The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  It was Halloween, and many went to the Grand Court in costume. It seemed I could see something of Cecily in every masked woman I passed.

  I would feel a quick beat of recognition in my heart when a woman happened to be looking up and off the way Cecily always had, like she was studying a pattern in a cloud or following the flight of a bird. And I don’t mean to say Cecily was ghostly even before she died. She was not some illusion. She was never dreamy, never doomed. Never. She was none of those things. That’s why I still saw her, alive, living, everywhere I looked.

  I made quite a fool of myself in front of a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette. She had a girlish habit of Cecily’s, of twisting a loose strand of hair around and around her finger, but it was all part of the contraption of her disguise. With each tug of the curl, she fluttered the wings of the three toy butterflies in her wig. I wore a mask—a simple pink face with pinhole eyes—and I pushed it up to settle it atop my head. I watched the woman for minutes and minutes, convincing myself Cecily had returned, even as I failed to see much of anything of her in the stranger. I became certain, though, that I knew very well the beat of her tiny pulse in her throat, and a freckle at the inside of her wrist. I followed her as she wove through the street, the crowd parting for her and her grand skirts that bounced like on a spring. I finally said her name, touched her elbow, and she turned, a mask of peacock feathers held to her face by a stick in her hand. I touched her wrist, to lower her mask. Those weren’t Cecily’s eyes, not her lips, not her pale, tender throat. I didn’t recognize this woman, but she recognized me. I mean to say, she recognized my sadness, and her happiness fell, and she stepped back, away, her mask returning to her eyes.

  Everyone was thieving. They were like Hansel and Gretel, tearing away at the buildings of sugar. They broke windows, toppling cornices. They snatched spoons and saltshakers. They dug up the canna and lily bulbs. The Fair was to be torn down, beam by beam, the lagoon drained, the carpets rolled up. It would all be gone, whether we took it or not.

  A little stationery shop in the Manufactures Building sold its goods for cheap. I bought an ink pot and a long fountain pen shaped like an alligator. I bought a bundle of postcards tied together with a white ribbon, and I walked down the Exposition Hall to the booth of a distillery, to sit at a stool at a cask and sample some scotch, my mask still pushed up into my hair. At first I attempted to describe the flavors, noting them on a postcard. Tumbleweed, cowboy bonfire, salted apple peel, black mulberry.

  And then I wrote to Cecily.

  The Fair ends today, my love, I wrote. I’m so glad you won’t see it. I wrote her name on the card, and dropped it in the mailbox. I stuck the rest of the postcards, and the pen, in my back pocket.

  I imagined what would happen if the Fair wasn’t razed but left to decay, nature taking the land back, returning it to the miles of dying fields it was before. If they would let the place fall apart, I thought, I would visit the ruins as an old man, a better man than I ever could have imagined I’d someday be, in top hat and overcoat and monocle. The swan gondola, its long neck broken, would sit shipwrecked at the bottom of the dry lagoon, the fossils of leaves speckling the winged hull. The fairgrounds deserved to become a sad, battered monument to every lost thing of beauty.

  • • •

  “YOU REALLY ARE AFRAID, AREN’T you?” Cecily had said the night we’d gone up in the basket of the balloon. She had asked me to steal her away. And it was true, I had been afraid, but why? What was there to be afraid of? Falling? Death? There’d not been a day that had passed, not an hour, that I hadn’t wished I’d cut that rope and carried her off, at the risk of everything.

  On this last day of the Fair, the Civil War balloon rose again. The men pulled it down and sent it up, down and up, all morning and afternoon, lifting people into the air to the very end of its rope, to wave at the city below.

  I’m not sure at what point I decided to escape with it. I’d walked the entire length of the midway, as the showmen and managers tore down and packed up. The tracks were rolled, the tents collapsed, the carousel horses unharnessed. The Turkish Village, the Moorish Village, the Filipino Village—whole civilizations fell.

  The Indians had abandoned their camp days before, with the first eddies of blizzard, and they’d torched their makeshift tepees and wigwams, setting their whole fake city ablaze. They’d put their belongings on their horses’ backs, shrouded themselves in blankets and hides, and walked against the ice and wind, away from the burning camp and down the midway, their hundreds of footsteps fading behind them as more snow fell to cover their paths. They walked through the Grand Court and past the lagoon, where the fairgoers watched while wrapped in their own coats and furs in the wind-rocked gondolas, their umbrellas knocking into each other. They watched, and some applauded, assuming it was all spectacle, a parade of tribal nations.

  August’s tent—its brightly colored walls made of ball gowns and tablecloths—was nearly all that remained in the vast vacant lot scorched black and gray. He’d added to its drapery in recent weeks, stitching on ruffles and stretching a wall by adding bolts of kimono silk, crimson, yellow, violet, patterned with cranes, butterflies, cherry blossoms. He attached a weather vane to the tip of the tent pole—a wooden mermaid that spun around and around no matter the breeze, the points of her pink fin pointing north, south, east, west.

  August wasn’t inside, but I went in to sit anyway. He’d dragged in a wrecked velvet settee. But he’d taken most of his own things—his samovar, his framed painting of Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet, the skull of Yorick in her hand like a puppet.

  I’d turned August away several times in the aftermath of Cecily’s death. I hadn’t meant to be cruel; I just refused to be comforted. I turned everyone away. And I went to my new office only once, to telephone the Wakefield house. To speak to Mrs. Margaret. “The nanny, please,” I told the servant who answered. “I’m the infant’s doctor.”

  “Don’t call again,” Mrs. Margaret told me, in her harsh growl. “You can expect nothing from me. This is what Cecily wanted for her little girl. And I’m here to look after her, so you don’t have to worry. You have no business worrying. Respect Cecily’s memory, and allow the little motherless mite a good life.”

  I had not intended to give up so easily, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t think. When the Fair ends, I promised myself, my life will start back up. I would move forward, toward whatever might be next, once the Fair was over. When the Fair was over, I would be ready.

  So when I reached the balloon, I’d not meant to commit a grand theft. Stealing it hadn’t even occurred to me. I just wanted to go up in it again, to see all that Cecily and I saw that day. I wanted to go up, and be unafraid.

  But the winch was loose, and nobody knew it but me. In my nervousness, I had stood aside, working up my courage, watching, inspecting every inch of the rope, seeking any slight fraying of the hemp. I lowered my mask back to my face.

  The rope that kept the balloon captive was wound around a winch that was grounded in a block of cement. With every winding and unwinding, the crank turned and the winch rattled, loosening itself from its anchor.

  The cement was cracked and crumbling, and when no one else stood in line for flight, and as the balloon’s managers flirted with the trapeze artist, sharing a cigarette with her, I stepped forward, kicked my boot hard against the failing winch, and pushed myself up and into the balloon’s basket. I gave the rope a yank, freeing it from the winch, and set sail.

  I was tucked into the basket of the balloon like a rabbit in a hat. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  Under hypnosis, a man could shake his sense of fear. You watched a watch swing—ticktock, ticktock—or you followed the crushed eggshell that trickled through the neck of an hourglass, and your torment ticked away too, like magic. Or so they said. I’d once been on the same bill as a hypnotist who mesmerized for show, not medicine, and he’d put me in a trance without me even realizing. It had been easy to fall into it.
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  As I watched a rapid cloud, and as the balloon lifted, I felt myself slipping away.

  I rose higher and higher, gripping the sides of the basket tight, the wicker sticking into my skin. I heard the shouting below, the beckoning, the begging, but it sounded no more boisterous than all the happy racket of the fairgoers. In my fear, I kept my eyes downturned, watching my feet on the floor. When I finally looked up, and over, and across, I saw the New White City no longer beneath me. I saw farms and pastures, the lines of furrows in the plowed ground.

  I lowered myself to the bottom of the basket, unwilling to watch the world drift away.

  BOOK THREE

  Ghosts

  December 1898

  32.

  EVERY CHRISTMAS EVE, late into the night, the Old Sisters Egan told the ghost stories they’d grown up with. They would go to church to hear the children sing the carols, and then return to the farm for oyster soup, cooked goose, and plum pudding with a puddle of rum burned away with a match. They would then have brandied figs by the hearth, their legs covered with quilts, and retell old tales of the unsettled dead.

  But on this, my first Christmas Eve with the sisters, a snowstorm kept us in. This pleased me, of course. I’d left the house once that day, and did not feel inclined to leave it again. We’d gone to town, to the dry goods store, where I bought Cecily some jasmine-scented soap wrapped in pink tissue. I bought Doxie a toy elephant that fluttered its ears when you wound it up. Emmaline had loaned me a handful of coins for the gifts. “The poor darlings should have something under the tree, at least,” she’d said.

  I’d gone to the library alone afterward—a little room with too little light and too few books—and spent the rest of the morning reading while Emmaline and Hester had tea and doughnuts down the street with the listless Mrs. Peck, the ether addict.

  At the library, I wrote Cecily a letter. I’m looking for ways to turn the Emerald Cathedral green, I wrote. I’d like that to be my Christmas present to Emmaline and Hester. A promise of some green, in the middle of winter. In a manual on painter’s varnishes, I found a recipe. You treat some sheets of scrap copper with crushed grape skins. You soak the sheets in tubs, then wash them with turned wine. Eventually you build up a coat of verdigris. We’ll scrape it off and sprinkle the cathedral with the crystallized emerald.

  I tore the wrapper from the soap and tucked it into the envelope. I hope the scent lasts long enough to reach you, I wrote. Merry Christmas. I love you. I had then posted the letter, and collected the mail.

  And in the mail was a letter addressed to me, but I didn’t have to open it to know who it was from. I’d written August Sweetbriar just once, to let him know I was alive, and he’d written back, in early November, a note so full of peevishness and disappointment, I’d had to read it several times, each time hoping to see something gentler in his screed. He’d not believed me when I’d said it was all an accident—it was as if he thought I’d gone up in the balloon and that I’d broken my leg, all as a plot to escape without saying good-bye. What I’d explained as a strange kind of fate, he’d dismissed as cruelty. I don’t believe in fate, he’d written. And he’d written me a few other times since, each letter a little crankier than the one before it. I tucked this one in my jacket pocket. I knew I had done a heartless thing to him, even if by accident, and didn’t need the reminder.

  I would read it later, though, when I felt better fortified against his moods. Charitably, he had sometimes sent news. Rosie and Josephine had married on the first Saturday in December. Pearl had gone to Paris to study the window dressing of the dress shops there. Doxie’s baptism, and her long, silk christening robe, and her new name—Dorothy Wakefield—had been featured in the Sunday pictorial section of the Omaha Bee, with the sainted Wakefield holding her over the baptismal font. August had enclosed the newspaper clipping.

  I decided I would wait to read August’s new letter until after Christmas. Or maybe after the first of the year. Or maybe never. I missed August, and I loved him, but if he could only scold, I couldn’t listen.

  Or could I? His letter, unread, occupied my thoughts all the ride home, as Hester drove the horses, me sitting between the two sisters. In that envelope might be the unforgiveness I needed. I needed him to be inconsolable, so that the old life of mine could finally fall behind and fall away.

  But I kept the letter tucked in my jacket, and as we drew nearer to the farm, the air grew gray and sharply cold, and I had to bury my hands in the pockets of my trousers. The morning had been pleasant, with no chill or wind, and I’d worn no overcoat or hat or gloves. The Old Sisters Egan had dressed lightly too, and as the mercury dropped and dropped and dropped, and the first of the snow began falling, we didn’t speak a word to one another. We worried we’d not outrun the blizzard, and we were all distracted by our misery, by the burn of the icy wind which seemed it’d never stop. We leaned forward on our bench, as if we could lean our way right into our house, right up to the hearth.

  When we were finally inside, and we’d built the fire and lit the stove, as we’d stamped our feet and slapped at our own arms to get the blood to pump, we laughed. We started laughing and couldn’t stop. We laughed at how miserable we’d been only minutes ago, back when we’d thought we might die.

  “Can you believe how awful that was?” Emmaline said, wheezing with laughter.

  “How did we survive it?” Hester said. Despite her laughter, she seemed truly curious.

  “Did we survive it?” I said.

  “We did!” Emmaline said, smiling, nodding, sipping from a glass of scotch whiskey. “But only just.”

  When we fell quiet again, I thought of Cecily, and the night she couldn’t stop laughing at my jokes, at Oscar’s jokes, as I’d stood on the stage on the rooftop, after Wakefield’s masquerade ball. I had thought I’d never forget the sound of it, so sweet it was.

  But now I couldn’t quite hear it. I heard her speaking, when I listened back, and I could hear her singing the little lullabies to get Doxie to sleep. But the exact sound of her laughter escaped me. And I realized I couldn’t remember the sound of anyone’s laughter, no one’s but Emmaline’s and Hester’s, which I’d only just heard. And now, in the silence, I had no memory of the sound of theirs either. I could see, in my mind, whole audiences, shaking with laughter, their mouths open, their eyes watering. What did it sound like? For the life of me, I didn’t know.

  With such deep regret I thought of all the times Cecily and I had strolled past the phonograph booth on the midway, where you could speak into a horn and record yourself. You’d take home your own voice, its rhythms etched into a wax cylinder. “I have nothing to say,” she’d said the first time I’d suggested we step inside.

  She wouldn’t have had to say anything. I could’ve told jokes, and she could’ve laughed. And I’d have that laughter still.

  • • •

  AS THE WIND BLEW HARD, then died down, then blew hard again, its every gust sounding like a great beast slithering against the house, rattling the panes, knocking away shingles with the brush of its tail, Emmaline stood at the front window, watching for the snow to stop. She had dressed for churchgoing in a cape of possum fur—“Siberian marten,” she insisted—and a fur cap stuck through with quail feathers.

  Hester called us to the table in the kitchen, the room still warm from all the roasting. Emmaline gave up on the storm ending, and she took off her cape and hat. We sat down to another of Hester’s fine feasts.

  “Did you visit the Filipino Village when you were at the Fair?” Emmaline asked me. “Do you believe them to be a tribe of cannibals?”

  “I don’t believe anything about the Fair,” I said. “Why do you ask? Are you thinking if we get snowed in for too long we’ll have to eat each other alive?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “but we have a cellar full of canned birds and meats. And pickles and preserves. To turn cannibal would just be an extravagance.”

  After dinner, after dark, we exchanged gifts—the sisters gav
e me a monkey-leather wallet for all the money I didn’t have, and a jade letter opener with a little circle of magnifying glass on one end of it.

  I’d made each of us a pair of green goggles—pieces of a broken bottle wired together into spectacles. I’d tucked them into the stockings that hung from nails hammered into the mantel. As they reached into the socks, I warned, “Don’t cut your fingers. Sharp edges. And don’t cut yourself putting them on.”

  We hooked the wires behind our ears and looked up and around, at the fire, at the candle flames on the Christmas tree, at the lamplight, casting a green glow across the room with our every glance.

  “In the morning,” I said, “in the sunlight, the cathedral will be emerald, finally.”

  “Oh, I love them, Ferret,” Emmaline said. “I never want to see again without them.”

  But no sooner had she said it than she took them off. We all did. And we settled in for ghost stories, and stayed up half the night. I found myself nodding off in the middle of my own telling of one, right at the minute of its grisliest twist. When I woke, I’d been covered with a quilt, and Hester and Emmaline had gone up to their beds.

  The room wasn’t bright, but it wasn’t dark. It wasn’t daylight. It was silvery in the room, like it was lit with moonlight, but the moon was clouded over, and it still stormed outside.

  Every Christmas I always felt sunk in nostalgia, longing a little even for the orphanage and the tin bird with the windup wings Sister Patience had once snuck beneath my pillow. So I got up from the floor, took up August’s letter and my new letter opener, and sat near the window. I needed the sound of his voice in his words, no matter what his words said.

  There was enough of that pale, winter light to read by, though morning was hours away.

  August had been using the typewriter I’d left in my office, and it appeared from my name on the front of the envelope that he’d got the thing repaired. Before, all the r’s had hovered above the other letters—the couple of r’s in Ferret and the couple of r’s in Skerritt looking like fangs lifted, about to strike—but the r’s had now been knocked back in line.