The Swan Gondola (9 page)

Her head suddenly turned as if slipping a gear on her neck. With her eye still open, she cast at me a deathly glare, her eyelid twitchy. Some drops of foam bubbled at the corner of her mouth. Then the booth lit up again, and the tuneless music rose, and a little boy with freckles and knee breeches elbowed me aside to speak into the horn.

“Is this worth a nickel?” the boy asked the witch. The witch shivered and jerked and lit the
No!
bulb.

“Don't worry, kid,” I said, “that's her answer to everything.” I leaned in to speak loud in the horn.
“She must be broken.”

August tapped my shoulder and pointed at a shack shaped like a dragon's head. “Cecily's with Satan,” August said, and sure enough, leaning against the dragon's tooth was one of Cecily's fellow actors in devil horns, his face painted red. His back was to us as he flirted with a geisha. Written across his red cape was the Silk & Sawdust Players in the same candy-box curlicue that had been painted on the side of the theater troupe's wagon.

“God bless Satan,” I said. I grabbed August's elbow and dragged him toward the dragon's maw.

•   •   •

T
O GET INTO THE
C
HAMBER OF
H
ORRORS,
you entered through the dragon's wide-open mouth, beneath giant bloodshot eyeballs that rolled up and down. You stepped up its tongue, and in.

In the lobby, where we waited for the next tour, August and I sidled up to a coffin-shaped bar where another devil served us boiled whiskey in shot glasses shaped like skulls. A squealing filled our ears—I'd later learn it was a recording of pigs at a South Omaha slaughterhouse.

A woman in black slouched forward, moving quickly through the crowd, gesturing and whispering, cupping her hand around the flame of a candle she carried. The dead black buds of roses were wired to the brim of her hat. “Come with me, come with me,” she said. “There's only one way out, there's only one way out.” We followed her through a creaky-hinged door.

You would walk down a dark hallway, stumble around corners, jumble up against each other. Every now and again a curtain on the wall would part, and you'd see some grim mischief lit by footlights on a stage. A family of pioneers got their gingham and bonnets all bloodied as their papa got scalped. A bone grubber robbing graves tripped into a coffin with a corpse. On a city street a man in a wolf's mask held a dagger to the throat of a pretty young thing in a red cape. Above Little Red and the wolf, true-to-life dead blackbirds bobbed on strings like back-alley vultures waiting for the girl's guts to spill. And spill they did. I admit I admired the mechanics and particulars of the gore and shocks throughout—the wolf cut open her dress and out fell some beast's fresh offal, probably brought over by the butcher.

But I didn't see Cecily anywhere in all this mayhem. The vampire, in her underthings in a bathtub of virgin's blood, was too plump, and the woman crazed by cocaine too thin. But Little Red Riding Hood was just right. I had to look close, and the closer I looked, the less certain I was. Was it her? Wasn't it?

As much as I wanted to finally see Cecily in Little Red's face, I couldn't. Cecily's nose had a pixielike lift, and her eyelids looked always half-shut, like she'd just woken up. I'd already learned Cecily's every aspect by heart.

So I turned the corner, returning to the crowd. I stood at the lip of the next stage, just inches from a guillotine.

And that's when I saw her.
This
was Cecily, without a doubt. As Marie Antoinette, her head on the block, Cecily had powdered her face stark white and dabbed perfect circles of pink rouge on her cheeks. The lights fell just as the blade trembled. In the darkness you heard the soft, wet give of a cleaver through a melon and the thump of the melon into the bottom of a basket, but you saw, in your mind's eye, Cecily's flesh sliced clean through, her pretty, bewigged head beheaded. Silence fell following the sharp gasp of the spectators, then the lights blasted back on with the shriek of a fiddle, the executioner thrusting forth a wax prop, holding the head by its wig, stage blood dripping, speckling your shoes if you stood too close.

By the end of the day, and by the end of evening, I knew the actors' every step, and every drop of blood. I went through again and again, even after August left me.

Poor Oscar remained unrepaired on my back as I abandoned our plot to become famous on the midway. Instead, I memorized Cecily's queen, down to the trembling of her hands that shook the lace fan tied to her wrist and the tension of the muscles of her neck and her gentle swallows, as she offered her throat hourly to the tin guillotine.

•   •   •

I
WAITED OUTSIDE
the Chamber of Horrors as the midway closed, the lights dimmed, the entertainers and exhibitors shuttering their theaters and leading their beasts to their stables. Finally, Cecily stepped from the dragon's mouth into the light from the nearly full moon, her face still plastered with powder, her cheeks still rouged. Her hair, which that morning had been a fright of wild curls pushed up with a few combs, was now matted to her head from the wig, the curls flattened and tucked with several pins and clips. She again wore the dress with the butterflies at the shoulders.

I followed Cecily, who tagged behind a small group of actors and actresses who seemed not at all tired from a full day of performance. One tall, thin man in an untucked shirt, his face still the gray of the plague that killed him on stage, would occasionally break out in song. He swept an actress into his arms to turn and turn her in an invented waltz. They laughed like they had drunk too much, but they had unlikely drunk a drop—they were graceful, their singing melodic. But Cecily seemed to barely notice them. She opened a sea-green paper parasol and leaned it against her shoulder. She spun it around and around as she walked. I followed its spin with my eyes, as if giving into a hypnotist's wheel.

“Oh, Cecily,” the actors and actresses called back to her, in sweet singsong, after she had fallen farther and farther behind the group. They were in love with her too. “Come to us, Cecily.” They delighted in their own melodrama. “Oh, Cecily, the world is so cold without you in it.” They kept calling to Cecily, but they never looked back. One actress made gestures toward the moon. An actor wrapped his arms around himself. “Come back to us, Cecily; come back; come back.”

“Go away, go away, go away,” she called ahead to them. She held a pink peony by its long stem, touching the bloom of it to her nose. The flower was nothing special—I could see it had seen better days, its outer petals brown and tattered. To Cecily, it was prettier than it was. I wondered where she'd gotten a flower so dear to her. Had some much-loved lover left it for her?

Nonetheless I picked up my step, but just as I did, she picked up hers. I stepped up more, and so did she. We were like two cyclers on a two-seater, pedaling but not drawing closer. A few steps farther and Cecily was no longer alone. She'd caught up with the others, and they all slipped through an iron gate, going to where all the noise was. I followed them into the crowded garden lit by the frosted glow of gas lamps, where people sat at tables among trees and rosebushes raising their steins of beer. Above the chatter I heard the organ grinder's crank piano. His monkeys, in their paper wings, had been released from their chains, and they leaped from table to chair to tree. They bounced into backs and took a wig from an actor's head; they knocked over wineglasses. They stole bits of cake right from the ends of forks.

In the garden of the Storz Brewery, beer could be got for a penny a pint after hours. After a long day of keeping the Fair's illusions spinning, the workers congregated to drink and to eat the day's leftovers—the whole roasts and broiled birds—that the waitresses brought over in vast tureens from the cafés along the midway. In the first few hours after the Fair closed, everyone was here—the ticket takers, the entertainers, the custodians, and managers, the beekeepers and ostrich farmers, the Chinese acrobats and the minstrels of the Old Plantation—everyone unwinding and flirting and dropping character. As the sharpshooters of the Wild West Show enjoyed their beer in a genteel manner not befitting a cowboy (pinky up, short sips), the magician's assistant, in red satin and feathers, collapsed in on herself to demonstrate how she disappeared nightly into the bottom of a box.

Cecily walked over to Little Red and all the others from the Chamber of Horrors—actors and actresses still in their bloodied and gun-shot getups. They were in the kick of some dice game. They cheered and shouted and bellowed out bawdy songs. The dice rolled, bounced, flew. Dollar bills changed hands without rhyme, without reason.

Cecily took a seat off to the side, apart from her crowd. She set the flower on the edge of a flowerpot next to her, and she began to remove the pins from her pinned-down curls, and she dropped the pins one by one into her lap.

That's when I saw August alone at a table in an opposite corner. He was in a very odd predicament—a live bird attacked the dead bird on his hat. I helped him to shoo the finch away, which returned to its nest in a potted tree in the garden.

As I licked my thumb and smoothed down the ruffled feathers of his bluebird, I said, “That's her over there.” I nodded in Cecily's direction. “The one messing with her hairpins.”

“Oh, she's much prettier with her head on her neck like that,” August said. He sighed and whimpered and it became clear from his wobbling that he was fuddled from whiskey. “I'm in love with her too,” he declared. August then lifted a shot glass, raising it to the empty seat next to him. “Ferret, I want you to meet somebody else I love,” he said. When August realized that that somebody had left, he said, “Oh. Maybe if I take another drink, he'll return.”

“Maybe you've had enough,” I said, sitting down.

“Maybe I have,” he said, sounding melancholy, falling into a slouch. He leaned closer to me, and it became clear he wanted me to put my arm around his shoulders. August rarely drank himself to drunkenness, but whenever he did, he was all affection and apology. When drunk, he became effusive, going on and on about how much our friendship meant to him, how much he loved me, and relied upon me. But what he felt for me was a different sort of thing than what I felt for him.

He put his hand to my cheek. “Thank you for saving my dead bluebird, Ferret. You're the only one who looks after me. Aren't you? Promise me you're my only one.”

“I promise,” I said, giving him a fatherly pat on the back. “You're a good kid, Augie.” When August was sober, his attentions were flattering, and I admit, though it was selfish, I encouraged him. He saw the world in a way I didn't, and saw me as I didn't see myself. I liked being invited into his imagination, where I was some kind of handsome, hapless character, my every failing charming and comical. But whenever he fell morose and lovelorn, I felt cruel for taking any delight in the attention he gave me. More than anything, I wanted August to find happiness, though I had no idea how he ever could in a town like ours.

August gestured again to the empty seat at his other side. “We were just talking about you. Me and the gondolier. A lad named Alonzo. Alonzo with the long eyelashes.” He stopped a moment, then said it again, singing it. “
Alonzo with the long eyelashes.
He can sneak you and Marie Antoinette out onto the lagoon, in the swan gondola, for a quick bit of moonlight. Any night after closing. Just bring him a bottle of wine.”

“That's sweet of you to think of me, Augie,” I said.

“I'm always looking out for you,” he said. He looked up to me, then past me. He squinted to see better into the dark of the garden. “Your witch has taken human form,” he said.

I looked to where August pointed. The automaton had changed into a shirtwaist and long black skirt, and had twisted her silver braids to pin them properly to the top of her head. She'd washed away the makeup that had stiffened her face but still wore the eye patch of her witch's costume. The whistle still dangled from the chain around her neck, bouncing against her chest as she stepped through the garden, Cecily's carpetbag in hand. When the automaton reached Cecily, Cecily took the bag from her, and together they left the garden.

August whispered in my ear. “The flower,” he said. “Take it to her.”

Cecily had left the peony on the flowerpot, but August's suggestion seemed backward to me—someone else had given her that flower first. I worried I would be carrying to her the gimmicks of another man's seduction.

“Go,” August said with a not-so-gentle shove at my shoulder.

•   •   •

I
PLUCKED AWAY
some of the peony's petals, wishing on each one, until the wish came true—the automaton ducked into the dim facade of the Chinese Village, and Cecily was at last alone again.

I'd left my dummy with August, and my jacket. I'd left behind much of my gentleman's disguise. I'd taken off my necktie and collar, and I'd yanked at my curls, pushing them this way and that. I'd untucked my shirt and dropped my suspenders to dangle at my sides. I had hoped for her not to recognize me from my clumsy efforts of that morning.

And yet the first thing out of my mouth was nothing but more clumsiness. “I'm the fool who tried to nab your carpetbag,” I said as I stepped up to her. She flinched and quickened her pace. Her parasol was closed, down at her side, and I saw her tighten her grip on the handle like she might be apt to smack me with it. “But I
wasn't
trying to nab it, really. It looked heavy, and I wanted to help. Or, actually, I just wanted an excuse to walk with you. I'm not a thief. And I don't know why I'm telling you this. You'd think I'd never spoken to a girl so lovely before. And I haven't, I guess. Not as lovely as you. Well, except I actually
have
spoken to you before. At the Empress Opera House. You were the violet-eyed trollop, and I tied your corset strings.”