The Swan Gondola (39 page)

“Rosie missed you most of all, I guess,” August said, taking a seat. He crossed his legs, flicked at some dust on his trousers, and spoke rapidly, as if bored. “Where have you been, what did you do, why are you here?”

I sat in a wing chair and ran my hands along the arms, along the freckled deer hide with the hair left on. Rosie's parlor was a dizzying display. There were apples and poppies in the wallpaper, and strawberries and lilacs in the carpet. The lamps had red glass globes painted with golden dragons. In a gold-painted cage, two lovebirds thrashed their wings in a lovers' quarrel. And covering one whole wall, ceiling to floor, were framed paintings of women wearing nothing or next to nothing, naked on a beach or in a field or in a bath. A woman's nightgown slipped off as she stood from her bed in the morning light. Another woman lifted her skirt to lower her stocking.

Rosie set a tray atop a low stool at our feet, with a cut glass decanter and tiny goblets, and a plate of little cakes decorated with candied violets.

“I have an engagement,” I said. The men just looked at me, expecting more. “An appointment,” I said. Silence, still. Then I said, “A business meeting.”

“I'm so glad,” August said, seeming genuinely pleased. “I'm glad you're getting back to things.” He leaned forward and reached out to put his fingers in my curls and to pull at them, to examine their length. “You should let me hack at that hair with my scissors,” he said.

I gently took August's hand from my head. We sat there, hand in hand, for a moment.

“Tell me what I've missed,” I said.

Rosie told me about his Josephine, his missus now, and how she'd taken up giving piano lessons to the city's rich, and played ragtime at night in the orchestra pit of the Orpheum Theater for traveling vaudeville acts. And August told me about Pearl, and how she, like Rosie, was stripping ladies too, but for a more moral purpose. Upon returning from Paris, she'd stopped dressing the manikins of Brandeis to take to the road with Susan B. Anthony, the “suffering sisterhood” as they were known, preaching about the hazards of how women dress. Pearl was part of a campaign to get women to send their corsets to the navy, so the steel ribs could be used to build ships.

“I think you can see the ladies' hemlines inching up a little off the ground,” August said, inching up the hem of his own trouser legs as he spoke, baring his ankles. “Back when Omaha was at its filthiest, a lady could drag her skirts through all kinds of muck. Vermin, dead or alive, could be swept right up.” August tiptoed his fingertips, like mouse steps, across my hand and up my arm.

Rosie crossed his leg too, his trouser cuff lifting, but the holster wasn't there.

“And what about the Fair?” I said. “Is the White City still standing?” I hoped for disappointment. I hoped for them to tell me the whole thing had turned to rubble. Then I could get back on the train, that very afternoon, and on the ride home, I would write Cecily.
It breaks my heart to tell you this. There's nothing left of the Fair.

“The buildings were supposed to be gone weeks ago,” Rosie said. “But there's a dispute over wrecking contracts. So the flimsy things are just collapsing in on themselves, under the weight of all the snow.”

“The Fair was supposed to save Omaha,” August said, pouting, “but I believe it ruined it. It was the Fair that brought the smallpox. People carried in with them all sorts of plagues. And any money that came in just fattened the wallets of the corrupt. Even the girls at Anna Wilson's brothel are struggling—the Fair brought to town every prostitute within three hundred miles, and now that the fairgoers are gone, any poor whore could starve. And we'll all of us be lucky to survive this awful winter.”

“I met a professor of the weather,” I said. I picked one of the candied violets from one of the cakes, and let its sugar melt on my tongue. I poured myself some of the liquor from the decanter. “He keeps all kinds of whirligigs and rain gauges on his barn roof. Weather balloons tied to windmills. He could never get much to grow in his dirt, so now his eighty acres is covered with contraptions and motors. He says the farmers brought on their own droughts and their own floods. They break up the soil, and they release all the gases, and they stir up the clouds.”

“Wakefield's lake froze over as always,” August said, “but he didn't even have the ice cut away. He defaulted on his contracts. There's an ice shortage, and the other ice dealers can't keep up. We're freezing to death and dying for ice.”

“If the smallpox doesn't kill us,” Rosie said, “the fetid meat will.”

Another silence fell, most likely from the mention of illness and death, and the suggestion of Wakefield too grief-struck to do business. Then Rosie said, “Do you want to know something about that Wakefield?” He leaned forward, one eye squinting, and the old Rosie I loved returned—Rosie the bitter, the broken-backed, the down-on-his-luck killer of presidents. His top lip lifted in a snarl. “I had a gentleman in here just the other day, a former business associate of Wakefield's. He was here to buy the diary of a whore, and he had a few glasses of hooch, and he said he hadn't worked a job for years. He was rich on account of a company he'd owned for a while with Wakefield. It was how Wakefield first got money—a syphilis cure.”

I listened, the glass of liquor at my lips, the warm smell of it, its fumes, filling my head. Wakefield and this friend, it seemed, won the syphilis business in a poker game twenty years before. They started advertising in the newspapers, and before they knew it they had more orders than they had bottles. Wakefield grew richer and richer, and when a newspaperman, his syphilis uncured, threatened to kick up a scandal, he just bought the newspaper and fired him. He continued to sell the syphilis remedy, and then began to sell a remedy to the remedy, a cure for the cure for the addicts who took more than a spoonful a day. And with all the money from the city's syphilitics, he bought Omaha, block by block by block.

“He knew the poisons he was pouring down Cecily's throat,” Rosie said. “He killed her as surely as if he'd stuck a knife in her gut.”

I swallowed back the booze, to chase away that image of Cecily knifed, and when I returned the little goblet to the tray, its stem snapped off. I had only meant to set the glass down, to stand up, explain that I was late and must leave, but the little snapped stem startled me. I saw a few drops of blood on my trousers leg, then brought my cut finger to my tongue. All the damage was so minute, but it echoed. It magnified. The room shrunk around me, and I found myself crouching, sensing the ceiling pressing against my shoulders, pushing my chest toward my knees.

I shut my eyes tight, and when I opened them again, a watery vision, a trick of the winter light, danced near the ceiling, a spinning of color, a prism of pale blues and pinks, like Cecily's gown of chameleon silk in the mirrored dome of the Flying Waltz.

The New White City still stood, and Cecily would be there soon, to meet me. I was certain of it.

“What would you have me do?” I said, sounding more angry than I'd meant to. “Call the police? Have Wakefield arrested? For giving his wife something for her headache?” I stood. “Would you have me stick a knife in
his
gut?”

Rosie looked me steady in the eye. “Save the girl,” he said. “Take Doxie away from him.”

It wasn't that I had never considered it. But it had seemed to me impossible. I couldn't imagine ever being allowed to even sneak a glimpse of the child, let alone get near enough to lift her from her pram and spirit her away. It was cruel of Rosie to taunt me with it.

So I left. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard August at the top of them. “Don't go, Ferret,” he called down.

“I won't,” I called up to him, stumbling off the bottom step as I turned back. “I'm not. I'll be away just a minute. I'm late.” I faked a cheery voice so he wouldn't feel inclined to follow me. As I stepped out the door, I said, “I'll explain later,” so that I wouldn't have to explain at all.

I
CAUGHT UP WITH
a cabbie who drove me north, to the ruins of the White City. I unfolded the cab's hood when a drizzling of ice began to fall. I could hear the ice sprinkling the trees' skeletal branches, a soft tune without melody, like chimes or shards of shattered glass swept into a dustpan. The white sky went whiter, paler, the clouds of frost sinking in, and I didn't see the Fair coming until we wheeled right up to it. The New White City's tall walls and rooftops bled away into the mist.

I walked into the Grand Court past a gate leaning open on broken hinges. I wasn't alone. Off on the far end, near where the fountain's waters had played, were two boys in breeches with their bicycles leaning against the railing. The statue of Neptune had either lost his head or had had it stolen, and the boys sought to sever him of his other parts. They pitched snowballs likely packed with ice toward the statue. One fell just short of the god's gut, another nearly hit the trident. I could see the boys had piled up a pyramid of them.

The buildings turned to ruin in the winter, some of the walls fell in, a few rotundas collapsed. Windows were boarded, and some statues had been pulled from their pedestals and left in pieces on the bricks. Wings had been plucked from angels. A naked god was riddled with gunshot. Eve's arm with the apple had been broken off and taken away, and so had the serpent from the tree. Wild turkeys ran by, pursued by two men with rifles, running past the
No Hunting or Shooting
sign tacked to a toppled column.

And on the lagoon was a trio of young women skating across the ice, wearing black fur caps and long black coats of fur. One of the girls had her hands in a muff. One had a long scarf that trailed behind her and wrapped around as she spun. With everything so decayed, I worried about them on the ice, though I knew the water had been frozen solid for weeks. I thought I could hear the brittle sound of cracking.

“Is the ice cold enough?” I shouted down to them, but they couldn't hear me above their own chatter and the slice of their blades, which was just as well. They probably would have laughed at such a question.

Inside the Agricultural Building was vast emptiness, all the exhibits having been packed up and carted away months before. A few of the ornate birdcages of brass and bamboo that had housed the German songbirds had been left behind, feathers clotted in the cages' bars. There were carts and baskets of fruits and vegetables gone bad, then frozen in their state of rot. Pumpkins had burst and peaches had wrinkled and browned. I walked through the barren hall, my heart beating hard. The echo of my heels made it sound like someone was behind me, but I was alone. All alone.

Last summer, locked in their dovecotes to be judged and exhibited, had been more varieties of pigeon than I'd ever known existed. I stopped now to read the labels on the wire gates of the empty cages. Short-faced bald heads and long-faced tumblers. Barbs, dragoons, fantails, and trumpeters. Chinese owls, English owls, African owls. Magpies, jacobins, priests, and nuns. The chanting of it brought me comfort, and I remembered the afternoon Cecily and I strolled through the hall and lucked upon the sight of a few of the birds escaping their prisons. Their wings had sounded too heavy to lift them, but they rose to the rafters. They'd swooped and glided overhead, suddenly seagulls in the open air.

I checked the hour on my pocket watch. It was several minutes past three. But then the lonely echo of my boots went on and on, too long, and I felt dizzy, like from some sudden suck into my lungs of poison air. The sound of my steps kept going, but I wasn't walking, I wasn't moving. I sniffed the air, to try to place the scent.
Extract of sweet pea
.

“Cecily,” I said, turning. I could feel her close to me, as if she stood at my back, her fingers light at my neck, but not touching, just stirring up static.

A figure in black approached. She was dressed in widow's weeds, a heavy black veil hanging from her hat and hiding her face. She carried at her side a mourning parasol trimmed in black feathers, the tip of it scratching across the wood planks of the floor as she dragged it along.

All air seemed to have left the room even as the wind picked up and spun little whirlwinds here and there, catching the skeletons of leaves and slips of paper. The husk of a dead cricket flew up to buzz past my ear. I could only take shallow breaths that felt too short to reach my lungs, and I tried to say her name again but couldn't.

The woman in black slipped her hand up under her veil, and she seemed to be scratching her head. Her hat shook. She then began to part the veil. “Cecily,” I said, though I had yet to see her face.

The woman looked up, and her mouth dropped open, her eyes rolling back, her eyelashes fluttering. A bright, burning redness rose to her cheeks.
Pearl.

“I'm here,” Pearl said. She leaned her head back more and her hat tumbled off. She swayed on her heels. Her knees gave out, and she collapsed, falling forward, into my arms.

I
N THE COACH,
Pearl tried to explain. She leaned against the door as the old driver, out on his perch, drove us away from the fairgrounds. Even in her lack of posture she posed as Cecily. She sat collapsed in the corner, her forehead against the window.

“I don't remember putting on these weeds,” Pearl said. “I don't remember leaving the house. But I've learned this is not unusual.”

“
Not
unusual?” I said. I'd raised my voice more than I'd meant. I'd not wanted to be snappish, or I feared I'd frighten her and she'd reveal nothing at all.

“Not unusual for a spiritual possession,” she said, slowly, cautious. She watched for my response. I looked out the window and shook my head. I couldn't bear to be part of this. Grief had stunted us. We'd all become disoriented. If we didn't set our minds to righting ourselves, we would become corrupt. As tempting as it was to trust her madness, to follow this all to some awful conclusion, I needed disbelief.

“August told me you'd left,” I said. “He said you were touring with Susan B. Anthony.” Even that detail had been surprising, I realized. Pearl was soft-spoken and skittish. I could barely even picture her pushing leaflets on people, let alone speaking to a group. She was far too shy.

When Pearl looked down to her hands, I saw she held the handkerchief I'd given Cecily. She ran her fingers along the embroidery of the letter
C
. “I've had to tell some lies,” she said.

“You don't say,” I said, and again I wished I'd said nothing at all.

“I helped Billy Wakefield with the funeral, and with Doxie, and he needed me to stay,” she said. “He bought Mrs. Margaret a train ticket and sent her away, off to the Pennsylvania World's Fair, to catch up with her theater troupe. There's a world's fair somewhere every summer now. He didn't like the way she looked at him. And he sent his sister off to Egypt, to dig for antiquities with a professor from the university. He's hoping she'll marry him, though he's practically a mummy himself, he's so old.”

“So you've been with Doxie?” I said. “How is she?”

“She has everything she could want.”

“But in a letter from . . . in one of the letters you . . .” I stopped for a moment. I took a breath. “One of the letters says Doxie cries, alone in her room.”

“She's never alone,” Pearl said. “She cries some, yes. She misses her mother. But she gets all my attention, and all the attention of the servants. With that sweet little face of hers, she needn't ever worry about being alone.”

“Let's go there now,” I said. “Let's go spend a little time with Doxie, and forget all this. This didn't happen at all, none of it. We didn't meet at the fairgrounds. You didn't write the letters. I never got the letters. None of it. None of it happened.”

“You think I'm insane,” she said. She watched my eyes, waiting for me to console. When I said nothing, she looked back down to the handkerchief. “And I probably am, aren't I?”

I took Pearl's hand. “You've been hiding in the Wakefield house?” I said. “You quit window dressing? That's a shame. You used to travel.”

“I'll travel again,” she said. “But I'll take Doxie. Billy wants me to take her to see the world. I'm her nanny, in a sense. I'll be her tutor. He's paying me much more than I would have ever made at Brandeis. And I have the run of the whole house; Billy spends all his hours in a shed in the back. I eat dinner with the servants every night in the kitchen. I love listening to their gossip, though half the time I don't know who they're talking about. They talk about a maid who was worthless, and who was fired long ago. But they still find remains of her ineptitude in the house—a spice in the wrong jar. A broken china saucer hidden far in the back of a drawer. A coat in the wrong closet. They blame her for everything.”

“You deserve better,” I said.

“Oh, Ferret, you don't know anything,” she said. She pulled her hand away from mine. It was the first I'd ever heard her speak with such a lashing tongue. “
Don't
you know anything? A woman living alone? Working as a shopgirl? Do you think I've ever been given a nod of respect? People are
suspicious
of a woman who works so hard at a job that pays so little. Even just my bedroom at Wakefield's is bigger than the room I had at the women's hotel.” She looked out the window. “
You deserve better,
” she said, with a shrug, with a snort of derision. “Yes, I do. I do deserve better. But who are you to say what's better and what's worse? What would you know about it?”

We rode in silence for a while, my hands folded in my lap. Then I said, “Just please don't write to me anymore. I beg you not to write me more of those letters. My soul can't take it.”

This just seemed to nettle Pearl all the more. She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Why would I write you letters?” she said. “Why would I put
myself
through all this? I open my eyes, and a whole afternoon is gone. And I'm not in the room I was in. There's ink spilled on my sleeve. I've gnawed my fingernails to the quick.” She calmed down and put her hand on mine. “I loved the letters you wrote from the farm. They tore my heart in two. I kept every one, tied with a ribbon. My bedroom used to be the boy's room. On the mantel of the hearth is a beautiful box, with bluebirds painted on it, and the letters fit perfectly inside. One day Billy collected the mail, as he never ever did, and there was a letter from you. He read it and was furious. He demanded I bring him the others. He tossed the letters in the fire.”

“When?” I said.

“In December, I think,” she said. “Before Christmas. And for the next several days, he insisted on collecting the mail himself. And he would throw your letters in the fire without even reading them. And then he just slipped away again. He forgot about them. He didn't have the energy to walk to the gate to collect the mail. He stayed in his shed. When your letters seemed to suggest that someone was writing you in response, I suspected Wakefield himself. But he couldn't have been seeing your letters. I would collect the mail, and I would read your letters while standing in front of the fire. And I dropped them into the flame as soon as I finished. I pushed at the paper with the fire iron, stabbed at it, until it was ash. And it was a short time after that when I realized it was me, not Wakefield, who wrote you. Cecily was communicating through me. She was using my hands to write you. At first I would blame those missing hours to the headaches I had. I thought I was fainting from them.”

It was then I realized that the coach had not just stopped, but that it had parked. We'd reached some kind of destination. I leaned over Pearl to look out her window. “I don't know this street,” I said.

“Ferret, please come inside with me,” she said. “Ella Winnows is a clairvoyant. She has a room on the top floor.”

“No,” I said, “no, no, no, no, no.”

“Ferret,” she said, clutching my arm, “just come with me this once. Allow me this one chance to prove the truth of it.”

“No,” I said.

“Ferret, the letters won't stop,” she said. “They won't just stop coming because we want them to. Bind my wrists. Bury me in a box. She'll find some other way to write to you. Or not. And that would be the worst yet. You mustn't silence her until she's said all she's needed to say. Ella says this isn't at all unusual. She says spirits often ramble until they find the ease they seek. None of this is in the slightest bit unusual, Ferret.”

I held my hand to Pearl's cheek, and I felt her skin grow hot. As disappointed as I was, as frustrated and as foolish as I felt, I did pity her. In her despair she'd fallen some charlatan's victim, willingly or otherwise. And I wasn't so wise myself; I'd fallen too, after all.

The town was plagued with clairvoyants—like beetles and silverfish, these men and women infested attics and undergrounds. They kept dim, moonlit parlors on every city block. They were just as plentiful and just as cheap as the churchless preachers who bellyached on street corners, predicting damnation with gin on their breath. And along with the mystics with business sense, the ones with telephones and advertisements in the
Evening Bee
, were those only passing through, renting theaters and halls to bilk the believing for a nickel a head before packing their trunks and moving on to the next congregation of ninnies. Add to them the hobbyists, the amateur psychics and spiritualists, who followed instructions in a book to save them the cost of a proper séance. It was a sport and a religion, and in our grief, we begged to be deceived.

I'd heard tell that Omaha was particularly rife with mysticism due, in no small part, to Wakefield. For a time, after the death of his son, then the death of his first wife, he spent outrageous sums in hopes of hearing their voices again. He had sought spiritual guidance nightly.

“No clairvoyant,” I said. Pearl needed me to turn cold and skeptical to the whole to-do, even if she didn't yet realize it. If I didn't disapprove, if I played along a second more, she'd be making sense of her every dream and headache. “No, Pearl, I'm sorry.” But then I felt, in the small of my back, some pressure and pain, like the sole of someone's boot. I arched my back and groaned. I turned around and, of course, no one was there. But in my ear, as clear as if she rested her chin on my shoulder to whisper, I heard Cecily's voice.
Stubborn
, she said.