The Swan Gondola (46 page)

My many, many thanks to the people of Riverhead, especially Sarah Stein, my editor, who contributed heroically to the care and feeding of these characters. Alice Tasman, my agent, is another of my heroes, always expertly guiding the way. Rodney Rahl, meanwhile, is my angel, offering support, inspiration, patience, and humor throughout every step of the process.

Thanks to:

—all the museums, libraries, scholars, and historians (amateur and otherwise) who have worked to preserve and archive Expo materials, including the Omaha Public Library; the Durham Museum; Douglas County Historical Society; Nebraska State Historical Society; University of Nebraska-Lincoln (notably Wendy Katz, Kay Walter, Jaclyn Cruikshank-Vogt, Laura Weakly, and Karin Dalziel, who have developed the new Trans-Mississippi Expo digital archive); and private collectors such as historian Jeffrey Spencer.

—Susan Belasco and the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, including research assistants Sarah Chavez, Anastasia Bierman, Ryan Oberhelman, Danielle Metcalf, and Laura Dimmit.

—Matthew Clouse, for his research on turn-of-the-century health resorts and regimens, and Roxanne Wach, for her research on the mediums and clairvoyants of the period.

Thanks also to the many others who have offered support, insight, and inspiration along the way: Janet Lura, Judy Slater, Kurt Andersen, Lauren Ceran, Kate Bernheimer, John Keenan, Leo Adam Biga, Kathy Patrick, LeAnn Messing, Jessica Regel, emily danforth, Wanda Ewing, Loretta Krause, and Greg Michalson and the exceptional Unbridled Books. And, as always, much love and admiration to my parents, Larry and Donita.

And a special thanks to the booksellers (especially the Bookworm of Omaha) who serve novels and novelists so tirelessly.

The Omaha World's Fair, as depicted in
The Swan Gondola,
is a fictional approximation of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898. For my interpretation of the event, and of turn-of-the-century Omaha, I relied primarily on the collections of the Omaha Public Library (for which I thank Gary Wasdin, OPL executive director; thanks also to Kyle Porter, Amy Mather, Patrick Esser, Martha Grenzeback, and all the fine librarians and staff members of OPL). I also appreciated the extensive index of newspaper articles compiled by historian David Wells, and I benefitted greatly from reading the 1898 editions of the
Omaha Bee
via the website of the Library of Congress. Some excellent portraits of nineteenth-century Omaha can be found in
A Dirty, Wicked Town
by David L. Bristow and
Impertinences
, a collection of articles by
Omaha World-Herald
columnist Elia Peattie, edited by Susanne George Bloomfield.

From that foundation of fact, I developed the fiction, shaping the novel and its details around the demands of character and plot. And the narrator brings along his own biases, filtering his portrait of Omaha and its people, rich and poor, through the perspective of a young man who grew up in the alleys. To learn more about the Expo as it actually was, visit http://trans-mississippi.unl.edu for photographs, documents, and Expo publications.

Though some real-life personalities of the time (such as President McKinley and some of the lunch guests at the Pink Heron Hotel) do make appearances in the novel, all the novel's main characters are imagined. There was a John A. Wakefield who served as the exposition's secretary, but I know little about him, and the character of William Wakefield is in no way based on him. I simply liked the name; John A. Wakefield's wife, whom I know even less about—I've yet to even stumble across her first name—was one of the Expo's first archivists, putting together scrapbooks that are still housed in the special collections of the Omaha Public Library.

But long before I became interested in the Expo, I was interested in
The Wizard of Oz
, and the wizard's balloon emblazoned with the name of his hometown: Omaha. I grew up in Nebraska and was always curious about the wizard's humble origins as a ventriloquist's apprentice (as briefly described in L. Frank Baum's original novel of 1900). Though
The Swan Gondola
is not a retelling of the Oz myth, I did consult Baum's novel frequently, particularly the centennial edition with annotations by Michael Patrick Hearn. Throughout
The Swan Gondola
are many allusions to Baum's novel and to the novel's illustrations by W. W. Denslow.

I'd also like to note: the paragraph from
The Female Offender
in chapter 21 is a direct quote from the 1897 criminal study by Professor Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero; a line about census figures in chapter 5 is paraphrased from
Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
; and chapter 9 features lines from a speech given by John L. Webster during the opening-day ceremonies.