The Swan Gondola (4 page)

The crowd at the Empress was howling so, Old Poppa could barely finish sermonizing. “They drive us to drink, then sell us mugs of their beer that's half bubbles from the keg,” he said, because it wasn't just the slaughter industry that had our town in a yoke—so did the breweries. So did the flour mills, the streetcar company, the newspapers that covered none of the worst scandals and true corruptions of our town. The businessmen set up shop anywhere they could sell anything of no worth to a man with little money. It was an age-old adage already: the poor could make you rich, and the rich could make you poor. “Then when we're good 'n' drunk, we buy their papers to read about ourselfs and our drunken ruckuses.”

Was I any better than the city's villains, peddling pain? I took the people's grievances, twisted them around, and sold them back to them nightly. After every show, I left the stage with their angry laughter filling my soul. I would sit in the saloon and weigh and consider the success or failure of every joke and I would revise my act, sharpening its stabs.

After Oscar's rabble-rousing, we ended with a magic trick. An actor planted in the audience threw an egg up to bust on my knees, and I picked up the shell, crushed it in my fist, and stuffed it in Oscar's jacket pocket. I then tapped at his chest to unhook the door to a tiny cage within, where a talented canary rested, patient and soundless. Once released, it flew from his coat and swooped and dove just above the heads of the crowd. I loved the sigh of the ladies' delight.

When the people fell for my tricks, I felt redeemed. For a moment, I reasoned, they believed in magic. They would carry their wonder out with them into the streets.

But by the end of that summer, I would come to see things differently. I would be troubled by my entertainment, played for a fool. I would be the puppet in a rich man's grim comedy.

T
HE BURLESQUE REVUE,
bereft of an orchestra, made a music all its own, all clatter and scratch, the ladies' every step and misstep making for an uneven rhythm against the stage. Even from the wings, I could hear the huff and puff of their breaths and the smack of the kisses they blew into the audience. I could hear the popping of Phoebe's trick knee. The ladies had lightly riddled their feather skirts with down from a pillow, so when they spun and kicked, the feathers flew up and drifted in the glow, giving the illusion of their costumes falling apart little by little.

One of the feathers drifted in my direction, catching in my intake of breath. It tickled my nose, working up a sneeze. I held my hands to my face and stepped quickly back, away from the quiet of the stage. As I buried the bark of my sneeze in the sleeve of my coat, Cecily entered from the alley.

I didn't yet know that this was the actress not listed in the program, that this was that Sessaly, the “violet-eyed trollop” of
Opium and Vanities
. Her eyes were not violet, after all—they were amber. They were the color of candied ginger or a slice of cinnamon cake. Faded paper, polished leather, a brandied apricot. Orange-peel tea. I considered them, imagining the letters I would write to her. Pipe tobacco, perhaps. A honey lozenge, an autumn leaf. I would look through books of poetry, not to thieve but to avoid.
Dear Sessaly
, I thought later that night, not actually with pen to paper but lying on my back, writing the words in the air with my finger,
let me say nothing to you that's already been said
.

The light of a lantern backstage caught in her wet eyes. When Cecily gave me that first look, then the second one, she had her hands up and behind her neck. She turned her back to me. She lifted the curls of her hair that had come loose from their pins, revealing a crisscrossing of complicated buttons at the top of her dress.

“Undo me,” she said.

The buttons, and their buttonholes, were absurdly small, and she tapped her foot, waiting, which somehow made my fingers more clumsy and slow. Typically I knew my way around a lady's buttons, and rarely needed more than the fingers of one hand. I squinted, wanting to be helpful but helping hardly at all. And I got distracted by the pattern in the fabric—what I had thought were flowers were actually little devils dancing and playing fiddles.

She reached back and her fingertips touched my fingertips, and without a word, she guided my hand and taught me the intricacies of the buttons and clasps. Did she even need me at all? I leaned in close to better smell the sweet pea perfume she had dabbed at her wrists. “Oh, I see,” I said, and when I'd finished the task, and she'd gone on her way to the stairs, to the dressing rooms in the basement, I felt foolish for not having been more expert.

The burlesque act fell apart in pieces—without music, the girls weren't sure when to stop, so one girl slowed, another girl shuffled, another kept going. Finally, they all hopped off the stage, doffing their costumes before they'd even entered the shadows.

“The glass in this silk scratches me up good,” Phoebe said, showing off the little cuts as she rolled down her stockings. The curtains closed, and the stagehands scurried, and the actresses stepped up from the basement, mostly undressed, to play the victims of the cautionary tale.

The stage glowed a bloody red for
Opium and Vanities
, the lights covered with pieces of stained glass. Only a few minutes before curtain, after all the other actresses had taken their places, Cecily climbed the stairs in her corset and underskirt, the black circles of an addict drawn thickly around and around her eyes. She studied the sight of her own mussed hair in the hand mirror she held. She used a dinner fork to tangle her hair more, twisting the tines of it through her curls.

Again she asked for my help as she turned her back to me, the laces untied. She clutched at the breast of the corset. “Tighten them up,” she said. Afraid of hurting her, I tied them too loose. “No,” she said. “Tighter.” I failed again, and she sighed. “Pull them until I yelp.”

I did as I was told. I gave the strings a sharp yank, with a zip of the laces, and yelp she did. I knotted them up with another sharp yank and another yelp. In the corner of my mouth was a pipe I had lit up. I used it in my act—it got good laughs when I would take a drag, then make Oscar cough, smoke lifting from his mouth from the popping of a capsule of powder. Cecily thanked me this time with a shy smile, her hands at her chest to cover herself. She then dropped her smile and seemed to contemplate my chin. She furrowed her brow, tilted her head in thought. I said, “Something puzzling you, sweetheart?”

Cecily swiped my pipe from my mouth. She ran on stage as the curtains parted, and she collapsed into the cushions of a red velvet sofa, puffing away without a single tickle in her throat.

She had no lines to say and yet, for me, she was the only actress worth watching. I leaned against a ladder and stared. And it was as if Cecily—and the wordless violet-eyed trollop she portrayed—knew everyone watched only her. And she ignored us all, her eyes on the clouds of smoke that rose before her.

The violet-eyed trollop figured in only two other scenes in the first act, all of them in her underthings, even the one that took place in the winter out-of-doors.
Opium and Vanities
chronicled a quick tumble down for the ladies of the bordello—one minute they were laughing it up with glasses of crushed-mint tea (simulating absinthe) and only minutes later begging at a train station, as a stagehand stood on the rigging overhead and sprinkled down bone shavings and soap flakes from a pillowcase for make-believe snow. A hose piped up steam from the boiler room below, to create a low-hanging fog. The poverty, the addiction, the bitter cold in too-little clothes—it was what turned the trollop's eyes violet, I guess.

At the end of her last scene, Cecily entered the wings, tugged at my chin, and returned the pipe to my lips. She tapped my chin again—a playful slap—then rushed down to the dressing rooms. I went over and over what I might say when she stepped back up, but I was feeling no better with words than I'd been with her buttons. I wanted to be gallant, to say something that would never occur to somebody like me.

Only minutes later she ran up the stairs in a rush, her devil-riddled dress only partly buttoned up the back. And she walked right out the stage door without a glance my way. I followed her, but she moved so swiftly through the alley and around the corner that I didn't have a chance to ask her if she might join me for a little drop of whiskey. She stepped into the street and into a phaeton with rattling wheels and a battered black hood. The driver didn't even stop for her—he only slowed the horses. A gloved hand reached out from beneath the phaeton's hood and Cecily took it, ran alongside, and she stepped up and in. And she was gone.

That was the first time I lost her. I would come to lose her again and again.

After the show, I asked Phoebe about Odie Hansom, the actress listed in the program as the violet-eyed trollop. I pretended concern, but I had never noticed Odie before. I couldn't even imagine what she looked like. I just wanted to know if there was any chance she'd return to the Empress to steal her role away from Cecily.

“Odie'll be back,” Phoebe said, which seemed to me the grimmest words I'd ever heard. Phoebe and I were walking down Farnam to Ninth Street, alongside the streetcar tracks, our eyes on the sky. Those days everybody looked up at night, seeking the airship, a mysterious silver flicker that moved through the dark like a slow shooting star. It had been showing up, off and on, for months, over Omaha and country towns farther west. Whatever it was, a handful of men took credit for it in letters to the editors of the dailies. One man described it as a cigar-shaped balloon off which he'd hung his bicycle, pedaling the propellers that flung him through space; another man said he'd built a yacht powered by mysterious fuels and captained by a whole squadron of sky pirates. We didn't believe any of the stories but couldn't resist them, nonetheless.

“Odie's not sick?” I said.

“Yeah, she's sick,” Phoebe said. “Sick with a drunk husband. He beats her, then cries and cries and begs her forgiveness. He buys her a couple of ounces of steak to nurse her black eye, acts like he's treating her to a fine filet at a hotel restaurant.”

Phoebe had changed into a plain shirtwaist and skirt and had pinned to her hair a small straw hat. We were on our way to the saloon in the parlor of a brothel, and she hoped to look like a schoolmarm among the working girls, to avoid any confusion when she made eyes at a gentleman she liked. When you left the morality plays of the Empress, you only had to stumble a few blocks to fall into what was known as the Burnt District, where men rented women for large sums or small. The deeper you walked into the neighborhood, the more pennies you saved.

We were headed to one of the grandest houses in town, and its saloon was called the Candy Box, with walls papered in pink silk striped with thin ribbons of white velvet. Anna Wilson, the madam, was rich and charitable—the money she'd made off her well-kept ladies afforded fat donations to children's homes and hospitals. Anna Wilson claimed, with pride, that she only hired girls who'd already been ruined—a girl, say, with a fatherless baby on the way or one already in her arms. When the mothers went to work at Anna Wilson's, the babies were sent to the orphanages with the finest cradles.

I have no idea at all who my mother ever was, but I'd been told by Sister Patience, at a very young age, “All orphans are born of whores.” In the only snippet of correspondence I had from my mother—a note that had been tucked into the dapper cap of a sailor's suit I'd been wearing when, as an infant, I'd been left at the nuns' door—she'd addressed me as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt:
Your last name was your daddy's last name (I'm right damn sure of it, don't let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I've ever seen written down. I can't give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.

At the library, when I was a boy, Mr. Crowe brought out county records, and there were no Skerritts listed anywhere in them, no matter how often and how hard we looked.

“Think you'll ever bring brats into the world?” I asked Phoebe.

“Only if I marry a compassionate man,” she said. Phoebe hoped to meet enlisted men in the brothel's saloon. Like everybody else, she'd got swept up in the call to arms for a war with Spain in Cuba, but in Phoebe's imagination she was a devoted lover sending off a handsome soldier. The newspapers nationwide had demanded battle weeks before and everyone was war mad. And when our navy ship, the USS
Maine
, was blasted and sunk in the Havana harbor, the phrase “Remember the
Maine
” was everywhere, in song after song and etched on teacups and pocketknives and souvenir spoons. President McKinley asked the men of the nation to prepare to fight, and the young and the old volunteered in the thousands. Those in Omaha waited to be called forward, basking in the sympathies of the town's ladies. The men haunted the saloons and bordellos, raising their glasses to their own bravery.

“What about you, Ferret?” Phoebe asked, and for a moment I feared she was asking me if I planned to enlist in that miserable war. But then she said, “Will you marry, and have little ferrets?”

“I'm going to marry the violet-eyed trollop,” I said, both a premonition and a fallacy. “The one from the stage tonight, not the one at home with the steak on her eye. But children . . . no. Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody. No, nope. No, siree.” I shared with Phoebe my Baker's Chocolate, pointing at the wrapper and my many failed attempts at spelling Cecily's name with an
S
. “And you have no idea who she is?” I said. “The actress who stood in for Odie?”

Phoebe cringed from the bitterness of the chocolate. “All I know is I don't want to know her at all,” she said. “She's one of the strangers who've come to town to take all the parts in all the plays.” Phoebe told me about the cavalcade of performers and gondoliers who'd rowed up the rivers from Nashville. “They're here for the Fair,” she said. “They move from one world's fair to the next, to work the midways, the magic shows, the illusions. The chambers of horror. All the cheap amusements.”

They'd had a treacherous winter trip, in the Venetian gondolas they would use later in the Fair's lagoon. The actors and actresses sat in fur coats and quilts as they'd sailed into the weather, with umbrellas their only protection against the elements. Leading the fleet had been a novelty gondola shaped like a swan, its long curved neck pointing its beak forward into the wind and snow.

“They've been here for months, it seems like,” Phoebe said, weary.
Months
, I thought, regretting all the hours already lost. But unless Odie Hansom kept irking her husband, I feared I'd never chance seeing Cecily again. I studied the wrapper, eyeballing all the wrong spellings, sensing her drifting farther away, nameless. Phoebe said, “Do you think she's pretty?”

“I do,” I said, though I knew Phoebe didn't want such an answer. She'd asked with a squint, her whole face screwed up ugly. “I couldn't take my eyes away,” I added.

Phoebe shrugged and sighed but did so politely. “I used to know a love spell,” she said, “but you have to pluck a hair out of the girl's head and burn it.
She will not sleep or eat, and she will forget father and mother and kith and kin, and for love of me may have me only in her mind.
Or something like that.”

“I used to court a lady who thought she was a witch,” I said, “but she doesn't speak to me anymore.” On our last evening together, she attempted to end her love for me with an alienation spell that called for driving nails through a calf's heart. She wept and wept, the bloodied, spiked calf's heart lying on the butcher's paper before her, drawing flies.