City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (53 page)

What did he need to tell them, then?

That he had seen that same dark pier of home, just the week before, stacked high with children’s coffins from the Charity Commission? They died in droves in the summer, from the measles and the diphtheria, and the whooping cough and the consumption. They died from cholera, and polio, and scarlet fever—and from falling off streetcars, and out of windows, and out-and-out starvation. Worst of all were the floaters—the unclaimed children who came floating up in the East River when the weather got warm, bloated and disfigured. To lie for weeks and months, unclaimed in the city morgue—

There were never enough parents who could pay—for all the seventeen-cent insurance policies the undertakers and the scam artists sold door-to-door. They brought the bodies to the pier, where they could be loaded without delay or ceremony, hauled up to the potter’s field on Hart’s Island, not far from where they were reveling now. All those tiny coffins, piled up casually there by the longshoremen, awaiting their meager contents.

Oh, but they knew that already. Hadn’t he seen them often enough down on the selfsame wharf, wailing as the coffins were loaded? They knew it, but he must not tell them.

Democracy is a lie then. A sweet, mutual, indispensable lie, like the Holy Trinity, or the Catechism, or the life everlasting, but a lie nonetheless.

It was his duty to keep up his end of the mutual lie. To make it so real and vivid that the lovely, roiling, drunken mob out there would make it the truth, would continue to rely on it as they did the confessional, or the Holy Communion.

He stood up straight and grinned out at them. His people. They cheered back, and he tapped his notes on the front rail, even though he had no need of them, the words still running through his head—

Land of the people

“Folks,” he began, “I’m a Democrat. I’ve been a Democrat all my life—”

—and the cheers rolled like thunder across the Flushing Bay.

They sat hand in hand, watching the disasters roll by through the years. The wind blew, the waves whipped up—the city of Galveston collapsed before their eyes. Mount Vesuvius belched up flames and deadly ash, the men and women of Pompeii racing around in their sandals and togas.

All the cataclysms of scrim and plywood, dry ice and magnesium powder, built to one-eighth scale, wedged into the plaster-of-paris villas and man-made lakes along Surf Avenue.

THE AUDITORIUM IS EQUIPPED WITH 11 EXITS AND MAY BE EMPTIED WITHIN TWO MINUTES!
read the signs, but Esther understood that they were only part of the attraction. It was a vicarious thrill, a sense that, for once in their lives—after all the daily disasters of rent and jobs, sickness and worry—they floated, smugly, above the fray. She was sure it was very much what God Himself must have felt like.

The scale-model sailboats glided through the clouds along the mountain lake, high above the rough mining hills, the miniature railway and houses of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The dam broke—and torrents of black water roared down upon the town, uprooting cunningly realistic trees, ripping up the railway, tossing whole locomotives in the air.

“I don’t know what I would do,” she breathed to Kid, beside her, equally fascinated in the dark. “I don’t know if I would have the courage.”

“What is there to do, little bird?” he shrugged, smiling. “You die or you don’t die; that’s all there is to it.”

“You—you would do fine!” she told him, her eyes shining. “You would always know what to do.”

“I dunno,” he said, shifting a little uncomfortably in his seat—an uneasiness she interpreted as modesty, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. But he was thinking of the rat pit again.

He just picked up the shovel He didn’t even think He just picked up the shovel and all of a sudden it was in his hands and he was bringing it down on Gyp the Blood’s fine head.

Was that wise? Was that brave?

After intermission, the great navies of the world sailed into New York harbor, flags flying and anthems playing—and let loose a crushing salvo. Wall Street fell, and the Woolworth Building. The Statue of Liberty, and City Hall; and all the new skyscrapers and the quiet streets and steeples of Brooklyn and even Coney itself—the impeccable miniatures of the three great parks—razed flat by the terrible, miniature bombardment.

The crowd burst into applause, different clumps of people even standing up and singing along with the national anthems as each fleet sailed past—the Japanese and the Russians, the Spanish and the Italians, and the French, and Germans, and British. They roared with delight as the model dreadnoughts and destroyers reduced their city to a rubble.

Then—for the grand finale—the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the American fleet, which had apparently been dawdling somewhere up the Hudson, came steaming out to fight. The crowd rose as one, roaring and cheering. Singing along with the national anthem—singing
something
, whatever it was, in a dozen tongues—as the American warships took them on: sinking all the combined navies of the world, one by one, the Japanese and the Russians and the French and the Italians, and yes, even the Germans and the British, the last Union Jack slipping forlornly under the waves.

The American fleet swung around the harbor once more in a victory procession, the crowd standing and cheering so ecstatically that the bleachers shook and wavered beneath their feet.

“Have you ever thought what war would be like?” Esther asked.

“Sure I have,” he joked. “Why do you think I left Lithuania? Fourteen years in the Czar’s army, dove; you can bet I thought on that!”

But that wasn’t it, he knew. It was a greater desire—to separate himself from everything and everyone he had ever known—to be
away.

So what was it to him if Gyp broke the back of that dwarf—or even a boy, like he’d thought at first? He’d seen worse. What was it to him—to bring him down like this, stuck somewhere again, stuck out in Coney Island, of all places—

The shows were good for an afternoon’s entertainment, and afterwards he was happy to let her idolize him, to think how cool-headed and competent he was. He bought her a cone, a great mountain of strawberry ice cream, topped with a cherry and held in a thin waffle wrapper, and she munched at it contentedly as they strolled through the Luna Park midway.

He gazed up, into the clear blue, unruffled sky—and saw the pig’s head. It loomed above him, along a wall, one in a row of leering, mocking plaster-of-paris heads, each at least twice the size of a man. A wolf’s head, a clown’s, a pig’s. Huge and pink and hairy—the same head he had shoved away, years ago, that first night in America, as he swam to shore through all the filth and offal of the harbor—only larger and more grotesque than ever.

Coming to meet her at Camp’s ice cream the next Sunday, Kid thought for the first time that he might love her.

She was supposed to meet him under Camp’s ambitious signs promising
21ST CENTURY SPECTACULAR! IT IS TO EAT—IT IS TO LAUGH—IT IS TO DRINK
—where he saw she had been discovered by the parks’ roving collection of pantomime freaks: a huge policeman in blackface, round as he was tall; a nine-foot Irishwoman that hid two midgets inside. A race act consisting of a Mick with a battered top hat and an actual harp, an I-tie with a pointed cap, a Hebrew with two thick, curly points of hair sticking out of each side of his head—

They paraded around her, hemming her in, joking and hooting incoherently. He could tell she was intimidated by the way she clutched her bag and edged a step back from the small mob of merrymakers.

Yet for the most part she held her ground, staring stubbornly ahead, her face reddening as the pantomime freaks danced around her. Standing there like any of a hundred thousand other girls on Coney Island, in her one good white summer dress, shapeless, flowered hat on her head. But sticking it out—holding her place, until his heart was pierced to see her there.

Esther watched him walk up the boardwalk toward her, and thought again how fine he was. Hard and wary as any tough, in his gaudy summer suit, until a smile began to leak out around his mouth when he recognized her. She was relieved—to have him rescue her from the huge pantomimes gallivanting around her—but also just to see him again, after the long past week of work.

She had no delusions about what he was, or what he might be: a thief, certainly; maybe a thug, maybe a murderer—maybe even a pimp. She knew she ran certain risks—that he might take her for her money, her love, or worse. She knew she ran the risk, even, of ending up a whore—and while she could not conceive of any way that would come about, she was aware there were hundreds, probably thousands of women lying in brothels and hotel rooms right now who had thought the same thing. Women who had simply taken a chance for love.

She knew better than to expect anything from him—beyond this day, strolling the boardwalk with him, her demon lover. Yet it was enough. She considered the most catastrophic possible end of her affair quite calmly.

Whatever it was to be, it could wait—as he strode up to her on the boardwalk, and all the prancing pantomine figures faded away.

“Nu
, dove, what do you want to do today?”

“I don’t know.” She considered, chuckling, happy just to be with him again. “What say—I teach you swimming today!”

“Huh? Well, all right,” he muttered, not so happy about the idea of going into the water, but an idea forming in his head already.

Down by the beach, on another wedge of sand marked off by barbed wire, he rented a single wooden cabana from the proprietor, pretending they were man and wife. The man smirked, and handed over the key and a black, rented bathing suit for him—not caring if they were man and wife, or King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

“In here—”

He led her into the tiny wooden cabin, mounted on short legs in the sand, the only light what snuck in through the cracks on the side, and the little hole on top. There, he sat himself on the changing bench, while she drew her mermaid bathing suit out of her bag, hesitating before him.

“Do it,” he whispered, imploring. “Do it,
please
—for me.”

“It would be too noisy in here—”

“Just to see—just to
see
.”

She smiled, her face above her mouth obscured in the slanted light, and deliberately, casually, began to take off her clothes. Slowly removing one garment at a time, neatly folding and arranging them, giving him time to look. Until when at last she stood easily naked before him—all that she was, smoothed and worn and calloused—he moved off the bench, onto his knees, embracing her around her thighs, and sliding his cheek along the warm, soft flesh of her stomach.

They walked down to the seaside together—Kid feeling more than a little foolish in the long leggings that stretched down over his knees. But he plunged on in, flailing and floundering around, while the children smirked, and she laughed at his efforts. She could not even get him to float without sinking beneath the surf.

“Face it,
hertzalle meine
—Jews don’t float,” he told her—but she only laughed at him.

“Greenie! Yok! Let’s see if you can wade, anyway.”

They joined the other bathers along the line. Esther leading, Kid clutching grimly to the guideline behind her, inching his way through the waves.

It was a rough day, and the swells rose suddenly and smacked against the bathers’ chests and heads. She took most of the swells for him, trying to get him to bob along with their motion. But even this he did awkwardly, the water repeatedly surging up into his mouth and nostrils. It was full of old wrappers, and bottles, and all kinds of other litter, but still infinitely cleaner than the harbor water he had first jumped into.

She looked back at him, laughing, and he had to laugh, too. He stood up again, and looked out to the horizon, past the breakers and the excursion boats, the buoys and the diving piers. He could see the open sea, and beyond that—nothing, all the way back to where he had come from.

The strike broke out one morning at the Triangle factory, over Wenke the
shadchen,
of all people. The union leaders had held more meetings. They had raised more money and made more plans, talking far into the night at the Talkers’ Cafe, under the stern tower of the
Forward
building. Yet the moment when they might have any chance against the owners was fast passing them by—and still they talked, and still they waited.

Then Wenke had brought his pathetic line of girls into the shop again. He had gone into the office to argue over the rate with Bernstein, and they could hear all their same violent arguments, even through the closed office door. Yet this time, when he emerged, Wenke was not sunk in his usual, glum acquiescence but still shouting defiantly at the shop manager.