The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  After we kissed for a while, she started in with that giggling again. “Pissing in the ether bottle . . . a pet gopher pelt . . .” She wept and wheezed with the comedy of it all. “It’s not funny . . . it’s the worst kind of . . . tragic . . .”

  I lifted her dress to duck in beneath, and I lightly bit at the inside of her thigh, getting a shriek from her, in among the giggling. “Do you have a corset in here?” I squealed, in imitation of Wakefield’s sister, mixed in with a pig’s oink. “Are you even wearing any drawers?” Cecily laughed more and shooed me out from beneath her dress. I held the bottle of champagne to her lips, and we kissed awhile, and then we kissed some more, all night long. We fell asleep, and in the morning a stick of sunlight slanted in bright from where the curtain didn’t close all the way. The coach wasn’t moving. We had stopped at the very edge of the river. Had we gone out the wrong door, we would have fallen into the water. On the other side of the coach, in a thicket of grasses, the driver slept on a saddle blanket. We apologized and apologized, and begged and begged his forgiveness.

  “For goodness sake, why didn’t you wake us?” Cecily asked.

  “I hated to bother you,” he said.

  We helped him up. Cecily had had her dress off in the night, and it was now only partly back on. I suspected her immodesty in allowing the front of it to slip about her naked breasts, revealing a nipple or two once or twice, may have been for the benefit of the driver we’d so cruelly left to sleep on the ground.

  The driver drove Cecily to the boardinghouse, and me to the Empress. As I reached up to offer the driver a tip—which the driver refused—he handed down another invitation, with Wakefield’s same wax seal, as if the message had somehow reached us as we’d traveled by coach.

  Will you and Cecily please join me at my house above the lake for the fireworks on Independence Day? Please arrive in time for quince brandy and cake. Bring Oscar.

  20.

  WAKEFIELD LAKE was at the very end of a long, long streetcar ride. The tracks even passed the far ends of the Fair and kept going north. There was little out that way but a cemetery and a carriage factory and a few churches without steeples.

  But many of the people on the streetcar were dressed for the lake—or undressed rather, in bloomers and knee-length swimming costumes. There was no other reason to take the Blue Line this far north. It was as if Wakefield had arranged for the city to pay for the laying of tracks right to the front door of his country resort.

  Oscar sat on the bench next to me, and Doxie lay in my lap, her head on my knees. It never occurred to us anymore to tuck Doxie away. For all appearances, we were a family. We were a father and a mother and a baby girl. And I no longer worried at all about dropping Doxie or holding her wrong. I didn’t fret over carrying her or holding her, any more than I’d fret over carrying my own heart or my own kidney inside my bones.

  Cecily and I had decided we’d go to the lake in the late afternoon, and we would have our supper on the beach before heading up to the house to knock on Billy Wakefield’s door. After stepping off the streetcar, we followed the cobblestone lane past the luxury hotel painted pink and pale blue, past the day-trippers on the beach in their brightly striped swimming suits. The beach was crowded, and waltzing had already begun on the dance floor on the wharf, paper lanterns bobbing in the breeze. Fireworks were already crackling against the sun’s glare.

  The streetcar ride had taken longer than we’d thought it would, so we skipped the beach and began our walk up the winding path toward the Wakefield house situated atop a hill that overlooked the city. The house was also farther up and away than it seemed, far from anything at all, and it was sunset by the time we reached the locked gate. At the center of the gate was the gilded letter W in loopy cursive above a keyhole the size of my head. The lane behind the gate wound through a peach orchard.

  Had Billy Wakefield forgotten us? Cecily playfully shook the gate, rattling it, squeaking its hinges. “Let us in, let us in,” Cecily said, “or we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house down.”

  The sky was dark enough now for us to see the fireworks blast red, white, and blue and spider down and out, the lake waters mirroring all the shimmer.

  Mrs. Margaret had prepared us a picnic basket, despite the fact that she still disapproved of me. We spread a thin blanket over the hard dirt of the road to sit and wait and eat. Mrs. Margaret had packed a tin of walnuts, some candied dates, a jar of pears in syrup, some bread and honey. Wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied over with twine was a boiled chicken.

  Night fell, and I held Cecily in my arms, and Cecily held Doxie in hers, as I leaned back against the stone wall of the estate. We dropped off to sleep, despite the endless crackling of the fireworks. But we didn’t sleep long, only just long enough for me to dream that Cecily and I sat there in that very same spot, on that very same picnic, while we ate deviled swan’s eggs, and a fire in the peach orchard raged out of control behind us.

  We woke to the sound of the gate screeching open on its hinges. “Oh, for goodness sake, there you are,” Wakefield’s sister said, exasperated. “Gather your things now, we’ll go on up. Hurry, hurry, hurry, now.” She kept her piglet on a leash tied to her wrist, and it galloped toward our picnic, trampling on our apple cores and empty tins, getting its hooves caught up in the rib cage of our chicken bones. Wakefield’s sister yanked on the leash and scolded the pig. She stood smiling impatiently, bouncing on her feet, as we wrapped the food that remained and folded the blanket.

  “Please, please,” she said, “hurry, hurry, rush, rush.” We moved too slowly for her, and she began to help us, grabbing at our cups and dishes, and Doxie’s bottle, and stuffing them in our basket. She picked up Oscar and slung him over her shoulder. “Not the time to dawdle,” she said. Once everything was gathered, she rushed up the path, her heels on the dirt clip-clopping in rhythm with the pig’s feet.

  “Shouldn’t we close the gate?” I called to her. I carried Doxie, and Cecily carried the basket.

  “No, no, no,” she said, barely glancing back, waving us on. “Leave it, leave it. Leave the gate.” Her hasty state made Cecily and me feel the need to dash. We didn’t know the winding path, so we listened to the woman’s heels, and the piglet’s hooves, though they stepped along so quickly up the steep hill, and around the madman turns of the road, we couldn’t keep close. Wakefield’s sister began to whistle a bunch of notes with no tune, and the whistling grew fainter and fainter as we slipped farther and farther behind. It was as if I were still in the dream, but instead of wildfire, we fought a river’s current.

  “Why are we running ourselves ragged?” Cecily asked me, but she likely knew I had no answer.

  Finally, panting, our sides splitting with ache, we reached that strange house with no corners. Wakefield House seemed to be all turrets and silos and wrought-iron spires, with pointed roofs like witches’ hats. It looked as if it might have no corners at all but for the three square chimneys that rose to different heights. A porch wrapped all around the front of the house, curving around its turns.

  The lamplight from the parlor spilled out onto the empty lawn, but our shadows were somehow cast ahead of us. Our shadows slipped through the front door before we reached the porch steps.

  The sister propped Oscar up in a chair in the hallway, scooped the piglet into her arms, and beckoned us forward, her own various shadows dancing and sparring with one another, each cast by one of the many lamps and candles lit throughout the house. The house was noisy with light, if such a thing could be said. Even if the rounds of the house had had corners, there wouldn’t have been a dark one to hide in.

  I nearly made my wildfire dream come true when I bumped into a hall table and toppled a candelabra. Cecily rushed to gather the candles that rolled across the carpets. We then walked slowly down the hallway, holding hands, following all those chaotic shadows that the sister and the piglet cast behind them. Now that we weren’t running, and the blood wasn’t pumping so loudly through our
ears, or our feet stamping against the wood floor, we could hear the house roaring. And the farther we went down the hall, the louder the roaring grew, and we could feel the floorboards rattling under our feet. We could see the tapping of the picture frames against the wall. A blue china panther, crouched to prowl, jiggled along a tabletop and right over the edge. We heard it shatter in our path.

  The sister’s shadows had vanished, so we followed the noise now, and we found our way into a conservatory of sorts, a parlor of glass walls, a glass roof slanting overhead. French doors open wide swung slightly on their hinges, as sheets of music from the grand piano were blown about, among leaves and flower petals that had been shaken from the branches and stems of the many plants that grew there in pots and vases.

  We weren’t sure what we were seeing when we looked out the French doors and through the glass walls, but whatever it was began to thump my heart to a different beat. I kept back, to keep Doxie from the thick of it, but Cecily crept forward.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE FRENCH DOORS was a lawn, and at the center of the lawn, a cyclone rose. It was only as tall as the house, and only as thick as a coffee can, the very top of it opening wide into a funnel that dissolved into the gray night above, unattached to any cloud. Except for all the violent spin at the heart of it, it didn’t move—the tip of it remained inside a box attached to pipes. At first I’d foolishly assumed that the wild thing had been caught, the box and pipes part of the rich man’s fancy tornado trap—in Nebraska, in summer, tornados seemed to touch the earth like demons dropping down from heaven, mindful, spirited.

  But then I saw that the pipes led to more machinery, to what looked like a giant fireplace bellows pumped up and down by the efforts of the old servant I’d met weeks before—he’d been the one to bring me the invitation to the masquerade ball. The man pushed down on the handle with all his might, leaning all his meager weight into it, then he pulled the handle up, nearly knocking himself over every time. Up and down, up and down he went, and the cyclone spun and corkscrewed, knotting and unknotting itself.

  “Get as close as you dare!” Billy Wakefield shouted above the rumbling. He leaned back from the wind. His hair had come loose from its part, and the wind blew it across his cheeks. “But don’t get too close! It’s liable to rip the tongue right out of your head.”

  And I believed it. I could feel the power of it enter my mouth and thunder around inside me, like it was loosening my guts from my bones. I held Doxie tighter and stepped backward.

  But Cecily stepped closer, even as she leaned away, pushing her feet into the earth, digging her heels in good. The wind puffed up her shirtwaist, billowing her sleeves like balloons, her skirt flapping. It sucked the pins from her hair, and her curls flowed loose in front of her. She held out her arms, her fingers spread out like a conjurer’s, and I swore I could see little bolts of silver lightning snapping from her fingertips.

  And she allowed that wind to pull her forward one fraction of an inch too far.

  All that came next came quicker than half a blink, but it was just enough time for my mind’s eye to see the end of everything. When Cecily lost her footing, it was as if she turned to air, so fast was she snatched away by the cyclone.

  What I saw next didn’t happen at all. My fear played out before me so vividly, that I sometimes still see her as she never was. I see her carried up through the funnel and shot out the top. I see her waltzing through the night, like the dancer on wires she was. I see her flung to the earth to be broken to pieces.

  But all the time he’d toyed with the wind, Billy Wakefield had kept a watchful eye. The tip of his boot was at a switch, and with a quick flick of his toe, nature was defeated. The twister stopped twisting, and when a twister don’t twist, there’s nothing left of it. Cecily was caught up in the cyclone barely at all, only enough to give her a few quick turns, lift her off the ground a few feet, and send her stumbling across the lawn to collapse in a patch of rosebushes.

  I ran forward, holding Doxie near, cradling her head in my hand. I stepped over and across the metal cage that had held the cyclone. Inside the cage were the slowing blades of an electric fan that had helped to keep the wind spinning.

  We all rushed to Cecily, even the old servant, and we carefully unpinned her from the thorns that had snagged at her clothes and scratched her skin.

  “Say something,” I said, looking into her eyes, putting my thumb to a scratch on her cheek.

  “Stir up the storm again,” she said.

  • • •

  ATOP A TABLE IN A ROOM that Billy Wakefield called his library were science books open to pages of formulas and diagrams. Wakefield unrolled a scroll of blueprints and weighted the corners with brass owls. He attempted to explain to me the mechanics and chemical reactions that made his cyclone tick—something to do with dry ice and vortexes. The tornado was to play a starring role in Heart of the White City, if he could manage to contain its rage.

  I tried to follow it all, but I was feeling like my head was filled with bees. The fast pumping of my blood—from the running uphill and from the fear—and a touch of intoxication from the reek of whatever magic smoke fueled the tornado made me blissful and mindless.

  All I really wanted to do was remind myself, over and over, that Cecily was alive.

  “What would have happened if you hadn’t shut the machine off?” I asked. I realized this was the first I’d seen of Wakefield’s whole face, when it wasn’t half hidden by masks or goggles. I looked for scars but saw none. I was caught by his eyes, which were somehow quite warm and gentle despite their color of fog.

  I swished the quince brandy around in the bottom of my snifter like I’d seen men do. Cecily reclined on the leather sofa, Doxie on the cushion next to her jabbering and grabbing at her own toes. Wakefield’s sister sat perched on a footstool, dabbing some kind of ointment on Cecily’s cuts, something she had muddled together with a mortar and pestle.

  “But I did shut the machine off,” he said.

  “But what if you didn’t?”

  “But I did, is what I’m saying.”

  “And what I’m saying is what if you didn’t?” I said.

  Wakefield’s sister sighed and spoke up without looking away from Cecily’s minor wounds. “Boys, boys, it’s very simple,” she said. “It would either have twisted her poor little neck or rocked her brain around in her skull until it snapped it from its stem.”

  “Or,” Wakefield continued, “she would have floated to the top of the cyclone like a champagne bubble.” The old man who had pumped the bellows of the cyclone machine refilled Wakefield’s snifter. “And,” Wakefield added, “she would have dropped into my arms, giggling.”

  When the sister finished spooning the pulp onto Cecily’s skin, she set the bowl on a bookshelf and picked up her snifter. Doxie had begun to fuss, so Cecily took her into her arms. As she kissed Doxie’s head, Cecily said to the woman, “You never did tell us your name, I don’t think.” She held the back of her hand to her mouth to lick at the medicine, then let Doxie lick some too.

  “Oh I didn’t? Oh, it’s just the same as his.” The sister nodded toward Billy. I dropped into the sofa next to Cecily and I took her hand in mine. I held it to my lips to taste the medicine myself. It tasted of apricot and vinegar, with some kind of mint vapor, and even just having it at the tip of my tongue sent a chill through my snout and down my throat in a sharp swallow.

  “The same?” Cecily said.

  “He’s Billy Wakefield with a y,” the sister said, “and I’m Billie Wakefield with an ie. He’s William. I’m Wilhelmina.”

  “You two don’t look so much alike,” I said.

  “Oh, we don’t?” said Billie with an ie. “Are you sure? Well, that’s strange. I always thought we did.” She pulled down her sleeve to cover her hand and held out a silver spoon and clawed at the air with it. “Now do I look like Billy?” she said.

  “Not in front of the children, Pickle,” Billy said. “They aren’t accustome
d to your ugly wit.” Cecily and I paused, but then we laughed a little, because they weren’t truly being cruel to each other. We both slouched deeper into the sofa cushions, and I daresay we could’ve stayed there for days. Wakefield was a man I could look up to. He was likely in his forties, and I admired him and his inventions, his novelty tornados, his giant miniature battleships. For him, entertainment was an expensive hobby, not a means of living. He could devote himself to his imagination.

  And I admired the clutter of his crooked library—though the walls were curved like all the other walls of the strange house, the bookcases weren’t. The bookcases, all different widths and heights, the tops of them stacked with even more books, overlapped in places, as if they’d been shaken away from the wall by an earthquake. And I could tell the books were read, not just collected, by the way they were shoved onto the shelves when not another book could possibly fit. Bookmarks and strings poked out the tops of them. Their pages were torn and stuffed back in, their covers were warped from having been left out in the rain. And the room had that rich, dusty, sweet smell of old pages constantly fluttered open, that cloud of vanilla and tobacco that watered your eyes.

  “You know what you oughta do?” I said, feeling a little drunk. The old man had refilled my snifter too, and I’d shot the brandy back in one swift gulp. “You oughta put your cyclone in its own booth on the midway. Cecily could learn her way around it. She could be the star. The Girl Caught in the Tornado. She would get swept up in it and dance her way right back out of it.” Of course I never wanted Cecily within two steps of that tornado ever again, but I was happy I’d suggested it, as it seemed to please Cecily to picture herself in such a show. With Doxie nestled in the crook of her arm, Cecily looked up and off, the snifter of brandy at her lips.

  “You’re a natural-born humbug artist,” Billy Wakefield said. He sat in a wing chair by the fireplace. “Speaking of that,” he said, “let’s talk about Oscar.”