“Why would I hang myself,” I said, “if I was happier than I’ve ever been? I’d be taking good care of you and Doxie.”
“And, see, that’s what troubles me and ol’ Dox,” she said. “We don’t like the sound of that at all. If I left the stage for you, I’d hate you with all my heart eventually.”
“How could I ever hate the two of you,” I said. I moved my hand up to brush a few strands of hair from her cheek. “And how could you ever hate me?”
“Let’s not try to find out,” she said sternly.
• • •
SO I PROMISED CECILY I’d not sell Oscar at the masquerade ball, and it was a promise that was easy to keep. I didn’t want to part with him. But Cecily insisted we all go to the ball nonetheless. She had felt some affection toward Wakefield ever since the auditions, when he’d stood to give her advice. Though he hadn’t given her the lead, he had seemed to believe, for those few moments at least, she might be perfect for the part. And she’d been flattered to end up with any role at all.
August fled to the Indian camp to buy feathers and ribbons for masks he would make us of satin and paper. And when the midway closed for the night, we rifled through the trunks in the wagon of the Silk & Sawdust Players parked behind the Chamber of Horrors. The building still seemed to smoke, casting a gray haze against the night, though the fire had been out for days and days. In the light of an oil lamp, we tried on costumes—all of us but Rosie, who would only go so far as to tie a bandana over his mouth, bandit-style.
“You’re dancing on the graves of dead soldiers,” he grumbled, not amused by Wakefield’s plans to sink a toy battleship in the lagoon. Typically I’d join Rosie in his indignation, but I’d begun to think of myself as a man who’d come into some luck. And as a man of some luck, I’d come to think that luck might suit me after all.
Josephine, Rosie’s ragtime girlfriend, wore Cecily’s Marie Antoinette costume, the wig still collapsed and snarly from the storm of early June, the skirts still dirty and snagged. August tied a thin red ribbon around Josephine’s throat.
“All the women of France wore red ribbons around their necks,” he said, “after Marie Antoinette lost her head.”
Pearl wore Chinese pajamas she bought off a man in the fan-tan den—roomy trousers and a long jacket patterned with golden tigers.
And Cecily, of course, was the most smashing of all, dressed as the enemy. She put on a red gown with pleats of yellow stripes, so when she walked she seemed to be waving the Spanish flag. She carried a spindly fan that looked a little war-battered itself, some of the torn black lace hanging loose from the fan’s ivory ribs. August stuck a tall comb into the top of her hair and draped from it a black veil that fell over her shoulders and down her back. She wore no mask but pinned the veil up to cover her face so only her eyes were showing.
We could hear the party long before we reached it, and we picked up our step to get there quicker. From atop the roof, a man with a high-pitched voice started the evening off by singing the tune “After the Ball” into a speaking horn, and his warbling echoed across the lagoon. We sang along and danced on the bricks on our way across the Grand Court. August tossed himself into my arms for a spin, in a costume that he called Oscar Wilde as Warrior. It consisted of a linen suit coat and vest on top, and a buckskin kilt and knee-high moccasins below. Through the buttonhole of his lapel he’d stuck the thick stem of a sunflower. He’d bought the kilt and moccasins, and his mask shaped like the snout of a mountain lion, from an Apache staying in the Indian camp.
“Don’t tell anybody who you’re supposed to be,” I whispered in his ear.
“People dress up like Wilde for fancy-dress parties all the time,” he whispered back.
“Not since he went to jail,” I said, my voice still kept low. “What’d they call it?”
“Gross indecency,” August said, not whispering anymore, practically shouting it, as he danced away from me and toward Rosie. Rosie comically swayed and dodged but nonetheless flirted back, bumping his hip against August’s.
“Are you drunk?” Rosie said.
“No,” he said, as he ran a peacock feather along his own cheek. “Only happy. We should all be more like Oscar Wilde. Did you know that in prison he campaigned for the release of some children who’d been jailed simply for poaching rabbits?”
“Do you even listen to yourself?” I scolded. “Prison. He’s in prison.” But August only raced ahead toward the stairs that spiraled up the side of the Fine Arts Building. He was no innocent, but he worried me. His longing for love, and his gentle heart, would lead him into enough trouble and pain. But if he was ever locked away in a cage, he’d die in a day.
No one ever asked to see my letter of invitation, though I had it at the ready the very second I stepped onto the roof and into the crowd. All day long I’d practiced my best devil-may-care, in hopes of impressing the rich man with my indifference. But once I got into the thick of the circus, I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t intimidated. I held the invitation in my fist, prepared for someone to call me a fraud and rustle me out and away.
There was a maharajah who’d likely blackened his face with burned cork, his turban strung with rubies and sapphires. A Cleopatra had greased-up catlike eyes and a live snake coiled up her arm, its head pinched between her fingers and its forked tongue darting. There was a chimney sweep, a Humpty Dumpty in an enormous papier-mâché egg, a fisher maid with strings of wooden fish dangling from her shoulders. There were men as women, and women as men, and men and women as children.
“The statues are alive,” Cecily whispered in my ear, and it was so; these weren’t plaster of Paris nudes, but actors and actresses in little more than loincloths, unflinching on pedestals, their every inch of skin powdered white. Every now and again they’d change their pose, slow and smooth and graceful, but otherwise remained as still as marble.
August had made me a mask of raven’s feathers, and I dressed like Oscar, in a pair of striped pants and a dotted vest. Oscar hung off my back, a mask across his eyes too—a mask of tiny feathers August had collected from the bottom of the canaries’ cage in the aviary in the Agriculture Building.
As we moved through the crowd, Cecily’s hand in mine, I looked for Wakefield. A harlequin on stilts bumped into me, and his marionette knocked off my derby with a brickbat, as he high-stepped through the crowd. Meanwhile, I rapped my ankle against the tiny Chiquita, the “Living Doll” who stood no taller than a goose.
“Knock into me again,” she shouted up, “and I blow out your kneecap.” She flashed me the pearl-handled pistol tucked into the cleavage of her low-cut ball gown of velvet. I had no reason to think it an idle threat. The ball seemed to have no rules. The roof was frantic with freaks and drunks, opium eaters and cocaine inebriates, men and women swapping pipes and spoons, and snorting from snuff bottles.
A troop of men were dressed in the khakis and neckerchiefs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, those cowboys who had galloped into Cuba to chase out the Spanish. They offered us Havana cigars, cut the tips, and lit a match. Cecily took one too, but after the first few puffs she felt a little queasy.
“Remember the Maine!” a sailor shouted over and over as he maneuvered through the crowd with a torch. We then all moved to the front of the roof to see the toy battleship chug through the lagoon.
“There was no attack of the battleship Maine,” Rosie said, returning to his disgust. He tossed an empty whiskey bottle over the side of the roof to break on the bricks below. “It blew up on its own.” Those around us shushed him and glared, but his protest only grew louder. “There’s all kinds of proof. The furnace was too close to the explosives. The Spanish did not torpedo our boat in the Havana harbor!” And with that, he got the fight he wanted. A man dressed as Gretel, in a blond wig and dirndl with low neckline, with candied cherries over his nipples, swung at Rosie and missed. Rosie swung back, and he missed too. A few ladies shrieked, men bellowed, and then the toy battleship exploded, smoke rose, debris flew, and
the boat sank into the lagoon in flames.
• • •
WE ALL LINGERED until long after the party wound down, the roof mostly emptied of its revelers, the floor littered with feathers and confetti. As we headed toward the stairs, with intentions of going to a saloon in full costume, Wakefield called after me.
“Did you enjoy the Carnival, Ferret?” he said.
Cecily and I let the others leave without us, and we walked to where Wakefield stood, at the edge of the roof, where he looked out on the debris in the lagoon. He wore a tuxedo, but his attire was white where it should be black, and black where it should be white. He carried a cane of onyx—its brass handle the head of a gryphon—but he didn’t lean on the cane at all. Instead he simply tap, tap, tapped at the floor, clicking out a little rhythm.
“I did,” I said, “Mr. Wakefield.”
“Call me Billy,” he said. His voice was muffled by his mask, a papier-mâché skull that covered every inch of his face. He held a cigar between the silver bones of his fingers, and he put the cigar to a hole in the skull’s toothy grin to smoke.
“And you’re Mrs. Wakefield?” I asked the woman with the piglet, who’d stepped up to him. Her eye mask of purple feathers was pushed up off her face and into her girlish ringlets of black hair.
“Mrs. . . . ?” she said, exaggerating her shock, with a laugh that echoed across the rooftop. “Mrs. Wakefield? I’m his sister. Can’t you see we’re twins?” But Wakefield stayed behind his skull.
“Very pleasant to make your acquaintance,” I said. “And this is Cecily.”
Billy Wakefield held his metal hand out, and Cecily hesitated, unsure what to do. She then put her hand in his, and he held it there for a moment.
“Cecily’s in Heart of the White City,” I said. “She plays a factory girl . . . and a fire victim . . . and, um . . .”
“Dance hall girl,” Cecily added. “And a Ferris wheel girl.”
“Oh?” he said, as if he didn’t recall.
At the same time, the woman who wasn’t Mrs. Wakefield leaned in toward me, squinting to see through my raven feather mask. “Your eyes,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a blue in an eye. Billy, his eyes are the blue of that stone scarab I bought in Cairo. At that bazaar.”
“Lapis lazuli,” Billy Wakefield mumbled.
His sister grinned wide as she pet the squirming piglet in her arms. “I shall dig out your eyes, and wear them as earbobs!”
Cecily and I chuckled but only politely. We weren’t quite sure if she meant to be funny.
“I’d like to see your act,” Billy Wakefield said. “You’ll take the stage, won’t you? Tell us a few jokes?”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t . . . I’m not . . . I couldn’t . . .”
Billy Wakefield reached into his coat and took from it a golden dragon’s head—the jaw was on a hinge, and its diamond-studded teeth clenched down on a fat mouthful of folded bills. He peeled off from that wad of cash more money than I’d expected to make all summer on the midway. I again refused, just to be coaxed and convinced, and he only peeled off more. I then took the money. I’d actually had no intention at all of leaving without that pretty payday.
“It would be a great honor,” Wakefield said. “I understand you were an apprentice to Crowe, the master ventriloquist.”
“And how’d you come to know that, sir?” I asked.
Wakefield shrugged one shoulder, as if to say, I know all, of course.
Wakefield’s sister complimented Cecily on her dress, but then peered at the front of it, puzzled. “Do you even have a corset on, in under there?”
“I don’t always wear one,” Cecily said.
“You’re a revolutionary!” she exclaimed, taking Cecily by the arm and leading her toward the rooftop’s stage, where some servants unfolded folding chairs for one another. “Not so long ago, if you went without a corset, we all thought you were a whore.”
“Better they think me a whore,” Cecily said, “than an actress,” and Wakefield’s sister let off another echoing laugh.
“Can we be best friends, my love?” the sister said.
Billy Wakefield then took my arm, and we followed the two of them. “I used to see Crowe, when I was a boy, on the stage of the Eden Musee,” he said. The Eden Musee had been a dime museum downtown that had featured oddities and cheap acts before burning to the ground one winter. Wakefield’s voice was so soft, so tucked away in the skeleton mask, I had to tilt my head toward him to listen close. “His puppet seemed so alive, you so much wanted it to truly live. I so wished for the puppet to just one day jump off his knee and stroll around on its own. It broke my heart that he didn’t exist. I could even somehow convince myself that he did indeed live, that he was real, that it would be entirely illogical for him to be only a puppet. Crowe’s lips didn’t move, and the puppet’s voice wasn’t Crowe’s voice at all! And the puppet could speak while Crowe gargled brandy! And Crowe and the puppet could sing the same song at the same time! It got so that I was having nightmares—I would sometimes dream I awoke locked in the box where the puppet was kept.”
No one had spoken to me of my dear old Crowe for so long, I felt a little catch in my gullet. “Crowe had magic,” I said. “I only know tricks.” I could only dream of my dummy giving a boy such nightmares.
We walked up to the stage where the band had played. I took a seat on the piano bench for an audience that grew only slightly—one of the statues, a burly Hercules who now wore a robe over his powdered skin, stretched out in a chair in the front row. A few of the waiters joined us, as did the harlequin now without stilts, and an ancient old cuss with a buggy whip.
I froze. Not a funny word came to mind. All the jokes I’d told on the midway, or on the stage of the Empress, seemed worth even less than the pennies I’d made from them. I sat there, everyone staring, Oscar silent on my knee. If I dared to open the dummy’s mouth, Wakefield would know, right away, he’d paid me too much.
I’d never had a minute of stage fright in my life—all fear of performance had been scared out of me as a waif when I’d had to steal to keep from getting beaten. I’d always had to be friendly, to gain the confidence of whoever I wanted to sidle up to and thieve. I had begged, I’d danced, I’d sung all the most popular songs. I’d been every bit as real and magic as Crowe’s dummy.
And that’s what Oscar started telling my rooftop audience. I opened his mouth and he spilled my guts. “He had a little groundhog pelt for a pet,” Oscar said, mocking my poverty, looking up at me askance. I didn’t even try to keep my lips still. “He kept it in a rusty birdcage and pretended to feed it grasshopper legs.” I paused for the audience’s nervous twittering. “He used a fish skeleton as a hair comb, and he greased down his cowlick with the mush of a rotten peach, and by the time he got to the whorehouse to beg for alms, his head was swarming with bluebottles.”
At first, I seemed to only be making everyone unhappy. Though his skull mask still hid his face away, Wakefield nonetheless looked mirthless, sitting stone-still, his silver hand folded around the head of his cane in front of him. His sister, so full of laughter only minutes before, only smiled a tight smile as she petted her piglet.
“He’s so poor,” Oscar said of me, “he’s thinking of selling his eyeballs for earbobs.” At that, the sister sneered, clucked her tongue with offense, and whispered loudly to Billy Wakefield, “That was my joke.” Billy Wakefield nodded with impatience.
Just when it seemed I might be dragged out and lynched, Cecily saved my neck. She started giggling. A little tee-hee-hee at first. A little pffft between her puckered lips. A little squeal, a little “oh!” And the giggling grew. And grew. A bubbling up of gentle laughs that shook her shoulders and gave her hiccups. And she couldn’t stop. She doubled over. She threw her head back. Even when she wheezed and snorted, I’d never heard anything more like music from heaven. And there was nothing fake about it. The poor thing was a genuine mess. I had her in stitches.
“Ferret bought old empty et
her tins from an addict, then sold them back to him full of piss at double the price!” Oscar said.
Cecily held both her hands tight to her mouth, but that only worsened her convulsions. She wept and sniffled. And it was infectious, of course. It was a delight to see someone so pretty so off her head. And once the others started laughing at her, they got to laughing at me too, even the old codger with the buggy whip. Suddenly, Oscar couldn’t utter an unfunny thing.
• • •
AFTER I FINISHED with the act, I suspected Billy Wakefield would want us gentlemen to engage in some buying and selling of my little dummy’s soul, but it turned out he didn’t want to talk business. He and his sister weighed Cecily and me down with the party’s picked-over remains: a half-empty box of candied plums, a few half-drunk bottles of champagne, a half-eaten fairy cake. Billy Wakefield tucked a half-smoked cigar in my inside suit pocket. “It’s half gone,” he said, “but half a Havana is better than none. Smoke it with this,” and he shoved into my arms a bottle of cognac that had only a few gulps left swirling around at the bottom of it.
Billy told the man with the buggy whip to take Cecily and me anywhere we wanted to go in the private coach, even if it was just to circle the block for hours.
And that’s practically what we did. Cecily and I got in the coach and closed the curtains after instructing the driver to drive nowhere in particular. I finished off the cognac and studied the French words on the label. I couldn’t help but think I’d earned Wakefield’s respect at the expense of my dignity. Though my boyhood had not been quite as miserable as I’d portrayed, I’d been every bit as poor. I’d bared my soul for the rich man’s amusement.
“Was I really all that funny?” I asked Cecily, as I unwrapped the tissue from a plum to tear it up and feed it to her.
“Yes, but it breaks my heart,” she said, putting her hand to her chest, “to think of you as that little boy.” She took my hand to lick the plum’s honey from my fingertips.
“I’m glad Doxie has you,” I said. I leaned forward to kiss her, tasting the sugar on her lips.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 17
