Among the Wonderful Read online

  Copyright: © 2011 Stacy Carlson

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C.

  45 Lyme Road, Suite 208, Hanover, NH 03755

  Earlier versions of chapter seven and eight

  were previously published in Inkwell Magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Carlson, Stacy.

  Among the wonderful : a novel / Stacy Carlson. – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58642-187-8

  1. Barnum’s American Museum–Fiction. 2. Barnum, P. T.

  (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891–Fiction. 3. Curiosities and

  wonders–Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)–History–1775-1865–

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A75327A83 2011

  813′.6–dc22

  2011015162

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  v3.1

  For Jason and Djuna

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Ark of the City

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  She Stands Up Again

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Lusus Naturae

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  She Stands Up Again

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  On New York Island

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  She Stands Up Again

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Spira Mirabilis

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  She Stands Up Again

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Metamorphosis

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  The Congress and the Conflagration

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Ana’s Passage

  The water below did not surge or recoil. It neither splashed — not from where I could see — nor frothed. No current swept it along the coast and no moon pulled it to tides. I watched the slow rolling of this gray syrup while the steamer North Shore pushed thickly on, seeming to labor more than water should demand.

  “Shh. Look!” The deckside breeze carried an exaggerated female whisper directly to my ear. “Right there. I told you!”

  I did not look. I clenched the railing, aware that I could rip it free of its stanchions and hurl it toward this noise, this intrusion. Were my hours, days, years of being gazed upon not enough to earn me a moment’s privacy? Rage flooded back, filling the contours gouged last night by Mr. Ramsay (I will never say his Christian name again) shouting after me as I left Toronto once and for all. But I would not wheel around and claw the air. I would not throw the benches arranged so tidily on the steamer’s top deck. I would not give that whispered voice the satisfaction. Instead I peered into the water.

  No delicate creatures inhabited these depths. The only fish alive down there scooted blindly above a muddy carpet, skin flaking, jaws filtering stagnant water in search of wormy food. I ignored the brightness of the sky and the mindless tumble of gulls. I perceived the eyes of the two women boring through my back. I was sure they discussed their strange luck that I should be here for them to behold.

  I imagined the water sucking me down to a place untroubled by any pulse. Gravity, that appalling master of the body, loosened its grip for once. My preposterous heft sloughed away and I drifted, deliciously weightless. In one swift motion I could be there. I willed Lake Ontario to yield more of this perverse solace even as my mind clamped tight around it: Drowning, indeed. What a ridiculous notion.

  “Look! Look!” the women cried again, their bleats barely distinguishable from the gulls.

  I turned, then, and there I was, reflected in their small, astonished faces and their delicate gasps. I straightened to my full height and cooled the rage with your words, with what you’d told me, Mother, time after time: You are a mirror held up in front of other people, Ana, which reflects their truest selves. But if that is so, then truly all humanity is an abomination.

  “Look! There it is!” And then I saw that they were pointing past me. “America.”

  She was right: It was there on the horizon — a drowsy leviathan drawing closer every moment, casting its hungry eyes across the waters.

  Ark of the City

  One

  They had discarded the egret. And strangely, the lynx. As he approached the building Guillaudeu observed that someone had draped a burlap sack around the wild cat and left it on the sidewalk. But the covering had half fallen away, exposing taut feline shoulders poised for attack. Inside the museum the lynx had inspired awe among the visitors. But against this new backdrop of street refuse, and in the bold morning light, the specimen had the look of a bleached housecat enchanted by a ball of dust.

  Until very recently, the changes had all been to the exterior of the building. The brick façade had disappeared under layers of whitewash and teams of men had painted oval portraits across the face of the structure, depicting everything from elephants to the Annunciation. They had even rebuilt the balcony, and judging from the crowds that now filled it, this narrow promenade over Broadway was as entertaining as the museum’s contents, if not more so.

  Guillaudeu did not appreciate the new owner’s gaudy taste. He averted his eyes from the huge transparency at the museum entrance that bore the smiling, bare-breasted image of the museum’s most recent acquisition: a mermaid. In his irritated mind, he shuffled through the myriad upsets in routine that had occurred since that scoundrel had taken ownership of the museum: the new exhibits, the theater, the rooftop restaurant, and on each floor an army of concessionaires. The whole place was a roiling mess.

  He watched three men lea
ve the building. One carried the white-faced ibis by the neck. The others struggled at each end of a reindeer. He did not betray even a hint of displeasure, though he felt an urgent desire to snatch back the ibis.

  The first visitors of the day formed a line outside the ticket window, and a vendor was selling them hot corn and coffee. Guillaudeu continued into the entrance hall, pushing through the inner door just behind a man and his young daughter.

  “A Chinaman pulled her up in a net!” the girl sang out as she skipped ahead of her father. “She’s got hair mixed with seaweed and a necklace of pearls!”

  The man hurried as the girl bounded up the first steps of the great marble stairway that led to the exhibits. She had holes in her stockings, and her father moved stiffly in a worn oilcloth coat.

  Guillaudeu walked past the door to his own office; like the patrons, he had business on the second floor before the day’s true work began.

  “Here, Margaret. This way!” the father called.

  “I can almost see her.” The girl’s voice was frantic as she approached the exhibit.

  Guillaudeu heard a shriek but he did not stop. He was already well aware that the desiccated horror the girl now beheld was nothing like the siren depicted on the transparency hanging outside the museum, and it was certainly nothing like the image she had coveted in her mind. When he glanced toward them, the father was making the sign of the Cross. Guillaudeu hurried around the corner without meeting his eye.

  His footsteps echoed as he walked across the portrait gallery where the blank faces of monarchs and presidents added their gazes to the empty air. At the far end he turned left into Gallery Three. He found the sloth in its handsome pergola, sleeping high in the crook of a dead tree trunk. It squatted with its long arms folded around its legs and sunlight from the gallery’s high windows warming its back.

  Guillaudeu had hoped that by now a proper naturalist would have been hired; he resented the amount of his time that had been wasted worrying over the museum’s newest inhabitants.

  “You’re an odd sort of fellow,” said Guillaudeu to the lump of gray-brown fur that acted as if sleeping in a museum were the thing one was born to do. With one hand Guillaudeu clutched a small parcel wrapped in newspaper and with the other he twisted the end of his mustache, which, though his hair was white, remained the color of cinnamon. The creature was in precisely the same place as when Guillaudeu had visited the pergola the previous afternoon.

  In an absurdly languorous movement the sloth raised its head. It lifted its arm and soundlessly scratched its armpit. Then the animal directed its attention toward the ceiling.

  “How can an animal never come down to the ground?” Guillaudeu was unaccustomed to analyzing animal behavior, never having had to account for it during his thirty-eight years as a taxidermist. “Who wants a sloth in a museum anyway?”

  He located the key to the pergola in his waistcoat pocket. He unlocked it and unwrapped his parcel, which contained half a cabbage. He pulled apart the outer leaves and placed the vegetable in the sloth’s tin bowl, which still held the two uneaten carrots and several brown lettuce leaves of yesterday’s meal. The creature now appeared to be gazing out the window, where the diffuse light of a March morning brightened.

  Guillaudeu descended the marble stairway against an incoming tide of people. Shoulders bumped him. The feather of a woman’s hat brushed across his neck and he swatted it away. The crowd’s excited murmur gave him a bitter sense of constriction. At the bottom of the stairs he turned left, out of the throng, and passed through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE into a corridor with one closed door at the end. Guillaudeu would take up the matter of the sloth with the new proprietor.

  Phineas T. Barnum had inherited Guillaudeu, along with the museum’s collection of mounted specimens, from John Scudder, the museum’s original owner. Scudder had been Guillaudeu’s benefactor, professional mentor, and closest friend. He still could not bear to think of his old companion signing over both of their lives’ work to a man like Barnum. He had made a point of avoiding Scudder ever since the older man had relinquished the title to the collection.

  Guillaudeu had spoken with Barnum only twice. In the first conversation Barnum praised the museum’s taxidermy displays and assured Guillaudeu that his services were invaluable to any natural history enterprise. But he then proceeded to reinvent the museum. To add interest, he had said during their second conversation, while men hoisted the first of the transparencies outside. Anything outdated must be expunged! Guillaudeu half expected to be thrown out himself.

  He was increasingly upset as strangers delivered more and more live animals to the museum. The creatures arrived in a racket of squeals; there was even a man who arrived at the door to Guillaudeu’s office with a one-eyed eagle tethered to his wrist. As he made his daily rounds among the specimens, he now looked closely to make sure no new creature was pacing or swimming in a cage that had sprung up unbeknownst to him. As he dusted and fumigated, he looked twice at specimens he had mounted himself: Was that a twitch of the head? Did the crane shift its weight from one leg to the other? He came to dread his peripheral vision.

  He considered looking for employment elsewhere, but he could not bear the thought of leaving behind his menagerie of specimens, which now numbered close to one thousand creatures, despite the loss of the lynx, the egret, the ibis, and others.

  He banged on the door to Barnum’s office. No answer. He leaned his head briefly against the door frame and thought he heard something rustle on the other side. “Where are you?” he whispered. He knocked again, but no one came.

  Guillaudeu made his way back to the entry hall with an uneasy feeling. The incoming crowd was almost impenetrable and he pushed himself against it to reach the door of his office, which was across from the ticket booth just inside the main doors. Once he was safely inside he moved to the opposite end of his cluttered workroom, past the piles of crates that had been arriving steadily and delivered, unfortunately, to his door.

  He paused before the skin of the owl, Asio flammeus, which hung, splay-winged, from hooks in the wall. The skull-less hood of its head remained erect above the pinned wings. He ran a finger along the banded brown primary feathers. It had taken him several days to identify the bird. He’d bought it at an auction and knew it came from arctic Norway, but its tags contained nothing legible except the words BOG OWL. It had taken careful study and verification from three different sources to characterize it as a short-eared owl. Now the specimen embodied this taxonomic victory and was thus endeared to the taxidermist. The poisoned varnish on the bill and feet was completely dry, and he examined the owl’s soles to ensure that the incisions that had drawn out the tendons had not damaged the appearance of the specimen. They had not. Poised at the threshold of his work, about to dive into its infinite solace, he turned away.

  “It’s not my job to take care of live animals!” he irritably told no one. “That’s not why I’m here! I’m not responsible for observing a godforsaken sloth. How should I know what it eats? You’ll have to find someone else to be your stable hand, Mr. Barnum.” He slouched into his chair. In an attempt to banish the sloth’s dolorous visage from his mind, he picked up the current issue of the University of Edinburgh’s Scientific Journal.

  Guillaudeu’s hero, the French anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier, had published a discourse titled On the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe, which the journal had excerpted. Cuvier described long periods of equilibrium on earth, during which whole kingdoms of plants and animals flourished. These epochs, though, ended in cataclysms of fire or flood. Out of the rubble of the old age would arise entirely new creatures to crawl and fly across the globe until the next apocalypse consumed them. As he read these words, Guillaudeu’s mind filled with the image of a massive cyclone of wind and lightning ripping up forests and carving great wounds in the earth. He had the uncomfortable sensation that Cuvier’s theory explained more than just an ancient scenario: A dark whirlwind, he realized, had struc
k the museum in the form of Phineas T. Barnum.

  Two