The Swan Gondola (36 page)

BOOK THREE

Ghosts

December 1898

E
VERY
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE,
late into the night, the Old Sisters Egan told the ghost stories they'd grown up with. They would go to church to hear the children sing the carols, and then return to the farm for oyster soup, cooked goose, and plum pudding with a puddle of rum burned away with a match. They would then have brandied figs by the hearth, their legs covered with quilts, and retell old tales of the unsettled dead.

But on this, my first Christmas Eve with the sisters, a snowstorm kept us in. This pleased me, of course. I'd left the house once that day, and did not feel inclined to leave it again. We'd gone to town, to the dry goods store, where I bought Cecily some jasmine-scented soap wrapped in pink tissue. I bought Doxie a toy elephant that fluttered its ears when you wound it up. Emmaline had loaned me a handful of coins for the gifts. “The poor darlings should have something under the tree, at least,” she'd said.

I'd gone to the library alone afterward—a little room with too little light and too few books—and spent the rest of the morning reading while Emmaline and Hester had tea and doughnuts down the street with the listless Mrs. Peck, the ether addict.

At the library, I wrote Cecily a letter.
I'm looking for ways to turn the Emerald Cathedral green
, I wrote.
I'd like that to be my Christmas present to Emmaline and Hester. A promise of some green, in the middle of winter. In a manual on painter's varnishes, I found a recipe. You treat some sheets of scrap copper with crushed grape skins. You soak the sheets in tubs, then wash them with turned wine. Eventually you build up a coat of verdigris. We'll scrape it off and sprinkle the cathedral with the crystallized emerald.

I tore the wrapper from the soap and tucked it into the envelope.
I hope the scent lasts long enough to reach you
, I wrote.
Merry Christmas. I love you.
I had then posted the letter, and collected the mail.

And in the mail was a letter addressed to me, but I didn't have to open it to know who it was from. I'd written August Sweetbriar just once, to let him know I was alive, and he'd written back, in early November, a note so full of peevishness and disappointment, I'd had to read it several times, each time hoping to see something gentler in his screed. He'd not believed me when I'd said it was all an accident—it was as if he thought I'd gone up in the balloon and that I'd broken my leg, all as a plot to escape without saying good-bye. What I'd explained as a strange kind of fate, he'd dismissed as cruelty.
I don't believe in fate
, he'd written. And he'd written me a few other times since, each letter a little crankier than the one before it. I tucked this one in my jacket pocket. I knew I had done a heartless thing to him, even if by accident, and didn't need the reminder.

I would read it later, though, when I felt better fortified against his moods. Charitably, he had sometimes sent news. Rosie and Josephine had married on the first Saturday in December. Pearl had gone to Paris to study the window dressing of the dress shops there. Doxie's baptism, and her long, silk christening robe, and her new name—
Dorothy Wakefield
—had been featured in the Sunday pictorial section of the
Omaha Bee
, with the sainted Wakefield holding her over the baptismal font. August had enclosed the newspaper clipping.

I decided I would wait to read August's new letter until after Christmas. Or maybe after the first of the year. Or maybe never. I missed August, and I loved him, but if he could only scold, I couldn't listen.

Or could I? His letter, unread, occupied my thoughts all the ride home, as Hester drove the horses, me sitting between the two sisters. In that envelope might be the unforgiveness I needed. I needed him to be inconsolable, so that the old life of mine could finally fall behind and fall away.

But I kept the letter tucked in my jacket, and as we drew nearer to the farm, the air grew gray and sharply cold, and I had to bury my hands in the pockets of my trousers. The morning had been pleasant, with no chill or wind, and I'd worn no overcoat or hat or gloves. The Old Sisters Egan had dressed lightly too, and as the mercury dropped and dropped and dropped, and the first of the snow began falling, we didn't speak a word to one another. We worried we'd not outrun the blizzard, and we were all distracted by our misery, by the burn of the icy wind which seemed it'd never stop. We leaned forward on our bench, as if we could lean our way right into our house, right up to the hearth.

When we were finally inside, and we'd built the fire and lit the stove, as we'd stamped our feet and slapped at our own arms to get the blood to pump, we laughed. We started laughing and couldn't stop. We laughed at how miserable we'd been only minutes ago, back when we'd thought we might die.

“Can you believe how
awful
that was?” Emmaline said, wheezing with laughter.

“How did we survive it?” Hester said. Despite her laughter, she seemed truly curious.

“
Did
we survive it?” I said.

“We did!” Emmaline said, smiling, nodding, sipping from a glass of scotch whiskey. “But only just.”

When we fell quiet again, I thought of Cecily, and the night she couldn't stop laughing at my jokes, at Oscar's jokes, as I'd stood on the stage on the rooftop, after Wakefield's masquerade ball. I had thought I'd never forget the sound of it, so sweet it was.

But now I couldn't quite hear it. I heard her speaking, when I listened back, and I could hear her singing the little lullabies to get Doxie to sleep. But the exact sound of her laughter escaped me. And I realized I couldn't remember the sound of anyone's laughter, no one's but Emmaline's and Hester's, which I'd only just heard. And now, in the silence, I had no memory of the sound of theirs either. I could see, in my mind, whole audiences, shaking with laughter, their mouths open, their eyes watering. What did it sound like? For the life of me, I didn't know.

With such deep regret I thought of all the times Cecily and I had strolled past the phonograph booth on the midway, where you could speak into a horn and record yourself. You'd take home your own voice, its rhythms etched into a wax cylinder. “I have nothing to say,” she'd said the first time I'd suggested we step inside.

She wouldn't have had to say anything. I could've told jokes, and she could've laughed. And I'd have that laughter still.

•   •   •

A
S THE WIND BLEW HARD,
then died down, then blew hard again, its every gust sounding like a great beast slithering against the house, rattling the panes, knocking away shingles with the brush of its tail, Emmaline stood at the front window, watching for the snow to stop. She had dressed for churchgoing in a cape of possum fur—“Siberian marten,” she insisted—and a fur cap stuck through with quail feathers.

Hester called us to the table in the kitchen, the room still warm from all the roasting. Emmaline gave up on the storm ending, and she took off her cape and hat. We sat down to another of Hester's fine feasts.

“Did you visit the Filipino Village when you were at the Fair?” Emmaline asked me. “Do you believe them to be a tribe of cannibals?”

“I don't believe anything about the Fair,” I said. “Why do you ask? Are you thinking if we get snowed in for too long we'll have to eat each other alive?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “but we have a cellar full of canned birds and meats. And pickles and preserves. To turn cannibal would just be an extravagance.”

After dinner, after dark, we exchanged gifts—the sisters gave me a monkey-leather wallet for all the money I didn't have, and a jade letter opener with a little circle of magnifying glass on one end of it.

I'd made each of us a pair of green goggles—pieces of a broken bottle wired together into spectacles. I'd tucked them into the stockings that hung from nails hammered into the mantel. As they reached into the socks, I warned, “Don't cut your fingers. Sharp edges. And don't cut yourself putting them on.”

We hooked the wires behind our ears and looked up and around, at the fire, at the candle flames on the Christmas tree, at the lamplight, casting a green glow across the room with our every glance.

“In the morning,” I said, “in the sunlight, the cathedral will be emerald, finally.”

“Oh, I love them, Ferret,” Emmaline said. “I never want to see again without them.”

But no sooner had she said it than she took them off. We all did. And we settled in for ghost stories, and stayed up half the night. I found myself nodding off in the middle of my own telling of one, right at the minute of its grisliest twist. When I woke, I'd been covered with a quilt, and Hester and Emmaline had gone up to their beds.

The room wasn't bright, but it wasn't dark. It wasn't daylight. It was silvery in the room, like it was lit with moonlight, but the moon was clouded over, and it still stormed outside.

Every Christmas I always felt sunk in nostalgia, longing a little even for the orphanage and the tin bird with the windup wings Sister Patience had once snuck beneath my pillow. So I got up from the floor, took up August's letter and my new letter opener, and sat near the window. I needed the sound of his voice in his words, no matter what his words said.

There was enough of that pale, winter light to read by, though morning was hours away.

August had been using the typewriter I'd left in my office, and it appeared from my name on the front of the envelope that he'd got the thing repaired. Before, all the
r
's had hovered above the other letters—the couple of
r
's in
Ferret
and the couple of
r
's in
Skerritt
looking like fangs lifted, about to strike—but the
r
's had now been knocked back in line.

But only a moment after cutting through the envelope flap, before even lifting the letter out, I realized that August had not sent this. He would never have been so cruel, no matter how angry he was. He would never have scented his letter with Cecily's perfume.

My dearest Ferret,

I'm here.

Yours always,

Cecily