Dreams Bigger Than the Night
Other Books by Paul M. Levitt
The Denouncer: A Novel
Stalin’s Barber: A Novel
Dreams Bigger Than the Night
A Novel
Paul M. Levitt
TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING
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Copyright © 2015 by Paul M. Levitt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levitt, Paul M.
Dreams bigger than the night : a novel / Paul M. Levitt.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-63076-078-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-63076-079-3 (electronic)
1. Organized crime—Fiction. 2. United States—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E935D74 2015
813'.6—dc23
2015008483
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For my wife, Nancy
Acknowledgments
John Donne reminds us that no man is an island entire of itself. My book emerges from a community, without which I would be the less.
First and foremost I am indebted to Henriette von Trapp for allowing me to edit and use parts of her memoir. A remarkable woman, she was the wife of the first von Trapp child, Rupert. Though stricken with crippling polio shortly after her wedding, she led an active life that included raising six children. My indebtedness extends to her sister FranÇoise, who first brought the memoir to my attention.
Warren Garfield, a longtime school friend, kindly found and reproduced the old newspaper reports of the Mary Astor trial. His own screenplay, based on the novel, gave me numerous ideas for revision.
Mitchell Waters, a first-rate literary agent, read the manuscript with a discerning eye, pointing out numerous stylistic misadventures.
My two editors, Gene Margaritondo and Janice Braunstein, artfully showed me the errors of my ways and, in so doing, saved me from subsequent despair. Kalen Landow tirelessly promoted the book, and Karie Simpson never failed to remind me of a deadline or an omission.
The distinguished people who have lent their names to the cover jacket reside in my pantheon of heroes: Frank Delaney, the brilliant novelist of Irish themes and the inspiration for chapter 2; H. Bruce Franklin, a Rutgers (Newark) professor and champion of justice, whom I tried unsuccessfully to hire several years ago but was rebuffed by the University of Colorado Regents; Berel Lang, professor emeritus, philosopher, aesthetician, holocaust scholar, and former colleague; and Alan Wald, an eminent historian of 1930s left-wing literature, now retired from the University of Michigan.
Warren Grover’s book, Nazis in Newark, provided invaluable background information, as did the numerous unnamed reference and history books that I consulted.
As always, I remain indebted to my family for their moral support and for their patience with my absences, when I frequently retreated to my office.
Financial assistance came from the University of Colorado, and in particular the generosity of Philip DiStefano.
And, once again, I thank Rick Rinehart for his encouragement and friendship.
1
“May bananas grow in their throat; my God, I am passing . . . out!” the young man anguished in Yiddish after the emcee applied “heat” in the form of twenty dynamite sprints around the dance floor, causing the Yid’s girl to go squirrelly and imagine that she had been assumed into heaven and stood before the throne of the Almighty. The heat also drove several other dancers to quit, even though the clock showed less than five minutes to go until the fifteen-minute rest period. Margie Smith, his part-time dance-marathon partner, mostly earned her living as a whore. “When my ass gets tired,” she liked to say, “I enter a contest, but only for the specialty events.” During breakout numbers, the audience “sprayed” the best dancers with coins and gifts. They had made it through nine days, picking up a fair amount of change from specialty events, particularly the fast ones in 4/4 time, like the Charleston, until the emcee weeded out the weak with a series of “sprints.” As he dragged her dead feet around the floor, waiting for the bell, she fell asleep standing up. A pretty girl with a splash of red across her lips and mascara running down her cheeks, she wore a tired plaid bathrobe, dingy white socks rolled at the ankles, and open-toe terry-cloth slippers. Her waist-length brown ringlets, only nine days ago light and airy, hung like attenuated chewing gum, and her lifeless arms rested limply on his shoulders. Suddenly she awoke, groaning that her gut had exploded. Usually, she could sleep on her feet for three hours at a stretch, all the while moving. Not him. He never had the knack; besides, he weighed 160 pounds and Margie 110, so how could he have leaned against her? But on that sweaty Saturday night in early March 1934, just as the contestants began to drop out, Margie burst an appendix. When they took her to the hospital, she said she’d soon be back, but she must have meant on her back, because he later learned she’d quickly returned to Madame Polly’s house on High Street. Meanwhile, he hoped the fifteen minutes of solo dancing allotted by marathon rules would not expire before some guy quit and he could take that gal for his own. The more-than-two-hundred hours of hoofing had left most everyone bedraggled. With the clock almost expired, a short, dark-haired fellow, whose tattooed arms exhibited, among other symbols, a winged eagle and Maltese Cross, and who danced like a cement mixer, threw in the trowel. His companion, who could still strut her stuff, looked crestfallen. As she danced solo, her shapely legs moved smoothly and seamlessly, slipping from one step to another. Shimmering like a preening bird, she seemed to be saying, “Do you have the stamina and footwork to keep up with me in the specialties?” He knew then that she would rather call it a day than settle for a klutz who could do no more than shuffle his feet and sway weakly in time with the music. Breaking into several fast steps, he signaled to her that he was her man.
The event had begun just like the dozens of contests that Margie and Jay had entered before. The Dreamland Amusement Park in Newark, on Frelinghuysen Avenue across the street from Weequahic Park, regularly sponsored dance marathons, billing itself as the site of America’s first such pageant. No piker, Victor J. “Buddy” Brown, the builder, owner, and manager, attracted name bands, major entertainers, and well-known vaudevillians to entertain the evening customers, who paid from twenty-five to forty cents for admission, sometimes more for a special guest performance. Mr. Brown hung the hall in patriotic bunting and always catered to the welfare of his dancers as well as his audiences. The layout exuded class: a polished dance floor circled by a low wooden wall, blue lights, a stage at the far end of the floor, rest quarters with cots in red-and-white tents, one marked “Girls” and one “Boys,” a
hospital area in larger tents to accommodate doctors, nurses, Swedish masseurs and masseuses, trainers, and beauticians. A row of booths along the wooden wall housed vendors touting foot eases, shoes, and hosiery. Refreshment stands sold hot dogs, Cracker Jacks, popcorn, and soda. Every advertisement reinforced the dream that fame and fortune would follow steadfastness. All of America seemed to have fallen for Horatio Alger’s hokum: persist and you shall succeed. Hardly a week passed when a new endurance record wasn’t set—for dancing, walking, piano playing, poetry reading, roller-skating, pole sitting, perambulator pushing, pie eating, oyster swallowing. Thousands of Americans, especially those out of work or underemployed, wanted to earn a check for $5,000 given to the last person standing—or prove themselves capable of shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel. Fame—it could even lead to a screen test in Hollywood, in which case, you could join the Okies flooding Highway 66, headed for golden California.
Her name, Arietta Magliocco, suggested dark operatic songs. Thin and limber as an eel, she had the staying power of an elephant. No sooner had they teamed up than the emcee called for another heat, a footrace through rubber pylons spaced at sharp angles around the floor. The added burden drove one fellow to quit for his cot, even though his partner kicked him in the shins, screaming that he had to continue. Another woman pleaded with her beau that she needed to sleep. “I’ll be all right if I can just take a short trip to dreamland.” Two more couples earned the audience’s displeasure, and a disqualification from the floor judge, for fighting. In the first rhubarb, the man repeatedly slapped his partner’s face; in the second, the woman punched her fellow’s nose, drawing a rush of blood. One cute girl, with Marcelled hair bleached nearly white, kept her partner upright by dancing with her right pinky stuffed in his left nostril. At this point, they all danced as if they wore snowshoes, but any thoughts of his quitting were dispelled by Arietta’s steely look.
Besides, he wanted to impress this demure elf with the bewitching widely spaced enormous green eyes. Strikingly fetching in her beautiful bones, she became his cynosure. Like a rash that itches all the more when scratched, she progressively invaded his skin. He felt like Odysseus encountering Nausicaa in a strange land—beached, bleached, and naked. The Mediterranean coloring, swan neck, Roman nose, and the sculpted line that ran from her high cheeks to the corners of her full lips, turned up slightly, brought to mind an odyssey of sin. Her brown hair, cut in a bob, made her look childlike, and yet, her constantly changing expression and penetrating eyes dispelled any idea of innocence. Within five minutes he loved her.
How could he not? Although they both laughed at the idiocy of marathons with their vaudeville routines and saccharine tunes that supplied the afternoon music—even the live musicians at night rolled their eyes when the emcee said that the “enduring American spirit” was on trial here—they joined hands to work the rail for a shower of coins and tokens of appreciation from the ringside ladies. Inspired by the mock weddings staged at marathons, he glibly told the applauding audience that he and Arietta had just met and would shortly be married, well aware that many a word spoken in jest is not without earnest.
A young woman with leg braces, sitting in a wheelchair, seemed particularly thrilled by the marital announcement and tossed nearly a dollar in coins. As they kneeled to gather them, Arietta whispered, “Another epidemic victim. Poor girl.”
During one of the rest breaks, after they had wowed the crowd with their turkey trot and Texas Tommy, the emcee introduced a vaudeville team, Ed and Florrie Lowry. Arietta retired to the rest area. As the couple performed, a man entered wearing a salt-and-pepper benny, the rim of his black fedora shading his eyes. Instead of taking a seat in the stands, the man paused at the women’s tent and then took up a position at the rail to watch the skit.
she: Say, Ed, don’t you think clothes give one confidence?
he: I certainly do. I go lots of places with them on. I wouldn’t go with them off.
she: How do you like these stockings? I got them in Paris. They cost only two dollars over there, and here you couldn’t touch them for less than fifteen dollars.
he: Say, how did you know what I was thinking?
At the end of the routine, the audience enthusiastically applauded, and the emcee led the orchestra through a tired rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Then the gong tolled. As Arietta came from the women’s tent, he glanced over her shoulder and counted the couples left in the contest: fifteen. Even more frenetic than before, Arietta seemed intent on picking up the pace, though neither the music nor the rules required a quickened step. Breaking away from him, she swept into a rumba, danced solo for a few moments, and then extended a hand to a man dancing with another woman. Flattered, the stubble-cheeked fellow, stocky and light-footed, said “Mit vergnügung,” and joined Arietta for a few turns of the Lindy Hop, dancing stylishly and beaming. His partner did not smile. In fact, her lips were so thin and hard, she could brand you with a kiss. Jay watched them spin away and hardly saw the man in the benny and fedora vault over the low wall, run onto the dance floor, pull a gun from his coat, and pump two shots into the chest of Arietta’s new partner. The thin-lipped woman screamed; dancers dove for cover. The orchestra and emcee stumbled off the bandstand, and the ushers and attendants ran. The audience, suddenly realizing that the action was not staged, rushed screaming for the exits. In the commotion, the shooter escaped out the front door. The ticket taker subsequently testified that a car came to a screeching stop. A rear door opened, the murderer jumped in, and then the sedan roared off. She was too stunned to note the license plate numbers, but she thought the car resembled a Buick, or a Packard, or maybe even a LaSalle. It held two men wearing black homburgs. The driver, she noted, was wearing black gauntlet motorcycle gloves.
Bleeding from two large holes in his chest, the stricken man gasped for air and uttered some unintelligible German words. His partner sank to his side and took his hand. While trying to whisper in her ear, the victim expired. The dead man, according to his partner, was Heinz Diebel, the notoriously camera-shy American Nazi leader who’d been urging his followers “to drive the parasitic, Marxist Jewish race from America.”
That someone had plugged him was no surprise, since every Jew in Jersey wanted to see him dead, though probably not many knew what he looked like. Besides, his own National Socialist party, the Friends of the New Germany, frequently quarreled among themselves, threatening each other with dire consequences for failing to show enough passion for the Nazi line or too much for the softer one of the Teutonia Society. But as Jay quickly learned, wanting in the abstract to see a guy dead and seeing him shot before your eyes are two different things. Diebel choked and gurgled as blood issued from his mouth.
Arietta shook uncontrollably and kept repeating incredulously, “I just danced with him!” Jay’s sphincter and nausea told him to find a bathroom as soon as possible. If the coinage of life is blood, Diebel, owing to the holes in his chest, was now bankrupt. When the cops questioned Arietta, she said that she had never seen the man before the marathon and that she singled him out because she’d noticed his Lindy Hop. Diebel’s companion, Gretchen Kunz, who wore her flaxen hair in a long, intricately woven braid, insisted with trembling lips that “the Jews killed him.” Even days later, when the cops presented her with evidence that Mr. Diebel’s fervor for Hitler had alienated the more-moderate members of his own party and that his womanizing had prompted death threats from numerous outraged husbands, she still held fast to the view that his killer must have been a Jew.
The local newspaper opined that the killing had the marks of a gangland rubout. Several days later, the pistol, a Browning model 1910, was found in a deserted lot with its serial number filed off. Other theories soon made the paper. This particular model had been used by the Serb student Gavrilo Princip, who had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. Perhaps the killer or killers intended to make some sort of political statement; after al
l, Diebel was attached to the extreme wing of his political party. But what was the statement?
When the Newark Star-Eagle ran the story, printing the names Arietta Magliocco and Jay Klug, Mrs. Klug mourned her son’s low associations since completing college; and his father, called “Honest Ike,” regretted “young Mr. Klug’s dissolute life” and his frequent absences from work at the Jeanette Powder Puff Company, named after his wife. In their place, he might have come to the same conclusion: Jay is a bum. Having to live at home meant that his guilt never took a holiday, and his likeness to his father—lanky, lithe, and lean-faced, with full lips, thick lashes, and Levantine skin and eyes—made him feel joined at the hip. An only child, he had no siblings to diffuse his father’s expectations. He was the hope of the family, the hope that the powder puff company had a future. But he had no desire to spend his life in a factory overseeing cutters and sewing-machine operators. Powder puffs! Frankly, he found the product frivolous, even if it did pay the bills.
“Jay, I feel you are lost. Aimless. A college graduate without purpose. I sometimes wonder if you’ll ever find yourself.”
His father then lectured him on the value of hard work and self-discipline. With the admonishment over, Jay hoofed it toward the Tavern. As he walked past the tidy houses with their postage-stamp lawns, he wished he could share the certitude of those who inhabited them. Notwithstanding the country’s economic woes, the occupants seemed to know who they were and their function in life. Whether or not that assurance came from religion or self-regard or selflessness, he envied their certainty. He had seen many of these people in shul, which he and his mother occasionally attended on Friday night. As his coreligionists davened, he did as well, all the while remembering Turgenev’s definition of prayer: the hope that two and two will equal five. In light of the current state of the world, like his father, he asked, “Where is God?” Mr. Miller, his Hebrew teacher who prepared him for his bar mitzvah, had said enigmatically, “You come to God through helping others, not yourself.”
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