Among the Wonderful (51 page)

For weeks Matthew’s face had been an ashen mask and I had done nothing to help. I had looked away, and now my casual dismissal seemed as brutal as a physical act of violence. I set off after them.

When I reached the top of the stairwell I heard them. Clutching the banister with both hands, I descended as fast as I could. They must have heard me because the sounds below intensified, as if someone were carrying too much firewood and the pieces were falling, one after another. Around we went, spiraling down.

I caught up with them on the second floor. They stopped in the middle of the shadowy portrait gallery and Matthew was slumped at an odd angle. He was on Jacob’s right as always, away from me. Jacob turned as I approached.

“Well, if it isn’t the inimitable Ana Swift, high above the clouds and all human concern. How pleasant it must be to rise above us all, to live always looking down … but not down your
nose
, of course, because that would be rude,
wouldn’t it? You would never think of doing
that!”
Jacob was slurring, and the whites of his eyes were an awful red.

“Matthew!” I spoke sharply, but he would not look at me. His brother blocked my view even further by moving his head and shoulders.

“I’m afraid my dear brother is
indisposed.”

“Where are you going?”

“We
were
going to fetch our last bottle of Balmenach single-malt whisky from its hiding place in our booth, but once we heard the thunder of your pursuit, we thought we might extend our expedition to the street instead, in the hope of avoiding any company.”

As he spoke, Jacob turned toward me and I saw that Matthew’s head lolled chin-to-chest. Jacob had tied his brother’s wrist to the waistband of their trousers with a silken scarf. Matthew’s shoulder drooped forward; Jacob was working hard to keep both of them steady on his own. I lunged forward and grabbed Jacob’s arm.

“Don’t touch me,” he hissed. But he could not free himself.

“What’s wrong with him?”

For a moment, I thought Matthew was unconscious from alcohol or some violence, but when I lifted his chin, against Jacob’s whining protest, his skin was cold and my own skin prickled. His face had no color at all. It looked as if Jacob had tried to disguise Matthew’s state by coloring his lips a garish red — I recalled the moment after Maud flung open the door to their room, the brothers in their dance, Matthew’s slender arm bedecked in jewels — but now his open eyes undid any attempt to hide the fact that Matthew was dead, or as close to dead as he could be in that shared body.

Under my hand, Jacob’s shoulder shuddered. He was laughing, silently, his eyes glazed and red.

“What will happen now?” he asked me breathlessly. “What in this cursed world is going to happen now?” He continued to laugh, his frame shaking, surrounded by dozens of portraits whose ghostly faces watched us, unmoved. I backed away.

If they need to die, they will do it
. My sentiment, so knowingly articulated, now stung with ruthless complacence. I had known something terrible would happen. Certainly if the conflicting wills within me were given physical form, they would mutilate one another. And here it had been done.

“You are a vile thing,” I said. He only laughed.

I hurried away, across the gallery and down the marble stairway. I found one of the night watchmen on the street just outside the main doors.

“Come quickly to the portrait gallery, and bring two more men.”

“What is it? What happened?”

“Just hurry.”

The twins had not moved and Jacob was no longer laughing. I stood just close enough that I could grab them if I needed to, but we did not speak in the minutes it took for the watchmen to arrive. For a few seconds these three men, all dressed in dark blue uniforms, just stared, their faces in shifting configurations of shock. Fear probably followed, but before they let that show on their faces they ricocheted back to the safety of their assigned jobs. They dragged the twins away.

“Take them somewhere safe,” I called, knowing that no such place existed. A hospital? What butchery would follow? A crime had been committed, but one unknown to the laws of ordinary man. My breath constricted in my lungs. I walked to my booth and sat down on the stool. Jacob should have finished the job here while he could, and quickly. But instead he had relinquished the power to end it himself, the only thing left to him. Now he would meet his end somewhere in the crowded city, alone for the first time in his life.

I imagined the watchmen returning to their homes after this night. I watched them enter their small apartments, places as bewildering to me as the museum was to them. They stroke the cheeks of their sleeping children and listen to the even breathing of their wives. They look out their windows over their domain and thank God for their sweet, simple life.

Of all the fifth-floor residents, only the albino children and Tai Shan had been asked to join the torchlight parade. I suppose the rest of us were not considered eligible for an Ethnological Congress. Our draw was exoticism, but of a more local flavor.

The parade would begin at nine o’clock. For the hour leading up to it, I sat in Maud’s parlor draping the children with scarves and bangles from Maud’s supply. Clarissa hovered over them, scolding and brushing their colorless silken hair until it stood up in its own electrical storm. Through the thin walls came the sounds of a hundred newcomers also preparing for the parade.

Tai Shan came in wearing a dazzling robe of bright red silk embroidered with serpentine dragons in green, purple, and black. From his days at the Imperial court, he said.

“I would die for a gown made from that,” breathed Maud, fingering the fabric.

“I’ll ask my uncle where to find it here. Are the children ready?”

“Thank you for looking after them,” Clarissa said. “I wouldn’t trust them with just anybody out there.”

“I won’t let them out of my sight,” Tai Shan said. The children twirled in front of us, two white dervishes. We applauded politely.

After they left, Maud, Clarissa, and I finished our tea, listening to the fading sounds of the Congress as people filed
down the stairwell to the bottom of the museum and out to Ann Street to begin the parade a few blocks north of us. When it was time, we headed for the balcony. The only light still burning in the apartments of the Wonderful was coming from the tribesman’s room.

“Shouldn’t he be in the parade?” whispered Maud.

We heard him singing inside the room, the song punctuated by clapping.

“Apparently not,” said Clarissa. “That little fellow seems to do what he pleases. I know for a fact he hasn’t performed a single time since he came here.”

“Like the beluga,” I said as we emerged into the fifth-floor gallery.

“But the beluga is next,” Clarissa continued. “After the Congress, Barnum will open up this gallery.” We strolled to the beluga tank and climbed the steps to the viewing platform. “It’s about time this whale started earning its keep.”

The creature hovered motionless in the middle of its tank, its knobby back like a small white island.

“It surely must miss the sea,” Maud said.

The whale sighed through its blowhole and floated nearer, but it did not raise its head.

“Perhaps it prefers a finite world,” I said, though I didn’t believe it. I would miss the whale once it was surrounded by a crowd, once it was no longer just ours.

“Come on, the parade is about to start.”

Barnum’s employees crowded the balcony. I spied a group of ushers and automatically searched for Beebe’s face among the red caps and jackets. Stupidly, I also looked for Thomas at his usual place; of course he was not there. But the harpsichord was, having weathered several rain showers on the balcony since Thomas’ departure. Now two men sat on its smooth wooden back. I wondered that the instrument did not cave in. Maud and Clarissa shoved their way to the railing, but my line of sight was clear so I stayed at the back.

Broadway was a sea of tightly packed bodies, faces like fields of nodding sunflowers along both sidewalks. Boys had climbed the lampposts, as they will in times like these. Figures
leaned from the windows of every building as far up and down the street as I could see.

Barnum must have paid the lamplighters to ignore Broadway tonight. Twilight’s mauve web spread the perfect atmosphere, a dimming, anticipatory pre-show lull. Light breezes came off the harbor, refreshing but not strong enough to snuff the candles people lit below, a hundred fireflies blinking into their short lives. I shut my eyes for a minute, sensing the crowd shifting around me. How often had I been among an audience? Usually on display myself, I tended to watch the museum patrons as a spectacle unto themselves.

The sound of drums reached us first, a faint pulse felt before sight is possible. With my eyes still closed, the percussion emerged beyond the clumsy sounds of the people on the street, the clattering noise of each isolated life. Without eyes, I perceived with a strange clarity. The drums, two of them, emitted a unifying rhythm, connecting those lives on the street with the life of the cosmos. Then the drummers lost synchronicity by half a second and the planet tilted, all imperfection, sin, cruelty, and death suddenly apparent. Uniting again, they regained symmetry and the invisible mathematic of the universe coalesced into the movement forward, always forward, of time. Then the crowd saw something and their reaction was a hiss slithering toward us, gaining volume and energy as it approached the balcony, and when it was upon me I opened my eyes.

Two behemoths rounded the corner and ambled heavily, trunks swaying, backlit by a dozen torches. Their great domed heads moved side to side, the mirrors and gilt of their headdresses glinting. Ears flapping like sails and pierced with thick gold loops, the elephants approached on painted legs, riderless, impenetrable creatures of daunting grace. As they passed I smelled a hot, grassy scent and heard their footfalls echo between the buildings. I watched their tasseled tails disappear with a sharp feeling caught in my chest.

Phineas T. Barnum appeared in a lacquered black carriage driven by a masked figure wearing a black cloak. He waved and shouted. “If you have ears to hear, then listen!
Mandatum
nuovo
, a new commandment I give unto you!” They were grand words, but his voice was barely audible; he’d been dwarfed by his creation.

Next came the five Haitian women in jewels and bright swaths of cotton, walking straight-backed, tall as alders, their expressions obscured by the flickering shadows cast by the torches they carried. The Esquimaux family followed, wearing costumes of sealskin and feathers. Their patriarch lunged and turned circles while his women struck small leather drums, chanting and tossing their hair, their children running along beside them. Here came the pale twins, tripping along holding hands and waving at their admirers, ushered by Tai Shan, elegant as ever. Some groups were lit brightly, smiling and addressing the crowd, while others came and went in the shadows. The gipsies appeared, wearing layered skirts embroidered with bells. Behind them came a lone Indian dressed in bark and wearing a huge wooden mask, lunging and dancing. One by one, region by region, Barnum’s Grand Ethnological Congress ceremonially passed and the crowd was unable to contain itself, shouting, clapping, shrieking, gasping. And on the balcony, for once we were no different.

Four bearded torchbearers dressed in deerskin presented Grizzly Adams. He stood atop the bare back of a sorrel mare with his arms folded across his chest. The mare walked slowly, pulling a high, planked cart that bore Adams’ now uncovered cage.

“Behold Orthrus!”

Unlike Barnum’s, Adams’ voice reached the balcony with force. “Behold the Geryon Dogs!”

“Orthrus!”
echoed the torchbearers in a fierce chorus.

Inside the cage, bracing itself against the motion of the cart with four splayed legs, a great white wolf glared at the horde. The beast swung its head to reveal a second, twin face; another jaw with bared teeth came into view, another pair of black eyes reflected fire. Sprung from the same body, another skull filled with menace. The creature used both pairs of eyes
to regard spectators on either side of the street, and both sets of twitching ears to listen.

What kind of entertainment was this? Released from the realm of nightmare, the creature’s claws scraped against the flimsiest barrier, threatening to burst through our notion of what is possible. I shivered, transfixed by its splendor. For a moment, the only sound I heard was a child crying somewhere below. But Barnum’s wonders overtook one another in quick succession, and by the time the cage disappeared into the shadows the next spectacle had already taken its place in the glittering lamplight and the crowd roared with pleasure.

The Japanese Yamabushi was an ageless man with a long, thin beard growing from the point of his chin. His face had weathered many seasons outside, although his shoulders were narrow and his torso, made half visible by his loosely draped white robe, was soft and frail. He wore a coarse rope belt and from it hung a whorled conch, spiny and white with an obscenely flesh-like pink interior. He stood with his walking stick firmly planted in front of him, perched in a spot of bright sunshine atop one of the stone benches along the aviary path. Visitors moved past him, but he stood motionless, smiling up at the branches. Some people craned their necks to see what he was looking at, but they could not see what it was. I opened the registry and noted the Yamabushi’s location next to his name.

I had seen the museum crowded before, of course, but nothing like this. In the morning after the parade, people walked shoulder-to-shoulder through the tented aviary and a line had formed at its entrance. Visitors were pressed together at each gallery door; I had already witnessed two scuffles between men shoving their way in. Barnum had outdone himself. It was only ten o’clock and already the museum was at capacity and it was the hottest day yet of the year. People fanned themselves with hats and handkerchiefs and the air was already sticky and stagnant.