No need. She sang, and they quieted down like dumb beasts. She faltered—perhaps out of astonishment—and to a man they leaned forward as if a show of their concern could somehow aid her. She resumed, as beautiful as ever, and looked over to Barnum with a smile. He adored her!
Every man did. Every man believed that, given the chance, he could win her heart. She still projected that peculiar poignancy, but Barnum did not know—as he did not know so many things—if audiences would accept her in the same way if they knew she was married, and a mother—that, too. Although she did not know it, Jenny wanted children. In every way, she was ready for motherhood. The audiences loving her now could not possibly understand the source of their love, their Nightingale’s swan song, if that was appropriate. Even if Barnum had not existed, it would have gone this way—somehow: she was thirty years old, sick of herself, brave at last, afraid she was too late with her newly found, or newly won, bravery. Oh, she loved him—she would love him even if she understood herself, because understanding did not change her basic, wonderful, difficult nature. Was she disloyal? Dishonest? No, no, and not stupid, vain, or self-deceiving, either. Barnum, do you like the way I look? Looking at her on a stage enchanting thousands, Barnum could only listen to his answer, echoing through time and his own developed understanding: Yes, angel. I love the way you look. When she looked, smiling and vulnerable, from center stage to him, standing in the wings, he was helpless.… Yes, sweet angel, I love the way you look at me. If he died then, he would have died happy.
During intermission, he told her that they had to make a quick stop before going on to the governor’s reception at his palace after the performance.
“Will it take long?”
“A minute—nothing at all.” He raised his hand, as if taking an oath. “I swear.” She loved royalty, even representatives of royalty, as much as she loved handsome, young men—army officers, musicians, a stranger in a restaurant. Charlie had the same deep-seated curiosity, the blind belief that life was more vivid or exciting at a royal court, or if not, then perhaps at the next table.
Outside, the progress of their carriage was halted by the passage of a company of government cavalry. Evidently they were returning from battle, for the last four horses bore their riders slung belly-down over their saddles, wrists tied to ankles to keep the corpses in place.
“Otto says I have war on my mind.”
“Babies! Twenty years old!”
He put his arm around her. “A fellow who used to work for me has fallen on bad days down here and he asked me if it would be possible to meet you.”
“Couldn’t he come to the theater?”
“He has a cancer,” Baraum said. “Seeing you will lift his spirits.”
“He’s going to die? Barnum, you have no emotions!”
“Oh, I don’t know him all that well. He had a season or two with one of my traveling shows.”
“Barnum, why do you deny it when you do a Christian duty—like this, visiting the sick?”
“Because I am a humbug.”
“You pretend! You don’t want people to know how sensitive and understanding you are. Why?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be able to make a living. I wouldn’t be able to make a damned dime.”
“That’s not the real reason,” she said. The carriage started forward, and as it crossed the street she turned to look at the cavalry trotting away.
Barnum’s friend’s name was Vivalla. An Italian, he had worked for Barnum years ago, before Charlie, when the main competition was the “mechanical” chess player, containing the bitter, deformed individual who made the mechanical arms move. Vivalla danced on plates and other crockery—without breaking them, of course—and for a while he was in vogue and made a lot of money when Barnum needed it. According to his note, he and his trained dog, which had supported him these last few years, had taken a room in a Chinese household. Until the last month, Vivalla had been able to eke out a living having the dog do his tricks on street corners; but now, Vivalla wrote, he was in a bad way.
“Barnum,” he groaned when they were shown to his room, “I want to be buried in Italy. Have my body sent to Italy.”
“I promise.”
“We will have a benefit,” Jenny said. “We’ll be here Sunday. We’ll tell the governor that we will give a benefit performance on Sunday.”
“A saint, Miss Lind,” Vivalla rasped. “You are a saint.”
Barnum would have preferred to have Sunday off, even if it meant that Vivalla would have to be planted here in Cuba. Barnum had a Yankee’s view of such matters. As a teen-ager he had spent one long January day chopping through the frozen earth to rid the neighborhood of the stink of an uncle who, until the preceding Wednesday, had spent his last years being spoon-fed, ungrateful, and incontinent. A benefit would get Vivalla’s body to Italy, but it would offer cold consolation for the mothers of the young men tied over their horses.
Vivalla wanted to show Jenny the dog’s tricks, and for the next fifteen minutes the dog stood up, rolled over, walked on his hind legs and forelegs, and so on, cued by his fading master’s nearly invisible gestures. Then, while thanking Jenny, Vivalla wept. Jenny wept. And Barnum wept.
“We will raise the money,” Jenny said as they rode away. “I am determined.”
Vivalla died on Saturday. The next day, singing for the governor and several hundred of his closest friends, Jenny raised five hundred dollars. Packed in ice, Vivalla would be on the next boat for Italy. Barnum was not even sure Vivalla had relatives in Italy to get him into the ground. Jenny’s one question didn’t concern that problem, however.
“We’ll be able to take the dog back to America with us, won’t we, Barnum?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Surely there is no law—”
“No, not at all. The Chinee family ate the dog.”
“No!”
“It’s true.”
“No! Chinese people do not eat dogs!”
“Of course they do. Ask Otto; he’ll be able to tell you.”
“I will! This better not be one of your jokes, Barnum!”
They were at the theater, and she was back within minutes.
“You are vile!” she shouted. “You could have prevented it.”
“Why should I have?”
“It was a lovely dog!”
“I’m sure it made a lovely meal, braised in brown sauce.”
“Horrible! Horrible, horrible! Why do you do these things to me?”
“I didn’t do anything. What was done was done to the dog. The Chinee family didn’t waste him. They picked on his bones the way I’ve seen you pick on a chicken!”
“Stop it!”
He hesitated. “Did I tell you that Otto saved my life?”
“Not another trick!”
“He did! I almost fell overboard. I would have drowned.”
She saw that he was not lying, and there was an expression of almost wild terror in her eyes. He didn’t know why he had told her what Otto had done, or why he had chosen this place and time. In the same way, in spite of what he could see, he didn’t know how she was reacting to the information, or the meaning she drew from the fact that he had told her, or the context. What went on was more complicated than either of them knew; in just the few months they had been together, they had shaped their lives around each other completely. He had been thinking about them? He had been wasting his time. What they did in the future they would simply do, and no one—least of all the two of them—would ever understand why.
17.
Not even the weather made sense in America, for with the coming of September, New Orleans just grew hotter and more humid. Jenny hated the place anyway, hated having been obliged to return to America, hated having to finish the rest of the tour—the worst part of it, in fact, involving single-night engagements in Natchez, Memphis, Madison, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh—Godforsaken places, she assumed. The longer stays, according to the itinerary Barnum had distributed when they first l
eft New York, involved places with names like Nashville and Louisville, which themselves sounded like outposts. Barnum was quick to tell Jenny that they were not, but quietly she reserved her opinion. She had seen enough of America with its isolated towns and vast emptinesses. It was not even a real country, in her opinion, and she doubted that it would ever rise out its pretensions to become one. She would never return to the South, she told Barnum; she told Otto and others that if she had known more about its slave system, she would not have come here in the first place. “It stinks of sin,” she said to Otto, who answered, plainly and quickly, “I agree.”
Even if she did not express the most intense of her opinions to Barnum, he could not fail to sense the darkening of her mood. Barnum rubbed her back and feet and said she was tired, but he did not bring up the subjects of slavery or the South or America. In her mind they were merely added to the list of unmentionable subjects, like his marriage, or the future. She was not willing to discuss the future, if it meant living in America, which she thought she would have to do at least part of the time, if she wanted a future with Barnum. In Europe he was known, but here he was a star of a greater magnitude than any of his attractions, including Charlie. Barnum wouldn’t be the same man in Europe, and she would be seen here as more than a home-wrecker. She would be seen as the woman who had fouled the quality of American life. That didn’t bother Jenny, for in her opinion P. T. Barnum was the only asset the accursed country actually had.
For all of that, the passion she and Barnum felt for each other had not grown pale. They were together more now than ever. He wanted to see her, he said, even if it meant taking the exercise she thought so beneficial to health, walking in the public park, or throwing a rubber ball back and forth. She couldn’t throw and he couldn’t catch, with the result that he spent the time running after the ball, while she laughed at his puffing and made fun of him for being fat.
They were still like children together, drawing strength from their belief in each other. He was a generous, free-spending man and she was a woman who appreciated little gifts and surprises and the pleasures of living well. While they were still in New Orleans and the warm weather and the receipts from her concerts were in the low five figures and there were profits above their guarantees to divide, they were together in the motionless center of the wheel of the world, with time standing still while the days went flying by; but then when they started north, into the first hints of winter out in the middle of the wide flat river with the oddly chirrupy Indian name, into a first frost in Natchez, which woke her in her grim, narrow, high-ceilinged hotel room, she began to see that they were running out of time. Alone in the room by choice because they had been together on the paddlewheeler coming north, then so giddy and urgent in the chill, changed air that people saw the truth about them so that she had felt what she called “a pang of disgrace”—alone now, as cold as she had been since her childhood, wanting Barnum but suddenly unwilling to endure the real disgrace of going down the hall to his room as she had done so many times this summer, she realized that his silence and list of unspeakable things and all the other rules of the game led to nothing for her: after everything that had happened between them, nothing. Lying on her back in the bottom of the horrible little room, she felt her sanity being lifted like skin blistered after a sunburn, pulled back from the top of her skull with a tearing she could hear, leaving nothing that made sense to her at all. She felt like a child in Sweden again even as she thought that Barnum’s tactics were the same as he must have used on a dozen passing trollops. He was a coward or a liar or a fool, which was what she was, too, as one who had betrayed herself. With everything turned upside down inside her, she asked herself if she had so much as one reason that did not fill her with disgust with herself for spending another moment in his company. Disgust with herself. It made her stomach hurt and she was so cold that her teeth rattled, but she could not stop thinking of those years at her grandmother’s, before her mother took her back to Stockholm in her lifelong pursuit of Niclas Lind, a weakling turned vile by her mother’s badgering. Finally Jenny wanted to ask Barnum aloud, as if he were in the room, standing over her bed, if he had betrayed her, but when she spoke, she shocked herself, because the words that came out had a different meaning entirely. She said, loudly enough for him to have heard, had he been there, “Oh, Barnum, please don’t hate me!” She had wanted to say “hurt,” but the other word jumped out. She didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t know what she meant, either, for it left her with the empty sense of not knowing who she was any more.
The episode was out of her mind until the next afternoon, after lunch with the local civic leaders, clergy, and members of the press—as Jenny had heard Barnum say a half-dozen times already, he wouldn’t bother with the first two without the presence of the last; what tickled him most, he liked to say, was that all three groups of fakers thought he was a villain. Arriving at her room fifteen minutes late, he started that diatribe again, and she cut him short.
“Stop it now. I’ve seen you courting and wooing the press. For hypocrisy, they are no worse than you.”
He puffed up comically when he was challenged, arching his back and eyebrows, glaring at her imperiously. “Izzatso?” He could ask the question so many different ways that she could discern the meaning only through his inflections. That he used the same three words, “Is that so?” to convey so many different things was another gesture of his contempt. For better or worse, Barnum was a genius, and this was one of the ways he told people he knew it. “Izzatso?” By his emphasis on the middle syllable, he was insisting that she prove her case.
“Barnum, you tell everybody what they have to hear to get them to do exactly what you want them to do. The first time you introduced a politician as a great American, I thought I was meeting someone important, but now, after fifty times, it’s a signal to me that you are talking about a fellow so low, so base—”
“My dear, if you do not sweet-talk these people, they will not issue the permits that let us earn a living—”
She laughed. “This is democracy?”
“At least we’re not bowing and scraping to some royal turd-let!”
“No, you bow and scrape to each other, and that makes you what you said.”
“You say it.”
She giggled. “No. I can’t say a word like that.”
He kissed her forehead. It was so splendidly simple just to submit to him. He intimidated everybody. He had crushed Otto and Minelli without a thought, and now they stayed crushed, at a distance, like cowed dogs. He kissed her again, whispering something about sleeping better. She pulled away.
“You know all the tricks. Sweet-talk, is it? I know when you sweet-talk me, when you are trying to get me to do something. If you weren’t trying to do something, why did you tell me in Havana that Otto saved your life?”
He frowned. “It’s true. I didn’t tell you that to make you do anything. It’s true, the man saved my life.”
“He said that you lost your balance and he steadied you, but that you were never in any danger.”
“Jenny, whatever his reason, he’s minimizing what he did. He asked me not to speak of it, but that was in a context of good-natured badinage—well, if not good-natured, then civilized. I swear I told you the truth, even if I apparently wasn’t supposed to say a word.”
He was understanding only part of her implication—that is, if he was telling the truth even now, if he wasn’t still trying to manipulate her. “Why did you tell me?” she cried. “Did you want me to be grateful to him? Were you testing my love that way?” And suddenly she remembered lying in the bed the night before, and what she had said aloud so shockingly in the dark. Her emotion continued to turn inward, downward, and she looked at him in a way he had not seen before, obviously, for he moved back a bit. “Barnum, do you hate me?”
“No! My God! I love you more every day! I’ve been as quiet as I have because of the very delicacy of our situation. I’ve hurt you enough, haven’t I? I’
m too old not to see the damage of building castles in air—just thinking out loud. I think as much about my age as any other factor—”
“Sixteen years is nothing.”
“You say that now. Age is just one issue among many. You see how even my friends regard me. When they look my way, they see their own wildest fantasies.”
“You exceed them, as fat as you are.”
“You’re as bad as any of the rest. Listen to me, Jenny. At the worst, this would ruin your career. You’d be the victim of what people believe of you just as you are the beneficiary of it now. Every good thing you have ever done would be turned against you, possibly even undone in malice and vengeance. Please believe me, you mustn’t ever underestimate what people believe, especially after you’ve worked so hard to develop that belief.”
“You don’t want to marry me,” she said bitterly. “You have never said a word in favor of it.”
“I’ve taken it seriously, Jenny,” he said sternly. “In order for the two of us to have a life together, we would have to throw over everything we’ve known. I have no doubt of it. People don’t really expect this of me any more than they expect it of you. We’d be forced into retirement—exile, too, probably. Where would we go, a neutral country, one where people don’t have strong feelings about us? Italy? There wouldn’t be a lot of Barnum left in Italy. If I wanted to work, I’d have to do Punch-and-Judy shows—only to be stoned by the mustachioed widows who knew our whole story.
“Jenny, in the face of all that and the differences between us and your vulnerability in this situation, it wouldn’t help to dwell on how grateful to you I am for making me feel whole and alive again. Before I met you, I was living my life as if I’d already given up to the long push into the grave. I have no doubt about my feelings for you and the worlds they open up for me. Your joy is contagious. I have never felt so loved. Believe me.”
Jenny and Barnum Page 33
