The Swan Gondola (30 page)

D
ESPITE ALL OUR
careful plotting and planning, I hadn't realized there were
two
rooftop gardens. I sat for several minutes, sunk with exhaustion, my head in my hands, on a stone bench in the one garden where Cecily wasn't.

I twisted the president's thread around my finger some more. I closed my eyes and calculated. I pictured Cecily standing, walking, leaving the dining room. I counted the steps down the hall, tapping them out with the toe of my boot. I counted the stairs, imagining the time it would take her to climb them so weighted down by the trappings of her dress.

Cecily once told me that rich ladies kept their skirts stiff by wearing crinolines spun from glass.

“No wonder the rich girls look more sour than the poor ones,” I'd said, whispering in her ear, slipping my hand beneath her kimono, running my fingers over the skin of her thigh. “They're bleeding from all those snips and cuts.” She had then taken my hand in hers to move it up her thigh, to between her legs. She writhed against my fingers. I watched her, as she closed her eyes, as she opened her mouth. I put my hand to her neck to feel it arch, her head falling back. I loved hearing her every broken breath. I held my mouth to her mouth, to let her breathe into me, my lips only barely touching hers.

But when I finally stepped from the wrong garden and saw her waiting in the right one, her back to me, she looked as light as a cloud. There was no taffeta, no crinoline to hide the bones of her hips. The silk of her sky-blue gown clung to her, as if she wore nothing underneath.

I had wished this other garden into existence. I'd conjured it up.
She lost her way
, I'd promised myself.
She's here.
I'd stepped back into the corridor, to look up and down, and had it not been for a slight gust of wind that had pushed at the garden door, and the squeak of the door's hinges, and a shift of pale shadow, I would have risked never seeing her at all. The door to Cecily's garden was tucked around a corner, behind a twist in the hall, hidden by a slope. How had she ever found her way in?

Out on her private corner of rooftop, she stood between two tall urns spilling over with ivy and she gazed across the Grand Court. The evening sky beyond her was a spatterwork of heaven-like colors—some lavender, some robin's-egg blue. “Cecily,” I said, softly, as if I might frighten her away if I spoke too loud. She didn't hear me, and when I said her name again, I ended up startling her anyway.

“Oh,” she said, “there you are,” with an edge of annoyance. She turned to me, sending sparkles glinting up and down her dress as the setting sun caught metallic threads of silver. The threads had been woven into the silk, into the blooms of fireworks bursting.

Her arms were bare, and she rubbed them for warmth. Her hair was done up again in a Psyche knot, some of the curls coming loose and dangling down, like she'd just woken from a nap beneath a tree.

“I was waiting in the wrong place,” I said. I smiled at her, but she didn't smile back.

“I figured you just couldn't kick the habit of abandoning me,” she said.

“I've never abandoned you,” I said. I spoke as softly as before. I didn't want her to think I was trying to stir up an argument. But I was desperate to explain. “I've never left you. Never. Please believe me.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said. She looked down at her hands. She ran a finger along the lines of her palm, like a fortune-teller tracing a fate. “That's the only reason I came up here, Ferret. To tell you that I won't talk to you. I have nothing else to say about it.” But she didn't leave the garden.

“Cecily, I was
there
,” I said. As I stepped closer, I saw how pale she'd become, all her summer color having faded away. “I was there in the hospital. That's what I've been wanting to tell you for weeks, Cecily. It kills me that you think I wasn't there. I was
there
. The nuns only ever let me see you when you were half asleep. They lied to you when they said they couldn't find me.”

“The
nuns
lied,” she said, scoffing, rolling her eyes, and despite her paleness and her finery, there she was again. There was Cecily. “The
nuns
.”

“Yes,” I said. “And Wakefield. Ask him. Tell him to tell you the truth.”

When I stepped forth to take her hands in mine, she pulled away. She shook her head. She shrugged, and the shoulder knot of her dress dropped down her arm. “I won't listen to this,” she said, her weak protest rising just above a whisper. “None of it matters.”

I reached over to push the shoulder knot back up. “The truth doesn't matter?” I said, but I said it gently, running my fingertips over the goose-pimpled skin of her ice-cold arm.

“No,” she said. She shook her head, then she looked me right in the eye, almost defiant. “
No
, frankly. No. The truth
doesn't
matter, to be honest. Whether it's true or not, I believed it. And isn't there something wrong with that? Isn't that troubling? It was so easy to believe that you would leave me. I'd been expecting all along for you to just run away. And I can't live like that. I can't live every minute wondering when I'm going to be alone again.”

“You're not being fair,” I said. “I never did anything to make you think I'd ever leave you.”

“Except for the time
you left me
,” she said. “When I was
sick
.”

“I was
there
,” I said again, raising my voice, and I suddenly remembered the little dove with the mop and bucket. “The novitiate,” I said, and I began to stumble over my words, rattling them out, excited to remember. “The novitiate. You remember her? Always cleaning? Always everyplace? She knew I was waiting for you. She knew I was in the chapel. She can tell you.”

Now Cecily's eyes seemed to fall on me with pity. She started to say something, but stopped. She returned to the railing, to look away. “I don't remember the novitiate,” she said, weary. She then spoke calmly, patiently. “Maybe I'm
not
being fair.
But it doesn't matter
. We don't
have
to puzzle it all out, Ferret. We don't have to worry over it all. This isn't
Heart of the White City
. This isn't a show. We don't have to have a scene with the novitiate.” She said “the novitiate” with a pompous air, mocking the drama of it. “We can simply let it all go, without a fight. I'm with Billy now.” She looked back to me, and she shrugged again, again knocking that shoulder knot off. “I
married
him. I'm married now. I have a daughter to look after.”

“I love Doxie,” I said.
Daughter . . .
I found it insulting the way she said it. Yes, your
daughter
, I know her. I know your daughter. I know your daughter's name. Remember?

“I know you love her,” she said, looking down again at her hands, and my feeling of insult faded as quickly as it had sparked up.

“
He
doesn't love her,” I said.

“He does,” she said, matter-of-fact, certain. “He does. He loves her very much.”

“He doesn't,” I said.

“How would you
know
, Ferret? We've been away for weeks. You don't know anything about us anymore. We've been away even longer than you and I were together. Did you even realize that, Ferret? Do you have any sense of time at all?” When I said nothing, she said, “No, not you,” but she wasn't angry. She spoke gently. “The days just trip along, one into the next. We should all be so lucky to care so little.”

I'd hoped she wouldn't see how misted my eyes had got, as I'd been concentrating on keeping my tears back. If I so much as blinked, the tears would drop, and I didn't want to cry alone over all of this. If I cried in front of her, I was just the helpless little boy she worried that I was.

So the first tear felt like defeat. But somehow it seemed even more cowardly to wipe it away. I blinked my eyes, and more tears fell. I sniffled, then cleared my throat, lowering my voice. “I'll be whoever you want me to be,” I said.

In a spat between lovers, you can shore yourself up when the other one buckles. You become the strong one in front of the weak one, just like that. She stepped forward, and with a kindness that killed me, she wiped my tears with her thumb. “You don't need to play a character, Ferret,” she said. “You need to be who you are.”

She rubbed at her bare arms. “I'm getting cold,” she said. “I'm going in.” She dropped her eyes from mine. “Good night, Ferret.”

As Cecily walked past me, I took her arm. I held it. I wouldn't let her go, but she didn't try, anyway. I pulled her to me, her back to my chest. I held her there, against me, wrapping my arms around her. I put my lips to her ear and whispered, “I
never
left you.” I said, “I never once left you.”

At first, Cecily seemed to be simply indulging me, kindly letting me hold her, petting my hand with hers, sighing with that pity again. But then her sighs grew heavier. She began to shiver, and I held her closer. And her shivering turned into shaking, and she wept. She fell slack in my arms.

Finally, she elbowed me in the ribs, and she shook herself away. She turned to face me, but stepped back, her eyes wide with rage. “Then why'd you burn my letter?” she said. She yelled at me, but with my mind so muddled I couldn't think of what letter I'd burned. “I poured my soul out to you in my letter,” she said, “and you
burned
it.” I'd never seen Cecily like this. She shouted above her sobbing, half bent at the back like a madwoman, clutching at the skirt of her dress. “I told you that I loved you in that letter, that it
killed
me that you weren't at my bedside when I needed you, and you
burned
it. And you held it in your fist . . .” She raised her hand in the air, her hand in a fist, and her weeping consumed her. “You wanted me to see . . . at the train window . . .”

“No. No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” I said, as I realized. I put my hands to her cheeks, to turn her face toward me, to get her to look into my eyes. “No, no, no,” I said. I felt washed in relief.
A mistake
, I thought. She had made a mistake. We could correct the mistake. We just had to come to this. It was this easy. “I didn't burn the letter, Cecily. Mrs. Margaret burned it. I wanted you to see that . . . I just needed you to see that I couldn't read it. Cecily, I don't know what you wrote in that letter. Mrs. Margaret burned it.” I felt such regret over my foolishness.
Of course
it had looked like
I
had burned the letter.
How could I be so stupid?

She seemed to be weighing this new information, considering it. She had stopped crying. She pushed my hands from her shoulders, and she stepped away in a daze. She leaned against a column, putting her forehead to it. “It doesn't matter,” I heard her say. But I knew that it did. I was certain that this all mattered to her deeply. I walked to her. I ran my fingers over her cheek, pushing away the strands of her hair caught in her tears. I put my lips to her cheek, and she allowed it. I then kissed her neck. And when she let me do that, I brought my lips to hers. I put my arms around her waist, and she put hers around my shoulders. We kissed not with intensity but with tenderness, sadly, as if we were saying good-bye.

She then said, “I need to go. I need to get back to the table. I've been gone too long.”

I kissed her cheek, her neck. “Don't go,” I said. “Won't you just get into trouble?”

“I can slip back in without him even noticing,” she said. “The fashionable ladies don't rustle anymore, you know. We wrap ourselves in a cashmere shroud to keep ourselves silent.” She reached down to lift her dress enough to show the thin lining beneath.

The garden door squeaked open and we both jumped at the noise of it. “There you are, Mrs. Wakefield,” Wakefield's sister said. I felt Cecily's heart quicken. “Your husband is worried about you,” Billie said.

Cecily hurried from my side without a word and walked past Billie, their skirts sweeping against each other with a whoosh of silk. Cecily left the garden, dry leaves dragged along behind her, caught up in the train of her dress.

“Thank you for finding her, Ferret,” Billie said. She came to me holding out some folded dollar bills. Instead of taking the money, I grabbed her wrist. I pulled her closer, and I grabbed her elbow, and I pulled her closer still. I looked her in the eye.

“Oh, Ferret, don't be bitter,” she said pleasantly as she squirmed. “This isn't a contest. And even if it was, how could you win?”

I held tight to her elbow. “I can't,” I whispered in her ear. I could feel her breath on my neck. “But if I threw you off the roof, it might feel a little bit like winning something, at least. And why shouldn't I do something awful? To you. Then to your brother. What have I got to lose?”

Billie leaned away from me. She lifted her chin, squinting, examining. She brought her hand up to my face and I flinched at first. She then touched my cheek with her thumb as if brushing away a fallen eyelash. “I always liked you, Ferret,” she said. “You've got a good soul. Don't let someone like her ruin you. She's not worth it.”

When I yanked her closer again, she gasped with what I hoped to be true fear. I then took the money she still held in her hand, but only so that I could drop it at her feet. I said nothing else and walked to the door to the garden. It satisfied me to hear the sound of her silk as she lowered herself to collect the dollar bills.

•   •   •

T
HE DINNER GUESTS
left the hall to be escorted into buggies and carriages festooned for a flower parade—President McKinley would ride at the end of the procession—down the Grand Court in the dazzle of the night's electric light. August would later educate me on all the flora, as he lay back in my arms on a patch of lawn to watch the parade pass. Forget-me-nots and myrtle wreathed and garlanded the manes of the horses, and clematis and daisies wove and wound through the spokes of the wheels. “Snowdrop, crocus, damask rose, hyacinth, hollyhocks,” August would say, pointing, tapping his finger at the air.