The Swan Gondola (31 page)

But before I would take any moments of ease, I slipped myself in among the footmen and maids assisting the ladies and gentlemen into their carriages. According to a chart acquired covertly by the anarchists, Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield would be riding with McKinley, whose wife had stayed behind in the White House to crochet slippers and nurse her epilepsy with laudanum.

We were to hand every woman a parasol trimmed with fresh flowers. I hid beneath one to wait for Cecily, the parasol's silk rippling with fringed pink.

Though I'd only ever been afflicted with the slightest bit of hay fever, all my weeping and snuffling on the roof had seemed to aid with my suffocation—the fragrance was like a cloud of dust, working up my nose and down my throat, to tickle and scratch. I fell into a sneezing fit that shook the petals off my parasol, sending them raining down around me.

All the servants noticed my convulsing, but I didn't care. I didn't care if I got caught and exposed as a fraud. I'd had my moment on the rooftop. Cecily had left her husband's side to meet me, and I'd been able to tell her the truth. I'd kissed her and held her. And she'd believed me, a little, at least.

When Cecily and Wakefield stepped forth, I ducked low, hiding beneath the parasol, and I nudged aside a young maid who was prepared to hand Cecily a parasol weighty with the heavy heads of sunflowers. As Wakefield attended to the president, I held my parasol over Cecily's head, tilting it, blocking Wakefield out altogether. She put her hand on mine as she took the handle, but she dropped her eyes away. In all the confusion and fuss on the roof, I'd failed to give Cecily the scent bottle, so I now held it out in my open palm. Without any words between us, she took the bottle and tucked it into her handkerchief with a magician's sleight of hand. As she walked away from me, she carried my sneezing fit with her, such a lovely contagion. She sneezed and sneezed, knocking the flowers around as she stepped up into the president's carriage, which was covered in cowslip and primrose.

•   •   •

A
UGUST HAD STAKED OUT
a spot of grass on the promenade early, so we could watch the flower parade up close. The promenade was flooded with electrical light, the Grand Court as lit up as daytime but starker, brighter, the white light casting the thinnest and slightest of shadows.

Even outside of his fortune-teller's tent, August's attire had grown bizarre. He had on trousers and a suit coat like a gentleman, but beneath his coat, instead of a shirt, he wore a woman's corset he'd fashioned into a kind of breastplate, having stuck in some feathers and wired in pieces of bone.

“That reminds me,” I said, touching a bone on his corset. I pulled from my pocket the gnawed-clean bone of a frog's leg I'd plucked from Cecily's plate as a waiter had carried it back to the kitchen. “Divine something from it,” I said, handing it to him. And though I'd had no way of knowing it, he predicted the leg I would break when the balloon would fall.

He closed his eyes and tapped the frog's bone against his forehead. “A crutch,” he said. “No spring in your step.”

August had brought along a box of macaroons and a bottle of red wine, and we leaned back against the pedestal of a statue. Feeling sentimental, I put my arm around his shoulders, and he snuggled in close. I guzzled back some wine, and since I'd eaten nothing all day, it took quick effect, and any pangs of worry I had left were dulled away to nothing. Cecily was still married, and Doxie still in her crib in the house on the hill, but I would get them back soon. Soon. I was certain. “Do you have any sense of time at all?” Cecily had asked, and her tone still stung. But I knew in my heart that I was the one she loved—we could throw all the clocks away and live only by the sun and the moon. I tapped my tongue against my teeth again, just as I had when waiting on the rooftop, ticking off the beat of her steps on the stairs.

As if sensing my inner rhythm, Rosie tapped the toe of his boot against the top of my head. He sat above us, atop the pedestal, at the feet of a naked-breasted angel, leaning back against her leg. He seemed mopey about the parade—President McKinley would be passing by in his flowered buggy unassassinated. McKinley was destined to survive our Fair, and all the anarchists were already feeling defanged by a sense of failure. It was a regret they'd feel even more severely a few years later, a deep envy, when McKinley would be gunned down at the world's fair in Buffalo, New York.

“Wallflower, foxglove, celandine, anemone,” August said, poking the coal of his asthma cigarette at the air as the flower-bedecked carriages wheeled by. I took August's opera glasses and looked down the line, seeking Cecily at the parade's end.

The rapid pops and shots that suddenly filled the night air didn't worry me a bit, as I could see the source. The horseless carriage that the catalog company sold, that had been sputtering and popping up the midway all summer long, giving rides to and from, had joined the parade too, strewn with honeysuckle and buttercups.

But the sharp, loud firing of its pipes set the folks in the crowd to shrieking and shouting, suspecting they'd just heard the president done in. No one ran for cover. Instead, they stood on their toes and craned their necks. They stepped into the promenade, closer to the horses and carriages, hoping to get an eyeful of history.

The spectators then retreated, running away from the parade when they saw what they saw: a carriage pulled quick by spooked horses. The carriage tottered and bucked, knocking off its red and white carnations, flinging the flowers into the crowd. I was relieved to see it wasn't Cecily's carriage. The passengers in the runaway cart, we'd later learn, were two teachers from a one-room schoolhouse in the little town of Aurora, who'd been rewarded for their commitment to the children of Nebraska with a place in the president's parade. The teachers screamed and clutched at each other, their hats toppled and their hairdos wrecked, their skirts in a flurry.

While all the rest of us scrambled up the steps of the Electricity Building, away from the danger, Rosie got to his feet on the pedestal. He held on to the angel's wing to lean out and forward to see all he could. And he surprised us by leaping onto the promenade into the thick of it.

Rosie stumbled at first, falling to the bricks and nearly rolling into the rush of the hooves, but he righted himself in time to run alongside the runaway horses. He grabbed hold of the harness of the horse nearest him and seemed to be trying a cowboy trick, intending to kick himself up and over and onto the horse's back, to slow the horse and steer it to safety.

But Rosie kept tripping on his own legs, and he took a few kicks from the horse. He abandoned the Wild West move and collapsed instead, using his full weight to pull and yank on the harness. The horse, weary of dragging him, bared its teeth and slowed to a gallop, then to a stop. The schoolteachers were saved. The two women wept and laughed all at once. They wouldn't even step down when some gentlemen offered to help. It was as though they could only feel at ease by loitering in this moment of death averted.

August and I elbowed and shouldered our way through the crowd, but before we could even reach Rosie, he'd become the Fair's hero as he lay groggy and wrecked, flat on his back on the bricks. Snippets of rumors passed quickly from person to person, and his heroism became more and more embellished along the way. We could hear everyone muttering. By the time we'd reached his side, word had spread that he'd saved not only the schoolteachers but also, somehow, the president and the president's wife, who wasn't at the Fair at all. And Rosie, we heard, prevented the trampling of an orphan; we then heard it was an orphan on crutches, then a one-legged orphan with a little mangy dog, then a whole choir of legless orphans who'd been singing a hymn.

“Did I live through it?” Rosie asked us as we knelt next to him, the ambulance wagon within sight.

“It doesn't look like it,” I said. I put my hand on his naked chest, plenty bloodied and bruised. His shirt had been torn, the rest of his suit ripped and dirty. He had a black eye and a purple nose and a mouthful of even more missing teeth. “Don't you know you're supposed to run away from a runaway horse, not into it?”

August smoothed back Rosie's hair from his forehead, and leaned down to kiss a cut above his eye. “You'll outlive us all, you mean cuss,” August said.

A few doctors and nurses attended to Rosie with stethoscopes and cotton balls of ointment before struggling to lift the beast onto a stretcher and into the back of the wagon. August and I attached ourselves to the outside of the ambulance, clinging to the sides and standing on steps, and we traveled from the Grand Court and into the midway.

The ambulance took Rosie past the Fair's hospital to Roentgen's Wonderful Ray of Light, a carnival attraction—Cecily and I had paid a dime each to stand in its beam to see our skeletons. “Your skeleton is much skinnier than I thought it would be,” Cecily had told me after.

The doctors and nurses pushed past the fairgoers in line for the X-ray. “Medical emergency,” a doctor explained to the ticket taker. We would later learn that the doctor had been waiting all summer for a chance to sneak a patient into the X-ray. But the doctor was nonetheless disappointed by the picture—Rosie didn't have so much as a crack in his bones.

November 27, 1898

Dear Cecily,

We've begun to build the Emerald Cathedral.

Emmaline woke in the night, only hours ago, so inspired she couldn't speak. I leaned on my cane and followed her, as quickly as I could limp, to the barn. She wore only a nightgown and no slippers, and though the wind was still, it was cold. She didn't feel it, though. She was feverish. Her chin dripped with the sweat that rolled down her cheeks. She paced the barn, she ran, she danced and spun, picking things up, putting things down, laughing, crying, possessed. Hester threatened her with a trip to the doctor, and Emmaline finally spoke.
Pick up everything you see
,
she said.
Move it over there
.
She pointed to the west wall of the barn. And we began to work.
Even this?
we often stopped to ask.
Even that
.
Even everything
,
she said.

The tools and materials of the Emerald Cathedral had been in the barn all along.

In my weeks as an oracle, folks often brought sentimental objects to my side. At first they only brought the little things they kept near their hearts—old keys to old diaries, frayed ribbons, dented thimbles, lockets with locks of hair. But the more often they came, the more they brought. They hoped for me to divine something from the everyday. In the twisted logic of the inconsolable, they concluded that the answers they sought rested in all the things that seemed to have no meaning. They wanted me to tell them something. Anything at all. They thought I might be able to intuit something from the dull scythe of a dead son, or a grandmother's cracked butter crock. They brought old sleds with rusted blades, moth-eaten quilts, broken carriage wheels, splintered school desks.

Hester had not allowed the debris to be dragged into her house.
Leave it all in the barn
, she'd said.
He'll get to it
. But I never did, and they kept bringing more.

Word of the cathedral had all day to spread, and when night came, the folks from town and from neighboring farms brought even more of their junk, and they brought wire and rope and pitch. Most of us have gone to bed, even Emmaline, but I can still hear the few that remain in the barn. The wind has dropped to nothing, and I can hear their every word, and every tooth of every saw cutting through something. I hear glass break, and pulleys screech. I hear boozy laughter. And I fall asleep to the noise, comforted, knowing that it's all begun.

Ferret

October 1898

I
N THE DAYS AFTER
our reunion on the rooftop garden, my letters to Cecily went unanswered, perhaps unread. I could easily lose an hour of an afternoon, slouched over my typewriter, coaxing forth poetry for her, hoping to sound hopeful. And I could lose the hour after that, collapsed on my bed, imagining her collapsed on her bed, my letter opened, a letter opener in the shape of a sword gripped in her hand, my words keeping her restless.

I hope to see you at
Rosie's tea
, I wrote to her a few days after the president's dinner. Rosie was being honored as a hero by the Fair's board of lady managers in the gallery of the U.S. Government Building. He was to receive a patchwork quilt, stitched from burlap bags by a girl in Iowa who was deaf and blind, and a framed certificate signed by President McKinley.

I wasn't all that surprised that Cecily never arrived, but I kept my eye on the entryway, watching for her, fooling myself into seeing a little bit of her in every woman that turned the corner. I even found myself recognizing her in the shape and flow of a few ladies' shadows, or a peal of polite laughter, or the click and skip of a heel on the floor. The afternoon ended up being a nonstop stuttering of disappointment.

I sat with August at Rosie's table of honor near an exhibit of things confiscated from federal prisons—dinner knives that had been sharpened into saws, the pine of broken broom handles whittled into keys. The tea in our pot was a strong and awful Lapsang Souchong that tasted of wet smoke.

•   •   •

R
OSIE HAD BEEN
patched up well, his few grisly gashes covered with gauze, his sprained wrist wrapped tight. But his gums were so sore from the few teeth he broke, he couldn't keep from licking his chops and smacking his lips. “Give up on her,” Rosie said, as I cast another glance across the gallery. “Stumble off and go trouble some other lass. And then some other lass after that. There are worse fates than a life of stringing dollies along.” He whistled his
s
's, still getting used to the extra holes in his grin.

“Besides,” August said, “you'll become more desirable to her if you desire her no more.” August had just come from his tent in the Indian camp, still in his petticoat and corset breastplate. Across his shoulders was a woman's fur stole, and he'd covered his face entirely in white paint but for a little blossom of red at the very kiss of his lips. He'd taken a new name:
Cinnamon Bear
.

August and Rosie, despite their motley appearances, were absolutely right. My cupids were putting away their quivers of arrows. No matter how carefully I scrutinized every minute that passed, Cecily would not suddenly be where she'd never been.

And Cecily certainly had no use for a man broken by love, even if it was her love that had broken him.

•   •   •

R
OSIE AND
A
UGUST
helped me even more in the days that followed, setting me up in an office across the hall from August's apartment, above his father's bookshop. Half the room served as August's laboratory, where he brewed his potions of frostwort and horse nettle and hemlock bark, and the other half, the half by the window, would be my office of literary assistance. Even injured, Rosie could lift and haul. He one-handedly took one end of a desk I'd bought secondhand from the stenographers' college and helped me carry it the few blocks to the office and up the narrow stairs. I installed my typewriter and a few chairs, a few lamps, and a hatstand. I propped a sign in the window:
Bartholomew “Ferret” Skerritt, Literary Assistance
. I placed an order for a telephone line, and August's father's shop printed me some sheets of letterhead and envelopes.

And all the while I was certain I'd see Cecily again. She was waiting for the right moment. The truth
did
matter to her.
It must.

I placed expensive, illustrated advertisements in the
Omaha Bee
and the
Omaha World-Herald
, with money August loaned me. The ad featured a picture of a ventriloquist's dummy that the ad man had had in his files—it had looked a little like Oscar.
Put Words in Your Mouth
, the headline read, along with details of my grand opening:
All love letters half price.
Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield couldn't possibly miss the advertisement in their daily papers.

On my first day of work, I arrived at the office early. From my closet at the Empress, I'd selected the costume of the captain of a paddleboat casino, for luck—a red satin vest and a necktie patterned with horseshoes. The actor who had donated it to me explained that the vest's pink buttons had been made of mollusk shells fetched from the river and cut into shape by the orphan girls of Council Bluffs, Iowa.

I was too excited to sit at my desk, so I paced the room, situating everything just so. I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. I adjusted and readjusted the window blinds. I sharpened pencils. I moved my desk around, pushing it against one wall, then another, studying the room for symmetry.

I had plenty of time that afternoon.

My one and only customer, on my first day of work, was the one-eyed automaton.