The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  38.

  I CAUGHT UP WITH a cabbie who drove me north, to the ruins of the White City. I unfolded the cab’s hood when a drizzling of ice began to fall. I could hear the ice sprinkling the trees’ skeletal branches, a soft tune without melody, like chimes or shards of shattered glass swept into a dustpan. The white sky went whiter, paler, the clouds of frost sinking in, and I didn’t see the Fair coming until we wheeled right up to it. The New White City’s tall walls and rooftops bled away into the mist.

  I walked into the Grand Court past a gate leaning open on broken hinges. I wasn’t alone. Off on the far end, near where the fountain’s waters had played, were two boys in breeches with their bicycles leaning against the railing. The statue of Neptune had either lost his head or had had it stolen, and the boys sought to sever him of his other parts. They pitched snowballs likely packed with ice toward the statue. One fell just short of the god’s gut, another nearly hit the trident. I could see the boys had piled up a pyramid of them.

  The buildings turned to ruin in the winter, some of the walls fell in, a few rotundas collapsed. Windows were boarded, and some statues had been pulled from their pedestals and left in pieces on the bricks. Wings had been plucked from angels. A naked god was riddled with gunshot. Eve’s arm with the apple had been broken off and taken away, and so had the serpent from the tree. Wild turkeys ran by, pursued by two men with rifles, running past the No Hunting or Shooting sign tacked to a toppled column.

  And on the lagoon was a trio of young women skating across the ice, wearing black fur caps and long black coats of fur. One of the girls had her hands in a muff. One had a long scarf that trailed behind her and wrapped around as she spun. With everything so decayed, I worried about them on the ice, though I knew the water had been frozen solid for weeks. I thought I could hear the brittle sound of cracking.

  “Is the ice cold enough?” I shouted down to them, but they couldn’t hear me above their own chatter and the slice of their blades, which was just as well. They probably would have laughed at such a question.

  Inside the Agricultural Building was vast emptiness, all the exhibits having been packed up and carted away months before. A few of the ornate birdcages of brass and bamboo that had housed the German songbirds had been left behind, feathers clotted in the cages’ bars. There were carts and baskets of fruits and vegetables gone bad, then frozen in their state of rot. Pumpkins had burst and peaches had wrinkled and browned. I walked through the barren hall, my heart beating hard. The echo of my heels made it sound like someone was behind me, but I was alone. All alone.

  Last summer, locked in their dovecotes to be judged and exhibited, had been more varieties of pigeon than I’d ever known existed. I stopped now to read the labels on the wire gates of the empty cages. Short-faced bald heads and long-faced tumblers. Barbs, dragoons, fantails, and trumpeters. Chinese owls, English owls, African owls. Magpies, jacobins, priests, and nuns. The chanting of it brought me comfort, and I remembered the afternoon Cecily and I strolled through the hall and lucked upon the sight of a few of the birds escaping their prisons. Their wings had sounded too heavy to lift them, but they rose to the rafters. They’d swooped and glided overhead, suddenly seagulls in the open air.

  I checked the hour on my pocket watch. It was several minutes past three. But then the lonely echo of my boots went on and on, too long, and I felt dizzy, like from some sudden suck into my lungs of poison air. The sound of my steps kept going, but I wasn’t walking, I wasn’t moving. I sniffed the air, to try to place the scent. Extract of sweet pea.

  “Cecily,” I said, turning. I could feel her close to me, as if she stood at my back, her fingers light at my neck, but not touching, just stirring up static.

  A figure in black approached. She was dressed in widow’s weeds, a heavy black veil hanging from her hat and hiding her face. She carried at her side a mourning parasol trimmed in black feathers, the tip of it scratching across the wood planks of the floor as she dragged it along.

  All air seemed to have left the room even as the wind picked up and spun little whirlwinds here and there, catching the skeletons of leaves and slips of paper. The husk of a dead cricket flew up to buzz past my ear. I could only take shallow breaths that felt too short to reach my lungs, and I tried to say her name again but couldn’t.

  The woman in black slipped her hand up under her veil, and she seemed to be scratching her head. Her hat shook. She then began to part the veil. “Cecily,” I said, though I had yet to see her face.

  The woman looked up, and her mouth dropped open, her eyes rolling back, her eyelashes fluttering. A bright, burning redness rose to her cheeks. Pearl.

  “I’m here,” Pearl said. She leaned her head back more and her hat tumbled off. She swayed on her heels. Her knees gave out, and she collapsed, falling forward, into my arms.

  39.

  IN THE COACH, Pearl tried to explain. She leaned against the door as the old driver, out on his perch, drove us away from the fairgrounds. Even in her lack of posture she posed as Cecily. She sat collapsed in the corner, her forehead against the window.

  “I don’t remember putting on these weeds,” Pearl said. “I don’t remember leaving the house. But I’ve learned this is not unusual.”

  “Not unusual?” I said. I’d raised my voice more than I’d meant. I’d not wanted to be snappish, or I feared I’d frighten her and she’d reveal nothing at all.

  “Not unusual for a spiritual possession,” she said, slowly, cautious. She watched for my response. I looked out the window and shook my head. I couldn’t bear to be part of this. Grief had stunted us. We’d all become disoriented. If we didn’t set our minds to righting ourselves, we would become corrupt. As tempting as it was to trust her madness, to follow this all to some awful conclusion, I needed disbelief.

  “August told me you’d left,” I said. “He said you were touring with Susan B. Anthony.” Even that detail had been surprising, I realized. Pearl was soft-spoken and skittish. I could barely even picture her pushing leaflets on people, let alone speaking to a group. She was far too shy.

  When Pearl looked down to her hands, I saw she held the handkerchief I’d given Cecily. She ran her fingers along the embroidery of the letter C. “I’ve had to tell some lies,” she said.

  “You don’t say,” I said, and again I wished I’d said nothing at all.

  “I helped Billy Wakefield with the funeral, and with Doxie, and he needed me to stay,” she said. “He bought Mrs. Margaret a train ticket and sent her away, off to the Pennsylvania World’s Fair, to catch up with her theater troupe. There’s a world’s fair somewhere every summer now. He didn’t like the way she looked at him. And he sent his sister off to Egypt, to dig for antiquities with a professor from the university. He’s hoping she’ll marry him, though he’s practically a mummy himself, he’s so old.”

  “So you’ve been with Doxie?” I said. “How is she?”

  “She has everything she could want.”

  “But in a letter from . . . in one of the letters you . . .” I stopped for a moment. I took a breath. “One of the letters says Doxie cries, alone in her room.”

  “She’s never alone,” Pearl said. “She cries some, yes. She misses her mother. But she gets all my attention, and all the attention of the servants. With that sweet little face of hers, she needn’t ever worry about being alone.”

  “Let’s go there now,” I said. “Let’s go spend a little time with Doxie, and forget all this. This didn’t happen at all, none of it. We didn’t meet at the fairgrounds. You didn’t write the letters. I never got the letters. None of it. None of it happened.”

  “You think I’m insane,” she said. She watched my eyes, waiting for me to console. When I said nothing, she looked back down to the handkerchief. “And I probably am, aren’t I?”

  I took Pearl’s hand. “You’ve been hiding in the Wakefield house?” I said. “You quit window dressing? That’s a shame. You used to travel.”

  “I’ll travel again,” she sa
id. “But I’ll take Doxie. Billy wants me to take her to see the world. I’m her nanny, in a sense. I’ll be her tutor. He’s paying me much more than I would have ever made at Brandeis. And I have the run of the whole house; Billy spends all his hours in a shed in the back. I eat dinner with the servants every night in the kitchen. I love listening to their gossip, though half the time I don’t know who they’re talking about. They talk about a maid who was worthless, and who was fired long ago. But they still find remains of her ineptitude in the house—a spice in the wrong jar. A broken china saucer hidden far in the back of a drawer. A coat in the wrong closet. They blame her for everything.”

  “You deserve better,” I said.

  “Oh, Ferret, you don’t know anything,” she said. She pulled her hand away from mine. It was the first I’d ever heard her speak with such a lashing tongue. “Don’t you know anything? A woman living alone? Working as a shopgirl? Do you think I’ve ever been given a nod of respect? People are suspicious of a woman who works so hard at a job that pays so little. Even just my bedroom at Wakefield’s is bigger than the room I had at the women’s hotel.” She looked out the window. “You deserve better,” she said, with a shrug, with a snort of derision. “Yes, I do. I do deserve better. But who are you to say what’s better and what’s worse? What would you know about it?”

  We rode in silence for a while, my hands folded in my lap. Then I said, “Just please don’t write to me anymore. I beg you not to write me more of those letters. My soul can’t take it.”

  This just seemed to nettle Pearl all the more. She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Why would I write you letters?” she said. “Why would I put myself through all this? I open my eyes, and a whole afternoon is gone. And I’m not in the room I was in. There’s ink spilled on my sleeve. I’ve gnawed my fingernails to the quick.” She calmed down and put her hand on mine. “I loved the letters you wrote from the farm. They tore my heart in two. I kept every one, tied with a ribbon. My bedroom used to be the boy’s room. On the mantel of the hearth is a beautiful box, with bluebirds painted on it, and the letters fit perfectly inside. One day Billy collected the mail, as he never ever did, and there was a letter from you. He read it and was furious. He demanded I bring him the others. He tossed the letters in the fire.”

  “When?” I said.

  “In December, I think,” she said. “Before Christmas. And for the next several days, he insisted on collecting the mail himself. And he would throw your letters in the fire without even reading them. And then he just slipped away again. He forgot about them. He didn’t have the energy to walk to the gate to collect the mail. He stayed in his shed. When your letters seemed to suggest that someone was writing you in response, I suspected Wakefield himself. But he couldn’t have been seeing your letters. I would collect the mail, and I would read your letters while standing in front of the fire. And I dropped them into the flame as soon as I finished. I pushed at the paper with the fire iron, stabbed at it, until it was ash. And it was a short time after that when I realized it was me, not Wakefield, who wrote you. Cecily was communicating through me. She was using my hands to write you. At first I would blame those missing hours to the headaches I had. I thought I was fainting from them.”

  It was then I realized that the coach had not just stopped, but that it had parked. We’d reached some kind of destination. I leaned over Pearl to look out her window. “I don’t know this street,” I said.

  “Ferret, please come inside with me,” she said. “Ella Winnows is a clairvoyant. She has a room on the top floor.”

  “No,” I said, “no, no, no, no, no.”

  “Ferret,” she said, clutching my arm, “just come with me this once. Allow me this one chance to prove the truth of it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ferret, the letters won’t stop,” she said. “They won’t just stop coming because we want them to. Bind my wrists. Bury me in a box. She’ll find some other way to write to you. Or not. And that would be the worst yet. You mustn’t silence her until she’s said all she’s needed to say. Ella says this isn’t at all unusual. She says spirits often ramble until they find the ease they seek. None of this is in the slightest bit unusual, Ferret.”

  I held my hand to Pearl’s cheek, and I felt her skin grow hot. As disappointed as I was, as frustrated and as foolish as I felt, I did pity her. In her despair she’d fallen some charlatan’s victim, willingly or otherwise. And I wasn’t so wise myself; I’d fallen too, after all.

  The town was plagued with clairvoyants—like beetles and silverfish, these men and women infested attics and undergrounds. They kept dim, moonlit parlors on every city block. They were just as plentiful and just as cheap as the churchless preachers who bellyached on street corners, predicting damnation with gin on their breath. And along with the mystics with business sense, the ones with telephones and advertisements in the Evening Bee, were those only passing through, renting theaters and halls to bilk the believing for a nickel a head before packing their trunks and moving on to the next congregation of ninnies. Add to them the hobbyists, the amateur psychics and spiritualists, who followed instructions in a book to save them the cost of a proper séance. It was a sport and a religion, and in our grief, we begged to be deceived.

  I’d heard tell that Omaha was particularly rife with mysticism due, in no small part, to Wakefield. For a time, after the death of his son, then the death of his first wife, he spent outrageous sums in hopes of hearing their voices again. He had sought spiritual guidance nightly.

  “No clairvoyant,” I said. Pearl needed me to turn cold and skeptical to the whole to-do, even if she didn’t yet realize it. If I didn’t disapprove, if I played along a second more, she’d be making sense of her every dream and headache. “No, Pearl, I’m sorry.” But then I felt, in the small of my back, some pressure and pain, like the sole of someone’s boot. I arched my back and groaned. I turned around and, of course, no one was there. But in my ear, as clear as if she rested her chin on my shoulder to whisper, I heard Cecily’s voice. Stubborn, she said.

  40.

  ELLA WINNOWS, a psychic with a lisp, had been a shopgirl at Brandeis before opening her attic parlor. She answered the door to us, hugging an open book to her chest, her wispy red hair wired with static. You could practically hear it sizzle and snap. “You’re early,” she mumbled, a cigarette burning in the corner of her mouth. “I have to find my glasses before I can get anything going.”

  “You’re wearing them,” I said.

  She brought her fingers to the lenses in front of her eyes. “Dear God,” she said. She took the glasses off and held them up toward the skylight, checking for smudges. “Why can’t I see through them? I’m blinder with them than without them. Sit.”

  The tabletop was covered with open books about the spirit world and the astral plane. She dropped her cigarette into her cup of coffee and slapped all the books closed, gathered them in her arms, and tossed them into the corner, into a wing chair so battered the springs stuck through. There was nothing about the room that would give a disbeliever faith. The wallpaper was torn and streaked with grime. Cobwebs gathered in the corners of picture frames. No one, alive or otherwise, had sat at this table in a while. I wrote Cecily’s name in the dust on the wooden arm of my chair.

  “I wish you had come when it was pitch-dark,” she said, sitting down and placing her hands on ours atop the table. “You should have come when it was summer. It’s better to summon spirits in the summertime by the light from my insects and fungus.” She nodded toward a cabinet; on a shelf was a jar of dead fireflies, marked fireflies on a piece of tape, and a jar of dead glowworms, marked glowworms. There was a pot of withered mushrooms. “The mushrooms glow blue around the gills when they’re healthy,” she said. “I don’t know if any of this will work at all. Don’t blame me if nothing happens. You should come back in the summer.” Her hands fidgeted. “I really just read tea leaves, as a rule.”

  We sat there, around the table, holding hands for several minute
s. The room was cold, but our hands grew sweaty.

  “My hands are hot,” Pearl whispered.

  Ella shook her head. “Doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “Not necessarily.”

  The wind picked up outside the window, so I tried to help things along. “There was no wind before,” I said.

  “The wind comes, it goes,” she said. “I wouldn’t read anything into it.”

  I heard a buzzing, like a short in a light, and I thought I saw, from the corner of my eye, the flicker of a firefly in the jar. When I turned to look, the jar was dark. And when I returned my eyes to the table, I thought I caught sight of the blue glow of the mushrooms. The table trembled. Ella didn’t seem to feel it.

  “Sometimes nothing happens,” she said. “It’s not unusual for nothing to happen.”

  My nostrils stung with the smell of a struck match. It gave me a headache between my eyes. Pearl’s grip tightened on my hand. Her grip grew so tight, I worried for my fingers and I wriggled my hand from hers.

  “Pearl,” I said, as she straightened her spine, segment by segment, as if some heavy sob was working up from deep in her body. She leaned her head back and opened her mouth.

  Pearl made no sound. She stood abruptly, and turned, the rustling of her skirt causing her chair to tip back and to spin on one leg before it tumbled to the floor. Blind as a sleepwalker, Pearl tripped forward into the wall. She ran her hands along it, as if feeling for a doorway. She followed the wall, whimpering and moonstruck.

  I stood to take Pearl’s shoulders in my hands, to turn her to me. I was spooked but not by spirits. There was the threat of death in the room. There was damage. Pearl had fallen ill, and it was illness that terrified me.