The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  It’s no small task to get a rich man to run, but Wakefield did a fizzing job of it. It was quite the comedy act—he slapped at the ass of a railroad magnate as if herding cattle. He chased and stomped and waved his arms to get everyone into a rooster’s state of frenzy, and then he ran out to crank his camera to capture the chaos. Mrs. Brandeis, of the department store Brandeises, stumbled and fell and rolled through a patch of clover. Klopp the printer stumbled too, but was able to right himself by knocking over Krug the brewer. Sunderland of the Omaha Coal, Coke, and Lime Co. lost a shoe, and Mrs. Kimball, the architect’s wife, lost her towering hat of osprey quills. None turned back.

  We were all well past winded when we reached the hay carts that had brought us to Pink Heron. “Just think,” Wakefield said, running down to send us off, “you may see yourselves life-size on the screen of Edison’s Vitascope Theater!”

  Cecily, still panting from the run, shrugged a shoulder and rolled her eyes. She and I had been to the theater on the midway and had left for want of story. There’d been only a handful of snippets of nothing much: an actress dancing with an umbrella, and a comical mismatch between a short fat pugilist and a tall skinny one. And the irony was not lost on either one of us when we realized we’d paid a dime to see an elephant march across the screen and raise his trunk when we could’ve spent half that to see an elephant living and breathing in the circus ring next door.

  “It’ll be better than the Vitascope show at the Fair,” Wakefield said, as if he’d caught sight of Cecily’s shrugged shoulder and eye roll. “Because this will be a drama. A cyclone tears a town apart, sending the fine folks of the hotel running away in horror!”

  Morearty placed a wooden crate next to the horse cart, as a step. After most everyone else had boarded and taken their seats at their game tables, Cecily put her right hand in my hand for balance, and took the hand of young Baker who had leaped first thing into the cart to help the ladies up. Cecily tripped a little on the crate, her foot caught in her dress, and her sweaty palm slipped from Baker’s. I caught her easily, and she righted herself. But when she tried again to step up, she fell, and the full weight of her in my arms caused me to stumble too.

  “I’m losing you, Cecily,” I said, nervous. “Cecily,” I said, sharper, needing her to help herself. I didn’t realize she’d gone rag doll, her arms and legs entirely limp. We both fell to the ground, my arms around her waist. Her eyes were closed. I put my hand on her chest to feel for the beat of her heart, and I thought I might burst into tears. I was terrified.

  Baker looked down and chuckled. “She just needs to sleep it off,” he said. “She’s had a gulp or two too many of the oh be joyful up at the hotel.”

  “She’s not drunk,” I snapped. I knelt beside her. “Could someone bring her some water?”

  “She needs to loosen her corset, of course,” a woman said with a cold absence of alarm.

  Billie Wakefield, who’d suddenly appeared with her piglet, said, “She doesn’t wear a corset.”

  “Oh, well, that’s unfortunate,” the woman said.

  To some relief, but only a little, Cecily began to blink herself halfway awake, and her hand clutched mine tight. “Ferret,” she said, woozy, “hang on to me. I’m going to fall over.”

  “You already fell over, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re okay. Somebody’s getting you some water.” I glanced up to shout at all who hovered over us. “Is someone getting her some water, for Christ’s sake?”

  Though even a sip of water was yet to come, Wakefield brought over one of his guests, a woman barely taller than a child. “Cecily,” he said, “this is Dr. Lankton. She’s a homeopath. Tell her what’s the matter.” The lenses of the doctor’s spectacles were smaller than her eyes.

  “Actually, no, don’t speak,” Dr. Lankton said as she lowered herself to her knees with no worry about dirtying her dress. “Just hush.”

  “I just need to sit down for a minute,” Cecily said, still flat on her back.

  “Hush,” Dr. Lankton said again. The doctor’s every movement was unspeakably slow. It was all I could do to keep from begging her to hurry. She undid the buttons at her own wrist and pulled off her linen glove. She pressed her fingers to Cecily’s throat. She took off her other glove, and she felt just beneath Cecily’s jaw. She looked me right in the eye as she did so. I thought she might have a question for me, so I said “Yes?” but the doctor wasn’t seeing me at all—she was merely looking off in contemplation, considering whatever swelling or softness might be there beneath Cecily’s skin. She put the back of her hand to Cecily’s forehead, and then poked around on Cecily’s gut.

  “The girl’s lucky,” one of the wives said to one of the other wives. “Freda knows her way around the most miserable creatures. She serves those shame-struck pitifuls over at the Open Door.”

  The one to finally bring some water was that cocky young Baker, who handed Dr. Lankton his silver flask. She gave him a stern glare of skepticism that didn’t quite fit on her girlish face. “I emptied out the liquor,” Baker said. “It’s just water from the pump over there.”

  “Can you sit up, Cecily?” she said, and Cecily did, with my help. The doctor held the flask to Cecily’s lips. “It could just be a summer cold,” Dr. Lankton said, “but it could be something else.”

  “She took a pill,” I said, and I shot Wakefield a look.

  “Just one of these,” he said. He handed Freda Lankton the bottle and she merely glanced at it. The label didn’t seem to suggest any danger to her, but she kept the vial, putting it in her pocket.

  “I’d like to check you into the hospital for the night,” she said, “and have an eye kept on you.” The hospital. Though I hated the idea of it, I couldn’t wait to get her there. I couldn’t wait for her to be seen, to get better, to be sent home.

  “You’re just hungry,” I said, full of hate for those little cooked birds on our plates.

  “I ain’t going to the goddamn Open Door,” Cecily said.

  “Ungrateful!” came a scandalized voice from overhead, along with all kinds of other buzzing. What did she say? Did she just say what I thought she said?

  The Open Door was a clinic and shelter for unmarried women, a charity frequented by prostitutes. “No, you’re not going to the Open Door,” I said, as much for Cecily as for all the others listening in.

  Dr. Lankton, her feathers forever unruffled, only smiled. “I’ll grant you it’s not the Paxton Hotel,” she said, glancing up to wink at Paxton the hotelier. “But we do very well for our girls.”

  “Don’t be offended,” I said to Dr. Lankton. You have no right to take offense was what I meant. “She’s not well,” I said.

  “We’ll take her to the nuns at St. Joseph’s,” Wakefield said. “I shove enough money up their habits, I oughta be able to get her a private room.”

  “Ho-ho-ho” those old men laughed in that pompous, knowing, witless way of theirs.

  I’d never felt more alone. I was alone with Cecily, floating in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

  “Is there a hospital closer?” I said.

  Wakefield said yes, but added, “I’m sure Cecily would rather we didn’t trust her care to rural medicine. If you’re worried about expense . . .”

  “No,” I said.

  Dr. Lankton stood, brushing dirt from her dress before returning her gloves to her hands. She said, “Can we do whatever possible to make the dear thing comfortable for the ride to the train station? Gather some pillows so she can lie down?”

  Cecily leaned over to whisper in my ear. “I just want to go back to the pensione,” she said. “I just want to hold my baby girl. She’s not feeling well, I’m sure of it. Whenever she has a cold coming on, I feel it in my own bones first.”

  I looked up at Wakefield, who hadn’t heard Cecily’s objection—no one had, because she’d spoken in such weak voice. And they’d all already grown impatient with our troubles. They’d seated themselves at the tables in the hay carts, and they’d resumed the
ir games, but mirthless, irritated.

  Wakefield gave orders to some servants, who then rushed off to carry them out. I realized, with a chill up my spine, that we needed Wakefield’s help. I said, “We will very, very much appreciate anything you can do for us, Mr. Wakefield.”

  “Of course you will,” Wakefield said.

  I held Cecily in my arms. The two farm boys who’d been managing the cyclone machine carried down from the hotel a fainting sofa of a cool-blue damask satin and installed it at the rear of one of the hay carts. Though Cecily at first tut-tutted the efforts of Baker and me to carry her onto the cart, she found herself too rickety on her pins to even take a few steps.

  The setting sun was still scorching hot as the horses and drivers carted us away from the bedraggled town of Pink Heron. One of the servant girls had been assigned to shade Cecily with her broad parasol, and she did a shoddy job of it. She seemed too infatuated with the handsome-faced Mr. Baker to keep her mind on her task, and the little slip of shadow would off and on drift away in inches. For the first several minutes of the ride down the road, I called the girl’s attention to her clumsy work; finally I reached over to snatch the parasol away. I sat with Cecily’s legs in my lap and tilted the shade toward her. I loosened the laces of her boots, and I stroked her bare ankles with my fingertips.

  Soon enough the sun dropped, and the temperature fell just enough to not be suffocating. And then it turned a little cool with the dark. The coolness was helped along by the squeaky-hinge song of frogs always nearby, as if the cart followed the line of a river.

  Cecily stopped squirming, stopped flinching with discomfort, and even slept a little, and I felt relieved too. I could have stared at the night sky, at the stars, for hours and hours, as Cecily rested. The servants held linseed-oil lamps above each table so the guests could see the spots of their cards.

  “Two queens,” Baker said, tossing his cards to the center of the table, certain of having won. Then he said, “Might Cecily be passing a stone?” Baker had made any number of diagnoses along the way, hoping to cast himself as the hero in the day’s turn of events.

  Dr. Lankton laughed at him, which pleased me. I had enough time on the ride back to worry over Baker’s concern. Cecily, despite having not a penny to her name, was pretty as a daffodil. And if a young man of means set his eyes on my girl, what sort of odds did I have? Didn’t men like Baker, and Wakefield, get whatever they wanted, even if they didn’t want it all that much or for all that long? The whole sordid melodrama played out in my brain, the story ending with Baker taking my girl away, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, the sad tale was a comfort. It kept me from dwelling on what had Cecily so weak.

  “A wicked stone will definitely double a girl over,” Dr. Lankton said. “An astute analysis, Dr. Baker.” She tilted her hand, and I saw the two kings in her mitt. She tossed the cards atop Baker’s queens. “Two butchers beats two bitches every time,” she said.

  Cecily woke, then fell back to sleep. She slept with her neck against the cushioned roll of the fainting sofa. On the silk of the parasol had been painted a garden scene in watery blues and cloudy pinks, and she dreamed herself there, or so she would tell me later in a letter.

  Your fingers were cupped in my hands, she would write. I overheard some word of stones, and at that, your fingers were the cool wet rocks from a brook. And I felt my aches, my fever, leaving me, one deep breath at a time.

  22.

  AS I WAITED FOR ANY WORD of Cecily’s condition, a young nun—a novitiate in a white habit—brought me coffee with chips of ice in it. Whenever I asked to see Cecily, the nuns would tell me, with squints of concern, in the gentlest of voices, that she simply couldn’t be seen.

  “I’m sure you understand,” they would say, always, every time, and I would say, “Yes, I understand,” but I never did. And the novitiate would bring me more coffee, her eyes a startling, wide-awake blue. She always seemed about to say something, but she would never utter a word.

  Two or three times a day, during those four or five days at St. Joseph’s, I would be allowed to look in on Cecily. Most often I could only look, and only as she slept. “She only ever sleeps,” the nuns told me.

  “Should she be sleeping so much?” I would ask.

  “Oh, yes, yes, she should,” they would say. “She’s awake all night, so she needs to sleep all day.”

  “Then maybe I can see her at night,” I said, “when she’s not sleeping.”

  “No one can see anyone at night,” they said.

  St. Joseph’s was a hospital that tended to charity cases, but the building was new, and the novitiates scrubbed the place until their blisters bled. The smell of the bleach sometimes burned your nose and pinched your lungs.

  Cecily had a sunny room, with a window that looked out onto a courtyard garden with grapevines winding around a gazebo and the pickets of a fence. Ravens gathered and then fled with grapes in their beaks.

  “She might like to see this,” I said once. “Can’t we get her up to look out the window?”

  At the suggestion of it, Cecily woke, and I went to her bedside.

  “It’s me . . . Ferret,” I told Cecily as I stroked her cheek.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “Here,” I said. “Always. They won’t let me see you except when you’re sleeping. And they won’t let me wake you.”

  “But I never sleep,” she said. “I can’t sleep at all.” And her eyes drifted shut. At her side, atop the bed covers, was always a book, and each time I peeked into the room, the bookmark, a yellow feather, had been moved deeper down. I liked to imagine my silent, blue-eyed novitiate reading to her.

  When not at the hospital, I tried to see Doxie at the boardinghouse, but Mrs. Margaret refused me. And the actors of the Silk & Sawdust Players assisted in the refusal, bullying me away just as expertly as they had on that first day of the Fair. They all had so little to do, they could afford to stand sentry at every entrance. And I didn’t even know where, in the house, the baby was. I appealed to the landlady, reminding her that I was the one who’d paid the rent. “You are an accomplice,” I told her, “in the child’s abduction.” But she was unmoved by my demands. Mrs. Margaret had her convinced that I was the reason Cecily had been hospitalized and that Doxie would be doomed in my care.

  Who could help me? I wasn’t Doxie’s father. Cecily wasn’t my wife. What laws were there to protect someone like me? I felt so desperate, I considered seeking out Wakefield. But I’d not seen him in the hospital halls even once. I assumed he was back at his theater in the Grand Court, seeking affection from his cast of hundreds.

  So I waited. I spent all my hours in the chapel, waiting, waiting, waiting. “I’m just downstairs waiting,” I told Cecily, when I could. I drew some comfort from the deep sympathy in the novitiate’s eyes, and she seemed to be everywhere, casting me glances like an angel.

  When Cecily was better, everything would be remedied, I assured myself. We would fall into our new life. We would get Doxie baptized, in a long silk gown. We’d get a house together, maybe even a little farm just beyond the fairgrounds. We could conspire on a show and take it to the stage. We could start our own theatrical troupe.

  One afternoon, August, Rosie, and Pearl brought Cecily a kimono wrapped in tissue in a box, and Cecily woke just long enough to tug at the box’s ribbon. Together, we watched Cecily sleep, her little soft snores puffing at her lips like she was blowing us kisses. Pearl took a manicure set to Cecily’s fingers, scratching away at the ends of her nails with a tiny file.

  “They ain’t doing nothing at all for the girl,” Rosie said. “Let’s leave with her.”

  “You won’t succeed at kidnapping,” August said. “There’s nothing more fierce than an Omaha nun. They’ve got shotguns tucked away in those habits. In a frontier town, you can’t fend off evil with a crucifix.” He came to the side of the bed and scooted me over in my chair, to share the seat with me. He took a chamois cloth from Pearl’s manicure
kit and began scrubbing the nails of Cecily’s other hand.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING I sat in the chapel as always. I’d gnawed my thumb bloody, chewing and peeling at a hangnail. I hadn’t slept, and I was on the verge of madness. I took out my pocketknife. I pressed the tip of it into my wound as if I could dig out all the damage I’d already done to it. But at the first sharp stab of pain I was startled from my delirium. I then leaned forward, pressing my forehead against the pew in front of me. I stuck the tip of the knife into the soft wood, and began to carve Cecily’s name. Part of me wanted to get caught, to get punished, but it mostly felt a holy act. It felt like worship, scratching the letters in deep.

  I froze at the sound of footsteps, having only carved in the C-e-c-i. I pulled back the knife, tucked away the blade. I hid my vandalism by holding my bloody thumb over the letters on the pew.

  Then came the ting of a tin bucket on the tiles of the floor, and an echoing bang as the handle dropped against the bucket’s side. I heard the sloshing of the water and smelled the bleach. I heard someone slip into the pew behind me to sit. I recognized the scratch and crunch of the starched folds of a habit.

  I turned when I heard her speak to me.

  In the split second before I saw the novitiate’s blue eyes, I’d hoped to see Cecily there, in nun’s costume, in the middle of a plot to escape. Ferret. I’d heard the song of Cecily’s soft voice in the way the nun whispered.

  At first I wondered how she knew my name, but then I realized this was that little dove in white who was everywhere, always. She was omnipresent, like her Lord. She mopped, she scrubbed. She changed the beds and fluffed the pillows. No matter how noisy the bristles of her brush, the patients paid her no mind. It was as if she’d made a sacred vow to fade away.

  “She’s gone,” she whispered.

  I asked my questions as I rushed to leave. I wanted to be every place at once.

  My clumsy stumbling was like something from a nursery rhyme.

  “Where’d she go?” I said as I stood from the pew and knocked over the novitiate’s bucket.