The Swan Gondola (27 page)

Baker looked down and chuckled. “She just needs to sleep it off,” he said. “She's had a gulp or two too many of the oh be joyful up at the hotel.”

“She's not drunk,” I snapped. I knelt beside her. “Could someone bring her some water?”

“She needs to loosen her corset, of course,” a woman said with a cold absence of alarm.

Billie Wakefield, who'd suddenly appeared with her piglet, said, “She doesn't wear a corset.”

“Oh, well, that's unfortunate,” the woman said.

To some relief, but only a little, Cecily began to blink herself halfway awake, and her hand clutched mine tight. “Ferret,” she said, woozy, “hang on to me. I'm going to fall over.”

“You already fell over, sweetheart,” I said. “You're okay. Somebody's getting you some water.” I glanced up to shout at all who hovered over us.
“Is someone getting her some water, for Christ's sake?”

Though even a sip of water was yet to come, Wakefield brought over one of his guests, a woman barely taller than a child. “Cecily,” he said, “this is Dr. Lankton. She's a homeopath. Tell her what's the matter.” The lenses of the doctor's spectacles were smaller than her eyes.

“Actually, no, don't speak,” Dr. Lankton said as she lowered herself to her knees with no worry about dirtying her dress. “Just hush.”

“I just need to sit down for a minute,” Cecily said, still flat on her back.

“Hush,” Dr. Lankton said again. The doctor's every movement was unspeakably slow. It was all I could do to keep from begging her to hurry. She undid the buttons at her own wrist and pulled off her linen glove. She pressed her fingers to Cecily's throat. She took off her other glove, and she felt just beneath Cecily's jaw. She looked me right in the eye as she did so. I thought she might have a question for me, so I said “Yes?” but the doctor wasn't seeing me at all—she was merely looking off in contemplation, considering whatever swelling or softness might be there beneath Cecily's skin. She put the back of her hand to Cecily's forehead, and then poked around on Cecily's gut.

“The girl's lucky,” one of the wives said to one of the other wives. “Freda knows her way around the most miserable creatures. She serves those shame-struck pitifuls over at the Open Door.”

The one to finally bring some water was that cocky young Baker, who handed Dr. Lankton his silver flask. She gave him a stern glare of skepticism that didn't quite fit on her girlish face. “I emptied out the liquor,” Baker said. “It's just water from the pump over there.”

“Can you sit up, Cecily?” she said, and Cecily did, with my help. The doctor held the flask to Cecily's lips. “It could just be a summer cold,” Dr. Lankton said, “but it could be something else.”

“She took a pill,” I said, and I shot Wakefield a look.

“Just one of these,” he said. He handed Freda Lankton the bottle and she merely glanced at it. The label didn't seem to suggest any danger to her, but she kept the vial, putting it in her pocket.

“I'd like to check you into the hospital for the night,” she said, “and have an eye kept on you.” The hospital. Though I hated the idea of it, I couldn't wait to get her there. I couldn't wait for her to be seen, to get better, to be sent home.

“You're just hungry,” I said, full of hate for those little cooked birds on our plates.

“I ain't going to the goddamn Open Door,” Cecily said.

“Ungrateful!” came a scandalized voice from overhead, along with all kinds of other buzzing.
What did she say? Did she just say what I thought she said?

The Open Door was a clinic and shelter for unmarried women, a charity frequented by prostitutes. “No, you're not going to the Open Door,” I said, as much for Cecily as for all the others listening in.

Dr. Lankton, her feathers forever unruffled, only smiled. “I'll grant you it's not the Paxton Hotel,” she said, glancing up to wink at Paxton the hotelier. “But we do very well for our girls.”

“Don't be offended,” I said to Dr. Lankton.
You have no right to take offense
was what I meant. “She's not well,” I said.

“We'll take her to the nuns at St. Joseph's,” Wakefield said. “I shove enough money up their habits, I oughta be able to get her a private room.”

“Ho-ho-ho”
those old men laughed in that pompous, knowing, witless way of theirs.

I'd never felt more alone. I was alone with Cecily, floating in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

“Is there a hospital closer?” I said.

Wakefield said yes, but added, “I'm sure Cecily would rather we didn't trust her care to rural medicine. If you're worried about expense . . .”

“No,” I said.

Dr. Lankton stood, brushing dirt from her dress before returning her gloves to her hands. She said, “Can we do whatever possible to make the dear thing comfortable for the ride to the train station? Gather some pillows so she can lie down?”

Cecily leaned over to whisper in my ear. “I just want to go back to the
pensione
,” she said. “I just want to hold my baby girl. She's not feeling well, I'm sure of it. Whenever she has a cold coming on, I feel it in my own bones first.”

I looked up at Wakefield, who hadn't heard Cecily's objection—no one had, because she'd spoken in such weak voice. And they'd all already grown impatient with our troubles. They'd seated themselves at the tables in the hay carts, and they'd resumed their games, but mirthless, irritated.

Wakefield gave orders to some servants, who then rushed off to carry them out. I realized, with a chill up my spine, that we needed Wakefield's help. I said, “We will very, very much appreciate anything you can do for us, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Of course you will,” Wakefield said.

I held Cecily in my arms. The two farm boys who'd been managing the cyclone machine carried down from the hotel a fainting sofa of a cool-blue damask satin and installed it at the rear of one of the hay carts. Though Cecily at first tut-tutted the efforts of Baker and me to carry her onto the cart, she found herself too rickety on her pins to even take a few steps.

The setting sun was still scorching hot as the horses and drivers carted us away from the bedraggled town of Pink Heron. One of the servant girls had been assigned to shade Cecily with her broad parasol, and she did a shoddy job of it. She seemed too infatuated with the handsome-faced Mr. Baker to keep her mind on her task, and the little slip of shadow would off and on drift away in inches. For the first several minutes of the ride down the road, I called the girl's attention to her clumsy work; finally I reached over to snatch the parasol away. I sat with Cecily's legs in my lap and tilted the shade toward her. I loosened the laces of her boots, and I stroked her bare ankles with my fingertips.

Soon enough the sun dropped, and the temperature fell just enough to not be suffocating. And then it turned a little cool with the dark. The coolness was helped along by the squeaky-hinge song of frogs always nearby, as if the cart followed the line of a river.

Cecily stopped squirming, stopped flinching with discomfort, and even slept a little, and I felt relieved too. I could have stared at the night sky, at the stars, for hours and hours, as Cecily rested. The servants held linseed-oil lamps above each table so the guests could see the spots of their cards.

“Two queens,” Baker said, tossing his cards to the center of the table, certain of having won. Then he said, “Might Cecily be passing a stone?” Baker had made any number of diagnoses along the way, hoping to cast himself as the hero in the day's turn of events.

Dr. Lankton laughed at him, which pleased me. I had enough time on the ride back to worry over Baker's concern. Cecily, despite having not a penny to her name, was pretty as a daffodil. And if a young man of means set his eyes on my girl, what sort of odds did I have? Didn't men like Baker, and Wakefield, get whatever they wanted, even if they didn't want it all that much or for all that long? The whole sordid melodrama played out in my brain, the story ending with Baker taking my girl away, and though I didn't realize it at the time, the sad tale was a comfort. It kept me from dwelling on what had Cecily so weak.

“A wicked stone will definitely double a girl over,” Dr. Lankton said. “An astute analysis, Dr. Baker.” She tilted her hand, and I saw the two kings in her mitt. She tossed the cards atop Baker's queens. “Two butchers beats two bitches every time,” she said.

Cecily woke, then fell back to sleep. She slept with her neck against the cushioned roll of the fainting sofa. On the silk of the parasol had been painted a garden scene in watery blues and cloudy pinks, and she dreamed herself there, or so she would tell me later in a letter.

Your fingers were cupped in my hands,
she would write.
I overheard some word of stones, and at that, your fingers were the cool wet rocks from a brook. And I felt my aches, my fever, leaving me, one deep breath at a time.

A
S
I
WAITED FOR ANY
WORD
of Cecily's condition, a young nun—a novitiate in a white habit—brought me coffee with chips of ice in it. Whenever I asked to see Cecily, the nuns would tell me, with squints of concern, in the gentlest of voices, that she simply couldn't be seen.

“I'm sure you understand,” they would say, always, every time, and I would say, “Yes, I understand,” but I never did. And the novitiate would bring me more coffee, her eyes a startling, wide-awake blue. She always seemed about to say something, but she would never utter a word.

Two or three times a day, during those four or five days at St. Joseph's, I would be allowed to look in on Cecily. Most often I could
only
look, and only as she slept. “She only ever sleeps,” the nuns told me.

“Should she be sleeping so much?” I would ask.

“Oh, yes, yes, she should,” they would say. “She's awake all night, so she needs to sleep all day.”

“Then maybe I can see her at night,” I said, “when she's not sleeping.”

“No one can see anyone at night,” they said.

St. Joseph's was a hospital that tended to charity cases, but the building was new, and the novitiates scrubbed the place until their blisters bled. The smell of the bleach sometimes burned your nose and pinched your lungs.

Cecily had a sunny room, with a window that looked out onto a courtyard garden with grapevines winding around a gazebo and the pickets of a fence. Ravens gathered and then fled with grapes in their beaks.

“She might like to see this,” I said once. “Can't we get her up to look out the window?”

At the suggestion of it, Cecily woke, and I went to her bedside.

“It's me . . . Ferret,” I told Cecily as I stroked her cheek.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Here,” I said. “Always. They won't let me see you except when you're sleeping. And they won't let me wake you.”

“But I never sleep,” she said. “I can't sleep at all.” And her eyes drifted shut. At her side, atop the bed covers, was always a book, and each time I peeked into the room, the bookmark, a yellow feather, had been moved deeper down. I liked to imagine my silent, blue-eyed novitiate reading to her.

When not at the hospital, I tried to see Doxie at the boardinghouse, but Mrs. Margaret refused me. And the actors of the Silk & Sawdust Players assisted in the refusal, bullying me away just as expertly as they had on that first day of the Fair. They all had so little to do, they could afford to stand sentry at every entrance. And I didn't even know where, in the house, the baby was. I appealed to the landlady, reminding her that I was the one who'd paid the rent. “You are an accomplice,” I told her, “in the child's abduction.” But she was unmoved by my demands. Mrs. Margaret had her convinced that
I
was the reason Cecily had been hospitalized and that Doxie would be doomed in my care.

Who could help me? I wasn't Doxie's father. Cecily wasn't my wife. What laws were there to protect someone like me? I felt so desperate, I considered seeking out Wakefield. But I'd not seen him in the hospital halls even once. I assumed he was back at his theater in the Grand Court, seeking affection from his cast of hundreds.

So I waited. I spent all my hours in the chapel, waiting, waiting, waiting. “I'm just downstairs waiting,” I told Cecily, when I could. I drew some comfort from the deep sympathy in the novitiate's eyes, and she seemed to be everywhere, casting me glances like an angel.

When Cecily was better, everything would be remedied, I assured myself. We would fall into our new life. We would get Doxie baptized, in a long silk gown. We'd get a house together, maybe even a little farm just beyond the fairgrounds. We could conspire on a show and take it to the stage. We could start our own theatrical troupe.

One afternoon, August, Rosie, and Pearl brought Cecily a kimono wrapped in tissue in a box, and Cecily woke just long enough to tug at the box's ribbon. Together, we watched Cecily sleep, her little soft snores puffing at her lips like she was blowing us kisses. Pearl took a manicure set to Cecily's fingers, scratching away at the ends of her nails with a tiny file.

“They ain't doing nothing at all for the girl,” Rosie said. “Let's leave with her.”

“You won't succeed at kidnapping,” August said. “There's nothing more fierce than an Omaha nun. They've got shotguns tucked away in those habits. In a frontier town, you can't fend off evil with a crucifix.” He came to the side of the bed and scooted me over in my chair, to share the seat with me. He took a chamois cloth from Pearl's manicure kit and began scrubbing the nails of Cecily's other hand.

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I sat in the chapel as always. I'd gnawed my thumb bloody, chewing and peeling at a hangnail. I hadn't slept, and I was on the verge of madness. I took out my pocketknife. I pressed the tip of it into my wound as if I could dig out all the damage I'd already done to it. But at the first sharp stab of pain I was startled from my delirium. I then leaned forward, pressing my forehead against the pew in front of me. I stuck the tip of the knife into the soft wood, and began to carve Cecily's name. Part of me wanted to get caught, to get punished, but it mostly felt a holy act. It felt like worship, scratching the letters in deep.

I froze at the sound of footsteps, having only carved in the
C-e-c-i
. I pulled back the knife, tucked away the blade. I hid my vandalism by holding my bloody thumb over the letters on the pew.

Then came the ting of a tin bucket on the tiles of the floor, and an echoing bang as the handle dropped against the bucket's side. I heard the sloshing of the water and smelled the bleach. I heard someone slip into the pew behind me to sit. I recognized the scratch and crunch of the starched folds of a habit.

I turned when I heard her speak to me.

In the split second before I saw the novitiate's blue eyes, I'd hoped to see Cecily there, in nun's costume, in the middle of a plot to escape.
Ferret
. I'd heard the song of Cecily's soft voice in the way the nun whispered.

At first I wondered how she knew my name, but then I realized this was that little dove in white who was everywhere, always. She was omnipresent, like her Lord. She mopped, she scrubbed. She changed the beds and fluffed the pillows. No matter how noisy the bristles of her brush, the patients paid her no mind. It was as if she'd made a sacred vow to fade away.

“She's gone,” she whispered.

I asked my questions as I rushed to leave. I wanted to be every place at once.

My clumsy stumbling was like something from a nursery rhyme.

“Where'd she go?” I said as I stood from the pew and knocked over the novitiate's bucket.

“They took her away,” she said as the water spilled.

“To where?” I said as I slid on the soap and the bleach.

“Who knows,” she said as she knelt to the floor to sop up the mess.

“Who knows?” I said.

“Go,” she said.

I squatted down next to her, nearly weeping from frustration. “But
where
?” I whispered.

“The child,” she whispered back. “They'll fetch the child first, I suspect.”

The child.
I stepped from the chapel, but had no idea where to find a door. The few times I'd left the building, I'd had to be taken by the hand. I'd never learned my way around the hospital's sprawl, every corridor alike, every window looking out on the same lawn of burnt grass. Whenever I'd been led up the winding of the halls and the spiraling of the stairs to Cecily's room, she had seemed housed in a tower, locked away by witches.

I returned to the novitiate's side, to whisper, “Which way to the door?”

“Heaven help us all,” she said. She stood up and took my arm, and left behind the wet floor, the bucket overturned, the brush in the aisle. She led me from the chapel, down a hall, around a corner.

“Who is
they
?” I said.

“Who is
they
?” she said.

“You said
they
.
They
took her.”

She held out her other arm, curled her fingers, clawed at the air, pantomiming Wakefield's silver fist. “Him,” she said. “And his butler and his driver.”

“That can't be,” I said. “He's not been here at all.” But even as I said it, I felt my stomach sink.

•   •   •

E
VEN THE NUNS
were villains in this ballad of mine. My novitiate explained it all to me on our long walk down an endless hall.

As I'd fretted in the chapel every day, hour after hour, with my hands folded in my lap, my head bowed, in all the postures of prayer, Cecily hadn't slept at all. Somewhere down a hall, around a corner, and up some stairs, and down more halls, and around more corners, and up more stairs, Cecily was seen by medical doctors, midwives, homeopaths, and healers of all stripes. Every waking minute, every minute I didn't see her, she'd been fiddled with, her temperature taken, her blood drawn, her skin needled, her reflexes tip-tapped. She guzzled beef tea to feed her iron-poor blood and they collected her urine to puzzle over its shade of yellow. Pills were tucked beneath her tongue. Electrostatic shock was shot through her joints. They sought illness in every inch of her with their spyglasses and stethoscopes. They went water witching in her ear canals and became students of her pupils.

And all the while, there sat Wakefield. He read to her and held her hand, and he promised her he could make her well. Whenever she asked about me, she was told I had trusted her fully to their care. And here is how she betrayed me: she believed Wakefield. And she believed the nuns. When she asked to see me, they told her I couldn't be found anywhere.

“It's unforgivable,” Wakefield told her. “And it's the same mistake I made when my Myrtle took ill. I hid. I ran away. I couldn't bear to see her in pain. And I couldn't bear to let her see me cry. So I couldn't be found when she needed me most. For all their bluster and fight, men are weak, weak creatures.”

•   •   •

W
HEN MY NOVITIATE
led me to the front door, she still held on tight. “Lean on me,” she whispered. “Act like you're on your last legs.”

I
was
on my last legs. Or at the moment it seemed so. Pretending to be weak came easy, and I was grateful to have her there next to me.

In the lane out front, a carriage and driver sat parked. He seemed to be there to serve the hospital's patients. My novitiate helped me into the carriage and instructed the driver to take me wherever I needed to go.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
REACHED
the boardinghouse to collect Doxie, I expected a battle. But there was no one on the stairs to stop me. No one in the hall. I went to Cecily's room, and the door was unlocked. And there stood the wicked Mrs. Margaret in costume, in that skirt patterned with frogs and crescent moons, her black boots with white spats. She was in the middle of twisting the wiry hair of her own pig-snouted, pumpkin head into a skinny braid.

“I'm the only one here,” she said. Mrs. Margaret nodded toward the empty crib as she tied a girlish pink ribbon to the end of her braid.

“Where'd they go?” I said. I can't say I didn't wish for that stubborn hag to drop dead right then and there, but I didn't pick up the scissors to stab her. The scissors were on the sewing machine just at my side, and I only took them in my fist to threaten. I just wanted to worry her. I wasn't leaving that rattrap without word of Doxie, and it was beginning to seem like the only way to eke out an ounce of civility from the old witch was to hold a blade to her throat.

No sooner had the light from the window glinted on the metal of the scissors than Mrs. Margaret had her full weight against me, pushing me to the wall, her knee in my groin, her arm cutting off the wind in my pipe. She gripped the hand that held the scissors and forced them so close to my ear, I could feel their pointed tip going too far in.

“When you gonna learn that I'm just trying to keep you out of trouble, Ferret?” she said. “It's pity I feel for you, deep, deep down in the cold black guts of my heart.”

I couldn't see anything for all the watering of my eyes. I couldn't breathe, and when I did sneak a gulp of air, I choked even more from the stench of whatever had died in her mouth.

“Now the nuns'll lie to ya, Ferret, but Mama Margaret, she'll tell it to you like you gotta hear it. But you gotta be smart enough to even
want
the truth. Are you? You gotta tell me. Or nod your head. Are you smart?” But I couldn't speak. And I couldn't nod. “Can you hear a word I'm saying?” she said. “Or do I need to dig out all the earwigs clotting up the sound?” She pushed the point of the scissors in deeper, and when I started to flinch from the pain, she backed up and let me drop to the floor. I coughed and clung to the bed.

“Now the person you wanna go after with scissors is Billy Wakefield,” and she ran the point of the scissors up along my cheek. “He stol'd your girl right from under your nose.” She stuck the tip of the scissors up one of my nostrils. I slapped her hand away. “He got Cecily good and scared. And he made sure the nuns kept you napping in that chapel, praying for help like a good little ninny. And now he's taking her away in his own private train.”

This isn't a city where the sick can get anything but sicker and sicker
, Wakefield had told Cecily. The whole profane town stood on the sacred boneyards of Indians. Omaha was blacking our every lung with its filth and soot. The hospitals were hot with poxes and fevers.
I know where to take you
, he'd promised.
I know all kinds of secrets about the wind and water. Your health is out there somewhere. We only have to find it.