The Swan Gondola Page 11

  And for the first time, my dummy spoke unprovoked. “What do you wish me to do?” he said, somehow louder than before, his voice crackling with scratches. “Why should I do this for you?”

  The automaton snapped her head my way, her one good eye wide and bloodshot, more of those bubbles frothing at the corners of her mouth. If there hadn’t been a baby in that bag, she’d have likely beat me with it. Instead she looked down at the child, and I saw the old lady soften. She reached in to touch the girl, tucking the blanket. She slouched even more, growing older and older before me. For a moment I thought I might even have to take her arm, to help her keep upright. I wanted to tell her not to worry.

  She then shot me yet another noxious look. “You’re seeing things,” she said, and she tossed in my face a handful of ash. It was pepper mixed with snuff, enough to blind me. As I blinked away the sting, she rushed ahead. This was no black magic—it was an old tactic of theft. I’d known at least one woman who’d worked as a sneeze-lurker, who would slip from around a corner, toss a handful of spice and dust into a man’s face, and make off with his wallet.

  I stumbled forward, blinking and sneezing. When I could see again, I saw Cecily up ahead, a long summer shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had again wandered away from the other actors, and while everyone else looked up to the airship, she looked down, watching her feet, her ankles, her legs, as she practiced the steps of a dance.

  The old woman walked up to Cecily without even nodding a hello, and Cecily took the bag from her, saying nothing. She looked into the bag, tilted her head with affection. She puckered her lips, kissing the air. The automaton gestured for Cecily to rush, and though Cecily did follow the old woman, she continued with her made-up waltz, circling and weaving, like a tuft of cotton caught in a slight breeze. I stood and watched the two of them work up the road toward the bridge, the old woman constantly trying to hurry Cecily along, Cecily constantly falling behind, until they turned a corner and away, beyond my sight.

  I’d had only the quickest of glimpses, but in that baby’s face I’d seen not only Cecily’s eyes but also Cecily’s nose, her chin, the dimples in her cheeks, and the curl of her lashes. She couldn’t possibly resemble anyone else. It was as if the child had never had any father at all. Was Cecily widowed? Abandoned? Was her baby feeble? And if she was feeble, would she just get sick when stolen from her glass egg? She had been small enough to fit in the carpetbag with some comfort, but not nearly as small as some of the smallest of the premature infants in the incubators.

  I’d only known this baby a matter of minutes, and I was already feeling fatherly.

  • • •

  IN THE BEER GARDEN, I took a seat at Rosie’s table as he and a few of his fellow anarchists fussed over the war that raged in Cuba. The whole Fair was a monument to imperialist pigs, they complained. “America is a plague,” whispered Zigzag the hobo clown, his face still painted with a black grin and red freckles. “It’s a killer pox.” Like a jumpy pyromaniac, Zigzag lit everything that would light. He touched the flame of his match to a fallen leaf, to a paper rose, to the lace of a lady’s dropped hankie, to his own cuff.

  Rosie had already abandoned his rickshaw business. No one would ride for fear of looking lazy. He still sold plenty of his lovelies, but he had to give postcards to every guard who threatened to throw him off the fairgrounds. “It’s exploitation,” he groaned, but Rosie was the type of man who could find injustice even in the cheap steak he sawed at. “This is some ugly slaughter,” he said, pointing at the steak with his knife, chewing with his broken teeth.

  He introduced me to Mandelbaum the lion tamer, a slight-built man with hair wispy and gray. He wore a red suit—the gold buttons buttoned unevenly, the epaulets off-kilter. He held out his hand to me, and his undone sleeve slipped up his forearm, revealing a crisscrossing of terrible scars. “Mandelbaum has been mauled twenty-seven times, twice just today,” Rosie said.

  And next to Mandelbaum was Josephine, an entertainer in the minstrel show of the Old Plantation. For the show, they put her in the sackcloth dress of a slave and tied strips of muslin in her curls, and she played the piano as others danced. But, Rosie explained, Josephine composed her own ragtime tunes. “‘The Draggletail Rag,’” he said, boasting and looking upon her with his lovesick eyes. “‘The Weasel Rag.’ ‘The Breaky-Leg Rag.’ ‘The Belly-Full Rag.’ Her songs are sold in New York City, for pity’s sake. This girl’s too good for this Fair. It’s undignified. They’ve got her playing the music for cakewalks and buck dances. A couple of old white men run the whole show and fill their pockets. It’s an insult to her and to her entire race!” Rosie sawed more at his grisly hank of steak, his indignation at a high pitch. Josephine and Rosie shared the steak and drank from the same glass of red wine. She started to speak for herself but stopped when Rosie leaned forward to give her a quick peck on the lips. “Exploitation,” he said again.

  Rosie and the ragtime player, the clown, the nervous lion tamer all looked to me to hear my tale of frustration. For once in my life, I wasn’t troubled by a thing.

  “Exploitation,” I said, nodding. “The uncooked babies, for example. In the incubator exhibit.” I brought it up only so they might tell me more about it.

  “God almighty I hate that live-baby exhibit,” Zigzag said. “That’s the first thing we should set on fire when we burn this fair down.”

  Josephine said, “The whole thing is out-and-out humbug.”

  “How do you mean?” I said.

  “You pay a quarter at the door to see orphans and circus children in the pink of health acting half dead,” she said. “You stand there and wring your hands, your heart in your throat, worrying about them in their glass coffins. And you leave saying, ‘It cost me a quarter, but I would’ve spent fifty cents to see such humanity.’”

  “How do you know?” I said, hoping it was true. It was a relief to think that Cecily’s little girl was just an actress like her mother.

  “It’s the midway,” she said. She peeled off a piece of fat from Rosie’s steak and popped it in her mouth. “Everything’s for show.”

  “Even war,” Zigzag said. He complained of all the relics of battle on display at the Fair. He wanted to set fire to the cyclorama that re-created the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. He wanted to puncture the Civil War balloon. Zigzag, too jittery to sit still, moved the anarchists on to a rapid debate of the efficiency of assassination. If President McKinley were to come to the Fair, should they shoot him? Poison him? Lynch him? I found it amusing to see Rosie contemplate such violence—though it wasn’t unusual for him to leap ham-fisted into a fight, I couldn’t picture him ever dealing anyone a fatal blow. I suspected he just wanted to impress Josephine with the staggering depths of his dissatisfaction.

  August arrived with a cricket in a bamboo cage. “Admiral Dewey lost his every match in the fan-tan den,” August said. “They were fixing to squish him, so I bought him out of slavery.” August tapped the cage, and the cricket jumped around in a fit. “See? The humiliation has already stirred up his killer instincts. Where’d you stumble off to, anyway?”

  I shrugged, thinking I should keep my discovery to myself. But then I leaned in to whisper in his ear: “Want to know why I got beat up for trying to take Cecily’s carpetbag?” I didn’t want to start rumors—a husbandless mother didn’t have an easy way around in the world we lived in—but I was anxious to tell somebody something. Anything. I wanted to talk about Cecily all night. I wanted August to promise me that Cecily didn’t have a husband at all, that I’d be a good father, that the incubator exhibit was a fraud full of well-fed babies.

  “Oh do tell me there’s something gothic inside,” August said. He held tight to my arm and leaned against me. He spoke close, his breath hot on my cheek and smelling of cloves. “A mummified mermaid? A secondhand prosthetic leg?”

  I turned my head, my lips at his earlobe. “A baby,” I whispere
d. August gasped, genuine. I said, “She keeps her in the incubator during the day.”

  “Such skullduggery,” he purred. “From a carpetbag into an incubator? Then from the incubator to the carpetbag? I hope you’re dreadfully suspicious. The baby could be a victim of a kidnapping. Or of scientific experiments in a country laboratory. Or maybe Cecily doesn’t even come and go with the same infant—maybe she’s some kind of handmaiden of death. Did you think of that? Maybe she and the automaton practice a nightly bloodletting in a terrible den of monsters. Like vampires in a penny dreadful. It could all be worse than anything you could ever imagine.”

  “Yes,” I said, though I hardly listened. “It could be. She might be married.”

  “Oh” was all August said.

  But it wasn’t the notion of a husband that worried me most. I already had so little I could give Cecily, what could I possibly give to a baby? Suddenly, I understood Cecily’s hesitance.

  As the anarchists playfully discussed how they might drown President McKinley in the lagoon, I put my hand to my chest, to the rich man’s calling card in my pocket. I touched the corners of the card through the fabric. I had no true intention of selling Oscar, but I did consider his worth. How much might a man like William Wakefield pay?

  12.

  WHEN THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS started on fire the next day, smoke rolling through the pitch-dark corridors to choke us, I first suspected, not lightning but Zigzag the clown anarchist. But it had been raining all morning, heavy, fixing to flood the whole Fair and wash it downriver. Oscar, soaked to his wooden bones, weighed double on my back.

  Not only did I hear the sharp crack of thunder but I could feel it like cold steel in my spine and joints. It startled Cecily out of character, and the executioner too, and they both grabbed at each other, clutching arms, their eyes meeting for a blink of sympathy. But in a moment, they returned their attention to the guillotine.

  Cecily’s neck went on the block, and they played out the beheading.

  After the curtains closed and the others slogged on, the water squishing in their socks, I peeked through to the stage. “Cecily,” I called softly. “Cecily.” Cecily stepped forward with a candle in her fist. I handed her an envelope.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “I explain in the letter,” I said.

  “What’s the letter say?” she said.

  I hesitated. I scratched my wet head. “I’d rather not say,” I said.

  “Why not?” she said. “What’s in it that’s so terrible? Why should I read something that you don’t want to say?”

  “There’s nothing terrible,” I said. “Nothing terrible at all. It’s just that I agonized over the letter. I put just the right words in just the right order. You need to read it all in a letter. It’s a confession, of sorts.”

  “A confession,” she said. “What are you confessing?”

  “Why can’t you just open it and read it?”

  “Ferret,” she said, sighing, “to read, I have to have my specs. Like an old lady.”

  Finally, after taking a deep breath, I spoke. I kept my voice low. “I don’t know if the automaton told you. Last night. I know about the baby. I saw the girl in the carpetbag.” Cecily lowered the candle, dropping the light from her face. “Please don’t be upset,” I said. “I said it much better in the letter.” As if hoping to impress her, I added, “I write letters for a living.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  I shook my hands with exasperation. “Because you told me to tell you.”

  “I didn’t tell you to tell me anything,” she said.

  “You told me to tell you what was in the letter,” I said.

  “But why did you write it in a letter? Why would you talk about such things?”

  “Because you have to know that I know,” I said. “I want to spend time with you, Cecily.” I reached up to touch her hand, to raise it, to return the candlelight to her face.

  “Oh, Ferret,” she said. “Please, please, please, you’d be so much happier with Pearl. I promise.” All her breathy p’s made the candle flame sputter.

  Before I could object, there came a clanging down the hall, and fast footsteps, and chaos, as someone ran through the winding corridor with a bell in hand, shouting, “Fire, fire, fire, fire!”

  I helped Cecily from the stage—or more rightly, I caught her as she tumbled down, her legs tangled up in her endless petticoats and layers of satin skirts. As we rushed ahead, squeezing all the flounce of her gown around narrow corners, I put one arm around her waist to keep her from tripping. She leaned in toward me, complaining of the awful pinch of her tiny velvet shoes.

  All the creatures and fiends from the Chamber of Horrors ran from the hallway, and we were shoved along, out through the mouth of the dragon, into the storm. A devil looked up, and the deluge washed away the red paint on his face. The rain matted the wolf’s whiskers and cleansed the blood from the Ripper’s hands. A dark angel, a skeleton bride, a man with a noose hanging from his neck, a ghost in sheets and shackles, they all rushed for cover as they scattered along the midway, sliding in the mud. A cloud of black smoke rose overhead like a snort from the dragon’s snout.

  Just steps from the Chamber of Horrors, my umbrella’s ribs got twisted and its silk ripped. Cecily’s wig and costume wilted in the rain as I held the spindly umbrella over her head, all her overskirts and underskirts growing waterlogged and heavy, dragging her down. There was no keeping the bottom of her dress out of the mud, though I tried. With one hand I held the umbrella over her head, with the other I carried her train like a courtier. Within seconds she was a muddy mess, her dress a wreck. “In here,” she yelled above the storm and its locomotive roar. She gestured toward the Mirror Maze.

  The building was closed for repairs, some drunk having tripped his way through, cracking every mirror he slammed against. I pushed aside the sawhorse blocking the entry and Cecily moved into the maze.

  “You stay here, and I’ll go look in on the baby,” I said, following her. A glass case seemed the worst place for an infant in a storm.

  “She’s not at the incubator exhibit,” Cecily said, panting and snuffling, as if she’d swum up from underwater. Cecily pushed the tall wig from her head and it fell onto her dress, rolled down the satin, and onto the floor. She began undoing the knots and ties at her waist.

  “Then where is she?” I said. “Your baby.”

  Cecily said nothing. She shook her hips, shaking off layers of the sopping costume. I was pleased to watch her undress even as I wondered if it would be more gentlemanly to look away. But she beckoned me forward to help her with yet more knots and clasps. “I want to see the broken mirrors,” she said. “Let’s go get lost.” As we stepped forward into the maze, layers of her costume loosened and dropped, giving way to bodices, hip pillows, bustles, ruffles, pleats. She shrunk away, piece by piece, the wreckage of her gown falling off. She stripped to a long skirt of pink satin and a chemise as lacy as a muslin nightdress. She stepped lightly, her feet still in the too-tiny shoes so as not to step on shards of glass. I watched her every reflection, and the reflections of reflections, in the mirrors. A few shivers worked up her spine from the damp.

  Cecily bumped along slowly in the dim maze, knocking her shoulders gently against the walls, feeling her way through. Eventually we did seem a little lost, every turn another twist, until we didn’t know forward from back. If the skinny tip of a cyclone had hit us, we would have been sliced to ribbons as we spun around. But that didn’t keep me from wanting to follow Cecily deeper and deeper into the maze.

  We found the broken mirrors, shards and shatter still hanging off the frames, breaking our reflections into pieces. We walked past. We would dead-end here and there, caught in corners and wrong turns, and as we corrected and doubled back, we’d brush shoulders and touch hands, and it became something like a waltz, graceful and smo
oth. And every time we turned again, our touches lingered longer. I felt her breath, still shaky with her shivering, against my neck, and her fingers stepped along my open palm, tapping, tapping, tapping. I looked in her eyes every chance I got, and I got more and more chances as our little waltz began to slow down to nothing.

  Cecily leaned back against a cracked mirror, the crack reflected, repeated, in all the other mirrors, casting the illusion that every mirror of the maze was broken.

  She plucked the handkerchief from my pocket and turned to her reflection to scrub away the smeared powder from her face. “My baby’s not sick,” she said. “So don’t feel sorry for us.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “The live-baby exhibit needed more live babies, and I needed somebody to watch her while I got my head chopped off every day. That’s all. There’s nothing more to it.”

  I looked at her face in the mirror as she wiped at her cheeks. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t like it when people ask me if they can ask me something. It always turns out to be something nobody wants to be asked.”

  “I’m going to ask you anyway,” I said. “Do you have a husband, Cecily?”

  “If I told you I did, would you leave me alone?”

  “No,” I said. “I would just decide not to believe you.”

  “Then why’d you ask?” she said.

  I shrugged and winked at her. “Seemed the gentlemanly thing to do.” I took her elbow and began to turn her toward me. She leaned back against the cracked mirror again, and as she looked down at her sleeve, she traced her finger along the petal of a rose in the lace.

  “Her name’s Dorothy,” Cecily said. “My little girl. But we all call her Doxie, for some reason.” Cecily lifted the watch from my pocket. She messed with the watch’s stem, watching the hands spin on the dial. She returned the watch, but it now told the wrong time. “She’s with Mrs. Margaret, the witch in the booth on the midway. When it looked like it might storm, we kept Doxie home. Mrs. Margaret is very protective.”