The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  I waved to August, and when his eyebrow rose and he squinted one eye to sum me up, I remembered my rough-and-tumble condition. I slapped some dirt from my sleeve and from the knee of my trousers. August stood next to Rosie’s makeshift rickshaw, a contraption of odds and ends. The taxi was worse off than I was, its two wheels uneven, its bench an old, short sofa of wine-colored velvet that had been tossed from a bordello saloon. Rosie had stitched shut some rips in the velvet with thick black thread. Wired to the back of the sofa was a parasol with a snapped stem repaired with string. The dainty parasol, its silk patterned with roses, cast barely an inch or two of shade.

  “Did you fall into a pack of sssssavages?” August hissed. He licked his thumb and rubbed my cheek with it. He then showed me the smear of blood he’d wiped up. I pressed my fingers to my scratch.

  “I’m in love,” I said.

  August sighed with pity and nodded. “Looks it.”

  The speech ended and the crowd applauded to be polite, but they were clearly eager to move on. Nonetheless, no one took the rickshaw rides Rosie offered, even when discounted to a nickel. He did, however, sell a few of his lovelies—the postcards were clothespinned all up and down the ratty silk lining of his coat. Whenever a gentleman passed, Rosie would fan himself with a picture of the three muses in sheer robes, and if the girls caught the man’s eye, Rosie would lift his coat open to offer a peek at the others. Rosie liked it most when a gentleman lingered and took a great interest in the art of it. A man, perhaps feigning insight in order to ogle the nudes, might make mention of deliberate shadows and classic poses, or ask Rosie for recommendations. “I love them all,” Rosie would say each and every time, and I somewhat believe he meant it. Rosie seemed to gaze upon his every lovely not so much with lust as with a longing and heartsickness, unable to decide if his love belonged more to Helen of Troy or to Salome or to Nefertiti.

  After the speech, I made my first wage at the Fair. Rosie hired August and me to simply ride in the rickshaw as he pulled us along the length of the court. He wanted to demonstrate to the fairgoers that his rickety taxi wouldn’t collapse, but I wasn’t convinced. I worried the risk wasn’t worth the fifty cents. But as I yakked on and on to August, boasting of my good luck at finding Cecily so soon, I would’ve been happy to have been wheeled around all morning long in that wobbling cart. And the more I talked about Cecily, the more I remembered of her, and all the rest of the day’s misery began to fade to nothing.

  “Just before I lost sight of her,” I said, “she was lifting up her dress an inch or two, to pick her hem up from the ground to step over some mud, or something, and she was wearing ballerina slippers. At least I think so. They were pink. The ribbons were undone, trailing behind her. I don’t know how she kept from tripping on them.”

  August blew out his cigarette smoke in a long sigh. “Heaven only knows,” he said.

  I sensed I was boring him, so I shut my mouth, and in the silence he whooped again. “‘The war whoop of the aborigine,’” August said, quoting the lisping speaker. He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “My father is an Omaha Indian,” he said, with a snap of irritation, “and he opened our bookshop before most of the cowboys of this grubby little town could read a word of English. I’ve been wearing a suit and tie since I was ten years old. As a matter of fact, my father took me, when I was that little boy, to Boyd’s Opera House to hear Oscar Wilde speak about the pursuit of beauty.” August drew out the phrase “pursuit of beauty” as if referencing a sacred text, fluttering his fingers before himself. “Here’s an adorable little irony you might appreciate, Ferret: Daddy does a particularly swift business selling dime novels all about wild Indian attacks on poor, frightened white settlers.”

  “Don’t the Indians always end up gunned down in the end?” I said. “In those books?”

  “Oh my yes,” August said. “Practically every character in the book gets a shot at the redskins. Even the little girls in their gingham dresses. But, oh, the violence, the glorious violence, that leads up to it all. The scalpings. The cowboys burned at stakes.”

  I nodded and winked, and I finger-thumped the brim of his derby, jostling the stuffed bluebird. The lazy bit of affection seemed to cheer him up, and he took his hat off so he could put his head on my shoulder. He looped his arm through mine and told me to tell him more about Cecily. “Tell me everything,” he said, “then tell me again.”

  • • •

  A LITTLE PAST NOON, the elephant was the first to cross the bridge, and many of us fairgoers followed him, like a tribe of exiles. August and I had failed to drum up business for Rosie’s rickshaw, so we were on foot now, Rosie having wisely hired a few pretty girls to ride and pose as fearless.

  Some boys risked getting stomped, roller-skating around the elephant’s lumbering legs, figure-eighting, ducking down and under the beast’s belly.

  Though August’s carpetbag jingled with bottled cures, he didn’t feel up to the task of hawking them. And Oscar, with his half-cracked head, was a fright. I would’ve been better off with a sock for a puppet, I thought. August and I wanted to simply be fairgoers like everyone else, just a couple of blokes on holiday. We deserved to be entertained.

  I needed to find Cecily. She could be anywhere, playing any part, I realized. I feared it could take me all summer to find her, and even if I did find her, what if I didn’t know her? She could be all decked out something awful, slathered in greasepaint, hidden by wigs.

  Crossing the bridge was like crossing the ocean—the two worlds had little in common. The midway’s road was hard-packed dirt, while the Grand Court’s promenade was paved with bricks that shimmered in the sun a yellow gold. The buildings of the Grand Court were dedicated to Electricity, Fine Arts, Agriculture, and Government, to Horticulture and Invention, while the midway’s devotion was to the devil, to hypnotists, fortune-tellers, belly dancers, swallowers of swords. On the midway were Turks racing camels, fakirs charming snakes. There was an Indian camp with wigwams, and a Filipino Village where cannibals were said to salivate every time a fairgoer passed.

  To me, the midway was heaven, or at least some hell-bent spin on it. When we first set eyes on it, on that very first day, it wasn’t ready to be seen. Workers scrambled to slap it all together on nothing but a lick and a promise—unlike the pristine whiteness of the court, the haphazard shacks ahead clashed in color and stripe, some tall, some short, each roof at an awkward angle to the other. Everybody seemed so roostered and frantic, you couldn’t tell if everything was going up or coming down.

  But many of the exhibits, even those that were only half-built, were ready to take your ticket. A dark-haired woman, her eyes painted with a Cleopatra swish, sat on a settee in front of the Streets of Cairo to puff on a hookah as a dervish whirled and whirled in front of her. A Chinese illusionist made his wife disappear with the spin of a mirrored wheel. An ostrich pulled a buggy in which was seated the Living Doll, a Cuban singer only twenty-six inches in height, and she sang a war tune called “The Belle of Havana.” Overhead were strings of Chinese lanterns of pink and baby-blue paper.

  There were buildings shaped like foreign shrines, with onion domes. There were thatched-roof huts of mud. There were the tall walls of Western forts and the short ones of sharecroppers’ shacks. There were cupolas with candy-striped shingles and parlors with polka-dot eaves. There were railroad tracks that curved and twisted, rising high to swoop and bend, promising danger of collision and derailment, the ground far below. There were stages without theaters. On one, a clown on a unicycle juggled cats. On another, a thrower of knives aimed for his wife. On yet another, an actor stood on a fake gallows, his future widow already in weeds, sobbing her eyes out, a trick noose snug on his neck. The smell of sausage carried from a cottage shaped like a cuckoo clock. There was a beer garden and a greenhouse full of hummingbirds that buzzed so close you could almost feel their wings flutter your lashes. The bees had already fled the apiary, filling the air with threat, thumping into hats and catching in the folds
of skirts.

  Down the center of the midway were all kinds of sordid enterprises, the whole endeavor bringing out the city’s thugs and hucksters. Riggers set up their sweat cloths, betting the kids they couldn’t pick the thimble that hid the dried pea. You could lose bets on marked cards, on loaded dice, on bones and feathers. You could have your palm read by a blind beggar.

  People lined up to be fleeced. The flush you felt when you lost to thieves wasn’t far from the rush of love, was it? When a pretty girl flirted, you could feel that same heat in your cheeks and fast beat of blood in your veins.

  That’s what I felt anyway, that rush and pulse, when I caught sight of the automaton who’d bruised my throat. “Her,” I said, with a hiccup of breath. I felt a sharp sting of ache in my head.

  • • •

  THE WOMAN WHO’D TOSSED ME off the wagon now sat stone-still in a tall, battered cabinet in the road. The cabinet was only just big enough to fit around her, and all its walls were mostly panes of glass. Leaning against one wall was a sign: Wake the Witch! For a nickel the automaton will answer questions you’re frightened to ask!

  Though I’d hoped never to see the old woman again, I could’ve kissed her on her rotten, foul mouth. If she was there in front of me, then Cecily might not be far off.

  “That’s the woman who tried to strangle me,” I told August, as I touched my fingers to the bump of my Adam’s apple.

  “How?” August said. “Her hands are made of wax.”

  “Those aren’t her hands,” I said. I stepped up to the booth, leaning forward to see close. “Her hands must be tucked into the sleeves.”

  I studied the skin of her face, which looked covered with a light cheesecloth and dusted with powder to give it the illusion of cracking plaster. My first mistaking her for an automaton was all part of the act, it seemed. She was done up to look just fake enough to seem startlingly real.

  The witch sat hunched on a stool and wore a tall pointed hat embroidered with a sour-faced monkey. She held a closed umbrella across her knees, and at her feet were two lightbulbs painted red. One bulb was screwed into a block of wood painted with the word Yes! and the other in a block of wood with the word No! A small plaque beneath the coin slot read: This ancient and magical toy was discovered in the basement of an old abandoned theater in Italy! She’s been taken apart and put back together and still nobody knows how she works! She’s the most lifelike automaton in all the world!

  I leaned over to speak into a brass horn sloppily rigged to the box, and it carried my voice inside, sending it echoing within the walls of glass. “I know your secret, old lady,” I said.

  August dropped a nickel into the coin slot, and the box came alive. The red bulbs at the witch’s feet flashed on and off. The crank of a street organ began churning on its own, the pipes and whistles wheezing slowly and then picking up the notes of a tune that seemed to have no beginning or end. The woman straightened on her stool to the sound of grinding cogs, her spine ratcheting up, vertebra by vertebra, click, click, click, click. She opened her one good eye—the glass one was covered with a patch.

  At the top of the booth, the word “Ask!” flickered with electricity. I again leaned into the horn, to taunt, to punish her for beating me up. I folded my hands at my chest and fluttered my lashes, lampooning a hopefully romantic pose, and I asked, “Will I find Cecily nearby?” The woman showed no reaction to the question but continued with her pantomime of mechanical, stuttering movement, her arms and wax hands lifting the umbrella to push the tip of a button on the floor. The red bulb behind the word No! lit with the clang of a bell. The woman then brought her umbrella back to her knees, and she drooped into her slouch, and the booth fell quiet and dark.

  Her head suddenly turned as if slipping a gear on her neck. With her eye still open, she cast at me a deathly glare, her eyelid twitchy. Some drops of foam bubbled at the corner of her mouth. Then the booth lit up again, and the tuneless music rose, and a little boy with freckles and knee breeches elbowed me aside to speak into the horn.

  “Is this worth a nickel?” the boy asked the witch. The witch shivered and jerked and lit the No! bulb.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” I said, “that’s her answer to everything.” I leaned in to speak loud in the horn. “She must be broken.”

  August tapped my shoulder and pointed at a shack shaped like a dragon’s head. “Cecily’s with Satan,” August said, and sure enough, leaning against the dragon’s tooth was one of Cecily’s fellow actors in devil horns, his face painted red. His back was to us as he flirted with a geisha. Written across his red cape was the Silk & Sawdust Players in the same candy-box curlicue that had been painted on the side of the theater troupe’s wagon.

  “God bless Satan,” I said. I grabbed August’s elbow and dragged him toward the dragon’s maw.

  • • •

  TO GET INTO THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS, you entered through the dragon’s wide-open mouth, beneath giant bloodshot eyeballs that rolled up and down. You stepped up its tongue, and in.

  In the lobby, where we waited for the next tour, August and I sidled up to a coffin-shaped bar where another devil served us boiled whiskey in shot glasses shaped like skulls. A squealing filled our ears—I’d later learn it was a recording of pigs at a South Omaha slaughterhouse.

  A woman in black slouched forward, moving quickly through the crowd, gesturing and whispering, cupping her hand around the flame of a candle she carried. The dead black buds of roses were wired to the brim of her hat. “Come with me, come with me,” she said. “There’s only one way out, there’s only one way out.” We followed her through a creaky-hinged door.

  You would walk down a dark hallway, stumble around corners, jumble up against each other. Every now and again a curtain on the wall would part, and you’d see some grim mischief lit by footlights on a stage. A family of pioneers got their gingham and bonnets all bloodied as their papa got scalped. A bone grubber robbing graves tripped into a coffin with a corpse. On a city street a man in a wolf’s mask held a dagger to the throat of a pretty young thing in a red cape. Above Little Red and the wolf, true-to-life dead blackbirds bobbed on strings like back-alley vultures waiting for the girl’s guts to spill. And spill they did. I admit I admired the mechanics and particulars of the gore and shocks throughout—the wolf cut open her dress and out fell some beast’s fresh offal, probably brought over by the butcher.

  But I didn’t see Cecily anywhere in all this mayhem. The vampire, in her underthings in a bathtub of virgin’s blood, was too plump, and the woman crazed by cocaine too thin. But Little Red Riding Hood was just right. I had to look close, and the closer I looked, the less certain I was. Was it her? Wasn’t it?

  As much as I wanted to finally see Cecily in Little Red’s face, I couldn’t. Cecily’s nose had a pixielike lift, and her eyelids looked always half-shut, like she’d just woken up. I’d already learned Cecily’s every aspect by heart.

  So I turned the corner, returning to the crowd. I stood at the lip of the next stage, just inches from a guillotine.

  And that’s when I saw her. This was Cecily, without a doubt. As Marie Antoinette, her head on the block, Cecily had powdered her face stark white and dabbed perfect circles of pink rouge on her cheeks. The lights fell just as the blade trembled. In the darkness you heard the soft, wet give of a cleaver through a melon and the thump of the melon into the bottom of a basket, but you saw, in your mind’s eye, Cecily’s flesh sliced clean through, her pretty, bewigged head beheaded. Silence fell following the sharp gasp of the spectators, then the lights blasted back on with the shriek of a fiddle, the executioner thrusting forth a wax prop, holding the head by its wig, stage blood dripping, speckling your shoes if you stood too close.

  By the end of the day, and by the end of evening, I knew the actors’ every step, and every drop of blood. I went through again and again, even after August left me.

  Poor Oscar remained unrepaired on my back as I abandoned our plot to become famous on the midway. Instead, I mem
orized Cecily’s queen, down to the trembling of her hands that shook the lace fan tied to her wrist and the tension of the muscles of her neck and her gentle swallows, as she offered her throat hourly to the tin guillotine.

  • • •

  I WAITED OUTSIDE the Chamber of Horrors as the midway closed, the lights dimmed, the entertainers and exhibitors shuttering their theaters and leading their beasts to their stables. Finally, Cecily stepped from the dragon’s mouth into the light from the nearly full moon, her face still plastered with powder, her cheeks still rouged. Her hair, which that morning had been a fright of wild curls pushed up with a few combs, was now matted to her head from the wig, the curls flattened and tucked with several pins and clips. She again wore the dress with the butterflies at the shoulders.

  I followed Cecily, who tagged behind a small group of actors and actresses who seemed not at all tired from a full day of performance. One tall, thin man in an untucked shirt, his face still the gray of the plague that killed him on stage, would occasionally break out in song. He swept an actress into his arms to turn and turn her in an invented waltz. They laughed like they had drunk too much, but they had unlikely drunk a drop—they were graceful, their singing melodic. But Cecily seemed to barely notice them. She opened a sea-green paper parasol and leaned it against her shoulder. She spun it around and around as she walked. I followed its spin with my eyes, as if giving into a hypnotist’s wheel.

  “Oh, Cecily,” the actors and actresses called back to her, in sweet singsong, after she had fallen farther and farther behind the group. They were in love with her too. “Come to us, Cecily.” They delighted in their own melodrama. “Oh, Cecily, the world is so cold without you in it.” They kept calling to Cecily, but they never looked back. One actress made gestures toward the moon. An actor wrapped his arms around himself. “Come back to us, Cecily; come back; come back.”