City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (61 page)

“Children! Who’s in charge of you? Off the lawn at once! Even you should know better—look at the signs!” he barked, waving them off the grass with a curt, imperious gesture. He pointed dramatically to one of the little signs, posted low to the ground, that read
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
! not only in English but also German, Italian, Yiddish.

“Look at that oaf!” Freud scoffed.

The children only squealed some more and ran off, their broad faces beaming—the park official repeating his curt, impatient wave. Freud would have walked after them, just to watch, but at that moment his gaze swung back to the little cliff overlook. The pond before it had not yet been filled up, he noticed, but there was a thin layer of stagnant black rainwater; a few dead pigeons floating on top. He stared at it all for a long moment—the miniature Rhineland castle, the dead birds, and the black muck in the pond—and felt his stomach lurch. He made that his excuse to turn back.

“It’s terrible over here, you ask for a bathroom, and they escort you along miles of echoing stone corridors, down to the very basement,” he rambled on to Jung, dissembling as he went. “And when you finally get there—a veritable marble palace! only just in time. The sign of a society still in its anal stage, all this primness about toilets!”

—though in fact there was something else bothering him. Something loitering just below the surfaces of conscious memory, though he still could not quite retrieve it—

The night before the election was like Christmas Eve throughout the East Side. Children tied brooms to their stoop railings in hopes of a Tammany sweep, and Florrie and Christy had the boys out hammering up the bleachers in Chatham Square and hanging red-white-and-blue crepe paper over everything that moved slower than a brewer’s wagon.

By the evening, all the Wise Ones were back in Big Tim’s saloon across from the Tombs. Later on, as the first tabulations started to come in, the place would be mobbed with all those who had ever loved him, but for right now he had the doors bolted and the shades drawn. Inside, it was the tightest possible circle: just himself and the family.

“Has everything been done that could be done?” he asked—his grave, ritual question.

“Yessir, Dry Dollar!”

“All of it, Tim!”

They sounded off, one after another, with military precision, eyes gleaming with pride, eager for his approval. They looked shiny and buffed for the occasion, though he knew they’d been out since before dawn, passing out palm cards and minding the ballot boxes; voting the bathhouse bums and the firemen’s widows and the foreign sailors.

No matter how many times he had been through it, Election Day made his blood run. It was when everything boiled down to its simple primordial struggle: to win. To get the vote out, get back in office, or there was no use talking about the right and wrong of anything else.

Outside, the streets were mobbed with their supporters, bellowing and hoisting their brooms, marching up and down Broadway like madmen. All through the day—and all the night before, and the day before that—the gangs had been out, heckling and throwing things at the Socialist soapbox orators or the rare independent. As soon as they were driven off, Sullivan’s own speakers took their place, trying to drum up any last-minute votes through the sheer silver of their tongues.

Of course, the speeches didn’t make much difference at this point, for all their fire and eloquence. Not that they ever did. Only a fool voted on “the issues,” or because someone could really roll the velvet. Votes were won through a lifetime of service. And when they could not be secured that way, there were other methods.

The whole miserable rabble of ward leaders and precinct captains and gangsters that they called the Organization had been set to with that purpose, and it worked with a magnificent efficiency and singlemindedness. They had become The Machine.

“All right then,” Big Tim said, standing up, the men around the table standing with him: all dark, well-cut long coats, dignified as undertakers. Bowlers and gloves, and clean white collars, and a bright red carnation in each man’s lapel. Big Tim solemnly looked over each one, pretending to inspect them but in fact just stealing another moment to look at them, as pleased and proud as any father.

“All right then, lads.”

He turned to Mr. Feeley behind the bar, and Photo Dave and Sarsaparilla Reilly hastened to attend to him—although this one day the ritual was different. Feeley held out the bar mirror to him, same as ever—but now instead of filling his pockets with coins and bills, they carefully brushed down his coat and hat. Peering into the glass, Sullivan saw the same, broad slab of face, hard and expressionless, with only a hint of cloudiness around the eyes.

“It’ll do,” he said, to himself as much as the boys, but they immediately backed off. The Wise Ones stood in a row by the door, hats in their hands, waiting for him. He placed his silver dollar on the bar for Mr. Feeley.

“Let’s go then, lads—”

—and they plunged out into the carnival streets of an election evening.

Outside there was a writhing, shoving mass of brass bands and flags and confetti. Huge posters of names and slogans were pasted to the sides of every building, and up on an equestrian statue of the Revolution someone was waving the old regimental banner of the Fighting Sixty-ninth, from the great slaughter at Fredericksburg: a gold harp on a green field, the ends tattered by Confederate bullets from half a century before.

We are a long-remembering race

“Big Tim!”

The street children were pushed aside now, mobs of men and women filling the streets, laughing and shouting gleefully, raucously. This once they asked nothing of him. They simply wanted to touch him, to be around him, shoving past the phalanx of the Wise Ones to shake his hand, pummel his back—to be with a winner.

As though I am their champion

He let himself be propelled up and down the Bowery, and Allen Street, and Canal, in a vast torchlight parade that wound its way all through Lower Manhattan until they wound up in Chatham Square, following the results as they were projected by magic lantern against the front of the graceful white tower of the
Jewish Daily Forward
building. Taking it right into the heart of the Socialists’ territory—little clumps of earnest men standing off in the shadows, in their beards and shabby suits, looking glumly at their shoes as the Tammany votes poured in.

Yet even some of the Socialists seemed to be celebrating, caught up in the sheer exhilaration of it all. When the result of each new Tammany triumph flashed up on the sheet, the crowd waved their torches and gave a wild, drunken cheer. Their faces sharp and greedy, as they chanted for victory in the flickering orange light:

Later on there were speeches with the whole of the Organization up in Union Square. Mr. Murphy was there to pump Sullivan’s hand on the speakers’ platform, looking genuinely pleased for a change, and Big Tim made his usual speech about how he was a Democrat, and always had been, and always would be.

It was a good night for the Tiger, not quite so good as the night, so long ago, when they had last elected Grover Cleveland president, but a good night, nevertheless. Big Tim had won his old state senate seat back easily, not that there had ever been much doubt. The Little Little Napoleon was finished, and his men had been soundly thrashed in the council, and the alderman races, and even for the assembly and the Congress. The same went for the Republicans and the Simon Pures.

Mr. Murphy had put over his replacement for mayor: another reformer, an odd little judge named Gaynor, who liked to quote Frederick the Great and Cato and Epictetus, and who was so blunt and sarcastic he didn’t really seem to care
who
backed him.

Big Tim suspected already that they were playing too fine a game in trying to ape Reform, and that Gaynor would eventually prove more trouble than he was worth, just as McClellan had. Not that it much mattered. They would just get rid of him later, if they had to—same as they had with the Little Little Napoleon. Reform came and Reform went; only the Organization was forever.

Down below him in the Union Square park the crowd was still ecstatic with victory, breaking into more of the endless Tammany songs:

—each chorus more nonsensical than the last, the mobs bellowing them out faithfully at the top of their lungs.

The cheering went on and on, and the men tossed their hats in the air, and Big Tim snuck away with Sarsaparilla and Photo Dave. He would be careful to make appearances at all his saloons, then have a celebratory seltzer water with Mr. Murphy, up at his place, and start planning the next campaign—there was
always
a next campaign. Then it would be off to bed, before the cheering faded away, and the crowds went home, and he would have to face the fact that Election Day was over.

The greatest roller coaster ride of all time took place on a balmy Sunday afternoon on Coney Island on September 6, 1901, at 4:07
P.M.

It was on a new coaster, called The Rough Rider, where each train was run by its own motorman. Done up in full San Juan Hill regalia. Instructed to make ’em scream, the louder the better—
that’s what brings in the paying customers.
Until that afternoon when one of the ersatz Teddies, pushing his train at full speed, snapped off the rear two cars and sent them soaring out, sixty feet into the air above Surf Avenue.

After the accident they didn’t close The Rough Rider, or even change it. The crowds were greater than ever for the roller coasters—
thanatos
and
eros
, the death wish and the pleasure principle, all at the same time. You could see them in the long line, staring avidly at the twisted track, the hole in the guard rail where it had smashed through. Wondering what it was like—

The cars thing slowly along the impossibly steep track, jerking and grating on their chains. The dread growing steadily in the pit of the stomach, until that last, awful moment, when you pause for a moment at the peak, and look down over the impossibly narrow, curving track, face-to-face with what you have lone. Yet always sure that at the very end, you will be pulled back from the brink—

Did they understand it? That’s what all the gawkers, the rubberneckers in line wanted to know. After the impossible happened, and the chain broke, and they crashed through the last barrier—did they understand in those last, suspended moments above Surf Avenue, before they hit the ground, that theirs was the greatest thrill of all?

On their next-to-last day in New York, Dr. Brill finally took them up to his clinic at Columbia. It was a small, red-brick building that stood out in its unpretentiousness on the raw, rambling campus. Like everything else in New York the university was still under construction, though there was already an impressive, colonnaded library with a great dome in place, white as a tomb.

The tiny clinic, however, was no more impressive inside than out. The remaining patients were mostly neurotic cases of minor interest, though Freud didn’t tell dear old Brill that. The doctor hung on his every word. The night before, he had had them over to his own home, where they had met Mrs. Brill—a tall, slender woman, charming and uncomplicated. She had served them by far the best meal he’d had since landing in this dyspeptic city. For the first time in America, Freud felt at something approaching peace.

Brill was called away for a moment, and Freud wandered out into the garden of the little brick clinic, unwrapping a new cigar. Ferenczi was off somewhere perusing his guidebook, but Jung was sitting in the garden under a copy of Rodin’s
Thinker
, looking over one of his sooty American newspapers.

“So, Doctor—any word on your race?” he called to him. “Who got to the North Pole first?”

Jung looked up, smiling and blinking in the hazy sunlight, squinting at him through his pince-nez.