The Swan Gondola (3 page)

Before the Fair

Late Spring 1898

A
T THE
E
MPRESS
O
PERA
H
OUSE,
where there had never actually been any opera, the talent got next to nothing—the tickets were cheap and the hall rarely filled. Even as a vaudeville house it came up short; you could find better at the Orpheum down the street, from troupes that traveled in from elsewhere. But what the Empress had was its morality plays. The ladies and gents would pay to see real live skin and sinning and pretend it was virtuous. The plays changed every few weeks, to allow folks to see men and women done in again and again by infidelity, addiction, syphilis, thievery, whoredom.

Most of the performers on the nightly program were only locals like me, but their ambitions matched those of the city itself. As our little frontier town became more and more refined, they became certain that more and more people would be looking in our direction. Already folks everywhere drank the beer from our breweries and ate the sugar from our beets. They ate the slaughter of our packing houses. The people of Omaha no longer dreamed of stepping out into the world, because the world was coming to us. Omaha was growing beyond the city limits; its buildings were taller, its streets were paved, and the railroad station connected us directly to Chicago and San Francisco and New York City.

I was no cynic, but I didn't share anyone's optimism. I had seen too much corruption. To my mind, Omaha had already been ruined. I saw no promise in the city's future. So while I waited for the world to come running, I lived in the attic of the Empress. The theater was an old temperamental firetrap newly wired for electricity, so in exchange for rent I slept lightly, poised to smell smoke at the first spark. Not sleeping was easy: my duck-feather mattress damn near flat. I whitewashed the iron bedstead to cover the rust, and I oiled the joints, as a squeaky bed made the ladies fidgety. I had a chair with broken springs and a little stove and a wardrobe full of worn-out costumes abandoned by their actors. I liked how I looked in them and adopted them as my own, gussying up a pocket with a square of silk or sticking a glass-ruby pin through the knot of my necktie—one day I was a Civil War soldier with a few patches of a hero's gunshot in my sleeve, the next I was some shabby king in epaulets with mangy fringe. I had top hats, plaid caps, a pith helmet. That's how people knew me, offstage and on—Ferret the ventriloquist, in the raggedy suits.

In the evenings I did my puppet show or magic or both, but all us performers had extra jobs we did in the daylight. I hadn't planned to get cozy with three of the girls in the four-girl burlesque act, but one by one they sidled up to me throughout that winter, each wanting to be my one and only. In January I took up with Ada who worked days wrapping bonbons in the back of Balduff's—the poor thing spent all of Valentine's up to her elbows in candy hearts and heart-shaped ice cream, while I forgot the holiday altogether. When I bought her a beer at Red's saloon, I thought I was being gentlemanly, but she burst into tears and refused to forgive the slight. So then I palled around with Florence, a ginger-haired cherry who hated her own freckles—I always fell into a fit of sneezing from her perfumed fading cream.

And all the month of April I dated the girl named May—when not at the Empress, May popped the corn and took the tickets at the zoological gardens, where they charged admission to see all the critters that lived in the plains just outside our city, Omaha still only a mile or two from wilderness. They kept buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, raccoons. One spring day we took a pleasant stroll through the zoo, arm in arm in the shade of her parasol, May looking down at the path, distracted from the eagles and owls. In front of the caged badger she finally spoke: “So go ahead and ask me to marry you, if you want,” she said. And I said, “But I thought we had a good thing going,” which wasn't at all what she'd hoped to hear, though I had truly meant it as a compliment. May had never before been so serious, which was why I'd liked her so much.

Marriage had seemed to me to be for men too old or too churchy for romance. I didn't know it then, but I was stunted, forever the orphaned child. As a boy, I'd feared I'd never grow up, that my rotten youth would never end. And though it did end, the fear didn't. That life I'd longed for—of being a man of worth and substance after shaking off my awful boyhood—still seemed a lifetime away. So I kept waiting and waiting.

I was waiting for Cecily, as it turned out. When I first saw her, only a few weeks before the Fair, I caught her eye, and she looked away. It was when she looked again that I straightened my back and lifted my chin. It was with that second look, as quick as it was, that I suddenly felt like I was somebody worth seeing.

•   •   •

I
HEARD HER NAME
before I saw her, that night, backstage at the Empress. Before the entertainment began, an old actor with a monocle shuffled out center stage to address a few changes to the cast. “And the part of ‘violet-eyed trollop' in
Opium and Vanities
will
not
be played tonight by Odie Hansom, as listed. She will be played, instead, by Cecily . . .” and here he paused, squinting at a sheet of paper in his hand, seemingly attempting to read the actress's last name. “Cecily . . .” he said again. He finally abandoned the effort. “Cecily,” he concluded, and left the stage.

As the master of ceremonies stumbled out to sing a comic song, his face painted white and his mouth a broad, bright-red gash of a smile that wouldn't stop, I shared a cigarette in the wings with the fourth girl in the burlesque revue. She was my favorite. I'd bought Phoebe St. James a consoling drink or two, ever since her traveling theater troupe went bankrupt the winter before, stranding all the actors and actresses far from home. She was content to share her troubles, and nothing more, with me. One day she'd been hamming it up as Yum-Yum in
The Mikado
at one of the city's finer performance halls, and the next she was a dime-a-dance girl at a local saloon.

“That wallpaper's truly the ghastliest,” she said, gazing at the backdrop dangling overhead in the rafters. She was dressed like a fairy with a short skirt of blue feathers and silk stockings the color of her skin—little pieces of glass had somehow been stitched into the silk to make her legs shimmer in the footlights. The dancers often changed their act, but their costumes stayed mostly the same. One night they were fairies, another night pixies, another night elves, another night angels—whatever called for paper wings and short skirts.

“Maybe it's supposed to be,” I said. “It's the walls of the opium den, after all.”

“Why would anyone have anything to do with opium if the wallpaper is that ghastly,” she said. The cigarette between her lips, she practiced her dance steps, swinging her wrists, wiggling her fanny, the wings on her back fluttering. Three little light steps forward on the balls of her feet, three little light steps back. She plucked at her stockings whenever the glass nettled her skin.

“You noticed there's no music tonight, didn't you?” I said. She stopped dancing, gave me back my cigarette, and leaned cautiously forward to peek down into the empty, shallow orchestra pit. “The musicians went on strike just before curtain,” I told her.

Phoebe shrugged, then picked up a grease pencil from a makeup kit on a stool. She leaned forward into a mirror and drew a heart-shaped birthmark on a bit of exposed breast. “Unlikely anybody would notice the fiddle player anyway,” she said. She batted feathery black eyelashes.

When the master of ceremonies was bored of getting booed, he ran to the opposite end of the stage spouting the foulest of words despite his painted-on grin. Phoebe took the cigarette from my lips and gave me a slap on the ass. “Time for your ol' song and dance, Geppetto,” she said.

•   •   •

M
Y PUPPET,
a doll I called Oscar, had rosy cheeks of chipped paint and a squat top hat atop a polished bald head. I had bought the dummy secondhand from a peddler's cart some years before, the sun having faded the doll's striped trousers and dotted vest, and yellowed the golden dragons embroidered on his tiny slippers.

In better days, he'd been a man of distinction, I figured, so he spoke with an uppity purr that was easy to do without moving my lips much, though I did still keep my mustache overgrown and unruly. My tongue lazy and slow, I created a drawl that tickled the crowds even more than his jokes about life as an elegant skinflint.

“Are you going to the Fair this summer, Oscar?” I asked him when the audience finished its feeble applause.

“Heaventh, noooo,” he said. I triggered a switch that rolled his glass eyes toward the ceiling. “I unnerstan,” he said, “tha' the castles are of horsehair and glue.”

The crowd enjoyed the puppet's cynicism, and they laughed without mirth.
Yes
, they seemed to say,
we're all weary of the World's Fair and it ain't even begun
.

The Omaha World's Fair had seemed, to those of us in the city's lower, dirtier parts, the folly of the wealthy and their wives. The white palaces would sparkle like gemstones, they told us. Foreign flowers had been blooming all winter in greenhouses and exotic fish had been shipped in from far-off oceans to stock the lily ponds. They talked as if they could unmuddy the river and uncloud the skies. “You won't recognize yourself. How happy you'll all be to be someplace else. It's so much better than what you deserve” is what we heard them saying when they were saying all those other things.

Some of the old-timers among us had been in Omaha since its earliest days fifty years before, and they weren't folks easily dazzled. Back then, the wind kicked up the dust in summer; and in the winter it spread fires from one house of sticks to the next. Many of the settlers only settled because they had slowed to a stop on their way to the Gold Rush.

And even when I was a little boy, twenty years or so before, packs of wild hounds so terrorized the town, sinking their teeth into children and livestock, that men took to poisoning the dogs with strychnine. I'd had to step over their carcasses on my way to the library. I knew the town's worst qualities too well. No matter how many streets the mayor paved or sewers he dug, Omaha would never be Chicago. I'd never once been to the Windy City, but it was my idea of civilization. If I'd grown up in Chicago, I reasoned, I would've stumbled over the good fortune that fell in the streets. The remarkable destiny that waited for me would've been right around every corner. I would've been Dickens's Pip.

In Chicago, there was beauty and class. There was wealth and money well spent. In Omaha, the only rich men I'd ever worked among were the cattle barons in their carriages outside the auction houses. They would sit there, brooding, puffing on cigars, sending up smoke that I could swear turned into dark clouds shaped like true-to-life skulls and crossbones. They weren't ones to sully their spats by taking a step into the marketplace, so they sat in their cabs, overburdened by their fur coats, poised to hear reports of profits. As an orphan I'd begged for alms, and they would pay me to go away, not out of charity but because my raggedness reminded them too much of the dust heap they'd only themselves just recently left behind.

“There's to be a carnival too,” I told Oscar on the stage, with some sense of nostalgia. “You can ride rides, and watch whirling dervishes. You can have your future told in a clairvoyant's booth.”

“I already know my future,” Oscar said. I played the buttons up his spine like those of a concertina, allowing me to work the movement of his hinged fingers. He opened one hand, joint by joint, and with the pointer finger of his other, he traced the line in his palm, along the grain of the wood. “The Fair ain't worth the admission fee,” he predicted.

But I thought just then of Mr. Crowe, and his stereopticon, the library dimmed, the lantern lit, projecting the colorful illustrations of the Paris Expo of 1867 on the wall. He showed slides of an enormous vapor-filled balloon, a Siamese pavilion, a grotto aquarium. I could taste again, at the tip of my tongue, the sugared figs that he'd cut up and shared, and how I'd run my fingers along the ribbons of French words on the candy box that had been delivered by mail.

Any thought of Mr. Crowe could turn me sentimental. Crowe would have been tickled by the notion of a world's fair in Omaha, no matter how little the city might resemble Paris.

To close the act, Oscar did a character for the crowd—Old Poppa Popocrat of the Populist Party. With a few twists of a knob on his steel spine, I could make him sit up ramrod straight. By playing some buttons and strings in among the cog works of his guts, I could bring his hands to his chest and could slip his fingers into his vest pockets. I pumped a leather bladder near his heart to puff up his chest with a blowhard's arrogance.

I wasn't much for politics and politicking, but I found that Old Poppa could quickly turn a crowd noisy. They all loved to laugh at their troubles. The best comedy plays on your very worst fears, it seems. The money panic of five years before—the days when a farmer's crop didn't even yield enough to pay the debt on a sturdy plow—inclined folks toward clamoring for a common man's revolution. The big businesses—the railroads, the banks—overbuilt, overborrowed, overloaned; and when they failed, we all fell with them. The Populists promised change; they would give the nation back to the people.

“They light their see-gars with the sweat of our brows,” Oscar said, speaking of the city's rich. “They work our fingers to the bone, then sell us leather mittens at a price twice our wages. At the slaughterhouse, we work for a penny a pig, then pay the butcher double for a slice of bacon!” The audience whooped and jeered, as if at a true rally.

“And now, the World's Fair,” Old Poppa Popocrat said, rocking back and forth, like in a chair on his porch. “A giant fairyland tossed up in the middle of a dead field. They say the architects are even gilding the bricks to line the walks. Yes, in Oh-me-ha, we pave our streets with gold bullion. And
you're
paying for it, one way or 'nuther, and there's
still
a fee to get in.”