The Thunder of Giants Read online

  She had to bite down on the reply. She couldn’t admit it; she wouldn’t. “Never mind,” she muttered, and she helped Rutherford stagger into the train.

  In the privacy of her berth, she crawled to the floor to nurse her aches and pains. In order to fit, she had to lie in an awkward way, bending her throbbing legs into a crooked shape. She barely noticed the discomfort. Her mind was rifling through the contents of her trunk in the hopes of finding something else that had once been her husband’s: a scrap of handwriting, a stray sock. There was nothing, of course. His belongings had all been handed down or given away. The blue shirt had been the only thing left.

  With a jerk, the train began to move, and Andorra shut her eyes to press out the light. Well, she thought, I wanted to leave Detroit behind. I have. She would cross into California with nothing of the past; she would arrive in Hollywood with swollen knees and a clean slate.

  PART THREE

  Love

  SEVEN

  The Top of the World

  New York City, 1863

  P. T. BARNUM’S AMERICAN MUSEUM towered over Broadway and Ann Street with the glory of a great cathedral. It was five floors of waxworks and trick dogs; it was a hundred rooms of living statues and industrious fleas. There were lectures and full-scale theatrical plays. There was a menagerie of exotic pets. There was an oyster bar and the hair of Pocahontas and the Cyclops’s retina floating in a jar. There were snow-white albinos, ink-dark aborigines, conjoined twins, a living skeleton, an army of miniature men. And, of course there was the thunder of giants: a trio of behemoths, each between seven and nine feet tall, who astonished visitors daily with their feats of strength. Yet on the first floor, inside the Great Lecture Hall, something far greater could be seen. Beyond the hall’s arched doorway, for the price of twenty-five cents, a visitor could see a girl, sixteen and a half years old and said to be eight feet tall. It was January 1863; she was thought to be the only lady giant in the world.

  By that frosted winter, this lady giant had been in New York for seven months. Since her opening night, her performance had never changed. The Great Lecture Hall was actually an elegant theater with a balcony, mezzanine, and tiered boxes for the upper class. Full-stage theatricals were known to occur there, but for this performance, no pageantry of costumes was needed—the lady giant was pageant enough. The performance always began with a clever juggler, who nimbly kept silver balls afloat while cracking jokes based on the news of the day. During that frozen January, the news was entirely about the Civil War. Far from New York, battles were happening in Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas. In the lecture hall, that deft juggler insulted the Confederates while maintaining a patriotic fervor to keep the fighting spirit high. Then, whenever he sensed he had outstayed his welcome, he would change his tone. Stepping onto center stage, he spoke in a grave voice that might have been shot from a gun.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you what you have all been waiting for—but please, no applause! Nothing but awed silence will do for this magnificent wonder! The book of Genesis tells us our world was once filled with giants, and today the Good Lord has given us an example of that magnificent breed in the form of a woman, nearly one hundred inches high. Remember, no applause! Hold your breath and marvel at the sight that is the Nova Scotia Giantess, Miss Anna Swan.”

  And there she was. Stepping out from behind a curtained portico at stage left, she was usually emerald-green from the neck down—her color of choice. She wore jeweled necklaces, and her dark hair, molded into a peak, sat high atop her head. Someone had worked hard to erase both her clumsiness and her Nova Scotia brogue. Her speech was as graceful as her movements: she had become the ideal. Stunned murmurs always shot through the crowd. Despite having paid to see a giantess, many did not believe that this was what they would see. Barnum was famous for his humbugs. Skeptics doubted that the Cyclops’s retina had really once been inside a Cyclops, but they could not doubt Anna Swan. This made her unique among the exhibits for the simplest of reasons. She was exactly as advertised; she was the real thing.

  The other giants could stand onstage and perform feats of strength, but Anna, as a woman, was expected to be more genteel. No one wanted to see her lift a cinder block over her head. Instead, she impressed the audience with her favorite hymn, singing in a pretty voice as her enormous goiter wobbled with the great precision of a violin. Then she gave a brief lecture on the history of Nova Scotia before being joined by a tiny dwarf in military dress (Barnum knew that a small boat always makes the ocean seem larger—and vice versa). Together, this unique pair enacted a scene from Macbeth. It was pure comedy to see the dwarf play the brutal Macbeth, but it was equally alarming to see his villainous wife portrayed with such seriousness that the absurd scene quickly ascended to solemnity. They always lightened the mood with a comic sketch about the dwarf’s hopes to fight in the war, after which Anna would sing “Amazing Grace,” making sure to dedicate the song to all the men fighting in the War of Rebellion.

  It was at this point in the performance that, on a blustery day in the second week of 1863, something happened that had not happened before. Glancing into the crowd, Anna caught sight of a familiar face, a dead ringer for a boy she had not seen since he had limped out of Tatamagouche nearly eight months before. A wet chuffing sound escaped her lips. The doppelgänger sat near the stage in the blue uniform of a Union soldier, but it was clear that his fighting days were done. The left sleeve of his jacket was folded at the elbow, with the cuff pinned to the shoulder; if it was Gavin Clarke, then he would never thread a needle again.

  Someone coughed. Only ten seconds of silence had gone by, but that’s a lifetime on the stage.

  She recovered her voice. It was custom, for her finale, that she answer the one question everyone wanted to ask. She called out for an “average girl” who would volunteer to step onto stage so their measurements could be compared. On this January afternoon, an ugly young schoolteacher was pushed into the limelight. As the grotesque thing made her way to the footlights, Anna turned back to the crowd to find a second volunteer who would have the honor of taking the measurements themselves.

  She stared at the one-armed boy who looked like Gavin Clarke.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “At this time I’d like to call upon another volunteer to take the measuring rope in hand. Usually, I’m not so particular, but I’m feeling a little homesick today, and so I would like to add a little caveat. Would all those people who have come to us from Canada please stand?”

  Across the auditorium, a few dozen people rose from their seats. For a second, the one-armed soldier didn’t move. Then he rose, too.

  “How many of you are from my own colony of Nova Scotia?” she asked, voice shaking.

  Most of the people sat back down. Now there was just the one-armed soldier and a single obese man whose skin poked through his shirt. She wished she had never started this game. But there was nothing to do but see it through to the end.

  “And of the two of you, which of you has spent a morning walking across the frozen Northumberland Strait to Prince Edward Island?”

  The obese man fell away, and the one-armed soldier became the city on a hill: the eyes of the world were upon him. Anna’s heart sank. It was no mistake. By then, she was accustomed to seeing injured men in the crowd. She had seen bandages and hardened scars of blood; she had even seen men who had lost limbs. But none of these men had ever been anyone she knew, and in this moment the entire war, once so distant, came crashing through the roof with a cannonball’s speed.

  If pity could manifest itself, then Gavin would have clambered to the stage in a fog. He was barely twenty and had already given an arm to save a country that wasn’t even his.

  Anna took his only remaining hand, squeezing it with affection even as the tears came to the corners of her great brown eyes.

  “Tell them who you are,” she said softly.

  “Speak up!” yelled someone.

  “Tell us who you are!” Anna said l
oudly.

  “Sergeant Gavin Clarke, ma’am. Fortieth Infantry.”

  A whoop from the crowd—a patriot or someone else from the Fortieth? There was light applause, and Gavin waved his cap. Anna collected her strength. How many times had she thought of Gavin since coming to New York? Yet never once had she pictured him with anything worse than a broken nail. She had thought him untouchable, an Achilles without a heel.

  “I can see you’ve given a lot for this war,” she said. She regretted it at once. A dumb thing to say. Absurd and idiotic.

  “I gave all I could give,” Gavin said. “I just wish I hadn’t left my arm in Virginia.”

  He winked even as a nervous laugh went through a part of the crowd. Anna covered her mouth to swallow another cry. A new thought had come to her. What if he couldn’t take her measurements? Had she singled him out just to humiliate him?

  “Do you think you can help us take some measurements, Sergeant?” she asked nervously.

  “I’m sure I can manage,” he said.

  So she handed him the measuring rope. The dwarf reappeared with a stool, and Anna took her place in front of it. Gavin climbed on top, moving with care, wincing slightly as he aggravated the pain in the arm that appeared to stop just above the elbow. He held the edge of the rope to the top of her hair, and let the rest drop. He called out the result (“Ninety-five inches!”) before stepping down to measure the hideous schoolteacher. Then he wrapped the rope around Anna’s waist and called out the result again (“Fifty-two inches!”). In a flash of inspiration, he used his singular arm to his advantage. His thumb was still marking the length of Anna’s waist, and instead of measuring the schoolteacher, he circled the schoolteacher, wrapping the rope around her. This created a rather dramatic effect: the rope went two and a half times around the woman’s body, thereby demonstrating the true enormity of the Nova Scotia Giantess without a single word.

  The audience hooted and broke into applause. Gavin smiled broadly, and Anna thought she saw the actor’s triumph, the great thrill of success.

  Anna curtsied to the crowd and then to her volunteers. The schoolteacher was already darting off the stage, but the one-armed sergeant lingered to return the rope. This allowed Anna the chance to lean down and leave a whisper in his ear: “Stay in the Hall. I’ll send someone to get you after the show.”

  After her bows, she paused long enough to give instructions to the juggler before slipping through the curtained portico. Beyond it was a spiraling staircase that ended at the Top of the World, her name for her fifth-floor rooms that afforded a glorious view of the city below. But Anna didn’t get as far as the top of the stairs. Emotion overtook her long before, and she fell into the shadows as tears filled her throat. She was holding a lantern, but the light went out, and in the dark she saw Gavin’s arm, lying in the field, left behind like a lost coat.

  She heard movement. There came the light of a torch, and then a one-armed shadow passed. He brushed right past her, walking carefully to keep his balance, for there was no way for him to hold onto the wall. She called his name and rose out of the dark. Because he was on the higher step, they were suddenly eye to eye. She could not help it: she fell back into tears even as she threw her arms around him.

  “Your poor, poor thing.”

  But her words were lost in his howl: she had squeezed his bad arm. She released him at once, flushing red with shame as she recalled the other scream she had caused just after cracking his foot nearly eight months before. Why was she always causing him pain?

  “Damn and double damn!” he cried. But the fury did not stay in his face: in hospital, Gavin Clarke had learned to swallow his complaints. “It’s not too bad,” he whispered. “I’m hoping it’ll grow back.”

  He told her how a pair of Confederate bullets had lodged in his arm. Gangrene had set in, and two months ago the doctors had lopped off the arm. Even now the wound was still swaddled and sore.

  She brought him to the Top of the World. Several suites on this floor had been designed to house Barnum’s thunder of giants, and the tremendous furniture met all of Anna’s peculiar specifications. In her sitting room, she left him to drown in one of the enormous chairs while she slipped into the bedroom to clean her face. She was determined not to cry again. The last thing he needed was pity. She splashed water on her cheeks and wiped her eyes clean.

  “I’m glad you remembered me,” he called from the other room.

  “Does that really surprise you?”

  “I don’t know. So much has happened, it feels like a lifetime ago.”

  “Two lifetimes,” she replied. A year ago she was at the Normal School feeling decidedly un-normal. Now she was a star attraction and Gavin was a man without an arm. Was it even possible? She returned to the other room, wondering if even now he might prove to be an illusion. This was Barnum’s world, after all. Nothing was ever what it seemed.

  Slowly, almost as if she herself was unsure of the narrative, she told him all that had happened since he had limped out of Tatamagouche. With her parents in tow—a mother elated, a father sour as rot—she had journeyed to New York through a magnificent combination of wagons, boats, trains, and, for one brief hour, a reinforced canoe. They had been fearful of everyone they met. It was wartime, after all, and on the steamship it had been impossible to tell the travelers from the spies. Only Anna herself could not be mistaken for anything other than what she was; only she had been the young woman who towered over the sea. In New York, a carriage drawn by two magnificent Clydesdales had carried them through the dirty streets toward the corner of Broadway and Ann. “From New Annan to Ann!” Anna had said to Ann Swan, and even her growling father had to admit there was something auspicious in this strange concordance of Annans and Annas and Anns.

  Her father handled the negotiations of her contract with P. T. Barnum, who turned out to be a dapper man with a plump face, curly hair, and a nose as soft as a spot of shit. Alexander Swan demanded draconian terms. His daughter was to be provided with room, board, and wardrobe. She was to be given a female attendant, at Barnum’s expense. Her education was not to be neglected. And she was to be paid in gold. (The war meant Alexander didn’t trust America’s paper money.)

  “I think he thought he would sabotage me,” Anna told Gavin. “I think he expected Barnum to turn him down and send me home.”

  But Barnum agreed to every condition. Anna still remembered the way her father’s jaw had gone slack even as her mother had swallowed a laugh. When her parents finally left, Alexander predicted that Anna would follow within the month. Anna replied by holding her father close and crushing him tight against her giant breast. “I want this,” she told him, quoting her Jane Eyre. “I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better.”

  Thus began her life in New York as one more crack in Barnum’s thunder of giants. As promised, Barnum had supplied her with a tutor, a dour thing who had erased Anna’s brogue and worked to instill nothing but good sense and decent morals. Yet the bulk of her time was spent serving as chaperone, for almost at once Barnum’s trio of male giants had viewed her as the water sent to slake their thirst. They fell over her and fought to win her affections. Colonel Routh Goshen—every inch of the name was a Barnum creation—plied her with flowers. Jean Bihin, the enormous Belgian, gave her both chocolate and language lessons. And there was Angus MacAskill, the behemoth from Cape Breton. Coming from Canada, with a Nova Scotian brogue of his own, he seemed to believe no seduction was needed. To MacAskill, the winning of Anna’s heart was a fait accompli.

  All of this attention had been wondrous, until Anna realized that she had fallen victim to the same curse that had struck Helen of Troy: men were fighting for her solely because of her looks. If she were any shorter, they would have looked the other way.

  “Surely you can see yourself loving one of them,” said Gavin.

  Anna shrugged. None of them were interested in her ideas; not one of them had even read Jane Eyre. Still, she understood the practicality of such an arra
ngement. A marriage to Jean Bihin or Angus MacAskill had a certain symmetry to it. She would be a bookend finding its mate.

  A sound at the door caused them both to turn. It was Miss Eaton, the tutor and chaperone who had helped turn Anna from a farm girl into one of Barnum’s star attractions. She was nineteen but built like a fourteen-year-old boy. A puritanical girl of strong Hoosier stock, she believed in propriety above all things. Because of this, Anna knew she would think it scandalous that her charge had spent fifteen minutes alone with an unmarried man. But Miss Eaton’s disapproving glare melted when she saw Gavin’s kepi on his lap; it vanished altogether when she noticed the pinned sleeve of Gavin’s coat.

  “You brave soul,” said the girl. “You have our sincerest gratitude for everything you’ve done.”

  “The doctor did most of the work,” said Gavin. “I just drank whiskey and looked away.”

  Miss Eaton frowned in confusion. She had not a humorous bone in her body.

  “Forgive me,” said Gavin. “Gallows humor. A consequence of the war.”

  “This is Sergeant Clarke,” Anna said. “He’s an old friend.”

  Miss Eaton was still staring in sorrow at Gavin’s pinned sleeve. “You’ll come back, I hope,” she said “We should convince Mr. Barnum to let you give a lecture on your experience.”

  “Actually, I did want to speak to Mr. Barnum about something. It’s the other reason I came today. I was hoping Annie could work me an introduction.”

  “Of course,” said Anna. “Is it about money? I’m sure he could find you work.”

  “Nothing like that. I’m still in the army. I’m fairly mobile, so they have me working as an attendant at the hospital. That’s what brought me here. Believe it or not, I’m actually one of the lucky ones. There are men who are bedridden and full of pain. I was hoping Mr. Barnum might allow some of his attractions to come down and raise their spirits.”