The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Like what else?” I said.

  “Like a key,” she said. “That might open a door.”

  • • •

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, a few whiskeys in, the plot had seemed foolproof. In the light of day I was certain of doom. I wanted nothing more than to wrestle myself from another of Mrs. Margaret’s death grips. But it was actually Doxie’s grip that held me, and I’d been in it ever since she’d first wrapped her fingers around my thumb.

  All the gears of the scheme were clicking along by afternoon. The only actress in the city of Omaha who I knew I could trust was Phoebe St. James, from the burlesque at the Empress Opera House. It’d been nearly a year since I’d seen her. I thought she’d left town, just before the Fair, to act in an open-air theater that had been hacked into a patch of forest. She went there, somewhere east, every summer to play actresses in Russian plays. “All the best plays are about actresses,” she would say. The theater consisted only of a stage built from the trees they’d felled. The audience sat on rows of stumps.

  “I didn’t go this summer,” Phoebe said, when I tracked her down. It had been easy—she had a telephone, and her name was in the directory. “You didn’t notice I wasn’t gone, I guess.”

  She had a little cottage of her own, and it looked like you could lick it. Some of its bricks were pink, others were white. The shingles were yellow and rippled like waves of ribbon candy. The wallpaper was striped like peppermint. I sat in her parlor with my hat on my knee.

  “I’m sorry I fell out of touch, Phoebe,” I said. “I had a very . . . a very complicated summer. How’d you get such a fine house?”

  “I met a soldier off to war,” she said. She picked up sugar cubes with tiny ivory tongs, and she seemed to drop about ten of them into a teacup. “He fell in love with me after only one day. We woke a judge in the middle of the night to marry us. And my soldier left in the morning. His family was wealthy. They were furious. I can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t want my son to marry an actress.” She poured tea into the cup of sugar, and brought the sickening brew to me. I set the saucer on the knee that didn’t have a hat on it.

  “So I made do,” she continued, “taking whatever work there was. I was paid by a horse thief to play the part of a reverend’s wife one afternoon. He had me take a Bible, with saws hidden in the pages, to his partner in crime who was cooling his heels in jail. I was so convincing, no one even suspected me when he cut his way out. Oh, and maybe you heard of Dizzy Daisy, who thieved on the midway? Watch out for Dizzy Daisy? No? I would pretend to faint from the heat, and the gentlemen who caught me would be relieved of their wallets and watches.”

  “You must’ve done a swift business,” I said, studying the pretty swoop of the gold handle of the teacup.

  “Not really,” she said. She cut through a coconut cake with a silver-handled knife. “I got my money from yellow fever. My soldier died from it.”

  “Oh, Phoebe,” I said.

  “And the family paid me well to go away,” she said. She picked up a flake of coconut and put it on her tongue. “They paid me to not have his name anymore. They paid me not to wear black and not to grieve. They paid me not to be a widow. And so I don’t grieve, and I’m not a widow.” She held out to me my slice of cake, and when I went to take the plate, my hat tumbled from my knee. I sat there, holding the saucer on my one knee with my one hand, and the cake plate on my other knee with my other hand. But I wasn’t hungry for cake or thirsty for tea, so it didn’t much matter that I couldn’t lift a finger.

  As a cuckoo clock clucked the hour, its little doors snapping open and shut, Phoebe said, “So I guess my summer was complicated too.”

  I told Phoebe of my own loss, and I think she took some comfort in it, in knowing that love and death had touched us both. The polite state of shock she’d seemed to be in as she’d served the cake and tea began to lift, and it was just us again, like always before, Ferret and Feeb, backstage at the Empress. We moved to the music room and sat slouched on the sofa, her arms wrapped around mine, her cheek on my shoulder.

  “I’ll be Madam Seymour,” she said, thrilling to my scheme. “Madam Seymour sees more.”

  • • •

  THE WAKEFIELD HOUSE, even though so far up the hill, had a telephone now. I called the house from Rosie’s den. I spoke to Pearl about Madam Seymour.

  “I’ve been to every parlor in the city,” I said. “Madam Seymour’s the finest.”

  “I’ll see what Billy says,” Pearl said. “I’ll ask him this evening over brandy.”

  “No,” I said. “Tonight must be the séance. Madam Seymour is impatient. She says Cecily needs us there. All of us. She needs all her friends with her.” Pearl said nothing. I listened for her voice in the crackling of noise on the line. I knew this wouldn’t work, I thought. My heart sped, my stomach turned. We’d failed. Just help us, I wanted to plead. Instead, I said, “Pearl? Don’t you believe in Cecily’s ghost? Has this all been a fraud? Pearl? Tell me. Has this all been a fraud?”

  Pearl said, “I’ll ring back in an hour.”

  And in an hour she called with an invitation to summon ghosts in the parlor. But Wakefield was not happy, she said, and he’d have no part in it. “I had to beg him, Ferret,” she said. “I broke down in tears.”

  By evening, we had rented a coach and driver, and had gathered our friends. August ran a stick of charcoal around Phoebe’s eyes, painting exotic sweeps. He plummed her lips purple with some kind of rouge and he got her lashes to sparkle with silvery dust. She wore a lace shawl over her head. The six of us crammed ourselves into the coach, with August, Phoebe, and me sharing one bench. Across from us, Rosie and Mrs. Margaret took up all of a seat, so Josephine sat on Rosie’s lap.

  The weather worsened, growing as wet and cold as it had on the day of Cecily’s funeral. The sky was just as stark-white. Maybe we were the ones who weren’t real, caught up in a dead woman’s dream.

  Mrs. Margaret had given me the key to the secret room, and I held it tight in my fist. I was going to the house to open a door. It kept me anchored, this piece of iron.

  • • •

  WHEN WE ARRIVED, Pearl ushered us into the parlor, the same parlor where Cecily had laid in her open-lidded coffin on the day of her memorial. Servants rushed in and out, not only with extra chairs to bring to the table but with decanters of wine and cut glass bowls of candied fruit. They brought in cakes and pies and plates of marrow on toast. They brought us mutton puffs, boiled sweetbreads, and oysters wrapped in bacon. “This was the best we could do on short notice,” said the head cook, a stout woman they called Lady, as she stood in the parlor and worried.

  “You shouldn’t have brought out anything at all,” Pearl said, scratching at the back of her head. “This isn’t a party.”

  Rosie popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and insisted the servants sit with us. “Cecily needs her people,” he said. The evening was like Christmas, with its snow at the window and the servants carrying in suet pudding and macaroon custard. With some coaxing the maids and the butlers, and even old Morearty, consented to a splash of the wine. Pearl stood at the doorway, gnawing a thumbnail, refusing all drink.

  Phoebe, as Madam Seymour, moved around the room with her eyes shut, wiggling her fingers in the air in front of her face like she was feeling for cobwebs in her path. “There is a room that is locked,” she said, in an accent thick with fraud. “Zere eees a vroom zat eees lok-ka-da.”

  Pearl stepped forward. “Yes,” she said, tilting her head. “At the top of the stairs. There’s a room.” I felt a pang of guilt seeing Pearl so curious. I nearly stepped forward to confess, to hold the key out to her. Pearl’s deception—her possession, her letters—seemed somehow less dishonest than mine. This burlesque of ours, this séance, seemed a crooked act. Poor, gentle Pearl had only wanted connection. In my foolishness, I started to speak, to apologize for all of us, for drinking and dancing on Cecily’s grave. But Mrs. Margaret elbowed me in the ribs and nodded her head, ha
ppy to see Pearl so easily fooled.

  “Doxie’s birthday’s in April,” Mrs. Margaret whispered in my ear. “I didn’t think I’d get to spend it with her.” She began to weep a little and held her handkerchief to her eye.

  “Don’t eat the calf in the cow’s belly,” I said. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  Madam Seymour opened and closed her hands. “Someone has the key in their fist,” she said. Some-vun az ze key in zere vist.

  Everyone held their hands out, palms up, even all the servants. They all looked around, looking for the hand with the key. “Ferret,” Pearl said.

  Pearl snatched the key from my hand and walked quickly to the stairs. We all followed, and we surrounded her in the narrow hall. The key fit through the keyhole, but it would only jiggle around in the lock, and the knob wouldn’t turn. She tried and tried, until finally Morearty stepped forward to take the key from her. “The locks in the house can be fussy,” he said. He put the key in and looked up and off, as if divining his way through the lock’s twists and turns. We stilled our breaths and waited.

  When it became clear that the old man could not unlock the door either, Rosie took him gently by the shoulders and led him out of the way. We all suspected what Rosie was up to as he pressed his palms against the door, testing for give. We stepped back, to allow him room. He rammed into the door, leading with his shoulder, shaking the whole house, it seemed. A picture fell off the wall. A hall lamp flickered and went out. But the door didn’t open. Rosie struck again, this time harder, knocking all breath from his lungs with a loud oomph. He slammed into the door a few more times, until he was clearly in great pain, and Josephine came forward to beg him to stop.

  “Is the door bricked up, for God’s sake?” Rosie said.

  I slipped away from the others and into Doxie’s room. The room was dark, and her crib was empty. I walked to the window and looked out into the backyard, and the gardens, where the cyclone had spun Cecily up from the ground and into the rosebushes. At the edge of the yard was a child’s house I hadn’t noticed before, a playhouse painted bright blue, like a box of sky against the bone-gray of winter. A light was on inside.

  • • •

  WHEN WE’D GIVEN UP on the door, we all returned to the parlor where Madam Seymour suddenly doubled over, clutching at her womb. “The child,” she said. “Where’s the child?”

  “She’s playing with the maid’s little girl downstairs,” Pearl said.

  “Fetch her,” the psychic said. “Cecily wants her among us.”

  Pearl began gnawing at her thumbnail again. “I don’t think that . . .”

  Madam Seymour bellowed as if gutshot, bending over even more. “Pleeeeeease,” she said, with a low growl. Pearl rushed to the back stairs that led to the servants’ quarters.

  While she was gone, I walked down the hall to the conservatory that led out into the garden. I stepped through the French doors and followed a snow-dusted lane of stone. When I reached the playhouse, I ducked my head around the gingerbread woodwork of the doorway’s eaves to let myself in. Wakefield, in a fur coat, sat hunched over a carpentry bench, the top of it scattered with the wheels and mechanisms of windup toys and trains. The room had a small hearth, and the little bit of heat from its fire struggled against the bitter cold. I closed the door behind me, and Wakefield looked up slowly, unsurprised by the noise.

  “Ferret,” he said in dull voice.

  The carpentry bench took up much of the room, having been shoved in among the furnishings of a child’s pretend life. I kept bumping my head against the low ceiling, so I took a seat on a wooden chair painted blue. Wakefield returned his attention to his bench, and a penny cart with a wooden horse. He picked up the horse of willow to whittle at its flank with a knife. “How goes the ghosting?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Have you ever been to a séance?” I said.

  He nodded. “Many séances,” he said. “Many, many, many. But all my ghosts are punishing. They won’t speak to me.”

  “Cecily seems to have some things to say,” I said.

  “I’m skeptical,” he said.

  “There’s a locked room,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’d like to unlock it.”

  “No.”

  “I just think that Cecily—”

  “No!” Wakefield said. He stabbed the point of the knife into the wood of the bench, and left the knife to stand there. He covered his face with his hand, then pushed his hand back through his hair. He took a deep breath and said, “That room is something between Cecily and me only.”

  A gust of wind knocked against the house and blew so harshly, so firmly, it seemed it’d blow the walls over. A draft worked in from somewhere, playing with the fire and rattling the paintbrushes in the jar on the bench. And just at my back, I heard the familiar tapping of shoes against the wall. I turned to see a puppet much like Oscar hanging from his collar by a hook. But I knew it wasn’t him. This dummy’s face was unmarred by dents or chips. His suit looked new and he wasn’t missing a single finger.

  I reached up to touch the dummy’s hand. “Could this be Oscar?” I said.

  Wakefield turned. “No,” he said. He then reached for a box on his bench—a splintered crate with oranges painted on. He pulled it down on its side, and my dummy spilled out, grotesque, stripped naked, plucked apart, dead. The door to his chest had been ripped off its hinges, and he’d been hollowed out, robbed of all his tricks and gimmicks.

  I fantasized picking up that knife from the bench and stabbing it into Wakefield’s throat. But I had no one to blame but myself for the damage done to my favorite toy. I’d taken Wakefield’s money.

  “Did you know he could do this?” Wakefield said, taking his dummy from the wall and propping it on his knee. He tugged a string, lifted the dummy’s hand, and a fountain of silver sparks flew up like from the wick of a Roman candle. Its whistle was shrill, and I plugged my ears with my fingers. The show finished with a pop, and feathers flew like from a shot bird.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I knew he could do that.”

  “Well, this one couldn’t,” he said, bouncing the doll on his knee. “Not until I fixed him with the pieces of Oscar. This one belonged to my boy. My boy, Sylvester. He and I found the dummy at the world’s fair in Chicago. The dummy was full of tricks then. Then it started to fall apart. Trick by trick by trick. The manufacturer fled his debtors, and was nowhere to be found. The factory closed. There was no way to repair it, except to gather up the parts of the dummies that somehow hadn’t collapsed. After Sylvester died, I did everything I could to put old Humpty back together again. I contacted ventriloquists around the world, and magicians’ clubs. I contacted antique shops, and doll hospitals. It was a needle in a haystack, it seemed. So when I saw you on the midway, it was a miracle. Here the doll was, right in my own town. It was as if Sylvester was trying to speak to me after all.”

  “So what now?” I said. “What good is it, anyway?” I tried to sound cynical, but my teeth rattled from the cold.

  He looked at me. He squinted. “That’s right,” he said. “You don’t know about the voice box.”

  “I know about it,” I said. “It’s nothing special. He doesn’t say anything interesting.”

  He worked his fingers back behind the dummy’s head, flipped the switch, and the dummy spoke in a voice I hadn’t heard before. The voice box crackled with noise, and turned the voice to mush. But it was clearly the sound of a child reading aloud.

  I couldn’t make out all the boy’s mumbled words, but I knew the rhyme from my own youth—a tale about a little lad who got a little wife, a wife who wouldn’t stay within. He wheeled her in a wheelbarrow until the wheelbarrow broke. The wife took a fall. “That put an end to the wheelbarrow, little wife, and all.”

  The boy had had to read in a rush, to fit all the rhyme in. Even so, his recording stopped halfway through the last word, all left to echo with only its ah, the l’s lost to time.

  “I’m no
t cut out for murder,” he said, “but I might have gunned you down in the street to steal your doll.” He placed the dummy on the bench, on its back. “My boy read the poem into a horn at the world’s fair,” Wakefield said. “Into a machine that made a tiny wax cylinder.” He sighed, touching tenderly at the dummy’s throat. “Smaller than a chicken-wing bone. When the dummy’s phonograph quit, it took his voice with it. The cylinder wouldn’t work in anything else. I hired engineers. I called Edison himself. No one could fix it. No one knew how it could ever have worked to begin with.”

  “What happens when this voice box quits too?” I said. I meant to be cruel. It seemed it’d be a blessing and a curse to have his dead son’s voice always at the tip of that dummy’s tongue.

  He looked at me with shock, as if such a thing hadn’t occurred to him, as if I’d stabbed him after all. He started to speak, but stayed silent, and he turned to again hunch over the bench. He picked up a wood locomotive and scratched a square of sandpaper at its edges.

  “I suppose you think you’re the only one she visits,” he said.

  “What? Who?”

  “Her ghost,” he said. “You think the ghost is all yours, I suppose.” He put the sandpaper aside and put a jeweler’s loupe to his eye. He cowered lower over the locomotive to tinker more, taking a screwdriver to it. “I loved her, and she loved me,” he said. “Invent all the fictions you want. Make me as evil as you can. But it was me she needed as she fell ill. And it’s my house she haunts.”

  My teeth were rattling more, and my voice shook. “But you didn’t save her,” I said.

  “I saved her from you,” he said. “It was your poverty that killed her. The way you lived. The dirty water you drank. The food you ate.” He looked up from the train but stared at the wall ahead of him as his voice rose. “And are you so stupid as to think I don’t know about the Chinese doctor? How would I not know something like that? Do I seem a man who is easily fooled?” He slammed the toy train against the bench, sending a few of its gears spinning away. “Do you think I’m a fool?” he shouted.