The Swan Gondola (5 page)

“I might very well marry you myself if you went to war and came back without a scratch,” Phoebe said. She reached over to push my curls back from my face. “In a place like America, a whore's boy can be a hero if he gets in a few good licks at the enemy.”

“You read that on a piece of needlepoint?” I said. I leaned my face into her hand to kiss her palm. She stroked my cheek with her thumb. “I don't fight the wars of warmongers,” I said. I meant no disrespect to the men who lined up to march off, but I'd already done all the fighting I ever wanted to do. I'd spent all those years warring with bullies and thugs so that someday I could
quit
fighting altogether.

F
OR THE REST OF THE
RUN
OF
Opium and Vanities
, Odie Hansom was back as the violet-eyed trollop, her left eye black-and-blue. And no one seemed to know a thing about anyone named Cecily or how she'd come to be an understudy for that one night only. Not a soul had seen her on that stage, as if she'd been as faint as a phantom even then. The manager didn't recall hiring her and he didn't recall paying her. “The violet-eyed trollop doesn't utter a word,” he said. “Why would she need an understudy?”

And Odie lied, embarrassed at being hit so hard she couldn't leave her house. “I haven't missed a day of work in my life,” she said, slurring with a fat lip. All the other actresses lied right along with her as if they thought they were saving her dignity.

I had evidence. I hadn't puffed on my pipe since Cecily had snatched it; and in its bowl was the tobacco she'd burned, and at the end of its stem was a kiss of red from the rouge she used on her lips.

But the fact that she was little more than a figment only fed my curiosity. And my hopes were lifted by a few unlikely matchmakers—my fellow rats of the Omaha underground. They'd seen nothing of Cecily themselves, but they seemed to get a kick out of egging me on. These swindlers and bandits coaxed and prodded like spinster aunts certain to marry me off.

“I'm fond of the thought of you getting away,” said August Sweetbriar, dandiest of dandies, who peddled tonics. We'd grown close in the year or so we'd known each other—I'd first met him at Anna Wilson's saloon, where he sold the ladies an aphrodisiac made from juniper berries and saffron. Though he was only my age, he carried himself like a man much older, often sighing with weariness or holding the back of his hand to his forehead like a fevered opera singer. He wore on his fingers handmade rings—pieces of wire twisted around little broken shards of colored glass. “Maybe you'll get in good with one of those traveling troupes that move from fair to fair to fair, and they'll adopt you into their life of endless summers.” Around his wrist was always a woman's silver bracelet engraved with Old English script, a quote from Shakespeare:
I bear a charmed life
.

August interrupted me in my bath one afternoon in late May, the Fair only a few days off. I had no running water in my attic, so I bathed in a claw-foot tub in the basement of the Empress. Even with my ears full of soap I recognized August's boots on the steps—the
tip
,
tip
,
tip
of the thin high heels. He'd bought the haggard boots off a retired cowboy, and he liked to stuff the ends of his trousers into them, to show off the flowers stamped into the tall leather. August boasted that the few dents above the right ankle were from rattlesnake fangs.

“I have a solution to your mustache problem, Ferret,” August said as he opened a mother-of-pearl case with a squeak of its small hinge. Inside, on a bed of blue velvet, rested a stainless steel straight razor with a handle made of scrimshaw. “You've never before been shaved with a blade this fine. I got it in a trade from a very nervous gentleman who was once very rich. He thinks he's addicted to my extract of evening primrose.” August had no sense of propriety and would find me no matter where I might be in the building.

“I'm not looking to solve any kind of mustache problem,” I said, wringing the bathwater out of my curls. I no longer needed to hide my lips when throwing my voice—I could keep them quite still—but my mustache reminded me romantically of my reckless youth, and of my old friend Crowe, so I was inclined to keep it always.

“Do it for the love of a lady,” August said. “Think how much sweeter your first kiss will be if she can find your lips.” August didn't wait for me to agree—he sat on the edge of the tub and removed his bowler, a fancy affair of gray felt. Stitched to the band of the hat was a taxidermied bluebird, with rubies where its eyes went. The short braid August wore at the back of his head was tucked under his starched collar. He began to prepare the tools to shear me: the blade, the scissors, a jar of lotion.

August had been nagging me to shave ever since we first met. “Why hide that pretty pout away?” he would whine, puffing out his lower lip. He and I worked together every now and again—we did a medicine show out in the countryside in the nearby valleys and villages, where we could make some money from the farmers' struggle. I would perform magic with my dummy as August sold envelopes of powdered corn silk and flasks of rhubarb cordial. Even at his feet just now was a carpetbag, and inside were little clear bottles of harmless cures. While some snake oil salesmen dealt in concoctions with dangerous doses of cocaine and morphine, August's fraud wouldn't stop your heart or poison your blood. Like a revivalist in a tent, he promised to end baldness with licorice-flavored tonics. He vowed to steady palsy with a spoonful of cinnamon extract, to stimulate heartsickness with love potions of water tinted brown from a pinch of burned sugar. Occasionally he would add to a concoction a few drops of alcohol—what he called
cologne spirits
—but never enough to even spin your head. “The worst that can happen is that the tonic does nothing,” August said to justify his deceit. “But the best that can happen is that it does everything I say it does. I never underestimate simple belief.”

“Ladies have never objected to my mustache,” I said, though as I said it, I realized it was far from true. Women were often berating my mustache as grizzly and uncivilized, even when I waxed and twisted the ends.

But I'd grown that mustache as soon as I'd been able, and it hadn't left my lip since. Not only had it hidden the throwing of my voice onstage but it had brought me a kind of respect that a hopelessly boyish face wouldn't. And in my attic garret was a cabinet stocked with grooming products and devices—special shampoos and waxes, strengtheners and weakeners, combs, curlers, snippers. I felt most like a gentleman when shopping for my mustache. And there were pretty girls behind the department store counter who attended to me.

A little sleepy from the warmth of the bath, and from the lily scent of the soap flakes, I closed my eyes and thought of Cecily haunting my bare room. I thought of my walls and how no pictures hung from the nails. I thought of how rarely I lit a lamp after dark.

And with that I leaned my head back, my neck on the lip of the tub, and closed my eyes. I nodded. August first began to trim with a pair of small scissors—the teensy
snip
,
snip
,
snip
pushed my teeth to edge; he might as well have been snipping at the ends of my nerves. He then produced from his carpetbag a shaving mug and a boar's bristle brush. He dabbed some jelly onto the remnants of my lip feathers. “The jelly's got mint,” he said, opening the blade. “Breathe it in and clear your nose. It will put you at ease.”

The mint didn't quite, but August's slow scritch scratch and his considering eye did manage to soothe me. He furrowed his brow, intent on his work, and I studied his face in return. I'd never before had occasion to look at him for so long. His face could use a mustache too. He looked worse than a boy: he looked like a baby, without a single sprout of hair on his chin, and brown eyes soft and wide. How had he ever convinced anyone of a cure for anything? He had the kind of gullible mug I'd looked for in a man I sought to thieve, back in my derelict days, before I took to the stage and found a little salvation in my vaudeville act.

When he finished, he went for a pewter hand mirror from a dressing room vanity, and I put my fingers to my lip. The skin somehow felt as smooth and cool as glass. For theatrical effect, he showed me only the back of the mirror, which featured stalks of cattails bending along the curve. He then turned the glass to me.

August said, “Tell me you like it as much as I like it. Please.” He gnawed on his thumbnail with worry. “What do you think?”

“I think . . .” I said, pausing. “I think I look like a man with a mustache who doesn't have his mustache anymore.” I held my finger across my lip, pantomiming a handlebar. “What if Cecily doesn't remember me without it?” I said.

“What's there for her to remember?” August said. “That you're the man with the terrible mustache who let her get away? It's best you pretend that that fool was somebody else altogether.” He then brought out some hats from the costume closet, and tried each one atop my wet head, at a number of jaunty tilts and angles.

•   •   •

A
NOTHER AMONG MY CUPIDS
was the anarchist Rościsław. We called him Rosie the Pole, and he and his pack gathered most every evening to argufy. All the anarchists were angry, having become expert at losing awful jobs—Rosie had cut throats of cattle at the slaughterhouse and swept blood into the drains, had hacked ice from a lake and loaded the blocks into wagons, had shoveled coal into the guts of the smelting works. He was the size of two men and didn't care to be criticized, so most of his jobs ended with him slugging his boss in the jaw.

On the afternoon I lost my mustache, I posed for Rosie in his studio, attempting to look respectable for a counterfeit pass. Each of the Fair's workers was required to carry identification with a stamped photograph. With the phony credentials we rats could ease through the gates without paying a daily fee. We all had ambitions: my dummy and I would do magic tricks for tips, August would sell his fixes, and Rosie had built a rickshaw from scrap parts to taxi folks around in.

I sat in front of the camera on a stool with a gray blanket draped behind, and Rosie shoved all my wild curls up into a derby. “The razor you took to your lip you oughta take to your head,” he grumbled. His studio was in a converted dovecote and greenhouse on the roof of a building on the Ware Block, with glass walls to let the sun in.

“I never realized I was quite so unsightly,” I said.

“I just want your girl to fall for you, is all,” he said. “I'm a sentimental bastard.”

Rosie's mouth was a box of dominoes with black holes among the broken teeth, but he wasn't always seeking a scuffle. His heart was soft at times. He'd come to America for the benefit of his sister, to work hard and make money to send home to the family farm in Poland. The girl needed a dowry or she'd never snag a husband.

He now made most of his money off selling French postcards of naked Omaha women. He called the ladies his
lovelies
, and he anticipated he'd do swift business at the Fair with his pictures of Lady Godiva on horseback, Sleeping Beauty sleeping in the buff, Hamlet's Ophelia having ripped off her clothes in madness, Joan of Arc naked and tied to a stake.

With such high-minded subjects, Rosie could pass the postcards off as art to the gentlemen who might otherwise be too nervous to gaze upon the nakedness. But Rosie did truly see himself as an artist and a lover of women—he was a lumbering beast with a delicate eye for beauty.

I glanced over all the postcards stuck to his door with insect pins, to see if Cecily was among the naked ladybirds. Part of me wanted to discover her there, stripped and indifferent to any leering eyes upon her, and yet another part of me couldn't bear the thought of it.

We then sat down to a table in the studio covered with maps and pamphlets and we studied the ins and outs of the Fair. Our passes weren't illegitimate; they were just ill got. August's father owned Megeath Printing Co. and Bookshop, and had manufactured many of the Fair's official materials; August had easily swiped some.

I memorized the fairground's nooks and crannies, walking my fingertips up and over walls, down alleys, over bridges.

“‘According to the 1890 census,'” August read aloud from the guidebook, “‘Omaha consisted of one hundred forty thousand four hundred fifty-two souls, of which four thousand five hundred sixty-six were colored, eighty-nine were Chinese, and three were civilized Indians.'”

“Where do you fall in all that?” I said.
Sweetbriar
was a name he'd taken for himself when grown, from a book a British anthropologist had written about the natives of America. His parents had never told him his real Indian name. When his father bought Megeath's, he'd kept the name of the shop and took it as his own. And August grew up as Little Augie Megeath, his hair cut to the quick, wearing tailored three-piece suits like a little white man with dusky skin.

“Nowhere, I suspect,” he said. “How does one get counted among the civilized?” He lifted his pinky as he sipped his whiskey from a chipped teacup.

“If you find out, let me know,” I said.

With the Fair flat on the map before me, confined to a page, I was certain I'd find Cecily somewhere among the showmen and charlatans. Like me and August and Rosie, she'd be among the uncounted, the uncivilized, the riffraff that kept the show going for the finer folk.

In what seemed an omen, the Fair's court was shaped like a key. On the left-hand side of the map was the clover-shaped reflecting pool—the filigree of the key's bow. I ran my finger along the canal, to the end of the key's bit pointed toward the midway—the lock to be unlocked, where all the mystery was.

And it
was
an omen, a lucky one, because find her I did, on the Fair's very first day. And on that very first day, I did everything wrong.