August 1842, New York City
Mother snored on the daybed. There was a mermaid swimming just upstairs somewhere, in the museum, and Mother snored.
Caroline lifted her mother’s heavy arm to tug out the news sheet, letting it drop again. The mermaid was in the paper today. Daddy’s museum was often in the news, but more so since the ladyfish arrived.
Her father had read the article aloud over breakfast. An engraving showed the creature at rest on a rock beside two elegant sister mermaids. She stared into a hand mirror, and her breasts were bare. Caroline knew Mother was scandalized by the set of her mouth and the way she blew on her tea to avoid their eyes. “Questions?” she chirped, in a tone that warned,
don’t ask.
Caroline shrugged. Though she was nine and Helen two, they saw breasts all the time —Mother’s, while baby Frances sucked.
When their mother fed Frances right at the breakfast table that morning, Daddy had called her a “fishwife.” At first, this confused Caroline. Did he mean Charity Barnum was the ladyfish, the same mermaid on display upstairs? But how? Mother mostly stood by the window or dozed on the daybed, as now, but she never left their sight. And when she unfastened her dressing gown to feed Frances, her bosom did not in any way resemble the graceful mermaids’.
Caroline knew to guard her questions. She would rather solve them herself when she could, and Madge had used the same word last week, only differently.
Fishwife meant “common,” Caroline deduced with pride.
But this morning she had another question, one she couldn’t answer herself.
Daddy replied with his back to her, riffling through a pile of contracts. “It’s the medicine.”
Answers made more questions sometimes, especially Daddy’s answers, but with his back to her, he couldn’t see her furrowed brow. He had found the page he was looking for and scanned it triumphantly, crushing the paper in his hands. “That’s what makes her sleep so much.” He looked up sympathetically. “The medicine.”
Whatever was on the paper had brightened his mood. Daddy felt sorry for his “wild three,” he confided, kneeling by them, but “for the old girl’s sake”— he pointed his dimpled chin at Mother on the lounge —“you’ll have to keep your voices down today.”
He paused over the cradle to fuss with Frances’s blanket. Daddy hated baby talk (there was altogether too much “pootsy-wootsy mamby-pamby” spoken to children, he maintained) but resorted to it now to make his point. “Let my girls be doves”— he looked back at them —“and coo like this —
coo, coo, coo —until she wakes.”
Two of three Barnum daughters cooed on command until Helen broke off, boldly asking the real question: “But
when will Mother get up?”
A Helen question was a thorn lodged in your thumb. You carried it around until someone saw your discomfort and removed it. Daddy admired her candor —yet another reason Caroline often itched to slap Helen or shake her; however clever she might be, Helen was young enough to fall for the same games over and over.
Look into my hand, Caroline would coax, opening a fist.
Closer . . . see? You trust me, right? Slap, slap.
Daddy tied a silk cravat at his throat. The hired girl would be here soon, he said. Madge came mornings to tidy and heat broth for their lunch. Sometimes, when Frances wailed for no reason and Mother shut herself in her room after Daddy left for the day, Madge bounced the furious infant round the house on her hip. “Colic,” she’d say, scowling at Mother’s door.
“You said after this week we would never drink broth again,” Helen observed with her air of being disappointed in advance. Daddy said it made her sound more like the old men who played chess outside Philosophers’ Hall, his favorite barbershop, than a child. “You said we’d dine with the Astors.”
“And I am a man of my word.”
He chucked Helen’s chin —dimpled, like his. Everyone said they looked alike, while Caroline had Mother’s sleepy eyes if not her underwater slowness —no mermaid moved like Mother. Mermaids were bullet swift.
Unless you had Daddy’s promises in writing, Mother said, he rarely kept them, and anyway he made everything up. Unlike those of the boys in school stories —who tied your braid to the back of your chair —his jokes were on whole cities. All of New York suffered Daddy’s whims and hoaxes, and he had crowned himself the Prince of Humbug.
“Receipts tripled this week, my girls.” With his document tucked under an arm, he bent to kiss their foreheads. Caroline winced when he gave the cradle a shove so sleeping Frances tipped on roily seas. “Our ladyfish will extend her stay.”
Caroline sat on her hands. It did not do to betray enthusiasm. “Please let me see the mermaid?” she blurted. “Is she beautiful like the picture?” She had other questions, too. Were the mermaid’s scales as sharp as steel blades? Did you have to cover your ears when she sang or be deafened?
But Mr. Barnum was needed at the office. “Proceeds will not count themselves.” He tipped his hat.
“I would like to see the mermaid also,” Helen added, almost too quietly to be heard.
Caroline gasped. The audacity. Daddy despised repetition.
But he turned his wrath on
her, not Helen. He leaned on Caroline’s chair arms and nearly knocked his forehead against hers while she held admirably still. “Nownownow,” he teased with a mean twinkle in his eye — in the same
tsk voice he sometimes used on Mother, who withdrew into herself like a duck into its feathers — and out he went, the hall door clicking shut behind him.
Patience is a virtue.
Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Noyes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
