Jenny and Barnum (4 page)

Anna Swan shifted around, causing the carriage to rock frighteningly. “What was she like? Was she as beautiful as they say?”

Tom Thumb pushed his Wellington tricorner hat over his eyes and closed them. “She's got a nose that's a round lump of a thing, a real potato,” he squeaked. “Her skin shines. You'd think a big star like her would use a little rouge and powder. And she needs it, she's so pale and colorless. Gray eyes, dirty blond hair. Slim enough, but she's bosomy—and
short
. She's as plain as a country schoolteacher.”

Joe Gallagher did not try to conceal his glee. He stared at the little cigar before he clenched it between his teeth. “How much money did Barnum talk you into putting in this? Tell us again how rich you're going to be!”

Coming over on the
Great Western
, Tom Thumb had done more than a little bragging. Now he burned; he was not going to admit that he might have made a mistake. But that did not mean he couldn't strike back at Gallagher. “I was about to say that her forehead is too flat and high, too, like a dwarf's.”

Gallagher snorted and looked out the window. Tom Thumb was physically afraid of Gallagher, but Gallagher's situation with the show was not so strong that he wanted to try anything with Barnum's star. Actually, Gallagher's position was a bit shaky. Standing next to Tom Thumb, Gallagher looked like a monster. At every opportunity, therefore, Tom Thumb made sure that he was as close to Gallagher as he could get. Barnum knew that the two little men weren't getting along, and he knew why, but so far he did not suspect how deadly the relationship had become, or how much effort Tom Thumb was putting into getting Gallagher out of his life once and for all.

Chang and Eng snuffled with laughter. They thought all human ugliness and suffering was funny.

“I don't believe what you're saying,” Anna Swan ventured. “How could all those people say she was beautiful?”

As big as she was, Anna Swan was a spectacularly timid woman, and when she mustered the courage to disagree with someone, she shook with nervousness. Tom Thumb's mood was turning unpleasant, but not so unpleasant—or uncivilized—that he could pick on someone as defenseless as Anna Swan. That's what Tom Thumb disliked about oversized-imitation Joe Gallagher: he was uncivilized. There was no limit to how low he would stoop in his dealings with people.

“I'm reporting what I saw, Anna,” Tom Thumb told her. “I'm not enjoying it, I promise you. That's not all, either. She's shy and high-strung. Naïve, too.” He realized what he was saying to Anna Swan, and checked himself. “I don't know, there's something wrong with her,” he muttered lamely, and drifted into silence.

Joe Gallagher started laughing, and Tom Thumb glared at him. Chang was looking out the window, but Eng was staring expectantly at the General, grinning like an idiot.

Tom Thumb had seen that he had been describing someone too much like Anna herself. Gallagher and Eng had seen it, too; that was the trouble. If Anna made the connection, the blubbering and moaning could become impossible, and might even spoil the show for the Emperor this evening. Barnum didn't think much of royalty, but Tom Thumb liked to do well before them—even if he couldn't remember one from the next.

Tom Thumb was still realizing how much he had seen in the suite at the Hotel Sacher this afternoon. Jenny Lind was a plain, almost frumpy, washed-out, anxious old maid probably too terrified of living ever to change her situation. In truth, the link between Jenny Lind and Anna Swan was more illusory than real. Anna Swan's predicament was completely the consequence of her size. Wherever they went, Barnum's operatives and agents struggled to fulfill his promise to get her a husband—but the tallest man they had ever found had barely come up to her shoulders, and had to be thrown back, like an undersized fish.

Anna Swan's problem was simple, even if the solution, large as it had to be, was nowhere in sight. With Jenny Lind, Tom Thumb was left with only shifting, undefinable, miserable feelings. And the more he thought of her, the more upset he became. She was the singer of the age? While he had never heard her sing, Tom Thumb could not believe that the self-conscious, unhappy woman he had just met would not show through anything she was able to accomplish on a stage, however brilliant it might be. The General had read the same articles as Anna Swan, the ones proclaiming Jenny Lind the most “radiant” of performers, but for an old hand on the stage like Tom Thumb, the tiniest human in history, there really were limits. But true, too, was the sparkle Tom Thumb had seen in Lind when she had laughed—the laugh itself, on the other hand, had been finished with an uncontrollable squeaking, like a mouse. Maybe some people liked it, but it had grated on Tom Thumb's nerves.

Oh, he had seen something just marvelous, all right, but nothing a young woman could control and project, even a young woman singing professionally for more than twenty years.

Radiant?
What Tom Thumb had seen was the girlish brightness of innocence. Virginity—Tom Thumb was absolutely certain that Jenny Lind was a virgin. Perhaps it was a measure of the depth of her problems, perhaps not, but at the age of twenty-nine the reigning star of Europe, Tom Thumb was willing to bet, remained untouched.

“She doesn't go to Paris,” he said out loud. “She thinks it's sinful.”

“She's right,” Anna Swan said. “I wouldn't go there myself if I didn't have to.”

“Lavinia likes Paris,” Gallagher purred.

“What do you mean by that?” Tom Thumb demanded.

“Take it easy, General,” Gallagher told him, “I'm quoting her. ‘I like Paris,' she said. ‘Charlie showed me all around the last time we went over.'”

Tom Thumb hated even the sound of Gallagher's voice. “Don't you call me Charlie. That's for her and Barnum—”

“And that's what
she
called you. What am I supposed to do, misquote the lady?”

“When was this conversation?”

Gallagher looked out the window, feigning nonchalance. “Two months ago, back in New York.” He looked around slowly, smirking. “I wouldn't lie to you about her, would I?”

“You're asking for trouble,” Tom Thumb said.

“I don't think you'll be the one to give it to me.”

Chang and Eng started laughing again. Tom Thumb glared at them and turned to the window. He had to get a letter about Jenny Lind off to Barnum, and with a little luck he would have it on a Paris-bound train this evening.

He kept looking out the window, afraid that if he turned his attention back to the carriage's other occupants, they would start laughing at him again.

All except Anna Swan.

Tom Thumb was in love with Lavinia Warren. Joe Gallagher—this Nutt—was trying to take her away from him, and P. T. Barnum had created the situation as surely as he had produced their show.

Tom Thumb knew how important he had been to Barnum's career—that is, if he had not been Barnum's first real attraction, he had been early enough to be remembered that way. He and Barnum had made history together but the relationship had rewarded the General just as much as it had Barnum, and Tom Thumb knew it. Before Barnum, he had been nothing more than a tiny, five-year-old curiosity in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a child midget named Charlie Stratton.

His parents were normal-sized, ordinary people, New Englanders, God-fearing Presbyterians. His father was a non-talking, non-smiling blacksmith; his mother severe, hard-working, and distracted. Charlie's older brothers and sisters were growing normally. It was not until abnormally small infant Charles failed to grow at all that anyone in the family could remember anything unusual in the handed-down stories comprising the family history. A ninety-two-year-old great-aunt on his father's side, deaf and toothless, her tongue flopping dryly out of her mouth, recollected that a hundred years earlier, in England, someone's cousin twice removed had had an unusual birth: midget twins.

Even for a midget, little Charlie Stratton was unusual. At the age of five, when he first met Barnum, Charlie was less than twenty inches tall, and weighed about eleven pounds.

No larger than a three-month-old baby he was normal in every other respect. And as tiny as he was, he was far above average in intelligence. At five Charlie Stratton could read, recite, count, and make his letters. More important, he knew what was special about him, and that it was having a profound effect on his family, their town, and everyone who saw him.

If the arrangements and appurtenances of Charlie Stratton's childhood weren't as romantically minuscule as Tom Thumb later sang on stages all over America and Europe, enough was scaled down, improvised, and jury-rigged to his dimensions to create something of a sensation around the bright little boy. He sat
on
the table when he ate, his plate on a tiny bench, and his father built him a chariot that was pulled by the family dog. People from farm and mill towns all over southern New England wanted to see the child some were calling “God's littlest angel.” Gawkers drove by the house, or waited out front, or even came up and knocked on the door, to get a peek at the tiniest human God had ever created. And for every person who came to Bridgeport, ten more heard the tales carried away, of the most unusual event ever to occur in western Connecticut.

One of those who heard the tales was Phineas T. Barnum, also a Connecticut Yankee. Though his business kept him in New York most of the time, Barnum, who had been born in Bethel, in Fairfield County, would not have missed the stories being circulated of the miracle-in-miniature for long.

Some years later, feet up on his desk, Barnum told General Tom Thumb exactly how he had masterminded getting tiny five-year-old Charlie Stratton away from his confused and put-upon parents. “I had an agent in the neighborhood more than a month before I even thought about how I was going to get in contact with your parents. I had the fellow fit himself out as a drummer, and as he went door-to-door selling feather dusters, he was supposed to strike up casual conversations with his customers about the little oddity in the neighborhood.”

Barnum was a big man, almost as big as Tom Thumb was small—
almost:
at six feet two inches and sometimes weighing as much as 240 pounds, Barnum physically loomed over nearly every other man in American public life, the Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln chief among the few exceptions. But where Lincoln was a beanpole, a suit of clothes hung on a rack of bones, Barnum was
prosperous
, often potbellied. For years he had been a drinker, but at his wife's insistence on his fortieth birthday he had taken the cure. But even sober—and Tom Thumb had never seen him really drunk, only on the edge—Barnum could not solve the problem of his appearance. He always looked rumpled. His collars were wilted. His thinning longish dark hair stuck out where the wind had blown it. Now that he did not drink, he found his after-hours, behind-the-scenes solace in his cigars, which he smoked continuously. He never smoked in public, where children could see him, setting an example Tom Thumb did not have to be told to follow.

The drinking did not stop until some years after Tom Thumb heard the story of how Barnum “sold” the Strattons, when Barnum still whetted his whistle while telling a story. The two of them had been drinking for hours, the big, disheveled man leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and the midget sitting Indian-style on the desk, Barnum's boots rising eye-high beside him. About a thimbleful of whiskey got Tom Thumb tipsy, but he'd already had two, measured steadily by Barnum, who drinking or dried-out never could resist pouring out his brand of malarkey, too, a bearish, gravelly aggrandizement more attractive, comforting, satisfying, and fulfilling. Barnum would tell you anything, if he thought it would have the desired effect. Their lifelong friendship, he told the little General, was noteworthy really because it was blessed by two rare loves. Tom Thumb couldn't help giggling when Barnum wound himself up like this. Not only did the two men love each other because they had gotten rich together, Barnum said, but for him Tom Thumb was the son he had been denied. A true son, too—didn't people say that Tom Thumb was a regular miniature Barnum? Drunk or sober, Barnum loved to talk like that.

Tom Thumb had vivid memories of his early life as Charlie Stratton, the uproar he caused in the community, and the resulting disruption to his parents' household. Now the little General earned far more every year than he could possibly spend, but he wanted to hear the story of how the Strattons had been “sold” not because he and Barnum thereafter had been able to make their fortunes. No, for Tom Thumb, what Barnum had done was what made the difference between a life of alienated torment as a less-than-human curiosity, and what Barnum had introduced him to, nothing less than the best the whole world had to offer.

“I had this skinny, frightened fellow write down everything he heard or saw,” Barnum said, “including what transpired at your parents' door when he materialized with his feather dusters. You were five, understand, no higher than my knee, not that you're very much higher now.” Barnum was laughing as he played the part of the nervous drummer for his tiny audience. “‘Sir,' his letter began. Can you imagine him writing that night, by the light of the kerosene lamp in his room at the old drovers' hotel? He carried the letter down to New York himself on the coach the next Sunday, but I had so terrified him that he was afraid if he did not write down every word, then sat in my office later while I read it, that I would see the lapse of effort as casting a shadow on what he was trying to tell me. His writing was wonderful—bad, but wonderful. I knew right away I had the opportunity of my lifetime.” Barnum tried to compose himself. “‘Today I saw The Wonder Child, and he is so dreadfully, painfully small that I cried out in despair for him while at the same time my brain demanded to know if my eyes were deceiving me!' Charlie, imagine how this hapless soul trembled! ‘I swear on my mother, sir, he is five years old, smart enough to read and write, and he can fit in my pocket!' My agent sat on the edge of his chair all the time we were together. I saw his lips moving while I read. I had no choice but to believe every word.” Barnum laughed until his eyes were wet with tears. “Of course I already had an idea of how small you were. Still, I had to ask myself, ‘What can make a man surrender to such craven, drooling imbecilities?' The Wonder Child? Egad! I decided, ‘The boy must have charm!'”