Jenny and Barnum (45 page)

At last she saw the telegraph wires next to the railroad track, running low along the bleak horizon—bleak now: she had forgotten even the vivid bloom of summer. The house appeared on the right, a quarter-mile away, as the dirt road curved around a clump of trees and a crumbling stone wall.

Iranistan was still epic bad taste, more crypt-like than ever in the tarnished silver gloom of November. Jenny had had the same ugly, distressing feelings the first time she had seen the place, she realized; not all that much of her memory had been lost. She saw that she really was in a trance, journeying to this place as if responding to a summons in a dream.

Once inside the gates and traveling around the curving drive, Jenny could see that the place was a cunning contrivance of black-painted stucco and carefully positioned thin plates of marble—a fake! The building was wood and plaster, like all other homes in the neighborhood—indeed, the country! Barnum had told her that the place was a stone-by-stone copy of a temple in India. He told such lies, he had explained to her at another time, to keep “the folks dazzled and mystified.” Clearly, he had not expected her ever to come to this place—it was not a home; she could not think of it as a home.

The carriage stopped in front of a pair of gleaming, copper-clad doors each no more than three feet wide, but more than eighteen feet high, coming to a pseudo-Arabian point.

A maid opened one of the doors. Full-sized, she looked absurdly small.

“Mrs. Barnum is in her upstairs sitting room, miss,” the maid said with a broad Irish accent. “I'll be serving tay. Mrs. Barnum said that you wouldn't be wanting sandwiches or cakes or any of that.” She took Jenny's coat. “It's just upstairs to the right, miss. You'll see it.”

Jenny shuddered. No doubt, Mrs. Barnum's orchestration of minor courtesies only showcased her choreography of a whole series of social cuts and personal slights. Jenny was to climb the stairs unescorted? It was the sort of thing that was beyond accusation. Even if she dared to speak of it, the woman would settle it with a look dismissing Jenny as mad. As perhaps she was: this had been a mistake, her own fault—but all at once she was willing to believe that it was a mistake that Mrs. Barnum had been waiting for her to make. Now the woman was upstairs waiting for the last of it. Jenny was so close to breaking down that she thought she could see at last the madness that was her heritage, both her parents' legacies, her father's brooding, boozy incoherence and her mother's curdled dreams, all of it somehow languishing in an appealing summery light; and to attain it forever, madness, she had only to stop climbing the stairs, stop everything here and now—just
stop
.

To the right, the maid had said. The interior of the house bore no resemblance to the outside. The interior was simply conventional, comfortable, with white plaster walls and much polished wood trim, filled with carpets and paintings and tables surmounted by vases of dried flowers.

“In here, Miss Lind,” a mature woman called.

“Very good,” she replied, so frightened suddenly that her voice sounded like a thing apart, disembodied.

“I'm sewing,” the woman said. Even on a murky day, the room was bright, the walls papered white and yellow, the window curtains brilliant and crisply starched. The woman was sitting with her back to the window, almost a silhouette. “Do sit down,” she said. “The holidays are coming and I like to give little things I've made in addition to the usual gifts. Sit down, sit down.” She looked up. Jenny's eyes were adjusting from the darkness of the hall. Mrs. Barnum was a tall woman, not young, with dark hair and a well-lined face. Her eyes were dark and her lips thin, and while she was not smiling now, her animation led Jenny to think that she was a warm woman, not cold—and not shallow or dull-witted, either. “Did you have a pleasant journey?”

“Yes—yes. It wasn't such a long trip, after the traveling I've done this year.”

“Of course.” She pushed her needle through the fabric again; she was hemming dinner napkins. “I almost never go to New York. I haven't been there in years, which is one of the reasons why we haven't met until now.”

Jenny stayed silent, her heart pounding. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, like a child summoned to the office of her school's headmistress. Mrs. Barnum eyed her wearily.

“The last several days have been the worst of my life, Miss Lind—”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come.”

“
He
seemed to be unaware of your letter to me,” Mrs. Barnum said. “I didn't answer you until that point was clear. You see, all I know about you is what he's told me—told the world, I should say—but I'm sure you can see that it was tedious listening for me. Now that you're here and I can see you, I realize that what he's been saying is true, although perhaps I would not use the same language he did.”

“Mrs. Barnum, I really—”

“Call me Charity, dear.”

“I don't know if I can. I—”

“Tay!” The Irish maid swept in. “I put out some ladyfingers, mum.”

“That's fine, Maureen. Close the door on your way out, if you don't mind.” Mrs. Barnum waited until the latch snapped into place. “When she was a child in Ireland, Maureen saw her parents starve to death. With the trouble in this house this week, she's been having nightmares, waking up screaming that the devil is after her. Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn't disturb anybody's rest, because we were all awake anyway. In all, it's been an eventful week—”

“Mrs. Barnum, I—”

“Not that I didn't expect it, Miss Lind, which is the real reason I haven't heard you sing, which I truly regret. I can stir myself to go to New York. I would have, too, because I have been reading about you for years, long before Barnum thought he could make money with you. I'm sure he told you that he and I live relatively independent lives. I'm very interested in culture and the arts.”

She had poured tea. For a few moments, all that could be heard was the thin clinking of silver spoons and delicate china, civilized life's metaphor for the chirping of birds. Peace in my kingdom, Barnum called it. The silver and china were English, of excellent quality, and through the window Jenny could see the rugged branches of a black walnut tree empty of leaves and birds, rigid, lifeless, and submissive to the lash of the November wind.

Mrs. Barnum said, “I'm sorry, but this isn't as easy as I thought it would be. What I've been trying to say is that, as a consequence of having lived with Barnum for a very long time, I saw this coming. When I saw how he was going to promote you, I realized that he was going to fall in love. Again. Oh, Barnum's in love, but I thought it was—again—just with another embodiment of his own lost innocence.” She pulled herself up. “But it's not.” She blinked. “I could not keep myself from reading the newspapers, even though I did try. They say you are a genius. I didn't know a woman could be a genius. Are you?”

Not even the impertinence of the question could conceal the weakness and fear so suddenly revealed. For Jenny it was an opportunity, but she wanted to be cautious in the way she asserted herself. Mrs. Barnum was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. Jenny thought that she could see that already the woman was beginning to think that she had regained her former absolute control of the conversation, and it made Jenny angry, determined to be strong. Genius! Yes, genius indeed.

“Genius is a foolish word, Mrs. Barnum. After twenty-one years as a professional and thirteen as a star, I defer to the opinion of no one in matters of singing. My success has been the result of hard work and love of music as well as God-given talent. As a person I am not special or unusual, and no one knows better than I the weaknesses and limitations of my voice, but to answer your question, in the context of my objection to the word itself, Mrs. Barnum, yes.” Jenny was sitting straighter; now she shuddered, then all but involuntarily shook her head from side to side, so her hair whipped against her neck, like pennants on a staff. “Yes, Mrs. Barnum, I am a genius.”

Mrs. Barnum smiled—as if
she
had won!

“The newspapers say the same of Barnum, you know. Do you think he is a genius, too?”

“My capacity to judge is limited to music,” Jenny said coldly.

Mrs. Barnum smiled again, warmer now, and paused to sip her tea. “Well, he
is
unique. If I seem less than respectful of him, I'm not; but I have known him a very long time. I'm older than him, you know. By four years. We were married when he was eighteen and I was twenty-two.”

Thinking at once that Charity Barnum had been an old maid who had trapped a boy, Jenny asked, “Why did you marry someone so young?”

“He persuaded me. He was very persuasive even in those days. And Barnum at eighteen was a lean, well-muscled youth who did not know what he wanted to do with his life, but burned brilliantly with the desire to do it. He was a dreamer and a worker. He wanted to make something of himself, he said. What made it easy for me to believe him was that he was telling the truth. So you see, then as now, he was quite a catch.”

Jenny stayed silent, and Mrs. Barnum sighed. “Like you, Miss Lind, I am a conventional person in matters of morals and manners. Without an obvious talent like yours to develop or even the opportunity to do so, if I had been given such a talent, my own ambitions were necessarily limited—modest. Barnum and I were married only a few months when he decided to up and go to New York, to make his fortune. I was with child; I couldn't go. He lived with a grocer's family and worked any number of jobs—always sending me money, to be sure. But in just a few more months he was home, his tail between his legs. The city had been too difficult and cruel for him. He cried. I had been approaching my time all but abandoned, and
he
cried.”

“He was a boy,” Jenny said.

“That's right. But the damage between us was done. I was young and inexperienced, too, remember. I wanted an orderly life, but he wanted to dream, and time after time he set off on a new tack, trying one business and another, sometimes leaving his family staring desperate poverty in the face—terror, when you have children to feed.”

“Mrs. Barnum, I really think—”

“In your letter you asked if you could see me privately,” the older woman said. “This is me, in private. You have to forgive me if I sound bitter, because really I am not. Or
was
not, until your imminent arrival awakened—rightly, it turned out—many old nightmares. Many, many. Did he tell you about the drinking?”

“He told me he had taken the pledge.”

“I
begged
him to! At the end, he was drinking every night, all but drunk every night. He had everything he'd ever wanted by then, including his success and his notoriety, this house and the children to fill it. He'd wanted a boy, a son, but when that had been denied us, he found his Tom Thumb—”

Not Charlie, Jenny thought; Charity Barnum didn't know him as Charlie. The woman had survived a thousand blows, by her account. If she was to be believed and had found her peace of mind, then talking had reminded her of the old pain, pain that had hardened her and spoiled her life. An endless, repetitive process. Even if what she believed was entirely true, she had missed the best of Barnum—and it was no wonder that he spent so little time with her.

“Barnum has always reminded me that Tom Thumb made our fortune—that after him, we never looked back.” The woman was in distress now, and Jenny could feel her own desire to fight ebbing from her. “I was talking about the drinking. Left to himself, he would have killed himself.” Now she said what had passed through Jenny's thoughts a moment ago, only in reverse, about Charity Barnum herself. “There was nothing in his life at that time to blame for the condition he was in; it had to go back, to what his childhood had made of him. But he looked me in the eye and took the pledge, and I have always felt that he kept it out of respect for me.”

Another sigh, her chest heaving with the torment Jenny could see all too clearly in her eyes. “Before that there were the women. He'd always liked a pretty face, the sweet smile. When I was young I thought I was glad he wasn't interested in the tarts and harlots that you find everywhere, even on the streets and in the saloons of a picture-perfect little town like the ones here in Connecticut.” Her eyes were wet now, her back stiff, her gaze vacant. “It was his own lost innocence he was looking for. All his life, everything in his life, has been pointed toward that.”

“You've mentioned this ‘lost innocence' before,” Jenny said. “I do not know what you mean, and would be grateful if you explained it to me.”

“Yes.” Charity Barnum stood up. “Yes, I will. I can see how you would not know. Excuse me for a moment, if you please. I feel a draft, and without something over my shoulders I get a terrible pain across my back.”

Jenny waited. The last thing she had expected to hear was that Barnum had ever been a troubled, unhappy man. She understood him now, too, understood what he was trying to say, even
teach:
that laughter, pleasure, and joy were not only necessary to life, but had to be made part of every day, every hour, every waking moment. Humanity had to live under the curse of death and only faith could save most souls from utter despair, but joy, pleasure, and laughter were fertile soil for love and other noble impulses, including faith. Charlie had faith, and life could have prevented him from ever having known it. Barnum had faith—oh yes. Faith alone lifted the curse, and he was doing everything he could imagine to share that secret—
that
was his secret. Barnum's freaks were not creatures apart from the rest of us, but distorted mirrors of ourselves, not unlike the curved and warped looking glasses elsewhere in the aptly named American Museum. Here we were, all humanity seen anew. Anna Swan had fallen in love, in the all-consuming, delicious agony of anticipation Jenny now knew only too terribly well. One way or another, Barnum made us re-examine ourselves. And laugh.