The Swan Gondola (44 page)

And August wrote,
Don't worry your pretty head. You were, and will always be, the only one who can break my heart.

Spring and Summer
1899

E
ULALIE BROUGHT ME
Phantasms of
the Living
and
The
Death-Blow to Spiritualism
and
The Weakness of Muscle-Reading
, but only after she'd read them herself. When the library closed for the day, she would bring me the books and we'd have our discussion. Together, we became scholars of flimflam.

As winter thawed away in April, Eulalie and I sat on the back porch drinking the dandelion wine she'd jugged the summer before. After analyzing whether
The Report of the Akrakoff Commission on the Occult
proved skeptical enough, I went into the house for the letters I'd received from Cecily's ghost. I hadn't looked at them for weeks. As I explained to Eulalie how I'd fallen victim, how convincing the fraud had been, as I ran my fingertip along the slopes and slashes of Cecily's handwriting, I felt myself falling once again. I believed. Here were her words before me, familiar and bewildering. And beautiful, despite her poor penmanship. The crosses of Cecily's
t
's had never, ever pierced the
t
's at all. They had scattered around the words, like arrows on the lawn of an archery range.

Eulalie ran the tip of her pinky along the words too, commenting on the sharp points of the
m
's and
n
's, the curls of the
p
's and
q
's.

I took Eulalie's hand in mine, twining my fingers with hers.

I asked her to marry me. I was surprised by the question myself.

When she didn't answer, I asked again.

“I heard you the first time,” she said.

“Then why won't you answer me?” I said.

“Because for all your fussing,” she said, taking her hand away, “you still believe in ghosts.” She took a sip of wine.

It was true. For all I knew, it was Cecily's ghost who'd put the idea of marriage into my head. “I don't,” I lied. “I have no ghosts.” I shrugged. “I don't.”

“Has this been a courtship?” she said.

“Has
what
been?”

“Exactly,” she said.

“Say again?” I said.

“
This
,” she said. She lifted her glass of wine, then gestured widely—at the porch, at the books on the table, at the landscape in front of us—
this
, has
this
been a courtship, as if to imply deception rested everywhere around us.

“Yes,” I said. “Hasn't it?”

“I certainly hope not,” she said. “You haven't asked me anything at all about myself. For all you know, I may be betrothed already.”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said.

“This is a very frustrating conversation,” I said.

“It's not a conversation,” she said.

We drank our drinks, and rocked in our rocking chairs.

After a silence heavy with the sense that someone should be speaking, Eulalie said, “Ask me again.”

“Will you marry me?” I said.

“I don't mean ask me
now
,” she said, with a gust of exasperation. “Because
now
my answer is no. But when you ask me again, some other time, I'll say yes.”

“When will that be?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe never. How will I know until you ask me at the right time?”

“Maybe I'll never ask again,” I said.

“Oh, I'll be
devastated
with
regret
,” she said, grabbing at her heart sarcastically. We then rocked and stewed in silence.

And this was how things would be between us. I'm not sure I ever did propose to Eulalie again, but somehow we married only a month or so later.

Eulalie quit her job at the library and moved to the farm in spring, and like a goddess she brought the land to life. She was a professor of everything. She knew, from books, the technology of seeds and the secrets of cultivation. She studied soils and root systems. She consulted almanacs and meteorologists, but learned the most from farmers' wives who, unlike their husbands, weren't afraid of confessing their mistakes. She kept good accounts, managed our money.

Myself, I couldn't even keep a vegetable garden. The watermelons burst before I picked them from the vine. The sweet corn grew tart and tasteless. The radishes were woody to the tooth and the green beans freckled with rust.

So I tended to the Emerald Cathedral instead. It did a swift business itself that summer, drawing pilgrims and the downtrodden from miles and miles around. People hung framed photographs from all the cathedral's stray hooks and points, from the legs of chairs and the handles of skillets. These were pictures of the pilgrims' dead, old and young, and strung among them were wreaths of twisted vine and dried roses tied round with ribbon. These people left donations in a coffee can in exchange for votives to burn.

I became the shrine's sole custodian and priest, but I no longer prophesied or spoke on behalf of the dead. If people came seeking comfort or healing, I only listened. August sent me tins of tea made from the petals and thorns he grew in a greenhouse on the roof of his father's building. I dragged an old tufted sofa of matted-down velvet into the barn, and a table, and I would sit with visitors, in the shadow of the leaning shrine, and we would drink the tea. I would tell them about the history of the Emerald Cathedral, and how it had saved many lives already, not the least of which was my own. The mystery and magic of it had given people faith, and the faith had healed wounds and stitched broken hearts. For many of us, the cathedral salvaged a childhood sense of wonder.

I would tell them they should trust in their belief in ghosts.

With the farm under Eulalie's management and Hester's oversight, Emmaline and I had the leisure time to become professional saints. We would take the donations we collected in the coffee can and dole them out as we saw fit. We weren't inclined to be anonymous. We announced our intentions to newspaper editors, dressed in our best, and posed for pictures as we distributed our wealth. With our money, we afforded legitimate cures for the sickly, we shoed the shoeless, we shingled the poorhouse, we filled the library with storybooks. And we were patrons of the arts. At the Bonnevilla Opera House, our money electrified the old gas chandelier. Emmaline and me, we got called angels daily.

Emmaline sewed a new suit for Oscar, from the scarecrow's pajamas, and we found him a new golf cap in a shop that sold clothes for dapper babies. We tore the pages from a book on papier-mâché and used the paper to paste and patch his broken head. We oiled his hinges and spit-polished his eyes. I then performed in hospitals and orphanages, with a repertoire of mild and inoffensive comedy. These were the most grateful audiences I'd ever encountered. I memorized their laughter.

I
N A FIELD IN LATE
AUGUST
,
a carnival parked. They strung up a tightrope for the high-wire artists, and flew flags, and raced horses with pink plumes in their manes. Girls in short ballet skirts of tulle did handstands on the saddles, and clowns conducted and wrangled trained birds that circled and dove in the sky. The birds seemed tethered to the clowns' wrists with strings. But most of the amusement was confined to the shadows. A circus barker in a candy-cane vest would lift a flap, and if you did so much as peek into the dark of the tent, you then likely stepped in to see more.

The folks that lurked there on those slapdash stages—a woman scantily clad and wrapped in a python, a skeletal man napping on a bed of nails, a contortionist, a fire-eater, a cancan dancer, and others—spent a great deal of time at the Emerald Cathedral during their week in Bonnevilla. They came seeking wisdom and courage. They had questions about love. They came late in the night after the carnival closed, and early in the morning before it opened again, still in costume and in makeup streaked from the sawdust that stirred in their tents.

They instantly felt like old friends, and it was good to be among them. From the books about spiritualists, I'd learned about tea leaves and cranioscopy. Though I didn't claim to be an interpreter of anything cryptic, I did tell these visitors what a seer might see. They seemed, by nature of their perversity, more likely to have a healthier skepticism than my usual pilgrims. So I would shuffle the dregs of their tea, seeking symbols in how the wet leaves clotted.
If I was a reader of leaves I might see a bat there
, I might say, pointing my pinky at the line of the wings.
And maybe here I'd see a teacup.

When a tattooed lady sat with me one afternoon, in the last days of the carnival's stay, I thought of Doxie's real father. Or, at least, I thought of the man that Cecily had described to me. His name had been Mercury, and he'd been a showman too, and had tried to convince Cecily to do as this woman had—to get covered in ink from forehead to foot. Inclined toward coincidence, I asked the woman her tattooist's name.

“Luther,” she said. Most of her skin was hidden by her high-collared shirtwaist and her long skirt. The pink tentacle of an octopus twisted up from the lace of her collar and snaked around her jawline. On the back of one hand was an anatomist's sketch of the bone and sinew that would be under the skin. On her palm was a patch of lucky clover, in reference to her name.

Clover tugged at her skirt and stuck out her leg, but revealed none of the tattoos beneath her white stocking. “Luther was an old sailor,” she said. “When Luther had a leg, he had a tattoo of a pirate ship on it.” She tapped at her calf. “So when he lost the leg, and got the wooden one, he had somebody carve the same ship in.”

I looked at the leaves in the cup, studying how they'd snaked into a perfect serpent. Or a river. Or the letter
S
.

I showed it to Clover. “The letter
S
mean anything to you?” I asked.

She shrugged one shoulder and squinted one eye to think. “I have an uncle named Stanley,” she said, with little faith.

I told her about the science of graphology—the analysis of handwriting—and the book I had read in which I'd learned the letter
S
was difficult to interpret. “There's too little expression in it, I guess,” I said. “But how could that be? Doesn't it seem the most expressive of all?” It was a viper coiled to strike. It was sex. It was lazy wisps of smoke that you let lift from your lips.

Sessily. Sessalee. Sissly.

•   •   •

I
THOUGHT OF
C
LOVER
often in the few days after her visit, and after the carnival tore down and packed back up. I guess I worried about her. The way those tea leaves followed that dark curvy line seemed ominous somehow.

“Ice skates,” Emmaline suggested, as we sat at the table having tea of our own, discussing the performers who'd passed through. She ran her finger in the air, twisting her wrists around the curves of the letter. “You skate an
S
when you're skating your figure eights.” She dropped her hand to the table with a thump. She gasped. “Clover will fall through the ice, to drown.”

Eulalie said, “I think all the trouble's with that uncle Stanley of hers. Ssssstanley's going to sssstab her with his sssstiletto.” She winked and smiled, and she studied her own tea leaves, which were too scattered to read.

As it turned out, it
was
a premonition I was having those days, but one that had nothing to do with Clover herself. I was rapt with her tattoos—she'd been a flesh-and-blood glimpse of Cecily's fate had she stayed with Doxie's dad.

And when the carnival left, Doxie arrived.

•   •   •

A
T FIRST
I
DIDN'T
recognize the child. Why would I? Not only had she grown since winter, not only did she now walk on her own two legs, but she was far from home, on forbidden land. I had resigned myself, absolutely and completely, to never being allowed to see her again. So when I did see her, there before me on my very own farm, she wasn't there. This was someone else's child, most certainly.

A woman all in black, and shrouded like a beekeeper, a dark, heavy veil hanging low from the brim of her hat, helped the girl down from the phaeton. They were alone but for the driver, a lanky lad from Bonnevilla who could be relied upon to slither out of his basement room whenever there was need for a cabbie or pallbearer or drinking chum.

In the back of the phaeton were steamer trunks, portmanteaus, hatboxes. This woman and her girl were refugees of the carnival, I figured. I wondered what sort of horrors might be hidden beneath the veil.

I'd been in the garden in my pajamas and robe, my pockets full of the stunted carrots I'd pulled, their leaves gnawed to twigs by rabbits. The two came toward me, the woman slightly bent so she could hang on to Doxie's hand, to help keep the little girl upright as she stumbled around the clods of dirt.

When the girl finally looked up at me with Cecily's eyes, I knew she was mine. The shock of seeing Doxie passed in an instant, and it was as if I'd been expecting her all summer long. I ran to her, and I swept her up and into my arms. She giggled and shrieked as I lifted her above my head. I tossed her in the air, up at the spot of sun. “More,” she said, slapping at my wrists.
More.

The woman in black lifted the veil up and aside with the whole of her arm, like parting a drape from in front of her. This was Pearl, of course, caught in those cobwebs, and I worried about her. I worried about myself. If she'd gone possessed again, I couldn't bear it. Though I no longer received letters from Cecily, or any word of any kind, Cecily was there with me always, whether she spoke or not. And I'd grown comfortable with the quiet.

“Pearl?” I said, hesitant.

She struggled with her hatpin as she resituated her veil. At the pin's head was a hornet of topaz. “I fear that I've . . . well, I think . . . I think I've left Billy,” she said.

•   •   •

A
T THE KITCHEN TABLE,
we all scrambled to entertain Doxie, looking for everything and anything that might pass for a toy. We let her upend the saltshaker and hammer the sugar cubes with the back of a spoon. We allowed her to tear a plum apart.

She sat on my lap and I ran my fingers through the tiny, fine curls of her hair. I didn't fret or dread. I didn't plot. I wanted only to be there with Doxie, letting every minute linger. I touched my fingertip to her ear, learning the slope of it. I put my fingers to her neck, gauging where best to tickle. She flinched, then laughed, then tried to tickle me back in revenge, her fingers sticky with plum, her face comically intent on my torture.

Pearl had changed from her black traveling dress in a back room and now stepped into the kitchen in a long bright yellow robe aswirl with pink paisley. She was dressed much like the actor from India who'd ridden down the midway atop an elephant. She even wore beaded carpet slippers that curled up at the toes.

While we entertained Doxie, Pearl opened and closed cupboard doors and put on a kettle for tea. Emmaline and Hester, who would normally object to anyone rummaging through their kitchen, paid no notice. The Old Sisters Egan became more animated than I'd ever seen them, as they clowned and mugged for Doxie and spoke in squeaky voices. Hester knotted and twisted a hankie into the shape of a baby in a cradle. She held each end of the little hammock and rocked it.

“How long will you be staying?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer.

“Only a day or two, if you don't mind having us underfoot a little,” Pearl said. She examined the patched-up china teapot that had fallen from the cabinet the day my balloon hit the house. Hester had pieced the delicate thing back together sloppily, for Emmaline, with cement and plaster, and it looked to be forever bursting at the seams. “I've booked passage for Paris.”

They'd only just arrived and already they were leaving. I held Doxie closer. “Then you need to go back the way you came,” I said, with an edge of irritation. “Unless you're taking the long way around the world.” But then I smiled, hoping she wouldn't sense my impatience. I would have to eke out to her every ounce of pity she sought, so she'd become addicted to my sympathy, so she'd escape Wakefield again and again, and bring Doxie to me, over and over. Pearl, so susceptible to spirits, would easily fall under the Emerald Cathedral's spell.

Pearl returned to the cupboards until Eulalie, unsettled by all the squeaking of hinges, stood to get the tin of tea from the spice cabinet. “Let me,” she said, taking the teapot and nodding toward the table.

But Pearl wouldn't sit. She walked from the kitchen to the front of the house, to look out the window and up the road. Hester was begging to hold Doxie, so I handed her over, and I went to Pearl's side. “Are you worried Wakefield will find you?” I said.

“No,” she said, but she continued to look out, as if expecting a late guest. “He's the one sending me off.” Wakefield, Pearl explained, had arranged for her to see a doctor in Paris.

•   •   •

T
HAT EVENING
I salvaged a broken-down bassinet from the Emerald Cathedral, prying it loose from where it'd been roped and nailed on. We put Doxie to bed on the screened-in porch, where there were some cool late-summer breezes that smelled of autumn must. We sat in the wicker swing and rocking chairs and watched the angel sleep.

Eulalie brought out our evening's cups of brandied plums, and we ate them with teaspoons as Pearl told the story of her escape.

“He wants me to conceive a child on the night of our wedding,” Pearl said. She spooned a sodden plum into her glass of red wine. “On the first night of the new century. And he wants a son. Only a son.”

“There are methods,” he'd told Pearl. He'd consulted with scientists and witches alike. He'd studied folklore and medicine. “We're on the precipice of discovering all there is to know about everything,” he'd said.

He'd already begun her on a diet of potato peels and red clover blossoms and alfalfa grass, horseradish, and dandelion leaves.
Alkaline
, he'd explained. She lay awake in her bed every night, worrying, some tonic undrunk on the nightstand beside her. She cried for her little girl that could never be. She began to feel herself going mad from it. Wakefield had spoken of having her womb
curetted
, a word she hadn't known. One of the maids, who'd worked for a time in an asylum, told Pearl it meant a scraping of her insides.

Then one afternoon Wakefield's twin sister, Billie, took Pearl to Brandeis for a private showing of the milliner's new wares. Billie and Pearl drank champagne on a sofa of white, and they would nod, gasp, cluck their tongues at the dramatic hats and compliment the shopgirls who modeled them. The girls would lean in to show off every hat's every frill—the glass grapes with leaves of calfskin, the stuffed doves with sapphire eyes, the blue beetles with stone backs pinned to silk ribbons, the feathers, the flowers, the gems.

And in between all the polite fuss, Billie offered rescue. “I'll help you get away,” she said in a whisper, leaning her own head forward, the brim of her hat hiding her face.

Not yet trusting Billie, Pearl said, “I have nowhere to be.”

“You're up all night crying,” she said.

Pearl felt her skin grow hot, felt the sweat bead on her forehead, and she cursed her constant blushing and how her red cheeks always told all her secrets.

Billie would arrange for Pearl to go to Paris with Doxie to a special clinic. “What clinic?” Pearl said.

Billie said, “It doesn't matter. It doesn't exist.” Billie would have materials printed, papers and advertisements that promoted the fictional clinic's expertise at selecting a baby's sex. Wakefield would find it irresistible and arrange the travel himself. And Wakefield's sister would send Pearl money, for as long as she needed it.

Billie spoke with her glass at her lips, her breath popping the bubbles of her champagne. “We'll tell my brother it requires months of treatment. And you'll tell him you're taking Doxie so she can learn French as she learns English. And you'll disappear into the city.”

Pearl asked, “Won't he come looking for us?”

“Eventually,” she said. “But he won't find you. And he'll forget about you. He's a broken man. He has no true capacity for love.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Billie leaned over, ducking the brim of her hat in and under the brim of Pearl's, and she said simply, as the answer was obvious, “I want you both out of my house.” She then smiled, fluttered her eyelashes prettily, and turned her attention to the shopgirl bent before them to show off the silk lilies twisted into the hatband.