Mistletoe tea.
Miss Cecily.
• • •
THE ROADS HAD TURNED to mud and slush, the snow and sleet having grown heavy. The coach slid and rocked, the tea sloshing in my cup. August had brought a whole pot full, and every time I spilled some tea, he poured in more.
The coach was not as crowded as first I thought—some among us had been only an illusion. We were all of us in black. The incubator nanny sat feathered, with a half-eaten apple in the hand in her lap, the red of it like a spot of blood. She was a shot crow. She stopped her chewing when I caught her eye. She smiled with closed lips, and furrowed her brow with sympathy. I was the widowed husband.
After the long drive in the rented coach, north, and up the hill to the Wakefield house and into a slow caravan of carriages and phaetons, I’d sobered up. They were taking me to see Cecily, for prayers in the parlor. Wakefield was having a service, of sorts.
“But he wanted no funeral, it seems,” August said. “There’ll be no sermons.” He took from his pocket a mourning card he’d collected from the undertaker’s parlor. The card was black with white illustrations. I ran my fingers over the embossed feathers of the angel wings and along the droop of the willow.
In eternal loving memory of Cecily Wakefield was etched into a gravestone that sat between two urns.
Wife & Mother
Who fell asleep in Jesus, on the month, the day, the year.
My sight fell past the white and into the black night of the background. How was any of this a comfort? The engraved cards, the mourning lace. Eternal memory? Eternal death. Every word of all this angelology was just another shovelful of dirt. There was no beauty in this. All the night and all the black there ever was, and could ever be, could never blind us. As long as we were alive, our dead would keep dying.
“I keep forgetting she died,” I said. “I keep thinking of new ways to try to take her from Wakefield. Just this morning I thought of the balloon at the Fair. Maybe if we went up in the balloon again, I thought.”
“They don’t even gas the balloon up anymore,” August said. “The Fair’s winding down. Some of the midway attractions have already started heading to Philadelphia for next summer’s fair.”
“Take me home,” I said, and by home I meant my sleeping berth, my healing pipe. It felt like I hadn’t slept in days. “I need to get some rest,” I said. “It’s important that I rest.”
But we were already there. Now we are there, I’d read to the orphans, from the story about the Paris exhibition. That was a journey, a flight without magic.
We stopped at the gate. We heard conversation, then dispute. We heard yelling and swearing, from the driver, from the men standing sentry, from the anarchists perched atop our roof. The anarchists’ anger shook the coach as they stood up to hurl down insults. Rosie stepped outside, and his shouting and curses joined the noise.
Those of us in the coach sat silent, listening, trying to interpret the nature of the ruckus. The guards at the gate kept us out, it seemed. You could only pass through with a wreath on a hook. The day before, every florist in the city, and every florist in every city nearby, had wound and wired fresh lilies and fronds into funeral wreaths. They’d filled wagons with the wreaths, and horses had galloped along every street and lane, slowing only long enough for a boy to jump off and deliver a wreath to a door of someone who was allowed, by Wakefield, to mourn his wife.
Without a wreath on your coach or carriage, you were sent away. You were among the uninvited.
“We’re her family,” Rosie shouted at them, as he opened the door to step back into the coach. He was bright red with rage. Josephine took his arm, petted his sleeve, to settle him. And the driver pulled away from the parade of coaches, steered the horses around, and headed back the way we’d come, past wreath after wreath, the lilies’ petals and leaves wilting, burning, in the cold. The anarchists on the roof kept shouting, kept cursing, back at the guards and ahead to the mourners in line.
Rosie saw me trembling and spilling more mistletoe tea. In the hour or so we’d been in the coach, all the mystifying smoke that had clouded my head had lifted. Rosie said bashfully, “I’m so sorry about all that.”
But I was grateful. My old anger at Wakefield jolted through me, pushing the blood up my veins, shortening my breath, the rush of it all so familiar. My hatred of Wakefield made sense, the only thing to make sense in the days since Cecily’s death. Now I wanted nothing more than to go into that house. I was the only one in all the world who deserved to mourn alongside little Doxie. I was afraid before that I would weep and wail, but now I needed it, I needed to fill that house with my pain. I am the widowed.
“I want to go back,” I said, and no sooner did I say it than Rosie had the door open again. He jumped from the coach and pulled me out by my sleeve, both of us slipping in the snow and nearly falling beneath the coach’s turning wheels. I’d only just righted myself before Rosie had opened the door of another coach, one moving slowly up the hill toward Wakefield’s gate. He pushed me up and inside, in with an old couple sitting across from each other. The gent withered on his bench, cringing, wide-eyed, clutching his cane to his chest, while his wife leaned forward, ready for battle, brandishing her mourning umbrella of black lace and raven’s feathers.
I sat next to the lady, and Rosie sat next to her gent. Somehow, through all that, I still had the empty teacup in my hand.
“You are so kind to offer passage,” Rosie said.
“You absolutely must leave at once,” the woman said.
When Rosie crossed his thick legs, his foot was suddenly in front of us all, and he leisurely tugged at the knee of his trousers to lift the hem above his sock. There, in a holster buckled to his calf, was a ladylike pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle. In all his weeks as a conspirator to assassinate, I’d not once seen a weapon.
The old man and the old woman leaned back, away from Rosie’s armed leg. “So sad when there’s a funeral,” Rosie said, tapping his toe in the air. “But I guess we should be happy it’s not our own, ay?”
Rosie tapped the toe of his shoe against my knee with affection, and he kept tapping, calming me with the rhythm as we rode up through the gate, and through the orchard, and up the winding lane to the house.
• • •
THE HOUSE SMELLED WARM, of cinnamon and ham hocks. The dining room thrashed with the well-meaning buzzards that hover at funerals, the undertakers with their folded hands and tics of sympathy, the church wives with their mince pies and mints handmade from cross-shaped molds. An aunt fussed with flowers, an uncle nipped at mulled wine.
They all looked my way, studying me in my topcoat and top hat, in my ratty undershirt and lilac pants. Rosie had plucked a lily from the coach’s wreath and poked its stem through the buttonhole of my lapel.
You can’t see me, I thought, even as they stared. None of these people were Cecily’s. These people were only here for Wakefield, to shed polite tears, to compliment the undertaker’s art, to chatter about all the life that burned in Cecily’s dead, red cheeks. So peaceful, they said.
But the old anger I’d worked up in the coach had dulled back to a sadness that seemed to thicken my blood. My skin felt too heavy, and every hair on my head weighed me down.
Though feeling queasy, I decided to eat. I wasn’t ready to go to the parlor, where Cecily rested in her casket. I sent Rosie in without me. “Go see her, and come back,” I said. “Tell me if I can bear it.”
I picked up a little china plate from a stack on the sideboard, and I nearly dropped it. My every finger was too weak.
An old woman, kindly recognizing my grief, came to take my arm, and my plate, and she led me to the table. The ladies’ group of a Lutheran church had brought casseroles and stews, cakes and ices.
“Pickled figs in the bowl there,” the woman explained to me, “calf’s liver here, kidney stew in the pretty tureen, eggs fricasseed.” I followed her around the table as she pointed at the dishes and platters. I would nod, and she would nod
back, and she would ladle a spoonful onto my plate.
My eye traveled up from the table to the portrait on the wall—a life-size picture of the first dead Mrs. Wakefield seated, her little boy in a sailor suit leaning against her knees. Had Cecily eaten all her last meals under the eye of her mister’s old missus? I feared the whole of her life there in that house had been haunted by the other Mrs. Wakefield. Cecily wore lace the first wife had tatted. She ate off the first wife’s wedding china and spent her sleepless nights in the first wife’s sheets. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the mortician had dug up the first Mrs. Wakefield to put Cecily in her burial gown, and on her pillow, and in her box.
After all the church wife’s work of heaping my plate full, I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not hungry. I should have told you. I can’t eat.” I put my hand on her thin, fragile wrist and I said again, “I can’t eat,” and she nodded, and she forgave me all the trouble I’d put her to. And that forgiveness lightened me somehow. I didn’t want to step away from her act of kindness. I longed to pick up another empty plate, and to ask her to fill that one too.
Instead, I left the dining room to search for another room where Cecily wasn’t, but Rosie found me, took my elbow, and led me back. I was relieved and leaned against him. I thought we might be leaving. He’d gone into the parlor, he’d looked, and he’d decided I shouldn’t see her. This was all a mistake, he would promise me.
But Rosie eased me around a corner, and into the parlor, and I saw her before I could look away from the black coffin surrounded by wicker baskets of white roses. Before I could see too much, I turned my head toward the bay window, where the light glowed a powdery white, as if the sun were trapped in muslin.
In front of the window sat Mrs. Margaret, Pearl, and a nurse in an apron and cap. A quilt covered their skirts, and the women slowly stitched without speaking, cobbling the clumsy memorial blanket together, all its squares at crosspurposes.
When Pearl spotted me, she seemed agitated at first, but then stood and came to take my hands in hers. Her thimble-less thumb was bloody from the needle. She wore a black dress trimmed in crepe that crackled as she pressed against me to kiss my cheek.
For a second, my anger rose again. “We were turned away at the gate,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” Pearl said, and the fact that she didn’t seem at all surprised only wounded me more. “There’s such confusion in a house when there’s been a death.”
“I wouldn’t know, I guess,” I said. You wouldn’t know either, I wanted to tell her. You don’t belong here.
“We have to help each other at times like this,” Pearl said.
Nail the coffin shut. Throw ashes in the river and the wind. None of it would work to spirit the lost life away or to shut it out. We were all fools, fattening up the undertaker, paying handsomely for the pantomimes of grief. I wouldn’t be a part of it.
“Let’s go,” I said to Rosie. Rosie tugged at my arm, to lead me to the coffin. “Why?” I said, through locked teeth.
Rosie leaned in to whisper. “Let it ruin you,” he said. “Let this be the very worst thing you have to get through. Get through it, and move on along.”
And when I saw her so still, I felt my own soul leave.
Tucked into her hands folded just beneath her breasts was a handkerchief, but not the one I’d given her. This handkerchief was a souvenir of the Fair, the battleship Maine embroidered in the corner of it, in gray thread. It was all wrong. It was all so terribly wrong. I had to believe Wakefield saw some sentiment in the gesture. Was it because he had been introduced to Cecily at his masquerade ball, with the sinking of the toy ship on the lagoon? Was that it?
I watched for the handkerchief to lift, the lace of it to rustle, her chest to rise and fall gently. Her breath before had always been so soft and slow, so barely there. If you didn’t know her like I knew her, if you didn’t know the rhythm of her sleeping breath, where to look, where to listen, you might not see the breath at all. But I knew. I’d watched her sleep so many times. I knew well the flutter of her lashes as dreams crossed her eyes. I knew how her tongue clicked as she ticked off each breath that left her lips.
I knew the best way to wake her, to ease her from sleep. I knew to stroke her neck.
I didn’t give much thought to touching her neck just then, to slipping my fingers beneath the silk and lace of her collar. When I did, I wasn’t astonished to feel the pulse of her heart. She was there with me, for only a beat. It was the pulse of my heart, in my fingers, beating against the skin of her neck. In a lost moment, quicker than a heartbeat, than a wink, I mistook my heart for hers, and she woke for me, just for me, for just that moment, one more time. And though it was only a heartbeat, only a wink, it was time enough. I had time to say good-bye to her.
• • •
THE MORTICIAN HAD signaled concern to the others in the room, as I’d stood there, touching Cecily, his corpse, his creation, and suddenly Mrs. Margaret was breathing her foul breath in my face, twisting my arm behind my back, leading me away from the coffin and toward the parlor door.
“I want to see Doxie,” I told her, in between gasps of pain.
“Doxie’s upstairs,” she said, spitting, her wretched breath now a mist, “where she belongs. She’s with her family. She’s a Wakefield now.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m doing this for your own good, Ferret. Get out and stay out.”
Rosie came up next to me and elbowed Mrs. Margaret away. “We’re going,” he said.
“We’re not,” I said. I stopped and turned to shout through the halls, up the stairs, “We’re not going!” But Rosie pushed at me, taking my arm, leading me toward the door.
I turned my head to shout back, “You can’t keep me from Doxie! You can’t keep me away from my girl!” But even as I shouted it, hearing my voice bounce from the walls and echo, I knew I’d lost her forever too. “She’s mine!” I shouted. But nothing had ever belonged to me.
December 15, 1898
Dear Cecily,
Yesterday I fell. I’d grown quite capable without my cane, able to climb and burrow, and I got too confident, scaling the Emerald Cathedral so that I could place a brass candlestick exactly where Emmaline wanted to see it, up among some bird’s nests the birds had built themselves. I fell, and I grabbed at the balloon’s rope. We’d built the basket and the rope into the workings of the cathedral. The basket was a sacred relic, of sorts. And that rope saved me from crashing. It burned my hands as it slowed me, and I hit the ground hard enough to crack my cast.
The Old Sisters Egan were at my side before anyone else.
Hester said nothing. She just lifted her hammer and tap-tap-tapped the crack deeper and longer, until she could pry the cast off. She and Emmaline then helped me to my feet and I walked. I strutted across the room and everyone applauded. The pretty daughter of the man who grew clover, a young woman named Eleanor, slipped herself into my open arms, tipped her hip against mine, and gently swept me into a waltz. We danced, circling close, as the others gathered around and clapped out a rhythm for our steps. We stopped to watch as Eleanor’s father carried the pieces of my cast up onto the shrine, binding the plaster to a statue of Mary, Mother of God, salvaged from an abandoned prairie hospital. He attached the cast to her plaster gown, winding a string of barbed wire around and around.
And last night I dreamed Emmaline’s dream. She and I had the exact same dream on the exact same night. In the dream, the Emerald Cathedral was finished, and it glowed as green as the grasses in the valley in springtime. Emmaline took my arm, and we walked to the front of a row of old, splintered church pews. We sat down. Behind us was a whole congregation, people humming and chanting the language Emmaline had created. We suddenly knew all the sounds for all the symbols. And the man who Emmaline had once loved was there. He was old now. He spoke to her in her strange language. “I had a long unhappy life,” he told her. “I died a broken man.” He took from his pocket the same emera
ld ring he’d given her years and years before. The emerald for Emmaline. She had dropped it into the sea on the day he left her for someone else. When she took the ring from him now, he faded away.
I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.
In my dream, I could picture you at rest within it, entombed but afloat, as if buried at sea. The emerald of the cathedral was the ocean, and you were caught falling in its waves. Your curls were tangled in the coils of a bedspring, your sleeves lifted and pricked by a thicket of nails. Your back arched over a wheel, your legs bent around the petrified branches of a tree.
In my dream, I cried myself to exhaustion. I curled up in the pew to sleep, and I dreamed within the dream that Doxie had grown up to look just like you.
Ferret
31.
THE SNOW BLEW ITSELF into a blizzard on the night of Cecily’s funeral, then settled, then quit. The snow was light enough to blow away in the gusts of evening, sweeping itself from our paths and our walks, away from our steps and our skirts, to drift in corners and doorways. We huddled in furs and held scarves to our cheeks. We warmed ourselves with whiskey, bellying up to the stoves in saloons.
In the first of the morning light, a dusting of snow glittered on eaves and windowpanes, in the manes of horses, in the cracks of the bricks of the sidewalk and street. The horses’ snuffling lifted in clouds of vapor as they lowered their heads against the last of the cold. By noon, it was warm, by afternoon warmer, and the snow went away. And as October ended, we were treated to a few days that seemed like spring. We opened our windows to let out the flat air and to let in the cool, to let in the smell of wet soil and leaves, the sealike breezes blown off the river and up and down the avenues.
I didn’t return to Dr. Gee Loy’s. I didn’t go much of anywhere. I slept, and when I couldn’t sleep, I sat at the window and let the hours pass. But I did return to the Fair on its very last day.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 31