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Cakewalk

SEPTEMBER 1883–APRIL 1884

… how small the sons of Adam are!

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Declaration of Sentiments

MRS. LANG’S SECRETARIAL BUREAU had arranged for me to stay with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at their boardinghouse in Murray Hill. They were in New York City to collaborate on the third volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage. Miss Anthony had traveled from her home in Rochester for the purpose, Mrs. Stanton from hers in Tenafly. They required a stenographer and typist. I arrived in a hackney driven by an Irishman with a put-upon expression and a grizzled beard stained by tobacco juice. As I entered the ladies’ sitting room, followed by the cabman, who had grunted and grumbled up the stairs with the bulk of my Sholes & Glidden in his arms, I was struck by its cheerfulness. Aware of their militant reputation, I had expected to find Spartan quarters devoid of the follies that often encrust the rooms of elderly ladies. But my suffragists, as I would come to think of them, did not scorn a so-called feminine weakness if the indulgence pleased them. They were as likely to meet an expectation based on gender as they were to defy it. Had I not been prejudiced by accounts of their warlike humor published in the sensational papers of the day, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the scent of violets emanating from Mrs. Stanton’s ample bosom or by the Henry Maillard bonbons they nibbled from a plate, as if the two most formidable women of the age were a pair of schoolmistresses whose delight was to needlepoint sentimental mottoes on fine linen for the adornment of walls papered in the color of dried blood. I was glad no such homely artifacts were displayed and that the walls were enlivened by a pattern of tea roses. A Persian carpet lay on the shellacked floor. Strings of glass beads hung from a gasolier, unlighted at that hour, and the walnut cornices were free of the dust that swayed from the ceilings of my own rooms like tiny trapezes. The apartment declared Mrs. Cady Stanton’s Dutch ancestry and Miss Anthony’s Quaker devotion to cleanliness. (Later, I would be introduced to Miss McGinty, who came on Tuesdays to do the actual cleaning.)

“I presume you’re acquainted with our work,” said Mrs. Stanton. She was the plump one of the two, whose white hair was dressed in ringlets.

“I am,” I said brazenly.

I knew the story, in its outline, of their long, tempestuous life together more than the particulars of their work, which was denounced by clerics as impious and by politicians as contrary to the self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence. At the time, I had no opinion on woman’s suffrage. Had I operated a sewing machine in the Garment District instead of a typewriter, I would have been more mindful of the cause to which the two women were devoted. As it was, I considered myself fortunate in having a profession and did not think my situation could be improved by the election of this man or that one, even if I had had a ballot to cast for either. One can find Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln on a map of the United States, in the names of its towns and streets, but men of their sort are scarce in the seats of government.

“Would you have any reservations about aiding us in our work?” asked Mrs. Stanton.

“I would not—ahem.” I had let the sentence “hang fire,” as Henry James would put it, uncertain as I was of how to address a suffragist who at one time in her long life had worn pants.

“Ellen, would you like a glass of water?” she asked solicitously.

I wondered if I ought to object to the familiarity; she would not have called Mr. James by his Christian name on so short an acquaintance—or, for that matter, a lengthy one.

“Our notoriety does not give you pause?” asked Miss Anthony in a manner I interpreted as a challenge.

The death of my brother-in-law, whose salary earned as one of Herman Melville’s underlings in the U.S. Customs Service had been essential to keeping our small household on Maiden Lane afloat, obliged me to overlook the disapproval with which the two women were generally regarded. In truth, I would have kept the accounts for Mrs. Standly’s brothel in the Tenderloin until my husband, Franklin, could find employment in the typesetting trade out west, where I planned to join him.

“Not at all, Miss Anthony.”

“You may call me Susan,” she graciously allowed.

“And you may call me Elizabeth,” said the other, inclining her venerable head toward me.

“When would you like me to start?” I was eager to begin; I had a grocer’s bill to pay.

“That remains to be seen,” said Susan flintily. “You haven’t been examined.”

“I was given to understand that the matter had already been decided,” I said with what I hoped was an air of dignity and not one of indignation, which was slowly mounting in me.

I thought I caught a glint of malice in Susan’s eyes as she went on airily. “No doubt you have stenographic and typewriting experience in business correspondence.” By the way she had pronounced business, I understood that the manufacture of tinware or galoshes could be of little consequence when compared to the “work.”

I nodded in the affirmative, suppressing an urge to battery.

Susan continued: “Here, however, the dictation you would be called upon to take—”

“And the manuscripts you would be typewriting,” said Elizabeth, “putting in her oar,” as Melville might have said.

“From handwritten notes and scribbles on foolscap or the back of butcher paper—”

“Can be daunting.”

Having been a long time together, the two were in the habit of collaborating on each other’s sentences whenever excitement or agitation caught them up like an outgoing tide.

“Have you had anything to do with—Oh, homilies, for example, or treatises where the style of the prose and the difficulties of the thoughts expressed would’ve challenged you more than a feather merchant’s letter of complaint to the chickens?”

Apropos of her friend’s remark, Susan cackled.

“I am sometimes called upon to typewrite manuscripts for Henry James,” I said smugly.

“We are suspicious of Mr. James’s attitude toward woman’s suffrage,” retorted Elizabeth.

“We are indeed!” said Susan, her face having become as sharp as her tone.

“However, in that his prose is difficult—”

“At times, tortuous.”

“We believe you are qualified.”

“But she has not yet given us a demonstration of her skills!” objected Susan.

“That won’t be necessary,” concluded Elizabeth with the decisiveness of Caesar settling the vexatious question of Gaul.

“Did Mrs. Lang mention that you will be required to stay here?” asked Susan, relaxing her jaw muscles into the faintest of smiles.

“We do not keep regular hours,” explained Elizabeth.

“Yes, she did,” I replied to the space between the two women, since I was beginning to find it hard to tell them apart in spite of their very different appearances. One was fat and jolly, the other thin and caustic; together, however, they made an impression as disconcerting as the plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng in Dr. Mütter’s Museum in Philadelphia.

“You will find the situation a pleasant one, I think,” said Susan, whose hatchet-shaped face would eventually become endearing. “Elizabeth loves to bake, you know.”

“I have an Eccles cake in the oven right now. Do you accept?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. Now that my heavy machine and I were comfortably installed in a sitting room fragrant with pastry and currants, it would have been a pity to have had to look elsewhere. Besides, I was feeling sleepy; I remember that I yawned in full view of my new employers. Embarrassed, I reaffirmed my joy at finding so happy a situation: “I accept with pleasure!”

Neither woman raised an eyebrow. Consorting for so many years with those in whom ideas produce the greatest excitement would have inured them to the enthusiastic display of a professional typist—or her back teeth.

“Good,” they remarked in unison.

“We are pleased,” said Elizabeth, who favored the royal we. And then she astonished me by asking, “When is the baby expected?”

If I’d been a reader of romance novels or had laced my corset too tightly, I would have required smelling salts. But I was accommodating the baby’s need for oxygen by doing without stays. I was slender to begin with, and even then, in the sixth month of my gravidity (a word I had recently encountered in one of Mr. James’s drafts), only a practiced eye—or a prying one—could have detected the immanent presence of another human being underneath my voluminous skirts.

The two women apparently sensed my surprise and perplexity.

“We’ve spent our lives mostly among women and have helped many ‘unfortunates,’” said Elizabeth meaningfully.

“Are you married, Ellen?” asked Susan bluntly. “It makes no difference to us whether or not you are.”

Elizabeth nodded hopefully. “Not in the least!”

What dears! I said to myself. Bless them for their tolerance.

“I am married,” I replied. “My husband is in San Francisco, looking for a place on one of the papers.”

They received this piece of intelligence glumly.

“Is that so,” remarked Susan, disappointment evident on her face and in her voice.

“We can’t allow our work to be interrupted,” said Elizabeth, having stiffened. The rigor was provided by her own bones and not borrowed from a dead whale’s. “You understand, Mrs. Finch, that what we do must take priority over other considerations.” She had resorted to an ominous formality. “If your husband were to find a position in California and send for you, we would be very much at sixes and sevens.”

“Very much so!” said Susan, offering vigorous confirmation of her friend’s misgivings.

Sinking into the horsehair sofa, I beheld in my fancy the scuttling of the household—Franklin’s and mine—awash in debt. I watched as our best hope of rescue drifted among the wreckage like a seaborne spar or bobbing hogshead beyond salvage. I had not counted on the women’s single-minded ambitiousness. No, the word wrongs them and belittles the devotion with which they pursued the overthrow of a fraternity that deemed women unequal by law and custom and no more deserving of protection than a mule. Their altruism, then.

As if to clarify the importance of their efforts, Elizabeth remarked, “A negro man can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of two hundred and fifty dollars; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool. But women are voiceless and oppressed.”

“The Lord will admit a good and virtuous woman into Heaven, although during her life, she was made to wait outside the polling place while her husband cast his vote. By the law of coverture, his vote represented hers regardless of whether or not her opinion was considered in the matter!” said an indignant Susan, who had neither vote nor husband, but had been arrested for violating the sanctity of the polling place.

I knew that the child’s welfare and my own could be assured in those delightful rooms kept by a pair of suffragists besotted on the intoxicant of high ideals and, in Elizabeth’s case, a pleasing sense of martyrdom. The infant would be nourished, loved, and endued with sympathy for the disadvantaged, whose lot I did not wish to share as I waited for Franklin to send for me.

I began to sob. They leaned forward, not with the pity that conceals self-righteousness or spitefulness, but with genuine compassion.

Elizabeth sat beside me on the sofa and, putting her arm around my shoulder, intoned, “There, there,” as if those two words had the power to resolve the disharmonies of the world. I let my head rest against her bosom and sneezed when particles of her violet sachet entered my nostrils.

“Tell us what’s troubling you, child,” encouraged Susan from across the room.

“I have no husband!” I cried, but the words were muffled by a snowy expanse of muslin.

“What’s that you said, Ellen?” asked Susan, whose withered breasts had never felt the greedy mouths of infants or of men.

I turned my head toward her. “I’m not married!”

“Ah, I thought as much!” she gasped.

“Wonderful!” The word had escaped Elizabeth’s lips before she could purse them.

“Please don’t send me to the Home for Magdalens!”

“We would sooner send you to the Tombs!” vowed Susan.

“Or to the river, along with a stone to tie around your waist!” cried Elizabeth, the more theatrical of the two.

“You’re a skillful Sholes and Glidden operator, not a laundress,” said Susan, alluding to the fate of unwed Magdalens who did not throw themselves into the river.

“I have no idea how I’ll manage,” I said ruefully. Oh, I was shameless!

“You will manage perfectly well with us!” replied Elizabeth, and in her resoluteness, I glimpsed the young firebrand who had omitted the words and obey from her marriage vow and affirmed our sex’s equality in the Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed at the Seneca Falls convention: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal …”

“When your time comes, you won’t find us wanting in either compassion or skill,” she said, or maybe it was Susan who did. I’d begun to weep in earnest, picturing myself left to face poverty and shame on my own. On the other side of the continent, Franklin seemed a figment of a dream.

“Elizabeth brought seven children into the world and can be trusted to know what to do!” said Susan as confidently as if she herself had suffered a woman’s agony and, according to men, her purpose.

“An excellent midwife in sympathy with our movement lives nearby,” said Elizabeth, who at that moment resembled a flour-faced mammy. “Her swine of a husband beats her when he has ‘a brick in his hat,’ as she calls his sprees. By now, he ought to have enough bricks to build a house of ill repute.”

“‘A man can’t close his eyes to pray without falling into a rum-hole!’” declared Susan, quoting from The Lily. “I’m waiting for someone to take a hatchet to the taprooms, bucket shops, spirit vaults, and doggeries that turn men’s fuggled brains to mash!”

“You beat that horse to death!” complained Elizabeth.

“Better that I should beat the horse than a drunkard his wife!”

“Ellen, we are happy that you’re unmarried and with child,” said Elizabeth pleasantly. “We can point to you as an example of the necessity for statutory protection of unwed mothers. Their welfare and that of their children cannot be left to the whim of churches and the discretion of private charities. Bastardy—odious word!—must be expunged from the law books, from the minds of those who set themselves up to judge women, and from the hearts of mankind.”

“Which are seldom kind,” said Susan. “That New York’s married women have a legal right to their wages and to their children is due, in part, to our campaigning.” As if having read my thoughts, she went on to say, “I could not give up my life to become a man’s serving woman. When I was young, if a girl made a poor marriage, she became a housekeeper and drudge; if she made a rich one, a pet and a doll.”

I couldn’t imagine her as a young woman, much less a man’s pet or doll. Her figure was gaunt like an old stick, her face drawn over bone and framed by two taut drapes of gray hair that appeared to have been screwed into place for eternity by her bun. Yet in her girlhood, she was accounted pretty and had been courted. But no man could inspire in her the passion she felt for her mind’s pursuits, which must be kept unencumbered. She refused to be anybody’s property. She agreed with Elizabeth, whom I once heard say, “To be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.”

“Wait and see, Ellen; all will be well,” promised a broadly smiling Elizabeth.

“You will be happy here with us—”

“And a great help to our cause!”

I thought then that I would be helpful and happy.

Sholes & Glidden

THE REMINGTON MODEL NUMBER 2 was the latest thing in typewriters, but I preferred my old Sholes & Glidden machine, whose operation I had learned at the Young Women’s Christian Association on Lexington Avenue.

“Does it bother you that my machine can make only capital letters?” I asked the ladies at the conclusion of the first day’s dictation and transcription. The Remington keyboard had both the upper- and lowercase alphabets in its chassis.

“Not at all!” replied Elizabeth. “It will remind Susan to speak emphatically.”

I guessed that she needed no reminder.

“Elizabeth forges the thunderbolts, and I fire them!” she said.

“Women should be grateful to Mr. Sholes for having chosen his daughter instead of a man to demonstrate his machine,” said Elizabeth. “As a result, the typewriter is considered a woman’s tool, and for the first time in the history of our sex, women work as clerk copyists in offices where previously only men had been employed.”

“A man would never choose to operate a machine so prettily decorated,” observed Susan, tapping, with a gnarled finger, a wreath of painted gillyflowers emblazoned on mine.

“Naturally, Mr. Sholes was not motivated by altruism or sympathy for our cause,” said Elizabeth, who gave every appearance of being omniscient. “He saw women as an opportunity to sell his machine to a boodle of new customers. But we would compact with the Devil in aid of woman’s rights.”

“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” growled Susan, who wore no stays except those fashioned of an elastic piety. “I will not give the Devil his due, though he gives women charge over the whole world in exchange.”

“I would trade my immortal soul for the vote!” replied Elizabeth theatrically.

“Will you never outgrow the need to be thought of as naughty? Heaven knows why you should find preening in blasphemy and provocation so much fun!”

“Oh, fudge! Heaven only knows how I’ve stood you all these years!”

“Primp!”

“Prude!”

“Poseur!”

“Prig!”

“Humbug!”

“Stickleback!”

“Egotist!” shouted Susan. “Must you always be the biggest toad in the puddle?”

I crossed my arms on top of the machine and, with a pitiable moan, rested my head on them.

“Ellen, what’s the matter?” they asked, competing for my recognition of their sympathies.

“I feel faint.”

“Is your corset laced too tightly?” asked Susan.

“If you cannot renounce it entirely, you must do so until the baby is born!” admonished Elizabeth.

“Rest yourself, dear girl. We shall not disturb you any more today.”

The two women took the manuscript pages I had finished typewriting into the kitchen, where I could hear Elizabeth reading them over slowly and articulately to Susan, who, now and then, would disagree with a word or phrase. They bickered until they remembered themselves—or rather, they remembered the cause that was their common ground and source of amity. Then they would eat a piece of strudel.

Not caring for accounts of other people’s lives unless they’re made up by a wizard like Mr. James, I found the ladies’ History dull. Having fixed my gaze on the machine for nearly three hours, my eyes were tired. I closed them and saw the keys in the darkness behind the curtains of the lids, arranged like a constellation whose stars had assembled into nothing legible.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

Q W E . T Y I U O P

Z S D F G H J K L M

A X & C V B N ? ; R

I went out for some air. Underneath its freshness, I caught the unsavory odor of the tidal strait released by the unseasonable heat of a September afternoon. I walked along Forty-second Street, my thoughts not yet my own after toiling at the two women’s prose, until I found myself beneath towering plane trees in Bryant Park, not far from the site of the Colored Orphan Asylum, which immigrant and nativist hooligans had burned to cinders during the draft riots twenty years before. I chose an ornamental iron bench placed in the shadow cast by the Sixth Avenue elevated railway. The person sitting opposite, half-hidden in the gloom, whom I had taken for a girl of six or seven, turned out to be—on close inspection—a little person unkindly called a “midget.”

I observed her discreetly, with sidelong glances, to satisfy my curiosity without causing offense. She was perfectly formed. Her round face was pretty, her dark hair thick and done à la mode. When she turned her head toward the chittering of a squirrel, her movements impressed me with their grace and elegance. Had she been of ordinary height, she would have been the object of a young man’s greedy eyes. Anger arose in me at God or—if He was disinterested, as Deists claim—at the mill of destiny, which will grind human beings into dust. By now, my furtive glances had settled into a stare.

“I’ve been admiring your hat,” she called from across the walk that separated us. Later, I would admire the tact with which she had spared me embarrassment by making herself out to be the one who had been staring. “It’s becoming to your face.”

“Thank you.” Inclining my head, the green felt hat waved a garnet and a sage plume at her.

“I don’t think I could wear such a hat half as well as you,” she said graciously.

“I’m sure that’s not so. It would suit you. Am I mistaken, or are your eyes green?” I asked, feeling that we had exhausted the subject of hats. I don’t know why I remarked on the color of her eyes. I couldn’t rightly make them out, because of the shadow cast by the brim of her straw bonnet. An awkward silence ensued, which I felt obliged to put to an end by crossing over to her bench. After a moment’s hesitation, in which I considered whether to sit beside her or a little apart, I decided on the former as being the less likely to embarrass. I did not want her to think that I was shy of her, as one might be in the presence of an anomaly.

She smiled, gave me her little hand, and said, “My name is Margaret Fuller Hardesty. Father was a Transcendentalist until he followed Mother’s example and died. I often wonder what became of him and his philosophy. Having no relations, near or distant, at least no one willing to acknowledge the connection, I came to New York to find employment. I suppose it was small wonder that I found none”—she smiled archly—“until Mr. Barnum happened to see me in the Central Park. I was walking on Sheep Meadow, my eyes intent on the ground, in the hope of finding the remains of a picnic lunch, when I was startled by a lumbering shadow on the grass, accompanied by heavy footsteps. I looked up and there, like a maharajah, sat Mr. Barnum astride Jumbo the Elephant, together with the Milo Brothers and, languid within the curve of its trunk, Miss Adelina, the famous high-wire ascensionist and juggler.”

“‘How do you do, little lady?’ I couldn’t have guessed that his voice—he had addressed me in the most cordial way—was able to reach the last row of seats in the Hippodrome, over the din of beasts and human beings come to gloat—or so it always seems to me, who has never felt at one with them.

“‘I have not had lunch,’ I said, hopeful that a banana or a bag of peanuts might be among the paraphernalia carried on the elephant’s back.

“‘Where do you live?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean to pry, but if we happen to be traveling in the same direction, I can give you a ride home.’

“‘I am presently stopping at a gardener’s unused shed.’

“‘Very resourceful.’

“Barnum grew thoughtful while Miss Adelina scratched the elephant’s huge leathery ear and Mr. Marsh, a renowned trombone soloist, blew spit from the mouthpiece of his instrument. He had been playing circus ‘screamers’ in the van to advertise an engagement at Madison Square Garden.

“‘I think you’d be happier with us,’ said Barnum, smiling radiantly. He let down a silken ladder and, lifting his high hat in welcome, bade me join him.”

“And you accepted his invitation?” I asked, fascinated by her tale, as anyone would be.

“I most certainly did!” replied Margaret, who had been alone and, like other pariahs in the world’s richest city, destitute.

A multitude beyond a miracle of fish and loaves to feed is packed into tenement houses, choked by stench, freezing or sweating according to the season, and famished for light and air, from the Five Points to Hell Gate. And a great many more of their predecessors lie in paupers’ graves on Ward’s, Randall’s, and Blackwell’s islands—infinitely beyond the reach of Barnum’s screamers, in an eternity of silent waiting for the promised recompense.

“Was Mr. Barnum kind?” I asked, hoping that he had been.

“He was and still is,” replied Margaret, smoothing her skirt. “I’ve been with him since that afternoon in 1862.”

“And are you happy?”

“I am.” She regarded me a moment. “It is not for you to be angry.” She took note of my perplexity. “Earlier, I saw it in your face. Your anger at whoever or whatever made my friends and me is as unwelcome as your pity.”

I bit my lower lip and frowned. I did not tell her that the anger and the pity had been for myself.

“We are not mistakes,” she said, modulating her tone into a softer register. “We are, as Mr. Barnum says of us, ‘nature’s eccentricities.’ And I am ‘La Belle Excentrique.”’

I looked at this miniature human being, remarkable in every aspect, and felt a surge of affection and—strange to say—gratitude. I admired her courage, knowing instinctually that she would have considered my admiration demeaning because it implied a sympathy—a pity, even—for the difference between us, a difference she would have vigorously denied. There she sat, her short legs dangling above the pavement, her head reaching only as far as my shoulder, endowed by nature, as though to compensate her for having fashioned her thus, with a ferocity—a strength of will—that carried her proudly past the rude stares, which might be contemptuous or kind, and the constant insult of a world not suited to her needs and dignity. There she sat as if I and not she were to be pitied for having been born “normal.”

“I invite you to tea,” she said, and for a dreadful moment, I pictured the two of us sitting in a Fifth Avenue tea shop, inviting careless stares in which I would be implicated. Before I could accept her invitation regardless of the tearoom she might choose, she said, “My rooming house is not far.”

I watched her clamber down from the bench as unselfconsciously as a child would have done. Not wanting to embarrass her, I did not offer my hand. We left Bryant Park, which had been a potter’s field until, in 1840, the nameless graves were opened and the remains unearthed and transplanted in the demotic soil of Ward’s Island. We headed for her rooming house, at the seamy edge of Longacre Square, erstwhile center of the city’s carriage trade. I matched my stride to Margaret’s shorter one, inconspicuously, so as not to slight her.

The Absurdity in the Room

“WON’T YOU SIT DOWN?” asked Margaret.

She had not needed to point me to the chair in which I now found myself sitting, at ease despite the strangeness of the room. Mine was the only chair, indeed the sole furnishing, that could accommodate a person of my size. The maroon horsehair sofa, the armchair, the carved walnut pedestal table, the cupboard, the plates, cups, and saucers were suitable for her diminutive figure. I was the eccentric, the absurdity in a room bright with fripperies and chintz, rose carpets and claret drapes. I felt as if I were sitting in a private box in a theater where a play was about to be performed for my exclusive enjoyment. In my seemingly big chair, I was Gulliver lording it over the Lilliputians or Barnum’s Cardiff Giant among the gawkers. Neither by word nor gesture did Margaret acknowledge the topsy-turvy universe in which we two were speaking to each other as if nothing were amiss. For her, nothing was amiss.

“What a charming room!” I may have sniffed (I hope not) as one might do upon entering a circus dressing room and detecting a lingering odor of greasepaint and sweat.

“Thank you, Ellen.”

“You must be very comfortable here,” I said, instantly going red in the face. I was afraid she would infer from my remark my belief that she must be uncomfortable outside of her “doll’s house.” She did not make an issue of it. Relieved, I glanced at a copy of the New-York Tribune lying open on the table to the theatrical notices, one of which announced the death on July 15 of Charles Sherwood Stratton, or Tom Thumb, as he was universally known. Margaret had drawn a heart in black ink around the engraved portrait of the little man.

“India or China?” she asked, rising from the sofa as gracefully as any society lady.

“China would be grand.”

She smiled and, with a flounce of her pretty curls, went into the kitchen, which I had no doubt was furnished with a miniature sink and stove. I listened to the rush of water surging into the teapot and the clatter of spoons as I perused Tom Thumb’s obituary, learning that he had been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1838, and after six months of ordinary development and having attained a height of twenty-five inches, he stopped growing.

Margaret returned from the kitchen, carrying a child’s tea service on a tin tray illustrated with dogs wearing derby hats and holding in their paws glasses of beer—the sole reminder in an otherwise-decorous setting that the events in my small hostess’s life would not be reported in the society pages. Setting the Tribune aside, she put the tray on the table and poured the fragrant tea into both our cups.

“Do you take sugar?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“Not for me, Margaret, thank you.”

Her preparations complete, we sipped the hot tea awhile in silence.

“Did you read poor Tom’s obituary?”

She took me by surprise, and I put down the tiny cup abruptly, causing tea to slosh over its gold rim and into the saucer. “Margaret, I hope you don’t mind.”

“That you took advantage of my absence to read a newspaper? Heavens no, child! I would have hidden it in a drawer if I’d intended to keep it a secret.”

I was taken aback by her having referred to me as a “child,” but looking at her face, I was reminded by the lines time had inscribed there that she was older than I, who was twenty-seven. She would have been in her forties—perhaps the same age Tom Thumb was when he passed on to a miniature heaven: forty-five. At some point, according to his obituary, he had begun to grow again, and at the time of his death, he was three feet tall.

“We called him ‘General,’ you know,” said Margaret—wistfully, I thought. “He was a dear man.” She stood, crossed the room, and beckoned me to join her by the wall, where, at the level of her gaze, a row of framed photographs hung. “This is Tom and Lavinia. It was taken on their wedding day, February 10, 1863. I was the maid of honor. Do you see me here?”

She pointed to a young woman wearing a dress trimmed in satin and silk rosebuds, her dimpled arms visible beneath puffed sleeves, the circumference of her ample skirt kept rigid by an old-fashioned farthingale. Long curls framed her chubby face, which wore a frown. One could easily mistake the bridal party for three people of common stature, if it were not for the Episcopal minister seen towering above them.

“Ten thousand people attended the reception at the Metropolitan Hotel. We greeted them, standing on top of a grand piano, as the Band of Caledonian Pipers played. Afterward, we went to Washington to meet President Lincoln. He was so tall, he had to stoop to shake our hands. He said the fault was his for having stretched the truth more than was good for him. General Tom became a wealthy man. He owned a steam yacht, a wardrobe of elegantly tailored clothes, and a summer house built to suit him on one of Connecticut’s Thimble Islands. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral.”

Margaret sighed, and a shadow stole across her face.

“Tom used to say that he had willed himself not to grow,” she said after a pause.

“Whatever do you mean, Margaret?” I asked in astonishment.

“He liked to say that, having briefly lived among your kind—”

“My kind?”

“I beg your pardon, Ellen, but Tom always used to put it that way. He could be awfully proud.”

I thought Tom’s pride and his claim preposterous. How on earth could a body will itself to stop growing, and why would it?

“He said that six months as a normally developing infant had been time enough for him to conclude that ‘your kind,’ Ellen, were mean and shallow, and he decided to have no part of it.”

“What about you, Margaret?” I asked pettishly. “Did you will yourself to stop growing?”

“I really don’t recall. Tom had a remarkable memory. Besides, I was not half so smart as he. He was a deep thinker, you know. Very philosophical. He always said that the small people constituted a race of its own and that of the two races—yours and ours—ours was superior.”

I could not help feeling resentful toward Tom Thumb and, for a brief moment, Margaret and her kind. I swallowed my indignation and conceded that General Tom might have been correct in his dark view of the majority of men and women, which the world considers normal.

The subject was in need of changing, and I did so by inquiring about another photograph hanging on the wall.

“Is that Ralph Waldo Emerson?”

“Yes. He often came to visit Father to discuss Transcendentalism. Sometimes Henry Thoreau would come to Worcester, as well.”

The photograph showed a young Margaret sitting on Emerson’s lap. I could have laughed aloud at how the scene resembled a ventriloquist’s act on the stage of a music hall.

“Mr. Emerson was a very great man and an even deeper thinker than General Tom,” she said, her eyes transfixed by a hypnotic light flaring on the pane of glass. “We all loved him.”

I coughed twice to remind her of my presence.

“I do recall Father’s asking him once if the reason for my stunted growth could be filial disobedience. ‘She is a good child,’ said Father, ‘but inclined to be headstrong.’

“Mr. Emerson smiled and said, ‘I believe Nature to be unfinished and that it will forever be tinkering with its creations, in order to ensure that no single form or design becomes fixed and absolute and, therefore, by immutability, proves unable to respond to a universe whose being is one of ceaseless change.’

“Tom loved to hear me tell that story. ‘We are Nature’s chosen scouts in the vanguard of humanity, searching for perfection,’ he would say. Tom became a Transcendentalist in honor of Mr. Emerson.”

All of a sudden, Margaret laughed hard enough to make her curls shake. “When Father asked Mr. Thoreau whether he thought I was being cussed, he shouted in answer, ‘She is indeed, and I adore her for her contrariety! Hers is an act of civil disobedience that puts mine to shame! Three cheers for little Miss Margaret!’

“It was so much fun, those childhood days in Worcester. Now they’re all dead—Henry David, Waldo, Margaret Fuller, my father and mother—all those kind souls have gone off to Glory, or to annihilation, if we are to believe gloomy old Herman Melville.”

We returned to the sofa and allowed our minds to drift in the currents of nostalgia and regret. I thought of my own dead, especially my poor brother-in-law, Martin. He and Melville—and Mrs. Stanton’s husband, Henry, as I would learn—the three of them had worked in the city for the U.S. Customs Service. Is history a game played by God in which humans are pawns? Or does time whipstitch together people and events, haphazardly catching up this piece or that one in its rumpled cloth?

My thoughts returned to Elizabeth, of whom I’d been thinking during the walk from Bryant Park. Of my two suffragists, she was the elder and worldlier. She had married Henry Brewster Stanton, a former abolitionist, whom I never once laid eyes on, and she had brought children into the turbulent world by “voluntary motherhood.” In this, as in all else pertaining to the dignity of women, she would not allow herself to be “forced” or her belief in her own worth set aside. She and Susan rarely spoke of Mr. Stanton; when they did, it was in low voices and never to me. I was unable to satisfy a natural curiosity concerning him and his whereabouts.

Margaret got up and played something mournful on a miniature harmonium, a gift from P. T. Barnum. As a girl living in Worcester, she had been taught the reedy instrument, and to my ear, she sounded accomplished.

“Do you play an instrument?” she asked, turning her head from the keyboard.

“I play the lyre,” I replied archly.

She finished “The Heart That Is Broken” and took up a sprightly air, “Do, Do, My Huckleberry Do.”

“Is it difficult to master?” she asked.

“Necessity is a great teacher.” In my voice, I heard self-pity and felt ashamed.

As I lay in bed that night, I pictured Margaret in hers, no larger than a child’s. What dreams sweeten her sleep? I wondered. What nightmares disturb it? Does she imagine herself a tiny princess in a fairy tale, waiting for a prince’s kiss to undo a curse and restore her to full womanhood? No! I upbraided myself. Margaret is complete in herself and would hate to be thought otherwise. All the same, I was troubled by the notion that a being lay shut up inside her—a fully grown woman impossible to rescue. It was too sad a thought to entertain. I would not let myself ponder the hopeless desires of so famished a heart, nor would I consider the possibility that Margaret might have reason to lament the death of General Tom apart from camaraderie. I recalled the parlor and its contents, which had been sized to accommodate Margaret’s humble standpoint, with the exception of a chair and an ornate mirror placed above her head—both objects kept for visiting emissaries from the larger world.

An Object of Curiosity

ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, MR. TIPSON, celebrated narcoleptic, delivered a note from Margaret, asking if she might visit on Friday at one o’clock, “if convenient.” “I’d be delighted,” I replied. In the brief time it took to compose my answer, Mr. Tipson had fallen asleep, and I had to poke him with Susan’s black umbrella to set him in motion again.

The appointed hour arrived, and I was looking anxiously out the window onto the street. The cause of my uneasiness was twofold: I worried that my suffragists would unwittingly pass a remark that would embarrass my small guest, and I feared that Margaret might come calling on board an elephant. I imagined her mistaking Miss Redpath’s second-floor apartment for ours and, peering in at her window, startling the elderly spinster into Green-Wood Cemetery. Who wouldn’t be terrified at the sight of a little woman seated on an elephant and rapping on the windowpane with tiny knuckles to attract her notice? In my fancy, I heard Jumbo trumpeting in fierce joy for a reason best known to pachyderms in captivity. (What monumental grudges might they harbor in their gigantic breasts! Now that Lincoln is dead, who is there to emancipate them?)

At five minutes past the hour, I watched as a hansom emblazoned with a seal balancing a red ball on its snout drew up to the curb, driven by David Henry Dode, the world’s tallest man. He unfolded his long legs from under the dashboard and, having opened the carriage door, lifted my petite guest onto the brick pavement. I was surprised to see a second person exit the carriage, whom Margaret would shortly introduce as Frank Ashton, renowned for his “posturing.”

Mr. Dode escorted Margaret upstairs and to our door, while Mr. Ashton, walking behind them, carried a large box done up with string. The brass knocker fell, and I let the strange party inside.

“Good afternoon, Ellen,” said Margaret pleasantly.

“Good afternoon. Won’t you and your friends come in?”

Having delivered his small charge to the door, the tall man turned on his heels and left.

“Mr. Dode will wait outside,” replied Margaret. “Mr. Barnum insisted he accompany me. He’s very protective of me, and Mr. Dode is daunting.” She turned her head to Mr. Ashton, who was standing in the hallway in an attitude of profound deference. In its exaggeration, it exceeded all bounds of polite usage and, in fact, the ordinary limitations of the human frame. I could not help laughing, a rudeness that brought out in him a smile so broad, I feared his lips, thin to start with, would disappear, leaving behind only a toothy gape such as children love to carve on jack-o’-lanterns. “Mr. Ashton, if you please,” said Margaret.

The man, whose parts appeared to have been molded of India rubber and whose face was the color of gamboge, bowed to her and then to me—an obeisance so extravagant that the top of his high hat rested on the floor. It resembled a flowerpot, from which grew a bulbous nose and a pair of ears that could only be described as elephantine. He stood upright and, with tremendous effort, carried the box into the sitting room as though it were packed with cast-iron stove lids. With another scarcely possible feat of agility, he bent over backward and placed the box on a three-legged stool, and then in a fluent movement that seemed to defy the laws of science and anatomy, he shot upright, as if his backbone were a spring, nodded to Margaret, and passed out the door, shutting it behind him with his foot.

Margaret behaved as if this preposterous show were commonplace, which it was in the strange world to which fate, will, or God’s carelessness had placed her. She took off white gloves such as children wear to dancing lessons, looked about for a place to sit, and, having chosen a chair that was shallower in its seat than the rest, ascended, as if to a throne, by the footstool Elizabeth had thoughtfully placed there.

“I was not sure how large your appetites would be,” said Margaret, glancing at the white box, from which a sweet smell escaped that in a graveyard would have made one gag. In that queasy observation lies a truth that can be profound or trivial according to one’s lights. “I have never before bought cake for ladies of substance.”

Susan and Elizabeth chose that moment to enter, their arms outstretched in welcome. “We are glad, Miss Hardesty, to make your acquaintance,” they said as one. “Ellen speaks highly of you.”

I blushed at hearing the word highly spoken within hearing of my new friend, though the remark had been an innocent one.

“I assure you that ‘ladies of substance’ are inclined to eat more cake than is good for them,” said Elizabeth. “And suffer the consequences.” She patted her stomach contentedly.

“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” snapped Susan, for whom temperance extended to cakes, if not to her speeches, which were ardent, even inflammatory.

“Shall I open it?” Elizabeth had picked up the outsize box and set it on a taboret.

“By all means!” cried Margaret, rubbing her hands in anticipation. “I’ve been waiting to try it!”

What a cake! It could have fed Barnum’s leapers, tumblers, clowns, and assorted artistes. I guessed that Margaret had estimated our appetites by our gigantic stature, unless she believed that the provender for grossly fashioned beings like us would be equally gross. The experience of seeing myself and my “kind” through her eyes always disturbed me. I did indeed belong to the clumsy race of men with coarse white faces that had shambled among the delicate Japanese in 1853, when Commodore Perry and his men came ashore at Edo. As the comedy of manners played in front of me, I had the curious sensation that I was growing larger, as did Alice after having eaten a slice of cake lettered EAT ME in currants.

Elizabeth and Susan returned to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea. Alone with Margaret, I was timid, as though I were the guest and she the host. I do not know why I should have felt so. Her smile was warm; her goodwill genuine; her manner not in the least haughty or privileged. (Vanity is seldom found in someone who has been looked down on since childhood.) She spoke of her afternoon ride, the loyalty of her two escorts, the consideration of Mr. Barnum, who had arranged for her outing, and of pleasures common to us all. Once again, I admired her wry observations, humor, and good nature, which I supposed had escaped the bitterness and cynicism that blight the hearts of men and women living in an absurd world.

“The ladies seem amiable,” she said. We could hear them fussing at each other, like a pair of hens, as two women will who find themselves occupying the same kitchen. “They’re considerate.” I supposed she was alluding to the footstool.

“They are,” I agreed. “I’m lucky to have found such obliging employers.”

“What is it that they do?” she asked.

I told her of their endeavors, which impressed her favorably.

“I regret only one thing,” said Margaret when I had finished. “That I haven’t any work to do of real importance.”

I hesitated, thinking how best to reply without seeming to disparage her. “You give people pleasure,” I said tentatively.

She glanced at me; she might have even glared. If so, the indignation that sparked her angry look quickly passed into resignation. She sighed and said, “Their pleasure is in feeling themselves—for a moment—lucky.”

Yes, I thought. That is the case.

“My role is unfulfilling. I might as well be hanging on a butcher’s hook.”

I must have looked appalled, because she clarified the gristly image.

“They devour me with their eyes until there is nothing left.”

“Who does?”

“The curious who come to view me. They leave with the rapt expression I’ve seen on the faces of the holy sisters after having eaten the body of Christ.”

For the first time in our acquaintance, she had allowed me to glimpse a woman whose contentment might be a pretense. I recalled that, when I had been in her dainty room, I had felt like a spectator of a play performed on a miniature stage—a drama written for a single character whose purpose eluded me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, having searched my mind and found nothing else to offer her.

She smiled, and her face softened into a gentle, almost beatific, expression. She waved a hand as a saint would distributing her blessings. “You must not mind me, Ellen. I don’t mean half of what I say. You are one of those rare people.”

“What sort of people?” I asked, intrigued.

“That inspire confidence in others. I’ve not known many in your world.”

“Mr. Barnum?”

“Mr. Barnum is another one, but then, he is not of your world. We’ve made room for him in ours.”

I could not make out whether “your world” referred to that of the fully grown or to one inhabited by people who see others only in terms of themselves. I had thought of myself as a decent, intelligent woman, mostly without prejudices. Had a war not already been fought to free the slaves, I’d be an abolitionist. Had I a ballot to cast, I’d vote to protect the poor and helpless, whether they were immigrant Irish, Germans, Chinese, Jews, blacks, or nativists festering in the putrid belly of the Five Points. Suddenly, I was conscious of excluding “freaks,” in the common parlance of the time, from my sympathies. Frankly, I had never thought of them at all except as circus and sideshow performers who were as irrelevant to matters of prejudice as a trained seal. Then at the spiteful urging of a bad conscience, I turned on Margaret in my thoughts, faulting her for having chosen to live in the private world, the little world, of the circus instead of confronting the cruelty of the big one. My anger was irrational, and I left the ugly words of reproach unsaid.

I glanced out the window and saw the world’s tallest man elegantly smoking a cigarette, while Mr. Ashton appeared to be suffering an extremity of boredom. Yawning theatrically and sighing prodigiously, he cracked his knuckles and shuffled his feet, determined to raise the dust, which he regarded with distaste and swatted with his hat, as at a cloud of midges. The horse had its head in a feed bag, its colorful plumes waving this way and that in the breeze, its harness bells ringing each time it lifted its head and snorted. What fun! I said to myself. Maybe a circus life is not such a poor one after all.

Elizabeth and Susan entered with a silver teapot and china cups too large for Margaret’s tiny hands. She accepted the situation with the easy manner and good humor of any other fine lady. I cut the cake and dealt out slices on Elizabeth’s wedding plates, which we balanced on our knees. We were delighted with ourselves and with one another.

Plates clean save for crumbs and the cups drained to the leaves, I carried the remains of the ritual of hospitality into the kitchen and returned in time to hear Elizabeth inviting Margaret to stay.

“You’ll have a room of your own, furnished to your requirements,” she inveigled. “I’ve taken to you, Miss Hardes—May I call you ‘Miss Margaret’ or, if you would allow me the privilege, ‘Margaret’?”

Margaret graciously indicated with a nod of her head that her hostess might adopt the latter familiarity.

“I’ve taken a liking to you, Margaret, and I know that Susan has also.”

“Very much so.”

“And, of course, you and Ellen are already friends,” said Elizabeth to sweeten her offer.

Margaret looked to me as if for assurance, which I gladly gave.

“What would I do here?” she asked after a pause, in which the two suffragists had leaned forward expectantly.

“You would do what you can,” replied Elizabeth, the image of a benevolent grandmother. “We share in the housework, although an Irish woman comes to do the unpleasant chores. You’d do whatever you are able—whatever you found pleasant and profitable.”

“Could I assist you in the cause of woman’s rights?” asked Margaret, looking at that moment as if she could be of no help at all. The truth is that I couldn’t picture her in any occupation other than that of circus eccentric.

“You can do the cause immeasurable good if you would accompany us on our lecture tours!” replied Susan, rubbing her bony hands together so ardently, I expected them to smoke.

“A world of good!” confirmed Elizabeth.

“I don’t think I could speak in public. Not in the way you envision.”

“You wouldn’t need to say anything,” said Elizabeth.

“Unless it pleases you to do so,” said Susan.

“You would be an example.”

“An example of what?” asked Margaret.

“Of abjection!” cried Elizabeth.

“Of humiliation!” croaked Susan.

“But I’m not abject or humiliated!” protested Margaret, clenching her small fists.

“A victim of the exploitation of weakness and a disadvantaged condition, then.”

“I don’t feel myself to be disadvantaged or especially weak.”

“You are a woman,” replied Elizabeth evenly. “As such, you are disadvantaged in law and weak in the eyes of men.”

“A good man will cosset you; a bad one will beat you,” declared Susan. “In either case, you’ll be exploited and—whether you are aware of it or not—humiliated.”

“Mr. Barnum treats me with consideration.”

“We are not interested in whether Mr. Barnum profits by your small stature. We leave that to his conscience. What does interest us is whether or not you are being taken advantage of because you are a defenseless woman,” said Elizabeth, or Susan. At such times, I could not tell them apart.

“Our conviction is that you most certainly are a victim!” asserted either the gray-bunned lioness or the plump states-woman with cake crumbs on her lap.

“Ellen, what is your opinion?”

I did not want to give it.

“Ellen?”

I bit my nails.

“Please answer the question!” a voice admonished. “I don’t think it’s any of my business!” I retorted. “Or yours!”

Susan and Elizabeth gasped, and their eyes narrowed in disapproval. I wondered if I would be sacked now that the tea party had gone to pot.

“It is our business! Her plight is of concern to all women—small, medium, and large.” Once again, Elizabeth patted the fabric stretched over her middle section.

I looked to Margaret in my distress.

“What I do with my life is my own affair,” she said with a fierce dignity that made her appear the largest person in the room.

An uncomfortable silence ensued. I looked outside and saw Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton arm wrestling, one of their specialties. The Posturing Man’s hyperbolic pantomime expressed strenuous effort, heroic gumption, and—visible in his eyes, which were opened so wide that I feared his eyeballs would pop out of their sockets—profound despair. The horse drowsed between the shafts, its plumes drooping. I wished I were with them instead of in a room electric with barely suppressed antagonism.

“And for your information, ladies, I am not presently faced with a plight,” said Margaret, putting an end to the subject.

The suffragists had incensed Margaret, who was now climbing down from her chair and calling for her hat.

“Furthermore, I don’t have a problem with men.”

In the world of eccentrics, who, in Margaret’s view, had been chosen to transform our savage race into a civil one, the sexes may have lived in harmony. In any case, she would not allow herself to be used to further the cause of women outside the tented universe in which she had been placed. I couldn’t blame her.

Having put on her hat, Margaret turned her back on us and sailed through the door. Scowling at Elizabeth and Susan, I hurried after her. I caught up to la petite just as Mr. Ashton was handing her into the coach with the finesse of a French dandy in the court of the Sun King.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I would not have seen you belittled for the world.”

Margaret laughed. “I enjoyed myself immensely! I seldom get among your kind except as an object of curiosity. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony are good women, and I hope they can understand my refusal to be put on display. I would feel a freakishness on a lyceum stage that I don’t in a circus parade.” She pressed my hand affectionately. “I’d like to show you my kind not as you might have seen us at Madison Square Garden or in a fairground tent, but as we are. What do you say, Ellen? Are you game?”

“I’d like that very much.”

“Good. I’ll stop for you tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow … Friday. On Friday, the ladies will be in Philadelphia, addressing the National Woman Suffrage Association.”

“Expect me at a half-past eleven.”

Madame Singleton

“ON HER DEATHBED, MY MOTHER begged my forgiveness for having locked me in the root cellar as punishment for my childish misdemeanors. Even now, I can smell the damp earthen floor, the mold and mildew, and the baskets of turnips, carrots, and potatoes. Father said I would grow eyes like the potatoes, which can see in the dark. He was not afraid to defy convention, but he could not stand up to Mother, who, he said, was ‘as fierce as an Amazon.’ She blamed herself for my ‘condition,’ she told me as she prepared to molder in an everlasting root cellar. But she was no more to blame for my eccentricity than a malevolent curse such as one encounters in a cruel tale by Heinrich Hoffmann or the Brothers Grimm. My diminutiveness has no external cause, but is, as General Tom maintained, an act of free will. Were it otherwise, I would not be able to call my life my own. I refused Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton’s offer because I am my own person and not anybody’s example.”

I was sitting beside Margaret in the carriage that had brought her to Murray Hill three days before. Mr. Ashton sat on the sprung seat next to Mr. Dode. The black horse had been changed for a white one adorned with scarlet plumes fatally plucked from a Florida spoonbill. Margaret held my hand—or rather, I held hers, her white glove enveloped in my fawn. I thought her a precious creature and was instantly ashamed. I reminded myself that she was not a little girl being taken to the stores by a favorite aunt. She was taking me to visit the small world, which I had never before entered.

“Most of our troupe is with Mr. Barnum on a London engagement,” she said. “I stayed behind to comfort Tom’s wife, Lavinia. Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton remained to chaperone me, and some six or seven others suffer from seasickness and do not go abroad. They’re stopping at Barnum’s Hotel, at Twentieth Street and Broadway.”

She sensed my nervousness, and, squeezing my thumb with her hand reassuringly, said with a smile, “It will be no worse than your tea party.” That is what worries me, I told myself. “I suspect that my friends will take to you, just as I have. You have only to be yourself, Ellen.”

And what is that self? I wondered.

I rested my eyes in the shadows of the coach. Margaret relaxed her grip on my thumb but did not take her hand from my palm. My mind was confused by her presence, and I wanted to compose myself. She was both rose and thorn: She delighted and vexed me at the same time.

Margaret’s imperious withdrawal from the sitting room had dismayed my suffragists. They criticized her for choosing to remain aloof from the issue of woman’s sovereignty; at the same time, they insisted on viewing her as another victim of men, who were incorporated in the shameless showman Phineas T. Barnum. Long after the customary hour of Morpheus’s descent, they fretted. At breakfast, they announced that they had failed her. Keeping Margaret’s parting words to me a secret, I let them stew. The dish was, I thought then, seasoned to their taste.

By supper, “the unfortunate business” had assumed gigantic importance in their minds. I do believe that if they had not been reconciled with Margaret, Susan and Elizabeth would never have finished the History; the ink would have dried to powder in their inkwells. Margaret never did agree to appearing on the lecture circuit, nor did she disavow her affection for Barnum. She gave the two suffragists to understand, however, that she admired their work and would value them as friends. Having met their match, the two firebrands let the matter drop.

Driving down Broadway, Margaret and I passed the Fifth Avenue Hotel, equipped with a steam-powered “vertical railroad” to transport guests to the upper floors, and Madison Square Garden, where the colossal arm and torch of Liberty awaited money to be pledged so that her dismembered parts could be assembled on Bedloe’s Island and rise colossally above New York Harbor.

About Bartholdi and Eiffel’s gigantic statue, I once heard Elizabeth say, “Thus do men idealize woman, turning her into a symbol, while they imprison her on an island of domesticity.”

“Were she real, Lady Liberty would be as disenfranchised as we are,” replied Susan with her usual tartness.

The carriage stopped at Twentieth Street, outside Barnum’s Hotel. Mr. Ashton helped Margaret down gallantly. When he offered me his hand, I recoiled and felt a momentary disgust. He responded with a pantomime that began with surprise and ended in abasement. I hurriedly put out my hand to him, but he had turned away, crocodile tears coursing down his ashen face. Margaret touched my elbow and shook her head, as if to say Pay him no mind.

We left him to his performance and Mr. Dode to see to the horse’s needs. I followed my friend across a wide porch and into the hotel lobby, where seven guests were sitting in chairs upholstered in buffalo hide, their heads buried in newspapers, turned in conversation, or fallen onto slowly rising and falling breasts in sleep. You could’ve mistaken them for an accidental congress of drummers and other travelers who are ubiquitous in hotel lobbies or the privileged residents at a sanitarium, in various stages of senility and physical collapse.

Margaret greeted them in general and then introduced me to each one.

“I’d like you to be acquainted with my friend Ellen Finch. You may call her—”

She looked at me for approval, and I said, “Please do call me ‘Ellen.’”

They put down their papers and turned their heads toward me, while those who had been asleep were nudged into wakefulness. More than polite, the smile they shed on me conveyed welcome and acceptance—not because of anything I’d done to deserve it but because their trust in Margaret was unquestioning. They regarded her with respect and—I could see it in their faces—affection.

“Ellen, please say hello to Miss Etta, the contortionist.”

“I am happy to meet you, Miss Etta.”

She acknowledged our new acquaintance by tying herself into a knot, shocking in its revelations, which none of the others appeared to notice.

“Mrs. Stoner, snake charmer.”

I waited nervously for her to produce her stock-in-trade, but she apologized. The hotel did not allow reptiles. Of all the eccentrics there, she was the dullest. Her charms, I supposed, were dispensed solely for the pleasure of the snake, whose name was Napoléon.

Margaret worked her way around the room, and I became acquainted with Mr. Matchett and Mr. Engelbrecht, scientific fencers; Mr. George Bliss, leaper; Miss Watson, chariot driver at the Hippodrome; and Miss Mattie Elliott, grotesque dancer, who was also renowned for her high kicks.

“Ellen is curious about us,” said Margaret.

I felt myself blush and looked at the faces ranged before me for any sign of resentment.

“She is not, however, the least patronizing or malicious. Her curiosity is only that which one human being feels about another. I invited her here—she did not ask to be brought—to see for herself what sort of people we are when we are being just ourselves.” She turned to me and asked, “Ellen, do you have any questions for my friends?”

It was a dreadful moment. To say the wrong thing would be devastating, to say nothing rude.

“Miss Watson.”

“What would you like to know, my dear?”

“Aren’t you scared of driving a chariot? I have an appreciation for the dangers after reading Mr. Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur.”

It was a stupid remark, especially since I had not read the book, but only the reviews. The Century criticized it as an “anachronism,” and The Atlantic as “too lavish.”

She smiled tolerantly. “Terrified! If it weren’t for the frisson, I would stay at home and knit.”

Several of her colleagues laughed—at me, I expect. Their amusement was not spiteful.

“Miss Etta, how is it that you are able to fold up like a—” An apt comparison eluded me.

Miss Etta was kind enough to complete the simile. “Portmanteau.”

I nodded in the affirmative. Frankly, I didn’t care how the trick was done. Whatever I’d hoped to learn by visiting Barnum’s Hotel, this was not it.

“My bones are vulcanized,” she said in a confidential tone, as if to conceal her secret from the rest of the eccentrics.

“She is an enterologist,” intoned Margaret with a deference that, though sincere, I thought comical.

“I’m not familiar with the word.”

“Mine is a very artistic profession!” exclaimed Miss Etta. “Mr. Barnum says so.” I could see that she was pleased with herself. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

She glanced at the lobby until her gaze fell on a rosewood cabinet on which a cut-glass vase of nasturtiums sat. I’d guess that the cabinet was about the same height as Tom Thumb at his tallest. Having opened its door, she packed herself inside it. “Peekaboo!” she called from between her thighs, and then she stuck out her tongue. The sight produced a disagreeable effect in me. I felt the blood leave my face as the room began to spin.

“Ellen, are you all right?” asked Margaret, helping me to a sofa.

“Forgive me, my corset is too tight,” I replied untruthfully. “That and the heat quite overcame me.”

She sat beside me and held my thumb until I felt it begin to numb. Her childlike frame was engulfed by the sofa; her short legs, clad in a striped skirt, were barely able to fold over the edge of the seat. Yet she behaved perfectly, as though not the least incommoded by the oversized world. “You went white as a ghost,” she said solicitously.

“I’m sorry to be such a bother,” I replied, my shamefaced glance taking in Margaret and each of her fellow artistes.

They made noises of concern, which I knew to be genuine.

“Seeing my act for the first time can come as a shock,” said Miss Etta after she had unpacked herself from the cabinet.

“Not at all. I was thrilled!” The truth is that the act had affected me queerly, as if I had happened on something altogether too grotesque for words.

“To put the color back in your cheeks” with a demonstration of scientific fencing, Mr. Matchett and Mr. Engelbrecht each offered me an arm and escorted me onto the porch. I sat in a rocking chair as they produced rapiers—seemingly out of thin air. (It was often so in those days that things came and went without explanation.)

“We have added an enhancement to our performance to edify the public, as well as to entertain it,” remarked Mr. Matchett smugly.

“A classical enhancement!” put in Mr. Engelbrecht, who clearly resented his partner’s superior attitude. A livid scar and a missing earlobe hinted that their tempers were not ideally suited to a combative profession.

With astonishing rapidity, Mr. Engelbrecht assumed the character (and strange to say, the costume) of Mercutio; in a trice, Mr. Matchett had transformed himself into Tybalt. (Mr. James once treated me to a performance of the “lamentable tragedy” at the Booth’s Theatre in Manhattan, with Edwin Booth in the role of Romeo.)

“We salt our swordplay with Shakespeare for the hightoned crowd,” simpered Matchett.

“Edwin Booth praised my fencing!” crowed Engelbrecht.

“Henry Irving said of my performance, ‘I could not have been more staggered by Mr. Matchett’s Tybalt had I been hit over the head with a sledgehammer such as is used to dispatch oxen.’”

Face-à-face, the pair of scientific fencers began to hurl Shakespearean insults.

ENGELBRECHT-MERCUTIO: Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk?

MATCHETT-TYBALT: What wouldst thou have with me?

MERCUTIO: Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives. That I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight. Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out.

TYBALT: I am for you.

They drew their swords and waggled them at each other.

MERCUTIO: Come, sir, your passado.

They fought with ludicrous ferocity until Tybalt gave Mercutio a fatal wound.

MERCUTIO: A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.

TYBALT: What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ’tis enough.

TYBALT: Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO: No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain who fights scientifically.

Passersby had gathered on the sidewalk, and as Mercutio crumpled onto the porch and expired with a most piteous sigh, they clapped and cried “Bravo!”

Not to be outdone by a pair of scientific fencers, George Bliss leaped from the balustrade over the heads of the astonished crowd. The poor man landed on a loose paving stone and broke his ankle. We heard the bone snap and shuddered. In fakir fashion, Miss Etta rolled herself into a doughnut for the approval of the gawkers, who graciously overlooked the immodest result of her art. Spurred by envy, Miss Watson of the Hippodrome had borrowed a Pierre Michaux “boneshaker” from a cyclist and was racing hell-bent for election up and down Broadway, like a cracked-brain Ben-Hur, while the gentlemen ogled Miss Mattie Elliott’s superb legs as she did her famous high kicks. Only glum Mrs. Stoner had no part in the variety; Napoléon was in Flatbush, growing fat on mice fed him by an admirer.

“Hooray for Miss Mattie!” shouted a gentleman wearing a pince-nez, which glittered wickedly in a blast of sunlight.

“Encore!” shouted a man who could have been either a drama critic or an aficionado of dogfights.

“More leg!” shouted a paperhanger whose slurred speech, wobbly gait, and roseate nose betrayed him as a sot. He sat on his book of samples and sighed for love.

A chorus of sybarites took up the inebriate’s theme: “Give us more leg, Miss Mattie!”

She obliged them with a kick of such extraordinary height that her head disappeared into the petals of her skirts. The gentlemen tossed their hats, and Miss Etta, envious of the attention being paid to her colleague, staggered down the porch steps on all fours like a large spider and sang “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead.”

“More leg, Miss Mattie, if you please!”

Margaret touched my wrist. “None of this is what you came to see.”

I admitted it was not.

“You mustn’t blame my friends; their roles are engrained. Perhaps I was naïve to think that you could get to know them as they really are. If they were to stop playing their parts, they might vanish. Is it the same for you, Ellen, in your world?”

Not wanting to follow the argument to its conclusion, I gave no answer. I had lost my hold on reality and was happier so. At least for a while, I will be free of all that, I told myself, unwilling to specify even to myself what “that” might be.

Margaret, however, had not finished with me.

“There’s someone else I want you to meet,” she said, leading me upstairs by the hand.

We stopped outside room number five on the hotel’s top floor. My heart was thudding, my mouth parched, my respiration fast. Something in Margaret’s tone had unnerved me, as did the atmosphere of the hotel’s upper stories, their dark staircases and corridors, which could have been modeled on Thornfield Hall’s. My mind is overly susceptible to the intimations of old houses, easily swayed by other people, and liable to be persuaded of hostile intentions by a neurotic fancy. Margaret knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” a thrilling voice asked from the other side. I pictured a room done up like one of Barnum’s attractions: a papier-mâché grotto inhabited by the resurrected Feejee Mermaid, languid in her bath; a fire-breathing chimaera chained in an asbestos-papered parlor; or, prodigy of prodigies, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, “a human–Skye terrier, the crowning mystery of nature’s contradictions.” Then, having just read Jane Eyre, I was certain that the room’s unseen tenant was a dangerously distracted creature like Rochester’s mad wife locked inside her tower.

“Margaret and a friend,” replied the indomitable little person standing next to me.

“A friend to whom?” asked the creature inside the room, which, as I recall, smelled of juniper berries.

“To those who work in circuses.”

“You may come in.”

I thought my heart would stop as Margaret opened the door and ushered me inside. To my relief, the room was ordinary, as was its tenant. I insist that there was nothing remarkable or grotesque. I felt the blood that had drained from my face returning, my breathing slow, and the vertigo that had nearly toppled me leave me to find my footing on a threadbare carpet that, in better days, had depicted a Mogul paradise in colored yarns.

“Do sit down,” said the elderly woman cordially.

I sat in one of the two “grown-up” chairs, and Margaret eased into a small one that the woman had evidently provided for her visits. I thought I should introduce myself and did.

The woman acknowledged me with a smile and nod of her head—a quite ordinary head, neither pretty nor plain. “I am Madame Singleton.”

“Madame Singleton is a clairvoyant,” said Margaret respectfully. “Her intuitions were recognized by the Fox sisters, Kate and another Margaret, when they were stopping at Barnum’s Hotel in the fifties, during the early years of their fame.”

Amy and Isaac Post, a Quaker couple living in Rochester, were the first to proclaim the girls’ gifts after they had rapped out messages sent by the inconsolable Posts’ recently departed daughter. (In another of history’s bewildering entanglements, Mrs. Post attended the Woman’s Rights Convention at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, authored and presented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) We now know that Kate and Margaret were frauds, after the third Fox sister, Leah, confessed to having perpetrated the hoax, which had begun as a childish prank.

I could never make out why the girls’ “psychic abilities” had excited the interest of many radically minded Quakers of the day, the same faction advocating temperance, abolition, and the cause espoused by those two other controversial “sisters,” Elizabeth and Susan. At the peak of their celebrity, the Foxes were championed by luminaries such as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, as well as P. T. Barnum, who appreciated the bamboozler’s art. Two of the era’s fringe movements—suffrage and spiritualism—became conjoined in the public’s mind, to the disadvantage of the first.

“You are thinking that I do not look like a medium and that my room is not furnished as you would expect,” said Madame Singleton.

I must have looked surprised, because she said, “Your thoughts are safe, my dear; I would not presume to read the mind of one of Margaret’s friends without permission.”

“I’m not sure I believe in the supernatural.”

“You are an intelligent young woman who knows her own mind.”

“I’m not sure that I do that, either,” I replied frankly.

“I am not interested in converting you to spiritualism. And you are right to be suspicious; there are a great many charlatans in the field of psychic research.”

Pointing to a framed photograph on the side table, Margaret said, “Here is Madame Singleton in costume.”

In the picture, she was dressed like an Assyrian sorceress. Her eyes had been made up to exaggerate the intensity of her gaze, and her fingers were adorned with gems, whose miraculous properties were said to strengthen her power of spiritual communion with those who had passed over. Her slender hands rested on a “talking table,” with which she would sometimes transmit, as if by infernal telegraph, messages between the quick and the dead. A crystal ball stood beside it, in which Madame Singleton could scry the future. Divination was powerful in her, as was the reach of her uncanny foresight. She was the very image of a medium, spiritualist, soothsayer, or clairvoyant. In that costume and setting, she appeared before the general public admitted to P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.

“It’s all for show,” said Margaret. “Stage props to give the crowd what it expects to see.”

“Then it’s nothing but a confidence game!” I said indignantly.

Mrs. Singleton spoke in defense of illusion: “The public would be disappointed, even enraged, if Mr. Barnum were to exhibit a man who could fly—not a creature with wings, mind you, but an otherwise-ordinary person able to levitate and soar unaided. He’d need to strap on a pair of cardboard wings covered in chicken feathers, such as children wear in Nativity pageants, to satisfy the ‘suckers,’ which they are not, since they know they are being gulled. People enjoy magic because they know there is a trick to it, and they would burn at the stake the magician who needed none.”

There is truth in that, I told myself.

“I require neither costume nor props to interpret etheric transmissions. They bring me secrets that have been locked in the vault of time and also those hidden in the tiny universe inside the human brain.”

“Her powers are stupendous!” exclaimed Margaret.

“They’re a burden,” said Madame Singleton, sighing—without, I hasten to add, ostentation.

“It is your gift,” concluded Margaret, as though the word comprehended the exceptional ability, grave responsibility, and a fate akin to doom borne by this selfless martyr to the spiritus mundi.

I was far from being convinced. At night, in a lightless room, I might almost believe in unseen, gibbering presences. But they were the stock characters of horror tales. I could more readily entertain the idea of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman or Hawthorne’s devils than the talking dead.

“I’ll read your palm, if you like,” she said. “It’s not as revealing as what can be seen in a dish of water or in grains left on the threshing floor or by eavesdropping on voices in another’s head—by far the most reliable method. But the lines of the hand are an aperçu of destiny.”

I gave her my hand, and, suddenly fearful, took it back before she had glimpsed its palm.

“Don’t be afraid, Ellen,” encouraged Margaret.

But I was afraid and would not let her read it.

Margaret bravely offered hers. Madame Singleton laid the childlike hand on her own and proceeded to ruminate over the lines of destiny inscribed on her palm.

“What do you see?” asked Margaret, and I could hear in her voice a thrill of anticipation.

“Moments of happiness.”

“Is that all?”

“Hours of sorrow.”

A human life, in other words.

“Does it matter that the hand is no bigger than a child’s?” I asked abruptly.

“If you mean by your question, is a child’s hand too innocent to have been marked by life and intimations of the future—you are correct. But Margaret’s hand bears time’s signature, and her story, albeit writ small, is plain to see on her palm.”

“You could have lied to me like the others!” said Margaret peevishly. Madame Singleton was not the only spiritualist in Barnum’s circus. Moreover, she was the least popular of them because she would not tell her customers what they wished to hear. I never understood why Barnum kept her, unless he depended on her predictions for reasons of business. Or maybe he loved her. Who can say what truths are radiant in the mind of a mountebank, what passions agitate his heart?

She gazed at me—her eyes gimlets—and said, “If I can ever be of service, please come and see me.” She offered me her card, which I took. She may have glimpsed my future after all, because, as it turned out, I would have great need of her.

Krakatoa

SHORTLY AFTER THEIR RETURN from Philadelphia, I told Elizabeth and Susan of my visit to Barnum’s Hotel. Their faces darkened like the sky the year following Krakatoa’s eruption in the Sunda Strait. Volcanic ash had been blown aloft into the highest reaches of the atmosphere and left for the upper winds to circulate. An immense wave rolled from the Java Sea to the English Channel. If God had instructed a new and pious family in the elements of carpentry, we never heard, nor was a second ark discovered on Mount Ararat.

Even now in 1904, I remember the dreadful sunsets caused by particles of soot drifting high above Earth’s surface. The sky might have been set ablaze by aerial troops of arsonists, so spectacular was each day’s end. When the Union Pacific tracks reached the hundredth meridian in 1866, the company director, Thomas Durant, ordered the prairie set on fire to entertain the investors who had traveled from Council Bluffs in his Pullman car to celebrate the milestone. Twenty square miles of grassland burned that night. The Pentecostal fires of 1883 were vaster and brighter, though they kindly left the earth unscorched.