The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  THAT EVENING I salvaged a broken-down bassinet from the Emerald Cathedral, prying it loose from where it’d been roped and nailed on. We put Doxie to bed on the screened-in porch, where there were some cool late-summer breezes that smelled of autumn must. We sat in the wicker swing and rocking chairs and watched the angel sleep.

  Eulalie brought out our evening’s cups of brandied plums, and we ate them with teaspoons as Pearl told the story of her escape.

  “He wants me to conceive a child on the night of our wedding,” Pearl said. She spooned a sodden plum into her glass of red wine. “On the first night of the new century. And he wants a son. Only a son.”

  “There are methods,” he’d told Pearl. He’d consulted with scientists and witches alike. He’d studied folklore and medicine. “We’re on the precipice of discovering all there is to know about everything,” he’d said.

  He’d already begun her on a diet of potato peels and red clover blossoms and alfalfa grass, horseradish, and dandelion leaves. Alkaline, he’d explained. She lay awake in her bed every night, worrying, some tonic undrunk on the nightstand beside her. She cried for her little girl that could never be. She began to feel herself going mad from it. Wakefield had spoken of having her womb curetted, a word she hadn’t known. One of the maids, who’d worked for a time in an asylum, told Pearl it meant a scraping of her insides.

  Then one afternoon Wakefield’s twin sister, Billie, took Pearl to Brandeis for a private showing of the milliner’s new wares. Billie and Pearl drank champagne on a sofa of white, and they would nod, gasp, cluck their tongues at the dramatic hats and compliment the shopgirls who modeled them. The girls would lean in to show off every hat’s every frill—the glass grapes with leaves of calfskin, the stuffed doves with sapphire eyes, the blue beetles with stone backs pinned to silk ribbons, the feathers, the flowers, the gems.

  And in between all the polite fuss, Billie offered rescue. “I’ll help you get away,” she said in a whisper, leaning her own head forward, the brim of her hat hiding her face.

  Not yet trusting Billie, Pearl said, “I have nowhere to be.”

  “You’re up all night crying,” she said.

  Pearl felt her skin grow hot, felt the sweat bead on her forehead, and she cursed her constant blushing and how her red cheeks always told all her secrets.

  Billie would arrange for Pearl to go to Paris with Doxie to a special clinic. “What clinic?” Pearl said.

  Billie said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist.” Billie would have materials printed, papers and advertisements that promoted the fictional clinic’s expertise at selecting a baby’s sex. Wakefield would find it irresistible and arrange the travel himself. And Wakefield’s sister would send Pearl money, for as long as she needed it.

  Billie spoke with her glass at her lips, her breath popping the bubbles of her champagne. “We’ll tell my brother it requires months of treatment. And you’ll tell him you’re taking Doxie so she can learn French as she learns English. And you’ll disappear into the city.”

  Pearl asked, “Won’t he come looking for us?”

  “Eventually,” she said. “But he won’t find you. And he’ll forget about you. He’s a broken man. He has no true capacity for love.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Billie leaned over, ducking the brim of her hat in and under the brim of Pearl’s, and she said simply, as the answer was obvious, “I want you both out of my house.” She then smiled, fluttered her eyelashes prettily, and turned her attention to the shopgirl bent before them to show off the silk lilies twisted into the hatband.

  • • •

  SO BEFORE PEARL left the country for good, with my girl, she found her way to the farm.

  “We couldn’t leave without saying good-bye,” she said.

  “I’m grateful,” I said, but I was heartbroken. Only months before I might have felt inclined to follow her to Paris, to be near Doxie always. But now I was home, and I was home to stay. I’d come to rely so much on Eulalie. And as the Old Sisters Egan got older, they needed the son they never had.

  After Eulalie and the sisters went up to bed, leaving me alone with Pearl on the porch, I said, “Don’t go.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” Pearl said. “I’m not tired. I can stay up all night talking to you. It’s so good to see you again. Can you believe how much we’ve been through?”

  “I mean, don’t go to Paris,” I said.

  “Oh,” Pearl said, worried, looking down to the floor. She reached to the curled toes of her slippers, to touch at their tips.

  “You can hide here as easily as in Paris . . . even easier,” I said. “You can’t trust the Wakefields. She’ll tell Billy where you are, I know she will.”

  Pearl met my eyes. “But you see, it’s all already settled, Ferret,” she said. “She bought me my own shop. I plan to pay her back, but . . . my own shop. In Paris.” It pleased her so much just to say it. “I can sell whatever I want.”

  “Do you even know what it is you want to sell?” I said.

  “It’ll be a shop for the new woman,” she said. “Dresses that fit. Cigarettes. Political magazines.”

  “Sounds just awful,” I said, but I smiled, and I winked, as I said it.

  “You’ll come visit us,” she said, which sounded even more awful somehow, and the words caught me by surprise. I felt my eyes tear up. In those words were all the miles of road and ocean between us. In that invitation to visit were all the visits we’d never have.

  • • •

  WHEN I WENT TO BED, I stared at the ceiling, two crickets in duet somewhere in the room. Every time I stood, my ear peeled toward the crickets’ chirp, hoping to cup the bugs in my palms to toss them from the window, they got quiet, dropping mum at the creak of the floor. Only when I was back under the sheet would they sing again.

  Eulalie was awake too, but distracted by other insects. “June bugs in August,” she said. We could hear the soft thump of their hard shells on the window and the screen.

  “What do we have to look forward to?” I said. It was a practical question—Eulalie was the expert on our crops and all the ways they might fail. June bugs in August sounded prophetic somehow. She knew the true villainy behind every summer song and flash of color. For her, the night quiet was always noisy with threat. As was a ladybug on a daisy petal. A robin perched on a fence post. The sight of any pretty thing could put a hitch in her step.

  “‘What do we have to look forward to?’” she said. “What a cruel thing to say.”

  “No, no, sweetie, no,” I said. “What does it mean, June bugs in August? What kind of damage will they do? That’s what I meant. What damage do we have to look forward to? To the crops.”

  But she’d already begun to cry. We lay flat on our backs. She put her hand to her face, and the bed shook with her sobbing. I got up on one elbow and held my fingers to her cheek. “Eulalie,” I said.

  She sat up to swing her legs over the side of the bed and rummaged through the nightstand drawer for a handkerchief. “They lay eggs in the meadow,” she said. “When they hatch, they’re worms that live in the sod. Then we cut the sod to put in the cornfield. And the grubs get in the roots.”

  “Is that anything to cry over?” I said, hoping to make light. I walked my fingers up the back of her nightgown, ladder-stepping the knots of her spine. “Worms in the roots?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed next to her and took her hand in mine. She put her head on my shoulder. She said, “She’s quite a little girl, isn’t she?”

  I nodded my head against hers. We could see the black shadows of the June bugs creeping along the screen. “What do we do about them?” I said. “The worms?”

  “We turn the neighbor’s hogs loose in the field to eat them up,” she said.

  I said, “I have so much to learn,” and Eulalie laughed.

  We lay back down, Eulalie in my arms. She put her hand at my cheek. “We’ve got skipjacks in the strawberry patch,” she said.

  “I like
the sound of that,” I said.

  “Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “Their eggs hatch worms too.” I’d seen the beetles bouncing around the strawberry leaves. Eulalie explained to me the notches in their skeletons and spines. The bugs, when on their backs, could right themselves with a click.

  “They’re cute,” I said. “I like how they pop up and around like acrobats.”

  She moved her hand to cover my mouth. “Sh,” she said. “You make me tired.”

  • • •

  I WOKE TO the noise of Pearl’s shoes on the living room floor downstairs, as she paced back and forth before sunrise.

  She’d already dressed for the day in her traveling suit of mohair, and she wore her veil again.

  “What’s wrong, Pearl?” I said, sashing my robe closed around my pajamas.

  It seemed my every word anymore brought a girl to tears. With the question, Pearl began to whimper, and her shoulders to bob. I went to her and pushed her veil away from her face. I put my arm around her as she cried, and I led her to the kitchen table. I put on some water to boil. “You’re leaving already,” I said, standing at the stove, staring down at the kettle.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I thought I might have the day with Doxie,” I said.

  “Ferret,” she said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  “What more could there be?” I said, weary.

  “I can’t take Doxie with me,” she said. I held my breath. Her words had been broken by her weeping. Had I heard her right? I was afraid if I asked her to say it again, she’d take it all back. “I love her with all my heart, but I’m no one’s mother. I’m no one’s wife. I never wanted to marry. I got lost in all of this. And now I can start over. I can be who I wanted to be. I can be who I am.”

  I sat at the table and took Pearl’s hands in mine. I knew I must move slowly, but it was all I could do to keep from running to the porch, to where Doxie slept, and snatch her up before Pearl changed her mind. But when I felt Pearl squeeze my hands, when I looked at her wet cheeks, at her chin quivering, I knew she’d already let Doxie out of her life. Doxie was mine. I sat up straighter in my chair. I gripped Pearl’s hand tight, and nodded, with my chin lifted. I took on all the stern and certain gestures I imagined a good father would have.

  When the water in the kettle began to bubble, Pearl stood from the table to attend to it. She wiped her face with her sleeve, and she went about brewing our tea. “I’m not sure if I should tell you what I want to tell you,” she said.

  “You should,” I said. “You should tell me.”

  She stood still, her back to me, steam leaving the room through the window open an inch. “Cecily sent me here,” she said.

  I welcomed it now, this ghost story. Pearl was on her way to Paris. It wouldn’t hurt to indulge ourselves for a minute or two, for old time’s sake. “You can tell me,” I said.

  Pearl told me that she and Mrs. Margaret had continued to secretly visit clairvoyants. Pearl would go down the hill and into town, hidden in veils and massive hats. Most often all the psychics’ hullaballoo amounted to nothing—even the charlatans saw their tricks fizzle, with cogs skipping gears, lightbulbs flickering to black in their presence. Now that the room with the swans was unlocked, Cecily’s ghost refused to haunt.

  “Absolutely nothing, until we returned to Ella Winnows,” Pearl said. It had been in Ella Winnows’s parlor that I’d watched Pearl, possessed, compose a letter from Cecily on that gray day in February. And it was in that parlor again that Cecily wrote, only a few weeks before Pearl left Wakefield. “I’m sure it was Cecily,” Pearl said. “Ella Winnows had a slate. We stared at the slate for the longest while. It was only when Ella picked the slate up and went to put it away that I saw the words. They appeared there suddenly. ‘Let Dorothy go to the City of Emeralds,’ it said. It couldn’t have been a trick, Ferret. Ella Winnows didn’t know that Doxie’s real name was Dorothy. I don’t think so, anyway. I don’t think I would’ve ever told her such a thing. And she certainly couldn’t have known about the Emerald Cathedral. It was our Cecily, Ferret. It was our Cecily, and she was setting me straight, bless her heart.”

  “Bless her heart,” I mumbled, like a muttered prayer. I wondered what Mrs. Margaret would have to say about that slate. I would’ve been just as happy to never see the old automaton again, but I wanted Doxie to someday learn all she could about her mother. Mrs. Margaret would have many stories that I didn’t know. And I wanted to hear them too.

  • • •

  AT THE STATION, Pearl stood on the platform with her bags and trunks, and we all looked up along the tracks, hoping to see the train’s lamp cut through the fog. The train was late, and it grew later and later, with no whistle in earshot.

  We’d arrived at the station late ourselves, and we’d been so relieved to find we hadn’t missed the train, we’d become giddy. We’d had a teary but cheerful farewell, with kisses and promises to write and visit, certain the train would be along in only a minute, to steal Pearl away to her new life and to leave us to ours.

  It was only Eulalie and me with Pearl, Doxie in my arms, and the train’s absence dragged on. We could think of no conversation. Every tick of the watch in my pocket made us tired and reminded us of the silence we shared. And we couldn’t distract ourselves by playing with Doxie, as she’d fallen asleep, her head on my shoulder. I wanted to concentrate only on the weight of her against me, and her hot puffs of breath against the skin of my neck.

  “She gets kind of heavy, doesn’t she?” I whispered.

  “She’ll get lighter,” Pearl said. “You’ll get used to carrying her.”

  Finally Pearl sat down on one of her trunks, slapping her bouquet across her knees. Eulalie had tied together the last of the flowers for Pearl—some stems of echinacea and black-eyed Susans, and some sprigs of dill. “You should go,” she told us. “Really, there’s no need for us all to wait. I’m perfectly fine. You should go home.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I was about to say, Are you sure? when Eulalie said, “Absolutely not. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”

  “Oh, please don’t,” Pearl said. She began to cry again, and she took her handkerchief from the pocket of her jacket to dab at her nose. “Please go. I insist. It’ll be easier for me. I can’t go through another good-bye. I’m terrible with good-byes to begin with.”

  Eulalie sat next to Pearl on the trunk. “You’ll have to suffer us, my dear,” she said. “We’re not leaving you alone at the station, for God’s sake. We’re family, and family waits. Right, Ferret?” She looked at me askance, as if she sensed I was eager to go. And I was. I couldn’t feel certain that Pearl had left us all behind until she was no longer in my sight.

  “We wouldn’t even think of leaving you here alone, Pearl,” I said.

  And so we waited the two hours it took. Doxie grew fussy, and an old woman alone on a bench nearby brought us a naked china doll so small it fit in Doxie’s hand. Much of it fit in her mouth too. I stuck my finger in to scoop the doll out, and she only fussed more when I refused to return it to her. She hadn’t been at all close to choking—the gangly doll wouldn’t have fit down her gullet—but I nonetheless pictured it clearly. I suspected I’d spend the rest of my life seeing the threat in seemingly harmless things.

  When we finally heard the train’s clattering wheels, we practically danced, bouncing on our heels, clapping our hands. Eulalie plucked away stray petals from Pearl’s jacket and skirt, and Pearl raised the bouquet and waved it in the air toward the train, as if she wasn’t about to leave but rather welcoming a lover arriving.

  Our last minutes together were a flurry of kisses and sweet nothings. We made yet more promises we wouldn’t likely keep, but in the moment they seemed the deepest of oaths. We were so happy and sad, so swept up, it seemed everything could change in a blink. Pearl might not leave, Doxie might not stay, every thread of our lives only ether.

  When Pearl leaned in toward Doxie for one last ki
ss, Doxie reached for Pearl, and cried and begged, clutching at her collar. Doxie tried to climb from my arms and into Pearl’s, and I wasn’t sure what to do. To Doxie’s frustration, I only held her tighter.

  Pearl pressed her cheek to Doxie’s forehead. “You’ll always be mine,” she whispered. “You belong to all of us.” She then stepped away, blew us a kiss, and got on the train as a porter gathered her trunks. Once she was inside, we didn’t see her again. She didn’t sit at a window to watch us, but we stayed on the platform nonetheless, looking after the train until we couldn’t see it at all. Its racket and whistle faded away, Doxie cried herself to sleep in my arms, and we were left with the quiet of the prairie. We could hear the wings of the wood thrush beating in the dry wheat in the field near the station.

  The day felt mercifully wasted away, and we resolved to go home and do nothing. We deserved it, we decided.

  I drove the horses, Doxie awake again in Eulalie’s lap. We learned our way around her language, interpreting, figuring out what noises meant what words. I made up a fable on the spot, and it seemed to soothe her. It was the first chapter of many tales I would tell her, about a farm girl named Doxie Skerritt, and her mother who waltzed in the air, and a balloon that fell with a wizard in it, and a one-eyed witch that saw everything. In these early years, the story of her mother would be a wonder tale, solely for her pleasure, all the heartaches and nightmares left out.

  Acknowledgments

  My many, many thanks to the people of Riverhead, especially Sarah Stein, my editor, who contributed heroically to the care and feeding of these characters. Alice Tasman, my agent, is another of my heroes, always expertly guiding the way. Rodney Rahl, meanwhile, is my angel, offering support, inspiration, patience, and humor throughout every step of the process.

  Thanks to:

  —all the museums, libraries, scholars, and historians (amateur and otherwise) who have worked to preserve and archive Expo materials, including the Omaha Public Library; the Durham Museum; Douglas County Historical Society; Nebraska State Historical Society; University of Nebraska-Lincoln (notably Wendy Katz, Kay Walter, Jaclyn Cruikshank-Vogt, Laura Weakly, and Karin Dalziel, who have developed the new Trans-Mississippi Expo digital archive); and private collectors such as historian Jeffrey Spencer.