Astray: Stories Read online

  It’s like trying to move a mountain, sometimes. Am I your master or your servant, that’s what I want to know? It’s a queer business.

  That superintendent! To think I used to be amused by his little ways, almost fond of the old gent. Well, a colder fish I never met. Sits there in his dusty top hat and frock coat flecked with hippopotami’s whatsits, tells me he’s giving me a little holiday.

  “A holiday?” I was taken aback, as you can imagine. I haven’t taken a day off in years, you’d never stand for it.

  He fixes me with his yellowing eyes and tells me that my temporary removal will allow Mr. Newman to accustom himself to the elephant’s habits and tastes before departure.

  “You know Jumbo’s tastes already,” I protest. “He can’t stand that Yank. And if the fellow dares to try cruel measures, word will get out and you’ll have the police down on you like a shot, spark off riots, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Which sends the superintendent off on a rant about how I’ve been conspicuously unwilling to get you into that crate.

  “Oh, I like that,” says I. “I’ve only loaded the unfortunate creature with shackles, pushed and roared to drive all six and a half tons of him into that blooming trap, so how is it my fault if he won’t go?”

  He fixes me with a stare. “Mr. Newman informs me that you must be engaging in sabotage, by giving the elephant secret signals. I have suspected as much on previous occasions, when I sent you perfectly competent assistants and Jumbo ran amok and knocked them down like ninepins.”

  “Secret signals?” I repeat, flabbergasted.

  “All I know is that your hold over that beast is uncanny,” says the superintendent between his teeth.

  Uncanny? What’s uncanny about it? Nothing more natural than that you’d have a certain regard for your pa, after he’s seen to all your little wants day and night for the last seventeen years. Why does the lamb love Mary so, and all that rot.

  Well, boy, at that moment I hear a little click in my head. It’s like at the halls when a scene flies up and another one descends. I suddenly say—prepare yourself, lad—I say, “Then why don’t you send a telegraph to this Barnum and tell him to take me too?”

  The superintendent blinks.

  “I’m offering my services as Jumbo’s keeper,” says I, “as long as his terms are liberal.”

  “What makes you imagine Mr. Barnum would hire such a stubborn devil as you, Scott?”

  That threw me, but only for a second. “Because he must be a stubborn devil himself to have paid two thousand pounds for an elephant he can’t get onto the ship.”

  A long stare, and the superintendent says, “I knew I was right. You have been thwarting me all along, using covert devices to keep Jumbo in the zoo.”

  I smirked, letting him believe it. Covert devices, my eye! To the impure, all things are impure. “Just you send that telegraph,” I told him, “and you’ll be soon rid of both of us.”

  Now, now, boy, let me explain. Doesn’t it strike you that we’ve had enough of England? Whoa! No chucking your filth on the walls, that’s a low habit. Hear me out. I know what a patriotic heart you’ve got—specially considering you come from the French Sudan, not our Empire at all—but how have you been repaid? Yes, the plain people dote on you, but it strikes me that you’ve grown out of these cramped quarters. If the Society’s condemned you to transportation for smashing a few walls and shocking a few members’ wives, why, then—let’s up stakes and be off to pastures new, I say. You’re not twenty-one yet, and I’m not fifty. We’re self-made prodigies, come up from nothing and now headline news. We can make a fresh start in the land of the free and home of the brave. We’ll be ten times as famous, and won’t England feel the loss of us, won’t Victoria weep!

  I expect the superintendent will call me in right after lunch, the wonders of modern telegraphy being what they are. (Whatever Barnum offers me, I’ll accept it. The Society can kiss my you-know-exactly-what-I-mean.) I’ll come straight back here and lead you out to the crate. Now, whatever you do, Jumbo, don’t make a liar of me. I don’t have any secret signals or hidden powers; all I can think to do is to walk into the crate first, and turn, and open my arms and call you. Trust me, dearest boy, and I’ll see you safe across the ocean, and stay by your side for better for worse, and take a father’s and mother’s care of you till the end. Are you with me?

  Man and Boy

  This story is based on almost daily reports in the Times of London between January and April 1882, as well as Superintendent Abraham Bartlett’s hostile account in his Wild Animals in Captivity (1898), and the ghostwritten 1885 Autobiography of Matthew Scott, Jumbo’s Keeper. Even after Matthew Scott persuaded Jumbo into his crate, the controversy—nicknamed “Jumbomania” or “the Jumbo movement”—lingered for several months on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring songs, poems, jokes, cartoons, advertisements, and the sale of “Jumbo” cigars, collars, fans, earrings, perfume, and ice cream.

  Jumbo toured with Barnum’s troupe over four very successful seasons (and showed no further sign of the aggression that dental analysis now suggests can be blamed on impacted molars, due to his low-fiber diet). In 1885, as Scott led him across a railway track after a performance in St. Thomas, Ontario, the elephant was killed by an unscheduled freight train. Barnum rehired Scott for one more season to introduce audiences to Jumbo’s stuffed hide. Despite pressure to return to England, Scott hung on near the circus’s winter headquarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he died in 1914 in the almshouse, aged around eighty. Jumbo’s hide was lost in a fire, but his skeleton lies in storage at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.

  LONDON

  1854

  ONWARD

  Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. “We saved you the last of the kippers,” she says in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.

  Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.

  His brow is wet with honest sweat,

  He earns whate’er he can

  And looks the whole world in the face

  For he owes not any man.

  Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized for two years old? But then girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks equally twiglike under their elaborate coats? “Where did you pick that one up?” she asks Fred.

  “A fellow at the office.”

  “Again, again,” insists Pet: her new word this week.

  Caroline catches herself watching the clock.

  Fred launches into song again as he rises to his feet and brushes the crumbs from his waistcoat with a manner oddly middle-aged for twenty-three.

  Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

  Onward through life he goes …

  “Come, now, Pet, let Uncle get his coat on.” Fred mustn’t be late, but that’s not it: Caroline wants him gone so she can tackle the day. The child, windmill-armed, slaps imaginary dust out of her uncle’s trousers while her mother adjusts his collar. Not that there’s any real prospect of advancement from the ranks of draftsmen, but still, no harm in looking dapper. She nearly made an architect of him, so very nearly; another few years would have done it. Nearly never knit a sock, as their mother used to say in sober moments.

  “Bye-bye,” chants Pet, “bye-bye, bye-bye.”

  Fred always leaves to catch his omnibus with a cheerful expression. Does he like his work? she wonders. Or does he just put a brave face on it for twenty-five shillings a week?

  Caroline carries the tray down to the kitchen and leaves the dishes for the girl. Pet drops a saucer, but by some miracle it only spins loudly on the tiles. Upstairs to do the beds together, shaking out the blankets; Caroline straightens everything as soon as her daughter’s back is turned. Then
down to the parlor again, where she takes up her mending while Pet wreaks havoc in the sewing box. The room is cooling down as the fire goes gray.

  Fred needs new cuffs. These ones are so frayed, it would be throwing good thread after bad to darn them. Or that’s her excuse; Caroline’s fingers are stupid with the needle. Her little brother, her charge and her pride, and she sends him out every day a little shabbier. Toast crumbs still gritty in her throat, and already Caroline is reviewing the contents of the pantry, brooding over lunch. The remains of yesterday’s beef? “What a tall tower,” she marvels, watching Pet set another spool on top of the quivering structure. Spools crash and roll across the room. Caroline jumps, pricks herself. “Pick up now” is all she lets herself say, sucking her finger. “Good girl,” she cries when her daughter produces the last dust-rimmed spool from under the table. Is false cheer better than none? she wonders. So much of motherhood is acting.

  Usually she manages to get Pet down to sleep by noon, when the girl comes in to mind her, but today Pet’s wound up, squeaking in her own private language, rattling buttons in the tin.

  A confident knock at the door. Early, how can he be this early, before the maid’s even got here? What makes him believe, what gives him the right—

  Anger tightens the drawstrings of Caroline’s face. “A visitor for Mamma! Would you like to sit here quiet as a mouse and play with Mamma’s jewels?” Before she’s finished speaking, she’s thundering up to her room, taking the stairs two at a time, Pet stumbling in her wake.

  She grabs the jewelry box from her dressing table. The second knock, still sprightly. He’ll wait, won’t he? Surely he’ll give her a minute to get to the blasted door—

  As she reaches the hall again, passing the struggling child on the stairs, her skirt almost knocks Pet over; Caroline grabs the small hand and pulls her into the parlor. She’s breathing hard as she sets the jewelry box down on the sofa. Pet’s mouth forms an O of ecstasy. All that’s left are cheap necklaces and bracelets in glass and jet, probably easy enough to break, but then again, not valuable enough to matter. “Be good now, Pet.” Good, what does that mean to a two-year-old whose every natural urge is to poke, to grab, to take the world in her fists and shake the secrets out of it? The fire— Caroline slams the guard across it. “Mamma back soon!”

  The third knock hammers as she’s dashing through the hall; she pauses to shake her skirts into shape.

  Her smiling apologies overlap with his. This one’s all bluff humor and compliments; he’s brought what he calls a mere token. Caroline stares at the miniature lilies, hides her face in their white stiffness. The scent is sweet enough to hurt her throat. Eerie white bugles, suited to a girl’s coffin. This late in the autumn, they must be hothouse blooms: she reckons the cost.

  “Mamma!” Pet, lurching into the hall, heavy with necklaces.

  “Stay in the parlor,” says Caroline, picking her up, crushing her against the flowers. She plants her on the sofa again, and in the small perfect ear, very low and fierce, she says, “Sh!” Turns to find the visitor leaning in the doorway, grinning as if to demonstrate that he doesn’t mind encountering the little one, on the contrary, in fact. It occurs to her that he’s scanning Pet’s features, and her stomach turns.

  “Piddy,” remarks Pet, caressing one glacial petal.

  What’s a pity? How does the child know about pity? Oh, pretty. Caroline yanks the bouquet away. “Yes, Mamma’s special pretty flowers, don’t touch.”

  Upstairs, she chats a little, marvels at how long her visitor’s mustache is getting. Has he had a very tiresome morning in the City? He’s considering investing in the Canadian Grand Trunk Railway, well, hasn’t that quite a ring to it.

  The sheets have a damp feel against her back, though Caroline tells herself she must be imagining it. She moves the way he prefers, with her ears always pricked. Nothing, not a sound. Could Pet have crept upstairs, might she be outside Mamma’s bedroom door right now, plucking up her nerve to push the door open? No, no, Caroline would have heard something; one of those little gasps of exertion or nonsense words a two-year-old can’t help making. But the man has put his oily mustache to her ear now, he’s grunting like a seal. She can’t hear anything else. She should be making those delicate bird cries he likes, but, oh god, what if a necklace has snagged, tightened round Pet’s soft throat? Earrings, she forgot to take the damn earrings out of the box. What would one of those tiny sharp hooks do to a small stomach? Her fingers clamp on the pale meat of his shoulders. Hurry, hurry, do your business and be done with it.

  “Oh, sweet Caroline,” he groans.

  A rage spirals up when she hears him use her name, a coal-smoke whirlwind wrenching this scarecrow out of her, hurling him against the walls, whipping him through the pealing glass to fall like rag ‘n’ bones on the Brompton street, where the next passing carriage will flatten his face into stone and mud.

  A small sound brings her back to herself. Rocking away on top of her, the visitor doesn’t notice, but Caroline can make out voices in the parlor, one deeper than the other. The girl at last, ten minutes late by the clock on the dresser. It’s all right. Pet’s all right. Caroline’s teeth unlock.

  Love fizzes like acid in her bones. She doesn’t have to fake that.

  Lunch is the last of the beef, in a soup, bulked out with turnips. Pet pushes her bowl away, but Caroline puts the spoon between the little pink lips over and over.

  Though the child hasn’t had her nap, Caroline takes her out while the rain is holding off. “Pam pam,” wails Pet. Her memory is getting longer; the pram was pawned three weeks ago. (Uncle Fred doesn’t seem to have noticed.)

  “You’re a great big girl now, you can walk,” says Caroline with one of those smiles that are too hard around the edges. Pet wanders in long spirals, trips over a pine cone. “Come along, my sweet. This way.” The air’s bad today; damp and sulfurous. “On we go!” After a minute, Caroline dips to lift her daughter onto her hip. When they reach Brompton Park, Pet struggles to get down and chases sparrows with the lumbering merriment of a drunk. She coughs with excitement, picks up a branch covered in curled yellow leaves and shakes it like a standard. Caroline wonders if the brown boots are pinching. She thinks of Chinese ladies with their ghastly little feet. For winter she could always line that thin coat with a flannel petticoat of her own … but then it mightn’t button up at the front.

  “Birdies! Mamma, birdies!”

  “That’s right, pretty birdies.”

  A spattering of rain. On the way home, they pass two women on a bench, whose conversation halts. Eyes flicker then avert. The chat starts up again in graver tones.

  Does Caroline hear her name? She keeps her gaze at the level of her daughter’s face. “Look, a snail,” she remarks inanely.

  “Nail,” echoes Pet, bending to examine it.

  But her mother jerks her hand. “On we go, the rain’s coming.”

  Caroline doesn’t care what people say, not for herself. There’s an automatic searing of the cheeks at moments like these; occasionally on waking, a leaden sense of her fate that presses her against the pillow. But no shame. What time in her day has she for shame?

  “Nail,” cries Pet again, squatting to reach for something that looks very like dog dirt.

  “Time for cocoa,” says Caroline, hauling her onto her hip with one arm.

  Fallen. It’s not like in the novels, or on the stage; it’s as ordinary as darning. What has Caroline ever done but what she had to since she was nineteen and she found herself alone with a nine-year-old brother to raise? The road never seemed to fork. She’s put one foot in front of another, and this is where they have led her, this moment, fat drops of rain falling into her collar, as she rushes along the blotched footpath with Pet laughing on her hip. Onward, onward, because backward is impossible. Fallen, like leaves that can’t be stuck back on the trees again.

  And it strikes Caroline now that everything the child learns is a step closer to misery. When will Pet begin to register
the neighbors’ words? At four? Five? Coming home with her face streaked with knowledge: I heard a bad word. Cruel misnamings of what she is, or rather, what her mother is; the falsity of fact. And what will Caroline tell her then? What fiction, what feeble justification? She wishes absurdly that Pet would stay light enough to carry on her hip; would shrink, in fact, falling back month by month into the plump oblivion of infancy.

  At home, the afternoon goes smoothly: a small mercy. The girl takes Pet up for a nap, while Caroline glances at yesterday’s paper. STOWAWAY FOUND ACCIDENTALLY STIFLED IN SALT BARREL THREE DAYS OUT FROM LIVERPOOL, says a headline; Caroline winces, and turns the page. She screws up her eyes to read tiny advertisements for items she can’t afford.

  By the time her second visitor knocks, Pet and the maid are playing with paper dolls in the parlor. This one only ever speaks about the weather; she agrees with him that the rain will get heavier before dark. Never more than three visitors a day, and usually only two; she can’t cut down any more than that and still make the books balance. No strangers, no boors; she has her standards.

  Caroline has bathed, and dismissed the girl, and tidied up, hours before Fred comes home soaked to the ankles. (She can’t find the bouquet of lilies, though it lingers on the air; the girl must have thrown it out, a piece of quiet tact that surprises Caroline.) Her brother apologizes for being late; the rain always causes traffic jams. He likes the way she’s moved the easy chair a little closer to the window. “It’s these little touches,” Fred assures her. “Lets me enjoy the view, while I’m polishing my shoes.”

  The view, as if their window looked onto an alpine lake, instead of one of Brompton’s meaner terraces.

  Pet’s got him singing that song about the blacksmith again.

  Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

  Onward through life he goes …

  His voice is a little hoarser after the long day. It was her little brother, Fred, who taught her to be a mother, long before Pet. Love happens, like age or weather. It’s not hard to do, only to endure, sometimes.