Jenny and Barnum (37 page)

Nor was the sudden violence of her speech all that bad a sign, either, for it was part of a great flamboyant outpouring of emotion. Late on Sunday afternoon he had the carriage brought around for a ride up Broadway to the tree-lined suburbs above Longacre Square, that is, north of where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue, at Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. From that point on the island was pleasant country, with yards full of apple trees. Jenny leaned out of the window to talk to the occupants of other carriages; she sang, she returned the shouted greetings of passers-by who recognized her—or Barnum. On the way back to the city, in the dark, the isinglass curtains drawn, he made love to her. She did not protest; she said she felt daring. She was not happy with people knowing so much about her private business, but it was clear to him that the source of her unhappiness was not anything that he or anyone else could control. Her problem was the person she found herself becoming. It was not a question of whether she liked that person; that was to be seen in her eyes as she looked at him while he made love to her. In that sense, she was a bolder woman than she knew. The problem was that Jenny did not know if she could control her, the person her relationship with him was turning her into—control, he could see, had always been her problem. As a child she had been forced to toe the mark and be a good girl, and now she had forgotten the punishment inflicted on her when she had been bad. At this stage, so many years later, it hardly mattered; all she knew was that doing what she wanted to do frightened her, and her fear was the one and only weakness in her entire character. Barnum loved her—loved her! He
knew
she was a great woman.

He had not expected so much, or quite believed it still. In some ways she was less mature than all of his four daughters, who were younger than she by as much as ten years. On the other hand, she knew she was a great artist—Barnum's daughters, bless them, didn't know the difference between art and Chinese food. But you could not compare people, and women were doubly difficult for Barnum, for in his view, all women were innately wonderful.

Barnum had spent his life surrounded by women, closer to women than to any man, and he had lived long enough to see the full circle of a woman's life from several points of view. In his childhood he had thought his mother's obedience to her father in the face of all common sense a sign of her own personal weakness, and in his youth he had thought his wife's timidity and inertia a minor matter time would repair; but as he observed the emergence of his daughters into adult life, as he saw their compromises and capitulations in spite of his most urgent advice, Barnum realized that the lot of women was at the center of the tragedy of our civilization. Even Joice Heth, the old black woman Barnum had represented as George Washington's mammy, just days before her death, wanted Barnum to know that she had had many opportunities to “sin,” but had controlled herself. Looking down at the withered old woman, curled up like an infant in a cradle, Barnum had not been able to imagine what her senile thought processes were pointing toward, or if “sin” was just another reflex word for her, a barnyard command, like “Giddyap, hoss!” There was a little bit of Jenny Lind in every woman, even if the reverse was absolutely untrue.

There was nothing in history to serve as precedent for what Jenny had accomplished. Barnum had no doubt that there would be women to come after her, actresses, dancers, other singers, perhaps the whole gamut, from lofty inventors to lowly politicians; but for now, Jenny Lind was unique among women, joining those few men, like Barnum, Dickens, or Napoleon, who had invented their lives and themselves. That she should be drawn to Barnum—or Barnum to her—was not surprising; what surprised Barnum was the emotion between them, the massive, overwhelmingly intense emotion. He dared not think of it. In his heart he knew, because he was helpless already, that either way, the emotion was going to make a coward of him.

On the other hand—simultaneously, as Barnum appreciated later—little Charlie was really strutting his stuff. Throwing money around, Barnum's little buddy had bribed his way into the kitchen of the hotel up on Fourteenth Street where Joe Gallagher had taken a suite, and where he and Lavinia were scheduled to have dinner that Sunday evening. How Charlie had managed to learn all these details mystified even Barnum, but Barnum knew his friend. If the Charlie underneath the public personality was not exactly a desperate man, he had the capacity to become one in a flash, given the right circumstances.

These were the right circumstances, and it was just Charlie's style, assuming he had never done it before, to hire some bowler-hatted private detective to flatfoot around behind a bandy-legged dwarf and a female midget who looked like a four-year-old. Charlie was too wise in the ways of the world to hire a private detective twice, so Barnum could easily imagine Charlie hearing some fat Irishman say that it was a tough case because the subjects were so small … no matter. Sunday evening, when the other two ordered their dinner, Charlie saw the waiter's pad. A desperate man, crazed with defeat and sudden new opportunity.
Here
, Barnum thought,
we are plumbing the very nature of the beast
. Lavinia had ordered mousse for dessert. It was not enough for Charlie merely to reclaim Lavinia. No, Charlie had to perform some audacious act; he had to stand on his opponent's chest and thump his own. God bless him, Barnum's little friend had to use the knife, at least ceremonially, for an audience of one. Charlie's move addressed itself to the very heart of man—
and
the comedy of his dilemma, for the battle-ceremony took place only on the stage of Lavinia's imagination.
So much for the depth of human civilization
, Barnum thought. When the mousse was served, the whipped cream on top was whirled in a single word:

Yes
.

A good stunt, but not the end of the story. Lavinia started to cry.

“What's wrong?” Gallagher asked from across the table on his own built-up chair.

“Nothing.” She smeared the whipped cream. If he had been able to reach across the table, Gallagher would have been able to confirm his immediate suspicions. No matter here, either, for everything was obvious enough. In her impatience she indicated too soon that she was going to have a headache, and Gallagher, no fool, did not bother to protest. A desperate man, too? He was too far from Barnum's perceptions for a judgment to be made. It was entirely possible for the deformed San Franciscan to have fallen in love with Lavinia. Lavinia had the stuff, no question of that; if the woman had been full-sized, she might have changed history. Whatever the reason, Gallagher, like Charlie, wanted to know the truth; and like Charlie, he became desperate enough to acquire the means. That night Lavinia was with Charlie and Gallagher found out about it. Barnum was snoozing alone, Jenny having achieved a full measure of sin and soreness. No matter at all: if the rest of the world had known, it might have laughed.

Barnum saw the denouement the next night at Jenny's third New York performance—gross: twelve thousand dollars, he was pleased to note. Barnum was in the wings, viewing the audience through a peephole. The miniature collision would have occurred anyway, Charlie apparently having planned to attend all of Jenny's New York performances. This was the night Gallagher had planned to take Lavinia, but instead she was with Charlie. Gallagher, not having figured out this last part, was making use of one of his two tickets. When Gallagher spotted Lavinia with Charlie, he tried to keep his composure, and for Barnum, it was a poignant moment. Gallagher's feelings
were
involved, even if they were only (only?) feelings generated by a lifetime of rejection, scorn, and ridicule. Barnum supposed that Gallagher felt that Charlie had used his superior position and income to devise this humiliation—whatever, from his stageside peephole Barnum saw what was coming, and had his agents in the lobby during the intermission. They leaped in, but not soon enough by the accounts they gave Barnum a few minutes later. Words were exchanged, the lady was insulted, and as the agents were moving in, somebody spat upon somebody else. Everybody in the lobby saw it—hell, the male principals left the field of combat under the arms of Barnum's men, kicking and squawking like children being rushed from a wedding. A woman came to aid Lavinia, standing alone suddenly, silent, looking dazed.

When the agents reported, they had Charlie and Gallagher in separate carriages around by the stage door, through which Barnum could hear an occasional squawked curse. It sounded like somebody chasing a parrot around a kitchen with a cleaver.

“What do we do with them, sir?”

“Run them back to the museum. I'll be up there right after the show.”

Jenny came out from her dressing room. “That's Charlie out there. What's going on?”

“It's an American courtship ritual, my dear. We're trying to keep them from burning down half the city.” They had made plans for later in the evening, supper at the Astor House. “I'm going to have to go up to the museum to see if I can sort this out.”

“Wait, and I'll go with you.”

By the end of her performance, Barnum had more information about the ruckus. In the confusion of the last twenty-four hours, Lavinia had forgotten all about Gallagher—that he had tickets to Jenny's third performance. Barnum had already heard from Charlie of the night-long conversation between Lavinia and him, the tears and inevitable reconciliation. By God, love was in the air! Barnum was trying to get out of hock and make a living, and here he was in the thick of romance! And Jenny wanted to ride up to the museum, while he wanted to get her in one of the private booths in the rear dining room of the Astor House. Love! In the carriage their breathing was so heavy they could not hear the creaking of the wheels—but they could hear the commotion inside the museum all the way out on the sidewalk.

Barnum's men had put Charlie up on the second floor, keeping Gallagher on the street level. Lavinia was on the top floor, in Barnum's apartment, nearly hysterical. There was no one to tend to her. Even if Anna Swan could have come out of her room instead of cowering behind the door, Lavinia would not have wanted to see her. Or Jenny. Barnum knew what had gone on among the women aboard the
Great Western
, but he had not thought the situation would ever require his attention. It still didn't; the women had kept away from each other. It was the men who were out of control. As usual.

“I'm going to kill the son-of-a-bitch, Barnum!” Charlie cried from the top of the stairs. “Give me a gun, I'll blow his damned head off!”

“You're not big enough to hold a gun, stupid!” Gallagher shouted from below. The stairs between them were empty, with Barnum's men blocking the way at both the top and the bottom.

“I want him out of here!” Charlie yelled. “Either he goes or I go. I don't want to have to set eyes on him again!”

“Hold it right there!” Barnum roared. “Don't tell me how to run my business. He's under contract and so are you. If he doesn't work, he's going to sue me; if you don't work, I'm going to sue you.”

“You didn't hear what he said about Lavinia!”

Barnum was climbing the stairs. “And I don't want to, either! Don't repeat it!”

“I'm going to kill him!” Charlie screamed. “I'm going to kill him!”

Charlie was more violent than Barnum had ever seen him. He looked back down the stairs toward the door, where Jenny stood in the shadows. He couldn't see her expression, and he wondered—with some anxiety—how she understood all this. Surrounding the two tiny combatants and Barnum's black-suited centurions were the misshapen denizens of the museum, jabbering and muttering among themselves. They were all here, Chang and Eng, Zip, the Wild Men, Jo-Jo, the Man with No Chin. Only an outbreak of the plague could yield more terrifying sights.

“Quiet, my lovelies!” Barnum boomed.

“He insulted my fiancée!” Charlie yelled. “Lavinia and I are going to get married!”

“Not if you kill
him
, squirt! They'll hang you for sure, even if they have to use the hitching post on the corner!”

Everybody laughed.

“Lay off, Barnum! I gotta settle with this scum! You didn't hear what he said about Lavinia! He hit me a Sunday punch on the ship coming back—!”

“You broke my arm!”

“That was an accident, you drunken scum, not that I ain't glad it happened to you! Scum, that's what you are!”

“Tell him to quit calling me that, Barnum.”

“We have free speech in this country, Joe.”

“Scum! That's what you are, Nutt—and that's the right name for you, too. Scum Nutt!” He tried to get past Barnum's men, one of them grabbed the back of his belt. In trying to get down the stairs, Charlie swung outward and upward, until the man brought him in a great arc back to the landing. “Let me go! I want to kill him!”

“Charlie, you're out of control.”

“That's right, and I'm going to stay out of control until I settle with Scum Nutt!”

It had gone too far. Charlie had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor. “If I tell him to let you go, who's going to take the responsibility for what happens?”

“I will.”

Barnum looked around. “What do you say, Joe?”

“Is this going to cost me my job?”

“It's not my business.”

“No!” Jenny cried.

Barnum raised his hand to quiet her.

“You're insane!” she shouted. “Stop this!”

“Make a circle,” Barnum called to Jo-Jo.

“A fight!” somebody shouted. “There's going to be a midget fight!”

“It's going to be short, that's for sure,” announced Eng, and for once, Chang led the laughter.

“Who's going to be referee?” asked Zip, forming the words slowly.

“Why, yours truly, of course,” Barnum said.

“You madman, they're going to hurt each other!”