Jenny and Barnum (41 page)

He slept badly, not really dozing off until near dawn. Because he had business appointments he had left a call for eight o'clock. He was still very groggy when he sat down to breakfast in the parlor alone twenty minutes after the boy poked his head into the bedroom to bellow the hour. Like a man with a hangover, Barnum was still remembering the worst details of the previous night's fiasco, just beginning to wonder what the permanent damage would amount to, when someone knocked on the door.

“Come in, if you want to joined the damned.”

Jenny looked in. “What?”

He stood up. “Gallows humor, my love. Have you had breakfast?”

“I'm not hungry,” she said.

He brought a chair up to the table for her. “Coffee? You don't look like you slept very well.”

“That's true enough,” she said. “I shouldn't have coffee, but I have to visit a school this morning. I don't want to fall asleep, do I?” She looked up at him, losing her composure. “I can't go on like this, Barnum.”

“Tell me what you mean.” He sat down, giving her such close attention that he nearly put his elbow in his fried eggs. She saw and smiled, which made tears flow down her cheeks.

“Barnum, I'm not your trained horse, or some frightful thing in a bottle!”

“I know that. I still don't know what you're talking about. Try to calm yourself and relax. Whatever is disturbing you, I'll put right. Haven't I done that right along?”

“You're so clever with words,” she said. “I can't tell people how to behave, Barnum. You don't know how to behave! Every time I turn around, with every new opportunity, you're at work on some trick. Last night was like trying to sing in a railroad station!” she shouted. “I will not tolerate it! I will not permit it! You will not defile my talent and my art!”

“Jenny, I made a mistake! It won't happen again, I promise you!”

“It's not the
mistake
that bothers me, you stupid man! It's that you went behind my back to book the larger hall to sell the last possible grubby ticket!”

“I swear on my honor that I did nothing underhanded or behind your back when I booked Congress Hall. The demand for tickets was that great, according to all the reports I'd received—”

“You packed the standing room to the point of suffocation! There was the imminent threat of panic!”

“Not at all,” he said. He was gaining control of the situation, he could see. “The people out front oversold the standing room on their own authority. If my agents hadn't been in the box office watching the money being collected, it would have been stolen from us.” He patted her hand. “If there had been a panic, it would have been entirely the fault of that mealy-mouthed little weasel who started yelling.”

“I felt the floor shaking. Everybody did.”

“Wooden floors shake. There was no panic. The concert was a financial and critical success, and more of an artistic success than your desire for perfection will permit you to admit. The four-teen-thousand-dollar gross justifies the move I made to Congress Hall. I did not hide that move from you. Under the terms of our contract, the responsibility to provide the auditorium is entirely mine. Jenny, if I start telling you everything I do, there'll be no end to it—you'll be buried in the petty details of business. The programs cost five dollars and forty cents to print. Does that fact hold your attention? Do you want to concern yourself with such twaddle? If you do, if you allow yourself to surrender to your worst fears every time something goes awry, you will find it harder and harder to concentrate on your talent and your art—”

“That is precisely what happened last night, Barnum, because of a situation
you
created!”

“All right, Jenny, I made a mistake and I've said I'm sorry and given my word that it won't happen again. What more would you have me do?”

“How is it that Waldo Collins knew you had secured Congress Hall?”

“That's a question you'll have to ask Waldo Collins,” Barnum said evenly. “If he told you in New York that I was acting against your best interests behind your back, I can see very easily how you would think what you did about last night. Jenny, I haven't tried to interfere in your business and I'm not going to start now, but surely you will see if you review the record that I've worked hard to meet your needs in every way, because I've assumed that you knew what was best for you. I haven't been trying to upset you at every turn with rumors and innuendoes—”

“But you've upset me just the same!”

“That's another matter.”

“Is it? I can't go on like this, Barnum, with this confusion and upset!”

“When are you going to have some faith in me?”

“You're a married man! I know you promised me nothing and I have no right to expect anything, but you knew what kind of a woman I was before you kissed me. Oh, Barnum, I am in love with you and I am frightened and I cannot have peace of mind simply because you tell me to!”

She broke down and wept, covering her face with her hands. For a moment he could not move, he was so sick with himself and filled with self-loathing. He had no one but himself to blame for what she was feeling. A younger man could plead innocence, or ignorance, but Barnum knew he was too old not to know the hopes in the heart of a girl. Even a girl of thirty, the most gallant and celebrated girl in the history of the world, whose voice still so clearly echoed the hope of her girlish heart. Still? Not last night. Barnum in his soul knew that his actions and inactions were inflicting grievous harm on her. She was no chorus cutie, or even some female hayseed like those Barnum had found so irresistible in his young manhood. That Jenny was who and what she was, the greatest singer of all time, the first people's heroine, made his abuse of her not different, only worse, for she
was
what he told the world, the perfection of young womanhood. He had seen it in the daguerreotypes sent to him from Europe, perhaps his clearest insight of all, and now he was its worst and most deserving victim.

“I am not trifling with you,” he whispered hoarsely, all but afraid to look her in the eye. “At the beginning, I admit, I followed my heart—caprice, desire, passion, plain lust. For you.” He could not help recognizing how much he meant what he was saying, and it made him catch his breath and arch his back. His emotion had him twitching like a marionette, he thought—and was he not just as dumb as wood? “When I first saw you, Jenny, I felt as though I were entering an ancient, personal dream—
déjà vu
, the French call it. It took me days to understand myself, the source of the sensation.” He was holding her hands, hoping she would believe him, for at last the Master of Insincerity, as he had come to see himself at bad moments, was telling the truth. He had felt the things he was describing, but he had ignored them, laughed at himself, denied his heart ever deeper into the agonizing labyrinth he could have avoided so easily, earlier in the game. Every great fortune, according to Balzac, was founded on a crime. If that was so, new love contained a lie like the apple nurtured the worm. No love started without that last parting lie to one's real self:
this will not matter
. He had told himself just that lie more times than he could remember and had gotten away with it always, more or less—but not now, not this time. He loved her—everything he had told the world about her he believed himself. And now, for the life of him, he did not know what he was going to do about it. “When I was six years old,” he said, “and just starting to go to school, loose from my mother's apron strings for the first time, I met a little girl my own age and fell wildly in love. Her name was Susan. I remembered her suddenly after forty years; I followed her from school, carried her books, struggled to win her heart—”

“What does she have to do with me?”

“You look exactly like her,” he said.

She sat back and looked away. “Oh, Barnum, when you're in trouble and you don't know what else to do, you make up some fabulous lie.”

“I swear it's the truth.”

She shook her head, unable to contain her derision. “What happened to her? Are you trying to tell me that some tragic twist of fate ruined both your lives?”

“No, I don't think so,” he said mildly. “Her father was offered a better position in Hartford, and the family moved away. She probably doesn't look like you at all now.”

“Barnum, I am in agony. Why did you tell me this?”

“Because, like you, I am shaken to my shoes by the emotion I feel. I am not a superstitious man, but I am so confused by this and want so much to understand myself that I can't help wondering if fate has taken a hand. I told you the truth—you do look like her. In one more small way, it is natural for me to love you. It may not be natural for you to love me, but in thousands of just such ways, it is very, very natural for me to love you.”

“It is natural for me to love you, too, Barnum,” she whispered. “All my life I've been looking for a man like you. I should have realized that you would be married. The others who came close also were married. I should have known. I should have seen where my heart was leading me long before I met you.” Her lips twisted bitterly. “And I am held up as an example to all women! I am a perfect example of the work of the devil!”

She wept again, and he went to her, held her, rocked her against him. “Don't you say such things about yourself. I am
not
a superstitious man. We were set in motion toward each other long, long ago, that's all. A series of accidents. No one could have foreseen it. There is no blame, so this can't be the perfidy of the devil—”

“Me! Me, I'm the work of the devil—and I wonder why God doesn't love me!”

He made her look at him. “Weren't you taught in church to open your mind and heart to the knowledge and love of God? Do that, and you will feel God love you.”

She shook with grief and terror, and he held her, silent for a time—more than anything, he did not want to intensify her distress. “I give you my word that there will be no repetitions of last night. I do not want to hurt you in any way. Not your reputation, not your talent, not your heart. This is difficult for me. I'm being honest with you. I promise to attend to my duties as your producer more carefully, and see that your stay in America is as comfortable and happy as I can make it.”

“Does that mean I'm going to see less of you?”

“No, the opposite, in fact, if that is what you want.”

She put her head against his chest. “I think I do. Are we a scandal, Barnum?”

“Not yet.”

“I don't want to be a scandal.”

“I have always known that,” he said.

“I'm sorry, I don't like America. I've tried, but I can't.”

“I've always known that, too.”

Boston, Providence, Boston again, Philadelphia, and then back to New York for the long, fifteen-date engagement. She told him he was a wonderful lover, but he knew better, confusing and upsetting her with stories like the one of his first-grade sweetie. True, but Jenny did not feel better loved, more
wonderfully
loved. He
wanted
to love her. In his wilder moments alone he thought he wanted to try to love her for the rest of his life. But he would only be trying. Charlie had her number—he had always had her number. “Barnum,” he said, “you're only the half of it. The other half is America.”

“She hates the whole country.”

“She says she does. She's afraid. She's got all kinds of ways of saying it, but she's just afraid.”

Barnum fell silent. He knew what Charlie was talking about. The fear never left her eyes. To one degree or another, Jenny was always afraid.

No matter; whatever the reason, the Swedish Nightingale was not going to live in the only country in which Barnum knew he could make a living. Barnum was thinking of that even if she wasn't. The truth was, she did not do much thinking as Barnum understood it at all. Her head was full of
art
, for God's sake.

She had to see the only Watteau in New York, and then she sat very quietly in front of it “experiencing the way he discovered the tree,” she said. She had to get close to see the brush strokes that “so successfully captured the artist's response to the mythic quality of the tree.”

“All art is performance,” she told Barnum authoritatively. “The composers see it most clearly. What Hans Christian Andersen told me about his working methods only confirmed what composers have said to me. Andersen must prepare just as I do before he can work. Once one learns his craft, only by a process of relaxing and concentrating on the matter at hand can one reach ever deeper into oneself for new understandings and solutions. Only the mode of expression is different; otherwise, everything is the same. One must have talent, of course,” she added quickly.

Art and more art. She hated Washington, which she said looked like a child's idea of a capital city. Everything was too neatly tucked away; one missed the urgent bustle of business one felt around an Emperor's court.

“Wait until the war starts,” Barnum said. “It will get busy then.”

“If this city is what the states have to show for having banded together,” she said, “perhaps it would be better if they went their separate ways. My dear Barnum, the red-light district is
much
too large!”

Now he was supposed to top her. She loved being made to laugh. “Jenny, love, the real sins here are committed in another part of town.”

“Ah, you see, that's the virtue of royalty. In court, all this sinning is kept in one place. It's more economical.”

That conversation ended with them kissing. In Washington they were wildly in love. For the White House reception Charlie and Lavinia came down from New York and Charlie laughed openly at them, in front of President Buchanan. Barnum introduced him to Jenny as “The President of the United States—all of them,” and Charlie grasped that Barnum was repeating a fragment of private conversation. Buchanan had no brains; when Jenny started laughing at Charlie, the President looked around as if his pants had fallen down. Everybody laughed louder—the night before, the two couples had wallowed in Washington gossip, including some really ripe trash about Buchanan's family. The idea that the President was just another citizen had horrified Jenny. “You Americans will never have an empire,” she had said, giving everybody a big laugh.