The Swan Gondola Read Online Free Page B

where they charged admission to see all the critters that lived in the plains just outside our city, Omaha still only a mile or two from wilderness. They kept buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, raccoons. One spring day we took a pleasant stroll through the zoo, arm in arm in the shade of her parasol, May looking down at the path, distracted from the eagles and owls. In front of the caged badger she finally spoke: “So go ahead and ask me to marry you, if you want,” she said. And I said, “But I thought we had a good thing going,” which wasn’t at all what she’d hoped to hear, though I had truly meant it as a compliment. May had never before been so serious, which was why I’d liked her so much.
    Marriage had seemed to me to be for men too old or too churchy for romance. I didn’t know it then, but I was stunted, forever the orphaned child. As a boy, I’d feared I’d never grow up, that my rotten youth would never end. And though it did end, the fear didn’t. That life I’d longed for—of being a man of worth and substance after shaking off my awful boyhood—still seemed a lifetime away. So I kept waiting and waiting.
    I was waiting for Cecily, as it turned out. When I first saw her, only a few weeks before the Fair, I caught her eye, and she looked away. It was when she looked again that I straightened my back and lifted my chin. It was with that second look, as quick as it was, that I suddenly felt like I was somebody worth seeing.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I HEARD HER NAME before I saw her, that night, backstage at the Empress. Before the entertainment began, an old actor with a monocle shuffled out center stage to address a few changes to the cast. “And the part of ‘violet-eyed trollop’ in
Opium and Vanities
will
not
be played tonight by Odie Hansom, as listed. She will be played, instead, by Cecily . . .” and here he paused, squinting at a sheet of paper in his hand, seemingly attempting to read the actress’s last name. “Cecily . . .” he said again. He finally abandoned the effort. “Cecily,” he concluded, and left the stage.
    As the master of ceremonies stumbled out to sing a comic song, his face painted white and his mouth a broad, bright-red gash of a smile that wouldn’t stop, I shared a cigarette in the wings with the fourth girl in the burlesque revue. She was my favorite. I’d bought Phoebe St. James a consoling drink or two, ever since her traveling theater troupe went bankrupt the winter before, stranding all the actors and actresses far from home. She was content to share her troubles, and nothing more, with me. One day she’d been hamming it up as Yum-Yum in
The Mikado
at one of the city’s finer performance halls, and the next she was a dime-a-dance girl at a local saloon.
    â€œThat wallpaper’s truly the ghastliest,” she said, gazing at the backdrop dangling overhead in the rafters. She was dressed like a fairy with a short skirt of blue feathers and silk stockings the color of her skin—little pieces of glass had somehow been stitched into the silk to make her legs shimmer in the footlights. The dancers often changed their act, but their costumes stayed mostly the same. One night they were fairies, another night pixies, another night elves, another night angels—whatever called for paper wings and short skirts.
    â€œMaybe it’s supposed to be,” I said. “It’s the walls of the opium den, after all.”
    â€œWhy would anyone have anything to do with opium if the wallpaper is that ghastly,” she said. The cigarette between her lips, she practiced her dance steps, swinging her wrists, wiggling her fanny, the wings on her back fluttering. Three little light steps forward on the balls of her feet, three little light steps back. She plucked at her stockings whenever the glass nettled her skin.
    â€œYou noticed