The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  My absence made me feel bold.

  The woman who’d told me to do nothing suddenly appeared in front of me. She snatched my arm tight and led me away while giving my elbow an ungentle twist. “Pretend to fold napkins,” she said, pushing me up to a table. “And do a better job of doing nothing this time.”

  When I picked up a napkin, I noticed all the other napkins that had already been folded and laid out across the table—they’d all been tucked and twisted together into the shape of swans. Swans. It felt like a symbol, a promise. A row of maids lined up at the table in a rush, the skirts and puffed sleeves of their aprons fluttering, and each one gently lifted one linen bird into her two cupped hands. They cradled the swans one by one to the tables as the guests were led to their seats.

  • • •

  EVERY LADY IN THE ROOM wore a hat, and every hat looked big enough to snap a lady’s neck. Their faint shadows were tremorous with all the gossip. I watched as a puzzled bee buzzed from one patch of velvet flowers to the next. There was a hat with a whole bird’s worth of plucked feathers, and another with an enormous silk bow with the wingspan of a hawk. There were wax apples with leaves of lace and strawberries of blown glass. One hat with bells tinkled and chimed with the lady’s every nod.

  And then there was Cecily, utterly hatless. She looked even more beautiful than she had at the theater, but I would’ve needed opera glasses to study her. The president’s table was clear across the hall from me.

  How was it that I couldn’t simply walk the vast distance and sit at her side? How had she become someone I wasn’t allowed to know?

  All those hats in the room set to bobbing at the sight of Cecily. Wives leaned past their husbands to speak to the other wives. The faint shadows in the room shivered with all the gossiping.

  I was proud of how she so scandalized the room without saying a word. She simply sat there, indifferent to them all, her eyes on the swan on her plate, thinking only of me.

  • • •

  AT EACH PLACE SETTING, clipped in the hinged beak of a little silver dove, was a card with a guest’s name in a scrolling and looping script. Where Mrs. Wakefield was to be seated, I had left a plea on the back of the little menu atop her plate. At the bottommost of it I’d etched, in a faint scratch of pencil: When you see this, meet me on the roof. Please. Ferret.

  And I’d carefully placed the handkerchief, near the leg of her chair, embroidery up. It served no purpose in the plot. It was only a sentimental gesture.

  I’d been so afraid of Wakefield seeing the note somehow that I’d barely pressed the pencil’s tip against the menu. I’d inched the message as close to invisible as I could get it. At a glance you would see only a smudge, much of the mark fading into the grain of the linen paper. The plan: After the dinner plates had been cleared, as the staff served the dessert in a flurry of bowls and spoons, the ice cream melting beneath everyone’s very noses, a waiter would lean over to place a spoon at Cecily’s side and whisper in her ear. He would prompt her to read the back of the menu. She would do so, then send a glance around the room. Her eyes would find their way to mine, to linger, then look away. She would wait for Wakefield to fall into a conversation with President McKinley to his left, and she would slip from the table. Her ice cream, molded into the shape of the battleship Maine, would sink into a puddle as she and I hid on the roof.

  But that’s not how it went. Not quite, anyway. Cecily did sit in the right place. Wakefield did indeed ignore her for much of the dinner as he busied himself with impressing the president. The waiter did whisper in her ear, and Cecily did flip her menu over to look at the back of it. But somehow in the plotting of it all I’d forgotten something key—Cecily wouldn’t be able to read a word of my note without her glasses.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about the glasses themselves—she’d often asked me to carry in my pocket the little paper case decorated with Chinese letters. But they were so part of her character, I’d forgotten their purpose.

  So when I saw her twist her pretty face into a terrible squint in her effort to read the writing before her, I feared all was lost, or even worse. She might turn to Wakefield and ask him to read it to her. For all she knew, the words on the menu could be as dire as an anarchist’s warning. When you’re in a room with a president, I realized, it was as if you were all made of china. Your every move seemed under scrutiny by everyone else, because even the weakest tip-tap could shatter the whole royal works.

  I felt myself flush with sweat. I brought my thumb to my mouth to gnaw nervously on the edge of my nail. And then, without a thought, I stepped forward.

  Every waiter I passed, every maid, shot me a look of shock, as if they knew all about me. They knew I was a man broken by love and jealousy—there was no telling what I might do if I stepped from my corner. They could only help a fool so much.

  The presidential table was set atop a long platform, so everyone in the room could see McKinley slurp his turtle soup. The floor creaked beneath my feet as I walked up, but no one could hear anything above the chatter of the crowd and the rattling of spoons. And I was nothing. I was a waiter. I was confident in my invisibility. If I’d been an anarchist intent on murder, I’d have had a bullet in the president’s brain in a matter of seconds.

  I crossed the dais, walking behind them all as they ate their ice cream. I ducked down to pick up the handkerchief she hadn’t even noticed, and I placed it atop the table, the letter C showing, and whispered into Cecily’s ear. “Meet me on the roof,” and I nearly wrecked the whole operation in my impulse to stay. She wore, again, the extract of sweet pea. The smell of her perfume worked into my senses and surprised me with its familiarity—it carried with it our entire lost summer, and every minute of it worked up into my thoughts. I needed to kiss her ear, her neck.

  Nonetheless, I moved on. As I passed behind the president, I saw a thin thread loose from a seam, and without pausing to think, I quickly twisted the thread around my finger as I passed behind his back. I snapped the thread off without even slowing my step.

  I twisted and untwisted the thread around and around my finger as I left the platform and walked through the hall. I’ll give it to Doxie someday, I thought, with a pang of regret. I’ll tell her it came from the president’s suit. Ever since I’d first thought of making Cecily my wife, I’d been thinking of all the things I’d save for our little girl, all the fragments of our first summer together.

  25.

  DESPITE ALL OUR careful plotting and planning, I hadn’t realized there were two rooftop gardens. I sat for several minutes, sunk with exhaustion, my head in my hands, on a stone bench in the one garden where Cecily wasn’t.

  I twisted the president’s thread around my finger some more. I closed my eyes and calculated. I pictured Cecily standing, walking, leaving the dining room. I counted the steps down the hall, tapping them out with the toe of my boot. I counted the stairs, imagining the time it would take her to climb them so weighted down by the trappings of her dress.

  Cecily once told me that rich ladies kept their skirts stiff by wearing crinolines spun from glass.

  “No wonder the rich girls look more sour than the poor ones,” I’d said, whispering in her ear, slipping my hand beneath her kimono, running my fingers over the skin of her thigh. “They’re bleeding from all those snips and cuts.” She had then taken my hand in hers to move it up her thigh, to between her legs. She writhed against my fingers. I watched her, as she closed her eyes, as she opened her mouth. I put my hand to her neck to feel it arch, her head falling back. I loved hearing her every broken breath. I held my mouth to her mouth, to let her breathe into me, my lips only barely touching hers.

  But when I finally stepped from the wrong garden and saw her waiting in the right one, her back to me, she looked as light as a cloud. There was no taffeta, no crinoline to hide the bones of her hips. The silk of her sky-blue gown clung to her, as if she wore nothing underneath.r />
  I had wished this other garden into existence. I’d conjured it up. She lost her way, I’d promised myself. She’s here. I’d stepped back into the corridor, to look up and down, and had it not been for a slight gust of wind that had pushed at the garden door, and the squeak of the door’s hinges, and a shift of pale shadow, I would have risked never seeing her at all. The door to Cecily’s garden was tucked around a corner, behind a twist in the hall, hidden by a slope. How had she ever found her way in?

  Out on her private corner of rooftop, she stood between two tall urns spilling over with ivy and she gazed across the Grand Court. The evening sky beyond her was a spatterwork of heaven-like colors—some lavender, some robin’s-egg blue. “Cecily,” I said, softly, as if I might frighten her away if I spoke too loud. She didn’t hear me, and when I said her name again, I ended up startling her anyway.

  “Oh,” she said, “there you are,” with an edge of annoyance. She turned to me, sending sparkles glinting up and down her dress as the setting sun caught metallic threads of silver. The threads had been woven into the silk, into the blooms of fireworks bursting.

  Her arms were bare, and she rubbed them for warmth. Her hair was done up again in a Psyche knot, some of the curls coming loose and dangling down, like she’d just woken from a nap beneath a tree.

  “I was waiting in the wrong place,” I said. I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.

  “I figured you just couldn’t kick the habit of abandoning me,” she said.

  “I’ve never abandoned you,” I said. I spoke as softly as before. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to stir up an argument. But I was desperate to explain. “I’ve never left you. Never. Please believe me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She looked down at her hands. She ran a finger along the lines of her palm, like a fortune-teller tracing a fate. “That’s the only reason I came up here, Ferret. To tell you that I won’t talk to you. I have nothing else to say about it.” But she didn’t leave the garden.

  “Cecily, I was there,” I said. As I stepped closer, I saw how pale she’d become, all her summer color having faded away. “I was there in the hospital. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you for weeks, Cecily. It kills me that you think I wasn’t there. I was there. The nuns only ever let me see you when you were half asleep. They lied to you when they said they couldn’t find me.”

  “The nuns lied,” she said, scoffing, rolling her eyes, and despite her paleness and her finery, there she was again. There was Cecily. “The nuns.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And Wakefield. Ask him. Tell him to tell you the truth.”

  When I stepped forth to take her hands in mine, she pulled away. She shook her head. She shrugged, and the shoulder knot of her dress dropped down her arm. “I won’t listen to this,” she said, her weak protest rising just above a whisper. “None of it matters.”

  I reached over to push the shoulder knot back up. “The truth doesn’t matter?” I said, but I said it gently, running my fingertips over the goose-pimpled skin of her ice-cold arm.

  “No,” she said. She shook her head, then she looked me right in the eye, almost defiant. “No, frankly. No. The truth doesn’t matter, to be honest. Whether it’s true or not, I believed it. And isn’t there something wrong with that? Isn’t that troubling? It was so easy to believe that you would leave me. I’d been expecting all along for you to just run away. And I can’t live like that. I can’t live every minute wondering when I’m going to be alone again.”

  “You’re not being fair,” I said. “I never did anything to make you think I’d ever leave you.”

  “Except for the time you left me,” she said. “When I was sick.”

  “I was there,” I said again, raising my voice, and I suddenly remembered the little dove with the mop and bucket. “The novitiate,” I said, and I began to stumble over my words, rattling them out, excited to remember. “The novitiate. You remember her? Always cleaning? Always everyplace? She knew I was waiting for you. She knew I was in the chapel. She can tell you.”

  Now Cecily’s eyes seemed to fall on me with pity. She started to say something, but stopped. She returned to the railing, to look away. “I don’t remember the novitiate,” she said, weary. She then spoke calmly, patiently. “Maybe I’m not being fair. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to puzzle it all out, Ferret. We don’t have to worry over it all. This isn’t Heart of the White City. This isn’t a show. We don’t have to have a scene with the novitiate.” She said “the novitiate” with a pompous air, mocking the drama of it. “We can simply let it all go, without a fight. I’m with Billy now.” She looked back to me, and she shrugged again, again knocking that shoulder knot off. “I married him. I’m married now. I have a daughter to look after.”

  “I love Doxie,” I said. Daughter . . . I found it insulting the way she said it. Yes, your daughter, I know her. I know your daughter. I know your daughter’s name. Remember?

  “I know you love her,” she said, looking down again at her hands, and my feeling of insult faded as quickly as it had sparked up.

  “He doesn’t love her,” I said.

  “He does,” she said, matter-of-fact, certain. “He does. He loves her very much.”

  “He doesn’t,” I said.

  “How would you know, Ferret? We’ve been away for weeks. You don’t know anything about us anymore. We’ve been away even longer than you and I were together. Did you even realize that, Ferret? Do you have any sense of time at all?” When I said nothing, she said, “No, not you,” but she wasn’t angry. She spoke gently. “The days just trip along, one into the next. We should all be so lucky to care so little.”

  I’d hoped she wouldn’t see how misted my eyes had got, as I’d been concentrating on keeping my tears back. If I so much as blinked, the tears would drop, and I didn’t want to cry alone over all of this. If I cried in front of her, I was just the helpless little boy she worried that I was.

  So the first tear felt like defeat. But somehow it seemed even more cowardly to wipe it away. I blinked my eyes, and more tears fell. I sniffled, then cleared my throat, lowering my voice. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be,” I said.

  In a spat between lovers, you can shore yourself up when the other one buckles. You become the strong one in front of the weak one, just like that. She stepped forward, and with a kindness that killed me, she wiped my tears with her thumb. “You don’t need to play a character, Ferret,” she said. “You need to be who you are.”

  She rubbed at her bare arms. “I’m getting cold,” she said. “I’m going in.” She dropped her eyes from mine. “Good night, Ferret.”

  As Cecily walked past me, I took her arm. I held it. I wouldn’t let her go, but she didn’t try, anyway. I pulled her to me, her back to my chest. I held her there, against me, wrapping my arms around her. I put my lips to her ear and whispered, “I never left you.” I said, “I never once left you.”

  At first, Cecily seemed to be simply indulging me, kindly letting me hold her, petting my hand with hers, sighing with that pity again. But then her sighs grew heavier. She began to shiver, and I held her closer. And her shivering turned into shaking, and she wept. She fell slack in my arms.

  Finally, she elbowed me in the ribs, and she shook herself away. She turned to face me, but stepped back, her eyes wide with rage. “Then why’d you burn my letter?” she said. She yelled at me, but with my mind so muddled I couldn’t think of what letter I’d burned. “I poured my soul out to you in my letter,” she said, “and you burned it.” I’d never seen Cecily like this. She shouted above her sobbing, half bent at the back like a madwoman, clutching at the skirt of her dress. “I told you that I loved you in that letter, that it killed me that you weren’t at my bedside when I needed you, and you burned it. And you held it in your fist . . .” She raised her hand in the air, her hand in a fist, and her weeping consumed her. �
��You wanted me to see . . . at the train window . . .”

  “No. No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” I said, as I realized. I put my hands to her cheeks, to turn her face toward me, to get her to look into my eyes. “No, no, no,” I said. I felt washed in relief. A mistake, I thought. She had made a mistake. We could correct the mistake. We just had to come to this. It was this easy. “I didn’t burn the letter, Cecily. Mrs. Margaret burned it. I wanted you to see that . . . I just needed you to see that I couldn’t read it. Cecily, I don’t know what you wrote in that letter. Mrs. Margaret burned it.” I felt such regret over my foolishness. Of course it had looked like I had burned the letter. How could I be so stupid?

  She seemed to be weighing this new information, considering it. She had stopped crying. She pushed my hands from her shoulders, and she stepped away in a daze. She leaned against a column, putting her forehead to it. “It doesn’t matter,” I heard her say. But I knew that it did. I was certain that this all mattered to her deeply. I walked to her. I ran my fingers over her cheek, pushing away the strands of her hair caught in her tears. I put my lips to her cheek, and she allowed it. I then kissed her neck. And when she let me do that, I brought my lips to hers. I put my arms around her waist, and she put hers around my shoulders. We kissed not with intensity but with tenderness, sadly, as if we were saying good-bye.

  She then said, “I need to go. I need to get back to the table. I’ve been gone too long.”

  I kissed her cheek, her neck. “Don’t go,” I said. “Won’t you just get into trouble?”

  “I can slip back in without him even noticing,” she said. “The fashionable ladies don’t rustle anymore, you know. We wrap ourselves in a cashmere shroud to keep ourselves silent.” She reached down to lift her dress enough to show the thin lining beneath.