Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  “Wonderful. You Americans invent your own language!”

  Tom Thumb wanted to ask her why they couldn’t, and he wanted to ask her why she disliked Lavinia, too, but he had not forgotten the lawyer Collins waiting for Jenny Lind in New York. But she saw Tom Thumb’s woebegone expression, and sat back, watching him, until courtesy required that he give her his complete attention.

  “Let us enjoy our lunch,” she said.

  For a bitter moment he remembered the years before he met Lavinia, when out of loneliness he had cultivated his tastes in food and wine. “You don’t want to say what’s on your mind.”

  “It’s not my place,” she said. “I don’t know who she is to you—”

  He gave a hollow laugh. “I wanted to ask you about the wine you ordered. Maybe you ought to tell me now.”

  The waiter arrived with it, in an ice-filled pewter bucket, and while he opened the bottle, she told the story. In the Middle Ages a Holy Roman Emperor, on pilgrimage from Germany to Rome to get back into the Pope’s good graces, found the wines of Italy so uniformly bad that he sent one of his men ahead to sample what was available farther along on the route. When the royal taster finally found a wine worthy of the royal palate, he exclaimed, “This is it!” over and over. Tom Thumb thought it foolishness, European foolishness, and he said so.

  “Ah, but it’s a true story, General,” the waiter said, as he served him. The wine was delicious, and Tom Thumb said that, too.

  “The point I’m trying to make,” he said to Jenny Lind, “is that there’s foolishness on both sides of the ocean, and the differences between the two cultures makes it easy for one to see the comedy of the other.”

  “We shall see if there are two cultures,” Jenny Lind said, her eyes sparkling.

  “You will see,” answered Tom Thumb.

  “If you have your own culture, then what need do you have of me?”

  “If I may be so bold, Miss Lind,” the waiter said, “the beauty of your singing transcends cultures and national boundaries.”

  “More foolishness. It must be the sea,” she said, as color came to her face. Tom Thumb could only stare, because it was as if the mere surprise of the waiter’s comment had disarmed her. It was no wonder men kept falling in love with her. At every turn she drew out a man’s instinct to protect and cherish a woman. Tom Thumb raised his glass. “An American toast?”

  “Oh yes. I want to learn.”

  “Here’s mud in your eye.”

  She laughed aloud, that marvelous schoolgirl laugh of hers. The whole dining room was looking at her, the most famous woman in the world after Queen Victoria, with smiles on their faces, basking in the glow of her joy. To hell with it, Tom Thumb thought; he was going to let himself love her a little, too.

  Before lunch was over a note was brought to Tom Thumb—an invitation to Jenny Lind and him from Captain MacDonald to tour the pilothouse and the steam engine down below. Tom Thumb passed the note to Jenny Lind. He had already toured the ship many times, but MacDonald knew that he never got enough of it. Tom Thumb was slightly drunk, and he thought Jenny looked a bit glassy-eyed as well. “You want to see the lockers where the food is kept. Everything is on ice, which is why we’ll have fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat all the way across the ocean. It’s very ingenious.”

  “You really do love the sea,” she said.

  “Everything about it.”

  “You’re a lovely, charming man. I would love to accompany you on a tour of the ship.”

  There was more of the Est! Est! Est! to drink, the effects of which made Tom Thumb see another meaning to the name of the wine. Trips to the toilet were required before they could go up to the deck, and by then it was two-thirty. Tom Thumb was drunk enough to be thinking about how she would feel about him if he were full-sized—but he was not so drunk that he could not remember the fate of all the others who had allowed their feelings about this woman to get away from them.

  Captain MacDonald instructed an officer to take them all over the ship. For Tom Thumb there were always new things to see, as drunk as he was, new things to learn, if he was able to remember them. He flirted shamelessly. He was terrifically drunk, thinking she could not be far behind him, telling himself that he absolutely did understand her now. She drew men in to assure herself nothing was wrong with her, when in fact there was—she was afraid. Scared to death of men. And every man knew it, flattering himself with the notion that he was the knight in shining armor to save her from her own distress. Wonderful madness. All quite intentionally, Tom Thumb took the tour away from the officer, interrupting and eventually overwhelming his narrative, maneuvering himself so that she would have to help him down the companionways of the fo’c’sle, lift him over the sills between the watertight bulkheads. Finally she carried him like a baby, giggling.

  Sure she was drunk. He loved her smell, especially around the back of her neck, where stray blond hairs brushed against his nose. She was flirting, too, but Tom Thumb was old enough to know that she would never admit it, possibly even to herself. The officer was going crazy. The greatest singer in the world and the smallest man in history nuzzling each other. Tom Thumb could not help thinking that if he had any courage, he would turn this into a scandal. He had to keep reminding himself how drunk he was. She liked looking into a man’s eyes—and it was odd, because if you could hold her gaze, you could get close to her. What he was thinking was drunken and insane not only because he was a midget and she was more profoundly beautiful, talented, and accomplished than any full-sized woman he had ever known, but because in her way she was just as deformed as he—the quirk in her that would not let her admit or even know she was flirting with him also made everything else he was imagining absolutely impossible.

  Still … at the end, near five o’clock, with a violin going in the Grand Saloon, when he saw her to her stateroom, they lingered in the passageway. He had an awful headache, and knew that he would spend the next three hours out cold. She was exhausted, having carried him up and down a score of narrow, steep companionways. The great mountains of coal down below had frightened her—what kept the ship afloat? The sails?

  There had been many such moments. The officer had told her that the Atlantic, in spite of all man’s traffic upon it, remained the most unforgiving mistress of all. Mistress, he had said, not ocean, and Tom Thumb had seen Jenny Lind blush. She had never been anybody’s mistress.

  They talked in the corridor, Jenny Lind and Tom Thumb, until they had run out of pleasantries. He could not even kiss her hand without rising to tiptoe, without asking her to extend her hand a bit downward. This was the agony of the degradation into which the fates had cast him. He had to get away from her and the entire lunatic, drunken afternoon, and he whispered thank you.

  She leaned over. “I beg your pardon?”

  He reached for her hand, had a moment of indecision, then put his hands on hers. His hand did not span her two middle fingers, from her finger tips to her knuckles. She saw what was in his heart. She reached to pick him up again, like a baby, her eyes vacant with terror at what she was doing, and kissed him lightly, but then lingeringly on the lips. His heart was dancing. She set him down again. He winked, saluted her, turned away, and, like any drunk on a rolling sea, walked a perfectly straight line down the passageway toward his own quarters.

  He awakened in the dark, with the sea tossing. His head was splitting. He knew where he was, knew exactly what he had done to himself. Through the whole drunken afternoon he had completely forgotten Lavinia. Only God knew what Jenny Lind thought of him. He was not sure he remembered everything that had happened. He had only his memory of their parting to assure him that he had behaved himself.

  The sea was getting worse. He rolled out of his bunk, holding onto the fiddles for balance while he found his shoes on the floor. What had Lavinia wanted? He could see now that she had been trying to tell him something. The pain in his skull had found its way to his temples. At times like these he was terrified for himself and wh
at he was doing to his constitution. He wanted to forget that he was not full-sized, but it was exactly at the times he was forgetting best that he was doing the most damage to the midget he really was. He didn’t know why he drank, but he was already a drinker, putting some alcohol inside him every day. Wine. Beer. Whiskey. It was crazy. Foolishness, as Jenny Lind would say. She had been foolishness. For all he knew, he was about to learn that Captain MacDonald had turned the Great Western around and was sailing back to Liverpool to relieve The Swedish Nightingale further embarrassment at the hands of the maniacs of America.

  In the passageway Tom Thumb checked his watch: ten-thirty. From the Grand Saloon he could hear the strings sawing a Strauss waltz. In the afternoon he had asked if the ship’s entertainment remained the same, and it did: five musicians and a tenor who specialized in English ballads—the pallid stuff that Tom Thumb hated.

  He headed for Lavinia’s stateroom. He wasn’t thinking. He wanted to be with Lavinia—it was as if he believed that she would even cure his headache.

  The ship’s motion was growing more violent. If the night was to be a bad one, the ultimate passenger had to be advised. Now that it was clear to him that he could spend the rest of his life worshiping Jenny Lind’s toenails, like the rest of the morons, he resented her even more. He had been jealous of her talent from the first. If he had been honest with himself in Vienna, he would have admitted then that she was a wonderful presence, elusive, fragile. You always wanted her to open more of herself to you. It was the most beautiful human magic—but now that he had a hangover, he wasn’t interested in a bit of it.

  He had his hand raised to knock on Lavinia’s door when he had that last thought. He put his hand down. One thing was sure: if he was to win Lavinia, he would have to cure himself of Jenny Lind.

  He knocked. The door was loose in its frame and rattled; the Great Western was the only one of its kind and full of such imperfections. But the door rattled so much when Tom Thumb knocked the second time that he realized the door was unlocked. He was just considering the meaning of the unlocked door when the ship rolled him toward it. His hand went up for the knob, the door swung open, and Tom Thumb was inside Lavinia’s suite.

  The kerosene lamps were lit, but turned down low. These staterooms were trimmed in pink—pink silk upholstery, pink brocade wall hangings, a carpet in hues of rose and cream. The wood paneling varied from one suite to the next: these walls were pale oak, the grains matching, trimmed with darker molding and buffed to a soft sheen. On the table was an amber bottle, an ice bucket, and two glasses.

  “Lavinia?”

  The creaking timbers swallowed up the sound of his voice. The bedroom door was hooked open; a light inside was reflected on it. Engraved on his mind was the thought, the long moment he crossed the room, that Lavinia was waiting for him. She had not spoken to him in days. Jenny Lind had made her jealous.

  At first he didn’t know what he was seeing, or didn’t want to recognize what his eyes were telling him, on the bed, like a pile of clothing, no bigger than a bushel basket, rhythmically moving. He smelled liquor. Then Tom Thumb saw the gleam of skin. What he did next came back to him later to make him shiver and squirm, for it was the final stupidity, the capstone and ringing proof of the fundamentally clownish nature of his character. He spoke:

  “Lavinia?”

  “Get out of here,” Joe Gallagher’s strained voice said. “Get out of here or I’ll kill you!”

  9.

  The Great Western churned on into a more turbulent sea. Bad weather lasted all day Thursday and most of Friday. The confinement below decks created complications, Jenny Lind observed. Many people were seasick, of course, including, it seemed for a while, her little friend Tom Thumb. She did not see him until Friday evening, and then only briefly, and at a distance, in the dining room. She was with Otto Goldschmidt, on their way to the Grand Saloon, where one of the passengers was going to put on a magic show. Tom Thumb was alone, and apparently just arriving for dinner, as late as it was.

  In fact, most of the Barnum troupe was not to be seen, and Captain MacDonald explained that they had poor constitutions for ocean travel. Jenny saw the woman midget, Lavinia—“Little Miss Lascivious,” in Jenny’s mind now—and the other male, the self-serving Gallagher, who obviously considered himself a great success with the ladies. Jenny had a fair idea of what was going on in that situation, and while it dismayed her that her friend Tom Thumb could feel so much pain at the hands of someone of such low character as the little woman, Jenny felt that the obvious trend of things was in Tom Thumb’s better interest.

  But the truth was that the behavior of Lavinia Warren raised old fears in Jenny. She worried that these people were in some way morally defective, as if they had been abandoned or even cursed by God. She did not understand God, as hard as she tried. Human suffering tormented her, but not as much as human stupidity and immorality. Had God forsaken these people? If such a thing could be true, it made a mockery of existence. Why were these people doomed to suffer so? Were they even human?

  What constituted a human being? Where did humanity begin and end? Jenny did not like to have these questions weighing on her mind, and it made her wonder again what kind of madman this alleged buffoon Barnum really was. For all she knew, he was aligned with the devil. She had his money, and if she didn’t have to worry about being cheated, she did have to ask herself what his real motives were for paying her such a fantastical sum. The devil was full of guile, a wily seducer, and even having already assigned half the amount to the orphanage in Stockholm might not protect her from some evil design. What if Barnum became unpleasant and she felt obliged to fulfill the contract because she already had been paid? This could still go badly—everything could go very badly indeed!

  Otto was advising her not to worry. In that regard he was giving her much more support than Giorgio Minelli, her Italian signore, who, in any case, was too sick to leave the suite the two men shared. Perhaps it had been a mistake to put them in the same rooms, but Jenny was paying their expenses and wanted to save where she could. As musicians themselves they naturally understood. Otto suffered long periods of unemployment, and Minelli certainly knew the singer’s terror of losing one’s voice. It could happen at any time and you would never know if the problem was temporary or permanent. But Otto said that the arrangement was going about as well as possible, considering Minelli did not want to get off his back, or stop moaning.

  “Minelli is a lunatic anyway—quite insane,” Otto commented cheerfully, letting her know that the arrangements were not upsetting his emotional equilibrium. And Jenny could see that, because he was so seasick, Minelli would be unhappy under any circumstances.

  She was not worried about receiving only one side of the story, either. Otto was too civilized for that, a gentle man who naturally kept himself a bit removed from the squabbling and hurt feelings attending all human activities. He had a quiet humor, and was capable of the kind of offhand quiet remark, deflating a pompous ass, for instance, that would leave its hearers helpless with laughter. Jenny liked Otto very much. He was patient with her and understood her need to think for herself and make her own decisions. She was sick of men who claimed undying love for her and then insisted on taking over her life. Minelli was almost one of those, but what was amusing about him was that he wept—of course, not all the time; but on more than one occasion as he told her he loved her, tears had started streaming down his cheeks. Once he had had to excuse himself—God only knew the reason why. He was very passionate, very passionate. More than once, she had had to twist his ear to make him behave. He loved it, loved everything she dared try with him. He was a baby, but the way he kissed and touched her made her shiver with delight. Very few men seemed able to draw out her feelings when she let them kiss her. Little Tom Thumb had been as helpless as the baby he seemed to be—she had felt very naughty, enjoying herself with him like that. She knew she was colder than most women in that regard—otherwise, she had deduced, she would have married long
ago and already delivered a half a dozen babies by now. As it stood, if she had children at all, it would not be as many as she had thought at one time necessary to fill her life.

  Otto Goldschmidt was gentle enough for her, but his natural reserve left her only wishing she was responding to him. She was holding herself back—but given their predicament, it was only natural: Otto was a Jew. He said he did not care as much about religion as he cared about music, and that was enough self-understanding, he thought, to suggest that he was probably better off not pursuing what he called “theological questions.”

  It was his tendency toward objectivity, that very coldness, that put her off. She liked and admired and respected him, but she did not love him. She wanted to tell him why, but it was not a question of a character flaw, for this was actually his character, all-of-a-piece, and he was a happy man.

  She had no right to interfere with him so intimately. She knew what falling in love was. She had been in love with her English officer—she had almost lost control with him. If he had been more forceful at critical moments, she would have had no choice, but in his case the passage of time—and not very much of it, either—had shown the weakness and immaturity of his character, not the reverse as with Otto.

  She had fallen in love with her Englishman because he was far and away the most handsome man she had ever seen, and he had fallen in love with her. Later, Felix Mendelssohn told her that the experience had been good for her, had added to her confidence in a way more important than her own character would allow her to accept. That some people thought she was not beautiful was because she herself did not believe it, Mendelssohn told her. She was still not willing to believe him on that score, but she knew now that men fell in love with her, and that it really wasn’t very difficult for her to make any man pay attention to her.

  The episode after the party on Sunday evening had been a disaster for her, but Otto had been in jaunty good humor for days afterward. During the storm at sea they worked on the program for her first performance. He was a gentleman and knew his place, and when she wanted to work he did not move from the piano bench. But this was a holiday until they reached New York, and they did not have to work very hard. She liked to be kissed. It was too bad Giorgio was sick. He wept and took liberties, but he was a passionate Italian and sometimes he made her gasp.