City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (72 page)

Did she think of him, out there, and wish him well?

And did she notice
the real man,
there on the ledge—if he
was
there—when she stepped out on the ledge herself, at four o’clock in the afternoon of a perfect spring day? The man who was obviously a superior man, the newspapers said—his superior face pale and tear-stained. Did she smile to see him, and lift his face up to hers and kiss him—just a panic-stricken boy, not at all her
dybbuk
from Coney Island—

Oh, how she would have loved to have him there, her dream lover!

Did she kiss him once, as a poor substitute, with the flames already billowing out the window behind her, already licking up the folds of her long, black dress? Did she kiss him—on the late afternoon of a perfect spring day, and then step off the ledge of the ninth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company?

Still not giving up completely, still trying to aim as best she could for the net, for the firemen scurrying hopelessly back and forth below like circus clowns. Still not giving up, even when she hit the net, and tore right through. Bouncing back up, just like the acrobats at Fighting Flames, and thinking
I did it Somehow I did
it—and actually walking five, ten, fifteen paces along the street before the gasping, open-mouthed cops and firemen, a little drunken smile playing across her face. Before she fell down.

Maybe. Maybe she did. And maybe Sadie, separated from her in the smoke, in the confusion—maybe Sadie banged and banged on the elevator doors until her fists ached. The stairs already jammed, the smoke cutting off everything and nobody coming back for her. Screaming for the elevator,
demanding
the elevator, refusing to accept that it would not be back. Refusing to die trapped up in some sweatshop firetrap, the whole idea of it too stupid for words—too much of a dirty joke, to die for some cockroach garment boss after whoring herself on the streets all these years.

And when the elevator did not return, did she scream even louder—tugging and scratching at the metal doors, getting the other screaming, trapped women waiting there with her to pull, too? Until by sheer force they managed to pry them back—revealing only the open shaft, gaping below them. And when the others hesitated and wobbled on the brink, did she jump in—grabbing hold of the elevator cable, scraps of the company’s precious lawn wound round and round her hands to cushion the burn, the electric shock she knew would come?

Did she jump right in, taking her best chance? Sliding down the cable until it burned right through the lawn. Holding on until she lost consciousness from the pain, and fell the rest of the way to the tin roof of the elevator, denting it with the impact of her body. Reviving hours later, half-drowned in the runoff from the fire hoses. Still on top of the broken elevator car where it was lodged in the basement, which was where the firemen found her late that night, soaked and freezing, with deep red creases across both her palms, looking mean and crazed as a wet cat but
alive
still
alive—

And whether it made any difference at all—after all the special editions, with their shocking pictures of the flattened, dead bundles of women lying out on the sidewalk, and the drop-jawed cops and the burnt-out factory floors, and whether these sufficiently horrified the good citizens of the City—

—and whether it made any difference, after all the incensed speeches, and the inquests, and the futile lawsuits, and the hearings, and the inspections, and the careful new legislation arranged by Mrs. Perkins, and rammed through by Big Tim’s boys, Bob and Al, up in the state legislature—

—and whether it made any difference, after the days of endless funerals through the Lower East Side, the hearses crossing at the intersections on Avenue C and Avenue A and Broome and Hester and Delancey and Division, so many that the mourners followed the wrong hearse sometimes in the confusion. After the final grand funeral procession, winding its way through the City streets on a freezing, rainy April day with the smell of smoke still in the air—the day when the City morgue gave up the last of its dead, the last seven coffins, containing bodies of the women no one could identify and no one would claim plus an eighth, grisly box containing all the dismembered, charred pieces scooped up at the site. The enormous, silent, gloomy crowds, huddled under umbrellas along the sidewalk the working girls walking shivering bareheaded behind the hearses the working girls looking up from their machines staring down from their firetrap lofts the families in their home sweatshops waving handkerchiefs out the windows of their tenements as the solemn mourners passed.

Converging finally before the burnt-out factory soon to be reopened under the same management. Converging on the park at Washington Square, the men the women the mothers with babes in arms—wearing the little white badges reading we mourn our loss carrying the long banners reading we demand fire protection—converging on the little green swath of trees littered with monuments to great men. Where, when the sinuous, black streams of humanity finally merged, there arose spontaneously a long, piercing, inchoate, feminine cry of grief like nothing ever heard before or since in the entire City, not even when all the Germans drowned—

—and whether all that finally made a difference, and led to Reform, and the whole, marvelous, bountiful present we enjoy right now as opposed to the dismal and long-ago past—whether all that came to pass—well, that, as they say, is another story.

“And that’s all?” Yolanda, the Amazon Queen asked.

“That’s all.”

She nodded, satisfied, working on a lump of betel nut in her cheek, skin the color and texture of a well-used saddle.

“Time to get back.”

It was fully dark on the ruined pier. Below them, along the sea, the City of Fire had come to life, and they could make out the inevitable evening crowds, beginning to pour out of the subway and the express trains and the trolleys.

They drifted back toward their booths, and their sideshows: Yolanda, and Nanook the Esquimau who was really a woman, and Ota Benga the Pygmy, who was not really a pygmy at all but an out-of-work piano player from St. Louis—not that it mattered in this City, where even the names of the freaks and the gangsters were repeated over and over again.

Trick the Dwarf trailed after them, beginning to hurry as he heard the music start to rise, the murmur of the crowds increase. Not quite so many people, perhaps, as in the old days; they had other entertainments now, all the movie palaces, all the new cars, and their gin flasks.

He had a longer walk now, all the way back to Steeplechase—and then there was his costume to get into, and his face to put on: the mad harlequin’s face, leering and jeering as he chased the customers across the blowholes, swatting at all the tall legs with his cattle prod. Chasing them all across the stage with as little dignity as he could provide—while in the stands, everyone was laughing.

I know a story.

The evening after their visit to Coney they left the City, and took the night boat up to Fall River—beginning the long haul to Worcester, and Clark University, pulling slowly out into the Hudson, past the looming Palisades that reminded Freud so much of the Danube—and then down to the sea.

After they made port it was still more long hours on the train through this infuriatingly endless country. Past all the neat little towns and farms of Massachusetts, until by the time they reached Worcester they were thoroughly exhausted.

They revived somewhat when they met President Hall at the railroad station—an austere, white-bearded man, who greeted them with an air of deep and solemn reverence. He had a comfortable home, full of books and cigars, and a jolly, plump, extraordinarily ugly wife, who called them her boys and saw to their every need. She plied them with good wine, and the best supper they had had in America, served by two grave Negro servants in dinner jackets.

The following day the lectures began. The university was new but well-endowed, its facilities simple and dignified, and Freud thought it was a fitting platform. Everything went off without a hitch. All the local papers covered the lectures, and the Boston
Evening Transcript
even sent a reporter out to interview Freud, and Jung kept his promise, introducing the shocking notion of childhood sexuality with the case of his own daughter, Agathli.

And when it was time for him to speak, when he walked out to the lectern, it was indeed the realization of an incredible, omnipotent daydream. All the terrible anxiety and turmoil of the preceding weeks fell away. Not even the presence of that little
ekel
Stern could spoil it. Looking out over the room, he saw there before him the best minds in all the fields of science and education, and history and anthropology, and mathematics and philosophy and—psychology. All of them, dressed up in their regal academic robes and mortarboards, applauding thunderously for him—for
the Cause.

And afterwards, when he received his honorary degree, the applause was even greater. One particular woman, short and plump and voluptuous, even stayed the whole week. She sat in the front row, listening avidly—dressed in a white dress with a dramatic rose at the belt, a pair of startlingly intelligent eyes behind her rimless glasses. She jumped up after every lecture, applauding ferociously and peppering him with questions. These, too, were quite intelligent, and Freud would have been intrigued to meet her, but his American colleagues assured him that she was a dangerous anarchist, and after each lecture they formed a protective cordon around him—a phalanx of the stately, learned men in their academic robes, slowly shuffling him away from the inquisitive little woman.

By the end of the week he was exhausted again—sustained as he had been on the ongoing exhilaration of the lectures, the long, invigorating talks afterwards with so many great men of science. After their work was done, he was glad to let Brill lead them on a further excursion, off to Niagara Falls, and then into Canada, where he filled out a postcard for his daughter Sophie, and Brill wrote one to Mrs. Brill, which they all signed:
BEST FROM ABE, FREUD, FERENCZI, JUNG
.

They traveled on, to a little camp near Lake Placid that one of his new American admirers had loaned them. It was just a rough set of converted farm buildings on a rocky, barely cleared patch of ground, but Freud found it idyllic. There were walking trails through the woods, and all around them loomed the majestic, tree-covered peaks of the Adirondacks, and he and Ferenczi made a great joke out of the fact that the house where all the psychoanalysts were lodged was named
The Chatterbox.

Jung professed not to be amused. A certain, permanent coolness had settled over their relations. Things had stayed patched up in Worcester—thanks to Jung’s sacrifice of his daughter—yet even this had backfired. Jung was hinting now that he had gone against his own principles to support him—that there might be certain other nonsexual,
spiritual
aspects of childhood development.

Freud had refrained, for the moment, from asking if Jung really meant
cultural
aspects. That boil would have to be lanced once and for all when they got back across the other side. He was not looking forward to it, but if it had to be, it had to be, he resigned himself. Another gentile—a real man of science—could always be found to lead the Cause forward.

For now, he tried to put it all out of his mind and simply relax, the way he always liked to after such sustained periods of work. In the absence of any civilized cafe, he took up his other main hobby—scouring the woods for new and unfamiliar species of local mushrooms. The air was clean and invigorating, and Freud tried not to think too hard of anything at all—not the strife to come, or the long journey home with Jung, or his anxieties over the Rat Man case—nothing at all but the beautiful daydream just behind him.

He had largely succeeded, when one day he came upon a small creature lying right across his trail. There was no blood, no visible marks of what might have caused its demise. It was as if it had just
stopped,
and right away, Freud knew what it must be. He whistled for his friends, and poked gently at the creature with his stick, but it was unmistakable:

A porcupine.

To live in New York a hundred years ago was to hear a dozen different tongues every day on the street. I have tried to depict one small corner of that experience. The following are words and phrases with which the contemporary reader may be unfamiliar. They are, as indicated, drawn mostly from either Yiddish or Bowery gangland slang. The Yiddish spellings tend to be rather subjective. This is inevitable, as Yiddish is, after all, a language drawn from both German and Hebrew, transliterated from the Hebrew, and spoken with different inflections and accents in cities from Moscow to Los Angeles. I have tried to use those spellings that seemed closest to their usual, New York pronunciations. For the definitions, I am deeply indebted to many sources but especially to Herbert Asbury’s
Gangs of New York
and Luc Sante’s
Low Life
(as regards the Bowery), and above all to Leo Rosten’s
The Joys of Yiddish.
I am also very grateful to David Rakoff for being good enough to vet the following list.