Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  Naturally, with so much on his mind, when Tom Thumb tried to make love to Lavinia Warren, he failed.

  He had moved her onto her bed, onto an oversized, lace-trimmed pink satin pillow he had turned the long way around on the center of the bed. It was summer in Louisville, mild and clear, with a full moon ghosting through a filigree of clouds; the window was open and the curtain flung back so moonlight and moist, sweet, honeysuckle air poured into the room. If he had thought of the weather, Tom Thumb would have prayed for such a night. She was timid; he arranged her skirts around her waist, so she couldn’t see what was happening. She liked lying on the pillow, she said; no normal-sized woman could dare such a dream. The pillow had been part of his planning, too; he had seen it earlier, his imagination leaping so that he’d almost giggled aloud. That was when he fell in love with her. He knew it; he could feel the moment burning indelibly on his memory. For the rest of his life, he knew, he would remember her tiny arms reaching up to him, her dark lips twisting into a breathless, voluptuous smile. She was surrendering to him, he was in love with her, but he was heartless, he could see the control he could have over her. His dishonesty betrayed him, and finally he could not hide his failure.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “I love you,” she said. “I want you to stay with me.”

  As they lay there and drifted half into sleep, he recovered and moved again, but even then, as they were becoming lovers, a part of him held back. He could not imagine surrendering himself as she was doing. He could not imagine his emotions so overtaken with someone else.

  But now, after two years, Tom Thumb could see that in his arrogance he had probably made the mistake of his life, assuming that she was his, like a gift from God. Youth ends when you realize what a mess you’ve made, Barnum had said to him years ago, and now Tom Thumb knew that was true.

  He could imagine that Lavinia was beginning to think she had put in enough time with the famous General Tom Thumb. While she had changed, grown and matured, he had tried to keep her as she had been that first night, loving, happy, and grateful. Something inside him insisted so strongly that she was supposed to stay that way that he resented anything new she tried, even a new hairstyle, to the point of ignoring her when she presented him with something as small as tickets to the ballet.

  They had gone on like that, or he was able to get away with such behavior, for many months; to others, they looked deeply in love, but the truth was, in his confusion, he was making her more and more constricted and unhappy, and more aware of her unhappiness, until Commodore Nutt, Joe Gallagher of San Francisco, came along.

  Tom Thumb had met Joe Gallagher months before Gallagher had joined Barnum. In Denver, in a hotel filled with dusty silver prospectors. Gallagher was traveling with a show out of San Francisco, nothing you could even call a circus, a strong man, a sword swallower, a bearded lady, and Joe Gallagher. When Tom Thumb came into the lobby of the hotel, Gallagher was brought out of the bar to meet him.

  “What do you say, Gallagher?” somebody hooted. “I bet you feel like a giant next to him.”

  “I feel like a giant next to you!” Gallagher shot back.

  Tom Thumb decided to buy Joe Gallagher a drink.

  It turned into dinner, and then Gallagher wanted to get a couple of girls. By then Tom Thumb had seen that he wanted to be careful around this Joe Gallagher, who was cunning and pressed every advantage, every situation. He freely admitted it—no, bragged: in his stories about his travails growing up in San Francisco, Gallagher loved to point up his successful manipulations and conquests.

  “Do you know when I know I’ve got a girl where I want her?” he asked Tom Thumb during one of many exchanges about sex. “When she wants to know if I ever think about being big—fullsized. I always say yes, as sincerely as I can. It gets them every time.”

  By then Tom Thumb knew that Joe Gallagher was more dwarf than midget—“I’m pretty good even for a big guy”—and that he had made love with scores of women all over the West, including the bearded lady in his show. “She’s hairy all over, soft, like a cat, and it’s interesting. It’s hot, though.”

  He knew how to take care of a woman, he told Tom Thumb. “Lots of sex. I work on them all the time. There’s nothing any of them like so much as a man who shows his interest, except for a man who knows how to follow through.”

  In San Francisco, that meant presents, including money, for Gallagher. He was a simple braggart trying to make an impression on Tom Thumb, that night in Denver, and Tom Thumb remembered thinking that he would not tell the story of the German countess who had dressed him up like a baby—the story was too exotic, too rich, and would have crushed Gallagher. Tom Thumb had all but forgotten him when Barnum announced months later that he had taken on “a tough little boyo from San Francisco.” Tom Thumb remembered Gallagher at once, and everything that had happened in Denver, including a memory that had passed quickly, unbidden, through Tom Thumb’s mind when Gallagher had made the remark about the effect on women when he admitted wishing he was full-sized.

  At the time—in Denver—Tom Thumb had told himself that the wishing was common with all little people, that it meant nothing, like wishing you didn’t have to die; but the day Barnum made his announcement, Tom Thumb saw the action of his mind in a different light, as if he had been trying to run away from what the memory told him about Lavinia and himself.

  Lavinia loved sex. She loved being romanced, and then she loved a little more. She loved the expression on her Charlie’s face afterward, she told him often. She loved talking in bed; she loved saying forbidden things almost as much as doing them.

  “Charlie, do you ever dream about being tall?”

  “Sure, all the time. In my good dreams, I’m always tall. In the bad dreams people are always chasing me, and then I’m always small, hiding under the stove and things like that.”

  “What would you do first if you were tall?” She snuggled against him; that’s what he remembered, that they were holding each other after lovemaking.

  “I don’t know. What would you do?”

  “You’re going to get mad,” she said.

  “No, tell me.”

  “I’d go out in a field and lie down and wait for the first full-sized fanner to come along.”

  He didn’t get mad, he got scared, which was what he didn’t want to remember when he met Joe Gallagher, and remembered all too clearly when Barnum said he was hiring the man.

  And the truth was that Gallagher did not start up with Lavinia just as soon as he was in the troupe; no, that came later, after he’d shown proper deference to the star and his old acquaintances from Denver. No, at the beginning, he made sure Lavinia understood how generous with his time—and money—General Tom Thumb had been with a lowly dwarf from San Francisco. In the beginning Joe Gallagher was very careful to mind his place. He was so deferential that it began to annoy Tom Thumb, and when he spoke of it to Lavinia, he was surprised to hear her defend Gallagher—yes, surprised.

  “He’s afraid of you,” she said. “There isn’t anything you can’t do on a stage, and he knows how close you are to Barnum. I’ve told him not to worry, but this is such a big chance for him that he can’t help being frightened.”

  It did not take another moment for Tom Thumb to see what Gallagher was up to, and he could see awful consequences with Lavinia if he dealt with it directly—went to Barnum and insisted, demanded, that the guy be fired. And it was no good going to Gallagher and warning him off, for he really wasn’t afraid of Tom Thumb at all—the stuff Gallagher was giving Lavinia about it was just bunk, and part of his plan. Gallagher hadn’t been afraid of Tom Thumb in Denver.

  “Maybe you ought to keep away from that mug,” Tom Thumb said to Lavinia. “He’s working on you.”

  “No, he isn’t. He’s been a perfect gentleman.”

  “He’s working on you, I’m telling you!”

  “Oh, you’re not going to do that to me! You’re not going to tell me who I can talk to and y
ou’re not going to raise your voice to me!”

  From then on they could not speak of Joe Gallagher without both of them raising their voices. And there was no doubt that Lavinia had discussed the situation with Gallagher, or at least some part of it, for soon enough Gallagher started to bait him whenever they were alone, taunt and intimidate him. Tom Thumb was helpless—he should have gone to Barnum when he’d had the chance. And now, in Antwerp, he was trying to face the possibility that the situation had passed beyond the point of salvation, and that no matter what happened to Gallagher, Lavinia Warren was finished with Tom Thumb.

  And that left Tom Thumb too numb to care about what happened to Gallagher, even though the General had enough on his adversary to send him not only back to San Francisco, but as far as Hawaii or even Japan.

  Sneaking out of Emperor Franz Josef’s reception in Vienna had been only the beginning of a long siege of frightening behavior coming from Joe Gallagher. Now Tom Thumb could see that, ever since they’d arrived in Europe, Gallagher had been warming up to a real bender, absent until minutes before a performance, showing up elegantly half-bagged, upsetting the rest of the troupe. No doubt about it, for all his smarmy self-confidence, Gallagher was a real alcoholic. After the tour of Italy, the period during which Tom Thumb still deluded himself about having won Lavinia back at last, when they reached Madrid, Gallagher got arrested in a drunken brawl, trying to fight with His Majesty’s troops, making such a laughingstock of himself that Tom Thumb had to forget all other considerations in the effort to keep the incident out of the newspapers. He’d failed, and for good reason: after Gallagher had punched a soldier in the groin, leaving him writhing on the ground, his fellows had played catch with Gallagher until he’d wet his pants and shrieked for his life. As it was, the soldiers told Tom Thumb later, Gallagher had had a very close call: if the man holding himself on the ground had had his way, Gallagher would have been tossed back and forth until someone decided to skewer him on the end of a bayonet—they did it with gypsies and Jews all the time, the soldiers assured Tom Thumb.

  That was it—except for the violence, not worse than some of the scrapes Tom Thumb and Barnum had gotten into not too many years ago. But it was enough for the Madrid newspapers, and, if Tom Thumb presented it properly when they were back in New York, enough for Barnum to send Gallagher packing. The General had a good case now. Gallagher’s antics had alienated and disgusted Anna Swan, whom Barnum truly loved and valued. Without prompting, Anna Swan would tell Barnum the truth about Gallagher, down to every excessive detail. Anytime he wanted, Barnum could have her crying on his shoulder, even if her weight did make his knees buckle.

  If Barnum wanted more confirmation, he could get it in ten minutes, setting Chang and Eng against each other. He had their number—or numbers. The only thing they agreed on was their hatred of Barnum, which was all he needed to make monkeys of them both.

  In dealing with Barnum, they never knew what was going on. Barnum got them to do what he wanted by telling one that he didn’t understand what the other was saying. In a moment they would be screaming at each other, telling Barnum exactly what he wanted to know. “I know their secret,” he told the General one time. “I’ll leave it to you to figure out for yourself.” He smiled; he had a smile like a cherub, his lips pressed tightly together, his cheeks reddening merrily. “What gives me the right to deal with them so shabbily is that I bought them for cash from a man who was about to sell them for half my price to an Arabian caliph, who was going to keep them in a cage in the zoo in his court, between the gorilla and the zebra.”

  Tom Thumb thought that was a lie, pure Barnum humbug, but also clear evidence of the kind of mind Barnum had—nothing, not even the fate of a Joe Gallagher, was assured, if Barnum could make a game of it, turn it into a vehicle for his practical jokes, and gleefully create an uproar.

  Barnum was loyal. Tom Thumb knew who would be at his side in a showdown. It was just that every situation was fair game for Barnum’s mischief—that included the developing Jenny Lind fiasco. Once things were settled, it would just be a matter of time before Barnum started manipulating that situation, too, for his own entertainment.

  But Tom Thumb had trouble focusing on something so far ahead, so far away from him. All his attention was taken by the calamity he had brought on himself. He and Lavinia were lovers again, but the passion was gone—even their ability to talk to each other was slipping away. The attention she gave Gallagher in her conversation ate at Tom Thumb like acid, but because he had decided in Vienna to change his behavior with her in regard to Gallagher, he kept quiet, growing steadily angrier. (It was when he was alone and in relative control of himself that he could see his mistakes and resolve not to make them again—but there was no peace in that kind of thinking; it was driving him crazy.)

  Now Barnum—Barnum’s response to Lind’s proposal. The troupe had been in Antwerp less than a full day when Barnum’s letter arrived. At noon Tom Thumb had a luncheon engagement with members of the local press, to publicize the troupe’s presence in the city. These mid-day entertainments, Barnum’s idea years ago, were doubly taxing for Tom Thumb, because he had to play the lively hail-fellow and drink (proportionately) along with the correspondents, while remembering that his purpose was business—selling the show. What compounded the difficulty was that trustworthy and untrustworthy journalists alike acted as if they enjoyed his company, tempting him to relax his guard with them. The trustworthy journalists created no problem; but there was no telling what the others would print, or hint at, from a genuine lapse of taste or a bad judgment to something taken out of context and twisted beyond any resemblance to the original meaning. Either way, it was a nerve-wracking experience even for a man not trying to marshal his emotional and physical resources, like Tom Thumb.

  He was under the quilts of the bed in his hotel room when he finally slit open Barnum’s envelope and poured out the heaps of newspaper clippings and pages and pages of Barnum’s handwriting. The General was dozy from lunch, and wanted a nap before this evening’s performance; on the night table was a gleaming pewter pitcher full of hot chocolate. Outside, a late February rain pelted at the windows. Winter weather was lethal, Tom Thumb knew; snuggling down under the thick, toasty, European quilts, he believed this the best thing he could do for himself, curling up to read Barnum’s letter and then falling asleep for hours. The General set the newspaper clippings in a stack beside him, made sure he had the pages of the letter in proper order, then turned them into the light of the oil lamp on the table beside the bed. Barnum’s handwriting was bold and even, without flourish or wasted motion.

  27 January, 1860

  Charlie, you malevolent toadstool, give thanks you’re in Europe instead of New York, where we are enjoying a most bitter winter. The harbor is solid with ice from the Narrows to north of Hell Gate, and on up the Hudson all the way to the Lake of the Moon. We have had a lot of snow, and one savage sleet storm caused horses all over the city to slip and fall, spilling carriages and injuring their occupants. Many of the agonized animals had to be destroyed—I’m speaking of the horses, of course, not the passengers.

  Gallows humor has become the order of the day hereabouts. With the bad weather an ominous mood has settled on the city, as more and more of the rational element of the citizenry realize that national events have developed a momentum of their own. To his credit, Lincoln, who has preached the evils of slavery, so far refuses to put that issue before that of the Union. But one side is as bughouse as the other, kiddo, meaning the worst is probably at hand. We have as much as a year before the battle lines are drawn, but longer than that before war begins in earnest, for the simple reason that armies cannot travel through the mud of late winter and early spring. At this point let it be enough to say, if you are reading this before the end of February, that we have all the time we need to complete the design I have fashioned for Jenny Lind.

  Ah! While I think of it, tell Anna Swan that I have entered into a correspondence with a young man
in Maine, who is, I have on excellent authority, a full eight feet tall. We are very early in this particular game, I must tell you, so please do not let her get her hopes up too high. (There may be a joke here, but I don’t think I understand it.)

  Lavinia knocked on the door—two taps, a pause, then two taps. It was how he had knocked on her door in the Washington Hotel, in Louisville, but now it was so much her signature that only his current fear of Joe Gallagher made him remember how the special knock had originated. Tom Thumb sat up and smoothed the guilt.

  “Come on!”

  She was just under thirty inches tall, the size of a two-year-old. From a distance she looked like four, with big blues eyes and fine yellow hair in curls around her neck—but not today, he noticed. Her hair was wet, limp. When she climbed up on the bed, he saw that the hem of her dress was wet, too. She kissed him on the mouth. Her lips and skin were cold from the out-of-doors.

  “A letter from Barnum!” she squealed. She leafed through the news clippings. “Is it any good?”

  She meant funny. She had a dimple in her chin, and a pink, pointing mouth. Her skin was perfect. She was beautiful to men of all sizes—Tom Thumb had seen all kinds of men, even royalty, respond to her.

  “Barnum’s got a lot on his mind,” Tom Thumb said. “Where were you?”

  “With the rain keeping people indoors, Anna thought she could take a closer look at a little church cemetery. As soon as she stepped out of the carriage, a hansom came around the corner, its horse spied Anna, reared up, whinnied and galloped down the block, leaving Anna in tears—just blubbering and helpless. It took us five minutes to get her back in the carriage, but by then we were all soaked.”

  Tom Thumb chose not to ask who the “we” had been—the kind of question that had nearly driven Lavinia away from him already. “I take it that Anna’s all right.”

  “She went to lie down.”

  “She should lie down anyway, she’s got a show to do tonight.”

  Lavinia stuck out her lower lip. She loved to play the tiny child when she wanted sex. “I want to lie down, too. Let me in there with you.”