Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  I knew the quietude and rigidity of this arrangement would mean the end of my hope of satisfaction with Adelaide. But I could not have said that aloud.

  “Why you not like the idea, brother?” Chang asked, blinking at me.

  Chang smiled like a man who’d been given back some lost years of his life. I was sure he did not know about Adelaide and me, of course—and I could not understand why he was proposing this foolishness. But then, when had I ever understood the rounds of his perplexing mind?

  And so we had matched homes built side by side. What anguish! Each house was two stories, with extra-wide stairways and three bedrooms on the top floor, and each felt much larger and emptier than our old home.

  The disadvantages of this arrangement were tremendous, even though it was an attempt at simulating separation. Not that I did not still burn to be separated from Chang; it was that I wanted dissolution so much I would not accept this or any compromise. That was not logic; it was yearning.

  Oh, I tried to make do. Sometimes, when in my house, I’d take my flute out of storage and I’d practice, warbling out an invented melody or playing “O, Susannah” with Stephen. Three nights in a row every week watching Sarah brush her hair. Three days away from Adelaide, the merciless tick of the clock, then three days unable to say a word even when in her presence. Sometimes I found myself getting Chang out of bed in the morning and vomiting for no reason. Chang would say nothing—lost, I suppose, in his own Silence.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Last Journey

  August 1873–January 1874

  Wilkesboro–New York

  The only relief from this double-residence was to tour. And we did that, again. But that was no solace (was it ever?), and then I came home to a life worse than the one that preceded it. When one is forbidden to speak an unsolicited word for more than three days of every week, it is like being dead half of the time, but a death that lacks the halo of eternity. And so, I would sit quietly in my brother’s home, following the rules and trying not to be present when Chang and his wife ate dinner, or idled in the parlor room together. But ultimately your desire is inseparable from your destiny, and it becomes nearly impossible to muffle the passion in your eyes by lowering your lids or smiling politely. After a day or two, an urge would come—it would never fail to come—and it was impossible not to talk to Addie about some triviality or another. But she was showing an odd willingness to play the role of Chang’s wife, and around me now Adelaide was awkward in the way people feel uneasy when a stranger occupies the empty seat at the dinner table.

  The other half of the week, in my house, I had no one to talk to. After a year in this arrangement, I thought my vocal cords would atrophy.

  Still, it was in my character always to attend to certain details, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN even in the worst of circumstances to attend to the fine points. I heard the low-toned voice of my father in these dark times: A Mekong Fisherman stays abreast of change.... Judgment helps one to diminish the influence of fate.

  With our wives one August evening, Chang and I discussed going on another tour, which would be our last, as it turned out. The only time the four of us were ever in the same room anymore was when Chang and I were calculating finances. Chang and I sat at the desk in the study in my house, and our wives stood around us as we looked at the itinerary I had drawn up, figuring out how many days to spend in New York, showing at Wood’s Curiosity Museum and Metropolitan Theatre. This would be the most lucrative stop on the tour. I was, however, uneasy about performing at Wood’s—which, after fire had razed Barnum’s New American Museum in 1868, was in part owned by our old acquaintance P.T.—because that “curiosity gallery” was too close in attitude and arrangement to a circus for my satisfaction. Though Mr. George Wood had written us saying that we could show ourselves at his museum as long as we liked, and each get paid fifty dollars for every five days of performing, I wished only to stay for a single week.

  Adelaide wanted no part of my hesitancy. “You said you was ‘uneasy’ about making fifty dollars a week each?” She was still fervent about things, despite her age. She was now a version of her mother in a one-half scale, her once-fiery eyes now red-rimmed and faint. But she still had something that I took for passion. Maybe it was the suggestion of her former self in her older, wider frame. Her long homespun dress encircled her ankles.

  “You may not understand what a Barnum gallery is like, Adelaide.” Though she and I were ostensibly adversaries in this debate, I was giddy at the prospect of being able to speak with her. “If one of these ‘curiosity museums’ found a two-headed Shakespeare,” I said, “they would not be interested in whether he could write plays, believe me.”

  My brother and his wife looked at each other, dumbfounded. Sarah, too, wanted to join in the eye-rolling, but neither Chang nor Addie paid her much mind.

  “I like to stay three weeks.” Chang leaned feebly into me. He boasted little of the independent brainwork one expects in a sixty-two-year-old man.

  “Don’t you care about your family,” Adelaide said to me, “as much as your brother cares about his?”

  “Of course,” I said. The joy of talking to her shriveled.

  “I haven’t asked that much out of either of you in this life, but I’ve managed to be disappointed anyways,” Adelaide said. “At least, look at your brother, he’s—”

  “I’d rather not,” I interrupted.

  “—he’s, he’s ... but at least he—”

  I could not believe it. Defending Chang—and from me. “I don’t want to argue,” I said. “I don’t want to argue with you....”

  “Okay,” Adelaide was saying to Chang and Sarah, “three weeks in New York, that’s, what?”

  “That’s one hundred and fifty each,” Sarah was figuring aloud.

  “Good, great, and then there’s obviously two hundred each for the rest of the trip....”

  “It’s just,” I said, “I feel we are a bit old for such a show.”

  “What in creation are you talking about now?” Adelaide was irritable and as confused by me as a preacher is by sin. “Isn’t it obvious, if that Yankee is willing to part with one hundred and fifty—”

  “It’s not age, it’s—well, I am what is at issue,” I said. “I do not want to debase myself. That is what I am trying to say.”

  After looking at me a moment, the sisters went on talking and planning the trip with Chang, who was drinking. I sat there, in all respects irrelevant. Out the window, the evening sky was dark enough to make a reflector out of the windowpane. Chang looked closer to me in that reflection than I would have thought.

  “I would rather make it two weeks in New York than three,” I said. I smiled at Adelaide. I was compromising.

  Her face changed, and she showed me a scowl that seemed to begin near her ankles and stretch all the way up to her forehead. Then she said something that would echo through the rest of my days, through every waking hour (and then, of course, there were the nights). “You make me sick,” Adelaide said. “I hate you, Eng. I really hate you.” And it was plain on her face, hatred and real disgust.

  I did not wither or implode right there, as I feared I might; it was Sarah who gave a start at her sister’s outburst. “Adelaide Bunker,” my wife gasped. “You liked to have said too much.” She glared at Adelaide. “That is my husband you are talking about,” and for some reason she laid her plump bloodless hand on my shoulder. If I had not been so dispirited, I might have jumped when the surprise of my wife’s touch bristled the hairs on my neck.

  I won this debate about Wood’s Museum. Chang and I set up plans to be in New York for only two and a half weeks. It was not out of concern for my feelings that our time at Wood’s Museum was cut even shorter than that.

  By the end of 1873, the New York I had known had now been subsumed by a taller, blacker place, known far and wide as Boss Tweed’s Manhattan. Entering the city on the steamer Ellenbernie, we could see the most perverse of New York’s alterations: by her southern tip, gian
t twin columns of what was to be a bridge linking Manhattan and Brooklyn stood facing each other on opposite shores, leviathan siblings across the water, awaiting connection. There were fresh new links everywhere in the city, as telegraph wires crisscrossed Manhattan like arteries in a human body, and the tracks for rail cars slept in the very stone of the streets.

  On our arrival, the newspapers were unswerving in their coverage; word had gotten out that we were fighting. There is nothing like conjoined brothers at quarrel to push President Grant off the front pages. Thanks to the newspaper attention, and, as the nation seemed openhearted in mood after the General Amnesty Act had given pardon to ex-Confederates the year before, we’d been drawing crowds in the North as grand as any we’d attracted before the war—everybody came to see “The United Twin, Chang-Eng,” and to receive a lithograph of us, arm in arm.

  To keep our spectacle modern, my brother and I had been riding two of Michaux’s new “bi-cycle” contraptions, pedaling side by side on identical two-wheels—not accomplishing much actual riding within the cramped terrain of our cage. Further, as by this time our constant leaning on one another had hooked my brother’s backbone, the large front wheel of Chang’s machine would invariably shake, its little hind wheel bobbing and scraping against mine, and we would all but tumble. We abandoned the bi-cycles before we reached New York.

  Wood’s Museum was at Broadway and Thirtieth Street, and awful as I had feared.

  The “museum” was not as degraded as a circus, which is a dusty carousal, an ungodly bacchanal, an animal-reeking, donkeyneighing jamboree encouraging the sort of base voyeurism not seen since the decline of Rome, a nightmare of shrieks, fisticuffs, oddities fornicating in shadows, earsplitting brassy music, drunkards, and, of course, a sea of elephant excretion. Wood’s establishment was not as low as all that, but for all its polish, this museum sustained the same sordid instincts as any cheap one-ring out in the Mississippi woods.

  An imposing building, Wood’s Museum was five stories of marble, brimming with “freaks” brought to America by sea captains or promoters, human curiosities of the meanest kind: Zip, ostensibly a grunting African pinhead who was “Living Evidence of the Missing Link”—he was actually a loquacious and deformed ex-slave named William Jackson; the Howling Human Hyenas, a dirty-faced brother-and-sister act from Australia whose only irregularity was that they shrieked all day long, wore brown cloths about their loins, and kept their hair at absurd lengths (they were also the worst conversationalists breathing, and smelled less than kind); the bearded lady, Virginia, whom Chang became friendly with, but whom I could not look at without feeling odd; and, unseemliest of all, the high-wire acts who slaved for attention above our heads when it was our turn in the “viewing auditorium.”

  The changing times had had their effect on the audiences, too. Manhattanites seemed an even crueler lot than they had been before the war, as if Yankee victory or seventy years of industrialization had rooted out any vestige of humanity from their hearts. Apparently people thought a 38¾ cent ticket allowed them to curse us. In the harsh light of Mr. Wood’s gas lamps, the audience looked like the rabble of purgatory.

  When it was time for our act, after the Howling Humans and before Zip, Chang and I, our act softened by the years, would walk out to a checkerboard in the middle of the cageless stage— walking side by side, then front-to-front, then side-to-side again—and we would call someone up from the crowd to play with us.

  On our third night at Wood’s Museum, we strolled as professionally as possible out to the board, my brother looking tired and sloping into me, and the crowd laughed at us, guffawed and blasphemed as we made our way before them. An anger festered in their stares, a malediction.

  I wanted to pick the kindest-looking spectator I saw to play checkers against, so Chang and I called up a young man—not too young, or he’d be filled with the spitefulness of adolescence, but not old enough for rancor to have set in, either—he was about twenty-four, with an open face and pale clean-shaved cheeks. Looking at him, I would have guessed he bathed and combed his hair every hour.

  This young man came to the stage and sat across from us. “You like checkers?” my brother asked him.

  “Yes, sir.” He was nervous to look at us. He had never been in front of a large group of people before, it was obvious. Meanwhile, a buzzing mosquito annoyed our eyes and ears.

  “Beat ’em good, sonny!” “Show those queer birds how to play!” “King those Chinamen!”—a few of the shouts from the crowd.

  “What’s your name, son?” I asked the young man.

  “Arlen,” he muttered, still looking into the board.

  “Do not worry, Arlen,” my brother said. “You probably twice the man we are.” The old humor. It did not work this time, the crowd was too raucous even to hear his bon mot.

  Turning to the game. We were black, the young man red. We gave him the first move, and Arlen bent his head to the board; his pomaded black hair shined. When he finished moving his corner piece, we began with our traditional opening gambit, moving the very middle piece of our front line.

  A drunkard’s voice form the back rows: “We paid to see a show!” Everyone laughed. Then some other voice added, “. . . And not a game!” Everyone laughed again.

  The young man trembled like a frostbite sufferer.

  “It’s all right, son.” I tried to calm him, though I was stirred by the madding crowd myself. “Just make the next move, please.” The mosquito whirred by my ear.

  Arlen looked as if he were going to cry. And then an invisible spark acted upon the air, and it was in Arlen’s expression, too, and in the sudden silence of the crowd; even the mosquito seemed to stop and pay attention. The only sound was the faintly pittering feet of the tightrope walker overhead.

  “Sorry,” Arlen said in a contrite whisper. And with a meek toss, he lobbed his checker piece at Chang and me, hitting us in the ligature. The crowd underwent a great spasm as one; the laughter was more of a single loud thundering typhoon than a collection of cackles.

  Arlen stood, his narrow face looking happier, relaxed now, and he pointed at us. “We want a show, not a game!” he cried.

  Even at our age, we could have tried to fight; how satisfying to double-kick Arlen in the head, or to try our hand at challenging the crowd, which now began throwing pennies and balled-up newspaper at the stage. But I was too tired, and my brother too weak, and I suppose age had sapped me a bit, too. After a life full of leering faces and slurs, whenever the fire of rage spread in me now, my insides no longer went up like twigs and tinder; the flame just did not catch.

  It was with great sadness that I did what I was to do next. As some unseen hand dimmed the lamps, my brother and I got on our fours and attempted a handstand. But at our stage of life, and with Chang’s condition, it was impossible to raise ourselves. As we started to put weight on our palms, Chang shook his head to say no. Crouched there together on all fours, not knowing what else to do for the crowd, we began to crawl as one. Happy laughter and mad cheering from the audience. The proprietor, Mr. Wood—his shirt tucked haphazardly into an ill-fitting pair of trousers—stood watching from the very back of the theater, leaning against the rear wall. From the position of our crawl, he was visible over my shoulder by the orange-yellow light of his cigar’s tip, a tiny circle of fire under the balcony.

  As we made our kneeling way across the stage, the audience was on its feet, whooping and mocking, and I had not felt this embarrassed since we’d been made to stand naked for the queens of Siam—only this was worse; I was now an old man, and knew better than to suffer humiliations. Here I was, however, meek as a martyr. A great wave of complacency came off my brother at that moment, as he bowed and scraped beside me—suggesting something ruined and barren. Maybe it came from his drink-ravaged liver. We were on our knees like that for another five minutes.

  Finally the show was over; still, the crowd wanted a last look on its way out the door. The heavy air held tobacco smoke stagnant in that close a
uditorium, a heaviness on top of everything, even the audience, a tide of hundreds now flooding past the stage, voyeurs of all classes, all ages and both genders, of every stripe, but for all the differences in these people—the many individual cravings and identities alive in such a herd—in every eye flickered the same light, the same insatiable, bellowing curiosity: I want to see it! Let me get a look at it!

  The Chang of forty years earlier would have crawled around for these morons until his knee prints branded the floor, and look what a lifetime of showmanship had gotten us. Poor Chang—any relic of his charm dissolved away, and with it any humanity. The crowd was whooping. The museum’s theater was enormous, but it shuddered and creaked under the commotion, the very walls ready to bend toward the curiosity. Nausea rose in my throat.

  “Let’s have a drink,” my brother said once the theater had cleared out. As was our custom after a show, he and I were still on stage, trying to relax, sitting on our settee side by side, stretching our band and buckling it into a C, each brother draping an arm over the other’s shoulder. “Wilkesboro blend,” he said, and reached for his flask.

  “If you must drink”—I held up the book that I always read after shows on this tour: Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the literary sensation of the year and a personal favorite of nomads like myself—“at least let me finish this chapter.”

  For as long, I suspect, as it took his addiction to craft his words for him, my brother stared at me, his eyes dull as Confederate pennies. And he said, “A double, then.” His breath was heavy on my neck, he had begun to cough and shake. I could feel his spine tremble.

  An intimation of remorse—not unselfish, for it wasn’t entirely free of bile—gushed from some artery of my heart. “I’m sorry to upset you, brother, but I can’t very well read if you have that drink,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Chang?”