The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  The doctor finished, removed the quills, and said, “Wake her,” as he left the room. I stood next to the table. How could her breaths fall so far apart? She seemed to be barely breathing at all.

  I leaned over to kiss her lips, and as I kissed her, she kissed me too, and she held her hand to the back of my head. I helped her from the table, and when I tried to speak again, she shushed me once more. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. I helped her with her dress, and her fur, and her hat, and her gloves. When we weren’t looking, the doctor had brought a little paper box containing a new chameleon. “Help me think of a name for him,” she said, and she slipped past the curtain, and down the hall, and out the back way.

  • • •

  CECILY VISITED DR. GEE LOY, and me, every day after that. As Wakefield spent his afternoons attending to the Fair in its final few weeks—in an endless parade of backslapping and celebratory lunches for a job well done—Cecily slipped from his side and into the coach, and she stole into town for our secret afternoons. She claimed to Wakefield, and to her driver, to be putting together her winter wardrobe, and needed to devote hours to the dress department of Brandeis. At the store, she had tea as the shopgirls modeled gowns, and she stood for fittings, allowing herself to be spotted by the gossips and scandalmongers. She then snuck away to weave through the store, around the shelves and manikins, and out the back. She moved then, in her furs of blue fox and chinchilla and electric seal, in her silks and diamonds, a veil across her face, from back alley to back alley, across the dirty, broken bricks, through inky puddles, past the skittering of rats and the grumbling of bums, until she came to the back door of Dr. Gee Loy’s. We would spend an hour together, then she would leave alone to retrace her steps. As she hurried through Brandeis’s again, Pearl would hand her paper bags full of boxes, of novelty shirtwaists, of boots, of a pigeon wing to clip to her hair with a diamond-studded clasp. For Wakefield, a silver match safe etched with a parrot. A doll for Doxie. Italian marshmallows for Mrs. Margaret.

  Wakefield would tease her at breakfast about her shopping, amused by her girlish pleasure in fashion and jewelry. They would spend their mornings in the conservatory, the autumn sun hot through the glass overhead. Wakefield would eat a steak delivered directly from one of the slaughterhouses he owned in South Omaha, and he would feign shock and disgust over the Brandeis bill, open at his side. He read aloud the list of clothing and gifts, clucking his tongue. More often than not, Cecily would not have even opened the boxes yet, and she would only just learn of their contents from Wakefield’s recitations. She was always caught up, she told me, in thoughts of our afternoons together. Cecily would butter her blueberry muffin with butterine, also from the slaughterhouse, made from cattle fat and oil, and she’d drink Hawaiian coffee, sitting in a kimono of blue satin, relaxed, happy, distracted.

  I imagined that Wakefield loved playing the part of a husband who indulged his spoiled wife too much. I could picture him boasting to other men: My darling canary, gilding her cage.

  Meanwhile, behind his back, Ferret the Weasel robbed the very rich groom of his very pretty bride. Cecily and I met every day of those few weeks in October. She wouldn’t allow me to walk her through the alleys, afraid we’d get caught together lurking about. So every day I waited in a room lit only with the low flame of a linseed-oil lamp hanging from the ceiling by a chain. This was not the private room where Cecily took the acupuncture, but a room full of people sleeping. Each wall was lined with berths like in a train car, three beds high. Some patients snored behind curtains, others lay with the curtains open, the pipes falling from their hands as they dropped into sleep. The room had a haze of vapor that had no way out, as there were no windows, and only the one door, always kept shut.

  “And if we get caught, it’s over,” she said. “He would never let me out again.” From Cecily’s little black hat hung a lace veil tatted to resemble a cobweb. Cecily pulled out the hatpin at the top of the veil, the pin’s head spider-shaped, the spider’s abdomen a teardrop pearl.

  I took off my boots, my coat, my collar, my cuffs. Dr. Gee Loy stepped in with a tray, and on the tray, a long bamboo pipe and an opium lamp. We never smoked the stuff, but Cecily liked to inhale the medicinal haze puffed up by all the other smokers in the den. “Not opium,” the doctor explained to a new patient on the other side of the room. He set down the tray and tapped his finger against the pipe’s bowl. “Swallows’ nests. Crushed lizard bones. Pipe tobacco. Maybe a little, little—just little—bit opium.” The pipe’s red enamel was patterned with bats. “Bats bring the happiness,” the doctor said.

  “What do the characters mean?” the patient asked, running his fingers along the calligraphy that lined the top of the bowl.

  “Opium better than money,” he said. He tapped again at the pipe’s bowl. “But no opium here. None. Just a little. So little, it is almost none at all. A little opium to ease you away from it.”

  This room was where addicts gathered to kick the habit.

  “When you start to see your dreams,” Dr. Gee Loy told his patient, “lie back and look.”

  Cecily whispered to me. “This medicine ain’t for the weak,” she said. She winked at me and tugged on my chin. We both lay back on the bed together, our heads on the same pillow. I put my hand on her hand. Her skin was like ice.

  “Leave him,” I whispered. “Get Doxie, and run away with me.”

  After a moment, Cecily said, “I will,” and I could have wept at the sound of it. I will, as precious as a wedding vow.

  • • •

  BUT SHE DIDN’T RUN AWAY with me that afternoon, or the afternoon after that. “I just need time,” she said, when we met again. Back and forth, she went. One day she would try to convince me that Billy Wakefield was no villain, that he’d always been sweet to her, that he loved her and cared about her, and the next day she’d tell me how powerful he was, how careful we must be, how doomed might be our every plot.

  But I don’t think she feared him, truly. She wasn’t frightened. She thought only of Doxie, and of how much her little girl would lose. To leave Wakefield would be to rob her daughter of the kind of future neither of us would have dared imagine.

  “He rescued us,” she said, in between kisses, as we lay in our sleeping berth.

  “From me,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said. She kissed my ear and whispered in it. “That’s not what I mean.” I closed my eyes, so pleased to believe her every word.

  I begged her to promise me that she’d only ever been mine. I wanted to believe that Wakefield’s gifts had never mattered, that she’d never paid him a minute’s interest in those days before he stole her away.

  “I never kept anything secret from you,” she said.

  • • •

  AFTER TWO WEEKS of our lost afternoons, the autumn began to feel wintery. “Your body senses a shift in the weather coming,” Dr. Gee Loy said, as he plucked away the bamboo needles of her acupuncture. “We will work with the storm.” I helped Cecily down, and the doctor’s little girl pulled the sheet away and set the very same table for tea. Cecily sat only in her underthings as the doctor poured the tea into cups carved from the horn of a narwhal.

  He then led us down the hall to the sleeping berths. There wasn’t a single lick of lamplight, and I felt I was back in the orphanage, in among its crooked corridors and damp little rooms, marching off to a whipping. The nuns who’d managed the children’s home had been renegade, not Catholic at all, with a mission of poverty and nothingness. They’d been an order with no order at all; their habits and wimples hadn’t even matched in color or cloth. Our house had been a house of sticks, ramshackle and cast-off, no sturdier than the cardboard in our shoes. Sister Patience had loved me, but she’d beat me too, and I would lie in my bed, my skin stinging from the switch, and I’d stare at the cracks in the ceiling, praying for the roof to fall in on us all.

  As we
sat on the thin mattress, Cecily said, of the doctor, “I’m not sure I believe he’s even Chinese. I once met a Chinese magician who was just some hayseed from Kentucky. All he did was buy a costume and a trunk of tricks off a real Chinese magician.”

  I saw Cecily’s earbob bobbing, a tiny silver swan on a little chain. I touched the swan. “Can I tell you something that you can’t tell anyone else?” she said, taking the swans from her ears.

  “Of course you can,” I said.

  “These swans,” she said, “I saw them in a hotel shop in one of those towns with the mineral springs, and I thought of you, and of us,” she said, “and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. And that night, at dinner, Billy gave them to me, in a pretty velvet box, and I thought I’d got caught. I thought he knew, somehow, how much I missed you.” She stopped speaking, and I was afraid there was nothing more to the story. She lay back in the bed.

  I lay down next to her. “I slept in the same iron crib from the time I was a baby until I was ten,” I said.

  “No wonder you kick in your sleep,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “How would you know if you do or you don’t?” she said. “You’re asleep.”

  “You know me best, I guess,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “So how did Billy know?” I said. “About the swans?”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “He thought I was thinking of the swans we watched together in the town before, in a park, where we had a picnic. Beautiful swans, some black, some white. We tossed some crumbs out on the water. He didn’t know I was thinking of you then too.”

  I whispered in her ear. “Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t go back.”

  She tried to breathe in deep, but her breaths were shallow. “I can’t live without Doxie,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I’ll take care of both of you.”

  “Doxie lives in the house on the hill now,” she said. She put her hand to my cheek, and met my eyes with hers. “Don’t you want the very best of everything for Dox? Shouldn’t she be far better off than we ever were? Just picture your miserable self in that old crib. If you hadn’t run away from the orphanage, you’d probably still be sleeping in that crib today.” When I said nothing, she put her forehead against mine, and she nodded, making my head nod too. “See, you agree with me,” she said, smiling.

  “How do you know I won’t run away with you when you fall asleep?”

  “Because I never sleep anymore,” she said, and with that her eyes dropped closed, and her breathing slowed, growing easy, and quiet, and she slept and slept.

  Somehow, I wasn’t worried. Without a doubt, she was mine, not his. And soon enough, it’d be summer, then soon enough, summer again, and we’d be alone with our little girl. We would live in a state of contentment and melancholy, arm in arm, anxious for the next moment, and the moment after that, even as we watched our lives leave us, minute by minute.

  29.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I lay in the berth, in the back of Dr. Gee Loy’s, waiting alone. I suspected Cecily had been slowed by the cold, icy drizzle that slicked the walks. I got up often to go to the back door, to lean out and look up and down the alley. I lingered there, as if I could see her figure in the mist and fog just by staring hard enough. Finally I walked to the front desk, to check if there’d been any word. Dr. Gee Loy had a telephone. She might have called.

  But before I even asked, I saw, out the window, the Wakefield coach parked in front, the coach that delivered Cecily to the front door of Brandeis every afternoon. The black umbrella that the old driver had wired to his perch drooped with a few broken spines, hanging above his head like a listless bat. The old man’s mouth was wrapped around tight with a woolen scarf.

  I stepped outside, suddenly remembering a dream I’d had the night before. I was happy it came back to me. In the dream, Cecily circled the cart of a flower peddler in the street, plucking off a petal here, a petal there, stealing a whole flower’s worth of petals that she kept clutched in her palm.

  I opened the coach door, wanting to tell Cecily of the sweet, strange dream, but only Pearl sat inside, Cecily’s handkerchief, with the initial stitched in, twisted in her grip. Her eyes and her nose were red.

  “Get inside, Ferret,” Pearl said, “so I can tell you.”

  Wakefield caught her, I thought, with a catch in my gut.

  I sat next to Pearl and closed the coach door. I took Pearl’s hands in mine. “Tell me,” I said. She began to cry.

  My worry, in the moment, was only for Pearl, this sad girl here at my side, Cecily’s friend, so wrecked. Cecily and I will find a way, I would tell her, to comfort. She loves me.

  Pearl tried to steady her voice to speak. In a moment, she said, “Cecily died this morning.”

  I took my hands from hers. A lie, I thought, but not with anger. Pearl was only confused. Or Wakefield had invented this, to take Cecily from me again. If it was true, how could Pearl possibly know? How was such a thing knowable? Who would have told her? Who was she talking about? I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t think. Stay confused. No one knows. There’s no truth.

  “Did you hear me, Ferret?” Pearl said.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “She became very ill, Ferret,” she said. “Something overtook her. And she died.”

  “Who?” I said, though I don’t know what answer I wanted. Who died? Who did this? I still expected Cecily to look in the window, to open the door.

  “Cecily died. Ferret, Cecily is gone.”

  The coach sat in the street, its stillness filling me with fear. It stopped my breath. I opened the door to let in the wind and sleet. I was with Cecily yesterday. We would be late to our bed in Dr. Gee Loy’s. We wouldn’t have enough time. We would lie there, sleep a wink, then she’d have to leave.

  Pearl leaned across me to pull the door closed. “So cold,” she said.

  And with the closing of the door, the snap of its latch, I believed it. I believed I was here, in this coach, hearing the truth. Pearl had no reason to lie. Cecily’s death was cold and exact, and it shuddered through me, through all my bones, a slamming of doors. And yet Cecily wasn’t gone yet. Her death was only in that handful of words, Cecily died this morning. Her death didn’t exist anywhere else. It was confined to those words. We were still in that cloud, when what was said could still be unsaid. Or more could be said, and everything could change. Do you have any sense of time at all? Cecily had asked me on the rooftop at the Fair, after the president’s dinner. And I didn’t. That moment on the roof was so near, the memory so vivid, I felt I could step back into it and leave myself there. Each moment with Cecily was close enough to touch. I could have every moment back.

  I opened my mouth to speak, and my words caught on my tongue, and they fell apart, into noise, and I sobbed. I tried to finish my sentence but only stammered. Pearl hushed me, whispering “sh” in my ear, her arms around my shoulders.

  “I was waiting for her inside,” I managed to say, through my weeping. “I was waiting and waiting. I thought she’d slipped in the rain.”

  Pearl put her arm in mine, and her hand to my wet cheek. “The rain,” she said. “It’s heaven fallen down on us.”

  “I can’t stop crying,” I said. “I can’t speak.”

  “You don’t have to stop,” she said, even as she shushed me some more, rocking me in her arms. “Sh-sh-sh-sh.”

  I looked at Pearl, and I didn’t have to ask her to tell me more. She took a breath and told me everything, in great detail. This was what we needed to do, it seemed. We needed to go over everything, minute by minute.

  “Mr. Wakefield sent the coach around for me this morning, thinking I could help ease Cecily into some sleep,” she said. “She hasn’t slept for days and days. It was all too bright, she said. She wore a mask over her eyes. They put her in a room with the windo
ws blacked out. And last night was the worst yet—she was disoriented and sick. There’s been a doctor there, who Mr. Wakefield brought in from Europe, and he said she needed desperately to sleep.”

  “But she did sleep,” I said, as if she could still be saved, if only everyone knew. “I know she did. I promise you. She slept.”

  Pearl nodded. “She was sleeping when I got there,” she said. “They’d given her something to get her to sleep. Everyone was so relieved. You could feel the ease in the house. It was like the air was of silk. Not only was she sleeping, but she was restful. Her breathing was easy. We all felt the worst was past. The doctor was with her. He wasn’t worried. We busied ourselves. Me and Mrs. Margaret and Mr. Wakefield and his sister. The staff. We played cards. And then the doctor came down from her room, only a few hours ago. He told us she’d passed.”

  “And you’re certain?” I said.

  She nodded. “We saw her,” she said. “We went upstairs and saw her. She was sick all along, I guess. She was sick.” And though Pearl described Cecily’s death no further, I couldn’t help but picture her myself, in her bed, her eyes closed, her life gone.

  I pushed open the door and jumped from the coach. I went back into Dr. Gee Loy’s, and down around the winding of its back halls, and out the door to the alleyway. I didn’t run, but I walked quickly against the sleet, my coat’s collar upturned, my hands buried in my pockets, my head low. I followed the path Cecily would have taken that very afternoon, if she’d ever arrived.

  And when I reached the back door to Brandeis, I turned and walked back to Dr. Gee Loy’s. I returned to my berth. I took off my coat. I took my feet from my shoes.

  The doctor didn’t ask about Cecily. He prepared a pipe and a lamp.

  Everyone in the berths was awake, but they paid me no mind. They smoked. They breathed deeply. Their breathing was all I could hear, as if it were my own, as if I held my hands to my ears and listened only to the sound of the air filling and leaving my lungs. The doctor handed me the pipe. He ran the lamp beneath the bowl, raising the vapor.