Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  After two more chapters, I put the book down. Why couldn’t I sleep? I feared I knew what was responsible, or who. It was being in the company again of Henry Taul. He had barely exchanged three words with me at dinner, yet his obsession with female purity seemed like it could only be a direct reproach.

  I had met Henry three years ago at a friend’s garden party up the Hudson. I was staying for the weekend, and barely noticed the arrival of a new guest. By that time, Henry wanted to live down his reputation. While in college he’d landed in the newspapers for his extravagance, his wild weekend-long parties, and for being kicked out of Harvard. His father reduced his monthly allowance after he was expelled – the entire East Coast knew that. He still enjoyed himself, but he was trying like hell to stay off the front page, and the second and third pages too.

  I was vaguely aware of everyone fussing over him at the party that afternoon. Everyone but me. I’d found a bench in the shady corner of the garden and was reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles – unfortunately, it turned out to be a significant choice – when I heard a sniffing noise. I looked down, and a little white-and-brown dog with inquisitive, damp eyes was nudging my knee.

  “Here you are, Charlotte – and who have you found for me?” said a man’s voice.

  “Oh, is this your dog?” I asked of the tall man looking down at me. “It would seem the other way around. She’s brought you to me.”

  Henry smiled. “Shall we say that we’ve found each other?”

  “It’s too soon for that,” I answered tartly, and he burst out laughing. I soon learned that few people put up any resistance to Henry’s approaches. I suppose that I piqued his interest better than any female ploy.

  It’s no use lying about the past when I’m alone with my thoughts in the middle of the night. I did like Henry then. He was brash and loud at times, but I found it refreshing after my escorts of the preceding year: painfully polite Jewish boys who I’d known most of my life. Henry was a novelty. A Protestant novelty, who never cared about our difference in religion. Nor did I – my branch of the family was not very religious, to say the least. We ate shellfish and pork and rarely set foot in a synagogue.

  Henry’s bank sheet and level of fame allowed him to shrug off unpleasantness, and that included the reputation that I was so sensitive about: daughter of the bad sheep Batternberg. He never cared about that and didn’t see why anyone else should, either.

  When I appeared with Henry at the opera or theater and the dinner parties afterward, I admit I relished the newfound respect, if not envy, I saw in the women and the assessing gaze of the men. There had been very few invitations arriving at East Seventy-Second Street since Father died two years earlier. Now they came as an avalanche, not just for me but for my mother and sister too. Even my brother was asked to play with the boys of families who’d seemed to have forgotten his existence. I was just seventeen years old, and this was heady stuff.

  It was at Saratoga Springs where our romance ended, after just three months. Horse racing was still legal in New York State, and of course Saratoga was one of the places to be if you owned thoroughbreds of good breeding. Dogs and horses were Henry’s chief enthusiasms at the time – and, briefly, me. His horse won as we cheered in the owners’ box, the curious crowd looking up at him, and at me.

  We celebrated that night at an enormous party a friend of his threw for him at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, the same vast establishment where we’d all taken rooms. Henry was a graceful dancer for a man of more than two hundred pounds, and he spun me around the floor as the orchestra played. I always liked dancing with him – I didn’t have to slouch across from a short-statured partner. That night I’d had three glasses of wine, though, and suddenly felt a bit dizzy. We went outside for some air.

  “Are you leading me down the garden path?” I said, laughing, as Henry pulled me behind a row of hedges and kissed me.

  Henry had kissed me before, but not this way: His lips were not gentle. His hard-muscled arms tightened around me, and while I should have felt trapped and frightened, outside, alone in the dark with an ardent man who’d had quite a few drinks, that wasn’t the result. I slipped my arms up under his jacket, feeling his smooth white shirt stretching across his back, and I melted into his broad chest. I can still smell the lilacs in the spring air as I kissed him, as demanding of him as he was of me. I nibbled his ear.

  Henry drew back suddenly; I couldn’t read his expression in the darkness. “Will you come upstairs?” he said, hoarsely. I kissed him as answer. Now of course, I should have said no, should have calmed him down and steered him back into the party. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. The wine, the dancing, my body greedily clamoring for more pleasure…

  Fifteen minutes later, we were alone in Henry’s suite. A voice started to whisper in my head that this was a big mistake. A minute later, though, the whisper was drowned out by the roar of excitement, my senses avid, as Henry cupped my breast with one hand, and with the other unbuttoned the top of my dress, his fingers expertly handling the eyelets and hooks.

  But then he stopped. His fingers froze, and he backed away. Henry began to pace the floor as I stood there, astonished, my dress half hanging off me.

  He veered back toward me, his expression rigid.

  “You’re spoiled – spoiled,” he hissed.

  Horrified, I could only say he was wrong.

  “I want you to tell me who it was,” he demanded. “Who was the man before me?”

  “No one. There’s been no one.”

  “You’re seventeen. The way that you kiss me tonight, you’ve been with someone. I can tell!”

  After a good ten minutes of this, Henry dragged me, struggling and protesting, to a smaller room within his vast suite. He pushed me inside and locked the door. Through it he shouted, “When I come back, you’ll tell me the man’s name, Peggy!”

  I went from disbelief to enraged pounding on the door to frightened weeping, and, finally, ice-cold determination to get the hell out of there. Using a pin from my hair, and a technique my cousin Ben had taught me, I fiddled with the key and unlocked the door. I feared that Henry was on the other side, waiting for me with that same threatening stance, but the dark room was empty. I managed to return to my own room in the hotel, where I wept all night.

  The first thing in the morning, I went to the room of a school friend staying in the Grand Union Hotel and asked her and her family to take me with them to Manhattan. I was gone from Saratoga Springs before noon. Henry did not come to see me, nor did he write to me. I was angry with him, and I felt ashamed too. I’d been told countless times that it was up to the female to control a man bent on love making. We were supposed to be cool and aloof – and I failed the crucial test. I wanted absolutely nothing more to do with him. Were it not for Lydia, I’d have diligently avoided him for the rest of my life.

  Henry had imprisoned me in the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. Three years later, I controlled the door to my room at Brooklyn’s Oriental Hotel, and Henry had showed next to no interest in me, but I was fighting this nagging sense that here, now, I’d been jailed again.

  Beneath the smooth luxuries of the Oriental Hotel, and the attractions of the beach, the boardwalk, and the place I had yet to see, Coney Island, I felt the existence of something disturbing, something I couldn’t put a name to. I saw it this afternoon, in the battered shape of the poor woman floating under a pier. But she was a stranger. There was something else.

  I tossed and turned, the sound of the water lapping at the shoreline drifting up to the window, and I yearned for morning to come.

  Our maid, Alice, noticed my pitiful state as soon as she brought in some coffee and breakfast – mercifully we were not expected to take all meals in that enormous dining room – and she suggested a bath with soothing oils, followed by a cucumber treatment for my complexion, and then a nap. “Yes,” I said, “and please tell my family I’m fine, no need to check on me, and I’ll be down later.”

&nb
sp; Alice’s regimen was of great help. When I finally dressed after a long, dreamless nap, it was early afternoon and I felt reinvigorated. My fancies of the night were just that – fancies. Who knows how many women Henry Taul had bullied over the years? It could be I was one of many. Our history held no special significance for him. I should not let the past hold power over me.

  When I checked, my mother, sister, and brother were not in their rooms. It was a pleasant feeling, to be on my own. I remembered how much I’d liked the look of the veranda, and, fetching my handbag, I decided to explore it, perhaps purchase some sweets. I stuffed some money into the bag.

  On the long veranda, tables were set out for the guests, with waiters bearing silver tea trays on their shoulders. I really had napped most of the day away. As I strolled along, I caught sight of the back of Lydia’s blonde head, the hair piled up in one of her intricate arrangements. She was sitting in a circle of wicker chairs painted white, set up around a table sprouting tall crystal vases of fresh-cut flowers and steaming tea. Two of the other chairs were too high backed for me to see who was sitting there, but I assumed it was the whole family. I reconciled myself to tea.

  I was no more than ten feet away when I heard him speak. “No matter what the newspaper writers say, I don’t believe the Brooklyn racing tracks will reopen this year, which is a shame.”

  I darted for a doorway back into the main hotel. Once inside, and praying no one from my family had seen me, I pressed my face against the wood panel of a door to collect myself. I would know that voice anywhere on earth. It was Ben.

  It took me a few minutes, but, taking deep breaths, I slowed my racing pulse. I composed my face and rehearsed what I would say, and only then did I return to the veranda.

  “Here she is at last,” drawled my cousin, Benjamin Batternberg. He was sitting in one of the high-back chairs, hatless, his legs crossed, his jacket flung open. His brown hair was tousled, and his dark eyes gleamed at the sight of me. “My, you are nice and brown. Brooklyn agrees with you.”

  “To what do we owe the honor?” I asked. “I thought you were a student of the law.”

  “Yale Law School doesn’t hold classes in the summer, Peggy,” he drawled. “You don’t know that?”

  I shrugged.

  “I thought you’d have picked up some facts about academia in the little bookstore job Cousin Marshall found for you.”

  And with that, he’d cut me down to size, or so I would allow him to think.

  “Sit down, Margaret,” said my mother, and I took the chair opposite Ben. It was always best, whenever he was in the vicinity, to keep watch. The worst strategy was to let him gain advantage from lack of attention to his next move. All that obstructed our view of each other was a vase packed with long yellow roses.

  My sister said, “Ben and Paul have been here for ages, it seems.”

  It was only then I noticed Paul, Ben’s younger brother, who was nineteen, nearly my age. Ben was the middle child, between the oldest, Rebecca, and the youngest, Paul. But Ben had always been the one in charge of them.

  Paul and I exchanged cool nods. On the face of it, he was the handsomer son, resembling his mother, who had been a dark-eyed beauty, rather than the Batternbergs. Moreover, Paul and I were both drawn to art and books, interests shunned by everyone else except for, interestingly, the head of the family, Uncle Bernard. But I’d never warmed to Paul our entire lives. We were anathema to each other.

  “Not ages, Lydia,” Ben said. “But Paul and I booked at the Manhattan Beach Hotel for a couple of weeks, yes. Going in and out of the city. We made reservations when I heard about your plan to occupy the Oriental as guests of your intended, Henry Taul.”

  “We are not Henry’s guests,” said Lydia tightly. “We are staying at the hotel like anyone else.”

  “Of course, of course,” Ben said, and sipped tea, his little finger extended.

  My mother frowned as all of a sudden she seemed to spot something of interest on the hotel lawn, determined not to meet my gaze.

  The sweet scent of the roses on the veranda took on the cloying rot of a funeral display. Was Henry Taul paying my family’s hotel bill for the entire summer? I nibbled a pastry without tasting it, considering that possibility. We were running out of money. And this was an expensive hotel. But how deeply humiliating for Henry to foot the bill for all of us before he even married Lydia.

  Setting down the pastry, I peered over at Ben. His eyes danced with bright malice. God only knows how he wormed out that fact, but it was true. Henry must be paying for everything.

  I’d been here five minutes and already learned a painful revelation. Some of the stories would turn out to be true, like this one, others would be partially true. That was my cousin’s way.

  Ben announced, “It’s Lawrence who is the man of the hour. I was hearing about your trip from town yesterday, Peggy, and Lawrence’s deep knowledge of the trains. We cede the railroads to the Vanderbilts and the oil fields to the Rockefellers, but your engineering knowledge will come in handy in running our mines, Lawrence. Father’s been after me to go to Bolivia to see our newest acquisition. Maybe you can come along.”

  My brother smiled, as did my mother, grateful that someone was taking up Lawrence as a cause. But my heart skipped a beat. Ben had never shown interest in “the Schlump” before.

  Henry Taul and Uncle David showed up at the table, returning from seeing Henry’s horses stabled at the Sheepshead Bay Race Track. I felt a curdle of apprehension as Ben rose to his feet and shook Henry’s hand – “It’s so nice to see you again” – but there wasn’t a flicker of suspicion on Henry’s face. Why should there be? Family members are supposed to look after each other, especially when they’re most vulnerable, as when a girl is fifteen and has just lost her father.

  But also Henry was plainly in a bad temper. Despite his assurances to all, the racetrack did not seem to be on the verge of reopening for thoroughbred horses. Even worse, they’d heard rumblings of motor car races taking the place of the horses. Not that Henry and all the rest of the men on this veranda weren’t mad for automobiles. But it could never be the sport of kings.

  Aunt Helen, always tactful, lightened the mood by sharing some newspapers delivered to the hotel shop that afternoon with photographs of the coronation of the new king and queen of England: George and Mary. No one was genuinely interested in this event but my mother; however, in a sort of unspoken agreement to show kindness to Sarah Batternberg, everyone at the table took a turn with the newspapers, looked at the photos, and commented. Lydia, being the person closest to my mother, studied the photographs with the most care, pointing out an elaborate gem-studded tiara worn by a duchess following the new Queen. Her fiancé made something of an effort to get into the spirit of it, although Henry sulkily grumbled about the superb horse races at Ascot and the British understanding things better than the Puritanical Americans. My cousin Ben said with a wink at Mother, “She’s wearing a crown and a diamond necklace and a six string of pearls? The sun may never set on the British Empire – it certainly won’t set on Queen Mary’s jewelry!”

  When my turn came, I was drawn to the face of the proud, plain Queen: frozen into a mask that transcended arrogance and aspired to that of a deity, like the statue of some stern Egyptian goddess. Since the British Empire ruled over a quarter of the earth’s surface, she wasn’t wrong. I thought of the shooting in East London earlier this year of two Baltic anarchists, how the police and army swarmed in the thousands over a wretchedly poor neighborhood to trap the revolutionaries in the Siege of Stepney Street. What had been the anarchist cry? “No gods, no masters,” I murmured, repeating the motto as I gazed at the photo of the haughty queen.

  “What did you say, Peggy?” asked Uncle David with a frown. Of course anarchists were the arch enemy of our family, along with trade unionists.

  “Nothing,” I responded, passing the newspaper along.

  “And now,” said my cousin Ben, “who’s for a stroll around Coney Island?” />
  Henry said, “You must be joking. None of us have gone there, none of us will be going there. It’s the dregs of the city.”

  Ben said lightly, “Oh, everyone needs to have a look, how could you not, so close at hand? And there really are some architectural marvels, even if you don’t care for a thrill ride or the dreadful food.”

  “Is it safe for us to… just walk around, among all those strangers?” asked Lydia, with a delicate shiver.

  Ben laughed. “Do you think I’ll be kidnapped? Or just blown to pieces by anarchists?”

  “That’s not funny,” said Uncle David. Now I remembered the meetings that the brothers had last year about the growing anarchist threat, though discussion of hiring special bodyguards ultimately led to nothing.

  His oldest son said, “I assure you that none of the sales clerks or secretaries know who I am, or cares, in Coney Island. And even if there were a spot of trouble, I am well able to defend myself. So what do you say, Lawrence? Care to join us? I promise to take good care of him, Aunt Sarah.” Lawrence jumped to his feet, and my mother did nothing to stop him.

  This was alarming – not their going to Coney Island, but Lawrence being in his company for hours. Whatever Ben had in mind for my brother, I needed to witness it, and, if necessary, countermand it.

  “I think I’ll come along,” I said, also rising.

  “Delightful,” said Ben.

  Henry put out his hand, as if to push me back into my chair. “Out of the question,” he said, far too loud.

  “Peggy is twenty years old, I think she’s capable of coping with an amusement park, particularly if she’s with me,” Ben said, in the same light, amused tone, refusing to acknowledge Henry’s belligerent attitude.