“Barnum, it’s you. You’ve changed everything in me.”
His eyes grew moist. Was he going to cry? In the past she had hated it when men cried, but this gave her a thrill of anticipation. She wanted all of his emotion. She moved toward him, not thinking, and he took her in his arms. Their passion seemed destined to prevent them from ever becoming better friends. In another moment she did not care. She could not even think, for they were in a frenzy together.
In New Orleans less than half the concerts earned more than the seven thousand dollars of their guarantees, Natchez grossed exactly five thousand, Memphis less, and the first performance in St. Louis only a few hundred above the magic seven thousand. The next morning, in what she regarded at first as an amazing coincidence, there was delivered to the hotel an envelope from Waldo Collins in New York. A thick packet, it contained offers from independent producers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia—all the major cities she had just played, plus Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec, in Canada. Collins had also prepared an estimate of the costs of mounting a tour not involving Barnum, and it was clear to Jenny that she could double or even treble what she had made so far in just half the time. Collins didn’t mention the unsatisfactory results of the renegotiated contract with Barnum, but the tone of the letter suggested that Collins was aware of the situation. Now that Jenny understood Americans better, she thought that she would not be surprised if Collins had a spy in Barnum’s entourage. She knew, too, that Collins was working for himself, angling to see what he could get out of the presence in America of the stupid Swedish songbird—who was inconveniently getting smarter every single day.
Before lunch, Jenny sent Miss Holobaugh to bring Otto around to her suite, with the explanation that she wanted to talk to Otto briefly and privately. She left the package from Waldo Collins out on the table where Otto would see it.
“Well, Otto, what do you think of our American adventure now?”
“This is the nadir, isn’t it? The city is full of fools in covered wagons babbling about going out into the desert to die of thirst. Is this the best they can do with their silly freedom? What are they going to do when the country is filled up?”
“That won’t happen for hundreds of years, Otto. I’m more interested in our problems.”
“Yes, I understand.” He sat down, saw the letter, and looked back to her without so much as the flutter of an eyelid. “What I started to say before succumbing to my rage about this awful place is that this city is our oasis before we go out into the desert again. Forgive me, Jenny, but I do have to say that I’ve noticed that in this series of single engagements at these overgrown forts that Mr. Barnum has scheduled the travel days to fall on the days you are supposed to rest, saving on hotel bills, food, and the like. Those items are all so cheap compared to the money coming in, I have to wonder why he must be so absolutely squalid about it.”
“Mr. Collins says we can make more money on our own—”
“Let’s be interested in making music again, Jenny, not money. I’ve given up all hope of composing while I’m in America. The place is an asylum. I absolutely cannot think. You look deeply haggard—”
She cut him off. “Have you ever talked to Mr. Collins?”
“No, I don’t care for that man any more than I care for Barnum. In fact, I think I disliked Collins first.”
“Do you think Signore Minelli has been in touch with him?”
“No, I don’t think so. Minelli is still too wrapped up in his own tragedy.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll excuse that as a momentary lapse. It’s you, of course.” He smiled. “If he heard what you said, he’d kill himself.”
She did not answer, afraid of what she might say. She was concerned about Otto, but the wrong words might lead him to believe that she was interested less in his well-being than in his suffering.
“Jenny, if Barnum loves you as he says, why does he exploit you so?”
“He doesn’t exploit me! You know how little he understood serious music when we arrived here. The schedule was made in accordance with the terms of the original contract. We had the chance to change those terms and we didn’t. Barnum gave us everything we asked for, remember.”
“I can’t help believing that he’s been very crafty. I think—well, I’m not in position to speak any more.”
“What? What do you think?”
“I am afraid that we’ll discover that he’s used you terribly—”
“That’s not true!”
“I hope so.” He stood up. “Jenny, if you please, I’ve already given you my best counsel: make music, not money. I don’t care who benefits from all this. You’ve done enough for people, perhaps too much. I only hope that performers of the future who make the kind of money you have will be as generous as you have been.”
“I’m not the moral woman people think they see. I never was.”
“Oh, Jenny, that’s simply not the case. Listen to me. I’ve known you a long time, and you are now, as you always have been, the most moral of women. I do not know another who concerns herself more with the effects of her actions.”
She lowered her eyes. There was something else in Collins’ letter. “We are contractually bound to Barnum for one hundred concerts, with indemnifications due him for concerts I do not choose to perform.”
“I am aware of some of the details.”
“Otto, one hundred concerts takes us back through New York and Philadelphia, and back to Boston!”
“The renegotiation really got you nothing, Jenny.”
“No, I’ve made more money. It’s just that by the time I finish with Barnum, all the major cities will have seen me again and again!”
“How much will you owe if you quit him before New York?”
“More than thirty thousand dollars—but I do not know if I want to quit him. With him, I’m sure I’ll make money again in New York and those other places, but I do feel that he has the upper hand.”
“He does.”
“Oh, Otto,” she cried, “did I do this to you?”
“No, Jenny. When I’ve been unhappy, it’s been only because of what I knew at the beginning, that you weren’t ready for what I wanted, that you didn’t know your own mind yet.”
“What do you want, Otto?”
“I want to marry you, Jenny.”
“Still?”
“Of course.”
Now she could not look at him, and he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. She started to cry, but he left. The anger she felt at Barnum’s machinations boiled up again. She had to make it stop. She was not a barmaid to be chucked under the chin by some burly, drunken lout—yet if she didn’t regain control of her life, she would sink into that same muck, the disorder, superstition, and violence from which she had thought she had already saved herself.
They were traveling into ever-colder weather and ever-louder electioneering, bonfires and speeches on the corners, bands marching down the streets. In Pittsburgh they saw a brawl outside the hotel, twenty men or more in the middle of the cobblestones and flailing away, flesh and bone thumping sickeningly. A man in a cap drew a revolver and fired, a spurt of flame and smoke reaching out more than a yard.
Another man fell down. Jenny saw it all and couldn’t believe her eyes. The man got up and tried to stagger away, and the other man fired his gun twice more. Everyone else was motionless. The stricken man cried out and fell again, and Jenny could see the blood spurting from the middle of his back. Everyone started running in all directions.
It all happened so quickly that the men in the room were only now coming to Jenny’s aid. Barnum took her away from the window and Otto closed the drapes. Otto said something and Barnum answered him sharply.
Jenny didn’t hear either of them—she was realizing that she had seen a murder, and she was losing control. She had not even seen her grandmother die. Hannelore and Miss Holobaugh took her into the bedroom and gave her opium and put her to bed. She did not awaken until two the next afternoo
n, and when she went on stage later, she was still groggy from the medication.
And just as well, she thought. If she had been more alert, she might not have wanted to perform—and in retrospect she was able to see that Barnum had not inquired very carefully about her feelings. His one concession: at a reception in her honor afterward he asked the guests to excuse her.
He walked with her out to the carriage.
“Do they know what I saw last night?”
“I don’t think so. It wasn’t in the papers today.”
“A murder? In front of the city’s best hotel?”
“That’s probably why. The hotel must have paid the newspapers to forget it.”
“Oh, dear God. When will I see you?”
“I have to send some cables in the morning. Let me take you out to lunch.”
“Somewhere I’ll be seen?”
He smiled. “Nothing less.”
She let her lips brush his cheek and stepped up into the carriage, and as soon as she was alone her smile twisted. He was always sending cables in the morning—but never telling her what the cables contained. Oh, she knew what she had made so far; he was very scrupulous about that. Counting what was hers of the money being held in escrow in London, she had made almost $200,000. But a little addition and subtraction revealed that after her shares, Barnum had grossed $475,000! Less his expenses, of course, which he did not divulge. He was a fox—but one who came whimpering into her bed. She missed Charlie. Charlie was able to help her see things clearly, and could tell her the other things she needed to know. He would help her dissolve her anger. Charlie knew Barnum, while the rest pestered Barnum’s heels—like midgets.
That thought made her laugh, and the laughter made her cry, and she realized as soon as the crying began that she was sick and tired of being so emotional and out of control.
Barnum stayed in New York overnight, and then he went up to Iranistan—to vote, among other things, he said. He was very muted, and Jenny’s mood matched his. The city roared with excitement over the election. She had dreaded this return—she had been another person when she had left, in high summer—but her concern had been needless. She knew and understood the city better now, and liked it more. She resisted seeing Otto, and Minelli was insufferable. There would be no performances until the weekend after the election, and without thinking or knowing why, Jenny kept to herself as much as she could, taking her meals in her room at the Irving House, walking up and down Broadway at dusk, when the light was poor and she wouldn’t be recognized. She did not want to talk. She did not even think—at least, not about Barnum, what he was doing or saying. Jenny had his book, and she could read whatever she wanted, but she left the book alone. She wrote brief letters to Europe, notes, really, for she did not have the energy to fill page after page of chatter. Miss Holobaugh sorted the incoming mail, tossing the marriage proposals and obscene offers into the waste-basket. On Jenny’s instruction, Miss Holobaugh was on the alert for one letter in particular, a reponse to a letter Jenny had mailed in Pittsburgh. When it rose to the top of the pile, Miss Holobaugh brought it directly to her employer, who did not open it at once. Not surprisingly, Jenny felt no excitement or anxiety. By its weight and feel, it contained a single piece of paper. Jenny had anticipated that a positive reply to her Pittsburgh request would be brief. There was nothing to think about. Nothing could stop the flow of events now.
Apparently the election was not going to be decided for some time while officials counted the votes and compiled the results from the various states. It was all too complicated for Jenny—nonsense anyway, considering how empty the country was. Barnum was due in New York on Thursday a little after noon, and the railroad schedule showed that the trip, with stops, took a bit more than an hour. Jenny was at the station at eleven o’clock, and traveling past Rye, New York, when a southbound train roared toward the city. She looked the other way, lest she be seen: unlikely, but not impossible. It made Jenny realize how afraid she was, too afraid, perhaps, to do whatever she thought she was trying to do. In Pittsburgh, even in New York, from the distance of longer time, she had allowed herself to believe she understood the purpose of this; but now she felt as if the idea had originated with someone else. She did not know what was going to happen. Having started this, Jenny had no idea of what she was going to do.
It was a blustery day, damp and threatening rain. Alighting from the railroad car, she was approached on the covered platform by an elderly Negro man. He was a big man, his hair wild and wiry, his creased skin the burnished brown of old fine leather.
“Miss Lind?” He spoke slowly, leaning forward and forming the words carefully. “Mrs. Barnum said I should wait here at the station for you. I recognized you from your picture and what Mr. Barnum said.”
“You have a carriage?”
“Closed carriage. That’s right.” He smiled, showing a gold tooth.
“What’s your name?”
“Caesar.”
“That’s an ancient Roman name.”
“Mr. Barnum told me all about Caesar.”
Outside, he had to take her elbow to steady her against the wind. He opened the carriage door. She stopped. “Mr. Barnum told me there were no slaves in Connecticut.”
“That’s right.”
His expression was still pleasant, but she was not convinced that she had not offended him. Now she was thoroughly disoriented. Caesar had taken Barnum down to the station and then, on Mrs. Barnum’s instruction, had waited for Jenny’s arrival. Caesar was a name Europeans gave to dogs. Jenny simply did not know that Caesar was capable of keeping his various assignments separate from one another. Barnum was gone—but Jenny was so confused that she thought it possible that Barnum could take his leave even knowing that Jenny was on her way here.
Caesar had the horse set a smart pace, and within minutes the carriage was moving toward the edge of the grimy little town. The absence of walls to echo the horses’ rhythmic hoofbeats made for a quieter ride and a lulling effect. She wanted to believe she had some recollection of the countryside, but the truth was that she did not know if she should have seen the great, bizarre house on her way into town, or if the place was located on the far side. She had passed here only months ago, but today it was a blur. So much of her American adventure was a blur now. And a waste. An exercise in her own vanity.
At last she saw the telegraph wires next to the railroad track, running low along the bleak horizon—bleak now: she had forgotten even the vivid bloom of summer. The house appeared on the right, a quarter-mile away, as the dirt road curved around a clump of trees and a crumbling stone wall.
Iranistan was still epic bad taste, more crypt-like than ever in the tarnished silver gloom of November. Jenny had had the same ugly, distressing feelings the first time she had seen the place, she realized; not all that much of her memory had been lost. She saw that she really was in a trance, journeying to this place as if responding to a summons in a dream.
Once inside the gates and traveling around the curving drive, Jenny could see that the place was a cunning contrivance of black-painted stucco and carefully positioned thin plates of marble—a fake! The building was wood and plaster, like all other homes in the neighborhood—indeed, the country! Barnum had told her that the place was a stone-by-stone copy of a temple in India. He told such lies, he had explained to her at another time, to keep “the folks dazzled and mystified.” Clearly, he had not expected her ever to come to this place—it was not a home; she could not think of it as a home.
The carriage stopped in front of a pair of gleaming, copper-clad doors each no more than three feet wide, but more than eighteen feet high, coming to a pseudo-Arabian point.
A maid opened one of the doors. Full-sized, she looked absurdly small.
“Mrs. Barnum is in her upstairs sitting room, miss,” the maid said with a broad Irish accent. “I’ll be serving tay. Mrs. Barnum said that you wouldn’t be wanting sandwiches or cakes or any of that.” She took Jenny’s coat. “It’s just ups
tairs to the right, miss. You’ll see it.”
Jenny shuddered. No doubt, Mrs. Barnum’s orchestration of minor courtesies only showcased her choreography of a whole series of social cuts and personal slights. Jenny was to climb the stairs unescorted? It was the sort of thing that was beyond accusation. Even if she dared to speak of it, the woman would settle it with a look dismissing Jenny as mad. As perhaps she was: this had been a mistake, her own fault—but all at once she was willing to believe that it was a mistake that Mrs. Barnum had been waiting for her to make. Now the woman was upstairs waiting for the last of it. Jenny was so close to breaking down that she thought she could see at last the madness that was her heritage, both her parents’ legacies, her father’s brooding, boozy incoherence and her mother’s curdled dreams, all of it somehow languishing in an appealing summery light; and to attain it forever, madness, she had only to stop climbing the stairs, stop everything here and now—just stop.
To the right, the maid had said. The interior of the house bore no resemblance to the outside. The interior was simply conventional, comfortable, with white plaster walls and much polished wood trim, filled with carpets and paintings and tables surmounted by vases of dried flowers.
“In here, Miss Lind,” a mature woman called.
“Very good,” she replied, so frightened suddenly that her voice sounded like a thing apart, disembodied.
“I’m sewing,” the woman said. Even on a murky day, the room was bright, the walls papered white and yellow, the window curtains brilliant and crisply starched. The woman was sitting with her back to the window, almost a silhouette. “Do sit down,” she said. “The holidays are coming and I like to give little things I’ve made in addition to the usual gifts. Sit down, sit down.” She looked up. Jenny’s eyes were adjusting from the darkness of the hall. Mrs. Barnum was a tall woman, not young, with dark hair and a well-lined face. Her eyes were dark and her lips thin, and while she was not smiling now, her animation led Jenny to think that she was a warm woman, not cold—and not shallow or dull-witted, either. “Did you have a pleasant journey?”
Jenny and Barnum Page 34
