The Swan Gondola (11 page)

“Hm,” Cecily said, shrugging, flicking her cigarette into the lagoon. “What a terrible way to go.” She kept her eyes on the water, and I worried I'd offended her by pointing out the inaccuracies of her horror show. But then I suspected she was just disappointed by the historical account. She preferred the queen going to the guillotine in a fancy dress and powdered wig.

Alonzo returned to the dock, a little too soon, I thought. I helped pull the gondola up and assisted the ladies from the boat. Pearl blushed again, nodding her good-byes. She stepped up the stairs as Cecily lingered with me a moment.

“She leaves work every night at five,” Cecily said, making her soft voice even softer, taking three cigarettes from the pack I held open. I hadn't noticed the little purse hanging from a chain at her side, attached to her belt. She clicked open its octopus-shaped clasp, and dropped the cigarettes inside. “They have a sandwich counter right there at the store. Would it kill you to stop by there sometime and treat her to a cup of coffee,
Ferret
?” She sneered my name, but in a teasing way, a flirtation that made me blush like Pearl. “You two can talk yourselves silly about Marie Antoinette's bedroom slippers.”

Cecily winked and left my side, and I sensed from the way she moved up the steps, drifting really, up toward the promenade, that she knew I kept watching. She too was playing the part of a carefree summer lover, moving slowly, humming, looking up and around, pretending to not know any eyes were on her. But I loved that she knew I couldn't look away.

November 10, 1898

Dear Cecily,

I only ever meant to write you once. It had been cold in the clouds, and I'd stayed at the bottom of the basket, huddled in on myself. I couldn't bear to stand up and look down. So all I saw was sky, even as the balloon plummeted. I'd thought that the first rattling scrape and tear of the wicker came from running aground on a cloud of ice.

I had tucked that postcard in my suit pocket, to have it next to my heart as I died.

And up in that balloon, the sense of doom made me
long
to crash. It would put an end to my fear. I romanced the idea of it, of death, waltzing it around and around in my head. But now here, in a house, broken, teetering, a couple of old-lady angels never more than a few steps away, I want to live. I want to live forever so I can always mourn losing you.

I never leave the music parlor. I sit here every day, writing you letter after letter. And Miss Emmaline posts them all for me, each one addressed to your house at the lake. It's cruel, I suppose. Everyone there loved you so. Are these letters even opened? Does someone read them? Does Wakefield? And if he does, does every word kill him a little?

Maybe Emmaline doesn't send my letters at all. Maybe she opens them, reads them, keeps them tied with a ribbon. I've been thinking of myself as a guest in this house. A hobbled charity case. But maybe I'm being held captive. Maybe I'm here against my own will. Flood, drought, freeze, bugs—all these plagues turn these farmers daft. Whole towns of people, gone mad from the sound of the wind, can hear God's voice in a turtledove. I've heard tell of a cult of farmers along the bone-dry Dismal River who took to worshipping the very insects that ravaged their crops, mimicking the chirp and posture of grasshoppers in nightly rituals, their eyes flickering yellow in the light of the bonfires.

Farmers, daft and otherwise, and the people from town—they come to sit with me. They only want to be neighborly, Miss Hester says. They bring me prayers and liquor. Sometimes they linger, like they're death watching at the side of a corpse, waiting for the undertaker. I write you letters, and they knit or stitch. A man can go batty from the needlepointing, the sound of that needle punching fabric and the soft zip of the thread.
Pop, thip, ffffwiiiip, pop, thip, fffffwiiiip,
over and over, and slow.

And though they bring me things, they also sneak things away. I didn't notice at first. If I had a loose thread at a seam of my pajamas, somebody would snap it off, and off they'd go with it. If an eyelash fell on my cheek, they picked it up with a fingertip. They scratched their fingers against my cast and carried off flecks of plaster beneath their fingernails. And they brought things of their own just for me to touch—a doll, a lock, a key, a ring, a Bible, a brush, a lily.

They don't see me as someone struck with bad luck and knocked from the sky. They see me as a man with a magical knack for staying alive. Around here, I'm the priest who fell from the heavens and lived.

Still yours,

Ferret

T
HE MORNING AFTER
the swan gondola ride, I sent Cecily a souvenir postcard. I didn't have her address, but it didn't matter. Now that I knew she rummaged nightly through the post office trash for the unsent mail, I simply dropped it into a mailbox on the Grand Court, without postage.

I'd spent much of the morning trying to decide what to say. And I was stalled right off by the greeting—I still didn't know how to spell her name.
Dear Marie Antoinette
, I ended up writing.
This is Ferret. I want us to be alone.

Just as the card left my fingers and fell into the slot, I realized with a thump in my chest that I wanted it back. I should've written
together
 . . .
I want us to be alone together.

•   •   •

W
HEN THE MIDWAY OPENED,
I
hurried to the doll hospital to collect Oscar. In the back room of the toy shop the shelves lining the walls were stocked with apothecary jars, some full of arms, some full of legs. One jar held bisque heads fractured and cracked; another jar was full of eyeballs. A dresser drawer spilled over with torn dresses and tiny petticoats. Miss Havelock, the young woman at the workbench, bought broken dolls from urchins, she'd explained, to harvest all the parts, and in turn she attached those parts—repaired with papier-mâché and mucilage—to the broken dolls of the daughters of the rich.

But her swiftest business in those first few days of the Fair had been the fashioning of wigs. Girls cut at their own goldilocks and brought the clippings to the hospital, in little silk purses, so Miss Havelock could sew and braid the snipped curls into wigs for the girls' favorite dolls. Miss Havelock herself had hair so fine and light—the white of the cotton of milkweed—you could see right through to the bright pink of her scalp.

“Have you ever heard him speak?” Miss Havelock said. At first I gave her comment no thought, as I was stunned by the sight of my dummy. Oscar looked better than I'd ever seen him. I'd bought him from a peddler's cart on Howard Street some time before, and though I'd polished him with oil and oiled his hinges and had restrung the rubber nerves of his fingers and joints, he'd always had the haggard look of something secondhand. But now I could swear his dead eyes looked right in mine.

“Speak?” I said.

Miss Havelock nodded like people nod when they know something you don't—quick and certain, her lips puckered primly. She turned his head to reveal a new string in his neck next to the old one. “Give it a yank,” she said.

I did. “What do you wish me to do?” he said. He spoke in perfect English, sounding nothing at all like the Oscar I knew. It was a preacher's voice, high-pitched but with a spark of fire and brimstone.

Though I knew many of the little tricks and gimmicks inside his hollow chest, all the switches and levers that brought his magic to life, I'd never been inside his head. I didn't even know of any way to jimmy my way in. I didn't see a single hinge or seam on his skull.

I gave the string another yank and he said something else. “Why should I do this for you?”

I pulled the string again, at which point he started to repeat himself. “That's all he'll say,” she said. “He has a phonograph in his head, but it's small.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “I didn't put it there.”

I nearly didn't believe her. How, in all my many performances, had I never jostled a single word out of him? I paid for the repairs and shrugged a shoulder.

And I'd barely taken a step onto the midway before fairgoers were begging for a joke. It was as if Oscar's new spirit possessed
me
, as if I were the one with a new string in my neck. With a strut and a shuffle I worked the crowd and they emptied their pockets into mine. My every cheap, creaky joke was suddenly worth a fortune. And Oscar taught me all kinds of new tricks, his skeleton of wood and rubber an extension of my own bones and muscles. My hand in his back, I fiddled with buttons that hadn't worked before. He shot a flame from a fingertip, plucked a paper rose from the nose of a girl. He set a windup sparrow free from under his hat. And from his sleeve he pulled his heart, a little pillow of silk. Oscar would invite a pretty lady to press the center of it, and when she did, the heart would throb and release a puff of cherry blossom perfume.

Up his other sleeve was a marionette I'd not met before, a sad little mister no bigger than a clothespin. With the flick of a switch, the puppet dropped from a hollow in his arm and danced a jig at the end of its strings. Oscar was making the puppet tell jokes of its own when a horseless carriage came sputtering up to brake right next to us.

Montgomery Ward, the company that sold a horseless carriage in its catalogs, had been giving the fairgoers rides in one up and down the midway all afternoon, but the driver never stopped whenever he neared me. As a matter of fact, he would never even slow, and I'd had to jump out of his way a time or two, as if he seemed set on running me over.

But this wasn't the carriage from the catalog. I'd never seen this automobile before or this driver.

The man steered with one gloved hand and wore a golfer's hat of red-and-green plaid. His driving goggles turned his face insect, and the woman next to him looked just as buggy. She wore goggles too and a broad-brimmed white hat tethered to her head with a bloodred scarf she knotted beneath her chin. A piglet, with a pink ribbon around its neck, wriggled in her arms, rustling all the ruffles of her white dress.

At first they said nothing when they parked at my side, so I went on with my act. I gave them the best I had. I showed off all Oscar's new tricks, but nothing moved them. They kept their goggles on, and they eyed me like scientists, like I was a specimen on a slide. They wouldn't laugh, they wouldn't smile. I felt unnerved by their scrutiny and concluded they didn't want jokes or magic. So I would offer them the wizard's voice. I leaned forward, easing Oscar closer to the man in the auto. I pulled the string to his phonograph.

“What do you wish me to do?” Oscar said. “Why should I do this for you?”

With that, the man turned slowly to face the woman at his side. Though their eyes were still hidden by the goggles, I could see this glance was somehow meaningful. The woman lowered her face, looking down and off as if remorseful, and the man lowered his face too. I pulled the string again twice.

“What do you wish me to do? Why should I do this for you?”

The man stuck his gloved hand into his coat and pulled from it a wallet that bulged and bent. He took from it some bills, then offered forth, with his ungloved hand, a shocking sum.

More shocking than the sum was the hand itself. The bills were held between two fingers of metal, the whole hand a skeleton of steel bones, each finger joint on a minuscule hinge. Whoever had crafted the hand had added a few prettified flourishes of art here and there. A fleur-de-lis had been cut into the center of the metal palm, and a vine of roses scrolled, engraved, in a wreath all around his silvery wrist.

I practically curtsied at the sight of the cash. “I thank you ever so much, sir,” I said, faking the gestures of a grateful beggar. All my deep disdain for the rich eased for a minute, and I allowed myself my greed. I was happy to bow and scrape and shuffle if it meant spending it all on Cecily, on a month's worth of moonlit rides in the swan gondola and on bottle after bottle of the finest wines and box after box of chocolates.

But as I reached for the money, the man's steel fingers snapped back like the spring of a mousetrap. “I'm not tipping you,” he said. “I'm
buying
your doll.”

“Oh,” I said. I pulled my hand back and brought it to my mouth to gnaw on my thumbnail. I considered the offer for only a moment. With the money the man held out, I could've easily bought a new dummy, a new suit for myself, and a new hat, and still wooed Cecily, but what kind of act would I have had without Oscar? Mr. Crowe had insisted no dummy was expendable. “As far as the audience goes, the dummy's the brains of the act,” he had told me many times. “The audience would be happier if you weren't there at all.” And besides, I was deeply fond of the doll. He had a character all his own. “Well, I'm sorry, it's not for sale,” I said. “This is my act. I can't sell Oscar.”

The woman then pushed her goggles off her eyes and onto her forehead. Her piglet squealed like he'd been pinched. The man brought his metal hand back to his wallet, and when he held it out to me again, there was even more money—a whole summer on the swan gondola, with a string quartet on the dock, serenading us every night.

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said. I studied that hand and ran my eyes along his coat sleeve, estimating where the fake arm ended and the real one began.

After a moment he nodded, and he returned the money to his wallet. He then held out a calling card. “If you change your mind,” he said, “let me know.”

Wm. Wakefield
was all that was written on the card. I'd seen his name all around the Fair, and his signature with all its sharp points.

“I think I might've heard of you,” I said.

“You might've,” he said, as he fussed with the automobile's devices before jerking forward and scooting on along. The woman with Wakefield looked back as they drove away, and she tossed some dollar bills into the air behind her. I skipped forward, and I swatted at those bills, grabbing each one before it fell to the dirt.

•   •   •

A
S THE SUN WAS SETTING,
August approached me with not a single bottle of tonic in his bag. He put the cigarette he was smoking to my lips for a puff. “That cigarette's the only potion I have left,” he said. “I've made a killing on my cures.” The cigarette tasted like strong tea sipped from a gas pipe. As I coughed, squinting, handing it back to him, he explained it was for the treatment of asthma. “It's quite medicinal,” he said, smoking it himself and inhaling deep like it was a gulp of spring breeze. “Crushed plantain leaves and belladonna,” he said. “Some saltpeter.”

The Chamber of Horrors wouldn't close for another half hour or so, so I let August lead me to the Chinese Village. August was feeling successful and full of luck. With a wiggle of his fingers, he flaunted his ring: a piece of wire he had twisted around a tiny, naked, porcelain baby. “The little doll was my prize in a piece of king's cake at the New Orleans café, up the way there,” he said. “I chipped my back tooth on it, but I rarely win the prize in anything. So now I wear it for luck. And my luck is your luck, my dear.”

We stepped past the joss house and through the rock garden to a silk curtain embroidered with cranes in flight. A young man stood at the curtain dressed like a barkeep, in a slick satin vest that burned with the pattern of bright-red dragons in a tussle. He plucked August's cigarette from his fingers with a sneer. “Smoke makes the fighters sick,” he said, as he lifted the curtain to allow us entry.

The den was crowded and noisy, everyone huddled around a low table. From the sound of the cheering and the groaning, some sort of match had been won and lost. But I couldn't see what any of them were looking at. When I'd been only as tall as a man's pants pocket, I could have a good evening of theft by working the cockfights and dogfights, weaving in and out among men's legs, lifting their wallets and watches and coin purses as they stood mesmerized by the brutality, knocking me aside with their knees, yelling their lungs sore at the battling, bloody creatures. I had never been able to stomach it, so it had been particularly sweet spending the money that otherwise would have kept the fights going all night.

Now at the back of the crowd I stood on my tiptoes to see the last of a fight between insects. So these were the cricket fights frequented by the automaton. It wasn't unlike a dogfight in practice—creature against creature—but on a much smaller, less violent scale. In a small wicker basket atop a table, one cricket kicked at another as it curled in on itself. When the fight was declared over, a tall Chinese woman dressed in a shirtwaist and long black skirt stepped forward to collect her bug. She imprisoned it in a tiny bamboo cage.

No sooner had the one wrestling match ended than another began. That's when I saw the automaton at the center of the crowd, sitting on her knees right at the table, having changed from her costume, her hair braided and pinned, her makeup rubbed away. She dropped some coins into a basket that a man dangled from the end of a long stick as he worked his way through the pack of gamblers.

A cricket was then passed around in a teacup through the crowd, for appraisal by all. The automaton held one lens of a pince-nez up to her good eye, and she examined the insect before passing the cup to the next gambler.

When the teacup reached us, August held his ear to it. “The ones that chirp the loudest,” he told me, “are the ones that wrestle the hardest.”

I couldn't take my eyes off the automaton. When I had seen her before, the very sight of her sent a shiver through me; I felt embarrassed, like a boy tripped by a bully. But seeing her here, with her head lowered, as if in prayer, crushed by the crowd but alone, I felt just a pinch of affection for her. Truth be told, I was glad Cecily had someone to look after her so fiercely.

Once the crickets had been examined by the crowd, they were weighed on an apothecary's scale, then tossed into the basket on the low table. The men and women leaned forward to watch and shout. The crickets' wranglers coaxed the insects forth by tapping them with straws, but all the bugs would do was pace the periphery of their boxing ring. They engaged in one little scuffle before leaping away from each other. “They should've put a lady cricket in with them last night,” August said. “It makes the boys bloodthirsty.” I became so engaged with the ruckus, I was startled when the fight ended before it had even really begun. And it was only then I discovered the automaton had slipped from the room unseen.