American Follies

by Norman Lock

  She glanced at me; she might have even glared. If so, the indignation that sparked her angry look quickly passed into resignation. She sighed and said, “Their pleasure is in feeling themselves—for a moment—lucky.”

  Yes, I thought. That is the case.

  “My role is unfulfilling. I might as well be hanging on a butcher’s hook.”

  I must have looked appalled, because she clarified the gristly image.

  “They devour me with their eyes until there is nothing left.”

  “Who does?”

  “The curious who come to view me. They leave with the rapt expression I’ve seen on the faces of the holy sisters after having eaten the body of Christ.”

  For the first time in our acquaintance, she had allowed me to glimpse a woman whose contentment might be a pretense. I recalled that, when I had been in her dainty room, I had felt like a spectator of a play performed on a miniature stage—a drama written for a single character whose purpose eluded me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, having searched my mind and found nothing else to offer her.

  She smiled, and her face softened into a gentle, almost beatific, expression. She waved a hand as a saint would distributing her blessings. “You must not mind me, Ellen. I don’t mean half of what I say. You are one of those rare people.”

  “What sort of people?” I asked, intrigued.

  “That inspire confidence in others. I’ve not known many in your world.”

  “Mr. Barnum?”

  “Mr. Barnum is another one, but then, he is not of your world. We’ve made room for him in ours.”

  I could not make out whether “your world” referred to that of the fully grown or to one inhabited by people who see others only in terms of themselves. I had thought of myself as a decent, intelligent woman, mostly without prejudices. Had a war not already been fought to free the slaves, I’d be an abolitionist. Had I a ballot to cast, I’d vote to protect the poor and helpless, whether they were immigrant Irish, Germans, Chinese, Jews, blacks, or nativists festering in the putrid belly of the Five Points. Suddenly, I was conscious of excluding “freaks,” in the common parlance of the time, from my sympathies. Frankly, I had never thought of them at all except as circus and sideshow performers who were as irrelevant to matters of prejudice as a trained seal. Then at the spiteful urging of a bad conscience, I turned on Margaret in my thoughts, faulting her for having chosen to live in the private world, the little world, of the circus instead of confronting the cruelty of the big one. My anger was irrational, and I left the ugly words of reproach unsaid.

  I glanced out the window and saw the world’s tallest man elegantly smoking a cigarette, while Mr. Ashton appeared to be suffering an extremity of boredom. Yawning theatrically and sighing prodigiously, he cracked his knuckles and shuffled his feet, determined to raise the dust, which he regarded with distaste and swatted with his hat, as at a cloud of midges. The horse had its head in a feed bag, its colorful plumes waving this way and that in the breeze, its harness bells ringing each time it lifted its head and snorted. What fun! I said to myself. Maybe a circus life is not such a poor one after all.

  Elizabeth and Susan entered with a silver teapot and china cups too large for Margaret’s tiny hands. She accepted the situation with the easy manner and good humor of any other fine lady. I cut the cake and dealt out slices on Elizabeth’s wedding plates, which we balanced on our knees. We were delighted with ourselves and with one another.

  Plates clean save for crumbs and the cups drained to the leaves, I carried the remains of the ritual of hospitality into the kitchen and returned in time to hear Elizabeth inviting Margaret to stay.

  “You’ll have a room of your own, furnished to your requirements,” she inveigled. “I’ve taken to you, Miss Hardes—May I call you ‘Miss Margaret’ or, if you would allow me the privilege, ‘Margaret’?”

  Margaret graciously indicated with a nod of her head that her hostess might adopt the latter familiarity.

  “I’ve taken a liking to you, Margaret, and I know that Susan has also.”

  “Very much so.”

  “And, of course, you and Ellen are already friends,” said Elizabeth to sweeten her offer.

  Margaret looked to me as if for assurance, which I gladly gave.

  “What would I do here?” she asked after a pause, in which the two suffragists had leaned forward expectantly.

  “You would do what you can,” replied Elizabeth, the image of a benevolent grandmother. “We share in the housework, although an Irish woman comes to do the unpleasant chores. You’d do whatever you are able—whatever you found pleasant and profitable.”

  “Could I assist you in the cause of woman’s rights?” asked Margaret, looking at that moment as if she could be of no help at all. The truth is that I couldn’t picture her in any occupation other than that of circus eccentric.

  “You can do the cause immeasurable good if you would accompany us on our lecture tours!” replied Susan, rubbing her bony hands together so ardently, I expected them to smoke.

  “A world of good!” confirmed Elizabeth.

  “I don’t think I could speak in public. Not in the way you envision.”

  “You wouldn’t need to say anything,” said Elizabeth.

  “Unless it pleases you to do so,” said Susan.

  “You would be an example.”

  “An example of what?” asked Margaret.

  “Of abjection!” cried Elizabeth.

  “Of humiliation!” croaked Susan.

  “But I’m not abject or humiliated!” protested Margaret, clenching her small fists.

  “A victim of the exploitation of weakness and a disadvantaged condition, then.”

  “I don’t feel myself to be disadvantaged or especially weak.”

  “You are a woman,” replied Elizabeth evenly. “As such, you are disadvantaged in law and weak in the eyes of men.”

  “A good man will cosset you; a bad one will beat you,” declared Susan. “In either case, you’ll be exploited and—whether you are aware of it or not—humiliated.”

  “Mr. Barnum treats me with consideration.”

  “We are not interested in whether Mr. Barnum profits by your small stature. We leave that to his conscience. What does interest us is whether or not you are being taken advantage of because you are a defenseless woman,” said Elizabeth, or Susan. At such times, I could not tell them apart.

  “Our conviction is that you most certainly are a victim!” asserted either the gray-bunned lioness or the plump states-woman with cake crumbs on her lap.

  “Ellen, what is your opinion?”

  I did not want to give it.

  “Ellen?”

  I bit my nails.

  “Please answer the question!” a voice admonished. “I don’t think it’s any of my business!” I retorted. “Or yours!”

  Susan and Elizabeth gasped, and their eyes narrowed in disapproval. I wondered if I would be sacked now that the tea party had gone to pot.

  “It is our business! Her plight is of concern to all women—small, medium, and large.” Once again, Elizabeth patted the fabric stretched over her middle section.

  I looked to Margaret in my distress.

  “What I do with my life is my own affair,” she said with a fierce dignity that made her appear the largest person in the room.

  An uncomfortable silence ensued. I looked outside and saw Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton arm wrestling, one of their specialties. The Posturing Man’s hyperbolic pantomime expressed strenuous effort, heroic gumption, and—visible in his eyes, which were opened so wide that I feared his eyeballs would pop out of their sockets—profound despair. The horse drowsed between the shafts, its plumes drooping. I wished I were with them instead of in a room electric with barely suppressed antagonism.

  “And for your information, ladies, I am not presently faced with a plight,” said Margaret, putting an end to the subject.

  The suffragists had incensed Margaret, who was now climbing down from h
er chair and calling for her hat.

  “Furthermore, I don’t have a problem with men.”

  In the world of eccentrics, who, in Margaret’s view, had been chosen to transform our savage race into a civil one, the sexes may have lived in harmony. In any case, she would not allow herself to be used to further the cause of women outside the tented universe in which she had been placed. I couldn’t blame her.

  Having put on her hat, Margaret turned her back on us and sailed through the door. Scowling at Elizabeth and Susan, I hurried after her. I caught up to la petite just as Mr. Ashton was handing her into the coach with the finesse of a French dandy in the court of the Sun King.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I would not have seen you belittled for the world.”

  Margaret laughed. “I enjoyed myself immensely! I seldom get among your kind except as an object of curiosity. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony are good women, and I hope they can understand my refusal to be put on display. I would feel a freakishness on a lyceum stage that I don’t in a circus parade.” She pressed my hand affectionately. “I’d like to show you my kind not as you might have seen us at Madison Square Garden or in a fairground tent, but as we are. What do you say, Ellen? Are you game?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “Good. I’ll stop for you tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow … Friday. On Friday, the ladies will be in Philadelphia, addressing the National Woman Suffrage Association.”

  “Expect me at a half-past eleven.”

  Madame Singleton

  “ON HER DEATHBED, MY MOTHER begged my forgiveness for having locked me in the root cellar as punishment for my childish misdemeanors. Even now, I can smell the damp earthen floor, the mold and mildew, and the baskets of turnips, carrots, and potatoes. Father said I would grow eyes like the potatoes, which can see in the dark. He was not afraid to defy convention, but he could not stand up to Mother, who, he said, was ‘as fierce as an Amazon.’ She blamed herself for my ‘condition,’ she told me as she prepared to molder in an everlasting root cellar. But she was no more to blame for my eccentricity than a malevolent curse such as one encounters in a cruel tale by Heinrich Hoffmann or the Brothers Grimm. My diminutiveness has no external cause, but is, as General Tom maintained, an act of free will. Were it otherwise, I would not be able to call my life my own. I refused Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton’s offer because I am my own person and not anybody’s example.”

  I was sitting beside Margaret in the carriage that had brought her to Murray Hill three days before. Mr. Ashton sat on the sprung seat next to Mr. Dode. The black horse had been changed for a white one adorned with scarlet plumes fatally plucked from a Florida spoonbill. Margaret held my hand—or rather, I held hers, her white glove enveloped in my fawn. I thought her a precious creature and was instantly ashamed. I reminded myself that she was not a little girl being taken to the stores by a favorite aunt. She was taking me to visit the small world, which I had never before entered.

  “Most of our troupe is with Mr. Barnum on a London engagement,” she said. “I stayed behind to comfort Tom’s wife, Lavinia. Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton remained to chaperone me, and some six or seven others suffer from seasickness and do not go abroad. They’re stopping at Barnum’s Hotel, at Twentieth Street and Broadway.”

  She sensed my nervousness, and, squeezing my thumb with her hand reassuringly, said with a smile, “It will be no worse than your tea party.” That is what worries me, I told myself. “I suspect that my friends will take to you, just as I have. You have only to be yourself, Ellen.”

  And what is that self? I wondered.

  I rested my eyes in the shadows of the coach. Margaret relaxed her grip on my thumb but did not take her hand from my palm. My mind was confused by her presence, and I wanted to compose myself. She was both rose and thorn: She delighted and vexed me at the same time.

  Margaret’s imperious withdrawal from the sitting room had dismayed my suffragists. They criticized her for choosing to remain aloof from the issue of woman’s sovereignty; at the same time, they insisted on viewing her as another victim of men, who were incorporated in the shameless showman Phineas T. Barnum. Long after the customary hour of Morpheus’s descent, they fretted. At breakfast, they announced that they had failed her. Keeping Margaret’s parting words to me a secret, I let them stew. The dish was, I thought then, seasoned to their taste.

  By supper, “the unfortunate business” had assumed gigantic importance in their minds. I do believe that if they had not been reconciled with Margaret, Susan and Elizabeth would never have finished the History; the ink would have dried to powder in their inkwells. Margaret never did agree to appearing on the lecture circuit, nor did she disavow her affection for Barnum. She gave the two suffragists to understand, however, that she admired their work and would value them as friends. Having met their match, the two firebrands let the matter drop.

  Driving down Broadway, Margaret and I passed the Fifth Avenue Hotel, equipped with a steam-powered “vertical railroad” to transport guests to the upper floors, and Madison Square Garden, where the colossal arm and torch of Liberty awaited money to be pledged so that her dismembered parts could be assembled on Bedloe’s Island and rise colossally above New York Harbor.

  About Bartholdi and Eiffel’s gigantic statue, I once heard Elizabeth say, “Thus do men idealize woman, turning her into a symbol, while they imprison her on an island of domesticity.”

  “Were she real, Lady Liberty would be as disenfranchised as we are,” replied Susan with her usual tartness.

  The carriage stopped at Twentieth Street, outside Barnum’s Hotel. Mr. Ashton helped Margaret down gallantly. When he offered me his hand, I recoiled and felt a momentary disgust. He responded with a pantomime that began with surprise and ended in abasement. I hurriedly put out my hand to him, but he had turned away, crocodile tears coursing down his ashen face. Margaret touched my elbow and shook her head, as if to say Pay him no mind.

  We left him to his performance and Mr. Dode to see to the horse’s needs. I followed my friend across a wide porch and into the hotel lobby, where seven guests were sitting in chairs upholstered in buffalo hide, their heads buried in newspapers, turned in conversation, or fallen onto slowly rising and falling breasts in sleep. You could’ve mistaken them for an accidental congress of drummers and other travelers who are ubiquitous in hotel lobbies or the privileged residents at a sanitarium, in various stages of senility and physical collapse.

  Margaret greeted them in general and then introduced me to each one.

  “I’d like you to be acquainted with my friend Ellen Finch. You may call her—”

  She looked at me for approval, and I said, “Please do call me ‘Ellen.’”

  They put down their papers and turned their heads toward me, while those who had been asleep were nudged into wakefulness. More than polite, the smile they shed on me conveyed welcome and acceptance—not because of anything I’d done to deserve it but because their trust in Margaret was unquestioning. They regarded her with respect and—I could see it in their faces—affection.

  “Ellen, please say hello to Miss Etta, the contortionist.”

  “I am happy to meet you, Miss Etta.”

  She acknowledged our new acquaintance by tying herself into a knot, shocking in its revelations, which none of the others appeared to notice.

  “Mrs. Stoner, snake charmer.”

  I waited nervously for her to produce her stock-in-trade, but she apologized. The hotel did not allow reptiles. Of all the eccentrics there, she was the dullest. Her charms, I supposed, were dispensed solely for the pleasure of the snake, whose name was Napoléon.

  Margaret worked her way around the room, and I became acquainted with Mr. Matchett and Mr. Engelbrecht, scientific fencers; Mr. George Bliss, leaper; Miss Watson, chariot driver at the Hippodrome; and Miss Mattie Elliott, grotesque dancer, who was also renowned for her high kicks.

  “Ellen is curious about us,” said Margaret.

  I felt
myself blush and looked at the faces ranged before me for any sign of resentment.

  “She is not, however, the least patronizing or malicious. Her curiosity is only that which one human being feels about another. I invited her here—she did not ask to be brought—to see for herself what sort of people we are when we are being just ourselves.” She turned to me and asked, “Ellen, do you have any questions for my friends?”

  It was a dreadful moment. To say the wrong thing would be devastating, to say nothing rude.

  “Miss Watson.”

  “What would you like to know, my dear?”

  “Aren’t you scared of driving a chariot? I have an appreciation for the dangers after reading Mr. Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur.”

  It was a stupid remark, especially since I had not read the book, but only the reviews. The Century criticized it as an “anachronism,” and The Atlantic as “too lavish.”

  She smiled tolerantly. “Terrified! If it weren’t for the frisson, I would stay at home and knit.”

  Several of her colleagues laughed—at me, I expect. Their amusement was not spiteful.

  “Miss Etta, how is it that you are able to fold up like a—” An apt comparison eluded me.

  Miss Etta was kind enough to complete the simile. “Portmanteau.”

  I nodded in the affirmative. Frankly, I didn’t care how the trick was done. Whatever I’d hoped to learn by visiting Barnum’s Hotel, this was not it.

  “My bones are vulcanized,” she said in a confidential tone, as if to conceal her secret from the rest of the eccentrics.

  “She is an enterologist,” intoned Margaret with a deference that, though sincere, I thought comical.

  “I’m not familiar with the word.”

  “Mine is a very artistic profession!” exclaimed Miss Etta. “Mr. Barnum says so.” I could see that she was pleased with herself. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

  She glanced at the lobby until her gaze fell on a rosewood cabinet on which a cut-glass vase of nasturtiums sat. I’d guess that the cabinet was about the same height as Tom Thumb at his tallest. Having opened its door, she packed herself inside it. “Peekaboo!” she called from between her thighs, and then she stuck out her tongue. The sight produced a disagreeable effect in me. I felt the blood leave my face as the room began to spin.