Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  When little Charlie Stratton was very young, before they thought he would remember it, his mother talked with his father about the possibility of keeping him in a specially prepared, interior room without windows—a closet. The Strattons would tell people he had been sent away, and eventually he would be forgotten. If he never saw the outside again, Tom Thumb was able to reason later, in time he would have put it out of his mind. He could have lived his whole life in that windowless chamber, content with whatever of the world his parents might have chosen to show him through books and pictures. He might have even been grateful to them for being so generous.

  “So then the drummer went on about how he saw you,” Barnum raved. “It was early on a Thursday morning, with your brothers and sisters getting ready to go to school. One of them was holding you like a doll, by the back of your suspenders, and you were squeaking at him to put you down. That was the first and only time my agent saw you, but thankfully he had the presence of mind to put it all down on paper, more than he realized.

  “The important thing to me was that you could read and write. I never lost sight of that fact in the two weeks it took me to compose my letter to your parents. I would have taken longer on that letter, but I was afraid some charlatan would come along and make your parents an offer.” He winked. “You deserved the best, General, only the very best.”

  Tom Thumb giggled.

  “Now, really, where would you be without me? Can you imagine what would have happened to you if someone else had even tried to manage your career?” Barnum didn’t wait for an answer. “As I say, for me the salient fact was that you could read and write. I came to the opinion that if you could do that, you were capable of reason, no matter how old you were or were not, or how limited your experience in the world happened to be.

  “I imagined,” Barnum intoned, for he was really drunk, “that if I had the chance to talk to you alone, I could make you see the path of reason and that your parents would soon come into line. I wonder—do you remember the critical moment?”

  “It was in the garden,” Tom Thumb said.

  “Yard. Your parents had a yard, a patchy diseased thing, until you earned them the money for those rosebushes.”

  General Tom Thumb signaled for another drink. “Don’t you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk, Barnum?”

  “Never. They’ll never throw dirt in my face if they can hear me talking. I knew your mother was going to be the tougher of the two to deal with. Before I ever started writing my letter, I knew that your mother was the one who saved the ten- and twenty-five-cent pieces to take them down to the bank every month. Almost a hundred and thirty dollars in savings! An amazing sum, considering your father never made three dollars in a week until the day he met me.

  “Such discipline as your mother demonstrated usually requires a hard heart, but I surmised that, if your mother had a weakness, it was in the direction her discipline and sacrifice were taking her. And sure enough, my agent’s notes contained the fragment of a clue. If I’d been able to keep all my wits about me during that hectic time, I would have seen and pursued it even before I initiated correspondence with your parents. As it was, I did not see it until after the situation had been settled to our mutual satisfaction, so the element of luck became a factor, but truly only the luck one works to attain.

  “That little fragment of a clue, as you still may not know, was the information that your mother had not spoken to a certain Mrs. Daisy Jordan for more than seventeen years. My agent had buried the valuable scrap in a compilation of seemingly similar back-fence items. If I’d allowed my curiosity and imagination to get the better of me in that critical instance, I would have taken the time to learn that your mother and Mrs. Jordan were neighbors in their childhood and that years later Mrs. Jordan reminded your mother of having said many times that she wanted to marry a man of wealth and substance, and that she, Mrs. Jordan, having married one of the town’s long-time selectmen, had actually fulfilled your mother’s ambition. Your mother didn’t speak to Mrs. Jordan again until the news was printed in the Bridgeport paper that you and I had been presented together to the President of the United States.

  “By then your family had been in a house as fine as the Jordan’s for more than a year. It wasn’t the honor of you meeting the President that your mother wanted to flaunt before her old friend, however. Your mother was every bit as cold and hardhearted as I’d imagined she’d be, but more than anything, she needed confirmation of her redemption that your introduction to the President signified. Your mother was a lifelong Presbyterian, remember.”

  “She thought I was the evidence of her sinfulness,” Tom Thumb said.

  “I’m afraid so, yes,” said Barnum, pouring himself another glassful in great dollops. “My youthful experience as a terrorized Methodist gave me a valuable understanding of what transpires in the hearts of Presbyterians. Her sense of her own sin was the reason. That’s why she had people on both sides of the family check back to see if there had ever been midgets in your family before. In fairness to her, it must be said that there are many people like your mother, and that New England particularly breeds them like rabbits, people who cannot help but see every element of life, including family, friends, love, and children, even religion—especially religion (and it doesn’t matter which brand)—as some infernal competition they must struggle to win. Finding midget twins on your father’s side must have comforted her, but she remained, until I met her, a woman in search of deliverance, the warmth and light of God’s grace. People like your mother are always yearning for something, and they have it all mixed up in their minds like soup.” Barnum smiled. “I sold a ring to buy the suit and rent the carriage that made your mother think that I was the man wealthy enough to ride to her rescue. That’s why I took two weeks to write that first letter, for every word had to convey to your mother that first, most important message, that I was the personification of her religious, social, and financial salvation.”

  Tom Thumb remembered the furor that the letter created, how it rested for days on the kitchen counter next to the water pump, how his mother read it aloud again and again until she settled on the parts she considered pertinent. The letter was addressed to the head of the household, Mr. Stratton, but the five-year-old Charlie, about to be renamed Tom Thumb, sitting like a little gentleman on an inverted pot beside the pump, heard all the phrases Barnum had worked into the letter about “fiduciary security” and “continuing income”—each preceded by a critical if—“if the little fellow proves capable of learning how to perform on stage,” and “if your son is in fact as small as the rumors suggest.” Just as his mother discerned the message encoded in the letter for her, the five-year-old felt something being said to him, too. That was the wonderful, true thing about Barnum: in telling a story, he really told all, more than you could have possibly imagined beforehand, filling the entirety of your mind with his vision. In the days the family waited for the showman to travel up from his American Museum in New York, Charlie Stratton was the one being lifted to a higher order of reality—and here was Barnum telling exactly how he had made the little boy feel it.

  And so that raising up was confirmed, from the moment of Barnum’s arrival that day so many years before, in his gleaming carriage so delicate it didn’t look strong enough to hold him, the liveried footman to open his door, and Barnum’s gracious acknowledgment of the crowd that was gathered in the street outside. Word had been spreading through the neighborhood for days that the scandalous, fast-talking young man who had exhibited George Washington’s 161-year-old slave mammy was coming to investigate The Tiny Child of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  Everyone knew something of the story of ancient Joice Heth, lying withered in a cradle and singing the songs she claimed to have sung to the Father of the Country himself in his infancy, but not all that many knew the rest of the tale, however freely admitted by Barnum after the decrepit black woman passed on to her just reward. There never had been any proof that the woman had been as old
as she’d claimed, and Barnum had never actually said he had such proof. He’d bought the old soul in Philadelphia from a slaver who had been the one to support her claim, although he had not been willing to swear out an affadavit on the matter. Barnum maintained he had only repeated what the other two had told him—and what crime was that? If people had been duped, he had been the biggest victim of all.

  Laughing along with the crowd, he demanded to be told what was wrong with his logic. It didn’t matter in any case, he said, because he was well satisfied with the exhibition of Joice Heth. If she hadn’t been George Washington’s mammy, she certainly had looked old enough to have been that person, and therefore the point was well made.

  “What was the point, Barnum?” someone yelled over the laughter.

  “That George Washington’s mammy, if she had lived, would look very old,” Barnum was alleged to have answered, to the shouts, hoots, and cheers of the crowd.

  Joice Heth had made Barnum’s reputation in New York. He was a merry rogue, a character, an actor who had somehow stepped off a stage to play his part in real life. And in New England, Barnum’s home, where the whole story had spread, where among its devotees the practical joke was a matter of regional pride if not outright legend, Barnum was a hero.

  At his mother’s instruction, little Charlie Stratton was at the door to welcome the great man. Barnum swept him up and set him on his shoulder. “Stay close to me, boy, you’re the one I came to see. Speak up, I want to hear you speak up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I had to take the chance of scaring you,” Barnum explained that bleary night in his New York office years later. “If you were going to turn into stone on me, nothing in the world was going to make you fit for performing, and the sooner I knew it, the better. The carriage was costing me a fortune. Fortunately, you chirped right up. It was as sweet as hearing a chipmunk nicker, and you were sitting on my shoulder. You were present in that scabrous back yard for my discussion with your parents, so you should remember every word. What you don’t know is that I had five hundred dollars in my pocket—not all I could get my hands on, mind you, but close to it. I was terribly broke in those days, but I had to be ready to put a binder on any deal I was going to be able to make with your parents. When I spoke, I made sure to look your mother’s way every once in a while, not too often, but regularly enough to make her believe I knew she was going to have plenty to say in any decision to be made about the matter. New England breeds people like her, rabbits, but it breeds foxes like me, too. God rest her soul, her piety and social ambition only made a hassenpfeffer of her for me. Dark, cold climates make for dark, cold people, Charlie. The witless yearning that infests us all takes sinister forms where life is hard. Even now, with New York turning into another Paris, New England is filled with people believing that only God can save them from their frostbitten, overcast gloom. Even a dog knows enough to come out of the rain, Charlie.”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” Tom Thumb said, toasting Barnum with his tiny glass.

  Barnum returned the toast. “Just make sure people are looking the other way when you’re helping yourself, however, and don’t stuff your pockets too full. In any event, after promising to put money in escrow—I had to mortgage my house for that—and guaranteeing your parents a minimum payment every month, as well as swearing that you would have the finest of English tutors—”

  Tom Thumb squealed with laughter. “I never saw one!”

  “Your parents didn’t care in the first place,” Barnum replied, a little put off. “Wasn’t I a good teacher? Haven’t I seen you myself standing over your newspaper, morning after morning, turning it like bed sheets, while you read every column, every word? God knows you can do your sums. You even have some Latin and Greek.”

  “Precious little. Books are too heavy for me anyway.”

  “Well, you have the money now to hire somebody to translate all the Greek and Latin you want,” Barnum said airily. “For that matter, he can even teach them to you, if that’s what you want—which I doubt, given your love of the pleasures of the flesh these days.”

  Tom Thumb was rocking with laughter. “I should take you into court. I should have you put in jail.”

  “We have had fun,” Barnum mused. “We’re two of a kind. As young as you were, you knew that even before your mother left the yard to fetch the tea, and called your father to help her. From the letter she knew I wanted to have a moment with you alone, but more important, you knew it, too.”

  “By the time we were sitting in the garden,” Tom Thumb said, “I knew you had all but made up your mind, even though I still didn’t know what was going to be expected of me.”

  “Our future depended on what I said to you next, and the way you responded to it. Do you remember? Can you possibly forget?”

  Tom Thumb laughed. “Yes and no. Yes, I remember; no, I can’t possibly forget.”

  Now, as if he wanted that moment to come alive again after so many years, as if he wanted to re-create it so he and his little General could live it again, Barnum came close and whispered, “Son, even though you’re half the size of other five-year-olds, most people are too stupid to be able to notice the difference. If we’re going to make any money together, you’re going to have to pretend you’re older. You’re going to have to say you’re nine years old and act accordingly. I’ll teach you what you need to know, but it will be up to you to make it work. Do you think you can make people believe you’re nine?”

  “I won’t be able to do the schoolwork,” Tom Thumb said, as he had years before.

  “You won’t have to go to school,” Barnum said without emotion, forgetting how the child’s concerns had visibly dismayed him that afternoon in the Stratton back yard. As then, Tom Thumb rose to his feet. This time he was unsteady, swinging his arms for balance.

  “If I’m nine,” he cried, “that means in November I’ll be ten!”

  Barnum paused; his memory of the event was near-perfect. He sat back. “How old are you?”

  “Nine!” Tom Thumb shrieked, like the child he had been.

  Barnum winked. “We’re going to be all right. Just don’t tell your mother what we just said.”

  Like a puppeteer, or some mischievous Olympian spirit, Barnum schemed and connived a whole new life for five-year-old Charlie Stratton. It began before that first week was out, eradicating that nasty little neighborhood and dark-spirited New England forever. Barnum named him for a character out of King Arthur, the thumb-sized son of a plowman swallowed whole by a cow, and prefixed “General” to add dimension and charm to the character. Barnum trained the little boy, patiently drilling him in his lines and steps, teaching him how to dress, walk, talk, bow, and acknowledge praise. In a matter of months the five-year-old became nine-year-old General Tom Thumb, whose first triumphal tour electrified America, took them both to the White House, to Queen Victoria, to the wonders of the Continent beyond …

  Tom Thumb had not lied to Jenny Lind: Barnum had invented him. Barnum was forty-six now, but already he had given the world the American Museum in New York, such wonders as Tom Thumb, Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, Anna Swan the Giantess, the Feegee Mermaid, and the Wild Men of Borneo. And if Jenny Lind could not see it, Barnum had changed for the better the lives of people who might have been made to suffer scorn, ridicule, and humiliation from childhood to the grave.

  People like Charlie Stratton.

  And Lavinia Warren.

  But as Barnum gave, Barnum also could take away: into Charles Stratton’s Eden Barnum had allowed to enter a real serpent.

  Joe Gallagher—Commodore Nutt.

  3.

  The Viennese winter afternoon turned cold and overcast, but the little General did not nap. Assured that the mountain passes were clear and the seven o’clock train to Paris would get through on schedule, Tom Thumb knelt on the blotter on the desk in his room and with his specially designed pen wrote four densely packed pages to Barnum, describing Jenny Lind as he had found her
, and stating his objections to going ahead with the project as clearly as he could.

  Given Jenny Lind’s personality, Tom Thumb was sure that her magic, whatever it was, would not work on Americans. Regardless of the causes, Lind’s attitudes and opinions might be seen as too prissy and refined in rough-and-tumble America. In Europe she may have earned her sobriquet, The Swedish Nightingale, but Tom Thumb could imagine too readily some ill-educated, nose-picking American newspaper critic seeing just how drab she was, and making sure everybody knew it before she even had the chance to sing.

  Worse, what if her voice turned out to be not the wonderful instrument European accounts had claimed? Even American critics had been known to fall victim to the mass hysteria that resulted in exactly the notices Jenny Lind had received—but Americans were not always ready to fall into line behind the Europeans in matters of art and culture. If American audiences felt they had been deceived by the Europeans, The Nightingale very easily could turn into The Swedish Duck. She would be laughed out of the country, and Barnum along with her. A lot of people hated Barnum and were itching for the chance to humiliate him. Tom Thumb was not privy to all of Barnum’s financial dealings, but he was reasonably sure that such a fiasco would leave Barnum bankrupt. Tom Thumb stood to lose not just the twenty thousand dollars he had invested, he would lose a producer and a stage—Barnum’s American Museum—as well. Tom Thumb wouldn’t exactly be out of business, but his income would suffer badly. He might be able to mount his own show and organize a tour, but it would be a terrible amount of work, and the results would be nothing like what Barnum was able to achieve.

  The truth was, while Jenny Lind had acted like a star this afternoon, while she had seemed to know how to make use of the prerogatives of stardom, Tom Thumb could not see how such a prematurely matronly little frump could hold the attention of an audience at even a small-town club musicale. He tried repeatedly to imagine her on a stage, but he just couldn’t. He wanted to be fair to her, but the colorless, plain, introverted little creature simply did not belong in the limelight, before an audience of emperors and kings, leaving them breathless in their love for her.