The Absurdity in the Room
“WON’T YOU SIT DOWN?” asked Margaret.
She had not needed to point me to the chair in which I now found myself sitting, at ease despite the strangeness of the room. Mine was the only chair, indeed the sole furnishing, that could accommodate a person of my size. The maroon horsehair sofa, the armchair, the carved walnut pedestal table, the cupboard, the plates, cups, and saucers were suitable for her diminutive figure. I was the eccentric, the absurdity in a room bright with fripperies and chintz, rose carpets and claret drapes. I felt as if I were sitting in a private box in a theater where a play was about to be performed for my exclusive enjoyment. In my seemingly big chair, I was Gulliver lording it over the Lilliputians or Barnum’s Cardiff Giant among the gawkers. Neither by word nor gesture did Margaret acknowledge the topsy-turvy universe in which we two were speaking to each other as if nothing were amiss. For her, nothing was amiss.
“What a charming room!” I may have sniffed (I hope not) as one might do upon entering a circus dressing room and detecting a lingering odor of greasepaint and sweat.
“Thank you, Ellen.”
“You must be very comfortable here,” I said, instantly going red in the face. I was afraid she would infer from my remark my belief that she must be uncomfortable outside of her “doll’s house.” She did not make an issue of it. Relieved, I glanced at a copy of the New-York Tribune lying open on the table to the theatrical notices, one of which announced the death on July 15 of Charles Sherwood Stratton, or Tom Thumb, as he was universally known. Margaret had drawn a heart in black ink around the engraved portrait of the little man.
“India or China?” she asked, rising from the sofa as gracefully as any society lady.
“China would be grand.”
She smiled and, with a flounce of her pretty curls, went into the kitchen, which I had no doubt was furnished with a miniature sink and stove. I listened to the rush of water surging into the teapot and the clatter of spoons as I perused Tom Thumb’s obituary, learning that he had been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1838, and after six months of ordinary development and having attained a height of twenty-five inches, he stopped growing.
Margaret returned from the kitchen, carrying a child’s tea service on a tin tray illustrated with dogs wearing derby hats and holding in their paws glasses of beer—the sole reminder in an otherwise-decorous setting that the events in my small hostess’s life would not be reported in the society pages. Setting the Tribune aside, she put the tray on the table and poured the fragrant tea into both our cups.
“Do you take sugar?”
“Yes, please.”
“Milk?”
“Not for me, Margaret, thank you.”
Her preparations complete, we sipped the hot tea awhile in silence.
“Did you read poor Tom’s obituary?”
She took me by surprise, and I put down the tiny cup abruptly, causing tea to slosh over its gold rim and into the saucer. “Margaret, I hope you don’t mind.”
“That you took advantage of my absence to read a newspaper? Heavens no, child! I would have hidden it in a drawer if I’d intended to keep it a secret.”
I was taken aback by her having referred to me as a “child,” but looking at her face, I was reminded by the lines time had inscribed there that she was older than I, who was twenty-seven. She would have been in her forties—perhaps the same age Tom Thumb was when he passed on to a miniature heaven: forty-five. At some point, according to his obituary, he had begun to grow again, and at the time of his death, he was three feet tall.
“We called him ‘General,’ you know,” said Margaret—wistfully, I thought. “He was a dear man.” She stood, crossed the room, and beckoned me to join her by the wall, where, at the level of her gaze, a row of framed photographs hung. “This is Tom and Lavinia. It was taken on their wedding day, February 10, 1863. I was the maid of honor. Do you see me here?”
She pointed to a young woman wearing a dress trimmed in satin and silk rosebuds, her dimpled arms visible beneath puffed sleeves, the circumference of her ample skirt kept rigid by an old-fashioned farthingale. Long curls framed her chubby face, which wore a frown. One could easily mistake the bridal party for three people of common stature, if it were not for the Episcopal minister seen towering above them.
“Ten thousand people attended the reception at the Metropolitan Hotel. We greeted them, standing on top of a grand piano, as the Band of Caledonian Pipers played. Afterward, we went to Washington to meet President Lincoln. He was so tall, he had to stoop to shake our hands. He said the fault was his for having stretched the truth more than was good for him. General Tom became a wealthy man. He owned a steam yacht, a wardrobe of elegantly tailored clothes, and a summer house built to suit him on one of Connecticut’s Thimble Islands. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral.”
Margaret sighed, and a shadow stole across her face.
“Tom used to say that he had willed himself not to grow,” she said after a pause.
“Whatever do you mean, Margaret?” I asked in astonishment.
“He liked to say that, having briefly lived among your kind—”
“My kind?”
“I beg your pardon, Ellen, but Tom always used to put it that way. He could be awfully proud.”
I thought Tom’s pride and his claim preposterous. How on earth could a body will itself to stop growing, and why would it?
“He said that six months as a normally developing infant had been time enough for him to conclude that ‘your kind,’ Ellen, were mean and shallow, and he decided to have no part of it.”
“What about you, Margaret?” I asked pettishly. “Did you will yourself to stop growing?”
“I really don’t recall. Tom had a remarkable memory. Besides, I was not half so smart as he. He was a deep thinker, you know. Very philosophical. He always said that the small people constituted a race of its own and that of the two races—yours and ours—ours was superior.”
I could not help feeling resentful toward Tom Thumb and, for a brief moment, Margaret and her kind. I swallowed my indignation and conceded that General Tom might have been correct in his dark view of the majority of men and women, which the world considers normal.
The subject was in need of changing, and I did so by inquiring about another photograph hanging on the wall.
“Is that Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“Yes. He often came to visit Father to discuss Transcendentalism. Sometimes Henry Thoreau would come to Worcester, as well.”
The photograph showed a young Margaret sitting on Emerson’s lap. I could have laughed aloud at how the scene resembled a ventriloquist’s act on the stage of a music hall.
“Mr. Emerson was a very great man and an even deeper thinker than General Tom,” she said, her eyes transfixed by a hypnotic light flaring on the pane of glass. “We all loved him.”
I coughed twice to remind her of my presence.
“I do recall Father’s asking him once if the reason for my stunted growth could be filial disobedience. ‘She is a good child,’ said Father, ‘but inclined to be headstrong.’
“Mr. Emerson smiled and said, ‘I believe Nature to be unfinished and that it will forever be tinkering with its creations, in order to ensure that no single form or design becomes fixed and absolute and, therefore, by immutability, proves unable to respond to a universe whose being is one of ceaseless change.’
“Tom loved to hear me tell that story. ‘We are Nature’s chosen scouts in the vanguard of humanity,