The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  “They took her away,” she said as the water spilled.

  “To where?” I said as I slid on the soap and the bleach.

  “Who knows,” she said as she knelt to the floor to sop up the mess.

  “Who knows?” I said.

  “Go,” she said.

  I squatted down next to her, nearly weeping from frustration. “But where?” I whispered.

  “The child,” she whispered back. “They’ll fetch the child first, I suspect.”

  The child. I stepped from the chapel, but had no idea where to find a door. The few times I’d left the building, I’d had to be taken by the hand. I’d never learned my way around the hospital’s sprawl, every corridor alike, every window looking out on the same lawn of burnt grass. Whenever I’d been led up the winding of the halls and the spiraling of the stairs to Cecily’s room, she had seemed housed in a tower, locked away by witches.

  I returned to the novitiate’s side, to whisper, “Which way to the door?”

  “Heaven help us all,” she said. She stood up and took my arm, and left behind the wet floor, the bucket overturned, the brush in the aisle. She led me from the chapel, down a hall, around a corner.

  “Who is they?” I said.

  “Who is they?” she said.

  “You said they. They took her.”

  She held out her other arm, curled her fingers, clawed at the air, pantomiming Wakefield’s silver fist. “Him,” she said. “And his butler and his driver.”

  “That can’t be,” I said. “He’s not been here at all.” But even as I said it, I felt my stomach sink.

  • • •

  EVEN THE NUNS were villains in this ballad of mine. My novitiate explained it all to me on our long walk down an endless hall.

  As I’d fretted in the chapel every day, hour after hour, with my hands folded in my lap, my head bowed, in all the postures of prayer, Cecily hadn’t slept at all. Somewhere down a hall, around a corner, and up some stairs, and down more halls, and around more corners, and up more stairs, Cecily was seen by medical doctors, midwives, homeopaths, and healers of all stripes. Every waking minute, every minute I didn’t see her, she’d been fiddled with, her temperature taken, her blood drawn, her skin needled, her reflexes tip-tapped. She guzzled beef tea to feed her iron-poor blood and they collected her urine to puzzle over its shade of yellow. Pills were tucked beneath her tongue. Electrostatic shock was shot through her joints. They sought illness in every inch of her with their spyglasses and stethoscopes. They went water witching in her ear canals and became students of her pupils.

  And all the while, there sat Wakefield. He read to her and held her hand, and he promised her he could make her well. Whenever she asked about me, she was told I had trusted her fully to their care. And here is how she betrayed me: she believed Wakefield. And she believed the nuns. When she asked to see me, they told her I couldn’t be found anywhere.

  “It’s unforgivable,” Wakefield told her. “And it’s the same mistake I made when my Myrtle took ill. I hid. I ran away. I couldn’t bear to see her in pain. And I couldn’t bear to let her see me cry. So I couldn’t be found when she needed me most. For all their bluster and fight, men are weak, weak creatures.”

  • • •

  WHEN MY NOVITIATE led me to the front door, she still held on tight. “Lean on me,” she whispered. “Act like you’re on your last legs.”

  I was on my last legs. Or at the moment it seemed so. Pretending to be weak came easy, and I was grateful to have her there next to me.

  In the lane out front, a carriage and driver sat parked. He seemed to be there to serve the hospital’s patients. My novitiate helped me into the carriage and instructed the driver to take me wherever I needed to go.

  • • •

  WHEN I REACHED the boardinghouse to collect Doxie, I expected a battle. But there was no one on the stairs to stop me. No one in the hall. I went to Cecily’s room, and the door was unlocked. And there stood the wicked Mrs. Margaret in costume, in that skirt patterned with frogs and crescent moons, her black boots with white spats. She was in the middle of twisting the wiry hair of her own pig-snouted, pumpkin head into a skinny braid.

  “I’m the only one here,” she said. Mrs. Margaret nodded toward the empty crib as she tied a girlish pink ribbon to the end of her braid.

  “Where’d they go?” I said. I can’t say I didn’t wish for that stubborn hag to drop dead right then and there, but I didn’t pick up the scissors to stab her. The scissors were on the sewing machine just at my side, and I only took them in my fist to threaten. I just wanted to worry her. I wasn’t leaving that rattrap without word of Doxie, and it was beginning to seem like the only way to eke out an ounce of civility from the old witch was to hold a blade to her throat.

  No sooner had the light from the window glinted on the metal of the scissors than Mrs. Margaret had her full weight against me, pushing me to the wall, her knee in my groin, her arm cutting off the wind in my pipe. She gripped the hand that held the scissors and forced them so close to my ear, I could feel their pointed tip going too far in.

  “When you gonna learn that I’m just trying to keep you out of trouble, Ferret?” she said. “It’s pity I feel for you, deep, deep down in the cold black guts of my heart.”

  I couldn’t see anything for all the watering of my eyes. I couldn’t breathe, and when I did sneak a gulp of air, I choked even more from the stench of whatever had died in her mouth.

  “Now the nuns’ll lie to ya, Ferret, but Mama Margaret, she’ll tell it to you like you gotta hear it. But you gotta be smart enough to even want the truth. Are you? You gotta tell me. Or nod your head. Are you smart?” But I couldn’t speak. And I couldn’t nod. “Can you hear a word I’m saying?” she said. “Or do I need to dig out all the earwigs clotting up the sound?” She pushed the point of the scissors in deeper, and when I started to flinch from the pain, she backed up and let me drop to the floor. I coughed and clung to the bed.

  “Now the person you wanna go after with scissors is Billy Wakefield,” and she ran the point of the scissors up along my cheek. “He stol’d your girl right from under your nose.” She stuck the tip of the scissors up one of my nostrils. I slapped her hand away. “He got Cecily good and scared. And he made sure the nuns kept you napping in that chapel, praying for help like a good little ninny. And now he’s taking her away in his own private train.”

  This isn’t a city where the sick can get anything but sicker and sicker, Wakefield had told Cecily. The whole profane town stood on the sacred boneyards of Indians. Omaha was blacking our every lung with its filth and soot. The hospitals were hot with poxes and fevers. I know where to take you, he’d promised. I know all kinds of secrets about the wind and water. Your health is out there somewhere. We only have to find it.

  “No,” I said. “She loves me.”

  “She loves you not,” Mrs. Margaret said. “You were nowhere when she needed you most.” She put on a mocking frown and tapped at her own chest with the points of the scissors. “It’s a story that stabs you in the heart.”

  “I was there,” I said, pushing myself up from the floor. “They told me she needed rest. She wouldn’t get better without rest. I wanted more than anything to be with her.”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” she said. “You should’ve fought to be at her side. People like you and me, we gotta fight tooth and nail, cradle to grave.” She called out to me as I ran from the room. “From the hole between your mama’s legs to the hole they shovel for you, you gotta be kicking and screaming every goddamn minute of it.” She raised her voice more as I ran down the stairs. “Your problem, boy, is you got uppity. You thought your luck improved. But it didn’t, and it won’t. You’re no better than the worst of us.”

  I slammed the door behind me, hoping to shut out her screeching, but before I had even crossed the front yard to the street she was at an upstairs window. “Oh, Ferret, love, I forgot something,” she sang out, singsongy. “I’m to give you thi
s letter she wrote you. She snuck the envelope into my fist when I handed her Doxie. She knew not to trust anyone else with it.”

  “I’ll come up for it,” I shouted back.

  “I’ll drop it down to you,” she said.

  “No, I’ll come up for it,” I said again.

  “No, I’ll drop it down to you,” she said again, and she held the envelope out the window and lit it on fire with a match she struck with the broken, banged-purple nail of her thumb.

  By the time the letter had fallen, burning, to the lawn, most of the words had been lost. After dropping to my knees to pat out the flame, I then collected the ashy snippets that had flaked away, whole words, and parts of words, and fragments of sentences, that had drifted into bushes and flowerpots, landing on leaves and petals—it’s not so, when, the rain, a mother, you don’t. At the end of the block, I was lucky enough to nab a cabbie unafraid to snap the reins. It was only half past noon and he was cross-eyed with liquor already. “You can’t get me to the train station fast enough,” I told him, and he laughed at me with teeth half-black from chaw.

  “This broken-down nag’s got a wild streak or two left in her,” he said.

  With one hand, I clutched the side of the carriage as we bucked away, and I pressed the other to my chest, holding the last of Cecily’s letter close, its charred and fragile pieces of linen stationery tucked into the inside pocket of my coat. I could still feel the heat of it and smell its smoke.

  I didn’t know what to believe.

  Mrs. Margaret’s flame had burned through the center of the letter, and I’d yet to read much of what little writing was left. But the ride was so rough as we galloped, I didn’t dare risk lifting the paper from my pocket and having the wind carry it away. I even held both hands tight against my coat, and the people we passed might have thought we were in such a rush because I’d been shot through the chest.

  “You’re either escaping a lady or going after one,” the driver called back to me as he slowed in front of the station’s towering columns.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Lady troubles are the best troubles to have,” he said, with a smile and a sigh, as if touched by the romance of it. I noticed then something quite dapper about the black-toothed lad, with his felt daisy in his buttonhole and a polka-dot necktie dressing up his tattered tweed suit. I paid him double, and was nearly trampled by the speckled horse of a passing carriage as I stepped into the busy street.

  The stately Burlington Station—blocks of marble and a roof of red—had only just opened that summer, in time for the Fair, and it swarmed with travelers. At the top of the facade was a clock cradled in the arms of a white angel, and I checked the hour hoping to see that time had stopped.

  I ran through the lobby and onto the staircase that spiraled down through the floor, my feet slipping out from under me on a freshly polished step. I grabbed hold of the brass banister before nearly braining myself on the marble, but not without accidentally kicking an old lady in the shin and nearly sending her for a spill—an old man at her side kept her from falling by grabbing her sleeve.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sputtered to them both, as I ran off.

  The lower level led out to the canopied platform, where Wakefield’s private car pulled away, at the very tail end of a long train. Unlike the sleek, dark cars of other rich men, Wakefield’s had all the marks of his showmanship, painted a canary yellow, its roof in peppermint stripes. In the railing of the observation deck were the curls and twists of a wrought-iron W.

  The train was leaving the station at a snail’s clip and I could have easily leaped onto that deck and slipped in through the back door, but for Wakefield himself. He stood out there, alone, with a teacup in his flesh hand and a cigar in the silver one.

  He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

  I walked alongside the car’s deck, quickening my pace as the train began to pick up speed.

  “Where are you taking her?” I said.

  He only shook his head. He plugged his cigar into the corner of his mouth and looked down into his tea.

  I said, “What’s stopping me from pulling you off there and pushing you under the wheels?”

  “Because you want what’s best for Cecily,” he said through the side of his mouth, with exasperation. He tossed the tea from the cup out onto the rails, then spat his cigar from his mouth. “You’re not good for her, and you know it.”

  “I could charge you with kidnapping,” I said. “She’s my wife to be.”

  “You were killing her by inches,” he said, his voice building. “Keeping her and that baby in that dark dusty room. You don’t even know the difference, do you? And why should she trust you? You were willing to sell off your whole livelihood when you sold me that dummy. You don’t have a care in the world. If only we could all be like you, Ferret.”

  He had to shout his insult above the clangor of the trains. My instinct was to pull him from his perch, not to beat him but to make him stand in front of me as he spoke.

  I ran ahead, and off the platform, as the train switched tracks. I skipped over the rails and followed alongside the car, running past Wakefield. I leaped up to knock my knuckles against the windows. I called Cecily’s name. I ran along, knocking, calling. And then I saw her. Cecily came to the window and pressed her palm against the glass.

  I reached into my coat pocket and so very carefully took from it the burned letter. I cradled it in my hands and held it up, hoping she could see it, even as I knew I was losing yet more of it, more of its ashen message blowing away word by word. She furrowed her brow. “She burned it,” I shouted, though I suspected Cecily couldn’t hear me at all. “I couldn’t read it.” I clutched the charred letter to my chest as the train left the rail yard, chugging quickly away, Wakefield no longer on the deck.

  Before she left my sight, I watched her lower her eyes, lower her chin, and turn her face away from the window. The wind picked up, and I lost a few more pieces of the letter. I clutched quickly at the paper and ashes. But then I opened my hands. I let the wind carry the last of the letter away.

  November 26, 1898

  Dear Cecily,

  I haven’t told Emmaline yet what becomes of you, and she’s fit to be tied. She always reads the ends of books first, she says. She reads books for their sentiment, for their characters. If she’s flustered by suspense, she worries too much. So she reads the end before she begins. At that point, there at the end, the dead are dead, and the living have lived.

  Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers’ arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we’d ever grieved.

  Emmaline has begun writing her own book, but no one can read it. It’s not that she hasn’t shown it to us—we just don’t know what it says. She wakes from dreams with symbols and shapes in her head. A new alphabet comes out of the end of her pen. Even she doesn’t know what it means. The dreams began on the night I arrived. She suspects I provoked them. I’m heaven-sent, she says.

  On some mornings she can interpret some of her dream writing, but only vaguely. All we know is this: they’re instructions. We’re to build something. And we’re to build it beneath the roof of the barn. We’re anxious to begin, but we don’t know how. We don’t even know the materials to use.

  I probably have no business diagnosing sanity in a letter that I’m writing to a ghost. But I don’t detect any madness in her hieroglyphics. Every time I look at the pages, I feel on the verge of literacy. If we can puzzle out one little word, one if, and, or but, then we’ll find our way to all the others.

  She has drawn a blueprint, of sorts, based on what little she understands. The drawing consists of circles circling, spiraling in and out of one another. But her circles don’t really mean circles, she says.

  Emmaline calls it the Emerald Cathedr
al, because a man whispered the name in a dream. The man is someone she used to know, she says, but she doesn’t like to talk about him. Before this man left her for someone else, when she was young, he gave her a ring. “An emerald for Emmaline,” he told her. She hasn’t dreamed about him in many, many years.

  We’re grateful for all the suspense. We wouldn’t ask her to dream any faster than she does. The mystery of it is where the magic is. What if the Emerald Cathedral can never be built? If that’s the ending, we don’t want to know it.

  Ferret

  September 1898

  23.

  IN THE LOOKING GLASS looking back at me was the mug of a man wanted dead or alive. In those weeks after Cecily left, my curls grew long and unruly. I took no scissors to the thicket of beard that crept onto my chin. My vest gapped open where the buttons were gone. My collar had warped. And in my eyes I saw no hope left.

  I had no work, and I had no money. For a time, Wakefield’s golden dragon head had seemed to cough up cash on its own, but the bundle had grown thin, the dragon swallowing it up. My literary correspondence had dwindled. I sat at the typewriter, back in my attic at the Empress Opera House, struck inarticulate. There’s nothing worth saying, I found myself typing in the few letters I wrote for others.

  A bottle of rum in the evening with August and Rosie would lift me a little, but the first glint of morning sun, and soberness, would drop me even lower than before.

  I did take some comfort from the postcards Cecily sent, though she didn’t send them to me. She sent them to Pearl who, in her mercy, would share them with me. I would meet Pearl, in my wrecked state, at the lunch counter at Brandeis for coffee and cold lamb’s-tongue sandwiches.

  On a card from New Helena, Nebraska, Cecily wrote only: Feeling quite well. Took the waters. Leaving today.

  On the back of a picture of bathers in a warm-water plunge in South Dakota, she wrote: Doing better. Took the waters. Leaving today.