The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [77]
I often forgot this part of his life, this rocky, unsettled business of buying and selling and betting on the taste of the public. He put on such a good face, even to me. But sometimes he dropped that mask to reveal his uncertainty and weariness; those were the moments I most cherished.
I frowned; he did not look at all well. “Are you eating properly? Getting exercise?”
“Yes, m’dear, I am.”
“I don’t believe you. Is Charity taking care of you? How is she these days?” I still had not met his wife.
“She is as usual. You realize I have three daughters to fuss and fidget over me; I don’t need a fourth, Vinnie.” He said it kindly, but there was a hint of frost in his voice, in his gaze; it was a warning.
“I assure you, I have no desire to be thought of as one of your daughters,” I replied with my own chilly attitude.
There was an uncomfortable pause, which he broke first; he always did. Mr. Barnum could not long stand silence.
“All right, then. Now, about your future—”
“What about it? You’re not thinking of kicking me out of the Museum already, are you?”
“Heavens, no—the very idea! Tell me, Vinnie, how old are you? Twenty-one?” Now he sounded very much like a father, and I did not like it. But I nodded, my cheeks burning, as any lady’s would at the mention of her age.
“I know things seem as if they’ve just begun for you, and of course you want to enjoy them, but you cannot ignore the fact that you have two highly eligible suitors vying for your hand. It’s cruel to allow them to go on in this way.”
I shook my head, closed my eyes, and sank against the plush cushioned seat; how romantic, how sweet—how very ordinary—it sounded when put that way! How unlike my life, the life with which I was so acquainted, the life that Mama had wept over, late at night, as I lay sleeping with my sister.
“They are simply two ridiculous, spoiled boys playing a game, and I happen to be the prize. Yet no one has asked what I want.” I opened my eyes, considering Mr. Barnum. He was my confidante, my mentor; he was the person I thought of when I went to bed, and the person I looked forward to seeing when I opened my eyes, eager to begin the day. How quickly he had assumed that place in my life!
“What do you want, Vinnie?” He smiled down at me; in the carriage, we could not sit knee to knee.
“I—I want—” What did I want? Oh, so many things; what didn’t I want? What didn’t I desire? It was because I wanted that I had left home in the first place, shunning the simple life my family so happily led.
Yet there was one thing—one simple, ordinary thing—that I did desire; I hadn’t known it until recently.
I wanted, to my great astonishment, to be loved. I wanted to be cared for, desired, not desiring; I wanted to be cherished not for my size, not for anything other than for my heart, my mind—just like any woman.
But I wanted these things not from any man; I wanted them from a great man, a man worthy of me. And this was the one thing I knew that I could never have—a great love. I must settle for something else—someone less, in every way. I must settle for a love in miniature. I did not quite know how to do that—settle; it was not a lesson I had ever bothered to learn.
“You’ve orchestrated this whole thing!” I burst out, tears suddenly in my eyes, my anger at what I could not have lashing out at the one thing I wanted. “You brought Charles Stratton to New York, filling his head with that business nonsense! You egged on poor Nutt. You’ve thrown me in the company of these two time and again, encouraged them both, planted items in the paper—oh, don’t try to pretend that you haven’t! And you’ve played with us, as if we were your own personal set of marionettes. You know,” I said, struggling to sort through my various emotions, all jumbled up like a ball of twine, “I was once nearly sold to a man. In New Orleans. Colonel Wood was offered five hundred