The Swan Gondola (18 page)

I looked at the silhouette in my hand and studied the uncanny resemblance. It looked exactly like her. And I thought of my own mother, of course, and my own sad little self and how I'd once decided, for a few months at the age of eight, that I was the secret son of Sister Patience, the orphanage nun. I'd studied her face for my nose, my eyes. And I'd managed to convince myself she spoke to me in a code I could crack. I memorized every word she said to me throughout each day, and at night I wrote it all down. I puzzled over it, substituting one letter for another, scrambling the words around, seeking a confession. That fantasy faded, but later I sought my identity in the spoils of my thievery. Whenever I lifted a purse I sat in the alley and weighed the value of even its most worthless objects, learning about the lady's character from the perfume she wore or the pills she took. A piece of hard candy in a strawberry shape. A wedding ring tucked away for an afternoon. My every fiction told the story of my mother somehow.

“Why doesn't your old automaton get after the minister?” I said. “She's not shy about strangling a gentleman.”

“The only thing in the world that scares Mrs. Margaret is religion,” she said. “She's had a long hard life, poor thing. She's been damned to hell so many times, she hates to tempt fate.”

And later that night, in the beer garden, I found myself almost grateful for Mrs. Margaret, and her devotion, as I sat and watched Cecily waiting. Cecily wasn't ready yet to tell the old woman about me, so while she drank wine with the Waltzing Dwarves, I stayed at the opposite end of the garden with August and Rosie and the anarchists. But I couldn't take my eyes off her, and she couldn't take her eyes off me.

When Mrs. Margaret swooped in like an old crow, in a black bolero jacket complete with a lapel of half-molted black feathers, carrying that carpetbag, I hated not following them when they left. Mrs. Margaret could learn to like me, I was sure of it. We weren't so very different. Things had never been easy for me either.

August told me to open my hand, and he shook into my palm a paper mermaid. “I bought it at the fortune-teller's booth,” he said. “It's sensitive to your temperament.” The paper's coating allowed it to respond to the palm's sweat and salt.

“That seems ominous,” I said when the mermaid curled itself into a tight little tube.

August read the chart on the back of the envelope to properly diagnose. “Passionate,” he said, with a dramatic sigh.
Proof
, I thought. Even a cheap novelty knows. Had the mermaid curled on the sides, or flipped over, it would have read as “fickle” or “false.”

C
ECILY LAY BACK
on a chamomile lawn. It was late morning, the sun hot, and August had brought a tea party right to us, into the gardens behind the Horticulture Building. We sat in the shade of topiary trimmed into the shapes of sea monsters attacking sailing ships. The gardens expanded north into the miles of empty fields behind the New White City, making this spot nearly silent but for the squawking of hawks circling overhead. The Fair sounded as if it might be miles away. Above the muffled noise of its calliopes and marching bands were the click-clack of a croquet mallet and the bubble and slosh of a stone fountain. We could even hear the squeaky turn of lawn mower blades as an old man cut the grass.

“This is how I would look,” she said, “if it had been me.” She closed her eyes and twisted her body, bending her legs in an awkward pose. The theater of the Flying Waltz had closed before it opened, and she was jobless once again. This time it was the gentleman's wires that had snapped. He had somehow managed to not break a bone when he'd hit the dirt, but he nonetheless sought a lawsuit.

I stood to help arrange Cecily's collapse. I stepped over and around her, composing. I turned a wrist and an elbow. I pushed her fingers into a fist. I removed a shoe, but just from her heel, leaving it clinging to her toes. I unbuttoned a button of her dress and pulled at a curl so it rested on her forehead. I rustled her dress—she'd decked herself out head to toe in cherries. There were red cherries and green stems in the pattern of her pink dress. Her red straw hat, tossed aside on the grass, was garlanded with wooden cherries and silk blossoms. She'd tied a red scarf around her waist.

August stood to critique my work. “I can't bear to look,” he said, looking closely. “The terror is absolutely lifelike.”

I positioned Oscar in the grass too, as if he'd been bent and broken from a fall, and I dropped to lie next to Cecily and to pose my own crippling. I kicked one leg over her legs and linked one arm with hers. The chamomile was soft and smelled like baked apples.

August attended to his tea party. He'd even packed a small samovar shaped like a keg, which he set up on his medicine trunk.

“What am I going to do now, Ferret?” she said. She looked past me, to the carriage I'd bought Doxie. Doxie reclined inside, under the shade of an umbrella of lace and ribbon. I'd come into a little money, with several literary assignments in recent days. Many people had employed me to write letters of complaint to the editors of the dailies. Everyone was afraid of the strangers invading our town to visit the Fair.
The Fair was intended to save us
, wrote Mrs. Mattie Ish, the chiropodist of Twenty-fourth Street,
but they'll kill us with all the illness they bring in from the outer reaches
. My clients complained about the overcrowding of the hotels and streetcars, of late-night noise and early-morning drunkards.
The city has doubled its number of thieves
, wrote Mrs. Pfeiffer, the phaeton-maker's wife of Leavenworth Street.

“You're an actress,” I told Cecily, “so you'll act.” I took her hand in mine and slipped into her palm a clipping. I'd bought an issue of the
Omaha World-Herald
that morning, to see if they'd run any of my letters of complaint, and had come across the advertisement for auditions. A play called
Heart of the White City
, a melodrama full of stunts and effects set in Chicago, was to premiere in the fall on the stage of the amphitheater on the Grand Court. Yes, the White City of the title was Chicago's, not ours. Omaha's biggest spectacle was the story of some other town.
My dummy
, I thought,
would have a heyday with that
.

Needed
:
A cast of hundreds
, the advertisement said.

August, listening in, leaned forward. “Speaking of actresses,” he said, “Ferret told me you collect cigarette cards.” He handed her two photographs—one of Sarah Bernhardt and another of the opera singer Adelina Patti. Patti wore a bridal gown and Cecily studied the picture. She turned the card to read the back. “She's Lucia di Lammermoor,” August said. “She has a mad scene. There she is just before her dress gets bloody. I've heard that Patti licks the blade of her knife after she guts her groom.”

August returned to his copper samovar and spooned crushed pinecones into the base to fuel its flame. When he poured some hot water from the spigot into a china cup, the samovar hissed and squeaked. He dropped in a candied violet.

“Too hot for tea,” I said.

“But that's why we drink it, isn't it?” he said. “And why we drink whiskey? And why we smoke like fiends? To work up a sweat to cool us off?”

“Nah, we just go crazy from the heat,” I said. “We're just trying to cook ourselves from the inside out.”

“I'd love some, please,” Cecily said.

“A little honey, sugar?” he said. “A little sugar, honey?”

Cecily and August, pleased with themselves, both shot me cold glares of playful derision, casting me from their tea party. I lay back again, charmed by their conspiring against me.

As August sipped his tea, he said, “I actually
saw
Sarah Bernhardt as Camille, here in Omaha. Well, rather, I saw her
dressing
for
Camille
. I didn't have tickets to the show. I was fifteen and I stood across the street from Boyd's Opera House, with my opera glasses, just hoping for any glimpse of her. And there she was.” He put the cup down, and seemed to lose himself in the dream of it all. “There she was, in the window of an upstairs dressing room. In the heat of the early evening, by the open window. Naked. Naked as sin. I hadn't expected to be lucky enough to see her at all, let alone without a stitch on. It felt like some miracle from heaven. It was a message from God that I was a man with the gift of luck. And magic. I was a man who could aim my opera glasses, and Sarah Bernhardt would appear naked in front of them.”

“How'd she look?” Cecily asked.

“Well,” he said, nodding toward the card in her lap, “just like
that
but without clothes.”

I picked up the card, and I gave it a sniff. “Pretty,” I said. “It smells like roses.”

August sighed. “It would, to
you
,” he said. He looked to Cecily and rolled his eyes. He leaned in toward her to conspire some more. “It's essence of Rhine violets, of course.”

“Of course,” Cecily said.

Afterward, August wrapped up his tea things in silk scarves and put them in a box, and the box in his trunk. He put the leftover scraps of scones in his pockets, to drop them into the lagoon later, to feed the river fish. “The fish in the lagoon are starving,” he said. “Meanwhile the foreign fish in the ponds here probably dine on anchovies and caviar.”

“The river fish oughta picket,” I said.

He wheeled his trunk away, to leave the garden, to go sell his medicine at the Wild West Show. “He loves you,” Cecily said, as I helped her up from the grass.

“And I love him,” I said. “He's the dearest friend I've ever had.” I picked up Oscar and brushed off his coat, then returned him to my back.

“But he loves you differently than you love him,” she said. I handed her her red straw hat, and she situated it atop her hair, which she'd kept coiled up into a Psyche knot. Even her hatpin had a cherry at the head of it.

“Do you mean to say,” I said, taking the handle of Doxie's buggy, “that he loves me the way I love you?” I'd said it hoping to sound debonair but immediately felt devious for using August's affection in this way. But once I said it, I could only wait. My heart seemed to thump harder, louder, every second she stayed silent.

She paused at my declaration. She slowed her step. She clicked her tongue as if about to speak, but then didn't speak at all. Finally she said, “You don't love me,” but she said it teasingly, girlish. And once again she insisted, “You don't know me.”

“You don't have to know a girl to love her,” I said. “That's the funny thing about love.”

She put her arm in mine as I pushed the buggy toward the lane lined by rosebushes. I said, “This could be us every day.”

“This isn't even us to begin with,” she said.

There was a trick I'd always longed to do, to impress a lady in a garden. I'd come prepared. In my pocket were aniline crystals in a corked vial, and as Cecily looked across to the caged alligator near the garden's fountain, I dusted the crystals across the petals of a white rose, then brushed them away with the cuff of my sleeve.

“This is a magic rosebush,” I told her. “Lend me your perfume.”

Cecily took from her chatelaine purse a scent bottle shaped like a pistol that fit in her palm. It was yet another dainty thing inspired by the war. The thin barrel of the gun was filigree and silver, and she unscrewed it from the crystal handle that contained the extract of sweet pea. I splashed the perfume against the rose, and the drops splattered and seeped, turning the rose red.

“How's the trick work?”

“No trick,” I said. I broke the stem from the bush and I bowed as I handed her the flower. “Magic.”

She held the bloom to her nose but drew her head back quick, her nose scrunched up. “It smells like rotten fish,” she said, smelling the aniline. And with that I shot up a spark from the magic ring of flint I wore. The spark fell on the rose, and the petals went up in a fast flame. Cecily dropped the burning rose on the cobblestone path.

She lifted her skirt an inch or two and tapped out the flame with the toe of her shoe. I explained the particulars of the trick as we continued with our walk, but I don't think she listened. She read the back of one of the cigarette cards August gave her. “Do you know what chemicals might color my hair?” she said. The opera singer, she explained, had bolts of red in her tresses.

•   •   •

G
ETTING LITTLE
Doxie to her job at the live-baby exhibit that day was a complicated business. In an alley between buildings, Cecily switched Doxie from the pram to the carpetbag, then went off to meet Mrs. Margaret, who would alone escort Doxie to her shift in the incubator. Though Cecily checked in on Doxie often every day, she never spoke to the nurses or gave any indication she was anyone but a disinterested party. Mrs. Margaret did all the dealings. “They don't ask Mrs. Margaret any questions,” Cecily said when she returned to me, childless. “She's too terrifying.” I'd been enjoying sitting on a bench waiting, the pram parked in front of me. When people peeked into the buggy and only saw Oscar where a baby should be, they cast me a disdainful glare, like they'd fallen victim to a prank. I would just wink at them, tip my hat, and give them a polite
Good day to you.
“But if anyone suspected Doxie belonged to an unmarried woman,” Cecily continued, “they might get that itch people get when they're itching to save something. Mrs. Margaret says Reverend Foltz of the Child Rescue Institute stops in every day to satisfy his lust for the destitute.”

Cecily nervously chattered away, wringing her hands, as I escorted her to the auditions for
Heart of the White City
in the auditorium at the west end of the Grand Court. She so much wanted the audition to go well and to return to the stage. “Sometimes I think I'm only truly happy when I'm in the skin of someone else,” she said.

We left the baby carriage parked just inside the theater door and I returned Oscar to my back. We stepped through a lobby so full of mirrors you couldn't avoid your own glance. A secretary at a desk—an old woman in a hat piled with real roses and thorny stems—eyeballed Cecily, scrutinizing her character.

“You're pretty,” she said, but she wasn't extending a compliment. She was just summing her up. “Can you sing?”

“Oh, oh my, well, yes, I . . . I'd well . . . yes . . .” and she cleared her throat and began to trill the first few bars of a song that began “When the war is o'er.”

“Not
now
,” the old woman said, interrupting with a snap of disgust. “You audition in
there
.” She nodded toward the doors to the theater. “I'm just asking you. Can you sing?”

“You just heard me sing,” Cecily said.

“This is a very, very, very important production,” she said, rifling through papers. “It'll be the most extravagant Omaha has ever seen.” The theater had been built to house only this one play and it would be torn down when the play closed. The stage and its mechanisms were vastly elaborate. Real fires were to be put out by real water from tanks pulled by real horses. There would be a hot-air balloon and a locomotive on a track.

The woman handed Cecily a page of script—a snippet of a monologue delivered by Heart, the melodrama's damsel in distress.
When I was a little girl growing up plucking chickens in the fields of Illinois
, Heart says,
I never dreamed of a place like this. At the very top of the Ferris wheel, I could look out on those fields, so colorful, like a patchwork quilt.

As I sat in the theater itself, as Cecily stepped toward the lip of the stage to read her few lines, I got all caught up in the thought of her as the star of the show. The theater had pillowed seats of velvet, and the walls were covered in deep-blue silk that was flocked and rucked to resemble a restless night sky, the stars stitched with silver thread. The gilded chandelier overhead was strung with pink crystals. The stage was flanked by columns with pink veins crackling through the granite. The theater looked like the inside of a jeweled egg. Everything was in place but the machinery of the show itself—the melodrama would require multiple stages that revolved on wheels; it would be rigged with tanks for pyrotechnics, and hydraulics for the spin of the Ferris wheel. Even the roof was rumored to crank open, as if the producers had employed the moon to run through a month of phases in only an hour or two.