The Swan Gondola (15 page)

S
TILL BAREFOOT,
I took the streetcar to the Empress in the late afternoon to slip my filthy feet into a pair of shoes. I was grateful for the task of taking Pearl for a stroll—I'd had nothing else to do but worry. I'd arranged for Alonzo the gondolier to be waiting with the swan gondola after dark, but I still fretted that I'd be sailing the lagoon alone.

Brandeis & Sons, the department store where Pearl worked as a salesgirl and window dresser, was only up the block from me. Though the store had everything anyone could want, I'd only once or twice gone inside.

A handful of ladies carrying signs marched in front of the store, and I first suspected nothing but gimmickry. The Brandeis men, the store's proprietors, were kings of hullabaloo. They often appeared in front of the store themselves, holding balloons by their strings, and at the ends of the strings were tickets you could exchange for a man's suit, a lady's hat, or a jeweled stickpin. The men, like a couple of boys, would release the balloons to rise and roam above the city before drifting back to earth to get caught in trees and on the roofs of houses. Even I, as unlucky as I am, once found a Brandeis balloon tangled in the wheels of a parked carriage. The prize was a silk-lined box of crystallized dwarf oranges so fancy that I chose to save them, but I saved them too long, and they turned on me before I had even a taste of one.

As I neared the store I was amused to discover that this wasn't a sales gimmick but a protest. The women carried picket signs—
Harlots in underwear! Activities unbefitting ladies!
Their chanting served only to draw people in. I had to elbow my way to the window to even get a glimpse at the offense.

It was quite something, that window display. With everything behind plate glass, you couldn't hear all the whirring and rumbling of motors and engines, so it looked like it all moved on air or by magic, or clicked along on the tiny gears of a windup music box. Overhead hung a banner—
America by Road
—and three manikins rode bicycles as a rolled-up canvas unrolled behind them in a continual loop, unspooling painted landscapes of fields and rivers. The cyclists were women, and they wore bloomers, not skirts, and they were decked out in red, white, and blue. They wore scarves patterned with stars and stripes that blew in a wind stirred up by an electric fan offstage. Their motorized legs pedaled fast, spinning the bicycles' wheels.

Pearl, too, was a magician.

“If you put your daughters on a bicycle,” a protester shouted in my ear, “you've given them the freedom of a whore! You've soiled your little doves! Do you even know where your girls are?”

“Yeah,” a heckler called back, a cigar plugged into one corner of his mouth. “She's in the store spending my money on a pair of them natty pants.” The others who'd gathered there chuckled, which just encouraged him to heckle her more.

I went to the front doors, and even after stepping just one foot in, I felt like somebody might kick me right back out. Even when I straightened up to give the illusion of dignity, I could feel a stitch or two in the seams of my suit pop and unravel. Fortunately, I was as invisible as I ever was.

Shoppers and clerks hustled quick and graceful, as if they too were electrified manikins linked by a single wire. Cash registers clunked and rang and their drawers sprang open and slammed shut, while a violinist stood at the center of the grand staircase, fiddling softly. The whole place was selling patriotism by the yard, the flag's stars and stripes even fashioned into petticoats in honor of the Spanish-American War. The manikins wore cavalry caps and army-blue dresses with gold braid and brass medals, the ladies' arms bent into a salute. You could get belt buckles with eagles painted on them and suspenders patterned with the mug of the mustachioed George Dewey, admiral of the navy.

You knew these shoppers were rich because they shopped for winter already—the place was stocked with fox fur collars and chinchilla overcoats. Imagine a life so leisurely you considered, in the heat of summer, what you might wear when it got cold.

I did find something I could afford, however. In a glass counter of scarves and neckties, gloves and collars, were handkerchiefs stitched with initials. I bought one for Cecily—its corners were embroidered with yellow roses, and along one edge was a pink cursive
S.

Before the shopgirl could tie the box closed with a ribbon, I heard Pearl call my name. In the millinery corner, at a counter, Pearl stood surrounded by hats on severed heads.

“Well, there you are,” I said, walking to her.

Pearl produced from behind the counter a comb, and she leaned across to fix me up. It embarrassed me a bit. Had I even looked in the mirror before I'd left my room? She touched the fingers of one hand to my chin, and with her other she ran the comb through my hair. I watched her face as she watched the wayward sweep and swoop of my curls. She squinted and grumbled, then finally gave up. She held out a mirror.

“Ah,” I said, looking at myself. “You parted it in the opposite direction. It would never have occurred to me.”

“You must have got caught in the storm,” she said.

“Do I really look so all in fits?” I said. Back in my attic, I hadn't thought to change. I'd been rushing through the day, anxious to return to the swan gondola at nightfall. I smiled and winked. “Seems I can't go anywhere anymore without someone doing my hair or shaving my lip.” As her face lit up apple red, I remembered:
Ah yes, Pearl blushes.
“It was raining pitchforks,” I said, hoping to change the subject so her cheeks could cool off. I told her about the lightning and fire in the Chamber of Horrors. I stepped back and tugged at the knees of my trousers, showing off the mud caked on the hems.

“Is Cecily all right?” she said with a gasp.

“She is,” I said. “She is.” I decided to show Pearl the hankie I'd bought Cecily, because I didn't want anyone wrongheaded about anything at all. “Is this the right sort of thing,” I said, holding open the box, “to buy a lady?”

Pearl seemed to fall into a little bit of a swoon. But when she looked at the hankie, and ran her finger along the curve of the letter
S
, she blushed herself into a sweat. “Oh,” she said, bringing her fingers to her lips as she looked into the box again. “I'm afraid the shopgirl gave you the wrong handkerchief.”

I looked at the embroidered letter. My hand began to shake. I was making matters worse and worse.
She thinks it should be a
P, I thought.
She thinks it's for her.

“Oh, Pearl,” I said, “I'm so sorry if you thought . . . I didn't mean to . . . You're a very lovely girl, and sweet to boot, and there's no reason at all that I shouldn't want to . . . that
any
gentleman shouldn't want, wouldn't be honored to . . . well, to buy you things and take you around . . . but this handkerchief is for . . . well, it's for Cecily. Who I'm very fond of.”

“Oh no, no, please, I know, I know, don't say another thing.”

“And it's not that I
couldn't
be fond of you, or
wouldn't
be fond of you, if . . .”

“Ferret,” she said, sternly. “Please.” She took the box from me. “The girl gave you the wrong handkerchief. You need the letter
C
, of course.” When she saw I was too dim-witted to catch on, she said, “For Cecily.” She paused again. “
C
 . . . for Cecily.” I think she even gave the
C
an extra
S
-like
ssssss
. She stepped from around the counter as I mulled it all over. “I'll just go swap it out for you and I'll be right back,” she said.

Now I was the one blushing. As I waited, I ran my finger through some light dust on a shelf, drawing the letter
C
, which looked to me like half a heart. I then touched at the glass eye of a wax head that wore a hat upon which toy ships with flames of red silk sank in a sea of blue crepe—a naval battle in the Havana harbor. When Pearl stepped up to my side, the box nicely tied shut, I said, “Who would wear such a hat?”

Pearl held the box to her chest. She twisted her finger through the box's ribbon. “Well, we haven't sold one yet, so I wouldn't know,” she said. “But people do like to feel like they're supporting the American troops at war.”

“By wearing a hat?” I said.

Pearl shrugged, and I worried I was being difficult. I was still burning a little from my embarrassment, I guess. I took the box from her. “I can read and write, in case you're wondering,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've ever seen my advertisement in the
Omaha Bee
. I offer literary assistance. I write letters and whatever else needs written. I've written a hundred letters, probably, to women with all sorts of names.”

My boasting didn't seem to impress her. Instead, she seemed distracted, melancholy. She held a finger to her lips in thought. “Maybe you wrote
me
a letter once.”

“Oh?” I said. She put her arm in mine and led me deeper into the store. Despite all her blushing, Pearl seemed nothing at all like the nervous girl I'd met at the swan gondola.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Do you remember something about . . . about . . .” She looked up and off in thought. “Pearl the girl of the ocean blue?”

“Hm,” I said. “No. No I don't think I quite remember . . .”

“A letter of proposal?” she said. Though I couldn't possibly remember every letter I ever wrote, it seemed I'd remember something like Pearl the girl of the ocean blue. It seemed a little too plucky for my style. “He was far too dull to write the letter he wrote,” she said. “I always suspected he'd copied it from a book. But if there are people like you—who
sell
love letters—then . . . well, perhaps
that's
why he didn't sound himself.” There'd been a pinch of disapproval with her mention of “people like you.”

“And you didn't accept?” I said.

Pearl sighed. “He was very kind,” she said. “But he should have written me a letter himself, don't you think? I actually liked the bit about the ocean. It made me sound like a girl in a song. But that was one of the reasons I wouldn't accept, you know? To have such a poetic proposal of marriage from someone who wasn't poetic at all? I came to my senses right then, and I knew I couldn't marry him.”

“You mean to say you didn't marry him
because
of the letter? It couldn't have been from me then,” I said. “I've never written a proposal of marriage that wasn't accepted.”

“And it's even worse than all that,” she said. “I even used the words of the letter against him. ‘What ocean?' I said to him. ‘I'm Pearl the girl of
what
ocean?
I've never even seen the ocean
,' I said to him. At that time, I'd never been to Paris. I'd never been to New York. I had never been anywhere. How could I even be the girl in those lovely lines? ‘How dare you ask a stranger to marry you,' I said. I was really very awful to him.”

I honestly did take great care to assure that the letters I wrote had the character of the sender. I figured into the fee of the letter the price of a pint of beer or a cup of tea, and I would sit with the sender for much longer than necessary, listening to every word. I found that my work as an entertainer gave me a good ear for voices. I picked up on any habits of speech or odd snippets of vocabulary, and I worked it all in, in a literary manner. It was my best bit of flimflam. Whenever they tried to write the letters themselves, they only sounded like somebody else. They needed a mimic in order to ring true.

“Whatever happened to the poor sap?” I said, but before she could answer, we'd reached the men's department, and she'd embarked on her scheme to get me in a new suit. The linen suits were on clearance—two dollars and fifty cents—and though I'd spent my last nickel on the embroidered hankie for Cecily with a
C
, Pearl opened an account for me, so I could buy the suit on time. I was no stranger to credit—I was living on jawbone all around town—but I'd never had credit in a place like Brandeis & Sons. And I'd never before been treated with such respect. Pearl left me to a manager named Mr. Foswig, who brought me a thin cigar and a snifter of whiskey so smooth it didn't burn its way down my gullet in the manner of most whiskeys I'd known. With each suit I tried on, Mr. Foswig appraised me in the way he'd appraise a man of only a finer feather, as if I'd be wearing this suit someplace of consequence. And when we'd made our selection, and the tailor had pinned and chalked the coat and pants and carried the suit away, Mr. Foswig brought me the catastrophe I'd been wearing when I'd walked in. But it had been attended to miraculously—the mud had been sponged away and some gaping seams stitched shut. My hopeless shoes had been polished and the cobbler's shoddy work redone. As Mr. Foswig helped me on with my coat, he told me my new suit would be ready in the morning. Pearl returned with her umbrella and hat. “Walk me home?” she said.

“I think I'll buy a two-dollar-fifty-cent suit every week,” I said as I studied my cigar out in the sunlight. I was quite unaccustomed to wearing suits that had never been worn before. “I feel like a million bucks just having tried it on.” The protesters had left for bigger and better scandals apparently, and the cyclists in the window still happily traveled as their bicycles spun in place. “Do you cycle?” I said.

“I do,” Pearl said. “I sold my piano to buy a bicycle, but we're all doing that. Sales in the sheet music department have dropped. It seems we're spending all our money on tires and patches. I wonder if they'll stop writing songs entirely.”

“If they were smart,” I said, “they would write songs about bicycles, I guess.”

Pearl put on a pair of eyeglasses, their lenses tinted red. When I raised an eyebrow at the sight of them she explained they'd been prescribed by a homeopath. “Iridology,” she said. “There are doctors who can read your health in the colors and shadows of the irises. All your pain and disease sits waiting in your body, and they can see it all in the eyes. I've had dizzy spells to the point where I see things in the room that aren't there.”