Earthly Astonishments (16 page)

Unless he could be reminded that he owed her. He shouldn’t forget the insult of the snake cage.

“There must be another way out of this!” Josephine tapped the side of her head, trying to shake loose a good idea.

“—an entire world of Nature’s Marvels awaits behind these doors!” Mr. Walters continued to enchant the onlookers.

“Constable?” Miss MacLaren had put up her pink parasol, giving her the look of a frosted teacake. “Are you going to permit him to strut about in this manner? I want him placed under arrest as well as the little freak.”

Mr. Walters’s expression became more grave at once.

“The woman is mad!” muttered Nelly.

The schoolgirls gasped.

Josephine rocked on her toes. Miss MacLaren really did have a nerve!

“Well, sir?” said the constable. “We’ve all heard the lady’s complaint. What’ve you got to say?”

“I have tolerated this woman’s behavior long enough. I would like to know the nature of the accusations against myself and my colleague.” He indicated Josephine with a nod.

Charley squeezed Josephine’s hand. She knew he was saying, “Colleague?” with his pink eyeballs rolling to Heaven.

“That puny thing has been a charity case in my fine Academy for five years.” Miss MacLaren didn’t look at Josephine while she spoke. “Through the goodness of my heart, I saved her from a life of neglect. Despite her incompetence, she was permitted to perform the occasional chore to allow for her pride.”

Josephine’s heart was beating louder than the lies. Emmy, squeezed between Harriet and Felicia, shook her head like a broken puppet.

“I fed her and clothed her and gave her an excellent education. And she repaid me by stealing! She sneaked into my study and stole my money before creeping away into the night!”

Nancy and Charlotte and the others were smirking, as if knowing all the time that she was a criminal. Josephine’s face was hot, scorched by all the eyes staring indignantly. She felt her feet burning inside the shoes she’d bought with her gold dollars. Emmy looked horrified. Mr. Gideon Smyth was writing. Mr. Walters
seemed intrigued. Charley squinted in surprise, disbelieving the impossible. The constable looked bored.

“Well, Miss?”

“I only took my wages that were owing. I wasn’t a resident in her stinking Academy. I was a slave.”

Miss MacLaren gasped and fanned her face with a glove.

“And there aren’t allowed to be slaves anymore, thanks to Mr. Abraham Lincoln. People who work should be paid. I was a hard worker every day.”

Josephine saw Emmy’s head nodding up and down.

“They weren’t good to me,” she continued, in her husky voice. “Miss MacLaren is saying untruths. I got beaten. The new cook beat me. So I left. And I took my wages with me.”

Mr. Gideon Smyth’s pencil skittered back and forth across the page as Miss MacLaren screeched her response.

“Don’t you get uppity with me! I sent your wages to your parents every year, as agreed, so what you took was out-and-out stealing. Do you hear that, Constable? She has confessed to a whole platoon of witnesses!”

Officer Beale shifted uncomfortably, as if his trousers were buttoned on too tight. He seemed to examine Josephine from under his shaggy eyebrows before he cocked his head toward Mr. Walters.

“What say you to that, eh?”

Mr. Walters managed an indulgent chuckle.

“The problem is simply one of misunderstanding!” He caressed his moustache, as though the solution should now be clear to everyone.

“If you would let me have a private word, my dear man.” Mr. Walters draped an arm across the constable’s shoulders. Josephine saw the fingers of his other hand clutching the folded money he had taken from Nelly’s apron. She had to do something!

“Excuse me!” Josephine felt a tremor of power rise through her spine. She knew she had to stop him.

“Mr. Walters is right. It’s all just a misunderstanding. I took that money by mistake. Miss MacLaren wants it back. She doesn’t really want me for a servant anymore. I’m too small and not very satisfactory. Isn’t that the impression you got, Mr. Smyth?”

Josephine was depending on luck. Would the reporter help her now? His eyebrows were arched in admiration, giving her the wits to go on.

“Did you meet Mr. Gideon Smyth?” She addressed the headmistress for the first time. “Mr. Smyth is a reporter. He’s here to write down everything about me. I’m pretty sure he put down the part about when I was beaten by your cook.” Miss MacLaren raised a hand in denial and simpered at Mr. Smyth.

“And he might put down all manner of things, about anything I might care to tell him, about any of the places I’ve worked, or things that might have been done to me.”

Now she was looking Mr. Walters straight in the eye.

“So I know that Mr. Walters will be happy to pay
Miss MacLaren the five dollars I took, and then we’ll all be settled up. I even think he has money in his pocket right now.”

Mr. Walters was truly flummoxed. Josephine bit the inside of her cheek so he wouldn’t see the grin she was sucking on while he reluctantly counted out the money and pressed it into Miss MacLaren’s white glove.

Surrounded by a keenly curious crowd, Miss MacLaren had no option but to accept the funds. She tugged on the strings of her purse and put the money inside, with her mouth shriveled up like a walnut.

“Well, now,” said Officer Beale, “that’s over then.”

But Mr. Walters wasn’t quite finished.

“Perhaps you would be so kind,” he said, with a theatrical wave of his hand, “dear Officer Beale, to accompany Miss MacLaren and her charges to the train station?”

He shook the constable’s hand with a carefully hidden gift in his palm. Only someone of Josephine’s height could swear to the exchange. Mr. Walters clearly recognized the usefulness of a contented police patrol.

Mr. Gideon Smyth bowed low to Josephine.

“I’d like to have a word with you, after the show, perhaps?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Not today, my friend.” Mr. Walters swiftly placed himself between Josephine and the newspaperman. “The child has tired herself out and will need to rest. Come another time.”

Mr. Gideon Smyth saluted Josephine with a wink. He tucked his notebook into his coat pocket and trundled off.

As Miss MacLaren convened her flock, Josephine searched for Emmy to signal a farewell, but now she was out of sight amidst her classmates. Josephine’s heart turned over in regret that she hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye.

r. Walters hustled his exhibitions back indoors to perform their overdue matinee. Josephine did not speak to her employer, nor did he approach her. It seemed they both knew a truce had been called and would leave the peace conference until a later time.

Onstage Josephine felt cheered by her admirers. Whatever had happened behind the scenes, she was still queen of her audience. But how long could she rule?

Following the performance, Josephine went straight to her platform in the main promenade. She was still ajitter, reliving the afternoon’s drama. Miss MacLaren was like an invading dragon, breathing fire from the moat. Mr. Walters was even worse, the duplicitous
knight inside the castle walls, awaiting his chance to confine the queen.

Finally the closing bell sounded, and lingering patrons trailed out of the building. The walls were instantly ghostly in the feeble light.

Josephine climbed down her ladder, promising to meet Charley outside to walk back to the boarding house together. The door to her dressing room was ajar. Was that singing coming from within? It surely wasn’t Rosie. She had a voice like a nanny goat.

Josephine peeked around the door. Barker lay asleep on his tattered horsehair cushion. And Emmy sat next to him, with her hand resting between his ears.

“Emmy!”

“Josephine!”

Josephine threw herself around her friend’s neck where she sat, pushing her off balance and across Barker’s back. They laughed as the dog snorted and opened an eye, but he didn’t seem to mind being a mattress.

“What are you doing here?” Josephine gasped.

“I couldn’t bear to go back to school, it’s been awful! Miss MacLaren is in such a temper, she made us come to find you, saying all the time you were ungrateful and stupid, and if you were going to exploit yourself, you should have gone uptown to the mighty P. T. Barnum. She didn’t say about the stolen money. Oh, Josephine! How did you dare!”

“I just had to. That’s where you found me, remember?
But now you’ve scarpered school! Talk about daring!”

“I’ve been sitting here waiting for you, thinking of nothing but my father’s face when he’s notified I’m gone, the way his eyes go crossed when he’s angry. I can’t decide if he’ll kill me for running off, or kill Miss MacLaren for losing me!”

“Probably both, but we’ll say it was her fault. Dragging her fine girls to such a dubious den! Whatever was she thinking!”

That started them laughing all over again, trying Barker’s patience to the limit. He heaved himself up and gave a good shake just as Rosie came through the door. Barker greeted his mistress with a plaintive whine and a limp wag of his tail.

“Hello, Rosie,” said Josephine, knowing that the Bearded Lady’s brain was as thick as a Bible. She wouldn’t realize that anything was amiss. “This is my friend Emmy. She’s been watching Barker sleep.”

“Ah, now, that’s nice. Come along, my pet, time to go home.” Barker shuffled to her side, and they departed.

“Oh! Jo-Jo!” Rosie poked her whiskery face around the door. “I near forgot. Charley’s waiting on you, with Nelly. By the oyster boys, he said.”

Josephine and Emmy looked at each other, suddenly serious.

“What’ll I do?”

“Come home with us,” declared Josephine. “Nelly’ll help think of a plan. She’s Charley’s ma, but she’s not
a regular mother; she’s completely trustworthy. Come on. Let’s go meet them, and you can sleep with me tonight.”

“Oh, Jo! What have you done?” Nelly was more upset to see Emmy than Josephine had expected.

“Emmy’s company!” protested Josephine. “She’s my friend!”

“She’ll be missed at once!” cried Nelly. “They’ll be back to find her!”

“I didn’t think of that,” admitted Josephine.

Emmy hung her head.

“I didn’t mean trouble for anyone,” she said, “I just wanted to see Josephine.”

“You’re a skedaddler!” blurted Charley.

“Close it, Charley!” Josephine shushed him, but he was irrepressible.

“You weren’t content to steal money from the old bat, Jo? Now you’re taking her pupils too?”

Nelly swatted her son lightly on the head, told him to button his lip, and announced that she would hold a family meeting in her bed chamber after supper was eaten and cleared away.

They introduced Emmy to Hilda as a friend who would be staying the night. Although the landlady grumbled that she preferred to have a little notice, she ladled out enough fish stew for everyone.

Nelly postponed any serious conversation until they were alone upstairs. Other years, Nelly had shared a room with Charley. But this season, Josephine slept in
the second bed in Nelly’s room, and Charley had a cot in the alcove by the sitting room.

It was the first bed of Josephine’s life. The first that she could remember anyway. At the school, she had slept next to the stove on a straw pallet. In Nelly’s apartment on Forsyth Street, she had only a folded blanket.

The ceremony of hauling herself up to lie upon the real mattress and to stroke the battered brass knobs on the corners of the bedstead was a nightly pleasure that had lost none of its novelty. And as Josephine’s body did not begin to fill the space, of course there was room for a friend.

“We’ve got a few decisions to make,” Nelly announced, as Charley settled himself on the floor at her feet. Emmy and Josephine sat cross-legged on the bed. “Emmy, you’ll not be staying more than a night with us—”

“Oh, but Nelly!” Josephine was alarmed.

“Mrs. O’Dooley! I can’t go back to school!”

“Miss MacLaren would chew her up and spit out the bones,” added Josephine.

“I won’t take you to school, Emmy. Now that you’ve told me your sister is married to Robert Dixon, I’ll take you in to the Half-Dollar Saloon. He was always a gentleman when I worked there with him.”