Jenny and Barnum (33 page)

On Friday night she went with Otto back to Delmonico's, where she was now willing to say the food was very good even by the standards of one who had dined at practically all of Europe's royal courts. The season was still too young for most fresh vegetables, but peas were available, along with an Indian concoction called “succotash.” But Delmonico's had spring lamb, and wonderful seafood from the local waters; from Virginia came a tangy cured ham and a curious mulled wine, sweet and thick as a syrup. She wanted to try other American wines, but the waiter, who was an Italian, one of the few in America, apparently, advised against it. Delmonico's had no
Est! Est! Est!
, a wine he knew, but there were some wonderful white Burgundies, as well as some fine German wines.

Thoughts of Tom Thumb had made her remember
Est! Est! Est!
She was only beginning to understand how Barnum had changed the little man's life—saved it, in fact. Tom Thumb's current troubles were partly the result of Barnum's carelessness or callousness or both, but Jenny could not see how or why Barnum should be held responsible for the behavior of others. How much did he owe these people anyway? More likely, the moral balances tilted in the other direction. Barnum was such a powerful figure in his originality that her confusion compounded itself. All she could see was a series of riddles, paradoxes, and unanswered questions.

It was not the happiest of dinners. Otto knew her too well for her to be able to conceal her feelings from him. After Mendelssohn's death she had not sung his music for years: it had been Otto who had led her out of her grief. Otto and Jenny understood each other. He tolerated Minelli because she was not serious about him. But Jenny knew Otto well enough to want to leave the subject of Barnum alone. There were times, Otto had told her, when he could not bear to think of what she was doing to herself. Afterward he would have some comment, of course, often insightful but occasionally annoying. No matter: she had observed, not unnaturally, that Otto experienced his times of shock and withdrawal from her when she started giving evidence of interest in another man. So the conversation this night after a night of nights, when it wasn't about the food, was about the restaurant, or their hotel. They forced themselves to talk about their impressions of America, but they were so distant from each other emotionally that they were afraid that even the most civilized conversation would degenerate into an argument.

The truth was, when Barnum wasn't around, Jenny Lind hated America. She felt at the edge of civilization, with unimaginable evils howling just outside. There was absolutely nothing here that justified the natives' enthusiasm for the place.

Her second concert was on Saturday night, but her schedule from early morning on was far from normal for a day of a performance. Usually she reserved her free days for charity events, but the demand for her and her services was so great that she really had no choice but to make herself available. This she did on her own, without Barnum's help—not that she would have needed it, or paid attention to him if he had some objection; but in fact he had none, he had told her.

He thought it was a wonderful thing. All the Americans did, which for her was the most uncomfortable aspect of the whole procedure. Charity was an inseparable part of Christianity, she thought, and it deserved no special attention. She had learned to keep her mouth shut about that, however. Years ago, whenever she tried to explain that she thought her audiences could better spend their time doing their own charitable work rather than wasting time and money coming to hear her sing, she got into trouble with the public and especially the press. But being a conduit for basic human decency gave her no pleasure, either—no, if she thought too deeply about it, it filled her with an agony of despair.

So on Saturday morning, before eight o'clock, she slipped out through the delivery entrance of the hotel, for there was still a crowd out front, its madness whipped to a froth by hawkers selling her portrait, drinking mugs bearing her likeness, and other disgusting trinkets. The mass insanity here was worse than anything she had ever seen in Europe, and she was thankful simply for the chance to get away from the noise of it. In spite of her several destinations, various institutions for society's helpless, Jenny was looking forward to seeing another part of the city, and perhaps getting an opportunity to glimpse the America that lay beyond, still mysterious and menacing.

But here at the edge of a new world mankind had built the worst slums Jenny had ever seen, worse than St. Petersburg, Liverpool, or the cities of Italy. Apparently the human race was incapable of starting over; progress, if there was such a thing, was going to be slow, infinitely slow. For mile after mile the carriage passed rotting, dilapidated wooden shacks giving off a hundred different foul odors. There were streetwalkers everywhere, and thousands of children in rags, clearly homeless, some of them near starvation. Jenny had had no idea—in Europe one heard all kinds of stories about America, but not even the bad ones—that American textile mill owners wanted immigrants only to run their inhuman machines—could have prepared her for the shattering reality. There was no beauty in New York, no joy—what good was America's so-called freedom, if the air was not fit to breathe.

In that ugly mood Jenny plunged into more ugliness still—her first stop was at a poorhouse, where many of the bedridden aged were too far gone to hear her name, much less recognize it. She had given this sour-stinking place five hundred dollars, and the directors were eager to show gratitude. In a dark, undersized dayroom were crammed as many of their charges as could move, or would fit—the scene was all too desperate. A local minister “led” the group in prayer, a generalized mumbling, and then Jenny sang one song accompanied by a fat woman playing an out-of-tune upright piano. Most of the audience nodded their heads in enfeebled accompaniment, but one woman down front decided to sing along with her, mouthing the words—no greater distraction for a singer, but over the years Jenny had taught herself to look over and beyond such pests. This morning, however, Jenny was so vexed that the old woman's moving lips almost derailed her concentration and rhythm.

Her next stop, in Corlear's Hook, on the unfashionable far east side of the island, was an orphanage. Jenny had hoped that the youth of the inmates would brighten her mood, but no, for these children were more poorly dressed and fed than those she had been seeing on the streets. Rotten teeth! What kind of place was this which allowed children's teeth to rot in their heads? Some children were clothed so poorly that Jenny could easily see their protruding ribs. If she had not been so angry, she would have cried. She sang for them, too, children's songs. Next she was going to a colored orphanage; she wondered if she would be right singing the same songs again. For all she knew about the Negro race, the music she sang might not be pleasing to them at all. Given what she knew about America's treatment of Africans, all she could expect was that their orphans' lot would be worse than that of the whites.

When she was leaving for that appointment, someone handed her a note that had been delivered to the door. The note was from Barnum: he was back in New York, and was inviting her for a personally conducted tour of his American Museum at two o'clock. On the other side of the paper she wrote that she would be pleased to accept his invitation, on condition that she be permitted to return to the Irving House by three-thirty, so she could prepare for the evening's performance.

Her spirits started rising. Riding to the second orphanage, she could feel the shocks to which she had been subjected slipping beyond her concern. No doubt, Jenny thought, she was in love again, in love with Barnum, in love with no one like her handsome, gallant, dumb English officer—the opposite, in fact, a baldish, overweight, merry conniver who kissed far more sweetly than any army officer—or composer, singer, or piano player, too! How was it that some men knew exactly how to hold and kiss a woman, and others were so inept that an embrace was as much an ordeal for the woman as making her way through the dirty mobs of London's Covent Garden?

Jenny's last stop was the worst of all, leaving her trembling and breathless in her anguish. Negro children, many of them naked, several of them blind with monstrous milky cataracts covering their eyes—malnutrition, she was told—all of the children dirty as well as underfed: a horror! A
horror!
Some were so underdeveloped that, even at the ages of five and six, they had not yet attained the power of speech. Someone led a prayer, and there was an attempt to make the children sing a song of welcome, but it was a shambles. Jenny was too choked with emotion to cry, much less sing. She could not sing. Was there no way these poor wretches were not cursed? She had not given this institution as much money as the others; now she had to reverse that injustice. And there were so many more children here than in the white foundlings' home. Jenny had heard that the Negroes were distinctly in the minority in this country, perhaps the most important factor contributing to their lowly situation, but apparently there were even more of them than whites at life's abyss. Beneath her anguish was the vast terror aroused by the meaning of those last thoughts—that God very possibly did not intend to treat all human beings equally on Judgment Day, that there were marks that set us in the order of his preference. If black skin could be one of those marks, as so many people said—as they said about dwarfism and giantism, too—then what of illegitimacy, being the issue of sin? So many people were marked one way or another. One little chocolate-colored boy seemed to sense her distress more than anyone else in the room, for he kept staring at her, his eyes as big as a fawn's. When she got up to leave, she could not resist the temptation to look back and find him in the crowd, to see what he was thinking as she swept out of his life as imperiously as she had swept in. He was about four years old. He was smiling. He waved, waggling his fingers as babies do. At twenty feet she could see the holes in his teeth.

Astonishingly, Barnum was not in his office on the fourth floor of the American Museum when Jenny arrived for their appointment. It was his train, delayed on its long journey from Bridgeport, in the wilds of Connecticut. Jenny was hungry, but now it was too late for her to eat. As a courtesy to him, Jenny had resisted peeking around the corners at the various exhibits, and now, alone, she was beginning to believe that she should have indulged herself. But then suddenly there was the herald of an arrival, for the floor began to shake, ever more violently, until the vibrations seemed to threaten the building itself. Jenny was about to run for her life when the door of Barnum's office opened, and Anna Swan, hunching down low, squeezed her way inside.

“Miss Lind!”

“Miss Swan!”

Jenny was standing, but suddenly she realized she could not embrace the woman who was more than twice her size, as big as a grizzly bear. She offered her hand, and when Anna Swan's enveloped it, Jenny remembered that afternoon in Vienna, when the hand emerged so startlingly from the black carriage outside the Hotel Sacher. Anna Swan made her way to the sofa on which Jenny had been sitting, and lowered herself carefully in it, covering two of the three seat cushions with her enormous, shapeless hips.

“Your performance two nights ago is still the only subject of conversation in New York,” Anna Swan said, her chest heaving for air. “Now I've just been told that you spent this morning touring the poorhouses. Truly you are a remarkable Christian woman.”

“Please, none of that. Tell me, what brings you here, to Barnum's workshop?”

Anna Swan smiled. “Oh, I live here, in an apartment in the back. I've just returned from shopping. But I'm waiting for Barnum because at last he has kept his promise to me, and found a suitor—a prospective husband. He sent me a note saying he interviewed a young man from Maine yesterday at Iranistan, in Bridgeport. He is younger than me by more than a few years, and not as tall—but then I've never expected to see anyone—well, Mr. Barnum is bringing a letter from him, an invitation, I hope.”

The huge woman was in a state of high excitement, which jarred Jenny's senses. Barnum a matchmaker, too? Or was this another of his manipulations to promote himself and his crazy enterprises? Jenny was obsessed with him, but she did not think she was fooled by him. He was wily as a thieving mongrel, licking your hand one moment, then stealing your roast the next. He played the innocent, as if saying,
What did you expect of me?
Money was given to charity, but he made sure the whole world knew it. He was a trickster, shameless in it. The people of this city were his hopelessly bemused audience, gleefully awaiting his next jape or humiliation. Jenny could not look at Anna Swan without wondering how Barnum was going to use her again for his own advantage.

“You're here to see Mr. Barnum, too, Miss Lind?” Anna Swan inquired.

“He's invited me for lunch and a tour of the museum,” Jenny replied brightly.

“Oh. I see.” Anna Swan's face hardened. She was so big that Jenny felt she was before a graven pagan idol. At first she thought the big woman was expressing her displeasure with having her time with Barnum usurped by another—but then Jenny remembered Anna Swan's reaction on board the
Great Western
when she heard from Jenny about Lavinia Warren's misconduct. Did Anna Swan suspect
her
of illicit behavior? As it turned out, not exactly. Anna leaned forward, causing the floorboards to groan alarmingly. “As much as I love Mr. Barnum, I feel I must warn you as a Christian woman that rumors about Mr. Barnum have circulated for years.”

Jenny wanted to giggle, but she kept her composure. “No!” she cried, with feigned horror.

Anna Swan leaned even closer, and Jenny was afraid that she was going to tumble onto the floor, spilling across the room as if a dam had burst. “There is one persistent story, Miss Lind—but I must say that there has never been an iota of proof—that Mr. Barnum is the father of a child now living with his mother, an actress, on the Riviera.”