Amelia waited just offstage. The theater was empty, but the restless excitement of the crowd outside could be heard despite the closed doors.
The tank, filled with seawater, sat in the center of the stage. It had a height of twenty feet and was approximately twenty-five feet across. Every human who saw it remarked on its size, but to Amelia it looked like a very small container compared to the ocean.
Behind the tank was a ladder that led up to a small platform that jutted over the water. A white screen hung just in front of the ladder, ending at the top of the glass. When Amelia climbed the ladder steps, her silhouette would be visible through the screen. The theater would use a limelight like the one Barnum had on the roof of his museum to attract visitors.
Amelia had seen these lights outside the museum at night. They were astoundingly bright, especially in a city lit only intermittently by gas. It seemed to her that there was often more light at night out in the country. In the city, the buildings huddled close and blocked out the stars.
When the limelight shone on the white screen, everyone in the audience would be able to see that Amelia was alone on the platform. There would be no trick with a second girl in a costume diving into the water just as Amelia reached the top of the water or some such thing. She would be in the light until she reached the screen, and then the light would shine through it.
Once there, she would remove her dress and dive into the water.
“Everyone will see a naked woman, but only for a moment,” Barnum had said when they discussed the show structure.
He rubbed his nose. “There’s just no avoiding this. I think if it’s very quick, then most folks will forget about it once they see you as a mermaid.”
He looked at her expectantly. Amelia realized he meant to preserve her modesty and that he was actually concerned that she might not want to be seen.
Amelia didn’t understand the human obsession with nudity as something sinful. It was particularly puzzling in light of most of the works of art she’d seen—almost all of these featured men and women in various states of undress, though Levi had told her they were “Greek and Roman and that was all right for them,” whatever that meant.
In any case, she could appreciate that Barnum was attempting to be kind for a change.
“I don’t mind,” she assured him. “Until I became human, nobody ever told me there was something wrong with my body.”
He appeared discomfited by this frankness, and Amelia realized she’d said the wrong thing again. Perhaps she was supposed to blush modestly and say she was troubled even if she wasn’t?
Amelia had carefully observed Charity Barnum over these weeks to see what was generally expected of women. All she’d found was that women spent a great deal of time saying they were pleased when they were not, smiling when they were not happy, and pretending their anger and frustration did not exist.
Jack had never expected this of her. He never wanted her to pretend to have feelings she did not have or to say something just to please him.
Having never troubled to do such things for her husband, she found the habit of being herself difficult to break.
Soon the doors to the hall would open and all the people outside would pour in. Barnum was among them, pretending to be an ordinary citizen curious about the Feejee Mermaid. His presence in the audience would ensure that no suspicion of association with the museum would come up prior to the show.
After the show ran for a week or so, Barnum would make a public offer to “Dr. Griffin” to house the mermaid at the American Museum for the benefit of the paying New York public. He was already arranging for a larger tank to be built in one of the saloons.
In this room would also be the awful mummy that Barnum’s friend Moses Kimball had brought from Boston. When Amelia saw it, she had gasped and turned her head away. It might not actually be a mermaid, but it still looked like a thing that had died in horrible pain. It did not even appear as well-preserved as the other dead things in the museum, like the elephant.
She did not think anyone could possibly believe that she and that dried “monkey-fish” were from the same family, but then humans showed an extraordinary willingness to believe absurdities that only made Amelia shake her head.
Amelia heard Levi’s steps behind her as he entered the wing of the stage. He looked, she thought, like a dandy. His waistcoat was striped, his hat was tall, his pants were checked, and he was nothing at all like the sober-faced and sober-dressed Levi Lyman she knew.
He’d grown out a very large and bushy beard over these last few weeks, not at all fashionable but deemed necessary. Levi had explained to her about Joice Heth, somewhat shamefacedly. Since he had been the public face of that hoax, it was important that no one suspect Dr. Griffin and Levi Lyman were the same person.
Dr. Griffin was said to be from the London Lyceum of Natural History. Levi had explained that London was across the sea in a country called England, and he had shown her pictures of the castle there from a large volume in the Barnums’ personal library.
She immediately decided that London was one of the first places she would see when she left Barnum’s employ. Amelia had never seen a castle. She’d asked if the castle was as big as the Park Hotel (the largest building in the neighborhood of the American Museum besides the museum itself), and Levi had laughed.
“You could put a whole bunch of Park Hotels inside a castle, especially that one,” he’d said, pointing to the picture.
He had also explained that he needed a different accent since he was supposed to be from a different country.
“Do I sound British?” he asked her, sounding very unlike himself.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, wondering why he asked such foolish questions sometimes. Then, because he looked disappointed, she added, “I imagine most people in the audience won’t know, either.”
That did not appear to comfort him. He said, in his regular voice, “I’ll go onstage first. I’ll tell the story of my expedition to the exotic waters of Fiji and how I encountered you while on a boat and convinced you to return to New York with me.”
They had changed this portion of the story at Amelia’s request, who objected to even the made-up implication that “Dr. Griffin” had caught her while out fishing.
Barnum and Levi thought this was because it implied she was an animal. The truth was that she couldn’t bear for any part of this lie to resemble her real life with Jack.
Jack was the truth; he’d caught her in a net but she chose to come back to him. This tale was not the truth, and Amelia felt that if they were going to lie, then they should lie about all of it.
“Then when I say, ‘Please observe, for the first time in the civilized world, the Feejee Mermaid,’ you’re to come onstage from this side and I’ll exit to the other side and then . . .”
“I know, Levi,” she said.
They’d practiced and practiced all of this numerous times. First they’d practiced on the theater stage in the American Museum—without the tank full of water, of course, but with the light and the ladder and the screen at the top. These rehearsals had essentially involved all the aspects of the show except the part where Amelia dove into the water.
In the last two days they had practiced in the Concert Hall itself, under the cover of strictest secrecy. Everyone was removed from the building, and guards were posted outside to ensure that no one tried to sneak in. Nothing could be worse in Barnum’s eyes than a member of the public catching a glimpse of her without buying a ticket first.
It had been necessary to have at least one session in the tank to ensure that Amelia could change when she was not actually in the sea. Barnum had not been willing to take Amelia’s word for it—“though a naked girl in a tank will probably cause just as much of a ruckus as a mermaid might,” he said.