The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Oh, Cecily,” the actors and actresses called back to her, in sweet singsong, after she had fallen farther and farther behind the group. They were in love with her too. “Come to us, Cecily.” They delighted in their own melodrama. “Oh, Cecily, the world is so cold without you in it.” They kept calling to Cecily, but they never looked back. One actress made gestures toward the moon. An actor wrapped his arms around himself. “Come back to us, Cecily; come back; come back.”

  “Go away, go away, go away,” she called ahead to them. She held a pink peony by its long stem, touching the bloom of it to her nose. The flower was nothing special—I could see it had seen better days, its outer petals brown and tattered. To Cecily, it was prettier than it was. I wondered where she’d gotten a flower so dear to her. Had some much-loved lover left it for her?

  Nonetheless I picked up my step, but just as I did, she picked up hers. I stepped up more, and so did she. We were like two cyclers on a two-seater, pedaling but not drawing closer. A few steps farther and Cecily was no longer alone. She’d caught up with the others, and they all slipped through an iron gate, going to where all the noise was. I followed them into the crowded garden lit by the frosted glow of gas lamps, where people sat at tables among trees and rosebushes raising their steins of beer. Above the chatter I heard the organ grinder’s crank piano. His monkeys, in their paper wings, had been released from their chains, and they leaped from table to chair to tree. They bounced into backs and took a wig from an actor’s head; they knocked over wineglasses. They stole bits of cake right from the ends of forks.

  In the garden of the Storz Brewery, beer could be got for a penny a pint after hours. After a long day of keeping the Fair’s illusions spinning, the workers congregated to drink and to eat the day’s leftovers—the whole roasts and broiled birds—that the waitresses brought over in vast tureens from the cafés along the midway. In the first few hours after the Fair closed, everyone was here—the ticket takers, the entertainers, the custodians, and managers, the beekeepers and ostrich farmers, the Chinese acrobats and the minstrels of the Old Plantation—everyone unwinding and flirting and dropping character. As the sharpshooters of the Wild West Show enjoyed their beer in a genteel manner not befitting a cowboy (pinky up, short sips), the magician’s assistant, in red satin and feathers, collapsed in on herself to demonstrate how she disappeared nightly into the bottom of a box.

  Cecily walked over to Little Red and all the others from the Chamber of Horrors—actors and actresses still in their bloodied and gun-shot getups. They were in the kick of some dice game. They cheered and shouted and bellowed out bawdy songs. The dice rolled, bounced, flew. Dollar bills changed hands without rhyme, without reason.

  Cecily took a seat off to the side, apart from her crowd. She set the flower on the edge of a flowerpot next to her, and she began to remove the pins from her pinned-down curls, and she dropped the pins one by one into her lap.

  That’s when I saw August alone at a table in an opposite corner. He was in a very odd predicament—a live bird attacked the dead bird on his hat. I helped him to shoo the finch away, which returned to its nest in a potted tree in the garden.

  As I licked my thumb and smoothed down the ruffled feathers of his bluebird, I said, “That’s her over there.” I nodded in Cecily’s direction. “The one messing with her hairpins.”

  “Oh, she’s much prettier with her head on her neck like that,” August said. He sighed and whimpered and it became clear from his wobbling that he was fuddled from whiskey. “I’m in love with her too,” he declared. August then lifted a shot glass, raising it to the empty seat next to him. “Ferret, I want you to meet somebody else I love,” he said. When August realized that that somebody had left, he said, “Oh. Maybe if I take another drink, he’ll return.”

  “Maybe you’ve had enough,” I said, sitting down.

  “Maybe I have,” he said, sounding melancholy, falling into a slouch. He leaned closer to me, and it became clear he wanted me to put my arm around his shoulders. August rarely drank himself to drunkenness, but whenever he did, he was all affection and apology. When drunk, he became effusive, going on and on about how much our friendship meant to him, how much he loved me, and relied upon me. But what he felt for me was a different sort of thing than what I felt for him.

  He put his hand to my cheek. “Thank you for saving my dead bluebird, Ferret. You’re the only one who looks after me. Aren’t you? Promise me you’re my only one.”

  “I promise,” I said, giving him a fatherly pat on the back. “You’re a good kid, Augie.” When August was sober, his attentions were flattering, and I admit, though it was selfish, I encouraged him. He saw the world in a way I didn’t, and saw me as I didn’t see myself. I liked being invited into his imagination, where I was some kind of handsome, hapless character, my every failing charming and comical. But whenever he fell morose and lovelorn, I felt cruel for taking any delight in the attention he gave me. More than anything, I wanted August to find happiness, though I had no idea how he ever could in a town like ours.

  August gestured again to the empty seat at his other side. “We were just talking about you. Me and the gondolier. A lad named Alonzo. Alonzo with the long eyelashes.” He stopped a moment, then said it again, singing it. “Alonzo with the long eyelashes. He can sneak you and Marie Antoinette out onto the lagoon, in the swan gondola, for a quick bit of moonlight. Any night after closing. Just bring him a bottle of wine.”

  “That’s sweet of you to think of me, Augie,” I said.

  “I’m always looking out for you,” he said. He looked up to me, then past me. He squinted to see better into the dark of the garden. “Your witch has taken human form,” he said.

  I looked to where August pointed. The automaton had changed into a shirtwaist and long black skirt, and had twisted her silver braids to pin them properly to the top of her head. She’d washed away the makeup that had stiffened her face but still wore the eye patch of her witch’s costume. The whistle still dangled from the chain around her neck, bouncing against her chest as she stepped through the garden, Cecily’s carpetbag in hand. When the automaton reached Cecily, Cecily took the bag from her, and together they left the garden.

  August whispered in my ear. “The flower,” he said. “Take it to her.”

  Cecily had left the peony on the flowerpot, but August’s suggestion seemed backward to me—someone else had given her that flower first. I worried I would be carrying to her the gimmicks of another man’s seduction.

  “Go,” August said with a not-so-gentle shove at my shoulder.

  • • •

  I PLUCKED AWAY some of the peony’s petals, wishing on each one, until the wish came true—the automaton ducked into the dim facade of the Chinese Village, and Cecily was at last alone again.

  I’d left my dummy with August, and my jacket. I’d left behind much of my gentleman’s disguise. I’d taken off my necktie and collar, and I’d yanked at my curls, pushing them this way and that. I’d untucked my shirt and dropped my suspenders to dangle at my sides. I had hoped for her not to recognize me from my clumsy efforts of that morning.

  And yet the first thing out of my mouth was nothing but more clumsiness. “I’m the fool who tried to nab your carpetbag,” I said as I stepped up to her. She flinched and quickened her pace. Her parasol was closed, down at her side, and I saw her tighten her grip on the handle like she might be apt to smack me with it. “But I wasn’t trying to nab it, really. It looked heavy, and I wanted to help. Or, actually, I just wanted an excuse to walk with you. I’m not a thief. And I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You’d think I’d never spoken to a girl so lovely before. And I haven’t, I guess. Not as lovely as you. Well, except I actually have spoken to you before. At the Empress Opera House. You were the violet-eyed trollop, and I tied your corset strings.”

  Though she kept the parasol poised to batter me, she looked down at the dirt road in tho
ught, slowing her step, sorting out all my rambling.

  And then her arm did relax. She swung the parasol at her side, back and forth, and she looked at me briefly. She looked in my eyes, then up to my hair. She smiled at me, then returned her eyes to the ground. “Violent-eyed,” she said. “I think it was the violent-eyed trollop.”

  “Oh?” I said, trying to seem easygoing, despite how my heart picked up to have her so near, speaking to me. “What would it mean to be violent-eyed?”

  She shrugged. “Violent with anger?” she said. “Violent with immorality? Regret? I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Violet-eyed makes more sense, I suppose. Even though my eyes are brown.”

  “Even though your eyes are amber,” I corrected. I restrained myself from rattling off all the poetic allusions I’d come up with on the night I’d met her, all those lines likening her eyes to cinnamon and autumn and ginger.

  “You must have watched me lose my head ten times today,” she said.

  “You couldn’t see me in there,” I said. “It was too dark. I could’ve been anybody.”

  “You were always right up close,” she said. “Right in the lights.”

  I held out the flower. “You forgot this,” I said.

  “It’s not mine,” she said, not taking it from me.

  “It is,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It belongs to the girl who plays the girl who gets knifed by Jack the Ripper. She got a whole bucketful of flowers from a gent. She gave me the worst of the bunch.”

  I sniffed at the peony. “It’s not so bad,” I said. Despite the raggedy nature of the thing, its sweet stink was potent enough to give me a pinch of headache.

  “Did your dummy run off?” she said, nodding toward my back.

  “He’s scared of the old lady,” I said. “Where’d she go, anyway?”

  “She bets on the crickets in the fan-tan den,” she said. “The Chinese magicians keep a gambling hall after hours. You can even bet on the number of seeds in an orange if you want. They train crickets to fight in rice bowls.”

  “I got no patience for crickets,” I said. “My room’s noisy with them in summer. When they keep you up at night with their clicking, you dwell on every minute that you’re not asleep.”

  But why was I talking about the crickets in my attic? I was nervous, I guess, afraid of frightening her off. She seemed so skittish, so shy for an actress. We slowed to a stroll, and I kept my mouth shut. We began to cross the bridge that led from the midway to the New White City. Though the midway had gone dark behind us, the Grand Court still glowed. The buildings were silvery like moonlight.

  “There’s this one thing you do as Marie Antoinette that I love,” I said.

  “What thing?” Cecily said.

  “You touch at the bow at your shoulder,” I said. I touched her shoulder with the bloom of the peony. “You’re straightening it, but you’re also lingering on the ribbon, the feel of it. She’s still vain, even as she walks to her death, but it’s also something more tender than that, really. She’s comforted by it, by the satin bow, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, maybe so,” she said.

  “A smoke?” I said, stopping, holding out my pack of cigarettes.

  Cecily stopped with me and stuck the parasol beneath her other arm. She touched the pack, but she didn’t take a cigarette. Instead, she took the card that kept the side of the pack stiff. I collected these cards, we all did, but I didn’t have much use for them. I tacked them to the wall from time to time—pictures of boxers, acrobats, varieties of wildflowers. The characters of Dickens. This card, like the pictures in Rosie’s gallery, was a color-tinted photograph of an actress; but unlike Rosie’s lovelies, the actress was fully clothed in an elaborate costume. She looked got up like a moth, with a cape of spotted ermine and a hat heavy with feathers. Queenie Brackett was written beneath her.

  “Can I keep this?” Cecily asked, though she’d already tucked it into the waist of her skirt. “Queenie Brackett’s an opera singer. She happened to be in one of the towns I was in once. I remember seeing her name on a sign.”

  “But you didn’t hear her sing?” I said.

  Cecily rocked the carpetbag at her side as she thought back and looked off at the White City. “No,” she said. “I don’t see much opera. But one time, in one town—I don’t remember which one—I heard Viola Lorraine.” She said the name like I should know it. I nodded, wanting to please her. “I heard her, but I didn’t see her. I don’t remember the opera. But I remember it was so sweltering hot that summer they had to keep the theater doors open wide. So me and my friend Agnes got a bottle of cider and a marshmallow cake, and we just sat right there, on the street, on a saddle blanket, and listened to all the music that tumbled out. Agnes knew the show, so she told me the story. She described it so well, I can still see it in my head, and sometimes I forget I didn’t see it at all.” She took the peony from me, and she held it again to her nose. “So you throw your voice good?” she said.

  Cecily spoke in a voice so small, it seemed it would never carry to the back rows, let alone out into the street. Maybe no theater would ever cast her as any character who was anything less than totally silent.

  I nodded, and I tossed my words into her carpetbag so convincingly, she jumped at the sound rising up from her side. “Meet me at the swan gondola tomorrow night,” my voice said, echoing in her bag.

  The lights of the New White City went out then, one by one, the darkness working up the court like a chill up a spine.

  Cecily looked up at the clouds gray against the black sky, and she seemed startled by them, as if wakened by the dark. She began to step quickly again and crossed the bridge.

  “Will you?” I said, as I followed. “The swan gondola? At this time tomorrow night? Meet me on the dock of the lagoon?” For all I knew, Alonzo the gondolier was a figment of August’s whiskey drunk, but I was determined I’d conjure him up nonetheless.

  Cecily said nothing, and yet she practically ran away from me, careful to keep the carpetbag from banging into her knees. She ducked behind a row of dogwoods and out through an open gate in the wall. I followed her.

  Cecily caught a cab, and the driver lashed his horse, and the rickety buggy creaked and wobbled on its wheels as it took a corner slow. She bent over the carpetbag in her lap, looking deep within it, as if rummaging around for something she’d lost.

  I watched as the buggy moved beyond the streetlamp, beyond any light, Cecily only a silhouette. And when she was gone from my sight, I remained there in the lot, stitching together our conversation word for word. Though I looked in the lighted windows of the houses and tenements ahead, and caught glimpses of the lives lived there, I could see only Cecily. I saw her sitting on the street in front of an opera house, propping herself up on an elbow, eating marshmallow cake, listening to the songs the singers couldn’t keep inside.

  10.

  I RETURNED TO THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS the next day, again and again, growing more and more poor with each ticket I bought. With Oscar all banged up from our skirmish the day before with the automaton, I left him to be repaired at a doll hospital in the back of a toy shop on the midway. I figured, with Oscar convalescing, I could abandon all plans and spend the day devoted to Cecily. I paid close attention to her every blink and nod. Having worked with any number of actresses over the years, I knew they liked to be complimented on the specifics of their characterizations. You could get a lass to spend the whole night if you offered a little praise alongside the kisses. “I could feel the woman’s lack of feeling,” I’d told one particularly bad actress, in between licks of her earlobe. “You made her into such a perfect nobody.”

  But I would never have to fib to Cecily. I would never have to invent compliments. While all the other actresses in the horror show, like Little Red, played their agony for a laugh or two, or at least seemed to give a little wink as they took the knife, Cecily was al
l worry and fret. She could make everything seem true, even the fallen eyelash on her powdered cheek, even the curl of her own brown hair that slipped loose from beneath the wig. Even her little trip up the step when her shoe caught in her dress. I heard a lock of her wig sizzle as it got a lick from a candle flame. She just reached up to twist away a bit of the spark, as easy as you please.

  August said the cool dark of the chamber’s halls eased his head, so he joined me for a few hours in the late afternoon. Though he sipped from a hangover cure of bottled dandelion milk and Saigon cinnamon, he denied having drunk too much the night before. And he denied the cause of it. “Being around all these foreigners on the midway gave me some exotic flu,” he explained, his hair undone from its braid and falling forward into his face. He didn’t seem at all consoled by the dark of the chamber or the playful violence. His hand trembled as he fluttered a lady’s fan of owl feathers as we watched a corpse rise from the grave on the stage. “I was fevered and delirious. I can only imagine what I might have said.”

  I reminded him of Alonzo the gondolier, the gentleman he’d mentioned the night before, hoping it might cheer him up. “Alonzo with the long eyelashes,” I sang, picking up August’s drunken tune. But August just rolled his eyes. “Does he exist?” I said.

  It turned out he did, and August seemed to like the idea of seeking him out again, to arrange for the swan gondola ride. When we spoke to Alonzo at the lagoon, August’s confidence returned, and as he negotiated with the gondolier I noticed him leaning in close. It was settled. That night I was to bring Alonzo one dollar, two bottles of red wine, and three of Rosie’s lovelies. August didn’t seem at all discouraged by Alonzo’s interest in the postcards. As a matter of fact, he seemed charmed by the gentleman’s lusts.