Jenny and Barnum (20 page)

In spite of Niclas Lind's lurching, drunken garrulousness, Anne-Marie insisted on going on with her dinner fiasco, assembling sixteen girls, including her own two, at the table, and bringing out the Christmas goose. Lind heaved himself to the head of the table, tried to pick up the carving fork, and dropped it on the floor. Anne-Marie was sitting on his right, Amalia on his left.

“Can't you do anything right?” Anne-Marie shrieked. “Couldn't you show me the courtesy of corning to my table sober?”

“You shut up, you stringy old hen!” he roared. “It should be you on the table, under the knife!”

“Oh, stop your whining and pick up the fork and get on with it!”

He stared at her for a moment, then ducked under the table. When he came up again, the innocent girls did not immediately realize what he had done. It was not his thumb or an oversized finger protruding from his pants. He waved it at Anne-Marie and shouted something that could not be heard over the screams of the suddenly-awakening girls as he began to splash urine all over the roasted bird before him.

An hour later Tengmark found the goose exactly as it had been defiled, Lind asleep in the chair, and Anne-Marie ready to begin some kind of story—the very idea of a story made Tengmark lose all control. Lind, Anne-Marie, and Amalia were on the street by midnight, just hours before Christmas, and Jenny was removed to the Tengmark household, where Frau Tengmark and their maids restored Jenny from the trembling shock to which her family had finally reduced her. It was clear that she did not want to cry, or discuss the matter, or in any way be reminded of her family. Tengmark was helpless—she wanted it that way, he could see. He was frightened for her, but he hoped he was also seeing her coming to an understanding of her own power and stature as an artist.
She
was deciding how she wanted the incident handled even if she could not say so out loud. Tengmark wanted to cater to her. If nothing else, he had been given an incident in which he could teach her that it was appropriate for people to defer to her, to see that she was left undisturbed to concentrate on her singing.

Tengmark suppressed the story, threatening to dismiss the man or woman who spoke of it to anyone, anywhere. Just the thought of the incident made Tengmark shudder with revulsion. It was impossible to tell if Jenny—or any of the other girls, for that matter—had sustained any permanent damage. For days afterward she seemed to slip away, distant. Tengmark told her she was to sing at his annual New Year's Eve private recital and after a moment's hesitation she nodded assent. Everyone attended, including a few who had not been invited, like old Herr Craelius, her first singing teacher, who bowed low to his host, tears streaming down his cheeks. Whatever he had heard it was enough to make him come out in the cold to show his love for Jenny. As soon as she began to sing, it became a wonderful party. She sang with perfect, shattering sweetness, and the audience shouted and cheered. She turned to the pianist and indicated she wanted to sing another song. There was no smile. No one saw a trace of emotion. She sang for an hour, until everyone, like Craelius, was in tears. Tengmark could see what she was doing. This was the person she wanted to be. It was an act of will so intense it made Tengmark afraid for her.

Bellini's opera
Norma
, in which Jenny Lind achieved her first great success, tells the story of a Druid princess at the time of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Betrayed by her proconsul lover, the priestess Norma declares all-out war against the invaders, but in the end gives her life attempting to save that of the unfaithful Roman.

What Jenny brought to the role of Norma was a new, hitherto-unsuspected interpretation. Previous sopranos had played the part like a fierce, avenging woman in her maturity, like Medea. Obviously Jenny was inappropriate for anything like that. Her interpretation, suggested by her student reading of the great aria, “Casta diva,” in which Norma prays that her lover be returned to her, completely reinvented the character and changed and deepened the meaning of the opera. Her Norma was concerned for the children she had borne her unfaithful lover, and was stricken by remorse by her betrayal of her people, her vows as a priestess, and herself. Jenny Lind made Norma a tragic victim of her own human weakness. The audience stood up and roared its approval, and Stockholm's critics correctly reported that a new day was dawning in the history of opera.

Jenny Lind was seventeen years old, and she understood perfectly what she had accomplished. In her diary the next day she wrote that she now had two birthdays, for on the day before she had awakened as one person, and gone to bed another. The trouble she was to have with her throat and the retraining she would have to endure were still ahead of her, although already it had been seen that occasionally she had difficulty sustaining high notes, and too much singing made her hoarse. Still, her career was launched; her reputation spread and soon she was in demand all over Europe. She visited her parents, wrote to them faithfully, and had Judge Munthe attend to their needs, but otherwise she tried to keep a distance from their unending difficulties. She gave herself unreservedly to charity; it unsettled her to know that she could open people's purses wider with one song than all the churches could do in a year of begging. And she met men, scores of them—hundreds. Older, established,
adult
men attracted her, but too often they were married, or quickly dissolved into lovesickness like their younger counterparts. Her English officer wanted her to give up singing, and for a while she went along with him, but at the last minute she came to her senses and broke off the engagement.

Jenny Lind had become the first great international singing star in the history of the world. People stopped traffic and smashed windows to get a glimpse of her. Her devotees stood in the hundreds beneath her windows until authorities begged that she dismiss them with a wave of her hand. On the eve of her journey to America, she had earned two million dollars, and had given one and a half away to charities. For all of that, she was able to support her parents and her own home in Kensington. By 1860 her position in the firmament of nineteenth century genius remained unique, her reputation studded by triumphs everywhere. Everyone knew her story, her parents, the men in her life, her flashes of temperament—but none of that mattered. Just the sight of her made grown men weep for joy. She was
beloved
.

8.

According to John Hall Wilton—if he could be believed at all—the news from America was good. On the Monday after Jenny Lind's party Tom Thumb was suffering the worst hangover of his life, his agony doubled by the long all-night trek back to Claridge's. Wilton had rushed over to the hotel at two in the afternoon, having just received in the afternoon post, he said, one last message from Barnum in New York.

Barnum wanted to assure the entire company, and especially Tom Thumb, that everything was going far better than anyone anticipated. More than that Barnum did not have time to say, except that the troupe should prepare itself for anything once the
Great Western
approached New York. Whatever else happened, Jenny Lind's welcome was going to be the biggest event in the history of the city.

Tom Thumb gave it all as careful a listen as he could. His hangover was relentless; his brain felt as if someone had tried to pry it loose with a grapefruit knife. Two similar images, one observed, the other not, flashed through Tom Thumb's tortured brain, triggering entirely dissimilar reactions.

He remembered Jenny Lind naked to the waist in the arms of her piano player; but then immediately he remembered that last night was the first chance Lavinia and the again-healthy Gallagher had had to be together—and realized that he had not seen them at the Kensington party at all. He groaned as the second image became enhanced in his mind by the first, made more intimate and all too vivid. Wilton prattled on, saying he would go over it all again tomorrow night aboard the
Great Western
in Liverpool. Liverpool! Tom Thumb still had to be sure the last of the troupe's special equipment got on the train, then off at the other end to be stowed on board the ship. He had Anna Swan to deal with, and Chang and Eng …

“I was hoping you'd be able to join me for a farewell dinner tonight, General,” Wilton said.

“No,” Tom Thumb said, leaving the hurt and dumbfounded Wilton staring at him speechless.

Happily, Wilton's transportation arrangements to Liverpool were comfortable and comprehensive. For all he did not know about the meaning and value of publicity, he seemed to have been able to get the crowds out. Tom Thumb was feeling better physically, however unnerved the sight of Lavinia and Gallagher together made him. There was no doubt any more about the magnitude of Jenny Lind's appeal with the common people on this side of the ocean. There were crowds at the railroad station, crowds on the overpasses, and all along the right of way, all for her. People carried placards and pennants bearing her name and proclaiming their love. Tom Thumb could not help pondering her “greatness,” if that was what it was, the immensity of her following, the depth of feeling she evoked, the rapture with which her adherents made legend of her accomplishments. The country was at her feet. All that Barnum had told him months ago about Jenny Lind did not amount to a fraction of the real situation. If this tide of love could do it, Jenny Lind would be swept to immortality.

Yet she really was a modest woman, and a bit of a joyless prig. She did not approve of the fuss made over her, and there were stories that she had her qualms about the money and time people spent on her singing itself. That such opinions came from the woman Tom Thumb observed battling her passion with the piano player gave the little man a moment of pleasure, perspective, and a sense of his own civilization just when it was clear he needed it most. No one was immune from the troubles of life. Lavinia and Gallagher had reserved a compartment for themselves, while Tom Thumb stared at Chang and Eng and wondered if doubled-up Anna Swan at his side was going to lose her balance and roll over on him.

At least Wilton had provided champagne. Jenny Lind was in her compartment, with her maid and the secretary, an overweight, heavily accented woman who had found a kindred spirit in Hannelore—two peasant women on a great adventure, as John Wilton put it. The piano player was billeted with the Italian tenor, her other swain, whose name Tom Thumb could not remember and whom he had privately christened Moldini. He was vain and nervous, so thin he looked fragile, and he lacquered his nails—exactly the kind of man Barnum loved to hate, like the other one, the piano player Goldschmidt. The two apparently were going to share a suite of staterooms, like Tom Thumb and Gallagher, although, knowing Lavinia as he did, Tom Thumb did not expect to see much of Gallagher. Given Jenny Lind's more bluenosed approach to living, the other two gentlemen's situation was going to be more interesting, more the spectator sport. Even on a floating city like the
Great Western
, one could not have enough amusements to pass the time at sea.

The
Great Western
was the greatest ship afloat, three years old, over four hundred feet long, with a beam of more than sixty feet. It carried 244 passengers and more than 60 crew. Under normal conditions a crowd came down to the docks to see her off or welcome her in, but the number of people in Liverpool gathered to cheer and wave good-by to Jenny Lind was positively frightening. At the top of the gangplank she turned and waved to them, and the crowd let out such a yell that a sailor in the pilothouse set off the steam whistle, a great baritone blast that echoed over the rooftops for minutes, it seemed. Everybody was deafened, and nobody heard the remarks of Captain MacDonald, who presented Jenny Lind with a great wreath of roses. John Hall Wilton was beaming like a bride's father. If Barnum had given Wilton orders to see that Jenny Lind got a proper send-off, God knew what he was planning in New York. It was going to be good, he had promised in his message to Wilton. Tom Thumb did not know if he looked forward to it or not. Normally he loved sailing the ocean, but now he was so weighed down with his own misery that he could imagine nothing for two weeks but the complaints of Chang and Eng, and the suffering of Anna Swan. He knew he was just torturing himself. The
Great Western
was one of the wonders of the age, and MacDonald and his crew were not only the best sailors the world had ever known, but very nearly the best hotelkeepers, too.

After the champagne and caviar laid on by Captain MacDonald to welcome Jenny Lind and his old friends from P. T. Barnum's troupe, Wilton and Tom Thumb slipped down the passageway to Tom Thumb's suite, opposite the Grand Saloon, which was over fifty feet long, the biggest single enclosed space ever to float in the history of the world. The sitting room of Tom Thumb's suite, like the Grand Saloon, was paneled with scenes taken from the rapidly emerging world of steam-powered commerce and industry.

“There was more in Barnum's letter than I originally let on,” Wilton said when they were alone. “He didn't want you burdened with it until absolutely necessary. Barnum thinks there's going to be trouble down the line, from a man named Collins, who is a lawyer in New York. Judge Munthe has been corresponding with him since the start of the year, having gotten his name from a colleague in Stockholm who recommended Collins highly. Apparently Collins is going to function in Munthe's capacity while Jenny Lind is in America.”

Wilton told Tom Thumb that he had listened to this in all innocence early in March when Munthe made the voyage from Stockholm to accept Barnum's $187,500 payment. The name Collins meant nothing to Wilton and he passed along the information to Barnum routinely. Barnum knew Collins, or of him; Collins was well known in the New York business community as a liar, a cheat, and a thief. He ruined people, turned them out on the streets; he was the kind of man who looked at every situation as an opportunity to take advantage of people who trusted him. But—Wilton said that this was his opinion now, not Barnum's—it appeared that Munthe, on the strength of his colleague's recommendation, had absolute faith in Collins, and had given Jenny Lind specific instructions to be in touch with Collins just as soon as she arrived in New York. Barnum wrote that he could see that his hands were tied, Wilton said; he could not possibly try to turn Jenny Lind against Collins when her guardian recommended him so strongly. Under the circumstances, however, it seemed clear that all involved in the project—Wilton said Barnum specifically named Tom Thumb—should do whatever was possible to ensure that Collins could do no damage to Barnum's reputation or his relationship with Miss Lind once Collins could get her ear. In that regard, Barnum thought, it seemed appropriate for Tom Thumb to remind Jenny Lind somewhere along the line that she already had the $187,500—all the proof any reasonable person needed of Barnum's good intentions.