hadn’t seen him since our evening together, even though I’d strolled by the theater entrance on more than one occasion. The idea that Beebe might have sneaked away from his chapel bed and across Broadway and made his way into the museum somehow and was now poised outside my door was oddly thrilling. I rose. Be that man, Beebe. One who would act rashly out of desire or, even better, simply to say,
Look how blue the night has become, how strangely silver
. If it’s you, I will not even speak. I will just pull you in.

It was only Maud, though, standing there, holding a mostly melted candle in a tarnished silver holder. It was Maud, and she was the image of a nightmare: her head a nest of black tangles, her recently woken face bearing a crease from her bedding, her beard and eyebrows in complete, awful, disarray.

“I have incontrovertible evidence,” she whispered fiercely, pushing her way into my room.

“Are you awake or asleep?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid. I
hear
them.”

“Who?”

“The gaff.”

“Not the gaff again!” Maud’s persistent interest in the authenticity of the conjoined twins had become an irritating obsession.

“Yes. And this time I’m ending it once and for all. Come with me.”

“I’m not coming with you anywhere.” I stepped back but she grabbed my wrist with force.

“I need a witness, Ana. So it’s not just my word against theirs.”

“Well, if they’re a fake, there should be plenty of evidence.”

“Just come on.” She pulled me into the hallway.

Regrettably, she was right. What sounded like two distinct sets of footsteps came from the closed door of the room. The few times I’d seen them, the twins had appeared real enough to me. I’d scorned Maud’s suspicion. The identical dandies, with their slicked black hair, had claimed to be British. They were of the most common variety, connected across the torso, each half with his own arm and the tri-legged mode of transport on the bottom. They wore elevated shoes of different heights, and their trousers fit loosely enough to imply that their middle appendage was not monstrously deformed.

“What are you going to do?” I whispered to Maud.

She flung open the door.

We were transformed, then, over the course of one long moment, into villains. We had surprised them in an act of intimacy, although to use that word in the context of conjoined twins is to imply a far deeper meaning: intimacy endured to the point of derangement. They were no gaff.

They were kissing, and they seemed to have been dancing before that. One half of the twins wore a rather fine organdy gown in violet and a wig of yellow hair piled high with tiny jewels. His face was powdered, and at the moment of our discovery I observed several enamel bracelets on his raised, gloved arm, which was entwined with his brother’s in the gesture of the dance. It was a picturesque scene, elegant as
ballet and as tender as the most fervent couple. However unusual, the caress thrilled me.

“Get out.” The unbedecked twin’s voice was not loud. He spoke with aplomb, though with no discernible British accent. He made no move toward us. His mouth was smeared with lip rouge.

“Get out. Monsters,” the twin repeated.

“Oh, Jacob.” The one in the gown also spoke softly. “We might as well invite them in.” He offered a strange smile, but we had already backed away. Maud shut the door and ran back to my room. We laughed, but there was wretchedness in it.

“The one question is answered,” gasped Maud. “But I have so many more!”

“Do you? I find I have no question at all.”

“How will we ever face them again?”

“We have no choice but to face them again. Probably tomorrow at breakfast.”

When she was gone, and I had once again crawled into my bed and tucked the quilt tightly around my body, I realized that what I felt was envy. For their closeness. Company. Companionship, however forced. I should have envied a normal couple, but naturally that was more difficult for me to imagine.

On New York Island

Above Murray Hill, mansions were replaced by factories set back from the road, emitting steam and occasionally foul odors. The view opened up on either side to pasture and thicket, with a few old oaks spreading their great umbrellas in the distance. These trees would be coveted in the city, but up here they were grand sentinels guarding nothing.

Guillaudeu passed an empty, reeking cattle market, a tidy brick building with a sign for Simeon’s Match Company and a factory busy producing whatever it was the city needed. If he’d ever passed these buildings before, he’d been deep inside a carriage and never noticed them. He was getting tired, but he went on, unable to stop even when he came to a gray wooden tavern at a crossroad. A dozen horses in the tavern’s small pasture looked up as he skittered past the open door and the men’s voices erupting from within. Half an hour later he sat down on the wooden steps of a church. He got out the smoked sausage and realized he hadn’t packed a knife. He made sure no one was watching before gnawing off a chunk. He checked his watch: four o’clock. He broke off some cheese and ate that, too.

A distant but growing rumble disturbed Guillaudeu’s meal; he walked around the side of the church, looking east until the steam engine appeared. So he was still on Fifth Avenue. The sleek coaches of the new Harlem Railroad clattered by on what must be Fourth. The windows were crowded with the figures of sightseers. A blaze of orange caught his eye
and for a fleeting moment he saw Celia, leaning against the glass in her ugly wool coat, waving to him. After it had gone he walked to the tracks and touched the still-warm rails.
I can’t escape the city’s tendrils. They reach up, always up
. He looked south.
I could be in my office within an hour if I catch the next train
. His heart leapt toward the idea of his freshly oiled worktable, the pots of resin and beeswax, and all his tools waiting in alignment, waiting for the next specimen and the application of his will over it.

But as the specter of Mr. Archer appeared, tapping his pencil on a stack of paper in the corner of Guillaudeu’s office, poised to write unknown nonsense about Barnum’s latest spectacle, one simple fact became utterly clear: The museum was no longer his home and there was nothing he could do about it.

For a moment he felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. He even raised a hand to his cheek as he stood there by the rails. Then from the gut he heaved, unsure if he was going to cry, scream, or vomit, and he found himself laughing.

Orphaned again, you fool! This time by a damned building! The hilarity crashed through him and his breath twisted free of his body in convulsions overlaid by squeaking mirth.

“I am
Lusus naturae,”
he wheezed, doubled over and clutching his belly against a cramp.

As suddenly as it was upon him, the episode ended. He righted himself and mopped his face with his handkerchief, feeling a welcome calm. He had been observed by a little boy in overalls standing against a fence across the rails, who now ran off.

I will continue north
, Guillaudeu declared to himself. He knew it wasn’t a noble decision, or, more significantly, a logical one. Like all voyages of discovery, his was fueled as much by a determination
not
to stay in one place as a conviction to explore. He imagined Cervantes’ approval.

Guillaudeu set off again. When he could see the river and the southern edge of Blackwell’s Island he turned north, and a brackish breeze caught him full in the face.

The landscape now shifted to asylums, which seemed to
be everywhere and only grew bigger as he walked. They were formidable buildings, even with children playing outside some of them. Deaf and Dumb Asylum. Colored Children’s Asylum. Lunatic Asylum. All catchments for the city’s inevitable by-product. What if he’d been taken to an orphans’ home up here? He’d have ended up an apprentice making matches.

Guillaudeu walked up a hill and past the gated estate that topped it. An orchard with newly unfurled leaves rustled like an audience whispering in the theater. He saw a cluster of buildings ahead, nestled at the water’s edge in a shallow valley beyond the foot of the hill. Turtle Bay. He’d stop for a meal and a good night’s rest in one of the village inns. Perhaps he’d have time to read a bit more of what Linnaeus had to say about voyaging in one’s own country. Guillaudeu had already adopted the essay as his guide and companion, as if the words of the famous taxonomist were enough to create order around him as he walked, and to keep him safe.

“O grim look’d night, o night with hue so black. O night, which ever art when day is not. O night, o night, alack, alack, alack!”

Now that Guillaudeu stood in the shadows at the edge of the tavern’s crowded garden, he saw that a rough theater had been erected at one end, lit by gas lamps now that the sun was setting. Two costumed men stood on the stage, holding open books in front of them. Women emerged from the tavern with plates and pitchers for the patrons, all of whom were busy heckling the players on the makeshift stage.

It had taken far longer than Guillaudeu expected to reach the outskirts of the village, and he was feeling light-headed.

“I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot! And thou wall, thou sweet and lovely wall, that stands between her father’s ground and mine … show me thy chink!” And the men roared as one player, acting the part of the wall, turned his back to the audience, bent over, and lifted his costume to reveal a pale and distinctly hairy backside.

If there had been some courage required for Guillaudeu to venture into this tavern, after pausing at the threshold the amount needed was doubled. He stood outside the gate, invisible (he hoped) to those within. Any remaining daring, which had sustained him as he started this adventure, leaked away. Clutching his satchel, tired and very hungry, he had
now lost himself somewhere along the mutable border of things, trying to discern exactly where the world ended and he began.

“O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans, for parting my fair Pyramus and me.”

An uproarious cheer accompanied Thisbe’s arrival onstage. She was a massive woman with rouged cheeks, a piercing voice, and an expansive bosom barely contained by a half-laced corset. Aghast, Guillaudeu watched as she pranced to the wall, who had righted himself and now stood with his arms folded in front of him.

“My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones!” Thisbe shrieked as the wall reached out with both hands and grabbed her ample breasts. The men in the tavern roared, and Guillaudeu nearly turned and ran, but then he saw one of the cooks emerge from the tavern with a huge pot of steaming food. Salivating, he took a step forward. Then another. He kept his eye on an empty place at one of the tables. He unlatched the gate and entered.