I didn’t fear for my own sanity – if I were going to go mad, surely it would have happened by now. But I had for some years worried about Lydia. Even when she was a little girl, passionate about nothing but sports, there was a germ of something there.
The concierge pointed me in the right direction for our family affair. It didn’t take me long to find the picnic, if you could call it that, under a taut white tent to the north of the hotel, near where Lawrence and I had ridden our bicycles that first afternoon. The tent was set back from the boardwalk, with a white rope stretching around the rectangular perimeter. I could see my relatives milling around on the other side of the rope.
Families strolled beneath the Batternberg tent, oblivious, with children waving little American flags. The bathing houses were packed, and the sand covered with people, for it had turned into a blazing hot afternoon. The sounds of splashing and laughter rippled off the beach. A perfect Fourth of July.
From this spot, I couldn’t even see the stretch of beach where the police had gathered this morning; the shorefront curved. The celebrating crowds didn’t seem aware of any murder. It was as if that had never happened.
Two hotel employees were posted at the entrance to the white tent. As I approached the entrance, where there was a gap in the white roping, one of them stepped toward me, shaking his head.
“Private party.”
To my left, seemingly coming from the shrubbery, a low voice said, “She’s one of them.”
Sitting in a wooden chair off to the side was Henry Taul’s flat-nosed driver again, wearing his uniform, as always. Smoking a long cigarette, he gave me a brief look. There was something familiar about his manner. But before I could think more about it, the apologetic hotel staff were ushering me into the family party.
Absolutely no one could have faulted the hotel for any aspect of its service to the Batternbergs that afternoon. There was a veritable train of ice carts, and an army of uniformed hotel employees besides. Uncle David kept pressing crisply folded bills into the hands of the waiters and all the other staff. Perhaps it was his generous tips that kept the food and drink flowing crazily, like a volcano exploding with lava. I confess that caviar is difficult for me to turn down, and I scooped little spoonfuls onto stiff crackers, taking pleasure in its salty richness.
I could feel something new in the air: a change in all the members of my family. Some tension had eased. They were like any other team celebrating the win of the season. If Henry Taul, who’d been finally dragged over the field goal line, sensed the profound relief in the air, he gave no sign of it. He seemed more relaxed, too. His voice was softer, his movements less aggressive than earlier in the day.
As for Lydia, she was the most at ease of all, standing at his side, smiling up at him, laughing at his jokes, sharing chaste kisses. The only thing that gave me pause was that Lydia did not eat a single bite, not at any time that I watched her. And she took only rare sips of champagne.
Getting a great deal of attention was my cousin Paul, who had brought along his prized possession, just delivered to his hotel room: a brand new camera that required no tripod. He carried it around, balanced before him, peering into the top of the black box of a machine before yelling, “Now!” and then snapping the shutter. Everyone submitted to being photographed, except for me. I’ve never cared for how I look in photographs.
Lawrence was having great fun helping Paul with his camera. Watching my brother, something occurred to me. I suspected the chief reason Benjamin was focused on him, feeding him lies, was that he thought it would upset me. He was using my brother. So I ignored Lawrence at the picnic, not angrily or sulkily, just treating him as if he didn’t interest me. If I were honest with myself, this was how I’d felt about him until just a few days ago. The tactic had quite a good chance of working, I thought over my second glass of champagne – or was it my third? Like everyone else, with the exception of Lydia, I was having quite a lot to drink.
Three friends of Henry Taul suddenly appeared at the picnic, evidently at his invitation. I recognized two of the men from that first dinner. They had women with them now – wives or girlfriends hung on their arms.
It was highly unusual for strangers to come to a Batternberg party. We were such a tight-knit clan, and large enough, due to the six brothers and their families, that we didn’t need to supplement our ranks. But it went deeper than that, of course. Batternbergs didn’t trust outsiders – with only certain exceptions. I don’t mean the executives who worked at the family’s mining firm. They were highly valued and well compensated, but for whatever reason they never crossed the line and joined us on social occasions. Only a school friend of a family member might discreetly receive the go-ahead to join us.
These three brash young fellows and their companions would never have passed muster, but the fact is, this was not just a Batternberg party. Henry Taul was half of the equation now. Everyone would need to adjust, and that afternoon the Batternbergs did just that.
Lydia continued to lead the way. The women who accompanied Henry’s three friends floated toward my sister, who was chatting them up as any hostess would. They were thrilled. I could tell from the way they looked at her face, hair, and clothes that these young women were awed by her. Lydia was beautiful, and not just for a Batternberg. She was beautiful by any standard. To marry someone right after turning eighteen, it seemed a waste of a life to me. She could have been the toast of New York City for years to come, celebrated along the entire East Coast. But then again, her aim was to marry well, and she’d captured a man who seemed, on the face of it, to be the supreme catch. Why not just proceed?
I am sure it appeared the smart thing to do, smarter than working in a bookstore. But thinking of the agitation I’d detected, I suspected another reason. The uncertainty of the marriage market, where girls had so little control, could cause anguish. By marrying Henry this autumn, Lydia was cutting the agony short.
The temperature was inching still higher, and at one point my Uncle David sat down abruptly in a chair, sending his wife into a tizzy.
“You’ve had too much to drink and you know it,” she said, fanning his red face.
“Nonsense,” he said faintly.
“If Dr. Mackenzie were here, you’d listen to him,” she lamented. “You shouldn’t have any alcohol in the heat, not when you’re so very tired.”
After drinking a glass of water, Uncle David insisted he felt better and rose to deal with a matter arising from one of the latest food trays being borne on a waiter’s shoulder.
“Why is Uncle David especially tired?” I asked her.
“He didn’t come to bed until past one o’clock,” she answered.
That surprised me. “Why so late?” I asked. “Lawrence told me that Uncle David called you and you told him that I was back at the hotel. That couldn’t have been too long after eleven. Didn’t everyone come back then?”
Brushing something off the shoulder of her dress, she said, “Only Paul and Lawrence came back before midnight.”
“And Ben?” I asked. “Did he come back to the Oriental the same time as his father?”
“No. He didn’t.”
Well, why would he have done that? I glanced over at my cousin, who at that moment was nowhere near Paul and Lawrence and their experiments with the new camera. Ben was standing on the periphery of Lydia’s group. One of the young women, a brunette, had turned to talk to him. Under guise of having my glass of champagne refilled, I wandered over.
After topping my glass, the waiter approached the brunette and held the bottle, poised to pour. Ben made a gesture with his hand, as if encouraging her to imbibe.
“Oh, I just don’t know,” she said, with an uncertain smile. She was somewhere in her twenties, petite, with a large bosom. “If I have more to drink, I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to come up with enough intelligent conversation for a Batternberg.”
“Would you be able to accomplish that feat even when you were dead sober?” he asked, tilting
his head, smiling.
The brunette put a hand over her mouth, to cover her shocked laugh at his remark. Then her hand dropped and she smiled back, crookedly, her gaze traveling down his tall frame, ending with his prized Oxford shoes, gleaming, freshly polished, in the green grass.
He edged closer to her, bending down a bit to keep talking to her and her alone, and she turned more fully toward him, her back to the other female guests gathered with Lydia, and, beyond them, Henry Taul and whichever man she came to the picnic with.
How did Ben do it? How did he manage to sense which female would find not insulting but stimulating – even erotic – his brand of insulting banter? I had no more desire to occupy a front row to this performance, and, with my full glass of champagne, I moved to the spot closest to the boardwalk and the bay beyond.
I sipped and looked out over the distant rippling waves. There was a time when I laughed at Ben’s jokes, cheered on his maneuvering, when I trusted him with my secrets. It was long ago.
The family turned to him to help me after Father died, and he was full of warmth and fun at the start. We had a repertoire of nicknames for each other; he said we would live like pirates, though now I had to wonder at my family thinking that our private games were beneficial. We were too old for pirates – but then, that very much depends on what kinds of pirates. Ben taught me how to ferret out the forbidden: steam open letters, pick locks, ease a phone off its cradle while holding a finger down. In our hideaways we drank cocktails, smoked cigarettes, and played cards as he made me laugh so hard my sides ached. His most cutting jokes were about members of our extended family, and he was utterly merciless. When he took control of our generation of Batternbergs, which he planned to do by the age of thirty, turning our older cousins into his minions, I would be his most trusted deputy, he swore.
A breeze caressed my cheeks as an unwanted memory surfaced. It was a cold, snow-covered day, completely unlike this one. I had fallen asleep with a book one afternoon, in a chair facing the window in Uncle David’s brownstone, the third floor study, as a blizzard turned the sky grayish white. I felt the book being gently pulled from my hands, but instead of opening my eyes, I pretended to still be asleep. I don’t know why.
Suddenly I was in the air. Ben carried me from the chair to the couch. “You’ll get a crick in your neck in that chair,” he said.
He laid me down, smoothing my skirts tangled up around me.
“I don’t know if I can fall back asleep again,” I said.
“Well, then.” My cousin sat on the couch next to me, giving me a strange look. After a moment, he said, “Has any boy tried to kiss you?”
“Just one, and it was awful, just terrible,” I said, heartbreakingly innocent.
“I think I should help you practice,” Ben said. “Prepare you. It’s really what any good cousin would do.”
I closed my eyes to drive the memory from my mind, our first kiss but not our last. Just at that moment I became aware of someone standing next to me. Let this not be Ben, I prayed.
“Here, Peggy, your favorite,” said Henry Taul.
I looked down at what was in his hand: a cracker heaped with caviar.
“I’ve already had plenty – way too much – but thank you.”
“But the hotel boys finally brought out the beluga,” he said. “You always loved it.”
A small part of me feared we were treading on dangerous ground, but a larger part of me was tipsy, and it was hot, and Henry was being nicer than at any other time in the last week, not repellent at the moment. I took his offering. The caviar was supremely delicious.
“You like the finer things in life,” he said, “though sometimes you pretend not to.”
We really needed to stop talking about me at his engagement celebration to my sister. Still facing the boardwalk and the water, I said, “Do you know where the beluga comes from, Henry? Not the package, but the sturgeon itself?”
He answered, “From a lake that has salt water far away.” He swung out his arm toward the Atlantic. “It’s the Caspian Sea, bordered by Persia and smaller countries, and Russia. The Russians are the ones who developed the technique for catching the sturgeon and harvesting the eggs.”
I seemed to have stumbled onto one of Henry’s pet topics. I took another sip of champagne and said, “So you approve of Russians when they are making caviar on the other side of the world, not when they arrive in New York to live among us?”
Henry said, “That about sums it up.”
I burst out laughing, and the next thing I knew my cousin Paul had leaped in front of us, cradling his stupid camera. “Smile, you two!” he shouted. “Stand closer together.”
“No,” I said, putting my hand up in front of my face. “I don’t want my picture taken.”
“Come on, Peggy,” he whined.
“No, Paul. Go away.”
He refused to budge. “I need to take your picture.”
“Why? Because Ben told you to?”
He scowled. “I’m not leaving until I get your picture.”
“No?” I lunged forward and knocked the camera out of his hands and onto the grass.
Shocked, Paul knelt before the camera. He picked it up and said to me, “You might have broken it, damn it. If this weren’t grass, it would be in pieces.”
“I told you to stop,” I said, refusing to back down while realizing that I was creating quite a scene. Everyone at the picnic, including Henry’s guests, male and female, stared at me.
I turned to Henry, whose gaze was unreadable behind his spectacles. “You’re marrying into a rotten family, hope you realize that,” I said. My words, to my mortification, were slurred.
“Margaret!” cried my mother. She was heading for me now, Lydia charging over too, and Uncle David wiping his face, when Henry waved both his arms as if he were at a sports match.
“Stop, everyone, it’s fine – it’s fine,” he announced. “I’m not the least upset or put off.” He glanced over at me. “I’ve known Peggy for a long time, and I’m well aware of how she can be, sometimes.”
It was at that moment that Mr. Lancet, the hotel owner, appeared. He was ushered in by his staff, eager to make sure everything was to our satisfaction. He hadn’t heard what Henry Taul had just said and didn’t pick up on any family strain. The party lurched forward, with everyone ignoring me, the family embarrassment, until my Aunt Helen came over with a glass of water and guided me to a chair.
“Thank you,” I murmured. I hated how Henry said, “I’m well aware of how she can be.” But I was a mess. I wasn’t in any position to make a case that I had behaved well a few minutes ago, or in the past.
I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone born Batternberg, and apparently the feeling was mutual.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One of the reasons Mr. Lancet came was to make sure we were aware that after sunset, we could watch the Independence Day fireworks from a promenade atop the main tower of the hotel, reserved for us. It was perhaps six o’clock at that point; we had a few hours to go before the pyrotechnics. I couldn’t wait to get to my room.
I still felt wobbly on my feet when we left the picnic – my goodness, I really had had too much champagne in the heat. But as I walked, I strove to collect myself. There’d be no stumbling on the boardwalk, I vowed. A cold bath followed by hot tea, and I’d be fine.
I walked a few feet behind my Uncle David and Mr. Lancet. Their conversation drifted back to me, but I paid little attention until I heard the word “Dreamland.”
“The fraud, the mismanagement, if I were to tell you even a fraction of what I’d heard these last seven years, ever since the place opened, you wouldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Lancet somberly. “From the beginning, it’s been a sinkhole. I’ve heard rumors Dreamland might not survive another year, the losses are so serious.”
Uncle David answered, “I had a look at that part of Coney Island last night, as a matter of fact, and it didn’t look as if it were teetering.”
&n
bsp; “My good man, they wouldn’t let you see it. They bury everything that isn’t perfect at Dreamland, both the stories and the people whose lives have been shattered,” responded the hotelier. “Like the world-famous lion tamer who entertained the crowds – that fellow who went by the name Captain Jack Bonavita. He had quite the setback here. A lion clawed one of his arms to shreds one day, right in front of all the little children. First time he’s ever been unlucky like that in his life. The circus people panicked and took him to a quack doctor. Naturally an infection set in and at hospital they had to take off his entire arm. I’m sure you never heard that story. They hushed it up.”
What an odious person this Mr. Lancet was, to gather up disgusting stories of his neighbor along the shoreline and disseminate them to guests. Who knew if any of it were true? I suppose Coney Island was nothing but an eyesore and source of potential trouble to these cynical moneymen who owned the large hotels. I thought sadly of the idealistic Stefan, holding my hand on the beach as we gazed in awe at the thousands of lights of that Coney Island park.
As we approached the main pathway leading up to the Oriental Hotel, a strange sight unfolded. A group of boys, perhaps twelve years old, ran up and down, waving bundles of newspapers in the air. They fanned out, one of them running right for us.
“Extra! Extra!” he shouted. “New York Herald extra edition – girl murdered in Manhattan Beach!”
Behind the newsboy a frantic hotel employee appeared, trying to chase him down. Other hotel workers were giving chase too. But startled people on the boardwalk were reaching for the extra, the single sheet that the boys had bunched up in their hands, pulling them from packs they had slung over their shoulders.
I pivoted into the path of the newsboy streaking toward us, no easy feat in my still-woozy state. He saw me coming for him and thrust a sheet into my hands and took a penny I quickly fished out for him before scrambling on, a red-faced hotel worker on his heels. I folded it in half and then halved again, to read as soon as I had a moment alone.
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