The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 19

  “And with that I retire to my cold, lonely quarters,” Billie said, standing. She held her snifter out to the old man for another pour before leaving. “I mean no disrespect, Ferret, but there’s nothing I despise more than a ventriloquist. There’s just something quite unsettling about those dolls, wouldn’t you say? It almost seems they can see out of those glass eyes. If you sell my brother your dummy, I will throttle you with my bare hands. Good night, children,” and with that little threat, she left.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T WANT TO TALK about Oscar either. I could see him in my head, sitting there alone in the hallway, slumped forward in the chair, waiting for my breath of life. There were indeed objects I’d grown attached to in my lifetime but only a very few: the letter my mother had tucked into my baby blanket when she’d abandoned me, the pipe that Cecily smoked onstage on the very first night I ever spoke to her. And Oscar.

  The impulse to sell him suddenly seemed like a dark one. It was human nature to grow attached to a possession. In fact, it was inhuman to have no affection of any kind for the pieces of your life you carried around with you. I felt a kind of loyalty to Oscar. To sell him meant I put no value on my own personal history, my own memories. I wanted Oscar right there, always on my knee, until I looked as old and raggedy as he did.

  “Oh look, the war,” I said, to steer the conversation off. The Omaha Evening Bee had been tossed onto the Persian rug. The news of our victory in Cuba had stirred the day’s patriotism into a fever pitch. By not spending our day at the Fair, we’d avoided endless parades stomping over our feet. I read aloud the headline: “‘All warships but one blown up and are burning on the beach—pride of Spain’s navy meets the same sad fate as the lamented Maine.’”

  And even as I read it, I wished I’d kept quiet. I thought about Wakefield’s toy ship on the lagoon, and I suddenly felt embarrassed for even having taken part in his Carnival. “This is independence?” I said. “Getting into fights just so we can win something? That’s freedom?”

  “War is necessary to the national temperament,” Billy Wakefield said.

  “Then why aren’t we all too sad to do anything today?” I said. “Why doesn’t it wreck our temperament every time a soldier gets himself riddled with bullets?”

  “Because the military man dies for his love of country,” Wakefield said. “He dies as an American soldier, not as a civilian like you and me. We celebrate him as a hero. And we show our respect for the family by letting the widows, the children, weep alone. Respect. We allow them to be prideful in their private grief. When a widow, shrouded in black, crosses your path, you feel the full weight of her sacrifice. You and me, Ferret, we couldn’t begin to understand it all. We’re not soldiers. We’re not even soldiers’ wives. It’s a different heart, a different love. We can’t fathom it.”

  “Oh, I understand it, every bit of it,” Cecily said, stretching her arm to hold out her empty glass for the old man. Doxie held her arm out too, reaching for the glass herself. But Cecily was already slurring her words, and Wakefield shook his head discreetly at the servant, and the servant stayed still. “War is all about men acting like kings,” Cecily said, bringing her empty glass back to try to get one last drop from it. “And we women get to worship, is all. When a man loses a wife, he marries again in a few months.” I looked to Wakefield to see if he might be offended by Cecily’s mention of a dead wife. But he didn’t flinch. He didn’t move at all. I knew that Cecily knew about Wakefield’s tragedies—we’d only just spoken of them on the long streetcar ride. I pinched her leg, hoping to remind her. “For a few weeks,” Cecily said, “he wears a black hatband. But a woman loses somebody, she’s hat to boot in a black weeping veil for two years. And you can’t just mourn a husband; you gotta mourn every old uncle and cousin too. And your cousins’ cousins. My mother was from a sickly family, and she started wearing black when my daddy died too young, and she’ll go to her grave in black. Not me, boy. If I married a dead soldier, you’d see me out in that parade, proud of my man.”

  I still had some brandy in my glass, so I poured a few swallows of it into Cecily’s. I kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry about your daddy,” I said.

  “Miss Cecily,” Wakefield said, “it is because women have such strength that they must mourn for us. If a man is allowed to indulge in the pain of loss, he’s ruined for all else. When a man loses his wife, he must marry again, or he’ll be lost forever. Blessedly, my sister has been my strength. Man is weak. When we see a widow in black, we know that love is constant. And it’s that privilege of love we fight battles for. For Americans, war is not waged by the bloodthirsty. War is a sentimental endeavor. For all our bluster and brutality, we are fighting for what’s in our hearts.” He began to drum his silver fingers on the arm of his chair, and he said, “You children make a very spirited debate. I guess this is why we send the young men to fight, while the old men ponder the inevitabilities and make the sensible decisions.”

  “I don’t mean to argufy, Mr. Wakefield,” I said, and I did wish I hadn’t brought it all up. What did I know from war and peace? I’d spent much of my life taking things and having things taken from me. If there was anything I should know inside and out, it was that some men had some peculiar notions of decency, and you had to fight to keep things in line. “But there’s just something about this war,” I said. “We’re fighting it because we like the idea of fighting it, don’t you think? The blood’s not even spilling in our own fields. Nobody’s going to really remember the Maine.”

  But before I’d even finished my sentence, Wakefield threw his snifter at the fireplace, and it shattered against the andirons. “Enough!” he barked, and it so alarmed me, I lost my breath. Cecily jumped and I feared Doxie might cry. The old servant stepped forward, having produced from nowhere a dustpan and brush, but Wakefield shooed him away, waving his hand. “Leave it, Morearty,” he snapped. “For God’s sake, just leave it be for now.”

  Morearty sniffled and nodded, and stepped back. The old servant shuddered with weeping he tried to hide. “Oh, Morearty,” Wakefield said, “I’m not angry at you. I’m simply . . . embarrassed. Now sit down, my dear friend, and pull yourself together. Pour yourself a snifter of that brandy.” And the old man did just that, though none of it seemed to ease his weeping. He sipped the brandy as he dabbed a tea towel at the corners of his eyes.

  I stood. “I apologize, Mr. Wakefield,” I said. “I’m not a very polite guest. We’ll be going.”

  “No,” Wakefield said, “no, please. Please. I should apologize. I should apologize especially to you, Miss Cecily. It’s undignified for men to talk war and politics in front of a lady.”

  Cecily shrugged, easing the tension with her pretty smile. “Ah, well,” she said, “as far as ladies go, I’m not much of one.” When she kissed Doxie’s forehead, I then realized Wakefield hadn’t made a single gesture in the baby’s direction all evening, despite all the mewling and gabbing she did. He hadn’t cooed at her. He hadn’t tickled her chin. He hadn’t even asked her name. I respected his tragedy, the loss of his young son, but how could anyone not be charmed by Doxie’s beauty?

  When Cecily squeezed my elbow, I knew she meant for me to hurry her away.

  “Thank you for the brandy, Mr. Wakefield,” I said.

  “No, please,” he said. “We haven’t finished our business, have we?”

  “We don’t have any business,” I said.

  “You let me buy your dummy, and I’ll buy you a new one for your act,” he said, in a rush of words. “I know a buyer at Brandeis; I’ll put him to the task of finding you the finest one ever made. I’ll even pay for him to go to London—or Bora-Bora—or wherever the hell the best dummies are.”

  “No,” I said. I wanted to ask him why, if he could pay anything for a dummy, he was so smitten with mine. But before I could speak, he stood with a happy stamp of his boot, practically bouncing up from his chair.

  “Ferret,” he said, smiling. “Miss Cecily. Come with me.” He picked u
p the brandy bottle in his silver hand, patted the still-weeping Morearty on the back, and stepped into the hall.

  “Let’s leave,” Cecily whispered in my ear. “I have an awful headache.” She took my hand and brought it to Doxie’s warm forehead. “I always get a headache whenever Doxie gets a fever. I always know it when she’s sick. I feel it in my own blood. I want to go home.”

  As we followed Wakefield, I gave our regrets again. “We really do need to be getting back,” I said.

  “And how are you doing that?” Wakefield said, without turning to look at us, without slowing a step. “Getting back, I mean.”

  “The same way we got here,” I said. “All the streetcars keep late hours this summer, for the Fair.”

  “If you spend a minute or two more with me,” he said, “I’ll send you back with my own driver, and you’ll still get home much sooner than if you take the streetcar, with all its stopping and going, going and stopping.”

  “Sir,” I said, “Cecily has a little bit of a headache.”

  This stopped Wakefield midstep. He turned slowly on his heel, and he gave us both a good looking over. “Oh?” he said.

  “I think you poured too much booze in me,” Cecily said, and I noticed her cheeks were as red as Pearl’s often were.

  “I’ll have Bugsy bring the coach around,” he said, and he slipped around a corner. We heard the cranking and bells of a telephone, and the hollow echo of his voice as he summoned the driver. We heard his footsteps go farther down the hall, and the squeak of a door. When he returned, he handed Cecily a bottle. The glass was dark blue and the label bore a doctor’s name in elegant print. “Take a few swigs now,” he said. “Then a few more when you get home. But no more than that. Your ache will leave your head.”

  He reached into his trousers pocket for his hinged dragon, and he spoke to me without looking in my eyes. He looked at his bills, ran his thumb along the edges. Each bill was a big one. I had never seen so much money in one place. “And I’d like to finish up business with you, Ferret, before you leave.” He hesitated, then held out the cash, dragon and all. “The dragon is twenty-two carat,” he said. “It’s yellow gold from China. The eyes are diamonds. The nostrils are rubies. It’s meant to be clipped to a lady’s dress.”

  I might not have taken it from him had he not let go, letting the dragon fall. I caught it. I ran my own thumb along the edge of the bundle. I looked at Cecily. She looked at me. I thumbed through it again, keeping track of the sum, but kept losing count of the bills. I was distracted by the wealth I held in my hand.

  And I put the dragon, and the money, in my own pocket. I traded Oscar for Doxie.

  I couldn’t help but think about all the things I could buy that little girl. She could sleep in a bassinet with a new mattress. She could go to a doctor when she needed to—her head did feel a touch too warm. I could buy her new dresses, and new dolls with dresses that matched hers, with wigs woven from her own hair clippings. In a booth in the Manufactures Building of the Grand Court, there’d been a girl’s wardrobe on display—a fur coat and muff of Russian squirrel, a nainsook slip trimmed with lace. The more I pictured her, the richer she got.

  Wakefield had no more to say to us then. He thanked us for the evening, gestured toward the doorway, and told us the coach waited at the front steps. And he headed back up the stairs to his library.

  It was only then that Cecily said, “You can’t sell Oscar.”

  “But I did,” I said, as we passed where Oscar had sat. He was no longer there—he’d already been snatched away, by a servant, I assumed. But that empty chair was an awful sight.

  In the coach, Bugsy drove us fast along the winding road, down through the orchard. “Take her,” Cecily said, handing Doxie over. “Thinking about Oscar is just splitting my head open more.” She then uncorked the remedy Wakefield had given her and guzzled back much more than a few sips.

  “Stop,” I said, putting my hand to her wrist. “Don’t take any more until I ask August about it.”

  “No need,” she said. “It’s working already.” She rested her head on my shoulder, and though the coach wheels seemed to be knocking against every rut in the road, she dropped right off to sleep. Her fingers loosened, and I took the bottle from her fist. The druggist was someone named Goodfellow, in someplace called Hot Springs, South Dakota. On the back of the bottle was another label, with a number and a dosage and a name: Mrs. William Wakefield.

  • • •

  WITH WAKEFIELD’S MONEY, I paid Cecily’s rent at the boardinghouse. I bought Doxie a new crib, and Cecily a new pillow. In the days after our visit to Wakefield’s, Cecily had got in the habit of having headaches. “How do you live with this heat?” she asked me a time or two, looking at me with suspicion. I bought an electric fan that kicked up cool breezes from a block of ice in a porcelain bowl.

  I bought a typewriter, used but newer than the one I’d had, and I would drag it out the window with me, onto the porch roof, where I wrote letters, wearing only my trousers, my feet bare, my shirt off, the sun on my naked back. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bee on behalf of yet another engineer who took credit for the airship we saw in the night skies. The engineer promised to eventually unveil all mysteries. All will be revealed, I wrote, at the Fair.

  And I wrote love letters for other men’s lovers and poems for lonesome wives. But every love letter was inspired by Cecily. Sometimes, in seeking the right sentiment, I got lost in a past afternoon, trying to put it all into words. I drank tea with a chip of ice in the teacup, and daydreamed.

  August had brought us his samovar when he’d heard of Cecily’s headaches, along with little silk pockets of crushed leaves and dried nettles. He recommended skullcap and lavender. Cecily had quickly emptied the bottle Wakefield had sent home with us, and her headaches would ease for a while, but then come back double.

  “This is nothing but swamp root,” August complained, sniffing the fumes from her medicine bottle, when he visited our room one afternoon. He found us in the dark, lying in our bed. Cecily often skipped the rehearsals for Heart of the White City, but she never got fired. The sun somehow felt a thousand times hotter in the Grand Court, she said, in the dazzle of the daylight against the ivory. But we had grown happy to go nowhere. Our new wealth had spoiled us. We were butterflies caught in a net.

  August threw the curtains open and I covered Cecily’s eyes. “She’s having a really bad one today,” I whispered.

  “I suspect she is,” he said. He ran his finger through the dust of the wardrobe and kicked at some dirty clothes strewn on the floor. He picked up an empty bottle, and another one. Wakefield’s butler, Morearty, had kept her stocked in tonics of various kinds. “Remember,” Morearty would say, “just a swig or two every now and again.” And on the days Cecily did go to the theater, and Wakefield happened to be there, he would give her even more new potions to try. I would have hidden the bottles, or thrown them away, but Cecily complained that she was in pain if she didn’t take a sip of syrup every now and then.

  “What does Mrs. Margaret say about all this?” August said.

  Cecily got up from the bed and walked to the open window. She picked up a pack of cigarettes, lit up, and blew her smoke outside, leaning her elbows on the windowsill. She wore only her corset cover and an underskirt. “Mrs. Margaret is ignoring us,” she said. “She won’t even speak to me in the hall. She hates Ferret.”

  “Have you been to a doctor, Cecily?” August said. He lay back in the bed, where Cecily had been. He curled up next to me and Doxie, and put his hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t dressed for the day either, and was in nothing but my underdrawers.

  “The headaches aren’t crippling,” she said. “They’re just a nuisance.”

  August kissed Doxie’s forehead. “I brought you more tea,” August said, dropping the silk pocket on the bed between us.

  “Aren’t you just selling the same remedies?” I said.

  “Ferret, what I sell is water and nectar mostly,” he sai
d, sighing with frustration as he stood. “Some herbs, some extracts. Maybe a few drops of beet juice for color. It’s harmless. I tell people to be careful with it, just for the charm of the act. That’s what people are paying me for, Ferret. Just the humbug of it. But this stuff . . .” He picked up a brown bottle, uncorked it, and sniffed. “This, for example, is Jamaican ginger. Druggists aren’t even allowed to sell it to Indians. It’s intoxicating. But you white people are allowed to guzzle it by the gallon.”

  When August left, Cecily blamed his distaste on his jealousy—he was simply peevish because we rarely went to the Fair anymore. I suspected she might be right. I knew I could trust August, but wouldn’t Wakefield know something about doctors, and pain? He’d had his own arm ripped off. His wife had been sick, and she’d died. He could afford the best treatment in the biggest cities. He would have insights that would otherwise be deprived us.

  But she did seem to ease up on her medicines, and we sought other advice. Even the midwife who delivered Doxie came to the room one afternoon. “Your womb hasn’t recovered from the violence done to it in childbirth,” the old crone told us, as she held her hand against Cecily’s stomach and eyed Doxie with accusation.

  I recalled Pearl’s tinted spectacles, and how they’d been prescribed by a doctor to still her ovaries. When Pearl stopped by the boardinghouse with some bottles of lemonade, she blushed at the mention of her red glasses. “I threw those horrid things away,” she said. She’d been to a lecture, she explained, and had become enlightened. “It’s all hogwash. The doctors will blame the womb for every lady’s every malady,” she said. “They want us to believe that being a woman is an illness in and of itself.”

  But Cecily’s headaches had become so constant, I was willing to believe not only in every cure but also every ailment. If her aches could be ended by steadying her womb, then I hoped for her womb to be hectic. I hoped for her to be sick with something that could be cured so easily.

  • • •