The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (19 page)

“Ha!” Matina plunked her glass down so hastily it hit a plate, clanging like a muffed bell.

Fish paid her no mind, just flourished one limp hand at Bridgett, waving her on into the room. “Although some of you may believe you have met this person at another time, let me clarify. She has just
arrived from across the ocean. She barely speaks our language. You’ve never met a person even remotely similar to her in the past. Is this perfectly clear?”

Bridgett removed her bonnet and carefully hung it on one of our hooks by the door. When she slipped out of her day cape, the beads around her neck jingled like tin chimes.

“Wonderful. Now, quickly, on another note: Mr. Barnum may be sending someone around to assess the living spaces and the shows. Please cooperate, and do not act put upon if he should ask you questions.”

“Why would Barnum do that?” I frowned at Fish, keeping half an eye on Bridgett as she advanced toward the table. The girl did have cheek.

“Cost cutting, Fortuno. This
is
a place of business, after all.”

“Maybe if Alley didn’t eat no forty pounds of meat every day.” Ricardo turned his bug eyes to Alley. “He drinks it down with six gallons of milk every meal, sir. Six!”

“Or if kitchen maids didn’t move upstairs,” Matina added, fussing with her plate.

Fish shot them a pointed look and resituated his glasses. “This is not about food, and no one in this room is a kitchen maid. Mr. Barnum is simply considering expanding the fourth-floor exhibit space. Nothing to get in a snit about.”

“Well, if Barnum
does
need more room,” Matina offered, an innocent look on her face, “I’d be more than happy to move to a boardinghouse like some others we’ve heard about.” She snickered and looked about the room for corroboration.

Fish smiled. “Anyone unhappy with these changes”—he poked his chin at Matina—“might want to reconsider her attitude. That’s all I have to say.”

After Fish left, Bridgett made her way along the side wall, stopping at the seat to my left, directly across from Alley. I expected her to sit, but she continued to hover next to me until I realized that she was
waiting for me to stand. I knew Matina would have a fit, but a man is bound by manners, so I stood and pulled out a chair for her.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Fortuno. I am so pleased to be in such good company.” She enunciated her words carefully but with an odd foreign accent. She’d obviously been coached. And though she was ostensibly addressing me, she continued to face Alley. “Mighten I have a bit of that, then?” She gestured toward a platter of roasted sweet corn on the other side of the table. Alley glanced up, his face mostly hidden behind strands of hanging hair, and pushed the plate of corn toward Bridgett with a single hammy finger.

“I do so love hubris,” Matina said to me, loud enough for everyone to hear.

I mouthed the word
shush
, and she returned to her pork and potatoes and said nothing more.

T
HE NEXT
day, the weather turned thick and wet in the late afternoon, making my hip joints stiff as a board and my back feel as if it had been welded into one unforgiving piece. After spending extra time in the Arboretum with the birds—I’d taken to naming a few of them: Twisty, Big Voice, Whisp, Esmeralda—I retired to my rooms, mixed two spoons of Mother Gray’s Sweet Powders into a glass of milk, and added a double dose of my tonic. Settling in my reading chair, my legs covered with my comforter, I sipped the concoction as I made a charcoal rendering of my mother. It was a fine depiction: her hair pulled into a knot to show off her long neck, her stubbornly squared chin, and that expressive brow I had so loved.

My mother was a formidable woman. She could convey her desires by the slightest contraction or widening of an eye. But sometimes she could be tender beyond belief, cradling me in her lap and running the tip of her finger gently down my cheek. I felt a tightening in my throat. There was something of my mother in Iell, I realized, a similar mix of tenderness and toughness. Was this why Iell had such a hold over me?
A man and his mother were not easily separated. An uncomfortable thought enveloped me. What if Iell had been offended by my illicit visit to her show? Perhaps a note would clarify my previous intentions.

Inspired, I went to my desk and pulled out a pen and a blank card.

I sneaked downstairs to place the note on top of Iell’s throne in the Yellow Room, but I still felt vaguely discontented. The rain had cleared, so I bought a copy of the
Times
from a vendor just outside the Ann Street door and found a free bench in the garden where I could sit and read.

The newspaper further upset my mood. I’d been following the trial of Lincoln’s supposed assassins—God knows, I was all for executing the bastards—but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the authorities might hang Mary Surratt if she was convicted. They’d never hanged a woman before. I looked up at the sycamore tree across from the bench and imagined my mother dangling by the neck from
one of the tree’s branches. I pinched my eyes closed. Good God! Stop it!

I shuddered. The sun shot through the tree branches, making patterns in the garden grass. I believed strongly in fate, but would it really be Mary Surratt’s fate to hang? Had it been Lincoln’s fate to be shot in a theater? Or my mother’s to pass away in a crumbling asylum? I had a sudden memory of my mother sitting by a window in our cottage, her beautiful cheeks already hollowed into caverns and her hands bone thin. On the windowsill behind her sat a glass bottle, green and slightly opaque. As my mother took it in her hands and lifted it into the sunlight, the light refracted through it beautifully. She turned and looked at me through the glass bottle.

“I believe you have a gift,” she said.

“A gift?”

“You’ve been put in this world for something special. I have always known this, my baby. But if you want to fulfill your destiny and be who you are meant to be, you must learn to control your impulses. Control, Bartholomew, control.”

I tossed the newspaper down on the ground and rose to my feet as a speckled starling flapped past me, snatching up a crumb at my feet. Control, my mother taught me. She was right. It was doing me no good to sit in the garden and stew. Better to take action, any action, and alter my mood. Up the stairs to the resident wing I went, determined to control a growing sense of discontent.

Kicking off my boots, I padded into the bedroom and studied my image in the mirror against the far wall. A trick in the glass made my reflection look taller. I moved sideways, to the right, and then to the front, my image changing and changing again. And then I remembered the root. I’d left it in my étagère. It took some digging, but I finally found it buried in the far corner of the top drawer, hidden like a hibernating animal. The bag felt smaller than I’d remembered, and when I unloosed the straps and drew out the root, I found it slightly sticky in my palm. It still smelled foul and earthy.

What foolish chatter had the Chinaman spouted? Eat the root to
find my true self? Perhaps it
was
as the Chinaman had hinted. Inside each of us is another self, a truer self. And Iell. Hadn’t she insinuated that I might have a choice about my appearance? Did she mean I could disguise myself, the way I had the other night, or something more?

I bit into the root, tearing off a gummy splinter, and let it sit on the top of my tongue. It tasted bitter, oily and dry at the same time. The stringy, barklike substance mixed with my saliva and let loose a tangy juice that settled hotly in the bottom of my mouth before slipping wickedly down the back of my throat. I spit the thing out and waited. At first I felt nothing, nothing at all. What in the world had I thought would happen? But then, something stirred inside me. A possibility; I’d no other name for it. And quick as that, it disappeared. I felt so alone.

Maybe it was time to talk to Matina. If I confessed all that had gone on since Iell came to the Museum, she could help me sort out my feelings, and together we would dispel my confusion. Despite its being late for a proper visit, I knew she would see me, so I pulled my boots back on and hustled down the hall toward Matina’s rooms, only to run into Alley returning from his last show. His bruises retained a bit of color, but he seemed more or less himself again as he rested against the wall.

“Where you off to?” he asked, and I explained that I was hoping Matina was still awake.

He gave me a piercing look. “You need to talk so late at night, you can try me, ya know.”

I looked up at him, his towering bulk overshadowing me. How could I explain this new sensation rising in me? As if suddenly I’d found a new door in a house I’d lived in all my life, but I wasn’t able to open it.

“Have you ever felt like you were missing something but didn’t know what it was?” I asked.

Alley flicked away a bit of dust from the front of his shirt. “I usually know what I want,” he said. “I just don’t know how to get it.”

That wasn’t at all what I meant. “So you’ve never felt like something was just out of your reach?” I tried again.

“Didn’t say that, did I?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Grabbing somethin’ don’t mean you can have it.”

I searched Alley’s unshaven face for a hint of irony, but he seemed quite serious. I changed the subject. “How goes it with the police?”

He shrugged.

“And those Copperheads. Any more trouble with them?”

Alley said nothing.

“You can tell me,” I prompted. “It was the Copperheads that pushed you into starting those fires, right?”

Alley jimmied his fists into his pockets and kicked one foot back against the hallway wall. “No, Fortuno, I never started no fires.”

“I understand what it’s like to be forced to do another man’s errands,” I said.

“
No
, Fortuno,” Alley repeated, straightening up. “I told you. It weren’t me.” The gruffness in his voice was enough to stop me from saying anything other than thank you and I would see him later.

After he stumbled off down the hall, I made my way to Matina’s door, still thinking about Alley’s crimes. He seemed so set on being seen as an upstanding citizen, but wasn’t it natural, if one had no inherent control, to give in to one’s baser instincts? I rapped lightly on Matina’s door.

“Barthy? Is that you? Are you feeling all right? It’s so late.” Matina flung open her door, moving her yellow cloak—the newest spring fashion, she’d said—so I could sit on her settee. She put the heel of her hand to my forehead, checking for fever. I realized how glad I was to see her face. It was all I could do not to throw my arms around her ample waist.

“What have you eaten today? Your color has gone all ruddy.” When Matina tilted forward, the neckline of her dress buckled, exposing the top of her ample bosom, and I found myself staring. “Everyone is asking after you. We can’t believe how many shows you’ve missed recently. Not at all like you, Barthy. And did you hear that Mrs. Barnum arrived yesterday morning? The first thing she did was get rid of the Indians.
Said they smelled like holy hell and made Barnum ship them out to some circus in the Carolinas.”

I stood and kissed her on the cheek. “Sometimes, you are my favorite person.” Although the urge to confess remained strong, I thought it best to start slow, so I took her by the hand. “How about I read to you? Tell me what you’d like to hear.”

“
Malaeska,
” Matina said happily. She curled up on the settee, her tatting recovered and in her lap at the ready.

I dug out the dog-eared copy of
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter
by Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens that she kept in a case by her front door, then read to Matina as she worked on her lace. But twice my eyes slipped off the page and wandered again to her neck and to the top of her breasts, all thoughts of confession washed away by the lushness of her. And then I felt a sharp stabbing feeling in my stomach. What in the world? I thought. It took a moment for me to realize the cause of the pain. That root! That horrible root the Chinaman gave me. Its juice must have reached my stomach! Could it be poisonous? Was it working its way through my bloodstream at that very moment, threatening my health? I forced myself to take a deep breath and waited. One more
ping
low in my belly, then nothing. I inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Nothing more. For the moment, all seemed well.