American Follies

by Norman Lock

  “Are you trying to be offensive?” rasped Susan. With her sharp face, she appeared as if she could split the incorrigible wag’s skull in two.

  Barnum roared and in his high-pitched barker’s voice asked, “Why, Miss Anthony, don’t tell me you believe in wedlock—lawful or awful as the case may be?”

  “My beliefs are my own business, Mr. Barnum!” she snapped back like one of Stephen Perry’s rubber bands.

  “And may I inquire what position you take in the matter of free love?”

  “The same as I always have: Someday women will make you men pay dearly for it.”

  “You are a fire-eater, Miss Anthony, and I respect your fearlessness!” He doffed his shiny ringmaster’s hat and bowed deeply.

  Susan laughed in spite of herself. “You are a devil, sir!”

  “I am the Prince of Humbug, madam, and am heartily glad to discover in you a sense of humor! I had been led to understand that the woman’s movement was as humorless as a justice of the peace or a darning egg.”

  “We need your help, Mr. Barnum, not your teasing.”

  “Ladies, you have caught me at a bad time. The Ethnological Congress of Savage Tribes is soon to be convened in this very city, a spectacle that will set you hens clucking as if God Almighty had jumped on Washington City, wearing His biggest boots, and stomped those good-for-nothing mudfish till they cried ‘Olio!’ and enfranchised the entire female race! Coming soon to Madison Square Garden for a limited engagement will be …”

  He consulted a printer’s proof of a four-sheet billboard fantastically illustrated and biliously colored, on which he had been making changes with a crayon. “Attend, ladies, to Barnum’s savage congressmen!” Like The New York Herald, Barnum couldn’t state a fact or a fancy in print or conversation without at least one exclamation mark.

  “‘Bestial Australian Cannibals, Mysterious Aztecs, Imbruted Big-Lipped Botocudoes, Wild Nubians, Ferocious Zulus, Invincible Afghans, Pagan Burmese Priests, Ishmaelite Todars, Dusky Idolatrous Hindus, Sinuous Nautch Girls, Annamite Dwarfs, Haughty Syrians, Oriental Giants, Herculean Japanese, plus assorted Kaffirs, Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Ethiopians, Circassians, Polynesians, Tasmanians, Tartars, and Patans!!!’”

  Dazzled by the vision, Barnum sought our approval. Susan knew how to use a man’s egotism against him, like a wrestler tossing a braggart on the hip of his braggadocio. “We will not forget your contribution to better understanding among the races, Mr. Barnum.”

  Her faint praise satisfied him. “Miss Anthony, did you happen to see, in younger days, the ‘Racial Anomaly’ on display at my American Museum before the 1865 fire burned it to the ground?”

  He did not wait for an answer but went on “at full chisel,” as Franklin liked to say. “I will never forget the handsome tribute printed in the Times: ‘Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the dirty, ill-shaped structure, filled with specimens so full of suggestion and of merit, passed from our gaze, and its like cannot soon be seen again.’ Two white whales captured off the coast of Labrador were boiled in their basement tank and one of my prized Numidian lions terrorized Manhattan until a fireman dispatched it with his ax. Waxwork figures of the illustrious melted, although the effigy of Jefferson Davis was saved from the flames—by a member of the Klan, no doubt. The actual Davis was arrested and later sold insurance. History is one smashup piled on top of another, the shards glued together with irony. Eventually, the paraffin Davis was kicked to pieces in Ann Street by nativist hooligans.” Barnum paused in his headlong flight of words and let his eyes sweep a wall covered with photographs of the famous and the freakish. “What was I going on about?”

  “The Racial Anomaly,” I said, opening my mouth to speak for the first time since our arrival in the stuffy, malodorous wagon.

  “Thank you. My brain grows more addled by the year. The Racial Anomaly was white—as white as you ladies are in your bathtubs—but he had been born a negro. He confided in me that he’d changed his color and the complexion of his very soul by eating a particular medicinal weed, which, alas, he never identified. Had it been in use earlier in the century, the weed could have prevented civil war and accomplished what Douglass, Garrison, John Brown, and the like did not: emancipated the negroes, who would have become indistinguishable from white men. Imagine, good ladies, if a weed could be found that would turn women into men!”

  I sensed Susan’s exasperation as Barnum extolled the benefits of such an arrangement: “Overnight, your associations, conventions, indignation meetings, parlor debates, and hen parties would be superfluous. You could take up cussing and chewing tobacco. Think of the erstwhile women who could cast their ballots and send themselves to Congress, where they would sit and bray like the other jackasses!”

  “Mr. Barnum.”

  “Yes, Miss Anthony.”

  “You talk the most awful bunkum!”

  “Perhaps you’re right. I can’t imagine a world without sinuous Nautch girls.”

  Foreseeing no end to the comic overture, I launched into an aria of tears.

  “What’s the matter with her?” he asked.

  “She has brought her troubles to you, sir, and you go on about braying asses!”

  “You won’t find Barnum backward when it comes to chivalry.”

  “Miss Finch believes you can be of help.”

  “I’m a friend of Margaret Hardesty,” I said, drying my eyes.

  “Ah, little Margaret! Had she been Eve, mankind would not have gotten itself kicked out of Eden.”

  “Only because she could not have reached the fruit in the tree of knowledge,” said Susan. “Eve’s gift to humankind was curiosity.”

  “A noble quality! Once again, Miss Susan, my hat is off to you.” He held it in his hands. “I admire quick wittedness in man, woman, or beast.” A rabbit poked its nose above the brim. “I appear to have expropriated Maxwell the Magician’s partner. By such follies, America grows.”

  “And breeds a race of rats!” said Susan tartly.

  “Speaking of rats, how fares that paragon of philandering, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, after the scandalous revelation of his affair with Elizabeth Tilton? To think that, in ten years, he has advanced from abolitionist to adulterer. What next? I wonder. Anarchist perhaps, since he has a proclivity for unlawful acts beginning with the letter a. Please give my regards to Mrs. Stanton, whose tattle dropped the reverend into the stew of juicy tidbits whose savor the public cannot do without!”

  Susan sniffed in disdain of the abolitionist who had armed John Brown and his would-be army of slaves with “Beecher’s Bibles,” rifles shipped to Brown in crates claiming, on their lids, to hold the Word of God. “Mr. Beecher’s infidelities have lighted a ‘holocaust of womanhood,’” she said, quoting Elizabeth, who had reviled the self-righteous fornicator whose first dalliance had been with a young woman copyist of his sermons.

  I’m grateful to you, Mr. James, for having never once tried to outrage me.

  “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung,” said Barnum wryly.

  I had been turning a shaving mug over in my hands while Susan and Barnum waged a war of wits. The mug was decorated with four cupids bearing an escutcheon dulled by dried lather. In a sudden fury, I smashed it on the floor.

  Barnum flew into a rage. “Damn you, woman! That was a gift from the prince consort!”

  Susan hid a smile in her glove as Barnum picked up pieces of broken china.

  “If I were not inured to disaster, I’d order Stanley Carl to feed you to his lions!” He snarled like one. “It’s better to be insured than inured, but the premium is exorbitant for a man of my inflammatory history.” Fires had destroyed the American Museum, the Hippodrome, and Iranistan, his Moorish palace in Bridgeport, at the time the largest private home in America.

  “I am very sorry, Mr. Barnum,” I said abjectly. “But I’m mad with worry!”

  “Young woman, what is the trouble?” His tone had changed in an instant from irascible to paternal.

  “My ba
by has been stolen!”

  Laying aside the remains of the Prince Albert mug, Barnum turned to Susan, who nodded and said, “We need your help in finding him.”

  Barnum scratched his cheek thoughtfully. Soap from the royal mug will never again do honor to your face, I said to myself. Susan apologized for the “wicked destruction of property,” and promised to send him a tin of Mrs. Stanton’s Washington Squares.

  “I’d be afraid to eat them,” said Barnum, clutching his neck and sticking out his tongue in a pantomime of asphyxiation.

  “Elizabeth is many things, but she’s not a poisoner.”

  “What your friend is, my good woman, is an opportunist,” said the caliph of claptrap.

  “You slander her, sir! And I am not your good woman!”

  “Come, come, Miss Anthony! Her nose for money is almost as keen as my own.” He took a gigantic handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with such stentorian effect that Jumbo answered him in kind from his cage. “What is the going rate for speaking engagements?” Susan made no reply. “Answer, or I won’t lift a finger to help you.” He waggled his pinkie, so that we might admire the ruby ring that decorated it, a “gift from Jenny Lind.”

  “One hundred dollars for a mixed crowd, fifty for women, and ten on the Sabbath,” I replied, though the question had not been put to me.

  Susan glared; the heat of her gaze could have melted the bone buttons on my dress.

  “As a statesman, she is downright greedy, but as a celebrity, she’s underrating herself.”

  “Stateswoman!” interjected Susan. “Or statesperson, if you like.”

  “Mr. Barnum, please!” I assumed an exaggerated attitude of abjection that Frank Ashton, the Posturing Man, would have applauded. Had Elizabeth been there to see her stenographer on her knees, she’d have sent me packing. “I beg you to help us find my baby, Martin!”

  “Have you no husband to rely on that you must come to Barnum for assistance?”

  “She has none to speak of,” said Susan with an inscrutable, tight-lipped smile.

  “Lucky for you Barnum is a man of the world. Rise, dear girl, and tell me your troubles.”

  After I’d related my sad tale, replete with tears and hand-wringing, he called from the window to a passing Wildman from Borneo: “Fetch Mr. Gallagher. You will find him asleep in his wagon.” Barnum touched the side of his nose and winked at us. “Our Mr. Gallagher drinks. He claims it’s a nerve tonic. The old soak! Barnum knows she-coonery when he smells it! He’s up on all the latest dodges.”

  The Wildman from Borneo removed his false incisors, each one sharp as a chisel, and affably replied, “Righto, boss!” He winked at Susan and hurried to the old soak’s wagon.

  While we waited for Gallagher’s arrival, Barnum took up a red crayon and worked on the banner headline for the Ethnological Congress billboard. Dissatisfied with one, he would write another, each attempt more bombastic than the one before.

  Come See The Greatest Convocation Of Human Species!

  Behold & Marvel At The Biggest Assembly Of

  For The First Time Since The Confounding At Babel

  “Whatever you do, do it ardently,” he counseled, slashing yet another sentence that failed to satisfy his demand for grandiosity.

  Witness Prodigies That Defy The Limits Of Human Nature!

  “Rodomontade is my favorite word—after money, of course. During a long career as a huckster of high jinks, I’ve learned that the more fantastic the first is, the more fabulous the second will be.” He scratched at the paper proof and tried again.

  “Voilà! What do you think of this?” he asked Susan, jabbing his crayon at the product of his garish imagination’s restless milling:

  BEHOLD BLOOD CURDLING & HEART STOPPING MONSTROSITIES

  THAT DARE TO CALL THEMSELVES HUMAN!!!

  “I hope that women will be represented,” she replied with unintended drollery.

  “Naturally!” declared the sultan of spectacles. “Contrary to the opinion of some of my sex, I believe that women have the same right as men to call themselves human—or monsters, if it comes to that.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it!” she grumbled.

  “Now for the finishing touch …”

  “Behold the finger of God commanding the people to go to Barnum’s and worship a creation second only to His own!”

  What folly! I thought, not daring to speak my mind. I could only guess at the thoughts seething in Susan’s matriarchal brain. Fortunately, Mr. Gallagher made a timely entrance before another priceless souvenir could be dashed to pieces. Barnum folded up the press proof and put it in a drawer.

  “Miss Susan B. Anthony, Miss Ellen Finch, may I present Special Officer Gallagher of the Pinkerton Agency, on permanent assignment to the Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome.”

  Susan nodded warily. I shook his plump hand eagerly.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the portly Irishman, whose breath did nothing to refute the chief stereotype attached to his people.

  “Mr. Gallagher! A child has been kidnapped, and we need you to find him posthaste!” The impresario of bull and bunkum used the same tone to motivate Homer Silvey and Al Cole, masters of canvas, to strike the circus tents, Miss Emma Jutau to slide down from the big top’s upper reaches by her teeth, or Billy Burke to warble his budget of songs.

  Gallagher took out a notebook and a pencil, licked its lead, and asked, “Name?”

  “Martin Finch II,” I replied.

  “Age?”

  “Five months.”

  “Last seen?”

  “Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse, Forty-second Street, Murray Hill.”

  “Second floor,” interjected Susan.

  “Any distinguishing features?”

  “In the eyes of man’s law, he’s a bastard,” said Susan, her own eyes glittering like daggers.

  I dared not speak.

  “Through no fault of his own,” declared Susan.

  “Do you suspect anyone?” His question was addressed pointedly to me.

  “Mary Surratt,” I replied, ignoring his snide innuendo.

  Gallagher stared down his red nose at me. “She that was hanged for helping kill Mr. Lincoln?”

  “I saw her take my baby!” I insisted, although I was less certain than I’d been when I saw her climb out my bedroom window. Self-doubt dogged me through that troublous time.

  “Miss Finch is in shock,” said Barnum, winking at the Pinkerton man.

  Having wet his pencil again, Gallagher wrote “Temporarily deranged” in his book.

  “But the child was taken!” averred Susan. “Mrs. Stanton and I can attest to the fact.”

  “The Mrs. Stanton who believes in free love?” asked the special officer.

  “She does not believe in free love! That’s a vicious lie put about by her enemies.”

  “Gallagher, your job is to find the child, not to pass judgment on anybody’s turpitude!”

  “Turpitude my eye!” shouted Susan.

  I thought I would go mad!

  “Right you are, Mr. Barnum, sir!”

  “How will you go about it?” he asked, stroking his chin.

  “By—consulting—Madame Singleton!” Officer Gallagher gasped, after having lost his breath to a string of hiccups.

  Susan offered him a horehound drop.

  “Excellent!” Rubbing his hands, Barnum turned to me and explained: “Second sight is twice as useful as plain sight, four times better than an oversight, and infinitely preferable to the hindsight in which we all indulge.”

  Overwhelmed by absurdity, I fainted. I was happily oblivious until the sting of spirits of ammonia brought me to my senses. Susan carried a bottle of smelling salts in her bag, although she hated to use them because they affirmed a woman’s frailty.

  “You should loosen her corset,” said Gallagher, taking an interest in my welfare.

  “She’s not wearing one,” said Susan, always a stickler for the truth.


  “In that case, I recommend unbuttoning her blouse.”

  “That will be enough, Gallagher!” chided Barnum.

  The officer shifted his gaze, which Susan later described as “prurient,” and desisted from taking a further inventory of my apparel.

  “A rare sympathy connects Madame Singleton and me,” said the Pinkerton man, wanting to be seen in a better light and on a higher plain. “We imbibe the same spiritual atmosphere.”

  Barnum, a teetotaler, acknowledged the efficacy of strong drink in special cases and kept a selection of ardent spirits in his cupboard. He handed Gallagher a bottle of gin. “Give her this, but don’t let her drain any more than the neck. The visions of a blind drunk are unreliable.”

  “Great gifts can be a burden,” remarked Gallagher.

  “Speaking of burdens, I’m worried about Jumbo. I think he’s got the grippe. Ladies, did you ever see an elephant sneeze? It’s not a pretty sight. Gallagher, have Madame Singleton consult her crystal. I paid ten thousand dollars for the animal, and if it’s likely to die, I might be able to palm it off on Bill Cody before it kicks the bucket.”

  Jumbo survived the grippe but was struck by a locomotive in 1885. Barnum donated the skeleton to the Museum of Natural History, sold the great heart to Cornell, and had the hide stuffed by William Critchley. Jumbo continued to make money for the Prince of Humbug from customers wishing to view death on a colossal scale. I hoped that the gleam of avarice in Barnum’s eyes would never light on la petite Margaret. Let her likeness be shaped in paraffin, I prayed, but protect her from the ravages of taxidermy! God grant that she will one day reside at Mountain Grove Cemetery, whole and self-possessed in death as she was in life, beside her beloved general.

  Not to be outdone by man or pachyderm, Elizabeth later willed her brain to Cornell, whose anatomists were eager to discover evidence of derangement.

  Ardent Spirits

  GALLAGHER, SUSAN, AND I were whisked to Madame Singleton’s in the antique phaeton Barnum used to make a spectacle of himself. Doffing his high hat to passersby as a trombonist blew a circus screamer, he would bellow greetings to the people of Manhattan or Brooklyn. Bells tied to their fetlocks, a pair of white horses pranced musically. Ersatz horns were strapped to their foreheads. That afternoon, Mr. Dode was not in the coachman’s seat. Perhaps he was still chasing Fischer’s hat. George Melville, bareback rider and “country innocent,” held the reins in his oddly pink hands.