The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [150]
THE FIRST STOP ON THIS LATEST TOUR WAS MILWAUKEE. WE arrived there on January 9, 1883, a gray, wintry day, although we barely saw it, getting in late, as usual, and driving straight to our hotel. Starting with our circus travels, it seemed to me that we spent less and less time in a particular city, so that I truly had no sense of place. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Davenport, Sioux City—they all looked the same to me. All had bustling, well-lit train stations, paved streets, new electric wires going up next to all the commercial buildings in the center of the city. Even the smallest towns had tall buildings now, for elevators were becoming commonplace.
Of all the many marvels of the modern age, the elevator was the one that most changed our lives. Maybe others were talking about telephones and electric lights, but Charles and I never tired of gushing about elevators. A lifetime of taking stairs meant for normal-size legs had taken its toll on both of us; Charles was now forty-five, I, forty-one. Our hips ached, as did our backs. Oh, the convenience—the bliss!—of walking into that wonderful little iron cage, watching the lift boy, clad in a smart uniform with a cap, move the handle, and then miraculously rising up, up, up, past all those awful stairs and landings!
Never before had Charles and I ever stayed above the first or second floors of a hotel, until elevators came into vogue. And so we were particularly excited to find that, upon checking into the Newhall House Hotel, we had rooms on the sixth floor—imagine! The very top floor, and we could get to it easily. Surely there would be a very fine view of the city from there!
This somewhat made up for the fact that the Newhall House was not the nicest hotel in Milwaukee. We could no longer afford to stay in the newer gilded palaces of stone and marble; the Newhall House was twenty-five years old, one of the few wooden structures left in that city just north of Chicago, which had suffered the infamous fire twelve years before. But still, the hotel was clean and bright—new electric lights were in every room—and we were happy to see other theatrical folk there, as well.
“Old troupers, all of us,” Mr. Bleeker said as he waved at one of the members of the Minnie Palmer Light Opera Company, seated across the lobby. “We’ll all die in the harness. It’s a sickness.”
“Speak for yourself, Sylvester,” Mrs. Bleeker said fondly. We were all four seated in one of the parlors after dinner; it was particularly cozy on this night, as it was frigid outside, but inside, we had the warm familiarity of flocked wallpaper, worn carpet, chipped hotel dinnerware. That was the life we knew, the four of us, and we had shared it for so long. The few times we saw one another out of such surroundings—not on a train, or in a theater or a hotel—it seemed odd; we always acted stiff, uncomfortable, overly formal. This was where we belonged—in anonymous hotels, in cities we never saw save from a train window or from a stage door. It may sound depressing, but it was not; rather, the bland anonymity of our surroundings served only to sharpen our identities, making us dear and recognizable to one another—making us a family.
The first stop on a long tour was always particularly full of warmth and laughter, like the first Sunday dinner after a long absence from home. And this night, we were all especially happy, for some reason. Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker sat close together on a plum-colored velvet settee; Mr. Bleeker’s lean face relaxed until it almost looked merry. He had his arm around his wife, who nestled her head against his shoulder without her usual reticence. Generally, Mrs. Bleeker conducted herself so modestly as to be ignored by those too busy to observe her gently mocking smile, her soft brown eyes that were quick to notice the most unusual details—the one man whose topcoat wasn’t buttoned properly, the one flower that poked its nose up through the grass ahead of the others. But tonight she appeared not to care who might see her playing coquettishly with the buttons on her husband