Moses’s face fell. Barnum sensed him trying to rally.
“I think you could exhibit it here to great success,” Moses said. There was a little touch of desperation now, the need to make sure the trip from Boston was justified. “People want to believe in mermaids.”
Barnum knew, better than anyone, that human tendency to want to believe, to want to see the extraordinary. He even knew that people sometimes enjoyed humbugs. All that business in the New York papers about winged men on the moon seen through a telescope! Everyone had believed it, and no one had really minded when it turned out it wasn’t true.
That was because as much as folk wanted to believe, they couldn’t help doubting. If they kept themselves in a state of belief mixed with a little healthy skepticism, then they could never be wrong. Nobody liked to be wrong. Most people would rather be humbugged than be flat wrong. If they were tricked, then it wasn’t their fault, and they could always say they’d never really believed in the humbug anyway.
He could probably make something of this stuffed monkey Moses had brought him—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d made something out of nothing—but he couldn’t deny that he was disappointed.
He’d wanted something spectacular. This was not spectacular.
“What if we put a girl in a tank with a fish costume on her bottom half?” Barnum said to Levi. “We could place her in with the fishes and the whale skeletons. You have to believe mermaids are real if she’s right there with all the other sea creatures.”
Levi contemplated the idea for a moment before shaking his head in regret. “Bound to have some churchgoers complaining about indecency if you had a girl swimming bare-chested in a tank.”
Barnum waved that away, warming to his idea. “We can cover her up with seashells or some such thing. That will make the church ladies happy.”
“What about my mermaid?” Moses asked. Disappointment had settled on his shoulders like a cloak.
Barnum knew Moses was thinking of the long journey from his Boston museum, seemingly for nothing if Barnum didn’t exhibit the monkey-fish in New York.
“I’ll think on it,” Barnum said. “We might be able to use it in the exhibit with the girl. The body of one of her ancestors or some such.”
Moses brightened a little. Barnum could tell he was pleased that his trip wouldn’t be wasted.
“If you’re going to use a girl in a tank,” Moses said, clearly in better spirits now, “you ought to use one from somewhere far away. That way the girl’s family won’t go to the papers and expose you.”
“Even with that I’m not so sure this would work,” Levi said. “How long can a girl hold her breath underwater? And you’d be lucky to find one who can swim. Most women can’t, you know. I don’t think most men can, come to that.”
“You’re down on all my plans today, Levi,” Barnum said, frowning at him.
“Dropping a girl in a big bucket of seawater isn’t the same as putting a shriveled old woman in a room and calling her Washington’s nanny. It’s a lot harder. You’d have to find a suitable girl, to start, and I’m pretty certain the sort who would swim half-naked in a tank isn’t the sort you want talking to the newspapers,” Levi said. His face was calm, but his tone was irritated. “And we got found out the last time, in the end. Imagine what everyone will say if Barnum tried to pull the wool over their eyes again.”
Barnum didn’t like this reminder of the way the Heth exhibit had turned out. They’d sold her as Washington’s nanny and it seemed in the end that she was not as old as advertised, but it really wasn’t Barnum’s fault. He’d been lied to in the first place. Levi ought not to be bringing it up in front of Moses, anyhow.
“Let me worry about the details,” Barnum said, frowning at Levi. “First thing is to find a girl who looks like she came out of the sea.”
“All you have to do is go up to northern Maine. There’s supposed to be a woman up there who really is a mermaid,” Moses said, laughing.
Barnum gave him a sharp look. “Whereabouts in Maine?”
“Why?” Moses asked.
“I might want to take a gander at the lady,” Barnum said. “See if the stories are true.”
“Come now, Barnum,” Moses said. “You can’t possibly believe that some widow who practically lives in Canada is a mermaid. It’s just a story told by fishermen to pass the time while they drink.”
“You can’t possibly believe that people will pay a dime to see a stuffed monkey-fish,” Barnum snapped. “Just tell me about the mermaid.”
Barnum listened closely as Moses told him about a woman who lived up the coast in a cottage by the sea. He said the villagers who lived near there noticed she seemed to come from nowhere and that she had lived for many years with her husband and had never grown older.
“That doesn’t mean she’s a mermaid. That might make her immortal, though,” Barnum said. “Or at least, we could say she’s immortal. Can’t really be immortal, of course.”
Of course, he didn’t say how intrigued he was by the story of the eternally young woman. After all, he’d been raised to believe that immortality occurred in the afterlife, when those who were chosen lived forever in heaven.
But the possibilities of this girl . . . She might make an even better exhibit than a mermaid would—imagine the scientists wanting to come and examine her! He’d make a fortune charging them for her hair and blood and whatever else they wanted to look at under their microscopes.
Of course, the trouble with Joice Heth had happened because he’d given his word about her autopsy. True, he hadn’t had to charge the public to watch it—that had made it impossible to suppress the truth that the lady was not as old as he’d claimed she was—but he couldn’t resist the chance. Barnum thought all publicity was good publicity, and even if folks thought he was a con artist, then at least they knew the name of Barnum.
“Or the lady is just a dab hand with her lotions and potions, and not an immortal at all,” Levi said.
“You’d have to be able to prove she’s lived as long as she says she has,” Barnum mused, thinking of Heth again. He’d been just as fooled by her papers as anyone else had, really. Of course he wouldn’t have exhibited the woman if he thought she was only 80 years old, not 161. “People don’t believe anything like that without papers and certificates and what-all.”
The trouble, too, was that a forever-young woman was a lot like saying an old black woman was older than she actually was. The public might not pay for the same humbug twice. And above all, Barnum wanted people to pay.
“But I haven’t told you the best part yet!” Moses said. It was clear from his manner that he didn’t think anything of this story but was enjoying the telling of it all the same. “One of the men who told me the story had heard it straight from a fisherman who claims he saw this woman shed her clothes on the beach at night and step into the ocean. Right after that she disappeared under the water. A few minutes later, he says, he saw the flash of her silver fin.”
“And how much whiskey had this fisherman drunk before he saw a girl turn into a fish?” Levi said.
Barnum wished Levi would stop interrupting and let the man finish his story.
“It wasn’t so much what he said, but what the villagers did after,” Moses said. “He came into town raving about what he’d seen under the moonlight. You’d expect that folk would be curious about a story like that, wouldn’t you? Even if it was only to scoff at?”
“Yes,” Barnum said. He had a feeling growing in his belly, a feeling that told him there was more to this than some tale that came out of a bottle. He’d learned over the years to trust that feeling.