The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Ah,” I said, looking at myself. “You parted it in the opposite direction. It would never have occurred to me.”

  “You must have got caught in the storm,” she said.

  “Do I really look so all in fits?” I said. Back in my attic, I hadn’t thought to change. I’d been rushing through the day, anxious to return to the swan gondola at nightfall. I smiled and winked. “Seems I can’t go anywhere anymore without someone doing my hair or shaving my lip.” As her face lit up apple red, I remembered: Ah yes, Pearl blushes. “It was raining pitchforks,” I said, hoping to change the subject so her cheeks could cool off. I told her about the lightning and fire in the Chamber of Horrors. I stepped back and tugged at the knees of my trousers, showing off the mud caked on the hems.

  “Is Cecily all right?” she said with a gasp.

  “She is,” I said. “She is.” I decided to show Pearl the hankie I’d bought Cecily, because I didn’t want anyone wrongheaded about anything at all. “Is this the right sort of thing,” I said, holding open the box, “to buy a lady?”

  Pearl seemed to fall into a little bit of a swoon. But when she looked at the hankie, and ran her finger along the curve of the letter S, she blushed herself into a sweat. “Oh,” she said, bringing her fingers to her lips as she looked into the box again. “I’m afraid the shopgirl gave you the wrong handkerchief.”

  I looked at the embroidered letter. My hand began to shake. I was making matters worse and worse. She thinks it should be a P, I thought. She thinks it’s for her.

  “Oh, Pearl,” I said, “I’m so sorry if you thought . . . I didn’t mean to . . . You’re a very lovely girl, and sweet to boot, and there’s no reason at all that I shouldn’t want to . . . that any gentleman shouldn’t want, wouldn’t be honored to . . . well, to buy you things and take you around . . . but this handkerchief is for . . . well, it’s for Cecily. Who I’m very fond of.”

  “Oh no, no, please, I know, I know, don’t say another thing.”

  “And it’s not that I couldn’t be fond of you, or wouldn’t be fond of you, if . . .”

  “Ferret,” she said, sternly. “Please.” She took the box from me. “The girl gave you the wrong handkerchief. You need the letter C, of course.” When she saw I was too dim-witted to catch on, she said, “For Cecily.” She paused again. “C . . . for Cecily.” I think she even gave the C an extra S-like ssssss. She stepped from around the counter as I mulled it all over. “I’ll just go swap it out for you and I’ll be right back,” she said.

  Now I was the one blushing. As I waited, I ran my finger through some light dust on a shelf, drawing the letter C, which looked to me like half a heart. I then touched at the glass eye of a wax head that wore a hat upon which toy ships with flames of red silk sank in a sea of blue crepe—a naval battle in the Havana harbor. When Pearl stepped up to my side, the box nicely tied shut, I said, “Who would wear such a hat?”

  Pearl held the box to her chest. She twisted her finger through the box’s ribbon. “Well, we haven’t sold one yet, so I wouldn’t know,” she said. “But people do like to feel like they’re supporting the American troops at war.”

  “By wearing a hat?” I said.

  Pearl shrugged, and I worried I was being difficult. I was still burning a little from my embarrassment, I guess. I took the box from her. “I can read and write, in case you’re wondering,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen my advertisement in the Omaha Bee. I offer literary assistance. I write letters and whatever else needs written. I’ve written a hundred letters, probably, to women with all sorts of names.”

  My boasting didn’t seem to impress her. Instead, she seemed distracted, melancholy. She held a finger to her lips in thought. “Maybe you wrote me a letter once.”

  “Oh?” I said. She put her arm in mine and led me deeper into the store. Despite all her blushing, Pearl seemed nothing at all like the nervous girl I’d met at the swan gondola.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Do you remember something about . . . about . . .” She looked up and off in thought. “Pearl the girl of the ocean blue?”

  “Hm,” I said. “No. No I don’t think I quite remember . . .”

  “A letter of proposal?” she said. Though I couldn’t possibly remember every letter I ever wrote, it seemed I’d remember something like Pearl the girl of the ocean blue. It seemed a little too plucky for my style. “He was far too dull to write the letter he wrote,” she said. “I always suspected he’d copied it from a book. But if there are people like you—who sell love letters—then . . . well, perhaps that’s why he didn’t sound himself.” There’d been a pinch of disapproval with her mention of “people like you.”

  “And you didn’t accept?” I said.

  Pearl sighed. “He was very kind,” she said. “But he should have written me a letter himself, don’t you think? I actually liked the bit about the ocean. It made me sound like a girl in a song. But that was one of the reasons I wouldn’t accept, you know? To have such a poetic proposal of marriage from someone who wasn’t poetic at all? I came to my senses right then, and I knew I couldn’t marry him.”

  “You mean to say you didn’t marry him because of the letter? It couldn’t have been from me then,” I said. “I’ve never written a proposal of marriage that wasn’t accepted.”

  “And it’s even worse than all that,” she said. “I even used the words of the letter against him. ‘What ocean?’ I said to him. ‘I’m Pearl the girl of what ocean? I’ve never even seen the ocean,’ I said to him. At that time, I’d never been to Paris. I’d never been to New York. I had never been anywhere. How could I even be the girl in those lovely lines? ‘How dare you ask a stranger to marry you,’ I said. I was really very awful to him.”

  I honestly did take great care to assure that the letters I wrote had the character of the sender. I figured into the fee of the letter the price of a pint of beer or a cup of tea, and I would sit with the sender for much longer than necessary, listening to every word. I found that my work as an entertainer gave me a good ear for voices. I picked up on any habits of speech or odd snippets of vocabulary, and I worked it all in, in a literary manner. It was my best bit of flimflam. Whenever they tried to write the letters themselves, they only sounded like somebody else. They needed a mimic in order to ring true.

  “Whatever happened to the poor sap?” I said, but before she could answer, we’d reached the men’s department, and she’d embarked on her scheme to get me in a new suit. The linen suits were on clearance—two dollars and fifty cents—and though I’d spent my last nickel on the embroidered hankie for Cecily with a C, Pearl opened an account for me, so I could buy the suit on time. I was no stranger to credit—I was living on jawbone all around town—but I’d never had credit in a place like Brandeis & Sons. And I’d never before been treated with such respect. Pearl left me to a manager named Mr. Foswig, who brought me a thin cigar and a snifter of whiskey so smooth it didn’t burn its way down my gullet in the manner of most whiskeys I’d known. With each suit I tried on, Mr. Foswig appraised me in the way he’d appraise a man of only a finer feather, as if I’d be wearing this suit someplace of consequence. And when we’d made our selection, and the tailor had pinned and chalked the coat and pants and carried the suit away, Mr. Foswig brought me the catastrophe I’d been wearing when I’d walked in. But it had been attended to miraculously—the mud had been sponged away and some gaping seams stitched shut. My hopeless shoes had been polished and the cobbler’s shoddy work redone. As Mr. Foswig helped me on with my coat, he told me my new suit would be ready in the morning. Pearl returned with her umbrella and hat. “Walk me home?” she said.

  “I think I’ll buy a two-dollar-fifty-cent suit every week,” I said as I studied my cigar out in the sunlight. I was quite unaccustomed to wearing suits that had never been worn before. “I feel like a million bucks just having tried it on.” The protesters had left for bigger and better scandals apparently, and the cyclists in the window still happily
traveled as their bicycles spun in place. “Do you cycle?” I said.

  “I do,” Pearl said. “I sold my piano to buy a bicycle, but we’re all doing that. Sales in the sheet music department have dropped. It seems we’re spending all our money on tires and patches. I wonder if they’ll stop writing songs entirely.”

  “If they were smart,” I said, “they would write songs about bicycles, I guess.”

  Pearl put on a pair of eyeglasses, their lenses tinted red. When I raised an eyebrow at the sight of them she explained they’d been prescribed by a homeopath. “Iridology,” she said. “There are doctors who can read your health in the colors and shadows of the irises. All your pain and disease sits waiting in your body, and they can see it all in the eyes. I’ve had dizzy spells to the point where I see things in the room that aren’t there.”

  “What things do you see?”

  “Well, it’s hard to describe.” Her voice, already so low and soft, grew softer and lower. “I see myself, but I’m somewhere else in the room. Like a ghost of myself, haunting only me.” Pearl turned bright red, of course. “There’s a spot of indigo in my left iris, and the doctor says it tells of an imperiled ovary.” She whispered that—“imperiled ovary.” And she kept whispering. “He worries my ovaries are afloat inside me. They’re untethered, was what he said. So he feels that if he can see the damage in my iris that he should be able to correct the iris and therefore correct the damage. The glasses are meant to chase away the little spot of deep blue in the ovary part of my eye.”

  “Maybe it’s the glasses giving you the dizzy spells,” I said. This iridology didn’t seem all that far from August’s cure-alls.

  Pearl laughed again. “My doctor thinks it’s because I don’t wear a corset,” she said. “He disapproves of dress reform.” And suddenly, Pearl wished me good night, one foot up on the front steps of a boardinghouse for women—its name, the Juliet, was etched in stone above the doors.

  “Can’t I buy you your supper?” I said. “A glass of wine and a plate of hash?” I still had hours to worry before that late-night gondola ride.

  “But you spent your money on the hankie,” she said.

  “Brandeis isn’t the only place I have a line of credit, you know,” I said. “A man of my means has debt all around town.”

  “You’re very sweet to offer, Ferret,” Pearl said, “but Cecily would be furious with me.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” I said. “Didn’t you hear her on the swan gondola? She wants us to like each other.”

  “Don’t you know anything? What she really hopes is for us to not like each other at all. I’m sure it would be much easier for everyone if you fell in love with me and I fell in love with you, but that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  “No?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Tomorrow you’ll go to the store and you’ll put on your new suit, and you’ll go find Cecily, and you’ll tell her that Pearl is a perfectly decent girl, but she’s just not the girl for you. There’s only one girl for me and that girl is you. That’s what you’ll tell her. I should be the one writing letters of literary assistance. At least I know how to spell Cecily’s name.”

  “How do you spell it anyway?” I asked, and she told me. I asked again, to make sure I had it right. And then I spelled it out loud myself. As Pearl headed up the front steps to the door of her building, I said, “I’m sorry about the proposal.”

  “What?” she said.

  “The proposal of marriage. Pearl the ocean girl, or whatever it was. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I hope I wasn’t the one who wrote it.”

  “But I hope you were,” she said. “What a charming coincidence that would be, wouldn’t it? If it had been you who’d written that proposal of marriage? And I had rejected it? And then here we were?”

  “And if we fell in love after all?” I said. “And got married? It’d be a story we could tell people.”

  “The story you’ll tell people will be the story of how you met Cecily,” she said. “I’ll be that awful extra girl who tagged along on that first gondola ride. What was her name again, love? Pearl, was it?” She took off her red glasses, showing off her ocean-blue eyes, as she opened the door. “But I don’t mind. I’m much more interesting as the girl who is forgotten.” And with that she slipped inside and away, turning to smoke behind the door’s frosted-glass window.

  16.

  MY STOMACH SO IN KNOTS, I had to nurse one of August’s tonics late into the night. Some sort of extract of some sort of weed. “You’re only to take a dessertspoonful,” he explained. “Any more than that and it could turn devil on you.” So I only touched my tongue to the wet underside of the cork of the little blue bottle—just for a lick or two, enough to give me a pinch of ease every now and again.

  I waited and waited alone on the heart-shaped bench of the swan gondola. Alonzo the gondolier had jilted me too. The lights of the Fair had been doused for hours, it seemed. And the later it got, the more I lost my mind. When I checked my watch, I could’ve sworn the hands were working their way counterclockwise. A few minutes later I realized the watch had quit altogether, and wouldn’t wind up, so I plunked it overboard.

  I blamed my nerves on the nerve tonic and pitched the bottle too. I shouldn’t be frustrated with Cecily, I thought. I should want Cecily to be cautious, after all. A mother, alone, with a little one, had no choice but to step lightly.

  But when I did hear her steps, at long last, they weren’t light at all. They weren’t even hers, they were mine; she clumped along in the shoes I’d put on her feet. I recognized the tap of the cobbler’s nail against the brick. I’d often cussed those shoes and their noise, but just now it seemed I’d never heard a prettier tune.

  I leaped from the bench. I ran up the stairs from the dock to the promenade. “Can I help you this time?” I said, walking up to Cecily, who gently rocked the carpetbag at her side.

  “Please,” she said.

  I took the bag and looked in on Doxie. As she slept, she smacked her lips. Her little lashes fluttered with a dream.

  “What do you suppose she’s dreaming about?” I said.

  “Me,” she said. “I’m all the poor little urchin’s got.” She folded her hands in prayer and fluttered her own lashes, mocking sincerity. She then elbowed me in the ribs. I didn’t tell her yet about my own orphanhood. But I couldn’t help but wonder what my life would have been like had my mother cared enough to keep me near. Snuck around in a carpetbag seemed a fate that would have suited me well. I’d been born as scrawny as a wet rat, and not much heavier—I would’ve made an excellent incubator baby.

  “I can’t fault her,” I said. “I might be dreaming about you right now myself. Are you really here, looking as beautiful as that?”

  Cecily smiled and tugged up at the fabric of her skirt, lifting the bottom of it above the tops of her shoes. My shoes. She’d cleaned off the mud, and wore a pair of wool socks to keep her feet from swimming in them. She did a little jig. “I’m stealing the shoes for good,” she said. “Walking right off with them. I like how they look.” They were nothing but calfskin, but they suited Cecily. She most often dressed like no one else. Her skirt, shiny and striped in purple and pink, seemed the same fabric as the cushions in an ice cream parlor. And around her waist was a belt of her own invention—the buckle was a gilt-framed miniature of a blue wasp that had once hung on a wall.

  I told Cecily there’d be no gondolier to row us through the lagoon, but she said she was just as happy to simply sit. I helped her into the swan gondola, and when we all went to the bench at the back, the front of the boat seemed to lift, like the swan was waking and about to stretch its bent neck.

  Cecily took Doxie from the bottom of the bag, and the baby squealed a little, her voice skipping across the still water. Doxie drifted back to sleep, my finger in her grip. I ran my thumb over the soft skin of her knuckles. Cecily said, “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d got tired of waiting for us tonight.” Then she said, “I think I wa
s half hoping I’d be too late.”

  I leaned in close. “Why would you half hope for something like that?” I said.

  “Because I want nothing to do with you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  “You’re breaking my heart,” I whispered back. I pushed a lock of her hair aside so that I could kiss her ear. She let me. I then unbuttoned a button of her lace collar, and I kissed her throat. She put her hand to my chest, to feel my fast heart, and she smiled at its telltale rattling around. “I’m worried,” she said.

  I put my hand over her hand on my chest. “About what?”

  “That your heart’s going to give out.”

  “Let it,” I said.

  Cecily ran her thumb over a drop of perspiration on Doxie’s forehead, wiping it away as it rolled toward her eye. Doxie’s pale hair was dark with sweat, the curls matted to her skin.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering the handkerchief. I took the box from beneath the bench, and I undid the ribbon for her, and opened the lid. “I saw Pearl today,” I said. “Like I promised. She set me right on the spelling of your name. I almost bought you a hankie with an S on it.”

  “You just can’t stop talking about Pearl, can you?” she said, her voice light. She only glanced at the embroidered initial before plucking the hankie away from the tissue paper to dab Doxie’s sweaty head.

  “Sure I can,” I said. “Watch me.”

  She touched the hankie to her own forehead. Then she held it to her throat. She said, “Does this town always suffocate everybody to death?”

  “Every summer,” I said. “No survivors.”

  “I wouldn’t have come out to meet you at all,” she said, “but it was too hot in our room. She wouldn’t sleep.” She moved Doxie into my arms, and I sat bolt upright, afraid of even letting the baby’s head loll an inch. It seemed that the slightest bit of jostling and her baby bird bones would crack. I’d not held many babies in my life, but I became expert in an instant. Doxie whimpered a little, then quieted as I situated her head softly in the crook of my arm. I tugged her collar down from her chin so she could breathe easy. “Walk me home?” she said.