A new note arrived every three days or so. No sooner would she leave one mineral spring sanatorium than she would leave yet another.
She took the waters in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. And she only ever wrote as she left a place. If she’d written on arrival, I might’ve caught the next train to wherever she was.
The words on the postcards were hollow—like she was shouting down a well only for the echo of it. But I was grateful for them, and they would lift me even higher than the rum could. She sounded lonely and lost without me.
• • •
ON MY BIRTHDAY, Pearl baked me a harlequin cake—one layer was chocolate, one white, one pink. “The pink has the last of the summer’s rose leaves,” she said. She had plucked them from the garden behind the Juliet, the women’s hotel where she lived. “I snipped them to pieces and powdered them with sugar.”
We had our sad little party on the unlit stage of the Empress, which had been set for a new play. The theater was to open again in a few weeks for its fall season, but Phoebe, and all the others from last spring, had not been invited back. The theater had a new manager, a gentleman in white linen and checkered hat, determined to go legit. The play didn’t even have a moral or much of a plot. I’d watched a rehearsal one afternoon. Two actresses I didn’t know played two sisters I didn’t like. The sisters paced a kitchen, dredged up old slights, and puzzled over their dead father’s ledgerbook.
The play would have no opening or closing acts, no vaudeville or burlesque. So even if I’d still had Oscar, I wouldn’t have had a stage.
Much of the kitchen was only painted sloppily on a backdrop. Pearl and I sat at a table that wobbled, sloshing the tea in our cups. She served the cake alongside a few dried apricots from the fruit market. I picked up a sliver of apricot and inspected it for dust. “The filth of the streets gets on the fruit,” I said, taking a bite nonetheless. “And the filth gives you typhoid fever.” I’d been studying a magazine sold in August’s father’s bookshop—a periodical for doctors called the Omaha Clinic. With my new medical knowledge I often reflected back on the summer, diagnosing Cecily from afar.
“This week it’s the apricots?” Pearl said, gently ribbing me. “Last week it was the oysters from polluted ponds.” Yes. The sewage oysters Cecily and I had eaten at the Fair, feeling elegant.
Pearl then gave me my gift. “A novel with a villain,” she said. “Do you know the story of Trilby?” On the cover was an angel-winged heart caught in a spider’s web.
“I do, a little,” I said, though I hadn’t read the book. You didn’t have to read it to know it. It sold millions. It was all the go. People slapped the name Trilby on anything they wanted to sell. You could wear a Trilby hat and eat Trilby chocolate. You could dance a Trilby waltz and play a Trilby rag. There were Trilby freckle creams and card games and china dolls. And there were endless sermons against the book’s naked ladies and gothic evil. But none of it mattered to me. What did I care anymore about other people’s amusements?
“It’s a horrible novel,” Pearl said. “Well, not horrible in that it’s a poor story but in that the incidents in it are horrible. Trilby is a beautiful young woman who falls victim to Svengali, an older man. He’s a mesmerist. He puts Trilby in a hypnotic trance, and she becomes his lover. She’s beautiful and he’s hideous. Nothing ends well.” She leaned forward to whisper, wobbling the table some more. “His first trick is to cure her of her headaches.”
I tried to read the book when I was alone in the attic, but it was mostly about artists in Paris. I learned very little of the villain’s methods. Instead I returned to the Omaha Clinic. I read about the medicinal properties of orchids. Travelers in the deserts of Persia sustained themselves on tonics mixed from the flower’s bulbs. Even just being in the presence of such strange blossoms was curative. Orchids needed no soil, so the Japanese would simply hang the plants from their ceilings. My mind drifted, imagining myself stringing orchids up by their stems, in a hothouse where Cecily could sit and sip orchid-bulb tea. She would return to me, and I would cure her.
• • •
ON THE OPENING NIGHT OF Heart of the White City, I returned to the Fair for the first time in weeks. I knew I would not see Cecily on the stage, but I would, at least, see her characters. I would see her factory girl, her dance hall girl, her Ferris wheel girl, her fire victim. And there was a part of me that wanted the constant ache of seeing Cecily everywhere, in everything, her shadow crossing my shoes, the scent of her extract of sweet pea caught in the garden. I wanted to sail alone on the swan gondola, with Cecily at my side.
I tamed my hair with a messy pomade August had concocted in his kitchen, a perfumed slop mixed from wax, mutton lard, and orange flowers. It slicked all my curls straight and made my hair darker and wet like from a rainstorm. I ran a string of dental silk between my teeth and brushed with August’s powder of French chalk and myrrh. I splashed my bloodshot eyes with a tonic from the oculist, a tepid water peppered with sea salt.
When I reached the theater at the Fair, the girl behind the gilded bars of the box office laughed at me. “There hasn’t been a ticket for weeks,” she said.
I refused to be disappointed. I leaned in close to the window, and I hooked a finger around one of the thin bars. “Do you know of any scalpers?” I said.
The ticket girl winked and tapped at my finger. “Go look on the midway,” she said. “It’s full of degenerates after dark.”
She was right. I found no ticket scalper, but rogues of every other stripe loitered and skulked. The midway had become more sordid than ever; it was the Fair’s back alley. The puppeteer’s Punch-and-Judy show was bloodier and filthier than before. In front of the big top of the Wild Animal Show, a man-size birdcage featured a woman inside swinging, in a costume trimmed with red feathers, nothing on beneath her skirt. She performed acrobatics that made her feathers flutter up so fast you risked missing something obscene. Young men stuck green carnations in their buttonholes, limped their wrists, fluttered their yellow hankies, and sold their kisses to Oscar Wilde types. Grass skirts wiggled off hips in the Hawaiian Theater. Women undid their corsets for the X-ray machine. Hard liquor flowed from the lemonade stands. From an apple cart a peddler sold opium pipes.
And the lovelies Rosie had been selling under cover of his coat had now crept out, every bare inch of them in the full glare of the midway’s lights. He’d parked his rickshaw in front of a souvenir shop. The photographs were pinned to the umbrella and propped up in the seat. They were stuck into the spokes of the wheels. He’d even strung up a clothesline, the pictures dangling from wooden pins, as shocking and delicate a sight as a lady’s frilliest underdrawers. Rosie had pictures pinned to his suspenders, and even one playfully tucked into the fly of his pants.
On the brim of Rosie’s hat was pinned a lovely I recognized—one of the young, motherly nurses of the incubator exhibit. I knew she had likely been an actress only playing the part of a nurse, but I still worried about her, posed as she was, naked but for a nun’s wimple atop her head. “I’ll buy it,” I said. She’d been one of the ones who’d been sweet to Doxie, so I paid to take the picture off the market or, at least, this copy of it. “Some of these girls have fathers, you know.” I harrumphed, holding out my dollar bill.
Rosie had grown used to my foul mood. He rolled his eyes and held out a half-dollar piece. “Men of the clergy get a half-price discount,” he said, with a sneer.
I didn’t take the coin. Instead, I folded up the card, smaller and smaller, and gazed into the window of the souvenir shop.
We were about as far from an ocean as we could possibly be, so landlocked were we there in the West, but the shop was stocked full of souvenirs made of seashells—little mother-of-pearl prairie schooners with dried sea horses in place of oxen, and figurines of mermaids holding ears of corn. I stepped inside. Nestled in among the knickknacks was an oval bottle not much bigger than a robin’s egg, and made of abalone shell. When it caught the light, the cloud-colored shell s
himmered faintly with pink and pale blue. The gilded tin stopper was shaped like a tiny crown, and it was attached to a little stick of pinewood. The idea, the clerk explained, was for a lady to attach the bottle’s chain to her charm bracelet, and she could turn the stopper when she wanted a bit of scent, the little stick grinding the perfumed seeds inside.
It cost only a half-dollar, so I stepped back out to take the coin Rosie had offered, and I returned to the clerk. Before I’d even left the shop with the bottle, it throbbed cool in the palm of my hand like a talisman. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth shell.
I twisted the stopper, to grind the seeds, and something about the scent—a mix of licorice and lilac—was tranquilizing. It already reminded me of Cecily.
• • •
I FOUND AUGUST SWEETBRIAR in the Indian camp, where he’d built himself a tent among the wigwams and tepees. He had hammered together a rectangular frame of scrap wood and hung up rags for walls—curtains, tablecloths, tattered ball gowns torn apart at their seams. Fairgoers lined up at the front of the tent, and he would lift the flap with his wrist and wave people in, one by one, with a witchy wiggling of his fingers.
August no longer practiced only medicine. He told fortunes too. The tent, though spacious, had no chairs, so he would sit with his subject on a rug spread out across the dirt. He would either diagnose and prescribe a tonic, or he’d have the man or lady shake a large kid glove that was filled with chicken bones left over from his previous day’s supper. August would spill the bones onto the rug and study how they fell.
When he saw me standing in the line outside the tent, he closed up shop, sent everyone else away, and pulled me in. I could smell the spot of perfume at his throat as he hugged me close.
His hair had grown past his shoulders. I ran my fingers through the snaggled ends of it. When I stepped back, I saw he wore only a woman’s petticoat that sagged on his skinny hips. Around his neck was a long necklace that nearly reached his knees. Knotted up in the necklace were misshapen pearls, seashells, and turtle bones. His cheeks and chest were crossed with white and yellow lines of paint.
“I’ve gone native,” he said, cocking a hip. “We all have around here.”
I ran my fingertip along the two-headed snake scribbled up his arm. “What’s all this mean?” I said.
“Oh, darling, I have no idea,” he said, “but I hope it means something awfully savage. Would you like some tea? I have the samovar.” Before I could answer, it seemed the whole tent would be trampled. A stampede passed so close, it shook the wooden frame and blew the walls like sheets on a line. The riders wailed and hollered, and the horses’ hooves kicked up a thick cloud. I bent over with a coughing fit from all the dirt.
“You do get used to it,” August said, when we could hear ourselves speak again. He went to a tent pole to secure it, pushing it deeper into the ground. “It was fairly quiet around here when it was all just an exhibit of everyone being peaceable and pretty.” He dusted the samovar with a peacock feather.
I had indeed noticed that things had changed in the Indian camp. The camp had been designed as a high-minded tribute to “the lost man,” according to the Fair’s diplomats. It was an important anthropological exercise, they’d explained. Before, the white folks had stepped polite and curious among the rituals, even a little stooped at the back, like they were examining medical oddities under glass in a dime museum. They wore thick goggles to keep their eyes from stinging from all the dirt kicked up by the strutting of warriors. They hesitantly accepted offers to bang a drum or blow through a flute.
Meanwhile, farther down the midway, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show made a fortune by staging mock scalpings and stagecoach massacres. Those Indians—most of them white men in face paint and loincloths—warbled and shrieked all day long, then spent their nights in the suites of the fine Paxton Hotel.
When the old warrior Geronimo arrived at the Fair as a one-night-only one-man show, selling the buttons off his coat and letting young ladies pose on his knee for a fee, he inspired the men and the women of the camp.
Now, for a nickel, you could be right in the thick of it. You could suck alfalfa smoke from a pipe—a penny a puff—while sitting alongside a man claiming to be an Indian chief. Everything cost you, even just a plug of that buffalo pemmican you could barely chew without ripping out a tooth. You could place bets on which man would catch the maiden in a love chase on horseback and get tickets to glimpse a baby that had been born in a tepee a few days before—Little Spotted Bear swaddled in a pelt. But the biggest spectacles were the sham battles staged in the open fields, stealing some business away from the Wild West Show. Rumors floated through the Fair that virgins had been abducted and businessmen scalped, right there, within the Fair’s fences, only steps away from the New White City. These rumors were designed by the tribesmen themselves. All the threat and naked skin drew folks closer and closer.
In August’s tent, I lay back on the rug next to the center pole that kept the roof up. The roof was nothing but a threadbare bedsheet patterned with stars, thin enough to let some light in. August stood nearby looking into a gilt-framed mirror he’d hung on one of the tent posts, twisting his hair up into a little bun and locking it into place with a thin-handled spoon. On his ankle was a stringy bracelet, and I touched its charms—a silver dove and a heart.
“It’s a mourning bracelet,” August said, lifting the hem of his petticoat an inch or two higher, moving his ankle around to show it off. “That’s what I tell people, anyway. ‘They’re strands of my dead lover’s hair,’ I tell people. ‘The bracelet helps me see what’s not there to be seen.’ But it’s just hair out of my own head.” He lowered himself to the rug to sit cross-legged. “Do you want me to tell your fortune?” he said.
“I don’t have a fortune,” I said. I sat up too, cross-legged, facing him. Our knees touched. “All I have is misfortune.”
“Well, yes,” he said, taking my hands in his, palm to palm, “misfortune is your fortune.” He closed his eyes tight and furrowed his brow, as if studying the ether. “It’s all I see for you.”
“Try to see something else,” I said. “I don’t want any more bad news.” I looked down at our hands and I laced my fingers in among his. He rubbed softly my thumbs with his thumbs.
“You’re such a broken little sparrow, aren’t you?” he said. He nearly whispered it. “How’d you ever survive the kind of life you lived?” He leaned forward to kiss my forehead. He then moved his head to press his cheek against my cheek. I put my head on his shoulder.
“If you look in my future,” I said, “see me there with Cecily, please. And with Doxie.”
August shrugged my head away, and he leaned back. “I’ve learned that I’ve lived other lives,” he said. His hair had fallen loose already from its knot, and a lock of it dangled in his face. I reached up to push it back, tucking the strands behind his ear.
“How do you know?” I said.
“There’s a woman here in the camp, and she told me,” he said. “We sat under the moon and drank some sort of wicked brew. When we got drunk enough, we ate a locust, and that’s when we saw this flurry of images. I’ve been stitching it all together in the days since.”
“Who were you before?” I said.
“One hundred years ago, I was one of the wives of a warrior,” he said. “I was a wife, but I was also exactly who I am now. I was a man, and I was a wife. Like a double life, like you might have in a dream. And a French fur trader fell in love with me, and he stole me away from the warrior. We lived in a plantation house in New Orleans, and he bought me beautiful dresses and beautiful wigs. He taught me French, and I wrote a journal of my captivity. In my vision, I could see myself as I was then, and I could see over my shoulder, see what I was writing. But I couldn’t read it, because I don’t know French now.”
“You only believe in all that voodoo because you want to believe in it,” I said. “You’re too romantic.”
“I am,” he said in a whisper, looking in my e
yes. “It’s a curse I’ve been carrying around for centuries.”
“Then you know the pain,” I said. I touched my fingers to his wrist, to feel the feather-soft beating of his pulse. His pulse quickened. “Did she ever even love me, do you think?” I said. “Does she love me still? Is she thinking about me?” In that moment, I would trust his every word. I just needed him to say it, to tell me that Cecily loved me, so I could believe him. It was childish, I suppose, but something about being there with him, snug in his sympathy, made me pitiful. I wanted to rest my head on his chest and listen to his heart.
But August stood, turned away, and walked to the wall of the tent. He took deep and broken breaths, his hands on his hips, looking down at the ground.
“August?” I said. “What’s wrong?” August said nothing. He didn’t move except to breathe. “Augie?” I said.
August ran his fingers over his cheek, smearing his paint. He then took a lace handkerchief from where he’d tucked it into the waist of his petticoat. He dabbed at his nose. “You will see her again,” he said, with a sniffle.
I stood and walked to August’s side. “What is it?” I said.
“It was only a glimpse, and a blur at that,” he said. “It was mostly nothing more than a shiver up my spine. But I’m certain. You’ll be with her. I see her hovering against a wall, up above your head. Like a picture in a magic lantern.” I looked back and up, following the line of his sight. “Will you go now?” he said. “I need to collect myself.”
If it hadn’t gotten so late, the play about to open, I would’ve begged for more. I wasn’t typically inclined to believe in any kind of soothsaying, but I could have spent hours analyzing his visions of Cecily, his voice gentle in my ear like a hummed lullaby.
• • •
THE MYSTERIOUS AIRSHIP flew again above the Fair, and many of the hundreds turning out for Heart of the White City stood in the street to watch the flicker of light in the night sky. A man in a top hat took his opera glasses from their leather case and focused them on the passing ship. Others followed suit until the promenade was crowded with gentlemen in full dress and ladies in gowns standing still, staring up, their binoculars to their eyes. I slipped in and out among them, as graceful as a vapor, not knocking a knee or brushing a sleeve, twisting myself this way and that. By the time I’d reached the front door, I’d lifted the ticket I needed.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 25
