The Swan Gondola (20 page)

July 1898

W
ITH
C
ECILY IN MY LIFE,
and my mind on fatherhood, I often thought about how little I had otherwise. I combed my hair and shaved my chin by looking in a little shard of broken mirror propped up on a windowsill.
I don't want to still be telling jokes at the Empress at thirty
, I told my twenty-five-year-old self. And I could just see myself at thirty saying,
I don't want to still be at the Empress at forty
. And if I was still at the Empress at forty, I'd say,
Why didn't you kill yourself at twenty-five?

I had long had ambitions for a larger theater, a bigger audience, perhaps traveling in a vaudeville circuit.
But what if I left the stage?
I wondered. What if I went to work in the offices of the
Omaha World-Herald
, to write obituaries and theater reviews? My letters to the editor were sometimes the liveliest pieces in the dailies. I'd recently read an article about the professional life of the literary hack—instead of writing correspondence, I could write articles for magazines, or poems and stories. I had it in my head that it would impress Cecily if I became dignified. If I became respectable, she would see how serious I was about her and Doxie.

“A hack can get twenty dollars for a thousand words,” I told Cecily. We were at the Fair after one of her afternoon rehearsals, sitting in the replica of a restaurant of a White Star luxury liner, the cardboard waves of a fake sea bobbing up and down on a motor outside the porthole. A string quartet strummed some slow sonata in the corner. We sat on a settee at a marble-top table, Doxie in my lap in a dress I'd bought her with a gingham apron. She toothlessly gnawed on my thumb. “It don't even matter what the words are. Every word pays the same. I could easily write a thousand words about anything, even the proper knotting of neckties, which I don't know much of anything about at all.”

We'd been served oysters soaked in a puddle of champagne in a seashell. Cecily swallowed an oyster and looked perplexed. “You're going to help people knot their neckties?”

“Is that what I said?” I said.

“No,” she said, smiling. She dabbed at her mouth with a linen napkin. She nodded at my dummy, who sat propped up in a chair. “Look how sad you've made him.”

And he had indeed looked sadder somehow, ever since I'd started thinking about selling him to Wakefield. I'd kept the invitation to Wakefield's masquerade ball all month long, having stuck it in the pocket of my winter coat hanging from a hook in my room. It was perhaps unseemly to be so attached to a doll. “He'll be fine on his own,” I said. “He's the one with all the talent.”

A waiter in a white jacket brought us the bottle of red wine we requested, and poured us each a glass. I asked him to bring more oysters. I was feeling flush already, with the thought of Wakefield's money and the possibility of legitimate work. A professional hack could make upwards of six thousand a year, according to the article I'd read.

Cecily leaned back in the settee with her glass of wine, slouching in the silk pillows. She looked perplexed again, squinting, like she was figuring math in her head. “It just seeeeeeems to meeeeee,” she said, “well, how should I put this? It seems to me that if you quit ventriloquism to write about how to knot a necktie, you'll soon enough be writing about how to knot your own noose.” She nodded her head sharply, pleased with what she'd come up with.

“I like that,” I said. “That's clever. I'll buy it from you. I pay a penny a word.”

“I'm quite serious,” she said.

“I won't write about neckties then,” I said. I put my hand on her neck and gently strangled. “I was just using neckties as an example.”

“I was too,” she said, putting her hand over mine.

“Why would I hang myself,” I said, “if I was happier than I've ever been? I'd be taking good care of you and Doxie.”

“And, see, that's what troubles me and ol' Dox,” she said. “We don't like the sound of that at all. If
I
left the stage for
you
, I'd hate you with all my heart eventually.”

“How could I ever hate the two of you,” I said. I moved my hand up to brush a few strands of hair from her cheek. “And how could you ever hate me?”

“Let's not try to find out,” she said sternly.

•   •   •

S
O
I
PROMISED
C
ECILY
I'd not sell Oscar at the masquerade ball, and it was a promise that was easy to keep. I didn't want to part with him. But Cecily insisted we all go to the ball nonetheless. She had felt some affection toward Wakefield ever since the auditions, when he'd stood to give her advice. Though he hadn't given her the lead, he had seemed to believe, for those few moments at least, she might be perfect for the part. And she'd been flattered to end up with any role at all.

August fled to the Indian camp to buy feathers and ribbons for masks he would make us of satin and paper. And when the midway closed for the night, we rifled through the trunks in the wagon of the Silk & Sawdust Players parked behind the Chamber of Horrors. The building still seemed to smoke, casting a gray haze against the night, though the fire had been out for days and days. In the light of an oil lamp, we tried on costumes—all of us but Rosie, who would only go so far as to tie a bandana over his mouth, bandit-style.

“You're dancing on the graves of dead soldiers,” he grumbled, not amused by Wakefield's plans to sink a toy battleship in the lagoon. Typically I'd join Rosie in his indignation, but I'd begun to think of myself as a man who'd come into some luck. And as a man of some luck, I'd come to think that luck might suit me after all.

Josephine, Rosie's ragtime girlfriend, wore Cecily's Marie Antoinette costume, the wig still collapsed and snarly from the storm of early June, the skirts still dirty and snagged. August tied a thin red ribbon around Josephine's throat.

“All the women of France wore red ribbons around their necks,” he said, “after Marie Antoinette lost her head.”

Pearl wore Chinese pajamas she bought off a man in the fan-tan den—roomy trousers and a long jacket patterned with golden tigers.

And Cecily, of course, was the most smashing of all, dressed as the enemy. She put on a red gown with pleats of yellow stripes, so when she walked she seemed to be waving the Spanish flag. She carried a spindly fan that looked a little war-battered itself, some of the torn black lace hanging loose from the fan's ivory ribs. August stuck a tall comb into the top of her hair and draped from it a black veil that fell over her shoulders and down her back. She wore no mask but pinned the veil up to cover her face so only her eyes were showing.

We could hear the party long before we reached it, and we picked up our step to get there quicker. From atop the roof, a man with a high-pitched voice started the evening off by singing the tune “After the Ball” into a speaking horn, and his warbling echoed across the lagoon. We sang along and danced on the bricks on our way across the Grand Court. August tossed himself into my arms for a spin, in a costume that he called Oscar Wilde as Warrior. It consisted of a linen suit coat and vest on top, and a buckskin kilt and knee-high moccasins below. Through the buttonhole of his lapel he'd stuck the thick stem of a sunflower. He'd bought the kilt and moccasins, and his mask shaped like the snout of a mountain lion, from an Apache staying in the Indian camp.

“Don't tell anybody who you're supposed to be,” I whispered in his ear.

“People dress up like Wilde for fancy-dress parties all the time,” he whispered back.

“Not since he went to jail,” I said, my voice still kept low. “What'd they call it?”

“Gross indecency,”
August said, not whispering anymore, practically shouting it, as he danced away from me and toward Rosie. Rosie comically swayed and dodged but nonetheless flirted back, bumping his hip against August's.

“Are you drunk?” Rosie said.

“No,” he said, as he ran a peacock feather along his own cheek. “Only happy. We should
all
be more like Oscar Wilde. Did you know that in prison he campaigned for the release of some children who'd been jailed simply for poaching rabbits?”

“Do you even listen to yourself?” I scolded. “
Prison
. He's in prison.” But August only raced ahead toward the stairs that spiraled up the side of the Fine Arts Building. He was no innocent, but he worried me. His longing for love, and his gentle heart, would lead him into enough trouble and pain. But if he was ever locked away in a cage, he'd die in a day.

No one ever asked to see my letter of invitation, though I had it at the ready the very second I stepped onto the roof and into the crowd. All day long I'd practiced my best devil-may-care, in hopes of impressing the rich man with my indifference. But once I got into the thick of the circus, I couldn't pretend that I wasn't intimidated. I held the invitation in my fist, prepared for someone to call me a fraud and rustle me out and away.

There was a maharajah who'd likely blackened his face with burned cork, his turban strung with rubies and sapphires. A Cleopatra had greased-up catlike eyes and a live snake coiled up her arm, its head pinched between her fingers and its forked tongue darting. There was a chimney sweep, a Humpty Dumpty in an enormous papier-mâché egg, a fisher maid with strings of wooden fish dangling from her shoulders. There were men as women, and women as men, and men and women as children.

“The statues are alive,” Cecily whispered in my ear, and it was so; these weren't plaster of Paris nudes, but actors and actresses in little more than loincloths, unflinching on pedestals, their every inch of skin powdered white. Every now and again they'd change their pose, slow and smooth and graceful, but otherwise remained as still as marble.

August had made me a mask of raven's feathers, and I dressed like Oscar, in a pair of striped pants and a dotted vest. Oscar hung off my back, a mask across his eyes too—a mask of tiny feathers August had collected from the bottom of the canaries' cage in the aviary in the Agriculture Building.

As we moved through the crowd, Cecily's hand in mine, I looked for Wakefield. A harlequin on stilts bumped into me, and his marionette knocked off my derby with a brickbat, as he high-stepped through the crowd. Meanwhile, I rapped my ankle against the tiny Chiquita, the “Living Doll” who stood no taller than a goose.

“Knock into me again,” she shouted up, “and I blow out your kneecap.” She flashed me the pearl-handled pistol tucked into the cleavage of her low-cut ball gown of velvet. I had no reason to think it an idle threat. The ball seemed to have no rules. The roof was frantic with freaks and drunks, opium eaters and cocaine inebriates, men and women swapping pipes and spoons, and snorting from snuff bottles.

A troop of men were dressed in the khakis and neckerchiefs of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, those cowboys who had galloped into Cuba to chase out the Spanish. They offered us Havana cigars, cut the tips, and lit a match. Cecily took one too, but after the first few puffs she felt a little queasy.

“Remember the
Maine
!” a sailor shouted over and over as he maneuvered through the crowd with a torch. We then all moved to the front of the roof to see the toy battleship chug through the lagoon.

“There was no attack of the battleship
Maine
,” Rosie said, returning to his disgust. He tossed an empty whiskey bottle over the side of the roof to break on the bricks below. “It blew up on its own.” Those around us shushed him and glared, but his protest only grew louder. “There's all kinds of proof. The furnace was too close to the explosives.
The Spanish did not torpedo our boat in the Havana harbor!
” And with that, he got the fight he wanted. A man dressed as Gretel, in a blond wig and dirndl with low neckline, with candied cherries over his nipples, swung at Rosie and missed. Rosie swung back, and he missed too. A few ladies shrieked, men bellowed, and then the toy battleship exploded, smoke rose, debris flew, and the boat sank into the lagoon in flames.

•   •   •

W
E ALL LINGERED
until long after the party wound down, the roof mostly emptied of its revelers, the floor littered with feathers and confetti. As we headed toward the stairs, with intentions of going to a saloon in full costume, Wakefield called after me.

“Did you enjoy the Carnival, Ferret?” he said.

Cecily and I let the others leave without us, and we walked to where Wakefield stood, at the edge of the roof, where he looked out on the debris in the lagoon. He wore a tuxedo, but his attire was white where it should be black, and black where it should be white. He carried a cane of onyx—its brass handle the head of a gryphon—but he didn't lean on the cane at all. Instead he simply tap, tap, tapped at the floor, clicking out a little rhythm.

“I did,” I said, “Mr. Wakefield.”

“Call me Billy,” he said. His voice was muffled by his mask, a papier-mâché skull that covered every inch of his face. He held a cigar between the silver bones of his fingers, and he put the cigar to a hole in the skull's toothy grin to smoke.

“And you're
Mrs.
Wakefield?” I asked the woman with the piglet, who'd stepped up to him. Her eye mask of purple feathers was pushed up off her face and into her girlish ringlets of black hair.

“
Mrs. . . . 
?” she said, exaggerating her shock, with a laugh that echoed across the rooftop. “
Mrs.
Wakefield? I'm his
sister
. Can't you see we're twins?” But Wakefield stayed behind his skull.

“Very pleasant to make your acquaintance,” I said. “And this is Cecily.”

Billy Wakefield held his metal hand out, and Cecily hesitated, unsure what to do. She then put her hand in his, and he held it there for a moment.