Excerpt from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Once, I remember, before I became Tom Thumb and before we had that spacious new house, he came home with a large wooden ball painted gray and blue. We sat on the floor, rolling it back and forth to each other. It seemed that he was a happy man that day, and I, too, felt happy, waiting for the ball as it rolled toward me. It was one of those special moments, a moment that is always there for me—just the two of us, rolling the ball back and forth.


The days and months flipped by, and suddenly, at seventeen, I found myself in a year that was like a box of broken crackers—and near the end of that year, at the bottom of the box, nothing but maggoty crumbs. That was the year my father's drinking became such a problem that his brothers, my uncles, gathered around and persuaded him to go into an asylum to take the cure. It would be months, we knew, and it wouldn't be easy, but he would come out a happier man.

That's what we thought, and hoped for. But only three weeks after he went in, his heart gave out, and we lost him. It was crushing. Impossible. Zatagatooz and Zootagataz wrapped up together in a lopsided nightmare. Why, I wondered. Why?

It wasn't just the suddenness that caught me, but the finality—the swift, irreversible shutdown. It had never crossed my mind, when he went into the asylum, that he might not come home.

My mother used to sing—old songs from long ago—but I haven't heard her sing for quite some time. She says the worst thing that ever happened was that Barnum brought us to Europe, because it was there, in London, in Dublin, in Paris, in Brussels, that my father quit drinking beer and started with whisky, and it ruined him.

She keeps a picture of him on the ledge above the fireplace, in an oak frame. He's standing beside an empty chair in a photographer's studio, one hand resting on the back of the chair. So young he was, so fine and good-looking, and when I think of that picture, I wonder what might have been running through his mind at the moment when the shutter clicked. Did he have even the faintest suspicion that he would someday afford the new big house that he put up for us? Could he possibly have foreseen that Queen Victoria, by having me to the palace so many times, would contribute hugely to my success? And, in his darkest imaginings, did he have even the vaguest notion that he would drink himself to death?

After my father passed on, Barnum, in a way, became my father, taking care of me, showing me how to handle money and property. But in fact he had been a father to me even before that, ever since he discovered me. He chose my clothes, and told me what to say when I met Queen Victoria and all of the other royals. He fed me the puns and jokes that I used onstage, and taught me the songs that I sang. And he showed me around, taking me to Brady's for the photograph exhibitions, to Brooks Brothers for my street clothes, to Genin the hatter, to the Park Theatre to hear Ole Bull playing his violin.

Sometimes I thought of him as a father, and sometimes I thought of him as God. There were times, too, when I thought of him as the Devil, and times when he seemed just an ungainly, overblown clown, eager for the day when every tooth in his head would be Tiffany gold. Somehow, all of those things were mixed up in him—they were part of him, braided into his personality.


"Life is a road," my father used to say, "you move from here to there, from yesterday to tomorrow. Hope for a good horse and a good wagon, and pray the damn wheels don't fall off."

A road, yes, that's what it was. And if you're a dwarf, twenty-five inches tall, and life, your life, is a journey, how do you make your way on this busy, bumbling, bombastic highway? How to avoid being trampled and crushed?

Day and night I was still out there, on the move, and wondering— what next? What lies in wait around the far bend? And where, where, was the woman whose perfume I caught a whiff of in a dream one night? I touched her and she was full of wild laughter, with liquid eyes and lips full of magic, and long fingernails that carved deep into my chest. Was she, too, out there on that same crazy road, searching, and waiting?

Excerpted from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rinaldi. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.