The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  And I’d barely taken a step onto the midway before fairgoers were begging for a joke. It was as if Oscar’s new spirit possessed me, as if I were the one with a new string in my neck. With a strut and a shuffle I worked the crowd and they emptied their pockets into mine. My every cheap, creaky joke was suddenly worth a fortune. And Oscar taught me all kinds of new tricks, his skeleton of wood and rubber an extension of my own bones and muscles. My hand in his back, I fiddled with buttons that hadn’t worked before. He shot a flame from a fingertip, plucked a paper rose from the nose of a girl. He set a windup sparrow free from under his hat. And from his sleeve he pulled his heart, a little pillow of silk. Oscar would invite a pretty lady to press the center of it, and when she did, the heart would throb and release a puff of cherry blossom perfume.

  Up his other sleeve was a marionette I’d not met before, a sad little mister no bigger than a clothespin. With the flick of a switch, the puppet dropped from a hollow in his arm and danced a jig at the end of its strings. Oscar was making the puppet tell jokes of its own when a horseless carriage came sputtering up to brake right next to us.

  Montgomery Ward, the company that sold a horseless carriage in its catalogs, had been giving the fairgoers rides in one up and down the midway all afternoon, but the driver never stopped whenever he neared me. As a matter of fact, he would never even slow, and I’d had to jump out of his way a time or two, as if he seemed set on running me over.

  But this wasn’t the carriage from the catalog. I’d never seen this automobile before or this driver.

  The man steered with one gloved hand and wore a golfer’s hat of red-and-green plaid. His driving goggles turned his face insect, and the woman next to him looked just as buggy. She wore goggles too and a broad-brimmed white hat tethered to her head with a bloodred scarf she knotted beneath her chin. A piglet, with a pink ribbon around its neck, wriggled in her arms, rustling all the ruffles of her white dress.

  At first they said nothing when they parked at my side, so I went on with my act. I gave them the best I had. I showed off all Oscar’s new tricks, but nothing moved them. They kept their goggles on, and they eyed me like scientists, like I was a specimen on a slide. They wouldn’t laugh, they wouldn’t smile. I felt unnerved by their scrutiny and concluded they didn’t want jokes or magic. So I would offer them the wizard’s voice. I leaned forward, easing Oscar closer to the man in the auto. I pulled the string to his phonograph.

  “What do you wish me to do?” Oscar said. “Why should I do this for you?”

  With that, the man turned slowly to face the woman at his side. Though their eyes were still hidden by the goggles, I could see this glance was somehow meaningful. The woman lowered her face, looking down and off as if remorseful, and the man lowered his face too. I pulled the string again twice.

  “What do you wish me to do? Why should I do this for you?”

  The man stuck his gloved hand into his coat and pulled from it a wallet that bulged and bent. He took from it some bills, then offered forth, with his ungloved hand, a shocking sum.

  More shocking than the sum was the hand itself. The bills were held between two fingers of metal, the whole hand a skeleton of steel bones, each finger joint on a minuscule hinge. Whoever had crafted the hand had added a few prettified flourishes of art here and there. A fleur-de-lis had been cut into the center of the metal palm, and a vine of roses scrolled, engraved, in a wreath all around his silvery wrist.

  I practically curtsied at the sight of the cash. “I thank you ever so much, sir,” I said, faking the gestures of a grateful beggar. All my deep disdain for the rich eased for a minute, and I allowed myself my greed. I was happy to bow and scrape and shuffle if it meant spending it all on Cecily, on a month’s worth of moonlit rides in the swan gondola and on bottle after bottle of the finest wines and box after box of chocolates.

  But as I reached for the money, the man’s steel fingers snapped back like the spring of a mousetrap. “I’m not tipping you,” he said. “I’m buying your doll.”

  “Oh,” I said. I pulled my hand back and brought it to my mouth to gnaw on my thumbnail. I considered the offer for only a moment. With the money the man held out, I could’ve easily bought a new dummy, a new suit for myself, and a new hat, and still wooed Cecily, but what kind of act would I have had without Oscar? Mr. Crowe had insisted no dummy was expendable. “As far as the audience goes, the dummy’s the brains of the act,” he had told me many times. “The audience would be happier if you weren’t there at all.” And besides, I was deeply fond of the doll. He had a character all his own. “Well, I’m sorry, it’s not for sale,” I said. “This is my act. I can’t sell Oscar.”

  The woman then pushed her goggles off her eyes and onto her forehead. Her piglet squealed like he’d been pinched. The man brought his metal hand back to his wallet, and when he held it out to me again, there was even more money—a whole summer on the swan gondola, with a string quartet on the dock, serenading us every night.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. I studied that hand and ran my eyes along his coat sleeve, estimating where the fake arm ended and the real one began.

  After a moment he nodded, and he returned the money to his wallet. He then held out a calling card. “If you change your mind,” he said, “let me know.”

  Wm. Wakefield was all that was written on the card. I’d seen his name all around the Fair, and his signature with all its sharp points.

  “I think I might’ve heard of you,” I said.

  “You might’ve,” he said, as he fussed with the automobile’s devices before jerking forward and scooting on along. The woman with Wakefield looked back as they drove away, and she tossed some dollar bills into the air behind her. I skipped forward, and I swatted at those bills, grabbing each one before it fell to the dirt.

  • • •

  AS THE SUN WAS SETTING, August approached me with not a single bottle of tonic in his bag. He put the cigarette he was smoking to my lips for a puff. “That cigarette’s the only potion I have left,” he said. “I’ve made a killing on my cures.” The cigarette tasted like strong tea sipped from a gas pipe. As I coughed, squinting, handing it back to him, he explained it was for the treatment of asthma. “It’s quite medicinal,” he said, smoking it himself and inhaling deep like it was a gulp of spring breeze. “Crushed plantain leaves and belladonna,” he said. “Some saltpeter.”

  The Chamber of Horrors wouldn’t close for another half hour or so, so I let August lead me to the Chinese Village. August was feeling successful and full of luck. With a wiggle of his fingers, he flaunted his ring: a piece of wire he had twisted around a tiny, naked, porcelain baby. “The little doll was my prize in a piece of king’s cake at the New Orleans café, up the way there,” he said. “I chipped my back tooth on it, but I rarely win the prize in anything. So now I wear it for luck. And my luck is your luck, my dear.”

  We stepped past the joss house and through the rock garden to a silk curtain embroidered with cranes in flight. A young man stood at the curtain dressed like a barkeep, in a slick satin vest that burned with the pattern of bright-red dragons in a tussle. He plucked August’s cigarette from his fingers with a sneer. “Smoke makes the fighters sick,” he said, as he lifted the curtain to allow us entry.

  The den was crowded and noisy, everyone huddled around a low table. From the sound of the cheering and the groaning, some sort of match had been won and lost. But I couldn’t see what any of them were looking at. When I’d been only as tall as a man’s pants pocket, I could have a good evening of theft by working the cockfights and dogfights, weaving in and out among men’s legs, lifting their wallets and watches and coin purses as they stood mesmerized by the brutality, knocking me aside with their knees, yelling their lungs sore at the battling, bloody creatures. I had never been able to stomach it, so it had been particularly sweet spending the money that otherwise would have kept the fights going all night.

  Now at the back of the crowd I stood on my tiptoes to see the last of a f
ight between insects. So these were the cricket fights frequented by the automaton. It wasn’t unlike a dogfight in practice—creature against creature—but on a much smaller, less violent scale. In a small wicker basket atop a table, one cricket kicked at another as it curled in on itself. When the fight was declared over, a tall Chinese woman dressed in a shirtwaist and long black skirt stepped forward to collect her bug. She imprisoned it in a tiny bamboo cage.

  No sooner had the one wrestling match ended than another began. That’s when I saw the automaton at the center of the crowd, sitting on her knees right at the table, having changed from her costume, her hair braided and pinned, her makeup rubbed away. She dropped some coins into a basket that a man dangled from the end of a long stick as he worked his way through the pack of gamblers.

  A cricket was then passed around in a teacup through the crowd, for appraisal by all. The automaton held one lens of a pince-nez up to her good eye, and she examined the insect before passing the cup to the next gambler.

  When the teacup reached us, August held his ear to it. “The ones that chirp the loudest,” he told me, “are the ones that wrestle the hardest.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the automaton. When I had seen her before, the very sight of her sent a shiver through me; I felt embarrassed, like a boy tripped by a bully. But seeing her here, with her head lowered, as if in prayer, crushed by the crowd but alone, I felt just a pinch of affection for her. Truth be told, I was glad Cecily had someone to look after her so fiercely.

  Once the crickets had been examined by the crowd, they were weighed on an apothecary’s scale, then tossed into the basket on the low table. The men and women leaned forward to watch and shout. The crickets’ wranglers coaxed the insects forth by tapping them with straws, but all the bugs would do was pace the periphery of their boxing ring. They engaged in one little scuffle before leaping away from each other. “They should’ve put a lady cricket in with them last night,” August said. “It makes the boys bloodthirsty.” I became so engaged with the ruckus, I was startled when the fight ended before it had even really begun. And it was only then I discovered the automaton had slipped from the room unseen.

  • • •

  I RAN INTO THE MIDWAY, my feet knocking around in the ill-fitting shoes I had borrowed from the theater’s costume closet because I’d liked the handsome point of the toes. I had apparently missed the automaton’s exit by only a heartbeat or two, as there she was, moving briskly past the foreign villages all closing for the night. I followed her at a safe distance, stepping forward on the balls of my feet to keep my heels from clomping against the hard dirt of the road. I kept my hand behind me, my finger between the teeth of my dummy to stop his jaw from clattering with my every step. I froze in my path when she paused a moment. I worried she had heard me. But no, upon listening closer I realized she had been arrested by the seesaw melody of a bush full of crickets near the picket fence of the toy shop with the doll hospital. She reached among its leaves to capture one in the palm of her hand. She watched it, held it to her ear, then delicately placed it upon a branch.

  The automaton then went to the next fence and followed the lane to the cottage, the one that housed the incubator exhibit. I grabbed hold of a few pickets and leaped over, nearly losing a loose shoe.

  I walked to a side window and looked into a room still partly lit by a few burning lamps. Inside stood one lone nurse in a starched cap and long white dress, a deep-blue cape across her shoulders. All along the walls of the room were the metal cabinets equipped with gauges and tubes that seemed to heat or cool, each box equipped with a coiled pump that lifted and fell with the rhythm of breath. The doors to the cabinets had foggy glass windows, babies sleeping fitfully within each one.

  Painted on the wall above the machines: Live Babies! Infant Incubator—A wonderful invention! Visited by 207,000 people at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Exhibition, London 1897.

  The automaton walked through the room slouched, but the bend of her back gave her a buzzardlike authority. She went directly to a closet, and on an upper shelf was Cecily’s carpetbag.

  And while the automaton prepared the carpetbag, opening it atop a center table, tucking a blanket inside, the nurse stood at one of the cabinets, fumbling with the keys on the iron ring of her belt. She stood on her toes so she could reach the cabinet’s lock without having to remove the key from the ring. And upon the opening of the cabinet door, I saw a baby swaddled tight in a pink blanket and fast asleep, a thermometer above her little nest. The nurse lifted the baby from the cabinet and walked to the very window at which I stood. I took a step to the side, again fearing I’d been caught, but the nurse saw only her own reflection in the glass. The nurse rocked back and forth on the balls and heels of her feet, smiling, quite taken with the sight of herself with a child in her arms. Had the glass not been between us, I could have reached across to touch the pale down of the infant’s head.

  The window was open a crack, and I heard the automaton grumbling above the wheezing of the machinery. “Your maternal nature’ll only lead to awful despair,” she said. “Bring the child to me.”

  “Despair?” the nurse said to the baby, smiling, with a slow shake of her head, as if such a thing was unthinkable. “Despair?” She then carried the baby to the table, waltzing a few circles, singing a one-word song, “Despair despair despair.” The old woman held the bag open, and the young nurse again stood on her tiptoes to cradle the infant’s head as she placed the baby inside.

  • • •

  THE AUTOMATON HURRIED from the cottage and down the lane, the rush of her legs in her black skirt sounding like the flapping of a bat. She somehow didn’t see me, though I hadn’t the presence of mind to duck behind a shrub. She had hold of only one handle of the carpetbag, and the carpetbag gapped open, unclasped, at her side. The baby wasn’t in any danger of tumbling out—as a matter of fact, she was probably better off getting a breath or two of the summer air. I took my shoes off so I could follow close without clomping.

  The midway was empty but for a few workers closing up shop and leading their beasts to their stables. A man in a long white robe with an ostrich on a leash looked up at the sky and stopped. He called out something in some foreign tongue to a group of belly dancers in a nearby pavilion, and the dancers stepped out and they too looked up.

  “The airship!” someone shouted. There was a flickering of silver light crossing the sky. It looked as if a sliver of the moon had broken free and drifted away. Others stepped from the buildings and gardens. They pointed at the airship. They squealed and laughed and chattered.

  All last spring and winter, whenever the airship had shown up at night, we could only ever see a little spot of light, and it inched forward so slowly, you thought you could hear its chug-chug-chug if you listened close, cupping your ear.

  Within minutes the midway was full of the Fair’s workers knocking into one another, bumping into the automaton, everyone distracted by the tiny light of the airship. But still the old woman wouldn’t slow her furious pace. She just wove through the growing, clumsy crowd. Two barefoot boys ran by me with sparklers sizzling in their hands, and they waved the fire in the air, as if trying to signal the pilot above. This inspired more fireworks, including some that spun around on the dirt, spitting sparks this way and that. One of the boys lit a rocket’s wick with the end of his sparkler, and the rocket shot off with a terrible shriek, then burst with a blast of red, white, and blue just above the palmist’s fortune-telling booth. Up ahead the folks who drank after hours in the beer garden all stumbled out into the road with their mugs and steins, and they celebrated the airship, raising their glasses to the sky. Some of them drunkenly fell into dancing with each other to the miserable tune cranked from the organ grinder’s hand piano. Even his winged monkeys climbed a wall to point and shriek. But the automaton kept on, oblivious to any danger posed to the baby she carried in the open bag.

  Finally, the automaton slowed, stopped, and looked up. She pushed herself t
aller on the balls of her feet, as if to see the airship better, and she held one lens of her pince-nez to her eye.

  I crept forward on my stocking feet. I peeked into the open carpetbag. The baby’s eyes glistened, wide and wet, catching the specks of light from the fireworks. Amber eyes, just like those of the violet-eyed trollop. Brown like a wren’s feather. A minnow. A tuft of rabbit’s fur. I’d already considered all the shades when trying to write Cecily a love poem.

  The little girl seemed not at all bothered by the noise. She’d already shoved herself out of the tight swaddling of her pink blanket, and she entertained herself with her fists at her mouth. She happily gummed at her knuckles. Her cheeks sparkled too, wet with slobber.

  And for the first time, my dummy spoke unprovoked. “What do you wish me to do?” he said, somehow louder than before, his voice crackling with scratches. “Why should I do this for you?”

  The automaton snapped her head my way, her one good eye wide and bloodshot, more of those bubbles frothing at the corners of her mouth. If there hadn’t been a baby in that bag, she’d have likely beat me with it. Instead she looked down at the child, and I saw the old lady soften. She reached in to touch the girl, tucking the blanket. She slouched even more, growing older and older before me. For a moment I thought I might even have to take her arm, to help her keep upright. I wanted to tell her not to worry.

  She then shot me yet another noxious look. “You’re seeing things,” she said, and she tossed in my face a handful of ash. It was pepper mixed with snuff, enough to blind me. As I blinked away the sting, she rushed ahead. This was no black magic—it was an old tactic of theft. I’d known at least one woman who’d worked as a sneeze-lurker, who would slip from around a corner, toss a handful of spice and dust into a man’s face, and make off with his wallet.

  I stumbled forward, blinking and sneezing. When I could see again, I saw Cecily up ahead, a long summer shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had again wandered away from the other actors, and while everyone else looked up to the airship, she looked down, watching her feet, her ankles, her legs, as she practiced the steps of a dance.