City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (24 page)

Esse, with some
shaygets.

“All right, I’ll see what she’s up to,” he told the old man, grinning sardonically despite himself. “But whatever it is, I’ll tell you.”

“Yes, yes!” the reb said, squeezing his shoulder excitedly. “Promise me!”

“Oh, it’s a promise. It’s a promise I will hold you to.”

Each of the great parks on Coney—Dreamland, and Luna Park, and Steeplechase—generated their own electricity, enough to light a large town, out in the dark fields of the republic. Dreamland’s powerhouse lay just west of the central lagoon, next to the Fall of Pompeii Building. It was shaped like the rolling, white armature of a dynamo, monumental and ornate. An attraction unto itself with its glowing, egg-white enamel engines, and gold-plated tools, and a mosaic table to hold the oil cups. There was a series of grand murals along the walls and ceiling, depicting the whole history of electricity—Edison and his bulbs, Sam Morse and his telegraph, Franklin and his kite, all the way back to God Almighty Himself, touching Adam and jump-starting the world with the same juice we had bottled up for your entertainment pleasure.

The attendants wore spotless white duck jackets with brass buttons, and white gloves—all emphasizing the cleanliness, the purity, the immaculate, magical divinity of electrical power. All except the chief engineer—a small, courteous, bitterly droll little Negro named Elijah Poole, who had worked with the Wizard of Menlo Park, Edison himself. He wore a sort of necromancer’s hat—a little fez, covered with hoary gold stars, and suns, and crescent moons—and Brinckerhoff had put it about that once Poole had actually been white, before an accident with the humming wires had left him charred his present, purple-black color.

That was all the usual nonsense, of course. Before Dreamland, Poole had worked on the Wizard’s ceaseless campaign to prove how deadly alternating current was. Together, with the other assistants, he paid local schoolboys to bring in subjects, two bits for each cat or each dog, until the town of West Orange, New Jersey, was nearly devoid of pets. They pushed the animals onto a wired tin sheet and pumped in a thousand volts—the schoolboys jumping up and down outside the windows, to watch their beloved pets get the chair.

After that they went state to state, bidding for the new electric chair contracts against Westinghouse’s men. Each one trying to prove how much more dangerous the other one’s power was—using the other side’s apparatus to electrocute a dog, a pig, a cow, for the commissioners and concerned clergy, and prison officials. The State of New York announced that it would test the new method on a live, human subject, a murderer named William Kemmler, and Dr. Poole and his team had rushed up to Sing Sing on the flyer, carting along their latest chair and a Westinghouse dynamo in the baggage car.

“We used a low charge—to show just how dangerous it really was,” Dr. Poole recalled, in his soft, bitter, wondering voice. “But of course it wasn’t—it wasn’t dangerous at all. That was the whole problem.”

The execution was a bloody mess, even worse than a hanging, Kemmler screaming like a banshee, breaking his wrists and his anides as he convulsed. The smell of slowroasting flesh filling the room until all the prison officials were all bent over puking—and then a visible, crackling bolt of electricity burst right out of the man’s temple.

The State of New York was altogether satisfied. It ordered up three chairs, but Poole quit and came down to Coney, where he was another attraction, along with the dynamos and the gilded oil cups. Now, every evening, as the sun began to fade, he pulled the levers and flicked the switches that brought up the new, garish light of a million individual bulbs. Dreamland going up most dramatically of all three parks, ride by ride, attraction by attraction. Until finally he lit the luminous white central tower, and it went on story by story, blazing window by window, right up to its crowning ball and eagle, the highest structure on the island, holding sway over all the rest of Coney.

The great green ship lay before them like a sleeping dragon, its wings slowly stirring to life as they filed into its belly.

“All aboard for the trip to the moon! The great Luna excursion! Journey to the unknown! All aboard!”

The eerie, disembodied voice repeated itself exactly, over and over again.

“It’s recorded,” Kid whispered to her.

Inside, they were strapped down into seats as if they were on a roller coaster, the shop girls and shipping clerks tittering at the pretense. But soon they could actually feel the power of the engines increasing, the ship tilting as if it were indeed lifting right off the ground.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain!”

On the bridge were men in sporty blue uniforms and elaborate gold braid, and an admiral with a white beard.

“Soon we will be skimming the cream from the Milky Way!”

“Do you feel us soaring, moon?” Kid teased her, sneaking a hand around Esther’s waist until she giggled.

But not even he could find anything to joke about as the rush of the wings began to accelerate madly, the airship rocking and swaying as if it would burst apart. The blackness outside the portholes swept past them, and there was a clap of thunder—so sudden and terrible that she shrieked out loud, along with half the other women on the ship; the men shouting in surprise.

Another clap of thunder, then another, and soon long cracks of lightning were piercing the sky outside, some so close they lit up the ship. Rain pounded on the great green canvas wings, and they began to roll furiously, the storm getting louder and closer, all the more terrifying for its recorded sights and sounds—the projected lightning, the staticky bursts of thunder from some strange God.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are just passing through a storm!” the captain’s voice boomed out. “We are quite safe!”

The thunder began to roll away, the lightning faded. Soon, a tranquil black sky flowed past the portholes—now filled with stars, more stars than Esse had ever seen before from the street stoops, or the roof of their tenement. The levered green shade around the ship’s bridge peeled back to reveal a pink, glowing orb in the distance.

“Behold, ladies and gentlemen: the moon! At morning light!”—though it looked more like the color of stomach medicine to Esther.

Still, as they approached the moon grew impressively. Its pink gauze slowly receded, the planet becoming steadily whiter, then a sort of wavy green, expanding until it filled up the whole view from the bridge, and every porthole on the ship.

“Come on! Come out and see the moon!” the captain cried merrily, waving his arm——and as if in a daze they began to stumble forward, out onto the bow of the ship, where a spotlight swept over the strange ground before them.

“Go ahead! Go on out and take a stroll! We won’t go without you!” the captain winked—and one by one they climbed over the rail and staggered about the barren, pock-marked surface of the moon.

They went only a few feet, and stopped—though they all knew that if they walked much farther they would reach the wall of the aerodome. The moon was obviously made out of plaster of paris, the green paint chipped in places, the lunar surface hollow under their footsteps but no less alien for all that—the spotlight swinging slowly back and forth over the desolate, cratered landscape.

Just then a horde of little moon men and moon women began to swarm up from the craters, and from behind the enormous square boulders. They wore green tights and smocks, with more green paint smeared roughly over their faces and hands, and they converged on the flabbergasted passengers, shrieking and pressing chunks of moldy green cheese into their palms. Then they joined hands, swaying back and forth, and in that strange, alien, celestial atmosphere, began to sing in unbearably high and shrill voices:

She sat out on the stoop, watching the neighborhood change into evening and reading the Gallery of Disappearing Men in the
Jewish Daily Forward.

HAVE YOU SEEN THESE MEN
? ran the headline, like the post office wanted posters. Underneath were their pictures, and a short history of each man who had absconded with his family’s happiness:

“. . . Solomon Feuerstein, late a tailor. More recently a day laborer of 17 Hester Street. Husband and father to three daughters. Last seen the night of Sunday, May the fifth, in the company of his
landsman’s
club . . .”

“. . . Morris Berlant, a dress cutter, of 33 Eldridge Street. Widower, and sole support of seven children. Last seen at the Grand Central train station, May the fourteenth, in the company of a certain female person in a red velvet dress . . .”

—each indictment ending in the stern imprecation, “If you have any information regarding these irresponsible individuals, it is your duty to contact the editors of the
Forward.”

These were the men who had got away. The husbands and fathers who had finally given up, and taken off one day for parts unknown: Philadelphia or Chicago, St. Louis or Cleveland—all those distant, exotic destinations. Even back to the old, damned country. They were the objects of Abe Cahan’s avenging fury, no less unremitting than that of God Himself, as the
Forward’s
editor tried to shame his people into models of citizenship, socialism, Judaism.

He shall be like a tree planted beside the streams of water,
read the psalm quoted just under the damning headline—though Esther suspected that the whole column might be self-defeating. The little pictures of each man were almost invariably taken at a wedding, a bar mitzvah—some joyous occasion when there was a photographer around. They grinned into the camera, decked out in their best clothes, looking delighted to have made their escape.

She put the paper down on her knee and gazed dully out on the street. It was another humid evening, the air already so heavy that the ubiquitous white paper badges of mourning barely fluttered from each tenement doorway. Despite the heat, boys ran about in the gutter, screaming, “Shame, shame! Everybody knows your name!” Some of them playing baseball, their heads shaved for the summer against lice, waving a broom stick at socks rolled up in a tight ball and yelling
“Aus! Aus!”
A Russian girl sat on the steps below her, reading the
Blue Fairy Tale Book
to her sister, both of them wearing penny bows in their hair, staring intently into the large picture pages.

It turned seven and all around her, up and down the block, Esther could hear the small whoosh of pilot lights being lit. She could hear the murmur of a hundred conversations—in Yiddish, but also in Russian, Polish, German, Armenian; even the soft, steady thread of Chinese, like the whir of her sewing machine. A bit of
Aïda,
the favorite opera of the ghetto, playing on a wobbly phonograph. The scissor grinders pushing their big wheels down the street, ringing bells and crying for the housewives to bring their knives down before they cut the chickens’ bellies.

The children ran off, the street filling up now with men and women walking home from work, coming in waves from the el on Allen Street. They walked slowly in the humid, heavy air. Even Muller, the goat that was the mascot of the German saloon under the stairs, lay on the sidewalk—forgoing, for once, his eternal quest to butt down the lamppost to which he was chained.

Esther looked up and down the murmuring old street: the little girls reading, the goat with its gold-painted horns, the little white paper badges—and wished it would all go away.

She could imagine: a big, wide avenue, with no elevated out back on Allen Street to billow soot in through the windows. The sidewalks scrubbed clean, and clear of peddlers; children and their parents walking out each day, well-rested, to eight hours of school, and meaningful work. The words stuck with her from one of the inspirational lectures at the settlement house:

The world must be made gracious for the poor.

She stood up, and stretched her hands high over her head, ignoring the men trotting down to the German saloon as they whistled and called to her. She cracked first her knuckles, then her back, and then her entire neck, making a sound like a pistol shot. The men blanched, and hurried on down to their beer, and she laughed.

It was her way of breaking out of the box into which she was forced during the day. Working the machine was better than felling coats, but her back still throbbed from leaning over the needle, and her knees ached from pushing the pedals, and her hands were stiff from feeding the monotonous yards of cloth into the machine all day long.