“She trusted me to take that letter to you, and I didn’t,” she said. “It’s unforgivable that I set fire to it, she says.”
Cecily’s lack of forgiveness consoled me. She had turned Mrs. Margaret from her home for being cruel to me. To me. “What do you wish me to do?” I said, mimicking Oscar’s creaky voice box without quite meaning to. I turned in my swivel chair—its coils still squeaking though I’d oiled them three times in my boredom that day. I touched my fingertips to the typewriter keys, drumming my fingers gently, making the letters on the thin steel bars shiver. “What is it you want to say to her?” I said.
“I don’t want to say anything to her,” she said. “You won’t pose as me, you’ll pose as yourself. In your own voice. You’ll tell her to forgive me. She will if you say so.”
She will if you say so. I could’ve listened to Mrs. Margaret all day, the two of us analyzing Cecily’s unforgiveness.
And then it occurred to me—my fee.
“If she forgives you,” I said, turning away from the typewriter, “then you have to get her to meet me. Trick her if you have to. I need to be alone with her.”
Her nod of agreement was so slight, it might have just been a little tremor of disgust.
I had installed a bottle of whiskey in a bottom drawer. “A gentleman’s contract,” I said, bringing out the bottle and two shot glasses. I’d barely finished filling her glass when she’d picked it up and tossed it back. I poured more in, and she drank that too, and held the glass out for another shot. I’d not had a chance to take a single sip of my own.
“She’s not good,” Mrs. Margaret said. At first I thought it some feeble attempt to convince me I shouldn’t love Cecily. It had been Cecily’s own strategy a time or two, in her attempts to send me off to Pearl: I’m no good for you, Ferret. I’m no good.
But then Mrs. Margaret said, “She’s sick.”
“No,” I said. “No, she’s getting better.” I thought of all those postcards. Took the waters, leaving today, took the waters, leaving today, took the waters, leaving today, her recitation sounding like a train on its tracks. But I also thought of how pale she’d looked on the roof. “The travel did her good,” I said.
“No,” she said, “the travel made her worse. Or something’s making her worse. I spent time up at the house when she first got back. She’d been to ten sanatoriums, had been prodded and fingered by perverted old doctors, and yet she couldn’t even lift Doxie out of the crib. She’s getting so big, she’d say, but Doxie isn’t getting so big. She’s not even as big as she should be. Do they even feed her? That little heiress is as thin as a waif.”
I shot the whiskey back, then poured some more, shot it back, catching up with Mrs. Margaret as she spoke of her dread. “I had a little girl of my own once,” she said. “I was just a little girl myself. What did I know about looking after a living thing? I didn’t know nothing, and she didn’t live long. And I knew she was dead a month before she died. Even when she was still alive, she was a ghost in her own skin. She was haunting her own bones. She was so afraid.”
I stood up too fast and knocked over the bottle, but Mrs. Margaret grabbed it before it spilled a drop. I fell back into my chair, dizzy. I shook with rage, and I felt my throat constrict. I felt it burning with the liquor. Wakefield was killing Cecily as sure as if he had his hands at her neck, pressing his thumbs in, inching her windpipe closed.
I would not write a letter. I would not scheme for a secret meeting of begging. I would not hope for the best. I would kill him. I would go to wherever he was, press the point of a pistol to his temple, and pull the trigger. And they’d hang me for it. They’d lynch me, so they could all have a tug on the rope.
Even before it had all flickered through my head, I resolved myself to this fate. Nothing in my life had ever seemed more certain. I took another shot, straight from the bottle.
Mrs. Margaret seemed to be seeing into my head and all the pictures of my execution. She put her hand on my wrist and squeezed hard. “I need your help,” she said. “If you go off half-cocked, you won’t get anywhere. You won’t get near Billy Wakefield. You think a man gets so rich from being a saint? You think you’re the first one to wish him dead? Get Cecily to forgive me, and I can keep watch. And I can get things fixed.”
It had a kind of hypnotism, her cranberry eye, the whites shot through with red. I believed her. We would save Cecily. We would get her and Doxie out of the house on the hill.
I turned back to the typewriter. I typed Dear Cecily, then stopped, defeated. “I don’t think my letters even reach her,” I said.
“I can get it to her,” Mrs. Margaret said. “I know where she’s going to be. I can even put it in her hand today if you finally get to writing the damn thing. It doesn’t have to be much. She just needs to know I was here, making things right.”
I concentrated. I considered. But everything I wrote was wrong. I would type a few lines, then rip it from the typewriter, to crumple the paper. Only when I imagined myself sitting with Cecily, speaking right to her, did the words come to me. Only one person has ever loved you and ol’ Dox more than I do, and that’s that Mrs. Margaret of yours, I wrote. Forgive her. She was only thinking of you when she was so awful to me.
I folded the note too slowly for Mrs. Margaret. She grabbed it from the desk, stood, and turned to leave the room. “Mrs. Margaret,” I said, and she paused with her hand on the doorknob, wiggling it with impatience. I said, “What did Cecily’s letter say? Did you read it before you burned it? I’d just like to know a little something about what it said.” I somehow felt, as coconspirators, we could rely on each other. And I could finally ask her what I’d so longed to ask. I was desperate for even the least fragment of a sentence, even a word or two more. Cecily had confessed on the roof what she’d written—I told you that I loved you. How, exactly, had she said it to me?
“You idiot,” she said, snorting. As she stepped out the door, she said, “Where would somebody like me have ever learned how to read?”
And it was as if she took a match to that letter once again.
December 10, 1898
Dear Cecily,
The Emerald Cathedral hasn’t an emerald in it. There isn’t much of anything green. In the sunlight that creeps in between the cracks of the barn’s walls, the cathedral does glisten with a few green sparks here and there—shards of jelly jars catch the light, and green glass bottles and lightning rod insulators and a window excavated from a church, the whale that devoured Jonah swimming in a blue-green ocean.
And it’s not much of a cathedral. There’s a cross of crystal doorknobs, but no door. There are no rooms within with pulpits and pews. Its spires suggest steeples, but for the most part, it has yet to take shape despite its hulking mass. The Emerald Cathedral seems it might fall apart from the strain of reaching toward heaven—it looks like a collision caught in the middle of collapse.
We use anything useless: bent nails and rusted wheels and broken pitchers; warped window frames of abandoned sheds, the ball-and-claw foot of an old bathtub, the clapper of a church bell. We built a scaffolding around the growing altar. We use wire and plaster and nails, tar and rope. The beauty of it, I came to see after only a minute or two, was how it stood always on the verge of ruin.
We dismantled all the implements rusting in nearby ditches and lying broken in neighboring creeks. The plows, the harrows, the cultivators, the weeders, the potato diggers. These winter days are mild, and the cathedral creeps along the walls and rafters, and swirls and towers, like a stilled tornado in the middle of tearing apart a town.
We add dolls to the cathedral, sundials, croquet mallets, mole traps, cherry stoners.
We’ve forgotten about Christmas coming. Many from across the countryside come every night to the barn, bringing along the birds they shot and plucked and cooked for our supper. We hang lanterns from every hook and we have evenings of waltzes in the flickering amber glow. A farmer plays a dulcimer, his wife a ukulele, and we dance across the barn
floor after dark, at the foot of the altar.
Somehow it seems the cathedral belongs to everyone around. It’s a reason to gather and to work. The harvests used to be like this, I’m told. When the crops were healthy, they would tend each other’s fields and gather for festivals. They would eat together, and drink, and they’d stay up past midnight.
We’re anxious to be finished with the cathedral, but we never want these days and nights to end.
Ferret
28.
AND CECILY 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.
• • •
CECILY VISITED DR. GEE LOY, 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 indu
lged 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.”
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 29