The Swan Gondola (16 page)

“What things do you see?”

“Well, it's hard to describe.” Her voice, already so low and soft, grew softer and lower. “I see myself, but I'm somewhere else in the room. Like a ghost of myself, haunting only me.” Pearl turned bright red, of course. “There's a spot of indigo in my left iris, and the doctor says it tells of an imperiled ovary.” She whispered that—“imperiled ovary.” And she kept whispering. “He worries my ovaries are afloat inside me. They're
untethered
, was what he said. So he feels that if he can see the damage in my iris that he should be able to correct the iris and therefore correct the damage. The glasses are meant to chase away the little spot of deep blue in the ovary part of my eye.”

“Maybe it's the glasses giving you the dizzy spells,” I said. This iridology didn't seem all that far from August's cure-alls.

Pearl laughed again. “My doctor thinks it's because I don't wear a corset,” she said. “He disapproves of dress reform.” And suddenly, Pearl wished me good night, one foot up on the front steps of a boardinghouse for women—its name, the Juliet, was etched in stone above the doors.

“Can't I buy you your supper?” I said. “A glass of wine and a plate of hash?” I still had hours to worry before that late-night gondola ride.

“But you spent your money on the hankie,” she said.

“Brandeis isn't the only place I have a line of credit, you know,” I said. “A man of my means has debt all around town.”

“You're very sweet to offer, Ferret,” Pearl said, “but Cecily would be furious with me.”

“No, she wouldn't,” I said. “Didn't you hear her on the swan gondola? She wants us to like each other.”

“Don't you know anything? What she really hopes is for us to not like each other at all. I'm sure it would be much easier for everyone if you fell in love with me and I fell in love with you, but that's not going to happen, is it?”

“No?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Tomorrow you'll go to the store and you'll put on your new suit, and you'll go find Cecily, and you'll tell her that Pearl is a perfectly decent girl, but she's just not the girl for you.
There's only one girl for me and that girl is you.
That's what you'll tell her.
I
should be the one writing letters of literary assistance. At least I know how to spell Cecily's name.”

“How do you spell it anyway?” I asked, and she told me. I asked again, to make sure I had it right. And then I spelled it out loud myself. As Pearl headed up the front steps to the door of her building, I said, “I'm sorry about the proposal.”

“What?” she said.

“The proposal of marriage.
Pearl the ocean girl
, or whatever it was. I'm sorry it didn't work out. I hope I wasn't the one who wrote it.”

“But I hope you
were
,” she said. “What a charming coincidence that would be, wouldn't it? If it had been you who'd written that proposal of marriage? And I had rejected it? And then here we were?”

“And if we fell in love after all?” I said. “And got married? It'd be a story we could tell people.”

“The story you'll tell people will be the story of how you met Cecily,” she said. “I'll be that awful extra girl who tagged along on that first gondola ride.
What was her name again, love? Pearl, was it?
” She took off her red glasses, showing off her ocean-blue eyes, as she opened the door. “But I don't mind. I'm much more interesting as the girl who is forgotten.” And with that she slipped inside and away, turning to smoke behind the door's frosted-glass window.

M
Y STOMACH SO IN KNOTS,
I had to nurse one of August's tonics late into the night. Some sort of extract of some sort of weed. “You're only to take a dessertspoonful,” he explained. “Any more than that and it could turn devil on you.” So I only touched my tongue to the wet underside of the cork of the little blue bottle—just for a lick or two, enough to give me a pinch of ease every now and again.

I waited and waited alone on the heart-shaped bench of the swan gondola. Alonzo the gondolier had jilted me too. The lights of the Fair had been doused for hours, it seemed. And the later it got, the more I lost my mind. When I checked my watch, I could've sworn the hands were working their way counterclockwise. A few minutes later I realized the watch had quit altogether, and wouldn't wind up, so I plunked it overboard.

I blamed my nerves on the nerve tonic and pitched the bottle too. I shouldn't be frustrated with Cecily, I thought. I should
want
Cecily to be cautious, after all. A mother, alone, with a little one, had no choice but to step lightly.

But when I did hear her steps, at long last, they weren't light at all. They weren't even hers, they were mine; she clumped along in the shoes I'd put on her feet. I recognized the tap of the cobbler's nail against the brick. I'd often cussed those shoes and their noise, but just now it seemed I'd never heard a prettier tune.

I leaped from the bench. I ran up the stairs from the dock to the promenade. “Can I help you this time?” I said, walking up to Cecily, who gently rocked the carpetbag at her side.

“Please,” she said.

I took the bag and looked in on Doxie. As she slept, she smacked her lips. Her little lashes fluttered with a dream.

“What do you suppose she's dreaming about?” I said.

“Me,” she said. “I'm all the poor little urchin's got.” She folded her hands in prayer and fluttered her own lashes, mocking sincerity. She then elbowed me in the ribs. I didn't tell her yet about my own orphanhood. But I couldn't help but wonder what my life would have been like had my mother cared enough to keep me near. Snuck around in a carpetbag seemed a fate that would have suited me well. I'd been born as scrawny as a wet rat, and not much heavier—I would've made an excellent incubator baby.

“I can't fault her,” I said. “I might be dreaming about you right now myself. Are you really here, looking as beautiful as that?”

Cecily smiled and tugged up at the fabric of her skirt, lifting the bottom of it above the tops of her shoes. My shoes. She'd cleaned off the mud, and wore a pair of wool socks to keep her feet from swimming in them. She did a little jig. “I'm stealing the shoes for good,” she said. “Walking right off with them. I like how they look.” They were nothing but calfskin, but they suited Cecily. She most often dressed like no one else. Her skirt, shiny and striped in purple and pink, seemed the same fabric as the cushions in an ice cream parlor. And around her waist was a belt of her own invention—the buckle was a gilt-framed miniature of a blue wasp that had once hung on a wall.

I told Cecily there'd be no gondolier to row us through the lagoon, but she said she was just as happy to simply sit. I helped her into the swan gondola, and when we all went to the bench at the back, the front of the boat seemed to lift, like the swan was waking and about to stretch its bent neck.

Cecily took Doxie from the bottom of the bag, and the baby squealed a little, her voice skipping across the still water. Doxie drifted back to sleep, my finger in her grip. I ran my thumb over the soft skin of her knuckles. Cecily said, “I wouldn't have blamed you if you'd got tired of waiting for us tonight.” Then she said, “I think I was half hoping I'd be too late.”

I leaned in close. “Why would you half hope for something like that?” I said.

“Because I want nothing to do with you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“You're breaking my heart,” I whispered back. I pushed a lock of her hair aside so that I could kiss her ear. She let me. I then unbuttoned a button of her lace collar, and I kissed her throat. She put her hand to my chest, to feel my fast heart, and she smiled at its telltale rattling around. “I'm worried,” she said.

I put my hand over her hand on my chest. “About what?”

“That your heart's going to give out.”

“Let it,” I said.

Cecily ran her thumb over a drop of perspiration on Doxie's forehead, wiping it away as it rolled toward her eye. Doxie's pale hair was dark with sweat, the curls matted to her skin.

“Oh,” I said, remembering the handkerchief. I took the box from beneath the bench, and I undid the ribbon for her, and opened the lid. “I saw Pearl today,” I said. “Like I promised. She set me right on the spelling of your name. I almost bought you a hankie with an
S
on it.”

“You just can't stop talking about Pearl, can you?” she said, her voice light. She only glanced at the embroidered initial before plucking the hankie away from the tissue paper to dab Doxie's sweaty head.

“Sure I can,” I said. “Watch me.”

She touched the hankie to her own forehead. Then she held it to her throat. She said, “Does this town
always
suffocate everybody to death?”

“Every summer,” I said. “No survivors.”

“I wouldn't have come out to meet you at all,” she said, “but it was too hot in our room. She wouldn't sleep.” She moved Doxie into my arms, and I sat bolt upright, afraid of even letting the baby's head loll an inch. It seemed that the slightest bit of jostling and her baby bird bones would crack. I'd not held many babies in my life, but I became expert in an instant. Doxie whimpered a little, then quieted as I situated her head softly in the crook of my arm. I tugged her collar down from her chin so she could breathe easy. “Walk me home?” she said.

“Already?” I said.

“It's not a short walk,” she said.

The fairgrounds were never empty, not even in the hours past midnight. Workers patched cracks and hammered and pasted and untangled wires. They touched up the paint on columns and statues, and watered the flowers. Maybe it took a whole army of workers working late to keep the walls and angels' wings from falling in.

For all I knew, putting Doxie in my arms was part of a plot to stop me from asking Cecily questions. I lagged, afraid of tripping over my own feet. I tried to keep my stride smooth so as not to bounce the baby awake. And we fell far behind Cecily, who seemed to have become oblivious to us, as she walked ahead at a wicked pace, swinging the carpetbag at her side.

The Fair's architects, perhaps with an eye toward mystery and intrigue and midnight gondola rides stolen across the lagoon, had riddled the tall walls with secret doors and gates—or maybe they just wanted the workers sneaking in and out, so the Fair could seem maintained by magic. We rats of the underground had already found many of the secret entrances. Cecily pushed at the door concealed behind a trellis of grapevine. We then walked across the lot, and into the dark streets.

Cecily got so far ahead, into the shadows, I worried I'd lose her. But I didn't want to call out and risk waking Doxie. It wasn't that the girl needed sleep—she slept all the time, for hours and hours in the incubator. I kept quiet because I simply liked the idea of her so peaceful in my arms. And I was hypnotized watching her as I cradled and rocked her. Doxie was an artist of sleep. A master at it. A sleeping beauty. A somnambulist. With such plump, pink cheeks, how could anyone but a great actress convince the fairgoers she was a premature infant, at risk of breathing her last? They all gathered around her glass bassinet to watch her live another minute, then another minute more.

•   •   •

C
ECILY WAS LIVING
in a fine-looking boardinghouse of two floors, with a long porch and a whitewashed fence, in a neighborhood that slept through the night, unlike my own, which rattled with thieves and drunkards in its alleys at any hour. But the Silk & Sawdust Players had infested the place, building nests of costumes and props. Hanging from the branches of the tree in the yard were cages of trained birds. The empty back and front of a two-man horse costume was deflated on the lawn, as if the horse had sloughed off its skin and left it behind. The skeleton of an old-fashioned hoopskirt sat near the rosebushes.

Cecily waited for me at the front gate. “We call it the
pensione
,” Cecily said, trilling the word in a foreign way, even fluttering her lashes. “It means ‘hotel' in Italian, I think.”

There were actors and actresses, some sleeping, some sleepless, on the porch, on the porch roof, on the grass, some smoking, some drinking, some tossing lit firecrackers, some getting firecrackers tossed at them.

“Ol' Dox has to work tomorrow in the live-baby exhibit,” Cecily said, taking the girl from my arms. “It's easy money, so I hate to have her miss another day. But I'm guessing
I
have the day off now. The Chamber of Horrors is still smoldering.” I kissed the baby's forehead, and Cecily's cheek, and we made plans to meet in front of the incubator exhibit at eleven in the morning. Cecily and I would spend the day together.

“Now run away quick,” Cecily said. “Mrs. Margaret might still be awake.” She reached up to pull at a curl at my forehead and to let it spring back. “And she
sure
don't like the looks of you.” Cecily then turned and left me, and I could have spent hours watching her with her baby, and listening to the lullaby she hummed. She carried Doxie with one arm, as if the child weighed no more than a bag of sugar.

•   •   •

I
LEFT
O
SCAR
at the Empress the next morning. On my way to the Fair by streetcar, in my freshly tailored lilac suit from Brandeis, I rolled up the trouser cuffs an inch or two more to show off the snakeskin slippers I'd got on credit to go with the suit. I wore a necktie of green silk and a straw boater with a yellow hatband. The streetcar passed so close to a garden wall, I was able to reach out and pluck a pink-lipped snapdragon from a pot, and I stuck its stem behind my ear.

When I got to the incubator exhibit, Doxie was tucked into her booth, but Cecily was nowhere. I looked inside and breathed on the glass. I wrote
Hello
backward, with my finger, through the fog. I longed to spring her from her prison, but she looked so content. Too content? Maybe she wasn't acting after all. Were all those pipes and tubes pumping in some kind of gas? And as I looked to the top of the cabinet, to watch the lift and fall of a coil, I saw a little swan folded from paper.

I took the swan into the palm of my hand. I hated the idea of undoing all the paper's twists and folds, but I could tell that something was written within—letters slipped from the folds and out onto the wings. When I first began to dismantle the bird, I thought I might be able to carefully follow its construction and perhaps return it to its form later. But with just a tug at the bird's beak and an untwisting of its neck, I lost all sense of the swan's design.

Ferret,

Don't you already miss my little paper swan? I can put it back together for you, if you'd like. An actress who plays a geisha in the Japanese tea garden taught me how to fold it.

I can't spend the day with you after all, but you have no choice but to forgive me. The girl in the Flying Waltz fell when her wires snapped, and she broke both legs and an elbow, so I have a new job. Unlucky her, lucky me, I guess. They say the wires are perfectly fine. It was a freakish accident unlikely to repeat. So I'll be spending all day learning the ropes (hee-hee). Don't tell anyone that I told you it's all a trick—we're to look like we simply took wing. The wires are attached to the straps and springs of a corset under my gown. Come watch me practice—it's the little blue theater at the end of the midway, the one with the dome.

Cecily-with-a-
C

I'd never before noticed the blue theater, but the midway grew every day, inching past its fences, threatening to spill into the river. It was becoming stranger and stranger all summer long, with new shows up in a matter of minutes and old ones falling just as fast. While the Grand Court could fool you into thinking it was all marble and stone, the midway was marzipan melting in a candy shop window.

A banner that stretched across the dome of the blue theater promised
The Flying Waltz & the Waltzing Dwarves
, and sure enough, the hall was full of folks shorter than my hipbone. Women in their underthings sorted through trunks full of child-size ball gowns, and men polished their shoes or practiced their steps. Others rushed around as if the curtain were scheduled to rise any minute.

“When's the first show?” I asked a woman who sat on a trunk lid to unashamedly roll a purple stocking up her bare leg, her underskirt hiked up to her hips. She pointed her toes, lifting her foot high, and she rolled the stocking so slowly, it was as if her little leg was a mile long.

Despite her languid movements, she opened her eyes wide at my question. “Oh don't remind me!” she said. “It's only two days away! Only two days.”

“Only two days” carried through the hall, all the others repeating the phrase, passing it from person to person, sending it across the room like an echo. They hurried their steps a beat.

The theater had only a stage and a piano and was otherwise bare. Even its floors were dirt. Either the seats had not arrived or they weren't arriving at all, the audience expected to stand.

“How long's it going to take you to look up?” came Cecily's voice, dropping from overhead. I looked into the arch of the dome and Cecily hovered above, smiling down at me, wiggling her legs. The dome was lined with mirrors and dotted with lamps, giving her pale dress a shimmer and sparkle.

“I'm getting dizzy just watching you,” I said.

“Go up on the stage,” she said. “Silas and the boys will help you get strapped in. Then you can come dance with me.”