God's Fool (27 page)

It was a lesson I was taught soon after our arrival. I had made the mistake one evening of allowing my feelings to show on my face while listening to one of the General’s self-aggrandizing little speeches. I had quickly found myself on the receiving end of a furious little sermon. “We must accept our fate with humility and gratitude,” he quacked, poking an indignant finger up at my belt and accusing me, as a stranger to Christian lands, of not understanding the danger I ran in resisting the Almighty’s will. So surprised was I by the vehemence of this onslaught that I actually found myself retreating a step, then two, dragging my brother along with me, all the while resisting the urge to put him over my knee.

“I am well aware,” he went on, by this point addressing the crowd more than myself, “that there are some who have lately wondered at the American fancy for exotics, and even objected to the public’s disgraceful preference for foreigners over native-born curiosities. I have never numbered myself among these critics and yet, when I see such un-Christian behavior in foreigners who know nothing of our noble land yet seem ever ready to accept her bounties, I confess I can see how they might take the position they do.” And here he turned to me and declared, “I have been blessed, sir, blessed, and am properly grateful for it. In the eyes of God, sir, I am a giant.” And for one absurd, irreverent instant, I imagined the Deity peering through Sophia Marchant’s microscope at the downy growth beneath our hero’s nose, miraculously transformed into a robust crop of hairy wheat springing from the soil. He gave me a curt little bow and turned on his heel. The crowd burst into applause.

I saw right through him, of course. I saw how the veneer of piety made it easier for the ladies to pass him around like a rare, hairless cat, to pet and fuss over him, to exclaim over his feet and his eyes and his adorable little hat. I saw how expertly he milked it, snuggling into their skirts, allowing himself to be kissed and stroked and fondled. He had made himself into an infant, you see—a Christian infant at that—and like his famous predecessor (preternaturally wise, surrounded by donkeys, staring up from the straw), he did well for a time.

I held my tongue. We all did. The only one who ever stood up to the pair and lived to tell the tale was Anna. She was fearless in a way we couldn’t imagine, routinely speaking her mind or laughing out loud at their absurdities with a freshness, a spontaneity, that never ceased to amaze us. Strangely enough, when faced with this unaccountable insubordination, the two seemed to accept it much the way one might accept a force of nature—grudgingly, even angrily, but in the end, with something like resignation. Anna was simply Anna, and there was nothing that could be done about it. The rest of us—awed, respectful—never
dreamed of adopting her ways. Hers, we understood, was a special dispensation.

Which is not to say that it was easy for her, or that the two conceded defeat with anything like grace. Barnum, especially, hated her continually and creatively, threatening to send her back to Nova Scotia or starting rumors of some other giantess, newly discovered in France or Fiji, who would cut her down to size. Whereas the General (who would sit in the palm of her hand during their act with his legs crossed, smoking an inch-long pipe) instinctively realized he had met his match, Barnum raged on. Unmanned by a woman a full two feet taller than himself—a woman, moreover, who had sent him sprawling at their very first meeting when, wishing to see if she was standing on a platform, he had lifted her skirts without warning—he never missed an opportunity to cast aspersions on her popularity, or to remind her of precisely how much she owed him.

To which our Anna would invariably respond with a sweet, disbelieving laugh, and go her way. “And how is Mr. Bunkum?” she would ask on coming to his office, or, if things were particularly strained between them, “Tell me, is the sham-man in today?” In the evenings we would gather in the sitting room to play pinochle and she would entertain us with stories about Barnum’s latest bit of humbuggery: an idiot brother and sister plucked from an asylum in Ohio and turned into “the Amazing Aztec Children”; a “Circassian Beauty” who had been overheard screeching at one of the geeks in a way that suggested the Hudson poured past the minarets of Wall Street directly into the Bosporus; an “Incredible Three-Horned Bull” whose stock in trade had unaccountably tilted like the Tower of Pisa in the middle of a performance, thereby earning its owner a quick trip to the stockyard …

It was a dangerous game, and it made our little circle—Madame Cloffulia and Isaak, Mr. Nellis and Susan—visibly nervous. Barnum, however tyrannical, was still their savior; it was his will (or whimsy) that kept them suspended above the poorhouse. And though this mercy—if mercy it was—was compromised by the fact that he never
let them forget it, it did not entirely erase their sense of debt. They laughed uneasily, lowered their voices, glanced around continually to see if they were being overheard. Of them all, I realize now, only Anna grasped the true nature of the covenant between Barnum and his flock; only she understood that the connection was less a lifeline (thrown from him to us) than, well, a Siamese bond; that just as he held us above the pit, he, in turn, continued to exist only by virtue of our continued belief in him.

Forty years later I can still see Isaak Sprague, with his hair slicked and combed, slowly dealing the cards with arms no thicker at the wrists than my finger. I can see Madame Cloffulia smiling to herself over a good hand, her husband’s portrait peering from her chest like a miniature chaperon. I can see Susan, like a genial mountain of flesh, sitting four feet back from the table on an iron stool; Anna, next to her, handing her her cards. I can see Mr. Nellis, leaning back in his chair, reaching across the wood with his smooth, splay-toed feet. With marvelous dexterity he raises his glass to his lips. Now he gathers the cards in a neat little pile, brings them to his chest, fans them out like a peacock’s tail.

They were our friends. We saw them nearly every day, shared a stage with them, traveled in their company. For three years we argued and commiserated with them, negotiated their moods (and they ours), shared their griefs and grievances. We even grew to love them, I suppose.

We might never have managed our escape without Charity Barnum. Sincere to a fault, plain as a pudding, she had about her a humorlessness that stopped just short of being terrifying. Utterly incapable of grasping even the simplest joke (observing others’ mirth she would smile vaguely, like a deaf-mute, or a traveler in a foreign land), she seemed overwhelmed at times by a husband who lived for the laugh (preferably at someone else’s expense), a husband who looked upon her the way an unrepentant sinner looks upon the flesh brush and the scourge.

Most of us, in our ignorance, felt sorry for her. We might have done better to pity Barnum. For Charity was in every sense her husband’s
match. Pale and prone to fainting, she put her frail evangelical faith up against his omnivorous appetite for bare-legged French girls dancing in tubs of bursting grapes, and fought him to a draw.

Barnum loved the theatre. Charity disapproved. Barnum smoked like the locomotive on the L&R Railroad. Charity disapproved. Barnum took a solicitous interest in the latitude of his female performers’ hems and necklines. Charity, not surprisingly, disapproved. Like Hunter before him, Barnum scrabbled for every cent, blissfully unconcerned that his wealth would in any way impede his entrance to heaven. For Charity, no labor could be so sweet, no employment so exalted, as holding up Christ to a dying world.

And so it went. Returning from abroad, Barnum ridiculed her, publicly, as a sickly, carping hypochondriac who had very nearly ruined their European tour. She endured—and prayed for him. When asked by the press, she opined that she had found Paris the most vulgar place she had ever visited, filled with half-naked trollops eager to show their legs and expose their nakedness on the stage. “They should be horsewhipped and kept on bread and water until willing to gain a decent livelihood,” she had added, stopping just short of offering to do the job herself. Barnum gnashed his teeth. When his beloved Charity, “always piteously moaning about something or other,” fainted on the staircase leading down to Niagara Falls, he continued on alone, smoked a cigar over the roaring cataract, then tossed the butt into the abyss.

If Barnum had been less of a hypocrite, or his wife more of one, I might have sympathized with him. As it was, I preferred to keep them both at bay. When Charity sought us out, month after month, determined to drag us under the protective wing of God, I resisted as politely as I could. When she informed us, in her tremulous, fainting way, that all were equal in His eyes, I marveled at her blindness. And his.

This, I see now, was when the forking of our lives began. I might have anticipated it, forestalled it somehow. I didn’t. I saw no need. It was only later I realized that even though my brother and I had been listening to the same words, we had been interpreting the sermon differently.

Sitting before us, ankles pressed together like a schoolgirl, Charity Barnum told us all—Madame Cloffulia and Mr. Nellis, the Albino Twins and the Aztec Children—that our female beard or lack of arms, eggshell skin or feeble mind, were invisible to Him. That these things were as the deceiving fog, which momentarily obscures the house in which we dwell, and that, just as the wise man disregards the mist and recognizes it for the slippery, insubstantial thing it is, so God in His Wisdom would disregard what was passing and concern himself solely with what is real. The shining house of the heart. The soul. Just as the morning sun inevitably burns away the morning mist, she would add, her eyes glistening, so he would one day send his only Son to burn away all the vanity and falsity of the world—expose, as with a burning flame, the rock of the Church within us all.

“When?” asked Anna, once.

“When what?” asked Charity Barnum, momentarily confused.

“When will he come to burn the mist away?”

“Soon, child. Look about you.” She waved her arm generally in the direction of Broadway. “The last days are clearly upon us.”

“Mmm.”

I looked at the others. Madame Cloffulia, eyes shut tight as if in pain, had bent her head and was praying earnestly. Susan was looking off at a spot on the floor where bits of sun and leaf-shaped shadows waved on the wood, thinking her own thoughts. Mr. Nellis stood up, and reaching for his cap with his toes, flipped it expertly on his head.

And it seemed to me then that almost everything Charity Barnum had told us was precisely backwards. To every one of us sitting there, whether we admitted it or not, the mist was as stone—neither slippery nor insubstantial—and would never burn away. Though we might wish it otherwise, our earthly shape
was
our house, our soul, and his inability to see that truth, to acknowledge it, to prostrate himself at our feet for it, made it forever impossible for me to see him. He could keep his Son at home, as far as I was concerned. Save him some pain. He would be too late in any case.

We left. We left Barnum in one blow—took our money and went—
at least in part because I had realized, thanks to his wife, that only on this earth, and not in heaven, could I hope to find some approximation of the equality she promised. I would leave the world of freaks and attempt to live like a man, equal to others in my own eyes, if not in theirs. But my brother—my baby brother, as I always thought of him—had been touched. The seed had been planted. In the eyes of Almighty God, we were all the same. It was only men that misread his creation, seeing differences where none existed. To stay in Barnum’s employ, therefore, continually exploiting these differences, would be to live a lie, to fly in the face of God’s truth. And so, though inspired by different motives, we went our way.

III.

Our leavetaking is something I look back on with a great deal of satisfaction. No one could accuse us of not having learned our lesson.

When the time came, everything had been planned; every move anticipated. Barnum, we knew, rarely lost what he considered his; once he had his paws around a thing it would either remain inside the American Museum or be rendered so unattractive that no one else would want it. Though smaller than Tom Thumb, we were still one of his biggest attractions, part of the central stable on which the museum depended; he would fight like a bear to keep us, and whatever else one might say about bears, they were not gentlemen. By the mid-1840s, Barnum’s reputation for ruthlessness was such that even the truly famous dealt with him carefully.

But Barnum had never met anyone like my brother, who still carried about with him, like a goad, the notebook in which he had painstakingly recorded all that Hunter and Coffin had owed us. When the moment came he unloaded all the anger and resentment he had stored, all the humiliation he had endured at their hands, on Barnum. Every slag heap we had picked through, every piece of pure we had sold, every moment he had endured on the floor of that boarding house watching our money disappear as I faded away beside him—every one of these he turned into a weapon. The first target had escaped him, had slipped away into
the forest of the world. The second sat, close-eyed and fat, just across the room, preparing, if necessary, to bargain us back to the poorhouse.

He never knew what hit him. For the first time in his life, I believe, Phineas T. Barnum found himself overwhelmed—quickly, decisively—by a force whose will was greater than his own. Scrambling desperately, he tried to take cover behind our contract. My brother had committed it to memory, and recited it back to him, chapter and verse. Barnum quoted expenses he had incurred, implied we owed him money. My brother knew our financial situation to the penny. We owed nothing. Mr. Barnum, in fact, by even the most conservative estimation, owed
us
just under three thousand dollars. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-six dollars, to be exact. We would expect payment in full within two days.

Barnum allowed himself to grow angry, then hurt. He called us ingrates, and reminded us of how he had saved us. My brother noted the sum we had made him over the past three years. He threw himself at our mercy. Times were particularly hard at the moment. The American Museum, appearances notwithstanding, was struggling. Surely we could stay on another six months, a year at most, if only for the sake of the friends we would be leaving behind. My brother replied that, regretfully, we could not. When all else failed him, Barnum, as expected, bared his teeth. He threatened to ruin us forever. We would never be able to show ourselves before the public again, he said, pounding the desk. He would grind us up like corn in the masher. He would not be intimidated. He would not be threatened by stripling boys still wet behind the ears who thought they could come into his office and throw their weight around any time they chose. Who did we think we were talking to? He had half a mind to throw us out on our Siamese ears.