The Swan Gondola (33 page)

A
ND
C
ECILY RETURNED TO ME,
like a blessing. Within only a minute of being together again, it was as if we'd never spent a minute apart. We didn't talk about the burned letter, or the summer just past. We didn't talk at all. She wouldn't let me speak. “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” she said, when she saw me.

Mrs. Margaret, not only forgiven by Cecily but given a job at the house, had arranged for us to meet in the offices of the Chinese doctor on Douglas Street.

Cecily had expected me, and took my hand the moment she walked in the door. She led me down a hall, through a dimly lit rabbit warren of little rooms and sleeping berths.

Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh. “I've grown to hate hellos even more than I hate good-byes,” she said, as we ducked through a curtain. She shook my hand, gentlemanly. “It's a pleasure to meet you, mister, ma'am, miss, a pleasure, a pleasure, a pleasure. The pleasure is all
mine
, to be
sure
.” She curtsied, she bowed, she tsk-tsked and tut-tutted, and she handed me her fur stole and her scarf and her hat, flinging them all into my arms with the lazy wrists of a wealthy matron.

She took off a winter glove lined with white rabbit, and she held her bared hand to my lips when I went to speak again. “Sh-sh-sh-sh,” she said. “The doctor needs absolute silence.”

Dr. Gee Loy had come in, and he placed a sheet across a black table inlaid with pearl. “When you're allowed to speak again,” Cecily told me, “remind me to buy a new chameleon from the doctor.” Pinned to the breast of her dress was a little chain with a ring at the end of it. A leash. “The fashionable ladies wear the chameleons as jewelry,” she said. “It's sweet to have a little heart thumping against mine, while I'm buried in cadavers.” She sneered at the head of the muskrat propped up on the fur stole in my arms. “I'm cold all the time, so he keeps buying me furs.” She unpinned the chain and stuck it into the lapel of my coat. She leaned in to whisper. “The chameleons keep getting away from me, but if I don't rescue them from the doctor,” she said, “I don't know what's to become of them.”

Any chameleon in Dr. Gee Loy's apothecary would likely end up dried or powdered. The doctor's methods of treatment crawled with dead bugs and reptiles. In the apothecary jars on the shelves of the office that fronted the street were the roasted larvae of grasshoppers for headaches, and the dusty husks of silkworm moths for fainting fits, and dead scorpions for rheumatism. There were little red-spotted lizards dried to a crisp, and rattles without their snakes. I suspected it was all for show, all the labels facing out, promising cures you wouldn't find anywhere else. It seemed nothing but hocus-pocus, just like everything else did those days.

But Cecily, to my great relief, seemed better somehow. Much, much better. She had color in her cheeks, life in her eyes. When she turned her back to me, lifting a few stray tendrils of hair up from her neck, asking me to undo the buttons of her collar, of the back of her dress, I was with her again on the night we first met, backstage at the Empress. I placed the fur stole and the hat in a chair, and I brought my fingers to the buttons, and I worked slowly, so slowly, and she let me. She stretched her neck forward. She touched her fingertips to mine. Once I'd opened her collar, I leaned forward to kiss her skin, and she reached back to run her fingers across my cheek.

I was willing to trust anything Dr. Gee Loy prescribed, even the vial of tiger's blood and the tincture of dragon's tooth.

Cecily stripped to a suit of underthings every bit as fancy as the dress itself, with all its ribbons and ruffles of lace. The doctor held a candle to Cecily's tongue to study the pink of it. He put his fingers to her wrist and whistled a tune to the rhythm of the beats of her pulse. I helped Cecily onto the table, and she lay back. I sat in a chair to watch.

A girl with a braid assisted the doctor. She held quills of bamboo. He heated the skin of Cecily's arms and shoulders, of her neck, by pressing against it an enamel pot of burning mugwort.

“Don't I make a pretty porcupine,” Cecily told me as the doctor gently riddled her skin with the quills.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” I said.

She said, “Yes, yes, sh-sh-sh-sh-sh . . . This is the only place I can sleep anymore,” and she closed her eyes and drifted off. I became mesmerized by the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, and as her breathing slowed more and more. Her breaths shivered the little silk roses at the knot of a ribbon between her breasts.

In the twenty minutes that the doctor worked, I considered what I'd say to her when she woke. I knew I must be careful. If I said what I wanted to say—
Leave with me now
—she might never return. I would have to let
her
let
me
know what to say next, and when.

The doctor finished, removed the quills, and said, “Wake her,” as he left the room. I stood next to the table. How could her breaths fall so far apart? She seemed to be barely breathing at all.

I leaned over to kiss her lips, and as I kissed her, she kissed me too, and she held her hand to the back of my head. I helped her from the table, and when I tried to speak again, she shushed me once more. “We'll talk tomorrow,” she said. I helped her with her dress, and her fur, and her hat, and her gloves. When we weren't looking, the doctor had brought a little paper box containing a new chameleon. “Help me think of a name for him,” she said, and she slipped past the curtain, and down the hall, and out the back way.

•   •   •

C
ECILY VISITED
D
R.
G
EE
L
OY,
and me, every day after that. As Wakefield spent his afternoons attending to the Fair in its final few weeks—in an endless parade of backslapping and celebratory lunches for a job well done—Cecily slipped from his side and into the coach, and she stole into town for our secret afternoons. She claimed to Wakefield, and to her driver, to be putting together her winter wardrobe, and needed to devote hours to the dress department of Brandeis. At the store, she had tea as the shopgirls modeled gowns, and she stood for fittings, allowing herself to be spotted by the gossips and scandalmongers. She then snuck away to weave through the store, around the shelves and manikins, and out the back. She moved then, in her furs of blue fox and chinchilla and electric seal, in her silks and diamonds, a veil across her face, from back alley to back alley, across the dirty, broken bricks, through inky puddles, past the skittering of rats and the grumbling of bums, until she came to the back door of Dr. Gee Loy's. We would spend an hour together, then she would leave alone to retrace her steps. As she hurried through Brandeis's again, Pearl would hand her paper bags full of boxes, of novelty shirtwaists, of boots, of a pigeon wing to clip to her hair with a diamond-studded clasp. For Wakefield, a silver match safe etched with a parrot. A doll for Doxie. Italian marshmallows for Mrs. Margaret.

Wakefield would tease her at breakfast about her shopping, amused by her girlish pleasure in fashion and jewelry. They would spend their mornings in the conservatory, the autumn sun hot through the glass overhead. Wakefield would eat a steak delivered directly from one of the slaughterhouses he owned in South Omaha, and he would feign shock and disgust over the Brandeis bill, open at his side. He read aloud the list of clothing and gifts, clucking his tongue. More often than not, Cecily would not have even opened the boxes yet, and she would only just learn of their contents from Wakefield's recitations. She was always caught up, she told me, in thoughts of our afternoons together. Cecily would butter her blueberry muffin with butterine, also from the slaughterhouse, made from cattle fat and oil, and she'd drink Hawaiian coffee, sitting in a kimono of blue satin, relaxed, happy, distracted.

I imagined that Wakefield loved playing the part of a husband who indulged his spoiled wife too much. I could picture him boasting to other men:
My darling canary, gilding her cage
.

Meanwhile, behind his back, Ferret the Weasel robbed the very rich groom of his very pretty bride. Cecily and I met every day of those few weeks in October. She wouldn't allow me to walk her through the alleys, afraid we'd get caught together lurking about. So every day I waited in a room lit only with the low flame of a linseed-oil lamp hanging from the ceiling by a chain. This was not the private room where Cecily took the acupuncture, but a room full of people sleeping. Each wall was lined with berths like in a train car, three beds high. Some patients snored behind curtains, others lay with the curtains open, the pipes falling from their hands as they dropped into sleep. The room had a haze of vapor that had no way out, as there were no windows, and only the one door, always kept shut.

“And if we get caught, it's over,” she said. “He would never let me out again.” From Cecily's little black hat hung a lace veil tatted to resemble a cobweb. Cecily pulled out the hatpin at the top of the veil, the pin's head spider-shaped, the spider's abdomen a teardrop pearl.

I took off my boots, my coat, my collar, my cuffs. Dr. Gee Loy stepped in with a tray, and on the tray, a long bamboo pipe and an opium lamp. We never smoked the stuff, but Cecily liked to inhale the medicinal haze puffed up by all the other smokers in the den. “Not opium,” the doctor explained to a new patient on the other side of the room. He set down the tray and tapped his finger against the pipe's bowl. “Swallows' nests. Crushed lizard bones. Pipe tobacco. Maybe a little, little—just little—bit opium.” The pipe's red enamel was patterned with bats. “Bats bring the happiness,” the doctor said.

“What do the characters mean?” the patient asked, running his fingers along the calligraphy that lined the top of the bowl.

“Opium better than money,” he said. He tapped again at the pipe's bowl. “But no opium here. None. Just a little. So little, it is almost none at all. A little opium to ease you away from it.”

This room was where addicts gathered to kick the habit.

“When you start to see your dreams,” Dr. Gee Loy told his patient, “lie back and look.”

Cecily whispered to me. “This medicine ain't for the weak,” she said. She winked at me and tugged on my chin. We both lay back on the bed together, our heads on the same pillow. I put my hand on her hand. Her skin was like ice.

“Leave him,” I whispered. “Get Doxie, and run away with me.”

After a moment, Cecily said, “I will,” and I could have wept at the sound of it.
I will
, as precious as a wedding vow.

•   •   •

B
UT SHE DIDN'T RUN AWAY
with me that afternoon, or the afternoon after that. “I just need time,” she said, when we met again. Back and forth, she went. One day she would try to convince me that Billy Wakefield was no villain, that he'd always been sweet to her, that he loved her and cared about her, and the next day she'd tell me how powerful he was, how careful we must be, how doomed might be our every plot.

But I don't think she feared him, truly. She wasn't frightened. She thought only of Doxie, and of how much her little girl would lose. To leave Wakefield would be to rob her daughter of the kind of future neither of us would have dared imagine.

“He rescued us,” she said, in between kisses, as we lay in our sleeping berth.

“From me,” I said.

“That's not what I mean,” she said. She kissed my ear and whispered in it. “That's not what I mean.” I closed my eyes, so pleased to believe her every word.

I begged her to promise me that she'd only ever been mine. I wanted to believe that Wakefield's gifts had never mattered, that she'd never paid him a minute's interest in those days before he stole her away.

“I never kept anything secret from you,” she said.

•   •   •

A
FTER TWO WEEKS
of our lost afternoons, the autumn began to feel wintery. “Your body senses a shift in the weather coming,” Dr. Gee Loy said, as he plucked away the bamboo needles of her acupuncture. “We will work with the storm.” I helped Cecily down, and the doctor's little girl pulled the sheet away and set the very same table for tea. Cecily sat only in her underthings as the doctor poured the tea into cups carved from the horn of a narwhal.

He then led us down the hall to the sleeping berths. There wasn't a single lick of lamplight, and I felt I was back in the orphanage, in among its crooked corridors and damp little rooms, marching off to a whipping. The nuns who'd managed the children's home had been renegade, not Catholic at all, with a mission of poverty and nothingness. They'd been an order with no order at all; their habits and wimples hadn't even matched in color or cloth. Our house had been a house of sticks, ramshackle and cast-off, no sturdier than the cardboard in our shoes. Sister Patience had loved me, but she'd beat me too, and I would lie in my bed, my skin stinging from the switch, and I'd stare at the cracks in the ceiling, praying for the roof to fall in on us all.

As we sat on the thin mattress, Cecily said, of the doctor, “I'm not sure I believe he's even Chinese. I once met a Chinese magician who was just some hayseed from Kentucky. All he did was buy a costume and a trunk of tricks off a real Chinese magician.”

I saw Cecily's earbob bobbing, a tiny silver swan on a little chain. I touched the swan. “Can I tell you something that you can't tell anyone else?” she said, taking the swans from her ears.

“Of course you can,” I said.

“These swans,” she said, “I saw them in a hotel shop in one of those towns with the mineral springs, and I thought of you, and of us,” she said, “and I couldn't take my eyes off them. And that night, at dinner, Billy gave them to me, in a pretty velvet box, and I thought I'd got caught. I thought he knew, somehow, how much I missed you.” She stopped speaking, and I was afraid there was nothing more to the story. She lay back in the bed.