The Swan Gondola (28 page)

“No,” I said. “She loves
me
.”

“She loves you
not
,” Mrs. Margaret said. “You were nowhere when she needed you most.” She put on a mocking frown and tapped at her own chest with the points of the scissors. “It's a story that stabs you in the heart.”

“I was there,” I said, pushing myself up from the floor. “They told me she needed rest. She wouldn't get better without rest. I wanted more than anything to be with her.”

“You don't have to convince
me
,” she said. “You should've
fought
to be at her side. People like you and me, we gotta fight tooth and nail, cradle to grave.” She called out to me as I ran from the room. “From the hole between your mama's legs to the hole they shovel for you, you gotta be kicking and screaming every goddamn minute of it.” She raised her voice more as I ran down the stairs. “Your problem, boy, is you got uppity. You thought your luck improved. But it didn't, and it won't. You're no better than the worst of us.”

I slammed the door behind me, hoping to shut out her screeching, but before I had even crossed the front yard to the street she was at an upstairs window. “Oh, Ferret, love, I forgot something,” she sang out, singsongy. “I'm to give you this letter she wrote you. She snuck the envelope into my fist when I handed her Doxie. She knew not to trust anyone else with it.”

“I'll come up for it,” I shouted back.

“I'll drop it down to you,” she said.

“No, I'll come up for it,” I said again.

“No, I'll drop it down to you,” she said again, and she held the envelope out the window and lit it on fire with a match she struck with the broken, banged-purple nail of her thumb.

By the time the letter had fallen, burning, to the lawn, most of the words had been lost. After dropping to my knees to pat out the flame, I then collected the ashy snippets that had flaked away, whole words, and parts of words, and fragments of sentences, that had drifted into bushes and flowerpots, landing on leaves and petals—
it's not so
,
when, the rain, a mother, you don't.
At the end of the block, I was lucky enough to nab a cabbie unafraid to snap the reins. It was only half past noon and he was cross-eyed with liquor already. “You can't get me to the train station fast enough,” I told him, and he laughed at me with teeth half-black from chaw.

“This broken-down nag's got a wild streak or two left in her,” he said.

With one hand, I clutched the side of the carriage as we bucked away, and I pressed the other to my chest, holding the last of Cecily's letter close, its charred and fragile pieces of linen stationery tucked into the inside pocket of my coat. I could still feel the heat of it and smell its smoke.

I didn't know what to believe.

Mrs. Margaret's flame had burned through the center of the letter, and I'd yet to read much of what little writing was left. But the ride was so rough as we galloped, I didn't dare risk lifting the paper from my pocket and having the wind carry it away. I even held both hands tight against my coat, and the people we passed might have thought we were in such a rush because I'd been shot through the chest.

“You're either escaping a lady or going after one,” the driver called back to me as he slowed in front of the station's towering columns.

“Yes,” I said.

“Lady troubles are the best troubles to have,” he said, with a smile and a sigh, as if touched by the romance of it. I noticed then something quite dapper about the black-toothed lad, with his felt daisy in his buttonhole and a polka-dot necktie dressing up his tattered tweed suit. I paid him double, and was nearly trampled by the speckled horse of a passing carriage as I stepped into the busy street.

The stately Burlington Station—blocks of marble and a roof of red—had only just opened that summer, in time for the Fair, and it swarmed with travelers. At the top of the facade was a clock cradled in the arms of a white angel, and I checked the hour hoping to see that time had stopped.

I ran through the lobby and onto the staircase that spiraled down through the floor, my feet slipping out from under me on a freshly polished step. I grabbed hold of the brass banister before nearly braining myself on the marble, but not without accidentally kicking an old lady in the shin and nearly sending her for a spill—an old man at her side kept her from falling by grabbing her sleeve.

“I'm so sorry,” I sputtered to them both, as I ran off.

The lower level led out to the canopied platform, where Wakefield's private car pulled away, at the very tail end of a long train. Unlike the sleek, dark cars of other rich men, Wakefield's had all the marks of his showmanship, painted a canary yellow, its roof in peppermint stripes. In the railing of the observation deck were the curls and twists of a wrought-iron
W
.

The train was leaving the station at a snail's clip and I could have easily leaped onto that deck and slipped in through the back door, but for Wakefield himself. He stood out there, alone, with a teacup in his flesh hand and a cigar in the silver one.

He didn't seem at all surprised to see me.

I walked alongside the car's deck, quickening my pace as the train began to pick up speed.

“Where are you taking her?” I said.

He only shook his head. He plugged his cigar into the corner of his mouth and looked down into his tea.

I said, “What's stopping me from pulling you off there and pushing you under the wheels?”

“Because you want what's best for Cecily,” he said through the side of his mouth, with exasperation. He tossed the tea from the cup out onto the rails, then spat his cigar from his mouth. “You're not good for her, and you know it.”

“I could charge you with kidnapping,” I said. “She's my wife to be.”

“You were killing her by inches,” he said, his voice building. “Keeping her and that baby in that dark dusty room. You don't even know the difference, do you? And why should she trust you? You were willing to sell off your whole livelihood when you sold me that dummy. You don't have a care in the world. If only we could all be like you, Ferret.”

He had to shout his insult above the clangor of the trains. My instinct was to pull him from his perch, not to beat him but to make him stand in front of me as he spoke.

I ran ahead, and off the platform, as the train switched tracks. I skipped over the rails and followed alongside the car, running past Wakefield. I leaped up to knock my knuckles against the windows. I called Cecily's name. I ran along, knocking, calling. And then I saw her. Cecily came to the window and pressed her palm against the glass.

I reached into my coat pocket and so very carefully took from it the burned letter. I cradled it in my hands and held it up, hoping she could see it, even as I knew I was losing yet more of it, more of its ashen message blowing away word by word. She furrowed her brow. “She burned it,” I shouted, though I suspected Cecily couldn't hear me at all. “I couldn't read it.” I clutched the charred letter to my chest as the train left the rail yard, chugging quickly away, Wakefield no longer on the deck.

Before she left my sight, I watched her lower her eyes, lower her chin, and turn her face away from the window. The wind picked up, and I lost a few more pieces of the letter. I clutched quickly at the paper and ashes. But then I opened my hands. I let the wind carry the last of the letter away.

November 26, 1898

Dear Cecily,

I haven't told Emmaline yet what becomes of you, and she's fit to be tied. She always reads the ends of books first, she says. She reads books for their sentiment, for their characters. If she's flustered by suspense, she worries too much. So she reads the end before she begins. At that point, there at the end, the dead are dead, and the living have lived.

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

Emmaline has begun writing her own book, but no one can read it. It's not that she hasn't shown it to us—we just don't know what it says. She wakes from dreams with symbols and shapes in her head. A new alphabet comes out of the end of her pen. Even she doesn't know what it means. The dreams began on the night I arrived. She suspects I provoked them. I'm heaven-sent, she says.

On some mornings she can interpret some of her dream writing, but only vaguely. All we know is this: they're instructions. We're to build something. And we're to build it beneath the roof of the barn. We're anxious to begin, but we don't know how. We don't even know the materials to use.

I probably have no business diagnosing sanity in a letter that I'm writing to a ghost. But I don't detect any madness in her hieroglyphics. Every time I look at the pages, I feel on the verge of literacy. If we can puzzle out one little word, one
if
,
and
, or
but
, then we'll find our way to all the others.

She has drawn a blueprint, of sorts, based on what little she understands. The drawing consists of circles circling, spiraling in and out of one another. But her circles don't really mean circles, she says.

Emmaline calls it the Emerald Cathedral, because a man whispered the name in a dream. The man is someone she used to know, she says, but she doesn't like to talk about him. Before this man left her for someone else, when she was young, he gave her a ring. “An emerald for Emmaline,” he told her. She hasn't dreamed about him in many, many years.

We're
grateful
for all the suspense. We wouldn't ask her to dream any faster than she does. The mystery of it is where the magic is. What if the Emerald Cathedral can never be built? If that's the ending, we don't want to know it.

Ferret

September 1898

I
N THE LOOKING GLASS
looking back at me was the mug of a man wanted dead or alive. In those weeks after Cecily left, my curls grew long and unruly. I took no scissors to the thicket of beard that crept onto my chin. My vest gapped open where the buttons were gone. My collar had warped. And in my eyes I saw no hope left.

I had no work, and I had no money. For a time, Wakefield's golden dragon head had seemed to cough up cash on its own, but the bundle had grown thin, the dragon swallowing it up. My literary correspondence had dwindled. I sat at the typewriter, back in my attic at the Empress Opera House, struck inarticulate.
There's nothing worth saying
, I found myself typing in the few letters I wrote for others.

A bottle of rum in the evening with August and Rosie would lift me a little, but the first glint of morning sun, and soberness, would drop me even lower than before.

I did take some comfort from the postcards Cecily sent, though she didn't send them to me. She sent them to Pearl who, in her mercy, would share them with me. I would meet Pearl, in my wrecked state, at the lunch counter at Brandeis for coffee and cold lamb's-tongue sandwiches.

On a card from New Helena, Nebraska, Cecily wrote only:
Feeling quite well. Took the waters. Leaving today.

On the back of a picture of bathers in a warm-water plunge in South Dakota, she wrote:
Doing better. Took the waters. Leaving today.

A new note arrived every three days or so. No sooner would she leave one mineral spring sanatorium than she would leave yet another.

She took the waters in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. And she only ever wrote as she left a place. If she'd written on arrival, I might've caught the next train to wherever she was.

The words on the postcards were hollow—like she was shouting down a well only for the echo of it. But I was grateful for them, and they would lift me even higher than the rum could. She sounded lonely and lost without me.

•   •   •

O
N MY BIRTHDAY,
Pearl baked me a harlequin cake—one layer was chocolate, one white, one pink. “The pink has the last of the summer's rose leaves,” she said. She had plucked them from the garden behind the Juliet, the women's hotel where she lived. “I snipped them to pieces and powdered them with sugar.”

We had our sad little party on the unlit stage of the Empress, which had been set for a new play. The theater was to open again in a few weeks for its fall season, but Phoebe, and all the others from last spring, had not been invited back. The theater had a new manager, a gentleman in white linen and checkered hat, determined to go legit. The play didn't even have a moral or much of a plot. I'd watched a rehearsal one afternoon. Two actresses I didn't know played two sisters I didn't like. The sisters paced a kitchen, dredged up old slights, and puzzled over their dead father's ledgerbook.

The play would have no opening or closing acts, no vaudeville or burlesque. So even if I'd still had Oscar, I wouldn't have had a stage.

Much of the kitchen was only painted sloppily on a backdrop. Pearl and I sat at a table that wobbled, sloshing the tea in our cups. She served the cake alongside a few dried apricots from the fruit market. I picked up a sliver of apricot and inspected it for dust. “The filth of the streets gets on the fruit,” I said, taking a bite nonetheless. “And the filth gives you typhoid fever.” I'd been studying a magazine sold in August's father's bookshop—a periodical for doctors called the
Omaha Clinic
. With my new medical knowledge I often reflected back on the summer, diagnosing Cecily from afar.

“This week it's the apricots?” Pearl said, gently ribbing me. “Last week it was the oysters from polluted ponds.” Yes. The sewage oysters Cecily and I had eaten at the Fair, feeling elegant.

Pearl then gave me my gift. “A novel with a villain,” she said. “Do you know the story of
Trilby
?” On the cover was an angel-winged heart caught in a spider's web.

“I do, a little,” I said, though I hadn't read the book. You didn't have to read it to know it. It sold millions. It was all the go. People slapped the name Trilby on anything they wanted to sell. You could wear a Trilby hat and eat Trilby chocolate. You could dance a Trilby waltz and play a Trilby rag. There were Trilby freckle creams and card games and china dolls. And there were endless sermons against the book's naked ladies and gothic evil. But none of it mattered to me. What did I care anymore about other people's amusements?

“It's a horrible novel,” Pearl said. “Well, not horrible in that it's a poor story but in that the incidents in it are horrible. Trilby is a beautiful young woman who falls victim to Svengali, an older man. He's a mesmerist. He puts Trilby in a hypnotic trance, and she becomes his lover. She's beautiful and he's hideous. Nothing ends well.” She leaned forward to whisper, wobbling the table some more. “His first trick is to cure her of her headaches.”

I tried to read the book when I was alone in the attic, but it was mostly about artists in Paris. I learned very little of the villain's methods. Instead I returned to the
Omaha Clinic
. I read about the medicinal properties of orchids.
Travelers in the deserts of Persia sustained themselves on tonics mixed from the flower's bulbs. Even just being in the presence of such strange blossoms was curative. Orchids needed no soil, so the Japanese would simply hang the plants from their ceilings.
My mind drifted, imagining myself stringing orchids up by their stems, in a hothouse where Cecily could sit and sip orchid-bulb tea. She would return to me, and I would cure her.

•   •   •

O
N THE OPENING NIGHT OF
Heart of the White City
, I returned to the Fair for the first time in weeks. I knew I would not see Cecily on the stage, but I would, at least, see her characters. I would see her factory girl, her dance hall girl, her Ferris wheel girl, her fire victim. And there was a part of me that wanted the constant ache of seeing Cecily everywhere, in everything, her shadow crossing my shoes, the scent of her extract of sweet pea caught in the garden. I wanted to sail alone on the swan gondola, with Cecily at my side.

I tamed my hair with a messy pomade August had concocted in his kitchen, a perfumed slop mixed from wax, mutton lard, and orange flowers. It slicked all my curls straight and made my hair darker and wet like from a rainstorm. I ran a string of dental silk between my teeth and brushed with August's powder of French chalk and myrrh. I splashed my bloodshot eyes with a tonic from the oculist, a tepid water peppered with sea salt.

When I reached the theater at the Fair, the girl behind the gilded bars of the box office laughed at me. “There hasn't been a ticket for weeks,” she said.

I refused to be disappointed. I leaned in close to the window, and I hooked a finger around one of the thin bars. “Do you know of any scalpers?” I said.

The ticket girl winked and tapped at my finger. “Go look on the midway,” she said. “It's full of degenerates after dark.”

She was right. I found no ticket scalper, but rogues of every other stripe loitered and skulked. The midway had become more sordid than ever; it was the Fair's back alley. The puppeteer's Punch-and-Judy show was bloodier and filthier than before. In front of the big top of the Wild Animal Show, a man-size birdcage featured a woman inside swinging, in a costume trimmed with red feathers, nothing on beneath her skirt. She performed acrobatics that made her feathers flutter up so fast you risked missing something obscene. Young men stuck green carnations in their buttonholes, limped their wrists, fluttered their yellow hankies, and sold their kisses to Oscar Wilde types. Grass skirts wiggled off hips in the Hawaiian Theater. Women undid their corsets for the X-ray machine. Hard liquor flowed from the lemonade stands. From an apple cart a peddler sold opium pipes.

And the lovelies Rosie had been selling under cover of his coat had now crept out, every bare inch of them in the full glare of the midway's lights. He'd parked his rickshaw in front of a souvenir shop. The photographs were pinned to the umbrella and propped up in the seat. They were stuck into the spokes of the wheels. He'd even strung up a clothesline, the pictures dangling from wooden pins, as shocking and delicate a sight as a lady's frilliest underdrawers. Rosie had pictures pinned to his suspenders, and even one playfully tucked into the fly of his pants.

On the brim of Rosie's hat was pinned a lovely I recognized—one of the young, motherly nurses of the incubator exhibit. I knew she had likely been an actress only playing the part of a nurse, but I still worried about her, posed as she was, naked but for a nun's wimple atop her head. “I'll buy it,” I said. She'd been one of the ones who'd been sweet to Doxie, so I paid to take the picture off the market or, at least, this copy of it. “Some of these girls have fathers, you know.” I harrumphed, holding out my dollar bill.

Rosie had grown used to my foul mood. He rolled his eyes and held out a half-dollar piece. “Men of the clergy get a half-price discount,” he said, with a sneer.

I didn't take the coin. Instead, I folded up the card, smaller and smaller, and gazed into the window of the souvenir shop.

We were about as far from an ocean as we could possibly be, so landlocked were we there in the West, but the shop was stocked full of souvenirs made of seashells—little mother-of-pearl prairie schooners with dried sea horses in place of oxen, and figurines of mermaids holding ears of corn. I stepped inside. Nestled in among the knickknacks was an oval bottle not much bigger than a robin's egg, and made of abalone shell. When it caught the light, the cloud-colored shell shimmered faintly with pink and pale blue. The gilded tin stopper was shaped like a tiny crown, and it was attached to a little stick of pinewood. The idea, the clerk explained, was for a lady to attach the bottle's chain to her charm bracelet, and she could turn the stopper when she wanted a bit of scent, the little stick grinding the perfumed seeds inside.

It cost only a half-dollar, so I stepped back out to take the coin Rosie had offered, and I returned to the clerk. Before I'd even left the shop with the bottle, it throbbed cool in the palm of my hand like a talisman. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth shell.

I twisted the stopper, to grind the seeds, and something about the scent—a mix of licorice and lilac—was tranquilizing. It already reminded me of Cecily.

•   •   •

I
FOUND
A
UGUST
S
WEETBRIAR
in the Indian camp, where he'd built himself a tent among the wigwams and tepees. He had hammered together a rectangular frame of scrap wood and hung up rags for walls—curtains, tablecloths, tattered ball gowns torn apart at their seams. Fairgoers lined up at the front of the tent, and he would lift the flap with his wrist and wave people in, one by one, with a witchy wiggling of his fingers.

August no longer practiced only medicine. He told fortunes too. The tent, though spacious, had no chairs, so he would sit with his subject on a rug spread out across the dirt. He would either diagnose and prescribe a tonic, or he'd have the man or lady shake a large kid glove that was filled with chicken bones left over from his previous day's supper. August would spill the bones onto the rug and study how they fell.

When he saw me standing in the line outside the tent, he closed up shop, sent everyone else away, and pulled me in. I could smell the spot of perfume at his throat as he hugged me close.

His hair had grown past his shoulders. I ran my fingers through the snaggled ends of it. When I stepped back, I saw he wore only a woman's petticoat that sagged on his skinny hips. Around his neck was a long necklace that nearly reached his knees. Knotted up in the necklace were misshapen pearls, seashells, and turtle bones. His cheeks and chest were crossed with white and yellow lines of paint.

“I've gone native,” he said, cocking a hip. “We all have around here.”

I ran my fingertip along the two-headed snake scribbled up his arm. “What's all this mean?” I said.

“Oh, darling, I have no idea,” he said, “but I hope it means something awfully savage. Would you like some tea? I have the samovar.” Before I could answer, it seemed the whole tent would be trampled. A stampede passed so close, it shook the wooden frame and blew the walls like sheets on a line. The riders wailed and hollered, and the horses' hooves kicked up a thick cloud. I bent over with a coughing fit from all the dirt.

“You do get used to it,” August said, when we could hear ourselves speak again. He went to a tent pole to secure it, pushing it deeper into the ground. “It was fairly quiet around here when it was all just an exhibit of everyone being peaceable and pretty.” He dusted the samovar with a peacock feather.

I had indeed noticed that things had changed in the Indian camp. The camp had been designed as a high-minded tribute to “the lost man,” according to the Fair's diplomats. It was an important anthropological exercise, they'd explained. Before, the white folks had stepped polite and curious among the rituals, even a little stooped at the back, like they were examining medical oddities under glass in a dime museum. They wore thick goggles to keep their eyes from stinging from all the dirt kicked up by the strutting of warriors. They hesitantly accepted offers to bang a drum or blow through a flute.

Meanwhile, farther down the midway, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show made a fortune by staging mock scalpings and stagecoach massacres. Those Indians—most of them white men in face paint and loincloths—warbled and shrieked all day long, then spent their nights in the suites of the fine Paxton Hotel.

When the old warrior Geronimo arrived at the Fair as a one-night-only one-man show, selling the buttons off his coat and letting young ladies pose on his knee for a fee, he inspired the men and the women of the camp.