Jenny and Barnum (11 page)

Obviously the hardship I am really asking of you is an extension of your current European tour—another six weeks, I'm afraid. In that regard, I have been corresponding with various theater managers from Berlin eastward to St. Petersburg; while the schedule is not a heavy one, it will pay you
(and all the others) as much or more than you have made on this tour so far—I will guarantee that!

Wilton in London has been looking after many of the details in this change of plans. As soon as you are in London in the first week in March, be in touch with him. I have invited Judge Munthe, Jenny Lind's guardian, to travel to London that first week in March to meet you and Wilton as my representatives. I expect the learned jurist to avail himself of a free holiday in Her Majesty's capital. I also expect him to make a pest of himself, be unreasonable, and otherwise test your patience until you can figure out that he wants money, women, or both. As I say, I have a good deal of information on Miss Lind, and I have reason to take her as a naive and frightened woman; and it is not unusual to find lurking in the background of such a woman some venal suitmonger ever alert for opportunities to emulate the most nauseating excesses of the Emperor Nero, or any other drooling, self-indulgent princeling you'd care to name. Accommodate Judge Munthe, no matter what brand of son-of-a-bitch he proves to be
.

And I add this last on the assumption that you'll keep to yourself the professionally disastrous information it contains, and because you have to share the laugh fate has handed me through the Lind matter
.

I am now broke. To meet Jenny Lind's demands, I have had to mortgage, again, both my beloved estate of Iranistan in Connecticut and the American Museum in New York. Only the prompt payment of European receipts will give me the capital needed to finance the Jenny Lind campaign. My credit in New York is so suspect that I had to travel down to Philadelphia to find the last few thousand to clinch the deal. On the way back, I stepped out onto the observation platform of the railroad car for a breath of air. The conductor recognized me and struck up a conversation, very respectful, addressing me as
“Mister
Barnum,” and calling me, “Sir,” if you please. In the presence of such adoration I began to puff up visibly, like the victim of a mother-in-law's pot roast
.

“
What's your next project, Mr. Barnum, sir?” he asked
.

“
I'm bringing Jenny Lind over to America from Europe,” I said, stroking my lapel, imagining the public throwing money at my feet
.

“
I've heard of her,” he said. “She's a wonderful dancer.
”

Charlie, I hear the snow doesn't melt in St. Petersburg until June, but while you're looking at it, I want you to think of how hard I'm working to get ten thousand people to welcome you home
.

Tom Thumb cursed under his breath. Wilton in London thought—thanks to Barnum—that the troupe had been consulted about another ten weeks. With the contracts signed, there would be no backing away without penalty—and the possibility of a lawsuit if any of them ever set foot in that country again. Barnum had been planning this almost from the start. He was going to get a grand American welcome for Jenny Lind for nothing—
true:
he would have had to pay for the troupe's passage home anyway! In the bargain, Barnum expected Tom Thumb to bring home a new act raising Joe Gallagher to nearly his equal. And Barnum complained about the Judge Munthes of the world.

“This is interesting,” Lavinia said.

“What?”

“All this about Jenny Lind being such a God-fearing Christian woman.”

“That's what I saw,” Tom Thumb said.

“Well, apparently it's common knowledge that she's a lovechild—illegitimate. Her parents weren't married when she was born.”

Tom Thumb sat up, thinking once again—so quickly—of his investment. “Are you sure?”

“I've heard it from several sources.” Lavinia giggled and grabbed the rest of the letter, including Barnum's references to the extended tour and his present financial condition. “That's right,” she said, as she started to read again, going into a perfect Irish brogue, “as Joe's sainted mother would say, ‘Miss Lind was conceived in
sin!
'” Lavinia rolled over. “Now don't bother me until I finish reading.”

Tom Thumb kept still. “Joe” loved to talk of his mother, who died when he was young. Lavinia no less than any other woman was ready to shower sympathy on an “orphan.” Joe was masterful at drawing out a woman's sympathies, even if it meant reminding her—as he apparently was doing—what her life would be like without Barnum and Tom Thumb. Joe was playing the outsider and making her see what she had in common with him. Well, it was just a matter of moments before she discovered she was spending the rest of the winter in Russia—and would have to worry about getting paid for it, too.

II

5.

Tom Thumb was a natural, born-to-the-sea sailor. Whether on a day sail on Long Island Sound on his own custom-designed yawl,
Shoal Draft
, or surging across the Atlantic on the
Great Western
, General Tom Thumb, cigar in his teeth, rarely was very far from the helm. Officers and crews on both sides of the ocean knew him; indeed, he and Barnum often used his visits aboard vessels in port to get the attention of the press—favorable, too, as the journalists observed the honest admiration of the sailors for the little man's seamanship. He was as good as any of them, and he could see in their eyes that if he had been normal-sized, they would have been glad to have him working along with them.

Aboard the
Great Western
, or the sixty-foot pilothouse ketch now slapping due west toward the Thames Estuary through an ugly North Sea chop, Tom Thumb knew he was taking advantage of his special circumstance—his deformity, or the privilege he and Barnum had fashioned of it, or both—but no matter: given the situation that obtained for people like him before Barnum had made him famous, this was better. Living in a closet, or let out only rarely, like the family exhibit, Charlie Stratton might never have seen so much as a picture of a ship. So General Tom Thumb had to be entertaining, witty, and good company, never overstepping himself, courteous to all. Often it tried his patience; often he saw too clearly into certain individuals and their lurid, cocksure speculations about little people. But this was better than his life ever could have been otherwise, and not because of the expectation of joy his presence created anywhere he went, including the deck of a ship, but because he was on the deck of a ship, sailing, which he loved as much as anything in the whole adventure he and Barnum had constructed of his life.

Lavinia, on the other hand, was a poor sailor who needed perfect weather to feel well enough to get up and move around and perhaps take a little food. Most of the troupe was like that, from Anna Swan, confined, sometimes even strapped, out of necessity, to her bed in heavy seas, or, on a boat this size, to the settee in the main salon, to keep damage belowdecks to a minimum; to Joe Gallagher, who came up on deck often enough but usually drunk and suffering from
that
. It was Chang who suffered the most of all, everybody agreed. The sea didn't bother him, but it made Eng sick. When they sailed, Chang had to spend most of the voyage watching brother Eng throw up in a bucket. Sometimes it was easy to understand why the Siamese Twins hated each other.

Before leaving Antwerp, Tom Thumb had had a letter from John Hall Wilton, Barnum's man in London. The meeting with Judge Munthe was arranged for Thursday, the fourth of March, in Wilton's offices in Chancery Lane. Wilton actually sounded enthusiastic about signing the agreement papers then and there; the money was in hand, he reported, as if he could not get rid of it fast enough.

Wilton was a sandy-haired, apple-cheeked young man like a character in a novel by Dickens. He also seemed a cultured sort who voluntarily attended opera and ballet, and Tom Thumb thought that a deadly combination for judging American audiences. The whole proposition now filled Tom Thumb with terror. The closer he got to seeing the $187,500—and his twenty grand along with it—go over to some Scandinavian Four-flusher, the more the little General was convinced that it was the last they were going to see of any part of it. Something terrible was going to happen. Nothing Tom Thumb had learned about Jenny Lind since Lavinia's amazing revelation offered the slightest assurance about doing business with The Swedish Nightingalemore like
buzzard
, Tom Thumb feared.

At two o'clock Lavinia tried to come up to the pilothouse. She had not eaten since the night before, but she was growing more uncomfortable, with good reason. The sea had been boiling up all day, the cloud cover lowering almost down to the top of the waves. They had left Antwerp at midnight, ghosting past Vlissingen in the Netherlands two hours after dawn. The wind had been westerly, mild, but it had been picking up all day, the eye shifting around to the south, coming in over their port beam. All day long Captain Ross had his crew of two dousing sail, so that by the time Lavinia appeared at the foot of the companionway, the little boat was flying only a storm jib. Lavinia was not much interested in the sea, but she had heard enough from Tom Thumb to know that so little canvas up meant that the weather was bad, no matter what anybody could tell her to calm her nerves.

“Look lively, boys!” Tom Thumb shouted. “The lady's trying to get up the companionway!”

One of the sailors, a redheaded Irishman named Murphy, reached down for Lavinia's arm, and then, steadying himself against the rolling and yawing of the boat, lifted her smoothly to the top of the locker aft in the pilothouse where Tom Thumb stood with a view of Captain Ross at the wheel, the whitecaps splashing over the cabin trunk, and the bow digging deep into the foamy, bright green sea, only to rise up again over the next tossing twelve-footer, pointing again and again at the fierce, blackening sky. The imminent storm extended so far in all directions that the horizon had become a ribbon of light so brilliant it was blinding. Lavinia took Tom Thumb's arm, and steadied herself against the bulkhead with her other hand.

“It looks awful!”

“It could blow over! We could get very little of it.”

“I don't think so. I came up here to see what was going on. Now I know.”

The wind picked up, putting the starboard gunwale in the water. Murphy battled his way outside to ease the sheet and let out the storm jib, righting the boat.

“Are we halfway?”

“Not even a third!” Tom Thumb shouted. “We have more wind than we need, but we're sailing into the current. We're not making five knots. How are they doing down there?”

“What you'd expect. Eng is sick, and so is Anna. Joe said he was going to sleep it off in your cabin.”

He and Tom Thumb had to share a cabin on a boat as small as this.

“Drunk in the morning, eh?”

“He only had a couple,” she said.

“He's a goddamned
dwarf!
How many does he think he can have?”

Captain Ross and the two crewmen heard him, and laughed. “I'll tell you one thing,” Captain Ross said. “If we start to go down, the first thing over the side would be that big woman, if I could figure out how to get her out of the hatch again without a block and tackle.”

Which was how they had put Anna Swan aboard at Antwerp, in a sling suspended from a rig bolted to the dock. From the moment she had stepped from her oversized carriage, Anna had hidden her face in her hands, as if that would keep the crowd that had gathered in the darkness from ever recognizing her again.

“That's not nice, Captain,” Lavinia said.

“I suppose it isn't—but
you
don't have to worry. The three of you teenie-weenies don't make up a quarter of her.”

A wave crashed against the pilothouse. “It's raining now, Captain,” Murphy called. “We're right in the middle of it.”

“I think I'll go below,” Lavinia said. “Looking at it doesn't help me.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

She shook her head. Murphy lowered her down the companionway again, and Tom Thumb strained to see that she got back to her cabin safely. In these seas little people were especially vulnerable to broken bones, including necks and skulls.

“I didn't upset her with what I said, did I?” the captain asked.

“She didn't like it, but that's not why she left. She was getting a little green around the gills.”

“You're as good a sailor as they come, General. I thought it might have to do with your size, but she gets sick just like a full-sized woman. The other fellow, too, but he drinks. It's hard to tell if he'd be better or worse, sober.”

“He's lousy either way,” Tom Thumb said.

“Well, he's a nasty drunk. Smooth on the outside and the ladies like him, but I've been seeing his kind all my life, and big or small, they're all the same.”

“Ireland's full of that type,” Murphy said. “All charm and romance until they're drunk, and then charm and romance the next day.”

“I wish you could convince her,” Tom Thumb said.

“Women are the last to get wise,” Captain Ross said. “I watched him when you boarded last night, the smooth-talking little bastard. What makes some people think they can flatter and lie through life? The booze will get him, though—it always does.”

“How bad do you think this storm is going to be?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, General. As for me, I'm getting a little nervous.”

At last Tom Thumb could admit to himself that he had been growing ever more afraid since the middle of the day.

At three o'clock they struck the storm jib and sailed at almost three knots on the force the wind exerted on the rigging alone. The waves rose higher, steering becoming that much more difficult. The wind shrieked through the rigging, and at times the boat seemed to roll completely onto its side. The waves marched steadily out of the eye of the wind, which Captain Ross now kept at their port quarter. It rained steadily. At any moment an unexpected random wave could dismast them, or pitch-pole them down into a trough, where they would surely take on water and sink. The thought of dying at sea made Tom Thumb feel queasy, but he waited until nearly five o'clock before asking to be lowered down the companionway, lest any of the ship's company think he wanted to check on Lavinia and Gallagher. He wanted to look in on all of the troupe, but it was Lavinia he wanted to
see
.