“Not now,” the old woman said, interrupting with a snap of disgust. “You audition in there.” She nodded toward the doors to the theater. “I’m just asking you. Can you sing?”
“You just heard me sing,” Cecily said.
“This is a very, very, very important production,” she said, rifling through papers. “It’ll be the most extravagant Omaha has ever seen.” The theater had been built to house only this one play and it would be torn down when the play closed. The stage and its mechanisms were vastly elaborate. Real fires were to be put out by real water from tanks pulled by real horses. There would be a hot-air balloon and a locomotive on a track.
The woman handed Cecily a page of script—a snippet of a monologue delivered by Heart, the melodrama’s damsel in distress. When I was a little girl growing up plucking chickens in the fields of Illinois, Heart says, I never dreamed of a place like this. At the very top of the Ferris wheel, I could look out on those fields, so colorful, like a patchwork quilt.
As I sat in the theater itself, as Cecily stepped toward the lip of the stage to read her few lines, I got all caught up in the thought of her as the star of the show. The theater had pillowed seats of velvet, and the walls were covered in deep-blue silk that was flocked and rucked to resemble a restless night sky, the stars stitched with silver thread. The gilded chandelier overhead was strung with pink crystals. The stage was flanked by columns with pink veins crackling through the granite. The theater looked like the inside of a jeweled egg. Everything was in place but the machinery of the show itself—the melodrama would require multiple stages that revolved on wheels; it would be rigged with tanks for pyrotechnics, and hydraulics for the spin of the Ferris wheel. Even the roof was rumored to crank open, as if the producers had employed the moon to run through a month of phases in only an hour or two.
But for now there was nothing on stage but construction and framework, and Cecily strained to lift her voice above the hammers and saws. She stood up on the balls of her feet, stretched her neck forth, opened her mouth wide. But her words fell short of even the third row where the director sat, the man leaning forward, trying his best to listen. I sat up straight myself, stretching my own neck, as if I could somehow help her voice carry farther.
When she finished, a command thundered up from several rows back, from the far reaches of the theater. “Again!” a man shouted, and when I looked to see who spoke, I saw Wakefield. He stood, raising his silver claw, gesturing broadly with it, summoning her voice forth. Strapped to his head were binoculars that scoped out from his eyes. He appeared to be wearing a silk smoking jacket with velvet lapels, and he held a pipe with an S-shaped stem. “Heart is . . .” he said, and then he paused, thinking. “Heart is a frail thing, it’s true. She would speak so as not to be heard. Hers is a gentle nature. And the actress must communicate Heart’s frailty. But she must do so as loud as she can. Heart’s weak voice must bounce off the rafters. So, please . . . let Heart be heard.” He then barked, “Try again!” while stabbing the air with his pipe.
Cecily nodded, she smiled, inspired, and she stepped forward, so close to the front of the stage I worried she’d tumble into the orchestra pit. Her feet were only half on the boards. She cleared her throat. She breathed in deep. And she read again.
Her voice was even softer than before. It sounded like she was speaking into a pillowcase. When she finished, she didn’t even wait for Wakefield or the director or anyone to say anything. I don’t think she even finished the sentence she was in the middle of. She stopped and walked to the stairs at the side of the stage, folding and folding the page of her script, making it smaller and smaller. Cecily kept twisting the page this way and that as she passed me. I grabbed her hat and ran to her side, and we walked up the aisle, past Wakefield, who only nodded politely. I had half a mind to sell him Oscar right then, right off my back, if it meant he’d give her a part, any part, in the play.
But I didn’t have to sell anything. In the lobby, the secretary held out a sheet of paper with a list of the characters Cecily had been assigned in the mere minutes between her audition and our walk up the aisle. “You’re lucky,” the secretary said. “No lines to learn.”
Cecily would not be playing Heart, but she had four different parts instead:
Factory Girl
Dance Hall Girl
Ferris Wheel Girl
Fire Victim
“You get fit for costumes next week,” the secretary said, “and the week after that rehearsals start. And just because you’re nothing but a face in the crowd, don’t go thinking we won’t notice if you don’t show up.” She eyed her up and down. “You’ll be getting paid good enough for what little you do.”
As we left the theater, I gave Cecily her hat. She strutted some as she walked alongside me, as I pushed the pram. “They just couldn’t put the show on without me,” she said, quite pleased.
“Of course they couldn’t,” I said.
I suggested we go fetch Doxie and spend the afternoon in celebration. “They won’t unlock her cabinet for us,” Cecily said. “They don’t know I’m Doxie’s mother, remember?”
“We’ll steal her,” I said, and she clapped her hands. She loved the idea of kidnapping her own infant.
At the cottage that housed the incubator exhibit, I pushed the carriage, with Oscar tucked inside, down the cobblestone lane. Fortunately there was only one nurse on duty, so Cecily engaged her in conversation, her sea-green paper parasol open, spinning around on her shoulder, doing her best to hide me as I picked the incubator’s lock without any special picklock—I used to sell French pocketknives equipped with a variety of tools, and I still carried one with me always: it held within it a cigar cutter, a glove buttoner, a tin opener. The ear-cleaning spoon proved the perfect key, and I managed to turn all the lock’s tumblers.
“I’m a disciple of the Reverend Foltz,” Cecily told the nurse, her quiet voice serving her well in this particular performance. “And my heart goes out to these little lambs. Wherever will these children go when the Fair ends? What if I wanted to adopt the whole litter?” The nurse was made so fidgety by her questions, she stuttered and stalled and lowered her eyes, busying herself with the folding of diapers. I easily lifted Doxie from her coop and slipped her beneath the blanket to cozy up with Oscar.
• • •
IT WAS A LOST, lazy afternoon and evening. We stood in line for a ride in the swan gondola, but the thought of sharing our private yacht with other fairgoers, in the bright light of day, made the whole endeavor a little less appealing, so we stepped away. Instead, we nestled in the swan bench on the merry-go-round of the midway, in among the carousel horses with their blue manes and bared teeth. The ride proved to be Doxie’s favorite, and for once she didn’t nap. Her eyes wide, she watched all the color spin around her, and she seemed to grab for the sunlight that sparked on the carousel’s mirrors.
As I held Doxie, Cecily held Oscar across her knees, his head dangling off the side of her lap.
On one of the last of our many spins around the carousel, I swore I glimpsed Wakefield watching. Not only did I think I saw him standing in the road, a cigar between his silver fingers, but I thought I saw the woman with the piglet too. The woman—who I’d assumed to be his wife or his mistress—wasn’t easy to miss; she wore a red dress, and the netting of a red veil across her face. But when our swan swam back around, they were gone.
November 20, 1898
Dear Cecily,
When I think back, I think I see Wakefield everywhere we ever were. In my memory, he can’t keep his eyes off us. Wasn’t he in the Indian camp as we watched a girl braid together a corn shuck doll for Doxie? Didn’t he eavesdrop on our fortunes as we got our palms read? I can just see him aiming a telescope at us from a rooftop as we lay back in the grass to gaze at stars.
Tonight, on the farm, it seems colder than it is. I stand at the hearth as I write this letter, with the mantel as my writing desk. I don’t leave my room often, but Hester made a cane for me.
It’s a polished branch of old gnarled wood. I worry that my leg, when the cast is broken off, will look just as rotten and twisted as this cane. My leg hurts as much as it ever did. The cast is crippling me, bending my knee the wrong way, chipping away at any bones left unbroken. I haven’t seen a doctor. Hester doesn’t trust them. So I don’t trust them either. I only trust the Old Sisters Egan. I want my world to shrink more and more, so that all that’s left is this farm.
I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to walk among the living.
I can see your absence everywhere, in everything. I could look at a rose, but instead of seeing the rose, I would see you not holding it. I look at the moonlight, and there you are, not in it.
Ferret
18.
THE SILK & SAWDUST PLAYERS slept even in the hallways of the boardinghouse and sometimes three to a bed. Cecily, with Doxie on the way when they had all left Nashville, had become sick from the winter trip up the river, so they’d given her her own room at the boardinghouse to thaw out. She kept the room, even after Doxie was born, and sweetened it up with touches of her own. The room had faded yellow wallpaper patterned with hornets on gray roses, so she tacked up covers of fashion magazines, illustrated with women in winter coats, and she hung a bright-blue ukulele on the wall above the bed. She tucked the cigarette cards into the edges of the mirror of a vanity. She made a chair from an overturned washtub, with embroidered pillows for a cushion. Behind a silk screen painted with pink apples was Doxie’s crib, rented from the landlady.
Before rehearsals were to begin for Heart of the White City, Cecily decided to get her hair dyed red. The sword swallower’s wife in the Turkish Village of the midway sold me a tin of henna and dried indigo leaf, and she wrote out instructions in broken English. After everyone else in the boardinghouse fell asleep, we snuck downstairs to the bathroom. Cecily left the door to her room open so we could hear Doxie when she cried. The little girl had her days and nights mixed up; she slept all of every day and fussed often after dark. In the hall, we heard the thundering of Mrs. Margaret’s snores. “Mrs. Margaret’s still so furious with me,” Cecily said, “she has to take a sleeping tonic at night.”
Doxie had been fired from her job as a living baby due to our mischief. I was relieved—I knew next to nothing about babies, but it seemed to me she was getting too old for that box. And the whole incident had led Cecily to confess our love affair to Mrs. Margaret. I still avoided the woman in the days after, sneaking in and out of Cecily’s room, in and out of windows, over eaves and down rain pipes, after dark and before dawn. And though I wasn’t pleased by Mrs. Margaret’s violent determination to keep Cecily all to herself, I understood it. She wanted Cecily to trust only her. Mrs. Margaret, after all, had helped with Doxie’s birth, staying right there at Cecily’s side, holding her hand, every minute of all the many hours it took for an elderly midwife to coax Doxie out into that little room at the boardinghouse. It seemed that Mrs. Margaret had often been at Cecily’s side when Cecily would have otherwise been all alone. And for that, Cecily would forgive the old woman anything.
In the bathroom, Cecily and I stripped naked, then stepped into the tub, hoping for the water to cool us off. Cecily sat with her back to me. I poured half a bottle of prune brandy into her hair to clean it of its fats and oils. Up in her room, I’d made a paste of the henna powder, mixing in a glass of red wine, some spoonfuls of paprika, and the juice of three lemons.
After I worked the henna into Cecily’s hair, I touched her shoulder, where there was a tattoo of a heart. I had seen it before but had never asked about it. I now ran my fingers along the heart’s curves and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “How’d you get this?” I said.
“Doxie’s father was a tattooist in Nashville,” she said. “He worked the midway of the world’s fair there, and sold tattoos for fifty cents in a striped tent. His name was Mercury.”
“Did something happen to him?” I said.
Cecily sighed. “I hope so,” she said. “But probably not. He tried to talk me into getting tattooed all over, and I was so in love I almost did. It would have taken two months, me and him alone in his parlor, his eyes only on me. And when I was covered neck to boot in tattoos we would go on the road on our own.”
I hated hearing she’d been in love once before me. But I only said, “I’d pay a buck to see that,” and I kissed her shoulder.
“We had quite an awful act in mind,” she said. “See, I’d pretend to be blind, and I would go on stage and tell the audience that I’d been nabbed by savages, and held captive, and tattooed, and then I would describe the tattoos, and how beautiful they were. Angels and doves and all that. But the audience would be horrified, because what was really on my skin would be fiercely ugly. Cross-eyed devils. A serpent with the mean eyes of a drunk. All the very worst things Mercury and me could think of. And after I left the stage, Mercury would get up there and beg the audience not to reveal the truth to me. ‘Let her at least have this illusion, folks,’ he’d say. And they’d be so full of pity, they’d give us all the change they could spare. And they would tell their friends about it, and they’d all line up to see how tragic I was.”
“That’s no kind of life,” I said.
Cecily leaned back in my arms, her hair sticky with paste. We stayed that way until daylight, very softly singing every song we knew with the word red in the lyrics.
Once the morning’s birds started up with their whistles, we followed the last instruction—a blast of sunlight to turn the hair hot. We grabbed our clothes and stepped lightly on the stairs to keep them from creaking. We crawled out the window of Cecily’s room to sit on the roof of the back porch, me in only my underdrawers, and Cecily in a kimono patterned with sea horses. As Cecily ate a freckled pear, I read to her from one of the pamphlets the Reverend A. Foltz had left behind: From Hell to Heaven, and How I Got There, about how he had become a lush at the age of eight.
“‘In early childhood,’” I read, mocking an evangelist’s vain humility, my fingers a deep bloodred that wouldn’t fade for days, “‘I struck off to swim in a dark sea of sorrow whose sad waves ever beat over me.’”
July 1898
19.
WITH CECILY IN MY LIFE, and my mind on fatherhood, I often thought about how little I had otherwise. I combed my hair and shaved my chin by looking in a little shard of broken mirror propped up on a windowsill. I don’t want to still be telling jokes at the Empress at thirty, I told my twenty-five-year-old self. And I could just see myself at thirty saying, I don’t want to still be at the Empress at forty. And if I was still at the Empress at forty, I’d say, Why didn’t you kill yourself at twenty-five?
I had long had ambitions for a larger theater, a bigger audience, perhaps traveling in a vaudeville circuit. But what if I left the stage? I wondered. What if I went to work in the offices of the Omaha World-Herald, to write obituaries and theater reviews? My letters to the editor were sometimes the liveliest pieces in the dailies. I’d recently read an article about the professional life of the literary hack—instead of writing correspondence, I could write articles for magazines, or poems and stories. I had it in my head that it would impress Cecily if I became dignified. If I became respectable, she would see how serious I was about her and Doxie.
“A hack can get twenty dollars for a thousand words,” I told Cecily. We were at the Fair after one of her afternoon rehearsals, sitting in the replica of a restaurant of a White Star luxury liner, the cardboard waves of a fake sea bobbing up and down on a motor outside the porthole. A string quartet strummed some slow sonata in the corner. We sat on a settee at a marble-top table, Doxie in my lap in a dress I’d bought her with a gingham apron. She toothlessly gnawed on my thumb. “It don’t even matter what the words are. Every word pays the same. I could easily write a thousand words about anything, even the proper knotting of neckties, which I don’t know much of anything about at all.”
We’d been served oysters soaked in a puddle of champagne in a seashell. Ce
cily swallowed an oyster and looked perplexed. “You’re going to help people knot their neckties?”
“Is that what I said?” I said.
“No,” she said, smiling. She dabbed at her mouth with a linen napkin. She nodded at my dummy, who sat propped up in a chair. “Look how sad you’ve made him.”
And he had indeed looked sadder somehow, ever since I’d started thinking about selling him to Wakefield. I’d kept the invitation to Wakefield’s masquerade ball all month long, having stuck it in the pocket of my winter coat hanging from a hook in my room. It was perhaps unseemly to be so attached to a doll. “He’ll be fine on his own,” I said. “He’s the one with all the talent.”
A waiter in a white jacket brought us the bottle of red wine we requested, and poured us each a glass. I asked him to bring more oysters. I was feeling flush already, with the thought of Wakefield’s money and the possibility of legitimate work. A professional hack could make upwards of six thousand a year, according to the article I’d read.
Cecily leaned back in the settee with her glass of wine, slouching in the silk pillows. She looked perplexed again, squinting, like she was figuring math in her head. “It just seeeeeeems to meeeeee,” she said, “well, how should I put this? It seems to me that if you quit ventriloquism to write about how to knot a necktie, you’ll soon enough be writing about how to knot your own noose.” She nodded her head sharply, pleased with what she’d come up with.
“I like that,” I said. “That’s clever. I’ll buy it from you. I pay a penny a word.”
“I’m quite serious,” she said.
“I won’t write about neckties then,” I said. I put my hand on her neck and gently strangled. “I was just using neckties as an example.”
“I was too,” she said, putting her hand over mine.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 16
