Among the Wonderful (5 page)

“And what is your opinion of Mr. Barnum?”

“My opinion? I hardly see the relevance of that. You might as well ask me my opinion of the wind.”

Mr. Archer passed two carpenters building a tall wooden booth of some kind and stopped next to the stone blocks imported from the Giant’s Causeway. He bent down to look into a case of fossils.

“Ah,” said Guillaudeu. “This one is part of Scudder’s original collection.
Homo diluvii testis
. Man who witnessed the flood.”

“Preserved in stone?”

“Just his imprint. The bones are long gone.”

“But look.” Mr. Archer squatted in front of the case. “His skull is far too small. Where are his hands, his arms? The way the stone’s grain dips, you really can’t be sure what you’re looking at, can you?”

“You said it earlier, Mr. Archer: We’re not so sure that’s the right question to ask, when faced with such a thing, are we?”

There was a crowd in front of Cornelia, the gray dog in Gallery Four who operated a sewing machine using a custom-made set of foot pedals. It was the first time Guillaudeu had seen her at work, and he watched as she guided a piece of blue muslin through the machine with her muzzle. The placard beside her said that she had come from Italy, but Guillaudeu had heard from William the ticket-man that Barnum found her in the back room of a tavern in the Bowery. By the look of the dog’s keeper, whose sharp features resembled
Vulpes vulpes
, Guillaudeu believed the story. The keeper tipped his oily top hat and exposed his toothless gums in what might have been a smile. The man’s hand was obscured by a tangle of black, vine-like tattoos. Guillaudeu hurried back to his companion.

“You must explain this to me.” The ad man led Guillaudeu past shelves of idolatrous objects: carved totems, the feathered rattle, white masks of cured leather ringed with feathers. He stopped in front of a cabinet that held a tall glass jar.

“I know,” Guillaudeu intoned. “I find it terribly inappropriate.”

“It’s a human arm,” Mr. Archer observed.

“Yes,” Guillaudeu sighed. “It is.”

“Why or how did it come to be here?” Mr. Archer whispered. “It looks quite old, really. Quite disgusting.”

“Yes. Tom Trouble’s arm. Apparently he was a pirate. A devilish prowler of equatorial seas, as they say.”

“But how did … he lose it? And how did it end up here?”

“Perhaps this is one of the exhibits Barnum was referring to when he hired you, Mr. Archer. To provide such stories. Facts. Or whatever you want to call the explanation.”

Mr. Archer straightened up. He laughed. He swiveled his head toward the clamoring crowd. “Of course! I should have known!” He poked his cane into the air, his laughs ringing out. Guillaudeu backed away from him. “That gives me a splendid idea.” He wiped his eyes with a canary-yellow silk handkerchief and scrutinized Tom Trouble’s arm. “Yes, indeed. This place is turning out to be rather amusing after all, Mr. Guillaudeu. I’m going back to our office. I want to get started. The rest of the museum can wait.”

With a headache blooming at his temple, Guillaudeu watched the crowd envelop
Homo malaccus:
man with a cane.

The small orb, with its emerald-and-indigo pattern of continent and sea, hung against a painted firmament. Guillaudeu did not mind this diminutive view of earth, although this exhibit had caused a ripple of controversy when Scudder unveiled it. Nor was he bothered by what the rendering made obvious: Any notion of the heft and volume of the highest mountain range, or the deepest oceanic trench, was a simple illusion. The planet hung without an anchor, free and unprotected in the void, susceptible to cosmic forces of which man could never conceive.

The only thing that unnerved Guillaudeu in this vista was the tiny sailing ship dangling alongside earth, positioned by a delicate filament as if it had caught a trade wind straight out into the universe and then wheeled around to take a good look homeward. Behind the ship, on whose stern was the name USS
Happenstance
, Guillaudeu’s line of sight seemed to be aimed at the whole scene as if he, or any observer, was the very force, massive and unknowable, that could annihilate the planet and man’s futile though doggedly consistent attempt to conquer it.

To view this scene, Guillaudeu had discovered when he first peered through the brass viewer labeled
SCIPIO’S DREAM
, was to take part in a strange charade: Here the whole earthly world was represented, including humanity itself, but the whole vista encompassed no more than a foot of space within a single room of a labyrinthine museum that was just one
building on a quadrant of buildings making up one block in one neighborhood in a city on a small island in the —

“What’s this?” A familiar voice accompanied a quick tap on his shoulder.

Guillaudeu pulled away from the brass viewer to find Edie Scudder with her hands on her hips. “Just a shell of the former man, eh?” She smiled.

“What are you doing here?” In his sudden elation, the paradox of Scipio’s Dream spun off into the ether.

“I received an invitation from Mr. Barnum to join his staff for lunch today.”

Edie’s wiry brown hair fell loose around her shoulders despite the fashion of the day. She wore a fitted velvet jacket and cobalt-blue skirt, though there was a streak of tar along the hem. Edie spent most days near the ships and had picked up everything from tattoos to foul language. She had long ago learned to censor herself with Guillaudeu, and now she patted him on the back and hooked her arm through his.

“You look tired.”

“I’ve become the keeper of a squealing menagerie.”

She laughed, and several museum visitors turned their heads. Guillaudeu had always hoped that Edie, John Scudder’s only child and a natural businesswoman, would take over the management of the collection when the time came. But her interest was shipping, and as unlikely as it seemed she was proving very successful at it.

“It’s not funny,” he said. Her lightheartedness suddenly made his disappear. “On Thursday a man delivered three parrots to the kitchen instead of my office. By the time I got there, they were already on their way to the restaurant: The chef had wrung their necks and plucked them.”

Edie laughed harder.

“It was
not
funny. I’ve got to do something.”

“Barnum’s got big ideas, Emile.” Edie looked around the crowded Cosmorama salon. “And it looks like they’re working.”

“But some division must be made between the specimens and the living. It’s simply not right to stumble upon a live
serpent when you think you’re in a room full of stuffed ducks, for God’s sake.”

Edie hooted again and slapped him lightly on the arm. “That’s
not
right, is it? Not acceptable at all.”

They moved among the Cosmoramas, now and then peering into the viewers at some exotic miniaturized scene. Guillaudeu did not explain that Barnum’s lack of organization was quickly eroding the integrity of the taxonomic principles on which Edie’s own father had built the museum, and to which Guillaudeu fervently adhered. To see the specimens shoved to the side or disappear entirely would kill him, he was certain. The prospect was harder to bear than the disappearance of his wife, as unnatural as that might be. These disappearances were erasing him. And so he hated Edie’s good humor about Barnum, but since he loved Edie, ruining it would not be worth the risk that she might leave.

Edie rarely came here anymore. She was twenty years his junior, which made her approaching thirty-five. But when he looked at her, Guillaudeu saw each stratum of her girlhood. His life enveloped hers; he’d been in her father’s employ since the day she was born.

She used to confide in Guillaudeu as he worked across from her. She was the only person to ever share his worktable. Opposite whatever specimen he stretched, scraped, or sewed, she would carefully spread her own work. Sometimes it was a tray of shells she organized, sometimes a box of agates. Sometimes it was schoolwork and sometimes it was her own sketches, kept safe in a notebook that he had given her on her seventh birthday.

His affection for Edie was never paternal. Even then, when she was seven and he was twenty-seven, he regarded her with a combination of delight and impatience. If only she could grow up faster, or he could go backward to meet her on equal ground. He hung back during her adolescence, watching periods of bravado give way to interminable solitary walks in her father’s galleries. She still told him things during this period, about her friends and the places she’d visited.
She told him what she would not tell her father, and yet he still waited.

He had endured several periods of romantic longing, the first during Edie’s fifteenth year. He considered this a natural evolution; it was a love that opened its arms wide to the child he had known. He considered his feelings respectful, reverential. He had believed it would not be long before they reached their final and permanent mode of relating, as lifelong companions. But in that peculiar way that lives diverge as sharply and decisively as an incision, soon after her twenty-third birthday Edie eloped with a naval captain. When her outraged father told him the news, Guillaudeu felt as if lightning had ignited every atom in his body. The gap between them, always wider than he would have liked, snapped open once and for all. What else could he do but swallow his hope that they would marry? Within the year he had married Celia, the daughter of his favorite bookseller.

Two years later Edie’s naval captain deserted her. Neither Edie nor her father ever discussed the matter with Guillaudeu, and eventually he and Edie reached what would become their permanent relationship: more like uncle and niece than he would have hoped, but still a great comfort to him through the years. With her arm through his, Guillaudeu could not imagine life without her sharp eye and her hardheadedness to flex against.

Moving from viewer to viewer, Guillaudeu half expected to find a replica of the museum as he’d first known it. During the building’s construction, John Scudder had asked Guillaudeu for advice about the dimensions of galleries and necessary precautions for optimizing space for the larger animal specimens. They had been discussing the construction of the new building for three years while Scudder raised funds. Guillaudeu had accompanied Scudder and Mr. Olmsted, the financier, on a trip to the Westchester quarries to pick out marble for the stairwell and façade. He had been among the first men to set foot in the finished building and that experience had been one of the highlights of his career. He could
still conjure the fragrance of newly hewn lumber filling the air as he walked through the main entrance for the first time and then up the great marble stairwell, cut smooth and straight as the very path to heaven. The ceilings of the main galleries stood at thirty feet, and though the place lacked altars or stained glass, it felt like a grand church. It was a perfect home for his specimens.

It had taken him almost two months to move the collection from the almshouse building and arrange the mounted animals across the five floors of the museum. He set the specimens in their carefully chosen places, making sure the snowy egret’s knifelike beak was poised exactly as it would have been in life, hovering above the water, waiting for the moment of its prey’s fatal mistake. Setting up the museum for Scudder had been the most pleasurable work of his life and now, as he stared at a tiny guardsman outside a balsa Tower of London, he couldn’t believe so many years had passed.

One Cosmorama revealed a model of a cobbled street, with tiny carved carriages hitched to delicate wooden horses. On the far side of this street stood streetlamps the size of matchsticks, and a few trees meticulously sculpted with minuscule paper leaves. A river flowed in a fluttering of mesh blown by a tiny fan on a hidden belt. Just beyond the river rose Notre Dame, its apostles carved under a magnifying glass. Each beveled buttress lay flush along the cathedral. The figures of saints leaned, as they did in reality, almost suicidal on the precipice. The sculptor had even added pigeons to a few of the saints’ shoulders.

Among Guillaudeu’s only surviving memories of the city of his birth were the smell of bread in his father’s bakery and certain tender feelings toward rivers that he re-experienced every time he saw the Hudson. He looked on the Cosmorama not with a sense of home, but with the feeling that the view, in wood and tiny plaster bricks, had successfully replaced any other memory he might have of the real city. He found it comforting, this sturdy little Paris. If only we could look in
on the world like this, he thought, and find everything fixed in its proper place.

Edie led Guillaudeu out of the viewing salon up into the main fourth-floor galleries. There was a new exhibit, in a case built in the style of all the vitrines of the museum, with wood moldings carved in various designs, but this case did not contain shelves. It was filled with water, and in the water were twenty little creatures that seemed to glide and float on springs. Their tails were coiled like fiddleheads below them, and they maintained themselves relatively upright. The specimens of
Hippocampus zosterae
had arrived just two days earlier, and Guillaudeu had been all over town until he found a Chinese mercantile on Third Avenue that sold tiny dried shrimp, which the swimming creatures darted after and inhaled with gusto. The strange, feathery fish drifted up and down, sometimes twining their tails around one another like schoolchildren holding hands and generally addressing the world with a kissing motion.

“Look at them,” said Edie. “Where are they from?”

“Who knows?” Guillaudeu tried to remain annoyed.

“How does he get seawater in here?”

“That was one of the first things he did. We all wondered why, but he built a pipe to the harbor right away.”

“Must’ve cost a fortune. And how does he pump the water?”

Guillaudeu shrugged. “He must have bribed the aldermen. The octopus was the first to arrive. It’s in Gallery Fourteen, but I think I’ll have to move it.”

“Is it near your stuffed ducks?” Edie laughed.

“Oh, stop! Please, Edie. These are serious problems, and not just taxonomic. When your father ran the place, I was invited to every important auction in the city. The zoological societies, hunting clubs, every respectable private collector, and all the government expedition companies. I had access to all the specimens coming into the city. I thought I might even have been close to receiving an invitation from the Lyceum.”