Steven Millhauser - The Barnum Museum - Stories

We who are not eremites, we who are not enemies, return and return again to the Barnum Museum. We know nothing except that we must. We walk the familiar and always changing halls now in amusement, now in skepticism, now seeing little but cleverness in the whole questionable enterprise, now struck with enchantment. If the Barnum Museum were to disappear, we would continue to live our lives much as before, but we know we would experience a terrible sense of diminishment. We cannot explain it. Is it that the endless halls and doorways of our museum seem to tease us with a mystery, to promise perpetually a revelation that never comes? If so, then it is a revelation we are pleased to be spared. For in that moment the museum would no longer be necessary, it would become transparent and invisible. No, far better to enter those dubious and enchanting halls whenever we like. If the Barnum Museum is a little suspect, if something of the sly and gimcrack clings to it always, that is simply part of its nature, a fact among other facts. We may doubt the museum, but we do not doubt our need to return. For we are restless, already we are impatient to move through the beckoning doorways, which lead to rooms with other doorways that give dark glimpses of distant rooms, distant doorways, unimaginable discoveries. And is it possible that the secret of the museum lies precisely here, in its knowledge that we can never be satisfied? And still the hurdy-gurdy plays, the jugglers’ bright balls turn in the air, somewhere the griffin stirs in his sleep. Welcome to the Barnum Museum! For us it’s enough, for us it is almost enough.

I was tense, irritable, overworked; the city stifling, my nerves stretched taut; life was a foul farce with predictable punchlines; things were not going well between Claudia and me; one morning in early September I threw a suitcase in the back of the car, and toward dusk I came to the village of Broome. A single street wound down to the darkening cove. The brochure had shown sunny red-and-white buoys lying against piles of slatted lobster pots, with brilliant blue water beyond, but tomorrow would be time enough for that. I expected no miracles; I wasn’t young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn’t escape my troubles by changing the view from my window. But I hoped for a little respite, do you know, a little forgetfulness, and perhaps a freshness of spirit, too. Was it asking so much? At the bottom of the street I rolled down my window and breathed the sharp chill air, drew it deep into my lungs. The brochure had shown a girl in a white bathing suit lying on a golden beach, but if the season was over, what was that to me? I needed the cleansing air, the purifying otherness, of Broome. The inn was a rambling many-gabled Victorian with a broad front porch and paired brackets under the eaves. It stood near the top of the hill, on a lane off the winding street of shops. And if the lamplit sign on the sloping lawn said OCEAN GABLES, what was that to me? Claudia would have found the perfect words for the sign, with its black iron lighthouse screwed into the wood. Claudia would have had something to say about the rockers on the porch, the old brass chandelier over the mahogany dining table, the square stairpost with its dark globe, the carpeted creaking stairs, the framed engraving on the landing (a little girl in a bonnet embracing a Saint Bernard), the ruffled pink bedspread, but Claudia hadn’t smiled at me in a month. I was here alone.

I slept well enough, not well, but well enough, and woke almost refreshed to a gray morning. Downstairs a brisk woman in a half apron was clearing the table in a small room off the main dining room. Her apron had a design of purple plums, red apples, and yellow pears, all with stems and little leaves. A white-haired couple sat at one table, sipping heavy-looking cups of coffee. “Am I late for breakfast?” I asked in surprise; it was 8:45. The brisk woman hesitated and glanced sharply at a blue wooden clock shaped like a teapot. “I can fix you up something,” she said, banging a knife onto a saucer. I sat down at a table covered with a clean white tablecloth with crisp fold-lines. Despite the slightly unpleasant note, the breakfast when it came proved generous — a tall, fluted glass of orange juice, two eggs with bacon, two slices of toast with blackberry jam, a yellow porcelain pot of superb coffee — and I rose in a buoyant mood, determined to make the best of the gray day.

Outside it was drizzling lightly, barely more than a mist. I turned up the collar of my trench coat and walked along the lane to the steep street that curved down to the water. Most of the shops had the look of houses, with curtained windows above the converted main floors. Between the shops on the shore side of the street I caught glimpses of grass, cove, and stormy sky. Once, through a large window containing giraffes and trains, I saw an open doorway, and through the doorway another window, with a view of rushing clouds. It was as if the shop were flying through the sky, like Dorothy’s house in the tornado. On the other side of the street I passed winding roads of white clapboard houses with bracketed porch posts, bay windows, and gingerbread along the gables. It was a village meant for brilliant sun and hard-edged shadow, for sharp rectangles of blue between the shingled shops. But what was it to me that the sun didn’t shine, that a cold drizzle matted my lashes and trickled down my neck? I wasn’t out for sun. I was here because it was not there, I was here because it was anywhere else, because Broome was — well, Broome; and I was set on taking it as it was, in dazzle or drizzle.

I stopped at every shop window, every one. I studied the realtor’s corkboard display of slightly blurred black-and-white photographs of houses in sun-dappled woods, I browsed in the window of the garden shop with its baked-earth flowerpots and shiny green hoses and country-humor lawn ornaments, including a pink wooden piglet and a fat woman bending over and showing her polka-dot underpants, I paused under the awning of the stationer’s to examine a table that offered half-price notepads stamped with treble clefs and called Musical Notes, gigantic pencils as thick as towel bars, and pencil sharpeners shaped like typewriters, mice, and black shoes. I admired the striped pole turning in a misted tube of glass and the melancholy barber with heavy-lidded eyes who stared out the window at the rain and me. I studied the ice cream parlor, the grocery store, the drugstore with its display of rubber-tipped crutches and back-to-school specials. I passed two gift shops and entered a third. I like gift shops; I like the variety of invention within a convention of rigorous triteness. I looked at the flashlight pens that said BROOME; the little straw brooms with wooden handles that said BROOME; erasers shaped like chipmunks, rabbits, and skunks; little slatted lobster pots containing miniature red plastic lobsters; tiny white-and-gray seagulls perched on wooden piles the size of cigarettes; porcelain thimbles painted with lighthouses; little wind-up kangaroos that flipped over once and landed on their feet; foot-high porcelain fishermen with pipes and yellow slickers; red wax apples with wicks for stems; a rack of comic postcards, one of which bore the legend LOBSTER DINNER FOR TWO and showed two lobsters in bibs seated at a table before plates of shrimp; black mailboxes with brass lobsters on them; sets of plastic teeth that clacked noisily when you wound them up; a bin of porcelain coin banks shaped like lobster pots, Victorian houses with turrets, and mustard-covered hot dogs in buns; and a basket of red, blue, and green brachiosauruses. When I stepped out of the gift shop I saw that the sky had darkened. I was more than halfway down the main street of Broome and it was not yet eleven in the morning. I didn’t know what to do. I passed a window filled with watches, two of which formed the eyes of a cardboard mouse. I passed a window with a white crib in which slept a red cotton lobster and a polar bear. The rain began to fall harder. The steep sidewalk turned sharply, and at the end of the street I saw wet grass, a stretch of slick dirt with pools of trembling rainwater, a gray pier leading into gray water.