Sixty-one

I sat in my room, scribbling away on my True Life History. Compelled to record the strands of my life, I did not care that most of them did not twine together into a braid; these strands were not meant for anyone’s eyes but mine. I set down the look on Thomas Willoughby’s face as he turned away from his harpsichord for the last time. Matthew’s slumped posture when he and Jacob emerged from their bedroom each morning. Maud’s expression sitting in her booth downstairs. They Are Afraid of Her’s body, which was still bundled tightly in blankets, lying on one of the cots among the Indians. Tai Shan, eliciting awe.

“Miss Swift.” One of the carpenters stood in the doorway. Breaking the flow of images, cutting the filament between a mind’s scrawled record and reality, this man, holding a hammer, had a simple message: “They’ve come.”

I approached a group of angular, stern-faced women with the leather-bound registry under my arm. The women carried baskets and wore narrow skirts of indigo and canary yellow, their hair wrapped in scarves of the same cloth. One woman spoke for them all. The Bella Luna Sisters, from Hispaniola. I copied their names into the register and explained the communal accommodations. They shrugged and nodded and arched their elegant necks this way and that like dark brown cranes until they spotted a serviceable corner with three narrow beds.

A white-haired patriarch appeared next, followed by two women at each end of a heavy trunk, their black hair hanging in sheets down their backs. Three children scurried along behind them chattering in English. They were Esquimaux most recently from Philadelphia, with their native costumes in the trunk. Close at their heels were more Indians, these from the northern coast of the Oregon Territory. They wore bark shawls and carried wooden boxes painted with red-and-black ovoid designs. Their manager, a red-bearded voyageur, filled out the registry and then hurried over to speak with Grizzly Adams.

And so out of thin air, Barnum’s Congress arrived. They filed to the fifth floor in a steady stream for two days, Wednesday to Friday. I set up a chair for myself, and a small table, and from there I cataloged them. Warriors from Central Africa: the thinnest, most aristocratic humans I’d ever seen. Roumanian gipsies with tiny mirrors sewn into their skirts, smoking pipes and arranging curtains around their beds. Laplanders in thick woolen pants, sweating and laughing at the beluga. I signed them in, page after page after page, satisfied by this attempt to organize such a cacophony of lives.

It was not as if I’d never seen performers of this sort — I had, of course, at almost every place I’d worked — it was the sheer number that amazed me, that struck me as wonderful, as well as the simple fact that most of them were exactly who they claimed to be. True, some had exhibited themselves in America for years, but many seemed to be new to the continent. A Saharan nomad spread his blankets on a cot beside a Japanese Yamabushi. A group of sunburned men wearing conical felt hats erected a cylindrical tent and disappeared inside. The Congress filled the beluga gallery until it was as crowded as anywhere else in the museum.

Barnum gave a short address on Thursday afternoon, shouting a welcome amid the babble of translation. He explained they would be debuting at the parade, which would begin at the museum entrance on Ann Street at precisely nine o’clock on Friday evening, and progress from there up Broadway.

I became the source of information for the Congress. They didn’t have many questions, though. No one seemed to mind the strange accommodations, and they accepted the food that appeared, carried by a dozen waiters, from the restaurant above.

These people were a new kind of nomad. I hadn’t seen it clearly until now, perhaps because I, too, am one. The city, the venue, the performances, those were all unimportant. By now there were established trade routes for the show business: Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, New York, Halifax. These people created their homes wherever they happened to be. The children of the Congress gave the clearest illustration: Two Chinese boys, the Esquimaux children, and a tiny African child had found one another among the multitude. They made a kind of playhouse underneath the beluga’s platform, with a stool and an overturned washtub for a table. A parent or two would stop by, bending down to pat the littlest one on the head before continuing on. History holds whole cultures like this, which have had to carry it all with them: their homes, their religions, the memory of where they come from. How much more interesting and skillful is this than the average American life, especially a female life, anchored in place, satisfied with one mundane perspective when a kaleidoscope is actually possible?

A group of Chinese monks arrived. Someone from Natchez, Louisiana, wearing bones around his neck and bells braided into his beard. A Pigmy. A druid. A dozen Indian elders.

By Thursday evening I was exhausted; not by keeping track of the Congress but because I’d been talked into looking after several children while their mothers went about various errands in the city. I held two on each thigh and one in my arms. They were peaceable children, content to construct a tent under my shawl and occupy it, giggling, playing patty-pan and occasionally nodding off against my back.

By the time I returned to the apartments of the Wonderful it was midnight and Maud, flushed and fuming, was pounding on the conjoined twins’ door.

“Damn them, Ana. They won’t come out!” She intensified the percussion of her fists. “I know they’re in there. I can hear them scraping around.”

A sound, muffled as if someone was shouting from underneath a pile of blankets, reached us.

“They stole my brandy,” said Maud. She stopped her banging and looked at the door thoughtfully. “Stole it. As if they couldn’t buy their own. It’s time for them to move on. What good are they doing anyone here?”

I lay my palm against the door. “Should I break it down?” But wars never end by invasions of kindness, do they?

“I suppose not,” Maud said. “Wouldn’t do any good. Come on, I have another bottle squirreled away. Let’s have a drink.”

An hour later, as I walked back to my room, I noticed the twins’ door was wide open. The creaking of the boards under my feet seemed to echo off the walls as I moved closer. The room was wrecked, with bedding on the floor and books and clothing scattered everywhere. I looked up and down the corridor. Where had they gone?

For weeks Matthew’s face had been an ashen mask and I had done nothing to help. I had looked away, and now my casual dismissal seemed as brutal as a physical act of violence. I set off after them.

When I reached the top of the stairwell I heard them. Clutching the banister with both hands, I descended as fast as I could. They must have heard me because the sounds below intensified, as if someone were carrying too much firewood and the pieces were falling, one after another. Around we went, spiraling down.

I caught up with them on the second floor. They stopped in the middle of the shadowy portrait gallery and Matthew was slumped at an odd angle. He was on Jacob’s right as always, away from me. Jacob turned as I approached.

“Well, if it isn’t the inimitable Ana Swift, high above the clouds and all human concern. How pleasant it must be to rise above us all, to live always looking down … but not down your nose, of course, because that would be rude, wouldn’t it? You would never think of doing that!” Jacob was slurring, and the whites of his eyes were an awful red.

“Matthew!” I spoke sharply, but he would not look at me. His brother blocked my view even further by moving his head and shoulders.

“I’m afraid my dear brother is indisposed.”

“Where are you going?”

“We were going to fetch our last bottle of Balmenach single-malt whisky from its hiding place in our booth, but once we heard the thunder of your pursuit, we thought we might extend our expedition to the street instead, in the hope of avoiding any company.”

As he spoke, Jacob turned toward me and I saw that Matthew’s head lolled chin-to-chest. Jacob had tied his brother’s wrist to the waistband of their trousers with a silken scarf. Matthew’s shoulder drooped forward; Jacob was working hard to keep both of them steady on his own. I lunged forward and grabbed Jacob’s arm.

“Don’t touch me,” he hissed. But he could not free himself.

“What’s wrong with him?”

For a moment, I thought Matthew was unconscious from alcohol or some violence, but when I lifted his chin, against Jacob’s whining protest, his skin was cold and my own skin prickled. His face had no color at all. It looked as if Jacob had tried to disguise Matthew’s state by coloring his lips a garish red — I recalled the moment after Maud flung open the door to their room, the brothers in their dance, Matthew’s slender arm bedecked in jewels — but now his open eyes undid any attempt to hide the fact that Matthew was dead, or as close to dead as he could be in that shared body.

Under my hand, Jacob’s shoulder shuddered. He was laughing, silently, his eyes glazed and red.

“What will happen now?” he asked me breathlessly. “What in this cursed world is going to happen now?” He continued to laugh, his frame shaking, surrounded by dozens of portraits whose ghostly faces watched us, unmoved. I backed away.

If they need to die, they will do it. My sentiment, so knowingly articulated, now stung with ruthless complacence. I had known something terrible would happen. Certainly if the conflicting wills within me were given physical form, they would mutilate one another. And here it had been done.

“You are a vile thing,” I said. He only laughed.

I hurried away, across the gallery and down the marble stairway. I found one of the night watchmen on the street just outside the main doors.

“Come quickly to the portrait gallery, and bring two more men.”

“What is it? What happened?”

“Just hurry.”

The twins had not moved and Jacob was no longer laughing. I stood just close enough that I could grab them if I needed to, but we did not speak in the minutes it took for the watchmen to arrive. For a few seconds these three men, all dressed in dark blue uniforms, just stared, their faces in shifting configurations of shock. Fear probably followed, but before they let that show on their faces they ricocheted back to the safety of their assigned jobs. They dragged the twins away.

“Take them somewhere safe,” I called, knowing that no such place existed. A hospital? What butchery would follow? A crime had been committed, but one unknown to the laws of ordinary man. My breath constricted in my lungs. I walked to my booth and sat down on the stool. Jacob should have finished the job here while he could, and quickly. But instead he had relinquished the power to end it himself, the only thing left to him. Now he would meet his end somewhere in the crowded city, alone for the first time in his life.

I imagined the watchmen returning to their homes after this night. I watched them enter their small apartments, places as bewildering to me as the museum was to them. They stroke the cheeks of their sleeping children and listen to the even breathing of their wives. They look out their windows over their domain and thank God for their sweet, simple life.