The boy considered this for a moment, and then contemplated the glass jar on the counter.
“I couldn’t pay you.”
“A meal would be quite satisfactory.”
The boy took him out to a barn behind the museum to look for tools. It was his uncle’s museum, he finally revealed. Until that soul had died, just three months earlier, the collection illustrated the diversity and color of the New York Island flora and fauna. But the boy had moved most of that small collection into the barn to make way for Symmes.
The former proprietor had been an amateur taxidermist, at best. His tools were meager and of poor quality. But Guillaudeu still managed to find some decent glue that hadn’t solidified, and a few sharp tools. He even found thread and a pot of black resin to repair the loose skin and darken the gums.
The work took nearly two hours and by the time he finished, the sun was setting. The bear was repaired and the boy was ready with a plate.
Guillaudeu had never had such a feast: brined beef and pickled cabbage, a small fillet of smoked trout, a hunk of fresh bread, peeled carrots, and a mug of beer. He sank onto the front steps of the museum, dizzy with hunger and delighted with himself. He was a barterer, a man of action, a sly negotiator! He could not see the boy standing behind him in the doorway, but the boy stared at Guillaudeu as if the taxidermist were a dangerous or deranged man. Guillaudeu relished the meal like no other and, later, also felt some relief that Ursus americanus was restored.
Once every month for the past eighteen years Guillaudeu stayed all night at his museum to fumigate. Armed with canisters of sulfur powder and camphor, he walked slowly among the galleries, puffing and squirting, thoroughly checking each specimen for signs of decay. The restoration of the bear, and the meal that was his reward, had temporarily banished the thought that this task was now overdue, and in his absence his own life’s work was falling to ruin.
Thirty-one
He opened his eyes into predawn twilight. A bright orange fox, Vulpes vulpes, was near, stepping meticulously between blades of grass, its body taut, eyes targeting something in front of it. Even the bushy tail with its black-and-white tip was angled in an attentive curve. The small lean creature moved silently, its pointed muzzle leading it toward its breakfast. In a practiced assault, the fox arched back on its hind legs, leapt straight up in the air, and pounced into the grass. Guillaudeu sucked in his breath. The fox lifted its head, the spread wings of a sparrow caught in its jaw. The fox trotted off. Guillaudeu closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
He returned to consciousness thinking of an aviary. A hundred birds lived in what used to be Gallery Nine, on the east side of the fourth floor of the museum. Some of the cages were too crowded. There were complaints from museum visitors that it was dirty, smelly, crowded. What happens when birds don’t have the materials to make nests? He envisioned the floors of the cages lined with soiled and broken eggs, birds crashing against the glass windows, starving and panicked. Any hatchlings would be pecked to death. Eaten. Had someone fed them since he’d been gone? How long had he been gone? How many birds had died? What about the snakes? The octopus? The whale?
Exactly in the position in which he’d slept, Guillaudeu stared up through the branches at the layers of wavering green shadow. A hive. A Chinese puzzle. A steam engine. The rogue echo of Barnum’s words returned. The place shifted and transformed under the myriad gaze of the public. A steam engine. A puzzle. The deeper you go, the less you know. The words formed an incantation that Guillaudeu also applied to his journey on foot across New York Island. Barnum’s was an endeavor that invited chaos into its design. Guillaudeu watched the fluttering leaves for a moment and then closed his eyes. Just like nature herself, he thought. No system exists that does not contain the element of the unknown, the egret’s razor beak hovering above the water, or that moment you realize your purse has been stolen and you are far from home.
The crack of a gun made him jump to his feet. Leaves fell from him. He was cold but not unrested. There had been no nightmares. He looked around, unsure from which direction the shot had been fired. He had made a nest for the night in a copse of sassafras trees. Beyond them to the west was someone’s orchard. Ahead of him northward was woods. Beyond that, he did not know.
From behind came the sounds of several men walking through tall grass, their low voices alternating in conversation. Guillaudeu stood unmoving as the flannel-jacketed trio saw him. From a rope slung over one man’s shoulder hung two foxes, still dripping blood from their mouths, their tails adorning the man’s neck like a woman’s stole. Guillaudeu raised his hand in greeting, or surrender; the men acknowledged him, he thought, and kept on walking.
After his meal with the Symmes fanatic he had stayed on the thoroughfare for a few miles until he came to a walking track veering off westward. He’d followed that between properties and through wild thickets until he found the sassafras copse. Now, as he gathered his things and started off again, his hip ached in its socket and he favored his right foot. The sole of his left shoe had thinned and the ball of his foot was bruised. He picked up a stout branch to use as a staff. He had passed beyond the margins of his known world, and in his aching muscles and stiff back he felt his age: A younger man would have traveled more quickly, observed more, never would have had his purse stolen in the Points, he thought. But he had done it — slipped into the lifestream beyond the walls of his office. Slipped into a world of chaos, the only real world. And it had not devoured him, at least not yet.
The woods were dim and the branches around him were mostly dead, choked out of the light by the upper reaches of trees. Here was a mixture of pines and maples, sassafras and alder. A group of tiny gray birds flitted above him.
An aviary, he recalled. A real aviary was what the museum needed. All the birds out of cages living together in one big gallery. Trees could be planted. A water feature — a spring and pool of some kind — would be constructed in which they could bathe and preen. Maybe the sloth could live there, too. He wondered if anyone was feeding the beluga whale. Had the orang-outang starved to death? He looked down, watched one foot go ahead of the other. His trouser hem had frayed. The sleeves of his jacket were splattered with mud. He ran a hand across his cheek and felt bristles. An aviary where different birds lived and nested all together and could be observed by the people of New York.
When the woods thinned and then dropped entirely away he found himself standing on the skyward edge of a great escarpment hundreds of feet above a plain of waving grasses. Far below, four horses galloped, riderless, across the savanna. Almost level with him, riding the upward air currents near the rock face, soared several large birds. Hawks, probably. Too small to be vultures.
Granite outcroppings dotted the flats below and the high cliff continued northward. He walked its edge, marveling at the landscape. In the distance he saw the East River curving westward. From the other direction came the Hudson. He was looking across the Harlem plains.
He walked across the tops of granite outcroppings the size of his apartment building, heavily lichened and bearing the petroglyphic markings of water and time. He passed a boulder that had been split by a maple tree growing up through it and now lay in leaf-covered halves. He felt as if he were walking through the ancient epochs, medieval times or even earlier. He walked until he saw a path winding down to lower ground. Following it with his eyes, it stretched all the way to a village at the edge of the Hudson. “The Spuyten Duyvil ferry,” he breathed, amazed to see something familiar in this wilderness. This ferry docked at the Christopher Street port, near the terminus of Franklin Street. He saw the moored ferry almost every day and had never given it an ounce of thought. He looked southward down the river, where several boats steamed or sailed toward the city. His heart lifted. He started down the path.
A lone woman stood at the end of the dock with a swarm of gulls banking above her.
She focused exclusively on her task, standing sturdily against the wind. She held part of a dinner ro
ll aloft in her outstretched hand. Her olive-green shawl had come half unwrapped and one end of it fluttered behind her. She seemed not to notice. Guillaudeu walked onto the dock. River water lapped the pilings and Guillaudeu felt light, like he barely inhabited this world. Banners of sunlight on the silty water waved like the flags of Barnum’s Aerial Garden. A sailboat tacked across the Hudson and Guillaudeu watched its pilot duck when the boom came across.
The woman took in his ragged clothes and tousled hair.
“Good morning,” he offered.
“Yes,” said the woman, brushing a brown-and-silver strand of hair away from her pursed mouth. She wagged the roll toward the gulls. He watched her.
“I don’t know why they won’t take the bread. They insist on fluttering around and endlessly bickering.” She was irritated, her voice surprisingly gruff. And British.
“Maybe they’re not hungry,” he offered.
The gulls dipped and hovered. The woman tossed the bread into the air and recoiled from the screaming tangle of gray wings that dived upon it. Guillaudeu leapt back too, shielding his head with his arms. She pulled another roll out of her handbag and started again. Without turning from the gulls, she tore the roll in half and offered a piece to Guillaudeu. He ate it.
The ferry appeared, chugging northward toward them. The woman tossed the rest of the bread over the water and the gulls attacked it as it floated. She was older than he’d thought at first. Maybe even fifty. Her hazel eyes were attentive and her movements decisive. She looked him over again.
“I’m hoping to catch this ferry,” Guillaudeu said. He felt oddly calm, unafraid of speaking frankly. “But someone stole my money several days ago.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have anything to spare.” She brushed the crumbs from her hands and started to walk away.
“Please wait.” Guillaudeu hoped he didn’t sound too desperate. He fumbled with his satchel. He had only one thing to offer.
“Here,” he said. “This is all I have to offer.”
“A book?” She stopped, curious.
“Linnaeus.”
She came over and took the book from him. “The 1812 edition. The best one.” She opened it up and scanned a page or two. “How much?”
“Two dollars.”
“Enough for the ferry.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a deal.”
He handed over the book and took her money. For him the transaction was strangely intimate: She now held the pages that had spurred his journey in the first place, and her money would get him home.
“It’s true what he says, you know.” Guillaudeu pointed at the book. “You must have experience, real experience, to complement reason and book learning. That combination makes one a wise observer of life.”
“The combination of experience and reason is life,” the woman said. “Experience, reason, and perhaps a little stubbornness. Yes, that ought to do it.” She laughed then, her face creasing to wrinkles around her eyes. “An observer of life is trapped in the margins, probably taking excessive notes.”
Struck mute, Guillaudeu helplessly returned her not-unfriendly gaze.
“What a lovely coincidence to be presented with Linnaeus by a wandering philosopher,” she said, shaking her head. Given a few more moments Guillaudeu probably would have thought of something to say, but the blast from the approaching ferry rattled his brain, and within seconds a small crowd of people poured out of the ferry landing’s tavern and streamed onto the dock. The woman hurried toward the gangway.
The whole way back, Guillaudeu stood outside, his jacket wrapped tightly around him and his cap pulled down. He watched the passing landscape and gradually the thickets, orchards, fields, and villages of New York Island lost their intricacies and shrank smaller and smaller, until they fit into a foot-long diorama and could be seen only through the lenses of a brass Cosmorama viewer.
She Stands Up Again
Thirty-two
My wooden booth stood twelve feet high by six feet wide and five feet deep, with a door built into the side for me to duck through and a front counter the height of an average person’s waist. The two carpenters had regularly disappeared from the job, probably called to some remote region to build animal cages, so the booth had remained unfinished until now, and I had occupied it without the benefit of paint or a sign. I had requested red and gold, and it had (finally) been admirably done in pinstripes all the way around, with a kind of faux gilt around the front. At my request the sign simply read MISS ANA SWIFT, THE WORLD’S ONLY GIANTESS.
The counter held stacks of new lithographs and a basket of Giant’s Rings, given to visitors in exchange for a nickel. I had requested shelves underneath the front counter so I could stow a few things for my convenience: a shawl, several bottles of Cocadiel’s Remedy. On a specially built ledge at my eye level, out of sight of the visitors, I put a volume of poetry. This was a luxury I had never yet known while working, and it was a great relief to think of reading a few lines as the hours passed.
The True Life History was already fifteen pages long and swerved hopelessly back and forth in its chronology. Eventually I would revise it but for now the simple act of writing mesmerized me: the symmetry of a stately H, the r’s small plateau, the continuing scrawl that could include any fancy, true or otherwise, that my mind could spawn. I had not written anything since my letters to you, Mother, and it was a strange relief, pouring memory into the imprecise mold of words. Writing is an imperfect alchemy. Why manufacture phrases to describe thoughts and imaginations that have nothing to do with an alphabet, with these scratched signs? Words have histories that span centuries, and what does that have to do with me? On the other hand, writing is a manifestation of our pathetic, inborn determination to leave a trace of ourselves, no matter how flimsy, to persevere beyond death. The journal is the simplest of legacies, the most intimate reflection of the supreme foolishness and arrogance of man and evidence of his most valuable illusion: I matter.
I recalled the recent story of Captain McCaffrey’s failed attempt to reach the North Pole. After enduring countless dreadful hardships and exposing his men to his own acute case of polar mania, McCaffrey led his crew, one after another, to icy death. Near the end, after everything else had been abandoned, the captain sacrificed the lives of his last two men in an attempt to drag a trunk full of his journals onward, over the endless ice. One year later a team of Norwegians on skis found Captain McCaffrey’s body draped dramatically over the trunk in a permanent, frozen embrace. So the journals were recovered, but the problem remains: All the valiant determination described in those pages was made ridiculous and void by the absurdity of McCaffrey’s fate.
Despite this example, I squeezed pleasure from the act of transcribing my thoughts and also the simple momentum of the pen filling page after page. I wrote as if the True Life History were my last will and testament. I hunched over the front counter of my booth, staining my fingers with ink, until the visitors came in great numbers and began to whisper, wondering what a giantess could possibly have to write about, and I hid it away.
Out on the balcony Thomas played Lanner’s Separation Waltz, one of my favorites. I affixed my gaze to the shaggy musk ox head mounted on the opposite wall and prepared to succumb to the hours. Randomly, a young couple danced across the gallery, disregarding everyone else on earth. I followed their progress without moving my head. They bumped Pa-Ib’s glass casket and sprang away in a whirl and laughter. Envy misted my sight, but the lovers were not its object. It was Thomas who had conjured my reaction, sitting out of sight in his threadbare coat, the vagabond prodigy with ragged stubble across his chin and his eyes perhaps closed. His particular magic, his contribution to humanity floated, bodiless, on the air. It emanated from him, but it did not depend on the spectacle of his person. He had no idea of the waltzing lovers, but here they were, the consequence. He provoked the classical feelings of love and rapture, a range of emotions captured in the music of the masters. I, on the other hand, was respon
sible for (indeed, made my living by) the basest emotions: voyeurism, astonishment, and weird taboo. And I accomplished this by doing nothing, just providing my body.
Two hours later, this rumination led to my humiliation. It was a small leap from the effects of music to those of poetry, and from there it was a very small distance indeed to reach my beloved volume, Collected Poems for a New Age, on the shelf below me. I had arrived at the awful idea of sharing a few lines with the world.
Into the river of brightly colored bodies and the cacophony of voices in the gallery, I added my own. I put on my shawl, stepped out of my booth, opened the book to page seventy-three, and funneled my voice into a booming, yet, I hoped, inviting, timbre:
“In ev’ry age, and each profession,
Men err the most by prepossession;
But when the thing is clearly shown,
And fairly stated, fully known,
We soon applaud what we deride,
And penitence succeeds to pride.”
Christopher Smart had long been my favorite poet, partly because he produced what the world considered his finest work only after he had been caged in a debtor’s insane asylum for years.
“A certain Baron on a day
Having a mind to Show away,
Invited all the wits and wags,
Foot, Massey, Shuter, Yates, and Skeggs,
And built a large commodious stage,
For the choice Spirits of the age.”
Under Mr. Ramsay’s tutelage I had learned oratorical techniques and had recited countless passages, mostly from Shakespeare. Though I never detected much of a response from the audience, they always gave me a polite applause, and reciting a few verses never failed to excite me. Even now I felt heat rising into my face and a nervous constriction of breath. I didn’t look up from the page, but I heard the silence spreading.
Among the Wonderful Page 19
