She Stands Up Again
Seven
I had to laugh at the room, with its too-small chair and an oval mirror hung the height of my chest. It was a new room nested inside an old building, with a drift of sawdust in one corner and sap pearling from the walls. A window, thankfully, but not facing Broadway. And the ridiculous bed, like a toy to me.
It’s a bed like any other. I knew it would break from the moment I saw it, so why did I even lie down? I can hear your voice even now. I can see the three of us in the kitchen by the stove, all of us laughing, you into your hands, me with no sound, and he with his mouth hanging open. We were still unsure: How had it happened? Where did I get it? What would happen next? I could touch my hand to the ceiling. Mornings, I woke with my legs hanging farther off the edge of the bed, my bones already a network of pain. You said if the bed’s too short, just take off the footboard! We used it for kindling. I will do the same thing here.
You would grab me by the waist with no warning, as if there was some urgency to your message, as if I didn’t have my whole life to understand what you said, to learn and hate your lesson again and again. You’re a mirror, Ana, for people to see themselves. And he would come up saying, Be prepared. Think ahead. Have what you will need. As if we control the world with foresight. As if you would have me believe the whole thing was planned. Do not look for yourself in others, Ana. But they will see themselves in you. I wanted to lunge out and take both of you in my arms. Already I was big enough to do that, big enough to know you were afraid for me. Here is the hammer and there is the bed. I am prepared. I have what I will need.
You would stand here, your eyes alight, peering up at me, proud that I don’t depend on the world for sustenance or for answers. But look at me. Just look. I am alone in this ridiculous room with a hammer in my hand, talking to my dead mother about broken things.
I could do nothing about the bed. I used crates to hold up the foot, but I knew it would crash down again. I had spent the day in alternating bouts of energy, unpacking, pacing, and fuming. Both my jars of sea salts had broken among my clothes so I could not even soak my feet. The train journey from Rochester had rattled my spine to such an extent that I felt each vertebra was about to pull free of the others. Sitting was no relief, nor was lying down, even if the bed had not broken. Dull reverberations echoed through the halls of my body. Doors slammed into my nerves, windows crashed together in gritty bone-gratings. Thank God my crates of Cocadiel’s Remedy hadn’t broken during the journey. I broke the seal on one of the cobalt bottles and held it between my thumb and forefinger to drink the bitter tonic.
At times throughout the day I doubted my decision to work without a manager. But each time this thought fluttered up, I experienced the subsequent, undeniable certainty that the way I had chosen was the only way I could proceed. At least with my career and my sanity, my life, intact. There was another way forward, the one that the sluggish waters of Lake Ontario had offered. But for now I continued to work. I busied myself with some triviality before the memory of my recent debacle, the events that had led me to Barnum’s museum, could wedge itself into view. I could do things differently now, I reassured myself. But what, exactly? I was in business for myself only, with no one taking away what I earned. But what changes would I make?
I was saved from this paradox by a crisp knock at my door. When I opened it, I beheld a familiar sight: a woman, her prodigious eyebrows furrowed, standing with her hands on her hips. There is always a hirsute woman, whether you join a one-wagon show or the most grandiose collection of exotica. This one had her beard coiled neatly in a net that hung by loops from her ears.
“Please tell me you play whist,” she said.
“I do, as a matter of fact.”
“Then life is bearable.”
She extended a hand covered in long black hairs. “I’m Maud Kraike.”
Maud was forty years old and wound tight as a fiddle string. In the two minutes I spent talking with her she insisted we’d been in a show together seven years earlier in Halifax, and that I’d worn a medieval princess costume with a conical, veil-draped hat. I had no recollection of this, but it could have been true. She had arrived from Niblo’s Garden two weeks earlier, and despite the energetic recitation of her past, it held nothing new for either one of us. We did not need proof that our lives ran closely parallel.
“We still need a fourth. I got Mr. Olrick. But the Chinaman will never do. Never play whist with a Chinaman.”
“I see,” I said, not seeing at all. I was suddenly weary. Or, more likely, I had returned, after a short lapse, to the fact that I’d been weary for quite a long while.
When Maud had gone I lay down on the collapsed bed, propping my feet on a crate. My spine relaxed slightly, and I closed my eyes, hoping to fall asleep before it found its next complaint.
You came to me every night, before I left you. Before you left me. You leaned over me before I slept. You stroked my face with the back of your hand. Ana, you said. Ana. We named you for Anastasia, your grandmother. And do you know why, what your name means? Why? What? Tell me. It means She Stands Up Again.
Eight
In Jones’ Medicine Show they put me in a bizarre patchwork of furs over a chiton and girdle. They gave me a wooden shield and a helmet and called me Athena. More recently, during my time with Mr. Ramsay, he nearly always embellished me in some manner, usually with a high ladies’ top hat with a wedge of lace draped across the brim. Near the end of my tenure with him he instructed me to wear a horrible costume that he had made at his own expense: a girl’s picnic dress, all yellow daisies, ribbons, and a white lace pinafore. A walking juxtaposition, he said. As if I wasn’t one already.
There would be no costume here. The taxidermist had delivered a letter from Barnum addressed to me. No costume, he said. Unless I wanted one. Wanted one. But speaking with the audience was part of my contract. The letter included no details about advertisement, when to expect my pay, and nothing about merchandise. Near the bottom of the page, though, one stipulation: For between three and five hours each day, Miss Swift will stroll among the visitors. For the remainder, there will be a booth in Gallery Three on the second floor. His intention was to surprise the crowd with an exhibit outside its case. I will disconcert them first, and subsequently please them.
There would be no costume and so in the morning I put on my blue ombré dress and the gray shawl over my shoulders. A mist from the harbor gave the impression of frost, but the morning was strangely warm, much warmer than March at home. I tidied my hair in the small oval mirror. What will they see? Shoulders wider than their fathers’. Strides wider than they can jump. A hand strong enough to lift them off the ground, big enough to encircle their necks. Breasts they will imagine when they get home. A face. Yes, up there, what about the face? As white and expressionless as fog.
I picked up my bottle of Cocadiel’s Remedy from the small table and drank deeply.
By the time I had walked across the beluga gallery and down the many flights of stairs, the remedy had numbed the revolting pain in my legs, lightening my burden in its usual way.
At nine in the morning a sizable crowd already roamed the halls. I walked as slowly as I could bear. If I was to walk for three hours I needed a slow rhythm to sustain me. Also new shoes. In the past my manager would arrange for a cobbler to visit me. I worried over how I would find one in the city. I feigned a charitable countenance, entered the portrait gallery, and listened as conversations trailed off in my wake.
The very tall, like the very beautiful, become accustomed to a certain range of response from those around them. Whereas the beautiful woman maneuvers in an arena of unprovoked deference, envy, illusion, and lechery, I remain mostly surrounded by the many incarnations of fear. I am an amusement in the marketplace, but delight is not usually the emotion I provoke. There is only one element of my work that has remained interesting to me over time, and that is the infinitely variable expression of surprise.
A majority of
people respond to my presence in familiar ways: a widening of the eyes, of course, and the related eyebrow movement; an audible intake of breath (I have never seen an exhale in these instances) that may or may not become a vocalization; some stutter in bodily movement, most often stopping completely or backing up, and occasionally an actual leap backward.
Apart from these generalities, the average member of the public has one or two involuntary responses that, frankly, would surprise them if they could see them as I do. In Halifax I encountered a lady who, when she saw me as Athena, began to violently pull her own hair and did not stop until her escort shielded her from my sight. One fellow seemed to take no notice of me at all. But as he stood with the others looking into my booth he suffered a delayed reaction: He crossed his left leg tightly over his right and leaned forward, twisted as a pretzel, as if he was overcome with the need to urinate, pointing at me while his hat toppled off his head.
And then there’s my favorite kind of surprise. It is that instance when a person tries his hardest not to show a change in expression at all. This particular, temporary flatness in the eye and stiffening of the neck may be the only symptoms, but they are enough to give him away. I find this response strangely heartbreaking: as if by denying a reaction he is denying reality itself in a small, futile attempt at self-protection in an uncertain world. Then there are always the yelps, the clutching at friends’ hands, the jump back, the handclap, the run away, the simple laugh, the blush, the hoot, the faint, and the horror.
I passed a group of three friends lounging on benches. They seemed accustomed to the portrait gallery, as if they met often there. The men — boys, really, they must not be older than twenty — wore wool frock coats and striped vests, one with a brown umbrella for a cane. This one stood with one leg propped on the bench, leaning over his knee with his hat tipped slightly over his forehead. His friend, skinny and red-haired, produced peanuts from one vest pocket, shelled and ate them, and deposited the shells in his other pocket.
The woman sat on another bench. She wore a pale coffee-and-cream-colored dress and cape and spoke excitedly to the boys. She was so caught up in the conversation that she’d failed to notice that one of her slippers had slid off her foot. It was as if they hovered around a table in their parlor instead of a wooden bench in a museum. None of them saw me when I passed. How could they not see me?
“He’s just wrong if he thinks he can stop it using the city government,” the girl with the fallen slipper was saying. “Just wrong.”
“Are you back on Mayor Harper, Bitsy? Why don’t you find something else to talk about?” This from the one with the umbrella.
“Because he’s about to fail at the job, and he’s had it for only two weeks.”
I slowed down. They must see me by now. They did not.
“He wants to stop liquor and immigration using the same method, and it’s simply not going to work. It’s insulting,” the woman huffed. “A Temperance man, for Christ’s sake. That’s not what this city needs. Doesn’t he know that a public ban will —”
“Are you saying the Irish are like whiskey?” said the one eating peanuts.
“I’m simply saying that if Harper encourages the dismissal of immigrant labor, the only thing it’s going to cause are riots and more illegal —”
“The only thing that’ll stop the Irish is cholera,” said the peanut-eater. They laughed.
“Cholera didn’t stop you, did it, Colin?” the other boy said.
“No, sir. I wasn’t going back to Dublin just because of some trifling disease, was I?”
I stole looks over my shoulder as I walked farther on but the friends had not looked up. Now I was disappointed, and angry at myself for it. I paced down the other side of the gallery, where two raggedy children squealed and pointed at me.
“The only reason Colin didn’t lose his job” — the boy was waving his umbrella as I approached them again — “is because he already had money. Harper doesn’t care where you were born, as long as you’ve got it.”
“I don’t care what you say. This platform will never —” and then, finally, they saw me. “Well! At least someone can see the portraits they’ve hung up so high,” said the woman.
The boy with the umbrella straightened, off guard for only an instant before he tipped his hat and gave a little bow. “Good morning, miss.”
I nodded, suddenly overcome. By what? Something that made the natural distance between us stretch threefold. I tried to smile. Was this simple shyness, the same thing I would feel if I could look them straight in the eye?
“You weren’t here last Saturday, were you?” the boy went on. I shook my head. “You do work here, miss?”
“Yes. I’ve just arrived.” All of them nodded. I took a step back. “From Canada.”
“We adore Canada,” said the woman. “I’m Elizabeth Crawford. Welcome to New York.”
“Thank you.”
I said my name and wanted to say more but I blushed like a girl. Why? For what? I could easily have stopped, asked or told them something. Anything. Easily. Instead, I was grateful for my assigned task and I moved on.
Nine
After three hours I returned to my room. No one was monitoring my movements, so who would care if I left the public sphere for a while, to rest a little and then take my lunch? I had the annoying sensation that someone was observing me as I made my rounds, but this was the result, undoubtedly, of the myriad eyes of museum visitors.
When I reached the hall on the fifth floor, I saw an open door two doors beyond mine. It wouldn’t kill me to be neighborly, would it?
It was a bigger apartment than mine, and a carpet with a distracting geometric design dominated it. Several suitcases filled with clothes were strewn about the place. I wondered what would appear as a feminine voice grew louder, but the woman who appeared from a small adjoining room appeared normal on first glance. She stopped when she saw me. She had never seen someone as tall as me. How could she be here, moving into this museum, and still be surprised? We looked at each other. Her mouth opened slightly. Her eyes: How dare you frighten me? She didn’t speak.
“I’m Ana Swift.” I held my ground. People find my hands monstrous and I never offer to touch others, so I kept them at my sides.
We were the same age. Hers was a narrow face, smooth and curved like a cake of soap worn down in the middle. Eyes set high and close under trembling black curls. A small mouth my presence had soured.
“Are you a new one? You must be.” The woman didn’t come closer. “They’re coming like a plague, for goodness’ sake.” Her eyes darted uncontrollably. Behind her were full bookcases and velvet chairs. They appeared to have been living there for some time, and yet there was no outward sign of her purpose in a museum of curiosities, unless she was an acrobat or had another invisible talent. But she didn’t have that look about her. She was a woman with things: tablecloths, porcelain, and a portrait on the wall. “They didn’t tell me this would happen.”
“That what would happen?”
“Mama —” A girl with a ridiculous blue satin bow around her head entered the room behind the woman. “Oh!” Eyes widening, hand rising to her mouth.
“They’re still arriving,” the woman murmured. But the girl rushed forward, tripping over her own feet and quickly regaining balance.
“I’m Caroline.” Breathless, the girl craned up.
“Ana Swift.” The girl was as tall as my waist, probably ten or twelve years old.
“I’m so glad to meet you.” The girl gave a little bow. “Where did you come from?”
“Pictou, Nova Scotia, originally.”
“Would you like to sit down?” Caroline waved at the tiny chairs.
Her mother took a step forward as if to stop her, but the girl gave her a stern look, and she wilted. Now the woman was not only unsettled by my presence but also embarrassed to be following her child’s example. “Well, yes. Do come in. I’m Mrs. Charity Barnum.”
The chair was not sturdy enough;
I sat on the edge of the love seat, supporting myself partially with my legs. It is my usual custom in these situations to ensure that my full weight never rests on other people’s furniture. Mrs. Barnum went for tea, and Caroline sat across from me.
“You’re very tall.” The girl walked to the chair I’d rejected and sat down primly.
“Oh, you can do better than that, can’t you?”
She swung her legs delightedly. She seemed no different from other children, with her bold, somewhat refreshing manner. I meet at least as many children as adults and I’ve come to depend on them to simply blurt out one of several variations on the sentence Caroline had just uttered.
“It must be strange. There are two others. Tall, like you. One’s from China. They live next door to each other, down the hall. The two last rooms. They arrived on the very same day. Tuesday, I think it was. But it was the first time they’d met.”
“Mr. Barnum is your father?”
“Yes. We moved into the museum a month ago, but Mother refuses to unpack her things.” Caroline gestured to the suitcases with her foot. “We couldn’t keep our apartment.”
“Why not?”
Caroline leaned toward me. “My sister’s sick,” she whispered, her smile fading as she pointed to the back room. “In there. It costs money. My mother” — she leaned forward even more — “is going to have another baby. But Papa is going to come back with a lot of money.”
Mrs. Barnum returned with a pot of tea and cups. Shakily, she set down the tray and sat down herself.
“Well,” she said. She glanced somewhere below my collarbone before looking at her lap.
Among the Wonderful Page 6
