The Swan Gondola (17 page)

“Oh, no, no. I can't,” I said. “I'm afraid of heights.”

“No, you're not,” she said. She spun herself around, circling and circling. “No one's afraid of heights. That's just something people say.”

“No, no, I am,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I wish you'd come down. And not go back up.”

“The fear's all in your head, Ferret.”

“Well, yes, it is,” I said. “Where else does fear go?”

Some of the dancing dwarves were suddenly upon me, tugging at my trousers and the sleeves of my suit coat, pushing and pulling. “It's nothing to be afraid of,” one of them said.

“No, nothing at all,” said someone else. “It's not even real. She's not really flying. It's all a trick.”

I said, “I know, it's not that, I just . . . ,” but somehow I allowed them to rustle me to the stage to truss me up in a harness and belts. Silas, it seemed, was a little man in a felt cap, and he stood on a ladder to remove my jacket and to buckle leather straps to my shoulders, attaching me to thin wires that led to a track in the ceiling.

I didn't want to look cowardly. “It's all in my head, it's all in my head,” I chanted to myself, concentrating only on the sounds of the words. But the chanting didn't help. I felt a shot of panic, my face dripping with sweat. Just as I said, once again, “I can't,” I did. I was. Up in the air. A group of stagehands as little as all the others turned the crank that tightened the wires that lifted me near the arches of the dome.

My stomach felt like it was lifting even higher than I was and twisting inside me. If I'd been able to catch a single breath and find a single word, I'd have begged for help.

Cecily swam toward me, kicking her legs, fanning her arms. She took my hands and pulled me to the center of the track that ran straight across the room. The dome arched above us. “See?” she said. “I've cured you of your fears.”

“No,” I said. “I'm still scared.”

Cecily rolled her eyes at me. “What, exactly, are you afraid of?” she said.

“Falling,” I said.

“We all could fall,” she said, spinning around and around and away from me. Overhead, her wires were attached to a contraption of propeller blades and wheels that worked along the track. I tried to swim toward her, swinging my arms and legs, but only moved backward and only an inch or two. She danced over to me and around me, pulling me into her arms, taking the lead, waltzing me in circles.

“So where's your dance partner?” I said.

“Sleeping off a drunk,” she said. “When his partner fell yesterday, it rattled him.”

“I imagine so,” I said. I looked down, and my stomach jumped again. I closed my eyes tight.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It was a simple fix, they tell me.”

“You look beautiful,” I said, when I could open my eyes again. She lifted my arm to spin around and beneath it, as if there were no wires to tangle.

“You always say that,” she said. “But this time it is true.” She backed away to show off the dress. It was one she'd made, when she'd danced onstage once before. The sheer fabric, she said, was something called white illusion. And looking through the gown you saw another gown beneath, one of “chameleon silk,” she said. When she spun for me again, the lights that bounced around and off the mirrors caught up in that silk, shifting the colors from pink to blush to blue, then back again.

Someone sat down at the piano below and began to play for us. The piano player was then joined by a woman with a fiddle and a man with a cello, and Cecily took me in her arms. At each shoulder was a muslin rose that sparkled with the crushed glass she'd dusted on the petals.

“I didn't even know you could dance,” I said. I was starting to understand my way around the wires, and the harness, and I was able to follow Cecily's lead as we waltzed along the track, our feet kicking around each other, but gracefully in rhythm.

“How
would
you know?” she said. “We're strangers. You don't know anything about me.”

“So then tell me something,” I said.

“There's nothing to tell,” she said.

I loved listening for the rustling of her body, her elbows, her legs, hidden and moving beneath the silk and skirts.

“How'd you learn to dance?” I asked.

“From the other candy factory girls,” she said. In New York City, she told me, where she'd lived before taking to the fair circuit, she dipped orange peel in chocolate in a chilled room. “Even in the summertime I went to work in a fur cap. And some nights, when the other girls weren't worn out from the long day, we went to the Hans'1 and Gret'l, a dance hall uptown. See, what you did was”—and she slipped away from me to dance alone—“you started dancing with one of the other girls, then a couple of gents would break in, and you'd dance with the man you got, if he was halfway handsome.” And here she returned to me, and we held each other close and turned on our wheels. “And if you were lucky, he took you to the saloon after and bought you a bowl of turtle soup or something.”

The tinny music below swelled into something dramatic, as if a whole orchestra had joined in, and Cecily and I matched it with our steps. I pulled her in so close and so sudden, she shuddered. She then followed my movements, my hips pushing hers this way, then that, my legs scissoring around her skirts. We rushed from one end of the track to the other, the flounce of her gown flowing around us. I held her right hand in my left one and I felt her grip tighten, squeezing, and we rushed the waltz more, fearless, testing the wires and the wheels of the track.

“And where'd
you
learn how to dance?” she whispered in my ear.

“The girl shop,” I whispered back. “The whorehouse.” She put her head to my neck and buried her laughter in my collar. “It was legitimate,” I said, and I laughed too. “It was a job, even. I got paid. I was fifteen. Anna Wilson, the madam, taught me all the steps so that the girls could practice on me, and they could invite their gentlemen to dance and seem ladylike. Anna fancied herself running a finishing school.”

“I hate to know how you got paid,” she said.

“The girls would only
dance
with me,” I said. “That was all. They thought I was a kid.”

“You
were
a kid,” she said.

“I was never a kid,” I said.

“Did you even steal a kiss, ever?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, “kisses I got.”

Our dancing had slowed as the music had trickled away to nothing. She leaned her head back to squint at my face, summing me up. She put a thumb to my lower lip. “They're kind of irresistible,” she said. “Those lips.”

“So don't resist them,” I said. And so she didn't. She put her lips to mine, and we kissed. Up to then I'd felt foolish to be so in love with someone I'd known so little. But the kiss, as kisses do, changed everything.

But the kiss stopped before it was meant to end, as I was dragged away from her, the wires pulling me back so fast I thought I was falling after all. I rocked forward and faced the ground. I felt that twisting in my gut again. My arms grabbed at the air. My heart sped. But I was still attached to my wires, and was only rushing back along the track. When I was above the stage, I was lowered, and I was unable to land on my feet. My legs buckled and I fell to my knees. I gasped, and though my hands and knees were on the boards, and I'd survived, I still thought myself doomed.

A man my height grabbed me by the harness and lifted me like a puppeteer, setting me upright, and he began undoing my belts and straps. His hands seemed to wander when he got to the clasps near my crotch. “I beg your pardon,” I said, lowering my voice to a gruff scratch as I pushed his hands away.

“I beg
your
pardon,” he said, glaring at me, lowering his voice too. “You're in my harness. Get out of it.”

Once I was freed of the rigging, I just wanted to be back in it. I felt severed.

I looked up to Cecily as I walked toward the door. She gave me a smile and a shrug, and the shrug somehow worked something loose, dropping her an inch with a jerk. My heart stopped again, and I stepped forward, my arms out, as if I might be able to catch her. But she stayed in the air. “A wire must've caught,” she said, shrugging again. “Meet me out front at five,” she said. “We'll walk the midway.”

I nodded, but I worried I should stay. I wanted to demand she get down. “Go,” she said, sensing my hesitance. “You're making me nervous.”

•   •   •

C
ECILY SOMEHOW SURVIVED
her day of waltzing, and I would say we made a dashing couple as we strolled the Grand Court that evening, her in her gown of white illusion and me in my lilac suit. But she wouldn't let me buy her a fine dinner or even a glass of wine. “We'll eat our supper like hummingbirds,” she said, and we moved from booth to booth within the Manufactures Building, sampling evaporated apricots and strawberries drenched in clover honey. We had some canned lobster on crackers, and some Chinook salmon, and a few spoonfuls of cured figs. We had ox tongue and tulip tea. We had a few tastes of orange wine and of something they called sparkling Scotch ale that rumbled our stomachs.

Back on the midway, we visited the tent with the whale—a five-hundred-year-old beast the size of a ship. We walked its entire fifty-foot length. With Cecily distracted by the stench of chemicals and decay, I suggested hiring Doxie myself. “What does she get for a day in the incubator?” I said. “What if I paid her the same rate to help me with my act?”

Cecily held her hankie to her nose like a railroad marauder. She lowered it to say with some irritation, “What could she possibly do?”

“Well,” I said, “I could set her up in the pram and put a little bonnet on her head. I could throw my voice and make her say funny things. She could cuss or something. Something babies don't do. Folks would love it.” The idea of it all seemed to be wrinkling Cecily's brow with worry, but instead of shutting my mouth, I felt compelled to say more and more, the suggestion sounding worse and worse with every word. I'd only meant for the idea to show my affection and my concern.

“But why?”

“It would get her out of that glass box,” I said.

“She doesn't mind the incubator,” Cecily said. “She doesn't mind it at all. And she can't be out in the hot sun all day.”

“I would keep her in the shade,” I said, but when she shook her head and furrowed her brow more, I said nothing else.

Outside Cecily wouldn't speak. She only nodded politely and smiled a tight smile at anything I said. I begged her to sit for a silhouette, and this seemed to cheer her up. But in the artist's studio, atop a stool, a blast of light casting the shadow of her profile large against the wall, she had time to weigh the slight. Looking at her shadow, I saw her chin quivering. She lowered her head.

“I need to leave,” she said.

The silhouette maker said, “I'm nearly done.” He snipped his scissors through the black paper, even cutting around the roses at her shoulder.

“What's wrong, Cecily?” I said. She didn't answer.

As soon as the light was turned away and her shadow vanished, Cecily stood from the stool and headed for the door. I took the silhouette from the silhouette maker's hand before he could paste it on white paper and place it in a frame.

I caught up with Cecily on the midway. “You think I'm a terrible mother,” she said.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said. “No, no.” I took her elbow and turned her to me. I held the silhouette in my palm. Cecily looked at it, but I don't think she saw it. She wasn't thinking of it at all. “I think you're a wonderful mother,” I said. “That's why I want to help.”

“Help?” she said, snapping at me. “Oh, there are plenty of people who want to help
me
. I'm helpless.” She then stepped close, her voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “I'm a woman with
circumstances
. There's all kinds of help for the likes of me. If I want to auction Doxie off, there's people all over Omaha who'll pay more than you.”

“Cecily, I'm sorry,” I said. “I wasn't . . . I didn't mean . . .”

Cecily put her hankie to her mouth again. She breathed deep. She calmed down. She lowered the handkerchief and spoke softly. “Do you know of a Reverend A. Foltz?” she said. She began to walk away slowly, and I walked alongside. I told her I didn't know any minister by any name. Not a one. “You'd think he was sweet on me. He shows up at the boardinghouse every Monday morning, in a rat-gray carriage coat, no matter how hot it is. Mrs. Margaret and me, we don't even know how he found out about Doxie. He brings me little pamphlets with little sermons in them. He manages something called the Child Rescue Institute. He rescues babies from their own mothers. He's paving his way to heaven with all the little souls he saves. I bet the bastard reaches in and yanks them out of the womb.”

I now remembered hearing of this reverend and his rescue. It was easy to get him confused with all the other Pied Pipers of Omaha, snatching babies from their cribs. A man like Reverend Foltz needed children to fill his little schools for the unfortunate, so he could add on towers and turrets, new wings and hallways. He longed to fill gymnasiums and natatoriums with all his saved babies. The bigger the academy, the bigger the bronze statue they'd someday insist on casting in his image. He probably lunched every day with all the fallow-wombed old ladies with more money than sense. The very idea of him at Cecily's door, lurking like a hungry undertaker, quickened my pulse. “Maybe I should stop by the boardinghouse myself on Monday morning,” I said. “I could give Reverend Foltz a sermon of my own.”

The suggestion, and my voice quivering with rage, seemed to please her. She smiled but shook her head. “There you go again,” she said. “Trying to save me.”