Jenny and Barnum (28 page)

New York looked like an English city, she thought, another Liverpool, but Barnum was quick to dispute that. In his lifetime New York had doubled in size, and the number of brick and stone buildings had multiplied ten times. Barnum was a storehouse of information about the city and the nation. She could see that he loved them both, which she found sweet, even if she did not share the sentiment.

He rescued her from the worst of the City Hall reception, deftly and quickly getting them away from an event that promised to continue for as long as the available alcohol would last. Tom Thumb, Otto Goldschmidt, and Signore Minelli stayed—now she could see Tom Thumb in all his glory, standing on a table to hold court for the press. On this side of the ocean he was everything he had said in Vienna; yet in London, she remembered, he had disappeared from her party in less than an hour. Now she thought she understood his shyness that night. He needed this adulation; it made him feel complete. She could only conclude that God did indeed work in mysterious ways.

At City Hall, too, she had the opportunity to meet Waldo Collins, the lawyer recommended by Judge Munthe. A gentleman. He was in his fifties, lean, with white hair and a florid complexion, well-cut clothes, and a professional demeanor. When she was rested from her journey, he said, he stood ready to represent her in all her American undertakings—a phrase she found curiously, refreshingly expansive, for it was her understanding that she was under exclusive contract to Barnum.

Barnum was standing nearby through all this, not interfering. It was clear that the two men had not met, and she wondered why. She told Collins to call upon her at her hotel at two o'clock the next afternoon.

She
was
tired, but clearly there was to be no letup in the celebration welcoming her to this crazy place. Thousands of people still lined the streets to attend the passage of her carriage up Broadway to the Irving House, where Barnum had taken an entire floor for her party.

There were as many people outside the hotel as there had been at the dock earlier. It was as if the city had taken a holiday. Barnum had never seen anything like it, he said, and she was beginning to believe it. She was beginning to believe that this madness was going to exceed anything that had ever happened in Europe. It took more than twenty minutes for the police to lead the carriage's horses through the crowd to the entrance of the hotel. At times it looked like people were going to be killed in the crush, and when the carriage had stopped at last, it took another five minutes for the police and hotel employees to clear a path across the sidewalk. Even so, several times Barnum shielded her from the blows of the crowd's pushing and shoving; and inside the hotel, their ears continued ringing from the crowd's screaming.

“The banquet at Delmonico's isn't scheduled until eight-thirty,” Barnum said, “but under the circumstances, perhaps I'd better come around for you and the others an hour earlier.”

“Come at seven and we'll open a bottle of champagne.”

“Oh, I'm a teetotaler, Jenny.”

“You? I don't believe it!”

“It's true, I took the pledge. But I'll be here at seven, and I'll be good company in spite of myself.”

“I'll be the best judge of that,” she said with a smile.

“I want to speak to the management before I go,” he told her. “I don't care what they do, I want them to provide you with a quiet, dark room that will permit you to get your rest.”

It hadn't occurred to her that the people in the street would not quiet down after they had been asked, but she had to keep reminding herself that this was America and not Europe, and that people
were
different here. What if they didn't quiet down—or ever go away? Suppose they didn't know how to behave at all?

Happily, the management had just spent the past hour hurriedly rearranging the rooms. Barnum was full of mirth, describing the clerk's reaction to all the excitement. “‘Really, Mr. Barnum,'” he mimicked effeminately, “‘the hotel isn't accustomed to such excitement, not even when Buchanan is here.' I told him that Buchanan isn't as important as you are.”

She giggled. “Forgive me, but who is Buchanan?”

“President of the United States.”

“
All
of them?”

He stepped back, his eyebrows arched, his lips pursed with suppressed laughter.

Apparently she had said something funny.

Barnum was charming, gallant, and obviously a powerful man, but what was most impressive about him to Jenny was his indefatigable good cheer with everyone he spoke to, from the rich and important down to the humblest carriage driver or doorman. He had a joke or story for all, and he didn't seem to mind repeating his little jests endlessly. Like an insane preacher proselytizing a new gospel, he seemed to dare not rest until he had all in his company smiling and laughing, their faces wreathed with joy. In the carriage on the way to Delmonico's from her little reception that evening, she felt bold enough to ask him why he behaved as he did.

“People expect it of me,” he said.

She was referring to an incident involving Otto and Signore Minelli—both of them still drunk from the City Hall reception in the afternoon, Otto tipsy in a merry, foolish way, and Signore Minelli feeling vastly superior to everyone, but most particularly to Barnum, whom he had decided to take for a rival—Otto already having been vanquished, Minelli apparently believed. It could have been an acutely embarrassing moment, but Barnum had turned it away so deftly and skillfully through his humor that it was now the high point of her little party. “But what about tonight?” she asked. “You just met those two men. Surely they didn't expect it of you.”

“I
want
them to expect it of me,” Barnum said.

Minelli had buttonholed Barnum in the center of the room. At the last minute, Jenny had been able to deliver a note to Waldo Collins, the lawyer, inviting him to her party, and Barnum had just as graciously invited him to continue with them to Delmonico's. Minelli was lurching. “Signore Barnum!”

“Ah,
buenos noches.
”

“You are speaking Spanish,” Minelli said, taken aback.

“And you, sir, are speaking English!” Barnum had a gleam in his eye; he knew Minelli was in his cups.

“Well, I am Italian!”

“And I am American. How'ja do?”

“Barnum! You have a terrible reputation! I will be following you everywhere!”

Barnum hesitated, then pulled himself up. “Well, I shall have to leave bits of spaghetti to make my trail easier to follow.”

Minelli suddenly seethed through the laughter and then pointed at Jenny. “This woman is a virgin!”

“She told
me
she was a
Swede!
” Barnum boomed so quickly and so much louder that people hardly heard what Minelli had said first—the colossal, ghastly rudeness! Minelli was drunk, of course, and Otto promptly hustled him out of the room, but it was Barnum, with his deliberate lunacy, who distracted the group from Jenny's humiliation.

I want them to expect it of me
. Given Minelli's insults, Barnum could have chosen any response, even including violence, and gotten away with it. But the incident was almost completely out of his mind when they were in the carriage, and later after the dinner he regaled the audience for three-quarters of an hour telling stories of his youth in Connecticut as a storekeeper's apprentice. The audience loved him, even if some had heard one or two of the stories before—with her experience on the stage, Jenny had no difficulty understanding the audience's response. His best stories were the ones he told on himself, in which the jokes were at his expense.

He was the penultimate speaker. She was required to say a few words of salutation, and she was never very comfortable speaking for herself in front of large numbers of people. She conveyed the greetings of the King of Sweden and the Queen of England, from whom she had received notes of godspeed and good wishes before her departure from London. Beyond that, what more could she say? She was a singer, and since they had not yet heard a song, she could not assume that they would like her. In some small way, she said, she hoped that her tour would strengthen the bonds of their common Christian culture. The mayor was present, judges and senators, a dozen members of the clergy. She thought she was saying the right thing, but it was as if they did not know what to make of her. Their response was only polite. In the carriage returning to the hotel, she thought she could sense Barnum's disappointment and concern.

“I am only a woman, Barnum. You cannot expect me to entertain a restaurant full of men with extemporaneous remarks.”

“No, you did well, believe me. You're a
modest
woman, Jenny, and that came through. You've whetted their appetites. They're profoundly curious now.”

“Ah, they wonder if I can sing! That's only natural. Tell me, Barnum, where did you hear me?”

“Me? Oh, my! In point of fact, I've never had the pleasure!”

She sat up. “Never? My God! What made you dare to pay me so much money to come to this madhouse?”

“Your reputation. I'm much better on matters of reputation than singing anyway.”

She regarded him carefully. He could not know it, but what he had just admitted made her shiver with an awful shock and dismay. She
was
a stranger here; for all she knew, they did not even know what singing
was
. “You're mad,” she said, and looked out the window at the unfamiliar wooden buildings passing. “You're quite mad.”

Barnum didn't answer, and after a while, when she sensed his attention turned elsewhere, she risked a glance in his direction. He looked like he was containing his glee, perfectly satisfied with himself. Perhaps he really
was
mad!

Upstairs in her suite, she could not sleep. She had not been able to nap in the afternoon, but she was still wide awake, excited, unnerved. All this time, she had thought Barnum a true impresario, a connoisseur in his own right—but if she had heard him correctly, he was actually a connoisseur of reputation, a trafficker in gossip and publicity. What was the substance of such a man? What was the accomplishment of such a life?

More important, what was he drawing her into?

There was a soft knock on the door—hardly Minelli's knock, even if he was awake and sober. She peered through the crack. It was Otto, looking chipper, smiling saucily. Under his arm was an ice bucket containing champagne and a bowl of caviar. She felt bold, even giddy, and opened the door wide.

He was kissing her before she mustered the courage to tell him that was what she wanted.

From the hotel Barnum went directly back to his quarters on the top floor of the American Museum. Late as it was, he still had much work to do. Tomorrow after lunch—and her first rehearsal, which would take place in the morning—Jenny would be interviewed by the gentlemen of the press, representing all fifteen New York newspapers, and several from Boston, Hartford, Newark, and Philadelphia as well. After years of dealing with Barnum, the journalists expected him to do most of their work for them, providing them with handouts bearing all the pertinent information. Barnum wanted to be in the newspapers, and they needed stories to fill their columns; if their relationship was too painfully obvious, Barnum always made sure it was happy. He was concerned about Jenny Lind's naïveté in such matters, afraid she was going to have some moral objection to what was, at least to the participants, nothing but a symbiotic business relationship.

A minor point. Nagging at Barnum since he'd boarded the
Great Western
—almost a full day ago; he'd been without sleep now for thirty-four hours—was the notion that the trouble in the Tom Thumb troupe had been the result of Barnum's neglect while he'd been attending to the Lind tour. Now the situation was beyond anything
he
could do—although he could see that the principals could work together no longer. Another factor, too: Barnum had heard only Charlie's side of the story. As much as Barnum loved Charlie, he knew Charlie suffered the same curse as everybody else, that of being human, and that the story could have elements not yet revealed to Barnum. At least Charlie was not quitting. He had taken a suite at the Astor House, and planned to remain in the city through Thursday night, when Jenny Lind would give her first concert.

The poor woman still didn't know that she was going to have to sing the prize-winning “Ode to America,” the result of Barnum's wildest scheme to stimulate interest in her arrival. For a grand prize of $100, twenty thousand entries, most of which went into the rubbish immediately upon receipt. If that was not enough, keeping Barnum's clerks and accountants busy for weeks of worthless labor, now some five or six of the losing poets were crying, “Foul,” claiming that the verdict had been rendered even before the contest had been announced. (Barnum only wished he had thought of that, for it would have saved a lot of labor; and if he'd been able to have a hand in the composition, he certainly would have come up with a better song!)

And sometime in the next few days, Barnum had to talk to Anna Swan. The young man found in Maine's backwoods was an almost: he was almost tall enough, almost old enough. He was twenty-four years old, five or six years her junior, and seven feet nine inches tall—
not
the full eight feet Barnum had said. Apparently he was an unhappy lad, sick of his isolated life and not much use to anybody else. The agent who had interviewed him reported that the prospect of working for Barnum and being put on exhibition had left the big kid thoroughly depressed. Still—and almost needless to say—the young man was willing to journey down to New York at Barnum's expense to see for himself that the promise of a better life was not a hollow one. He had been apprised of Anna Swan, and she interested him. (The agent indicated confidentially that the coltish giant had the girls of his neighborhood quaking with terror.) There was a chance, the agent said, that the fellow could be fobbed off as a strong man, or modern Goliath—but the problem with that, as Barnum knew too well, was that in every village in America was some burly lunatic ready to challenge man, horse, or elephant to any kind of test of strength, including mortal combat. Given the role Barnum hoped Anna Swan would play in the whole business, just about the last thing he could do was send the young man out to the boondocks to be torn to pieces by some local man-mountain who chewed bear meat for breakfast.