Ana Swift

I had to laugh at the room, with its too-small chair and an oval mirror hung the height of my chest. It was a new room nested inside an old building, with a drift of sawdust in one corner and sap pearling from the walls. A window, thankfully, but not facing Broadway. And the ridiculous bed, like a toy to me.

It’s a bed like any other. I knew it would break from the moment I saw it, so why did I even lay down? I can hear your voice even now. I can see the three of us in the kitchen by the stove, all of us laughing, you into your hands, me with no sound, and he with his mouth hanging open. We were still unsure: How had it happened? Where did I get it? What would happen next? I could touch my hand to the ceiling. Mornings, I woke with my legs hanging farther off the edge of the bed, my bones already a network of pain. You said if the bed’s too short, just take off the footboard! We used it for kindling. I will do the same thing here.

You would grab me by the waist with no warning, as if there was some urgency to your message, as if I didn’t have my whole life to understand what you said, to learn and hate your lesson again and again. You’re a mirror, Ana, for people to see themselves. And he would come up saying, Be prepared. Think ahead. Have what you will need. As if we control the world with foresight. As if you would have me believe the whole thing was planned. Do not look for yourself in others, Ana. But they will see themselves in you. I wanted to lunge out and take both of you in my arms. Already I was big enough to do that, big enough to know you were afraid for me. Here is the hammer and there is the bed. I am prepared. I have what I will need.

You would stand here, your eyes alight, peering up at me, proud that I don’t depend on the world for sustenance or for answers. But look at me. Just look. I am alone in this ridiculous room with a hammer in my hand, talking to my dead mother about broken things.

I could do nothing about the bed. I used crates to hold up the foot, but I knew it would crash down again. I had spent the day in alternating bouts of energy, unpacking, pacing, and fuming. Both my jars of sea salts had broken among my clothes so I could not even soak my feet. The train journey from Rochester had rattled my spine to such an extent that I felt each vertebra was about to pull free of the others. Sitting was no relief, nor was lying down, even if the bed had not broken. Dull reverberations echoed through the halls of my body. Doors slammed into my nerves, windows crashed together in gritty bone-gratings. Thank God my crates of Cocadiel’s Remedy hadn’t broken during the journey. I broke the seal on one of the cobalt bottles and held it between my thumb and forefinger to drink the bitter tonic.

At times throughout the day I doubted my decision to work without a manager. But each time this thought fluttered up, I experienced the subsequent, undeniable certainty that the way I had chosen was the only way I could proceed. At least with my career and my sanity, my life, intact. There was another way forward, the one that the sluggish waters of Lake Ontario had offered. But for now, I continued to work. I busied myself with some triviality before the memory of my recent debacle, the events that had led me to Barnum’s museum, could wedge itself into view. I could do things differently now, I reassured myself. But what, exactly? I was in business for myself only, with no one taking away what I earned. But what changes would I make?

I was saved from this paradox by a crisp knock at my door. When I opened it, I beheld a familiar sight: a woman, her prodigious eyebrows furrowed, standing with her hands on her hips. There is always a hirsute woman, whether you join a one-wagon show or the most grandiose collection of exotica. This one had her beard coiled neatly in a net that hung by loops from her ears.

“Please tell me you play whist,” she said.

“I do, as a matter of fact.”

“Then life is bearable.”

She extended a hand covered in long black hairs. “I’m Maud Kraike.”

Maud was forty years old and wound tight as a fiddle string. In the two minutes I spent talking with her she insisted we’d been in a show together seven years earlier in Halifax, and that I’d worn a medieval princess’ costume with a conical, veil-draped hat. I had no recollection of this, but it could have been true. She had arrived from Niblo’s Garden two weeks earlier, and despite the energetic recitation of her past, it held nothing new for either one of us. We did not need proof that our lives ran closely parallel.

“We still need a fourth. I got Mr. Olrick. But the Chinaman will never do. Never play whist with a Chinaman.”

“I see,” I said, not seeing at all. I was suddenly weary. Or, more likely, I had returned, after a short lapse, to the fact that I’d been weary for quite a long while.

When Maude had gone I lay down on the collapsed bed, propping my feet on a crate. My spine relaxed slightly, and I closed my eyes, hoping to fall asleep before it found its next complaint

You came to me every night, before I left you. Before you left me. You leaned over me before I slept. You stroked my face with the back of your hand. Ana, you said. Ana. We named you for Anastasia, your grandmother. And do you know why, what your name means? Why? What? Tell me. It means She Stands Up Again.

 

 

In Jones’ Medicine show they put me in a bizarre patchwork of furs over a chiton and girdle. They gave me a wooden shield and a helmet and called me Athena. More recently, during my time with Mr. Ramsay (I shall never call him by his Christian name again) he nearly always embellished me in some manner, usually with a high ladies top hat with a wedge of lace draped across the brim. Near the end of my tenure with him he instructed me to wear a horrible costume that he had made at his own expense: a girl’s picnic dress, all yellow daisies, ribbons, and a white lace pinafore. A walking juxtaposition, he said. As if I wasn’t one already.

There would be no costume here. The taxidermist delivered a letter from Barnum addressed to me. No costume, he said. Unless I wanted one. Wanted one. But speaking with the audience was part of my contract. The letter included no details about advertisement, when to expect my pay, and nothing about merchandise. Near the bottom of the page, though, one stipulation: For between three and five hours each day, Miss Swift will stroll among the visitors. For the remainder, there will be a booth in Gallery three on the second floor. His intention was to surprise the crowd with an exhibit outside its case. I will disconcert them first, and subsequently please them.

There would be no costume and so in the morning I put on my blue ombré dress and the gray shawl over my shoulders. A mist from the harbor gave the impression of frost, but the morning was strangely warm, much warmer than March at home. I tidied my hair in the small oval mirror. What will they see? Shoulders wider than their fathers’. Strides wider than they can jump. A hand strong enough to lift them off the ground, big enough to encircle their necks. Breasts they will imagine when they get home. A face. Yes, up there, what about the face? As white and expressionless as fog.

I picked up my bottle of Cocadiel’s Remedy from the small table and drank deeply.

By the time I had walked across the beluga gallery and down the many flights of stairs, the remedy had numbed the revolting pain in my legs, lightening my burden in its usual way.

At nine in the morning a sizable crowd already roamed the halls. I walked as slowly as I could bear. If I was to walk for three hours I needed a slow rhythm to sustain me. Also new shoes. In the past, my manager would arrange for a cobbler to visit me. I worried over how I would find one in the city. I feigned a charitable countenance, entered the portrait gallery, and listened as conversations trailed off in my wake.

The very tall, like the very beautiful, become accustomed to a certain range of response from those around them. Whereas the beautiful woman maneuvers in an arena of unprovoked deference, envy, illusion, and lechery, I remain mostly surrounded by the many incarnations of fear. I am an amusement in the marketplace, but delight is not usually the emotion I provoke. There is only one element of my work that has remained interesting to me over time and that is the infinitely variable expression of surprise.

A majority of people respond to my presence in familiar ways: a widening of the eyes, of course, and the related eyebrow movement; an audible intake of breath (I have never seen an exhale in these instances) that may or may not become a vocalization; some stutter in bodily movement, most often stopping completely or backing up, and occasionally an actual jump backwards.

Apart from these generalities, the average member of the public has one or two involuntary responses that, frankly, would surprise them if they could see them as I do. In Halifax I encountered a lady who, when she saw me as Athena began to violently pull her own hair and did not stop until her escort shielded her from my sight. One fellow seemed to take no notice of me at all. But as he stood with the others looking into my booth he suffered a delayed reaction: he crossed his left leg tightly over his right and leaned forward, twisted as a pretzel, as if he was overcome with the need to urinate, pointing at me while his hat toppled off his head.

And then there’s my favorite kind of surprise. It is that instance when a person tries his hardest not to show a change in expression at all. This particular, temporary flatness in the eye and stiffening of the neck may be the only symptoms, but they are enough to give him away. I find this response strangely heartbreaking: as if by denying a reaction he is denying reality itself in a small, futile attempt at self-protection in an uncertain world. Then there are always the faints, the yelps, the clutching at friends’ hands, the jump back, the handclap, the run-away, the simple laugh, the blush, the hoot, the horror.

 

The problem of my True Life History had bothered me since my arrival. I hadn’t brought any copies of my old one, an absurdly gothic melodrama which recounted my “early life” in the remote Hebrides, where I was apparently raised by a clan of druids whose tendency to use me as a centerpiece for cultic invocations partially accounted for my stature. Mr. Ramsay had spent days composing it, and the pamphlet sold well. The public must have souvenirs, and fabricated accounts of my origin seemed to please them very much.

There had been other True Life Histories before the Hebrides story, a new one every year or every time I changed managers. The only one I was ever particularly fond of was the first. The manager who wrote it was not an educated man, but he owned a copy of Tabart’s Jack and the Bean-Stalk and decided to invent me as the ogress in his own interpretation of the fairy tale. She was an awful character; he dressed me in rags and a yarn wig. My props included a hen and golden egg, a small harp, and, when he was available, a dwarf who agreeably played the boy Jack in our crude skit.

What new story would I now invent? I had never written a True Life History myself and I had to come up with something before my booth was finished. But the prospect of writing it irritated me in the extreme; it gave me the feeling that I was falling for some kind of prank, even though I knew it was those who would part with their money for the pages who were the fools.

 

I entered the world an average size; my mother, a missionary’s wife, held me easily in her arms on the deck of the ship that carried us to the jungled shore of South America, which was to be our home for as long as the Lord willed it. Safely under God’s wing, we had no idea what terrors we’d soon encounter, and what black magic would be incanted upon us.

 

Or perhaps:

 

My father guided my mother down the gangway onto the rough-hewn pier that led into the jungle with one arm around her shoulders and the other gently touching her heavy belly. They were relieved that the baby had not arrived on the ship; little did they know that this gestation would be the longest the world had ever known; the birth of such a monstrous baby would be so gruesome that my father, the most devout soul in South America, would lose his faith in God. At my mother’s funeral he gave me to the black nurse who had attended the birth-murder. It was she who I would call mother, and, after the mission burned and my father’s head rotted on a wooden stake beside the ruins of his church, it was with her that I fled to my second life in the jungles of Surinam.

Horror sells, but maybe this was too much? I put down my pencil and rubbed my eyes. I should just hire someone to write it. I could speak to Barnum’s ad man, what was his name? He could recommend someone, and I would be rid of this terrible task. The True Life History nagged at me incessantly. Without a story, however full it was of nonsense, I was just an oversize body on display.

I sat on the north edge of the rooftop garden, half-hidden in the shadow of the kitchen. Under low clouds that threatened rain, about a hundred museum patrons wandered the rooftop promenade. An umbrella vendor would soon appear, and some of the restaurant staff had already started to unfold one of the large tents that could stand over a section of tables. A crowd had gathered around a white-suited juggler wearing a Harlequin mask who I could tell was a woman. She juggled well; her seven gold balls cascaded in a perfect circle. She was probably French. I scanned her audience, wondering if she worked with a disguised accomplice who gently robbed the enchanted crowd.

My first act on Earth was to destroy my mother; By the time I could read I knew that most of literature’s lessons and pleasures did not apply to me. By the time I reached Womanhood, my punishment was fully realized: I was eight feet tall.

A shadow crept over my paper and I covered the scrawl with my arm.

“May I?” Thomas Willoughby, slouching and spectacularly unkempt, gestured to the seat next to mine.

“By all means. I’m just waiting for my lunch to arrive.”

Thomas sat heavily, and crossed his grubby hands in front of him. “What are you writing, a letter?”

“Just a story to sell at my booth.”

“Fabricated?”

“Of course. But I’m tired of it.” I folded the paper and placed it under my water glass.