The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (20 page)

Somehow, I managed to get all the way to chapter three without giving way to panic, but I breathed easier when Matina tossed aside her lace and stood. “I think I’ll go downstairs and take a bite to eat,” she said, “then come back and toddle off to bed. I’m so glad you’re not horribly ill.”

So was I. After walking her to the stairs, I returned to my own rooms and took stock of my body. The pain had ceased entirely, and I felt no nausea, just a slow feeling of potency spreading through my limbs, an invigorating sensation, as if I’d slept for hours and had just woken up, utterly refreshed. Is this what the Chinaman thought I’d experience, this feeling of strength? No. Ridiculous. The man had been toying with me, and having fallen for his silliness, I’d let my mind have its way. I was allowing my imagination to get the best of me.

I started to prepare for bed, but for some reason I couldn’t shake the image of Matina from my mind. How luscious she had looked! Why had I left her without a word of confession? In fact I barely gave her a proper good night. How rude of me. Lately I hadn’t been much of a friend, and I owed it to her to try harder. She might still be in the kitchens getting her snack. I should stroll downstairs and wish her a pleasant evening.

After throwing on my smoking jacket, I made my way to the kitchens, and sure enough, she stood in the larder loading a tray with dark rolls and sauce-covered mutton chops. The icebox stood open, its square oak door allowing the mist from the melting ice to escape and surround her in a soft fog. When Matina saw me in the doorway, she clutched her tray in surprise. “Barthy. You scared me half to death. Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I came down to say good night.”

She studied me carefully. “Didn’t you already do that?” She shoved the icebox door closed with one hip and moved toward a little table in the back.

“Let me help you.”

Lifting the tray from Matina’s hands, I slid it onto the table, then pulled a sprig of thyme from a bunch drying in a nearby jar and stuck it in her hair. Turning her hand over, I unbuttoned the top of her glove and kissed her wrist, the flesh yielding and pink. What are you doing? I asked myself. Stop it this instant. But try as I might, I couldn’t seem to control my impulses.

“You look absolutely irresistible tonight,” I said, and I meant it.

I leaned in and kissed her flush on the mouth—softly, at first, then a bit more aggressively.

Matina pulled away, her expression incredulous.

“I’m so sorry.” I backed away, horrified by my behavior. “I don’t know why in the world—”

“It’s all right.” Her voice was soft and full of surprise.

“No. You must think I’m an animal. It’s only that your neck, your hair . . .”

Matina smiled. “How can a girl complain when a gentleman is overwhelmed by her charms?” She sat down to her snack, but the skin on her neck was still flushed with excitement.

“Well, good night then,” I stuttered, and left before I could make any other mistakes. I hoped my rash actions hadn’t changed anything between us.

M
EET IN THE DINING ROOM
. T
EN MIN
utes.” Fish’s voice jarred me awake. The clock at my bedside read five
A.M.
“Wait, wait. One minute!” I pulled my dressing gown around my shoulders and cracked open the door. Fish peered in at me. “It’s the middle of the night, for God’s sake,” I yelled through the crack. “Go the hell away.”

“Don’t toy with me, Fortuno. Get yourself dressed,
in
costume, and down to the dining room. We’re off to Brady’s.”

Down the hall, Matina’s door opened and closed after Fish pounded on it loud enough to wake the dead. Normally, I’d have gone to check on her, but after the kiss a few nights back, I was trying to keep my distance.

Neither Matina nor I had said a word about what had happened in the kitchen, but it still worried me. I had chalked up my own action to a moment of madness, and Matina had not pressed me for clarification. But I wasn’t entirely certain that she’d taken it in stride.

At least new photographs would please Matina. Mathew Brady hadn’t taken pictures of us for years. Before the war, we used to go to his studio annually, always without notice and before dawn so that, according to Barnum, “He can catch the purity of your faces in the glow of the morning sun.” Ha! We all knew why Brady liked to steal us away in the wee hours of the night. In his own way, he was as much a freak as we were. He liked to think of us as secrets that belonged to him and him alone. I’d never expected to see him again after he ran off
to the battlefields, wild with the idea of documenting the war in photographs. The country was stunned by his audacity in displaying the battlefield dead. But now that the war was over and the country was eager to forget its horrors, he’d come back to us.

My toilette took me no time at all—just a dash of pomade on my hair and scuffing to clean my shoes. My tights had yet to soften and felt uncomfortable beneath my performance suit, but at least I’d look my best in the photographs. And maybe Iell would be at the studio. Lord, how I would love to have a portrait of her!

I hesitated. Where was that root? Digging about in the drawer, I found it hiding beneath my handkerchiefs, and carefully, I pulled it out and set it in my open palm. The first time I’d tasted it, it had given me a sense of confidence, and if Iell were at Brady’s, I would need all the confidence that I could muster. Looking to heaven with a silent prayer to protect my health, I bit off a sliver and, to avoid the bitter taste, swallowed it whole.

By the time I entered the dining room, I felt marvelous. Matina swooshed up to me the moment she saw me.

Fish pointed a bony finger toward the clock and clucked his tongue at me. “You’ve kept us all waiting on you, Fortuno. What
have
you been doing?”

“Sorry, Mr. Fish.” I made a mental note not to irritate him any more than necessary. Who knew if I might need him as an ally one of these days?

Fish looked again at the clock, fretting. “Dear me, I’ve got to leave. Miss Emma, here, will be in charge of getting you to Brady’s safely. Please treat her with the same respect with which you would treat me.”

Ricardo cleared his throat but dared not laugh. Emma stepped forward. She wore the fluffy white dress of a little girl, and she contrasted mightily with Alley, who had donned his animal skins and oiled his biceps. The two of them flanked the dining room table like pillars.

“Let’s get on with it, dearies. He who waits, as the Good Book says.”

Emma shepherded us briskly through the courtyard and out onto Ann Street. The city was doing repair work on the sewers, so our carriages were waiting a half block away. We moved in a cluster toward Broadway, lurching past closed doors and darkened windows. Zippy kept stopping to pick up bits of trash from the street, slowing our progress. It was still dark, but the air carried a hint of the dusky light that would soon wake the city to its frenetic state. Lingering behind the others for a moment, I stopped to listen to the starlings, remembering how, as a child, I’d sometimes crawl from bed at dawn to lie on the lawn between the barns, listening to the birds’ morning song, happy to be out of earshot of my parents’ arguing.

“Let’s
go
, Fortuno,” Emma called out. “We haven’t got all night.”

I quickened my step to rejoin the group. Just before we reached the carriages, Fish’s voice came out of nowhere. He was talking to someone, but I couldn’t see him. And then I glimpsed a smaller carriage beyond ours. In front of that carriage, Fish was chatting with a gray-haired woman in a dress the color of twigs. She rested against a cane, a small carpetbag with leather fittings and a lock in her other hand, and for one moment she looked at us over the top of wire eyeglasses.

Tension hopped from one member of my group to the next as we all recognized the woman at the same time: Barnum’s wife, Charity.

“What in heaven’s name?” I whispered to Matina, who looked as stricken as the rest of us.

“Watching out for her interests, I suppose,” Matina said, keeping her voice low. “You know this can’t be good.”

Matina was right. Mrs. Barnum’s proximity to us—as occasional as it was—usually bode ill. Ever since the scandal of the Jerome Clock Company five years ago, Mrs. Barnum owned more than half of her husband’s assets.

You see, Barnum had gotten hoodwinked. He’d been trying to create a city—East Bridgeport; who else would undertake such a thing?—and his plan had been to buy parcels of land and sell them to companies who would then move to town. One such enterprise, the Jerome Clock Company, had accepted happily, providing Barnum
would temporarily cover their debts. “They are gentlemen,” Barnum said, “and the company is sound, just having a bad year. Why not extend a bit of trust and my good name?” He’d signed undated notes to cover incoming debts, and it ended up bankrupting him. He had to sell the title to the Museum, plus most of his holdings, and though the Museum soldiered on, it took two grueling tours of Europe with Tom Stratton and the rest of his diminutive company for Barnum to recover his holdings. The day he repurchased the Museum, Barnum addressed the staff and performers at a must-attend meeting after church services. Nearly sixty of us crammed along the benches in one of the minor rooms and listened to Barnum attentively.

He stood on the stage in the front of the room and rested an elbow against the lectern at his side. No one had fired up the footlights, so his strong eyebrows overshadowed his nose and eyes.

“I want to squelch any rumor of financial insolvency,” he said. “As you well know, I have suffered greatly by ignoring my own business sense. I’ve been preached to, harassed, and made to dance to every jig our spectacle-loving fellows could impose on me.” He lifted his face dramatically as if praying to a vengeful God. “I’ve tolerated everything and held my own, but”—here he held up a finger and wagged it at us—“what I could
not
tolerate was how my so-called friends turned into butterflies at the sight of me brought low.”

He scowled across the room. We sat still as rocks, trying to hide from the light of Barnum’s glare as he pounded his fist on the lectern, the fat of his belly and jowls shaking in response to the suddenness and strength of the gesture.

“Nothing is worse than false friends,” Barnum hissed, and he scanned our faces as if to catch an unbeliever in the crowd. Then his expression changed; he beamed over us, a newly risen sun. “But you, my
true
friends, will help me return the Museum to its previous majesty. Together, we will reach an even greater height.”

A cheer went up, and because I was still green and awestruck, I believed that Barnum had prevailed by being a man of character, a man of strength: a hero. In reality, he bought back his Museum with
his wife’s inheritance. It was she, not he, who saved the day. And ever since, Mrs. Barnum has had the upper hand—an unnatural and uncomfortable state of affairs.

I didn’t relax until we climbed into the two carriages and took off, leaving Mrs. Barnum and Fish behind us, chatting in the street. Matina pulled out her tatting and worked at her lace as the carriages made their way through the empty streets. Bridgett and Alley sat across from us. Alley looked utterly miserable, his eyes glued to the floor. Bridgett glared into a small mirror, adjusting her hair, constantly checking to see if Alley was paying her any mind. When she started to hum some barroom tune, Matina rolled her eyes.

We halted in front of a gray building. Its roof was covered in creeping ivy, with two long skylights cut through the vines like eyes. Emma jumped out of the lead carriage and pounded heavily on the battered door as the rest of us gathered near an etched metal sign swinging from two iron poles:
MATHEW BRADY: IMAGES AND DAGUERREOTYPES
. One of Brady’s assistants, a young man in a blackened apron carrying a lamp, let us in.

After staggering through the deserted reception room, we filed one by one through a narrow door at the assistant’s behest and followed him down a long hall, our shadows skittering along bare walls, the sound of our footfalls echoing against the oaken floor.

Brady’s used to be a grand old place, but apparently he’d moved his furniture and most of his portraits to a newer studio farther uptown. When the assistant pulled open the doors to the main room, however, I breathed out in relief. This, at least, remained intact. As before, a scarlet and indigo palace carpet, shopworn but handsome, covered the floor, and unframed daguerreotypes of Lincoln and Webster and the brave Clara Barton still lined the walls. I flushed with pleasure to see the famed portrait of Madame Jumel, wife of the fallen Aaron Burr, hanging along the northern wall as it always had.

Though the room lacked the brilliant light that would soon pour in from the skylights, the windows at least let in a limpid breeze. In the front of the studio, a handful of assistants draped a large raised dais
in red velvet cloth. Six-foot ferns stood on either side of the dais like palace guards, and, in front, two cameras bordered a table covered with stacks of framed glass, pans of liquids, rags, and hanging racks.

“Beautiful creatures! How I’ve missed you!” Brady bounded in through a door in the back. Dust rose at his feet as he walked toward us. After wiping his hands on the sides of his trousers, he slipped on a pair of immaculate white gloves. He must have reopened his old studio just for us.

“Let me take a look at you. You bring an old man to tears.” Collectively, we expanded our chests and stood a little taller, in love as always with his vision of us. Brady had been aged by the war, his hair thin and snowy now, his eyeglasses so thick and heavy that their metal frames cut into his nose. But he still radiated vitality and walked with the same businesslike intent he’d always had, circling us slowly and peering at each of us in turn. With Brady, we were all children. Ricardo stood up taller when Brady mussed his hair, and Matina giggled as he ran his gloved hand along her arm. When he pulled Bridgett forward and spun her around, her bangles clinked together, dust swirled around her like a squall, and she smiled from ear to ear. “A new girl! With such beautiful, beautiful eyes.” He peered at her through his thick spectacles, then turned and blew a curdled kiss to Emma; I was happy to see how much it flustered her. Grabbing hold of Alley’s leg, he used the palm of his hand to test the strength of Alley’s thighs. Zippy surprised us all with a show of unexpected dignity, shaking hands with Brady like a peer.