And she continued to be a shining example to all American womanhood of character and behavior—the ideal. Jenny Lind was one of those rare individuals, Barnum said, whose presence on earth changed everything.
By then Barnum was beginning to understand what she had tried to tell him during their last visit in the Cotswolds. He was prepared for death, too—serenely satisfied and unafraid. He had made his point in life. There were theaters and shows and fairs and celebrations everywhere. People like Chang and Eng could not only make a living, they could get rich; and if Barnum had not completely solved their problem, at least he had made a start. Tom Thumb was an immortal, the smallest man in the history of the world. And Barnum had invented advertising, the only way one human being could get the attention of everybody else in this modern age.
By the end of his life, Barnum was pleased to note, everybody knew these things about him. It was time to curtail his activities. Bailey ran the circus and Nancy screened the interviews and supplicants. Barnum still wrote. He wrote circus programs and publicity, he revised his autobiography still again, and then he got the newspapers to let him rewrite the obituaries they had prepared for him. It was another laugh, extolling himself so shamelessly. By then Nancy, who had fallen in love with him a dozen times over in the sixteen years they were together, was herself old enough to enjoy the joke. For a long time their marriage had been an old man and a young girl, the latter comforting the former in his declining years, but then, as so often happens, one night the young girl took the initiative and went to the old man’s room. She never left.
What Jenny had tried to tell him was that he had taught her the underlying importance of being happy, and that the lesson was always ready for relearning. He had learned it himself and forgotten, only to have to learn it all over again. In the process of his discovery, over all the decades of his life, he had taken the sorriest bits and pieces around him and fashioned them into something transitory but worthwhile, something that had changed the quality of life itself for all humanity. Barnum knew exactly what he had done. He had invented fun.
About the Author
Roderick Thorp is the author of The Detective, Rainbow Drive, and Nothing Lasts Forever, the basis for the movie Die Hard. He has worked as a private detective and done extensive crime reporting, including a twenty-one-part series on cocaine traffic in Southern California, which was published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Thorp’s other novels include Into the Forest, Dionysus, Slaves, The Circle of Love, Westfield, Jenny and Barnum, Devlin, and River.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt of “Norma” by Bellini, Copyright 1951 Capitol Records, Inc. Used by permission.
Copyright © 1981 by Roderick Thorp
Cover design by Kat Lee
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8092-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Jenny and Barnum Page 40
