City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (8 page)

He wasn’t there.
She
was, though—still regal as a queen, sitting at her makeshift vanity. Even with the door crashing in, she did not hurry her royal, deliberate turn. I could swear, though, that I actually saw a hint of admiration in her eyes—something that sent chills through me.

“Quickly—there’s not much time!” I told her, dramatic as any romance hero. “Get your things together.”

“Are we going somewhere?” she asked, still perfectly self-possessed.

“To your palace—where else? It is being built even as we speak—
Your Majesty.”

The salutation did it. Her mad blue eyes glistened with the thought. A palace! It’s one of the advantages of dealing with the truly insane; they wish for the moon but are completely satisfied with cheese.

“I must pack,” she insisted—still testing me.

She hopped down from her chair, wooden shinguards knocking together, and opened up a traveling trunk stuffed with the most exquisite, miniature dresses and gowns—a living doll’s wardrobe.

“Please hurry—
Majesty!”
I begged her, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. She ignored me, of course, neatly folding and packing away her ensembles as if she were going on tour.

I ducked around the corner, and peered out through the wings: I could see him at the bar still, towering above the boys. Even as I watched, he finished the last swig of his whiskey, dashed coins absently out on the bar and began to make his way toward me, through the merry crowd cheering the thrashing of the Jew.

“Now!” I screamed at her, bolting back into the dressing room.

She was working carefully through her yards of fine, silken underwear, sorting through mounds of credible paste diamonds and pearls and tiaras—humming “The Blue Danube” to herself as contentedly as if she were awaiting her lady’s maid.

“We
must,
uh,
fly,
Your Majesty. Before he comes back!”

She gazed coolly up at me, pausing from her work.

“If he does come,” she said as imperiously as Queen Victoria herself, “you must deal with him.”

I rushed over to help her, rudely shoving her things down into her trunk. She frowned at me, but finally pulled down the lid and locked it shut.

“All right. It is ready.”

“It can’t be done!” I gasped, staring at the enormous trunk. I lifted at one end, but all the heroic gestures in the world wouldn’t budge it. I could hear his steps in the hail outside.

“Eugénie, my love, it’s almost time!” I heard his comfortable Bourbon drawl—employing both a name and a loving tone that astonished me. Eugénie, the old, exiled empress of France: Could she be
doubly
mad?

I didn’t have time to reflect upon it. I secreted myself behind the door and swung my wooden saber down at his knees with all my might when he came through. He screamed and fell to the ground, clutching at his legs.

“For the love a God, don’ murder me!” he begged—suddenly cut down to my size.

I was a man of action now. I shoved the sham pistol into his lowered gut, then banged it up hard beneath his chin. Marconi swooned on the floor.

“Let us fly,” I said bravely to my queen, whose eyes shone with adoration.

Somehow, I managed to pick up the trunk, haul and shove it out the backstage door, and down an alley to Pearl Street. I was ready to drag it all the way out to Coney Island by myself, even if it tore my arms out of their sockets. Yet a block away, she placed a surprisingly soft, tentative hand upon my shoulder.

“There’s a cab,” she said—and I was in no mood to argue, even though I knew it would take my last five dollars to get us out to Coney.

“Where can I take you kiddies?” the coachman grinned down at us.

I flipped a silver dollar up to him, ordered him to boost our trunk. He did as he was told, still smirking—though I fancied he shot an appraising glance over my Carlotta, or Eugénie, or whoever this strange, immaculate little doll was. I helped her up into the cab, her little hand small and cool and smooth in my palm.

We took off, clopping at the usual lumber truck’s pace through the streets of lower Manhattan. I knew the cabbie would squeal—they always did—but I figured her Marconi would be reluctant to come out to my territory for her, and if he did I could handle him there.

“Lower the curtains,” she commanded, inside the warm, leathered coach, and when I did she moved against me, put her arm through mine, lowered her head to that soft spot where the neck meets the shoulder.

I sat there rigidly, stunned by what she had done. It was everything I had ever wanted, in that one, simple gesture of affection. I was afraid to move, afraid to hold her—afraid to do anything that might end the moment.

Slowly, slowly, I laid my head against hers, crept my arm around her shoulders until I was actually holding her, like some strong and protective man, her body soft and pliant and trusting against my chest.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Is it really a palace?”

“Yes. Or it will be. I promise.”

The cab began to rise steadily, as we pulled onto the bridge over to Brooklyn. She sat up, and I pulled aside the curtain a little, to show her the traffic careening madly around us, even at this hour, automobiles and trucks and bicycles, all lunging avidly ahead.

Far below, we could see the slips along South Street pier to our left, the harbor to our right—the ships with their running lights like lily pads in a shimmering night pond.

“Will it be like this?” she asked, her eyes like pinwheels inside the cab, and for once she didn’t seem like a queen at all but a young girl, dreaming of married life and her own first home.

“Better,” I told her, willing now to say absolutely anything she wanted to hear.

“Better.”

I was afraid that she might bolt once she saw the Tin Elephant. I kept telling her it was only temporary the whole way up the spiral stairs, the coachman bumping her trunk carelessly along behind, grinning and quipping with the whores. There was no disguising the place—but to my surprise she took it all in stride.

“To true royalty there are no indignities,” she said with regal equanimity.

Somehow, she didn’t mind it—not even the moldy, salt-etched walls and the hookers, the deliberately leering, suggestive signs in the halls:
BATHERS WITHOUT FULL SUITS POSITIVELY PROHIBITED BY LAW
.

That first night, she sat on my bed in a dark blue evening gown she put on especially for the occasion. I know it was silly, it was silly as young love and honeymoon nights, but I loved it.

The whores stood out in the hail and sang us a drunken shivaree. A blind girl they called the Yellow Kid led them. She wasn’t much to look at, a stringy, jaundiced street whore, but the johns all loved her because she played the zither and sang sad, homesick songs from Kiev to Dublin in a sweet, clear voice:

“You may undress me,” my empress said, her voice calm and self-assured as ever.

“I never—I mean, I didn’t
plan
—”

“Go ahead,” she commanded, and I began to undo the stays on her dress.

“You will have your palace. I swear it.”

“I know.”

I undressed her the way I might have undressed a child, or indeed a doll—my sweet, pretty bride, how many things were you? Mad queen; mechanical wonder; lost, wandering freak. Reverently, carefully, I pulled the midnight blue dress down over her perfect, white shoulders; it made a gorgeous rustling sound.

She sat comfortably through it, moving just enough to accommodate me here, help my thick, clumsy fingers with a catch or a stay there. I took off her clothes layer by layer, first the dress, then the outer petticoats, then her slips and stockings, until she sat small and naked and even more beautiful on my rough bed—still as regal as ever.

I touched her all over, unable to help myself in the face of such unmitigated beauty. And she sat there, and let me, and then she was holding me, kissing me back, her arms around me, soft and giving.

It wasn’t simply the lust. The popular imagination has it that we are all freakishly lusty creatures, diddling away like little demons. It couldn’t be further from the truth; after all, the only partners usually available to us are other freaks—the bearded lady, the fat woman, the alligator man—or prostitutes, or thrill-seekers—or those like ourselves. It becomes a degraded act, filled with self-loathing, in which the best one can hope for is an all-too-accurate mirror of one’s own, despised self.

But this was different. She was beautiful, and she offered herself up to me freely, and unabashedly. Afterwards, I bathed her in my wash basin, kneeling before her, until her skin shone. She put on a fine, white, embroidered nightgown—where she obtained such things I could only imagine—and then she rolled over and fell asleep in my bed, trusting as a child. I sat up for a long time, and watched her, stroking her hair.

After my revelation in the anatomical museum, I had run back home to my poor, deluded father—his already feeble act beginning to falter as he forgot his lines, his brain marinated in brandy by now.

I kissed him good-bye, took one trunkful of books for my own, and hooked on with Proctor’s, then the old Sunday School Circuit, doing anything I could. I learned a little tumbling and how to tell jokes, and how to juggle. I turned magic tricks on a bill between Evelyn Nesbit and Convict 6630, The Man Who Sang Himself out of the Penitentiary. I played the old ten-twenty-thirties, in the stock shows
The Earl of Pawtucket
and
Are You My Father?
and
What’s the Matter with Susan?
and I sang in the chorus of
Beautiful Edna May, Salvation Army Girl—

—I tell them to follow, follow Jesus,

but they always follow, follow me—

In short, I did anything, no matter what the degradation. For what was I, but life?

Above all, I kept moving—back and forth, every season, from Lake Quinsigamond to the old German Sharpshooter Park in Chicago; from Euclid Beach to the White City to Paragon Park. For a time, I would stop back on the Bowery and see how the old man was doing, got him a new room when he couldn’t do the act at all anymore.

One season I stopped going back—just stopped. Until, three years later, when I finally mustered the courage to go back and see him one more time, he was gone. Whether he had died or not I could never determine, but his books kept popping up, in raggedy little notion shops and ragpicker alleys all around the Bowery. I always recognized them, even before I saw his name, and the date he had bought them, penciled neatly in on the title page: “Patrick J. Mahoney, Sr.”—that last, conscience-plaguing acknowledgment of my existence. I bought them up whenever I could, but I never found any other trace of him.

And after it all, after all the coon songs and the Carrie Nation lectures, after all the freak shows and the midways, the Chautauquas and the rube towns, after all the endless nights picking up rude bits of knowledge in parlor cars and fleabag hotels and blind pigs—after all that, I had been tossed up on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, on Coney Island, like so much flotsam and jetsam myself.

Was I home now? Outside, the whores slowly drifted away, off to the next batch of customers. I stayed chastely beside my beloved the rest of the night, one arm draped around her so that no hand could take her from me in my sleep. Was I home? I watched her for a long time before I nodded off, dreaming fitfully of us both in a great palace.

Freud wasn’t sure that he had really seen the man at first. It seemed impossible, like a waking nightmare, or one of Jung’s apparitions.

He had just finished a long stretch of work, writing up the Rat Man case, and he was sitting contentedly on the terrace of the Cafe Landtman with the rest of the Vienna bourgeoisie. Reveling in his cigars and his
einen kleinen Braunen,
like a pleasure-loving philistine, swapping his favorite old Yiddish jokes with the
maskilim.
When this vision appeared—

He was both more and less than a man. A monolith, really, something primitive and huge, standing out there on the Ringstrasse. One more refugee from the East, come from a land past all human memory and knowledge, and more than likely having walked all the way. Face swathed in a ragged, aimless beard, tattered skullcap on his head. Plodding open-mouthed up the Ring in his beggar’s rags, past the fairy-tale buildings, the long file of lifeless statues.