The Swan Gondola (19 page)

But for now there was nothing on stage but construction and framework, and Cecily strained to lift her voice above the hammers and saws. She stood up on the balls of her feet, stretched her neck forth, opened her mouth wide. But her words fell short of even the third row where the director sat, the man leaning forward, trying his best to listen. I sat up straight myself, stretching my own neck, as if I could somehow help her voice carry farther.

When she finished, a command thundered up from several rows back, from the far reaches of the theater. “Again!” a man shouted, and when I looked to see who spoke, I saw Wakefield. He stood, raising his silver claw, gesturing broadly with it, summoning her voice forth. Strapped to his head were binoculars that scoped out from his eyes. He appeared to be wearing a silk smoking jacket with velvet lapels, and he held a pipe with an
S
-shaped stem. “Heart is . . .” he said, and then he paused, thinking. “Heart
is
a frail thing, it's true. She
would
speak so as not to be heard. Hers is a
gentle
nature. And the actress
must
communicate Heart's frailty. But she must do so as loud as she can. Heart's weak voice must bounce off the rafters. So, please . . . let Heart be heard.” He then barked, “Try again!” while stabbing the air with his pipe.

Cecily nodded, she smiled, inspired, and she stepped forward, so close to the front of the stage I worried she'd tumble into the orchestra pit. Her feet were only half on the boards. She cleared her throat. She breathed in deep. And she read again.

Her voice was even softer than before. It sounded like she was speaking into a pillowcase. When she finished, she didn't even wait for Wakefield or the director or anyone to say anything. I don't think she even finished the sentence she was in the middle of. She stopped and walked to the stairs at the side of the stage, folding and folding the page of her script, making it smaller and smaller. Cecily kept twisting the page this way and that as she passed me. I grabbed her hat and ran to her side, and we walked up the aisle, past Wakefield, who only nodded politely. I had half a mind to sell him Oscar right then, right off my back, if it meant he'd give her a part, any part, in the play.

But I didn't have to sell anything. In the lobby, the secretary held out a sheet of paper with a list of the characters Cecily had been assigned in the mere minutes between her audition and our walk up the aisle. “You're lucky,” the secretary said. “No lines to learn.”

Cecily would not be playing Heart, but she had four different parts instead:

Factory Girl

Dance Hall Girl

Ferris Wheel Girl

Fire Victim

“You get fit for costumes next week,” the secretary said, “and the week after that rehearsals start. And just because you're nothing but a face in the crowd, don't go thinking we won't notice if you don't show up.” She eyed her up and down. “You'll be getting paid good enough for what little you do.”

As we left the theater, I gave Cecily her hat. She strutted some as she walked alongside me, as I pushed the pram. “They just couldn't put the show on without me,” she said, quite pleased.

“Of course they couldn't,” I said.

I suggested we go fetch Doxie and spend the afternoon in celebration. “They won't unlock her cabinet for us,” Cecily said. “They don't know I'm Doxie's mother, remember?”

“We'll steal her,” I said, and she clapped her hands. She loved the idea of kidnapping her own infant.

At the cottage that housed the incubator exhibit, I pushed the carriage, with Oscar tucked inside, down the cobblestone lane. Fortunately there was only one nurse on duty, so Cecily engaged her in conversation, her sea-green paper parasol open, spinning around on her shoulder, doing her best to hide me as I picked the incubator's lock without any special picklock—I used to sell French pocketknives equipped with a variety of tools, and I still carried one with me always: it held within it a cigar cutter, a glove buttoner, a tin opener. The ear-cleaning spoon proved the perfect key, and I managed to turn all the lock's tumblers.

“I'm a disciple of the Reverend Foltz,” Cecily told the nurse, her quiet voice serving her well in this particular performance. “And my heart goes out to these little lambs. Wherever will these children go when the Fair ends? What if I wanted to adopt the whole litter?” The nurse was made so fidgety by her questions, she stuttered and stalled and lowered her eyes, busying herself with the folding of diapers. I easily lifted Doxie from her coop and slipped her beneath the blanket to cozy up with Oscar.

•   •   •

I
T WAS A LOST,
lazy afternoon and evening. We stood in line for a ride in the swan gondola, but the thought of sharing our private yacht with other fairgoers, in the bright light of day, made the whole endeavor a little less appealing, so we stepped away. Instead, we nestled in the swan bench on the merry-go-round of the midway, in among the carousel horses with their blue manes and bared teeth. The ride proved to be Doxie's favorite, and for once she didn't nap. Her eyes wide, she watched all the color spin around her, and she seemed to grab for the sunlight that sparked on the carousel's mirrors.

As I held Doxie, Cecily held Oscar across her knees, his head dangling off the side of her lap.

On one of the last of our many spins around the carousel, I swore I glimpsed Wakefield watching. Not only did I think I saw him standing in the road, a cigar between his silver fingers, but I thought I saw the woman with the piglet too. The woman—who I'd assumed to be his wife or his mistress—wasn't easy to miss; she wore a red dress, and the netting of a red veil across her face. But when our swan swam back around, they were gone.

November 20, 1898

Dear Cecily,

When I think back, I think I see Wakefield everywhere we ever were. In my memory, he can't keep his eyes off us. Wasn't he in the Indian camp as we watched a girl braid together a corn shuck doll for Doxie? Didn't he eavesdrop on our fortunes as we got our palms read? I can just see him aiming a telescope at us from a rooftop as we lay back in the grass to gaze at stars.

Tonight, on the farm, it seems colder than it is. I stand at the hearth as I write this letter, with the mantel as my writing desk. I don't leave my room often, but Hester made a cane for me. It's a polished branch of old gnarled wood. I worry that my leg, when the cast is broken off, will look just as rotten and twisted as this cane. My leg hurts as much as it ever did. The cast is crippling me, bending my knee the wrong way, chipping away at any bones left unbroken. I haven't seen a doctor. Hester doesn't trust them. So I don't trust them either. I only trust the Old Sisters Egan. I want my world to shrink more and more, so that all that's left is this farm.

I don't want to die, but I don't want to walk among the living.

I can see your absence everywhere, in everything. I could look at a rose, but instead of seeing the rose, I would see you not holding it. I look at the moonlight, and there you are, not in it.

Ferret

T
HE
S
ILK &
S
AWDUST
P
LAYERS
slept even in the hallways of the boardinghouse and sometimes three to a bed. Cecily, with Doxie on the way when they had all left Nashville, had become sick from the winter trip up the river, so they'd given her her own room at the boardinghouse to thaw out. She kept the room, even after Doxie was born, and sweetened it up with touches of her own. The room had faded yellow wallpaper patterned with hornets on gray roses, so she tacked up covers of fashion magazines, illustrated with women in winter coats, and she hung a bright-blue ukulele on the wall above the bed. She tucked the cigarette cards into the edges of the mirror of a vanity. She made a chair from an overturned washtub, with embroidered pillows for a cushion. Behind a silk screen painted with pink apples was Doxie's crib, rented from the landlady.

Before rehearsals were to begin for
Heart of the White City
, Cecily decided to get her hair dyed red. The sword swallower's wife in the Turkish Village of the midway sold me a tin of henna and dried indigo leaf, and she wrote out instructions in broken English. After everyone else in the boardinghouse fell asleep, we snuck downstairs to the bathroom. Cecily left the door to her room open so we could hear Doxie when she cried. The little girl had her days and nights mixed up; she slept all of every day and fussed often after dark. In the hall, we heard the thundering of Mrs. Margaret's snores. “Mrs. Margaret's still so furious with me,” Cecily said, “she has to take a sleeping tonic at night.”

Doxie had been fired from her job as a living baby due to our mischief. I was relieved—I knew next to nothing about babies, but it seemed to me she was getting too old for that box. And the whole incident had led Cecily to confess our love affair to Mrs. Margaret. I still avoided the woman in the days after, sneaking in and out of Cecily's room, in and out of windows, over eaves and down rain pipes, after dark and before dawn. And though I wasn't pleased by Mrs. Margaret's violent determination to keep Cecily all to herself, I understood it. She wanted Cecily to trust only her. Mrs. Margaret, after all, had helped with Doxie's birth, staying right there at Cecily's side, holding her hand, every minute of all the many hours it took for an elderly midwife to coax Doxie out into that little room at the boardinghouse. It seemed that Mrs. Margaret had often been at Cecily's side when Cecily would have otherwise been all alone. And for that, Cecily would forgive the old woman anything.

In the bathroom, Cecily and I stripped naked, then stepped into the tub, hoping for the water to cool us off. Cecily sat with her back to me. I poured half a bottle of prune brandy into her hair to clean it of its fats and oils. Up in her room, I'd made a paste of the henna powder, mixing in a glass of red wine, some spoonfuls of paprika, and the juice of three lemons.

After I worked the henna into Cecily's hair, I touched her shoulder, where there was a tattoo of a heart. I had seen it before but had never asked about it. I now ran my fingers along the heart's curves and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “How'd you get this?” I said.

“Doxie's father was a tattooist in Nashville,” she said. “He worked the midway of the world's fair there, and sold tattoos for fifty cents in a striped tent. His name was Mercury.”

“Did something happen to him?” I said.

Cecily sighed. “I hope so,” she said. “But probably not. He tried to talk me into getting tattooed all over, and I was so in love I almost did. It would have taken two months, me and him alone in his parlor, his eyes only on me. And when I was covered neck to boot in tattoos we would go on the road on our own.”

I hated hearing she'd been in love once before me. But I only said, “I'd pay a buck to see that,” and I kissed her shoulder.

“We had quite an awful act in mind,” she said. “See, I'd pretend to be blind, and I would go on stage and tell the audience that I'd been nabbed by savages, and held captive, and tattooed, and then I would describe the tattoos, and how beautiful they were. Angels and doves and all that. But the audience would be horrified, because what was really on my skin would be fiercely ugly. Cross-eyed devils. A serpent with the mean eyes of a drunk. All the very worst things Mercury and me could think of. And after I left the stage, Mercury would get up there and beg the audience not to reveal the truth to me. ‘Let her at least have this illusion, folks,' he'd say. And they'd be so full of pity, they'd give us all the change they could spare. And they would tell their friends about it, and they'd all line up to see how tragic I was.”

“That's no kind of life,” I said.

Cecily leaned back in my arms, her hair sticky with paste. We stayed that way until daylight, very softly singing every song we knew with the word
red
in the lyrics.

Once the morning's birds started up with their whistles, we followed the last instruction—a blast of sunlight to turn the hair hot. We grabbed our clothes and stepped lightly on the stairs to keep them from creaking. We crawled out the window of Cecily's room to sit on the roof of the back porch, me in only my underdrawers, and Cecily in a kimono patterned with sea horses. As Cecily ate a freckled pear, I read to her from one of the pamphlets the Reverend A. Foltz had left behind:
From Hell to Heaven, and How I Got There
, about how he had become a lush at the age of eight.

“‘In early childhood,'” I read, mocking an evangelist's vain humility, my fingers a deep bloodred that wouldn't fade for days, “‘I struck off to swim in a dark sea of sorrow whose sad waves ever beat over me.'”