The Swan Gondola (21 page)

“Cecily's in
Heart of the White City
,” I said. “She plays a factory girl . . . and a fire victim . . . and, um . . .”

“Dance hall girl,” Cecily added. “And a Ferris wheel girl.”

“Oh?” he said, as if he didn't recall.

At the same time, the woman who wasn't Mrs. Wakefield leaned in toward me, squinting to see through my raven feather mask. “Your
eyes
,” she said. “I've never seen such a blue in an eye. Billy, his eyes are the blue of that stone scarab I bought in Cairo. At that bazaar.”

“Lapis lazuli,” Billy Wakefield mumbled.

His sister grinned wide as she pet the squirming piglet in her arms. “I shall
dig
out your eyes, and
wear
them as earbobs!”

Cecily and I chuckled but only politely. We weren't quite sure if she meant to be funny.

“I'd like to see your act,” Billy Wakefield said. “You'll take the stage, won't you? Tell us a few jokes?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don't . . . I'm not . . . I couldn't . . .”

Billy Wakefield reached into his coat and took from it a golden dragon's head—the jaw was on a hinge, and its diamond-studded teeth clenched down on a fat mouthful of folded bills. He peeled off from that wad of cash more money than I'd expected to make all summer on the midway. I again refused, just to be coaxed and convinced, and he only peeled off more. I then took the money. I'd actually had no intention at all of leaving without that pretty payday.

“It would be a great honor,” Wakefield said. “I understand you were an apprentice to Crowe, the master ventriloquist.”

“And how'd you come to know that, sir?” I asked.

Wakefield shrugged one shoulder, as if to say,
I know all, of course.

Wakefield's sister complimented Cecily on her dress, but then peered at the front of it, puzzled. “Do you even have a corset on, in under there?”

“I don't always wear one,” Cecily said.

“You're a revolutionary!” she exclaimed, taking Cecily by the arm and leading her toward the rooftop's stage, where some servants unfolded folding chairs for one another. “Not so long ago, if you went without a corset, we all thought you were a whore.”

“Better they think me a whore,” Cecily said, “than an actress,” and Wakefield's sister let off another echoing laugh.

“Can we be best friends, my love?” the sister said.

Billy Wakefield then took my arm, and we followed the two of them. “I used to see Crowe, when I was a boy, on the stage of the Eden Musee,” he said. The Eden Musee had been a dime museum downtown that had featured oddities and cheap acts before burning to the ground one winter. Wakefield's voice was so soft, so tucked away in the skeleton mask, I had to tilt my head toward him to listen close. “His puppet seemed so alive, you so much wanted it to truly live. I so wished for the puppet to just one day jump off his knee and stroll around on its own. It broke my heart that he didn't exist. I could even somehow convince myself that he did indeed live, that he was real, that it would be entirely illogical for him to be only a puppet. Crowe's lips didn't move, and the puppet's voice wasn't Crowe's voice at all! And the puppet could speak while Crowe gargled brandy! And Crowe and the puppet could sing the same song at the same time! It got so that I was having nightmares—I would sometimes dream I awoke locked in the box where the puppet was kept.”

No one had spoken to me of my dear old Crowe for so long, I felt a little catch in my gullet. “Crowe had magic,” I said. “I only know tricks.” I could only dream of my dummy giving a boy such nightmares.

We walked up to the stage where the band had played. I took a seat on the piano bench for an audience that grew only slightly—one of the statues, a burly Hercules who now wore a robe over his powdered skin, stretched out in a chair in the front row. A few of the waiters joined us, as did the harlequin now without stilts, and an ancient old cuss with a buggy whip.

I froze. Not a funny word came to mind. All the jokes I'd told on the midway, or on the stage of the Empress, seemed worth even less than the pennies I'd made from them. I sat there, everyone staring, Oscar silent on my knee. If I dared to open the dummy's mouth, Wakefield would know, right away, he'd paid me too much.

I'd never had a minute of stage fright in my life—all fear of performance had been scared out of me as a waif when I'd had to steal to keep from getting beaten. I'd always had to be friendly, to gain the confidence of whoever I wanted to sidle up to and thieve. I had begged, I'd danced, I'd sung all the most popular songs. I'd been every bit as real and magic as Crowe's dummy.

And that's what Oscar started telling my rooftop audience. I opened his mouth and he spilled my guts. “He had a little groundhog pelt for a pet,” Oscar said, mocking my poverty, looking up at me askance. I didn't even try to keep my lips still. “He kept it in a rusty birdcage and pretended to feed it grasshopper legs.” I paused for the audience's nervous twittering. “He used a fish skeleton as a hair comb, and he greased down his cowlick with the mush of a rotten peach, and by the time he got to the whorehouse to beg for alms, his head was swarming with bluebottles.”

At first, I seemed to only be making everyone unhappy. Though his skull mask still hid his face away, Wakefield nonetheless looked mirthless, sitting stone-still, his silver hand folded around the head of his cane in front of him. His sister, so full of laughter only minutes before, only smiled a tight smile as she petted her piglet.

“He's so poor,” Oscar said of me, “he's thinking of selling his eyeballs for earbobs.” At that, the sister sneered, clucked her tongue with offense, and whispered loudly to Billy Wakefield, “That was my joke.” Billy Wakefield nodded with impatience.

Just when it seemed I might be dragged out and lynched, Cecily saved my neck. She started giggling. A little tee-hee-hee at first. A little
pffft
between her puckered lips. A little squeal, a little “oh!” And the giggling grew. And grew. A bubbling up of gentle laughs that shook her shoulders and gave her hiccups. And she couldn't stop. She doubled over. She threw her head back. Even when she wheezed and snorted, I'd never heard anything more like music from heaven. And there was nothing fake about it. The poor thing was a genuine mess. I had her in stitches.

“Ferret bought old empty ether tins from an addict, then sold them back to him full of piss at double the price!” Oscar said.

Cecily held both her hands tight to her mouth, but that only worsened her convulsions. She wept and sniffled. And it was infectious, of course. It was a delight to see someone so pretty so off her head. And once the others started laughing at her, they got to laughing at me too, even the old codger with the buggy whip. Suddenly, Oscar couldn't utter an unfunny thing.

•   •   •

A
FTER
I
FINISHED
with the act, I suspected Billy Wakefield would want us gentlemen to engage in some buying and selling of my little dummy's soul, but it turned out he didn't want to talk business. He and his sister weighed Cecily and me down with the party's picked-over remains: a half-empty box of candied plums, a few half-drunk bottles of champagne, a half-eaten fairy cake. Billy Wakefield tucked a half-smoked cigar in my inside suit pocket. “It's half gone,” he said, “but half a Havana is better than none. Smoke it with this,” and he shoved into my arms a bottle of cognac that had only a few gulps left swirling around at the bottom of it.

Billy told the man with the buggy whip to take Cecily and me anywhere we wanted to go in the private coach, even if it was just to circle the block for hours.

And that's practically what we did. Cecily and I got in the coach and closed the curtains after instructing the driver to drive nowhere in particular. I finished off the cognac and studied the French words on the label. I couldn't help but think I'd earned Wakefield's respect at the expense of my dignity. Though my boyhood had not been quite as miserable as I'd portrayed, I'd been every bit as poor. I'd bared my soul for the rich man's amusement.

“Was I really all that funny?” I asked Cecily, as I unwrapped the tissue from a plum to tear it up and feed it to her.

“Yes, but it breaks my heart,” she said, putting her hand to her chest, “to think of you as that little boy.” She took my hand to lick the plum's honey from my fingertips.

“I'm glad Doxie has you,” I said. I leaned forward to kiss her, tasting the sugar on her lips.

After we kissed for a while, she started in with that giggling again. “Pissing in the ether bottle . . . a pet gopher pelt . . .” She wept and wheezed with the comedy of it all. “It's not funny . . . it's the worst kind of . . . tragic . . .”

I lifted her dress to duck in beneath, and I lightly bit at the inside of her thigh, getting a shriek from her, in among the giggling. “Do you have a corset in here?” I squealed, in imitation of Wakefield's sister, mixed in with a pig's oink. “Are you even wearing any drawers?” Cecily laughed more and shooed me out from beneath her dress. I held the bottle of champagne to her lips, and we kissed awhile, and then we kissed some more, all night long. We fell asleep, and in the morning a stick of sunlight slanted in bright from where the curtain didn't close all the way. The coach wasn't moving. We had stopped at the very edge of the river. Had we gone out the wrong door, we would have fallen into the water. On the other side of the coach, in a thicket of grasses, the driver slept on a saddle blanket. We apologized and apologized, and begged and begged his forgiveness.

“For goodness sake, why didn't you wake us?” Cecily asked.

“I hated to bother you,” he said.

We helped him up. Cecily had had her dress off in the night, and it was now only partly back on. I suspected her immodesty in allowing the front of it to slip about her naked breasts, revealing a nipple or two once or twice, may have been for the benefit of the driver we'd so cruelly left to sleep on the ground.

The driver drove Cecily to the boardinghouse, and me to the Empress. As I reached up to offer the driver a tip—which the driver refused—he handed down another invitation, with Wakefield's same wax seal, as if the message had somehow reached us as we'd traveled by coach.

Will you and Cecily please join me at my house above the lake for the fireworks on Independence Day? Please arrive in time for quince brandy and cake. Bring Oscar.

W
AKEFIELD
L
AKE
was at the very end of a long, long streetcar ride. The tracks even passed the far ends of the Fair and kept going north. There was little out that way but a cemetery and a carriage factory and a few churches without steeples.

But many of the people on the streetcar were dressed for the lake—or undressed rather, in bloomers and knee-length swimming costumes. There was no other reason to take the Blue Line this far north. It was as if Wakefield had arranged for the city to pay for the laying of tracks right to the front door of his country resort.

Oscar sat on the bench next to me, and Doxie lay in my lap, her head on my knees. It never occurred to us anymore to tuck Doxie away. For all appearances, we were a family. We were a father and a mother and a baby girl. And I no longer worried at all about dropping Doxie or holding her wrong. I didn't fret over carrying her or holding her, any more than I'd fret over carrying my own heart or my own kidney inside my bones.

Cecily and I had decided we'd go to the lake in the late afternoon, and we would have our supper on the beach before heading up to the house to knock on Billy Wakefield's door. After stepping off the streetcar, we followed the cobblestone lane past the luxury hotel painted pink and pale blue, past the day-trippers on the beach in their brightly striped swimming suits. The beach was crowded, and waltzing had already begun on the dance floor on the wharf, paper lanterns bobbing in the breeze. Fireworks were already crackling against the sun's glare.

The streetcar ride had taken longer than we'd thought it would, so we skipped the beach and began our walk up the winding path toward the Wakefield house situated atop a hill that overlooked the city. The house was also farther up and away than it seemed, far from anything at all, and it was sunset by the time we reached the locked gate. At the center of the gate was the gilded letter
W
in loopy cursive above a keyhole the size of my head. The lane behind the gate wound through a peach orchard.

Had Billy Wakefield forgotten us? Cecily playfully shook the gate, rattling it, squeaking its hinges. “Let us in, let us in,” Cecily said, “or we'll huff and we'll puff and we'll blow your house down.”

The sky was dark enough now for us to see the fireworks blast red, white, and blue and spider down and out, the lake waters mirroring all the shimmer.

Mrs. Margaret had prepared us a picnic basket, despite the fact that she still disapproved of me. We spread a thin blanket over the hard dirt of the road to sit and wait and eat. Mrs. Margaret had packed a tin of walnuts, some candied dates, a jar of pears in syrup, some bread and honey. Wrapped in butcher's paper and tied over with twine was a boiled chicken.

Night fell, and I held Cecily in my arms, and Cecily held Doxie in hers, as I leaned back against the stone wall of the estate. We dropped off to sleep, despite the endless crackling of the fireworks. But we didn't sleep long, only just long enough for me to dream that Cecily and I sat there in that very same spot, on that very same picnic, while we ate deviled swan's eggs, and a fire in the peach orchard raged out of control behind us.

We woke to the sound of the gate screeching open on its hinges. “Oh, for goodness sake, there you are,” Wakefield's sister said, exasperated. “Gather your things now, we'll go on up. Hurry, hurry, hurry, now.” She kept her piglet on a leash tied to her wrist, and it galloped toward our picnic, trampling on our apple cores and empty tins, getting its hooves caught up in the rib cage of our chicken bones. Wakefield's sister yanked on the leash and scolded the pig. She stood smiling impatiently, bouncing on her feet, as we wrapped the food that remained and folded the blanket.

“Please, please,” she said, “hurry, hurry, rush, rush.” We moved too slowly for her, and she began to help us, grabbing at our cups and dishes, and Doxie's bottle, and stuffing them in our basket. She picked up Oscar and slung him over her shoulder. “Not the time to dawdle,” she said. Once everything was gathered, she rushed up the path, her heels on the dirt clip-clopping in rhythm with the pig's feet.

“Shouldn't we close the gate?” I called to her. I carried Doxie, and Cecily carried the basket.

“No, no, no,” she said, barely glancing back, waving us on. “Leave it, leave it. Leave the gate.” Her hasty state made Cecily and me feel the need to dash. We didn't know the winding path, so we listened to the woman's heels, and the piglet's hooves, though they stepped along so quickly up the steep hill, and around the madman turns of the road, we couldn't keep close. Wakefield's sister began to whistle a bunch of notes with no tune, and the whistling grew fainter and fainter as we slipped farther and farther behind. It was as if I were still in the dream, but instead of wildfire, we fought a river's current.

“Why are we running ourselves ragged?” Cecily asked me, but she likely knew I had no answer.

Finally, panting, our sides splitting with ache, we reached that strange house with no corners. Wakefield House seemed to be all turrets and silos and wrought-iron spires, with pointed roofs like witches' hats. It looked as if it might have no corners at all but for the three square chimneys that rose to different heights. A porch wrapped all around the front of the house, curving around its turns.

The lamplight from the parlor spilled out onto the empty lawn, but our shadows were somehow cast ahead of us. Our shadows slipped through the front door before we reached the porch steps.

The sister propped Oscar up in a chair in the hallway, scooped the piglet into her arms, and beckoned us forward, her own various shadows dancing and sparring with one another, each cast by one of the many lamps and candles lit throughout the house. The house was noisy with light, if such a thing could be said. Even if the rounds of the house had had corners, there wouldn't have been a dark one to hide in.

I nearly made my wildfire dream come true when I bumped into a hall table and toppled a candelabra. Cecily rushed to gather the candles that rolled across the carpets. We then walked slowly down the hallway, holding hands, following all those chaotic shadows that the sister and the piglet cast behind them. Now that we weren't running, and the blood wasn't pumping so loudly through our ears, or our feet stamping against the wood floor, we could hear the house roaring. And the farther we went down the hall, the louder the roaring grew, and we could feel the floorboards rattling under our feet. We could see the tapping of the picture frames against the wall. A blue china panther, crouched to prowl, jiggled along a tabletop and right over the edge. We heard it shatter in our path.

The sister's shadows had vanished, so we followed the noise now, and we found our way into a conservatory of sorts, a parlor of glass walls, a glass roof slanting overhead. French doors open wide swung slightly on their hinges, as sheets of music from the grand piano were blown about, among leaves and flower petals that had been shaken from the branches and stems of the many plants that grew there in pots and vases.

We weren't sure what we were seeing when we looked out the French doors and through the glass walls, but whatever it was began to thump my heart to a different beat. I kept back, to keep Doxie from the thick of it, but Cecily crept forward.

•   •   •

O
UTSIDE THE
F
RENCH DOORS
was a lawn, and at the center of the lawn, a cyclone rose. It was only as tall as the house, and only as thick as a coffee can, the very top of it opening wide into a funnel that dissolved into the gray night above, unattached to any cloud. Except for all the violent spin at the heart of it, it didn't move—the tip of it remained inside a box attached to pipes. At first I'd foolishly assumed that the wild thing had been caught, the box and pipes part of the rich man's fancy tornado trap—in Nebraska, in summer, tornados seemed to touch the earth like demons dropping down from heaven, mindful, spirited.

But then I saw that the pipes led to more machinery, to what looked like a giant fireplace bellows pumped up and down by the efforts of the old servant I'd met weeks before—he'd been the one to bring me the invitation to the masquerade ball. The man pushed down on the handle with all his might, leaning all his meager weight into it, then he pulled the handle up, nearly knocking himself over every time. Up and down, up and down he went, and the cyclone spun and corkscrewed, knotting and unknotting itself.

“Get as close as you dare!” Billy Wakefield shouted above the rumbling. He leaned back from the wind. His hair had come loose from its part, and the wind blew it across his cheeks. “But don't get too close! It's liable to rip the tongue right out of your head.”

And I believed it. I could feel the power of it enter my mouth and thunder around inside me, like it was loosening my guts from my bones. I held Doxie tighter and stepped backward.

But Cecily stepped closer, even as she leaned away, pushing her feet into the earth, digging her heels in good. The wind puffed up her shirtwaist, billowing her sleeves like balloons, her skirt flapping. It sucked the pins from her hair, and her curls flowed loose in front of her. She held out her arms, her fingers spread out like a conjurer's, and I swore I could see little bolts of silver lightning snapping from her fingertips.

And she allowed that wind to pull her forward one fraction of an inch too far.

All that came next came quicker than half a blink, but it was just enough time for my mind's eye to see the end of everything. When Cecily lost her footing, it was as if she turned to air, so fast was she snatched away by the cyclone.

What I saw next didn't happen at all. My fear played out before me so vividly, that I sometimes still see her as she never was. I see her carried up through the funnel and shot out the top. I see her waltzing through the night, like the dancer on wires she was. I see her flung to the earth to be broken to pieces.

But all the time he'd toyed with the wind, Billy Wakefield had kept a watchful eye. The tip of his boot was at a switch, and with a quick flick of his toe, nature was defeated. The twister stopped twisting, and when a twister don't twist, there's nothing left of it. Cecily was caught up in the cyclone barely at all, only enough to give her a few quick turns, lift her off the ground a few feet, and send her stumbling across the lawn to collapse in a patch of rosebushes.

I ran forward, holding Doxie near, cradling her head in my hand. I stepped over and across the metal cage that had held the cyclone. Inside the cage were the slowing blades of an electric fan that had helped to keep the wind spinning.

We all rushed to Cecily, even the old servant, and we carefully unpinned her from the thorns that had snagged at her clothes and scratched her skin.

“Say something,” I said, looking into her eyes, putting my thumb to a scratch on her cheek.

“Stir up the storm again,” she said.

•   •   •

A
TOP A TABLE IN A ROOM
that Billy Wakefield called his library were science books open to pages of formulas and diagrams. Wakefield unrolled a scroll of blueprints and weighted the corners with brass owls. He attempted to explain to me the mechanics and chemical reactions that made his cyclone tick—something to do with dry ice and vortexes. The tornado was to play a starring role in
Heart of the White City
, if he could manage to contain its rage.

I tried to follow it all, but I was feeling like my head was filled with bees. The fast pumping of my blood—from the running uphill and from the fear—and a touch of intoxication from the reek of whatever magic smoke fueled the tornado made me blissful and mindless.

All I really wanted to do was remind myself, over and over, that Cecily was alive.

“What would have happened if you hadn't shut the machine off?” I asked. I realized this was the first I'd seen of Wakefield's whole face, when it wasn't half hidden by masks or goggles. I looked for scars but saw none. I was caught by his eyes, which were somehow quite warm and gentle despite their color of fog.

I swished the quince brandy around in the bottom of my snifter like I'd seen men do. Cecily reclined on the leather sofa, Doxie on the cushion next to her jabbering and grabbing at her own toes. Wakefield's sister sat perched on a footstool, dabbing some kind of ointment on Cecily's cuts, something she had muddled together with a mortar and pestle.

“But I
did
shut the machine off,” he said.

“But what if you didn't?”

“But I did, is what I'm saying.”

“And what I'm saying is what if you didn't?” I said.

Wakefield's sister sighed and spoke up without looking away from Cecily's minor wounds. “Boys, boys, it's very simple,” she said. “It would either have twisted her poor little neck or rocked her brain around in her skull until it snapped it from its stem.”

“
Or
,” Wakefield continued, “she would have floated to the top of the cyclone like a champagne bubble.” The old man who had pumped the bellows of the cyclone machine refilled Wakefield's snifter. “And,” Wakefield added, “she would have dropped into my arms, giggling.”

When the sister finished spooning the pulp onto Cecily's skin, she set the bowl on a bookshelf and picked up her snifter. Doxie had begun to fuss, so Cecily took her into her arms. As she kissed Doxie's head, Cecily said to the woman, “You never did tell us your name, I don't think.” She held the back of her hand to her mouth to lick at the medicine, then let Doxie lick some too.

“Oh I didn't? Oh, it's just the same as his.” The sister nodded toward Billy. I dropped into the sofa next to Cecily and I took her hand in mine. I held it to my lips to taste the medicine myself. It tasted of apricot and vinegar, with some kind of mint vapor, and even just having it at the tip of my tongue sent a chill through my snout and down my throat in a sharp swallow.