The Swan Gondola

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The Swan Gondola Page 9

by Timothy Schaffert


  I was expected to pay in full, whether Cecily showed up or not. But it was well worth the risk.

  • • •

  AFTER DARK, Alonzo and I sat alone in the quiet lagoon, he at the swan’s head, me at its wooden tail feathers. Alonzo only glanced at the naked women in the photographs before tucking them away in his coat pocket. “If I look at them as much as I want to,” he said, “the beauty will wear off too soon.”

  August had brought me a biography of Marie Antoinette from his father’s bookshop, and Alonzo kindly shared the wine with me as I read by the light from the swan’s lantern that rocked from a hook overhead. Cecily’s performance had little to do with history, but reading about the queen seemed to somehow bring me closer to my actress.

  As it got later and later, Alonzo grew drunker and drunker and sang more and more. I was distracted by the evening ticking away, Cecily nowhere near. I would read a page of the book, and another, without concentration, none of the words even making it into my head. I studied an illustration of Marie Antoinette wearing a toy ship atop her tall wig, tendrils of her hair combed up and curled around the deck like the tentacles of an attacking squid. When I put my thumb over the queen’s nose and a finger across the point of her chin, I could start to recognize a little bit of Cecily in the portrait. I put another finger across her eyes and moved my thumb to her throat.

  Maybe it was best she stayed away, I considered. What did I have to offer anyway? I wore a jacket and trousers of two different plaids. The mismatched suit came from the theater’s wardrobe closet, along with the tattered straw boater I wore. I had thought the costume might cast me handsomely in the part of a carefree summer lover. But now, feeling rejected, I found the suit tawdry and juvenile. I realized I had little to offer other than my infatuation. And even if she did, by some miracle, consent to spend time with me, when would I confess my whole life of missteps?

  Then I suddenly remembered a pocket watch. As a boy thief years before, I’d come to fancy myself a toy-getter—which is what we called a thief of watches. I had one shaped like a beetle—you parted its emerald wings to see the time. One was an owl’s head, and another’s workings were hidden by an agate eye. One was a mandolin with pluckable strings. I had a snuffbox with a working cuckoo clock atop it. And one, I now fondly recalled, featured Marie Antoinette in the guillotine. The watch had a front and a back you flipped open; one side kept time, the other side ticktocked along with little flat mechanical figures, chopping off the queen’s head one second, putting it back the next, only to chop it off a second later.

  And as I considered the possibility of fate, of destiny, that watch some long-ago foreshadowing of good luck, Cecily came stepping down the staircase to the dock, her hair unpinned and combed out into its pretty, tangled mess of wild, brown curls. Perfect, I thought. She’s perfect. She’s meant for me and only me.

  I slipped the book beneath the bench and stood to take her hand.

  Her skin, so freshly scrubbed of its powder and paint, looked too pink and sore, and I longed to give her cheek a very soft, sympathetic kiss.

  Cecily had brought along a young woman with hair an old woman’s white. “Pearl’s a dear friend of mine,” Cecily said. “I think you’ll like each other,” and Pearl blushed with such a red fever that I worried about her. I wondered if I should ask if she was all right, or if that would only worsen her condition.

  I took Cecily’s hand to help her into the gondola, and Cecily whispered to me, her breath on my neck, “Isn’t Pearl so very cute? Everyone adores her.” Her enthusiasm was a stab of disappointment.

  I helped Pearl in too, and Alonzo prepared the swan for sailing, standing next to the swan’s curving neck so he could row the craft toward the center of the lagoon. I took a seat up front, and Pearl and Cecily sat on the heart-shaped bench at the swan’s tail feathers.

  In Cecily’s lap was a thin stack of postcards tied together with twine. She unknotted the string and she and Pearl read aloud from the unsent greetings. Cecily had become friendly with the postmistress, who had told her that many of the fairgoers who dropped souvenir postcards into the postbox failed to remember to address them. Cecily had been rescuing them from the postmistress’s trash bin. “I hate to see them thrown away,” she said. “Someone should read them, at least.”

  Cecily took a pair of reading glasses from a little paper case marked with Chinese letters. The glasses, with hinges and springs, collapsed in on themselves, and she unfolded them, then set them on her nose. Somehow the old-lady glasses made her look even younger. “‘My love,’” Cecily read aloud, “‘I typed this on a typewriter at the fair.’” She rolled her eyes and said, “That’s all it says.” She looked at me, as if she knew I’d know better than to write a lover such empty words.

  I leaned back to listen. Cecily could render even the lazy, tossed-off greetings of strangers into something true and necessary. After she read a few more, she took off her glasses and the three of us fell silent as we drifted on the water and watched the moon.

  Finally, Cecily sat up and seemed about to speak, but stopped. “I don’t even know your name,” she said. “Do you know mine?”

  “Yes,” I said. “From when you played the violent-eyed trollop.”

  “So maybe I know yours,” she said. “Or I did. Before I forgot it.”

  “My friends call me Ferret,” I said.

  Cecily covered her mouth with the postcard to laugh a little. “Why would your friends call you something like that?” she said. She then told Pearl, “Ferret’s a ventriloquist. A ventriloquist without a dummy.”

  “He’s being repaired,” I said. On the midway were two cottages side by side, each with gingerbread woodwork and scalloped shingles and picket fences. One was the toy shop with a doll hospital in the back, where I’d left Oscar, the other the incubator exhibit, where live babies were displayed. Both little cottages were meant to appeal to our sympathies—from the toy shop, we’d take home our own little darlings. And next door the live babies, born too early, cooked in glass nests like new chickens. Nurses moved about like farmers’ wives, peeking into the incubators, adjusting temperatures, eyeing the mercury of thermometers. For a dime, fairgoers could enter the exhibit to study the mechanics of the babies’ little booths. They could cluck and coo at the unfinished infants resting in iron wombs.

  “Don’t you want to know how Pearl and me know each other?” Cecily asked me.

  “I do,” I said.

  “You do know how we know each other?” Cecily said, with a wink.

  “No,” I said, “I do want to know how you know each other.”

  “Oh, well, Pearl’s a shop girl and window dresser downtown,” Cecily said. “And just before the Fair, she sewed me into a mermaid’s fin for an umbrella display. I tell you, it was scandalous, practically. I had hardly a stitch on. Well, you tell him, Pearl.”

  “Oh, well, yes,” Pearl said, stuttering, blushing. “A mermaid . . . in the window . . . I’m the dresser . . .”

  “Have you seen Pearl’s windows at the department store?” Cecily asked. “At the Brandeis? Her windows have been in magazines. She studied window dressing in Paris.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “She’s a mad genius, Pearl is,” Cecily said. “She does all the electricity herself. She can wire the whole setup for all sorts of tricks. She can make a manikin vanish, then, pop, there it is again, but with a brand-new hat.” She nudged at Pearl’s hip with her own. “Well, you, you tell him, Pearl.”

  I interrupted, leaning forward to offer the ladies each a cigarette, which they took without any ladylike hesitation. They let me light them too. When I held the match between Cecily and me, and we both lit up, my face was so close to hers it was like we were practicing for a kiss. I looked at her eyes as she looked down at the flame. The flame rose as we drew in our breaths.

  “What was the mermaid fin like?” I said.

 
; “Oh you wouldn’t believe it, it was so pretty, wasn’t it, Pearl?” she said. Cecily dropped her hand with a sweeping gesture down the length of her legs, twisting her wrist back and forth, like following a flowing wave. “It stretched way past the ends of my legs, like the train of a gown. How’d you make it sparkle like crazy, Pearl? Tell him what it was made of.”

  “Beads,” Pearl said. “Satin.”

  “She sewed on each individual fish scale,” Cecily said, “and each individual bead.”

  I nodded and smiled politely at Pearl. Cecily fanned herself with one of the unsent postcards. “Pearl isn’t as quiet as she seems,” Cecily said. “She introduced Susan B. Anthony a few weeks ago at a ladies’ luncheon. Pearl is a dress reformist. She’s very much against corsets, bless her heart. She says our corsets are making us feeble. We can’t breathe.”

  “The corset is an instrument of torture,” Pearl said, her voice soft. “It doesn’t fit the woman’s natural figure.” She shrugged her shoulders. “As long as a woman is trapped in her dress, she is disfranchised.”

  Cecily had dressed simply, but I noticed that the top buttons of her shirtwaist were undone, as were the buttons at her wrist, causing her sleeves to slip up and down her arms as she fanned herself. She wore boots of a damask silk, the laces up the side untied, allowing her to slip her stockingless foot in and out. Pearl meanwhile continually fussed with the pins in her hair, taking them out, putting them back in somewhere else. At one point she even had a few pins between her teeth as she twisted a curl back to tuck behind her ear. I couldn’t quite imagine this mousy girl leading any political battles.

  “Have you seen Cecily’s Marie Antoinette act, Pearl?” I asked.

  “Yeth,” Pearl mumbled, the pins still at her lips.

  Cecily seemed to be waiting for Pearl to say more, and when she didn’t, she said, “Pearl even did a window a few months ago with a manikin dressed like Marie Antoinette. She gave her a hat that was swan-shaped like this here boat.” Cecily rapped her knuckles against the side of the gondola. “The window had all these tall towering cakes with pink and blue icing. Not real cakes but paper cakes that looked real. And the floor of the window was just cluttered with women’s shoes.”

  “It’s much sadder,” I said, reclining, my ankles crossed, my hands in my pockets, my cigarette hanging from my lip. “So much sadder how it all went in true life.”

  “How what went?” Cecily said.

  “The offing of her head,” I said, hoping Cecily would be impressed that I’d read up on the queen. “She’d been in prison, not the palace. All she did was iron her cap actually. They cut her hair, so it wouldn’t get in the way of the blade, I guess. She had a plain nightdress of dimity. Black stockings. Prunella shoes with little heels. A poor actress gave her the dress,” I added, nodding at Cecily with a wink, “or so they say. And they say she stepped on the executioner’s foot. She begged his pardon. Said she didn’t do it on purpose. Those were her last words. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’ But in French, I guess.”

  “Hm,” Cecily said, shrugging, flicking her cigarette into the lagoon. “What a terrible way to go.” She kept her eyes on the water, and I worried I’d offended her by pointing out the inaccuracies of her horror show. But then I suspected she was just disappointed by the historical account. She preferred the queen going to the guillotine in a fancy dress and powdered wig.

  Alonzo returned to the dock, a little too soon, I thought. I helped pull the gondola up and assisted the ladies from the boat. Pearl blushed again, nodding her good-byes. She stepped up the stairs as Cecily lingered with me a moment.

  “She leaves work every night at five,” Cecily said, making her soft voice even softer, taking three cigarettes from the pack I held open. I hadn’t noticed the little purse hanging from a chain at her side, attached to her belt. She clicked open its octopus-shaped clasp, and dropped the cigarettes inside. “They have a sandwich counter right there at the store. Would it kill you to stop by there sometime and treat her to a cup of coffee, Ferret?” She sneered my name, but in a teasing way, a flirtation that made me blush like Pearl. “You two can talk yourselves silly about Marie Antoinette’s bedroom slippers.”

  Cecily winked and left my side, and I sensed from the way she moved up the steps, drifting really, up toward the promenade, that she knew I kept watching. She too was playing the part of a carefree summer lover, moving slowly, humming, looking up and around, pretending to not know any eyes were on her. But I loved that she knew I couldn’t look away.

  November 10, 1898

  Dear Cecily,

  I only ever meant to write you once. It had been cold in the clouds, and I’d stayed at the bottom of the basket, huddled in on myself. I couldn’t bear to stand up and look down. So all I saw was sky, even as the balloon plummeted. I’d thought that the first rattling scrape and tear of the wicker came from running aground on a cloud of ice.

  I had tucked that postcard in my suit pocket, to have it next to my heart as I died.

  And up in that balloon, the sense of doom made me long to crash. It would put an end to my fear. I romanced the idea of it, of death, waltzing it around and around in my head. But now here, in a house, broken, teetering, a couple of old-lady angels never more than a few steps away, I want to live. I want to live forever so I can always mourn losing you.

  I never leave the music parlor. I sit here every day, writing you letter after letter. And Miss Emmaline posts them all for me, each one addressed to your house at the lake. It’s cruel, I suppose. Everyone there loved you so. Are these letters even opened? Does someone read them? Does Wakefield? And if he does, does every word kill him a little?

  Maybe Emmaline doesn’t send my letters at all. Maybe she opens them, reads them, keeps them tied with a ribbon. I’ve been thinking of myself as a guest in this house. A hobbled charity case. But maybe I’m being held captive. Maybe I’m here against my own will. Flood, drought, freeze, bugs—all these plagues turn these farmers daft. Whole towns of people, gone mad from the sound of the wind, can hear God’s voice in a turtledove. I’ve heard tell of a cult of farmers along the bone-dry Dismal River who took to worshipping the very insects that ravaged their crops, mimicking the chirp and posture of grasshoppers in nightly rituals, their eyes flickering yellow in the light of the bonfires.

  Farmers, daft and otherwise, and the people from town—they come to sit with me. They only want to be neighborly, Miss Hester says. They bring me prayers and liquor. Sometimes they linger, like they’re death watching at the side of a corpse, waiting for the undertaker. I write you letters, and they knit or stitch. A man can go batty from the needlepointing, the sound of that needle punching fabric and the soft zip of the thread. Pop, thip, ffffwiiiip, pop, thip, fffffwiiiip, over and over, and slow.

  And though they bring me things, they also sneak things away. I didn’t notice at first. If I had a loose thread at a seam of my pajamas, somebody would snap it off, and off they’d go with it. If an eyelash fell on my cheek, they picked it up with a fingertip. They scratched their fingers against my cast and carried off flecks of plaster beneath their fingernails. And they brought things of their own just for me to touch—a doll, a lock, a key, a ring, a Bible, a brush, a lily.

  They don’t see me as someone struck with bad luck and knocked from the sky. They see me as a man with a magical knack for staying alive. Around here, I’m the priest who fell from the heavens and lived.

  Still yours,

  Ferret

  11.

  THE MORNING AFTER the swan gondola ride, I sent Cecily a souvenir postcard. I didn’t have her address, but it didn’t matter. Now that I knew she rummaged nightly through the post office trash for the unsent mail, I simply dropped it into a mailbox on the Grand Court, without postage.

  I’d spent much of the morning trying to decide what to say. And I was stalled right off by the greeting—I still didn’t know how to spell her name. D
ear Marie Antoinette, I ended up writing. This is Ferret. I want us to be alone.

  Just as the card left my fingers and fell into the slot, I realized with a thump in my chest that I wanted it back. I should’ve written together . . . I want us to be alone together.

  • • •

  WHEN THE MIDWAY OPENED, I hurried to the doll hospital to collect Oscar. In the back room of the toy shop the shelves lining the walls were stocked with apothecary jars, some full of arms, some full of legs. One jar held bisque heads fractured and cracked; another jar was full of eyeballs. A dresser drawer spilled over with torn dresses and tiny petticoats. Miss Havelock, the young woman at the workbench, bought broken dolls from urchins, she’d explained, to harvest all the parts, and in turn she attached those parts—repaired with papier-mâché and mucilage—to the broken dolls of the daughters of the rich.

  But her swiftest business in those first few days of the Fair had been the fashioning of wigs. Girls cut at their own goldilocks and brought the clippings to the hospital, in little silk purses, so Miss Havelock could sew and braid the snipped curls into wigs for the girls’ favorite dolls. Miss Havelock herself had hair so fine and light—the white of the cotton of milkweed—you could see right through to the bright pink of her scalp.

  “Have you ever heard him speak?” Miss Havelock said. At first I gave her comment no thought, as I was stunned by the sight of my dummy. Oscar looked better than I’d ever seen him. I’d bought him from a peddler’s cart on Howard Street some time before, and though I’d polished him with oil and oiled his hinges and had restrung the rubber nerves of his fingers and joints, he’d always had the haggard look of something secondhand. But now I could swear his dead eyes looked right in mine.

 

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