The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [169]
She also doesn’t discuss her feelings. She never shares any disappointments, any frustrations about her size, her physical discomforts. She presents a determined, sunny face always. You have to read very carefully to find the disappointments and frustrations.
For example, she gives her time with Barnum’s circus in 1881 only a couple of paragraphs and concludes by saying, “It was not to our taste.” Similarly, while writing about some of the dangers of her life upon the river with Colonel Wood, she admits, “It cannot be denied that these occurrances (sic) were a little disquieting.”
And she makes no mention of her “child,” the humbug she and Barnum perpetuated concerning a baby Thumb. Accounts vary as to whether Lavinia was barren, or she chose not to have children. I have to think that, as intelligent as she was, she was very aware of the dangers to one her size. And when Minnie became pregnant, apparently Barnum’s doctors tried to convince her to have an abortion, which she refused. So obviously, while press accounts of Minnie’s death mention her “fairy child,” Vinnie was only too aware of the risks.
How she felt, then, having deceived the public into rejoicing over the “birth,” and then mourning the “death,” of her own child can only be imagined; likewise, the guilt and grief she must have felt in watching her own sister die in childbirth. She discussed the hoax once in public, in an interview given to Billboard magazine in 1901, explaining the procedure of obtaining “English babies in England, German babies in Germany.” But she also takes pains to say that “Mr. Barnum was a great man.”
As I researched Lavinia’s history, her great intelligence and drive were the characteristics that spoke to me. There seemed to be only one other person in her life who even came close to matching those characteristics, and that person was, of course, P. T. Barnum himself.
Lavinia’s story is so big—there were times when I feared turning her into a nineteenth-century version of Woody Allen’s Zelig—that it threatened to get away from me at times. Yet I found that whenever I turned back to Barnum, a story came into focus. I believe that every novel is either a mystery, a tragedy, or a love story—some are all three—and it became clear to me that this is a love story. An unusual love story; an affair of the mind rather than the body. P. T. Barnum was always the light she was seeking; whether, as at first, he was just the means to bring her to a wider audience and take her away from the dangers of working with shadier characters or, ultimately, the companion, the true partner, she could never find in Charles Stratton or even her beloved sister Minnie.
I chose to end my novel, then, a good forty years before Vinnie’s death. To me, the story had to end with Barnum; he was the great love of her life, I came to believe, and everything she did began and ended with him. Even in her own autobiographical chapters, Lavinia only devotes four pages to her life after the death of Charles Stratton.
Did Vinnie marry Charles Stratton only for the fame she had to know it would bring her? Most accounts record their marriage as a happy one. Yet he does not loom over her life in the way that Barnum does. It is difficult to imagine that Vinnie wasn’t aware of the enormous fame that would result in marrying a fellow little person—the most famous little person in the world, in fact. The novelty of the perfect little couple in miniature was too much to pass up. Most accounts also record Charles Stratton as being somewhat of an innocent, an intellectual weakling—although a very genial man, one who would not have caused Vinnie any grief. He also would not have excited her mind in the way someone like P. T. Barnum would have.
Barnum died in 1891; somewhat like another larger-than-life