The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (30 page)

And me? As the days passed, I’d started craving the root and thought constantly of how it lay buried under the rock in the Arboretum. The birds were a consolation—spending time with them had become a daily ritual of real joy—but, sadly, my mind wandered constantly to the root. Some ridiculous part of me had begun to believe that it held the key to my salvation. Not having it was becoming worse than the consequences it caused.

Then, during my last show on Sunday, Mrs. Barnum showed up with the assessor in tow. The man jotted down notes in a small book as he stood with Mrs. Barnum at the rear of my little showing room. The sight of them sent me into an absolute panic. I stumbled over several of my lines and nearly missed a cue, to the disgust of Thaddeus. But then I reminded myself that, unless Emma told her, Mrs. Barnum knew nothing of my recent activities, and I stood a little straighter, drawing in my stomach and enunciating every syllable. I even made a point of displaying the inside of both legs to show off my new tights. I was so confident I’d given a good showing that it came as quite a shock to find out the following morning that Fish had taken me off the performance schedule.

The first thing I did was march down to Barnum’s office, but a sign posted on his door said he was out for the day, which sent me sweating into Fish’s office a few doors down.

“I can’t understand why management would
do
such a thing.”

“Only following orders, Fortuno.” Fish was on his feet and moving a mile a minute, rearranging account books, gathering papers, and making last-minute changes to lists posted on the walls.

“Whose orders? Why?”

Fish shot me a look over his shoulder. “You’re still showing in tableau. Just bide your time and keep your nose clean, and all should be well.”

No one said a thing to me at breakfast, though they’d surely seen the schedule change. Matina raised an inquiring eyebrow, but when I sat and silently sipped my tea, she let the matter be. Calmly, I accompanied her to the Exhibit Hall as instructed, and I was quite pleasant to the crowds.

I finished around eleven, and with little else to do, I hung about outside the Lecture Room, relishing the crowd’s reactions to me. At least I still had the power to make them look. This raised my spirits for a while. But then I made the mistake of walking by my performance room. Thaddeus was nattering away inside, and I could hear the audience laughing at familiar cues. I knew Alley was breaking the rock on his head at that very instant, and Ricardo was limbering up in the wings. No one seemed to miss me at all.

I slipped off my coat to invite more attention from the crowd in the hall, but even the swoon of a young woman dressed in orange taffeta failed to bring me any lasting satisfaction. What had Alley said to me about desire? That he knew what he wanted but couldn’t always get it? That same longing threatened to suffocate me now.

“Hey, freak! How much do you weigh?” A yokel came up the hallway behind me and poked me between the shoulder blades with his finger. “What do you eat, little chicken feet? And where did you get that fine hat?”

I sighed. Perhaps I should go fetch the root after all. I’d just passed the Yellow Room, heart thumping as it always did in Iell’s vicinity, when I stopped in my tracks; Mathew Brady and Barnum were making their way up the main hall toward me. Barnum had draped one arm over Brady’s shoulder, and he was gesticulating toward the exhibits as if Brady were a cherished Museum patron come for the first time to witness the splendor of the place. They cut a swath through the crowd as if they were parting the Red Sea. And under one of Brady’s arms was a cloth portfolio. The photographs!

Pressing myself into the corner behind a mock thrashing machine, I watched them go into Barnum’s office. After they closed the door, I crept forward and pressed my ear against it. Barnum’s voice boomed from inside; there was no mistaking that laugh.

“Oh, these are excellent! They always are. But where . . .” I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said, but I did hear parts of Brady’s garbled answer:
wonderful
,
matter of time
, and
many interested parties.

When Fish started his patter in front of the Yellow Room, I reluctantly moved away from the door. I knew the photographs were in Barnum’s office, and I was dying to see them, but I’d clearly have to bide my time.

After what felt like an eternity, Brady and Barnum stepped into the hallway. They passed within inches of me, and only Brady acknowledged me, greeting me with a tip of his hat. I waited a good five minutes more before I ducked into Barnum’s office, closing the door tight behind me.

The black portfolio sat on top of Barnum’s desk. After I stuck my head into the hall one final time to make sure Barnum wasn’t on his way, I moved a chair to the side of the desk and pulled the portfolio near. Heart pounding, I took hold of the cover. Then I had a sudden and paralyzing thought. What if Brady’s camera had caught my physical indiscretion that morning? I’d be the laughingstock of the Museum.

I flipped open the portfolio cover. Inside, dozens of photographs were piled, one on top of the next. I thumbed through them as quickly as I could, praying that nothing in the images showed my compromised condition, and thank God, there was not a hint of it. In every single photograph, I stood enough behind Iell to hide my lower body. Thoroughly relieved, I laughed aloud.

Then I went back through the photographs again, more slowly this time, and with a considerable amount of pleasure. In the middle of each photograph sat the lovely Iell. Her regal face beamed out like a candle in a dark cave. Even on paper, her heavy-lidded eyes bewitched me. And her beard, exceptionally dark in the photographs, lay proud against the whiteness of her skin. Matina appeared quite content behind me, her sweet face smiling and serene. Hadn’t she been upset?
I’d heard her cry, I knew I had. And afterward, there’d been no mistaking her distress. She must have masked her pain. I hadn’t thought her capable of such deception.

I took a closer look at my own image in the photographs, surprised by how—I hated to use the word—insubstantial I appeared. My cheekbones looked almost ghoulish, and my body, carved by shadows, was little more than angles and planes. Even my hand on the rung of Iell’s chair looked like a collection of brittle twigs serendipitously arranged to resemble a hand. Is this why Iell had asked me if I felt substantial? Could this be how others saw me? I thought back to the stunned faces during my show. Was it possible that their shock came not from the philosophical truths I laid bare but from something simpler and less noble?

I slammed the portfolio shut and loosened my tie. I had always been proud of my gift. I’d been chosen to show people the truth. So why did I suddenly doubt myself?

Then something else hit me. Brady had asked Iell to stay for solo photographs. Where were they? Flipping though the portfolio again, I couldn’t find a single one of them.

“Are you looking for these, perhaps?”

My heart rammed into my throat. Matina stood in the doorway. In her hand, she held a second portfolio.

I struggled to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing here?”

Matina sank down on a chair by the door, its wood creaking from the burden of her weight. She let her fingers play blindly along the leather straps of the portfolio, teasing them until they dangled free, and then she quite purposely let the book slide from her grasp. It fell to the floor and burst open. Dozens of photographs flew across the green-and-red rug. My breath caught in my chest. They were the portraits of Iell.

“Oops. What a clumsy girl I am.”

Without thinking, I fell to my knees and gathered the fallen images into a neat pile. In the first photograph, Iell posed regally on a daybed, her expression playful. My breath quickened.

“Where did you get these?”

“I am wicked to have them, I suppose.” Matina tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ears and looked above my head. “Our Mr. Brady left them inside one of the ticket booths unattended, can you imagine? But no harm done. I was just coming to return them.”

Obviously, Matina had stolen the portfolio. I was flabbergasted, but I couldn’t resist what lay before me. I remained on my knees and worked through the photographs slowly. Matina sat silent above me, her breathing low and heavy. At first I felt shame, crouching at the feet of my friend, knowing she was watching me, but I forgot her completely when I saw the next photograph—a likeness of Iell lying across a daybed, her eyes focusing on a strand of light passing above her head. Her face glowed, but she also looked undeniably available. I blushed to see it. In the next, she sat—no, slouched—in a manner so unbefitting a proper lady that I had to loosen my collar. She smiled with illicit intimacy; you could see the tip of her tongue protruding from between her perfect teeth. In another, more provocative still, she posed with her hands inches from her own breasts. At this point I’d gone well past blushing and was, frankly, in shock. But the one that most upset me was at the bottom of the pile, and I held my breath when I saw it. She had untied the laces of her dress so that the upper parts of her sleeves slipped halfway down her arms, revealing bare shoulders and amazing décolletage. She straddled the daybed like a man and had thrown back her head in utter abandon. Her hands were underneath her beard, lifting it up like an offering.

I forced myself to look up at Matina. “Has everyone seen these?”

“Some of us took a peek.” Matina shrugged her shoulders, her flesh wavering, her look a mixture of supremacy and remorse. “Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought you might want to see them, too. In fact, Barthy, I think you
needed
to see them. You’ve already been pulled from the schedule, Lord knows why. Don’t you think having as much knowledge as possible is a good plan? You have to protect yourself.”

When Matina touched me, I pulled away. What did Matina know? And how could Iell have allowed someone to take such pictures
of her? Surely, she’d been forced. I remembered her telling me that Barnum was after her secrets, and now I understood. In all likelihood, she’d been under the influence of opium. Barnum was a scoundrel.

“What will Barnum do with these?”

Matina stood then and loomed above me, blocking out the light. “Whatever he wants, I suspect.”

I must have made some weak gesture, because her voice softened and she drew toward me. “I’m sorry, Barthy, but you simply had to know.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, I sat at the café table in the Arboretum, desperate to dig up the root. Head in hands, I asked the birds why the root existed if not to make me strong enough to carry on without my performances? Their silence was expected. I thought of Iell and her opium and once again decided to leave the root buried. It was bad enough that one of us required a foreign substance to survive.

A
LTHOUGH
I
WENT ABOUT MY BUSI
ness as usual the rest of the week, sitting tableau and caring for the birds, thoughts of Iell and those photographs plagued me. By Friday morning I’d had enough, and, hidden in my padded suit, I took the trolley all the way to Iell’s boardinghouse with the intention of telling her what I’d seen. In the end I lacked the courage to present myself. What could I have said, that my heart was broken? That my poor addled brain now burst with images of my True Prodigy half undressed, painfully compromised, and not living up to the standards her gift required? But no matter how I struggled to reconcile my previous impressions of Iell with what I’d seen in print, one thing seemed certain: Barnum had made Iell sit for those photographs. And given that fact, I could not abandon her. She obviously could not protect herself in our world.

After lunch, I lingered in the Green Room as the company got ready for their afternoon shows. The room was unusually dark—after the fire, most performers had stopped lighting the candles on their dressing tables—and I had to squint to see. Matina surprised me by moving a stack of clothes from the chair next to her dressing table to make room for me. She seemed willing to have me near her. Perhaps she felt she’d evened the score by showing me the photographs.