The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Already?” I said.

  “It’s not a short walk,” she said.

  The fairgrounds were never empty, not even in the hours past midnight. Workers patched cracks and hammered and pasted and untangled wires. They touched up the paint on columns and statues, and watered the flowers. Maybe it took a whole army of workers working late to keep the walls and angels’ wings from falling in.

  For all I knew, putting Doxie in my arms was part of a plot to stop me from asking Cecily questions. I lagged, afraid of tripping over my own feet. I tried to keep my stride smooth so as not to bounce the baby awake. And we fell far behind Cecily, who seemed to have become oblivious to us, as she walked ahead at a wicked pace, swinging the carpetbag at her side.

  The Fair’s architects, perhaps with an eye toward mystery and intrigue and midnight gondola rides stolen across the lagoon, had riddled the tall walls with secret doors and gates—or maybe they just wanted the workers sneaking in and out, so the Fair could seem maintained by magic. We rats of the underground had already found many of the secret entrances. Cecily pushed at the door concealed behind a trellis of grapevine. We then walked across the lot, and into the dark streets.

  Cecily got so far ahead, into the shadows, I worried I’d lose her. But I didn’t want to call out and risk waking Doxie. It wasn’t that the girl needed sleep—she slept all the time, for hours and hours in the incubator. I kept quiet because I simply liked the idea of her so peaceful in my arms. And I was hypnotized watching her as I cradled and rocked her. Doxie was an artist of sleep. A master at it. A sleeping beauty. A somnambulist. With such plump, pink cheeks, how could anyone but a great actress convince the fairgoers she was a premature infant, at risk of breathing her last? They all gathered around her glass bassinet to watch her live another minute, then another minute more.

  • • •

  CECILY WAS LIVING in a fine-looking boardinghouse of two floors, with a long porch and a whitewashed fence, in a neighborhood that slept through the night, unlike my own, which rattled with thieves and drunkards in its alleys at any hour. But the Silk & Sawdust Players had infested the place, building nests of costumes and props. Hanging from the branches of the tree in the yard were cages of trained birds. The empty back and front of a two-man horse costume was deflated on the lawn, as if the horse had sloughed off its skin and left it behind. The skeleton of an old-fashioned hoopskirt sat near the rosebushes.

  Cecily waited for me at the front gate. “We call it the pensione,” Cecily said, trilling the word in a foreign way, even fluttering her lashes. “It means ‘hotel’ in Italian, I think.”

  There were actors and actresses, some sleeping, some sleepless, on the porch, on the porch roof, on the grass, some smoking, some drinking, some tossing lit firecrackers, some getting firecrackers tossed at them.

  “Ol’ Dox has to work tomorrow in the live-baby exhibit,” Cecily said, taking the girl from my arms. “It’s easy money, so I hate to have her miss another day. But I’m guessing I have the day off now. The Chamber of Horrors is still smoldering.” I kissed the baby’s forehead, and Cecily’s cheek, and we made plans to meet in front of the incubator exhibit at eleven in the morning. Cecily and I would spend the day together.

  “Now run away quick,” Cecily said. “Mrs. Margaret might still be awake.” She reached up to pull at a curl at my forehead and to let it spring back. “And she sure don’t like the looks of you.” Cecily then turned and left me, and I could have spent hours watching her with her baby, and listening to the lullaby she hummed. She carried Doxie with one arm, as if the child weighed no more than a bag of sugar.

  • • •

  I LEFT OSCAR at the Empress the next morning. On my way to the Fair by streetcar, in my freshly tailored lilac suit from Brandeis, I rolled up the trouser cuffs an inch or two more to show off the snakeskin slippers I’d got on credit to go with the suit. I wore a necktie of green silk and a straw boater with a yellow hatband. The streetcar passed so close to a garden wall, I was able to reach out and pluck a pink-lipped snapdragon from a pot, and I stuck its stem behind my ear.

  When I got to the incubator exhibit, Doxie was tucked into her booth, but Cecily was nowhere. I looked inside and breathed on the glass. I wrote Hello backward, with my finger, through the fog. I longed to spring her from her prison, but she looked so content. Too content? Maybe she wasn’t acting after all. Were all those pipes and tubes pumping in some kind of gas? And as I looked to the top of the cabinet, to watch the lift and fall of a coil, I saw a little swan folded from paper.

  I took the swan into the palm of my hand. I hated the idea of undoing all the paper’s twists and folds, but I could tell that something was written within—letters slipped from the folds and out onto the wings. When I first began to dismantle the bird, I thought I might be able to carefully follow its construction and perhaps return it to its form later. But with just a tug at the bird’s beak and an untwisting of its neck, I lost all sense of the swan’s design.

  Ferret,

  Don’t you already miss my little paper swan? I can put it back together for you, if you’d like. An actress who plays a geisha in the Japanese tea garden taught me how to fold it.

  I can’t spend the day with you after all, but you have no choice but to forgive me. The girl in the Flying Waltz fell when her wires snapped, and she broke both legs and an elbow, so I have a new job. Unlucky her, lucky me, I guess. They say the wires are perfectly fine. It was a freakish accident unlikely to repeat. So I’ll be spending all day learning the ropes (hee-hee). Don’t tell anyone that I told you it’s all a trick—we’re to look like we simply took wing. The wires are attached to the straps and springs of a corset under my gown. Come watch me practice—it’s the little blue theater at the end of the midway, the one with the dome.

  Cecily-with-a-C

  I’d never before noticed the blue theater, but the midway grew every day, inching past its fences, threatening to spill into the river. It was becoming stranger and stranger all summer long, with new shows up in a matter of minutes and old ones falling just as fast. While the Grand Court could fool you into thinking it was all marble and stone, the midway was marzipan melting in a candy shop window.

  A banner that stretched across the dome of the blue theater promised The Flying Waltz & the Waltzing Dwarves, and sure enough, the hall was full of folks shorter than my hipbone. Women in their underthings sorted through trunks full of child-size ball gowns, and men polished their shoes or practiced their steps. Others rushed around as if the curtain were scheduled to rise any minute.

  “When’s the first show?” I asked a woman who sat on a trunk lid to unashamedly roll a purple stocking up her bare leg, her underskirt hiked up to her hips. She pointed her toes, lifting her foot high, and she rolled the stocking so slowly, it was as if her little leg was a mile long.

  Despite her languid movements, she opened her eyes wide at my question. “Oh don’t remind me!” she said. “It’s only two days away! Only two days.”

  “Only two days” carried through the hall, all the others repeating the phrase, passing it from person to person, sending it across the room like an echo. They hurried their steps a beat.

  The theater had only a stage and a piano and was otherwise bare. Even its floors were dirt. Either the seats had not arrived or they weren’t arriving at all, the audience expected to stand.

  “How long’s it going to take you to look up?” came Cecily’s voice, dropping from overhead. I looked into the arch of the dome and Cecily hovered above, smiling down at me, wiggling her legs. The dome was lined with mirrors and dotted with lamps, giving her pale dress a shimmer and sparkle.

  “I’m getting dizzy just watching you,” I said.

  “Go up on the stage,” she said. “Silas and the boys will help you get strapped in. Then you can come dance with me.”

  “Oh, no, no. I can’t,” I said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said. She spun herself around, circling and ci
rcling. “No one’s afraid of heights. That’s just something people say.”

  “No, no, I am,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I wish you’d come down. And not go back up.”

  “The fear’s all in your head, Ferret.”

  “Well, yes, it is,” I said. “Where else does fear go?”

  Some of the dancing dwarves were suddenly upon me, tugging at my trousers and the sleeves of my suit coat, pushing and pulling. “It’s nothing to be afraid of,” one of them said.

  “No, nothing at all,” said someone else. “It’s not even real. She’s not really flying. It’s all a trick.”

  I said, “I know, it’s not that, I just . . . ,” but somehow I allowed them to rustle me to the stage to truss me up in a harness and belts. Silas, it seemed, was a little man in a felt cap, and he stood on a ladder to remove my jacket and to buckle leather straps to my shoulders, attaching me to thin wires that led to a track in the ceiling.

  I didn’t want to look cowardly. “It’s all in my head, it’s all in my head,” I chanted to myself, concentrating only on the sounds of the words. But the chanting didn’t help. I felt a shot of panic, my face dripping with sweat. Just as I said, once again, “I can’t,” I did. I was. Up in the air. A group of stagehands as little as all the others turned the crank that tightened the wires that lifted me near the arches of the dome.

  My stomach felt like it was lifting even higher than I was and twisting inside me. If I’d been able to catch a single breath and find a single word, I’d have begged for help.

  Cecily swam toward me, kicking her legs, fanning her arms. She took my hands and pulled me to the center of the track that ran straight across the room. The dome arched above us. “See?” she said. “I’ve cured you of your fears.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m still scared.”

  Cecily rolled her eyes at me. “What, exactly, are you afraid of?” she said.

  “Falling,” I said.

  “We all could fall,” she said, spinning around and around and away from me. Overhead, her wires were attached to a contraption of propeller blades and wheels that worked along the track. I tried to swim toward her, swinging my arms and legs, but only moved backward and only an inch or two. She danced over to me and around me, pulling me into her arms, taking the lead, waltzing me in circles.

  “So where’s your dance partner?” I said.

  “Sleeping off a drunk,” she said. “When his partner fell yesterday, it rattled him.”

  “I imagine so,” I said. I looked down, and my stomach jumped again. I closed my eyes tight.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It was a simple fix, they tell me.”

  “You look beautiful,” I said, when I could open my eyes again. She lifted my arm to spin around and beneath it, as if there were no wires to tangle.

  “You always say that,” she said. “But this time it is true.” She backed away to show off the dress. It was one she’d made, when she’d danced onstage once before. The sheer fabric, she said, was something called white illusion. And looking through the gown you saw another gown beneath, one of “chameleon silk,” she said. When she spun for me again, the lights that bounced around and off the mirrors caught up in that silk, shifting the colors from pink to blush to blue, then back again.

  Someone sat down at the piano below and began to play for us. The piano player was then joined by a woman with a fiddle and a man with a cello, and Cecily took me in her arms. At each shoulder was a muslin rose that sparkled with the crushed glass she’d dusted on the petals.

  “I didn’t even know you could dance,” I said. I was starting to understand my way around the wires, and the harness, and I was able to follow Cecily’s lead as we waltzed along the track, our feet kicking around each other, but gracefully in rhythm.

  “How would you know?” she said. “We’re strangers. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “So then tell me something,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said.

  I loved listening for the rustling of her body, her elbows, her legs, hidden and moving beneath the silk and skirts.

  “How’d you learn to dance?” I asked.

  “From the other candy factory girls,” she said. In New York City, she told me, where she’d lived before taking to the fair circuit, she dipped orange peel in chocolate in a chilled room. “Even in the summertime I went to work in a fur cap. And some nights, when the other girls weren’t worn out from the long day, we went to the Hans’1 and Gret’l, a dance hall uptown. See, what you did was”—and she slipped away from me to dance alone—“you started dancing with one of the other girls, then a couple of gents would break in, and you’d dance with the man you got, if he was halfway handsome.” And here she returned to me, and we held each other close and turned on our wheels. “And if you were lucky, he took you to the saloon after and bought you a bowl of turtle soup or something.”

  The tinny music below swelled into something dramatic, as if a whole orchestra had joined in, and Cecily and I matched it with our steps. I pulled her in so close and so sudden, she shuddered. She then followed my movements, my hips pushing hers this way, then that, my legs scissoring around her skirts. We rushed from one end of the track to the other, the flounce of her gown flowing around us. I held her right hand in my left one and I felt her grip tighten, squeezing, and we rushed the waltz more, fearless, testing the wires and the wheels of the track.

  “And where’d you learn how to dance?” she whispered in my ear.

  “The girl shop,” I whispered back. “The whorehouse.” She put her head to my neck and buried her laughter in my collar. “It was legitimate,” I said, and I laughed too. “It was a job, even. I got paid. I was fifteen. Anna Wilson, the madam, taught me all the steps so that the girls could practice on me, and they could invite their gentlemen to dance and seem ladylike. Anna fancied herself running a finishing school.”

  “I hate to know how you got paid,” she said.

  “The girls would only dance with me,” I said. “That was all. They thought I was a kid.”

  “You were a kid,” she said.

  “I was never a kid,” I said.

  “Did you even steal a kiss, ever?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, “kisses I got.”

  Our dancing had slowed as the music had trickled away to nothing. She leaned her head back to squint at my face, summing me up. She put a thumb to my lower lip. “They’re kind of irresistible,” she said. “Those lips.”

  “So don’t resist them,” I said. And so she didn’t. She put her lips to mine, and we kissed. Up to then I’d felt foolish to be so in love with someone I’d known so little. But the kiss, as kisses do, changed everything.

  But the kiss stopped before it was meant to end, as I was dragged away from her, the wires pulling me back so fast I thought I was falling after all. I rocked forward and faced the ground. I felt that twisting in my gut again. My arms grabbed at the air. My heart sped. But I was still attached to my wires, and was only rushing back along the track. When I was above the stage, I was lowered, and I was unable to land on my feet. My legs buckled and I fell to my knees. I gasped, and though my hands and knees were on the boards, and I’d survived, I still thought myself doomed.

  A man my height grabbed me by the harness and lifted me like a puppeteer, setting me upright, and he began undoing my belts and straps. His hands seemed to wander when he got to the clasps near my crotch. “I beg your pardon,” I said, lowering my voice to a gruff scratch as I pushed his hands away.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, glaring at me, lowering his voice too. “You’re in my harness. Get out of it.”

  Once I was freed of the rigging, I just wanted to be back in it. I felt severed.

  I looked up to Cecily as I walked toward the door. She gave me a smile and a shrug, and the shrug somehow worked something loose, dropping her an inch with a jerk. My heart stopped again, and I stepped forward, my arms out, as if I might be able to catch her. But s
he stayed in the air. “A wire must’ve caught,” she said, shrugging again. “Meet me out front at five,” she said. “We’ll walk the midway.”

  I nodded, but I worried I should stay. I wanted to demand she get down. “Go,” she said, sensing my hesitance. “You’re making me nervous.”

  • • •

  CECILY SOMEHOW SURVIVED her day of waltzing, and I would say we made a dashing couple as we strolled the Grand Court that evening, her in her gown of white illusion and me in my lilac suit. But she wouldn’t let me buy her a fine dinner or even a glass of wine. “We’ll eat our supper like hummingbirds,” she said, and we moved from booth to booth within the Manufactures Building, sampling evaporated apricots and strawberries drenched in clover honey. We had some canned lobster on crackers, and some Chinook salmon, and a few spoonfuls of cured figs. We had ox tongue and tulip tea. We had a few tastes of orange wine and of something they called sparkling Scotch ale that rumbled our stomachs.

  Back on the midway, we visited the tent with the whale—a five-hundred-year-old beast the size of a ship. We walked its entire fifty-foot length. With Cecily distracted by the stench of chemicals and decay, I suggested hiring Doxie myself. “What does she get for a day in the incubator?” I said. “What if I paid her the same rate to help me with my act?”

  Cecily held her hankie to her nose like a railroad marauder. She lowered it to say with some irritation, “What could she possibly do?”

  “Well,” I said, “I could set her up in the pram and put a little bonnet on her head. I could throw my voice and make her say funny things. She could cuss or something. Something babies don’t do. Folks would love it.” The idea of it all seemed to be wrinkling Cecily’s brow with worry, but instead of shutting my mouth, I felt compelled to say more and more, the suggestion sounding worse and worse with every word. I’d only meant for the idea to show my affection and my concern.