The tribesman stayed in the doorway.
“Well. Here you are, then. Barnum will be back soon, so they say. Until then, please eat your meals with the other performers on the roof. There’s a restaurant up there.” Guillaudeu pointed a finger toward the ceiling.
“Well, good-bye.” He squeezed past the man, whose body exuded the deepest musk. As he passed back through the gallery, the Indians erupted into laughter over the beluga’s antics.
When he returned to the office, Guillaudeu ignored Mr. Archer. He went straight to Cuvier’s Natural History and flipped through the index until he found the volume concerned with the races of man. It was a slimmer volume than the others, and Guillaudeu could not recall ever opening it before.
Of the Mongolians, Cuvier pointed out: The religion of these benighted tribes is that of the Dalai Lama, in which the people are held under the entire subjection of priests and jugglers. Guillaudeu snorted. Jugglers?
Yes, he was quite certain that he’d never ventured into the ethnological chapters. He’d had no need to consult the anatomist on the behaviors of man. He knew Cuvier to be scientifically scrupulous and often playful in his descriptions of the lower kingdoms. He’d always enjoyed these touches of humor. And yes, several of the snakes cataloged here had downright ominous descriptions. But this scornful tone was new.
He scanned sections on Batu Pigmies, Saharan giants, Esquimaux, and the Aborigines of the American continent.
He was momentarily satisfied when he found an etching that perfectly illustrated the tribesman’s facial structure, his tufted hair, and even the deeply creased face: The tribes of Australia have already been noted for their ignorance, their wretchedness, as well as their moral and intellectual debasement. Their tribes are not numerous, have little communication with each other, and are sunk into a state of almost hopeless barbarism.
Perplexed, he verified that Cuvier was the sole author of the text; the frontispiece even contained the anatomist’s elegant declaration that the study of nature was the study of God’s Divine Plan. Guillaudeu stared at the image of the Australian tribesman. For Cuvier, could the races of man lie somewhere outside the realm of nature? Could this be possible? Didn’t God’s Plan include everything that crept, swam, flew, and walked upon the earth? How could Cuvier rationally say otherwise?
The degradations on the page were evidence of a fatal clouding of scientific observation. It was a betrayal so sudden and thorough that Guillaudeu’s impulse was to tear out the pages and pretend he’d never seen them.
Cuvier had ignored the fundamental principle of scientific observation. Including one’s emotional conclusions and personal judgment in a scientific manual was an offense of the highest degree. Published under a different title, in a book devoted to such things, Cuvier’s thoughts on primitive man would be legitimate, but this? He stared at the pages of his beloved volume, no longer reading but unable to turn away from the columns of type that had provided him shelter, structure, and guidance. Was nothing in this world reliable? Would his abandonment be complete? His erasure total? Guillaudeu was glad that Archer, absorbed in his own entertainments, did not see him slowly close the book.
He gathered the volume in his arms and left the office. For once, the obnoxious surge of the crowded entry hall had no effect on him. He walked quickly through the waxworks gallery, but instead of going upstairs using the back stairwell, he unlocked the small door next to it and descended all the way to the cellar of the museum.
He hadn’t been down there for years, ever since he’d had to bring the black bear specimen down to the furnace. It had become infested by moth eggs, and the only way to avoid a widespread danger to the collection was to bake the eggs off the bear’s fur using the furnace’s heat.
A new sound clanged and hummed from some dark region. He found matches on the stone ledge and lit the single dusty lamp where it hung on a hook at the bottom of the stairs. He held it before him as if he now entered a dark forest. He walked toward the sound until he came to an old metal door with a brand-new lock hanging from the latch. The banging and whirring was so loud, the door vibrated. There was a machine at work on the other side, and after a few moments of standing in the lamp’s weak light, his brain rattling thoroughly, he realized that it was the work of this machine that kept the beluga alive. What else could it be but the pump he’d heard the staff whispering about, that Barnum had built to bring harbor water all the way to the fifth floor?
He went to the farthest corner of the dingy room and wrapped Cuvier in an oily rag he found on the dirt floor under his feet. A deep crack branched in the wall of the building’s foundation; he shoved Cuvier inside at the widest point, at the height of his chest. Guillaudeu wiped his forehead with one trembling hand: By God, here’s where you belong.
The tribesman sits in the corner of his room at the top of the museum, unable to stop the persistent rocking motion that upsets his balance when he moves and also when he tries to be still. He rests his head against the wall. In his body he holds eight months of the sea’s constant pulling. Each time he closes his eyes he returns to the hull of the ship.
In the beginning he was sick: first with grief, then with scurvy, and finally with boredom. He spent each night deafened by the sound of one hundred and fifty snoring men and each day dazed by their kicks, wishing first to kill and then to die. He clung to, and soon lost, the patterns of land and life that had guided him for fifty years: the shadow of the stone cliffs lengthening over the grasslands during dry seasons and shading the mirrored floodwater in the wet; hot wind blowing from the south, the people with their faces turned into it, eyes closed, smiling.
In the hull he floated day after day, adrift upon the deepest, most terrible fluid. He felt the vast distance of compressed, liquid space beneath him and clenched his fists, enraged to be gliding over the back of this abyssal enemy. He held tight to memories of stone and flame, the crackle of the fire just there, proving all was as it should be as he slept in the home place with his ear to the ground. As the ship went on, the water washed it all away: The dry earth of the home place turned to thick mud, to silt, and finally melted into a swift-flowing river overrunning its bed, drowning the hearth flame, the sustaining fire. The substance and source of life was dissolving, disappearing into a terrible sea, the great eraser.
He did not believe he would live, and for a time he was not living at all, just lying in filth and tilting darkness. It was only when a man tried to take the small bundle he kept tied to his chest that he remembered he was alive. He fought the man. After that it was two months before he heard the sound of birds and considered the possibility that he might walk upon the earth again.
Fourteen
In the blue dark of earliest morning, shadows wavered across the far wall of Guillaudeu’s bedroom like reflections of water cast sideways. His wife sat straight-backed at the foot of the bed. He struggled to focus his eyes while she mumbled, her face obscured by a ribboned bonnet. With both hands, she rooted around in a basket, first pulling out a newspaper and then a small pumpkin. Every few seconds she stopped her mumbling to listen, head cocked to the side. Guillaudeu held his breath, frozen, until she resumed her search.
He lifted the covers and stood up. He took a step toward her. She cocked her head again, listening, but did not turn. With a thrill of anticipation, Guillaudeu dipped his hand into the pocket of his waistcoat. He pulled out his coiled measuring tape. In response, his wife held her arm straight out to the side. She still did not turn her head to look at him. Guillaudeu walked to her and measured the arm, not allowing his own hand to touch her wrist or her shoulder. Twenty and a half inches. I must remember. Must remember. He felt around in his other pocket for his pencil, but what he pulled out was a wriggling worm. He jerked it away. He knelt and rummaged among her skirts until he felt her legs. He found her patella and stretched the measuring cord down to her ankle. Seventeen inches exactly. She rose to her feet and he measured on, femur to humerus. Depth of body. Height at shoulder. She sto
od still with perfectly straight posture, which made his work easier.
The scene changed: Celia now lay upon the bed, her face still obscured by some unnatural shadow. He stood over her, rubbing his hands together. He would need more arsenic, much more salt, human glass eyes, and pounds of excelsior. He found the scalpel in his left waistcoat pocket. He reached out and sliced through the layer of lace at her collar.
Once she lay flayed from her clothing, her skin, webbed with veins and sagging in most places, was so delicate, like crumpled tissue. He would need all his skill to handle it. He stepped back from his wife’s prone body.
Before making the first incision, he must clearly visualize the finished specimen. It was this decisive view of the ultimate goal that led him unwavering from the messy beginning all the way through to the finished specimen. So he imagined Celia in her various familiar poses: behind her father’s bookselling counter with ringlets around her shoulders and that notebook she always had open in front of her, for her poetry. Celia turning toward the door as he returned from work, her smile and her calm or amused gaze. Celia asleep beside him all those years, even when she spent her afternoons with another man. Celia frowning at him over something or another, there always seemed to be something. Celia in the pale first throes of cholera. The images flashed before him faster and faster, and he could not alight on one long enough to consider it as her final position before another took its place. Faster and faster they came: Celia lying down with her head resting on a pillow stained with vomit. Celia as he first saw her, among the stacks of shelves in the bookshop. Celia turning away from him in disgust, halfway through their marriage. Celia in his office at the museum, holding her nose. Celia.
His wife rose slowly from the worktable. The pieces of her dress swung from her arms as she got to her feet. She now regarded him from inside the moldering bonnet. Hers was the face of Barnum’s hollow-eyed mermaid: papery gray skin framing empty eye sockets. A wasp emerged from one of them and buzzed straight toward his face. He awoke instantly, hands over his eyes and a fly bumping against the bedroom window. He jumped out of bed as if it were an open grave.
Fifteen
A lone sparrow perched on the glittering branch of the chandelier. It hopped a few paces, perhaps looking for food, and set the crystal ornaments swinging. It flew to the elaborately carved molding at the intersection of the theater’s walls and ceiling, hoping for better hunting there. But it stayed for only a moment before winging back across the gallery, this time alighting on the stage curtain, where it delivered a significant streak of white excrement.
Like the pit embedded in a gigantic fruit, the new theater was at the center of the museum. Before Barnum built it, the space had been a much smaller and plainer lecture hall. Education was important to John Scudder, and he had scheduled weekly presentations in the hall on topics that ranged from roses to osteology. It was during a lecture on the latter subject that Guillaudeu first heard the famous story of the brash young Cuvier, who declared that he could determine a creature’s entire skeletal structure by examining a single bone. There were reports from visiting natural philosophers, and demonstrations given by botanists who had returned from abroad with strange potted specimens and the remnants of New World fevers. The lecture hall had been one of Guillaudeu’s favorite places: In its straight-backed chairs he had traveled the world.
Barnum had raised the lecture hall’s ceiling a full story by demolishing three galleries on the third floor. He removed walls and added columns and support beams. This remarkable architectural feat became known throughout the city, and the museum staff had discussed it for weeks. Despite the reports, however, Guillaudeu had been reluctant to visit the new space. He held on to the idea of the old lecture hall even as crowds hurried past his office, bound for the new matinee performances. As a result of this delusion, he was not prepared for what he saw when he filed in, as instructed, with the rest of the museum employees.
The theater shimmered in layers of gilt and filigree. A newly built balcony hung over a sea of black velvet chairs, and the walls, covered in ivory damask, reflected globules of light from the chandelier. It was like being inside a monstrous jewel box, Guillaudeu imagined. He was uncomfortable and distracted by the dozens of employees he had never seen before, and by the way the theater contrasted so sharply with the academic décor of the rest of the museum. When he lost sight of the sparrow, he took a seat as quickly as he could. So quickly, in fact, that he sat directly behind the giantess and had to move over two seats just to see beyond her colossal shoulders.
Guillaudeu had not given Barnum’s human exhibits much thought. His path did not often cross with theirs, and he hoped the episode with the Australian tribesman was the single exception to this rule. He had never watched the acrobats, or observed any of the others in their booths or on the various stages where they showed themselves. As he watched the giantess lean down across a ridiculous distance to speak with the woman next to her, he could not help but think that these oddities belonged in the saloons, or at Niblo’s Garden. Such entertainment was properly displayed in the evening, under dim lighting, with the accompaniment of a jigger of whiskey and no pretense of educational merit.
But the tribesman. He wanted to alert one of them to his presence, and the giantess was the only one he knew by name.
“Miss Swift?” he offered.
Both women turned. He froze at the sight of the outlandish beard on the smaller woman’s face.
“I …,” he stuttered, averting his eyes. He had not seen her before. He wondered what else might be living on the fifth floor.
“Well?” said the giantess.
But the house lights had begun to dim. Voices around them grew momentarily louder as people finished their conversations and then hushed.
“There’s a man —” Guillaudeu blurted, shrugging helplessly and looking up at the chandelier. The hirsute woman laughed at him and both women turned away. From the wings, someone yanked open the curtain.
The stage was a careful replica of a museum gallery, with rows of paintings high on the walls and cabinets scattered across the broad space. A group of visitors strolled across the stage, laughing at specimens and gawking appropriately. Whoever set it up had moved the mounted polar bear onstage, complete with its velvet guard rope. The players ambled forward and a man disentangled himself from the arm of a companion. A cheer went up.
It had been two months since Guillaudeu had seen the museum’s owner, but Barnum seemed younger than he remembered. Round-cheeked and curly-haired, in a crimson vest and dark blue coat, he looked nothing like the small portrait that hung in the museum’s entryway. He was more like an overgrown boy than an entrepreneur. Barnum stepped to the front of the stage and opened wide his arms as if to take his employees to his breast.
“Since the day my American Museum opened its doors, fifty thousand people have visited us. Word of it has traveled around the globe, confirming that this institution is on its way to becoming an international destination for entertainment and education!
“And so the first thing I’d like to say is thank you.” Barnum extended his arms. Sections of the audience, mostly the restaurant and custodial staff, applauded.
“As some of you know, I have just visited our great southern states, where news of the museum has already proliferated. The reason for this trip, as you might have read in the papers, was an extraordinary young man, whose destiny is great indeed, and intertwined with that of this museological enterprise. I now present this young man to you, the General himself! My personal prodigy: Tom Thumb.”
Barnum backed up. He stopped next to a glass cabinet that held, Guillaudeu now realized, a very small human being wearing a very large hat. With a flourish, Barnum opened the cabinet and the dwarf leapt out. He wore what appeared to be a pair of long underwear, high black boots, and a cutaway coat with a banner draped around one shoulder. The boy strutted across the stage, kicking up his tiny legs with each step, pausing to execute a sharp quarter turn toward the a
udience. He gave an exaggerated salute.
“Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell!” Thumb’s voice was loud, confident, and discordantly young. He stalked across the stage. “For twenty years I have constantly accompanied you on the road to honor and glory!” he yelled. “In these latter times, as in the days of our prosperity, you have invariably been models of courage and fidelity.”
Oh God, not Napoleon. Guillaudeu sank lower in his chair. Here was a parody in miniature of the man for whom Guillaudeu’s father had been killed, his family destroyed. The memory spawned the familiar chain of images that had worn deep ruts in Guillaudeu’s mind and now swept him away from the dwarf’s recital: that night, so long ago, how the rain had turned the cobble to onyx as he walked behind his mother, who carried his infant sister, Adèle was her name, in her arms and looked neither right nor left; the way she turned from him with her hand raised to the door of someone’s cousin, the second mate on a ship; the rough paper she handed him with the name of someone in America, an address on Cortlandt Street; her whispered voice near the river: Where you land, I’ll find you. And finally, the spiraling realization that the slip of paper had fallen from his pocket somewhere, blown into the river, or even back onto the cobble near his mother’s feet, the folded paper catching her attention like a fluttering moth; she is bending down to catch it and realizing that all of her intention was not enough to keep him safe. Had she followed? Had his sister lived? Forty-eight years later Guillaudeu still did not know, but it was not for lack of searching the faces of old women on the street. Years ago he had stopped calculating her age.
Applause for the dwarf subsided and Barnum took the stage again. “My friends, there are those in this great city who would destroy us. Already I’ve read articles in some of our … well, not our most respected papers, but papers I know well. These articles describe the American Museum as a den of sin! A nest of immorality where bawdy entertainments are played to drunken crowds. There are quotes from our new mayor, the honorable James Harper, vowing to root out the vipers at the heart of our establishment! He says we are no different from the back rooms of the Bowery saloons. Says we are those who would sell idols at the door of the temple! I read these things, friends, and I laugh! I laugh because we are an establishment devoted to the enlightenment of men. Amusement, too, but of a kind that the ancient philosophers would call nature’s sense of humor, Lusus naturae. And who are we if we cannot laugh at ourselves? There is no vice in that! Just ask Ashmole, Tradescant, Kircher, and all the others preserved by history who collected and displayed the wonders of our world! I might add that the gentleman virtuoso Ferdinando Cospi employed a dwarf as museum guide in Italy two hundred years ago!
Among the Wonderful Page 11
