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

  Samuel’s dream. In an upstairs bedroom Samuel Ross, age fifty-seven, wakes from a troubling dream. He has not been sleeping well lately. Martha lies in her separate bed beside him, facing him, asleep. In the dream he was back in his childhood apartment on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. His father, Solomon Ross, né Rostholder, wearing a brown vest with a pocket watch, was seated at the kitchen table, bent over his account books. Suddenly his father’s face had a stricken look, the pen dropped from his fingers, he stood up holding his chest; and a stream of bright blood burst from his mouth onto his vest. Samuel shakes his head once and sits up in bed. His father died at the age of sixty-four, when Samuel was twenty-one. In six years David will be twenty-one and Samuel will be sixty-three. Samuel thinks: I have seven years left. From the porch he hears the sound of voices, laughter. He thinks: it is David’s birthday. He thinks: my children are home, the family is together. I am happy now. He thinks: forgive me, Father.

  Borders. The nine rooms are surrounded by a green border, which itself is surrounded by a narrow black border that forms the outermost edge of the playing board. Unlike the smooth green border, the black border is grainy in texture; it forms part of the black paper used for the back of the Clue board and has been carefully folded over each of the four sides. The colorful playing surface is a square sheet of smooth paper pasted over a slightly larger square of cardboard. Under the green border you can see the slight elevation caused by the black paper, which extends nearly half an inch beneath the smooth surface.

  Of course! Mrs. White—the widow White—stands in the KITCHEN staring at an object in her hand. It is smooth and heavyish, with a gleam or shine; through it she can see her hand. She runs her long thumb along the side, over and over, watching the play of the tendon. Of course: it is a glass. It is a glass of water. I am standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand. A glass. Of water. In my. She is standing, in the kitchen, with a glass of, and it is all strange, so utterly strange. Is it perhaps a dream? Fifteen years of making the best of it (how well she has adjusted!), fifteen years of long dreary afternoons (how well she looks!), and then last night, was it only last night, the earth-shattering proposal, flames of happiness, and next morning the cold corpse at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. White stares at the mysterious glass in her hand: how did it get there? She hears a noise and turns to see Mrs. Peacock—dear, dear Evelyn—enter the room.

  From the window seat Miss Scarlet. From the window seat Miss Scarlet watches Mr. Green retreat awkwardly from the BALLROOM, shutting the door behind him a little too loudly and enclosing her with the Colonel, who strides to Mr. Green’s corner, picks something up, and begins to walk toward her across the long, polished floor. She feels that she is watching her doom approach, as if the intensity of her detestation no longer mattered. Men are of two kinds: the coarse, sensual, and indifferent tribe, who wish to enact their curious little rituals upon her arranged, convenient flesh, and the gentle tribe, with their pale hands, wry phrases, and alarmed eyes. If she were an empress, she would choose for her lover a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy with small round buttocks and strong white teeth: she would instruct him slowly in the art of love, she would be mistress and mother to him, goddess and tender sister. Miss Scarlet feels there is something shameful in this fantasy, which she has revealed to no one. As the Colonel approaches she feels his gaze lapping at her, rising insolently along her legs, sliding along her hips like thumbs. Miss Scarlet feels arranged by his gaze, emptied of interest, rendered desirable and trite: he confers upon her a sensation of absence. He unsees her: makes her invisible. “A pleasant evening,” the Colonel remarks, flawlessly banal, placing something, a book perhaps, on the window ledge and glancing incuriously at the romantic twilight dying over the black yews. “Is it,” he continues, turning upon her silken throat his melancholy gaze, “not?”

  Ballrooms. For Jacob, the BALLROOM is the salle de bal in the château de Fontainebleau, dimly remembered from a day trip during his summer in Paris, when he turned seventeen: the glossy floor stretching away, the sunken octagons in the ceiling, the chandeliers plunging from the great arcades, the tightly clutched copy of the Oeuvres Complètes of Rimbaud purchased at a bookstall on the Seine and carefully cut with his Swiss Army knife, the tormenting breasts of a tour guide called Monique. He can still see her coppery braided hair and the white, loose blouse, suddenly heavy with breasts from a twist of the shoulders. His seventeenth birthday: two years older than David. Jacob is glad to be rid of adolescence; he worries about David, but doesn’t know how to protect him. For Marian, the BALLROOM is a nearly forgotten black-and-white movie in which a bride, abandoned by her groom, dances a waltz alone, round and round, one two three one two three, as the members of the hired orchestra exchange nervous glances and continue playing. For David, the BALLROOM is the high school gym, festooned with pink and green crepe paper for the spring dance. He tries to see another, more plausible ballroom, but the images are vague—a British officer with neat mustache and slicked-back hair gazing across a room at a girl with masses of blond ringlets overflowing with ribbons—and keep turning into the high school gym. For Susan, the BALLROOM remains unimagined: a gray rectangle on a board.

  Other rooms. The board does not mention the other rooms of the mansion, rooms that are nevertheless implied by the board and have their own life apart from the game: the three wine cellars with their tiers of bottles in slanting rows, the two beer cellars, the servants’ bedrooms in the cramped upper story, the gun room, the scullery, the butler’s pantry, the serving lobby, the breakfast room, the day nursery, the summer smoking room, the winter smoking room, the glass pantry, the governess’s rooms, the night nursery, the larders, the maids’ sitting room, the maids’ lavatory, the housekeeper’s room, the servants’ dining room, the five bathrooms, the six bedrooms in the family wing, the eight guest bedrooms, the dressing rooms, the anterooms, the refrigerated cold store, the garage with its motorcar (a Daimler). And let us not forget the entrance court, the rose garden, the park, the pleached avenues, the summer pavilion, the ruined rotunda in the lake, the hunting lodge, the carp pool glistening in the sun…

  Martha. Martha Altgeld Ross lies dreaming of summer at Blue Point. She is cutting beans into a pot on the unrailed back porch. Jacob is swinging on the wooden swing that hangs from the twisted apple tree. Under him his shadow is swinging through the tree-shadow onto the sunny unmown grass. Sun streams onto her hands, onto the apple leaves, onto the beanstalks on their rickety poles, onto Jacob’s plump strong legs stretching, stretching into the blue air. Suddenly she puts down the knife, runs down the unpainted steps into the yard, seizes the ropes of the swing. Jacob is startled and looks up at her with his dark, earnest eyes. She snatches him from the swing and kisses his stomach, his neck, his long-lashed eyelids. O my handsome boy, my son. She feels crazed with love. Martha is sitting on the swing, with Jacob on her lap. Higher and higher they go, she is laughing, she is happy, sun and shade ripple over her outstretched legs. Jacob is laughing. O how do you like to go up in a swing, up in the sky so blue? O I do think it the pleasantest thing. Sunlight glints on the pot of beans on the porch. O my handsome baby boy. Tears burn in her eyes, she is heavy with love. She is calm now.

  Ritual. Although it is past midnight and he is already tired, David plans to stay up the entire night, if necessary, in order to be alone with Marian and Jacob, and then with Jacob. When Marian visits, she and David always stay up and talk after their parents go to bed; when Jacob visits, he and David stay up till three or four in the morning, or even till dawn. The long night with Jacob is a well-established ritual, which David looks forward to intensely, for aside from the sheer excitement of late, forbidden hours it is a way of asserting intimacy. Surely Jacob will not fail him on his birthday. David is aware that his formulation of the thought contains a doubt: he isn’t entirely certain of Jacob, who arrived four and a half hours late, with an unannounced girlfriend, and who now sits remote and unhappy at the other end of the table. Jac
ob’s unsatisfactory reason for his lateness—he hadn’t fallen asleep till five in the morning and had slept until noon—is, from another point of view, reassuring: if Jacob has slept late, then he will stay up late, quite apart from the question of obedience to their late-night ritual. Of course, this line of reasoning is far from decisive: the badness of last night’s sleep might easily lead to early tiredness. It’s true that even if Jacob goes to bed early, they will be sleeping in the same room, since Susan has been given Jacob’s attic room and the folding cot has been set up for Jacob in David’s room. But isn’t it possible, isn’t it even likely, that Jacob will sneak upstairs with Susan, in defiance of his mother’s chaste arrangements? The possibility of no talk, no late-night summer walk, no assertion of the ritual, is so disturbing to David that he pushes the thought away with another: after all, even though Jacob was four and a half hours late, even though he is sitting remote and unhappy at the other end of the table, they are playing Clue, as they always do.

  Not uninteresting. The Colonel, who is continually threatened by an appalling boredom, does not take pleasure in easy conquests. He is therefore surprised, indeed disturbed, by the ease with which matters seem to be taking their course: the rigid arm unwithdrawn from the negligently brushing hand, the thigh tensed but motionless under the testing palm, the silken knees irresistant to his slight pressure of parting. The Colonel is not a profound student of human nature, but he is quick to understand that the exaggerated ease of surrender is intended to convey contempt: you may stick my body, which I value less than an old, discarded hat, with your swollen red member, it is nothing to me, who live elsewhere. In this sense Miss Scarlet intends her swift surrender to be the precise opposite: a resistance deeper than flesh, a spiritual negation. The thought pleases the Colonel; Miss Scarlet continually proposes erotic riddles that require complex solutions. It is important, he reflects, to linger now, seated beside her on the window seat, his torso twisted toward her as she leans back fully dressed but already a little disheveled against the far pillow, with her stockinged feet on the seat-cushion, her knees raised and parted a hand’s width, her crimson hem draped over the tops of her knees—affording the Colonel a piquant view of her elegant silk stockings, her long thighs in the mauve shadows, her fashionable pink crepe de chine knickers with plissé frills (the Colonel is extremely knowledgeable about ladies’ undergarments), the clearly outlined pink fold between the slightly parted thighs, the transverse crease that divides one raised thigh from the firm but flattened base of the coyly proffered buttock. It is yet another of Miss Scarlet’s poses—all in all, the Colonel reflects, a not uninteresting one.

  A trifle anxious. At a bend of the path there is a stretch of darkness, and Professor Plum experiences a delicious confusion. Although he has passed this way before, he cannot remember whether the black passage proceeds straight for the next few steps, or continues to turn in the same direction, or turns the other way. Each time he descends from the civilized world of well-appointed rooms and high windows to the dank dark of the SECRET PASSAGES he has the pleasurable sensation of losing his way, of immersing himself in an alluring and alien realm of flickering lantern-lit walls, unlit stretches of darkness, black fissures and crevices, sudden cavelike openings. The paths are growing increasingly familiar, but at the same time they are accumulating strangeness, for the growth of familiarity releases him to search for new details, not seen before. The two passages, moreover, really constitute four different paths, depending on his point of descent, since it is impossible, in the semidark, to commit to memory the precise pattern of turns or the exact number and order of crevices, fissures, and curious outcroppings; and as if to conspire with the dark, and increase his sense of uncertainty, he cannot always recall whether he is on the way to the KITCHEN, the STUDY, the LOUNGE, or the CONSERVATORY. The four descents to the two passages are strikingly different: the rickety wooden stairway leading down from the KITCHEN, the rusting iron handrail rattling in the wall over the stone steps behind the secret door in the LOUNGE, the grass-grown earthen steps descending from the CONSERVATORY, the circular stairway behind the sliding panel in the STUDY. Professor Plum reaches out a hand and touches the damp wall; it appears to be crusted with loose, brittle growths, several of which drop lightly to the path. The sense of strangeness is, to be sure, carefully contained within an encompassing sense of the familiar; the passages, however dark, surprising, and uncertain, always lead to one of the four rooms. It cannot be otherwise. Professor Plum advances slowly, with his hand on the wall. It is like the experience of reading a detective novel: a rigorous design bristling with dangerous surprises and leading to an inescapable end. But is this an original thought? Has he perhaps read it somewhere? Lantern-light is already visible on the path; the Professor, who has begun to be a trifle anxious, feels a little burst of relief, of disappointment.

  Physical. It is an old board, which goes back to Jacob’s childhood. The line down the center, representing the place where the board folds in half, has become more visible over the years; the paper has gradually worn away over the fold, exposing the gray cardboard beneath, so that a thin gray line now runs through the center of the HALL, across a row of yellow squares, through the central rectangle, across two rows of yellow squares, and through the center of the BALLROOM. The O in the word LOUNGE is shaded with a pencil. Part of the shading has been erased, but the erasure has removed an arc of the O and the gray color beneath the shading, and has left a white smudge. A small brown stain beside the R in BILLIARD ROOM, on one side of the fold, corresponds to a pale stain, identical in shape, on a wall of the DINING ROOM, on the other side of the fold. A faint pencil line is visible in the LIBRARY. A darker, wavy line shows in two yellow squares beside one of the doors of the BALLROOM.

  Rooms. The Ross house has eight rooms: a kitchen, living room, dining room, and study (formerly a playroom) downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs, and an unheated bedroom (formerly a study) in the attic. There is also a small screened porch in back, in the space between the kitchen and the attached garage. When David was born, he slept in a cradle in his parents’ bedroom for three weeks, before being moved to a crib in Marian’s room. Marian, aged nine, moved into Jacob’s room and stayed with him for nearly a year. When Marian was ten, she moved back to her room and David’s crib was moved into Jacob’s larger room for a trial period; to everyone’s surprise, Jacob liked having David in his room and spent many hours sitting on the floor with him, reading books patiently over and over and showing him how to fit the bright red apple and the bright yellow banana into his fruit puzzle. When Jacob entered high school, his father converted the playroom to a study and Jacob moved up to the room in the attic, where he used an electric heater in the winter. Jacob liked being alone at the top of the house, in a room with a slanting ceiling, a room whose walls were entirely lined with bookshelves. David missed Jacob but liked having complete control of the room; he felt he was taking care of it for his brother, who still kept some of his clothes in the closet. When Jacob left home for Columbia, David, aged eight, felt that his brother had moved to a still higher room. Every day for nearly a month he climbed the stairs to Jacob’s room in order to straighten the books and make certain everything was all right; one day he stopped going up there, and did not return until Jacob came home for Thanksgiving. He began staying in the living room when Marian practiced her Czerny exercises and Chopin études, and he had long talks with her before going to bed. When Marian left home for Barnard, David did not feel that the house had grown larger: he felt that two rooms had been lost, since there was now no reason to enter Marian’s room or Jacob’s attic room. One night when his parents were asleep he went into Marian’s room and crept into her bed; he thought he could smell her perfume on the pillows. When he woke up in the middle of the night he did not know where he was; he thought that he must be in Grandma’s apartment in Washington Heights, and only when he remembered Grandma lying proud and white in the coffin did he realize his mistake.

  Still lif
e. Miss Scarlet is struck again by the Colonel’s ability to turn her into an arrangement: to be inspected by that banal gaze is instantly to become a tableau, a wax figure, a mediocre artist’s gilt-framed still life (the staring fishhead, the glossy green grapes each with its careful highlight). She feels, in that pause of inspection, that she has achieved the condition of utter banality. It is a condition more extreme than death, for to die is to continue to exist in the body; but she has ceased to exist in the body, she is impalpable, the cells of her flesh have dissolved in the solvent of a trite imagination. Despite her revulsion for the vulgar Colonel, Miss Scarlet is grateful to him for permitting her to savor this annihilation.