The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series) Read online

  praise for The Barnum Museum

  “What a pleasure it is to read a writer this good—Millhauser seems sometimes to return us to the original sources of art, the awe and wonder before the untrustworthy but beautiful force of existence…. I love this writer and this book.”

  —PETER STRAUB

  “Staggering…With his doppelgangers and children’s games, thaumaturgical hauntings and junkshop catalogues, Steven Millhauser may well be American literature’s last Romantic, its sole remaining wanderer through the troubled borderland between mundane reality and the world of art.”

  —VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  “Elegantly told, charming stories.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  “Intoxicating stories…dazzling…fictions that inspire awe.”

  —KIRKUS

  “Stunningly clever and thought-provoking…Millhauser is a brilliant stylist who can shift voices like a good ventriloquist.”

  —THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL

  “His true strength is magic realism…. Brilliant parodies, pastiches, and comments on Alice in Wonderland, Sinbad and T. S. Eliot show how this gifted craftsman can stretch the boundaries of the form.”

  —TIME

  “Imagine a funhouse gallery for fictive techniques and ideas, and you’ll have some sense of these stories…. Invites comparison with the work of Robertson Davies…. A distinctive mix of stylistic dazzle and erudite wonder.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Millhauser has pursued—and perfected—a narrative mode that comes out of the European romantic tradition by way of Edgar Allan Poe…. His stylized elegance is reminiscent of Borges and Nabokov…. His stories are paeans to the imagination, their magic stemming from the human mind’s zest for creating marvels…. Graced with a powerful sense of humor.”

  —SEATTLE WEEKLY

  “The work of a sorcerer, a devotee of paradox—of profound whimsy and heartfelt frivolity. He amazes, awakens, enlivens—a beautiful and special writer.”

  —LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

  “A writer of rare imagination…At his best he can weave narrative into a tapestry of dramatic tricks and dazzling magic.”

  —THE RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH

  “His best, most resonant stories, like those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, remind us that good works of fiction are, among other things, fables…. Some of Millhauser’s stories bring to mind the somber ironies of Kafka and Borges, but in general his imagination has a light, serene quality—the quality of a precocious child’s delight in his own ingenuity…. Purely enchanting.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “A book of wonders that calls Borges and Calvino to mind…. He is a creator of cunning and delectable universes…. Telegrams from the dream world.”

  —THE BUFFALO NEWS

  “So convincing that the most skeptical reader will be swept away.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “I read Steven Millhauser in a state of enchantment, quite conscious that he is seducing me with his intelligence and his craft, while leading me back to the source of imagination. Like Hawthorne, he recreates the wonder of stories for us and with us.”

  —MAUREEN HOWARD

  “This is a literary feat that few among contemporary writers attempt and even fewer accomplish.”

  —SAN DIEGO UNION

  “The sentences are of a Cartesian clarity.”

  —WASHINGTON POST

  books by Steven Millhauser

  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

  Little Kingdoms

  The Barnum Museum

  From the Realm of Morpheus

  In the Penny Arcade

  Portrait of a Romantic

  Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer

  THE

  BARNUM MUSEUM

  stories by

  Steven Millhauser

  Dalkey Archive Press

  Copyright © 1990 by Steven Millhauser

  Originally published in hardback by Poseidon Press, 1990

  First Dalkey Archive edition, 1997

  All rights reserved

  “The Barnum Museum,” “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” and “Klassik Komix #1” appeared previously in Grand Street.

  “Rain” appeared previously in The Paris Review.

  “Alice, Falling” appeared previously in Antaeus.

  “Eisenheim the Illusionist” appeared previously as “The Illusionist” in Esquire.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Millhauser, Steven.

  The Barnum Museum / Steven Millhauser.—1st Dalkey Archive ed.

  p. cm.

  Contents: A game of clue—Behind the blue curtain—The Barnum Museum—The sepia postcard—The eighth voyage of Sinbad—Klassik komix #1—Rain—Alice, falling—The invention of Robert Herendeen—Eisenheim the illusionist.

  ISBN: 978-1-56478-179-6

  I. Title.

  [PS3563.I422B37 1997] 813'.54—dc21 97-23679

  This publication is partially supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the Lannan Foundation.

  To Charlotte Millhauser

  and the memory of Milton Millhauser

  Contents

  A Game of Clue

  Behind the Blue Curtain

  The Barnum Museum

  The Sepia Postcard

  The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad

  Klassik Komix #1

  Rain

  Alice, Falling

  The Invention of Robert Herendeen

  Eisenheim the Illusionist

  A

  GAME OF CLUE

  The board. The board shows the ground plan of an English mansion. The nine rooms are displayed along the sides of the board and are connected by a floor consisting of a series of identical yellow squares the size of postage stamps. In the middle of the board, on a stairway marked with a white X, rests a black envelope. Each room bears its name in the center, in black capital letters: the STUDY, the HALL, the LOUNGE, the DINING ROOM, the KITCHEN, the BALLROOM, the CONSERVATORY, the BILLIARD ROOM, and the LIBRARY. Each room contains furniture, drawn in black outline and pictured from above, as if we are viewing the room from the center of its ceiling. One corner of the board is partly concealed by the edge of a saucer, on which lies a smoking cigarette.

  The table. The board lies not quite in the center of a green folding table, which shines with a dull gleam in the glow of two lights: the overhead porch light, encased in four squares of frosted glass, and the small red-shaded lamp attached to one of the porch walls. Additional light comes through the four small panes of the kitchen-door window, part of which is covered by translucent yellow curtains. If we view the table from directly above, as if our vantage point were that of the moth beating its wings against the glass of the overhead light, we see that the green border of the table is crowded with objects: a coffee-stained saucer on which lies a smoking cigarette; four pads of Detective Notes; a green quarter-full bottle of wine, bearing on its label a purple sketch of a grape arbor with three purple birds flying overhead; two yellow hexagonal pencils, one round black pencil (supported by a hand), and one round shiny-green pencil; an opaque glass bowl, white on the inside and orange on the outside, containing a few broken three-ring pretzels lying among crumbs and pretzel salt; a nearly empty stem-glass of red wine, which bears on its cup, in white letters, the legend BROTHERHOOD: AMERICA’S OLDEST WINERY; two tulip-shaped glasses of red wine; a slender wineglass one-third full of 7-Up; a half-empty cup of coffee; a transparent green
glass bowl of potato chips; and a small china plate showing, beneath a scattering of brown crumbs, a blue stone bridge overlooking a blue stream with three blue ducks, one of which is raising its head toward the outstretched blue arm of a girl in a blue bonnet. In the course of the game, while the tokens move on the board, these objects also move; some of them move small distances, whereas others, like the bowl of potato chips, the bowl of pretzels, and the bottle of wine, exchange places or move to different, unpredictable places on the table. In addition there are, at the moment of observation, three hands on the table: one hand taps restlessly between the saucer with the cigarette and the nearly empty glass of wine; the side of another hand, lightly tanned, lies quietly on the table while the pad of the forefinger moves slowly, slowly back and forth against the glistening tapered thumbnail; and a third hand, holding the round black pencil, writes a question mark beside the words Professor Plum on the Detective Notes and at once erases it.

  Jacob. Jacob Ross, twenty-five, sits tapping the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop as he stares unseeing at the fan of five cards in his left hand: the LIBRARY, the KITCHEN, the BILLIARD ROOM, Professor Plum, Mrs. White. He is so angry that he feels it as a pounding in both temples and a beating in his throat. He is so angry that he would like to weep, to cry out, to kill, to sweep his long hand across the board and fling from the table the tokens, the weapons, the die, the black envelope, but when, by old habit, he imagines how he appears to whoever may be watching him, he sees only a look of tense concentration, an exaggerated and brooding attention to the cards in his hand. But he is angry. He is enraged. At Marian: for speaking to him in a certain tone of voice, in their father’s study four hours ago, immediately after dinner. At Susan: for their epic argument in the car that afternoon, lasting from 3:37 (by his watch) on the Mass Pike to 5:54 (by his watch) under the railway trestle by the Post Road, exactly two minutes and thirty-six seconds before he drew up in front of his parents’ house. At David: for saying nothing, for concealing his hurt, for flooding him with forgiveness. At himself: for spending eight hours a day (2:00–6:00 and 8:00–12:00) six days a week at his desk for the past four months unable to write a single new word of what was to have been Part One (The Book of Childhood) of the greatest American poem of the second half of the twentieth century, after a period of five months during which he had accumulated 180 pages of manuscript in a minuscule handwriting in a single spiral-bound notebook (Narrow Ruled). He is enraged at his failure, at his evasions, at his later and later awakenings, at the slow erosion of his belief in his destiny, at the inexplicable wreckage of his dream, at his inevitable future as an embittered professor of English at a major university, at the unknown obstacle, at his daily defeated will. Jacob taps his fingers against the tabletop, not metrically but in a nervous and disordered rhythm that exasperates him as if the hand belonged not to him but to some clumsy stranger inhabiting him and smothering his brain. “Colonel Mustard,” he says sharply, not looking up. “In the library. With the revolver.”

  Pray forgive me. Colonel Mustard enters the LIBRARY and sees, standing with her back to him to the left of the fireplace, Miss Scarlet, in a tight crimson dress, reaching for a book in the bookcase. At the sound of the opening door she turns suddenly; the book drops to the floor. “Oh, I didn’t—” she says, crouching swiftly to pick up the book and with her other hand sweeping a lock of pale hair from her eye. “Pray forgive me for disturbing you,” the Colonel remarks, closing the door quietly behind him. Her crouching knees, one higher than the other, press through the clinging crimson, which seems stretched to the breaking point. It is an effect not lost on the Colonel, who feels, in his right palm, a sudden sensation of taut silk and tense thigh. Proper now, aren’t we. Ripe for it.

  The library. Viewed from above, the LIBRARY is a symmetrical figure that may be thought of as a modified rectangle: from each of the four corners a small square is missing. The resulting figure has twelve sides. As in all the rooms, the furniture is pictured from above and drawn in black outline. Thus the lamp on the central table reveals only the hexagonal top of its shade, whereas the standing lamp beside the fireplace reveals the top and side of its shade, the slanting line of its stand, and the slender oval of a base we assume to be circular.

  Marian. Marian Ross, twenty-four, rolls the red die, which tumbles past the DINING ROOM into the LOUNGE and comes to rest beside the lamp. Four. Marian is no longer angry at Jacob, who was not one, not two, not three, not four, but four and a half hours late on David’s fifteenth birthday; who’d been expected for lunch but who arrived, without a phone call, four minutes before dinner; who stepped from an unknown car in the unannounced company of some girlfriend or other; and who said something impatient and unsatisfactory about a broken alarm clock, while Miss Slenderella stood with a little frown and suddenly introduced herself with an outthrust hand and a tinkle of silver bracelet: hello, I’m Susan Newton. Marian moves her piece, Miss Scarlet—she always chooses Miss Scarlet—from the LIBRARY in the direction of the distant BALLROOM. Two or three moves from now she will enter the BALLROOM, which she holds in her hand, and will suggest that the murder was committed there by Mr. Green, whom she also holds in her hand, with the Lead Pipe, which she does not. After dinner, in her father’s study, she asked Jacob why he hadn’t called. His evasive reply angered her. “You should have called. It’s David’s birthday.” “Should have, should have. Christ, Marian.” She called him selfish, and he walked out of the room. Now she wonders: was she too harsh? Marian loves Jacob and knows he is unhappy. He has passed his orals brilliantly at Harvard but has refused to begin his dissertation. He argues that scholarship and poetry both require a lifetime of devotion and that he has only one life. His decision to write for a year has brought him no peace. Was it necessary for her to use the word “selfish”? Couldn’t she have found a word with less sting, like “inconsiderate”? He had looked at her with hurt surprise. Is it possible, Marian asks herself, that her outburst was directed not at Jacob but at Susan Newton?—for having the bad taste to come with Jacob on an intimate family occasion, for being Jacob’s girlfriend, for being beautiful and desirable, for having an easy life. Marian’s own life is unsatisfactory. The men she meets are superficial or humorless, her assistant editorship in the science division of a textbook publisher interests her less and less, she is dissatisfied with her appearance (hips too broad, hair impossible), she has a sense of waste and drift. At twenty-four she is already afraid of ending up alone. Or worse: of making a safe marriage out of fear of ending up alone. Where did she go awry? Robert’s words, when she broke with him: “You talk too much about your family. What about me?” Jabbing his forefinger into his chest. “What about me?” She can still hear the sound of his finger thumping against the breastbone. Marian looks at her cards: the BALLROOM, Mr. Green, the Revolver, the Wrench. The thought comes to her: am I selfish?

  Tokens and weapons. Of the six original tokens, made of wood and shaped like pawns, five remain: the red token (Miss Scarlet), the yellow token (Colonel Mustard), the green token (Mr. Green), the white token (Mrs. White), and the blue token (Mrs. Peacock). The purple token (Professor Plum) has been lost for years and has been replaced by the top half of a black wooden chess knight. There are six weapons: the Rope, the Knife, the Candlestick, the Revolver, the Wrench, and the Lead Pipe. The Rope is a small piece of white rope, formed into two coils, one on top of the other, and knotted at the ends; the five remaining weapons are made of metal. The Lead Pipe is soft and can be bent back and forth. Unlike the tokens, which are essential to the conduct of the game, the weapons are merely decorative; their movement from room to room serves no purpose, except perhaps an atmospheric one, and in no way affects the strategy of the game

  The porch. One wall of the porch is shared with the kitchen, one wall is shared with the garage, and two walls contain screened windows: four in the longer wall that faces the garage, and three in the shorter wall that faces the kitchen. All seven windows are partially covered by the
narrow wooden slats of roll-up blinds (dark green), held in place by ropes that pass around pulleys at the corners of the upper windowframe and around hooks under the windowsills. The rolled-up portion of the long blind lies in a slightly slanting line across the four windows. Marian sits with her back to the long blind. To her left is Jacob, with his back to the wall of three windows. Behind him, in the wall angle formed by the windows and the garage, is an aluminum chaise longue with a flower-pattern cushion on which lie a small black AM-FM radio with extended antenna, a section of the New York Times folded in half twice so as to display the crossword puzzle, and an open Clue box with partitions for the cards, the tokens, the weapons, the die, the black envelope, the Detective Notes, and the instructions. The Clue box lies aslant on its upside-down green boxcover, whose split corners have been fastened with package tape. On the wall above the chaise longue hang the red-shaded lamp and a Navajo sand painting from Albuquerque, New Mexico, showing three identical stick-figure Indian girls with outstretched arms. Susan sits to Jacob’s left, with her back to the garage. She faces Marian and the slightly slanting line of the rolled-up portion of the blind. Beneath the rolled-up blind, through the four screens, she sees mostly darkness. In one corner she can also see a porch light and part of a front porch post across a street. To Susan’s left, facing Jacob, sits David, with his back to the kitchen door. The four-paned window of the kitchen door is partially covered on the inside by translucent yellow curtains. Two wooden steps, painted gray, lead up to the door. There are two more doors on the porch: the wooden maroon door, which opens to the garage, and to which is fastened a used Connecticut license plate with two white letters and four white numerals on a blue ground; and the aluminum porch door, which opens to the back yard and is located beside the four windows near the kitchen wall. The top panel of the aluminum door is glass, and is mostly covered with a dark red strip of cloth with black and gray geometric designs, hung there for the sake of privacy by Martha Ross, who received it from a friend traveling in India. The narrow lower panel is a screen; it is changed to glass in the fall. Whenever Marian, Jacob, or Susan rises from the table in order to go to the kitchen, or to the small bathroom past the kitchen near the entrance to the cellar, David moves his chair forward under the table. He wishes to leave plenty of room for the person coming around the table toward the two steps leading to the kitchen door, even though there is room enough. When David looks to the left he can see, reflected in the narrow band of glass beneath the dark red strip of cloth, the back of his chair and a piece of his light-blue shirt. When he looks to the right he can see, over Susan Newton’s shining hair, a green, red, and black lobster buoy from Maine, hanging by a rope from a hook in the wall.