The Swan Gondola (34 page)

I lay down next to her. “I slept in the same iron crib from the time I was a baby until I was ten,” I said.

“No wonder you kick in your sleep,” she said.

“No, I don't,” I said.

“How would you know if you do or you don't?” she said. “You're asleep.”

“You know me best, I guess,” I said.

“I do.”

“So how did Billy know?” I said. “About the swans?”

“He didn't,” she said. “He thought I was thinking of the swans we watched together in the town before, in a park, where we had a picnic. Beautiful swans, some black, some white. We tossed some crumbs out on the water. He didn't know I was thinking of you then too.”

I whispered in her ear. “Stay with me,” I said. “Don't go back.”

She tried to breathe in deep, but her breaths were shallow. “I can't live without Doxie,” she said.

“You don't have to,” I said. “I'll take care of both of you.”

“Doxie lives in the house on the hill now,” she said. She put her hand to my cheek, and met my eyes with hers. “Don't you want the very best of everything for Dox? Shouldn't she be far better off than we ever were? Just picture your miserable self in that old crib. If you hadn't run away from the orphanage, you'd probably still be sleeping in that crib today.” When I said nothing, she put her forehead against mine, and she nodded, making my head nod too. “See, you agree with me,” she said, smiling.

“How do you know I won't run away with you when you fall asleep?”

“Because I never sleep anymore,” she said, and with that her eyes dropped closed, and her breathing slowed, growing easy, and quiet, and she slept and slept.

Somehow, I wasn't worried. Without a doubt, she was mine, not his. And soon enough, it'd be summer, then soon enough, summer again, and we'd be alone with our little girl. We would live in a state of contentment and melancholy, arm in arm, anxious for the next moment, and the moment after that, even as we watched our lives leave us, minute by minute.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
I lay in the berth, in the back of Dr. Gee Loy's, waiting alone. I suspected Cecily had been slowed by the cold, icy drizzle that slicked the walks. I got up often to go to the back door, to lean out and look up and down the alley. I lingered there, as if I could see her figure in the mist and fog just by staring hard enough. Finally I walked to the front desk, to check if there'd been any word. Dr. Gee Loy had a telephone. She might have called.

But before I even asked, I saw, out the window, the Wakefield coach parked in front, the coach that delivered Cecily to the front door of Brandeis every afternoon. The black umbrella that the old driver had wired to his perch drooped with a few broken spines, hanging above his head like a listless bat. The old man's mouth was wrapped around tight with a woolen scarf.

I stepped outside, suddenly remembering a dream I'd had the night before. I was happy it came back to me. In the dream, Cecily circled the cart of a flower peddler in the street, plucking off a petal here, a petal there, stealing a whole flower's worth of petals that she kept clutched in her palm.

I opened the coach door, wanting to tell Cecily of the sweet, strange dream, but only Pearl sat inside, Cecily's handkerchief, with the initial stitched in, twisted in her grip. Her eyes and her nose were red.

“Get inside, Ferret,” Pearl said, “so I can tell you.”

Wakefield caught her
, I thought, with a catch in my gut.

I sat next to Pearl and closed the coach door. I took Pearl's hands in mine. “Tell me,” I said. She began to cry.

My worry, in the moment, was only for Pearl, this sad girl here at my side, Cecily's friend, so wrecked.
Cecily and I will find a way
, I would tell her, to comfort.
She loves me.

Pearl tried to steady her voice to speak. In a moment, she said, “Cecily died this morning.”

I took my hands from hers.
A lie
, I thought, but not with anger. Pearl was only confused. Or Wakefield had invented this, to take Cecily from me again. If it was true, how could Pearl possibly know? How was such a thing knowable? Who would have told her? Who was she talking about? I couldn't ask. I couldn't think.
Stay confused. No one knows. There's no truth.

“Did you hear me, Ferret?” Pearl said.

“No,” I said. “No.”

“She became very ill, Ferret,” she said. “Something overtook her. And she died.”

“
Who
?” I said, though I don't know what answer I wanted.
Who died? Who did this?
I still expected Cecily to look in the window, to open the door.

“Cecily died. Ferret, Cecily is gone.”

The coach sat in the street, its stillness filling me with fear. It stopped my breath. I opened the door to let in the wind and sleet.
I was with Cecily yesterday
. We would be late to our bed in Dr. Gee Loy's. We wouldn't have enough time. We would lie there, sleep a wink, then she'd have to leave.

Pearl leaned across me to pull the door closed. “So cold,” she said.

And with the closing of the door, the snap of its latch, I believed it. I believed I was here, in this coach, hearing the truth. Pearl had no reason to lie. Cecily's death was cold and exact, and it shuddered through me, through all my bones, a slamming of doors. And yet Cecily wasn't gone yet. Her death was only in that handful of words,
Cecily died this morning
. Her death didn't exist anywhere else. It was confined to those words. We were still in that cloud, when what was said could still be unsaid. Or
more
could be said, and everything could change.
Do you have any sense of time at all?
Cecily had asked me on the rooftop at the Fair, after the president's dinner. And I didn't. That moment on the roof was so near, the memory so vivid, I felt I could step back into it and leave myself there. Each moment with Cecily was close enough to touch. I could have every moment back.

I opened my mouth to speak, and my words caught on my tongue, and they fell apart, into noise, and I sobbed. I tried to finish my sentence but only stammered. Pearl hushed me, whispering “sh” in my ear, her arms around my shoulders.

“I was waiting for her inside,” I managed to say, through my weeping. “I was waiting and waiting. I thought she'd slipped in the rain.”

Pearl put her arm in mine, and her hand to my wet cheek. “The rain,” she said. “It's heaven fallen down on us.”

“I can't stop crying,” I said. “I can't speak.”

“You don't have to stop,” she said, even as she shushed me some more, rocking me in her arms. “Sh-sh-sh-sh.”

I looked at Pearl, and I didn't have to ask her to tell me more. She took a breath and told me everything, in great detail. This was what we needed to do, it seemed. We needed to go over everything, minute by minute.

“Mr. Wakefield sent the coach around for me this morning, thinking I could help ease Cecily into some sleep,” she said. “She hasn't slept for days and days. It was all too bright, she said. She wore a mask over her eyes. They put her in a room with the windows blacked out. And last night was the worst yet—she was disoriented and sick. There's been a doctor there, who Mr. Wakefield brought in from Europe, and he said she needed desperately to sleep.”

“But she
did
sleep,” I said, as if she could still be saved, if only everyone knew. “I know she did. I promise you. She slept.”

Pearl nodded. “She was sleeping when I got there,” she said. “They'd given her something to get her to sleep. Everyone was so relieved. You could feel the ease in the house. It was like the air was of silk. Not only was she sleeping, but she was restful. Her breathing was easy. We all felt the worst was past. The doctor was with her. He wasn't worried. We busied ourselves. Me and Mrs. Margaret and Mr. Wakefield and his sister. The staff. We played cards. And then the doctor came down from her room, only a few hours ago. He told us she'd passed.”

“And you're certain?” I said.

She nodded. “We saw her,” she said. “We went upstairs and saw her. She was sick all along, I guess. She was sick.” And though Pearl described Cecily's death no further, I couldn't help but picture her myself, in her bed, her eyes closed, her life gone.

I pushed open the door and jumped from the coach. I went back into Dr. Gee Loy's, and down around the winding of its back halls, and out the door to the alleyway. I didn't run, but I walked quickly against the sleet, my coat's collar upturned, my hands buried in my pockets, my head low. I followed the path Cecily would have taken that very afternoon, if she'd ever arrived.

And when I reached the back door to Brandeis, I turned and walked back to Dr. Gee Loy's. I returned to my berth. I took off my coat. I took my feet from my shoes.

The doctor didn't ask about Cecily. He prepared a pipe and a lamp.

Everyone in the berths was awake, but they paid me no mind. They smoked. They breathed deeply. Their breathing was all I could hear, as if it were my own, as if I held my hands to my ears and listened only to the sound of the air filling and leaving my lungs. The doctor handed me the pipe. He ran the lamp beneath the bowl, raising the vapor.

The smoke choked me, catching in my throat like dust. I felt nothing else at first, nothing but a cottonlike covering of my tongue.

After only a minute with the pipe, I lay down to rest, and I slept. In the middle of a dream, Cecily shook me awake.
Don't wake up
, she said, crying and crying and crying. She pushed against my chest. She clawed at my cheeks. She pounded her fists on my shoulders.
Don't, don't, don't
, she said.
Don't wake up. Don't, Ferret, don't. Don't wake up.

I won't
, I said.

I can't hear you
, she said, putting her ear to my lips.

“I won't,” I said, and I said it aloud, waking myself with the effort to speak. Cecily was gone, though someone cried somewhere, there in the room. Someone a few berths away.

I held my hands to my face, covering my eyes, and I cried along with her. I cried myself back to sleep, to dream again of Cecily so frightened, shaking me awake.
Don't, Ferret.
Don't, don't, don't wake up.

I
QUICKLY GREW ADDICTED
to the doctor's addiction cure. “It's all right, it's not opium,” I whispered to August as he dragged me from my bed in the back of Dr. Gee Loy's. “Don't worry, I'm fine. I've only been here a minute.” But I'd been there often, off and on, in the handful of days since Cecily's death. But I'd had no sense of time. For all I knew, I'd been there every hour, every second, for weeks and weeks.

I feel as light as air
, I meant to say, but I wasn't sure any of my words left my mouth. As I was lifted from the bed, heavenward, I felt I should tell August I was levitating.
Hold me down.
But my tongue felt too heavy for my head. The weight of it sank my chin, and I felt my heart grow heavy too, and my stomach, and my spleen, wherever it might be. I felt tugged along by the wires of the Flying Waltz or by puppet strings.

August was to the right of me, Rosie to my left, and when I saw the black coach out the front window, I feared that Cecily had died again. Pearl would be inside, waiting. They were taking me to Pearl, the angel of death, the character she'd been born to play.
I know already
, I tried to tell them. I tried to stop them.
This happened already.

We were cogs in the guts of a clock. We were on a stage, on wheels, on a track, appearing nightly. We stepped outside and snow fell from the rafters, little puffs of pillow feathers and shavings of bone, catching in my eyelashes and melting on my red-hot cheeks. A pale gray scrim served as the winter sky, and actors and actresses in minor roles moved from one sidewalk to another, crisscrossing from corner to corner, pretending to talk to one another, moving their mouths for soundless words and empty phrases. The peddler pushed his flower cart along the streetcar tracks. Was this the same flower cart and flower peddler from my dream? The dream where Cecily picked the petals?
Had
that been a dream? Was I dreaming now?

But the cart wasn't the same cart, and the coach wasn't the same coach. This wasn't the same day. August and Rosie helped me inside, into the packed crowd of it. Still hallucinating, I saw anarchists and actors, a few of the Waltzing Dwarves, a nanny from the incubator exhibit, a magician's assistant, an elephant wrangler. There was Josephine the ragtime player, Mandelbaum the lion tamer, Zigzag the clown, and though he'd washed the makeup from his face, he had the same bulbous, gin-blossom nose and baggy eyes.
There's no room
, I tried to warn,
I won't fit
, but there was room, and I did fit. A few people spilled out the other side, and they crawled up to ride on the roof, despite the snow and the cold. And the coach pulled away.

I was the widowed husband. I wore an old undershirt, the neck of it sagging down my chest. I wore the trousers of my lilac suit and woolen socks. Rosie had grabbed my shoes from beside my berth, and he put my feet into them, and knotted the laces, as we rode along in the coach. August helped me into a long black topcoat, and a top hat, with a black lace rose pinned to the hat's black band.

“Mistletoe tea,” August said, putting a cup to my lips.
Mizzle toad-ee
, I heard, and I saw mizzle toads, whatever they were, filling the coach like a plague.

“You should feel his heart,” August told Rosie.

“You should feel my heart,” I whispered.

Mistletoe tea.
“Missed ol' Dox-ee,” I said. I sang it, in a low howl, like the serenade of a sick dog under the porch.
Missed ol' Dox-ee
was how the song started, a song for the parlor, about the tragedy of the second Mrs. Wakefield. I couldn't remember how the rest of it went, but it didn't end well. That much I knew.

My hand was too heavy to lift, and when I looked at my open palm, I saw Cecily's heart, it having grown big enough to bust the rusted birdcage she'd kept tucked beneath her corset, and under her ribs. It weighed my hand down more with each tremor and beat.

“Here,” August said, holding the teacup to my lips for more. “Here.”

Here. Here. I'm here. Hear
me.

“Drink.”

“What is it?” I said.

Mistletoe tea.

Miss Cecily.

•   •   •

T
HE ROADS HAD TURNED
to mud and slush, the snow and sleet having grown heavy. The coach slid and rocked, the tea sloshing in my cup. August had brought a whole pot full, and every time I spilled some tea, he poured in more.

The coach was not as crowded as first I thought—some among us had been only an illusion. We were all of us in black. The incubator nanny sat feathered, with a half-eaten apple in the hand in her lap, the red of it like a spot of blood. She was a shot crow. She stopped her chewing when I caught her eye. She smiled with closed lips, and furrowed her brow with sympathy.
I was the widowed husband.

After the long drive in the rented coach, north, and up the hill to the Wakefield house and into a slow caravan of carriages and phaetons, I'd sobered up. They were taking me to see Cecily, for prayers in the parlor. Wakefield was having a service, of sorts.

“But he wanted no funeral, it seems,” August said. “There'll be no sermons.” He took from his pocket a mourning card he'd collected from the undertaker's parlor. The card was black with white illustrations. I ran my fingers over the embossed feathers of the angel wings and along the droop of the willow.

In eternal loving memory of Cecily Wakefield
was etched into a gravestone that sat between two urns.

Wife & Mother

Who fell asleep in Jesus,
on the month, the day, the year.

My sight fell past the white and into the black night of the background. How was any of this a comfort? The engraved cards, the mourning lace. Eternal memory? Eternal death. Every word of all this angelology was just another shovelful of dirt. There was no beauty in this. All the night and all the black there ever was, and could ever be, could never blind us. As long as we were alive, our dead would keep dying.

“I keep forgetting she died,” I said. “I keep thinking of new ways to try to take her from Wakefield. Just this morning I thought of the balloon at the Fair. Maybe if we went up in the balloon again, I thought.”

“They don't even gas the balloon up anymore,” August said. “The Fair's winding down. Some of the midway attractions have already started heading to Philadelphia for next summer's fair.”

“Take me home,” I said, and by
home
I meant my sleeping berth, my healing pipe. It felt like I hadn't slept in days. “I need to get some rest,” I said. “It's important that I rest.”

But we were already there.
Now we are there
, I'd read to the orphans, from the story about the Paris exhibition
. That was a journey, a flight without magic.

We stopped at the gate. We heard conversation, then dispute. We heard yelling and swearing, from the driver, from the men standing sentry, from the anarchists perched atop our roof. The anarchists' anger shook the coach as they stood up to hurl down insults. Rosie stepped outside, and his shouting and curses joined the noise.

Those of us in the coach sat silent, listening, trying to interpret the nature of the ruckus. The guards at the gate kept us out, it seemed. You could only pass through with a wreath on a hook. The day before, every florist in the city, and every florist in every city nearby, had wound and wired fresh lilies and fronds into funeral wreaths. They'd filled wagons with the wreaths, and horses had galloped along every street and lane, slowing only long enough for a boy to jump off and deliver a wreath to a door of someone who was allowed, by Wakefield, to mourn his wife.

Without a wreath on your coach or carriage, you were sent away. You were among the uninvited.

“We're her
family
,” Rosie shouted at them, as he opened the door to step back into the coach. He was bright red with rage. Josephine took his arm, petted his sleeve, to settle him. And the driver pulled away from the parade of coaches, steered the horses around, and headed back the way we'd come, past wreath after wreath, the lilies' petals and leaves wilting, burning, in the cold. The anarchists on the roof kept shouting, kept cursing, back at the guards and ahead to the mourners in line.

Rosie saw me trembling and spilling more mistletoe tea. In the hour or so we'd been in the coach, all the mystifying smoke that had clouded my head had lifted. Rosie said bashfully, “I'm so sorry about all that.”

But I was grateful. My old anger at Wakefield jolted through me, pushing the blood up my veins, shortening my breath, the rush of it all so familiar. My hatred of Wakefield made sense, the
only
thing to make sense in the days since Cecily's death. Now I wanted nothing more than to go into that house. I was the only one in all the world who deserved to mourn alongside little Doxie. I was afraid before that I would weep and wail, but now I needed it, I needed to fill that house with my pain.
I am the widowed
.

“I want to go back,” I said, and no sooner did I say it than Rosie had the door open again. He jumped from the coach and pulled me out by my sleeve, both of us slipping in the snow and nearly falling beneath the coach's turning wheels. I'd only just righted myself before Rosie had opened the door of another coach, one moving slowly up the hill toward Wakefield's gate. He pushed me up and inside, in with an old couple sitting across from each other. The gent withered on his bench, cringing, wide-eyed, clutching his cane to his chest, while his wife leaned forward, ready for battle, brandishing her mourning umbrella of black lace and raven's feathers.

I sat next to the lady, and Rosie sat next to her gent. Somehow, through all that, I still had the empty teacup in my hand.

“You are so kind to offer passage,” Rosie said.

“You absolutely
must
leave at once,” the woman said.

When Rosie crossed his thick legs, his foot was suddenly in front of us all, and he leisurely tugged at the knee of his trousers to lift the hem above his sock. There, in a holster buckled to his calf, was a ladylike pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle. In all his weeks as a conspirator to assassinate, I'd not once seen a weapon.

The old man and the old woman leaned back, away from Rosie's armed leg. “So sad when there's a funeral,” Rosie said, tapping his toe in the air. “But I guess we should be happy it's not our own, ay?”

Rosie tapped the toe of his shoe against my knee with affection, and he kept tapping, calming me with the rhythm as we rode up through the gate, and through the orchard, and up the winding lane to the house.

•   •   •

T
HE HOUSE SMELLED WARM,
of cinnamon and ham hocks. The dining room thrashed with the well-meaning buzzards that hover at funerals, the undertakers with their folded hands and tics of sympathy, the church wives with their mince pies and mints handmade from cross-shaped molds. An aunt fussed with flowers, an uncle nipped at mulled wine.

They all looked my way, studying me in my topcoat and top hat, in my ratty undershirt and lilac pants. Rosie had plucked a lily from the coach's wreath and poked its stem through the buttonhole of my lapel.

You can't see me
, I thought, even as they stared. None of these people were Cecily's. These people were only here for Wakefield, to shed polite tears, to compliment the undertaker's art, to chatter about all the life that burned in Cecily's dead, red cheeks.
So peaceful
, they said.

But the old anger I'd worked up in the coach had dulled back to a sadness that seemed to thicken my blood. My skin felt too heavy, and every hair on my head weighed me down.

Though feeling queasy, I decided to eat. I wasn't ready to go to the parlor, where Cecily rested in her casket. I sent Rosie in without me. “Go see her, and come back,” I said. “Tell me if I can bear it.”

I picked up a little china plate from a stack on the sideboard, and I nearly dropped it. My every finger was too weak.

An old woman, kindly recognizing my grief, came to take my arm, and my plate, and she led me to the table. The ladies' group of a Lutheran church had brought casseroles and stews, cakes and ices.

“Pickled figs in the bowl there,” the woman explained to me, “calf's liver here, kidney stew in the pretty tureen, eggs fricasseed.” I followed her around the table as she pointed at the dishes and platters. I would nod, and she would nod back, and she would ladle a spoonful onto my plate.

My eye traveled up from the table to the portrait on the wall—a life-size picture of the first dead Mrs. Wakefield seated, her little boy in a sailor suit leaning against her knees. Had Cecily eaten all her last meals under the eye of her mister's old missus? I feared the whole of her life there in that house had been haunted by the other Mrs. Wakefield. Cecily wore lace the first wife had tatted. She ate off the first wife's wedding china and spent her sleepless nights in the first wife's sheets. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that the mortician had dug up the first Mrs. Wakefield to put Cecily in her burial gown, and on her pillow, and in her box.

After all the church wife's work of heaping my plate full, I said, “I'm sorry, I'm not hungry. I should have told you. I can't eat.” I put my hand on her thin, fragile wrist and I said again, “I can't eat,” and she nodded, and she forgave me all the trouble I'd put her to. And that forgiveness lightened me somehow. I didn't want to step away from her act of kindness. I longed to pick up another empty plate, and to ask her to fill that one too.

Instead, I left the dining room to search for another room where Cecily wasn't, but Rosie found me, took my elbow, and led me back. I was relieved and leaned against him. I thought we might be leaving. He'd gone into the parlor, he'd looked, and he'd decided I shouldn't see her.
This was all a mistake
, he would promise me.