The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  And all the month of April I dated the girl named May—when not at the Empress, May popped the corn and took the tickets at the zoological gardens, where they charged admission to see all the critters that lived in the plains just outside our city, Omaha still only a mile or two from wilderness. They kept buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, raccoons. One spring day we took a pleasant stroll through the zoo, arm in arm in the shade of her parasol, May looking down at the path, distracted from the eagles and owls. In front of the caged badger she finally spoke: “So go ahead and ask me to marry you, if you want,” she said. And I said, “But I thought we had a good thing going,” which wasn’t at all what she’d hoped to hear, though I had truly meant it as a compliment. May had never before been so serious, which was why I’d liked her so much.

  Marriage had seemed to me to be for men too old or too churchy for romance. I didn’t know it then, but I was stunted, forever the orphaned child. As a boy, I’d feared I’d never grow up, that my rotten youth would never end. And though it did end, the fear didn’t. That life I’d longed for—of being a man of worth and substance after shaking off my awful boyhood—still seemed a lifetime away. So I kept waiting and waiting.

  I was waiting for Cecily, as it turned out. When I first saw her, only a few weeks before the Fair, I caught her eye, and she looked away. It was when she looked again that I straightened my back and lifted my chin. It was with that second look, as quick as it was, that I suddenly felt like I was somebody worth seeing.

  • • •

  I HEARD HER NAME before I saw her, that night, backstage at the Empress. Before the entertainment began, an old actor with a monocle shuffled out center stage to address a few changes to the cast. “And the part of ‘violet-eyed trollop’ in Opium and Vanities will not be played tonight by Odie Hansom, as listed. She will be played, instead, by Cecily . . .” and here he paused, squinting at a sheet of paper in his hand, seemingly attempting to read the actress’s last name. “Cecily . . .” he said again. He finally abandoned the effort. “Cecily,” he concluded, and left the stage.

  As the master of ceremonies stumbled out to sing a comic song, his face painted white and his mouth a broad, bright-red gash of a smile that wouldn’t stop, I shared a cigarette in the wings with the fourth girl in the burlesque revue. She was my favorite. I’d bought Phoebe St. James a consoling drink or two, ever since her traveling theater troupe went bankrupt the winter before, stranding all the actors and actresses far from home. She was content to share her troubles, and nothing more, with me. One day she’d been hamming it up as Yum-Yum in The Mikado at one of the city’s finer performance halls, and the next she was a dime-a-dance girl at a local saloon.

  “That wallpaper’s truly the ghastliest,” she said, gazing at the backdrop dangling overhead in the rafters. She was dressed like a fairy with a short skirt of blue feathers and silk stockings the color of her skin—little pieces of glass had somehow been stitched into the silk to make her legs shimmer in the footlights. The dancers often changed their act, but their costumes stayed mostly the same. One night they were fairies, another night pixies, another night elves, another night angels—whatever called for paper wings and short skirts.

  “Maybe it’s supposed to be,” I said. “It’s the walls of the opium den, after all.”

  “Why would anyone have anything to do with opium if the wallpaper is that ghastly,” she said. The cigarette between her lips, she practiced her dance steps, swinging her wrists, wiggling her fanny, the wings on her back fluttering. Three little light steps forward on the balls of her feet, three little light steps back. She plucked at her stockings whenever the glass nettled her skin.

  “You noticed there’s no music tonight, didn’t you?” I said. She stopped dancing, gave me back my cigarette, and leaned cautiously forward to peek down into the empty, shallow orchestra pit. “The musicians went on strike just before curtain,” I told her.

  Phoebe shrugged, then picked up a grease pencil from a makeup kit on a stool. She leaned forward into a mirror and drew a heart-shaped birthmark on a bit of exposed breast. “Unlikely anybody would notice the fiddle player anyway,” she said. She batted feathery black eyelashes.

  When the master of ceremonies was bored of getting booed, he ran to the opposite end of the stage spouting the foulest of words despite his painted-on grin. Phoebe took the cigarette from my lips and gave me a slap on the ass. “Time for your ol’ song and dance, Geppetto,” she said.

  • • •

  MY PUPPET, a doll I called Oscar, had rosy cheeks of chipped paint and a squat top hat atop a polished bald head. I had bought the dummy secondhand from a peddler’s cart some years before, the sun having faded the doll’s striped trousers and dotted vest, and yellowed the golden dragons embroidered on his tiny slippers.

  In better days, he’d been a man of distinction, I figured, so he spoke with an uppity purr that was easy to do without moving my lips much, though I did still keep my mustache overgrown and unruly. My tongue lazy and slow, I created a drawl that tickled the crowds even more than his jokes about life as an elegant skinflint.

  “Are you going to the Fair this summer, Oscar?” I asked him when the audience finished its feeble applause.

  “Heaventh, noooo,” he said. I triggered a switch that rolled his glass eyes toward the ceiling. “I unnerstan,” he said, “tha’ the castles are of horsehair and glue.”

  The crowd enjoyed the puppet’s cynicism, and they laughed without mirth. Yes, they seemed to say, we’re all weary of the World’s Fair and it ain’t even begun.

  The Omaha World’s Fair had seemed, to those of us in the city’s lower, dirtier parts, the folly of the wealthy and their wives. The white palaces would sparkle like gemstones, they told us. Foreign flowers had been blooming all winter in greenhouses and exotic fish had been shipped in from far-off oceans to stock the lily ponds. They talked as if they could unmuddy the river and uncloud the skies. “You won’t recognize yourself. How happy you’ll all be to be someplace else. It’s so much better than what you deserve” is what we heard them saying when they were saying all those other things.

  Some of the old-timers among us had been in Omaha since its earliest days fifty years before, and they weren’t folks easily dazzled. Back then, the wind kicked up the dust in summer; and in the winter it spread fires from one house of sticks to the next. Many of the settlers only settled because they had slowed to a stop on their way to the Gold Rush.

  And even when I was a little boy, twenty years or so before, packs of wild hounds so terrorized the town, sinking their teeth into children and livestock, that men took to poisoning the dogs with strychnine. I’d had to step over their carcasses on my way to the library. I knew the town’s worst qualities too well. No matter how many streets the mayor paved or sewers he dug, Omaha would never be Chicago. I’d never once been to the Windy City, but it was my idea of civilization. If I’d grown up in Chicago, I reasoned, I would’ve stumbled over the good fortune that fell in the streets. The remarkable destiny that waited for me would’ve been right around every corner. I would’ve been Dickens’s Pip.

  In Chicago, there was beauty and class. There was wealth and money well spent. In Omaha, the only rich men I’d ever worked among were the cattle barons in their carriages outside the auction houses. They would sit there, brooding, puffing on cigars, sending up smoke that I could swear turned into dark clouds shaped like true-to-life skulls and crossbones. They weren’t ones to sully their spats by taking a step into the marketplace, so they sat in their cabs, overburdened by their fur coats, poised to hear reports of profits. As an orphan I’d begged for alms, and they would pay me to go away, not out of charity but because my raggedness reminded them too much of the dust heap they’d only themselves just recently left behind.

  “There’s to be a carnival too,” I told Oscar on the stage, with some sense of nostalgia. “You can ride rides, and watch whirling dervishes. You can have your future told in a clairvoyant’s booth.”

 
“I already know my future,” Oscar said. I played the buttons up his spine like those of a concertina, allowing me to work the movement of his hinged fingers. He opened one hand, joint by joint, and with the pointer finger of his other, he traced the line in his palm, along the grain of the wood. “The Fair ain’t worth the admission fee,” he predicted.

  But I thought just then of Mr. Crowe, and his stereopticon, the library dimmed, the lantern lit, projecting the colorful illustrations of the Paris Expo of 1867 on the wall. He showed slides of an enormous vapor-filled balloon, a Siamese pavilion, a grotto aquarium. I could taste again, at the tip of my tongue, the sugared figs that he’d cut up and shared, and how I’d run my fingers along the ribbons of French words on the candy box that had been delivered by mail.

  Any thought of Mr. Crowe could turn me sentimental. Crowe would have been tickled by the notion of a world’s fair in Omaha, no matter how little the city might resemble Paris.

  To close the act, Oscar did a character for the crowd—Old Poppa Popocrat of the Populist Party. With a few twists of a knob on his steel spine, I could make him sit up ramrod straight. By playing some buttons and strings in among the cog works of his guts, I could bring his hands to his chest and could slip his fingers into his vest pockets. I pumped a leather bladder near his heart to puff up his chest with a blowhard’s arrogance.

  I wasn’t much for politics and politicking, but I found that Old Poppa could quickly turn a crowd noisy. They all loved to laugh at their troubles. The best comedy plays on your very worst fears, it seems. The money panic of five years before—the days when a farmer’s crop didn’t even yield enough to pay the debt on a sturdy plow—inclined folks toward clamoring for a common man’s revolution. The big businesses—the railroads, the banks—overbuilt, overborrowed, overloaned; and when they failed, we all fell with them. The Populists promised change; they would give the nation back to the people.

  “They light their see-gars with the sweat of our brows,” Oscar said, speaking of the city’s rich. “They work our fingers to the bone, then sell us leather mittens at a price twice our wages. At the slaughterhouse, we work for a penny a pig, then pay the butcher double for a slice of bacon!” The audience whooped and jeered, as if at a true rally.

  “And now, the World’s Fair,” Old Poppa Popocrat said, rocking back and forth, like in a chair on his porch. “A giant fairyland tossed up in the middle of a dead field. They say the architects are even gilding the bricks to line the walks. Yes, in Oh-me-ha, we pave our streets with gold bullion. And you’re paying for it, one way or ’nuther, and there’s still a fee to get in.”

  The crowd at the Empress was howling so, Old Poppa could barely finish sermonizing. “They drive us to drink, then sell us mugs of their beer that’s half bubbles from the keg,” he said, because it wasn’t just the slaughter industry that had our town in a yoke—so did the breweries. So did the flour mills, the streetcar company, the newspapers that covered none of the worst scandals and true corruptions of our town. The businessmen set up shop anywhere they could sell anything of no worth to a man with little money. It was an age-old adage already: the poor could make you rich, and the rich could make you poor. “Then when we’re good ’n’ drunk, we buy their papers to read about ourselfs and our drunken ruckuses.”

  Was I any better than the city’s villains, peddling pain? I took the people’s grievances, twisted them around, and sold them back to them nightly. After every show, I left the stage with their angry laughter filling my soul. I would sit in the saloon and weigh and consider the success or failure of every joke and I would revise my act, sharpening its stabs.

  After Oscar’s rabble-rousing, we ended with a magic trick. An actor planted in the audience threw an egg up to bust on my knees, and I picked up the shell, crushed it in my fist, and stuffed it in Oscar’s jacket pocket. I then tapped at his chest to unhook the door to a tiny cage within, where a talented canary rested, patient and soundless. Once released, it flew from his coat and swooped and dove just above the heads of the crowd. I loved the sigh of the ladies’ delight.

  When the people fell for my tricks, I felt redeemed. For a moment, I reasoned, they believed in magic. They would carry their wonder out with them into the streets.

  But by the end of that summer, I would come to see things differently. I would be troubled by my entertainment, played for a fool. I would be the puppet in a rich man’s grim comedy.

  4.

  THE BURLESQUE REVUE, bereft of an orchestra, made a music all its own, all clatter and scratch, the ladies’ every step and misstep making for an uneven rhythm against the stage. Even from the wings, I could hear the huff and puff of their breaths and the smack of the kisses they blew into the audience. I could hear the popping of Phoebe’s trick knee. The ladies had lightly riddled their feather skirts with down from a pillow, so when they spun and kicked, the feathers flew up and drifted in the glow, giving the illusion of their costumes falling apart little by little.

  One of the feathers drifted in my direction, catching in my intake of breath. It tickled my nose, working up a sneeze. I held my hands to my face and stepped quickly back, away from the quiet of the stage. As I buried the bark of my sneeze in the sleeve of my coat, Cecily entered from the alley.

  I didn’t yet know that this was the actress not listed in the program, that this was that Sessaly, the “violet-eyed trollop” of Opium and Vanities. Her eyes were not violet, after all—they were amber. They were the color of candied ginger or a slice of cinnamon cake. Faded paper, polished leather, a brandied apricot. Orange-peel tea. I considered them, imagining the letters I would write to her. Pipe tobacco, perhaps. A honey lozenge, an autumn leaf. I would look through books of poetry, not to thieve but to avoid. Dear Sessaly, I thought later that night, not actually with pen to paper but lying on my back, writing the words in the air with my finger, let me say nothing to you that’s already been said.

  The light of a lantern backstage caught in her wet eyes. When Cecily gave me that first look, then the second one, she had her hands up and behind her neck. She turned her back to me. She lifted the curls of her hair that had come loose from their pins, revealing a crisscrossing of complicated buttons at the top of her dress.

  “Undo me,” she said.

  The buttons, and their buttonholes, were absurdly small, and she tapped her foot, waiting, which somehow made my fingers more clumsy and slow. Typically I knew my way around a lady’s buttons, and rarely needed more than the fingers of one hand. I squinted, wanting to be helpful but helping hardly at all. And I got distracted by the pattern in the fabric—what I had thought were flowers were actually little devils dancing and playing fiddles.

  She reached back and her fingertips touched my fingertips, and without a word, she guided my hand and taught me the intricacies of the buttons and clasps. Did she even need me at all? I leaned in close to better smell the sweet pea perfume she had dabbed at her wrists. “Oh, I see,” I said, and when I’d finished the task, and she’d gone on her way to the stairs, to the dressing rooms in the basement, I felt foolish for not having been more expert.

  The burlesque act fell apart in pieces—without music, the girls weren’t sure when to stop, so one girl slowed, another girl shuffled, another kept going. Finally, they all hopped off the stage, doffing their costumes before they’d even entered the shadows.

  “The glass in this silk scratches me up good,” Phoebe said, showing off the little cuts as she rolled down her stockings. The curtains closed, and the stagehands scurried, and the actresses stepped up from the basement, mostly undressed, to play the victims of the cautionary tale.

  The stage glowed a bloody red for Opium and Vanities, the lights covered with pieces of stained glass. Only a few minutes before curtain, after all the other actresses had taken their places, Cecily climbed the stairs in her corset and underskirt, the black circles of an addict drawn thickly around and around her eyes. She studied the sight of her own mussed hair in the hand mirror she held. She used a dinner
fork to tangle her hair more, twisting the tines of it through her curls.

  Again she asked for my help as she turned her back to me, the laces untied. She clutched at the breast of the corset. “Tighten them up,” she said. Afraid of hurting her, I tied them too loose. “No,” she said. “Tighter.” I failed again, and she sighed. “Pull them until I yelp.”

  I did as I was told. I gave the strings a sharp yank, with a zip of the laces, and yelp she did. I knotted them up with another sharp yank and another yelp. In the corner of my mouth was a pipe I had lit up. I used it in my act—it got good laughs when I would take a drag, then make Oscar cough, smoke lifting from his mouth from the popping of a capsule of powder. Cecily thanked me this time with a shy smile, her hands at her chest to cover herself. She then dropped her smile and seemed to contemplate my chin. She furrowed her brow, tilted her head in thought. I said, “Something puzzling you, sweetheart?”

  Cecily swiped my pipe from my mouth. She ran on stage as the curtains parted, and she collapsed into the cushions of a red velvet sofa, puffing away without a single tickle in her throat.

  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.