Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  He had to be careful of robbers, too—but who would that be? Given his size, he could be too much of a temptation for any passer-by. Hell, he thought dismally, he could wind up being eaten by a dog.

  7.

  Jenny Lind was born illegitimate and unwanted, in a dirty, unheated, sparsely furnished third-floor flat in one of the slums of Stockholm, capital of the Kingdom of Sweden—in that time, after the overthrow of Napoleon of France, Europe again was a continent of kingdoms.

  With the restoration of the monarchies, after forty years of upheaval, revolution, and chaos, had come a new interest in the arts, esthetics, and manners, the clearest articulations of a world that believed itself once more made orderly. Sweden had weathered the preceding violent period practically unscathed, in fact; and ironically a commoner was its present queen—Désirée, daughter of a Marseilles merchant, who had rejected Napoleon as a lover and then had outlasted him on one of Europe’s thrones. The Swedish people adored Désirée, and she returned their affection through the length of her life by patronizing Swedish arts and charities. In her time, the respectful merchant’s daughter came to represent all that was good, decent, and civilized about Swedish life. Désirée presided over exactly the kind of genteel atmosphere in which a willful and selfish young woman would suffer, and such a young woman was Jenny Lind’s mother, Anne-Marie Fellborg.

  Married at seventeen to escape a nagging mother and a disciplinarian father, Anne-Marie was the mother of a little girl, Jenny Lind’s older half-sister, before her eighteenth birthday. Her immature husband, barely a year her senior, was more interested in drinking through the weekends with his chums—longer, if he had not had to work—than attending to family life. He was a handsome boy, and Anne-Marie, who had married him for his looks, immediately became afraid he was seeing other women. She had been like that, suspicious and calculating, before marriage, and now that pregnancy had claimed her girlishness (and three teeth), she was worse.

  In his own way her husband was worse, too, mocking the changes in her figure, using her suspicions to gain the upper hand. She could not bear it; she could not believe that the sexual control that was to be the cornerstone of the life she had planned had crumbled so abruptly. The truth was that her boy-husband was tired of her, bored when he did not feel trapped, and his viciousness with her was just beginning to surface. One night she misjudged his drunkenness, hounding him as he lurched from room to room, and he slapped her. When she hit him back, he knocked her down and sat on her chest and hit her until she bled from the nose and mouth. She refused to give him more satisfaction, determined not to cry or beg even when her mouth filled with blood and two more dislodged teeth. He laughed anyway, smearing her blood on her face, so drunk he was making a game of it. She would have killed him if she thought she could have gotten away with it.

  Three weeks later, when she was fit to go out of the house again, she had formulated her plan of revenge. A musician in a club where her husband sometimes did his drinking had ogled her; now when he did it again, she responded, hintingly, in front of his fellows. He was a big, older fellow capable of protecting her from her husband. He was an even heavier drinker, emotional and fun-loving, a guitar player who had lived without responsibility for almost twenty years. His name was Niclas Lind, and three years later he became Jenny Lind’s father.

  By then Anne-Marie Fellborg’s life had taken several more downward turns. In those days women who otherwise would have become wards of the state went into teaching. Divorced, with three-year-old Amalia to care for, Anne-Marie was living in a girl’s dormitory, hoping that Niclas Lind would change his life and marry her at last.

  Marry her? He didn’t even think very much about her. When she came around and he was drunk enough, he would have sex with her. More often than not he was too drunk to know when she left his bleak and dirty rooms. He had other women and Anne-Marie knew it, but she had a lower opinion of herself than she’d had three years before—lower, but not less outraged. Her father was dead and her worthless first husband had remarried and become a father two more times. She hated her father and ex-husband alike. She hated Lind, too, but he was still within her reach. She had come around to the opinion that Niclas Lind was responsible for her—he was not going to be able to get away with using her without meeting his obligations. She never mentioned any of these thoughts to Lind, of course, not just because she was calculating and scheming, but also because he was the sort of free spirit who never thought ill of anyone. If he had known what was in her mind, he would have run like a man realizing he was in a leper colony. Given the situation, it was only a matter of time before Anne-Marie Fellborg became pregnant.

  The baby Jenny was shipped as soon as practicable to her maternal grandmother, who had moved to spend her declining years in the country. There Jenny lived her first four years, showered with her grandmother’s love, pity, and guilt, until the old woman’s health gave out, and Jenny had to return to her mother in Stockholm.

  By then, her mother’s situation had changed only slightly for the better. She and Amalia, Jenny’s half-sister, had a ground-floor apartment in the dormitory, and Niclas Lind was a regular visitor, often drunk but always subdued. He was getting older, and Jenny’s harridan mother offered security. Her price was his spirit, and he was determined to pay it as slowly as he could, and only for value already received. So he would be there for days at a time, and then some blowup or other would send him running, looking for work or drink or a woman. It was a grim, loveless household in one of Stockholm’s dirtier, uglier neighborhoods, but little Jenny wanted to be part of it, within the protection of her mother’s love. Love never came. Her mother was interested in protecting her position, not recognizing the living symbol of how she had wrecked her life. After all the little girl was a bastard, and not even attractive. Her complexion was poor. She sang, but like any other child, to her cat, to her doll. Childishly, she knew her mother did not love her, and childishly, she understood why, too: she had come from her father, from a man’s lust. Anne-Marie Fellborg’s seethings, mutterings, and icy silences made that clear to Jenny very quickly. And little Jenny Lind understood what lust was: when her father was in the house, drunk and sullen, his smell filled the house and entered her being. She could put her hands and wrists up to her nose and smell him—he was inside her, part of her, and it filled her with horror.

  She could see he was a drunk and an outcast, without the dignity of a home or a real job. He was not even a part of the solid world to which Jenny’s mother clung so tenaciously, precariously, her daughters holding tightly to her skirts. Through her father Jenny could see how easily one could fail and fall away. His fault was within him, and within her; what had happened to him could happen to her.

  But he was not really an evil man, merely a ne’er-do-well. He did a bit of sleight-of-hand, drawing marbles from Jenny’s ears and making playing cards appear from the thin air. But Jenny had no special relationship with him, even though she was his natural child. Amalia knew all his tricks; she and Jenny’s father were old friends. His tricks were foolishness anyway, or so Jenny’s mother said, and finally Jenny had to agree. Lind could not be counted on even for tricks, for as often as not, when she woke up in the morning, he was gone, and no one knew when he was going to return.

  But the truth was that the worst for Jenny was when he was drunk at home, or in the neighborhood. People saw him. They knew what the situation was, that Jenny was his child and not even that fact could make him marry her mother. People pitied the children. They were at the bottom, the least important people of the community. One afternoon Jenny saw her father lurching down the street in his bedroom slippers, and she turned and ran the other way so she would not have to be seen with him. Later she was so ashamed of what she had done that she did not know how to talk to him, and while she stood there wondering if talking would ever be possible again, he yelled at her and slapped her face. The next morning they found Jenny shivering in her bed. She had pneumonia, and she very nearly died.r />
  Jenny was a week shy of her ninth birthday when she was heard singing by a maid working for Irina Lundberg, star of the Royal Theater of Stockholm. The little girl’s voice actually brought tears to the maid’s eyes, and when she told her mistress, Lundberg told her to fetch the child.

  Although Irina Lundberg was a star of the Royal Theater and famous throughout all of Sweden, Anne-Marie Fellborg had her doubts. For centuries the theater had been known for its immorality—it was the devil’s workshop. When the maid assured her that young female students lived in only the most respectable circumstances—in dormitories much like the one she lived in now—Jenny’s mother relented. It did not occur to the little girl that her mother may have had something more on her mind, but the maid could see it: in the theater, mothers like Jenny Lind’s are such a commonplace that even the servants can recognize them on sight. She reported her observation to Irina Lundberg, who decided that the maid’s original reaction to the little girl’s singing was more important. The next afternoon, child and mother were in Irina Lundberg’s sitting room.

  “Sing for me, little one.”

  “What should I sing?”

  “Do you know ‘The Shepherd’s Song’?”

  The little girl nodded. In it a shepherd sings to a bird, asking why it sings. In the absence of an answer, the shepherd realizes that he doesn’t know why he asks—he doesn’t know what it means to be human any more than the bird understands itself. It was not a difficult song to sing, but it was a difficult song for a child to comprehend—thus, sing with feeling. When Jenny Lind finished singing, Irina Lundberg had to wipe her eyes and clear her throat before she could speak.

  “Well?” Anne-Marie Fellborg demanded.

  “Madame, your child is a genius.”

  But Lundberg was only an actress; first she took little Jenny to her singing teacher, old Joachim Craelius. Craelius, in turn, took Jenny to the director of the Royal Theater, Peter Tengmark. Like most creative people, Craelius viewed the man who controlled the purse strings with little more than contempt. Tengmark made all the final decisions at the Royal Theater, and Tengmark did not want to hear her.

  “She’s nine! This is not a kindergarten! Come back in five years!”

  “If you do not listen to her, I will teach her to sing anyway, and she will never sing for the Royal Theater!”

  Tengmark eyed him. “How will you support yourself?”

  Craelius was scheduled to collect his pension from the Royal Theater in little more than a year. “She will sing in public, and the public will decide who will have the problem supporting himself.”

  “You’re a foolish old man to put so much stock in a child,” Tengmark said.

  “Herr Tengmark, the other afternoon I felt that I understood the emotions of John the Baptist—”

  Tengmark raised his hand. “Don’t blaspheme. Let me hear the little bitch.”

  Ten minutes later, Tengmark was trying to figure out what it was going to cost him to get the little girl away from her mother and under contract to the Royal Theater.

  Not very much—at first. It was arranged for Jenny herself to receive a few pennies each week for candy, buttons, and thread, while her mother would receive the lion’s share, almost two dollars, every week, until Jenny reached her fourteenth birthday. At that time the contract would be renegotiated or Jenny would be discharged. Under such conditions the youngest student in the history of the Royal Theater began her studies, moving into the dormitory with her classmates—girls of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age.

  The older girls had heard of Jenny’s remarkable voice, but as singers who had trained and worked for years, they had to hear her for themselves. On that first night they put her on a table and demanded that she perform. She was too young to know how much they wanted to find fault with her talent, and so she sang as purely and honestly as she could. She was nine years old and untrained, and they were young women already beginning careers in the theater. She was so innocent and unaffected, so defenseless, her voice so sweet, true, and perfectly pitched, that the older girls were helpless in their desire to go on listening. They applauded and cheered and begged her to go on. It did not take the dormitory matron long to hear the commotion. The girls were so caught up by Jenny’s singing that they did not hear the matron slip into the back of the room. She could have been there many minutes.

  “What are you girls doing to this child?”

  There were shrieks as the girls hurried to their beds, leaving Jenny standing on the table alone. The matron extended her arms to Jenny, the first time a woman had tried to hold her since she had left her grandmother’s house in the country almost five years before.

  “They wanted you to sing for them, eh?” the matron asked, helping her down. “You do not have to sing at all hours at the Royal Theater. Little girls need their sleep. You are not a nightingale.”

  “Oh yes, she is!” a voice on the far side of the room piped up.

  “Jenny is our nightingale!” another girl cried.

  “One more song, nightingale! Sing us to sleep!”

  The matron was looking into Jenny’s eyes. “I want to hear you, too. Just one song this one night. Sing for us.”

  It was the first moment of pure joy Jenny Lind had ever known in her life.

  The Royal Theater was a true atelier, a workshop of artists practicing, teaching, and learning their crafts. Jenny studied acting and dance in addition to singing. She had no doubt about her position in the theater or what her teachers and colleagues thought of her progress. She was their prize, a diamond forming itself before their eyes. Tutors were brought in to drill her in multiplication tables, history, geography, and Latin. She understood the opportunity being given her and she worked to make the most of it. She worked hard. Everyone in the Royal Theater was aware of her effort.

  Craelius had her singing publicly within months. It was necessary, he thought. Certain people with talent find it difficult to function in front of audiences, but happily, Jenny proved not to be one of them. She was as natural and unaffected on stage as she was off. Her child’s voice didn’t carry very well, of course, but its innocence and purity could be heard. She was a fair-enough dancer, and a curiously affecting actress. She was beginning to understand that she had talent, but she believed what she had been told by Craelius and others, that talent was nothing without work. With work, they had assured her, she would have a home at the Royal Theater for many years.

  Everyone knew what kind of a home she had come from; in just a few months, her mother made sure the entire Royal Theater knew who she was. Anne-Marie had to see that Jenny’s quarters were as had been promised, that the food was sufficient, that the tutors were well versed in their subjects, that Jenny went to church every Sunday; but most of all, she made sure that she received her money every week, on time.

  Before long she was trying to secure an appointment with Director Tengmark to apply for a position as matron of one of the dormitories—presumably Jenny’s. It was clear to all in the company that the mother was profoundly jealous of Jenny’s sudden elevation, as it were, to the romantic and adventurous world of the theater, but to some—the more insightful and experienced—it was also clear that the woman was ever-so-delicately unhinged, a troublemaker who could destroy Jenny’s talent if given the opportunity and the provocation.

  To Tengmark, Craelius, and the others, it was clear that Jenny understood all that, too. She drew into herself in her mother’s presence, showing and admitting nothing. For hours after an appearance by the woman, Jenny would seem to be in a trance, staring off as if into a great distance, numb. If approached too soon, she would bolt like a frightened doe. Being reminded of who and what she had been was still too painful for her. Here at the Royal Theater she had the opportunity to create herself anew. Given her mother’s rights, the situation was delicate, if not impossible; but given Jenny’s talent, all concerned had to do their best. They tried to keep Jenny away from her mother, arranging her schedule so she would
be in class when her mother was able to come around to collect her money. When the woman protested, they saw to it that she was able to observe her daughter on stage, in rehearsal, when she was not to be disturbed. On other weeks they simply locked their doors and made themselves unavailable, leaving the money with a secretary.

  And through it all they kept close watch on Jenny. There was no doubt that her mother upset her, but once she was calm, Jenny betrayed no feelings one way or the other about the woman. She never spoke well of her mother—but she never spoke ill, either. Herr Craelius thought it unnatural, but decided to leave well enough alone. Jenny was a religious girl. If she hated her mother, as Craelius was sure she did, then it was difficult, if not impossible, for her to express her feelings. Still, he could not help believing that it would have been healthier if the little girl had tantrums, cried and screamed, or threw things and broke them. Craelius focused on teaching Jenny how to sing, but he kept an eye on her and worried about her all the same.

  Craelius’ successor, Herr Berg, was an even greater believer in Jenny’s talent. Before she was eleven, she was singing duets with him in Sunday evening recitals, and by the time she was thirteen, she was a regular performer in the Royal Theater, singing a dozen minor parts. In another year, as she entered puberty, what became clear to Tengmark and Berg was the magnitude and depth of her talent. She was a short young woman and probably doomed later in life to being overweight, but for now she was a passable dancer, good enough for fundamental steps as part of a larger total performance. As an actress she was limited in both range and depth of character, which had to do with the peculiarities of her own personality. In certain areas of human experience she was wholly without insight, in part because—at least for the time being—she was not interested in boys or gadding about socially. The acting required of her presently was not all that complicated anyway: she played daughters, servant girls, children, with rarely more than a few scenes, a few lines, and she was never in the spotlight alone.