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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2014, 384 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2015, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kate Braithwaite
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Still, Mary Darling, with that gleam in her eyes, and so daring. For every performance, she dressed as a man, in black evening wear, jacket and pants and a red cravat. I was four when I first met her, then quickly five. And she was—what? Nineteen? Twenty-two? She was a magician, she could have been a hundred and who would have known the difference? Those eyes, that sly, ironic smile. I sometimes imagined that she would wave a wand, or snap her fingers, and I would suddenly be six feet tall and exactly her age, and off we would go to some hidden isle in the Pacific. But a dream, that's all it was.
The third floor held its share of exhibits, and it also held the entrance to the theater. When I first arrived, the theater was of modest size— but Barnum was always expanding, and, before long, the theater was large enough to seat three thousand. It was there that his actors presented plays, and there, too, on the enormous stage, that the acrobats, fire-eaters, and aerialists appeared, and the Kiowa and Cheyenne chiefs from the Far West, when they visited New York.
And on that stage, I offered my song-and-dance routines, wearing a kilt when I danced my Highland fling, and a three-cornered hat when I sang my Yankee Doodle song. Barnum taught me. He gave me the words, the timing, the fancy foot movements, and that special way of leaping out, front and center, as the curtain rose—
Yankee Doodle ride your horse,
Yankee Doodle randy—
Be quick to kiss
the pretty girls
Sweet as sugar candy.
I was a fast learner, good at picking up the moves. Quick, too, with the songs, the jokes, the puns, the wicked smiles.
At five I often drank a few sips of wine with my dinner. On my sixth birthday I lit a cigar onstage, and the audience out there, the mothers and kids, the laborers, shopkeepers, immigrants just off the boat—they loved it. Even the clergymen, who considered me a gift from God. I could read and write, add and subtract, and even had a few words of French, the bad ones, which I'd learned not from Kwink but from a janitor who'd grown up in Marseille.
"Precocious" is the word our family doctor had for me. My parents used that word often, whenever they couldn't think what to make of me. But the truth of the matter is that in some ways I was, at times, just plain bad, with a will of my own and a mind full of mischief.
I already knew something about sex, the general idea of it. At home, in Bridgeport, I'd seen my mother and father performing with great zest under the sheets, in their creaky wooden bed, which my father had made with his carpenter's tools. That's what he was, a carpenter. When he was in bed with my mother, she moaned, making an awesome sound, and it was a bit of a while before I understood that her moaning had nothing to do with pain.
"Get out there and kill them dead," Barnum would say, as I pulled on my sailor suit for the three o'clock performance. At the piano, Old Tom, an African from Madison Street, banged away at the keys, and I jumped out from the wings and danced the hornpipe. Always, the crowd went wild. Applause, foot stomping. Shouts of bravo. They fussed over me because I was small and because I was perfectly formed, all the parts of me correctly proportioned—head, torso, arms, legs. But mostly, I think, they liked me because I reminded them of themselves. Looking at me, they knew that the self inside their bodies was something small, needing help. It could be hurt. It could be stepped on and bruised. So I was them, and they, in a sense, were me, all of us part of the same tongue-twisting song.
When Barnum thought I was ready, he took me out on the road for twoor three-day stints in New Jersey and lower Connecticut. It was a dizzying swirl—the faces, the people, the smiles and laughs as I sang and danced, and offered the impersonations that I learned from Barnum. I was Napoléon, wordless, brooding after Waterloo. I was Ajax, waving a sword, and Hercules struggling to lift an immense rock, which was papier-mâché, light as a feather. Or Samson in a ragged leopard skin, flexing my biceps—a joke, of course, because at fifteen pounds, what muscles did I have?
Excerpted from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rinaldi. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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