The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  When we were finally inside, and we’d built the fire and lit the stove, as we’d stamped our feet and slapped at our own arms to get the blood to pump, we laughed. We started laughing and couldn’t stop. We laughed at how miserable we’d been only minutes ago, back when we’d thought we might die.

  “Can you believe how awful that was?” Emmaline said, wheezing with laughter.

  “How did we survive it?” Hester said. Despite her laughter, she seemed truly curious.

  “Did we survive it?” I said.

  “We did!” Emmaline said, smiling, nodding, sipping from a glass of scotch whiskey. “But only just.”

  When we fell quiet again, I thought of Cecily, and the night she couldn’t stop laughing at my jokes, at Oscar’s jokes, as I’d stood on the stage on the rooftop, after Wakefield’s masquerade ball. I had thought I’d never forget the sound of it, so sweet it was.

  But now I couldn’t quite hear it. I heard her speaking, when I listened back, and I could hear her singing the little lullabies to get Doxie to sleep. But the exact sound of her laughter escaped me. And I realized I couldn’t remember the sound of anyone’s laughter, no one’s but Emmaline’s and Hester’s, which I’d only just heard. And now, in the silence, I had no memory of the sound of theirs either. I could see, in my mind, whole audiences, shaking with laughter, their mouths open, their eyes watering. What did it sound like? For the life of me, I didn’t know.

  With such deep regret I thought of all the times Cecily and I had strolled past the phonograph booth on the midway, where you could speak into a horn and record yourself. You’d take home your own voice, its rhythms etched into a wax cylinder. “I have nothing to say,” she’d said the first time I’d suggested we step inside.

  She wouldn’t have had to say anything. I could’ve told jokes, and she could’ve laughed. And I’d have that laughter still.

  • • •

  AS THE WIND BLEW HARD, then died down, then blew hard again, its every gust sounding like a great beast slithering against the house, rattling the panes, knocking away shingles with the brush of its tail, Emmaline stood at the front window, watching for the snow to stop. She had dressed for churchgoing in a cape of possum fur—“Siberian marten,” she insisted—and a fur cap stuck through with quail feathers.

  Hester called us to the table in the kitchen, the room still warm from all the roasting. Emmaline gave up on the storm ending, and she took off her cape and hat. We sat down to another of Hester’s fine feasts.

  “Did you visit the Filipino Village when you were at the Fair?” Emmaline asked me. “Do you believe them to be a tribe of cannibals?”

  “I don’t believe anything about the Fair,” I said. “Why do you ask? Are you thinking if we get snowed in for too long we’ll have to eat each other alive?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “but we have a cellar full of canned birds and meats. And pickles and preserves. To turn cannibal would just be an extravagance.”

  After dinner, after dark, we exchanged gifts—the sisters gave me a monkey-leather wallet for all the money I didn’t have, and a jade letter opener with a little circle of magnifying glass on one end of it.

  I’d made each of us a pair of green goggles—pieces of a broken bottle wired together into spectacles. I’d tucked them into the stockings that hung from nails hammered into the mantel. As they reached into the socks, I warned, “Don’t cut your fingers. Sharp edges. And don’t cut yourself putting them on.”

  We hooked the wires behind our ears and looked up and around, at the fire, at the candle flames on the Christmas tree, at the lamplight, casting a green glow across the room with our every glance.

  “In the morning,” I said, “in the sunlight, the cathedral will be emerald, finally.”

  “Oh, I love them, Ferret,” Emmaline said. “I never want to see again without them.”

  But no sooner had she said it than she took them off. We all did. And we settled in for ghost stories, and stayed up half the night. I found myself nodding off in the middle of my own telling of one, right at the minute of its grisliest twist. When I woke, I’d been covered with a quilt, and Hester and Emmaline had gone up to their beds.

  The room wasn’t bright, but it wasn’t dark. It wasn’t daylight. It was silvery in the room, like it was lit with moonlight, but the moon was clouded over, and it still stormed outside.

  Every Christmas I always felt sunk in nostalgia, longing a little even for the orphanage and the tin bird with the windup wings Sister Patience had once snuck beneath my pillow. So I got up from the floor, took up August’s letter and my new letter opener, and sat near the window. I needed the sound of his voice in his words, no matter what his words said.

  There was enough of that pale, winter light to read by, though morning was hours away.

  August had been using the typewriter I’d left in my office, and it appeared from my name on the front of the envelope that he’d got the thing repaired. Before, all the r’s had hovered above the other letters—the couple of r’s in Ferret and the couple of r’s in Skerritt looking like fangs lifted, about to strike—but the r’s had now been knocked back in line.

  But only a moment after cutting through the envelope flap, before even lifting the letter out, I realized that August had not sent this. He would never have been so cruel, no matter how angry he was. He would never have scented his letter with Cecily’s perfume.

  My dearest Ferret,

  I’m here.

  Yours always,

  Cecily

  33.

  I READ THE LETTER, and I read it again and again and again. I picked up a pen and ran its dry nib over Cecily’s words—I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here—over and over, following the slants and dips of her cursive.

  Even if it was only a hoax, I would let myself be fooled. I would play along. I could imagine Mrs. Margaret, or Wakefield’s sister, or Wakefield himself, weary of all the letters I sent to the house. I could imagine them wanting to taunt. Those three, they did love a dirty trick.

  But I knew my way around the pitfalls of forgery. In my literary business, I’d been asked a time or two to mirror and mimic, to fake a wife’s handwriting or a husband’s signature, for seemingly deceitful purposes. If Cecily’s letter had been written by someone else, there’d be stops and starts. There’d be tremors and tracing. Letters would fail to connect. You’d be able to see past the words to all the toil and industry in it.

  And this, with little doubt, was truly Cecily’s hand. I’d become an expert in her bad penmanship.

  So, for a few hours in the night, my head not straight, I considered her death the hoax, not this letter in my hands. I closed my eyes and looked past logic. I returned to the funeral, lighting here and there like a fly in the room. How did he do it? I wondered as I studied the plot for its hinges.

  Wakefield was a master of spectacle. Maybe Cecily’s death had been nothing but a week of theater. Had he spoon-fed Cecily a poison that only slowed her heart, that hid its fragile beats away long enough to convince the undertaker? Had he buried a wax wife and locked Cecily in a cellar?

  I began to see other things I hadn’t seen at all. In my memory, Cecily appeared at an upstairs window of the Wakefield house as we left the memorial. She parted a drape, her breath frosting the glass.

  In my response to Cecily’s letter, I gave no greeting. I didn’t sign my name. I wrote only, You’re cruel to deceive me.

  34.

  AM I CRUEL? she wrote in response, in a letter that arrived only a few days later. Am I deceiving? I don’t mean to be. I’ve read your every letter, and your every letter lifts my heart. I make a ritual of it all. Before sitting down with your latest, I pour some quince brandy in my little ruby-red glass from the Fair. You seal your envelopes with golden wax, and you stamp the wax with a honeybee. I cut the wax with a kitchen knife. The knife has a handle of whalebone, and carved into the
handle is the tail of a whale. Your letters smell of tobacco and smoke, and I picture you puffing on a pipe as you consider what to write to me. I hold the paper to my nose. I’ve lost my spectacles, so I run a magnifying glass over your words. I study every scratch of your pen, I follow every curve of your every letter of every word.

  I don’t get your letters until they’re gone. He gets them first, and he throws them in the fire. They burn away to nothing. And then they’re mine.

  To all you who hate me,

  If Cecily’s a ghost, why won’t she haunt me in my own house?

  Yours truly,

  Ferret Skerritt

  My dear Ferret,

  Burn this letter before you even lay eyes on it. I don’t deserve a single sympathy. I’m sorry to be such a puzzle. I won’t write again.

  With all my love,

  Cecily

  Whoever you are,

  Don’t stop writing.

  F.

  Dear Ferret,

  I should never have written to you. Before you knew I was reading them, you wrote me such beautiful letters.

  Yours,

  Cecily

  Dear Cecily,

  How are you writing me at all?

  Ferret

  Dear Ferret,

  How am I writing you? I can’t lift a feather. How am I reading your letters? I have lied, I confess. There’s no ritual. I can’t swallow a measly drop of quince brandy. I can’t smell the tobacco on the page.

  I can’t pluck a string of the mandolin in the corner. My breath won’t fog the mirror. I can’t write my name in the dust. The room could be locked. Or not. I can’t turn a knob. I don’t come and go as I please. I hear Doxie when she cries on the other side of the wall, but she can’t hear me hushing her. How can I haunt the place? I can’t rattle a chain or knock the pictures off the wall. I’m not a ghost, I fear. I’m less than a ghost. I’m less than the words written on the paper in your hand. I didn’t write them. The ink in the pot is dry.

  Cecily

  Dear Cecily,

  Tell me something only we know.

  F.

  Dear Ferret,

  1. The day we danced a waltz hanging off wires.

  2. The day you pressed into my palm a scent bottle made of shell, and when I twist its stopper, it smells of caraway seeds and flower petals.

  3. On Sundays, those days the Fair was dry, our favorite waiter at the midway café served us our beer in teacups.

  4. On the days Dox and me felt melancholy, you called us “colly-molly” and it cheered us up.

  5. At the glassblower’s booth, you bought me my little ruby-red glass, etched with my name, almost—the old man hadn’t heard you right, so he left the y off. And you called me Cecil for days after. You pronounced it See-sill.

  6. The shoes you gave me on the day it rained.

  7. Mexican cigarettes.

  8. Dandelion honey.

  9. That place you kiss on my neck.

  I am,

  Cecily

  January and February

  1899

  35.

  EVERY DAY I DROVE Hester’s haggard horse to town. Some days there were two letters from Cecily waiting for me. Some days, three. Some days, I posted two or three myself. I got in the habit of reading the letters there at the post office, and I would write in response right on the page, my words twisting around hers, my script weeding along the margins and around the roses and posies embossed in the corners. I believed in her. If this is deception, I once wrote, deceive me.

  When the wind bit too harshly, the librarian let me stay among the books. I curled up in quilts under the table, breathing in the smell of worn leather and glue, and the vanilla scent of old paper, just as I had on the nights of my childhood, when studying under Mr. Crowe. When I couldn’t sleep from the noise of the ice and snow, I read and reread Cecily’s letters at the window. In the thick of winter it never got dark—there was always that haze of silver and gray that bounced the moonlight around.

  The librarian was a young woman named Eulalie—when I first saw it spelled on the plaque on her desk, I thought it was pronounced You-lay-lee. After weeks of my saying it that way, she finally said, “You-LAH-lee.”

  Confused, I said, “I lolly?”

  It was the very end of January, and a table was covered with lace and crepe paper, scissors and glue; she’d been instructing the town’s lovelorn on the construction of valentines and the composing of poems. “My name,” she said. “It’s Eulalie, with a la in the middle.” She raised her scissors and waved them like a wand, like conducting a choir, and she sang, “La-la-la-la-la-la-la.”

  She twisted an expert poppy from tissue paper as she sat on the edge of the table. She crossed her thin legs, and I saw the heavy winter boots she wore, a farmer’s boots with buckles, lined in lamb’s wool.

  Eulalie knew I was all caught up in letters from a lady friend, and she naturally assumed my love was a woman who lived. “When will you go find your girl?” she asked. She wired a stem to the bloom. “There’s nothing here to keep you, is there?”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” I said.

  “Hm,” she said, holding the flower before her, as if confiding in it, “what could he possibly mean by that?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts, You-la-la-la-lee?”

  “I believe in the spirit,” she said. “I believe in the soul.”

  “I’m talking about unholy ghosts,” I said. “The ones that aren’t in heaven.”

  She held the paper flower to her nose. “The ones that rattle the windowpanes?” she said, as the windowpanes rattled. She smiled and stood from the table. “No,” she said. “I suppose I don’t.” She shrugged her shoulders. “No ghosts have crept up on me. But I trust others when they say that they’ve seen them. I believe in other people’s ghosts, I guess.” She took a book from the shelf, and thumbed through its pages. She finally found what she looked for, and she marked the page with the wire stem of the paper poppy. She handed me the book—Around the World in Eighty Days. “This made me think of you,” she said. “Read this instead of those.” She nodded toward the stack of letters I carried around with me everywhere. I helped Eulalie on with her coat, a threadbare thing that had already had a long life as a patchwork quilt. She lived only a few doors down, in a room above the drugstore.

  Her flower marked a page with an illustration of a hot-air balloon. I read a little of the book’s middle, before backing up to the start. I sat by the library window and stayed up all night, reading front to end. When I got to the part about Phileas Fogg riding a sledge with a topmast and jib over the snowy fields and creeks of Nebraska, across the frozen Platte, catching a winter wind and sailing to Omaha, it seemed I could step out the door and into the story.

  I finished the novel before morning, and I wrote Cecily a letter on one of the paper hearts, following the line and curve of the edges, turning the heart as I wrote, spiraling the sentences inward. I’ll rig a sail to a sled and get to you by nightfall, I told her.

  36.

  IN THOSE FIRST DAYS of February, it had never been so cold in all the history of writing things down. The temperature fell past zero, past minus ten, past minus twenty, past thirty, past forty. The numbers on our thermometers didn’t even go so low. And as the temperatures dropped, the drifts rose. Four inches, six inches, twelve. The snow closed the roads, slowed the trains. The coal ran out. A fire in town raged as the firemen watched, the water from their nozzles turning to ice and falling like hail.

  I couldn’t get to the post office to collect my letters, but even if I’d made the journey, and even if I’d survived it, there’d likely been no delivery at all. Later, when we were able to see a newspaper again, we would learn that the blizzard hadn’t been only ours. The quilt of white spread out far past our fields. We’d shared the blizzard with much of the country,
though we’d had no way of knowing so at the time. The storm had muffled our noise, trapping us in our rooms. No words reached us.

  Hester, who wasn’t typically biblical, nonetheless now suspected I was a messenger of the Revelation. “‘And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud,’” she recited, as we high-stepped through the drifts, the two of us, on our way to a neighboring farm. “There are prophets who say the world will end when the century does,” she added.

  The temperatures had finally begun to rise, the mercury inching back to zero. We’d covered our faces with woolen masks and buried ourselves in coats and scarves. We were off to help a farmer feed his struggling cattle.

  “I’m no angel,” I said, my voice cracked from the cold.

  “You are today,” she said. “We’re doing a good deed.” Hester was the closest thing to a veterinarian anywhere nearby. She often helped her neighbors contend with livestock illnesses—hog cholera, tuberculosis, swine plague. She’d picked ticks off other farmers’ pigs, led infected cattle through paraffin dips. She’d splinted the broken bones of horses. She’d committed herself to the animals’ well-being, even here, during the coldest winter of the century, even at the age of seventy something. And she even moved quicker than I did, springing her legs up and over the tall drifts like a hound after fox.