The Swan Gondola Read online

  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.

  “I might very well marry you myself if you went to war and came back without a scratch,” Phoebe said. She reached over to push my curls back from my face. “In a place like America, a whore’s boy can be a hero if he gets in a few good licks at the enemy.”

  “You read that on a piece of needlepoint?” I said. I leaned my face into her hand to kiss her palm. She stroked my cheek with her thumb. “I don’t fight the wars of warmongers,” I said. I meant no disrespect to the men who lined up to march off, but I’d already done all the fighting I ever wanted to do. I’d spent all those years warring with bullies and thugs so that someday I could quit fighting altogether.

  5.

  FOR THE REST OF THE RUN OF Opium and Vanities, Odie Hansom was back as the violet-eyed trollop, her left eye black-and-blue. And no one seemed to know a thing about anyone named Cecily or how she’d come to be an understudy for that one night only. Not a soul had seen her on that stage, as if she’d been as faint as a phantom even then. The manager didn’t recall hiring her and he didn’t recall paying her. “The violet-eyed trollop doesn’t utter a word,” he said. “Why would she need an understudy?”

  And Odie lied, embarrassed at being hit so hard she couldn’t leave her house. “I haven’t missed a day of work in my life,” she said, slurring with a fat lip. All the other actresses lied right along with her as if they thought they were saving her dignity.

  I had evidence. I hadn’t puffed on my pipe since Cecily had snatched it; and in its bowl was the tobacco she’d burned, and at the end of its stem was a kiss of red from the rouge she used on her lips.

  But the fact that she was little more than a figment only fed my curiosity. And my hopes were lifted by a few unlikely matchmakers—my fellow rats of the Omaha underground. They’d seen nothing of Cecily themselves, but they seemed to get a kick out of egging me on. These swindlers and bandits coaxed and prodded like spinster aunts certain to marry me off.

  “I’m fond of the thought of you getting away,” said August Sweetbriar, dandiest of dandies, who peddled tonics. We’d grown close in the year or so we’d known each other—I’d first met him at Anna Wilson’s saloon, where he sold the ladies an aphrodisiac made from juniper berries and saffron. Though he was only my age, he carried himself like a man much older, often sighing with weariness or holding the back of his hand to his forehead like a fevered opera singer. He wore on his fingers handmade rings—pieces of wire twisted around little broken shards of colored glass. “Maybe you’ll get in good with one of those traveling troupes that move from fair to fair to fair, and they’ll adopt you into their life of endless summers.” Around his wrist was always a woman’s silver bracelet engraved with Old English script, a quote from Shakespeare: I bear a charmed life.

  August interrupted me in my bath one afternoon in late May, the Fair only a few days off. I had no running water in my attic, so I bathed in a claw-foot tub in the basement of the Empress. Even with my ears full of soap I recognized August’s boots on the steps—the tip, tip, tip of the thin high heels. He’d bought the haggard boots off a retired cowboy, and he liked to stuff the ends of his trousers into them, to show off the flowers stamped into the tall leather. August boasted that the few dents above the right ankle were from rattlesnake fangs.

  “I have a solution to your mustache problem, Ferret,” August said as he opened a mother-of-pearl case with a squeak of its small hinge. Inside, on a bed of blue velvet, rested a stainless steel straight razor with a handle made of scrimshaw. “You’ve never before been shaved with a blade this fine. I got it in a trade from a very nervous gentleman who was once very rich. He thinks he’s addicted to my extract of evening primrose.” August had no sense of propriety and would find me no matter where I might be in the building.

  “I’m not looking to solve any kind of mustache problem,” I said, wringing the bathwater out of my curls. I no longer needed to hide my lips when throwing my voice—I could keep them quite still—but my mustache reminded me romantically of my reckless youth, and of my old friend Crowe, so I was inclined to keep it always.

  “Do it for the love of a lady,” August said. “Think how much sweeter your first kiss will be if she can find your lips.” August didn’t wait for me to agree—he sat on the edge of the tub and removed his bowler, a fancy affair of gray felt. Stitched to the band of the hat was a taxidermied bluebird, with rubies where its eyes went. The short braid August wore at the back of his head was tucked under his starched collar. He began to prepare the tools to shear me: the blade, the scissors, a jar of lotion.

  August had been nagging me to shave ever since we first met. “Why hide that pretty pout away?” he would whine, puffing out his lower lip. He and I worked together every now and again—we did a medicine show out in the countryside in the nearby valleys and villages, where we could make some money from the farmers’ struggle. I would perform magic with my dummy as August sold envelopes of powdered corn silk and flasks of rhubarb cordial. Even at his feet just now was a carpetbag, and inside were little clear bottles of harmless cures. While some snake oil salesmen dealt in concoctions with dangerous doses of cocaine and morphine, August’s fraud wouldn’t stop your heart or poison your blood. Like a revivalist in a tent, he promised to end baldness with licorice-flavored tonics. He vowed to steady palsy with a spoonful of cinnamon extract, to stimulate heartsickness with love potions of water tinted brown from a pinch of burned sugar. Occasionally he would add to a concoction a few drops of alcohol—what he called cologne spirits—but never enough to even spin your head. “The worst that can happen is that the tonic does nothing,” August said to justify his deceit. “But the best that can happen is that it does everything I say it does. I never underestimate simple belief.”

  “Ladies have never objected to my mustache,” I said, though as I said it, I realized it was far from true. Women were often berating my mustache as grizzly and uncivilized, even when I waxed and twisted the ends.

  But I’d grown that mustache as soon as I’d been able, and it hadn’t left my lip since. Not only had it hidden the throwing of my voice onstage but it had brought me a kind of respect that a hopelessly boyish face wouldn’t. And in my attic garret was a cabinet stocked with grooming products and devices—special shampoos and waxes, strengtheners and weakeners, combs, curlers, snippers. I felt most like a gentleman when shopping for my mustache. And there were pretty girls behind the department store counter who attended to me.

  A little sleepy from the warmth of the bath, and from the lily scent of the soap flakes, I closed my eyes and thought of Cecily haunting my bare room. I thought of my walls and how no pictures hung from the nails. I thought of how rarely I lit a lamp after dark.

  And with that I leaned my head back, my neck on the lip of the tub, and closed my eyes. I nodded. August first began to trim with a pair of small scissors—the teensy snip, snip, snip pushed my teeth to edge; he might as well have been snipping at the ends of my nerves. He then produced from his carpetbag a shaving mug and a boar’s bristle br
ush. He dabbed some jelly onto the remnants of my lip feathers. “The jelly’s got mint,” he said, opening the blade. “Breathe it in and clear your nose. It will put you at ease.”

  The mint didn’t quite, but August’s slow scritch scratch and his considering eye did manage to soothe me. He furrowed his brow, intent on his work, and I studied his face in return. I’d never before had occasion to look at him for so long. His face could use a mustache too. He looked worse than a boy: he looked like a baby, without a single sprout of hair on his chin, and brown eyes soft and wide. How had he ever convinced anyone of a cure for anything? He had the kind of gullible mug I’d looked for in a man I sought to thieve, back in my derelict days, before I took to the stage and found a little salvation in my vaudeville act.

  When he finished, he went for a pewter hand mirror from a dressing room vanity, and I put my fingers to my lip. The skin somehow felt as smooth and cool as glass. For theatrical effect, he showed me only the back of the mirror, which featured stalks of cattails bending along the curve. He then turned the glass to me.

  August said, “Tell me you like it as much as I like it. Please.” He gnawed on his thumbnail with worry. “What do you think?”

  “I think . . .” I said, pausing. “I think I look like a man with a mustache who doesn’t have his mustache anymore.” I held my finger across my lip, pantomiming a handlebar. “What if Cecily doesn’t remember me without it?” I said.

  “What’s there for her to remember?” August said. “That you’re the man with the terrible mustache who let her get away? It’s best you pretend that that fool was somebody else altogether.” He then brought out some hats from the costume closet, and tried each one atop my wet head, at a number of jaunty tilts and angles.

  • • •

  ANOTHER AMONG MY CUPIDS was the anarchist Rościsław. We called him Rosie the Pole, and he and his pack gathered most every evening to argufy. All the anarchists were angry, having become expert at losing awful jobs—Rosie had cut throats of cattle at the slaughterhouse and swept blood into the drains, had hacked ice from a lake and loaded the blocks into wagons, had shoveled coal into the guts of the smelting works. He was the size of two men and didn’t care to be criticized, so most of his jobs ended with him slugging his boss in the jaw.