The Swan Gondola (23 page)

Wakefield had no more to say to us then. He thanked us for the evening, gestured toward the doorway, and told us the coach waited at the front steps. And he headed back up the stairs to his library.

It was only then that Cecily said, “You
can't
sell Oscar.”

“But I did,” I said, as we passed where Oscar had sat. He was no longer there—he'd already been snatched away, by a servant, I assumed. But that empty chair was an awful sight.

In the coach, Bugsy drove us fast along the winding road, down through the orchard. “Take her,” Cecily said, handing Doxie over. “Thinking about Oscar is just splitting my head open more.” She then uncorked the remedy Wakefield had given her and guzzled back much more than a few sips.

“Stop,” I said, putting my hand to her wrist. “Don't take any more until I ask August about it.”

“No need,” she said. “It's working already.” She rested her head on my shoulder, and though the coach wheels seemed to be knocking against every rut in the road, she dropped right off to sleep. Her fingers loosened, and I took the bottle from her fist. The druggist was someone named Goodfellow, in someplace called Hot Springs, South Dakota. On the back of the bottle was another label, with a number and a dosage and a name:
Mrs. William Wakefield
.

•   •   •

W
ITH
W
AKEFIELD'S MONEY,
I paid Cecily's rent at the boardinghouse. I bought Doxie a new crib, and Cecily a new pillow. In the days after our visit to Wakefield's, Cecily had got in the habit of having headaches. “How do you live with this heat?” she asked me a time or two, looking at me with suspicion. I bought an electric fan that kicked up cool breezes from a block of ice in a porcelain bowl.

I bought a typewriter, used but newer than the one I'd had, and I would drag it out the window with me, onto the porch roof, where I wrote letters, wearing only my trousers, my feet bare, my shirt off, the sun on my naked back. I wrote a letter to the editor of the
Bee
on behalf of yet another engineer who took credit for the airship we saw in the night skies. The engineer promised to eventually unveil all mysteries.
All will be revealed
, I wrote,
at the Fair.

And I wrote love letters for other men's lovers and poems for lonesome wives. But every love letter was inspired by Cecily. Sometimes, in seeking the right sentiment, I got lost in a past afternoon, trying to put it all into words. I drank tea with a chip of ice in the teacup, and daydreamed.

August had brought us his samovar when he'd heard of Cecily's headaches, along with little silk pockets of crushed leaves and dried nettles. He recommended skullcap and lavender. Cecily had quickly emptied the bottle Wakefield had sent home with us, and her headaches would ease for a while, but then come back double.

“This is nothing but swamp root,” August complained, sniffing the fumes from her medicine bottle, when he visited our room one afternoon. He found us in the dark, lying in our bed. Cecily often skipped the rehearsals for
Heart of the White City
, but she never got fired. The sun somehow felt a thousand times hotter in the Grand Court, she said, in the dazzle of the daylight against the ivory. But we had grown happy to go nowhere. Our new wealth had spoiled us. We were butterflies caught in a net.

August threw the curtains open and I covered Cecily's eyes. “She's having a really bad one today,” I whispered.

“I suspect she is,” he said. He ran his finger through the dust of the wardrobe and kicked at some dirty clothes strewn on the floor. He picked up an empty bottle, and another one. Wakefield's butler, Morearty, had kept her stocked in tonics of various kinds. “Remember,” Morearty would say, “just a swig or two every now and again.” And on the days Cecily did go to the theater, and Wakefield happened to be there, he would give her even more new potions to try. I would have hidden the bottles, or thrown them away, but Cecily complained that she was in pain if she didn't take a sip of syrup every now and then.

“What does Mrs. Margaret say about all this?” August said.

Cecily got up from the bed and walked to the open window. She picked up a pack of cigarettes, lit up, and blew her smoke outside, leaning her elbows on the windowsill. She wore only her corset cover and an underskirt. “Mrs. Margaret is ignoring us,” she said. “She won't even speak to me in the hall. She hates Ferret.”

“Have you been to a doctor, Cecily?” August said. He lay back in the bed, where Cecily had been. He curled up next to me and Doxie, and put his hand on my shoulder. I hadn't dressed for the day either, and was in nothing but my underdrawers.

“The headaches aren't
crippling
,” she said. “They're just a nuisance.”

August kissed Doxie's forehead. “I brought you more tea,” August said, dropping the silk pocket on the bed between us.

“Aren't you just selling the same remedies?” I said.

“Ferret, what I sell is water and nectar mostly,” he said, sighing with frustration as he stood. “Some herbs, some extracts. Maybe a few drops of beet juice for color. It's harmless. I tell people to be careful with it, just for the charm of the act.
That's
what people are paying me for, Ferret. Just the humbug of it. But this stuff . . .” He picked up a brown bottle, uncorked it, and sniffed. “This, for example, is Jamaican ginger. Druggists aren't even allowed to sell it to Indians. It's intoxicating. But you white people are allowed to guzzle it by the gallon.”

When August left, Cecily blamed his distaste on his jealousy—he was simply peevish because we rarely went to the Fair anymore. I suspected she might be right. I knew I could trust August, but wouldn't Wakefield know something about doctors, and pain? He'd had his own arm ripped off. His wife had been sick, and she'd died. He could afford the best treatment in the biggest cities. He would have insights that would otherwise be deprived us.

But she did seem to ease up on her medicines, and we sought other advice. Even the midwife who delivered Doxie came to the room one afternoon. “Your womb hasn't recovered from the violence done to it in childbirth,” the old crone told us, as she held her hand against Cecily's stomach and eyed Doxie with accusation.

I recalled Pearl's tinted spectacles, and how they'd been prescribed by a doctor to still her ovaries. When Pearl stopped by the boardinghouse with some bottles of lemonade, she blushed at the mention of her red glasses. “I threw those horrid things away,” she said. She'd been to a lecture, she explained, and had become enlightened. “It's all hogwash. The doctors will blame the womb for every lady's every malady,” she said. “They want us to believe that being a woman is an illness in and of itself.”

But Cecily's headaches had become so constant, I was willing to believe not only in every cure but also every ailment. If her aches could be ended by steadying her womb, then I hoped for her womb to be hectic. I hoped for her to be sick with something that could be cured so easily.

•   •   •

A
FEW DAYS LATER
August and Pearl returned, and this time they brought Rosie. Rosie wasn't the type to go visiting, and the massive bulk of him shrunk the room. The crystals of the lampshade jingled as he walked across the floor. He bumped his head on the paper lantern that hung from the ceiling. As he sat on the overturned washtub, we weren't so much intimidated as confused by the sight of him making a social gesture. August made us all tea, and the cup, tiny in Rosie's fingers, seemed it might shatter with his every slurping sip.

August called the tea
scandal water
, as tea parties were typically circles of gossip. “Rosie has a few snatches of gossip himself,” August said.

“You're fueling the war with those patent medicines,” Rosie said.

Cecily wore a kimono, her hair fastened up with a whalebone comb decorated with a constellation of little gold stars. She sat on the edge of the bed drinking her tea, facing the wall, her back to all of us. “I quit taking the medicine . . . for the most part,” she said, with some irritation. “I just endure the pain.”

“That's good,” Rosie said. “If it's a pain you can live with, then you don't need to kill it, do you?” Cecily only shrugged. “The government put a special tax on those medicines that advertise in the paper, you know,” he said, the teacup held near his chest, one pinky out. “The nostrum tax. For the war. They tax all the cheap medicines that you get from any druggist. The poor don't have any doctors, so we buy the celery tonic that's half water and half liquor, or something worse, to keep us wanting it. It costs fifteen cents to make and we buy it for a dollar. And since the government needs the money, they'll approve any drug. And the newspapers get rich off the advertising. And we all get poorer, because we're paying for the battleships that'll blow up in the harbors.”

Cecily set her cup in her saucer and leaned over to place the saucer on the desk, next to my typewriter. She stood up. As she spoke, she looked down to smooth out the wrinkles of her kimono, pretending to be perfectly calm. “So my headaches are sinking our ships, is what you're telling me,” she said.

“And maiming our soldiers,” Rosie said. “Then they come home. They can't work. They can't afford doctors. And they start taking the tonics too. Even the whiskey's medicinal these days.”

I stood, and I took Rosie's teacup from him, and August's. “Maybe you should go,” I said, though it felt cruel to be dismissive. Rosie only wanted to see Cecily feel better. He loved us. And I could see the line of logic Rosie followed. I just didn't think there was any hope of it helping. “Cecily's headaches aren't political,” I said. I cast a glance at Pearl then too, so she knew we wouldn't need medical advice from her women's societies either.

“But they are political,” Rosie said. He put on his hat and walked toward the door. “The more headache medicine you take, the more headaches you get. And then you take more medicine.”

“Oh, Rosie,” Cecily said, suddenly smiling, chipper. She rolled her eyes to mock his seriousness and stood on her toes to kiss Rosie on the cheek. “Don't worry about me. I'll be sure to write President McKinley and insist he stop banging around in my head.”

Her good-byes were cheerful then, with kisses all around. But after they all left, Cecily's smile dropped, and she leaned back against the door. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. I walked up to her and kissed her. “Ignore Rosie,” I said. “He's been angry for years. The Board of Health chased him out of his own tar-paper hut down by the river bottoms. They were afraid all the squatters living there would bring back the cholera. And they were probably right. So what does he know?”

And though Cecily left the boardinghouse for rehearsals every day that week, I became doubtful she ever took the stage. She wore a perfume I'd never smelled before, not the same sweet pea scent I'd grown to love but something spiced, musky, and when I asked her about it, she said she'd simply stopped at the druggist on her way to the theater and treated herself. I became suspicious of the slightest things—a sprig of wool violets stuck into the knot of her hair, a blush of pink rouge on her cheeks. And she would claim to buy herself more than just new perfume—she had charms on a bracelet, such as a little golden Buddha with a tiny glass diamond set in his belly.

She said she'd stopped at Brandeis for the reindeer-skin driving gloves she brought home one evening.

“But you have nothing to drive,” I said.

“You don't have to drive anything to have driving gloves,” she said.

At the end of the week, we left Doxie with the landlady and I bought Cecily dinner at Bridenbecker's, a restaurant on Farnam Street. The proprietors listed their menu on a chalkboard (pig's head, pig's tongue, pig's tail, pig's feet, fried halibut, coffee jelly in cream, Charlotte russe) and a fiddler played in the corner, mostly hidden by beer casks. I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. On her bracelet was a frog set with glass emeralds. I flipped the frog over with my thumb, and on the frog's golden underbelly, I saw the initials
W.W.
The letters were minuscule, practically invisible, but they were somehow as shocking, as bold, as if Wakefield had carved his bloody initials into her flesh.

My hand began to shake. It wasn't jealousy firing up through me. It was fear. It was the same worry I'd had over Cecily's headaches—his initials on her wrist might as well have been a black spot of cancer. I felt her slipping away from me, like a breath I couldn't catch.

Cecily gave my hand a squeeze, gripping my hand tighter. “Billy gave that to me,” she said, without even a flinch of shame.

“It must be real emeralds then,” I said, my stomach churning.

“Oh not at all,” she said. She pulled her hand away, and she touched at the frog. “I wouldn't have accepted it if it was anything of worth. He just gave it to me as a joke. I told him how I'd taken ballet lessons as a girl, and how I'd been in a troupe that was terribly untalented. ‘It was a real frog salad,' I said. And he thought it was funny, my calling it that. And the next day he brought me this.”

“I didn't know you were in a ballet,” I said. “Do you speak to Wakefield often?”

Cecily sighed. “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

“But you just said you talked to him one day, and he gave you a gift the next. That's not ‘not at all.'” She glared at me, rolled her eyes, and took a sip of wine. “Do you talk to him every day? In passing? Do you sit down together?”

Cecily leaned over, breathing through her nose. She grit her teeth and spoke slowly. “
We . . . exchange . . . pleasantries
,” she seethed. Then she said, “Your jealousy is insulting.”

“I'm just curious,” I said. “Why do you talk to him? About ballet? About frogs? Or anything? And if you just exchange pleasantries, why would he give you a gift? With his initials on it?”