God's Fool (26 page)

And, indeed, at times it would seem as though this world we had found ourselves in was just that: a blank page on which anything might be written, any, even the wildest narrative ventured—and if believed, made true. Or true, at any rate, by the definition of truth that seemed to hold sway here: If they believe it, it’s true; if they buy it, it’s real. For this, we were made to understand, was the promised land of puff, the
happiest place in the world for quacks and schemers and frauds. And floating above this Elysium of liars whose depths no plummet could ever sound, forever trolling for suckers, was none other than Phineas T. Barnum.

Years later, long after we had left his employ, we would read about him (and little Charlie Stratton and Anna and some of the others we had known) in the newspapers. Barnum, we heard, had just acquired a pair of long-necked camelopards (as giraffes were called then), or a red-lidded albino child that had never seen the sun. He had built a house in Connecticut encrusted with Turkish towers and minarets. He had bought a thousand acres aligning the railroad tracks to New York and hired a man to plow the fields with an elephant. And so on.

And it seemed to me then—I can’t speak for my brother—that even Phineas T. had served a purpose; that without him we might never have found the will to be anything more than freaks. Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.

Barnum’s representative returned from England with a learned pig, a dwarf woman, a white Negro, a two-headed calf, and us. We outdid them all. We were bigger on Broadway than we had ever been in Piccadilly, more popular in Boston and Philadelphia than we had ever been in Paris. “The nigger’s the worst suck I ever had,” Barnum complained to his friend Moses Kimball, in a letter found and given to us by a friend, “and the calf shits so I can do nothing with him, but the twins will
draw
, I tell you.” He went on: “They’re an unlikable pair, I’ll admit, much inclined to take on airs and question expenses and talk about what
we
are doing, but I’ll have them down to their old level soon enough. They’re worth the aggravation. Give me a fortnight, and I’ll have the community
ravenous for them. And when the public maw is ope, my dear Kimball, then, like a good genius, I’ll throw in, not a ‘bone,’ but a regular tid-bit, a bon-bon, and they’ll swallow it in a single gulp.”

The maw opened, the good genius threw us in. Three years later, to pursue the alimentary metaphor to its natural conclusion, we emerged, properly masticated and digested at last—as celebrities. We had clothes, we had money—and the airs to go with them. It was time to go. We could have stayed, of course—allowed ourselves to be cycled through once more, passed like a pearl through America’s second stomach, puffed and sold and consumed again; indeed, if one thing seemed certain, it was that the Almighty Audience—a fatted ox with the head of a lion and the soul of a barnyard chicken—would always be up for another serving. We chose to leave, instead. Some appetites can make you uneasy.

But if the public’s hunger seemed insatiable at times, it was as nothing compared to Barnum’s; after all, if the masses paid to see 161-year-old Joyce Heth, “Washington’s Slave,” or “the Feejee Mermaid,” a dried-up monstrosity consisting of the tail of a fish, the body and breasts of a female orangutan, and the head of a baboon (a thing with all the appeal of a giant piece of hair-covered jerky), it was because their appetite had been artificially stimulated. Barnum’s was real. His was a shameless, a prodigal gluttony. Gorged and stuffed to surfeit, glutted to the gills, he hungered for more.

“I must have the fat boy,” we heard him bellowing once from the back of the museum on Ann Street in a voice that must have shaken the guests and rattled the windows of Astor House across the way. “I must have him, you hear?”

And he got him, just as he would get all the other sad, triple-chinned seven-year-olds that followed over the years—“the Carolina Prodigy” and “the Baby Goliath,” “the Great Wisconsin Boy” and “the Infant Hoosier Giant”—each one, in turn, ceremonially escorted up the steps of the American Museum (and out of whatever childhood might have remained to him) by his proud, diminutive mother. No, whatever Barnum’s
failings, excessive self-restraint was not among them. He got them all—“albino beauties” and “dog-boys,” African sloths and Nile crocodiles, “man-monkeys” and musclemen. He got “shaking Quakers” and German midgets, twelve-fingered flute players and horned Ethiopian comedians. He got Madame Josephine Cloffulia, whose dark, virile beard extended a full five inches, and who was never seen in public without the brooch containing the portrait of her bearded husband. He got a four-and-a-half-foot-high, twenty-six-year-old armless man named Mr. Nellis, who could fire a pistol and play the violin and cut out paper valentines with his feet. And, of course, he got us.

I disliked him from the moment I saw him—a sentiment shared, for once, by my brother. I disliked the bushy hair, the well-fed face, the pork-sausage fingers. I disliked the air of self-importance—the almost suffocating atmosphere of self-regard that filled the room. Most of all, I disliked the calculating I sensed taking place behind that pasty brow, those quick little eyes, those bunched and meaty cheeks—the ceaseless, machinelike calibrating and recalibrating of opinion and tone, the parrying and probing for weakness, the constant figuring and refiguring of the probable odds of success.

More than any other man I ever met, Barnum had an instinctive, almost doglike nose for power. Those greater than himself he flattered instinctively and shamelessly; those he deemed below him he bullied or ignored. He could turn on a dime—wheedle and whine one moment, bare his teeth the next. Worse yet, he could be charming, with an irrepressible, childlike enthusiasm and a hearty, booming laugh that made him difficult to hate. A connoisseur of the varieties of human desire, he could set the table to suit the guest, and have him signing on the dotted line before the second course. Meeting him, one had the distinct impression, above all, that this man would do anything to win; that it mattered supremely to him; that everything in him was trained, like a cannon, to his purpose.

“Of all the sons of bitches in the world,” Gideon once said to me, “the worst are the ones that can make you laugh right after they’ve stuck a fork in your chest.” I disagreed. I said the worst were not the likable
ones but the ones who knew what you wanted. The ones who could align themselves with your needs. These were like a river—benign enough, even useful, so long as you happened to be going their way. But try to turn and they’d roll right over you. This was Barnum.

He saved us, I suppose, or, more accurately, his representative in London did. By the time he found us on the floor of the boarding house off Parson’s-court, we were down to our last ten shillings. I was more gone than here. Barnum’s man arranged for everything. We were transported to decent rooms, bathed and fed. A regular physician attended us. In less than a month we were on our feet. Passage on a steamer had already been purchased, we were told. We signed a preliminary contract, designating Phineas T. Barnum as our exclusive representative; details to be worked out on our arrival in New York. We were in no position to argue. We sailed a week later with a single carpetbag between us. Our possessions, besides the few necessities that had been bought for us, consisted of two English novels and a miniature jade Buddha. My brother had sold his watch and our father’s knife that last week in the boarding house. The Buddha would have been next. The novels had survived because they were worthless.

It was not until late in the spring of the following year that we met again the man who had found us—a Mr. Timothy O’Shay, a tall, dignified gentleman in whiskers who nonetheless gave the impression of having, at some earlier point in his life, seen a ghost and been marked by the experience for life. His hands, in particular, seemed to have registered the shock; quick and nervous, they would periodically sprint away like runaway children, rising halfway to his head or quickly picking a hair off his tongue before he could manage to bring them under control; these actions he would attempt to cover over, like an embarrassed parent, by casting attention elsewhere, by laughing loudly or suddenly growing irritated over some matter that until then had gone unremarked.

We were sitting in the cool dimness of Barnum’s drawing room in the back of the museum, waiting, as usual, for him to decide that we’d waited long enough. From the front of the building, sounding deep in
shade one moment, filled with sun the next, came the din of Broadway: hooves and carriage wheels, shouts and oaths, bits of songs and laughter. Now and then a particular voice, no louder than the rest, would rise and we would hear the words, perfectly clearly, as though the city had momentarily disappeared or the speaker sat beside us, invisible, in the leather chair by the grate. “Masie? Too tight a wicket for me,” said one with a laugh. “Turn him, you fool!” bellowed another. “The vexations I’ve had with that darky, I can’t begin to tell you,” a young woman’s voice complained to some unseen companion.

It was partly to cover these voices that came in from the street (it felt vaguely indecent to sit there listening to them) that we asked him how he had come to find us.

“Purely by chance, really,” said O’Shay, taking a deliberately casual sip of port. He scowled, an expression that seemed to come naturally to him. “Of course I had heard of you. Everyone had. Mr. Barnum had even instructed me, on leaving for the Continent, to try to find you. But nothing had worked. Thieves and scoundrels, when they heard I would pay for knowledge of your whereabouts, claimed to have seen you here and there, but nothing ever came of it.”

As he spoke O’Shay’s right index finger, seeing its opportunity, had begun drawing quick little circles along the inside rim of his glass. Noticing it, he quickly placed the glass on the table beside him. “Of course, one never knows with these people,” he continued, quickly sitting back in his chair and waving his arm in an expansive gesture meant to suggest the generally unaccountable rabble just outside the walls. “It was because of one such mongrel that I—”

“O’Shay?” It was the imperial summons.

Our companion leaped to his feet as if kissed by a tack, one hand automatically jumping to his hair, the other to his waistcoat. “Yes, Mr. Barnum,” he called, looking about for his coat and cane. “Coming, Mr. Barnum.”

“Timothy, Timothy, Timothy O’Shay/Gathering flowers in the month of May …” It was Barnum, amusing himself.

“It was the sheerest chance, really,” O’Shay concluded, whispering.

“Eating them raw like a horse eats hay …” rhymed Barnum. “Tell us why you do it, O Timothy O’Shay.”

There was a pause. “O’Shay?” he roared.

“Coming, Mr. Barnum.” Snatching up his cane, O’Shay gave us a quick little bow and hurried into the office, closing the door on Barnum’s bit of doggerel and our two-year sojourn in the Old World.

II.

It was around this time that we made the acquaintance of Charlie Stratton and Jesus Christ. The first we would leave behind, eventually. The second “took,” as they say, quietly padding along behind us on his bare, martyr’s feet, insinuating himself into our lives … For seventeen years he sat on our porch in North Carolina, picking his toes and damning our pleasure, speaking through my brother’s mouth.

Barnum, of course, thought Stratton and God were one, and if one exchanges the currency of heaven for the baser coin of Broadway, one can see how he might. To Barnum, after all, Stratton
was
the savior—his own pint-sized personal savior—and recognizing a good thing when he saw one, he prayed fervently for the little man’s continued well-being, consecrated his heart and his purse to him, knelt daily at his thumb-sized feet. The image is as appealing as it is appropriate: Barnum on his knees, supplicating himself; the General, standing bolt upright, staring imperiously into his disciple’s navel. How
like
the little homunculus to accept such a tainted reverence. And how like the other—forever praying with one eye open and one hand on his purse—to offer it.

What an exhibit they would have made—Phineas and the General. “See them Talk Out of the Corners of Their Mouths, ladies and gentlemen! See them Gull Their Closest Friends!” As the evangelical strain grew louder throughout the land, and everywhere song turned to hymn,
they adapted their tune without missing a beat. “Small in stature but big in Christ,” was how Stratton described himself now, always adding “and there’s not a day that passes that I don’t fall on my knees and thank God it’s not the other way around.” Sometimes, particularly if the members of the press were present, he would do just that, and falling to his knees (hands clasped and tiny ankles touching), thank the Almighty for having made him as he was.

Who could resist such submissiveness? So profound a resignation? Who could fail to note the lesson in humility it taught those of us (like Mr. Nellis, perhaps, or Lettie “the Leopard Child”) who might have thought they had a bone or two to pick with fate? Not the press, apparently. Nor the public, who never tired of his piety
or
his antics. “Such a vision of courage and Christian acceptance was Tom Thumb as he knelt before the Almighty last night at the American Museum, that few could look upon him without weeping,” wrote the reporter for the
New York Observer
, an observation with which I could readily concur.

Carefully, of course. Barnum’s American Museum, as we all knew, was not a democracy; despite its name, the give and take of the streets stopped at its doors. Obeisance was expected. On a bad day, an inadvertent smile or a stifled snort could put one on the corner, bag in hand and heart in throat. Of course, as in a regular monarchy, dukes were afforded liberties peasants could ill afford: The biggest attractions could risk the occasional ironic smile. To others it could be fatal.