The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (11 page)

Barnum removed a great ring of keys from the top drawer of his desk. Taking his time, he worked a small silver key off the ring, the rest
of the keys jangling against one another as if saying goodbye to one of their own. He slid the loose key across the polished surface of the wide desk, and it stopped halfway over the edge nearest to me. “This opens the storeroom in the back hall,” he said. “You’ll find the birdseed in the corner. How about you start Wednesday? That gives me plenty of time to relieve the maids.”

Pleased that Barnum had granted my request, I stood and clicked my heels together, grabbing the key before he changed his mind.

“One more thing, Mr. Fortuno,” he added, as I backed out his door, the little key already seated in the watch pocket of my vest.

I frowned.

“I have given a certain new performer permission to sit in the Arboretum as she wishes.”

“Sir?”

“And as long as you’ll be in that room . . .”

My breath quickened. Was Barnum asking me to do the very thing I most longed for? “I’m not sure I understand you, sir.”

Barnum shuffled papers about and avoided my eyes. “It’s not like I’m asking you to spy on her or anything.”

“What then? Who?”

Barnum picked up a small obsidian paperweight rumored to be as old as time itself. Squeezing it as if trying to break it, he sighed, then tossed the rock back down and grabbed his glass of brandy.

“Just come see me next week. Share a cigar and a brandy, and tell me if you’ve run across anyone else lingering in the Arboretum or the hallway nearby. But Fortuno—say nothing of this to your companions, eh?”

“About which, the brandy or the bird feeding?”

Barnum laughed one more time before shooing me out the door with a great bearlike swipe of his hand.

W
HY DIDN’T YOU COME SEE ME LAST
night?” Matina looked up at my reflection in her makeup mirror. “The second I’m finished, you’re to tell me everything that happened on your”—she looked around the Green Room—“you know, your trip.”

I was dying to tell all, but with Alley’s huge body sprawled across the chair behind her, I held my tongue. What in the world was Alley hanging about for, anyway? Something must have happened. Otherwise, he’d be sitting alone as he always did. Instead, he loitered behind Matina, smoking a cigar and watching her swipe at her face with a cloth full of cream. Behind them, faded posters and clippings covered the wall, old pictures of Barnum, banners from
The Enchantress
, which ran for six months at Niblo’s, and newspaper headlines such as
CHILD DEVOURED BY PIGS AND SHOCKING OCCURRENCE: FIVE MEN SMOTHERED IN GIN VAT
.

Alley pulled on his cigar, his cheeks collapsing in on themselves like sinkholes. Then he puffed the smoke straight up, sending a cloud of it rolling past my face.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said, waving my hand through the smoke. I pulled up the chair from the next dressing table and sat down on it.

“Don’t pick on the poor man.” Matina moved close to her oval mirror and squinted at the side of her nose, perfect from what I could see despite her eye for secret flaws. “Alley had a bad day yesterday, and we’ve been talking about what he might do, poor thing, to make some sense of it.”

“My day wasn’t easy, either,” I interjected, but Matina seemed not to hear me or not to care. “All right then,” I barked at Alley, “tell me what happened.”

Alley looked the other way.

“The police picked him up,” Matina answered for him.

“The police?”

“But I can’t get him to tell me why. And now he says he wants to leave us, Barthy. Can you imagine?”

“I’m thinkin’ o’ maybe goin’ west,” Alley said at last. “Buy a farm somewheres. Maybe Indiana.”

Matina threw up her hands. “Goodness, no! Have you any idea what a wilderness the territories are? Tell him, Barthy.”

I’d nothing to say. It was utterly inconceivable to me that anyone would want to leave the Museum, let alone to go to the territories. Nowhere in the world would Alley be so well regarded as here. And God knows he could never manage to control himself outside the company of his peers. He knew that as well as I did.

Matina picked up an old photograph in a silver frame she always kept on her dressing table and waggled it in front of Alley’s nose. Ah, yes, the husband’s likeness. I knew it well.

“I myself am from Indiana,” she told Alley. “Horrible place. Horrible people. My very own Paps, in fact, married me off to this Swede to pay his dry goods bill. It was barbaric. Look at this!” The photograph showed Matina, probably fifteen or so, standing in front of a much older man. Behind them was a pine building with an overhead sign that read
SVENDAL DRY GOODS
. Matina, already large by normal standards, was wearing the kind of dress that’s only seen on young country girls, and her hair was braided. The man, her husband, Henrick, towered above her. He had legs like oak logs and shoulders as broad as she was wide. His pocked face bore the long nose and craggy cheekbones of his Nordic ancestry. “I swear that man was chiseled from a glacier.” She sighed. “I had to wrap up in raccoon furs whenever he touched me. And here.” She lifted the white sleeve of her
gown and pointed with her chin to a scar on the inside of her left arm. “He cut me once with a kitchen knife for burning his bread.”

Alley reached a huge finger out toward her scar.

“Don’t fret.” Matina pulled her arm away before Alley could touch it. “He left me for an Irish girl, a sheepshearer, and it was the best thing that could have happened. I didn’t even petition for room and board, though with the way he treated me, Lord knows, I’d probably have gotten it. But no, sir. Just signed a paper of divorce, packed my bags, and got right out of there. I ended up in Indianapolis. Morty Howard—you remember him, Barthy?—well, Morty Howard saw my potential right away, and it took less than a year of eating pork fat and goose to become the girl I am today.” Matina wagged at finger at Alley. “We make ourselves succeed,” she said. “We don’t run away.”

“
You
ran away,” Alley said, scratching his head.

Matina shrugged. “I hardly think it’s the same.” After turning to me for assistance and getting silence, she twisted around and reached beneath her chair. With a bit of effort, she pulled out a basket full of
cartes
and plunked it onto her lap. Flipping through the basket, she found what she was looking for and held it up in front of us.

“Here it is: Kaspar Hauser,” Matina said, poking at the picture with her finger. “That boy lived in a tiny cellar until he was sixteen years old. He never saw the light of day, never spoke to anyone. His meals came each morning delivered by an unseen hand.” Matina pulled out the battered picture and held it up: a short man with a large head, bowed legs, and hair pressed to his ears. “He’s a wonderful example: the way he rose above his problems. I find it quite inspirational.”

“His life sounds all right to me.” Alley smirked.

“I’m serious. The poor boy lived in darkness for years until some kind soul found him and let him out. And he ended up quite famous despite his lack of language. The rumor—and I, for one, believe it—was that he was the son of the Grand Duke of Baden!”

Matina rummaged about in her basket, pulling out another picture, this one of a huge man dressed in a loincloth.

“Better yet, here’s Charles Freeman, who could lift fifteen hundred pounds with one hand. This here says that even though he knew not a thing about boxing, he went into the ring with the Tipton Slasher.”

At this point, I interrupted. “My dear, it might not be the best idea to compare Alley to Charles Freeman.”

Matina knew how I felt about Alley. No matter how gentle his temperament, a man with a body like Alley’s was subject to dangerous storms—storms that, should they break, could cause all manner of harm and destruction. Better to give him practical counsel than encourage him with stories of violence.

“I simply want to remind him that we succeed by being brave, not by letting our problems overwhelm us.”

“I think you’ve made your point.”

Alley reached over to take the
carte
from Matina, but his elbow hit the dressing table and knocked her hairbrush from the top. It clattered across the floor and slid under the adjoining makeup table. I let Alley jump to retrieve the brush even though it was probably as difficult for him to clamber beneath the table as it would have been for me. I didn’t care. I wanted a moment to let Matina know I wasn’t pleased about her fussing over Alley when I had so much news to tell her. As soon as Alley ducked his head, I gave her a searing look. She shook her head back at me, frowning.

When Alley stretched forward and reached his gigantic hand along the floor, his shirt rode up, revealing the beginning of three long, deep scars that disappeared beneath his broadcloth shirt. I flinched. Alley had once told me about those scars. His father had died in New York City’s Great Fire of ’35 and afterward, although he was no more than sixteen, Alley took to whiskey. Some days, he could drink all day and still be on his feet and lucid. Other days, a single shot could intoxicate him, and if someone provoked him while in that drunken state, Alley flew into an awful rage. One day, after drinking a few too many shots of whiskey, he nearly killed another boy over a game of cards at a dive in Five Points. The courts sent him
upstate to a reformatory for two full years. Alley spent his time there quietly, causing no one else harm. But the moment he got out, he was at it again.

Barnum’s scouts found Alley a few months later, brawling in a tavern on the West Side. The scouts watched him for two days, then sat him down, fed him, and gave him a free glass of whiskey. That was all it took to convince Alley to compete in the Fight of the Beasts, a notorious bear-wrestling contest Barnum put on for private clients with a taste for violence. Held on a pig farm near land the city had set aside for the new central parklands, the fights took place in an old barn that Barnum had refitted as a fighting ring, with rough-hewn oak benches lining the walls and, in the center, a metal cage on top of a huge pit of mud. Inside that cage, a black bear raged. Barnum would pit that bear against anyone crazy or desperate enough to fight it and made quite a sum, I’ve heard, on entrance fees and betting.

After Alley scrawled his name across the front of a one-page contract, he found himself propped up in a donkey cart on his way up the island, crooning love songs and drinking black ale under a cold winter sky. During the long ride, it started to snow. Alley didn’t bother to shelter himself beneath his coat. He just stared wistfully out across the Croton Aqueduct and the open fields of Manhattan, dreaming, he told me later, about some girl named Eleanor. The snow floated down, and the cold kept him still. By the time he jumped off the cart and headed into the barn, his clothes, his hair, and most of his face lay buried under dirty snow and ice. He stumbled into the barn like a Himalayan Yeti, and he must have made quite an impression because the bear shook his bars as spectators flew to their feet, appreciatively. Alley yelled a ferocious greeting and jumped into the caged arena half blind from the ice. The bear reared up. They circled each other like warring brothers, equal in size and strength, and took turns swatting and showing their teeth. At one point, the bear knocked Alley sideways and the impact whipped him around on his heels, exposing his back. With one tidy swipe, the bear clawed down his skin like it was the bark of a tree. But rather than stop Alley, the swipe sent him into a fury. The powerful howl from this
ice-encrusted wild man so stunned the animal it jerked back, and that hesitation gave Alley his chance. With a roar as loud as a crashing tree, he slammed his fist across the poor bear’s nose, and with that single
thump
he knocked the animal to the ground, unconscious. Barnum did not waste a moment. He recruited Alley on the spot.

Now, as Alley pulled his shirt down to cover the scars—raised slashes like tiny mountain ranges that started at his lower back and twisted halfway up to his shoulders—I felt sorry for him. But pity didn’t change a thing. A man built like Alley was destined for violence.

“Here it is!” Alley righted himself, handing the brush to Matina as if it were a precious gift.

“Perhaps what you need,” I suggested to Alley, slightly repentant, “is a female companion. Someone to pass the time with. How about Bridgett, that black-haired girl from the kitchens? She’s totally smitten with you.”

But Alley wasn’t listening to me. He stared mournfully at Matina, his long hair flopping over his face so that only the tip of his nose and his dark eyes were visible. When she took the brush out of his hands, he turned to go.

“You stay right where you are,” Matina ordered, and Alley hesitated, then sat down. “Barthy, why don’t you go check the schedule while I finish here. We can talk about your day later.”

Irritated, I walked over to the Notice Board and waited until Fish came to hang up the new schedule. Over my shoulder, I watched Matina pat Alley on his arm. Why did she baby him like that? I turned back to the board and, to my surprise, found that a small crowd had already gathered.

I had to squeeze myself between two sweating acrobats to get a better look.