Earthly Astonishments (7 page)

“You run along now, Charley. Get yourself to work. Mr. Walters’ll be in a fine pucker if you’re late again.”

Charley ducked his mother’s kiss and then saluted as he ran inside.

“That’s where the staff and the paying customers go in,” Nelly explained. “His Nibs is the next door over. Oh, and Missy? Be sure to find out the fee he’s got in that greedy mind of his. You’re worth twice times, or more, whatever he says.”

Without another word, she escorted Josephine all the way to the center diamond in Mr. Walters’s office carpet. Mr. Walters bounced to his feet when they came in and rubbed his palms together.

“Did we sleep well?” He bent over Josephine to ask, as if the mood of the day depended on her answer.

“If she’s staying on with us, she’ll be needing a mat, sir.” Nelly was quick to the point.

“We’ll all be moving to the summer quarters in Coney Island on Saturday. I’m sure a bed will be found at the boarding house. It is nicer for all of us to be out of the city for a few weeks. Thank you, Nelly, for bringing her in this morning. You can wait in the main hall.”

Josephine lifted her head with a jerk. “I want Nelly here,” she said quietly.

“Indeed?” Mr. Walters swallowed that like a sour cherry. His eyes narrowed, and he sat down on a wooden chair to look at her.

“I would like you to join our little family, Josephine,” he said quietly. “But first we need to know a few important statistics.”

He stood up and produced a folding measuring stick seemingly from nowhere.

“With your permission?”

She could feel her lips tightening as she held back squawks of anger. Should she let him? Could she stop him? Should she kick him? He held the stick against her back. She could feel the warmth of his large hand as it rested for a moment on her head.

Mr. Walters made a little noise in his throat, like a bumblebee deep inside a daffodil. Josephine caught a look from Nelly’s eyes that made her sharpen up.

Maybe she should wait to see what he offered?

“Just as I thought!” He exclaimed, his smile nearly as wide as his moustache. “Under twenty-nine inches! Well under twenty-nine inches!” He beamed at Josephine, as if expecting her to marvel with him.

“How old are you, my dear?”

“Twelve last October.”

“Twelve? Hmmm. Perhaps we could say fourteen? Or fifteen? To make it even more, even more…” He patted
his pockets and then riffled papers on his desk until he’d found a small notebook and a pencil. He began muttering to himself and making notes.

“New clothes, of course, right away, first thing, and shoes! Do those clodhoppers fit, my dear? No, I didn’t think so. Take them off, let me see your feet.”

Josephine’s cheeks were burning and her hands were like ice as she yanked at the knotted laces. If nothing else good comes of this, she thought, at least I’ll get a pair of real shoes, fitted to my own feet and not stuffed in the toes with crumples of paper.

Mr. Walters crouched next to her, like a giant bear. He seemed hardly able to wait for her bare toes to emerge, as if he would eat them up and lick his lips after.

“Your feet are four inches long! Four inches! I am delighted, my dear, simply delighted!”

Nelly’s eyebrows were raised, maybe laughing to see this huge man in his fancy suit down on the floor. Josephine’s shame suddenly floated away, and she felt a burst of hope inside. She had something that Mr. Walters wanted, and Mr. Walters was a rich man. She was good at arithmetic. She could make up any sum she wanted.

“I am prepared to offer you room and board, and new dresses, plus ten dollars a year, in exchange for your services in our museum,” stated Mr. Walters, his voice steady and warm, as if promising the moon. “What do you say to that, my dear?”

Josephine could hear the clock ticking with a steady, hollow click. Tick, tock. Must talk. Tick, tock. Must talk.

Having learned the carpet pattern by heart, she lifted her chin to face him.

“Mr. Walters.” It came out in a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Mr. Walters. When I saw those pictures out front, I was ready to skedaddle straight to the stitching factory. Then I remembered you bought me my supper, and Charley said it wasn’t so bad here anyway. So I thought it wouldn’t hurt to hear what you had in mind.

“But I’ll need more than what you’re saying.” Josephine didn’t know where her courage was coming from. Maybe from Nelly’s soft smile over in the corner.

“First of all, I want to be where no one can touch me. Up somehow, so they can look, but no touching.”

Mr. Walters smiled. “Of course, my dear, I can understand that. You shall have a platform, all your own.”

Josephine raced ahead before she could succumb to the jitters. “And I want two gold dollars every single week I stay with you, and I want it paid on Saturday night, not saved up for someday later on. Every week.”

Mr. Walters jumped back to his feet. Josephine could see Nelly’s jaw roll open and knew she’d overstepped it.

It was amazing how a voice could change from honey to grit in the wink of an eye. Mr. Walters began spitting his words, as if they were bits of stone.

“Perhaps you have forgotten that you are a gutterpup. Do you think life for a freak in a garment factory will be a merry one?”

Josephine’s heart plunged to her four-inch feet.

“I am taking a tremendous risk,” Mr. Walters continued, “by investing in you at all. What if you start to grow? What then?”

Josephine’s eyes stung, her tears making a sneak attack. She looked at Nelly, feeling hopeless. Nelly winked. That was all Josephine needed.

“I don’t think I’ve got any more growing to do, sir. But I suppose you can’t be sure of that, not knowing me. I guess I’m pretty small, anyhow, even if I did grow a little. Mr. Barnum, who’s got the new circus? He might think I’m small enough, being under twenty-nine inches and all. I might try going to him before I go to a stitching factory.” She stopped talking and listened to the clock.

Mr. Walters clasped his hands and bowed his head, as if in prayer.

“Josephine,” he said finally, “I will accept your conditions.”

Josephine pinched herself to stop from laughing.

“If you start to grow, our arrangement is over. Is that understood? You are a tough little thing, but it adds to your charm. I foresee a prosperous partnership between us.” He turned to Nelly.

“Nelly? I can trust you to clean her up for tomorrow? She’s a bit ripe.”

“Aye, sir.”

But Josephine wasn’t quite finished. “Mr. Walters? Because Nelly found me and will be looking out for me, she gets a half-dollar extra every week.

“Those are my rules. You can say yes or no.”

ext morning, when Nelly suggested a scrubbing, Josephine wasn’t quite sure what she meant. Why, she’d washed her face and hands the night before last in the Half-Dollar Saloon. Surely that had taken care of things for a while?

“No, Missy, I mean your whole body, and your hair.”

“My hair too?”

“Aye, your hair too. Charley, my boy, you start filling pots from the tap. We’ll have her scrubbed and polished in no time.”

Charley scowled, but he took two cooking pots and went off down the hall to the tap, shared by the O’Dooleys with the Wongs and the Flanigans and the Goldsmiths. Nelly unhitched a washtub from a hook on the ceiling and set it on the floor next to the table.

“Couldn’t we just rinse me off with a cloth?”

“Well, we could. But since you fit, you might as well sit down and have a real bath like the Queen of England over there in Buckingham Palace.”

She emptied the first pot that Charley brought and passed it back to him.

“We’ll hot up the next pot on the cooker. That’ll make it easier to sit in.”

Charley made two more trips before Nelly thanked him and shooed him out the door.

“You can take yourself out for a walk around the corner. We’ve got women’s work to do.”

“You don’t mean I’m to be naked?” asked Josephine, as soon as he’d gone.

“Near enough,” replied Nelly. “Now, don’t worry yourself. A good bath never killed a person yet.”

Josephine took off her dress and wrapped her arms about herself, not quite believing what Nelly expected of her.

“Oh, you can leave on your underthings if you’re so edgy. They could do with a wash as well, I’m sure.”

Josephine shut her eyes and lowered herself into the warm water. “Uck! I can feel the ridges on the bottom pressing into my legs.” She didn’t like to mention the bruises on her thighs.

Her chemise and pantalettes clung to her skin. She supposed it might feel this way to jump into a rain barrel after a summer rain. There was something unnatural about being so wet indoors.

Nelly dunked the soap bar and set to work, rubbing the lather all over, until Josephine squealed with laughter.

“Ah, she’s ticklish, is she?” Nelly’s fingers started to
wriggle and Josephine started to squirm, soon sending waves over the side of the tub to soak the floor.

“All right, we’ve got your hair to do yet. Let’s not empty it all out.” Without warning, Nelly dipped Josephine’s whole head under the water and brought it back up before she had time to be scared.

“I went under!”

“Aye, that you did!”

Nelly set to soaping Josephine’s curls.

“You’ve a lot of hair for a little person,” she said, rinsing it clean with the water left in the pot.

“I snip it off sometimes, if it gets too wild. With my sewing scissors.”

Laughing, Nelly helped her out of the tub and peeled off the sodden undergarments.

“I never saw a grown person laugh before,” said Josephine. “I only know the mean variety with pinched-in lips.”

“You’ve had a bad start, Missy, but I can make you a promise that there’s laughter to be found in all but the darkest corners.”

The bath ended with Nelly nearly as sopped as Josephine and one thin towel trying to do a job beyond its ability. Charley came home to find them still damp but well scoured, nibbling buns together like old ladies in an uptown tea shop.

Her bath was only the first of many novelties for Josephine that week.

After expressing his initial dismay at the cost of an entire wardrobe made to measure for Little Jo-Jo, Mr. Walters had become deeply interested in the process. He hired Eliot Jacobs, Custom Clothier, who promised a special rate due to the limited yardage involved. Mr. Jacobs had proven up to the challenge of creating miniature versions of gowns worn by great women of history: Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette of France, and Abraham Lincoln’s fashionable wife, Mary, who was famous for her devotion to fancy dresses.

Josephine tolerated hours of fittings, standing on a table in Mr. Jacobs’s workshop. From her unusually elevated vantage point, she could see every corner of the crowded studio. Looking like headless monsters, tailors’ forms stood near the dusty windows, stuck with pins and pattern pieces. Bolts of fabrics were stacked on shelves up to the ceiling. Spools of ribbon, boxes brimming with buttons, and reels of thread littered every surface.

Josephine gazed down upon Mr. Jacobs’s gleaming bald head and admired a master tailor at work. She turned, inch by inch, while Mr. Jacobs pinned here and fussed there.

“You’re a patient little thing, I’ll say that for you,” praised Mr. Jacobs gruffly.

“I’m used to being told, is all,” said Josephine shyly. “It’s having someone sew for me I’m not used to. Instead of the other way around.”

And along with being fitted for new clothes, she had two short lessons in how to wear them. How to walk, how to turn, and how to curtsy without falling on her nose.

Her feet, too, needed particular attention. The cobbler, a wizened Mr. Amos, was bent nearly to her own height from decades at his bench. He was delighted to create a whole series of ornate slippers, sized for a fairy.

“You’re not the first tiny lady I’ve attended to!” he crowed.

“What do you mean?” asked Josephine, thinking she misunderstood him.

“It’s over twenty years now, but Mr. P. T. Barnum himself hired me to make the wedding slippers for Miss Lavinia Bump Warren when she was married to General Tom Thumb!” He peered into Josephine’s face. “You do know who I’m referring to? The most celebrated midgets ever known on this earth?”