The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (9 page)

Instinctively, I reached my hand out toward the canvas.

“Even if I knew you, sir, I would have to object to your touching me like that.” It was the same voice I’d heard in Barnum’s office, coy and confident.

Stunned, I spun around and saw her: the new act. Iell Adams, in the flesh. She watched me from the doorway, and for those first few moments, the only thing I could do was manage to keep my mouth from falling open. I’d never seen such a magnificent woman in my life. She had the same flame-red hair, but in person it was fashionably parted in the center, swirling down into loops and braids. The dashing cape had been replaced by an elegant emerald Zouave jacket worn over a dress of dark blue silk. Black braiding and strings of lilac buttons decorated her skirts; and around her neck was draped a diaphanous white scarf, the very scarf she used as a veil when traveling in public.

But it was the beard that weakened my knees and took my breath away. It had none of the ferocity depicted in the artist’s rendering. She had combed it smooth and decorated it festively with satin bows tied sporadically throughout, but nothing could hide how lush and full it flowed. Now I understood why Barnum’s new act deserved such special treatment. She was one of a kind.

“Might I suggest that you move along, sir?” she said. “I am sure you haven’t intentionally entered a place where you were not invited.”

All I could do was take one step toward the door. I ordered my tongue to loosen and my ears to cease ringing. “You must be . . .” I croaked out, and she smiled, coolly.

“Iell Adams,” she said. “Though if we’re to be colleagues, you may call me Iell.” She smelled of roses, and her perfume reminded me of my mother’s, though the sweet floral odor was mixed with something deeper and more mysterious. When I said nothing, Iell looked at me dispassionately and cleared her throat. “But now, sir, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

I tried to leave but found myself paralyzed by her gaze.

Iell shook her head. “All right, I’ll come back to see the poster later,” she said, “but I hope you’ve found both your tongue and your manners the next time we meet.” She shut the door behind her, leaving me insulted and already half in love.

By the time I fetched Matina’s cape and slipped into the dining room, I could barely feel my body. Matina was talking, but all I could hear was Iell’s voice. How horribly I’d bungled my own introduction. Somehow, I would have to find a way to see her again.

“Then that doctor came around again,” Matina said to the table at large, and I tried my best to listen. “And this time he wanted to measure Alley’s head.”

“He wants to buy my body when I die. Offered good money for it, too.”

“Don’t sign a thing!” Emma glared over at Alley with true alarm. “Where is this so-called doctor from, the Medical College? Please don’t say yes. Two years ago, they Offered me three hundred dollars for my skeleton after I died and I almost agreed, but you should have seen the look in their eyes. I could just picture myself signing some paper and then meeting with a mysterious accident: a fall in the night, arsenic in my soup. Next thing you know, those butchers’d have my flayed self laid out on a slab in front of fifty doctors, and my parts sold to Dr. Kahn’s within a week.”

“Naw, it weren’t no doctor,” Alley answered Emma. “One of those scientific men. Kept measuring my biceps and writing in some book and talking about normal. Why are folks only interested in how big I am? Nothin’ else.” He shook his head and looked over at me as if I should have the answer.

“What?” I asked.

“Alley doesn’t think anyone sees past those big strong arms of his,” Matina said, causing Alley to choke out a red-faced guffaw.

My mind was spinning with images of auburn hair and fingers as light as smoke. Maybe I should tell them I’d met Iell Adams. But no. Better, I decided, to wait.

“You know people don’t understand us,” I said, forcing my attention on the conversation at hand, “and it’s only getting worse. We used to be
Lusus naturae
, special beings, unclassifiable. Now the scientists just want to explain away our gifts.”

Alley cut off a hunk of pork with a short hunter’s knife. “I thought you liked all that measurin’.”

In my mind, I wondered how a scientist would classify the new act. But aloud, I took a more certain stance.

“Indeed. I consider myself a man of science. But the whole point of Curiosities is to blur the line between reason and faith. Darwin and Linnaeus both have their place, but we represent something beyond evolution. Something mythical. Did you know that medieval naturalists used to believe in a sheep that was half plant?”

Emma smiled.

“Don’t laugh. They imagined a sheep that grew from the ground, its belly attached by a fat stem. Supposedly, it lived by eating the grass that grew up around it. And these men believed so strongly that the thing existed, they classified it—named it a Scythian lamb—even though no one had ever laid eyes on such a creature.”

“Whatever is your point?” Emma asked.

“We mustn’t slaughter our Scythian lambs. Man needs a bit of mystery to remind him that the world still holds miraculous things. Unclassifiable wonders. And if scientists simply shove us somewhere in the grander scheme of things, the magic disappears.” I wondered whether someone like Iell Adams might do for us what we did for the world. Open up our eyes. A Scythian lamb in the flesh. My heart soared.

Alley picked up his beer mug. “Here, here!” he said, hefting his
glass to the ceiling and then taking a long, slow drink. Everyone else held up their glasses, and for a moment we were united.

Then Mr. Fish flung open the dining room door, letting in a breeze strong enough to blow the tablecloth over the breadbaskets and rustle the dried flowers on the wall.

“Children, children! I’ve got little time and much to say, so please pay attention.” He pushed his way to the front of the table and stood stiff as a yardstick, white hair wild with electricity. He banged on the table once with his cane. Cook and Bridgett bustled out of the room and Matina settled into her seat, swallowing a half laugh aimed either at Fish or at me, I really wasn’t sure.

“Mr. Barnum has returned, and he’s not at all happy with your performance. He says you are all turning listless onstage, commonplace.”

“He’s never happy, is he?” Emma said, her legendary dislike of Barnum distorting her face. “And he’s been out of town. How would he even know how we’ve been?”

Fish raised a disapproving eyebrow until Emma flushed and quieted. “We must attend to business, people. Your positions are always coveted by newer acts, and you should not for a moment forget that.”

Ricardo snorted. “What other act could do this?” He bent forward and stuck his head between his legs, coming up the back high enough to kiss his own posterior.

Fish dismissed him with an impatient flap of his hand. “
Also
,” he said, “next week we will be joined by a new act, Mrs. Iell Adams. She has come to us from Boston and has never before been seen onstage.”

Matina raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word
Mrs.
? My heart sank. She was married. Fish shushed us, and Matina rolled her eyes.

“She will be gracing us for an indeterminate length of time, and although I expect you to welcome her and treat her as a colleague, she’ll not be staying here at the Museum, nor will she be paying any social calls. Please respect this; carry on.” As quickly as he had come, Fish scurried out.

“
Nor will she be paying any social calls
.” Matina mimicked Fish’s offcious tone. “Now why in the world would that be?”

“She
must
be a Gaff!” Ricardo chimed in.

I almost spoke up in her defense, but I held my tongue, wanting to keep the unsullied image of Iell to myself for a little while longer.

“Barnum won’t let us meet her up close ’cause she ain’t real. Either that or, like I said before, she’s his chippy.” Ricardo waggled his tongue, swinging it back and forward, and winked at Matina. “What Barnum can’t find, he makes. Though I’d like to see him make the likes of us, eh, my sweet?”

“Or me, or me.” Tipping a chair over in his exuberance, Zippy bounced on tiptoe; Nurse grabbed him by the neck, wrestled him down into his chair, and said, “I seen the woman myself, going in the Arboretum. First a few nights ago, and then again last night.” She peered down the table at us, the white of her scalp visible beneath thinning strands of hair. “Veiled head to foot, she was.”

“But the Arboretum is being renovated,” I said. “No one is supposed to go in there. And why at night? Perhaps she’s staying there, secretly.”

“Supposition takes us nowhere. Why don’t we just wait until we see what her gift is?” Emma finished. “Much as I hate to defend the scoundrel, if Barnum’s keeping her under wraps, he’s probably got his reasons.”

The conversation moved on to other things: our linen pickup day, ticket receipts, anticipation of the early summer corn. After lunch, I walked Matina to her tableau and took the service stairs up to my rooms. But on my way I stumbled upon Emma and Ricardo.

“Fortuno is such a ninny,” Emma said, not knowing I was behind her. “I was dying to tell him that the new act is lodging at Mrs. Beeton’s, just to see the look on his face.”

“He thinks he knows everything,” Ricardo responded, slipping his arm around Emma’s waist in a most ungentlemanly manner. Although I felt my blood heat up—ninny, indeed!—I owed Emma a debt. Now that I knew where Iell was staying, perhaps I could arrange to cross
paths with her again. But why would Barnum put her up in a boardinghouse halfway uptown? I could understand why she might not want to live with the rest of us. She was a star, after all. But why wouldn’t she insist on the glamour and notoriety of the St. Nicholas Hotel, like others before her?

T
HE MOMENT
I
OPENED THE SERVICE DOOR
onto Ann Street Thursday afternoon, I realized what a fool I’d been. The smell that wafted in from the street turned my stomach, and I shut the door immediately. Why had I agreed to Barnum’s request to go out?

I took a moment to compose myself, opened the door once more, and stepped onto the filthy walk.

Although the day was slightly past its peak, the sunlight crashed down over everything, and the sewage smells, mixed with the stench from the Brooklyn glue factories, brought tears to my eyes. Pulling my Panama hat lower, I lifted a hand in hopes of hailing a carriage. Ann Street was nearly empty. Only a few bankers loitered around the Oyster House across the street, and a wagon was pulling up to the dry goods annex of Hearn’s. Not a cab was in sight, and my palms were already itching inside my gloves from the heat. I squinted toward the far end of Ann Street to where a river of folks surged past on Broadway at a most alarming pace. Good Lord, what a nightmare! Well, all I could do was swallow the dust in my throat and trudge forward. After all, how difficult could a little day trip be?

When I reached the corner of Ann and Broadway, I stopped, aghast. I’d spent many idle hours on the Museum balconies watching the wagons and carts battle for right-of-way along Broadway, kicking up dust or churning the street into a thoroughfare of mud in the rain. I’d laughed when the crossings logjammed, forcing the police to come and disentangle the mess, directing the drivers to reroute their goods
to Vesey Street. It had been a long time since I’d been out in the daytime—two years at least—and then I had gone in the early morning, well before the crowds could swell. But now, face-to-face with the midday rush, I saw Broadway for what it was: a battlefield. Each man, each carriage, struggled to overcome the others, and my ears were bombarded with the screech of metal on metal, the drivers’ shouts, the cowbells, and the wheels rolling by. I pitched myself into the throng and let it sweep me away. How in heaven’s name had Barnum talked me into a trip in the middle of the day?

By some miracle, I maneuvered across Park Row without incident and moved toward City Hall, mumbling obscenities to myself. The sun reflecting off the municipal building nearly blinded me, but fortunately, the trees along Barclay Street provided a bit of shelter. After a block or so, however, the trees proved insufficient, so I hobbled over to a park bench to gather my wits. Careful to keep my hat down, I sat and slipped off my coat for a touch of air.

“Oh, mercy, look at that.” An elderly woman had stopped on the walkway in front of me.

Her younger companion tried to pull her along, all the while hiding her face behind her fan so as not to stare directly at me. “Come away, Mirabel. He’s probably sick.”

“Sick?” the older woman said. “No. I think the poor thing is dead, I really do.” She drew near me, cocking her head and fiddling with her spectacles to get a better look. “Probably killed by one of those Irish hooligans for the price of a beer.”

The idiocy. I flipped off my hat and stood.

“It moves!” The older woman cried, bowing her head to genuflect. “In the name of the Father and the Son!”

“I am alive, woman!” I shouted at her. “Alive and well! Or at least I would be if it were slightly less hot outside today.”

Startled, the woman stumbled backward and grabbed her companion’s hand, and they scuttled off in the opposite direction, horror-struck that a dead man could have such appalling manners. This was precisely why I never mixed with people outside of the Museum. Normal
people needed the context of my show to understand my place in the world. And I needed the distance from normal people. Idiots, every one.

I tugged my coat back on, buttoned it all the way up, and pulled out Barnum’s map. According to the directions, I was to travel past City Hall to Chatham, then to Mott Street, then east to Pell. A half-hour walk at most, with the Elizabeth Street police station nearby in case I ran into trouble. At this point, my left ankle began to throb, and I noticed a pinch beginning to travel up my leg. Perhaps instead of walking I should flag down one of the horse trolleys and ride up Broadway to Walker. After that, it would be a short jaunt to Pell. Even relying on public transportation, I’d arrive back at the Museum a little late, but I was doing Barnum a favor. How could he mind?