The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  • • •

  CECILY SKIPPED that afternoon’s rehearsal, but the next day she insisted I go with her. I told her there was no need, I’d been foolish, I’d been jealous. I told her I trusted her, I trusted her more than I’d ever trusted anyone, but she said the walk, the sunlight, would do Doxie good, and that I might enjoy seeing all the actors and actresses muddle through the awful script, missing cues, dropping props, stumbling over the half-finished sets. It was unsightly, she said. And it must be seen to be believed. So I went with her to the theater at the Fair.

  Wakefield was indeed in the lobby. He was the first person I saw inside, and I bristled at the sight of him. How could a man so important have such leisure? Had he nothing better to do than lurk and linger? He was the boss of every factory in town, and producer of every entertainment. He paid us our wages at the end of the day, then took it away when we went out for the night.

  But I was pleased to see how little notice he took of Cecily. Or, at least, he took no more notice of her than he did the other actresses. And the actresses did gather. All the girls likely knew who he was, so they reacted to his lazy stabs at flirting, his cold nods and awkward winks, as if he were the most charming gent alive. As it turned out, he gave them charms for their bracelets too. He had a pocket full of them.

  “Did you see the frog I gave Cecily?” Wakefield asked as I wheeled the pram into the lobby. He leaned forward, his hands behind his back, to look in at Doxie beneath the umbrella. He didn’t even offer the baby the slightest flicker of a smile.

  “I did,” I said. “She lost it.”

  “A shame,” he said with a shrug.

  Despite his seeming indifference, he invited Cecily and me to dinner in a rooftop café on the Grand Court that night, then again a few nights later. Whenever we dined with him, we could have been anyone—he asked us nothing, and responded to nothing we said. But he boasted, and we genuinely enjoyed his tales of influence. And he seemed to enjoy our enjoyment. We loved it, particularly, whenever he started anything with, “Now don’t tell anyone . . .” The phrase was always followed with some privileged bit of knowledge. We were not to tell anyone many things: that President McKinley would visit the Fair as soon as the details and negotiations for peace with Spain were settled; that the New White City was already turning pale gray from the smoke of the smelting works and would need a thorough whitewash before fall; that a Salvation Army lieutenant had been arrested for taking a hatchet to the genitals of a statue of a naked cherub she’d found offensive.

  And he told us just a little about Oscar, and his reasons for buying him. “Sentimental attachment,” he said. “Nothing more than that. My son had a very similar toy.” And to think, I deeply pitied him just then. He sniffled and plucked a handkerchief from his pocket, but he explained away his sudden red eyes and runny nose as symptoms of allergy. The lagoon, he said, and the humidity, were turning the structures mossy and soft with mold. The framework of the New White City was warping around us, cracking the plaster walls, threatening the domes over our heads. Don’t tell anyone . . .

  • • •

  IN THE DARK OF OUR ROOM, Cecily lifted money from Wakefield’s dragon to hire me. “Write me love letters,” she said. “Nobody ever sent me one before.”

  I ate a cold grape from the bunch we’d thrown in with the ice. When writing love letters to be sent to other women by other men, I’d grown lazy. I peppered them with lines lifted from the published love letters of others—from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, or those letters written by that Portuguese nun.

  But the very second she requested a letter I started composing one in my head, with words all my own. “Find me some paper,” I said. “Quick.”

  Cecily carefully ripped a blank page from the front of a book. As I wrote, I read aloud. “‘If I was a poet, I could tell you how beautiful you are. You have plump red lips like wax cherries. You have long eyelashes that catch the snowflakes when they fall. Isn’t that something a poet might write on a valentine, my love?’”

  “You’ve never even seen my eyelashes in the snow,” she said.

  I rolled forward to kiss her ankle. “But I will,” I said. “The winters here are fierce.”

  “The Fair’s over before winter,” she said.

  “You won’t leave with the Fair,” I said. I kissed her leg.

  “What if I do?” she said.

  “I’ll die,” I said.

  “Why would you do something like that to me?”

  “You wouldn’t know about it,” I said. I kissed her knee. “You’re gone by then. You leave me when winter comes. And then I die. And you never know.” I ran my lips along the inside of her naked thigh.

  Cecily put her fingers to my chin and tilted my head up to look in my eyes. “But you’ll write me love letters, and you’ll tell me you’re dying, and then the letters will stop, and I’ll know then.”

  “I can’t send you letters,” I said. I brought my face up to kiss her lips, and I touched my tongue to hers. “I don’t know where you are. You and little Doxie don’t have a home. You move from boardinghouse to boardinghouse. That’s no way to live.”

  After we kissed for a while, I got off the bed and went to my hat, upturned on the floor. Inside the hat was a ring box, and inside the box a ring with a heart, and at the heart of the heart, a cluster of little diamonds. I’d paid cash for it at Brandeis, and Pearl had helped me pick it out. Pearl had put it on to model it, and I’d held her fingers with mine, tilting her hand from side to side, wondering if the little diamonds had enough sparkle.

  I got on my knees beside the bed, put my elbows on the mattress, and took the ring from the box. “Won’t you marry me?” I said.

  Cecily’s eyes turned wet, and she sniffled, and she took a deep shaky breath as she let me put the ring on her finger. She held her hand against my cheek, and she looked at the ring. “Write it to me in a letter?” she said. “Your proposal of marriage? I want to have something to show Doxie when she gets older. She’ll want to see it.”

  “Then will you say yes?” I said. “Because you haven’t said yes yet.”

  She nodded. I turned my head to kiss her wrist, to kiss her palm.

  Dear Cecily, I wrote, but I could think of nothing else to say. I was too happy, my heart too full. I didn’t want to think in words.

  • • •

  CECILY’S HEADACHES had grown mild, lessening to a feeble pulse at her temples that she could almost convince herself was pleasant. “I just think of you kissing me here,” she said, tapping at her forehead, and I kissed her right there, right then, as we entered the Fair as fine new citizens, not workers, of the New White City. Cecily had somehow convinced me she felt invincible. With her headaches cured, she would cure me of my fear of heights. And I felt inclined to believe her, somehow.

  The manager of the Civil War exhibit offered to let us ascend in the basket of the tethered balloon, to the end of its rope, to watch the sun set.

  I felt my vertigo spinning my head before we’d even lifted an inch, but I said nothing. I wanted, more than anything, to be fearless for Cecily. If ever my life had been touched with magic, it was in those days when Cecily wore my ring. I had no doubts, no troubles. And my contentment became contagious—even Mrs. Margaret finally forgave. She’d come to Cecily’s room that morning to make amends, in her way. “Marry the devil himself why don’t you,” she told Cecily, as I sat on the edge of the bed putting on my socks. “Why should I trouble myself about it?” she said. And with that, Cecily threw her arms around Mrs. Margaret, and kissed and kissed and kissed the old woman’s jowls. Cecily let Mrs. Margaret take Doxie for the day, to a park down the street, but Mrs. Margaret refused to use the pram. Instead, she returned Doxie to the carpetbag. “Doxie likes to be rocked in it,” Mrs. Margaret explained. “She likes to be right at my side.”

  I held on to the edge of the balloon’s basket, digging my feet in
to the floor of it, holding fast like I had on the night of Wakefield’s cyclone. This was worse than the Flying Waltz—at least then, dancing with Cecily, the wires had given the illusion of safety. Cecily now held tightly to my arm. “Squeeze my hand as hard as you need to,” she whispered, and I wrapped my fingers so tight around her hand that the heart of her ring left a deep red imprint in my skin that didn’t fade for hours.

  As we rose, Cecily leaned out over the side of the basket to take in the sight of the city and the river and the countryside beyond. I watched with horror, too easily picturing her tumbling out and dragging me over. I begged her not to lean over the edge. As we bobbed in the air, she pointed to the horizon. “I think I can see the boardinghouse!” she said, excited, as if the house was her home.

  She turned to face me and she now held both my hands, helping me feel anchored. “Let’s steal the balloon,” she said. “Steal me away, Ferret. Kidnap me. We’ll just live wherever the balloon comes down. Just you and me. We’ll take new names. New lives. We’ll hide.”

  She looked at me, on the verge of tears, and it felt too dangerous to say anything at all. If we stole the balloon and lived where it landed, we’d be leaving Doxie behind. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want her to think that I would ever want such a thing. But neither did I want to scold her for spinning a yarn, for slipping into a minute of fantasy that didn’t hurt a soul. To me, she could say anything she wanted to say. Anything at all. But I had to leave her alone in this. Doxie—she was my little girl.

  When Cecily took her hands back and started to twist my ring off her finger, I was struck with worry. In some sense I’d been waiting for her to take it off ever since she’d first put it on. But then she said, “Propose to me again. But like it’s the first time. This is the story I want to tell Doxie. That you proposed to me in the balloon.”

  And so I did. I asked her, again, to marry me. And again she wouldn’t say yes. She wouldn’t say the word. She let me put the ring on her finger, and she kissed me. She wrapped her arms around me, and she put her cheek against my chest, listening to the fast beat of my heart. “You really are afraid, aren’t you?” she said.

  Thanksgiving (the night of) 1898

  Dear Cecily,

  I often wonder what would have happened had I cut the rope somehow, when we were up in the balloon together. What if I’d dropped the sandbags and let us drift off? I sometimes picture us living near an abandoned little town, even deeper in the country than here where I am, way out where everything dried up or flooded, where all the harvests reaped only worm-eaten crops. We would’ve gone to the city to steal Doxie back, but otherwise we would never leave our broken-down farm, spending our nights starving to death in each other’s arms in secret, watching the fireflies blink.

  Today, for Thanksgiving dinner, the sisters opened their doors to all their neighbors from miles around. The ones who came were the ones most grief-struck by the holidays, by the empty chairs around their tables and the quiet rooms down their halls. Emmaline and Hester cooked all of yesterday and today, and they covered the dining room table with turkeys and pheasants and sausages, with mincemeat pies, and plates of salted alligator pears, and a chowder of scalded oyster liquor and cream. You wouldn’t know from the feast that the Old Sisters Egan’s farm had been strangled and choked years ago.

  And though the house was packed to the belfry, no one made a noise. They whispered and crept, respecting me, their oracle.

  And I called out to them, asking them into the parlor, whenever they peeked in. One by one they sat down next to me, and I offered them little.

  Ever since falling from the sky, I’ve resisted playing the part they so need me to play. I’m not a priest or a pastor. I don’t know anything about what they’ve lost, or where their lost ones have gone. But it seems, with so little effort, I can offer them a moment of calm. At first it felt like deception. It felt like a theft to promise them anything. But the comfort I could lend lifted my spirits too. It warmed my heart to see them feel a snippet of hope.

  When the first woman sat down with me today, I didn’t know what to tell her. And she seemed to need me to say something. The only words I could summon were the questions on Oscar’s phonograph. Oscar’s questions seemed like something a wizard would ask. What do you wish me to do? Why should I do this for you? And with that, I had to ask nothing more. And more and more of them came into my parlor to hear those same questions.

  They brought me old tintypes of their fathers, their grandfathers, their brothers, their sons. They brought me locks of a daughter’s hair and a page torn from a wife’s diary.

  I still gave them next to nothing. But they were thrilled with even a sentence, no matter how cryptic. I spoke my nonsense, and they nodded, making sense of it. And where’s the harm?

  What if all they need is a whisper of faith? It’s not mischief I’m up to. These good people just need to know, after years of struggle, that the prayers they’ve been praying, Sunday after Sunday, have finally scared up an angel.

  And my talents as a thief finally serve a holy purpose. Back as a boy, as a wharf rat for the river men, I learned to see the rage before I saw the fist. I became a prophet of abuse, seeing every slug coming from a mile away. And in the street, fleecing strangers, I learned the habits of a man’s elbow in a stiff suit coat, and the meager give of a lady’s corset whenever she went to turn. As a thief, you anticipate surprise. When a man’s hand goes here—as it always does and always will—your hand goes there, and you take what’s his. You look for the fall and flutter of his shadow and you let it serve you in your crime. You dance your own shadow like a puppet, or you allow it to dodge the sun and slip away, and all in all, you know that his gaze will go from here to here to here so you go from there to there to there. You calculate gullibility in just the way a gentleman stands. You detect a lady’s character in the spin of her parasol.

  Here on the farm, I put the back of my hand to the foreheads of men and women and children to calculate the damage of their fevers. I feel for their pulses in their wrists, and attach meaning to the rhythm of the beats. I press my fingers to their throats. I sniff at a baby’s sour breath.

  And I only ever tell them what they could have figured out for themselves.

  F.

  21.

  WHEN WAKEFIELD sent along yet another invitation, I accepted on the spot. Morearty stopped by the boardinghouse, having driven himself down in a one-horse buggy. Ferret & Cecily was written across the front of the envelope he handed me, our names made nearly illegible by all the swirl and flourish of the pen. I barely glanced at the card before starting to fan my sweaty neck with it. I told the old butler, as I leaned back on the picket fence, “Tell Wakefield I said ‘Why the hell not?’”

  It makes me sick to cast back with my mind’s eye to my arrogance. My vanity. I could’ve simply declined. Why hadn’t my instincts led me to hide Cecily away, to keep her to myself, out of sight of everyone?

  The truth was, I was proud. As proud as Wakefield, in my way. I wanted him to see how Cecily loved only me. I wanted the richest man in Omaha to want everything that was mine.

  • • •

  The cyclone machine is now divinely unstoppable, the invitation read. I’ve thrown together an afternoon of devastation. When we arrive in Pink Heron, Nebraska, it will still be a place on the map, but when we leave, all the maps will be wrong. Don’t eat lunch, for we’ll have a lavish early afternoon dinner in the Peacock Room of the condemned Pink Heron Hotel, so that we may watch the town destroyed by my tornado while there’s still good sun to be had.

  And beneath the engraving, Wakefield had scribbled, F&C, Dress in your finest, as you’ll be hobnobbing with snobs. W.W.

  We met the other guests at the train station early Sunday morning, to be ferried by private car to the depot of a town called Blue Creek, the stop that got us the closest to Pink Heron. But, of course, had Pink Heron been easily reachable
by rail, it might not have perished. The countryside was riddled with new houses and new schools abandoned, whole towns pristine and empty. People had flocked to Nebraska for the land, only to discover they’d bought acres of desert. A few summers of insects, heat, drought, and flood, and the people fled their new houses without even taking down the curtains.

  Wakefield hadn’t told us we would leave the luxury of the private car to sit in the back of a long hay wagon pulled by a team of local steeds. There were three such wagons for all the party’s guests, and most everyone was amused by the novelty of it. Wakefield had had chairs and tables set up in the carts for parlor games and rounds of cards. A few pretty maids in linen and aprons had been tasked with standing next to the tables with enormous parasols, dropping some shade on us all. But most of the women had their own shade, sitting beneath their elaborate hats decorated for their trip into the countryside, with wildflowers and thistle and milkweed woven into the hatbands.

  Each cart was equipped with a fiddler in an evening coat who played what sounded to me like lullabies. Two old men at my table bickered about whether the tune was Schumann or Schubert, and then they bickered about which of the two was the greater composer.

  Cecily and I were likely the party’s clowns, dressed as we were. Cecily had lifted bills from the dragon’s head to return to the Howard Street market. For me, she had plucked from a peddler’s cart a swallowtail coat, and she’d made me a vest out of that dismantled dirndl she’d bought before. My stovepipe hat was a little bit crushed, but she pinned onto it a moth she’d knotted from a silk hankie. “Wakefield always digs up the best characters,” old Schumann said, and I nodded and half bowed in my seat, taking it as a compliment.

  “Like all those spiritualists,” Schumann’s wife said, and the others at the table clucked their tongues, rolled their eyes. They chuckled, but disdainfully. (“Yes, yes, yes,” they all said. “Yes, those spiritualists.”) “All those séances we’ve sat through. All those ghosts we’ve summoned.”