The Swan Gondola Read online

  “I don’t remember it,” Ferret said. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “I hope that’s not true, Ferret,” Emmaline said. She ran her fingers over the keys, striking aimless notes, in a way that seemed flirtatious to Hester, who now stood at the parlor door.

  “Emmaline,” Hester said, “let the man rest.”

  “I’ll press your suit coat,” Emmaline said. She left her cup atop the piano bench and collected his clothes. “I’ll repair your trousers. We had to rip into them.”

  • • •

  ONLY A FEW MINUTES LATER, at the kitchen table, Emmaline said, “I wonder what he’s doing now.”

  Hester just shook her head and returned her gaze to a book about silk she’d bought many years before and had never read all the way through.

  “Perhaps he’ll never go,” Emmaline said. “And then we’ll have someone to keep us company when the other one dies.”

  “He seems cursed with some bad luck,” Hester said. “I wouldn’t plan on him living longer than either of us.” Emmaline didn’t hear Hester, though. In her mind she was already composing the will for which she had never before felt a need. She listed in her mind all the lovely things she owned that she wanted someone else to have.

  • • •

  FROM THE INSIDE POCKET of Ferret’s suit coat, a postcard fell. Hester had gone on to bed, so Emmaline sat for a moment alone, with the correspondence in her hand. With Hester upstairs, Emmaline could allow herself to be tempted. The postcard was addressed to Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. She touched it to her nose and smelled the extract of sweet pea.

  Wakefield. She knew something of the name. There was a Wakefield who’d built the Fair. She wondered who this Cecily was, and then wondered if she wanted to know at all. Would knowing change everything?

  Emmaline turned the card over, for only a glance, and she thought she spotted words as incriminating as heart and love. Ferret wrote in a small, cramped hand to fit all the words on the card. She took up her magnifying glass and read more.

  October 31, 1898

  To a doll-faced doll with a heart-shaped heart,

  I wish this wasn’t a love letter at all. I wish I was writing to tell you that I’ve forgotten everything about you, and that I’m never, ever thinking of you, not even for a minute. I want to tell you that it wouldn’t even occur to me to sprinkle this paper with your favorite perfume because I remember nothing about that Extract of Sweet Pea, or how it smells like springtime (even in wintertime) at the nape of your neck.

  I don’t remember you on the bench of the swan gondola, your bare feet lifted from your slippers, a sea-green paper parasol spinning on your shoulder.

  Your restless spirit shouldn’t try to find me. Haunt somebody else. And when I’m a ghost too, my ghost won’t go anywhere your ghost goes.

  Yours,

  Ferret

  The reading glass shook in Emmaline’s hand as she read the letter again. This distressed her, this twist. She’d got lost in the romance of the day’s events, with a handsome fugitive recovering under her roof. If there was to be a love story, she’d hoped for it to be hers. But I’m too old, she thought as she studied the lines and freckles of her hands beneath the magnifying glass. Or am I?

  You forget yourself, Hester always reminded her.

  Emmaline decided not to despair. She would simply play a different character in this little amateur theatrical.

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING, Emmaline entered the music parlor, a tray in her hands. One side of the tray held a soft-boiled egg in a pewter eggcup, a few wrinkles of bacon, and a buttermilk biscuit with a dollop of sorghum. Across the rest of the tray were the implements of letter writing: an ink pot and pen, and some sheets of stationery.

  “The paper’s a little yellowed,” Emmaline said. “So you’ll need to beg Mrs. Wakefield’s forgiveness. We don’t write a lot of letters here, because we don’t normally have much news to report.”

  “How do you know about Cecily?”

  “The postcard in your pocket,” she said, pleased to know something secret. “My eye just happened to fall on the name.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. He grimaced and rubbed his temples hard with his fingertips. “I don’t care if you read it. Read it if you want.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’ve been to town already. I posted it.” Ferret started at the mention of the post, but he said nothing. “You’ll need to write her to let her know you survived.”

  “Did I survive?” Ferret grumbled.

  Hester entered then, with a tray of her own: a cut glass decanter of whiskey, a shot glass, and three cigarettes. “In case you’re not up to eating yet,” she said, setting the tray on the tea cart near the sofa. Ferret took up a cigarette and began to light it.

  “I beg your pardon, Ferret,” Emmaline said, with a smile and a flutter of her lashes. “Shouldn’t you ask the ladies in the room if they object to you smoking?”

  Ferret, the cigarette between his lips, the match lit, smiled back at Emmaline, and his face snaked into that of the devil at his most pretty and corrupting. More than a hint of mischief and trouble, and a speckling of lemon-colored freckles that seemed sudden on his cheeks, gave him the look of a boy a mother never could properly scold. With a flick of his neck, he tossed his hair out of his face, and he widened his eyes. He gently took the cigarette away from his lips, lips so puffy, so thick, they seemed swollen from a tussle. Or from a long night of kissing. “May I, Miss Emmaline?” he said.

  “I insist,” she said. She picked up the bowl of sorghum and a spoon, and sat in the chair to eat the sweet jelly straight, like pudding.

  He took the smoke in his lungs like it was a breath of bottled air, and it appeared as if he could feel the cigarette healing all the cracks of his bones, working down through him like vapor.

  “You need to heal up fast,” Hester grumbled. “You have to fetch your balloon off my house.”

  Ferret’s eyes were closed. He held each puff of smoke inside as long as he could without coughing. “It’s not my balloon,” he said.

  “You should tell us what happened,” Emmaline said.

  “There’s too much to tell,” he said, shaking his head. His face had returned to its grimace of pain.

  “We’ve got nothing but time,” Hester said.

  But Ferret said no more.

  BOOK ONE

  Strangers

  1.

  EVERY TIME HER NAME crosses my mind, I whisper it. I whisper her name. Like a chant, or a prayer. Cecily. I like hearing it, this name of silk and satin. I like feeling the teakettle hiss of it on my tongue. And like a chant, or a prayer, it soothes my soul.

  When I first wrote her name down—on the wrapper of a piece of Baker’s Chocolate I happened to have in my pocket—I spelled it phonetically with an S. I was imagining it as Sessily or Sessalee. Or Sissly, even. I wrote it every way I could possibly picture it, but with no C in sight.

  I wasn’t at all unworldly at twenty-five, though it was true that I had never taken a step out of Omaha. I’d known many women of all sorts, ladies down on their luck and otherwise. A woman with a mind to bend her elbow at the bar—I would buy her a pint and let her trill away about her woes like a bird in a cage. I was quick with the nicotine when a lady had fits. And though some might accuse me of rascality, I was a gentleman always. I’d even been known to pick up the dropped hankie of an angelic who stumbled from church, her brain full of scripture.

  And I wrote letters. Hundreds of them. To hundreds of women—all strangers, all around the world. But none of these letters had ever been addressed to anyone named Cecily.

  2.

  THE MEN WHO PAID ME to write letters of proposal and promise and regret were most often writing to women in faraway places. Some of the letters were to women the men had never met, and yet these men complimented the wom
en endlessly on their beauty and their charms, hoping to entice them to the new city of Omaha from the old cities of Baltimore or Boston or New York, or from foreign cities overseas.

  Each week, I ran an advertisement:

  Literary assistance: letters of all descriptions written or edited; business letters, invitations, acceptances, letters of sympathy, love, disappointment, confession; all confidential; experienced ink-slinger for a big city paper, with a talent for drama and intrigue.

  In fact, the closest I’d ever been to being a newspaper man was when I’d been a newsboy in knee breeches, hawking the rag on street corners. But if I lied in my advertisement, the letter writing, at least, was legitimate, despite all the tall tales I told to wheedle and convince these faraway women.

  When I was a boy, no one had ever bothered to enroll me in any kind of school, but I nonetheless learned my way around the turns and twists of a phrase. I spent the afternoons of my childhood under the tutelage of Mr. Crowe, the city’s librarian. Four different pairs of spectacles lined the broad brow of his balding head, each of a different magnification. I came to think of his round, owl-eyed specs, with their tortoiseshell nosepiece, as the ones that could see right into my heart of hearts—he put them to his eyes whenever he examined the shelves, seeking what might stir up my imagination. He first prescribed for me the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and I read and reread them until the bindings collapsed. Mr. Crowe wasn’t the first to try to save me from the fate that loomed for all boys with the worst of luck, and he wasn’t the first to fail at it either. But he was the first to get me to listen close.

  Sister Patience, so unsettled by the motherlessness of all us children of the orphanage, had often worried herself into nausea, complaining of her pain even to me as we’d walked to the library, her breath always sharp with the mint leaves she chewed to ease her stomach. I startled the nuns when I took to books—nothing much of anything had ever been expected of me—and soon enough I was asked to read to the other children every bedtime. During the day, the orphans acted like feral cats—one boy had even put out the eye of one girl in a tussle—but at night they sucked their thumbs and mewled, and they asked again and again for the story about the fair.

  We are traveling to Paris to the Exhibition, I had read by candlelight, sometimes singeing the page when I leaned the flame too close. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I burned holes through a word, or if a whole sentence went up in smoke. I knew it all by heart and still do. Now we are there. That was a journey, a flight without magic. We flew on the wings of steam over the sea and across the land.

  Mr. Crowe collected all the books he could that depicted the Paris world’s fair, and together we studied maps of gardens and galleries, and portraits of the fair’s cathedrals and mosques; the harmoniums and waterfalls; the octopus, the orchids, and the canons and engines of war. From reading the official reports of the fair, we learned the particulars of making sparkling wine in a mechanical press and the weaving of French hosiery on an electrical loom.

  There was to be another world’s fair in Paris in 1889, and Crowe intended for us to go together—not just as spectators but as performers.

  In his after hours, Mr. Crowe was a master of the art of ventriloquism, with a whole wardrobe of fancy-patterned suits that matched those of his dummy. No matter the kind of crowd or the size of it—whether in a saloon or on a stage—Mr. Crowe denied no one the exquisite beauty of his peculiar talents. He could throw his voice into the mouth of a doll with such stillness of lip, blink the doll’s eyes and flap the doll’s gums with such delicate twists of his wrists, you would forget the doll was nothing but wood and hinges and a ratty, yak-hair wig. You would find yourself falling in love with the soulless little thing.

  He had no sons of his own (and believed his daughter to have a voice too weak for throwing), so he revealed to me everything, and I think he longed for me to become even better than he ever was. I think he pictured me someday stepping from behind the curtains of the grandest of concert halls, my voice lifting from the very back of my throat and carrying to the very tops of the balconies. “And when you retire,” said Mr. Crowe, “you will write a book of betrayal. Give away all your mentor’s niftiest tricks. Make a fortune telling everyone how we did it.” Crowe, above all, loved books, and he longed to end up in one.

  As the ventriloquist’s apprentice, I grew out my mustache as much as a boy of that age could. I waxed and combed it, to best conceal my lips. And when I glanced in a looking glass, another young man looked back, a young man of fine style and dignity.

  “We’ll perform on top of the Eiffel Tower and enter the history books,” Crowe vowed. I loved Crowe for his dream, but in my lowest moods, I couldn’t imagine crossing the river, let alone the ocean. He was not my father. I was not his son. I was a thief. The only things I’d ever owned I’d stolen from someone else. I deserved nothing and expected nothing, and was certain I’d never see a world’s fair.

  Nonetheless, we had prepared for our journey to Paris. Crowe had a fear of heights, so we stood together on rooftops, and on ledges, holding hands. I helped him to the tops of ladders and led him along the branches of trees, all in anticipation of the Eiffel Tower, eighty stories tall. He’d been so agile and spry, so determined to overcome his anxiety, I’d not realized how old he really was. And months before the tower was complete, before it reached its uppermost point, Crowe took ill and swiftly died.

  I convinced myself I’d doomed him with my doubt. I hadn’t truly pictured myself in Paris. And after his death, in a nightmare, I climbed the Eiffel Tower alone, moving up along its latticework, scaling its side. I fell before I reached the zenith. When just an inch from splattering, I woke with a gasp. And in that gasp, I inherited Crowe’s fear. Ever after, even just on steep, narrow steps, I could get struck with vertigo.

  I never went to Paris, and I certainly never dreamed any world’s fair would come to me. But ventriloquism possessed me and I became expert at the art. In the beginning, I imagined my act as something transcendent. When I got into character, like an actor, Crowe’s voice spoke through me. But soon enough I became more practical-minded about it all. I strengthened my voice by saying not a word, speaking only when rehearsing, spending all my time sucking lemons and gargling tepid water, warming my throat by day with a scarf even in the summer months. At night I pressed a cold compress to my neck and tied it there with a strip of flannel. When practicing, I stood in front of a mirror to watch for any twitch of my lips. The lip-heavy p’s and b’s were impossible, so I avoided all mention of pianos and bustles. When a letter trembled my mouth too much, I did what I could to alter the word, changing its sound, reinventing the language as I went along. I spoke softer and softer, pushing each letter farther and farther back into my mouth, until every word I ever knew vanished from my lips. I cupped my hands at my ears to hear the seashell sound of a crashing ocean and to listen for the voice of my character in the distance.

  And those years of practice were what led me to Cecily, in a sense.

  Before the Fair

  Late Spring 1898

  3.

  AT THE EMPRESS OPERA HOUSE, where there had never actually been any opera, the talent got next to nothing—the tickets were cheap and the hall rarely filled. Even as a vaudeville house it came up short; you could find better at the Orpheum down the street, from troupes that traveled in from elsewhere. But what the Empress had was its morality plays. The ladies and gents would pay to see real live skin and sinning and pretend it was virtuous. The plays changed every few weeks, to allow folks to see men and women done in again and again by infidelity, addiction, syphilis, thievery, whoredom.

  Most of the performers on the nightly program were only locals like me, but their ambitions matched those of the city itself. As our little frontier town became more and more refined, they became certain that more and more people would be looking in our direction. Already folks everywhere drank the beer from our brew
eries and ate the sugar from our beets. They ate the slaughter of our packing houses. The people of Omaha no longer dreamed of stepping out into the world, because the world was coming to us. Omaha was growing beyond the city limits; its buildings were taller, its streets were paved, and the railroad station connected us directly to Chicago and San Francisco and New York City.

  I was no cynic, but I didn’t share anyone’s optimism. I had seen too much corruption. To my mind, Omaha had already been ruined. I saw no promise in the city’s future. So while I waited for the world to come running, I lived in the attic of the Empress. The theater was an old temperamental firetrap newly wired for electricity, so in exchange for rent I slept lightly, poised to smell smoke at the first spark. Not sleeping was easy: my duck-feather mattress damn near flat. I whitewashed the iron bedstead to cover the rust, and I oiled the joints, as a squeaky bed made the ladies fidgety. I had a chair with broken springs and a little stove and a wardrobe full of worn-out costumes abandoned by their actors. I liked how I looked in them and adopted them as my own, gussying up a pocket with a square of silk or sticking a glass-ruby pin through the knot of my necktie—one day I was a Civil War soldier with a few patches of a hero’s gunshot in my sleeve, the next I was some shabby king in epaulets with mangy fringe. I had top hats, plaid caps, a pith helmet. That’s how people knew me, offstage and on—Ferret the ventriloquist, in the raggedy suits.

  In the evenings I did my puppet show or magic or both, but all us performers had extra jobs we did in the daylight. I hadn’t planned to get cozy with three of the girls in the four-girl burlesque act, but one by one they sidled up to me throughout that winter, each wanting to be my one and only. In January I took up with Ada who worked days wrapping bonbons in the back of Balduff’s—the poor thing spent all of Valentine’s up to her elbows in candy hearts and heart-shaped ice cream, while I forgot the holiday altogether. When I bought her a beer at Red’s saloon, I thought I was being gentlemanly, but she burst into tears and refused to forgive the slight. So then I palled around with Florence, a ginger-haired cherry who hated her own freckles—I always fell into a fit of sneezing from her perfumed fading cream.