The Swan Gondola (32 page)

M
RS.
M
ARGARET,
out of costume, in a shirtwaist and small straw hat decorated with crocheted sunflowers, carried a cake box by the twine that tied it closed. “Pork fruitcake,” she said, sitting across from me. She put the box on my desk and cut the twine with a pocketknife.

“Pork, you say?” I said, looking in at it. I sniffed for poison in among the scents of cinnamon and clove.

“Some salt with the sweet,” she said. “You'll like it.” She cut off a slice as I gathered a few sheets of letterhead to use as plates. We had no forks, so we tore at it with our fingers. But I paused to let her take the first bite. When she saw I was waiting for her, she stopped.

“I read in a penny dreadful once that you can smell almond when there's cyanide in something,” I said.

“Yeah, cyanide smells like almonds,” she said. “And so do
almonds
.” She ate the cake, so I ate too. I didn't care for it much, so I only nibbled.

At first I thought Mrs. Margaret was laughing when she started wheezing. She buried her face in her handkerchief. She boohooed and blubbered, her wails broken by her shaky breath. She flipped up her eye patch to dab at the tears there.

Seeing her cry was somehow like seeing a snake swallowing a mouse, gulp by gulp. But it was jarring in other ways too. I counted on her cold indifference, I realized. Without her hardness to rage against, I felt a wall I'd built falling down.

She'd pinched and blown her nose until it was as purple red as a beetroot, like a drunkard's. Finally she cleared her throat and took some deep breaths. She snorted back the phlegm she'd worked up. She took the folded newspaper from the corner of my desk and fanned her hot, red cheeks with it. “I need a letter written,” she said. She snapped the eye patch back into place, blessedly hiding the milky glass. Her unseeing eye seemed it could see right through a person.

“I thought you only
burned
letters,” I said.

“I'll pay you whatever you need to get paid,” she said. “I don't have much, but I'll get you whatever sum you ask for.”

“Seeing you in such misery may be sum enough,” I said.

As she spoke with her head lowered, she picked at a loose thread in the embroidered violets of her handkerchief. “Cecily can't look at me without getting sick with rage,” she said. She sniffled. She whimpered and whined. “She won't let me see Doxie. She doesn't want my inky black soul infecting the child, she says.”

“Maybe it's for the best,” I said.

Mrs. Margaret slapped the flat of her hand on the top of my desk, rattling the pen in my ink pot. I jumped at the noise and she looked me in the eye. “Understand something, Ferret. I'd sooner swallow glass than live without those girls. Nothing in this world matters to me but Cecily and Dox. I couldn't love them more if they were part of my own blood and guts. Why do you think I've tried to kill you so many goddamn times? I can't have nobody taking them away.” I still said nothing, and she sat back in the chair and returned to picking at her needlepoint violet. “You're kinder than I am, Ferret,” she said. “I know you think you're tough because you're a boy who grew up in an alley, but can you imagine being a
girl
growing up in an alley? You learn your way around your reflexes awfully fast when the men come creeping, even in the daylight. And I know what you're thinking . . . you're thinking who'd be so hard up they'd go after an ugly toad like old Mrs. Margaret in the light of day? But back when I was young, I was only half this ugly. And even if I'd been double as ugly as I am now, I still wouldn't have been safe, because they ain't looking to show you off to their mothers.”

I folded my hands atop my desk. I sighed, exhausted. “What am I supposed to do for you, Mrs. Margaret? Cecily won't see me either.”

“She trusted me to take that letter to you, and I didn't,” she said. “It's unforgivable that I set fire to it, she says.”

Cecily's lack of forgiveness consoled me. She had turned Mrs. Margaret from her home for being cruel to me. To
me
. “What do you wish me to do?” I said, mimicking Oscar's creaky voice box without quite meaning to. I turned in my swivel chair—its coils still squeaking though I'd oiled them three times in my boredom that day. I touched my fingertips to the typewriter keys, drumming my fingers gently, making the letters on the thin steel bars shiver. “What is it you want to say to her?” I said.

“I don't want to say anything to her,” she said. “You won't pose as me, you'll pose as yourself. In your own voice. You'll tell her to forgive me. She will if you say so.”

She will if you say so.
I could've listened to Mrs. Margaret all day, the two of us analyzing Cecily's unforgiveness.

And then it occurred to me—my fee.

“If she forgives you,” I said, turning away from the typewriter, “then you have to get her to meet me. Trick her if you have to. I need to be alone with her.”

Her nod of agreement was so slight, it might have just been a little tremor of disgust.

I had installed a bottle of whiskey in a bottom drawer. “A gentleman's contract,” I said, bringing out the bottle and two shot glasses. I'd barely finished filling her glass when she'd picked it up and tossed it back. I poured more in, and she drank that too, and held the glass out for another shot. I'd not had a chance to take a single sip of my own.

“She's not good,” Mrs. Margaret said. At first I thought it some feeble attempt to convince me I shouldn't love Cecily. It had been Cecily's own strategy a time or two, in her attempts to send me off to Pearl: I'm no good for you, Ferret. I'm no good.

But then Mrs. Margaret said, “She's sick.”

“No,” I said. “No, she's getting better.” I thought of all those postcards.
Took the waters, leaving today, took the waters, leaving today, took the waters, leaving today
, her recitation sounding like a train on its tracks. But I also thought of how pale she'd looked on the roof. “The travel did her good,” I said.

“No,” she said, “the travel made her worse. Or something's making her worse. I spent time up at the house when she first got back. She'd been to ten sanatoriums, had been prodded and fingered by perverted old doctors, and yet she couldn't even lift Doxie out of the crib. She's getting so big, she'd say, but Doxie isn't getting so big. She's not even as big as she should be. Do they even feed her? That little heiress is as thin as a waif.”

I shot the whiskey back, then poured some more, shot it back, catching up with Mrs. Margaret as she spoke of her dread. “I had a little girl of my own once,” she said. “I was just a little girl myself. What did I know about looking after a living thing? I didn't know nothing, and she didn't live long. And I knew she was dead a month before she died. Even when she was still alive, she was a ghost in her own skin. She was haunting her own bones. She was so afraid.”

I stood up too fast and knocked over the bottle, but Mrs. Margaret grabbed it before it spilled a drop. I fell back into my chair, dizzy. I shook with rage, and I felt my throat constrict. I felt it burning with the liquor. Wakefield was killing Cecily as sure as if he had his hands at her neck, pressing his thumbs in, inching her windpipe closed.

I would not write a letter. I would not scheme for a secret meeting of begging. I would not hope for the best. I would kill him. I would go to wherever he was, press the point of a pistol to his temple, and pull the trigger. And they'd hang me for it. They'd lynch me, so they could all have a tug on the rope.

Even before it had all flickered through my head, I resolved myself to this fate. Nothing in my life had ever seemed more certain. I took another shot, straight from the bottle.

Mrs. Margaret seemed to be seeing into my head and all the pictures of my execution. She put her hand on my wrist and squeezed hard. “I need your help,” she said. “If you go off half-cocked, you won't get anywhere. You won't get
near
Billy Wakefield. You think a man gets so rich from being a saint? You think you're the first one to wish him dead? Get Cecily to forgive me, and I can keep watch. And I can get things fixed.”

It had a kind of hypnotism, her cranberry eye, the whites shot through with red. I believed her. We would save Cecily. We would get her and Doxie out of the house on the hill.

I turned back to the typewriter. I typed
Dear Cecily
, then stopped, defeated. “I don't think my letters even reach her,” I said.

“I can get it to her,” Mrs. Margaret said. “I know where she's going to be. I can even put it in her hand today if you finally get to writing the damn thing. It doesn't have to be much. She just needs to know I was here, making things right.”

I concentrated. I considered. But everything I wrote was wrong. I would type a few lines, then rip it from the typewriter, to crumple the paper. Only when I imagined myself sitting with Cecily, speaking right to her, did the words come to me.
Only one person has ever loved you and ol' Dox more than I do, and that's that Mrs. Margaret of yours,
I wrote.
Forgive her. She was only thinking of you when she was so awful to me.

I folded the note too slowly for Mrs. Margaret. She grabbed it from the desk, stood, and turned to leave the room. “Mrs. Margaret,” I said, and she paused with her hand on the doorknob, wiggling it with impatience. I said, “What did Cecily's letter say? Did you read it before you burned it? I'd just like to know a little something about what it said.” I somehow felt, as coconspirators, we could rely on each other. And I could finally ask her what I'd so longed to ask. I was desperate for even the least fragment of a sentence, even a word or two more. Cecily had confessed on the roof what she'd written—
I told you that I loved you.
How, exactly, had she said it to me?

“You idiot,” she said, snorting. As she stepped out the door, she said, “Where would somebody like me have ever learned how to read?”

And it was as if she took a match to that letter once again.

December 10, 1898

Dear Cecily,

The Emerald Cathedral hasn't an emerald in it. There isn't much of anything green. In the sunlight that creeps in between the cracks of the barn's walls, the cathedral does glisten with a few green sparks here and there—shards of jelly jars catch the light, and green glass bottles and lightning rod insulators and a window excavated from a church, the whale that devoured Jonah swimming in a blue-green ocean.

And it's not much of a cathedral. There's a cross of crystal doorknobs, but no door. There are no rooms within with pulpits and pews. Its spires suggest steeples, but for the most part, it has yet to take shape despite its hulking mass. The Emerald Cathedral seems it might fall apart from the strain of reaching toward heaven—it looks like a collision caught in the middle of collapse.

We use anything useless: bent nails and rusted wheels and broken pitchers; warped window frames of abandoned sheds, the ball-and-claw foot of an old bathtub, the clapper of a church bell. We built a scaffolding around the growing altar. We use wire and plaster and nails, tar and rope. The beauty of it, I came to see after only a minute or two, was how it stood always on the verge of ruin.

We dismantled all the implements rusting in nearby ditches and lying broken in neighboring creeks. The plows, the harrows, the cultivators, the weeders, the potato diggers. These winter days are mild, and the cathedral creeps along the walls and rafters, and swirls and towers, like a stilled tornado in the middle of tearing apart a town.

We add dolls to the cathedral, sundials, croquet mallets, mole traps, cherry stoners.

We've forgotten about Christmas coming. Many from across the countryside come every night to the barn, bringing along the birds they shot and plucked and cooked for our supper. We hang lanterns from every hook and we have evenings of waltzes in the flickering amber glow. A farmer plays a dulcimer, his wife a ukulele, and we dance across the barn floor after dark, at the foot of the altar.

Somehow it seems the cathedral belongs to everyone around. It's a reason to gather and to work. The harvests used to be like this, I'm told. When the crops were healthy, they would tend each other's fields and gather for festivals. They would eat together, and drink, and they'd stay up past midnight.

We're anxious to be finished with the cathedral, but we never want these days and nights to end.

Ferret