Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  On the street idled Uncle David’s pride and joy, his enormous new cream-colored automobile, a Franklin Model D Phaeton with a smooth front hood that was larger than the table I toiled at upstairs. His liveried driver, standing at attention, rushed to open the back door for us, but he had to push back someone to do it – a young man standing on the sidewalk, clutching a briefcase as he gaped at the automobile as if it were Zeus’s chariot. A crowd was forming, men on their way to Pennsylvania Railroad Station, willing to risk missing their trains as they stood mesmerized at the sight of this vehicle.

  The driver managed to open the door. First Dr. Mackenzie leaped onto the deep-red hard leather seat, then my Uncle David, far more awkwardly, eased his way in; I got in last.

  As the car rumbled forward on the street, I said, tears of helpless rage gathering, “Why on earth did you do that to me, Uncle?”

  “The family needs you, Peggy,” he said, handing me a handkerchief. “I’ll explain as we head uptown. But I would ask that you refrain from hysterics. Remember who you are, please.”

  With that, I dabbed my eyes with his thick, snow-white handkerchief, and shifted on the seat of the Franklin Model D Phaeton, uncomfortable as all hell, and girded myself to listen to his explanation.

  The car turned right onto Fifth Avenue. Whatever was coming, I’d have to cope with it. I was capable of coping with it. I was, after all, the granddaughter of the richest man in America.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Except Abraham Batternberg wasn’t the richest man. He was one of a handful at the top of the heap. It’s important to be truthful about such things. Grandfather, a humbly-born Swiss Jew, came to America as a peddler, changing his name from Bernstein to Batternberg when he reached these shores. Through working brutally hard with scarcely time for sleep, he earned enough money to make investments.

  He chose to buy ownership of two mines in Colorado. It was purely speculation. He was no expert on what lay beneath the earth’s surface. But those two mines turned out to be the gateway to a fortune, millions and millions and millions of dollars. He became a king ruling over the treasures of the underground.

  In the last century, others with names like Rockefeller, Fricke, Carnegie, or Vanderbilt had exchanged plain beginnings for vast wealth too, thanks to an eye for a deal and a talent for ruthlessness. What made Abraham Batternberg special was the number of ambitious sons he had to carry on after him: six of them. My Uncle David was the fifth son, and my father, Jonathan, the youngest. A knot in my stomach told me, sooner or later, this conversation would lead to the doings of my late father.

  Uncle David had said my family needed me, and I, unquestionably a bit late, asked, “Is there a crisis – is someone ill?”

  “No, no. This evening the family is having dinner at home.”

  “And for this I am abducted?” I demanded.

  “A telephone call was put through to your house earlier this week, and a note sent by messenger, neither of which you responded to.” He shifted in his seat. “It’s quite an important dinner.”

  As the automobile waited for the Forty-Second Street streetcar to pass, I thought about it. Yes, there had been messages and notes left for me on the foyer table at Mrs. Thompson’s house. I hadn’t looked at them. One of the reasons I took up residence with my former teacher off Washington Square and pursued the position at the bookstore was to gain distance from my family.

  Still, I apologized to my uncle for my negligence. Perhaps, I offered, this Batternberg intrusion might not leave too much of a stain on my record as assistant. I would apologize to everyone, come Monday morning.

  In response, my uncle did the oddest thing: he wordlessly reached up with both hands and removed his bowler hat, placing it on his lap. His hair bore a circular imprint from the hat. A few gleaming patches shone through, where his hair had thinned the most. But strangest of all, he wrapped his forearms around the hat, not as if he were protecting it but more that he wanted the hat to protect him.

  “You will not be returning to the Moonrise store,” my uncle said. “You shall spend the summer with the family.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  Once again he jerked his chin at the silent Dr. Mackenzie. Our car idling in the shadow of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the doctor fiddled with the clasp to his black medical bag. I sputtered, “Are you planning to have this man dose me with laudanum? Some other potion?”

  My uncle sighed, “He is my internist, Peggy. Because of my heart. My wife has concerns.”

  Dr. Mackenzie proceeded to loosen my uncle’s vest, and, without moving the hat, apply a stethoscope to his chest. I didn’t wait for this procedure to be completed before launching into my argument.

  “It was Cousin Marshall who arranged for the position at the bookstore, he vouched for everything, and he is One of Us,” I said. Marshall, my cousin once removed, who dabbled in poetry and traveled frequently – he was in Paris now – invested a little of his money in Moonrise Bookstore. He had been crucial in quieting all the family objections to my idea. It was the time of the New Woman, wasn’t it? Marshall demanded of them. And New Women pursued jobs before marriage.

  “Marshall may smooth the path to your return this autumn,” said Uncle David. “But you’re needed by your family for the next two months.”

  “You keep saying I am needed. They don’t need me. I need to have a purpose. You can’t take that away from me.”

  “Yes, I saw evidence of a certain purpose not too long ago,” he said dryly. “You and that girl – a suffragette, I’ll wager – drinking alcohol with two men. I only thank God your mother wasn’t there to witness it.”

  “I wasn’t drinking the martinis, Uncle. I simply made them.”

  I fear it was this, more than any other fact or argument, that sealed my fate. “A Batternberg, playing barmaid for bohemian rabble,” he moaned, as Dr. Mackenzie sought to calm him. “And though I’m afraid to learn the answer, where did you learn how to make a martini?”

  “As a matter of fact, in your house,” I retorted. “From Ben.”

  He winced. “Ben has his… quirks.”

  This was no time to enlighten Uncle David about the nature of his oldest son’s “quirks.” Instead, I resumed making a case for my independence.

  Holding up his hand with a certain weariness, Uncle David said, “There’s a great deal you don’t know, Peggy. It has to do with your father.”

  I’m not right about many things. But I’m usually right about my father. As the car rumbled north, Uncle David told me, for the first time, the truth about my father’s estate at the time of his sudden and notorious death. I was painfully aware that my father, Jonathan Batternberg, was the one brother who failed to seize hold of their father’s fortune and increase it. Every investment was misguided, every bold venture a mistake.

  But that afternoon I learned that my father had actually accomplished what might seem impossible for a Batternberg. He didn’t just fail to increase his inheritance – he lost it, and more. My father died in debt.

  I stared out the window as I listened to the crisp sentences. There’s no small irony in my learning of the depth of my father’s failure as Uncle David’s automobile rumbled past what the newspaper writers called, faintly reprovingly, “Millionaire’s Row.” I’d never cared for the brownstone and marble extravagances crowding both sides of the street, and today they were particularly appalling. Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s monstrosity at Fifty-Seventh Street taking up the whole block loomed like a French chateau gingerbread house constructed for Swiftian giants.

  Perhaps if he’d lived, my father might have been able to recoup his losses, Uncle David said. But Father died at the age of thirty-eight. After they pored through his accounts, my uncles learned the worst but decided to conceal it from my mother. They quietly paid for her expenses, as well as her children’s, for the last five years. However, several weeks ago, he said, my mother, Sarah Batternberg, stumbled upon the truth.. There were scenes. She made known her wishes: No more
assistance from her brothers-in-law. She’d sell the family house, and with that windfall, move into a small apartment, dismiss most of the servants, and live within her means.

  This didn’t sound like my mother one little bit.

  However, it wouldn’t do any good to voice my skepticism. Everyone always rushed to my long-suffering mother’s defense, particularly those who found her the most frustrating. Amid the depressing news about the family’s finances, I felt surprised and faintly flattered that the family believed I could play a role in the complicated business of moving the household.

  I said, “I’m needed to prepare the house to be sold?”

  My uncle ran his thick fingers along the brim of his bowler. “Lord no, we have plenty of people to see to all of that. Your mother and sister and brother will be spending the summer out of town, and you need to be with them during this difficult time.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, gripping the handle on the door as if to leap out. “I’m not going to New Jersey.”

  “Everyone knows you loathe the compound down the shore,” he said. “That’s not the plan.”

  “Newport? Oyster Bay?”

  “Arrangements have been made for your family to take up several suites at the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn, with rooms overlooking the Atlantic.”

  I was speechless for at least a minute.

  “Brooklyn?” I finally stammered. “We’re going to Brooklyn?”

  “Peggy, the Oriental is one of the finest establishments on the entire East Coast.”

  “Ten years ago, perhaps.”

  My uncle insisted that the Oriental Hotel held its reputation, as did the neighboring Manhattan Beach Hotel and Brighton Beach Hotel. This was so strange. No one of our extended family had ever, to my knowledge, taken up rooms in the grand oceanfront hotels of Brooklyn. And now? When the raucous Coney Island Amusement Park, also on the Brooklyn shore, had become world famous as America’s Playground, this was when we would spend two whole months there.

  “Uncle David,” I said, “There is something you’re not explaining.”

  The automobile slowed. On our left rose the graceful trees of Central Park; on our right, on the corner of Seventy-Second Street, stood the house I’d grown up in. My uncle laid his hand on my arm.

  “Please go with your mother and sister and brother to the Oriental Hotel, Peggy,” he said. “Your stay will extend for less than two months. I’ll be there for the first few weeks to help. Helen and I have made the booking.”

  “And if I don’t go?”

  Without removing his hand, he said softly, “We could cut you off, you know. No more money. I doubt that your shop girl wages would cover a flat in Greenwich Village.”

  By that time, Uncle David’s driver had turned off the motor. I leaned toward him and said, just as softly, “Do so. In four months’ time I turn twenty-one, and I come into my trust from Grandfather. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. After that, I won’t need a penny from anyone.”

  Uncle David half turned to the doctor. “My good man, could you give us a moment alone?”

  In the time it took Dr. Mackenzie to shuffle out of the automobile, I realized that I’d broken the cardinal rule of not discussing the details of a Batternberg inheritance in front of someone outside the family.

  In a flash I remembered something else, a long-ago remark of my father’s, that everyone adored David, but he was the brother most to be feared when he was made angry.

  “That’s quite true about the trust,” my uncle said. “Though you won’t be able to touch the capital. Just the interest payments.”

  “More than adequate to my needs, Uncle.”

  “So, Peggy, let us be clear,” he said, in a voice devoid of all feeling. “You are refusing to go with your family?”

  I tapped on the door to let the driver know I wanted out. “No,” I said over my shoulder. “I will consider it. But not without understanding the real reason for my family going to the Oriental Hotel.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  As I approached the front entrance of the dark-brick house, my limbs felt heavy. It had been three weeks and six days since I last crossed this threshold.

  The sound of water greeted me as always, the spotless fountain in the center of the marble floor, burbling away. My mother would obtain a fortune in this house sale. My working at the bookshop, and making the acquaintance of different sorts of people, had made me keenly aware that to harbor complaints about an upbringing amid comfort was in bad taste. But luxuries had never done much for a lonely, confused young soul.

  The women were gathered in the parlor – my mother, my sister Lydia, and my Aunt Helen – and I sensed that they’d been talking about me up to the moment of my arrival.

  “Oh dear, what are you wearing, Margaret?” was my mother’s greeting after pressing a kiss on my forehead with her cool, dry lips.

  “I didn’t have time to change for dinner, Mother,” I said.

  “Of course.” She forced a smile.

  Mother was dressed beautifully, as always, corseted to the expected silhouette for a lady of her social standing. Her light brown hair was pinned and perfumed, a pearl necklace gleaming at her throat. I was a true Batternberg: tall, black hair, high forehead, blue eyes under darkest brows. I didn’t look like her at all. My mother came from a family that arrived from Germany two generations earlier than my father’s, and they found ways to work that into many a conversation. The Donifer men were bankers, the women were temperamental beauties. My mother, in her youth, was much celebrated, her debut noted in the better newspapers. Now her face was crisscrossed with lines, like a piece of crumpled tissue paper, though she was barely into her forties. Someone unfamiliar with the situation might say, kindly, that becoming a widow before her time had aged her prematurely. I, who was rarely kind where my mother was concerned, would attribute it to more than that.

  “Hullo, Peggy,” said my sister. Even at her absolute peak, I don’t believe Mother was as lovely as my younger sister, Lydia, just seventeen years old. Though she seemed happier than my mother to see me, she kissed me tentatively, perhaps so as not to disturb her elaborate hair arrangement. Her thick golden hair was curled and beribboned, the masses gathered just so to emphasize her long creamy throat. My sister: the perfect Gibson Girl. Her high-neckline, pale-pink embroidered dress was constructed in filmy layers, but one could still make out her tiny waist and slender arms. Too slender. In that brief embrace, I could feel her delicacy, that even through her gloves, her wrists were bony. Was it possible that since I’d seen her last, she’d lost weight?

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “Never better.”

  My uncle said he had enough time for a sherry before dinner. Dr. Mackenzie sent back the first glass, insisting it was too generous a serving, an act highly approved of by Aunt Helen, my uncle’s solicitous second wife.

  The parlor conversation centered on me, and it was benign. Too benign. My Aunt Helen wanted to know if I had had an opportunity to read EM Forster’s new novel, Howard’s End. Lydia brought up the news story of the day, the trial of the owners of the terrible Triangle shirtwaist factory. My curiosity about what my family was up to deepened.

  Our jowly butler, Arthur, announced dinner, and we made our way to the dining room.

  This was the space where my mother’s worship of English country house décor found its most fervent expression. The curtains were perpetually drawn to keep out the light – heaven forbid the bright vigor of Seventy-Second Street intruded. And though the house was laid with wires for electricity when I was a child, my mother permitted only lamps and wax candles here. Paintings of the staid English countryside hung on wood-paneled walls; her favorites were thoroughbred horses, trainers holding them by the reins. I particularly hated those horse paintings, their precise lines and cautious, pallid colors such a contrast to the bold new art that intrigued me.

  A pink-and-gold set of Sevres porcelain was arranged on the shelves of a w
alnut cabinet. Surveying it all, one would assume that the room was decorated the same as certain rooms of the upper class of England. My mother worshipped the royal houses of Europe, and most of all, the British monarchy. Her particular heroine was Queen Alexandra, and she was keen to read any books or articles written about the Queen – now the Queen dowager. Whether my mother responded emotionally to Queen Alexandra’s life, a faded beauty married to a womanizer, even I dared not ask.

  A stomping on the stairs signaled the arrival of my fifteen-year-old brother. Surly and spotty, Lawrence careened into the room, grunted his greetings, indifferent to my presence, and took a seat at the table. “The Schlump” was Cousin Ben’s name for Lawrence, with his unerring cruelty.

  As we sipped the first course – turtle soup served in Wedgewood bowls – my Aunt Helen took up a matter with Dr. Mackenzie. One of her sisters-in-law wanted to secure a Scottish internist for her husband. Had he progressed in forming a list of recommendations of those others like himself?

  This was how the family did things. What one branch took up, the others followed, until all were in alignment. Elderly English tailors. Young French embroiderers. Emotive Italian music teachers. Hearty Irish stablemasters. Strict German nannies – that fad was the worst of all, for I hated each one of the German women my mother hired to raise us. Now it would be Scottish personal physicians that my uncles and aunts would fuss over finding, as word spread of Dr. Mackenzie, discovered by Aunt Helen.

  It was stifling hot in the room. My mother, taking out her fan, said apologetically to her brother- and sister-in-law, “I should have told Cook to prepare vichyssoise.”

  Uncle David said he had read in the Farmers’ Almanac that this would be an unusually hot summer in New York.