Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  “Families that are starving,” I retorted, ignoring my mother’s frosty glare.

  Henry began, once more, to pace the floor. “Do you know what sort of men show up at Ellis Island now, by the thousands? Beaten men of beaten nations. There are more Italians in New York City than there are in Rome. Imagine that. And the Russians? The Russians! I can’t even speak of it. This is madness. They sit in squalor in their tenement houses, sending their women to the garment factories while they cook up their plots of violence against this country, their acts of anarchy.”

  I’d never heard him speak of social issues before, and while what he said was doubtless what others were thinking up and down Fifth Avenue, I found it contemptible coming from him. Who was Henry Taul, notorious for his Harvard University days of playing poker all night, lighting his cigars with hundred-dollar bills, to sit in judgment of anyone? My heart began to hammer in my chest.

  “I suppose you must charge my family with negligence, Henry, for allowing me to work,” I said, my voice sounding harsh even to my ears. “But of course, that has been put an end to.”

  Henry did not rise to provocation but stayed silent as the seconds crawled by. His massive shoulders began to rise as if to execute a shrug but stopped, and eased back down. Behind his spectacles, looking down on me, his gaze was cold but not indifferent. I was beginning to wonder if I detected a certain satisfaction there.

  The last person in the world whom I expected to speak on my behalf, my brother Lawrence, said, “I think it’s terrific that Peggy took a job. She doesn’t want to sit in the house and do nothing.”

  “Thank you, Lawrence,” I said, as my mother and sister turned on him, smarting from implicit criticism.

  The next surprise came from Henry himself, who said with a chuckle, “We shouldn’t chide the boy for defending his sister. I wish I’d had someone to speak up for me – it wasn’t easy being an only child.”

  And so the conversation moved to happier ground, discussing the childhood of Henry. His mother dominated his life – he sometimes spoke of her with resentment, but she ruled him, without doubt. Just as she now threatened to rule the rest of us, her bad legs notwithstanding, it occurred to me. As for his father, Hezekiah Taul never came East, unlike all the other rich men, from Carnegie to Frick, who, once they’d made their fortune, scrambled to make their mark on New York City. He sent his son East but didn’t follow. Taul Senior didn’t ache to smoke his cigar in the clubs of the Astors. The face of the mine owner could only be glimpsed in newspaper photographs, and I always found it hard to connect the gaunt, white-bearded man staring at the camera like an angry Old Testament prophet with his baby-faced, luxury-indulging son.

  As we finished our tea, Henry turned to immediate, pragmatic matters: traveling to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn. He planned to drive my sister out himself in his favorite automobile, with my mother as chaperone. Lawrence and I would follow in another of his cars; our two maids, Alice and Myrtle, would ride in our own car. The thirty-seven pieces of luggage were being conveyed separately.

  “I’d rather take one of those fast trains to the hotel,” Lawrence announced. “The tracks were laid for this purpose, to get people to the hotels on the ocean.” When my mother said it was out of the question, he responded, with spirit, “My uncles want me to study engineering at college, but you won’t allow me to even lay eyes on any sort of new technology. I’m forbidden to go down into the subway stations, I can’t take the trains. It’s unfair.”

  An idea jumped into my head. “I could accompany Lawrence,” I said. My mother pursed her lips as she thought it over. I knew that it was only by invoking Batternberg pride that we could succeed, so I added, “If he’s to study engineering, as the family wants, then he really should see such feats in person.”

  “I’d say yes to it,” Henry said. “They wouldn’t be forced to mix with the crowds going to the amusement park – that’s a separate train altogether.”

  “Yes, it wouldn’t do to have any mixing,” I murmured, my temper rising again. I hated that Henry’s approval was required.

  Lydia said, “But once we’re at the Oriental Hotel, won’t we be at all aware of the crowds there, Henry? I read in the paper that there are thousands and thousands of people coming into Coney Island every day.”

  “Not at all,” he said, emphatically. “It’s a good distance away along the water, and there are plenty of guards – armed Pinkerton guards – hired to keep the bad element from the hotels. They get the job done, thank God. All the worst people of the city parade out to the amusement park. I’m sure you’ve heard its nickname? ‘Sodom by the Sea’?”

  My mother twitched in her chair at the word Sodom.

  “So do not worry for a second, Sweetheart,” Henry said with expansive confidence. “You won’t even know Coney is there.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Lydia said, and, from what I could detect, with all sincerity. He beamed down at her, and in the glow of his approval, the sharpness I’d seen in my sister’s features softened. I tried my best to accept it: Lydia adored him. Was it real love? I would have no way of knowing, since I’d never been in love.

  I rose to leave, nearly forgetting my wildflowers. I turned back but, stretching out my hand, I hesitated. Just a half hour or so in the parlor had turned my daisies limp and shriveled.

  On the day we left Manhattan, my sister and mother were escorted to Henry Taul’s jaunty red motor car with a black canopy top, larger even than Uncle David’s, with the rather absurd name of American Eagle. His liveried driver leaped to open the doors for them, my sister and mother sitting in the back. Lawrence and I stood on the sidewalk on Seventy-Second Street, waving politely.

  As the American Eagle rumbled down the street, I turned to my brother and he grinned at me. The two of us burst out laughing. What a gift. It would be for just a few hours, but we were free. Free.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lawrence and I made our way to the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway depot on Twenty-Seventh Street.

  He was an inch or so taller than me – he’d shot up in height in the last year or so – but Lawrence hesitated on the steps leading to the train platforms, unsure of himself. It was a shame to see how my mother’s snobbery and smothering had stymied him, and though I had seized on his train trip as a means of escaping from my mother and Henry Taul – at this point I wasn’t sure who I wished to avoid more – my feelings for my brother extended beyond gratitude at the opportunity. I felt more kindly toward Lawrence than at any other time I could remember.

  “Well, Mister Future Engineer, let’s have a look at some engines,” I said. I hadn’t been sure how sincere his interest was, but it turned out my brother really did like trains, and we circled a few of them resting in the station as he peered intently at their enormous wheels and intricate gears.

  Checking my timepiece, I cried, “We’re in danger of missing the noon train!” We had to step smart to pick up our tickets. I feared we’d have the poorest seats so, scrambling quickly, we aimed for the first car after the conductor’s engine. I spotted two free seats facing forward, by a window. I darted around a slow-moving gentleman wearing a reverend’s collar and two chatting matrons to weave up the aisle and lay claim to them. It took a good three minutes for Lawrence to join me. “I’ve never seen you move like that, Peggy,” he said, laughing. “Can you imagine Mother boarding a train without a porter to lead the way – and no first class?”

  “I don’t believe in first class,” I said, and the train blew a deafening horn as if in agreement.

  I’d ridden trains before, but not one moving this fast. Nor, more significantly, one that cut through a certain section of the city. I’d lived in New York all my life, but it was not until that Saturday, the first of July, that I had an eyeful of the Lower East Side. It was through freshly washed windows, and from an elevated track, that I could see it, really see it: the sagging, dejected tenement houses, interlaced with narrow streets seething with thousands of people. More
people than I thought could possibly fit on any street. I hated the expression, but I couldn’t deny these people did look like insects. I was aware of the slums of New York, everyone was, but to bear witness to the dense, pitiless enormity of this was something else entirely. It was a shallow glimpse into deepest misery.

  The shining river beckoned, and we ascended the bridge to Brooklyn.

  While our fellow passengers chatted happily around us, filled with anticipation for the hotel and beach, Lawrence and I shared a silence. I don’t know if it hit him as hard as it did me, the shame over our unearned lives of comfort in the face of such squalor. I would wait for Lawrence to speak, and at last, after we’d passed the houses and shops of Brooklyn and were moving though farmland, he did so. It wasn’t what I expected.

  “Do you think about Father?”

  Ah. Our handsome, amusing, friendly, careless, dissolute, and dishonest father.

  With a sigh, I nodded.

  “You were his favorite,” he pointed out, but not jealously.

  I was Father’s favorite, for years. It was true. And I gloried in his warmth, his laughter at my precocious remarks. But it didn’t last. And I sometimes think the caressing sun being eclipsed by dark, thunderous clouds is so painful that it would be better to have never felt the sun at all.

  I said, “You’re too young to remember what happened when I was twelve, the baked salmon dinner, but you must have heard about it.”

  “A little,” said Lawrence. I could tell he wanted to hear it from me.

  Outside the window, a dirt road ran parallel to our train track, and we flew by a farmer as he shook the reins on his wagon heaped with vegetables. How I envied him right now.

  I began the story. “I don’t know where I got the idea, where I heard the word, what made me say it. I’ve wondered about that a dozen times. It started with Father not being home for dinner – perhaps you remember that? – and then disappearing for weekends while Mother stayed with us. And after that, he was gone for weeks at a time. Finally, it became months. He would say it was for business, but I knew it wasn’t true.

  “That night all of us sat at the dinner table, Father wearing one of his beautiful suits. We’d just finished our baked salmon, and it was being cleared for dessert. Father pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, and carefully laid down his napkin, saying he had an appointment and would have to miss tonight’s treat, sadly. And at that moment it just came out of my mouth: ‘Are you going to see your mistress tonight?’”

  It was never the same between me and Father after that. He was as offended as only the guilty can be. In some half-understood way, I had said what I said for Mother’s sake, abandoned and suffering. But for me to put into words what was never acknowledged in front of the children, it was a devastating humiliation, and years later, she was capable, after a glass of wine, of saying I only did it to hurt her.

  Three years after I asked my father if he was going out to see his mistress, he died in a boating accident, the sort of boating accident that newspaper writers jostle to write about. On 18 March, 1906, Jonathan Batternberg was one of twelve passengers aboard a yacht, the captain as staggeringly drunk as everyone else, and when they sailed straight into a fog bank on Long Island Sound, they were rammed into pieces by a shipping vessel registered to the nation of Norway. The largest piece of the boat caught fire. Everyone aboard died, except for a nineteen-year-old model named May Calhoun. She was my father’s latest mistress.

  “That girl in the water,” Lawrence said, “she was one year younger than you are now.”

  Now that was a thought, and an incredibly unpleasant one.

  “I know about how it works with the Batternberg men,” my brother said. “It’s disgusting.” His face turned scarlet, his body twisting up like a ball in his seat. “I could never be like that!”

  It seemed an extreme reaction. But then I thought back to when I first ferreted out the truth about our father and uncles. I had felt, well, not disgusted, exactly, but appalled. My grandfather, who had always espoused devotion to family, had certain ideas. Each of his sons was indoctrinated into sex by the age of fifteen with a carefully chosen prostitute. The brothers all married proper ladies, but after getting married they proceeded to chase after, dally with, and purchase secret apartments for, improper ladies. After they tired of a mistress, she’d receive money and several pieces of excellent jewelry that could hold value through any “boom and bust” market; a few received actual pensions.

  I’ve never been able to determine if this strain of Batternberg behavior – acquiring loose women – is particularly virulent in my family, or if most wealthy men in New York City act this way. I do think there might be exceptions.

  One night last year, the extended family was celebrating someone’s birthday at a long table at Delmonico’s. We ate steaks and those marvelous potatoes – mashed, smothered in cheese and breadcrumbs – and polished off frosty bottles of champagne. Suddenly a hush fell over the entire restaurant, and, champagne glass in hand, I looked up to spot a tall, bulky older man making his way through the room. He surveyed our Batternberg table with blazing, scornful eyes, set atop a bulbous reddish nose, and tilted his head in greeting only at my oldest uncle, Bernard. “That’s JP Morgan,” a cousin whispered. He marched onward, and I saw another long, festive table blanch under his scowl. Could this man ever have stashed a buxom showgirl in a secret apartment? My imagination retreated from it.

  But there is one thing I do know. Women of my family, and all others like us, cannot behave the same as the men do. After Father died, in my pain and confusion, I fell under the influence of someone who was supposed to look after me but took advantage of that trust. Spurred on by a furious rebellion, I neared that point of no return – of being “ruined” – but I drew back.

  Any Batternberg adolescence was difficult – but to have experienced it in the shadow of lurid screaming headlines was agony. I had come through it, yes, but without flying colors. And now I had no idea what to do with my life, beyond not wanting to wed some smooth-faced young banker who after a few years of marriage would slink off before dessert to a secret apartment downtown. Still, I had to say something to Lawrence.

  “You don’t have to be like them,” I said. “I know the family teases me for being a New Woman. Maybe you can blaze a trail to become a New Man.”

  It was the right thing to say. He nodded, grateful, his complexion returning to a normal shade.

  Just after crossing a thin creek, the train slowed. Everyone was on their feet, impatient to charge out the door. The moment my feet hit the platform of the little depot, I understood why.

  As New York City never tires of saying, it’s the greatest metropolis in the world. Manhattan is an island of delights. But it is also a crowded island, so much so that in order to expand one must go up, not out. New buildings soar seemingly to the clouds: the “skyscrapers,” as the newspapers dubbed them. While here, at the edge of Brooklyn, the city pressed not up but out, its face turned toward the Atlantic Ocean, a body of water so vast it puts even Gotham in its place. I drank in the dazzling, open brightness of this place called Manhattan Beach. The blue of the sky enveloped me; there were no buildings blocking it or the gray haze of factories and automobiles. The sky arched to meet the water that rippled in the sunlight. Boats large and small danced on the horizon.

  Near the water stood the Oriental Hotel. I’d been bracing myself for some ghastly Shanghai palace imitation. It was nothing of the sort. The hotel was huge, four stories tall, with what looked to be a hundred windows, and a dozen minarets atop the roof, giving it a Moorish flair. I especially liked the elegant veranda that wrapped around the first floor of the building and the emerald green of the lawn, bordered by pink, yellow, and white geranium beds.

  Our beaming Uncle David appeared at the end of the platform, trailed by Dr. Mackenzie. Both wore summer resort clothes, complete with straw hats, and carried long bags over one shoulder. “Right on time, good for you,” my uncle crowed, a
s if we’d driven the train ourselves.

  He explained that after they’d conveyed us to our rooms, the two men were booked for a game of golf – “Dr Mackenzie said it’s medicinal, for my heart” – and so it was necessary for us to hurry along.

  “Oh, must we go inside right away?” I asked, basking in the sun and the ocean breeze.

  “Your mother left strict instructions. She and Lydia and Helen are all napping, and if you lie down presently you can catch up and be refreshed for tea, that is how she put it.”

  Lawrence smacked his forehead with his hand. “A nap? You must be joking. I’m not a baby.”

  “But what of you, Peggy?”

  “Me? Not a bit tired,” I said. Spying a couple pedaling by on a bicycle built for two, I said, “I’m for a bicycle ride – Lawrence and I could explore while you play golf.”

  Seeing that his game was in no jeopardy, my relieved uncle obtained our room keys and organized bicycles for our use with the staff. He also prattled on about our new summer dwelling, telling us that in the last thirty years, three U.S. presidents had stayed at this hotel as well as the cream of the English nobility. The presidents’ portraits all hung in the lobby parlor, among the mirrors. Uncle David must be in a good mood to resist singling out with disdain the face of Teddy Roosevelt. In our family, Roosevelt was called “hypocrite,” “traitor,” and “buffoon” – and those were the nicer names.

  I continued to be pleased with the hotel. Its veranda was not as enormous as that of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, which stretched seven hundred feet, but it was spacious and nicely shaded. The Oriental’s lobby parlor might have lacked the polished grandeur of the Waldorf Astoria, but who could possibly require a long, carpeted, and mirrored “Peacock Alley” this close to the beach and ocean? It looked to be about fifty feet in length, perfectly designed for its scale and situation. One thing was for certain – people dressed in their best here, as they did in Manhattan and Saratoga Springs.