From the whale’s platform a creature with long red hair blinked down at me. Its slender black hand shielded its nose. It clung to a man who leaned over the edge of the whale tank and appeared to be speaking to the whale. The taxidermist.
“Will you take this?” I ventured.
He coughed. He held the orang-outang like a child on his hip. Under his other arm was a purple, hen-like bird with a strange knobby face. The bird clucked nervously.
“Mr. Guillaudeu.”
“There’s nothing we can do for the whale,” he said, not looking at me.
“True.”
“The octopus is already dead.” His eyes followed the circling whale. “And the seahorses. Most of the birds have escaped, but the ravens don’t seem to mind the flames, somehow. I —”
“I want you to take this.” I held out my True Life History. “Please look at me.” I gently shook his shoulder. He finally turned. “Take it.”
“All right.” He adjusted the bird and the ape so he could hold my History, too. He was looking at the whale again. I heard it whistle uncertainly.
“Mr. Guillaudeu, it’s time to go.”
“And which would be the best way to proceed from here?” He looked up at the high windows. “If one wanted to reach the ground.”
“You need to go to the third floor right away. They’re on the Broadway side of the building. They can reach you if you go there, but you’ve got to go now.”
“I did the best I could,” he said.
“I know you did,” I said. “Please go now.”
“All right.”
I lifted him and his various cargo down from the platform and pointed them in what I hoped was the direction of the stairwell. The smoke quickly took him. “Hurry,” I murmured.
The gallery, not yet engulfed, was poised on the brink of its own destruction. The air was electrified against my face. The beluga screamed. I covered my ears and started back toward my apartment. The whale whistled hopelessly, splashing in its interminable circles, and I turned back to ease its passage.
It was easier than I thought to undo the carpentry of the tank. The metal bands holding the planks together were hot, but I slammed my body into the tank as hard as I could. I felt the wood tremble, but it held. I slammed again. The hot metal burned me, but what did that matter? On the third try one plank popped loose, then two more. By the fifth hit, water was gushing from the tank and a metal stave had sprung loose from one end. I stepped aside just as the whale leapt free, hurdling the jagged wall I’d broken. It sailed silently across the gallery toward the apartments and hit the wet floor sliding. It broke easily through the partition wall and into hall of the Wonderful, and then it was lost in the smoke. I heard a tremendous crash, then nothing. The creature left a steaming trail and I followed it.
The heat was so intense in my room I could step only a few feet inside. The flames already glowed blue at the center of the blaze that had been my bed. The wood popped and crackled and sparks spilled up in a dazzling firmament until the floor gave way and sucked the burning bed down. Wisps of quilt were flung upward like the surprised arms of a human being before plummeting, and then all that was left was a ragged hole. I leaned toward it and felt a column of heat so intense I jumped back. The remaining floor creaked and I felt a lurch. Flames licked up through the hole, burning with devouring energy. My heart told me to relinquish this shell but I paused. I looked back, but the way was blocked. The fire had moved in behind me, had eaten up the hallway, the museum, the world.
Sweat fell in rivulets and evaporated. My hair was a hot, wet coil against my neck. Heat climbed each finger of my left hand and covered my right, which was curled into a fist. I saw my wooden booth and heard Thomas playing Separation Waltz on the balcony. I felt fire in the creases of my face and moved quickly to the edge of the hole. It was only a moment before my body’s weight did the rest.
I rode the back of an old elephant for the rest of the way. We swayed through a furnace of skin-splitting heat. We rode through the worst of it, across the cracked earth of a desert, where I could smell my flesh burning. We reached a narrow canyon passageway and entered it. Buzzards circled, closing in. I leaned all the way forward, resting my head against the great dome of the elephant’s skull. It carried me on toward the place where all giants’ bones must lie.
Sixty-six
Guillaudeu stood in the wings, perspiring. You would think I’d get over these ridiculous nerves, considering how many times I’ve done this, he thought. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and scolded the merciless butterflies in his stomach. To help ease his mind he focused on the clear, familiar voice coming from the other side of the curtain.
He had been surprised by how easy it was to leave New York. His home was already almost bare and it was no trouble to arrange for his remaining things to be sold and the proceeds forwarded. When he left the apartment for the last time he carried just the satchel he’d taken on his walk in the wilds of New York Island. A small trunk of clothes would be delivered later.
He stood in the crowd at the edge of the still-smoking ruins of Barnum’s museum and verified with his own eyes what he’d already heard shouted by the paperboys for the past three days: It had been completely destroyed. Barely visible among the ashes, he saw the blackened outline of the marble staircase and also the jutting remains of the second-floor balcony, which had crashed to the ground at an angle reminiscent of a sinking ship. And his life’s work? Gone, of course. But when he imagined his specimens consumed in flames, from the smallest songbird to the cameleopard, and their orderly taxonomies and dioramas burned away, he did not feel pain or despair, but relief. An echo of Cuvier drifted to mind: Out of the rubble of the old age will arise entirely new creatures to crawl and fly across the globe. He walked swiftly away.
Across Broadway he climbed aboard an omnibus and from that vantage point observed for the last time the clatter of people intersecting, outstripping, meeting, and avoiding one another on the street, seeing it all as if through the glass of a swaying aquarium. He disembarked at the southern terminus and strolled through the Battery, enjoying the brisk air, children playing on the grass, rows of oyster vendors peddling wares, and the simple sensation of being among the living.
At Whitehall Slip, the Royal Mail Ship Acadia lay at anchor with colored flags waving from all three masts and her crew swarming the decks. Without pausing, Guillaudeu presented the attendant with his ticket, climbed the gangway, and proceeded to his modest cabin. He spent the three hours until the ship’s departure writing letters, to Edie and then to John Scudder, to the Lyceum, and even one to Barnum. He paid another attendant to mail them right away. He stood at the small cabin window staring out at the city, the only home he’d ever known, and he did not feel much at all. He wondered if the fire had made a shell of him, if he would soon fall to charred pieces. Only after he felt the ship lurch into motion, and he had sprung up on deck and stood at the railing until the great mouth of New York Harbor slid backward over the horizon, did he thrill eastward, toward London.
He waited until the Acadia was far out to sea and then he read what she’d given him. After he’d followed her, page after page, through black and then indigo ink, through hurried scrawl and careful, beautiful script, through the last twenty pages of pencil that had been applied with force that at times buckled or ripped the page, he was breathless. So thoroughly astonished was he by these intimacies, her histories and fantasies, recollections, speculations, and especially her delicate hopes, that afterward, when he went up on deck to take in the sea air, he beheld all the other passengers as vessels for their own such wonders, and he was humbled to the core. He then understood the gift she had bestowed.
Before saying a word, before the astonishment had left her eyes or he could truly believe he was there, he put the bundled pages into Lilian Kipp’s hands. “She saved my life.”
Her eyes searched his, and she almost asked questions, but she saw a sad and wondrous expression in him that settled her aft
er some moments. She beckoned him inside and closed the door behind them.
All afternoon in her sitting room, Guillaudeu rested while Lilian read Ana Swift’s life history. At first she sat at a small lacquer desk and Guillaudeu watched her from an upholstered chair. After a while he dozed off and when he woke she had moved across to the window seat, where she was curled like a girl with the charred and flaking pages in her lap, gazing out the window. It was an image he carried with him from then on.
“Hello,” he said.
She regarded him. “Hello.”
Ana Swift was a sensation in the few days between the fire and his departure. There had been dozens of articles in the papers about Barnum’s Giantess, Her Heroism in the Flames, Her Giant Sacrifice, and so on. The press put the number of lives she’d saved at thirty-one, and there was talk of erecting a bronze statue in her likeness at the site of the museum. Guillaudeu was sure Barnum’s men would be looking for her bones among the ruins, but the heat had been so fierce, the fire so annihilating, he knew that nothing, not her bones nor the bones of his life’s work, remained.
Guillaudeu watched Lilian in the fading afternoon light. Framed by the window behind her, she traced patterns on the final page of Ana Swift’s life story. She read it aloud.
“There is just one direction for me to go now, and I am comforted even in the midst of my destruction, because I am choosing it, just as it has chosen me. It is a painful, and a beautiful, embrace. What was once a dark mystery lurking in a corner of my mind is now utterly clear. But whether I am the last of my kind, if now the world’s only giantess bids her leave, remains to be seen by you, whoever you are. And if another like me steps into the world’s sights, will you see her? Will you truly see her?”
Lilian carefully lay the pages down. She got up, brushed the burned flakes of paper from her skirt, and came to stand in front of Guillaudeu.
“It looks like we have our work cut out for us.” She put both her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “I know people who can help us get started. You stay right there. I’ll make some tea and then you’ll tell me everything.”
That had been six months ago. Now, still nervous, Guillaudeu listened to Lilian’s voice on stage. It was almost time.
“We all have read narratives of foreign lands, diaries of voyages and accounts of new geographies and species,” she said to the audience. “In our time, hundreds of lives have been honorably lost in the name of exploration. But the prism of life you are about to look through will flash with an entirely different light, one new to the world. It is the life of one who walked among us, but she walked apart, and that distance, though measurable in feet, was often as great as any ocean. Her vantage point at times may seem foreign, but far more often you will recognize her in yourself. And now, to present you with more on the life and death of this remarkable woman, and to introduce you to her True Life History, which you are encouraged to purchase after the lecture, is Mr. Emile Guillaudeu, formerly a curator and taxidermist in Barnum’s doomed museum, who was there on the night of the fire.”
The book already had sold so many copies that there had been a second printing. After news of it had reached New York they’d received several letters from Barnum’s lawyers, who claimed that Barnum owned the rights. Lilian shrugged this off and continued to plan the lecture tour of America that would come early the following year.
Holding tightly to the leather-bound volume, Guillaudeu emerged from the wings into the bright light of the stage.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Valerie Martin for her invaluable guidance during the initial drafts of this book and beyond. Many thanks also to Joshua Henkin, Peter Cameron, Stephen Dobyns, Karen Rader, Elise Proulx, and Rebecca Brown for their insight and tutelage.
The Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Gerlach Artists Residency each gave me the gift of time to write, for which I am very grateful. The wonderful staff of the Somers Museum of the Early American Circus, as well as the librarians and archivists at the American Museum of Natural History, the New-York Historical Society, and the main branch of the New York Public Library graciously lent their expertise to my endeavors. Among the many books that informed this novel, I am especially grateful for Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham, Bluford Adams’ E Pluribus Barnum, and James W. Cook’s The Arts of Deception.
Heartfelt thanks to Chip Fleischer, Roland Pease, Helga Schmidt, John Gall, and everyone at Steerforth Press. Kate Garrick, your passion and advocacy is a special gift. Thank you.
To my parents, Stan and Sue Carlson, your encouragement and support over the years has been an invaluable anchor. And finally, Jason, your unwavering love and steady presence during the book’s (and my) journey has made all the difference.
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