Eleven
It will surprise no one that boredom is the greatest, the most contagious evil in the show business. When it overtakes a talker or a showman, the audience is lost. It is the same with a performer, except that in my experience, given time, a bored performer is less likely than a showman to change her occupation. Instead we devise strategies for enduring it.
At the beginning of my career I was sunk in melancholy. No action was required of me to fulfill my role as a display, and so I lost great pockets of time when it simply wasn’t efficient to remain attentive to my surroundings. At first my mind went in circles around the absurdity of my profession and the endless sequence of ridiculous faces and exclamations people made at me. This was exhausting, of course, so I developed a method wherein I simply put myself on a repeating loop of smile, nod, fold hands, acknowledge the audience, turn, unfold hands, nod, smile. Thus separated from my surroundings, I peered into my own cabinets of memory and examined everything I found. The problem, though, was that after I had done this (and I spent many months at it) it was done. Through excessive repetition, I petrified my own life. Images of my home and my family lost all interest, even to me, the only person to whom they shouldn’t. That was what depressed me. So as an antidote, I attempted to reanimate memory through conversation with the dead or those otherwise lost to me.
During my first week in Barnum’s American Museum, I familiarized myself with the mummy and the rest of the collection in my gallery. I was grateful that my booth, still under construction, was near the balcony and the band, because the pianist played exquisitely. If he had not, the location would probably have been unbearable. I grew accustomed to eating my meals on the roof; the chef was gracious to all the performers and supplied me with unlimited hot water for soaking my feet. He even gave me a metal basin big enough to immerse both my legs up to the knees.
“It doesn’t fit in the ovens,” he said. “It’s useless to me. Take it.”
On my sixth day of work, I met the pianist formally. He appeared as disheveled as he had been during the gallows parade, with a thin, white-flecked beard on his chin. He was a perpetually startled sort of man, vaguely ill equipped for the roughness of the world around him. His close-set eyes darted all around as he introduced himself as Thomas Willoughby, and then awkwardly asked my permission to visit the beluga whale on the fifth floor.
“My permission?” I laughed. “Do I look like Phineas T. Barnum to you?”
“I’ve been waiting to ask him, but apparently he is still away. I thought, since you lived up there … maybe there are no visitors allowed. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“Go ahead! I don’t care. You might want to ask the Indians, though. They’re sharing the gallery with the whale.”
“You think it really might be all right?” Thomas looked directly at me for the first time. His hair appeared to suffer from excessive static electricity; it floated like an undersea plant. “It really is an extraordinary beast,” he asserted before striding back toward the balcony.
After a week of walking among the museum visitors in Barnum’s establishment, and standing in my stall, I settled into my usual patterns. I passed into the mental arena where I live much of my life, where one figure, emerging from the dusk of memory, dissolves into another and the doorway of my childhood home in Pictou, Nova Scotia, could lead to my old room above the saloon in Montreal. The only continuous thread in this tapestry was the certainty that I will continue to be the abhorrence that I’ve always been.
One afternoon near the end of my second week of work, I was lulled by the coy repetitions of a sonata breezing in from the balcony. My mind conjured an image of Beebe the usher, and I could not keep away his inevitable shadow-selves, the spectral composite of Men, collected over the course of my thirty-four years into one ringing echo, which then arose in my mind.
Out of this mnemonic throng, my father emerged first: On one side, he stands over me as I sit reading on the hearth. He gives me his tired smile and hands me the rabbit-skin gloves he spent all Sunday stitching. He can no longer look me in the eye. You could build a barn with all the books you’ve read. And there he is again, walking away from our house with the first promoter who came to our door. Unfortunately, he did not walk far enough away to hide his outstretched palm and the money that filled it.
Close behind my father came the boys from my childhood, but they are a short and expected story leading directly to the slingshot-flung rock that left a scar on my right shoulder blade. I can’t remember their faces and now I tend to think of them not as people but as a small, strong force behind my joy at leaving home seventeen years ago.
The next apparition came forward dusting off his lapel and straightening his cravat. He was old enough to be Beebe’s father, I shuddered to think. I’d long ago given up trying to stop the encounters among the figments of my mind. If I had, they would insist on returning to the fore until they made the connection they wanted. So I let Mr. Ramsay, hawk-nosed and elegant in his rimless spectacles, approach Beebe and, as I knew he would, straighten the younger man’s usher’s cap.
Mr. Ramsay, who had been my manager until one month ago, made a home for me in his Yorkville row house, where he lived with his elderly aunt. He gave me the largest bedroom, even had a bed custom-made. I had become accustomed to an itinerant life, moving from hotel to hotel and town to town, so I loved that room. His own bedroom was next to mine; we even had an adjoining closet, though he took great pains to demonstrate that his access door had been nailed shut. For peace of mind, he said.
Mr. Ramsay also shifted me from an exotic mode of presentation to what he called an ennobled one. Instead of Athena the Goddess, or Anoo, the South American Amazon, I became Anabelina Swann, Countess of the Hebrides. Mr. Ramsay taught me to mimic a unique derivation of the British accent, and he told me stories of the Hebrides Isles, where exceedingly fine wool and tea were made. He even obtained samples of these products and put them for sale after my performances. He had a silk gown and a fine wool shawl made for me, and I performed recitations not only of my local history but of English poetry as well. The ennobled mode, said Mr. Ramsay, is not at the whim of whatever scientific exploration happens to be the fashion. American Anglophilia, he declared, will never wane.
Unsurprisingly, I grew smug and comfortable in my new role. Months of reciting Donne and Shakespeare lifted my spirit. I enjoyed a period of singular scorn: for my audiences, for other performers. As embarrassing as it now is, through repetition and perhaps isolation, I began to believe my fabricated history.
Each evening Mr. Ramsay and I sat late in his library, drinking sherry and discussing the day’s audience or the industry’s latest trends. It is always best, he said, with his spectacles reflecting the fireplace glow, to take advantage of people’s aspirations. To amplify their own desire to move up in the world. The show business wasn’t about the mystery of unknown lands; it was about the mysteries of the known elite. Our evenings together in the velvet-draped library seemed to belong to a different world, a world in which I loved poetry and spoke fervently of it while Mr. Ramsay nodded his head and gazed into the fire, or at me.
At the end of these evenings I ascended to my room, with Mr. Ramsay waiting courteously until I was safely shut in before he made his way up. Then I would listen while he opened drawers, lifted out his pajamas, I imagined, setting his spectacles on the nightstand and unbuttoning his clothes. After a few months I had determined to see all of this for myself.
I recited Shakespeare’s sonnets. I lingered at the end of the evening, complaining that the nights were so long. It did not take much for him to see my intention. I allowed him to accompany me up the stairs, then to kiss my hand.
“You are the most introspective woman I’ve ever met,” he said as we stood on the landing outside our two bedroom doors.
“But this does not surprise you, surely?”
“No. But observing you awakens a certain desire,” he said, taking a step closer. “To bring you outside
of yourself, to give you, of all people, a sense of wonder. But the only way I can imagine to accomplish this,” he went on, removing his spectacles and putting them in his waistcoat pocket, “is by a purely conventional, although admittedly ancient and successful, mode.”
“Oh?” I didn’t want him to lose his nerve, so I slouched my spine, which brought my height down a few inches.
“The body, Ana. Through the body.”
He achieved this goal with the first touch of his lips against my collarbone. I was not a stranger to physical intimacy; there had been a gymnast, and then a tall boy from Cooper’s Medicine Show. But aquiline Mr. Ramsay, with his solemn, graceful manner and his velvety library, made my heart rise with a delicious new expectation.
“You can’t know, Ana,” he murmured, his lips moving across my décolletage, “the effect you have on the men who see you.”
“I know very well the effect. Imagine if I were beautiful.”
I led him into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. He kissed me, and I relished how his prodigious nose pressed against mine. He began to unhook the buttons down the side of my dress.
“Why did you take the mirror down from the wall, Ana?”
“Do you really need to ask?”
“I didn’t know you disliked the sight of yourself.”
“It’s not that. It just reminds me that I ought to charge myself admission. That’s not right, is it?”
“No, no, it’s not. Come here.” He slid his hands inside the dress and felt the smooth, hot cotton of my shift. I helped him off with his coat. I wanted to see him out of it, and out of the pointed collar, out of his sleeves. Then we were laughing and gawking, him at my broad expanses, I at his narrow waist, his chest covered in white down. With his shiny pate and regal nose he struck me as a newly hatched bird, flailing in the nest, trying to fathom the size of its mother.
Next morning we smiled into our tea, trying to pay attention to his aunt’s comments on the morning newspaper. Mr. Ramsay had not stayed long in my room; we did not expose ourselves fully, or otherwise overreach our fragile intimacy. But that evening I went to bed early, and he tapped on the door. When he came in, he stopped long enough to hang the large, gilt-framed mirror back on the wall.
“I want you to appreciate your own beauty, Ana.”
He was so adamant that I indulged him. And soon he was in the bed with me, navigating the folds of my nightgown. I discovered that my hands could almost encircle his waist, and if he moved up far enough to kiss my lips, his feet would tickle my knees. He discovered ways in which I was five times stronger than he; he discovered my breasts, and groaned and suckled and his taut, curved penis poked my belly like a stick.
The next night we grew bolder. He wanted me to see myself as he did. He left two lamps burning and maneuvered me so that we could see ourselves in the gilt mirror. He lifted my nightgown over my head and I lay naked. I did not tell him that this display excited only him; I had seen myself a thousand times, of course. He leaned over the bed to caress me, running his hands up and down my legs, across my belly, dipping his head to kiss my neck, my arms, my lips.
“Now you,” I whispered, reaching for his shirt buttons. But he wouldn’t let me.
“Not yet,” he said, and continued running his hands all over me, no doubt feeling me soften. I closed my eyes. He put a hand on each of my knees and slowly spread my legs apart. And then, from very close by, from somewhere just behind my right shoulder, someone coughed. It wasn’t me; I was sure of that. And when I looked at Mr. Ramsay, he was already horrified, staring back at me. I leapt up from the bed and lunged for my nightgown. Holding it in front of me, I turned in the direction of the sound and saw a shadow move underneath the closet door and I flung it open. Inside, a man with a terrible look on his face was just getting to his feet. He was dressed in a fashionable suit, a wealthy man. He stumbled backward with his hands up in front of his chest. He made no sound as he disappeared into the closet. I saw a small hole cut into the door about four inches from the bottom. An eyehole. I followed the man, pushing past my dresses in the closet, and emerged in Mr. Ramsay’s room. The man was already gone. I stood there, holding my nightgown to cover my front, looking at Mr. Ramsay’s small bureau, where a basin, pitcher, and shaving brush sat neatly on a linen cloth next to a small pile of bent nails.
“Ana —” Mr. Ramsay came in through the proper door. Like the man in the closet, he held his hands out as if to stop me, though I had not moved. “Let me —”
“How much?”
“Ana, just —”
“How much?” I turned on him.
“Really, Ana. If I thought you would —” In two steps I had him by the arm. My nightgown fell to the ground. I took hold of his other arm and I lifted him into the air. His head hit my chest and I lifted him higher, shaking him now. I let my hands slide up to his neck. I could kill him easily. “How much money did he pay?” I jerked him from one side to the other. His eyes nearly popped out of his head and I wished they would.
“One hundred dollars,” he whispered.
I lifted him so high he was level with my face. “You hung that mirror just right, didn’t you? Probably before I even moved in.”
He grew redder and redder in the face, opening and closing his mouth, and uselessly prying at my hands.
I let him drop to the ground, where he crumpled. “I’ll be gone by morning.” I was already thinking of a steamer and the gray syrupy waters of Ontario widening the gulf between us, and the possibility of my body sinking into a place with no more breath, no more me, ever. Or else New York. “You can leave the one hundred dollars on the table in the library for me.”
Twelve
I entered the world an average size; my mother, a missionary’s wife, held me easily in her arms on the deck of the ship that carried us to the jungled shore of South America, which was to be our home for as long as the Lord willed it. Safely under God’s wing, we had no idea what terrors we’d soon encounter, and what black magic would be incanted upon us.
Or perhaps:
My father guided my mother down the gangway onto the rough-hewn pier that led into the jungle with one arm around her shoulders and the other gently touching her heavy belly. They were relieved that the baby had not arrived on the ship; little did they know that this gestation would be the longest the world had ever known; the birth of such a monstrous baby would be so gruesome that my father, the most devout soul in South America, would lose his faith in God. At my mother’s funeral he gave me to the black nurse who had attended the birth-murder. It was she whom I would call mother, and, after the mission burned and my father’s head rotted on a wooden stake beside the ruins of his church, it was with her that I fled to my second life in the jungles of Surinam.
Horror sells, but maybe this was too much? I put down my pencil and rubbed my eyes. I should just hire someone to write it. I could speak to Barnum’s ad man. What was his name? He could recommend someone, and I would be rid of this terrible task. The True Life History nagged at me incessantly. Without a story, however full it was of nonsense, I was just an oversized body on display.
I sat on the north edge of the rooftop garden, half hidden in the shadow of the kitchen. Under low clouds that threatened rain, about a hundred museum patrons wandered the rooftop promenade. An umbrella vendor would soon appear, and some of the restaurant staff had already started to unfold one of the large tents that could stand over a section of tables. A crowd had gathered around a white-suited juggler wearing a harlequin mask, whom I could tell was a woman. She juggled well; her seven gold balls cascaded in a perfect circle. She was probably French. I scanned her audience, wondering if she worked with a disguised accomplice who gently robbed the enchanted crowd.
My first act on earth was to destroy my mother. By the time I could read I knew that most of literature’s lessons and pleasures did not apply to me. By the time I reached Womanhood, my punishment was fully realized: I was eight feet tall.
A shadow crept over my
paper, and I covered the scrawl with my arm.
“May I?” Thomas Willoughby, slouching and spectacularly unkempt, gestured to the seat next to mine.
“By all means. I’m just waiting for my lunch to arrive.”
Thomas sat heavily and crossed his grubby hands in front of him. “What are you writing, a letter?”
“Just a story to sell at my booth. About my so-called origins.”
“Fabricated?”
“Of course. But I’m tired of it.” I folded the paper and placed it under my water glass. “Tell me something about your origins, Thomas. Did your parents set you aside at birth to become a prodigy, or were you driven to it by some mysterious, possibly divine force?”
“Nothing like that.” Thomas Willoughby smiled. I had heard that he was widely known in Europe some years ago, and even here in New York, quite recently. I still had no idea why he was working for Barnum.
“I didn’t start playing until I was eleven, which is quite late. I would never have come to it on my own. One of our neighbors played, and it was because of her that I learned. Mrs. Corbett.” Thomas smiled coyly and tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. It appeared that he was feigning shyness, which made me smile.
Above us, the overcast thickened. Museum visitors strolled among the flagpoles and potted trees, their shawls wrapped tight and jackets buttoned against the breeze that wanted to blow their hats toward the harbor.
“My mother and father didn’t own a piano. Neither did Mrs. Corbett, actually. I would meet her at the church. She was a widow. I was in love with her.”
“Of course.” With his rabbity nervousness, I wouldn’t have taken Thomas for a storyteller. Two plates of chicken salad arrived for us.
“A widow, but still young,” I goaded.
“Not very young.”
“But pretty.”
“Not so pretty. I adored her! She paced the church while I played. We were the only two people in existence. You know how it is.”
Among the Wonderful Page 8
