The Swan Gondola (12 page)

•   •   •

I
RAN INTO THE MIDWAY,
my feet knocking around in the ill-fitting shoes I had borrowed from the theater's costume closet because I'd liked the handsome point of the toes. I had apparently missed the automaton's exit by only a heartbeat or two, as there she was, moving briskly past the foreign villages all closing for the night. I followed her at a safe distance, stepping forward on the balls of my feet to keep my heels from clomping against the hard dirt of the road. I kept my hand behind me, my finger between the teeth of my dummy to stop his jaw from clattering with my every step. I froze in my path when she paused a moment. I worried she had heard me. But no, upon listening closer I realized she had been arrested by the seesaw melody of a bush full of crickets near the picket fence of the toy shop with the doll hospital. She reached among its leaves to capture one in the palm of her hand. She watched it, held it to her ear, then delicately placed it upon a branch.

The automaton then went to the next fence and followed the lane to the cottage, the one that housed the incubator exhibit. I grabbed hold of a few pickets and leaped over, nearly losing a loose shoe.

I walked to a side window and looked into a room still partly lit by a few burning lamps. Inside stood one lone nurse in a starched cap and long white dress, a deep-blue cape across her shoulders. All along the walls of the room were the metal cabinets equipped with gauges and tubes that seemed to heat or cool, each box equipped with a coiled pump that lifted and fell with the rhythm of breath. The doors to the cabinets had foggy glass windows, babies sleeping fitfully within each one.

Painted on the wall above the machines:
Live Babies! Infant Incubator—A wonderful invention! Visited by 207,000 people at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Exhibition, London 1897.

The automaton walked through the room slouched, but the bend of her back gave her a buzzardlike authority. She went directly to a closet, and on an upper shelf was Cecily's carpetbag.

And while the automaton prepared the carpetbag, opening it atop a center table, tucking a blanket inside, the nurse stood at one of the cabinets, fumbling with the keys on the iron ring of her belt. She stood on her toes so she could reach the cabinet's lock without having to remove the key from the ring. And upon the opening of the cabinet door, I saw a baby swaddled tight in a pink blanket and fast asleep, a thermometer above her little nest. The nurse lifted the baby from the cabinet and walked to the very window at which I stood. I took a step to the side, again fearing I'd been caught, but the nurse saw only her own reflection in the glass. The nurse rocked back and forth on the balls and heels of her feet, smiling, quite taken with the sight of herself with a child in her arms. Had the glass not been between us, I could have reached across to touch the pale down of the infant's head.

The window was open a crack, and I heard the automaton grumbling above the wheezing of the machinery. “Your maternal nature'll only lead to awful despair,” she said. “Bring the child to me.”

“Despair?” the nurse said to the baby, smiling, with a slow shake of her head, as if such a thing was unthinkable.
“Despair?”
She then carried the baby to the table, waltzing a few circles, singing a one-word song, “Despair despair despair.” The old woman held the bag open, and the young nurse again stood on her tiptoes to cradle the infant's head as she placed the baby inside.

•   •   •

T
HE AUTOMATON HURRIED
from the cottage and down the lane, the rush of her legs in her black skirt sounding like the flapping of a bat. She somehow didn't see me, though I hadn't the presence of mind to duck behind a shrub. She had hold of only one handle of the carpetbag, and the carpetbag gapped open, unclasped, at her side. The baby wasn't in any danger of tumbling out—as a matter of fact, she was probably better off getting a breath or two of the summer air. I took my shoes off so I could follow close without clomping.

The midway was empty but for a few workers closing up shop and leading their beasts to their stables. A man in a long white robe with an ostrich on a leash looked up at the sky and stopped. He called out something in some foreign tongue to a group of belly dancers in a nearby pavilion, and the dancers stepped out and they too looked up.

“The airship!” someone shouted. There was a flickering of silver light crossing the sky. It looked as if a sliver of the moon had broken free and drifted away. Others stepped from the buildings and gardens. They pointed at the airship. They squealed and laughed and chattered.

All last spring and winter, whenever the airship had shown up at night, we could only ever see a little spot of light, and it inched forward so slowly, you thought you could hear its chug-chug-chug if you listened close, cupping your ear.

Within minutes the midway was full of the Fair's workers knocking into one another, bumping into the automaton, everyone distracted by the tiny light of the airship. But still the old woman wouldn't slow her furious pace. She just wove through the growing, clumsy crowd. Two barefoot boys ran by me with sparklers sizzling in their hands, and they waved the fire in the air, as if trying to signal the pilot above. This inspired more fireworks, including some that spun around on the dirt, spitting sparks this way and that. One of the boys lit a rocket's wick with the end of his sparkler, and the rocket shot off with a terrible shriek, then burst with a blast of red, white, and blue just above the palmist's fortune-telling booth. Up ahead the folks who drank after hours in the beer garden all stumbled out into the road with their mugs and steins, and they celebrated the airship, raising their glasses to the sky. Some of them drunkenly fell into dancing with each other to the miserable tune cranked from the organ grinder's hand piano. Even his winged monkeys climbed a wall to point and shriek. But the automaton kept on, oblivious to any danger posed to the baby she carried in the open bag.

Finally, the automaton slowed, stopped, and looked up. She pushed herself taller on the balls of her feet, as if to see the airship better, and she held one lens of her pince-nez to her eye.

I crept forward on my stocking feet. I peeked into the open carpetbag. The baby's eyes glistened, wide and wet, catching the specks of light from the fireworks. Amber eyes, just like those of the violet-eyed trollop. Brown like a wren's feather. A minnow. A tuft of rabbit's fur. I'd already considered all the shades when trying to write Cecily a love poem.

The little girl seemed not at all bothered by the noise. She'd already shoved herself out of the tight swaddling of her pink blanket, and she entertained herself with her fists at her mouth. She happily gummed at her knuckles. Her cheeks sparkled too, wet with slobber.

And for the first time, my dummy spoke unprovoked. “What do you wish me to do?” he said, somehow louder than before, his voice crackling with scratches. “Why should I do this for you?”

The automaton snapped her head my way, her one good eye wide and bloodshot, more of those bubbles frothing at the corners of her mouth. If there hadn't been a baby in that bag, she'd have likely beat me with it. Instead she looked down at the child, and I saw the old lady soften. She reached in to touch the girl, tucking the blanket. She slouched even more, growing older and older before me. For a moment I thought I might even have to take her arm, to help her keep upright. I wanted to tell her not to worry.

She then shot me yet another noxious look. “You're seeing things,” she said, and she tossed in my face a handful of ash. It was pepper mixed with snuff, enough to blind me. As I blinked away the sting, she rushed ahead. This was no black magic—it was an old tactic of theft. I'd known at least one woman who'd worked as a sneeze-lurker, who would slip from around a corner, toss a handful of spice and dust into a man's face, and make off with his wallet.

I stumbled forward, blinking and sneezing. When I could see again, I saw Cecily up ahead, a long summer shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had again wandered away from the other actors, and while everyone else looked up to the airship, she looked down, watching her feet, her ankles, her legs, as she practiced the steps of a dance.

The old woman walked up to Cecily without even nodding a hello, and Cecily took the bag from her, saying nothing. She looked into the bag, tilted her head with affection. She puckered her lips, kissing the air. The automaton gestured for Cecily to rush, and though Cecily did follow the old woman, she continued with her made-up waltz, circling and weaving, like a tuft of cotton caught in a slight breeze. I stood and watched the two of them work up the road toward the bridge, the old woman constantly trying to hurry Cecily along, Cecily constantly falling behind, until they turned a corner and away, beyond my sight.

I'd had only the quickest of glimpses, but in that baby's face I'd seen not only Cecily's eyes but also Cecily's nose, her chin, the dimples in her cheeks, and the curl of her lashes. She couldn't possibly resemble anyone else. It was as if the child had never had any father at all. Was Cecily widowed? Abandoned? Was her baby feeble? And if she was feeble, would she just get sick when stolen from her glass egg? She had been small enough to fit in the carpetbag with some comfort, but not nearly as small as some of the smallest of the premature infants in the incubators.

I'd only known this baby a matter of minutes, and I was already feeling fatherly.

•   •   •

I
N THE BEER GARDEN,
I
took a seat at Rosie's table as he and a few of his fellow anarchists fussed over the war that raged in Cuba. The whole Fair was a monument to imperialist pigs, they complained. “America is a plague,” whispered Zigzag the hobo clown, his face still painted with a black grin and red freckles. “It's a killer pox.” Like a jumpy pyromaniac, Zigzag lit everything that would light. He touched the flame of his match to a fallen leaf, to a paper rose, to the lace of a lady's dropped hankie, to his own cuff.

Rosie had already abandoned his rickshaw business. No one would ride for fear of looking lazy. He still sold plenty of his lovelies, but he had to give postcards to every guard who threatened to throw him off the fairgrounds. “It's exploitation,” he groaned, but Rosie was the type of man who could find injustice even in the cheap steak he sawed at. “This is some ugly slaughter,” he said, pointing at the steak with his knife, chewing with his broken teeth.

He introduced me to Mandelbaum the lion tamer, a slight-built man with hair wispy and gray. He wore a red suit—the gold buttons buttoned unevenly, the epaulets off-kilter. He held out his hand to me, and his undone sleeve slipped up his forearm, revealing a crisscrossing of terrible scars. “Mandelbaum has been mauled twenty-seven times, twice just today,” Rosie said.

And next to Mandelbaum was Josephine, an entertainer in the minstrel show of the Old Plantation. For the show, they put her in the sackcloth dress of a slave and tied strips of muslin in her curls, and she played the piano as others danced. But, Rosie explained, Josephine composed her own ragtime tunes. “‘The Draggletail Rag,'” he said, boasting and looking upon her with his lovesick eyes. “‘The Weasel Rag.' ‘The Breaky-Leg Rag.' ‘The Belly-Full Rag.' Her songs are sold in New York City, for pity's sake. This girl's too good for this Fair. It's undignified. They've got her playing the music for cakewalks and buck dances. A couple of old white men run the whole show and fill their pockets. It's an insult to her and to her entire race!” Rosie sawed more at his grisly hank of steak, his indignation at a high pitch. Josephine and Rosie shared the steak and drank from the same glass of red wine. She started to speak for herself but stopped when Rosie leaned forward to give her a quick peck on the lips. “Exploitation,” he said again.

Rosie and the ragtime player, the clown, the nervous lion tamer all looked to me to hear my tale of frustration. For once in my life, I wasn't troubled by a thing.

“Exploitation,” I said, nodding. “The uncooked babies, for example. In the incubator exhibit.” I brought it up only so they might tell me more about it.

“God almighty I hate that live-baby exhibit,” Zigzag said. “That's the
first
thing we should set on fire when we burn this fair down.”

Josephine said, “The whole thing is out-and-out humbug.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“You pay a quarter at the door to see orphans and circus children in the pink of health acting half dead,” she said. “You stand there and wring your hands, your heart in your throat, worrying about them in their glass coffins. And you leave saying, ‘It cost me a quarter, but I would've spent fifty cents to see such humanity.'”

“How do you know?” I said, hoping it was true. It was a relief to think that Cecily's little girl was just an actress like her mother.

“It's the midway,” she said. She peeled off a piece of fat from Rosie's steak and popped it in her mouth. “Everything's for show.”

“Even war,” Zigzag said. He complained of all the relics of battle on display at the Fair. He wanted to set fire to the cyclorama that re-created the Battle of the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack
. He wanted to puncture the Civil War balloon. Zigzag, too jittery to sit still, moved the anarchists on to a rapid debate of the efficiency of assassination. If President McKinley were to come to the Fair, should they shoot him? Poison him? Lynch him? I found it amusing to see Rosie contemplate such violence—though it wasn't unusual for him to leap ham-fisted into a fight, I couldn't picture him ever dealing anyone a fatal blow. I suspected he just wanted to impress Josephine with the staggering depths of his dissatisfaction.

August arrived with a cricket in a bamboo cage. “Admiral Dewey lost his every match in the fan-tan den,” August said. “They were fixing to squish him, so I bought him out of slavery.” August tapped the cage, and the cricket jumped around in a fit. “See? The humiliation has already stirred up his killer instincts. Where'd you stumble off to, anyway?”