City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (71 page)

Just after three in the morning the great eagle tower of Dreamland caved in on itself, nothing more by then than an ashen hulk. The fire rampaged up and down the beach like a mad giant, stomping all the splendid plywood and plaster confections along the boardwalk—the flames, for once, released from their fixed and frozen courses. Cannibalizing the Fighting Flames—then, with one gigantic, orgiastic roar, taking Dr. Poole’s enamel, egg-white powerhouse, with its gold oil cups and its gorgeous mosaic table.

It looked then as if the fire might consume everything on the island. Not only Dreamland, but also Luna Park and Steeplechase, and Feltman’s and Stauch’s, and the Tin Elephant, and the Centennial Tower, and all the shooting galleries, and the whorehouses and the flophouses, and the tattoo parlors and the clip joints and the oyster bars, all sheltering under their skirts like shanties against a castle wall. Until the whole island would be razed as flat as when the first Dutch sailors found it, a pestilential sandbar, overrun with mosquitoes and skittish brown rabbits.

The surf began to fill up with steamers and pleasure boats, yachts and trawlers and garbage barges—a motley flotilla of anything that could float, preparing to try and evacuate all of Coney if it came to that. It would have been something—a grand Götterdämmerung. Think of the movies they could have made! The postcards they could have printed up, the reenactments they could have produced on Coney itself, once it was rebuilt: the pleasure-loving masses, and the firemen, and animal trainers, and the freaks and the showmen—all wading out into the churning, boiling water, fighting past the barbed wire and the rain of burning splinters, under the hellish and unnatural light—

Reality is rarely so obliging. Instead, the winds shifted, the flames ran out of fodder. The fire puttered out at the edge of the Great Galveston Flood Exposition, peeling the paint, the picture of the tidal wave, right off the walls—but that last cosmic irony was the best it could manage. It expired there—saving Luna Park, and Steeplechase, and all the rest of the midway for their own inevitable infernos at some later date.

After it was all over—after the fire had burned itself out and Dreamland was safely leveled, and no longer any box-office threat—the great Tilyou, and Feltman, and all the other owners came over, one by one, and silently shook Brinckerhoff’s hand.

“Don’t worry,” he told them—he told all the reporters, and the politicians, and the money men, with his usual, boozy self-confidence.

“Don’t worry—Dreamland will rise again from the ashes, more brilliant and wonderful than ever.”

The very next day he had a booth out, ten cents admission to see the smoking ruins—and I believe that given the chance he
would
have built it again. He would have built it over and over again, and let it burn down every five years or so, and built it still again—always bigger, and grander, and stuffed full of greater and greater marvels.

But after Big Tim was put away he couldn’t get the money, and then the war came, and the movie palaces. The old Dreamland, the old Coney, seemed to recede further and further into the past, like a dream you had just the night before but can’t quite remember by breakfast. They never put up anything like it again; they never put up anything more than another big sideshow hut, which they
called
Dreamland, and filled with freaks, and fakes, and vaudeville acts.

They replaced the diving elephants with pigs, and the incubator babies with cockroach races, and every year, everything seemed to get a little more tired, a little more seedy and dilapidated, as the public moved on to new wonders, and the parks slowly retreated under the gentle, relentless breezes of the sea. Until we came to live wholly in this world, where all the miracles, all the real spectacles, are locked safely away on a two-dimensional screen.

And as for the rest of it, who knows? You want an epilogue, but who knows where people go? They get swallowed up in the crowds, and all that is left is speculation.

Maybe Esther did get married, and settled down to churning out children in spite of herself. While he got a good position with the City, or made his fortune bottling celery tonic that tasted like old socks but which they always loved in the kosher dairy restaurants and the teahouses. Until they all got nice and fat, and moved into the apartment of their dreams, along the fine and spacious new streets of Brooklyn, or the Grand Concourse, up in the Bronx.

Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe she went back to the Triangle, along with Sadie, to try to organize the scabs, and the green girls, and all the other yoks and fools and half-wits who didn’t know how to do for themselves. The two of them working side by side on the long benches that ran all the way across the shop floor. Helping Sadie steady her lawn until she learned, the two of them exchanging a smile from time to time when they looked up, to see each other there—a little more worn, a little grayer every year. Sharing a cup of tea together during the fifteen-minute lunch break—

Like something from a movie—something she might see at the nickelodeon at Union Square: a heroic biography of an ordinary life, where the prince, or the big break, or the moment of truth never did quite arrive.

Or maybe she did become a traveling delegate: going town to town in the smoky Pullman parlors, a little sliver of excitement going through her, no matter how many times she had done it before. Inspiring the machine girls, and facing down the cheap goons, and the cockroach bosses. Speaking before the wealthy, concerned women at their teas and their literary societies—always half envying, half smiling at their limousines and their drawing rooms, their fine vases, and books, and silver tea services, their easy way around a salad plate—until finally, even that sliver of excitement was gone. Sitting on the edge of a worn quilt, bone-tired, alone in a dingy YWCA room. Not exactly the ending she had envisioned, perhaps, but still keeping that faith—keeping the faith of
one day,
one shining future, when she could sit out on the stoop of her porch on Orchard Street and see that decent world she had always craved.

Or maybe it was something in between. Maybe she stayed on. Maybe she married Kid, or moved in with him, and they lived as no one had ever lived before—a love based upon mutual respect, and understanding, and friendship. Maybe he respected her right to live any way she chose, but maybe the traveling delegate’s job never did quite materialize, and she had to stay up in the Triangle.

Still trying to do the good work, to get the girls to listen, and care, and sign up with the union—until one early spring afternoon on the eighth floor, when the ash from some cutter’s cigarette caught in one of the big scrap bins, full of cutouts that didn’t quite fit into one pattern or another, waiting to be hauled away by the felt dealer.

The fine, thin lawn catching at once. The fire leaping up out of the bins, catching on to the little wisps of patterns. Skipping quicker than a thought across the room, from one pattern to another, strung above the cutters’ desks. The men swatting at them too late, sending the burning lawn floating like fireflies across the room—until the whole burning line collapsed into the bins.

The machine girls already putting on their coats at the end of the half-day Saturday, not even aware of it yet. Just a few more minutes and they would have been out. Already making their way toward the stairs, singing one of the popular new dance-hall tunes:

Mr. Bernstein, still cool and calm in his shirtsleeves, barking out orders to contain the blaze, trying to keep everyone moving toward the doors. But then the fire reached the barrel of machine oil kept right by the stairs door. Then the first women discovered that the fire doors were locked, just in case they were trying to steal a few pennies worth of lawn. Then—as if in a dream—one of the errand boys went to grab a fire hose and it fell apart in his hands.

Then some idiot, hurrying up with a bucket of water, opened the elevator doors and let the new air billow across the open shop floor—

And after that, of course, there was no stopping it: the men and women trampling each other to get to the stairs, beating on the elevator doors as they closed. The lines of women calmly making their way out onto the fire escape—only to have it tear away from the building with an awful noise, pitching them down into the alleyway below, pitching them through a greenhouse roof, impaling them on a cast-iron fence—

All across the Village they heard it. Mrs. Perkins, having tea with some friends, paused with the cup in her hand to hear the fire alarms going off, the running in the streets. Hurried to the scene with the rest of the neighborhood—all of Little Italy, and the Lower East Side, running over to see what was happening. The fire trucks rolling up—their ladders too short to reach beyond the sixth floor, their nets too weak to hold the leapers. The cops holding the crowds back—watching open-mouthed as the girls they had beaten just months before plunged to the ground.

One hundred forty-six people in fifteen minutes they counted it—that’s all they could do—

One hundred forty-six women and girls and men in fifteen minutes. Impaled on the steel fence crashing through the greenhouse glass

Leaping from the windows At first they thought below they were burning piles of lawn being thrown from above Leaping from the windows, and the ledges, as the flames licked up at their legs falling with dull, awful plops along the sidewalk Falling right through the fire nets right through sidewalk through the basement deadlights Falling but not rising Falling but not somersaulting Falling, only, and laying still save for one woman—one woman, the papers all reported, who fell right through a fire net but then bounced up and walked Walked as if there were nothing wrong with her, maybe weaving a little bit as if she’d just come out of a saloon but walking like anyone else five, ten, fifteen paces before she fell down, dead, just like that

And maybe they panicked and fled with the rest. Maybe they died huddled under a bench, a machine; or maybe they made it up to the roof and safety, or down in one of the elevators before they stopped running.

Or—maybe—Esther stood by the benches, calming the younger girls, guiding them toward the door. Stopping their panicky sobs, telling them to breathe. Putting out the cinders on their billowing dresses with her hands. Guiding them out until there was no one left, save for the utterly hysterical and hopeless, sobbing quietly under the benches. Staying at her post, guiding them all out until it was too late, the fire had cut her off, and it was impossible even to see the stairs for all the smoke.

It happened so quickly

She wasn’t intending to be a martyr. That’s not what she was, after all; that’s not what Clara would have wanted from her. She was a person among people, there were people she loved, and wanted to return to. It happened so quickly—
one hundred forty-six in fifteen minutes
—so that by the time she had the last one out and looked around to save herself it was too late.

And did she turn then, toward the windows? Did she smile with a small, bitter pride, thinking
Now I know At least now I know that I could do it—

Did she turn then to the window, thinking there might still be a way out? After all, she was no martyr. After all, who would have thought that the fire department could be so idiotic as to not have a ladder that went over six stories in a city of skyscrapers? Who would have assumed that the City fathers would have been so busy gorging themselves that they could not have given even a passing thought to the public safety?

No one ever gives up, not completely. Would she have stepped to the windows, thinking there still might be hope—and looked down then, to see the crying, gaping crowds, looked down to see the insufficient ladders flailing futilely below, and the women ripping right through the nets. Looked down then—and known there was no chance?

Or would she still have held on to some hope?

The papers said at least one young woman, in final, democratic, socialist irony, pulled what money she had out of her pocket before jumping and scattered it to the crowds below—thereby ensuring that others besides the single stealthy thief would share in her misfortune. The papers said that a young man out on one of the ledges—obviously a real man—helped the girls jump to their deaths—that he held and steadied them, then lifted them out, and let them fall. And that then he held the last woman to him, and kissed her, before he let her fall, then jumped right after, so everyone assumed she was his fiancée.

An
unlikely
story, an all-too-perfect story, typical of the public press. And shouldn’t the women have gotten to make this last choice, after all, to jump or not to jump—having had no other choices to make in the entirety of their short and miserable existences?

(How like a man, to drop a woman off a ledge and make it look like a romantic gesture!)

But just
say
he was there, when she stepped out of the window—

Stepping out on the ledge on an early spring day. Stepping out on the ledge on a perfect, early spring evening, with the trees just beginning to bloom, their green and pink buds covering the full ugliness of the tenements below. Looking down over the crooked streets of Little Italy, and the green of Washington Square, and the handsome Florentine clock tower across the park.

Looking all the way uptown, all the way up to the Palisades—the rest of the City stretching out so vast, so indifferent. Street after street full of people beyond the immediate commotion, striding along calmly, obliviously, walking on toward their own errands, their own lives, their own troubles.

Imagining
him
out there, Kid out there, somewhere, striding along the streets, savoring the City the way he did, eating up every moment. Did she think of him out there, enjoying himself, oblivious to what was going on even though he might have been only a few blocks away in the Village? Hearing the fire engines again, annoyed at their constant wail—another passing annoyance in a city full of them. Hearing the fire engines as he stopped by the open-air markets, stooping down to sniff at the pears and the apples. Stooping down to buy a fish, a piece of meat, a cabbage for their dinner. Stooping down, maybe to buy a flower for her—a real flower—from a passing girl. His head spinning with schemes to make them rich, to get them a better apartment—