The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

A FEW DAYS LATER August and Pearl returned, and this time they brought Rosie. Rosie wasn’t the type to go visiting, and the massive bulk of him shrunk the room. The crystals of the lampshade jingled as he walked across the floor. He bumped his head on the paper lantern that hung from the ceiling. As he sat on the overturned washtub, we weren’t so much intimidated as confused by the sight of him making a social gesture. August made us all tea, and the cup, tiny in Rosie’s fingers, seemed it might shatter with his every slurping sip.

  August called the tea scandal water, as tea parties were typically circles of gossip. “Rosie has a few snatches of gossip himself,” August said.

  “You’re fueling the war with those patent medicines,” Rosie said.

  Cecily wore a kimono, her hair fastened up with a whalebone comb decorated with a constellation of little gold stars. She sat on the edge of the bed drinking her tea, facing the wall, her back to all of us. “I quit taking the medicine . . . for the most part,” she said, with some irritation. “I just endure the pain.”

  “That’s good,” Rosie said. “If it’s a pain you can live with, then you don’t need to kill it, do you?” Cecily only shrugged. “The government put a special tax on those medicines that advertise in the paper, you know,” he said, the teacup held near his chest, one pinky out. “The nostrum tax. For the war. They tax all the cheap medicines that you get from any druggist. The poor don’t have any doctors, so we buy the celery tonic that’s half water and half liquor, or something worse, to keep us wanting it. It costs fifteen cents to make and we buy it for a dollar. And since the government needs the money, they’ll approve any drug. And the newspapers get rich off the advertising. And we all get poorer, because we’re paying for the battleships that’ll blow up in the harbors.”

  Cecily set her cup in her saucer and leaned over to place the saucer on the desk, next to my typewriter. She stood up. As she spoke, she looked down to smooth out the wrinkles of her kimono, pretending to be perfectly calm. “So my headaches are sinking our ships, is what you’re telling me,” she said.

  “And maiming our soldiers,” Rosie said. “Then they come home. They can’t work. They can’t afford doctors. And they start taking the tonics too. Even the whiskey’s medicinal these days.”

  I stood, and I took Rosie’s teacup from him, and August’s. “Maybe you should go,” I said, though it felt cruel to be dismissive. Rosie only wanted to see Cecily feel better. He loved us. And I could see the line of logic Rosie followed. I just didn’t think there was any hope of it helping. “Cecily’s headaches aren’t political,” I said. I cast a glance at Pearl then too, so she knew we wouldn’t need medical advice from her women’s societies either.

  “But they are political,” Rosie said. He put on his hat and walked toward the door. “The more headache medicine you take, the more headaches you get. And then you take more medicine.”

  “Oh, Rosie,” Cecily said, suddenly smiling, chipper. She rolled her eyes to mock his seriousness and stood on her toes to kiss Rosie on the cheek. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be sure to write President McKinley and insist he stop banging around in my head.”

  Her good-byes were cheerful then, with kisses all around. But after they all left, Cecily’s smile dropped, and she leaned back against the door. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. I walked up to her and kissed her. “Ignore Rosie,” I said. “He’s been angry for years. The Board of Health chased him out of his own tar-paper hut down by the river bottoms. They were afraid all the squatters living there would bring back the cholera. And they were probably right. So what does he know?”

  And though Cecily left the boardinghouse for rehearsals every day that week, I became doubtful she ever took the stage. She wore a perfume I’d never smelled before, not the same sweet pea scent I’d grown to love but something spiced, musky, and when I asked her about it, she said she’d simply stopped at the druggist on her way to the theater and treated herself. I became suspicious of the slightest things—a sprig of wool violets stuck into the knot of her hair, a blush of pink rouge on her cheeks. And she would claim to buy herself more than just new perfume—she had charms on a bracelet, such as a little golden Buddha with a tiny glass diamond set in his belly.

  She said she’d stopped at Brandeis for the reindeer-skin driving gloves she brought home one evening.

  “But you have nothing to drive,” I said.

  “You don’t have to drive anything to have driving gloves,” she said.

  At the end of the week, we left Doxie with the landlady and I bought Cecily dinner at Bridenbecker’s, a restaurant on Farnam Street. The proprietors listed their menu on a chalkboard (pig’s head, pig’s tongue, pig’s tail, pig’s feet, fried halibut, coffee jelly in cream, Charlotte russe) and a fiddler played in the corner, mostly hidden by beer casks. I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. On her bracelet was a frog set with glass emeralds. I flipped the frog over with my thumb, and on the frog’s golden underbelly, I saw the initials W.W. The letters were minuscule, practically invisible, but they were somehow as shocking, as bold, as if Wakefield had carved his bloody initials into her flesh.

  My hand began to shake. It wasn’t jealousy firing up through me. It was fear. It was the same worry I’d had over Cecily’s headaches—his initials on her wrist might as well have been a black spot of cancer. I felt her slipping away from me, like a breath I couldn’t catch.

  Cecily gave my hand a squeeze, gripping my hand tighter. “Billy gave that to me,” she said, without even a flinch of shame.

  “It must be real emeralds then,” I said, my stomach churning.

  “Oh not at all,” she said. She pulled her hand away, and she touched at the frog. “I wouldn’t have accepted it if it was anything of worth. He just gave it to me as a joke. I told him how I’d taken ballet lessons as a girl, and how I’d been in a troupe that was terribly untalented. ‘It was a real frog salad,’ I said. And he thought it was funny, my calling it that. And the next day he brought me this.”

  “I didn’t know you were in a ballet,” I said. “Do you speak to Wakefield often?”

  Cecily sighed. “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  “But you just said you talked to him one day, and he gave you a gift the next. That’s not ‘not at all.’” She glared at me, rolled her eyes, and took a sip of wine. “Do you talk to him every day? In passing? Do you sit down together?”

  Cecily leaned over, breathing through her nose. She grit her teeth and spoke slowly. “We . . . exchange . . . pleasantries,” she seethed. Then she said, “Your jealousy is insulting.”

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “Why do you talk to him? About ballet? About frogs? Or anything? And if you just exchange pleasantries, why would he give you a gift? With his initials on it?”

  “I don’t know, Ferret,” she said. “He probably gives gifts engraved with his initials to everybody he sees. You know how the rich are. They think they’re royalty. We’re all supposed to be tickled by the attention.” She smiled, and took my hand again. She looked me in the eyes. “I have a confession,” she said. “He’s been giving me something new. A headache powder. I’ve been taking it, and it’s been working. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. But I’m so relieved. It’s made all the difference. And it’s not like the patent medicines Rosie and August were talking about. You can’t even buy it at the druggist. And doctors around here don’t know anything about it. It comes from a very esteemed doctor in New York City.” She took her hand away and took another drink of her wine. “So that’s why I accepted a bauble from Billy Wakefield. To be polite.”

  “How much of the powder do you take?” I said. “How often do you take it?”

  My questions, or the brusque way I asked them, made Cecily angry again, and she refused to answer. Then she said, “Billy struggled a great deal with his wife’s illness. He has insights.”

  “What do you know about his wife?” I said. “And what makes you think this is an illness? D
o you think you’re ill?”

  “For God’s sake, Ferret,” she said. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t tell me I’m well when I’m not. Don’t patronize me. I have to take these things seriously. You don’t know what it’s like. I have a child to look after.”

  “No, I don’t know what it’s like,” I mumbled.

  Cecily sighed, tilted her head. She realized she’d upset me, but she continued. “How would you know?” she said, pitying.

  “Let’s leave,” I said.

  “Our food’s coming,” she said.

  “No, I mean, let’s leave Omaha,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “To where, Ferret?” she said, with a hiss of spite. “Where are we going?”

  I took her hand again. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “Of course, because nothing matters to you,” she said. “We could live our whole lives in that boardinghouse, never taking a step outside, and you’d be perfectly happy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”

  “And what happens when you stop loving me? Then what will we have?”

  “I could never stop loving you,” I said.

  “Your romance is sweet,” she said. “But you talk like a—a child.” She clucked her tongue. She shrugged her shoulders. “You’re a child.” She looked down at our hands, and she stroked my palm with her thumb. “Billy says you don’t want me to get well. He says you want to keep me sick.”

  I snapped my hand back. I dropped my fist against the table, rattling the silverware. I yelled. “Nobody cares what Billy says,” I said. I then grabbed Cecily’s wrist, pinched the frog between my fingers, and wrenched the charm free from the bracelet. I threw it across the restaurant, above the heads of the other diners.

  I regretted my rage even before I looked to see Cecily so startled. She held her hand to her mouth, and her face was deep red. She trembled. She wept. I began to apologize, to beg her forgiveness, but she stood from the table to leave. I threw some money on the tabletop just as our dinner arrived.

  I followed her to the boardinghouse, staying a few steps back. We didn’t speak. We returned to the room together, and I paid the landlady who’d sat next to Doxie’s crib reading a novel by lamplight. When the woman left, I shut the door, and Cecily and I undressed in a silence that pressed against me, that stilled the air in the room. I worried that every second that passed gave her more time to consider my wretchedness, my worthlessness. But I feared that anything I said—even I’m sorry, even I love you—would just be more evidence of my ignorance. Or worse, would lead to some truth she was too afraid to tell me, some twist ending she was waiting to reveal.

  We put out the lights and got into bed. She turned onto her side, her back to me. That awful silence kept me from sleeping. Then I heard a whimper, and I looked over to see her sobs gently shaking her. I stroked her arm, her shoulder. I got up on one elbow to speak into her ear. “I love you so much,” I said. “I never want to lose you.”

  She turned to me and put her arm around my shoulder. “You can’t ever leave me,” she said. “You can’t. I can’t be alone again.”

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING, we didn’t speak of the night before.

  • • •

  I WOKE CECILY BEFORE SUNUP, kissing her cheek, her neck, her naked shoulder. She ran her fingers through my hair. I undid the tiny buttons at the front of her nightgown and kissed her chest. I licked her nipple, and I ran my tongue along the sweat beneath her breast. I unbuttoned her gown further and kissed her stomach and kissed her hip. Her fingers caught in a tangle of my hair, giving my curls a yank. I flinched and looked up to see her smiling at my pain. She gave my hair another light pull, and another shot of pain, and this time I growled low and pushed myself up to bury my face between her neck and her shoulder, lunging, my teeth lightly gnawing on her skin. She shrieked and laughed, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, her legs around my hips. As we kissed, I held my hand at the back of her head, and pushed her head forth as I pressed my lips harder against hers, my tongue against hers. I lay on top of her, and she wrapped her arms tighter, pulling me closer, pushing herself beneath me, her wanting more and more of my weight to hold her there.

  We made love, and by dawn we were tired again, and we napped an hour more, not having untangled our arms and legs. We woke drenched in sweat and the smell of each other, but we didn’t even run a washcloth over our skin. We threw on whatever clothes were nearest on the floor, took Doxie from her crib behind the screen, changed and powdered her, and left the room. And we still hadn’t said hardly a word to each other. The silence, the not speaking, comforted now. The silence was as light as mist. But the room, where we’d been so happy to be trapped, seemed to be losing every breath of air with every ray of sun that slipped in. Our movement stirred the dust that caught in the morning light.

  For a while we just walked, talking little, mostly just leaning into each other and moving slow as Cecily pushed the pram and I held Doxie, feeding her her bottleful of milk. Despite Pearl’s politics, Cecily now wore tinted glasses prescribed by an iridologist—Cecily’s lenses were blue to treat the equilibrium part of the eye, an effort to end her headaches. She wore a shirtwaist patterned with bars and notes, and a few lyrics, like a sheet of music. I wore only an undershirt and trousers, and a derby, my suspenders dangling at my sides. And I was barefoot again.

  We’d walked so far away from the Fair, we decided to keep going, to the Howard Street flea market, where the rag-and-bone peddlers parked their carts full of junk and shoddy. The goods, if you could call them that, were collected from all the world over—anything from a dented tin cup from a cowboy’s satchel to a chipped teapot of blue-and-white china from a London parlor. It was here that I had first found Oscar hanging on the side of a wagon alongside a whole colony of broken dolls, all of them strung together on a clothesline, a chain gang of misfits missing limbs or stripped naked.

  I carried Doxie in the crook of my arm and held my derby up between her and the sun to give her some shade. Cecily pushed the baby carriage along the street, all the while weighing it down with snatches of fabric and secondhand dresses. She was expert at bargaining, casting some kind of hex on the peddlers whenever she lifted the tinted lenses up from in front of her eyes.

  “Nobody’s going to buy that ratty old dirndl,” she might say, and the seller would somehow agree, and he would sigh, and he would take whatever pitiable sum she offered.

  Back in the room, we ripped the dresses apart at the seams. The landlady rented us her sewing machine, and her sons carried its cabinet up the stairs and crammed it into the only corner it fit. Cecily had to sit on the edge of the bed to work it, her granny-like glasses perched at her nose, and she began to patch together street skirts and shirtwaists of her own invention, turning things inside out and upside down—the velvet from a hat for the belt of a skirt, the sateen lining of an old coat for the sleeves of a gown.

  • • •

  CECILY SKIPPED that afternoon’s rehearsal, but the next day she insisted I go with her. I told her there was no need, I’d been foolish, I’d been jealous. I told her I trusted her, I trusted her more than I’d ever trusted anyone, but she said the walk, the sunlight, would do Doxie good, and that I might enjoy seeing all the actors and actresses muddle through the awful script, missing cues, dropping props, stumbling over the half-finished sets. It was unsightly, she said. And it must be seen to be believed. So I went with her to the theater at the Fair.

  Wakefield was indeed in the lobby. He was the first person I saw inside, and I bristled at the sight of him. How could a man so important have such leisure? Had he nothing better to do than lurk and linger? He was the boss of every factory in town, and producer of every entertainment. He paid us our wages at the end of the day, then took it away when we went out for the night.

  But I was pleased to see how little notice he took of Cecily. Or, at least, he took no more notice of her than he did the other
actresses. And the actresses did gather. All the girls likely knew who he was, so they reacted to his lazy stabs at flirting, his cold nods and awkward winks, as if he were the most charming gent alive. As it turned out, he gave them charms for their bracelets too. He had a pocket full of them.

  “Did you see the frog I gave Cecily?” Wakefield asked as I wheeled the pram into the lobby. He leaned forward, his hands behind his back, to look in at Doxie beneath the umbrella. He didn’t even offer the baby the slightest flicker of a smile.

  “I did,” I said. “She lost it.”

  “A shame,” he said with a shrug.

  Despite his seeming indifference, he invited Cecily and me to dinner in a rooftop café on the Grand Court that night, then again a few nights later. Whenever we dined with him, we could have been anyone—he asked us nothing, and responded to nothing we said. But he boasted, and we genuinely enjoyed his tales of influence. And he seemed to enjoy our enjoyment. We loved it, particularly, whenever he started anything with, “Now don’t tell anyone . . .” The phrase was always followed with some privileged bit of knowledge. We were not to tell anyone many things: that President McKinley would visit the Fair as soon as the details and negotiations for peace with Spain were settled; that the New White City was already turning pale gray from the smoke of the smelting works and would need a thorough whitewash before fall; that a Salvation Army lieutenant had been arrested for taking a hatchet to the genitals of a statue of a naked cherub she’d found offensive.

  And he told us just a little about Oscar, and his reasons for buying him. “Sentimental attachment,” he said. “Nothing more than that. My son had a very similar toy.” And to think, I deeply pitied him just then. He sniffled and plucked a handkerchief from his pocket, but he explained away his sudden red eyes and runny nose as symptoms of allergy. The lagoon, he said, and the humidity, were turning the structures mossy and soft with mold. The framework of the New White City was warping around us, cracking the plaster walls, threatening the domes over our heads. Don’t tell anyone . . .