Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  Tom Thumb finally took to his room, so depressed that he did not come out the next morning until the rest of the party had cleared the dock, Joe Gallagher going directly to the hospital. It was all Tom Thumb could do to say good-by to Captain Ross and his crew. He did not know how he was going to be able to speak to anybody again—but it was already Thursday, and Tom Thumb had an appointment in John Hall Wilton’s offices in Chancery Lane.

  The meeting with Judge Munthe of Stockholm wasn’t scheduled until the middle of the afternoon, but as tired as Tom Thumb was, he could not rest—he dared not go to the meeting unprepared. The simple fact was, the Jenny Lind Tom Thumb was coming to know through what was apparently the common knowledge of Europe was a person altogether different from the saint of Barnum’s description or the shy maiden in Tom Thumb’s own first impression.

  Lavinia was only one of Tom Thumb’s informants. Whatever he had seen in Vienna notwithstanding, all those self-conscious uncertainties and seeming nervous diffidences, it was now clear that Jenny Lind was no Joan of Arc. The list of men known or rumored to have fallen in love with her included some of the most famous names of Europe, composers, singers, musicians-Felix Mendelssohn, Adolf Lindblad, Hans Andersen, an Italian tenor, a German baritone, and, oddly, an obscure English army officer, once her fiancé. Lind had been engaged to the baritone, too, running away from both gentlemen just weeks before the wedding dates. The jilted pair were still in love with her, as were all the rest, apparently. The Italian tenor remained a problem, having made a spectacle of himself so many times that even the public now took him for a joke.

  Jenny Lind was a madwoman who precipitated all her woes anyway, Tom Thumb judged; she had to stay friends with all her former suitors—save Andersen, apparently one of Europe’s great lunatics; in any case, she really did not do that well with the whole spectrum of writers, who were suspicious of her—rightfully, Tom Thumb thought. Jenny Lind had lived in the home of Lindblad, the Swedish composer, and his wife, and the Mendelssohns, each time falling in love with the man of the house, seemingly innocent and unknowing—or so the gossip had it. Lindblad in particular had had a very bad time, so beguiled by her “innocent” love and tormented by guilt over what he was doing to his wife, that his friends had feared for him.

  Tom Thumb thought he saw a pattern here. In both instances Jenny Lind was the one “to come to her senses” and break off the relationship—or rather, as with so many of the others, including her two fiancés, dash the hopes the men might have entertained for more emotional involvement. She still visited the Lindblads, and continued to correspond with the others, at least a dozen, perhaps a score. If the gossip was to be believed, every single one of them still hoped his situation with her could change for the better.

  Tom Thumb thought they were all insane.

  This was the woman people called the most devout in public life today, who gave fortunes to orphanages, old people’s homes, charities of all kinds. The audacious flirt, the troubled spinster, and the woman of Christian charity were one and the same. And more: her singing, or what everyone insisted on saying about it, which Tom Thumb still refused to believe. Enchanting, they called her singing. How could the dowdy woman Tom Thumb met in Vienna be an enchantress?

  She had been sued for breach of contract by an English promoter, but in that matter the common talk was in her favor: the promoter had tried to take advantage of her innocence. Again, her innocence—Tom Thumb didn’t want to believe that, either.

  Lavinia’s information about Jenny Lind was true: she had been born out of wedlock. Her parents married when she was fourteen, by then already recognized in Stockholm as a talent of immense promise. Her parents were still alive, her father a ne’er-do-well itinerant musician, her mother a grasping, embittered hag eager to cash in on her daughter’s success. In spite of the fact that, at the age of eighteen, Jenny elected to appoint Judge Munthe as her legal guardian, she was, according to accounts, a good daughter to her parents, loyal and supportive—but no fool.

  Tom Thumb’s own impressions of her were still too vivid. He remained terrified of her fears and uncertainties. She was all wrong for America, for American audiences. Men would not like her, and as soon as she committed her first American indiscretion, however innocent, women would hate her.

  Finally, there were real problems with her voice. After her engagement to the Englishman, Captain Harris, a German throat specialist made her stop singing for half a year, to avoid permanent damage to her throat. And years ago, when she first left Stockholm to study in Paris, her new teacher, the best in Europe, had had to instruct her in the basics of singing all over again. She would have destroyed her voice within a year otherwise. For all Tom Thumb knew, she could be the victim of several constitutional weaknesses, any one of which could wash $187,500 over the dam.

  It was going to be a scandal. Barnum and everybody associated with him were going to be the laughingstocks of two continents.

  The troupe was staying at Claridge’s, under the personal supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Claridge themselves. Barnum insisted that his performers stay at the best hotels, the Astor House in New York, the Ritz in Paris, the Sacher in Vienna—all part of the show and the illusion that his performers were special and privileged people. For this tour Barnum had selected the new Claridge’s over the Connaught or the Savoy because he had heard that the Claridges had once been servants, he a butler and she a housekeeper. “They’ve come up through the ranks, Charlie. They’ll understand us Americans better.”

  If he had thought, Tom Thumb could have set Barnum straight; hadn’t it taken Oliver, the butler Barnum had pushed on him, more than two years to quit calling Tom Thumb “Master”? As it turned out, the Claridges were more genteel and class conscious than Queen Victoria, observing every custom and propriety, and most of all, obsequious, remembering their place. A lot of people, including Americans, loved that stuff, as much as it drove Tom Thumb crazy. But just as Barnum was sure that kings and queens were the same as everybody else and should be treated accordingly, he was convinced that the great mass of Europeans were democrats and lovers of equality and freedom, just like Americans—or the American ideal. By now Tom Thumb had been to Europe several more times than Barnum, and he thought he knew the people and the customs better. At least he knew them well enough to see that Europeans were different from Americans, that they did not think the same, that the world they lived in was different from the one familiar to Americans.

  But Barnum, possibly blinded by his vision of what he wanted to make of the world, could not accept that, could not imagine it—even after finding himself an object of the most intense European curiosity. It did not matter that they thought of him as a savage; he remained confident he would be able to bring them around to his view of the world. The sort of mind that had the troupe suffering the bowing and scraping of the insufferable Claridges also was thinking of how Jenny Lind, a religious woman, a frightened spinster, who sang in the traditional, formal European style, was going to bridge the widening gulf between the two cultures. The closer Tom Thumb got to it, the more the Jenny Lind scheme seemed like one of the greater follies in the history of mankind.

  Soreness was beginning to settle into the bruises he had sustained during the storm at sea—no one at the hotel had thought of the rain two evenings before as a life-threatening storm, merely a night-long, late winter downpour. At one-thirty Tom Thumb struggled downstairs and summoned a hansom for Chancery Lane. Now he was getting tired—now. But at least he was ready for Munthe.

  Tom Thumb loved the hurly-burly of London. Jenny Lind had her home here, although Tom Thumb couldn’t imagine why. She belonged in a place surrounded by gardens and twittering birds. With chimneys gushing coal smoke from every rooftop, the air was gritty with soot, the dirtiest in the world. The city was so far north that even in March the sun hardly rose above the treetops, a pale, yellow feeble thing scudding through the curling ribbons of smoke and dirt. But down below, the streets were crowded with raucous, ruddy-c
heeked city folk creating a carnival atmosphere of their struggle for existence. Every peddler, entertainer, artist, beggar, and prostitute had special sing-song patter; the single-horse hansom clop-clopped through rivers of burbling voices and eyes bright with the ancient mischief of a city settled beside its river for almost two thousand years.

  Wilton’s offices were on the third floor—the European second floor—of Clifford’s Inn, a famous old pile of rubble in Chancery Lane, up two flights of steep, worn slate stairs. When he was with Barnum or someone else full-sized, Tom Thumb rode upstairs sitting on a pair of shoulders. When he was alone, climbing was slow going; because each riser was almost double the height of his knees, Tom Thumb had to use both hands on the iron posts of the banister to pull himself up each and every step of the way. Now he was more than just sore from the storm at sea; he felt like he had rolled around the boat’s deck in a barrel. He had thought that climbing the stairs would take only a few moments longer than normal, that he would have no difficulty with his aches and pains. But he hurt worse than he had thought, and he had to stop to rest at each landing, up less than a dozen steps—almost fifty steps, he calculated once, before he pushed the idea as far from himself as possible. He had read somewhere that the human heart roughly corresponded in size to one of the owner’s hands, which in Tom Thumb’s case was equal to the volume of a hummingbird. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, the blood rushing past his eardrums, the result of too many cigars. For his own sake, he thought, he had to start remembering he was a midget, with greatly reduced capacities in all areas—save sex, of course. How big were his lungs anyway, the size of a rooster’s? This foolishness was Barnum’s fault, or doing—if anything happened to his little partner, then it would be Barnum’s fault. As Tom Thumb sat trembling from the exertion on the third landing, he could not help thinking of the callousness and insensitivity of all the full-sized, even Barnum. There were times when Tom Thumb wanted to scream for the smallest hint of understanding, of discovery, of realization in someone full-sized. None ever came, not even from Barnum.

  It was the way of the world, the hardest lesson of all to learn: finally, you were alone. By yourself. It was in moments like this that Tom Thumb came around to such a bleak and hopeless vision. He had more on his mind than Jenny Lind, or getting up two flights of stairs. Lavinia had shut him out before, but never with so much fury. She’d said he had a dirty mind. It was true, but not completely. He could see where he was wrong, and he was ashamed of himself. But she’d talked as if she didn’t care any more about the fine points—as if she had decided to try to live her life without Tom Thumb.

  The knob on the door of Wilton’s offices was too far from the floor for Tom Thumb to reach. He kicked at the bottom of the door, which was fast in the jam, and yielded only a few muffled and unsatisfactory thumps.

  “There he is,” he heard Wilton say, from deep inside. Tom Thumb stepped back from the door and adjusted his cuffs. He was perspiring now, and his clothing felt uncomfortable and heavy.

  The door swung open. “Ah, General! You’re just in time to meet Judge Munthe.” Wilton looked out into the hall. “You came alone?”

  “We had a terrible crossing. A storm. People are still sick from it.” He was looking up at Wilton, who was a year or two his junior. “I’d like to sit down, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, of course. Are you all right? Was anyone hurt?”

  Tom Thumb trooped through the outer office. “Joe Gallagher broke his arm. We’ve all got bruises.”

  “My God! You didn’t have to come here today!”

  Tom Thumb wanted to see this Judge Munthe. Wilton had two maroon velvet barrel chairs facing his desk, and now a white-haired, pale, thin, old man, bony hands wrapped around the brass top of an elegant cane, peered around. When he saw Tom Thumb, he muttered something—in his astonishment, he allowed his lips to move.

  “Unbelievable,” he said aloud.

  “General Tom Thumb, Judge,” Tom Thumb said, extending his hand. The old man blinked, then offered the tips of his thumb and two fingers.

  “You are the smallest man I have ever seen in my life,” Judge Munthe said. He had pink-rimmed blue eyes that bulged in their sockets. His skin was so thin that when he blinked, Tom Thumb could still see the color of his eyes shadowing through. Judge Munthe was at least seventy-five years old.

  “I’m the smallest man in the history of the world,” Tom Thumb said.

  The old man smiled; it was as if his skin shattered into a million tiny fragments, like a frosted champagne glass dropped onto a marble table. “I was told that you were a man of immense charm,” Judge Munthe said. “Miss Jenny Lind will be in good hands, going to America.”

  “If we can iron out the details,” Tom Thumb said. “Give me a hand here, Wilton, and go easy.” He indicated that he wanted to sit on Wilton’s desk. “You didn’t run into that storm, did you, Judge?”

  “No, I’ve been here in London since last Saturday.” For some reason, he was looking at Wilton, who was smiling.

  “What’s going on?”

  “General,” Wilton said, “the deal is done, signed and sealed. I put the money in an escrow account for Miss Lind this morning.”

  “What the hell—? I damn near died making this meeting, and climbing those stairs out there was more than just adding insult to injury—”

  “Believe me, General, I would have sent a message around to your hotel if I’d had any idea of what you’ve been through.”

  Judge Munthe wrapped his clawlike hands around the top of his cane again. “Mr. Barnum indicated to me that he wanted a contract signed at the earliest possible opportunity. That was his highest priority. Please don’t conclude that there was an attempt to exclude you from our negotiations, because the fact of the matter is that the role you played at the start was critical, at least from Miss Jenny Lind’s point of view.”

  Tom Thumb sat down on the edge of the desk, crossed his legs, bit the end off a cigar and lit it. “That’s all nice to say and to hear, Judge, but I think you ought to know that where I come from, they put the perjurers in jail.”

  The judge giggled, shaking soundlessly, small spots of color appearing under his cheeks like rouge. It occurred to Tom Thumb that Judge Munthe wasn’t going to look much different after he was dead. His spindly fingers reached out in a gesture to attract Tom Thumb’s attention. “My little friend, Miss Jenny Lind decided to go to America because your eagerness and sincerity convinced her that your Mr. Barnum could not enjoy your trust if he had so much as a fragment of evil in him—”

  “Sometimes I really have to wonder about Barnum, I’ll tell you that.”

  The old judge went through the motions of laughter again. “Every time you speak, sir, you demonstrate what Miss Jenny Lind saw in you.”

  Tom Thumb looked around at Wilton. “Did you really give him the hundred and eighty-seven grand? I admit that he isn’t what I expected, but—”

  John Hall Wilton nodded happily. “Other American promoters were about to offer her more.”

  “Miss Jenny Lind had already decided, on the basis of her meeting with you, to accept Mr. Barnum’s offer,” Judge Munthe said.

  “General,” Wilton said gently, “you should know that Judge Munthe is eighty-one years old.”

  “You came all the way over here from Stockholm for a singer?”

  Judge Munthe nodded.

  John Hall Wilton said, “Miss Lind sent Judge Munthe the copy of Barnum’s autobiography that you gave her in Vienna.”

  The judge was giggling again. “Is Mr. Barnum really like that?”

  “Like what?”

  Wilton said, “Before you arrived, General, Judge Munthe was telling me how he laughed when he read of Barnum’s practical joke on the ministers with the straight razor.”

  “Tell me,” the old judge said, “were they Lutherans?”

  “Better than that, they were Presbyterians. You’re a Lutheran?”

  The judge nodded. “And you’
re a Presbyterian, I take it.”

  “Preachers are the same the world over,” Tom Thumb said. The three men laughed heartily together. “What did Jenny Lind think of that story?”

  “She has a fine sense of the ridiculous,” said Judge Munthe. “She loves a good joke.”

  Tom Thumb studied him: what he’d said didn’t mean she’d read the book. “You think a lot of Jenny Lind, don’t you?”

  The judge’s old eyes glowed. “The joy of my old age, my young friend. She is a saint and a genius, and it is an honor and joy to serve her.”

  Another one, Tom Thumb thought, sitting back. With so many people saying these things about her, it was a wonder that she didn’t want to be carried through the streets on a golden throne.

  6.

  Eighteen forty-four. Barnum was already notorious as the exhibitor of Joice Heth, George Washington’s alleged mammy, and Tom Thumb, without doubt the world’s smallest human being. Barnum was thirty, and he was on his way to putting together the deal of his life, acquiring the centerpiece of a veritable empire (he hoped) of wonders and fantastical delights, the American Museum on Broadway, in New York. The matter was complicated; he had unscrupulous competitors, and as usual, he was broke.

  He had made bad investments with his profits from exhibiting Tom Thumb, investments so bad, in fact, that he knew he did not understand money at all. He had no respect for it, either. The Tom Thumb money had gone into a variety of enterprises, including a giant steamship, an automatic printing press—all pipedreams. Barnum was a chronic dabbler who thought a nickel in his pocket entitled him to a vacation from the labor of getting it. The result was that he leaped from one crisis to the next, never far from the obsession of money-getting. He had kept himself out of the red by going back to what he had done after he had exhibited Joice Heth and before he met Tom Thumb, buying and selling traveling tent shows in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Most of these shows barely supported themselves, much less turned a profit; the money to be made from them, such as it was, came from the buying and selling of performers’ contracts, trading on the universal hope that a rare animal, like a lion or a tiger, or a curiosity, like a human skeleton (living) or a two-headed dog (dead) would turn into another bonanza like Tom Thumb. The curiosities ranged from the bizarre and disgusting (a man scalped by Indians, but who had lived) to the outright fraudulent (the Automatic Chess Master, a large wooden box, the arms of which manipulated chess pieces—the box contained a bitter, deformed creature who eventually hanged himself in Philadelphia).