The result of that bit of genius would mean the museum could accommodate more people, and more people meant more ticket sales. Amelia should have been pleased about this; her contract stated that she took a portion of the sales, and Levi had assured her that he’d been keeping careful track of Barnum’s accounting. But somehow she couldn’t think of dollars and cents as Barnum did. She could think only of the eyes, the parade of eyes that would march past her all day.
“How about a demonstration from the mermaid?” one of the reporters asked Barnum.
Half of the men looked at Barnum and the other half at Amelia. She felt suddenly the discomfort of being the only woman in a room full of men, men who gazed at her with speculative eyes. Her body did not seem to be protected by her clothes, and she resisted the urge to turn away. They would not make her ashamed of herself. They would not make her a human woman.
She pretended not to know what the man had said and gazed at each one in turn until their eyes dropped away.
Barnum said, “I can’t believe a demonstration would be necessary. Not when all of you lads have surely seen the lady at the Concert Hall this week.”
“I’ve seen it, but I’m still not sure what actually happened,” one man said. “How does she change? How can it even be possible?”
“The good Lord created many wonders before he rested,” Barnum said.
Amelia marveled at the way a lie rolled off his tongue. He didn’t even seem to think about it.
“Dr. Griffin, you’re a naturalist. What do you think?”
Levi smiled easily, the smile that Amelia thought of as his showman’s smile. It wasn’t really Levi when he smiled like that.
“I’d have to agree with Mr. Barnum. Some wonders can’t be explained,” he said.
The man looked as though he wanted to continue that line of questioning, but then Barnum promised all of them a glass of whiskey to celebrate and they filed out.
Amelia lingered behind, staring at the tank, trying to remember why she was doing this. She tilted her head, walked around it. She thought of the long and tiresome days at the Concert Hall, and the more she looked at the tank, the more it looked like a cage.
CHAPTER 9
Barnum wanted Amelia to climb into the tank every morning before the crowds arrived and then swim in circles for the duration of the day. This meant hours and hours and hours of dull repetition while people stared at her.
“No,” she said. “I won’t do it from morning until night.”
Amelia and Levi and Barnum were at Barnum’s dining table, a place that had become an unofficial conference area for performance-related discussions. There were doors that could be latched shut on either end of the room, thereby keeping Caroline out (she always wanted to be near Amelia if the mermaid was in the building).
The reporters had been politely shooed from the museum, each one promising a sensational write-up of the new exhibit. Barnum had been unable to keep the glee off his face as he locked the museum doors behind them. The only thing Barnum loved more than ticket sales was the thought of free advertising.
“Young lady, may I remind you that the point and purpose of the exhibit is to see you. If you are not present, then who will buy tickets?”
“I will be present,” Amelia said. “But I won’t be present all day from the museum’s opening until its close. Even you must agree that’s an unreasonable request, Mr. Barnum.”
“Even I?” Barnum spluttered. “And just what do you mean by that?”
“You’ve got to give her a rest, Barnum,” Levi said, giving Amelia a warning look.
Amelia stared blandly back at him. She wasn’t about to tiptoe around Barnum’s feelings when he never did the same for her.
“If she’s resting, she’s not getting paid,” Barnum said.
“You don’t make your Mammoth Boys perform all day without stopping,” Amelia said. “Why do I not get the same consideration?”
“The Mammoth Boys aren’t the same draw you are,” Barnum said. “It’s a different situation. People are going to flood into the museum tomorrow with just one thing on their mind—to see the Feejee Mermaid. How can we disappoint them? If you’re not in your tank when they arrive, they’ll be angry and disappointed. They might even ask for their money back.”
The horror of this thought could be clearly read on his face.
“Why?” Amelia said. “You’ve said many times that you aren’t increasing the entry fee because of me. They can tour the rest of the museum if I am not there and obtain the same entertainment value that they always have.”
“And then leave and tell their friends that old Barnum was at it again, that it was all just another humbug? I can hear it now—‘I came all the way from Pennsylvania just to see the mermaid and there was no mermaid when I got there. Barnum’s Museum is nothing but a lot of stuff and nonsense.’ That would be terrible. Terrible. We need people to go home and tell their friends about how marvelous the museum is, how magnificent it was to see a real mermaid, how it is worth every penny to travel to New York City and take in the sights here.”
Barnum stood, pointing his finger at Levi and Amelia. “I don’t think either of you truly understand what’s at stake. This is bigger than just the mermaid. This is about the reputation of this institution.”
“I won’t swim in circles all day without a chance to rest and eat,” Amelia said, not deigning to acknowledge the reputation of the institution.
And get away from prying eyes, she thought. The tank in the museum would be much closer to the crowds than it was onstage. A rope had been strung around the glass to keep people from pressing up against it, but they would still be too close.
“What if we clearly posted the hours for mermaid viewings?” Levi said. “We could put them up where folks pay the entry fee. That way there would be no disappointment if they wanted to see Amelia. They would know that she was only on exhibit at certain times.”
“What if people decide to leave and not pay the fee at all?” Barnum said. “We would be losing business. And that’s your business, too, madam. Don’t pretend that you’re above such petty human concerns.”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked.
“You want to make money, the same as me, the same as everyone. There are things you want, and you can’t get them without money. You’re not so different from me at all,” Barnum said, triumph in his voice.
Amelia stood. She wouldn’t have him shouting down at her. “You don’t know me, Mr. Barnum. You don’t know why I am here or what I want. Don’t think you can hold everyone to your same low standards.”
“I am paying for you, and you will do what we agreed,” Barnum said between his teeth.
“You are not paying for me,” Amelia said. “You are paying me, and there’s a difference.”
“Barnum—” Levi began.
“And you,” Barnum said, pointing at Levi. “Always taking her side, always playing the knight-errant. If you want to get into the girl’s skirts then do it, but stop getting in the way of my business.”
“You seem to think that my skirts are available for lifting on demand,” Amelia said. “I am not a whore, nor will I be one for you, Barnum, or you, Levi Lyman.”
“Amelia, no, I would never—” Levi said. His cheeks were ruddy, and his expression was a cross between pleading and anger. The anger, she knew, was for Barnum, but she couldn’t worry about Levi’s feelings just then. She had to make things clear to Barnum.
There had always been the threat of his fist closing around her from the start. He wanted to control her, keep her in a bottle, make her a possession. Thus far she’d managed to squirm away from his grasp, but she was tired of it. He needed to understand that it was she who held the power now, not him. All the money that he wanted would not appear without her.
“I will dictate the terms of my performance, Mr. Barnum, not you. You’v
e already expressed that the museum would suffer without my presence for an hour. I imagine it would suffer even more if there was no mermaid there at all.”
“You signed a contract,” Barnum said.
“You need a mermaid,” Amelia said. “How will you ever recoup your expenses without me?”
She’d been careful not to smile or to express any annoyance or anger in her face. Throughout the conversation she’d remained perfectly cool and blank, but it was difficult to suppress her glee at the trapped look in Barnum’s eyes. She had him, at least for now.
Amelia didn’t fool herself that Barnum was beaten. It was only a temporary setback to him, and he was too crafty to try such a straightforward assault again. There would never be a time when she would not have to be on her guard against him.
Barnum laughed then, a short, sharp bark with no mirth in it. “Lady Amelia wants rests and meals, and so she shall have them.”
He gave an exaggerated bow in her direction. She nodded. Levi seemed to be struggling to keep up, which was unusual for him. Amelia thought he must still feel embarrassed about Barnum’s crude statement. Later, when the two of them returned to the hotel, Levi asked if he might enter her room for a moment to speak to her.
Barnum had kept on a few of the toughs who’d guarded the stage at the Concert Hall to watch Levi’s and Amelia’s hotel rooms at night. They appeared in an irregular rotation so that Amelia was never certain if she saw the same man twice, particularly since they superficially resembled one another. They were all large and squinty-eyed and wore good coats, but they could not hide the scabs on their knuckles.
The necessity of their services had been increased from night watch to all-day and all-night watch due to reporters. Several of the men who seemed to live in the hotel lobby had become more aggressive of late.
One morning Amelia had opened the curtains in her room to discover one of these newspapermen hanging from a rope outside her window. As soon as her curtains parted he began shouting questions through the glass. If he thought to startle her into speech he’d been badly mistaken. Amelia had calmly left her room, knocked on Levi’s door, and told him (in a quiet undertone, just in case there were reporters outside his own window) what had occurred.
Levi called the hotel manager, and the man was removed with much fuss and bother, as he had lowered himself down in a kind of rope seat but apparently lacked the strength to pull himself up again. A crowd of onlookers gathered below, clogging up the already busy intersection. Several of the hotel staff were forced to help drag the man up to the roof in a kind of tug-of-war.
This man was later to be the butt of many of his colleagues’ jokes when a drawing of him dangling like a spider appeared on the front page of his own newspaper. He’d been the biggest news story that day, and his own publication couldn’t miss the chance he’d presented. While he hadn’t gotten any quote from “Lady Amelia,” he did tell the thrilling eyewitness tale of having seen her at her window in a white dressing gown.
The newspaper was able to make hay of this again when a number of scandalized letters were written impugning the reporter for daring to look upon a lady in her private clothes, and worse for writing about it.
The scandal bumped the paper’s numbers for several days, which had the unfortunate effect of encouraging the remaining pool of reporters to similar feats. It seemed they had nothing better to do during the lull between Amelia’s Concert Hall appearances and her opening at the museum.
Thus the need for more guards, though Amelia did not fool herself that it was all for her benefit. Barnum didn’t want his prize to fly away.
Levi seemed overconscious of the presence of the man at the door while asking if he could speak to her. Amelia thought it was likely the man didn’t care in the least what Levi was about but that he would probably report the incident to Barnum.
Barnum at first had seemed amused by Levi’s interest in her (Levi, of course, appeared unaware that anyone but he knew of his feelings), but Barnum now seemed to find it personally insulting. He relied on Levi much more than he would admit, and it clearly troubled him that Levi never seemed to see things his way any longer.
Amelia nodded and let Levi into her rooms. She did not invite him to sit, but she did remove her bonnet, breathing a small sigh of relief as she pushed it off her head.
She didn’t know what she hated more, the bonnet or the petticoat. Both of them scratched at her and kept her from moving about as she wished—the bonnet by restricting her sight and the petticoat by restricting her walk. One could not run in a petticoat (though Charity had informed her that women of good breeding did not run in any case).
She placed the bonnet on one of the many small tables and immediately began unbinding the braids that were tied in a bun at the back of her neck. She’d never bound her hair for Jack, and she despised the expectation that she should now.
Levi watched her in obvious fascination as she loosed each bit of hair. It was apparent he’d forgotten why he’d asked to come into her room in the first place.
“You wished to speak to me, Mr. Lyman?” she asked.
He shook his head, and when he looked at her again, the spell was broken.
“I wished to apologize for what Barnum said to you earlier. The implication that you were an, er, unclean woman,” Levi said.
“He didn’t imply I was unclean. He said I was a prostitute,” Amelia said. “And I don’t see why you should have to apologize for his behavior. Mr. Barnum should apologize for himself.”
“Barnum doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry,” Levi muttered.
“That’s because he never is sorry,” Amelia said.
“Still, he insulted you, and someone ought to apologize for that, even if it didn’t seem to bother you,” Levi said, looking at the ground.
He seemed very young in that moment, a little boy trying to make things right but not knowing how. She felt a sudden swell of affection for him—this man who had struggled to make things better for her, this man who wanted something from her that he would never ask for.
She went to him and took his hand. He glanced up in surprise, for Amelia was always careful to keep physical distance between them.
“It did bother me,” she said. “I never saw a prostitute until I came to this city, but I know what it means now. I know Barnum meant to insult me, that he lashed out because he couldn’t have his way. And I know that you feel that insult on my behalf. I haven’t said this to you as much as I should have, Levi, but I thank you. Thank you for what you have done for me.”
She saw the conflict in his eyes—the quiet pleasure at her words and then the impulse to press his advantage, to ask her for more.
She was surprised by the sudden spark she felt, the answering impulse to lean into him. That feeling had her loosening his hand, stepping back, running her hand over her hair in a nervous gesture that was entirely unlike her.
Levi cleared his throat. He had a habit of doing this when he was uncomfortable. It had irritated her at first, but now she found it endearing. That was worrisome, too. She should not find his silly habits endearing.
He seemed to be casting about for something to say in response to her thanks. She could almost see the words on his tongue, considered, and then swallowed.
Finally he said, “I always wish to be of any possible assistance to you, Mrs. Douglas.”
Mrs. Douglas. She was always Mrs. Douglas when he was most afraid of her being Amelia. He gave her a little bow and left the room.
Amelia blew out all the air in her lungs and plunked herself into one of the delicate chairs in the sitting room. For a moment she’d felt something like desire toward Levi, but she couldn’t feel that, could she? Because if she did it meant that she was betraying Jack, and she couldn’t do that. She was his wife even if the sea had taken him from her.
But he had been gone so long. So very, very long, and when
she tried to remember his face and the touch of his hand, it was mixed up with Levi’s, and she could not recall Jack’s voice at all.
She felt the bitterness of her choice then; she’d chosen to leave Jack’s home, and in doing so she’d left his memory behind. No matter what she did now, he would fade more and more, until all she had left of him was his name even if she never did love another.
Love another? Did she even want to? If she loved Levi, what would happen?
“He will die,” she said aloud.
Yes, he would die. He would die and she would go on living, on and on and on alone, and then all she would have left of him, too, would be his name.
It might never come to that, she reflected. Amelia would leave New York when her contract with Barnum was over. She knew Barnum hoped she would change her mind, that he could convince her otherwise, but she would leave. There were only so many hours she intended to spend inside his tank.
She would leave and Levi would stay, for he was unlikely to trail around after her while she traveled the world—though traveling the world had lost some of its shine for her, too. If she went to any of the great cities of the world, places like London and Rome and Paris, there would be people just as there were in New York.
And Amelia was heartily sick of people—the smell and the sound of them, the heat and the noise of them, and most of all the way everyone around her wanted something from her. Would she truly be able to be anonymous in a new city, or would some curious newspaperman find her out?
They wouldn’t even need to find her out, she realized. She was unable to go anywhere without a horde following her. On the day she left the hotel, they would all surely see her off at the dock, and all it would take was one word from someone on board and everyone in her new place would know her identity. Would she always be Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid wherever she went?
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