The Swan Gondola

by Timothy Schaffert

  • • •

  I TOLD MRS. MARGARET everything. I told her about the letters, and about Pearl. I told her I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  We weren’t the only lost souls in the joint. Others had braved the killer chill of the night to warm their bones with liquor. “Is there any truth to what you do on the stage?” I said.

  “No,” Mrs. Margaret said. “Before we started up on the fair circuit, the Silk & Sawdust Players was legitimate theater. I’m a classically trained actress. I’ve been in Romeo and Juliet. I played the nurse.”

  I told her about the farm, and the Emerald Cathedral, and my own performance as an oracle. “I only communed with their dead because they begged for it,” I said.

  “The century’s about to turn,” she said. “There’s a lot of call for soothsaying. If we didn’t do it, somebody else would, and they’d be the ones to get the coin.” The boiled whiskey in her copper cup burned her mouth, so she blew on it. The sourness had somehow left her breath and I could have sworn it’d gone pleasant. Her breath smelled of spice cake hot from the baker. “And what do we know?” she said. “Maybe the spirits guide our tongues when we lie.”

  I leaned forward to whisper, though no one in the saloon was listening to us. “Do you think he killed her?” I said.

  Mrs. Margaret took another drink. She put the cup down and folded her hands, prayerlike. She watched the skin of her hands as she rubbed at the wrinkles with her thumbs. She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think he wanted her to die.”

  “He thought he was healing her with all that poison?” I said, incredulous. “It was an accident?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t an accident,” she said.

  I had finished my drink, so I reached across for hers. I took a swallow, but the cheap burn of it made me even more peevish. “Why do I bother asking you anything?” I said. “What would you know about it?”

  But Mrs. Margaret remained patient with me. I think she was pleased to have an audience for her tale of intrigue. “He wanted her weak, but he didn’t want her dead,” she said, speaking slow. “He wanted to keep her just a little bit sick so he could keep saving her. He wanted to keep her at the brink, keep her needing him, so that he could rescue her with some new doctor or drug. He was addicted to her salvation.”

  “No,” I said, but I didn’t doubt Mrs. Margaret’s theories. But the closer I got to the truth of it all, the more the thought of Cecily’s murder terrified me. I couldn’t stomach it. I could have saved her. We could have been together always.

  “When you’re rich, everything’s a trifle,” she said. “So what if he gives her a little extra pinch of headache? He takes it away eventually. So she’s up all night because the moon’s in her window; she’ll sleep tomorrow, or the night after that. The rich invent their own morality. Especially a man like Wakefield. He thought he paid for his sins already. So he just sinned some more.”

  “I thought he just wanted to save her because he couldn’t save the wife who died,” I said. “Or did he kill that wife too?”

  “He took his first wife to surgeons, Cecily told me,” she said. “She had nerves in her eyes snipped. She had something cut out of her womb. It’s all too grisly to speak of.”

  But we did speak of it, for much of the night. Speculation, mystery. It kept the dead from dying entirely. When you’re angry, you grieve a little less.

  “Would he ever hurt Doxie?” I said.

  “When I lived up in the house,” she said, “he didn’t even know she was there. His neglect might be a blessing.”

  “In the letters,” I said, “there’s been mention of a room.”

  Mrs. Margaret looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “Yeah?” she said.

  I shrugged. “She says she can hear Doxie crying on the other side of the wall. Or, that’s what Pearl says, in the letters she writes as Cecily.”

  “When Cecily was at her sickest,” Mrs. Margaret said, “she spent time in a room in the upstairs. It was next to Doxie’s.”

  “She had her own bedroom?” I said, somewhat hoping.

  “No,” she said. “It was where she looked after her hobbies. She said she kept her scrapbooks in there. She pasted her cigarette cards in the pages of one. In another one she pasted newspaper clippings about the Fair. But she kept the room locked. There was only one key. A skeleton key wouldn’t even work in it. She insisted, when she married Wakefield, that he give her one room all to herself.”

  “In Pearl’s mind, Cecily’s in a room she can’t get out of,” I said. We sat without talking. I listened close to the wind just to be grateful I wasn’t out in it. “How do we get Doxie away?” I said.

  “There’s no way,” she said. “He might not care about her, but he needs her. He covets the attention of a man suffering. He’s already been in the newspapers three times with our little girl, showing her off, so they can all talk about how lucky the little urchin is. She’s already a legend—she’s just like the Little Match Girl, but with a happy ending.” She paused. “But if I can get back in there, I can look after things. You need to get Pearl to have a séance up at the house.”

  “Nobody up there’s going to fall for your Madame LeFleur act,” I said.

  “Not Madame LeFleur,” she said. “You get an actress who could use some work. We pay her to say what we want her to say.”

  “What do we want her to say?”

  “That Cecily wants her friends around her,” she said. “That she wants Doxie to get to know us. She wants us around Doxie all the time. If the clairvoyant is convincing, Wakefield will fall for it. He believes in ghosts because that’s all he’s got. And he needs forgiveness, I’m guessing, no matter what kinds of laws he lives by.”

  “Every time I conspire with you,” I said, “it ends with me getting strangled. I’m not interested.”

  Mrs. Margaret pushed up her sleeve and wiggled her fat wrist around, showing off the bracelet with the scent bottle I’d given Cecily the day of the president’s parade. When I reached out for it, she snatched her hand back and pulled her sleeve down. “You be a good little kitty,” she said, “and I’ll give it to you. And I’ll give you other things too. Wakefield fired me because he caught me taking things of Cecily’s after she died. But I wasn’t stealing. She would’ve wanted me to have them. And on the day he fired me, I snuck away with her jewelry box. And this pretty thing was in it.” She let the abalone shell of the scent bottle shimmer in the fire from the stove. “And a few other odds and ends of interest.”

  “Like what else?” I said.

  “Like a key,” she said. “That might open a door.”

  • • •

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, a few whiskeys in, the plot had seemed foolproof. In the light of day I was certain of doom. I wanted nothing more than to wrestle myself from another of Mrs. Margaret’s death grips. But it was actually Doxie’s grip that held me, and I’d been in it ever since she’d first wrapped her fingers around my thumb.

  All the gears of the scheme were clicking along by afternoon. The only actress in the city of Omaha who I knew I could trust was Phoebe St. James, from the burlesque at the Empress Opera House. It’d been nearly a year since I’d seen her. I thought she’d left town, just before the Fair, to act in an open-air theater that had been hacked into a patch of forest. She went there, somewhere east, every summer to play actresses in Russian plays. “All the best plays are about actresses,” she would say. The theater consisted only of a stage built from the trees they’d felled. The audience sat on rows of stumps.

  “I didn’t go this summer,” Phoebe said, when I tracked her down. It had been easy—she had a telephone, and her name was in the directory. “You didn’t notice I wasn’t gone, I guess.”

  She had a little cottage of her own, and it looked like you could lick it. Some of its bricks were pink, others were white. The shingles were yellow
and rippled like waves of ribbon candy. The wallpaper was striped like peppermint. I sat in her parlor with my hat on my knee.

  “I’m sorry I fell out of touch, Phoebe,” I said. “I had a very . . . a very complicated summer. How’d you get such a fine house?”

  “I met a soldier off to war,” she said. She picked up sugar cubes with tiny ivory tongs, and she seemed to drop about ten of them into a teacup. “He fell in love with me after only one day. We woke a judge in the middle of the night to marry us. And my soldier left in the morning. His family was wealthy. They were furious. I can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t want my son to marry an actress.” She poured tea into the cup of sugar, and brought the sickening brew to me. I set the saucer on the knee that didn’t have a hat on it.

  “So I made do,” she continued, “taking whatever work there was. I was paid by a horse thief to play the part of a reverend’s wife one afternoon. He had me take a Bible, with saws hidden in the pages, to his partner in crime who was cooling his heels in jail. I was so convincing, no one even suspected me when he cut his way out. Oh, and maybe you heard of Dizzy Daisy, who thieved on the midway? Watch out for Dizzy Daisy? No? I would pretend to faint from the heat, and the gentlemen who caught me would be relieved of their wallets and watches.”

  “You must’ve done a swift business,” I said, studying the pretty swoop of the gold handle of the teacup.

  “Not really,” she said. She cut through a coconut cake with a silver-handled knife. “I got my money from yellow fever. My soldier died from it.”

  “Oh, Phoebe,” I said.

  “And the family paid me well to go away,” she said. She picked up a flake of coconut and put it on her tongue. “They paid me to not have his name anymore. They paid me not to wear black and not to grieve. They paid me not to be a widow. And so I don’t grieve, and I’m not a widow.” She held out to me my slice of cake, and when I went to take the plate, my hat tumbled from my knee. I sat there, holding the saucer on my one knee with my one hand, and the cake plate on my other knee with my other hand. But I wasn’t hungry for cake or thirsty for tea, so it didn’t much matter that I couldn’t lift a finger.

  As a cuckoo clock clucked the hour, its little doors snapping open and shut, Phoebe said, “So I guess my summer was complicated too.”

  I told Phoebe of my own loss, and I think she took some comfort in it, in knowing that love and death had touched us both. The polite state of shock she’d seemed to be in as she’d served the cake and tea began to lift, and it was just us again, like always before, Ferret and Feeb, backstage at the Empress. We moved to the music room and sat slouched on the sofa, her arms wrapped around mine, her cheek on my shoulder.

  “I’ll be Madam Seymour,” she said, thrilling to my scheme. “Madam Seymour sees more.”

  • • •

  THE WAKEFIELD HOUSE, even though so far up the hill, had a telephone now. I called the house from Rosie’s den. I spoke to Pearl about Madam Seymour.

  “I’ve been to every parlor in the city,” I said. “Madam Seymour’s the finest.”

  “I’ll see what Billy says,” Pearl said. “I’ll ask him this evening over brandy.”

  “No,” I said. “Tonight must be the séance. Madam Seymour is impatient. She says Cecily needs us there. All of us. She needs all her friends with her.” Pearl said nothing. I listened for her voice in the crackling of noise on the line. I knew this wouldn’t work, I thought. My heart sped, my stomach turned. We’d failed. Just help us, I wanted to plead. Instead, I said, “Pearl? Don’t you believe in Cecily’s ghost? Has this all been a fraud? Pearl? Tell me. Has this all been a fraud?”

  Pearl said, “I’ll ring back in an hour.”

  And in an hour she called with an invitation to summon ghosts in the parlor. But Wakefield was not happy, she said, and he’d have no part in it. “I had to beg him, Ferret,” she said. “I broke down in tears.”

  By evening, we had rented a coach and driver, and had gathered our friends. August ran a stick of charcoal around Phoebe’s eyes, painting exotic sweeps. He plummed her lips purple with some kind of rouge and he got her lashes to sparkle with silvery dust. She wore a lace shawl over her head. The six of us crammed ourselves into the coach, with August, Phoebe, and me sharing one bench. Across from us, Rosie and Mrs. Margaret took up all of a seat, so Josephine sat on Rosie’s lap.

  The weather worsened, growing as wet and cold as it had on the day of Cecily’s funeral. The sky was just as stark-white. Maybe we were the ones who weren’t real, caught up in a dead woman’s dream.

  Mrs. Margaret had given me the key to the secret room, and I held it tight in my fist. I was going to the house to open a door. It kept me anchored, this piece of iron.

  • • •

  WHEN WE ARRIVED, Pearl ushered us into the parlor, the same parlor where Cecily had laid in her open-lidded coffin on the day of her memorial. Servants rushed in and out, not only with extra chairs to bring to the table but with decanters of wine and cut glass bowls of candied fruit. They brought in cakes and pies and plates of marrow on toast. They brought us mutton puffs, boiled sweetbreads, and oysters wrapped in bacon. “This was the best we could do on short notice,” said the head cook, a stout woman they called Lady, as she stood in the parlor and worried.

  “You shouldn’t have brought out anything at all,” Pearl said, scratching at the back of her head. “This isn’t a party.”

  Rosie popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and insisted the servants sit with us. “Cecily needs her people,” he said. The evening was like Christmas, with its snow at the window and the servants carrying in suet pudding and macaroon custard. With some coaxing the maids and the butlers, and even old Morearty, consented to a splash of the wine. Pearl stood at the doorway, gnawing a thumbnail, refusing all drink.

  Phoebe, as Madam Seymour, moved around the room with her eyes shut, wiggling her fingers in the air in front of her face like she was feeling for cobwebs in her path. “There is a room that is locked,” she said, in an accent thick with fraud. “Zere eees a vroom zat eees lok-ka-da.”

  Pearl stepped forward. “Yes,” she said, tilting her head. “At the top of the stairs. There’s a room.” I felt a pang of guilt seeing Pearl so curious. I nearly stepped forward to confess, to hold the key out to her. Pearl’s deception—her possession, her letters—seemed somehow less dishonest than mine. This burlesque of ours, this séance, seemed a crooked act. Poor, gentle Pearl had only wanted connection. In my foolishness, I started to speak, to apologize for all of us, for drinking and dancing on Cecily’s grave. But Mrs. Margaret elbowed me in the ribs and nodded her head, happy to see Pearl so easily fooled.

  “Doxie’s birthday’s in April,” Mrs. Margaret whispered in my ear. “I didn’t think I’d get to spend it with her.” She began to weep a little and held her handkerchief to her eye.

  “Don’t eat the calf in the cow’s belly,” I said. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  Madam Seymour opened and closed her hands. “Someone has the key in their fist,” she said. Some-vun az ze key in zere vist.

  Everyone held their hands out, palms up, even all the servants. They all looked around, looking for the hand with the key. “Ferret,” Pearl said.

  Pearl snatched the key from my hand and walked quickly to the stairs. We all followed, and we surrounded her in the narrow hall. The key fit through the keyhole, but it would only jiggle around in the lock, and the knob wouldn’t turn. She tried and tried, until finally Morearty stepped forward to take the key from her. “The locks in the house can be fussy,” he said. He put the key in and looked up and off, as if divining his way through the lock’s twists and turns. We stilled our breaths and waited.

  When it became clear that the old man could not unlock the door either, Rosie took him gently by the shoulders and led him out of the way. We all suspected what Rosie was up to as he pressed his palms against the door, t
esting for give. We stepped back, to allow him room. He rammed into the door, leading with his shoulder, shaking the whole house, it seemed. A picture fell off the wall. A hall lamp flickered and went out. But the door didn’t open. Rosie struck again, this time harder, knocking all breath from his lungs with a loud oomph. He slammed into the door a few more times, until he was clearly in great pain, and Josephine came forward to beg him to stop.

  “Is the door bricked up, for God’s sake?” Rosie said.

  I slipped away from the others and into Doxie’s room. The room was dark, and her crib was empty. I walked to the window and looked out into the backyard, and the gardens, where the cyclone had spun Cecily up from the ground and into the rosebushes. At the edge of the yard was a child’s house I hadn’t noticed before, a playhouse painted bright blue, like a box of sky against the bone-gray of winter. A light was on inside.

  • • •

  WHEN WE’D GIVEN UP on the door, we all returned to the parlor where Madam Seymour suddenly doubled over, clutching at her womb. “The child,” she said. “Where’s the child?”

  “She’s playing with the maid’s little girl downstairs,” Pearl said.

  “Fetch her,” the psychic said. “Cecily wants her among us.”

  Pearl began gnawing at her thumbnail again. “I don’t think that . . .”

  Madam Seymour bellowed as if gutshot, bending over even more. “Pleeeeeease,” she said, with a low growl. Pearl rushed to the back stairs that led to the servants’ quarters.

  While she was gone, I walked down the hall to the conservatory that led out into the garden. I stepped through the French doors and followed a snow-dusted lane of stone. When I reached the playhouse, I ducked my head around the gingerbread woodwork of the doorway’s eaves to let myself in. Wakefield, in a fur coat, sat hunched over a carpentry bench, the top of it scattered with the wheels and mechanisms of windup toys and trains. The room had a small hearth, and the little bit of heat from its fire struggled against the bitter cold. I closed the door behind me, and Wakefield looked up slowly, unsurprised by the noise.