The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (29 page)

“Because I believe you will accept me for who I am and not try to use me.”

Carefully, Iell stood, and I rose with her, understanding that our time together was over.

“I know that I have pressed you, Bartholomew. I would understand perfectly well if you’d rather not be involved. But please, do not answer me yet. Simply consider my request.”

On my way out, she quoted Robert Browning: “Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe.” And then, to my astonishment, she rose on her toes and kissed my cheek, her lips the softest things I’d ever felt, and slipped the scarf around my neck. “A remembrance,” she whispered, her voice encircling me like the flutter of angels’ wings.

M
Y FEET
must have taken me down the stairs and out into the streets, but I’ve no memory of making my way home. All I can recall is the sparkle of the New York night. It was the perfect reflection of how I felt. I did not regain my senses until I slid off the trolley at Broadway and Ann. I should have gotten off earlier to be safe, but even so, I almost missed my stop.

I ran into Emma as I cut through the kitchens toward the service stairs. She was sprawled over a small wooden chair, a candle and a cup of tea on the table in front of her, and before she could see what I wore, I slipped off my padded coat and folded it over my arm, hiding the hat that I’d carried home. Did she know I’d witnessed her humiliation on the big stage with Iell? Was she sitting in wait to even the score?

“What in heaven’s name?” Emma stood when she saw me, and her
expression slipped quickly into suspicion. “Not like you to be out and about, Fortuno, especially without Alley to watch over your skinny behind.” The half-light of the kitchen lamps turned Emma’s face into a parody of itself. Her forehead thrust out like an overhanging cliff, and her large feet spread on the stone floor like islands. My whole body went cold. She could not possibly know I’d been with Iell. I just had to act normal. Breathe easy. She’d be a poor enough spy if I gave her nothing to report.

“Felt like an evening out. There’s nothing wrong with a beer at McNealy’s alone, is there?”

Emma took a step toward me and stared straight into my eyes. “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,” she said, and plucked Iell’s scarf from my neck. I’d forgotten I wore it.

I snatched back the scarf. “I ask you to keep this to yourself, much as I will keep your little talk with Iell after the Memorial service to myself.”

She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know about that?”

We stared at each other in silence until I muttered, “Forgive me, but it’s late,” and forced my way past her.

Emma nodded her great head and held two fingers to her lips, pretending to turn a lock. “You’re lucky it was only me who found you out,” Emma said. “Best be more careful. The Lord hates a liar, dearie. And a snitch.”

I left Emma in the shadows and all but ran up the service stairs. When I made it to my rooms, I sprawled out across my bed, panting. I had seen Iell, and Emma knew it. If my meager attempt at blackmail did not work and she chose to tell Mrs. Barnum—or Matina—my career was over.

S
ITTING WITH ALLEY THE FOLLOWING WEEK AT
the bar in McNealy’s, I tried my best not to rush him. Utterly out of character, he’d approached me the previous afternoon, telling me he had to talk to me and could I meet him at McNealy’s? Though there had been no repercussions from my visit with Iell, I worried that he might have learned something bad—Emma telling him that I had Iell’s scarf, for example, or, on a different note, Matina confessing why my relationship with her had become so tense. I could barely sit still. But I waited patiently, as he sat on his stool and nursed an ale.

The havoc in the room filled up the mirror that hung behind the bar, and I watched the reflection of a man tattooed from head to foot as he took the seat next to me. He flung a small cage onto the bar. Inside was a hen with no beak. A black-and-white sign hanging by thin chains from the cage’s rusty bars read:
HEN WITH A HUMAN FACE
(10
^¢
). I grabbed hold of the bar rail—a long piece of oak carved to look like a serpent—and tilted toward Alley.

“Come on, man. Out with it already!” I shouted, over a chorus of “Old Bob Ridley” being sung in drunken harmony by a group of minstrel players from one of the Bowery shows. Scowling, Alley lifted one giant finger to tell me to wait and then another two fingers toward the barkeep, a wild-looking girl named Esmeralda. Then he wrangled a piece of paper from his dingy trousers and spread it out across the bar in front of us. An application:
THE HOMESTEAD ACT, MAY
1862.
Underneath it, a clipping from the
Chillicothe Scioto Gazette
showed a large tract of land cut in half by a wide river.

Now that he’d presented the papers, Alley was a bit more talkative.

“Hundred and sixty acres, right next to the river, for two hundred dollars. Just have to fill this in and plant my shovel, and I can own it in five years.”

“Where
is
this?”

“Ohio.”

“Good Lord, man. Are you out of your mind?”

We sat in silence and looked over the paper. Esmeralda—whose eyebrows formed a solid ridge above her eyes—slung two more ales down in front of us. Alley downed his in one gulp, then held up one of the bar candles to shed more light on the announcement.

“What does Matina say?” I asked, looking over his shoulder at the clipping. “She’d be horribly upset if you left us.”

“Don’t know, Fortuno. She ain’t been herself lately. In her room all the time. Is she sick or somethin’?”

A pang of guilt shot through my belly, then fear. What if I’d impregnated her? No, I needn’t worry about that. I’d used great caution at the end. I glanced at Alley’s reflection in the bar mirror, glad he didn’t know about our tryst. And I wasn’t quite ready to confess it to him.

“Frankly, I don’t see why you’d want to do something as ridiculous as farming, and in Ohio no less,” I told him, shifting the subject away from Matina. “The bugs alone will kill you.”

“It’s time for a change, is all.”

I shoved my ale forward for him to drink. “Nowhere in the world beats the place we have with Barnum.”

Alley took up my beer and downed it in one gulp. “What’s so great about the Museum? I feel like a caged animal.”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Bridgett said, stealing up behind us. Her eyes were still kohled dark as a Gypsy’s. Even in the short time since she’d been performing, her girlish face had begun to change into
something harder, more knowing, and her rouged lips were red as a wound.

Accompanying Bridgett was a most unsavory fellow dressed in tall leather boots, red flannel shirt, and a tasteless stovepipe hat. I couldn’t believe Bridgett had had the effrontery to bring such riffraff into McNealy’s. Most likely, he was one of the thugs hired by City Hall to keep the peace.

“Mr. Alley, my friend Alfred here says he’d like to speak to you.” Bridgett spoke to the back of Alley’s head and, though he flinched at the sound of her voice, Alley did not turn around and did not respond. Undaunted, Bridgett winked at me and went on. “Wants to hire you to do a little door-watching for him, like you did before. What do you think? Pays real good.” She moved closer to Alley, her bracelets jingling like some voodoo instrument.

“Bridgett,” I intervened, “this is neither the time nor place—”

Alley scraped back his bar stool and stood without a word. I was flabbergasted.

“Surely, you’re not considering . . .” I said, but Alley nodded to her companion and, after gathering his papers and shoving them into his shirt, led the man to a nearby table.

Bridgett sighed and fluffed her hair as she slipped onto the stool Alley had left empty. “And I was so hoping he would ask me to join them.” She squinted at her image in the mirror behind the bar and rearranged a hair clip that looked like a silver bird.

“Why would you do that, girl?”

“Rumor is, Alley needs money, so I’m trying to help him out.” Her eyes followed Alley’s movements as he shrugged his shoulders at something the thug had said. He nodded his head no, and then yes. “Maybe help myself out a little while I’m at it.”

“Well, Alley shouldn’t be encouraged to keep bad company. The police are already watching him.”

Bridgett sighed and plunked an elbow against the bar, resting her chin in her hand. “He’s so . . . big, isn’t he? Tell me something personal
about him,” she said. “What does he like? Where does he spend his free time?”

“I think he’s engaged to some gal in Indiana.” A lie, but I hated to see the girl hook her heart to something she couldn’t possibly have. And I meant it when I said Alley shouldn’t keep bad company. The last thing he needed was more involvement with the Copperheads.

“Engaged.” Bridgett sighed again, stretched her arm farther out on the bar, and rested her head along it. “Don’t it figure.”

Bridgett seemed genuinely stricken and, for a moment, when she looked up at me with the unsure face of the servant I used to know, I softened to the girl. Perhaps there were worse things than her striking up a romance with Alley. At the very least, it might keep him in New York.

“Maybe he isn’t engaged,” I offered. “In fact, honestly, I’m not at all certain that he is.”

Bridgett’s eyes shone as she sat up on the bar stool, the jangle of her bracelets setting off the chicken still in the cage on the bar.

“Now, ain’t
that
good news. But I wanted to ask you a question. Would you consider giving me a bit of help with my show? Maybe you can watch me sometime. Tell me if I miss any marks. How I can stir folks up more.” She moved closer and whispered in my ear. “Our kind has to stick together.”

Our kind? Oh, the audacity! Was she really unable to grasp our differences? My momentary kinship with her disappeared. I swiveled to face the room, an empty glass of ale still in my hands.

“I’m sorry, my dear, but you will have to figure out your show the way all of us did.”

A storm crossed Bridgett’s face. Once she got it under control, she called for Esmeralda to bring her a glass of whiskey and then said, “Guess I see why Barnum’s old lady is having your shows watched special.”

I swiveled to face her. She was probably making things up, a petty attempt at revenge for my not helping her.

“Barnum’s wife hired some man to come around to all the shows. Didn’t you hear?”

The assessor Fish had mentioned. This was nothing new.

Esmeralda plunked down her whiskey. Bridgett made no move to pay for it. It wasn’t until I put cash on the bar, and Esmeralda swooped it up, that Bridgett continued. “Mrs. Barnum told the man, when he sees your show, to write down everything you done wrong.”

“When did you hear this?”

“A few days ago, not that it matters. If you ask me, you people really shouldn’t take yourselves so seriously.” She hopped off the stool with a flip of her skirt and made her way into the crowd. That’s what I got for trusting a Gaff.

I never did get Alley’s ear again. He didn’t notice me waiting at the bar to go on with our conversation. Instead, he sat sprawled across two chairs, a great thigh on each. He’d gotten hold of
Leaves of Grass
by the bohemian Walt Whitman, and he held it to his nose, reading out loud from “A Song of Joys” to anyone who might listen:

“To rise at peep of day and pass forth nimbly to work,

To plough land in the fall for winter-sown crops,

To plough land in the spring for maize,

To train orchards, to graft the trees, to gather apples in the fall.”

I didn’t know he could read like that.

T
HE NEXT
few days were uncharacteristically quiet. I heard nothing from Iell. No assessor showed up, and neither did the Barnums. Every night, Alley disappeared to do who knew what for the Copperheads,
and Matina continued to vacillate between truculence and an awkward coquettishness. She was sweet enough during the morning tableau, happy to chat about idle events—concern over the fire; how surprisingly tender Ricardo was with that cat, which he now carried with him everywhere; and how, any day now, our photographs from Brady should be completed—but she avoided spending any real time with me. She no longer visited my rooms as she used to, and she refused an invitation to walk with me along the rooftop. She never once mentioned the night we had spent together. I hoped that if I continued to behave as usual, she would return to her old cheerful self.