Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I gazed at Stefan’s profile, his high cheekbones and proud, slightly beaked nose. His tie was loosened; the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. That shirt rose and fell from breathing as I watched, spellbound. Almost without being aware of it, I placed my hand on his shirt. “I want to feel your heart,” I whispered.

  Stefan turned and took my hand, guiding it under his unbuttoned shirt. Feeling his bare, smooth flesh made me fall forward, as his arms closed around me, my lips seeking his. As in Hell Gate, my touching him set off an immediate passionate response in him. But I needed him more than I did before. My tongue searched his mouth with a new urgency. I tore loose my blouse from the waistband of my skirt. Seconds later his hand had snaked underneath, his fingers exploring my bare flesh, seeking out my breasts under the prim undergarments. He groaned, frustrated at that barrier. His groan was like a match struck. If I could, I would have taken a knife, scissors, anything, and snipped every string, destroyed every hook, shredded all my clothes, torn them right off my body.

  His hands shaking, he stepped away. “No – we stop. We stop now.”

  “I don’t want to stop.”

  “Not in dirt, Peggy,” Stefan said. “I can’t do that to you.”

  “I want you to,” I begged, devoid of all pride and restraint. “I love you, I do, Stefan. I’ve never… felt like this.”

  Stefan muttered something in another language.

  “We can go somewhere today,” I raced on. “I have money, we can pay for a room somewhere, we can be alone.”

  He shook his head, his forehead creased, and I began to cry, the pain of his refusing me was so intense. My shoulders heaved. Stefan embraced me, but differently than he had a moment before. He held me with exquisite tenderness, stroking my hair and saying, “Hush, Peggy, hush.” I tried to stop crying, but to my horror I couldn’t. It didn’t make him recoil. He comforted me, saying softly, “I know, I know,” as if my desperate desire for him followed by this breakdown were completely natural.

  I stopped crying, and he cupped my face in his hands. “Peggy, I love you too.” With that, we kissed again. We kissed for a long time, every single second of it precious to me.

  “Ah, Peggy,” he said. “You are my darling.”

  I laid my head on his shoulder and touched his chin, his cheek. Gusts of cooler air encircled us as the rain slackened. But I was on fire with exaltation. He loved me too. Stefan loved me. This is the turning point, I thought. In a rainstorm, in this peaty tunnel, my entire life changed and moved in its new direction. My future would be fuller and happier than my past.

  To my amusement, Stefan took pride in restoring me to propriety. He tucked in my blouse and with his handkerchief wiped my face. He smoothed my hair, brushed the dirt off my hat. I tried to do the same for him, of course. When the rain slackened, we prepared to step out and meet the rest of the world. First he cupped my chin and gave me one last tender kiss.

  The rain stopped. New York City had had a few short bursts of rain in the last fifteen days – it hadn’t been a drought – but each time the heat and humidity quickly returned. Today was different. The temperature dropped significantly, and that oppressive thickness in the air was gone too. As Stefan and I resumed our stroll, we were surrounded by ecstatic parkgoers. The heat spell seemed as if it had truly lifted.

  “The quality of the air is different,” I said. “It’s like new.”

  “Not new to me – old,” he said with a smile. “This feel like home.”

  “You mean Serbia?” I asked shyly.

  Perhaps because we’d found this new intimacy, Stefan opened up to me about his past as we walked the paths of Central Park. I listened so closely I nearly stumbled into puddles twice. He was the youngest of three boys, living in the town of Čačak. His father died when Stefan was seven. An uncle helped his two older brothers enroll in a military school in Belgrade, but Stefan remained in Čačak with his mother; she enrolled him in school. A kind teacher gave Stefan two books on art that he pored over every night. When his beloved mother died of tuberculosis, his brothers, now junior officers, sent for him to attend their former school. It was a disaster, as Stefan showed no aptitude for army life. The only subjects he cared about were philosophy and literature – and art. When he was seventeen, his brothers intervened. Instead of reacting with anger, they pooled the small amounts of money they’d managed to save and paid for his travel to Budapest to study. From there he ventured farther from his homeland, traveling to Italy.

  “You couldn’t have become an artist in Belgrade?” I asked.

  “In our own country, it’s impossible for most Serbians to achieve,” he said bitterly. “First the Turks rule with savagery, now Austrians oppress. The only way to go forward for family like ours is join army, but you risk much. You may become executioner of own people. My brothers, they can only… wait. And hope.”

  “You miss them,” I said softly.

  His lips tightened, and that faraway look in his eyes returned, one I now recognized as his yearning for the company of his brothers and his complicated feeling for his homeland.

  “What about this park reminds you of Serbia?” I asked, beckoning to the vast lawn spread before us, its grass sparking with today’s rain.”

  He snorted. “Nothing! No, it’s just feeling of air: nice and dry. To make nature in center of city could never be real to me. I do not crave meadow.”

  I laughed a little, taking in the latest declaration of the man who endlessly fascinated me. “What in Manhattan is most real to you?” I asked.

  “Want me to show you?”

  The last time he offered to show me something, it was the spectral city of Dreamland, alive with a million lights. I eagerly slipped my hand into the crook of his arm. Less than an hour later, using Stefan’s knowledge of streetcar and subway, an aptitude I, to my embarrassment, lacked, we stood on the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, looking up, up, up, at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, a narrow square building that thrust skyward, its pointed tower gleaming in the faraway.

  “The tallest building in whole world – 560 feet high,” Stefan said reverently. “Engineers finish it weeks before my boat arrive in New York. I wish I was here in time to see it go up.”

  I felt a twinge of remorse over never making my way to the corner to witness that construction. It simply wasn’t what anyone in my circle had been interested in doing. When my brother Lawrence begged to go several years ago, my mother refused, saying the site would be too dirty. Our family’s priority was the same as the other privileged families of New York: to live in quiet, elegant luxury, imitating the languid landed aristocrats of England with whom we had no real link. Our own city’s growth was… vulgar.

  Stefan said, mesmerized, “We stand in second biggest metropolis in world, with tallest building, biggest stadium for baseball, biggest museum, biggest port, biggest amusement park with Coney Island. Richest man: Rockefeller. Greatest showman: Ziegfeld. Streetcars, subways go zip, zip, zip. This is city that breaks the record – everything biggest. New York is fastest growing city in world. I had to be here, to see it myself.”

  I wanted to soak up his enthusiasm as much as if he were the Coca-Cola I drank so thirstily. “Tell me about your days as an artist in Italy,” I urged.

  It was then that I learned how Stefan found like-minded people in Rome and Milan, those enraptured by inventions, engineering feats, anything that fueled their vision of the future: cars, airplanes, the rise of the machine. The artists inspired one another. But when the Italian artists and poets praised the glory and necessity of war, Stefan pulled away. “To them, war is cleansing,” he said, shaking his head. He decided to move to the place he believed embodied his vision of a perfect future: New York City.

  “That is tallest building, but I must pay court to most stupendous building in city,” Stefan said, taking me by the hand as we darted through the madness of motor cars, streetcars, horse-drawn carts and buggies, and zigzagging pedestrians to the Flatir
on Building, built like a twenty-two-story triangular slice of cake off Fifth Avenue. The traffic and the skyscrapers seemed to imbue him with energy, not fatigue, as they might have other people. Stefan wasn’t like other people.

  “I’m hungry, and you must be too,” Stefan announced, and he led me to a restaurant in the basement of the Siegel-Cooper Company on Eighteenth Street. He devoured a sturgeon sandwich while I happily ate a roast beef sandwich, each costing a dime.

  “Stefan, I have to tell you something,” I said as soon as I finished my meal. I timidly reached for his hand across the linoleum table.

  “You can tell me anything,” he said, with a warmth that made my stomach flutter.

  I began with the story of my near-drowning, which made his eyes widen in alarm. I reassured him of my complete recovery, but then had to break the news of Lieutenant Pellegrino coming to see me with his Italian magazine.

  “Another artist paint anarchist funeral, so now I’m murderer,” he said scornfully. “Police same all over world. They break heads of those who care about lives of working man.” Stefan proceeded to inform me that in Italy he joined the Socialist Party – “One-quarter of Europe joins!” – and was beaten by the police when he supported a strike in Milan, the same kind that led to the death of Galli.

  “I no longer support socialists and I was never communist,” he said. “But I get punched by police in America anyway.”

  “How have you recovered from what they did last week?”

  “Not too bad,” Stefan said, pressing his chin in the place a bandage once covered. “Many good friends helped me.”

  I pictured the voluptuous Louise and wondered unhappily about her style of helpfulness.

  “Peggy?” Stefan’s level gaze met mine. “You should not fret about Louise. She is my friend. She is my good friend. We are not lovers.”

  At his use of the word lover, said openly in a basement restaurant, I felt a flush move up my neck to warm my cheeks. “I see,” I said. “She is… quite good looking.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, seeming to weigh various pros and cons. Finally, he said, “Louise, she prefers women.”

  “Prefers they do what?”

  He gazed upward as if hoping for some sort of rescue from above. Such rescue didn’t materialize. He said in a low voice, “She loves women more than men.”

  “Oh.” I moved the sugar dispenser from one side of the table to the other. This was unexpected. I said slowly, “I thought she was jealous of you, that’s why she disliked me so much.”

  “She is woman of… complication,” he said. “Louise is loyal to her friends, and she always protects them. She acts as if she has light heart, but it is not so. She is sad. Her life, her childhood, very bad. Harsh. Men took advantage of her. Now she takes advantage of them. Who can blame her?” He sighed. “She finds much happiness with Ruth.”

  “Ruth?” I said blankly.

  “You saw her, that afternoon. She came with Louise.”

  So the lovely dark-haired woman brought happiness to Louise, who had seemed to me obsessed with Stefan – and yet viewed him purely as a friend. My ideas and perceptions shifted. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” I said.

  Now it was Stefan’s turn to fidget with a spoon. “I tell you whole truth. I slept with Louise last year. But she met Ruth at Henderson’s, and she’s happiest with Ruth. We are all of us friends.”

  I stiffened in my chair. I couldn’t be hurt that Stefan made love to a woman long before he met me, but I was. I couldn’t help it. These interlocking relationships made little sense to me. Louise preferred women but she slept with men too. Or at least with Stefan. If she were to make an exception for anyone, it would have to be him.

  “Peggy,” he said softly. “You must know how I care for you. You are future.”

  I gathered a smile. “The future of the Futurist is no small matter.”

  Walking to the train station that would take us back to Coney Island, Stefan and I made some plans. Seeing that Lieutenant Pellegrino still had a grudge against him, we decided to wait two more weeks, until the beginning of August, to try to meet. Stefan explained that at the end of the summer Coney Island shut down, and he planned to find a job of some kind in Manhattan. Since I intended to return to the bookshop, we’d be in the same borough again, with no one to prevent us from seeing each other. What I didn’t tell him was that my twenty-first birthday in October would bring even greater independence – the first part of my inheritance. These things couldn’t be discussed on a city street. But my thoughts were busy.

  “I have ideas of how to approach galleries to display your work,” I told him.

  “You have ideas?” He smiled.

  “I can be quite persuasive.”

  “What is your plan? You walk into gallery and say, ‘I am Peggy Batternberg, you will show these paintings at once’?” He laughed, but without a trace of mockery.

  “Something along those lines.”

  *

  It was a far different type of train that took us to the heart of Coney Island. Crowded, far from clean – and, to me, infinitely preferable to the train Lawrence and I took to the Oriental Hotel. No one could possibly know me in this train, and I felt emboldened to hold his hand and lean into Stefan as he put his arm around me. We could be a married couple, I thought. Indeed, no one gave us a second look, not even when he kissed me fleetingly on the lips a half dozen times. The feelings he aroused in me each time were exquisitely painful. I wanted to press my entire body against him, but instead I willed myself to be content with the pleasure of his lips grazing mine. Everyone in the train car seemed in a good mood because the heat spell had broken, but no one could possibly feel more happiness than me.

  We pulled into the station at six o’clock. We’d agreed that I would quickly separate from Stefan, hiring a car or horse buggy to take me to the Oriental. But on the platform, Stefan and I risked everything, unwilling to part, to let go of each other’s hand. He squeezed my arm, harder than at any time since the tunnel, and whispered in my ear, “I love you.”

  “Stefan!” It was a girl’s voice.

  We turned in the direction of the cry. It was Marta, waving frantically.

  Stefan practically leaped off the platform. I scrambled after him.

  “It’s Louise, something bad happen – I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Marta said, her eyes red, her mouth quivering. “They found her inside Hell Gate.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Who says this? She was ‘found’?”

  “I don’t know,” Marta howled.

  Stefan turned to me, “You can’t come with me to Dreamland. Go back to your hotel.”

  “No,” I insisted. “I want to stay with you.”

  We hurried across the road, past Luna Park, pushing past the heedless crowds waiting in lines and massing outside the attractions. All the time I tried to understand how a woman could be “found” in Hell Gate – and I couldn’t. Ahead of us on Surf Avenue rose the entrance to Dreamland, and the half-naked Creation Angel. Soon we’d get the answers.

  “Stop! Stop now!”

  Who said that, a father shouting to his misbehaving children?

  “Stefan Chalakoski, stop!”

  Everything happened so fast. A woman screamed to my side: “He has a gun!” A madman’s loose in the park, I thought, terrified. But the man I next saw was Detective Sean Devlin, standing no more than ten feet in front of us, with a gun drawn and pointed at Stefan’s head.

  Two police officers tackled Stefan, throwing him roughly to the ground. Other hands seized me by my arms as I screamed, “Stefan! No!”

  “Take her to Pellegrino,” barked Devlin. Both my arms pinned behind my back, a policeman marched me through the entrance to Dreamland, past the gaping park attendants collecting coins. My mind went blank as the police officer pushed me toward Hell Gate, the enormous demon leering down. There were no couples waiting in line now. A yellow rope sealed off the entrance.

  The poli
ceman shoved me through the side door of Hell Gate. It was not dark inside. There were electrical lights, strewn haphazardly on ladder steps, to brighten this cavernous room. One third of it was taken up by a pool of dark, filthy-looking water. A table had been shoved next to the pool. A woman was laid out on the table, a sheet over her face and body. Long strands and clumps of damp red hair hung down the table’s end, reflecting in the harsh electrical light like the achingly beautiful color of a new copper penny. Louise’s hair.

  A man walked slowly around the table. It was Lieutenant Pellegrino, his eyes blazing.

  “Now you see what you’ve done,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I don’t know what time it was when I finally asked for Ben. The police interrogation hammered me with questions: What time did I meet Stefan and where? What did we do? What time did we return to Coney Island? Did he tell me his plan for our next meeting? Did he ask me for money?

  As upset as I was, and as terrified for Stefan, I tried to stay calm. What happened to Louise was horrific – I kept picturing those strands of red hair – but I was determined to make the police see, once and for all, they were wrong about Stefan. I told Lieutenant Pellegrino, Detective Devlin, and anyone else who came near me that he was a gentle person who had never hurt me or could ever hurt me. My description of our day together left them in disbelief over its banality: Meeting in Central Park for a walk, going to see the tallest building in the world on Madison Avenue, eating sandwiches, and taking the train to Coney Island.

  I kept back two things: Our passionate kisses in the archway tunnel, and Stefan’s telling me Louise loved women. The first was too precious to be soiled by police jeers. As for the second, I wanted to shield her private life. But it soon became apparent that Stefan was telling them things in the other room. I didn’t know exactly what. Different police officers would come in and take the questions in a new direction.