She was a princess, princess-perfect, shyly peeking at the crowd, joining in the laughter as so many of its number clambered into boats covered with sheets of translucent seaweed. These first few moments were already a roaring success—marred for Barnum by what apparently he alone knew about Charlie, Lavinia, and Joe Gallagher.
After he had heard Charlie’s story, Barnum had told him to take some time off. All he had to do, and only because it had been announced in the press, was introduce Jenny Lind at dock-side today. By late afternoon, if he wanted, he could be at home on Oyster Bay, making plans to take the Shoal Draft for a cruise on Long Island Sound. But no; to Charlie, that looked like slinking off in defeat. He thought he was made of stronger stuff than that, he’d told Barnum, who’d had tears in his eyes. General Tom Thumb would introduce Miss Jenny Lind, he would ride beside her in the parade to City Hall, and he would be at her gala première at Castle Garden at the Battery on Thursday night.
“And if there’s any other way I can lend a hand with this venture,” the little man squeaked, sitting straight up in the middle of the vastness of his bed like Caesar in his senate, “you just let me know.”
More than anything, Charlie wanted to be big—the word meant many things to him. He didn’t want to make trouble for anyone; he’d had his moments of anger, but he could see that they could do him no good at all. Barnum was quick to say that he would do everything possible to make the situation tolerable for him—but what Barnum kept to himself was a promise to look after Charlie, and make sure the little fellow wasn’t in more pain than he was willing to allow.
When the gangplank was in place, and the rail taken away, Barnum waited until the surrounding crowd—on rooftops and up the streets in all directions—realized that all motion had stopped. It was a time for Barnum not to lose patience, for in the silence expectations continued to gather. Politicians knew all this stuff; they used it every day. What was different about Barnum was that the crowd could see the mockery he was making of it and himself. Barnum wanted people to enjoy themselves as the politicians never did. He stepped to the top of the gangplank and raised his hands as if to quiet the already attentive thousands.
In response, they cheered and threw their hats in the air. Gravely accepting their disrespect, Barnum marched down the gangplank. Little maneuvers such as this were more difficult than they looked—with thousands of eyes on him, the easiest thing for Barnum to do was trip over his own feet. That would spoil the effect, for, with all the mockery, there never was any hint of loss of control. People believed in Barnum because they believed he knew what he was doing. Even when he was having sport with them, they had faith in his ability to entertain. When he was ten feet from the foot of the gangplank, he stopped, turned to face the ship, pulled himself up straight, cued the bandleader waiting beyond the floral arches, and bellowed,
“Ladies and gentlemen, the smallest man in the history of the world, General Tom Thumb!”
He pointed—to the top of the gangplank, to the opening in the rail, where appeared, not so high as the railing itself, in white formal dress, top hat, and a boutonniere from the dining room’s iced centerpieces, truly the smallest man ever to have lived, Connecticut’s own Charlie Stratton. He was still sick and, for all Barnum or anyone else knew, recovering from the worst bender of his life; but when he smiled, really smiled, as he was doing now, he was as bright and fresh as the symbol of the New Year; 100 per cent professional—Charlie Stratton was 100 per cent professional.
“Barnum!” he squeaked.
The crowd cheered for a full minute.
“Yes, mon général,” Barnum answered with a flourish for the crowd, which laughed, hooted, and then yammered back and forth for quiet until Tom Thumb stepped forward and raised his hand. White gloves, Barnum noted admiringly. The little man never missed a beat. He was a consummate performer.
And being in front of his own admiring home audience wasn’t hurting him, either, for now he did a little flourish of his own, creating another uproar, which he took his own good time quieting.
“Barnum,” he yelled, so that only the few close to him could hear, “permit me to present you to the greatest singing star in history, the toast of Europe and its kings and queens, emperors and empresses, Scandinavia’s miraculous gift to the world, the one and only Swedish Nightingale, Miss Jenny Lind!”
Barnum allowed himself to breathe. The crowd cheered. Charlie stepped back, out of sight, and then reappeared with her, Jenny Lind, who was smiling that shy, self-conscious smile Barnum already recognized as the start of her heart-wrenching charm. She was holding Charlie’s hand, which was perfect, and made Barnum wonder just how much she knew about the effect she had on others.
The effect was like nothing Barnum had ever heard before. He was deafened. On every side, men and boys were risking their lives straining forward to get a better look at her. They loved Jenny Lind. Without consideration, without reservation, they were surrendering to her. Barnum had never seen such worship. The city was abject—roaring thunderously, uncontrollably, stupefied.
The gangplank wasn’t really wide enough for both of them. The General bowed to her and started down first, but not walking suddenly, skipping, dancing, and pirouetting before her, a top-hatted cherub to her blushing madonna. She was blushing, too, as aware as Barnum had been of the importance of getting down the gangplank smoothly and safely. Oh, she knew what she was doing—she knew everything. The noise seemed to be coming out of the very air, it was so intense. Barnum was sure that this was the grandest moment of his life.
Now he felt a presence beside him, and he looked down. The flower girl! He had forgotten the flower girl! Not an orphan, unhappily, but the daughter of a newspaper publisher, she had a bouquet of two dozen expensive, rare white roses. She was wearing white, too, and Barnum could see he had missed an opportunity. Everyone should have been in white, and he should have gotten a white carriage even if he’d had to paint it himself.
He stepped forward, took Jenny Lind’s hand and kissed it, then turned to the crowd and raised his hand to silence it. The cheering went on so long that he finally had to give up, step back, and let her accept the salute alone. She waved, the roses cradled in her other arm. Tom Thumb urged the little girl, who was a foot and a half taller than him, to take her own bow. Jenny Lind took the little girl’s hand, and Tom Thumb stepped back beside Barnum, and together the two men joined in the applause. It went on for five minutes. Barnum clocked it, and the next day the newspapers reported the same. They also estimated the crowd at the pier alone at twenty thousand. As for the rest, lining Canal Street to Broadway, and Broadway to City Hall, one newspaper said that “there would be no way to count the multitudes, for it was in the hundreds of thousands, surely the largest assembly of humanity since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.”
A welcoming speech was required, and a few remarks by the lady herself. Barnum had a hoarse, gravelly voice, but over the years he had perfected a method of projecting it so that he could be heard by hundreds—even thousands. But these thousands did not want more than a few jokes from him, and out of respect for the guest of honor he wanted to confine himself to the mildest jest, so he had to be brief. He stepped beside her.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked her.
“It’s a sin to waste so much time, money, and energy on a mere singer.”
“They do it for you in Europe—”
She glared at him. “That makes them fools, too.”
As if unperturbed, he stepped forward. “Citizens of New York! Citizens of America! Welcome to your home and into your hearts the valiant young woman who has just traveled arduously across the ocean to share with you the beauty and joy and the profound spiritual reward of her musical genius, the Swedish Nightingale, Miss Jenny Lind!”
Now they screamed. Barnum turned and offered his arm. “Jenny, this is not a sin.”
“It is, Barnum,” she answered, hesitating to hook her arm in his. He could see that her distress wa
s genuine. “Why do they carry on so, when misery rules the world?”
Now he smiled. “Jenny, believe me, you’ve come to the only man in the world who can answer your question.” He took her arm and led her forward. Beyond the welcoming arches, beyond the parade of coaches and fire companies up Canal Street as far as the eye could see, under trees billowing in the sunshine with new spring growth, the crowd on both sides was four and five deep, waving handkerchiefs and flags, yelling and cheering, their faces a ruddy sea of rapture.
“Welcome,” Barnum said again, but this time Jenny Lind did not hear him. It was as if she were trying to look into the heart of America, now, on first glance.
11.
America! It wasn’t even America, but the United States of America, some thirty-odd tiny principalities mostly on the East Coast (one, California, faced the Pacific, which she found bizarre); the rest of the continent was Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, or in the hands of foul-smelling savages who wore skins and feathers. All of it was more or less free of responsibility to, and the influence of, Europe, and the pride with which the provincials pointed to that fact was almost as disturbing to her as their crude humor about the savages and the Negroes who were slaves—although many of the people she met were quick to say they were opposed to the institution of slavery.
Of course. Jenny was beginning to believe that she could expect anything of these people and dislike all of it. They were brash, loud specimens, Americans; most of them had English and Welsh names, but already they seemed a breed apart from those two. The Irish and Scots were looked down upon, the Germans another subject of ugly comment. All these groups only recently had begun to arrive in America in large numbers. These incredible hatreds were not directed only at outsiders. As she understood it, these were Northerners; Northerners hated Southerners because the Southerners owned the Negroes, who were slaves—never mind that the day’s festivities in New York were served almost entirely by people with skin as black as a reindeer’s nose. Nor was that the limit of the madness: apparently there were people called Yankees, and Barnum was one of them. In their presence, at least, Yankees were treated as relatively harmless blackguards, fair targets for casual guff. Barnum took it all blithely, exhibiting, not incidentally, a quality of personal conduct far above that of his countrymen.
They ate like pigs, shoving chicken and seared ribs into their mouths with bare, greasy hands. Their clothing was food-stained and they smelled as bad as any savage; crumbs were lodged in their beards and their necks were dirty. They were loud, the loudest people Jenny had ever met. They looked English, most of them, but their speech was so coarse and harsh that it made her think that the monkeys had been taught to speak.
New York looked like an English city, she thought, another Liverpool, but Barnum was quick to dispute that. In his lifetime New York had doubled in size, and the number of brick and stone buildings had multiplied ten times. Barnum was a storehouse of information about the city and the nation. She could see that he loved them both, which she found sweet, even if she did not share the sentiment.
He rescued her from the worst of the City Hall reception, deftly and quickly getting them away from an event that promised to continue for as long as the available alcohol would last. Tom Thumb, Otto Goldschmidt, and Signore Minelli stayed—now she could see Tom Thumb in all his glory, standing on a table to hold court for the press. On this side of the ocean he was everything he had said in Vienna; yet in London, she remembered, he had disappeared from her party in less than an hour. Now she thought she understood his shyness that night. He needed this adulation; it made him feel complete. She could only conclude that God did indeed work in mysterious ways.
At City Hall, too, she had the opportunity to meet Waldo Collins, the lawyer recommended by Judge Munthe. A gentleman. He was in his fifties, lean, with white hair and a florid complexion, well-cut clothes, and a professional demeanor. When she was rested from her journey, he said, he stood ready to represent her in all her American undertakings—a phrase she found curiously, refreshingly expansive, for it was her understanding that she was under exclusive contract to Barnum.
Barnum was standing nearby through all this, not interfering. It was clear that the two men had not met, and she wondered why. She told Collins to call upon her at her hotel at two o’clock the next afternoon.
She was tired, but clearly there was to be no letup in the celebration welcoming her to this crazy place. Thousands of people still lined the streets to attend the passage of her carriage up Broadway to the Irving House, where Barnum had taken an entire floor for her party.
There were as many people outside the hotel as there had been at the dock earlier. It was as if the city had taken a holiday. Barnum had never seen anything like it, he said, and she was beginning to believe it. She was beginning to believe that this madness was going to exceed anything that had ever happened in Europe. It took more than twenty minutes for the police to lead the carriage’s horses through the crowd to the entrance of the hotel. At times it looked like people were going to be killed in the crush, and when the carriage had stopped at last, it took another five minutes for the police and hotel employees to clear a path across the sidewalk. Even so, several times Barnum shielded her from the blows of the crowd’s pushing and shoving; and inside the hotel, their ears continued ringing from the crowd’s screaming.
“The banquet at Delmonico’s isn’t scheduled until eight-thirty,” Barnum said, “but under the circumstances, perhaps I’d better come around for you and the others an hour earlier.”
“Come at seven and we’ll open a bottle of champagne.”
“Oh, I’m a teetotaler, Jenny.”
“You? I don’t believe it!”
“It’s true, I took the pledge. But I’ll be here at seven, and I’ll be good company in spite of myself.”
“I’ll be the best judge of that,” she said with a smile.
“I want to speak to the management before I go,” he told her. “I don’t care what they do, I want them to provide you with a quiet, dark room that will permit you to get your rest.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that the people in the street would not quiet down after they had been asked, but she had to keep reminding herself that this was America and not Europe, and that people were different here. What if they didn’t quiet down—or ever go away? Suppose they didn’t know how to behave at all?
Happily, the management had just spent the past hour hurriedly rearranging the rooms. Barnum was full of mirth, describing the clerk’s reaction to all the excitement. “‘Really, Mr. Barnum,’” he mimicked effeminately, “‘the hotel isn’t accustomed to such excitement, not even when Buchanan is here.’ I told him that Buchanan isn’t as important as you are.”
She giggled. “Forgive me, but who is Buchanan?”
“President of the United States.”
“All of them?”
He stepped back, his eyebrows arched, his lips pursed with suppressed laughter.
Apparently she had said something funny.
Barnum was charming, gallant, and obviously a powerful man, but what was most impressive about him to Jenny was his indefatigable good cheer with everyone he spoke to, from the rich and important down to the humblest carriage driver or doorman. He had a joke or story for all, and he didn’t seem to mind repeating his little jests endlessly. Like an insane preacher proselytizing a new gospel, he seemed to dare not rest until he had all in his company smiling and laughing, their faces wreathed with joy. In the carriage on the way to Delmonico’s from her little reception that evening, she felt bold enough to ask him why he behaved as he did.
“People expect it of me,” he said.
She was referring to an incident involving Otto and Signore Minelli—both of them still drunk from the City Hall reception in the afternoon, Otto tipsy in a merry, foolish way, and Signore Minelli feeling vastly superior to everyone, but most particularly to Barnum, whom he had decided to take for a rival—Otto already having been vanquished,
Minelli apparently believed. It could have been an acutely embarrassing moment, but Barnum had turned it away so deftly and skillfully through his humor that it was now the high point of her little party. “But what about tonight?” she asked. “You just met those two men. Surely they didn’t expect it of you.”
“I want them to expect it of me,” Barnum said.
Minelli had buttonholed Barnum in the center of the room. At the last minute, Jenny had been able to deliver a note to Waldo Collins, the lawyer, inviting him to her party, and Barnum had just as graciously invited him to continue with them to Delmonico’s. Minelli was lurching. “Signore Barnum!”
“Ah, buenos noches.”
“You are speaking Spanish,” Minelli said, taken aback.
“And you, sir, are speaking English!” Barnum had a gleam in his eye; he knew Minelli was in his cups.
“Well, I am Italian!”
“And I am American. How’ja do?”
“Barnum! You have a terrible reputation! I will be following you everywhere!”
Barnum hesitated, then pulled himself up. “Well, I shall have to leave bits of spaghetti to make my trail easier to follow.”
Minelli suddenly seethed through the laughter and then pointed at Jenny. “This woman is a virgin!”
“She told me she was a Swede!” Barnum boomed so quickly and so much louder that people hardly heard what Minelli had said first—the colossal, ghastly rudeness! Minelli was drunk, of course, and Otto promptly hustled him out of the room, but it was Barnum, with his deliberate lunacy, who distracted the group from Jenny’s humiliation.
I want them to expect it of me. Given Minelli’s insults, Barnum could have chosen any response, even including violence, and gotten away with it. But the incident was almost completely out of his mind when they were in the carriage, and later after the dinner he regaled the audience for three-quarters of an hour telling stories of his youth in Connecticut as a storekeeper’s apprentice. The audience loved him, even if some had heard one or two of the stories before—with her experience on the stage, Jenny had no difficulty understanding the audience’s response. His best stories were the ones he told on himself, in which the jokes were at his expense.
Jenny and Barnum Page 21
