The Swan Gondola (10 page)

Though she kept the parasol poised to batter me, she looked down at the dirt road in thought, slowing her step, sorting out all my rambling.

And then her arm
did
relax. She swung the parasol at her side, back and forth, and she looked at me briefly. She looked in my eyes, then up to my hair. She smiled at me, then returned her eyes to the ground. “
Violent-
eyed,” she said. “I think it was the
violent
-eyed trollop.”

“Oh?” I said, trying to seem easygoing, despite how my heart picked up to have her so near, speaking to me. “What would it mean to be violent-eyed?”

She shrugged. “Violent with anger?” she said. “Violent with immorality? Regret? I don't know. Maybe you're right. Violet-eyed makes more sense, I suppose. Even though my eyes are brown.”

“Even though your eyes are amber,” I corrected. I restrained myself from rattling off all the poetic allusions I'd come up with on the night I'd met her, all those lines likening her eyes to cinnamon and autumn and ginger.

“You must have watched me lose my head ten times today,” she said.

“You couldn't see me in there,” I said. “It was too dark. I could've been anybody.”

“You were always right up close,” she said. “Right in the lights.”

I held out the flower. “You forgot this,” I said.

“It's not mine,” she said, not taking it from me.

“It is,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It belongs to the girl who plays the girl who gets knifed by Jack the Ripper. She got a whole bucketful of flowers from a gent. She gave me the worst of the bunch.”

I sniffed at the peony. “It's not so bad,” I said. Despite the raggedy nature of the thing, its sweet stink was potent enough to give me a pinch of headache.

“Did your dummy run off?” she said, nodding toward my back.

“He's scared of the old lady,” I said. “Where'd she go, anyway?”

“She bets on the crickets in the fan-tan den,” she said. “The Chinese magicians keep a gambling hall after hours. You can even bet on the number of seeds in an orange if you want. They train crickets to fight in rice bowls.”

“I got no patience for crickets,” I said. “My room's noisy with them in summer. When they keep you up at night with their clicking, you dwell on every minute that you're not asleep.”

But why was I talking about the crickets in my attic? I was nervous, I guess, afraid of frightening her off. She seemed so skittish, so shy for an actress. We slowed to a stroll, and I kept my mouth shut. We began to cross the bridge that led from the midway to the New White City. Though the midway had gone dark behind us, the Grand Court still glowed. The buildings were silvery like moonlight.

“There's this one thing you do as Marie Antoinette that I love,” I said.

“What thing?” Cecily said.

“You touch at the bow at your shoulder,” I said. I touched her shoulder with the bloom of the peony. “You're straightening it, but you're also lingering on the ribbon, the feel of it. She's still vain, even as she walks to her death, but it's also something more tender than that, really. She's comforted by it, by the satin bow, isn't she?”

“Yes, maybe so,” she said.

“A smoke?” I said, stopping, holding out my pack of cigarettes.

Cecily stopped with me and stuck the parasol beneath her other arm. She touched the pack, but she didn't take a cigarette. Instead, she took the card that kept the side of the pack stiff. I collected these cards, we all did, but I didn't have much use for them. I tacked them to the wall from time to time—pictures of boxers, acrobats, varieties of wildflowers. The characters of Dickens. This card, like the pictures in Rosie's gallery, was a color-tinted photograph of an actress; but unlike Rosie's lovelies, the actress was fully clothed in an elaborate costume. She looked got up like a moth, with a cape of spotted ermine and a hat heavy with feathers.
Queenie Brackett
was written beneath her.

“Can I keep this?” Cecily asked, though she'd already tucked it into the waist of her skirt. “Queenie Brackett's an opera singer. She happened to be in one of the towns I was in once. I remember seeing her name on a sign.”

“But you didn't hear her sing?” I said.

Cecily rocked the carpetbag at her side as she thought back and looked off at the White City. “No,” she said. “I don't see much opera. But one time, in one town—I don't remember which one—I heard Viola Lorraine.” She said the name like I should know it. I nodded, wanting to please her. “I heard her, but I didn't see her. I don't remember the opera. But I remember it was so sweltering hot that summer they had to keep the theater doors open wide. So me and my friend Agnes got a bottle of cider and a marshmallow cake, and we just sat right there, on the street, on a saddle blanket, and listened to all the music that tumbled out. Agnes knew the show, so she told me the story. She described it so well, I can still see it in my head, and sometimes I forget I didn't see it at all.” She took the peony from me, and she held it again to her nose. “So you throw your voice good?” she said.

Cecily spoke in a voice so small, it seemed it would never carry to the back rows, let alone out into the street. Maybe no theater would ever cast her as any character who was anything less than totally silent.

I nodded, and I tossed my words into her carpetbag so convincingly, she jumped at the sound rising up from her side. “Meet me at the swan gondola tomorrow night,” my voice said, echoing in her bag.

The lights of the New White City went out then, one by one, the darkness working up the court like a chill up a spine.

Cecily looked up at the clouds gray against the black sky, and she seemed startled by them, as if wakened by the dark. She began to step quickly again and crossed the bridge.

“Will you?” I said, as I followed. “The swan gondola? At this time tomorrow night? Meet me on the dock of the lagoon?” For all I knew, Alonzo the gondolier was a figment of August's whiskey drunk, but I was determined I'd conjure him up nonetheless.

Cecily said nothing, and yet she practically ran away from me, careful to keep the carpetbag from banging into her knees. She ducked behind a row of dogwoods and out through an open gate in the wall. I followed her.

Cecily caught a cab, and the driver lashed his horse, and the rickety buggy creaked and wobbled on its wheels as it took a corner slow. She bent over the carpetbag in her lap, looking deep within it, as if rummaging around for something she'd lost.

I watched as the buggy moved beyond the streetlamp, beyond any light, Cecily only a silhouette. And when she was gone from my sight, I remained there in the lot, stitching together our conversation word for word. Though I looked in the lighted windows of the houses and tenements ahead, and caught glimpses of the lives lived there, I could see only Cecily. I saw her sitting on the street in front of an opera house, propping herself up on an elbow, eating marshmallow cake, listening to the songs the singers couldn't keep inside.

I
RETURNED TO THE
C
HAMBER OF
H
ORRORS
the next day, again and again, growing more and more poor with each ticket I bought. With Oscar all banged up from our skirmish the day before with the automaton, I left him to be repaired at a doll hospital in the back of a toy shop on the midway. I figured, with Oscar convalescing, I could abandon all plans and spend the day devoted to Cecily. I paid close attention to her every blink and nod. Having worked with any number of actresses over the years, I knew they liked to be complimented on the specifics of their characterizations. You could get a lass to spend the whole night if you offered a little praise alongside the kisses. “I could feel the woman's lack of feeling,” I'd told one particularly bad actress, in between licks of her earlobe. “You made her into such a perfect nobody.”

But I would never have to fib to Cecily. I would never have to invent compliments. While all the other actresses in the horror show, like Little Red, played their agony for a laugh or two, or at least seemed to give a little wink as they took the knife, Cecily was all worry and fret. She could make everything seem true, even the fallen eyelash on her powdered cheek, even the curl of her own brown hair that slipped loose from beneath the wig. Even her little trip up the step when her shoe caught in her dress. I heard a lock of her wig sizzle as it got a lick from a candle flame. She just reached up to twist away a bit of the spark, as easy as you please.

August said the cool dark of the chamber's halls eased his head, so he joined me for a few hours in the late afternoon. Though he sipped from a hangover cure of bottled dandelion milk and Saigon cinnamon, he denied having drunk too much the night before. And he denied the cause of it. “Being around all these foreigners on the midway gave me some exotic flu,” he explained, his hair undone from its braid and falling forward into his face. He didn't seem at all consoled by the dark of the chamber or the playful violence. His hand trembled as he fluttered a lady's fan of owl feathers as we watched a corpse rise from the grave on the stage. “I was fevered and delirious. I can only imagine what I might have said.”

I reminded him of Alonzo the gondolier, the gentleman he'd mentioned the night before, hoping it might cheer him up.
“Alonzo with the long eyelashes
,
”
I sang, picking up August's drunken tune. But August just rolled his eyes. “Does he exist?” I said.

It turned out he did, and August seemed to like the idea of seeking him out again, to arrange for the swan gondola ride. When we spoke to Alonzo at the lagoon, August's confidence returned, and as he negotiated with the gondolier I noticed him leaning in close. It was settled. That night I was to bring Alonzo one dollar, two bottles of red wine, and three of Rosie's lovelies. August didn't seem at all discouraged by Alonzo's interest in the postcards. As a matter of fact, he seemed charmed by the gentleman's lusts.

I was expected to pay in full, whether Cecily showed up or not. But it was well worth the risk.

•   •   •

A
FTER DARK,
Alonzo and I sat alone in the quiet lagoon, he at the swan's head, me at its wooden tail feathers. Alonzo only glanced at the naked women in the photographs before tucking them away in his coat pocket. “If I look at them as much as I want to,” he said, “the beauty will wear off too soon.”

August had brought me a biography of Marie Antoinette from his father's bookshop, and Alonzo kindly shared the wine with me as I read by the light from the swan's lantern that rocked from a hook overhead. Cecily's performance had little to do with history, but reading about the queen seemed to somehow bring me closer to my actress.

As it got later and later, Alonzo grew drunker and drunker and sang more and more. I was distracted by the evening ticking away, Cecily nowhere near. I would read a page of the book, and another, without concentration, none of the words even making it into my head. I studied an illustration of Marie Antoinette wearing a toy ship atop her tall wig, tendrils of her hair combed up and curled around the deck like the tentacles of an attacking squid. When I put my thumb over the queen's nose and a finger across the point of her chin, I could start to recognize a little bit of Cecily in the portrait. I put another finger across her eyes and moved my thumb to her throat.

Maybe it was best she stayed away, I considered. What did I have to offer anyway? I wore a jacket and trousers of two different plaids. The mismatched suit came from the theater's wardrobe closet, along with the tattered straw boater I wore. I had thought the costume might cast me handsomely in the part of a carefree summer lover. But now, feeling rejected, I found the suit tawdry and juvenile. I realized I had little to offer other than my infatuation. And even if she did, by some miracle, consent to spend time with me, when would I confess my whole life of missteps?

Then I suddenly remembered a pocket watch. As a boy thief years before, I'd come to fancy myself a
toy-getter
—which is what we called a thief of watches. I had one shaped like a beetle—you parted its emerald wings to see the time. One was an owl's head, and another's workings were hidden by an agate eye. One was a mandolin with pluckable strings. I had a snuffbox with a working cuckoo clock atop it. And one, I now fondly recalled, featured Marie Antoinette in the guillotine. The watch had a front and a back you flipped open; one side kept time, the other side ticktocked along with little flat mechanical figures, chopping off the queen's head one second, putting it back the next, only to chop it off a second later.

And as I considered the possibility of fate, of destiny, that watch some long-ago foreshadowing of good luck, Cecily came stepping down the staircase to the dock, her hair unpinned and combed out into its pretty, tangled mess of wild, brown curls.
Perfect
, I thought.
She's perfect. She's
meant for me and only me.

I slipped the book beneath the bench and stood to take her hand.

Her skin, so freshly scrubbed of its powder and paint, looked too pink and sore, and I longed to give her cheek a very soft, sympathetic kiss.

Cecily had brought along a young woman with hair an old woman's white. “Pearl's a dear friend of mine,” Cecily said. “I think you'll like each other,” and Pearl blushed with such a red fever that I worried about her. I wondered if I should ask if she was all right, or if that would only worsen her condition.

I took Cecily's hand to help her into the gondola, and Cecily whispered to me, her breath on my neck, “Isn't Pearl so very cute? Everyone adores her.” Her enthusiasm was a stab of disappointment.

I helped Pearl in too, and Alonzo prepared the swan for sailing, standing next to the swan's curving neck so he could row the craft toward the center of the lagoon. I took a seat up front, and Pearl and Cecily sat on the heart-shaped bench at the swan's tail feathers.

In Cecily's lap was a thin stack of postcards tied together with twine. She unknotted the string and she and Pearl read aloud from the unsent greetings. Cecily had become friendly with the postmistress, who had told her that many of the fairgoers who dropped souvenir postcards into the postbox failed to remember to address them. Cecily had been rescuing them from the postmistress's trash bin. “I hate to see them thrown away,” she said. “Someone should read them, at least.”

Cecily took a pair of reading glasses from a little paper case marked with Chinese letters. The glasses, with hinges and springs, collapsed in on themselves, and she unfolded them, then set them on her nose. Somehow the old-lady glasses made her look even younger. “‘My love,'” Cecily read aloud, “‘I typed this on a typewriter at the fair.'” She rolled her eyes and said, “That's all it says.” She looked at me, as if she knew I'd know better than to write a lover such empty words.

I leaned back to listen. Cecily could render even the lazy, tossed-off greetings of strangers into something true and necessary. After she read a few more, she took off her glasses and the three of us fell silent as we drifted on the water and watched the moon.

Finally, Cecily sat up and seemed about to speak, but stopped. “I don't even know your name,” she said. “Do you know mine?”

“Yes,” I said. “From when you played the violent-eyed trollop.”

“So maybe I know yours,” she said. “Or I did. Before I forgot it.”

“My friends call me Ferret,” I said.

Cecily covered her mouth with the postcard to laugh a little. “Why would your friends call you something like that?” she said. She then told Pearl, “
Ferret's
a ventriloquist. A ventriloquist without a dummy.”

“He's being repaired,” I said. On the midway were two cottages side by side, each with gingerbread woodwork and scalloped shingles and picket fences. One was the toy shop with a doll hospital in the back, where I'd left Oscar, the other the incubator exhibit, where live babies were displayed. Both little cottages were meant to appeal to our sympathies—from the toy shop, we'd take home our own little darlings. And next door the live babies, born too early, cooked in glass nests like new chickens. Nurses moved about like farmers' wives, peeking into the incubators, adjusting temperatures, eyeing the mercury of thermometers. For a dime, fairgoers could enter the exhibit to study the mechanics of the babies' little booths. They could cluck and coo at the unfinished infants resting in iron wombs.

“Don't you want to know how Pearl and me know each other?” Cecily asked me.

“I do,” I said.

“You
do
know how we know each other?” Cecily said, with a wink.

“No,” I said, “I do want to know how you know each other.”

“Oh, well, Pearl's a shop girl and window dresser downtown,” Cecily said. “And just before the Fair, she sewed me into a mermaid's fin for an umbrella display. I tell you, it was scandalous, practically. I had hardly a stitch on. Well,
you
tell him, Pearl.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Pearl said, stuttering, blushing. “A mermaid . . . in the window . . . I'm the dresser . . .”

“Have you seen Pearl's windows at the department store?” Cecily asked. “At the Brandeis? Her windows have been in magazines. She studied window dressing in Paris.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She's a mad genius, Pearl is,” Cecily said. “She does all the electricity herself. She can wire the whole setup for all sorts of tricks. She can make a manikin vanish, then, pop, there it is again, but with a brand-new hat.” She nudged at Pearl's hip with her own. “Well,
you
, you tell him, Pearl.”

I interrupted, leaning forward to offer the ladies each a cigarette, which they took without any ladylike hesitation. They let me light them too. When I held the match between Cecily and me, and we both lit up, my face was so close to hers it was like we were practicing for a kiss. I looked at her eyes as she looked down at the flame. The flame rose as we drew in our breaths.

“What was the mermaid fin like?” I said.

“Oh you wouldn't believe it, it was so pretty, wasn't it, Pearl?” she said. Cecily dropped her hand with a sweeping gesture down the length of her legs, twisting her wrist back and forth, like following a flowing wave. “It stretched way past the ends of my legs, like the train of a gown. How'd you make it sparkle like crazy, Pearl? Tell him what it was made of.”

“Beads,” Pearl said. “Satin.”

“She sewed on each individual fish scale,” Cecily said, “and each individual bead.”

I nodded and smiled politely at Pearl. Cecily fanned herself with one of the unsent postcards. “Pearl isn't as quiet as she seems,” Cecily said. “She introduced Susan B. Anthony a few weeks ago at a ladies' luncheon. Pearl is a dress reformist. She's very much against corsets, bless her heart. She says our corsets are making us feeble. We can't breathe.”

“The corset is an instrument of torture,” Pearl said, her voice soft. “It doesn't fit the woman's natural figure.” She shrugged her shoulders. “As long as a woman is trapped in her dress, she is disfranchised.”

Cecily had dressed simply, but I noticed that the top buttons of her shirtwaist were undone, as were the buttons at her wrist, causing her sleeves to slip up and down her arms as she fanned herself. She wore boots of a damask silk, the laces up the side untied, allowing her to slip her stockingless foot in and out. Pearl meanwhile continually fussed with the pins in her hair, taking them out, putting them back in somewhere else. At one point she even had a few pins between her teeth as she twisted a curl back to tuck behind her ear. I couldn't quite imagine this mousy girl leading any political battles.

“Have you seen Cecily's Marie Antoinette act, Pearl?” I asked.

“Yeth,” Pearl mumbled, the pins still at her lips.

Cecily seemed to be waiting for Pearl to say more, and when she didn't, she said, “Pearl even did a window a few months ago with a manikin dressed like Marie Antoinette. She gave her a hat that was swan-shaped like this here boat.” Cecily rapped her knuckles against the side of the gondola. “The window had all these tall towering cakes with pink and blue icing. Not real cakes but paper cakes that looked real. And the floor of the window was just cluttered with women's shoes.”

“It's much sadder,” I said, reclining, my ankles crossed, my hands in my pockets, my cigarette hanging from my lip. “So much sadder how it all went in true life.”

“How what went?” Cecily said.

“The offing of her head,” I said, hoping Cecily would be impressed that I'd read up on the queen. “She'd been in prison, not the palace. All she did was iron her cap actually. They cut her hair, so it wouldn't get in the way of the blade, I guess. She had a plain nightdress of dimity. Black stockings. Prunella shoes with little heels. A poor actress gave her the dress,” I added, nodding at Cecily with a wink, “or so they say. And they say she stepped on the executioner's foot. She begged his pardon. Said she didn't do it on purpose. Those were her last words. ‘I didn't do it on purpose.' But in French, I guess.”