The Swan Gondola (40 page)

E
LLA
W
INNOWS,
a psychic with a lisp, had been a shopgirl at Brandeis before opening her attic parlor. She answered the door to us, hugging an open book to her chest, her wispy red hair wired with static. You could practically hear it sizzle and snap. “You're early,” she mumbled, a cigarette burning in the corner of her mouth. “I have to find my glasses before I can get anything going.”

“You're wearing them,” I said.

She brought her fingers to the lenses in front of her eyes. “Dear God,” she said. She took the glasses off and held them up toward the skylight, checking for smudges. “Why can't I see through them? I'm blinder with them than without them. Sit.”

The tabletop was covered with open books about the spirit world and the astral plane. She dropped her cigarette into her cup of coffee and slapped all the books closed, gathered them in her arms, and tossed them into the corner, into a wing chair so battered the springs stuck through. There was nothing about the room that would give a disbeliever faith. The wallpaper was torn and streaked with grime. Cobwebs gathered in the corners of picture frames. No one, alive or otherwise, had sat at this table in a while. I wrote Cecily's name in the dust on the wooden arm of my chair.

“I wish you had come when it was pitch-dark,” she said, sitting down and placing her hands on ours atop the table. “You should have come when it was summer. It's better to summon spirits in the summertime by the light from my insects and fungus.” She nodded toward a cabinet; on a shelf was a jar of dead fireflies, marked
fireflies
on a piece of tape, and a jar of dead glowworms, marked
glowworms
. There was a pot of withered mushrooms. “The mushrooms glow blue around the gills when they're healthy,” she said. “I don't know if any of this will work at all. Don't blame me if nothing happens. You should come back in the summer.” Her hands fidgeted. “I really just read tea leaves, as a rule.”

We sat there, around the table, holding hands for several minutes. The room was cold, but our hands grew sweaty.

“My hands are hot,” Pearl whispered.

Ella shook her head. “Doesn't mean anything,” she said. “Not necessarily.”

The wind picked up outside the window, so I tried to help things along. “There was no wind before,” I said.

“The wind comes, it goes,” she said. “I wouldn't read anything into it.”

I heard a buzzing, like a short in a light, and I thought I saw, from the corner of my eye, the flicker of a firefly in the jar. When I turned to look, the jar was dark. And when I returned my eyes to the table, I thought I caught sight of the blue glow of the mushrooms. The table trembled. Ella didn't seem to feel it.

“Sometimes nothing happens,” she said. “It's not unusual for nothing to happen.”

My nostrils stung with the smell of a struck match. It gave me a headache between my eyes. Pearl's grip tightened on my hand. Her grip grew so tight, I worried for my fingers and I wriggled my hand from hers.

“Pearl,” I said, as she straightened her spine, segment by segment, as if some heavy sob was working up from deep in her body. She leaned her head back and opened her mouth.

Pearl made no sound. She stood abruptly, and turned, the rustling of her skirt causing her chair to tip back and to spin on one leg before it tumbled to the floor. Blind as a sleepwalker, Pearl tripped forward into the wall. She ran her hands along it, as if feeling for a doorway. She followed the wall, whimpering and moonstruck.

I stood to take Pearl's shoulders in my hands, to turn her to me. I was spooked but not by spirits. There was the threat of death in the room. There was damage. Pearl had fallen ill, and it was illness that terrified me.

She looked past me, her eyes wide. Her mouth gaped open, her chin shook. It was as if her jaw had locked. She clawed at the skin of my neck until I pulled away and she broke from my hold. She stumbled toward a barrister bookcase and she struggled with a glass door.

Ella came forward, her shoe lifted. “Hold her back,” she told me. “It's a tricky latch.” She banged the heel against the latch until it came unstuck. Pearl again pulled away from me. She lifted the door and grabbed from the shelf a blue box, all the while whining and sniffling.

When she returned to the table, she opened the lid—it was a stationery kit. She took sheets of pale-blue paper from the box and an ink pot and a pen. She rocked back and forth as she wrote on the page.

The longer she took to finish the letter, the more the spell of the dingy room lifted and the more impatient I got. She wasn't caught in the fits of a seizure, to my great relief. This was some dark theater, her every move deliberate, even when her shaking hands knocked the ink pot over. She was left to dip the nib into the stream of ink that flowed across the tabletop and drip-drip-dripped off the edge.

I held my hand gently at Pearl's back. “Please stop,” I said. “Let's quit this,” I said. She kept writing, so Ella and I waited.

When Pearl finished her letter, she shoved the paper across the table, and she would have pushed it right into the spilled ink had I not leaned forward to snatch the pages up. Pearl's teeth chattered, as if she were out in the cold.

“Oh, Pearl, oh, Pearl, oh, Pearl,” Ella said, clutching Pearl's shoulders, “you're all right, dear, you're all right. There's nothing to worry about, nothing at all.”

Pearl held her hands to her face and fled the room. I headed off after her, but Ella grabbed my sleeve. “You haven't paid,” she whispered. I took a coin from my pocket and flicked it with the top of my thumb to bounce across the tabletop. Ella grabbed my sleeve again. “And I gotta replace the ink pot in my stationery kit now.” I took all the change from my pocket and slapped it into her open palm, and I ran from the room and down the stairs. I reached the street just as the coach pulled away, Pearl's dress caught in the door, a bit of fabric flapping at me like a taunt. I watched as the coach neared the end of the block. The door popped open enough for Pearl to pull her dress in, and then the coach turned a corner and was gone from sight.

As I walked to August's, I read the letter. I read it more than once, circling the block, passing August's door again and again. Though Pearl had written without posture, without her eyes on the page, she'd again captured Cecily's handwriting, down to the slant of her
b
's, and the short, squat loop of her
l
's.

When I first read the first line, I laughed. I rolled my eyes.
Dear Ferret
, she'd written,
Please don't be too hard on poor Pearl.
But by the next sentence, I was already hearing Cecily's voice again.
I guess we should have suspected her.

S
HE WAS VERY GOOD AT
forging my signature
, the letter continued.
On the days I went to Dr. Gee Loy's, Pearl signed my receipts at Brandeis, so Billy would think I'd gone shopping. He never suspected, and yet he studied those receipts like an accountant. I suppose if I'd developed a gift as worthless as signing a dead girl's name, I'd be happy for the chance to put it to proper use too.

And so the mystery is solved. I don't exist. I'm a parlor trick. I always was, I suppose. They'd chop off my head, then, lo and behold, it was back, right where it always was.

But I don't possess people, Ferret. I didn't slip my hand in the hand of someone else to write you this letter. I'm not a morbid entertainment. It seems to me if there's a spirit world beyond the understanding of the material world, then in the material world the spirit world would be beyond our understanding. So how would you know how I do what I do?

Are there stains from tears on the letter you hold? And if so, could they be mine? Or were they sprinkled there, with a sleight of hand, for theatrical effect?

How is it that I felt your hand in mine at the psychic's table?

Maybe I am only a gimmick, after all. A wire and a wheel under a sheet. I hang in a clairvoyant's cabinet, whistling through a harmonica on cue. But there are worse eternities, I'm guessing.

And now your letters will end. And I'll haunt strangers for a nickel.

Please write me one more time and tell me how you might be convinced. What would it take to fool you completely? How can I make you give in to my illusion?

Go to the house. Look in the room. See if I'm there.

Always,

Cecily

I
SLEPT ON
A
UGUST'S FLOOR
every night that week, and spent my every day in mystics' parlors. I saw palmists and astrologers. The Widow Gustafson ran her fingers over my skull, to read bumps and dents, and it comforted me so, I just wanted to sleep with my head in her lap as she predicted all my misery to come. Mrs. Fritz served me a flower tea that tasted of Cecily's perfume, and when she read the leaves left in the dregs, she said she could see me tortured by lies my whole life long.

In the lounge of a defrocked Chinese nun who called herself Miss Mulberry, I wrote a letter to Cecily on paper of silver foil. The nun stirred coals in a porcelain bowl on her windowsill and we dropped the letter in the flame. We watched it burn, our eyes following the wisps of smoke as they twisted toward heaven.

I don't believe you wrote that letter in the clairvoyant's parlor. I don't believe you're reading this. I don't know what to say. I don't want to write you ever again. I'm only writing you now because I can't keep myself from it. I can't bear to be the one to stop. I write to respect your memory, not to stir up mischief. I write, under the spell of sadness.

And it was through this coven of witches I learned of Madame LeFleur and her midnight séances. She didn't advertise in the newspapers, and she had no parlor in town. She snuck nightly onto the condemned stage still set for
Heart of the White City
, in the theater of the Grand Court, and she did all her seeing in the near dark.

The theater looked as if it had been abandoned in a mad rush, as if the audience had run away from the Ferris wheel as it had slipped off its axis and rolled into the aisle. The wheel now lay wrecked in the seats, leaning against a wall, creaking as it rocked. The paper flames of the fire that rose above the buildings still crinkled with the drafts that flowed through the theater. A train had jumped its tracks and into the orchestra pit. A gondola sat shipwrecked in the curve of the crescent moon that had fallen off its chains and down from the riggings to crash on the floorboards. But the buildings of the backdrop—all made of white stone—still stood as the theater fell down around them.

Madame LeFleur served as what they called an in-between—she would quiz the dead and perk her ears for their answers from the afterworld. People would bring to her the things their loved ones left behind, the ribbons and rings, the Bibles and poems, the windup toys, the tatted lace, the spectacles, the neckties, the snuff bottles, the tintypes.

These men and women, and children, would beg for any word, no matter how harsh or unwelcome, just as the men and the women of the farms had begged me. But Madame LeFleur was notorious for giving the living the dead's worst regards. Through Madame LeFleur, the dead rekindled old feuds once settled, confessed to love affairs, aired grievances, and revealed the secrets they'd taken to the grave.

I arrived at the theater only a minute before midnight, and I took a seat in the back as an organist pumped out funeral hymns. The organ's elaborate system of pipes reached to the domed roof, stopping just short of the hole the winter had made. Birds fluttered in and out, and wind blew in to lick the flames in the oil lamps that lined the foot of the stage. The lamps reminded me of the old theaters of Omaha, without electricity or gas, the ones I snuck into as a boy, where the saloon girls kicked their legs out from under their petticoats in the dim glow.

The audience was sparse. People alone, or in pairs, sat here and there in the dark. When the organist finished, Madame LeFleur took the stage without introduction, entering in a hooded cloak. She undid the clasp at her neck, took off the cloak, and draped it over the organist's outstretched arms. From where I sat, she was only a shadow, despite the lamplight.

From her very first words—“Let's burden the dead with our questions”—I recognized the gravel and bark of her voice. I even imagined I smelled her rotten-onion breath. I leaned forward.

I'd brought along August's opera glasses, and I now held them to my eyes. The woman stepped up to the edge of the stage and bent down to take a book a man handed up to her. The light played across her face, a mask of shadow and flicker. “I'll be damned,” I mumbled. This Madame LeFleur was Mrs. Margaret, eye patch and all.

As the automaton on the midway, she'd barely moved, but as a medium she never stopped. She spent about an hour letting the phantoms go in and out of her. She paced and wrung her hands when possessed by a woman who fretted. She whistled and skipped when a little girl slipped in. She cursed and swore as she swaggered, finding the sea legs of a soldier shot in Cuba. She wept. She pointed fingers of accusation. She was even a dog once, dropping into a squat to howl at the moon.

When the séance was over, Mrs. Margaret lowered her shoulders into a slouch. “I can't do no more,” she said. “Get your ghosts away from me.” She left the stage, stepping into the wings, as the organist returned to blow out the flames of the lamps. Everyone left, but I lingered out front in the frozen night, the air like glass. Mrs. Margaret stepped past me, huddled in her cloak, and she paid me no notice until I said her name.

She stopped, paused. She turned to me, shaking her head.

She said, “You're the bad penny that keeps turning up.”

“I could say the same of you,” I said.

She was like a chimney spouting smoke, vapor puffing up out of her with her heavy, labored breaths. I could hear a few squeaks of a wheeze, like from a slow accordion.

“I already grieved over you,” she said, smiling. “I figured you for dead. I heard you were in the balloon that got away.”

I slapped my left leg. “Escaped with nary a limp,” I said. “I can't be killed, even when they drop me out of the clouds. I heard
you
went to Pennsylvania.”

“You heard I was
sent
to Pennsylvania, maybe,” she said. “When you don't get on the train, the ticket takes you nowhere.”

“Why didn't you go?”

She shrugged. “I can't leave Doxie here,” she said, “even if she ain't mine. Even if I ain't welcome in the house. I promised Cecily as she breathed her last that I'd look after Doxie, and I'll do it until I'm dead. I'll always look after her even if I can't never see her.”

“Wish I could work up an ounce of sympathy for you,” I said.

She hawked up some phlegm and spat on the bricks. “You pity me for even a second and I'll take a pig snouter to your jiggling bone,” she said, nodding at my crotch.

“It's probably talk like that that got you tossed out on your ear,” I said.

“When I'm in among a
decent
lot, I'm sweet as sugar back to belly,” she said. She gathered her hood tighter at her throat. She sighed, looked up at the moon. Her voice was wet. “Does anybody up at that house even know when the baby's birthday is? She hasn't had one yet.” She sniffled. “She's not some mutt they saved from an alley, you know.” She looked back to me. “How'd you know it was me doing these séances?”

“I didn't,” I said. “Why would I go
looking
for you? I came looking for help.”

“You're one of
them
?” she said, nodding her head toward the theater, toward the audience that wasn't there anymore.

My throat had gone sore, and I could only barely croak my words. “I have the same ghost you do.”

She turned and walked away. “There's a saloon nearby that's open to all hours,” she said without looking back. “It has a stove in the corner.”

•   •   •

I
TOLD
M
RS.
M
ARGARET
everything. I told her about the letters, and about Pearl. I told her I didn't know what to believe anymore.

We weren't the only lost souls in the joint. Others had braved the killer chill of the night to warm their bones with liquor. “Is there any truth to what you do on the stage?” I said.

“No,” Mrs. Margaret said. “Before we started up on the fair circuit, the Silk & Sawdust Players was legitimate theater. I'm a classically trained actress. I've been in
Romeo and Juliet
. I played the nurse.”

I told her about the farm, and the Emerald Cathedral, and my own performance as an oracle. “I only communed with their dead because they begged for it,” I said.

“The century's about to turn,” she said. “There's a lot of call for soothsaying. If we didn't do it, somebody else would, and they'd be the ones to get the coin.” The boiled whiskey in her copper cup burned her mouth, so she blew on it. The sourness had somehow left her breath and I could have sworn it'd gone pleasant. Her breath smelled of spice cake hot from the baker. “And what do
we
know?” she said. “Maybe the spirits guide our tongues when we lie.”

I leaned forward to whisper, though no one in the saloon was listening to us. “Do you think he killed her?” I said.

Mrs. Margaret took another drink. She put the cup down and folded her hands, prayerlike. She watched the skin of her hands as she rubbed at the wrinkles with her thumbs. She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I don't think he wanted her to die.”

“He thought he was healing her with all that poison?” I said, incredulous. “It was an accident?”

She shook her head. “It wasn't an accident,” she said.

I had finished my drink, so I reached across for hers. I took a swallow, but the cheap burn of it made me even more peevish. “Why do I bother asking you anything?” I said. “What would you know about it?”

But Mrs. Margaret remained patient with me. I think she was pleased to have an audience for her tale of intrigue. “He wanted her
weak
, but he didn't want her
dead
,” she said, speaking slow. “He wanted to keep her just a little bit sick so he could keep saving her. He wanted to keep her at the brink, keep her needing him, so that he could rescue her with some new doctor or drug. He was addicted to her salvation.”

“No,” I said, but I didn't doubt Mrs. Margaret's theories. But the closer I got to the truth of it all, the more the thought of Cecily's murder terrified me. I couldn't stomach it. I could have saved her. We could have been together always.

“When you're rich, everything's a trifle,” she said. “So what if he gives her a little extra pinch of headache? He takes it away eventually. So she's up all night because the moon's in her window; she'll sleep tomorrow, or the night after that. The rich invent their own morality. Especially a man like Wakefield. He thought he paid for his sins already. So he just sinned some more.”

“I thought he just wanted to save her because he couldn't save the wife who died,” I said. “Or did he kill that wife too?”

“He took his first wife to surgeons, Cecily told me,” she said. “She had nerves in her eyes snipped. She had something cut out of her womb. It's all too grisly to speak of.”

But we did speak of it, for much of the night. Speculation, mystery. It kept the dead from dying entirely. When you're angry, you grieve a little less.

“Would he ever hurt Doxie?” I said.

“When I lived up in the house,” she said, “he didn't even know she was there. His neglect might be a blessing.”

“In the letters,” I said, “there's been mention of a room.”

Mrs. Margaret looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “Yeah?” she said.

I shrugged. “She says she can hear Doxie crying on the other side of the wall. Or, that's what Pearl says, in the letters she writes as Cecily.”

“When Cecily was at her sickest,” Mrs. Margaret said, “she spent time in a room in the upstairs. It was next to Doxie's.”

“She had her own bedroom?” I said, somewhat hoping.

“No,” she said. “It was where she looked after her hobbies. She said she kept her scrapbooks in there. She pasted her cigarette cards in the pages of one. In another one she pasted newspaper clippings about the Fair. But she kept the room locked. There was only one key. A skeleton key wouldn't even work in it. She insisted, when she married Wakefield, that he give her one room all to herself.”

“In Pearl's mind, Cecily's in a room she can't get out of,” I said. We sat without talking. I listened close to the wind just to be grateful I wasn't out in it. “How do we get Doxie away?” I said.

“There's no way,” she said. “He might not care about her, but he needs her. He covets the attention of a man suffering. He's already been in the newspapers three times with our little girl, showing her off, so they can all talk about how lucky the little urchin is. She's already a legend—she's just like the Little Match Girl, but with a happy ending.” She paused. “But if I can get back in there, I can look after things. You need to get Pearl to have a séance up at the house.”

“Nobody up there's going to fall for your Madame LeFleur act,” I said.

“Not Madame LeFleur,” she said. “You get an actress who could use some work. We pay her to say what we want her to say.”

“What do we want her to say?”

“That Cecily wants her friends around her,” she said. “That she wants Doxie to get to know us. She wants us around Doxie all the time. If the clairvoyant is convincing, Wakefield will fall for it. He believes in ghosts because that's all he's got. And he needs forgiveness, I'm guessing, no matter what kinds of laws he lives by.”

“Every time I conspire with you,” I said, “it ends with me getting strangled. I'm not interested.”

Mrs. Margaret pushed up her sleeve and wiggled her fat wrist around, showing off the bracelet with the scent bottle I'd given Cecily the day of the president's parade. When I reached out for it, she snatched her hand back and pulled her sleeve down. “You be a good little kitty,” she said, “and I'll give it to you. And I'll give you other things too. Wakefield fired me because he caught me taking things of Cecily's after she died. But I wasn't stealing. She would've wanted me to have them. And on the day he fired me, I snuck away with her jewelry box. And this pretty thing was in it.” She let the abalone shell of the scent bottle shimmer in the fire from the stove. “And a few other odds and ends of interest.”