The Phantom of Manhattan (10 page)

12

THE JOURNAL OF TAFFY JONES

STEEPLECHASE PARK, CONEY ISLAND, 1 DECEMBER 1906

MINE IS A STRANGE JOB AND SOME WOULD SAY NOT for a man of some intelligence and no small ambition. For this reason I have often been tempted to give it up and move on to something else. Yet I have never done so in the nine years since I have been employed here at Steeplechase Park.

Part of this reason is that the job offers security for me and my wife and brood, with an excellent income and comfortable living conditions. Another part is that I have simply come to enjoy it. I enjoy the laughter of the children and the pleasure of their parents. I take satisfaction in the simple off-duty happiness of those all around me during the summer months and the contrasting peace and quiet of the winter season.

As for my living conditions, they could hardly be more comfortable for a man of my station. My principal dwelling is a snug cottage in the respectable middle-class community of Brighton Beach, barely a mile from my place of work. Add to that, I have a small cabin here in the heart of the funfair to which I can repair for a rest from time to time, even at the height of the season. As for my salary, it is generous. Ever since, three years ago, I negotiated a reward based on a tiny fraction of the gate money I have been able to take home over one hundred dollars a week.

Being a man of modest tastes and not much of a drinker, I am able to put a good part of it by, so that one day and not so many years from now I shall be able to retire from all this, with my five children off my hands and making their way in the world. Then I shall take my Blodwyn and we will find a small farm, perhaps by a river or a lake or even by the sea, where I can farm and fish as the mood takes me, and go to chapel on the Sabbath and be a regular pillar of the local society. And so I stay and do my job, which most say I do very well.

For I am the official Funmaster of Steeplechase Park. Which means that with my extra-long shoes on my feet, my baggy trousers in a violent check, my stars-and-stripes weskit and my tall top hat I stand at the entrance gate to the park and welcome all visitors. More, with my bushy sideburns and handlebar moustache and a smile of cheerful welcome on my face, I bring many of them in who would otherwise have passed by.

Using my megaphone I cry constantly, ‘Roll up, roll up, all the fun of the fair, thrills and spills, strange and wonderful things to see, come in my friends and have the time of your lives …’ and so on and on. Up and down outside the gate I go, greeting and welcoming the pretty girls in their best summer frocks and the young men trying so hard to impress them in striped jackets and straw boaters; and the families with their children clamouring for the many and special treats that I tell them are in store once they have persuaded their parents to take them in. And in they go, paying their cents and dollars at the pay-booths, and of every fifty cents there is one for me.

Of course, this is a summer job, lasting from April until October, when the first cold winds come in off the Atlantic and we close down for the winter.

Then I can hang the Funmaster’s suit in the closet and drop the Welsh lilt that the visitors find so charming, for I was born in Brooklyn City and have never seen the land of my father and his fathers before him. Then I can come to work in a normal suit and supervise the winter programme when all the sideshows and rides are dismantled and stored; when the machinery is serviced and greased, worn parts replaced, timber sanded and repainted or varnished, carousel horses regilded and torn canvas stitched. By the time April comes again all is back where it should be and the gates open with the first warm and sunny days.

So it was with some amazement that two days ago I received a letter from Mr George Tilyou personally, he being the gentleman who owns the park. He dreamed up the idea in the first place, with a partner who exists only in rumour and whom the world has never seen, at least not down here. It was Mr T’s energy and vision that brought it all into being nine years ago and since then the park has made him a very rich man indeed.

His letter came by personal delivery and was clearly very urgent. It explained that on the following day, which of course is now yesterday, a private party would be visiting the park and for these people the place should be opened up. He said he knew the rides and carousels could not function in time, but stressed that the Toyshop should be open and fully staffed and so also should the Hall of Mirrors. And this letter led to the strangest day I have ever known in Steeplechase Park.

Mr Tilyou’s instructions that the Toyshop and the Hall of Mirrors should be fully staffed put me in the very devil of a fix. For both my key staff in these areas are on vacation and far away.

Nor are they easily replaceable. The mechanical toys in the shop, the very speciality of that emporium, are not only the most sophisticated in all America but are also very complicated. It takes a real expert to understand them and explain their workings to the young people who come by to wonder, to explore and to buy. I am certainly not that expert. I could only hope for the best - or so I thought.

Of course the place is bitter cold in winter but I took kerosene warmers in to heat up the shop on the evening before the visit so that by dawn it was warm as a summer’s day. Then I removed all the dust-sheets from the shelves to reveal the ranks of clockwork soldiers, drummers, dancers, acrobats and animals that sing, dance and play. But that was as far as I could go. I had done all I could in the toyshop by eight in the morning before the private party was due to arrive. Then something most strange happened.

I turned around to find a young man staring at me. I do not know how he had got in, and was about to tell him that the place was closed when he offered to operate the Toyshop for me. How did he know I had visitors coming? He did not say. He just explained that he had worked here once and understood the mechanics of all the toys. Well, with the regular Toyman missing, I had no choice but to accept. He did not look like the Toyman, all jovial and welcoming and a favourite with the kids. He had a bone-white face, black hair and eyes and a black formal coat. I asked for his name. He paused for a second and said, ‘Malta.’ So that is what I called him until he left, or rather vanished. But more later.

The Hall of Mirrors was another matter. It is a most amazing place and though, in off-duty hours, I have been inside it myself, I have never been able to understand how it works. Whoever designed it must have been a sort of genius. All visitors have come out after a ritual stroll through the many constantly changing mirror-rooms convinced they have seen things they could not have seen and not seen things that must have been there. It is a house not just of mirrors but of illusion. In case, years from now, any soul should read this journal, having some interest in the Coney Island that once was, let me try to explain the Hall of Mirrors.

From the outside it appears a simple, low-built square building with one door for going in and out. Once inside, the visitor sees a corridor running to his left and right. It matters not which way he turns. Both walls of the corridor are sheeted with mirror and the passage is exactly four feet wide. This is important, for the inner wall is not unbroken but comprised of vertical sheets of mirror exactly eight feet wide and seven high. Each plate is on a vertical axis, so that when one is turned by remote control half of it will completely block the passage, but reveal a new passage heading into the heart of the building.

He has no choice but to follow this new passage which, as the plates turn on a secret command, becomes more and more passages, small rooms of mirrors that appear and disappear. But it gets worse. For nearer the centre many of the eight-feet-wide sheets are not only axled top-to-bottom but stand on eight-feet-diameter discs which themselves revolve. A visitor standing on a semicircular but unseen disc with his back to a mirror may find himself turned through ninety, a hundred and eighty or two seventy degrees. He thinks he is stationary and only the mirrors are turning, but to him other people suddenly appear and disappear; small rooms are created then dissolve; he addresses a stranger who appears before him only to realize he is talking to the image of someone behind him or to his side.

Husbands and wives, lovers and sweethearts are separated in seconds, stumble forward to be reunited - but with someone quite different. Screams of fright and laughter echo throughout the hall when a dozen young couples have ventured in together.

Now all this is controlled by the Mirror Man, who alone understands how it all works. He sits in a raised booth above the door and by glancing upwards can see a roof mirror, angled to give him alone a bird’s-eye view of the whole floor, so that with a bank of levers under his hand he can create and dissolve the passages, rooms and illusions. My problem was that Mr Tilyou had insisted the lady visitor should under all circumstances be urged to visit the Hall of Mirrors, but the Mirror Man was on holiday and could not be contacted.

I had to try to understand the controls myself so that I could operate them for the lady’s amusement, and to this end spent half the night inside the building with a paraffin lantern, testing and experimenting with the levers until I was sure I could guide the lady for a quick tour inside and yet show her the way out when she cried for release. For with the rooms of mirrors all open-topped, the sound of voices is quite clear.

By nine yesterday morning I had done the best I could and was waiting to greet Mr Tilyou’s personal guests. They came just before the hour of ten. There was virtually no traffic on Surf Avenue and when I saw the brougham coming past the offices of Brooklyn Eagle, past the entrances to Luna Park and Dreamland and on towards me down the avenue, I presumed it must be they. For the brougham was the smartly painted hack that waits outside the Manhattan Beach Hotel for those descending from the El-train from Brooklyn Bridge, though few enough there are in December.

As it approached and the driver reined in his pair I stepped forward with the megaphone up. ‘Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Steeplechase Park, first and finest of the funfairs on Coney Island,’ I boomed, though even the horses gave me a glance as if looking at a madman dressed in all his finery at the end of November.

The first out of the coach was a young man who turned out to be a reporter from the
New York American
, one of Hearst’s yellow-press rags. Very full of himself he was and apparently the visitors’ guide to New York. Next out came a most beautiful lady, a true aristocrat - oh yes, you can always tell - whom the reporter presented as the Vicomtesse de Chagny and one of the leading opera singers in the world. Of course, I did not need to be told this, for I read the
New York Times
, being myself a man of some education, even though self-taught. Only then did I understand why Mr Tilyou wished to indulge the wishes of such a lady. She descended to the rain-slick boardwalk, supported on the arm of the reporter; I laid down the megaphone - no further use for it - gave her a most sweeping bow and welcomed her again to my domain. She replied with a smile to melt the stone heart of Cader Idris and said in a delightful French accent that she regretted having to disturb my winter hibernation. ‘Your devoted servant, ma’am,’ I replied to show that behind my Funmaster clothes I was aware of proper forms of address.

Next came a small boy of about twelve or thirteen, a good-looking lad who was also French like his mother but spoke excellent English. He was clutching a toy monkey-cum-musical box of the type I saw at once must have come from our own Toyshop, the only place in all New York to provide them. For a moment I was worried: had it broken down? Were they here to complain?

The reason for the boy’s good English emerged last, a stocky and fit-looking Irish priest in black cassock and broad hat. ‘A good morning to you Mr Funmaster,’ said he. ‘And a cold one for the likes of us to bring you out.’

‘But not cold enough to chill a warm Irish heart,’ said I, not to be outdone, for as a chapel-going man I do not normally have much to do with Papist priests. But he threw back his head and roared with laughter, so I reckoned he was perhaps a good fellow after all. It was thus in a merry mood that I led the party of four up the boardwalk, through the gates, past the open turnstile and towards the Toyshop for it was plain this was what they wished to see.

Thanks to the heaters it was pleasantly warm inside and Mr Malta was waiting to greet them. At once the boy, whose name turned out to Pierre, was entranced by the shelves and shelves of mechanical dancers, soldiers, musicians, clowns and animals that are the glory of the Steeplechase Park Toyshop and not to be found anywhere else in the city and perhaps not in all the country. He was racing up and down the alleys asking to be shown them all. But his mother was only interested in one type - the rack of music-playing monkeys.

We found them on a rear shelf, right at the back, and she at once asked Mr Malta to make them play.

‘All of them?’ he asked.

‘One after the other,’ she said firmly. So it was done. One after the other the keys in the backs were wound up and the monkeys began to bang their cymbals and play their tune. ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, always the same. I was puzzled. Did she want a substitute? And did not they all sound the same? Then she nodded at her son and he produced a penknife with a screwdriver attachment. Malta and I looked on stunned as the boy eased away a flap of cloth at the back of the first monkey, then undid a small panel and put his hand inside. He took out a dollar-sized disc, flipped it over and put it back. I raised my eyebrows to Malta and he did the same. The monkey began to play again. ‘Song of Dixie’. Of course, one tune for the North and one for the South.