The Swan Gondola (35 page)

But Rosie eased me around a corner, and into the parlor, and I saw her before I could look away from the black coffin surrounded by wicker baskets of white roses. Before I could see too much, I turned my head toward the bay window, where the light glowed a powdery white, as if the sun were trapped in muslin.

In front of the window sat Mrs. Margaret, Pearl, and a nurse in an apron and cap. A quilt covered their skirts, and the women slowly stitched without speaking, cobbling the clumsy memorial blanket together, all its squares at crosspurposes.

When Pearl spotted me, she seemed agitated at first, but then stood and came to take my hands in hers. Her thimble-less thumb was bloody from the needle. She wore a black dress trimmed in crepe that crackled as she pressed against me to kiss my cheek.

For a second, my anger rose again. “We were turned away at the gate,” I said.

“I'm so sorry,” Pearl said, and the fact that she didn't seem at all surprised only wounded me more. “There's such confusion in a house when there's been a death.”

“I wouldn't know, I guess,” I said.
You wouldn't know either
, I wanted to tell her.
You don't belong here.

“We have to help each other at times like this,” Pearl said.

Nail the coffin shut. Throw ashes in the river and the wind. None of it would work to spirit the lost life away or to shut it out. We were all fools, fattening up the undertaker, paying handsomely for the pantomimes of grief. I wouldn't be a part of it.

“Let's go,” I said to Rosie. Rosie tugged at my arm, to lead me to the coffin. “Why?” I said, through locked teeth.

Rosie leaned in to whisper. “Let it ruin you,” he said. “Let
this
be the very worst thing you have to get through. Get through it, and move on along.”

And when I saw her so still, I felt my own soul leave.

Tucked into her hands folded just beneath her breasts was a handkerchief, but not the one I'd given her. This handkerchief was a souvenir of the Fair, the battleship
Maine
embroidered in the corner of it, in gray thread. It was all wrong. It was all so terribly wrong. I had to believe Wakefield saw some sentiment in the gesture. Was it because he had been introduced to Cecily at his masquerade ball, with the sinking of the toy ship on the lagoon? Was that it?

I watched for the handkerchief to lift, the lace of it to rustle, her chest to rise and fall gently. Her breath before had always been so soft and slow, so barely there. If you didn't know her like I knew her, if you didn't know the rhythm of her sleeping breath, where to look, where to listen, you might not see the breath at all. But I knew. I'd watched her sleep so many times. I knew well the flutter of her lashes as dreams crossed her eyes. I knew how her tongue clicked as she ticked off each breath that left her lips.

I knew the best way to wake her, to ease her from sleep. I knew to stroke her neck.

I didn't give much thought to touching her neck just then, to slipping my fingers beneath the silk and lace of her collar. When I did, I wasn't astonished to feel the pulse of her heart. She was there with me, for only a beat. It was the pulse of my heart, in my fingers, beating against the skin of her neck. In a lost moment, quicker than a heartbeat, than a wink, I mistook my heart for hers, and she woke for me, just for me, for just that moment, one more time. And though it was only a heartbeat, only a wink, it was time enough. I had time to say good-bye to her.

•   •   •

T
HE MORTICIAN HAD
signaled concern to the others in the room, as I'd stood there, touching Cecily,
his
corpse,
his
creation, and suddenly Mrs. Margaret was breathing her foul breath in my face, twisting my arm behind my back, leading me away from the coffin and toward the parlor door.

“I want to see Doxie,” I told her, in between gasps of pain.

“Doxie's upstairs,” she said, spitting, her wretched breath now a mist, “where she belongs. She's with her family. She's a Wakefield now.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm doing this for your own good, Ferret. Get out and stay out.”

Rosie came up next to me and elbowed Mrs. Margaret away. “We're going,” he said.

“We're not,” I said. I stopped and turned to shout through the halls, up the stairs, “We're not going!” But Rosie pushed at me, taking my arm, leading me toward the door.

I turned my head to shout back, “You can't keep me from Doxie! You can't keep me away from my girl!” But even as I shouted it, hearing my voice bounce from the walls and echo, I knew I'd lost her forever too. “She's mine!” I shouted. But nothing had ever belonged to me.

December 15, 1898

Dear Cecily,

Yesterday I fell. I'd grown quite capable without my cane, able to climb and burrow, and I got too confident, scaling the Emerald Cathedral so that I could place a brass candlestick exactly where Emmaline wanted to see it, up among some bird's nests the birds had built themselves. I fell, and I grabbed at the balloon's rope. We'd built the basket and the rope into the workings of the cathedral. The basket was a sacred relic, of sorts. And that rope saved me from crashing. It burned my hands as it slowed me, and I hit the ground hard enough to crack my cast.

The Old Sisters Egan were at my side before anyone else.

Hester said nothing. She just lifted her hammer and tap-tap-tapped the crack deeper and longer, until she could pry the cast off. She and Emmaline then helped me to my feet and I walked. I strutted across the room and everyone applauded. The pretty daughter of the man who grew clover, a young woman named Eleanor, slipped herself into my open arms, tipped her hip against mine, and gently swept me into a waltz. We danced, circling close, as the others gathered around and clapped out a rhythm for our steps. We stopped to watch as Eleanor's father carried the pieces of my cast up onto the shrine, binding the plaster to a statue of Mary, Mother of God, salvaged from an abandoned prairie hospital. He attached the cast to her plaster gown, winding a string of barbed wire around and around.

And last night I dreamed Emmaline's dream. She and I had the exact same dream on the exact same night. In the dream, the Emerald Cathedral was finished, and it glowed as green as the grasses in the valley in springtime. Emmaline took my arm, and we walked to the front of a row of old, splintered church pews. We sat down. Behind us was a whole congregation, people humming and chanting the language Emmaline had created. We suddenly knew all the sounds for all the symbols. And the man who Emmaline had once loved was there. He was old now. He spoke to her in her strange language. “I had a long unhappy life,” he told her. “I died a broken man.” He took from his pocket the same emerald ring he'd given her years and years before. The emerald for Emmaline. She had dropped it into the sea on the day he left her for someone else. When she took the ring from him now, he faded away.

I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.

In my dream, I could picture you at rest within it, entombed but afloat, as if buried at sea. The emerald of the cathedral was the ocean, and you were caught falling in its waves. Your curls were tangled in the coils of a bedspring, your sleeves lifted and pricked by a thicket of nails. Your back arched over a wheel, your legs bent around the petrified branches of a tree.

In my dream, I cried myself to exhaustion. I curled up in the pew to sleep, and I dreamed within the dream that Doxie had grown up to look just like you.

Ferret

T
HE SNOW BLEW ITSELF
into a blizzard on the night of Cecily's funeral, then settled, then quit. The snow was light enough to blow away in the gusts of evening, sweeping itself from our paths and our walks, away from our steps and our skirts, to drift in corners and doorways. We huddled in furs and held scarves to our cheeks. We warmed ourselves with whiskey, bellying up to the stoves in saloons.

In the first of the morning light, a dusting of snow glittered on eaves and windowpanes, in the manes of horses, in the cracks of the bricks of the sidewalk and street. The horses' snuffling lifted in clouds of vapor as they lowered their heads against the last of the cold. By noon, it was warm, by afternoon warmer, and the snow went away. And as October ended, we were treated to a few days that seemed like spring. We opened our windows to let out the flat air and to let in the cool, to let in the smell of wet soil and leaves, the sealike breezes blown off the river and up and down the avenues.

I didn't return to Dr. Gee Loy's. I didn't go much of anywhere. I slept, and when I couldn't sleep, I sat at the window and let the hours pass. But I did return to the Fair on its very last day.

It was Halloween, and many went to the Grand Court in costume. It seemed I could see something of Cecily in every masked woman I passed.

I would feel a quick beat of recognition in my heart when a woman happened to be looking up and off the way Cecily always had, like she was studying a pattern in a cloud or following the flight of a bird. And I don't mean to say Cecily was ghostly even before she died. She was not some illusion. She was never dreamy, never doomed. Never. She was none of those things. That's why I still saw her, alive, living, everywhere I looked.

I made quite a fool of myself in front of a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette. She had a girlish habit of Cecily's, of twisting a loose strand of hair around and around her finger, but it was all part of the contraption of her disguise. With each tug of the curl, she fluttered the wings of the three toy butterflies in her wig. I wore a mask—a simple pink face with pinhole eyes—and I pushed it up to settle it atop my head. I watched the woman for minutes and minutes, convincing myself Cecily had returned, even as I failed to see much of anything of her in the stranger. I became certain, though, that I knew very well the beat of her tiny pulse in her throat, and a freckle at the inside of her wrist. I followed her as she wove through the street, the crowd parting for her and her grand skirts that bounced like on a spring. I finally said her name, touched her elbow, and she turned, a mask of peacock feathers held to her face by a stick in her hand. I touched her wrist, to lower her mask. Those weren't Cecily's eyes, not her lips, not her pale, tender throat. I didn't recognize this woman, but she recognized me. I mean to say, she recognized my sadness, and her happiness fell, and she stepped back, away, her mask returning to her eyes.

Everyone was thieving. They were like Hansel and Gretel, tearing away at the buildings of sugar. They broke windows, toppling cornices. They snatched spoons and saltshakers. They dug up the canna and lily bulbs. The Fair was to be torn down, beam by beam, the lagoon drained, the carpets rolled up. It would all be gone, whether we took it or not.

A little stationery shop in the Manufactures Building sold its goods for cheap. I bought an ink pot and a long fountain pen shaped like an alligator. I bought a bundle of postcards tied together with a white ribbon, and I walked down the Exposition Hall to the booth of a distillery, to sit at a stool at a cask and sample some scotch, my mask still pushed up into my hair. At first I attempted to describe the flavors, noting them on a postcard.
Tumbleweed, cowboy bonfire, salted apple peel, black mulberry.

And then I wrote to Cecily.

The Fair ends today, my love
, I wrote
. I'm so glad you won't see it.
I wrote her name on the card, and dropped it in the mailbox. I stuck the rest of the postcards, and the pen, in my back pocket.

I imagined what would happen if the Fair wasn't razed but left to decay, nature taking the land back, returning it to the miles of dying fields it was before. If they would let the place fall apart, I thought, I would visit the ruins as an old man, a better man than I ever could have imagined I'd someday be, in top hat and overcoat and monocle. The swan gondola, its long neck broken, would sit shipwrecked at the bottom of the dry lagoon, the fossils of leaves speckling the winged hull. The fairgrounds deserved to become a sad, battered monument to every lost thing of beauty.

•   •   •

“
Y
OU REALLY
ARE
AFRAID, AREN'T
you?” Cecily had said the night we'd gone up in the basket of the balloon. She had asked me to steal her away. And it was true, I had been afraid, but why? What was there to be afraid of? Falling? Death? There'd not been a day that had passed, not an hour, that I hadn't wished I'd cut that rope and carried her off, at the risk of everything.

On this last day of the Fair, the Civil War balloon rose again. The men pulled it down and sent it up, down and up, all morning and afternoon, lifting people into the air to the very end of its rope, to wave at the city below.

I'm not sure at what point I decided to escape with it. I'd walked the entire length of the midway, as the showmen and managers tore down and packed up. The tracks were rolled, the tents collapsed, the carousel horses unharnessed. The Turkish Village, the Moorish Village, the Filipino Village—whole civilizations fell.

The Indians had abandoned their camp days before, with the first eddies of blizzard, and they'd torched their makeshift tepees and wigwams, setting their whole fake city ablaze. They'd put their belongings on their horses' backs, shrouded themselves in blankets and hides, and walked against the ice and wind, away from the burning camp and down the midway, their hundreds of footsteps fading behind them as more snow fell to cover their paths. They walked through the Grand Court and past the lagoon, where the fairgoers watched while wrapped in their own coats and furs in the wind-rocked gondolas, their umbrellas knocking into each other. They watched, and some applauded, assuming it was all spectacle, a parade of tribal nations.

August's tent—its brightly colored walls made of ball gowns and tablecloths—was nearly all that remained in the vast vacant lot scorched black and gray. He'd added to its drapery in recent weeks, stitching on ruffles and stretching a wall by adding bolts of kimono silk, crimson, yellow, violet, patterned with cranes, butterflies, cherry blossoms. He attached a weather vane to the tip of the tent pole—a wooden mermaid that spun around and around no matter the breeze, the points of her pink fin pointing north, south, east, west.

August wasn't inside, but I went in to sit anyway. He'd dragged in a wrecked velvet settee. But he'd taken most of his own things—his samovar, his framed painting of Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet, the skull of Yorick in her hand like a puppet.

I'd turned August away several times in the aftermath of Cecily's death. I hadn't meant to be cruel; I just refused to be comforted. I turned everyone away. And I went to my new office only once, to telephone the Wakefield house. To speak to Mrs. Margaret. “The nanny, please,” I told the servant who answered. “I'm the infant's doctor.”

“Don't call again,” Mrs. Margaret told me, in her harsh growl. “You can expect nothing from me. This is what Cecily wanted for her little girl. And I'm here to look after her, so you don't have to worry. You have no business worrying. Respect Cecily's memory, and allow the little motherless mite a good life.”

I had not intended to give up so easily, but I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't think.
When the Fair ends
, I promised myself,
my life will start back up
. I would move forward, toward whatever might be next, once the Fair was over. When the Fair was over, I would be ready.

So when I reached the balloon, I'd not meant to commit a grand theft. Stealing it hadn't even occurred to me. I just wanted to go up in it again, to see all that Cecily and I saw that day. I wanted to go up, and be unafraid.

But the winch was loose, and nobody knew it but me. In my nervousness, I had stood aside, working up my courage, watching, inspecting every inch of the rope, seeking any slight fraying of the hemp. I lowered my mask back to my face.

The rope that kept the balloon captive was wound around a winch that was grounded in a block of cement. With every winding and unwinding, the crank turned and the winch rattled, loosening itself from its anchor.

The cement was cracked and crumbling, and when no one else stood in line for flight, and as the balloon's managers flirted with the trapeze artist, sharing a cigarette with her, I stepped forward, kicked my boot hard against the failing winch, and pushed myself up and into the balloon's basket. I gave the rope a yank, freeing it from the winch, and set sail.

I was tucked into the basket of the balloon like a rabbit in a hat.
Now you see him, now you don't.

Under hypnosis, a man could shake his sense of fear. You watched a watch swing—ticktock, ticktock—or you followed the crushed eggshell that trickled through the neck of an hourglass, and your torment ticked away too, like magic. Or so they said. I'd once been on the same bill as a hypnotist who mesmerized for show, not medicine, and he'd put me in a trance without me even realizing. It had been easy to fall into it.

As I watched a rapid cloud, and as the balloon lifted, I felt myself slipping away.

I rose higher and higher, gripping the sides of the basket tight, the wicker sticking into my skin. I heard the shouting below, the beckoning, the begging, but it sounded no more boisterous than all the happy racket of the fairgoers. In my fear, I kept my eyes downturned, watching my feet on the floor. When I finally looked up, and over, and across, I saw the New White City no longer beneath me. I saw farms and pastures, the lines of furrows in the plowed ground.

I lowered myself to the bottom of the basket, unwilling to watch the world drift away.