The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (37 page)

Who cared that he’d only put me down for one appearance? I couldn’t wait to perform again. And my morning show went better than it had for years. Not since I’d first joined the Museum did I display myself with such pleasure. A woman sitting in the front row fainted mid-show, and I could not have been happier. For some reason, though, the Misting Over I so often experienced in performance was completely gone. Rather than people’s faces blurring as I gazed out over them, every face was now distinct, with its own story to tell. I wondered if this was another side effect of the root.

Minutes after my show ended, Alley showed up backstage with a house escort and my mood plummeted. He told me that Barnum had
put me on the morning schedule only because Alley couldn’t make it in time. But what did it matter?

“Are you all right?” I asked Alley, and he gave me a brave nod as his escorts shoved him onto our little stage. He only had a few more days before he’d leave the Museum forever. But he looked almost joyous. I knew he wanted to move to Ohio, but I would have expected a bit more sadness on his part, given what he was losing.

On Sunday, guest performers started to arrive. Cook set up a picnic outside in the courtyard. Everyone sat scattered on the benches and across the patches of green grass, balancing plates of food on their knees. Zippy and Nurse sprawled across an old horsehair blanket that they’d spread out on the eternally hardened ground, playing a game of dice, and behind them loitered two midgets on loan from the Boston Museum, one a youngish man with a slightly oversized head, the other a perfectly formed woman only three feet tall and dressed like Martha Washington. Beside them, Bridgett sat laughing on the lap of the owner of the Boston Museum, who’d come to watch over his midgets.

On a flat stone bench at the far end of the courtyard, Matina sat fanning herself, and next to her, Emma argued with two visiting giants whom I recognized as the sharpshooter Captain Bogardus and his brother Ethan. The two giants gesticulated and poked long fingers into each other’s chest. I raised my hand to catch Matina’s eye, but she turned away. I looked around and not a single other soul returned my gaze. Fine. It was a beautiful day. No reason I couldn’t enjoy it all alone.

Besides, the food table called to me. Why had I never noticed how comely a roasted chicken could be, or how plump a loaf of bread? And the smells—so rich, so mouthwatering. I piled my usual green beans onto a plate, adding a few extra, and then spooned out a dollop of mustard. I found a seat on an empty bench and laid my napkin across my lap. As always, I sliced each bean into equal parts before methodically dipping each piece into the mustard. I thought about the Chinaman’s root and ignored the quick flip in my stomach. Then, surprising
myself, I walked back to the food table, picked up a piece of bread from the communal basket, and gingerly lifted it to my nose. The wheat, ripe and vaguely nutty, dredged up some deep craving within me. I turned away from the group and took a huge bite of it. The bread sat heavily in my mouth. I dared not move. Saliva poured into the bottom of my mouth. Instinctively, I chewed. Then, unable to resist any longer, I swallowed.

Almost immediately, a memory rose up. I was a boy again, a boy who hadn’t eaten in days. A boy who, late one night, crept out into the dark orchards and ate three fallen apples. The next night I stole radishes and squash from the garden, eating them raw, and the next day I hid in the kitchen, waiting for the household to finish their supper. The kitchen maid had piled trays of leftovers on the big oak table, and when no one was looking, I snatched up the cornbread ends, ham bones, half-eaten potatoes, and chicken legs that were meant for the pigs. Stealing food. Why would I do such a thing?

I ordered myself to step away from the food table, but instead, I wrapped the half-eaten piece of bread in my napkin and, after making sure there were no witnesses to my indiscretion, stuck it in my pocket. Across the garden, Matina was frowning at something one of the giants had said, her arms crossed defensively across her chest. I desperately wanted to join them, but they were in another world.

Feigning a calmness I did not feel, I set my plate down and poured myself a cup of tea. Ignoring the tantalizing smell of a pork loin roasted with garlic, I forced myself to return to the empty bench and sipped the tea slowly, washing away the taste of the bread I’d eaten. By the time the one o’clock bell rang from St. Paul’s, I’d calmed myself. Eventually, my colleagues moved on to their afternoon work, and when Cook’s new assistant came hustling outside to pick up the empty platters and clear away the condiments, I pushed up from the bench feeling back in control of my world.

That’s when the first real wave of hunger hit me. At first, I failed to recognize it for what it was; I felt only that same ache at the bottom of my belly that I’d felt before. But then a desire rose up in me, a craving
for something, anything, to take away the ache, and, by the time that urge changed into a brutish growl, it was much too late. My feet marched me out of the courtyard and into the kitchens, and into my pocket went a pork chop, a pink apple, and a huge hunk of yellow cheese.

Desperate for the courtyard to empty out, I paced behind the kitchen door until the last of the troupe had gone and then dashed up the cobblestone walk to the gardener’s shed. Crouching down in the weeds, I pulled the pork chop from my pocket and tore into it. The taste of the meat shocked me: fleshy, firm, peppered to the point of burning. I chewed until my jaw hurt, the smell making me woozy, juices rolling down my throat like a river. After that, the apple tasted so sweet and crisp it brought tears to my eyes. I used my back teeth to rip off chunks to the core, and I even ate the seeds, the crunch of them between my teeth remarkably satisfying. When my belly started to swell, I told myself to stop, but, looking furtively through the weeds, I pulled out the cheese. I polished it off within a few glorious seconds. How wonderful the texture was, giving but insistent. Rich and heavy on the tongue.

I managed to go back to work after that, sitting in tableau and then lingering in the Cosmo-Panopticon Studio, chatting with customers and selling my
cartes
as if it were a normal day. The first spasm in my belly passed within moments, and I covered up the pain by smiling broadly and feigning interest in the story a lad was telling me about a neighbor’s dog who died of malnutrition. The next spasm was more insistent, and within minutes I was pushing blindly through the crowd. As if in a nightmare, I could barely move forward. The food in my stomach had turned into a two-ton rock, dragging me to the ground. What I needed was fresh air. I forced my way through the public spaces, past the kitchens, and back out to the courtyard, stumbling through the vegetable garden. There I fell to my hands and knees, gagging. And finally, heaving with violence but great relief, my body rejected all the food I’d eaten.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I
WOKE UP RAVENOUS
. T
HE
Museum was closed for the day in preparation for Barnum’s party, and despite the battery of cleaners engaged to assist him Fish had pinned up a list of job postings on the dining room wall.

Thank God for the diversion. All I wanted was to keep busy and pretend the previous day hadn’t happened. It had been a fluke, I told myself. Nothing but nerves. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that all was well, I couldn’t push away a growing dread.
What else could I do but take my normal tea at breakfast and then go back to my room? There, I snuck a tiny bite of the root. After chewing it thoroughly, I pitched myself into the day, hoping a bit of physical activity would bring me back to myself.

Staff members had spread across the Museum like locusts, polishing marble floors, dusting staircases, and setting up potted trees and seats along the walls near the Ballroom. Without being asked, I pitched in, dusting and straightening with forced heartiness. Come midmorning, three wagons pulled up to the back entrance and unloaded dozens of animals that had been stuffed by a zealous taxidermist and dressed hideously in party clothes and hats. In came a lioness in a pink dress; two bulls in neckties; a coyote, a handful of raccoons, and a fox all costumed as waiters; plus a huge black bear in formal evening clothes. I helped place them in the niches along the Ballroom walls. When workers hauled in twenty-foot renditions of Brady’s photographs—including a solitary but discreet one of Iell—it was I who gave them a hand tilting the huge portraits out onto the lower balconies, securing them to the railings so they faced down to the street for all to see.

By the time I reported to the Arboretum at eleven for my scheduled assignment, I had all but exhausted myself. Just outside the door, dozens of slatted crates full of new songbirds had been stacked. The crates were stamped riche brothers—the same company that had shipped three thousand canaries to the California gold mines and sold them for a fortune. I tromped down the pathway and ran smack into five burly men who had already transferred my Arboretum birds into pens and were carting them out. One uncoordinated buffoon banged the end of the pen he was carrying against the wall, sending the birds into a panic.

“Here, here! Barnum appointed me supervisor of these birds. You’d best take care with them or I will have your job.”

“Sorry, sir, sorry,” one of them mumbled, and they moved more carefully after that, toting crates of birds slowly up the main staircase to the Moral Lecture Room. The birds squawked as if it were the end
of days until the men pushed the pens through the bank of doors leading into the theater. Then they fell silent. We all did.

Barnum had completely transformed the cavernous theater for his party, and the effect was breathtaking. Across the gigantic stage, hundreds of prisms hung from strings. At some crucial point during the party, one of Barnum’s handymen would fire up the Gothic torches hung high on the walls to bring these prisms alive. To the right, against the side wall, long tables were covered with Belgian linens, stacks of gold dishes, rows of goblets and decanters, candles, and a gigantic three-tiered crystal punch bowl. But most impressive were the fifty-foot runners of silk hanging from the ceiling of the cavernous room. Multicolored and festooned with pounded-tin ornaments in the shape of Barnum’s profile, they listed from one side to the other, and when I pulled the door closed behind me, the breeze set all the runners in motion.

It took us the rest of the morning to transfer the songbirds from their pens into the gilded cages piled in the rear of the theater. After that, I helped place my Arboretum birds. We put the parrots on covered perches at the front doors, Arrow looking proud and handsome. The cockatoos were displayed in oval cages lit from behind by candles, and the macaws and African grays went into an oblong box hung high above the Lecture Room doors. The raven roosted alone on a perch in a black iron cage by the exit.

By noon I’d finished my tasks and went searching for Matina. Surely she’d know how Alley was faring. When I stuck my head into the kitchens to find her, I saw only the fruits of her labor—a mountain of folded napkins—and discarded empty plates everywhere. I hung about outside the dining room then, expecting Matina to come to lunch, but she never appeared. Anxious and tired of waiting, I walked into the room to ask after her, but from the moment I set foot in the dining room, all I could see was the food table: roast duck, pureed potatoes, tomato soup, baskets of fruit, all smelling heavenly and calling out to me. I didn’t know what to make of this strange new impulse, but I wanted that food more than I’d ever wanted anything else.
Straight to the table I went and, pretending to serve myself my usual beans, I surreptitiously slipped a piece of duck into a napkin and then my pocket, followed shortly by a corn fritter and an orange. I caught Zippy staring at me from across the table. He tapped his spoon against his glass and sang out:

“Eat the sacred.

Whatcha got?

Stomach naked.

Lost the lot.”

The floppy fur hat and deerskin boots he wore no matter what the weather infuriated me.

“Why don’t you speak up,” I hollered at him. “Say what you mean to say, boy. Stop speaking in riddles.”

Zippy stopped in mid-tap, an unexpected gleam of intelligence in his eyes. “Maybe you should attend to your own riddles.”

Everyone in the dining room looked over at me. Standing mute in front of the others, a big chunk of bread in my hand, I was horrified. The Chinaman had told me that chewing the root would reveal my true self, but this couldn’t be right. If I lost control of my appetites, I would lose what made me special. My God, what was I doing? I looked around the table, everyone’s eyes on me. Without my gift, I’d be like everyone else, and the world was already full of normal people. It was
us
the world needed, we Curiosities. I yanked out the food from my pocket and threw it onto the serving table. A piece of duck slid over the side and landed on the ground below.

“That’s a clean floor!” Cook hollered after me, but I was already running out the door.