Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  “Yes—yes. It wasn’t such a long trip, after the traveling I’ve done this year.”

  “Of course.” She pushed her needle through the fabric again; she was hemming dinner napkins. “I almost never go to New York. I haven’t been there in years, which is one of the reasons why we haven’t met until now.”

  Jenny stayed silent, her heart pounding. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, like a child summoned to the office of her school’s headmistress. Mrs. Barnum eyed her wearily.

  “The last several days have been the worst of my life, Miss Lind—”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “He seemed to be unaware of your letter to me,” Mrs. Barnum said. “I didn’t answer you until that point was clear. You see, all I know about you is what he’s told me—told the world, I should say—but I’m sure you can see that it was tedious listening for me. Now that you’re here and I can see you, I realize that what he’s been saying is true, although perhaps I would not use the same language he did.”

  “Mrs. Barnum, I really—”

  “Call me Charity, dear.”

  “I don’t know if I can. I—”

  “Tay!” The Irish maid swept in. “I put out some ladyfingers, mum.”

  “That’s fine, Maureen. Close the door on your way out, if you don’t mind.” Mrs. Barnum waited until the latch snapped into place. “When she was a child in Ireland, Maureen saw her parents starve to death. With the trouble in this house this week, she’s been having nightmares, waking up screaming that the devil is after her. Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t disturb anybody’s rest, because we were all awake anyway. In all, it’s been an eventful week—”

  “Mrs. Barnum, I—”

  “Not that I didn’t expect it, Miss Lind, which is the real reason I haven’t heard you sing, which I truly regret. I can stir myself to go to New York. I would have, too, because I have been reading about you for years, long before Barnum thought he could make money with you. I’m sure he told you that he and I live relatively independent lives. I’m very interested in culture and the arts.”

  She had poured tea. For a few moments, all that could be heard was the thin clinking of silver spoons and delicate china, civilized life’s metaphor for the chirping of birds. Peace in my kingdom, Barnum called it. The silver and china were English, of excellent quality, and through the window Jenny could see the rugged branches of a black walnut tree empty of leaves and birds, rigid, lifeless, and submissive to the lash of the November wind.

  Mrs. Barnum said, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. What I’ve been trying to say is that, as a consequence of having lived with Barnum for a very long time, I saw this coming. When I saw how he was going to promote you, I realized that he was going to fall in love. Again. Oh, Barnum’s in love, but I thought it was—again—just with another embodiment of his own lost innocence.” She pulled herself up. “But it’s not.” She blinked. “I could not keep myself from reading the newspapers, even though I did try. They say you are a genius. I didn’t know a woman could be a genius. Are you?”

  Not even the impertinence of the question could conceal the weakness and fear so suddenly revealed. For Jenny it was an opportunity, but she wanted to be cautious in the way she asserted herself. Mrs. Barnum was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. Jenny thought that she could see that already the woman was beginning to think that she had regained her former absolute control of the conversation, and it made Jenny angry, determined to be strong. Genius! Yes, genius indeed.

  “Genius is a foolish word, Mrs. Barnum. After twenty-one years as a professional and thirteen as a star, I defer to the opinion of no one in matters of singing. My success has been the result of hard work and love of music as well as God-given talent. As a person I am not special or unusual, and no one knows better than I the weaknesses and limitations of my voice, but to answer your question, in the context of my objection to the word itself, Mrs. Barnum, yes.” Jenny was sitting straighter; now she shuddered, then all but involuntarily shook her head from side to side, so her hair whipped against her neck, like pennants on a staff. “Yes, Mrs. Barnum, I am a genius.”

  Mrs. Barnum smiled—as if she had won!

  “The newspapers say the same of Barnum, you know. Do you think he is a genius, too?”

  “My capacity to judge is limited to music,” Jenny said coldly.

  Mrs. Barnum smiled again, warmer now, and paused to sip her tea. “Well, he is unique. If I seem less than respectful of him, I’m not; but I have known him a very long time. I’m older than him, you know. By four years. We were married when he was eighteen and I was twenty-two.”

  Thinking at once that Charity Barnum had been an old maid who had trapped a boy, Jenny asked, “Why did you marry someone so young?”

  “He persuaded me. He was very persuasive even in those days. And Barnum at eighteen was a lean, well-muscled youth who did not know what he wanted to do with his life, but burned brilliantly with the desire to do it. He was a dreamer and a worker. He wanted to make something of himself, he said. What made it easy for me to believe him was that he was telling the truth. So you see, then as now, he was quite a catch.”

  Jenny stayed silent, and Mrs. Barnum sighed. “Like you, Miss Lind, I am a conventional person in matters of morals and manners. Without an obvious talent like yours to develop or even the opportunity to do so, if I had been given such a talent, my own ambitions were necessarily limited—modest. Barnum and I were married only a few months when he decided to up and go to New York, to make his fortune. I was with child; I couldn’t go. He lived with a grocer’s family and worked any number of jobs—always sending me money, to be sure. But in just a few more months he was home, his tail between his legs. The city had been too difficult and cruel for him. He cried. I had been approaching my time all but abandoned, and he cried.”

  “He was a boy,” Jenny said.

  “That’s right. But the damage between us was done. I was young and inexperienced, too, remember. I wanted an orderly life, but he wanted to dream, and time after time he set off on a new tack, trying one business and another, sometimes leaving his family staring desperate poverty in the face—terror, when you have children to feed.”

  “Mrs. Barnum, I really think—”

  “In your letter you asked if you could see me privately,” the older woman said. “This is me, in private. You have to forgive me if I sound bitter, because really I am not. Or was not, until your imminent arrival awakened—rightly, it turned out—many old nightmares. Many, many. Did he tell you about the drinking?”

  “He told me he had taken the pledge.”

  “I begged him to! At the end, he was drinking every night, all but drunk every night. He had everything he’d ever wanted by then, including his success and his notoriety, this house and the children to fill it. He’d wanted a boy, a son, but when that had been denied us, he found his Tom Thumb—”

  Not Charlie, Jenny thought; Charity Barnum didn’t know him as Charlie. The woman had survived a thousand blows, by her account. If she was to be believed and had found her peace of mind, then talking had reminded her of the old pain, pain that had hardened her and spoiled her life. An endless, repetitive process. Even if what she believed was entirely true, she had missed the best of Barnum—and it was no wonder that he spent so little time with her.

  “Barnum has always reminded me that Tom Thumb made our fortune—that after him, we never looked back.” The woman was in distress now, and Jenny could feel her own desire to fight ebbing from her. “I was talking about the drinking. Left to himself, he would have killed himself.” Now she said what had passed through Jenny’s thoughts a moment ago, only in reverse, about Charity Barnum herself. “There was nothing in his life at that time to blame for the condition he was in; it had to go back, to what his childhood had made of him. But he looked me in the eye and took the pledge, and I have always felt that he kept it out of respect for me.”

  An
other sigh, her chest heaving with the torment Jenny could see all too clearly in her eyes. “Before that there were the women. He’d always liked a pretty face, the sweet smile. When I was young I thought I was glad he wasn’t interested in the tarts and harlots that you find everywhere, even on the streets and in the saloons of a picture-perfect little town like the ones here in Connecticut.” Her eyes were wet now, her back stiff, her gaze vacant. “It was his own lost innocence he was looking for. All his life, everything in his life, has been pointed toward that.”

  “You’ve mentioned this ‘lost innocence’ before,” Jenny said. “I do not know what you mean, and would be grateful if you explained it to me.”

  “Yes.” Charity Barnum stood up. “Yes, I will. I can see how you would not know. Excuse me for a moment, if you please. I feel a draft, and without something over my shoulders I get a terrible pain across my back.”

  Jenny waited. The last thing she had expected to hear was that Barnum had ever been a troubled, unhappy man. She understood him now, too, understood what he was trying to say, even teach: that laughter, pleasure, and joy were not only necessary to life, but had to be made part of every day, every hour, every waking moment. Humanity had to live under the curse of death and only faith could save most souls from utter despair, but joy, pleasure, and laughter were fertile soil for love and other noble impulses, including faith. Charlie had faith, and life could have prevented him from ever having known it. Barnum had faith—oh yes. Faith alone lifted the curse, and he was doing everything he could imagine to share that secret—that was his secret. Barnum’s freaks were not creatures apart from the rest of us, but distorted mirrors of ourselves, not unlike the curved and warped looking glasses elsewhere in the aptly named American Museum. Here we were, all humanity seen anew. Anna Swan had fallen in love, in the all-consuming, delicious agony of anticipation Jenny now knew only too terribly well. One way or another, Barnum made us re-examine ourselves. And laugh.

  Of course.

  Mrs. Barnum returned, wearing a fuzzy gray sweater buttoned to her neck. Her eyes were clearer now, as if she had washed her face. “What has he told you about his mother?”

  “Little, actually. He seems to be full of wonderful memories of her.”

  “He is. She was a wonderful woman, in her way. What did Barnum tell you of his grandfather, his mother’s father, Phineas Taylor, for whom he was named?”

  “How do you say it? He was one of the great trick-players of his time.”

  “Practical jokers, they’re called.”

  “I know that Barnum learned the shaving trick he played on the ministers from his grandfather.”

  “I’m not sure the world is a better place for that.”

  Jenny almost smiled. If Mrs. Barnum’s “lost innocence” was what Jenny saw as Barnum’s gift to the world, then the conversation was over. Jenny would simply humor the woman until it came time to leave. The world was not a better place for humiliating the ministers? On second thought, Jenny was not so sure—the second thought being that Barnum had done it only to promote himself, out of the same instinct that had made him tilt his contract with her so much in his own favor.

  Charity Barnum said, “In those days, playing tricks on people was the chief entertainment here in New England. People had to devise all their own amusement, and these practical jokes, as they’re called, are spontaneous, or easily improvised. You have to remember, Miss Lind, that in those days this was still a new country, not just a young one. Barnum’s grandfather Phineas Taylor fought in the Revolution, and when we were born many of the founding fathers, like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, were still alive. We were a new, raw, rough country.

  “Barnum’s father was a practical joker of some note, too. He lent a man a horse he described as a former champion racehorse when in fact it was a broken-down sickly plug. When the poor horse fell over in a stream and drowned, Barnum’s father insisted that the man pay what he thought the horse was worth—well, you see the point: Barnum’s father was trying to humiliate the other man by demonstrating his ignorance about horses. Humiliation is the key. If a joke made people laugh, no matter how cruel, the joke-players would do it.”

  “I do not understand. Why would people want to do that to each other?”

  “Only a very small minority were involved. Life was full of rules then, and practical jokes were a way of rebelling—sometimes an angry, nasty way.”

  “You people are full of rebellion. With you it is like a cancer.”

  The older woman sighed. “Before Barnum was born, Phineas Taylor conceived what he thought was the grandest joke of his life. It involved dozens of people, not merely Barnum’s family, and most particularly his mother.

  “The Barnums and the Taylors were reasonably well off, descended from generations of successful colonial farmers. All through his childhood Barnum was the envy of the town of Bethel, and especially of his own peers, the other children, because he had already been provided for by his great-grandfather, who had made the boy sole heir to Ivy Island, a huge estate thirty or forty miles from town—”

  “There was no Ivy Island,” Jenny said.

  “Yes, there was, but as a boy Barnum never went there. No one would take him, and he was too young to go so far alone. In those days there were still bears and wolves in the area, but we’re rid of them now, thank God.

  “In any event, when he was eleven, Barnum could resist his curiosity no longer, and insisted on seeing his inheritance. The whole family made the trip, and the whole town knew they were going. The town wanted to hear from the boy himself about the place. It was quite a lot of land, hundreds of acres.

  “Grandfather Taylor let the boy walk the last few hundred yards up the dirt track alone. It was part of the joke that went back a dozen years, a joke an old man contrived to play on an innocent child before he was born. When our children were told of it—by me, in the effort to help them understand their father, who is often a difficult man—I saw the shock in their eyes, the sudden fear of betrayal. It had never occurred to them that parents or grandparents could do such a thing to a child for nothing more or less than the malicious glee of it.

  “Ivy Island was a worthless swamp. At first Barnum didn’t understand, thought he had taken a wrong turn, but there was the sign, ‘Ivy Island,’ planted at the edge of the muck.

  “He still didn’t understand what was happening when he ran back to report his discovery to his family. He didn’t understand even when they began to laugh, and when he looked bewildered, they pointed their fingers at him and laughed louder. Then he understood. He didn’t cry, he told me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I saw at once that that would only make it worse for me. I had to go along with the joke. I dreaded going back to Bethel, because it meant another wave of laughter. But there was nothing I could do but go along. I don’t know what went through my mind, but it was with a shock that I saw it, almost instantaneously—’”

  “He weathered it well,” Jenny said.

  “No, there’s more. In public he never said a bad word against his grandfather or any of the other conspirators, including his mother, but there was no doubt—he knew, he told me—that they had cut him to the quick.

  “He told me all this years later, but when he was still a young man, and after we had made our first terrible mistakes with each other. He cried. He told me that he would never forget the simpering, idiotic look on his mother’s face that day, and that he resolved, in a flash, never to trust her again. That was the measure of the shock he sustained. His own mother had betrayed him from birth. For a joke. He told me, ‘I never said a word to her, but I promised myself that I would never take her into my confidence again, and I never did.’”

  The light was fading. Mrs. Barnum was very nearly a silhouette, motionless as a statue against the window frame and the tree beyond thrashing in the stronger wind signaling the advance of night. It was going to rain. Charity Barnum leaned forward. “That has been part of my life for almost thirty years. I know he didn’t tell you wha
t his life was like before you came to America, before he first started scheming to bring you here. His life was quiet. Orderly. He went to New York and ran his museum and tended to his other businesses and then, more nights than you would believe, he came home. If there was a part of his life that I don’t know about, it is because it didn’t affect his life here.”

  Jenny could see the thrust of this comment, and there was an obvious answer to it. Whatever Charity Barnum wanted to believe, her husband had been an unhappy man—but Jenny did not want to think of him before their own meeting.

  “Now you must go,” the older woman said. “You’ve seen what you wanted, whatever it was. You’re such a naïve young woman that it’s almost possible for me to feel sorry for you. I can certainly see how Barnum is drawn to you. He has never really put away the dream of Ivy Island he was allowed to build all through his childhood. His museum full of all its ridiculous junk is only what a child wants the world to be. Ivy Island—in you he’s found the little girl fit to be its queen. He thinks.” She stood up. “No, I do not want to hear you sing. You are a naïve young woman but no child. You knew Barnum was a married man. This is what you’ve disrupted and probably destroyed forever. My life. Another human being’s life. You will understand if I do not tax myself with the burden of forgiving you—at this point, it is just too easy to imagine cursing you with my dying breath.” She was at the door. “Let yourself out the way you came in, if you don’t mind, and Caesar will drive you back to the railroad station.”

  The rain began after dark, when the train was still far north of the city, traversing the now-familiar farm land. The orange glow of oil lamps in farmhouse windows gleamed on the beading drops of rain on the cold glass of the rocking, clattering railroad car. The car was stuffy and smelled of kerosene. Jenny was not thinking of Barnum. There was nothing to think about. Charity Barnum’s revelations about her husband’s childhood were not as terrible, in Jenny’s view, as the way the woman herself saw so much of her husband’s life and works. If the American Museum was full of a child’s dreams, wonder, and awe, that was not ridiculous. You could not appreciate Barnum unless you were on the side of laughter. Barnum was for foolishness and humbug—from his point of view, that he was also for shrewd business and money-getting were not significant. You were supposed to ignore that side of Barnum and accept him on his own terms. That was not lost innocence. And that made Barnum his own kind of genius. In inventing his life, Barnum had accepted nobody’s definitions but his own. Jenny had her own vivid memories of Barnum, her joyous, exuberant lover. Jenny had not been completely gulled by Charity Barnum’s self-righteous, wronged-woman posings. What brought down Charity’s wrath was the fact that Barnum had been happier with Jenny than he had ever been before. For a while, he had made her feel like the Queen of Ivy Island, which was not so bad to have been, for a while. Jenny did not know when it had begun to slip away. Love had slipped away, like nothing important. Perhaps that was the reason she had resisted love for so long, the hidden foreknowledge that it would slip away. That it was not important. Perhaps failure had been inevitable. In her heart she knew that her talent and position made her more than the simple girl she liked to pretend to be. Jenny supposed that Charity probably saw Barnum as much a villain in this as Jenny, but Jenny herself was not so sure. It was very odd, because she could see that, when she took Barnum as he wanted, she loved him still—even though love had slipped permanently, irretrievably away.