The Swan Gondola (25 page)

I got on my knees beside the bed, put my elbows on the mattress, and took the ring from the box. “Won't you marry me?” I said.

Cecily's eyes turned wet, and she sniffled, and she took a deep shaky breath as she let me put the ring on her finger. She held her hand against my cheek, and she looked at the ring. “Write it to me in a letter?” she said. “Your proposal of marriage? I want to have something to show Doxie when she gets older. She'll want to see it.”

“Then will you say yes?” I said. “Because you haven't said yes yet.”

She nodded. I turned my head to kiss her wrist, to kiss her palm.

Dear Cecily
, I wrote, but I could think of nothing else to say. I was too happy, my heart too full. I didn't want to think in words.

•   •   •

C
ECILY'S HEADACHES
had grown mild, lessening to a feeble pulse at her temples that she could almost convince herself was pleasant. “I just think of you kissing me here,” she said, tapping at her forehead, and I kissed her right there, right then, as we entered the Fair as fine new citizens, not workers, of the New White City. Cecily had somehow convinced me she felt invincible. With her headaches cured, she would cure me of my fear of heights. And I felt inclined to believe her, somehow.

The manager of the Civil War exhibit offered to let us ascend in the basket of the tethered balloon, to the end of its rope, to watch the sun set.

I felt my vertigo spinning my head before we'd even lifted an inch, but I said nothing. I wanted, more than anything, to be fearless for Cecily. If ever my life had been touched with magic, it was in those days when Cecily wore my ring. I had no doubts, no troubles. And my contentment became contagious—even Mrs. Margaret finally forgave. She'd come to Cecily's room that morning to make amends, in her way. “Marry the devil himself why don't you,” she told Cecily, as I sat on the edge of the bed putting on my socks. “Why should I trouble myself about it?” she said. And with that, Cecily threw her arms around Mrs. Margaret, and kissed and kissed and kissed the old woman's jowls. Cecily let Mrs. Margaret take Doxie for the day, to a park down the street, but Mrs. Margaret refused to use the pram. Instead, she returned Doxie to the carpetbag. “Doxie likes to be rocked in it,” Mrs. Margaret explained. “She likes to be right at my side.”

I held on to the edge of the balloon's basket, digging my feet into the floor of it, holding fast like I had on the night of Wakefield's cyclone. This was worse than the Flying Waltz—at least then, dancing with Cecily, the wires had given the illusion of safety. Cecily now held tightly to my arm. “Squeeze my hand as hard as you need to,” she whispered, and I wrapped my fingers so tight around her hand that the heart of her ring left a deep red imprint in my skin that didn't fade for hours.

As we rose, Cecily leaned out over the side of the basket to take in the sight of the city and the river and the countryside beyond. I watched with horror, too easily picturing her tumbling out and dragging me over. I begged her not to lean over the edge. As we bobbed in the air, she pointed to the horizon. “I think I can see the boardinghouse!” she said, excited, as if the house was her home.

She turned to face me and she now held both my hands, helping me feel anchored. “Let's steal the balloon,” she said. “Steal me away, Ferret. Kidnap me. We'll just live wherever the balloon comes down. Just you and me. We'll take new names. New lives. We'll hide.”

She looked at me, on the verge of tears, and it felt too dangerous to say anything at all. If we stole the balloon and lived where it landed, we'd be leaving Doxie behind. I couldn't speak. I didn't want her to think that I would ever want such a thing. But neither did I want to scold her for spinning a yarn, for slipping into a minute of fantasy that didn't hurt a soul. To me, she could say anything she wanted to say. Anything at all. But I had to leave her alone in this. Doxie—she was my little girl.

When Cecily took her hands back and started to twist my ring off her finger, I was struck with worry. In some sense I'd been waiting for her to take it off ever since she'd first put it on. But then she said, “Propose to me again. But like it's the first time. This is the story I want to tell Doxie. That you proposed to me in the balloon.”

And so I did. I asked her, again, to marry me. And again she wouldn't say yes. She wouldn't say the word. She let me put the ring on her finger, and she kissed me. She wrapped her arms around me, and she put her cheek against my chest, listening to the fast beat of my heart. “You really
are
afraid, aren't you?” she said.

Thanksgiving (the night of) 1898

Dear Cecily,

I often wonder what would have happened had I cut the rope somehow, when we were up in the balloon together. What if I'd dropped the sandbags and let us drift off? I sometimes picture us living near an abandoned little town, even deeper in the country than here where I am, way out where everything dried up or flooded, where all the harvests reaped only worm-eaten crops. We would've gone to the city to steal Doxie back, but otherwise we would never leave our broken-down farm, spending our nights starving to death in each other's arms in secret, watching the fireflies blink.

Today, for Thanksgiving dinner, the sisters opened their doors to all their neighbors from miles around. The ones who came were the ones most grief-struck by the holidays, by the empty chairs around their tables and the quiet rooms down their halls. Emmaline and Hester cooked all of yesterday and today, and they covered the dining room table with turkeys and pheasants and sausages, with mincemeat pies, and plates of salted alligator pears, and a chowder of scalded oyster liquor and cream. You wouldn't know from the feast that the Old Sisters Egan's farm had been strangled and choked years ago.

And though the house was packed to the belfry, no one made a noise. They whispered and crept, respecting me, their oracle.

And I called out to them, asking them into the parlor, whenever they peeked in. One by one they sat down next to me, and I offered them little.

Ever since falling from the sky, I've resisted playing the part they so need me to play. I'm not a priest or a pastor. I don't know anything about what they've lost, or where their lost ones have gone. But it seems, with so little effort, I can offer them a moment of calm. At first it felt like deception. It felt like a theft to promise them anything. But the comfort I could lend lifted my spirits too. It warmed my heart to see them feel a snippet of hope.

When the first woman sat down with me today, I didn't know what to tell her. And she seemed to need me to say
something
. The only words I could summon were the questions on Oscar's phonograph. Oscar's questions seemed like something a wizard would ask.
What do you wish me to do? Why should I do this for you?
And with that, I had to ask nothing more. And more and more of them came into my parlor to hear those same questions.

They brought me old tintypes of their fathers, their grandfathers, their brothers, their sons. They brought me locks of a daughter's hair and a page torn from a wife's diary.

I still gave them next to nothing. But they were thrilled with even a sentence, no matter how cryptic. I spoke my nonsense, and they nodded, making sense of it. And where's the harm?

What if all they need is a whisper of faith? It's not mischief I'm up to. These good people just need to know, after years of struggle, that the prayers they've been praying, Sunday after Sunday, have finally scared up an angel.

And my talents as a thief finally serve a holy purpose. Back as a boy, as a wharf rat for the river men, I learned to see the rage before I saw the fist. I became a prophet of abuse, seeing every slug coming from a mile away. And in the street, fleecing strangers, I learned the habits of a man's elbow in a stiff suit coat, and the meager give of a lady's corset whenever she went to turn. As a thief, you anticipate surprise. When a man's hand goes here—as it always does and always will—your hand goes there, and you take what's his. You look for the fall and flutter of his shadow and you let it serve you in your crime. You dance your own shadow like a puppet, or you allow it to dodge the sun and slip away, and all in all, you know that his gaze will go from
here
to
here
to
here
so you go from
there
to
there
to
there
. You calculate gullibility in just the way a gentleman stands. You detect a lady's character in the spin of her parasol.

Here on the farm, I put the back of my hand to the foreheads of men and women and children to calculate the damage of their fevers. I feel for their pulses in their wrists, and attach meaning to the rhythm of the beats. I press my fingers to their throats. I sniff at a baby's sour breath.

And I only ever tell them what they could have figured out for themselves.

F.

W
HEN
W
AKEFIELD
sent along yet another invitation, I accepted on the spot. Morearty stopped by the boardinghouse, having driven himself down in a one-horse buggy.
Ferret & Cecily
was written across the front of the envelope he handed me, our names made nearly illegible by all the swirl and flourish of the pen. I barely glanced at the card before starting to fan my sweaty neck with it. I told the old butler, as I leaned back on the picket fence, “Tell Wakefield I said ‘Why the hell not?'”

It makes me sick to cast back with my mind's eye to my arrogance. My vanity. I could've simply declined. Why hadn't my instincts led me to hide Cecily away, to keep her to myself, out of sight of everyone?

The truth was, I was proud. As proud as Wakefield, in my way. I wanted him to see how Cecily loved only me. I wanted the richest man in Omaha to want everything that was mine.

•   •   •

The cyclone machine is now divinely unstoppable
, the invitation read.
I've thrown together an afternoon of devastation. When we arrive in Pink Heron, Nebraska, it will still be a place on the map, but when we leave, all the maps will be wrong. Don't eat lunch, for we'll have a lavish early afternoon dinner in the Peacock Room of the condemned Pink Heron Hotel, so that we may watch the town destroyed by my tornado while there's still good sun to be had.

And beneath the engraving, Wakefield had scribbled,
F&C, Dress in your finest, as you'll be hobnobbing with snobs. W.W.

We met the other guests at the train station early Sunday morning, to be ferried by private car to the depot of a town called Blue Creek, the stop that got us the closest to Pink Heron. But, of course, had Pink Heron been easily reachable by rail, it might not have perished. The countryside was riddled with new houses and new schools abandoned, whole towns pristine and empty. People had flocked to Nebraska for the land, only to discover they'd bought acres of desert. A few summers of insects, heat, drought, and flood, and the people fled their new houses without even taking down the curtains.

Wakefield hadn't told us we would leave the luxury of the private car to sit in the back of a long hay wagon pulled by a team of local steeds. There were three such wagons for all the party's guests, and most everyone was amused by the novelty of it. Wakefield had had chairs and tables set up in the carts for parlor games and rounds of cards. A few pretty maids in linen and aprons had been tasked with standing next to the tables with enormous parasols, dropping some shade on us all. But most of the women had their own shade, sitting beneath their elaborate hats decorated for their trip into the countryside, with wildflowers and thistle and milkweed woven into the hatbands.

Each cart was equipped with a fiddler in an evening coat who played what sounded to me like lullabies. Two old men at my table bickered about whether the tune was Schumann or Schubert, and then they bickered about which of the two was the greater composer.

Cecily and I were likely the party's clowns, dressed as we were. Cecily had lifted bills from the dragon's head to return to the Howard Street market. For me, she had plucked from a peddler's cart a swallowtail coat, and she'd made me a vest out of that dismantled dirndl she'd bought before. My stovepipe hat was a little bit crushed, but she pinned onto it a moth she'd knotted from a silk hankie. “Wakefield always digs up the best characters,” old Schumann said, and I nodded and half bowed in my seat, taking it as a compliment.

“Like all those spiritualists,” Schumann's wife said, and the others at the table clucked their tongues, rolled their eyes. They chuckled, but disdainfully. (“Yes, yes, yes,” they all said. “Yes, those spiritualists.”) “All those séances we've sat through. All those ghosts we've summoned.”

I'd been to a few séances myself. Some of them were held in public halls, as theater. A clairvoyant could get good work in those days—with the century about to turn, everyone, rich and poor, seemed mindful of other worlds and the afterlife.

I closed my eyes, dropped my jaw, and placed my fingertips atop the table, all to their amusement. I hummed demonically, as if falling into a dark trance. Everyone laughed some more. “Is that you, Aunt Nannie?” Schubert said. “Who pushed you down the stairs, Aunt Nannie?”

We made introductions. Schubert owned a brewery, while Schumann had the vinegar works. “Ah yes,” I said, “I do all my best pickling with your vinegar.” This made the old men, and their old wives, laugh some more. “Ferret Skerritt,” I said, flicking my card out from up my sleeve. “Ventriloquism and magic tricks.”

For herself, Cecily had fashioned a gown from a tablecloth patterned with grapes and grasshoppers.

“It's just Russian crash,” she told Schumann's wife when the woman asked about the gown's fabric.

“I wouldn't say so,” Schubert's wife said. “It looks Parisian.”

Schumann's wife held a pearl-handled lorgnette to her eyes and leaned in to examine the dress. “I tore all the rucked-velvet roses off a dreadful hat and stitched them on wherever there was a threadbare spot,” Cecily said, lifting at a rose at the low-cut neckline. The women seemed amused by her ingenuity. All the front and back of her dress was scattered with those patches of roses. I couldn't take my eyes off Cecily, or the sweet freckles across the skin of her chest.

To punish me, most likely, for my war talk on the Fourth of July, Wakefield had seated me at a table with a game called War in Cuba—you pulled back the spring of a little cannon to shoot wooden balls at a row of tin soldiers on hinged pegs on a board. When it was Cecily's turn to massacre Spanish troops, I kissed her ear and ran my fingers over the back of her neck. She lifted her chin like a cat getting scratched, so I kissed her throat too. She fumbled with the cannon, sending the ball skittering.

Schumann, or Schubert—I'd already lost track of who was who—made much of having caught the ball easy with one hand, keeping it from rolling off the cart altogether. Everyone applauded his dexterity, as if he'd saved the day from ruin.

•   •   •

A
T DINNER, ON EACH PLATE,
there was a scrawny bird we didn't know. Cecily and I, too shy to ask the uppity among us, concluded it was partridge or squab, though we tickled ourselves by speculating otherwise. “Canary?” I whispered to Cecily. “Rook?” Cecily whispered back. This went on for a while.
Swallow? Sparrow? Finch? Hummingbird? Butterfly? Mosquito? Gnat?

The dinner was served on the hotel's china which had been found left in a hutch. A maid ladled lobster bisque from a tureen into our tiny bowls, and old Morearty poured us a wine that was a deep bloodred. The old butler's hand shook, and drops of wine stained the sleeves of nearly all the fine men around the long table.

Once we'd all picked the meat off the little bird bones, Wakefield stood. “Let's raise our glasses to a man named Dudley,” he said, lifting his snifter. Morearty now dribbled our sleeves with that quince brandy Wakefield favored, and the maid handed out Cuban cigars. We all looked around for this Dudley, but Wakefield said, “Oh he's not here. He ran off long ago. He built this hotel on a hill, thinking a town would rise up around it.” He raised his glass higher. “God bless his blind ambition, and thank God none of us were born so stupid.”

The rich men laughed, and so did their wives, but their laughter didn't sound at all jolly. It sounded like a noise they'd all invented for occasions when laughter was called for.

“Flood the town and make it a lake,” one of the youngest of the bunch said, as he leaned back in his chair, rocking and balancing on the chair's back two legs. He wore a vest striped with purple and gold. I would later learn his name was Baker, of Baker Bros. Engraving Co. Everyone there, other than us, had their names on Omaha buildings. “Turn this hotel into a resort. You'd probably make a fortune without even trying. Some men have the golden touch, and others don't. It's that simple. You do, Dudley didn't.”

Wakefield's sister, who'd been seated far at the other end of the table opposite her twin, leaned her own cigar into the flame of the butler's match. It was a skinny cigar wrapped in ivory paper. “Finally, I'm interested,” she said, drawing out that word
finally
with a long, long sigh. “Destiny. Is that what you're speaking of, Mr. Baker?”

My old friend Schubert spoke up before Baker had a chance to answer. “There's no such thing,” he said, gruff, dropping his fist on the table. “I was destined for nothing. Less than nothing. My father was in debtors' jail when I was a newborn, so I came into the world owing people. Everything I have I got on my own.”

“By the sweat of your brow, and all that?” Billie said, smirking. “And
luck
had nothing to do with it? Nothing at all?”

At Billie's mention of luck, the table fell gloomy. No one among us said anything. Wakefield, after all, had all the best luck in the world but had paid too dearly for it. His shoulders slouching, he lowered himself into his chair. He drank up the dregs from the bottom of his snifter.

“You have not misunderstood me, Billie,” Schubert said. “I do not believe in destiny, and I do not believe in luck.”

I leaned over to whisper, my lips to Cecily's ears, and was only just about to ask her
Do
you
believe in luck?
when the same question was put to me.

“Well, do you, Ferret?” Billie said, raising her voice to call down the table. I felt my stomach lift and fall, like I was back in that balloon. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today an honest-to-God waif,” she said. “Raised in the street by thieves. Does someone like you, Ferret, trust in luck?”

I looked at the others all looking back at me.
Raised by thieves?
What did she know about me, and how did she know it?

I took Cecily's hand in mine, the hand with the ring, and I brought her fingers up to my lips for a kiss. “I'm the luckiest man alive,” I said.

Everyone at the table was so grateful for my gesture, for the easing of the tension, they applauded, and they clucked their tongues at the very sweetness of it all. A few of them tapped their spoons against their glasses in celebration. “Hear, hear,” old Schubert said, raising his snifter though there was nothing left in it. “Well done.”

“Do you know who believed in luck, Pickle?” Wakefield called to Billie from far down the table, cupping his hand around his mouth like a megaphone. Pleased to have another reprieve from the somber mood, everyone perked up, raising their eyebrows.

Who who who
, they all asked, filling the room with owls.

“Dudley, the founder of Pink Heron, Nebraska. There'd been a crippling drought when he arrived in these parts, but only a week later it rained. It rained so hard, it left a little pond, where he spotted a pink heron one sunny afternoon. It was a sign, he thought. Fortuitous. A symbol of luck and prosperity.”

“Oh that's too too utterly marvelous,” one of the wives said.

“Now,” Wakefield said, “let's go tear his dream to pieces.”

And with that, the guests pushed themselves from the table. The room filled with the scratching of chair legs against the wood floor. The men and women chattered and bellowed, and they made those laughlike noises again.

Though Wakefield intended to capture the wreckage with his motion picture camera outside, he insisted that all the rest of us keep to the rooms of the pink hotel, where we were to watch from the windows. Even the men who fancied themselves adventurers, who wanted to be out in all the whirl and wind of it, respected Wakefield's wishes. He was a living rebuke to the dangers of daredevilry.

Cecily got up from the table too fast. She grabbed hold of my arm to steady herself from the spinning of her dizzy spell, and I helped ease her back into her chair. There was no water left in her glass, and she'd emptied the pitcher too—she'd been guzzling it all through dinner, blaming the cook's heavy hand with the saltshaker. “I just need one more little sip,” Cecily said, touching her fingertips to her temples. She looked up at me and said, in a tone that sounded like accusation, “Headache again.”

I picked up her glass and left the dining hall to seek out the kitchen. When I found the doorway and stepped inside, an old woman wringing her hands in her apron looked at me wide-eyed, as shocked as if I'd stumbled upon her in her underskirts. I hadn't been among the rich long enough to know that the servants got embarrassed if you caught sight of the dishes in the sink and the pots on the stove.

“I just need a splash of water,” I said.
I'm not one of them
, I wanted to add.

“Let
me
, Mr. Skerritt,” Morearty said, suddenly at my side, taking the glass. “I'll bring it to you.” He smiled broadly but gently, politely indicating I needed to leave the kitchen. He kept still, the glass just staying empty in his hand.

When I returned to the dining hall, there was no one left, not even Cecily. I followed the voices of the crowd to the lobby, and once there, I glanced through an entryway into another hall, to see Cecily and Wakefield off alone, sitting on the bottom steps of a grand staircase. Cecily held a snifter of brandy.

It certainly didn't surprise me that Wakefield had swooped in. The drapes were drawn and the hall was dark—Wakefield lured her forth, I assumed, promising that the shadows would chase the ache from her head.

When I walked up to them, they were both intently studying the fabric square that he'd pulled from the pocket of his dinner jacket. He held the fabric open in the palm of his metal hand.

“Oh, Ferret, look at this,” Cecily said, setting down the snifter and plucking up the fabric. She stood from the steps and walked toward a window. She elbowed the drapery open an inch or two to let in just enough sun to glisten the jewels woven with gold thread into the mesh of the square. The jewels were all circles, some round, some oblong.