The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 5

  I sat in front of the camera on a stool with a gray blanket draped behind, and Rosie shoved all my wild curls up into a derby. “The razor you took to your lip you oughta take to your head,” he grumbled. His studio was in a converted dovecote and greenhouse on the roof of a building on the Ware Block, with glass walls to let the sun in.

  “I never realized I was quite so unsightly,” I said.

  “I just want your girl to fall for you, is all,” he said. “I’m a sentimental bastard.”

  Rosie’s mouth was a box of dominoes with black holes among the broken teeth, but he wasn’t always seeking a scuffle. His heart was soft at times. He’d come to America for the benefit of his sister, to work hard and make money to send home to the family farm in Poland. The girl needed a dowry or she’d never snag a husband.

  He now made most of his money off selling French postcards of naked Omaha women. He called the ladies his lovelies, and he anticipated he’d do swift business at the Fair with his pictures of Lady Godiva on horseback, Sleeping Beauty sleeping in the buff, Hamlet’s Ophelia having ripped off her clothes in madness, Joan of Arc naked and tied to a stake.

  With such high-minded subjects, Rosie could pass the postcards off as art to the gentlemen who might otherwise be too nervous to gaze upon the nakedness. But Rosie did truly see himself as an artist and a lover of women—he was a lumbering beast with a delicate eye for beauty.

  I glanced over all the postcards stuck to his door with insect pins, to see if Cecily was among the naked ladybirds. Part of me wanted to discover her there, stripped and indifferent to any leering eyes upon her, and yet another part of me couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  We then sat down to a table in the studio covered with maps and pamphlets and we studied the ins and outs of the Fair. Our passes weren’t illegitimate; they were just ill got. August’s father owned Megeath Printing Co. and Bookshop, and had manufactured many of the Fair’s official materials; August had easily swiped some.

  I memorized the fairground’s nooks and crannies, walking my fingertips up and over walls, down alleys, over bridges.

  “‘According to the 1890 census,’” August read aloud from the guidebook, “‘Omaha consisted of one hundred forty thousand four hundred fifty-two souls, of which four thousand five hundred sixty-six were colored, eighty-nine were Chinese, and three were civilized Indians.’”

  “Where do you fall in all that?” I said. Sweetbriar was a name he’d taken for himself when grown, from a book a British anthropologist had written about the natives of America. His parents had never told him his real Indian name. When his father bought Megeath’s, he’d kept the name of the shop and took it as his own. And August grew up as Little Augie Megeath, his hair cut to the quick, wearing tailored three-piece suits like a little white man with dusky skin.

  “Nowhere, I suspect,” he said. “How does one get counted among the civilized?” He lifted his pinky as he sipped his whiskey from a chipped teacup.

  “If you find out, let me know,” I said.

  With the Fair flat on the map before me, confined to a page, I was certain I’d find Cecily somewhere among the showmen and charlatans. Like me and August and Rosie, she’d be among the uncounted, the uncivilized, the riffraff that kept the show going for the finer folk.

  In what seemed an omen, the Fair’s court was shaped like a key. On the left-hand side of the map was the clover-shaped reflecting pool—the filigree of the key’s bow. I ran my finger along the canal, to the end of the key’s bit pointed toward the midway—the lock to be unlocked, where all the mystery was.

  And it was an omen, a lucky one, because find her I did, on the Fair’s very first day. And on that very first day, I did everything wrong.

  November 1, 1898

  My Cecily,

  I’ve spent the evening an invalid, in a wicker-back wheelchair. My broken leg is propped on a footstool, my foot on a cushion. Today is All Saints’ Day, and in some countries people light candles on graves. But here where I am, wherever this is, there’s nothing but life. All the neighbors came here tonight to help these two old sisters undo my damage. They’ve brought their ladders and their strongest boys to remove the empty balloon from the house. They’ll do something useful with the silk, they figure, even though it’s all dirty with sky, stinking of glue and of the gas that lifted it up. They’ve considered sewing it into new choir gowns, which makes me think of the singers all connected by the same dress, like a string of paper dolls.

  Everyone from all around is here. The farmers’ wives have brought pies baked from the apples new off the trees. A flank of some beast cooks on a spit over a fire that the children dance around like sprites in worship. I can hear the wolves yipping, not howling like they should be, at the bright yellow harvest moon, almost full.

  The farmers’ sons have carried the dining room table from the house and onto the lawn. It took eight of those boys. Hester, one of the sisters whose house this is, built the table herself, cut it from some enormous tree she felled by the river. Emmaline, the other sister, brings out the dishes from the house, the ones that didn’t break when the balloon crashed, and a lacy tablecloth. She hooks elephant-shaped weights to each corner of the cloth, to keep it from rustling away in the slight night breeze. The women cover the table with plates of biscuits and baked beets, a platter of mackerel, some jars of pickled figs, pickled peaches, watermelon pickles. It’s a sight of beauty. They need all this ritual because of all the grief the land has given them. They need to connect with the earth, to tether themselves to this place they so want to leave, because they need someplace like home.

  But they leave me be in my little wheeled chair, alone, writing my ghost a letter. The farmers and their wives and their children steal glances at me, and they huddle to whisper, as if I’m the apparition. And maybe I am. I’m haunted by the words that I write to you, knowing that your eyes will never fall across them.

  In the dark, in the country,

  Your Ferret

  At the Fair

  June 1898

  6.

  ON THE CROWDED STREETCAR I tucked my counterfeit pass into the front of my britches—over the summer, the Fair would welcome two million visitors from near and from far, and it seemed that half of them were free-market thieves. Already, on the Fair’s first day in June, I spotted Mrs. Lou Decker all in black, posing as a widow in weeds. She was the famous Chicago pickpocket, well-known for the absence of her right ear.

  But many of the other women on the streetcar, the respectable ones, wore white ruffled gowns. They carried white parasols, wore white hats, white ribbons, white veils. The fairgrounds were already known as the New White City, making Chicago the Old White City as far as we were concerned, and Omaha was dressing the part. The Fair’s architect, a man named Kimball, went so far as to assert that Omaha’s was the only true White City, as Chicago’s buildings had actually been painted a pale brown. Our palaces were pure, whitewashed in the cleanest ivory.

  I leaned out and over the side of the streetcar to see around a woman’s broad-brimmed hat piled high with white peonies. Even once I saw past, to the tall walls ahead surrounding the fairgrounds like a fortress, I imagined only fakery inside, a wonderland of false fronts propped up by two-by-fours and gardens of wilting roses painted red. But to my mind, that’s what magic was. The Fair was an optical illusion as illegitimate as my sleight of hand, a summer-long dream we all dreamed together, and I adored it already. All the happy hoodwinked fairgoers would line up to be mesmerized. I would make a killing off my dummy’s tricks, I decided.

  I carried Oscar dangling off my back, the doll’s hands latched—with a metal hook and eye screwed into its wooden wrists—at my neck. The dummy’s back was against my own, his head facing out. He blinked with every bump on the tracks, making the little boys behind me giggle.

  I wore an evening tuxedo from the theater’s wardrobe closet, complete with tails, though it was only just past dawn. I wore white gloves, but the only pair I could find had finge
rtips badly yellowed from nicotine, so I kept my hands in fists, my fingers curled in. Though the tuxedo was missing a button, and the back of its collar was shiny from years of an actor’s greasepaint, it would position me well in the crowd. Opening day would be packed with the highfalutin, and I knew, from all my pillaging of the Empress’s costume closet, how much gentlemen owed their clothing for their positions of authority. When dressed so, I found myself enhanced with all the gestures of importance, my stride brisk, my spine broomstick straight. I quickly took up the habit of tucking my thumb into my watch pocket, and rolling back on my heels, like a man both leisurely and impatient.

  When the streetcar stopped, we all stumbled out to join the others waiting at the gates. All of Omaha had turned out that morning, it seemed. An empty lot in front of the Fair’s archway filled with hundreds waiting for the gates to open. The lot was like a new city of its own, as hectic as a marketplace, with people hawking goods—hot doughnuts, watermelon, roasted cashews, armloads of calla lilies. The iceman, with a face pocked like lemon peel, leaned out from the back of his wagon and stabbed at a block with a pick, sending chips into the street for the children to fetch.

  The proprietor of a smoke shop jostled the crowd with his sandwich-board advertisement for pipe tobacco and candied ginger. As the tobacconist passed, his cigar burning, a few old ladies fanned away the smoke with paper fans passed around by the undertaker promoting his parlor.

  I kept my eye on the one-eared Mrs. Decker, and sure enough she went to work even as she stepped from the streetcar. She knocked into an old man, and as she apologized and helped to right him, she made off with his coin purse.

  In picking her pocket, I impressed myself with skills I hadn’t known I still had. Though I had learned how to filch any watch and wallet fifteen years before, at the nimble-fingered age of ten, from the saloon keep who’d let me sleep in a crate behind the bar, I’d not practiced the craft in some time. But I saw no violation in the picking of the pocket of a pickpocket, and I discovered that I still possessed a ten-year-old’s innocent carriage, able to bump into people without even a pardon me. With just a nudge of my thumb, I had slipped in and tipped the stolen purse from Mrs. Decker’s pocket right into my palm and up my sleeve.

  Something about the spirit of the Fair inclined me toward feeling generous. We had all watched the buildings going up in winter, and had even skated on the frozen-over lagoon in the faint shadows of the buildings’ rafters and frames. But with the first thaw, the walls of the city had been erected, hiding the kingdom away as its courts and halls took shape. Even the most cynical among us could see the myth in it. The Fair had come in the night and would draw the world near. Everyone in Omaha—angels and all—would visit the Fair. It wouldn’t have shocked me to see Mr. Crowe in the crowd, his dummy in his arms. And it was at the Fair I would find Cecily, I was certain, and this time I would remember to tell her my name.

  I returned the coin purse to Mrs. Decker’s victim. I didn’t even look to see how much money I was giving up. “You had a lady get in your pocket,” I explained. “I got this back for you.” The old man only eyed me with suspicion.

  “Go on with you,” he croaked. “I ain’t giving you a reward.” He then turned to his hunchbacked wife and shouted into the little brass hearing trumpet she held to her ear. “They think every act of kindness deserves a nickel.”

  His condescension dropped me into a sour mood. My tuxedo, it seemed, was earning me no special respect.

  Though the front gates wouldn’t open for another half hour, the crowd kept taking little scuffle steps forward, as more and more people arrived. But no one seemed to mind the crush. Every bump and shove just wriggled them closer to the Fair, as if they were working together to storm the walls inch by inch. They all laughed at their predicaments, at the elbows in their ribs, their hats knocked off. I’d never seen such a friendly mob in our outlaw town.

  At the edge of the crowd, an organ grinder played a tinny tune, with five little monkeys with chains around their ankles collecting tips in copper cups. The grinder had put fezzes on their heads and strapped little feathered wings to their backs. The wings, not the monkeys, brought to my mind the angels of the burlesque. I missed Phoebe and the girls already.

  Expecting the Fair to steal all the business, the Empress had shut down for the summer, and the performers all scattered. Phoebe had saved enough money to go back East for a few months, to join a summer troupe, and she’d been rehearsing for days—she was to play a woman blind from syphilis. One night at Red’s saloon, Phoebe had lifted her skirt and pushed down her stocking to show me her bruises from bumping into furniture, her eyes having often been shut to bring her closer to her character. “Chifforobe,” she said pointing to the black-and-blue mark on the back of her knee. “Leg of the bench,” she said, pointing to her ankle.

  Standing in this packed lot made me realize how naive I’d been. Cecily could be tucked in under any of these towering hats. Would I even know her if I saw her? Did I remember her as she really was? At least Phoebe was real, truly real, head to toe. We could have made a fine summer of it, mocking the whole pompous to-do. Phoebe would have loved those monkeys in particular. For a moment, with a pang, I longed for the summer to be over.

  And with that little spark of doubt, Cecily appeared, as if I’d summoned her by giving up. And I didn’t just happen to spot her in the crowd—the crowd parted for her. Or rather, the crowd broke apart, to keep from getting stomped by the slow mules of a wagon. The wagon’s driver was drunk already, swaying and rocking on his perch. Or he was acting drunk—he was dressed in the tattered clothes of a scarecrow, with a hayseed’s battered straw hat. He might have been nothing but a clown. “Please pardon me,” he said over and over as he attempted to steer the mules away, off to the side. “Don’t mind us. We won’t bother you again. I beg your pardon.”

  Rising above the complaint of the crowd came a song, sung in a baritone so deep and loud I could feel it in my own chest. The wagon made its way to the edge, directed by a policeman with a whistle who waved the driver toward the lane that would lead them to a delivery entrance. The side of the wagon was painted with a mural depicting a bare stage with red curtains parted. Above the stage, the troupe’s name swirled across a banner in purple: the Silk & Sawdust Players.

  I stumbled back out of the wagon’s way. Five or six actors and actresses strolled alongside, in the ruffles and frills of their underwear. The men wore undershirts and pants that sagged, and derbies and fedoras; the women wore petticoats and corset covers. And all their faces were caked with stage makeup, their kissers rosied, their cheeks comical circles of red. They seemed poised to jump right into costumes and onto a stage.

  The gent who sang so forcefully had the build of a circus strong man. His hair was perfectly oiled, and he’d raked it wavy with a comb. He carried a Spanish fan that he seemed to enjoy snapping open and shut. And over his arm was the arm of Cecily.

  As she passed, Cecily looked at me, then looked up and over the rooftops, knowing me not at all. But she looked my way again, and I kept looking, and her eyes, like something precious and polished, seemed too beautiful to see out of. I mean to say, when I looked at her, it seemed she might not see me at all, and I could stare without being noticed.

  Cecily wore what looked to be an old wedding dress of yellowing ivory satin, but it didn’t seem a costume. It just seemed to be something someone like her might wear, any day of any week. Sewn atop each shoulder was a lace butterfly with starched wings that flapped with her steps, and each butterfly’s curling, twisting path was stitched in pearls all down the front of her dress.

  And she carried a carpetbag. The bag was nothing special. Nothing worth notice. I paid no mind to its design of fat quail and yellow pears. Later I’d learn the bag’s contents, and the contents’ great value, but just then, with Cecily again walking away, the bag meant little to me. I only considered its weight. The carpetbag caused Cecily to list to one side, giving me the opportunity to be gal
lant.

  The actors who might have volunteered to carry the bag were too preoccupied with their own whimsy. One actor walked a marionette, working its riggings, concentrating on the puppet’s graceful stride as he himself tripped and stumbled over his own feet. Another actor kept stealing kisses from an actress, nuzzling his narrow nose into her double chins.

  I ran up to Cecily, eager to play the gentleman, and I slipped my hand into the bamboo handle of the bag, my fingers lacing with hers. The skin of my wrist rubbed against the lace of her sleeve. When her fingers tightened against mine, I couldn’t speak. It was a message, I thought. A secret. I leaned in closer, as if she might whisper something. Not here, she might say.

  But she said nothing. And when I saw her face, and felt her tug hard at the bag, pulling it away, I realized I’d frightened her. Like a fool, I’d gone about it all backward. I’d meant to ask if I could assist and then take the handle. She had no reason to believe, despite my tuxedo, that I was anything but a thief.

  Before I could explain, the burly actor with the deep voice grabbed my shoulder and gave me a good shove, sending me back to get tangled up in the strings of the marionette. While the actor and I attempted to disentangle, both of us plucking at the strings like at a spider’s webbing, the troupe moved on. Once released from the puppet, I ran ahead again, hoping to apologize, but none of the actors would now let me near. They shoved and pulled and tripped. The plump actress worked her fingers into my curls and yanked me away by my hair.