Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

  Barnum thought it a wonderful stunt. Bailey had four partners as lackluster as Barnum’s own pair. If Bailey wanted to do a deal with Barnum, the two shows could be put together, and then it would just be a matter of time—and careful maneuvering—to get rid of the other partners and build the finest circus the world had ever known.

  In 1885, Barnum and Bailey’s Combined Shows, known as The Greatest Show on Earth, conquered Europe. Thirteen hundred performers and roustabouts, more than five hundred animals, including eighty elephants—many, many more than had been with Hannibal crossing the Alps—and enough equipment, paraphernalia, and costumes to fill fifty railroad cars: acrobats, jugglers, clowns, and pretty girls; lions, tigers, gorillas, and polar bears; midgets, giants, human skeletons, and fat and bearded ladies, an entire army from a make-believe land of wonder and joy, the white-haired Phineas Taylor Barnum, the living legend himself, in the lead, in an open white carriage drawn by four spirited white horses. The Greatest Show on Earth had filled an entire iron-plated steamship, easily the most all-inclusive collection of the world’s creatures to sail upon open water since Noah and the Ark.

  Bailey had solved the problem of feeding so many large carnivores at sea by freezing meat in blocks of ice, then thawing them as required. Bailey was really a taciturn and self-effacing man; it was Barnum who overruled Bailey and printed both of their pictures on their broadsides and billboards. But Bailey was the great riddle-unraveler, able to muster imaginative flair in answering such questions as how to pack a tent in a railroad car (after the giant cats had been stowed, on the rolling carts that had carried their cages, hauled aboard, of course, by the elephants) to what to do with tons of elephant dung (claim it possesses amazing fertilizing qualities, and sell it). Bailey ran the show, made it work the way a chef operates a good hotel’s kitchen, with efficiency and dispatch, and an eye on his own professional pride.

  Barnum, on the other hand, the Mighty Monarch of Merriment himself, wrote the advertising copy, hired acts, beguiled the press, and counted the money. It was a perfect business relationship, without a lot of God-awful personal and social complications, and both men were truly rich—high-on-the-hog rich, as Bailey liked to put it.

  The Greatest Show on Earth was not on tour merely to offer Europe the opportunity of seeing it, but, as Barnum had promised America, to bring back the Greatest Creature on Earth-Jumbo, the largest elephant in captivity!

  No mean feat, considering that all of Victoria’s Empire was aligned against Barnum. Jumbo was presently quartered at the London Zoological Garden, where he was a favorite of royalty and commoner alike, because he was loved by English children. They traveled from all over the country to ride on his back around a special track at the Zoological Garden, which was owned by a man who, like Braithewaite years ago, had fallen on bad times. Barnum was going to pay him enough to keep him fat and sassy well into the twentieth century, if necessary. The deal was done, but unannounced. Rumors about Jumbo had been floating for months, and the response on both sides of the Atlantic was as could have been predicted. Now that Barnum could not make off with Jumbo in the dead of night, as it were, he had to put as good a face on the situations as he could. Whole orphanages of English children got to see the world’s first three-ring circus, all its exhibits, pageants, and tableaux, generating waves of favorable publicity for Barnum and Bailey. When Barnum returned to London from Leeds, where the show was on tour, he found a letter written in a script he had not seen in almost twenty years.

  My dear fat old man,

  Perhaps you can take time from winning the hearts of English schoolchildren to pass an afternoon with one of your earlier conquests. I realize that you are as frightfully busy as ever, and that you are no longer the sprightly, high-stepping youth I once knew, but if it is possible for you to take the train out to Castle Combe, where I have spent the last seventeen summers, I shall be pleased to brew you a cup of tea.

  Yours faithfully,

  Jenny L.

  He scribbled a note straightaway and got it in the noon post, assuring its delivery by the next morning. In the absence of a reply, he would see her on Friday afternoon—whatever else he felt, the thought made his heart leap like a boy’s.

  He had known he was heading into one of the prettiest parts of the world, but he had forgotten just how very pretty the Cotswold Hills really were. It was easy to see why so many emigrants from these parts had fallen in love with the soft, rolling hills of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Here were wonderful stone villages set in the folds of the earth like miniatures under a Christmas tree, fields marked with ancient stone walls, cathedral steeples poking over the distant hills. It had been raining when he had left London, but here the sky was mostly blue, a silent sea for a school of brilliant orderly clouds. The green of the fields and woods was so intense that it hurt Barnum’s eyes. This was the country of King Arthur and Will Shakespeare, ancient country filled, it seemed, with children and the young, boys driving sheep and cattle down the lanes, girls tilling kitchen gardens beside their mothers. As much as it reminded Barnum of the simple countryside in which he had spent his boyhood, he could see, too, that it was entirely different, most particularly in the length and stature of its history. Life here had almost always been lived as he was seeing it, and so it seemed timeless. There was a joy in the newness of the New World, but there was a very deep pleasure in contemplating what the land had contemplated in the innumerable cycles of humanity that had come before. Barnum had almost lived this life, he knew, and although he was a happy man, he could not help feeling a sense of loss for not having done it.

  Jenny’s directions accompanying her note indicated that he could easily walk from the railroad station to her cottage, which was on the edge of town. The main street was an unpaved stretch of rutty hardpan, not different from Bethel. Once the train had pulled away, the loudest sounds were those made by the goats and chickens. People came out of their stone cottages and the public house on the corner to see the erect, potbellied septuagenarian in city clothes striding smartly toward the northern edge of the settlement, where a view of the broad, cultivated valley was revealed. Jenny’s cottage, she said, was just around the bend. Barnum was too deaf now to hear the murmurings of the locals, but their behavior confirmed his suspicions and Jenny’s directions. Barnum felt just like a boy, in a bliss of anticipation. He did not know what he was going to hear, or even if she had anything to tell him at all.

  The cottage was set down the hill from the road, twenty feet behind a wooden fence and a vividly blooming, slightly overgrown garden. The path was a set of flagstones curving down to the door. He was raising his hand to knock when the door opened, and there she was.

  “I watched from the window,” she said with a shy smile. “I heard the train, and I waited to see you come along.” Jenny extended her arms. “It’s a long time, Barnum.” He kissed her cheek. “You look well,” she went on. “Your hair is white and the lines in your face are deeper, but you’re the same. You’re going to live forever.”

  There was some gray in her hair, her skin was dryer, and there were circles under her eyes. She had aged—both of them had aged, her polite malarkey notwithstanding. “You are still the most beautiful woman of the century,” he said.

  “And you are its biggest liar,” she said.

  “I thought you were trying to give me competition,” he said. “I am seventy years old, and while my health is excellent, I know very well that I am not going to live forever.”

  “Come in, come in. You remember Hannelore.” He didn’t, but an old woman nodded a grim hello. “Hannelore has made us lunch, which we will have outside.”

  The parlor was at the back of the house, where a small veranda looked over the view that was the chief attraction of the house.

  “I no longer drink myself,” Jenny said. “So—may I offer you some cider?”

  “I would love some cider,” Barnum said. Jenny nodded, and Hannelore toddled off. “I hope you are well,” he said, after a moment.r />
  “Well enough. I believe—now I believe—that health is a complicated, mysterious affair. By my standards and understandings of twenty years ago, you should have been dead long ago.”

  “I come from long-lived stock. I’ve never been really sick in my life.”

  “I am sorry about Charity,” she said. “I would have written to you, but I heard too late, almost a year after her passing. It would have done you no good to have heard from me on the subject by then.”

  “Quite right,” he said. Hannelore served the cider at the little table that had been set for lunch. When Barnum held Jenny’s chair, he had the thought not that he could have spent the last twenty-four years doing it, but that the movement felt so comfortable and familiar after twenty-four years that he could almost believe that somehow he had been doing it, in his sleep, in his dreams, throughout the whole long time he had thought he had been far away from her. She had won, for he loved her still: like all her other lovers, he had been struck to the core, changed forever.

  And she was the same! He could see it in just these few minutes. Her gestures and shy smiles were the same; the fetching modesty that had enchanted millions had been distilled to a seriousness that he found more beguiling still.

  “What shall we toast?” she asked.

  “Love. It must be love.”

  She giggled. “Of course. Tell me of your new wife.”

  “Not so new. We are married five years now. Her name is Nancy. I love her very much. She has made me very happy.”

  “I see.” She was staring at him; he could still recognize her mischievous sense of humor. “Are you going to tell me how old she is?”

  “I’m sure you know, but I wasn’t going to say it unless you asked.”

  “Well?”

  She wanted him to make her laugh, as if nothing bad had ever happened between them; she was still a princess, exercising royal prerogatives without any awareness whatsoever. “Nancy is thirty,” Barnum whispered.

  “You are a wonderful, crazy old man,” Jenny said.

  He beamed. “And how is your family?”

  “Very well,” she said. “Otto is in Bonn, working. Sarah is with her father—she plays the violin—and Gustave is an intern with the Royal Theater in Stockholm, studying to be a stage manager. He is not musical.”

  “You,” he pressed. “How are you?”

  “I am all right,” she said. “The winters get harder for me, so we go to the south of France every January. Otto and I teach together, and occasionally I sing. My voice is not what it was, but people are very kind. Are you going to take our Jumbo?”

  “I’ve already paid for him. He’s going to America.”

  Her hands were in her lap as Hannelore brought their lunch, slices of gammon, fresh tomatoes from the garden, gherkins. “Why? Why must you do this?”

  “Jumbo belongs in The Greatest Show on Earth. He will be its centerpiece.”

  “But English children love him. They’ll never see him again.”

  “Not so. The circus is here and will return—with Jumbo—in two years. The whole world will see him now.”

  “And you will make another fortune in the process,” she said.

  “In my dealings with you, my dear, I learned that you always keep a sharp eye on the box office.”

  She blushed. “One of my many mistakes.”

  “Are you comfortably off? When you married Otto, some of your less gallant worshipers thought that he would run through your bankroll.”

  “Oh no. You made me rich, but Otto made me richer. We made money in English industry, and now we are making money in German industry.”

  “Very wise.”

  “It is good to see you, Barnum. I am glad you are doing well and are so happy. You look happy.”

  “Are you?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I am. I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time now. I’ve wanted to tell you things, but as time passed, the things I wanted to tell you kept changing, one more reason to keep postponing—well, this visit. I was afraid. At the end of our tour I became absolutely terrified—”

  “You don’t have to explain that,” he said. “It’s all so long ago, and most important, no harm was done.”

  “I harmed myself. I suffered terribly afterward. With Otto I thought I would be safe, but I was not, not from myself. I sent you that letter because I could not imagine how we could have a life together. I lied to myself. After all the torment I put myself through for so many years before I met you, I wanted to believe that I could go back to being ‘normal.’ My life was crazy before I met you. You were the one who made me sane—gave me a glimpse of sanity. I tried to make life more complicated than it really is. Life is mysterious, but not complicated. The years with Otto and his patience only brought back to me the lessons I should have learned with you, the lessons you were trying to teach me.”

  “Oh, I was just in love with you,” he said.

  “You’re being kind,” she said. “I know what I was. When I knew you, I thought I had been a foolish twenty-year-old. But I was foolish at thirty, too, and only began to know myself at forty.”

  “That’s true for us all, I suspect.”

  “I wanted to say thank you,” she said.

  “No, you wanted to say something more,” he answered.

  “Yes.”

  He waited.

  “I think I wanted to say good-by, as well. I am reasonably healthy, too, but something tells me I will not live much longer—”

  “No!”

  “It’s true. Accept it, please, as I have. Nothing will be lost. My life is complete and I am happy. I want you to know that. I want you to know that because of you, my life is whole and wants for nothing. Perhaps it was a mistake at the time to have run away from you as I did, but not now.”

  “You can’t look at children and think that anything you did that brought you closer to them was a mistake.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” she said. “That, and more. As I said, I was afraid. I don’t think I really could have done anything else.”

  “You’re not going to die, Jenny,” he said.

  “I grew up at an early age,” she said. “I made my own living at the age of eight. I was not happy. I was never happy until I met you. Perhaps each of us is allotted only so much strength, and I used mine in my childhood, in my girlhood, simply trying to stay alive and make sense of the world. In any event, I know—I just know. I am not afraid or disappointed, and I wanted to tell you how grateful I am to you, how grateful I’ve been to you for so many years.”

  He did not answer. His good manners told him to deny everything she was saying, but something else inside him made him pause. He believed her, or his instincts wanted to; in calling him here she was demonstrating that her views had changed, and her world along with them. She had changed and grown while remaining the same. Life was mysterious. He had to believe his eyes, just as he’d had to believe his ears a quarter-century ago at Castle Garden. She remained a genius. Nothing had been taken from her. She had not been spoiled. The little girl singing to a kitten in a Stockholm window so long ago had achieved wisdom. Barnum understood all too easily just how he had fallen in love with her the first time.

  “Give me a dollar,” she said.

  “I don’t have one. Will five shillings do?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “What do you want it for?”

  “To keep.”

  “Oh. Oh!” And he laughed out loud.

  “I waited twenty-four years,” she said.

  Later, when he was leaving, he remembered something else. For a wedding gift he had sent a music box, and had never heard another word about it.

  “Your music box? I thought it came from Charlie and Lavinia. That’s what Otto told me.” Now it was her turn to gasp. “It came when I was still telling myself—and Otto—that I never wanted to see or hear from you again. Oh, Barnum, he saw through me even then, or knew I would have a change of heart. I have always loved that
music box. Otto will tell you that he has been hearing me praise it for more than twenty years!”

  He kissed her cheek. He thought she would have permitted him to kiss her on the lips, but he loved Nancy, and he did not want to put himself in the position of feeling something else.

  Jumbo never made it back to England. Only clever management of the press kept the Jumbo affair from becoming a first-class disaster for the entire circus, instead of only for the stupid animal itself.

  Barnum and Bailey’s Combined Shows, The Greatest Show on Earth, was on tour in the remote Canadian provinces when the animal got loose one night and wandered about the countryside until it came to a stream, gleaming in the moonlight, that ran straight off to the horizon.

  At least, that was the opinion of the elephant handler. What Jumbo thought was a peculiar stream was in fact a railroad track, and the only non-military thing in North America that could kill an elephant, a freight train, hit the damned $100,000 dumb beast smack in the backside.

  Jumbo took a full day to expire, long enough to let Barnum get an entire civilization ready for grieving. Insurance paid for the pachyderm, but the railroad sued Barnum and Bailey for the damage done by the derailment, and the two entrepreneurs had to watch receipts for months to see if the death of Jumbo had done them any harm. Later they were able to see that it had, indirectly: while they were going through an appropriate period of mourning, the five Ringling Brothers took the opportunity to pirate acts and book cities on Barnum and Bailey’s usual tour.

  Jenny died the next spring. The world was shocked, but not Barnum, who had been prepared by Otto. The previous winter, Jenny had gotten sick in London and had not recovered after months of warm weather on the Riviera. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, and there was a movement afoot at once to have her honored, the first woman ever, in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  From New York, Barnum issued a statement in which he tried to capture the entire nation’s sense of loss. A quarter-century later, Americans still talked of how Jenny Lind had captured their hearts. Girls were still being named for her, so many that Jenny remained one of the most popular names for girls in the United States.