“Absolutely nothing, until we returned to Ella Winnows,” Pearl said. It had been in Ella Winnows’s parlor that I’d watched Pearl, possessed, compose a letter from Cecily on that gray day in February. And it was in that parlor again that Cecily wrote, only a few weeks before Pearl left Wakefield. “I’m sure it was Cecily,” Pearl said. “Ella Winnows had a slate. We stared at the slate for the longest while. It was only when Ella picked the slate up and went to put it away that I saw the words. They appeared there suddenly. ‘Let Dorothy go to the City of Emeralds,’ it said. It couldn’t have been a trick, Ferret. Ella Winnows didn’t know that Doxie’s real name was Dorothy. I don’t think so, anyway. I don’t think I would’ve ever told her such a thing. And she certainly couldn’t have known about the Emerald Cathedral. It was our Cecily, Ferret. It was our Cecily, and she was setting me straight, bless her heart.”
“Bless her heart,” I mumbled, like a muttered prayer. I wondered what Mrs. Margaret would have to say about that slate. I would’ve been just as happy to never see the old automaton again, but I wanted Doxie to someday learn all she could about her mother. Mrs. Margaret would have many stories that I didn’t know. And I wanted to hear them too.
• • •
AT THE STATION, Pearl stood on the platform with her bags and trunks, and we all looked up along the tracks, hoping to see the train’s lamp cut through the fog. The train was late, and it grew later and later, with no whistle in earshot.
We’d arrived at the station late ourselves, and we’d been so relieved to find we hadn’t missed the train, we’d become giddy. We’d had a teary but cheerful farewell, with kisses and promises to write and visit, certain the train would be along in only a minute, to steal Pearl away to her new life and to leave us to ours.
It was only Eulalie and me with Pearl, Doxie in my arms, and the train’s absence dragged on. We could think of no conversation. Every tick of the watch in my pocket made us tired and reminded us of the silence we shared. And we couldn’t distract ourselves by playing with Doxie, as she’d fallen asleep, her head on my shoulder. I wanted to concentrate only on the weight of her against me, and her hot puffs of breath against the skin of my neck.
“She gets kind of heavy, doesn’t she?” I whispered.
“She’ll get lighter,” Pearl said. “You’ll get used to carrying her.”
Finally Pearl sat down on one of her trunks, slapping her bouquet across her knees. Eulalie had tied together the last of the flowers for Pearl—some stems of echinacea and black-eyed Susans, and some sprigs of dill. “You should go,” she told us. “Really, there’s no need for us all to wait. I’m perfectly fine. You should go home.”
“Oh,” I said.
I was about to say, Are you sure? when Eulalie said, “Absolutely not. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”
“Oh, please don’t,” Pearl said. She began to cry again, and she took her handkerchief from the pocket of her jacket to dab at her nose. “Please go. I insist. It’ll be easier for me. I can’t go through another good-bye. I’m terrible with good-byes to begin with.”
Eulalie sat next to Pearl on the trunk. “You’ll have to suffer us, my dear,” she said. “We’re not leaving you alone at the station, for God’s sake. We’re family, and family waits. Right, Ferret?” She looked at me askance, as if she sensed I was eager to go. And I was. I couldn’t feel certain that Pearl had left us all behind until she was no longer in my sight.
“We wouldn’t even think of leaving you here alone, Pearl,” I said.
And so we waited the two hours it took. Doxie grew fussy, and an old woman alone on a bench nearby brought us a naked china doll so small it fit in Doxie’s hand. Much of it fit in her mouth too. I stuck my finger in to scoop the doll out, and she only fussed more when I refused to return it to her. She hadn’t been at all close to choking—the gangly doll wouldn’t have fit down her gullet—but I nonetheless pictured it clearly. I suspected I’d spend the rest of my life seeing the threat in seemingly harmless things.
When we finally heard the train’s clattering wheels, we practically danced, bouncing on our heels, clapping our hands. Eulalie plucked away stray petals from Pearl’s jacket and skirt, and Pearl raised the bouquet and waved it in the air toward the train, as if she wasn’t about to leave but rather welcoming a lover arriving.
Our last minutes together were a flurry of kisses and sweet nothings. We made yet more promises we wouldn’t likely keep, but in the moment they seemed the deepest of oaths. We were so happy and sad, so swept up, it seemed everything could change in a blink. Pearl might not leave, Doxie might not stay, every thread of our lives only ether.
When Pearl leaned in toward Doxie for one last kiss, Doxie reached for Pearl, and cried and begged, clutching at her collar. Doxie tried to climb from my arms and into Pearl’s, and I wasn’t sure what to do. To Doxie’s frustration, I only held her tighter.
Pearl pressed her cheek to Doxie’s forehead. “You’ll always be mine,” she whispered. “You belong to all of us.” She then stepped away, blew us a kiss, and got on the train as a porter gathered her trunks. Once she was inside, we didn’t see her again. She didn’t sit at a window to watch us, but we stayed on the platform nonetheless, looking after the train until we couldn’t see it at all. Its racket and whistle faded away, Doxie cried herself to sleep in my arms, and we were left with the quiet of the prairie. We could hear the wings of the wood thrush beating in the dry wheat in the field near the station.
The day felt mercifully wasted away, and we resolved to go home and do nothing. We deserved it, we decided.
I drove the horses, Doxie awake again in Eulalie’s lap. We learned our way around her language, interpreting, figuring out what noises meant what words. I made up a fable on the spot, and it seemed to soothe her. It was the first chapter of many tales I would tell her, about a farm girl named Doxie Skerritt, and her mother who waltzed in the air, and a balloon that fell with a wizard in it, and a one-eyed witch that saw everything. In these early years, the story of her mother would be a wonder tale, solely for her pleasure, all the heartaches and nightmares left out.
Acknowledgments
My many, many thanks to the people of Riverhead, especially Sarah Stein, my editor, who contributed heroically to the care and feeding of these characters. Alice Tasman, my agent, is another of my heroes, always expertly guiding the way. Rodney Rahl, meanwhile, is my angel, offering support, inspiration, patience, and humor throughout every step of the process.
Thanks to:
—all the museums, libraries, scholars, and historians (amateur and otherwise) who have worked to preserve and archive Expo materials, including the Omaha Public Library; the Durham Museum; Douglas County Historical Society; Nebraska State Historical Society; University of Nebraska-Lincoln (notably Wendy Katz, Kay Walter, Jaclyn Cruikshank-Vogt, Laura Weakly, and Karin Dalziel, who have developed the new Trans-Mississippi Expo digital archive); and private collectors such as historian Jeffrey Spencer.
—Susan Belasco and the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, including research assistants Sarah Chavez, Anastasia Bierman, Ryan Oberhelman, Danielle Metcalf, and Laura Dimmit.
—Matthew Clouse, for his research on turn-of-the-century health resorts and regimens, and Roxanne Wach, for her research on the mediums and clairvoyants of the period.
Thanks also to the many others who have offered support, insight, and inspiration along the way: Janet Lura, Judy Slater, Kurt Andersen, Lauren Ceran, Kate Bernheimer, John Keenan, Leo Adam Biga, Kathy Patrick, LeAnn Messing, Jessica Regel, emily danforth, Wanda Ewing, Loretta Krause, and Greg Michalson and the exceptional Unbridled Books. And, as always, much love and admiration to my parents, Larry and Donita.
And a special thanks to the booksellers (especially the Bookworm of Omaha) who serve novels and novelists so tirelessly.
Author’s Note
The Omaha World’s Fair,
as depicted in The Swan Gondola, is a fictional approximation of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898. For my interpretation of the event, and of turn-of-the-century Omaha, I relied primarily on the collections of the Omaha Public Library (for which I thank Gary Wasdin, OPL executive director; thanks also to Kyle Porter, Amy Mather, Patrick Esser, Martha Grenzeback, and all the fine librarians and staff members of OPL). I also appreciated the extensive index of newspaper articles compiled by historian David Wells, and I benefitted greatly from reading the 1898 editions of the Omaha Bee via the website of the Library of Congress. Some excellent portraits of nineteenth-century Omaha can be found in A Dirty, Wicked Town by David L. Bristow and Impertinences, a collection of articles by Omaha World-Herald columnist Elia Peattie, edited by Susanne George Bloomfield.
From that foundation of fact, I developed the fiction, shaping the novel and its details around the demands of character and plot. And the narrator brings along his own biases, filtering his portrait of Omaha and its people, rich and poor, through the perspective of a young man who grew up in the alleys. To learn more about the Expo as it actually was, visit http://trans-mississippi.unl.edu for photographs, documents, and Expo publications.
Though some real-life personalities of the time (such as President McKinley and some of the lunch guests at the Pink Heron Hotel) do make appearances in the novel, all the novel’s main characters are imagined. There was a John A. Wakefield who served as the exposition’s secretary, but I know little about him, and the character of William Wakefield is in no way based on him. I simply liked the name; John A. Wakefield’s wife, whom I know even less about—I’ve yet to even stumble across her first name—was one of the Expo’s first archivists, putting together scrapbooks that are still housed in the special collections of the Omaha Public Library.
But long before I became interested in the Expo, I was interested in The Wizard of Oz, and the wizard’s balloon emblazoned with the name of his hometown: Omaha. I grew up in Nebraska and was always curious about the wizard’s humble origins as a ventriloquist’s apprentice (as briefly described in L. Frank Baum’s original novel of 1900). Though The Swan Gondola is not a retelling of the Oz myth, I did consult Baum’s novel frequently, particularly the centennial edition with annotations by Michael Patrick Hearn. Throughout The Swan Gondola are many allusions to Baum’s novel and to the novel’s illustrations by W. W. Denslow.
I’d also like to note: the paragraph from The Female Offender in chapter 21 is a direct quote from the 1897 criminal study by Professor Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero; a line about census figures in chapter 5 is paraphrased from Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition; and chapter 9 features lines from a speech given by John L. Webster during the opening-day ceremonies.
The Swan Gondola Page 42