The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  The rich men laughed, and so did their wives, but their laughter didn’t sound at all jolly. It sounded like a noise they’d all invented for occasions when laughter was called for.

  “Flood the town and make it a lake,” one of the youngest of the bunch said, as he leaned back in his chair, rocking and balancing on the chair’s back two legs. He wore a vest striped with purple and gold. I would later learn his name was Baker, of Baker Bros. Engraving Co. Everyone there, other than us, had their names on Omaha buildings. “Turn this hotel into a resort. You’d probably make a fortune without even trying. Some men have the golden touch, and others don’t. It’s that simple. You do, Dudley didn’t.”

  Wakefield’s sister, who’d been seated far at the other end of the table opposite her twin, leaned her own cigar into the flame of the butler’s match. It was a skinny cigar wrapped in ivory paper. “Finally, I’m interested,” she said, drawing out that word finally with a long, long sigh. “Destiny. Is that what you’re speaking of, Mr. Baker?”

  My old friend Schubert spoke up before Baker had a chance to answer. “There’s no such thing,” he said, gruff, dropping his fist on the table. “I was destined for nothing. Less than nothing. My father was in debtors’ jail when I was a newborn, so I came into the world owing people. Everything I have I got on my own.”

  “By the sweat of your brow, and all that?” Billie said, smirking. “And luck had nothing to do with it? Nothing at all?”

  At Billie’s mention of luck, the table fell gloomy. No one among us said anything. Wakefield, after all, had all the best luck in the world but had paid too dearly for it. His shoulders slouching, he lowered himself into his chair. He drank up the dregs from the bottom of his snifter.

  “You have not misunderstood me, Billie,” Schubert said. “I do not believe in destiny, and I do not believe in luck.”

  I leaned over to whisper, my lips to Cecily’s ears, and was only just about to ask her Do you believe in luck? when the same question was put to me.

  “Well, do you, Ferret?” Billie said, raising her voice to call down the table. I felt my stomach lift and fall, like I was back in that balloon. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today an honest-to-God waif,” she said. “Raised in the street by thieves. Does someone like you, Ferret, trust in luck?”

  I looked at the others all looking back at me. Raised by thieves? What did she know about me, and how did she know it?

  I took Cecily’s hand in mine, the hand with the ring, and I brought her fingers up to my lips for a kiss. “I’m the luckiest man alive,” I said.

  Everyone at the table was so grateful for my gesture, for the easing of the tension, they applauded, and they clucked their tongues at the very sweetness of it all. A few of them tapped their spoons against their glasses in celebration. “Hear, hear,” old Schubert said, raising his snifter though there was nothing left in it. “Well done.”

  “Do you know who believed in luck, Pickle?” Wakefield called to Billie from far down the table, cupping his hand around his mouth like a megaphone. Pleased to have another reprieve from the somber mood, everyone perked up, raising their eyebrows.

  Who who who, they all asked, filling the room with owls.

  “Dudley, the founder of Pink Heron, Nebraska. There’d been a crippling drought when he arrived in these parts, but only a week later it rained. It rained so hard, it left a little pond, where he spotted a pink heron one sunny afternoon. It was a sign, he thought. Fortuitous. A symbol of luck and prosperity.”

  “Oh that’s too too utterly marvelous,” one of the wives said.

  “Now,” Wakefield said, “let’s go tear his dream to pieces.”

  And with that, the guests pushed themselves from the table. The room filled with the scratching of chair legs against the wood floor. The men and women chattered and bellowed, and they made those laughlike noises again.

  Though Wakefield intended to capture the wreckage with his motion picture camera outside, he insisted that all the rest of us keep to the rooms of the pink hotel, where we were to watch from the windows. Even the men who fancied themselves adventurers, who wanted to be out in all the whirl and wind of it, respected Wakefield’s wishes. He was a living rebuke to the dangers of daredevilry.

  Cecily got up from the table too fast. She grabbed hold of my arm to steady herself from the spinning of her dizzy spell, and I helped ease her back into her chair. There was no water left in her glass, and she’d emptied the pitcher too—she’d been guzzling it all through dinner, blaming the cook’s heavy hand with the saltshaker. “I just need one more little sip,” Cecily said, touching her fingertips to her temples. She looked up at me and said, in a tone that sounded like accusation, “Headache again.”

  I picked up her glass and left the dining hall to seek out the kitchen. When I found the doorway and stepped inside, an old woman wringing her hands in her apron looked at me wide-eyed, as shocked as if I’d stumbled upon her in her underskirts. I hadn’t been among the rich long enough to know that the servants got embarrassed if you caught sight of the dishes in the sink and the pots on the stove.

  “I just need a splash of water,” I said. I’m not one of them, I wanted to add.

  “Let me, Mr. Skerritt,” Morearty said, suddenly at my side, taking the glass. “I’ll bring it to you.” He smiled broadly but gently, politely indicating I needed to leave the kitchen. He kept still, the glass just staying empty in his hand.

  When I returned to the dining hall, there was no one left, not even Cecily. I followed the voices of the crowd to the lobby, and once there, I glanced through an entryway into another hall, to see Cecily and Wakefield off alone, sitting on the bottom steps of a grand staircase. Cecily held a snifter of brandy.

  It certainly didn’t surprise me that Wakefield had swooped in. The drapes were drawn and the hall was dark—Wakefield lured her forth, I assumed, promising that the shadows would chase the ache from her head.

  When I walked up to them, they were both intently studying the fabric square that he’d pulled from the pocket of his dinner jacket. He held the fabric open in the palm of his metal hand.

  “Oh, Ferret, look at this,” Cecily said, setting down the snifter and plucking up the fabric. She stood from the steps and walked toward a window. She elbowed the drapery open an inch or two to let in just enough sun to glisten the jewels woven with gold thread into the mesh of the square. The jewels were all circles, some round, some oblong.

  “But they aren’t jewels at all,” she said. “They’re the backs of beetles. Billy bought this from a market in Egypt.”

  “We match,” Wakefield said, walking over to us. He pointed toward the grasshoppers in the pattern of Cecily’s dress. “We’re both covered in insects.” When she held the fabric out to him, he said, “I want you to keep it.”

  “I can’t,” she said. She then said to me, “It’s very rare. It’s only made for the women in harems.”

  “Dead bugs?” I said. “Morbid. Where’d your dizzy spell go?”

  Wakefield said, “I gave her the tiniest pink pill,” he said, “and her headache left in an instant.”

  “In the three seconds I was down the hall, you got a pill down her throat?” I said.

  “Ferret . . . ,” Cecily said, scolding.

  “Would you like one?” Wakefield asked me, taking a vial from his trousers pocket. “It might cure you of that disposition,” he said, not so kindly.

  “No need to be rude about it,” I said, moving my jaw around like I was gnawing on a toothpick.

  “Really, Ferret,” he said, “your determination to keep your lady in pain is quite ungentlemanly.” We were then interrupted by another of his servants, who handed him a pith helmet and a pair of goggles. He then left us for the lobby where his guests gathered, and he assured everyone he’d be safely tucked away in a duck blind. Some ladies attempted to discourage him, but they did so too politely, for he left without a hitch in his step.

  “He’s leaned too close to such spectacle be
fore,” one woman said.

  Baker, the young man of the engraving company, said, “Well, he still has another arm and two legs to lose.” He sat at an upright in the parlor and played a melody that got him scolded by the old ladies who flapped fluttery lace fans with the quick wrists of disgust.

  “I don’t know what’s so insulting about the tune,” I whispered to Cecily.

  “It’s ‘The Ballad of Billy Wakefield’s Little Boy,’” she whispered, still enraptured by the beetle-backed hankie that she hadn’t given back after all. “About the train crash that cost him his life.”

  “How do you know it?” I said.

  “Me and Pearl had the girl play it for us at the store the other day,” she said. There was a piano in the sheet music department of Brandeis, and when you picked a song that you might want to give a listen before paying the nickel, you took it to one of the shopgirls who would plunk it out. “We had her play it for us a few times, then a few times more. It’s so sad. We just couldn’t stop listening to it.”

  The butlers and maids had situated chairs at every window, upstairs and down, and on the pillow of every chair was a pair of opera glasses. Cecily and I roamed the halls, looking for the room with the best view of the valley below, of the few empty houses and barns, and the blacksmith’s shop, and a red schoolhouse with a silver bell on its roof.

  Suddenly, Billie was there in the hallway with us, her piglet in her arms. “Please ignore my bad manners at dinner, won’t you?” she said.

  “It’s shrinking,” I said of the runt.

  “Piglets don’t stay piglets,” she said. “This is Mr. Swift. The piglet you met previously was Mr. Cudahy, who has moved on to capture other hearts.” Cudahy and Swift were the names of a few of the packing houses of South Omaha.

  Billie told us we were to watch the cyclone with her, in her suite on the top floor. She had been there a few days already, she told us, “living in the light of an oil lamp, like a pioneer girl in a soddy.” The hotel had been abandoned but not emptied. Rooms were full of beds and vanities, draped with sheets, as if only shut up for a season. But there were also the dried husks of crickets and locusts in the corners, and cobwebs spun in among the chandeliers. Weather had cracked the walls and warped the wood of the floors. But in its day, if it had ever had a day, the pink hotel had been handsome. The wallpaper was flocked and the beds were brass.

  The three of us sat on a davenport that old Morearty had pushed up to a bay window, Billie scooting in between Cecily and me. Her red gown was so full of frill and crinoline, its satin and lace spilled over into our laps. Billie took her own binoculars from an alligator-skin case, an elaborate set of spectacles with a strap she buckled at the back of her head. The glasses rested on the bridge of her nose, and the barrels, made of whale tooth, telescoped with a turn of a tortoiseshell wheel between her eyes. Once she had it set, her hands were free to cradle the fidgeting Mr. Swift.

  I was still stinging from her scrutiny at dinner. Yes, I’d spent some time with thieves in my youth, but also the nuns, and it’d been years since I’d done much of anything dishonest. “I think you think you know things about me,” I said, looking through my own opera glasses, holding them by a silver handle, to watch Wakefield walk down the hill. The only other men down below were two burly farm boys on either side of the cyclone machine, which had doubled since I’d seen it last, with two bellows now and a more complicated system of pipes. It sat on a wheeled cart, and the farm boys pumped the bellows with all their muscle and might.

  “I know a thing or two,” she said. “I probably know more about you than Cecily does.”

  The tornado began to bend the air, the wind of it starting to bat at some thistle.

  “Cecily, did you know,” Billie continued, “that Ferret got his name from his police record? Ferret is called Ferret because a ferret is something like a weasel, and do you know that old expression? When something is an impossible task, it’s like catching a weasel asleep? The police found it impossible to pin a crime on the young weaselly Ferret Skerritt.”

  It was an insulting insinuation, this notion that I had something to hide. “Why would you go to all the trouble?” I said. “I hardly seem worth it.” As the tornado worked itself into a good fierce conniption fit, the farm boys ran into the barn and out the door of the other side. They were tugging hard on a rope now, dragging the cyclone machine along on its wheels. As the tornado neared the barn, shingles flew off the roof and twirled in the air, a few of them smacking against Wakefield’s duck blind as he turned the crank of his camera. The barn’s weather vane pointed its iron arrow in every direction, faster and faster, spinning and spinning until it too spun off, stabbing the end of itself into the dry, cracked ground. The others in the hotel shrieked and yelped at the violence and threat, and all their noise echoed up through the hallways and floorboards.

  “I don’t want to see any more harm come to my brother,” Billie said with a weary sigh, adjusting the wheel of her glasses to telescope the lenses an inch or so more. “I’m the only one in the world he can trust. You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like being Billy Wakefield. People will crawl out from anywhere to take advantage of his good nature.” The tornado then began to lose its steam, turning into a puff of nothing, having only scattered some hay and torn a barn door off its hinges. “I think he paid much too much for that dummy of yours.”

  “I’ll gladly buy it back from him,” I said with a shrug, and before the words even left my tongue, I knew I could never manage it. Too much of the money was already gone.

  “Oh, Ferret,” Billie said, slapping my knee, “don’t be so sour. There’s no need to get owly with me. I’m your dear friend and I wouldn’t dream of offending you. And it seems you’ve been a very, very good boy for the last several years. There’s hardly anything on you at all. And I’m sure Cecily’s record is as clean as a whistle, though I can’t find a damn thing on the girl.” Billie pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. “It’s as if she never existed,” she said, as if Cecily wasn’t right at her side. Billie stood from the sofa, releasing her pig, letting it scurry away. “I’m spontaneously bored,” she said. “I’m going to go see what I can pilfer from the rooms.”

  As she was about to step into the hallway, Billie clucked her tongue and snapped her fingers, remembering something. She went to a grip next to the vanity, and she took from it a book that she then dropped on the sofa between Cecily and me. I flipped open the book’s cover with my pinky. The Female Offender, it said on the title page. The Criminology Series.

  “I marked a particularly compelling paragraph on page one twenty,” Billie said, and she left us.

  Glancing over her shoulder toward the door, Cecily whispered, “That one smiles real pretty but she’s mean as a rattler.”

  “And I have a feeling we’re about to find out she’s even meaner than we think,” I said. I read aloud from the marked paragraph, from a chapter on the tattoos of prostitutes and other women of the clink.

  “‘Five women bore the half-length likeness of a young man; four showed two clasped hands; nine a heart, that well-worn symbol of love’”—that bit about the “well-worn symbol of love” was circled in pencil—“‘three a kind of ribbon; two a branch with leaves, and two a leaf only. Eight had a bracelet, or a funereal cross, or a rosary, a ring, a star, a ship with sails, or a flag with cannon. Two women were tattooed in nine places, one in eleven, and another in fifteen. All these marks were on the upper part of the body; rarely on the legs or chest; and eight were on the joints of the fingers.’”

  Cecily twisted her neck around, her pretty face a scowl, as she attempted to see her own back. She ran her fingers over her skin, as if she might locate the heart by touch. “Can you even see it?” she said.

  “You can,” I said, pushing down the petals of a velvet rose at her back, “when the dress droops a little, when you slouch. But even then you can only see a little.”

  “I’ve never been in jail,” she said. “Except for once, an
d that was just to visit.”

  I kissed again the tattoo on her naked shoulder, then glanced back to the book to read more. “This is underlined too. ‘Among prostitutes, those who are tattooed are the most depraved.’”

  “That bitch is itchin’ to get her eyes clawed out of her head,” she said.

  “An eye for an eye,” I said, kissing her eyelid. “Tooth for a tooth,” kissing her cheek.

  The farm boys had kicked the tornado back into a fury, and as the machine neared the school, the bell rang like one in a firehouse as a city burned. The rest of the hotel whooped at the sight of the cyclone huffing and puffing at the school’s feeble walls. I tugged down at the front of Cecily’s dress, and I pressed my lips against her breast. She ran her fingers through my hair and kissed the top of my head. I reached over to the curtain to pull it closed, as if the ghosts of the town below were looking up, aiming their opera glasses at our window.

  • • •

  AT THE END OF THE DAY, Pink Heron, Nebraska, still stood. Wakefield’s cyclone felled only the school. The farmers who’d abandoned the town had built their houses and barns to survive the winds of the prairie, and Wakefield seemed to find such fortitude exasperating. He admitted defeat and ended the party.

  But first he put us to work. “The sun’s about to go out!” he shouted in the hotel’s parlor, gathering us all up and rushing us out the door. He wanted to film us scrambling from the hotel and running for our lives. “The tornado is coming!” he directed. “You’ve watched its destruction from the window of your hotel! You’re the finest ladies and gentlemen of all the land. You’ve mastered nature. You’ve built industries up from nothing. But you can’t keep a cyclone from flipping you inside out!”