Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  The crushing waves and buoyant salty water proved a tonic for me, body and soul. I practiced all my swim strokes, pushing myself harder than the day before. I waved off Lawrence when once again he was sent to retrieve me. Only when I was good and ready did I emerge from the water, my skin and hair soaked along with the bathing costume that clung to me.

  I didn’t see Mother or Lydia or any of my other family among the people lounging on our part of the hotel’s private strip of beach, the one spreading down from “Pavilion One.” They must have given up on me, which suited me perfectly.

  There was a tight cluster of young people standing together, laughing, that I needed to make my way around. “Excuse me,” I said, veering to the left of the group to reach the pavilion. My arms and legs had that pleasurable throbbing from exercise, and my feet sank into the sand as I more or less staggered toward the pavilion, my head down.

  It was a shock when I smacked right into someone, head first, and fell back in the sand. Embarrassed, I laughed and made a shade of my hand as I peered up at the tall man looming over me, his back to the sun. It was Henry.

  He leaned down and offered me his hand. I took it – warm and damp with grains of sand from his hand or mine, now grinding together into my palm and fingers. He pulled me up as easily as if I’d been a rag doll. His bare shoulders and the top of his chest glowed with a fresh tan.

  Now face to face, physically closer than we’d been in years, and with fewer clothes on than during that last fateful fumbling in his Saratoga hotel room, I found myself speechless. So was he.

  I decided the only thing to do in the situation was nod and continue to the bathing pavilion. I made it to the doorway when, feeling a pinprick of uneasiness, I looked over my shoulder. Henry wasn’t anywhere near; he had returned to the water with a resounding splash and hard athletic kick.

  I was fairly unnerved by the encounter with Henry, which followed on the heels of my quarrel with Ben. It was tempting to have dinner brought up and eat alone, for I needed time away from my family. But the air was still so heavy and thick in my room that it was impossible. I had no choice but to go down.

  At first it seemed I made the right choice, for it was more comfortable on the dinner veranda than any other place on the island. The occasional ocean breezes felt like merciful balm. The place next to Lydia sat empty. Her fiancé did not join us, and no one remarked on his absence or asked Lydia about him. I wondered if Henry made anyone else as uncomfortable as he did me. I sat next to Ben as always, but we didn’t speak to each other. We were at a stalemate – or was the better term “checkmate”? Our mutual antipathy did not go unnoticed. I caught Aunt Helen in a thoughtful stare in our direction, oblivious to conversation.

  That conversation, besides comments on the food, centered on the other branches of the family: minutia on various Batternberg relatives not present – their health, improvements made on their homes, university choices, servants needing to be fired, notable purchases of art or furniture. This was what I grew up on, and I long ago learned how to endure the tedium by occasionally voicing agreement or asking an innocuous question so that I seemed attentive, but was in reality occupied by my own thoughts. The charade was helped along by two glasses of chilled champagne.

  Most of us had finished our lamb chop and green beans almandine when Henry Taul suddenly appeared. He said, “It’s happening now. Come or you’ll miss it. Everybody.”

  Lydia half turned in her chair, frowning. It was Uncle David who spoke from the head of the table: “Henry. We’re at dinner. Please have a seat.” Beneath his geniality was the chill of disapproval.

  “It’s the Siege of Alexandria,” Henry said, booming with enthusiasm. “The Oriental Hotel puts it on every other Wednesday night. Hundreds of people and real ships. If you sit here through your coffee, you’ll miss the battle.”

  Lydia looked unconvinced. My mother shot a look at my uncle, who seemed more intent on silently gathering the opinion of his oldest son. From where I sat, I could not read Ben’s expression. It was Lawrence who swung the tide when he said, “That sounds like fun, Henry.”

  “Yes,” I echoed. “Why not?” The boredom of our table had been in danger of putting me to sleep in my chair.

  “Very well,” said Uncle David. “Lead the way.”

  The waiters did not hide their surprise when the Batternberg party stood up to leave abruptly. Lydia silently walked at Henry’s side as he hurried us along the veranda and down to the water, in the direction of the Manhattan Beach Hotel. The day was just beginning to fade to twilight.

  “Is this in imitation of the amusement park, that the fine hotels feel they must put on such spectacles?” my uncle wondered.

  “They’ve been mounting it for years,” Henry insisted. “I saw it the last time, and it was splendid. Everyone from Wall Street should come out and see.”

  “Why should they do that?” asked Ben, lighting a cigarette.

  “Because we are Rome! America is Rome! We are the empire the world should fear, not the British, the French, or the German. Don’t you see?” Henry was beside himself.

  Hundreds of eager people already waited, held back behind a rope stretched between poles along the beach. On the other side, close to the water, marched two dozen men dressed in ancient garb, gripping swords. I assumed these were to be the Egyptians. Many, many more men stood on the decks of three ships sailing toward us, the soldiers in full Roman gear. On each boat torches blazed, which in this heat seemed ridiculous, although I had to admit that the orange-white flames reaching up to the violet sky added to the spectacle. The breastplates of the men’s armor glowed.

  We took our place to the side and the back of the crowd. Our view wouldn’t be the best for observing the “battle” to come, but I don’t think any of us cared too much. We were primarily there to appease Henry Taul. I thought of that table in Ben’s room, covered with maps of mines.

  Any hope that Henry would calm himself died after the trumpets from a small orchestra blasted across the beach. He leaped over the rope separating spectators from soldiers as if to join them. A horrified hotel employee tugged on his shirt, and the word “safety” floated up the beach, but Henry pushed him away. Pinkerton guards came forward, but the white-maned Mr. Lancet emerged from the front of the crowd and seemed to be directing employees to leave Henry alone. The son of one of the richest men in the country must be allowed to run amok.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Uncle David. Paul began to laugh, and Ben elbowed him to stop, though I saw his shoulders shaking too. Lawrence just seemed confused. My uncle craned his neck, worriedly scanning the faces of our fellow hotel guests, fearing that Henry was making a spectacle of himself within the spectacle. Fortunately, the crowd seemed wholly captivated by the Roman ships. They looked like clusters of torches gliding magically toward the sand.

  My sister stood apart from the rest of us. She never turned away or covered her eyes. She tracked Henry’s running up and down the beach, shouting and clapping his hands, with tense concentration.

  I moved closer to her, to offer silent support.

  We both watched as two young men slipped past the rope to stand with Henry. Both wore the Taul uniform jackets, and even in the dimming light I recognized the driver from earlier today, spotted in the Manhattan Beach Hotel garden. The other man was dark-haired and vaguely familiar. I’d seen him on the periphery of our gatherings as well. The way they flanked Henry, it was as if they were allies more than servants.

  Unable to hold back any longer, I said, “Lydia, I think Henry’s driver might have been following us earlier, when we left tea.”

  I waited for her to deny it. Instead she said, “Yes, Henry has them do that.”

  “Them?”

  She raised her finger as if to point but then quickly lowered it. She must have meant the dark-haired one as well as the blond. “They run his errands, and sometimes the errand is to keep track of me.”

  “That doesn’t upset you?”

  After
a long silence, Lydia responded. “Henry says it’s because he loves me dearly, and he doesn’t want anything bad to ever happen to me.”

  And with that, she threw back her little shoulders, put a smile on her face, and waved to her fiancé, who was at that moment plunging his fist into the air as if he held an imaginary sword.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The heat spell of 1911 was talked and written about for many years, but for those who lived through it in New York and the rest of the Northeast, what is lost in such accounts is what it was like to be in the middle of it, the feeling of alternating panic and enervating despair over whether this would ever end. Each day it seemed as if it simply must be the last. But the next day would dawn, as pitilessly hot as the one before.

  The morning after Henry Taul behaved so oddly at the Alexandria battle spectacle, my mother began to talk of leaving the Oriental Hotel. Since we had yet to be introduced to Henry’s mother, this was quite an admission of how much she was suffering, that she would forego the all-important meeting. But it was not just her own physical discomfort. Mother said several times, “This heat can cause temporary imbalance of the mind.” Yes, the stories of those driven to insanity made for gripping newspaper stories: the poor desperate souls who drowned when they threw themselves into lakes, rivers, or oceans without any ability to swim, the tragic few who shot themselves. But I believe the person my Mother meant was Henry. She had decided that the heat spell unhinged him, and were we to escape its reach, he’d become normal again. It was true that Henry’s behavior was increasingly bizarre, but the truth was he’d always been an eccentric of rapidly shifting moods. Mother hadn’t spent much time in his company until this holiday. I’d known him longer than anyone else in my family, though of course this was never referred to. Henry’s vast fortune and good looks smoothed over the fault lines of his character, like a thickly woven Turkish carpet stretching across a buckling floor. Now that my family, and that included Lydia, had spent more time with him in strained circumstances, they could see the breaks and splinters.

  The problem with abandoning the hotel was, where could we go? Saratoga Springs, Oyster Bay, Newport, the resort hotels and weekend houses all sweltered just as much as those of New York City. The bigger obstacle was Henry, who said, “My mother can’t be suddenly moved, especially since these salt water treatments are helping her legs.” Mother backed down, but she wasn’t happy. The next two days she spent in her suite, fans whirring and her personal maid Beatrice pressing her head with cold compresses, as she struggled to plan Lydia’s wedding.

  It was spotting that bucket of ice in her suite that gave me an idea. With The Wings of the Dove abandoned, I longed for something to read to pass the time until my meeting Stefan. I went to the shop in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel and was happy to see a corner shelf devoted to books. But none of the novels appealed to me, for they were ridiculous Western adventures or shallow romances. My own daydreams were dominated by a blissful aching for Stefan, but I didn’t want to sully the emotion I felt by equating it with the love affairs depicted in popular novels.

  My attention drifted to the table of weekly newspapers and magazines for sale: Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and, to my delight, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, along with many more. “Are you interested in any of our publications, Miss Batternberg?” asked the saleswoman anxiously. Her face was flushed red and shiny. The hotel hadn’t seen fit to place an electric fan in the windowless shop in which she toiled. Her hair was scraped up into a tight bun, but the brown tendrils that escaped down her neck were wet with perspiration. I felt badly for her.

  “I’m interested in all of them,” I said. “Can I purchase a copy of each?”

  “Of course! How lovely!” she said. “Anything you like, you have only to ask. We can order any book, or for that matter anything you desire. A special treat you’d like to eat or a drink that’s not available on a restaurant menu? I hope you’ll let me know.”

  “How about bottles of Coca-Cola?”

  She blinked for a few seconds, stunned, but then rallied. “Yes. Certainly. How many bottles?”

  “Let’s begin with a dozen.” I gave her my room number. She didn’t ask whom to bill the items to. I admit to some satisfaction over the prospect of either Henry Taul or my mother eventually paying for the Coca-Cola.

  And so I fashioned a method for surviving the heat spell: I arranged for my own large bucket of regularly refreshed ice to be stationed in my room, and I submerged the bottles in it. Every morning and many of the late afternoons, I took down a bundle of magazines and cold Coca-Colas and set myself up on the shadiest section of the veranda. I also arranged to drink Coca-Cola at lunch while everyone else stuck to iced tea or lemonade. In the early afternoon I swam. At night I joined whomever else was dining at the hotel.

  On Thursday evening the smallest group yet gathered for dinner. Henry had taken Lydia into town in his motor car to dine at Delmonico’s, and my mother was eating a light meal in her room, Aunt Helen keeping her company. That left me as the only woman at the family dinner. I noticed with some amusement how different a direction the conversation took. Uncle David and Ben talked over the latest troubling news coming from Mexico and an election that established a leader who claimed to be for the interests of the common man. The winds of revolution were not wholly welcome in a country where the family’s mining interests could be affected.

  After dinner, wanting to postpone the moment I must go upstairs, I found a place on the veranda yet again. I opened a soda bottle with a loud snap – I was getting quite proficient with the opener I’d obtained – and poured my fizzy Coca-Cola into a tall glass, all the while balancing Town Topics on my lap. I glanced up to catch two frumpy, gray-haired matrons observing me. To go by their expression, I was an orangutan on display at the Bronx Zoo.

  Relishing their disapproval, I turned the pages of the weekly magazine until I reached the irresistible column “Saunterings.” This was a feature like no other magazine’s. It revealed salacious stories of New York while naming no names, doubtless to fend off furious protests and lawsuits. They were called “blind items.” I was rarely sure of anyone’s identity. We Batternbergs were off to the side, not at the pinnacle of Manhattan society. If it were 1875, and Mrs. Astor sent out her invitations to the “Four Hundred,” no one from our Jewish family would make it onto her long list. Times had changed since those parties, and on Wall Street, the Batternberg name was often said in the same breath as that of Rockefeller and JP Morgan, but we weren’t considered blue bloods. Some of my aunts and uncles minded that. I honestly never did. Ben didn’t either.

  But reading one “blind” item made me feel an unpleasant tickle of recognition:

  What incorrigible playboy is trying to settle down with the delectable daughter of a deep-pocketed family, hoping the news won’t follow him to New York from Paris about an all-night party with twenty of the most ravishing ladies of the night France has to offer, a party costing $25,000. Of course staying up all night is an easy proposition for this gentleman, with the help of his favorite friends. Paris, we hear, will never completely recover.

  That couldn’t be Henry, could it? I thought, dismayed. Some said that the word “playboy” was invented to describe Henry Taul, with his round, youthful face and outrageous antics. But those days of debauchery were behind him. And he hadn’t mentioned that Paris was on his European trip. It had to be someone else. America's army of privileged sons made a playground of Paris, London, and Rome. I put the newspaper aside.

  Reports must have been made of my veranda reading, because the next morning, when I poked in my head to see Mother, she had a list of complaints ready. “You must stop drinking Coca-Cola in public and reading tawdry magazines, and you absolutely must stop wearing that bathing costume. Apart from its indecency, you wear it every single day. The same item of clothing.” She shuddered.

  “Alice scrubs it and lays it out to dry every night,” I said. “It’s clean.”

&nbs
p; My mother cleared her throat. This meant something distinctly unpleasant was seconds away.

  “In my generation, Margaret, many girls were married by the age of twenty-one,” she said, as gently as she was capable of. “I realize that you think you are more advanced in your ideas than the rest of us, that you are a modern woman, but the truth is, in spite of your position at that bookshop, you’re very young in your … shall we say, experience of life. You are not aware of doing so, but your actions, the way you dress and so on, they can be provoking.”

  “Provoking,” I echoed. It couldn’t have been the gray-haired ladies who fussed over seeing me last night. I wondered just who was running to her with complaints.

  Mother said, “It is all very well for the girls who work in factories to act in a certain way, but you are a Batternberg, you absolutely must remember that at all times.”

  I thought of Stefan’s kissing me on the beach and in Hell Gate, of my clinging to his arm afterward, and I said, “I will.”

  To placate her, I read my magazines in my room before going down to lunch. There was nothing to do today besides swim; for tomorrow, I’d agreed to accompany Lydia for another outing with the Campions. This time we were to hear a botanical lecture in the Rose Garden of the Manhattan Hotel. Horticulture history interested me about as much as orchestral music, but I agreed to go.

  I was impatient to swim and, gathered with my family at the restaurant for lunch, I ate but a few forkfuls of lobster salad. I did drain my Coca-Cola with a certain wistfulness. From now on, I’d drink it only in my room, I decided. Ordinarily, I’d resist conforming to Mother’s wishes. Still, with the date for my seeing Stefan drawing nearer, I thought it prudent to call as little attention to myself as possible.