The Swan Gondola Read Online Free Page A

much, I did what I could to alter the word, changing its sound, reinventing the language as I went along. I spoke softer and softer, pushing each letter farther and farther back into my mouth, until every word I ever knew vanished from my lips. I cupped my hands at my ears to hear the seashell sound of a crashing ocean and to listen for the voice of my character in the distance.
    And those years of practice were what led me to Cecily, in a sense.

 
    Before the Fair
    Late Spring 1898

3.
    A T THE E MPRESS O PERA H OUSE, where there had never actually been any opera, the talent got next to nothing—the tickets were cheap and the hall rarely filled. Even as a vaudeville house it came up short; you could find better at the Orpheum down the street, from troupes that traveled in from elsewhere. But what the Empress had was its morality plays. The ladies and gents would pay to see real live skin and sinning and pretend it was virtuous. The plays changed every few weeks, to allow folks to see men and women done in again and again by infidelity, addiction, syphilis, thievery, whoredom.
    Most of the performers on the nightly program were only locals like me, but their ambitions matched those of the city itself. As our little frontier town became more and more refined, they became certain that more and more people would be looking in our direction. Already folks everywhere drank the beer from our breweries and ate the sugar from our beets. They ate the slaughter of our packing houses. The people of Omaha no longer dreamed of stepping out into the world, because the world was coming to us. Omaha was growing beyond the city limits; its buildings were taller, its streets were paved, and the railroad station connected us directly to Chicago and San Francisco and New York City.
    I was no cynic, but I didn’t share anyone’s optimism. I had seen too much corruption. To my mind, Omaha had already been ruined. I saw no promise in the city’s future. So while I waited for the world to come running, I lived in the attic of the Empress. The theater was an old temperamental firetrap newly wired for electricity, so in exchange for rent I slept lightly, poised to smell smoke at the first spark. Not sleeping was easy: my duck-feather mattress damn near flat. I whitewashed the iron bedstead to cover the rust, and I oiled the joints, as a squeaky bed made the ladies fidgety. I had a chair with broken springs and a little stove and a wardrobe full of worn-out costumes abandoned by their actors. I liked how I looked in them and adopted them as my own, gussying up a pocket with a square of silk or sticking a glass-ruby pin through the knot of my necktie—one day I was a Civil War soldier with a few patches of a hero’s gunshot in my sleeve, the next I was some shabby king in epaulets with mangy fringe. I had top hats, plaid caps, a pith helmet. That’s how people knew me, offstage and on—Ferret the ventriloquist, in the raggedy suits.
    In the evenings I did my puppet show or magic or both, but all us performers had extra jobs we did in the daylight. I hadn’t planned to get cozy with three of the girls in the four-girl burlesque act, but one by one they sidled up to me throughout that winter, each wanting to be my one and only. In January I took up with Ada who worked days wrapping bonbons in the back of Balduff’s—the poor thing spent all of Valentine’s up to her elbows in candy hearts and heart-shaped ice cream, while I forgot the holiday altogether. When I bought her a beer at Red’s saloon, I thought I was being gentlemanly, but she burst into tears and refused to forgive the slight. So then I palled around with Florence, a ginger-haired cherry who hated her own freckles—I always fell into a fit of sneezing from her perfumed fading cream.
    And all the month of April I dated the girl named May—when not at the Empress, May popped the corn and took the tickets at the zoological gardens,