Dreamland

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I shook my head, not understanding. The workman stuck out his hand to shake. “I am Stefan.”

  Being deceived is never welcome. But Stefan looked so entirely pleased that after the first shock, I couldn’t hold it against him.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said. Now that we were close, I could see specks of paint on his tunic, the same deep red as on the first painting. His grip was tight and warm, with calloused ridges on his fingers. “These are first sales in days,” he said, not in self-pity but matter of fact.

  “Well, that’s because you’re showing them here. I don’t think Coney Island is the proper… environment for your work.”

  His eyes widened and he said, “Mmmmmm.” I realized that we were still holding hands, although the shaking motion had ended. I carefully withdrew my hand.

  “Peggy, I have question,” he said. He said “Peggy” in a way no one else ever had, something that sounded like “Peyagey.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry? I don’t know.” But I did know the second I said it. I was ravenous. I hadn’t eaten anything but that half pastry at tea on the veranda.

  “May I take you to dinner?” Again, he bowed with that distinct formality. “It would be my honor.”

  It struck me that I had never in my entire life consented to a private conversation or a stroll, much less a meal, with a strange man.

  I felt myself smile. “Yes,” I said. “You may.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Although I could hardly believe I’d just agreed to have dinner with him, the man himself didn’t seem surprised by my consent. “Remain here one minute,” he said, holding up a single finger as if my seeing it were needed, to convey the point. He slid out the side of the booth, leaving me alone with my paintings, which he’d taken down in their light frames.

  It seemed as if he were gone for longer than one minute, and I began to feel ridiculous, and a little angry, standing inside the “Futurist” booth of The Art of Coney Island. Was this some sort of nasty trick that he’d now disappear?

  But I heard a soft footfall and, turning, saw Stefan approach, that same steady smile on his face but wearing new clothes: a white shirt and gray jacket with a wide lapel and three buttons. Where he’d found these garments, I couldn’t imagine. The jacket was frayed and a bit too big for him, and I was touched that he’d gone to this effort. An answering smile again spread across my face. It just wasn’t possible not to smile.

  “After dinner, we come back and I wrap paintings for you,” he said, holding out his arm for me to link with his.

  And so I was escorted to dinner in Coney Island, the Playground of America, or as Henry had described it, Sodom by the Sea. Associating with an artist and a foreigner gave me deep satisfaction. I was behaving in a way that would, if they knew it, cause the maximum amount of distress to my family and Mr. Henry Taul.

  As if he knew what I was thinking, Stefan said, “Are you here with friends today?”

  “No.”

  “You came with family?” We were now in the thick of the crowd. Stefan moved through them slowly, making sure with every step that I wasn’t being bumped or jostled. He had a gait like no one else. He was completely calm and relaxed in the eye of this storm, but with ramrod-straight posture.

  “I’m here alone,” I answered.

  He stopped, to look at me in surprise. “You came out on train from city by yourself?”

  I realized that I’d have to make a bit of an adjustment to the identity of Peggy the shop girl. “I’m here at Coney Island alone, but I’m staying with my family at a hotel near here. It’s in Manhattan Beach, just a short distance along the water.”

  I waited for realization to dawn, for my dinner partner to perceive that the daughter of a family who stays at one of the ocean-side hotels could not possibly be a typical shop girl. But all he did was nod and say, “I shall escort you to hotel after dinner.”

  There weren’t any other questions along those lines from him, to my relief. I didn’t want to have to explain.

  The restaurant he chose was an enormous one near the ocean, with tables arranged on a platform not far from where the water rides charged down to their squealing conclusion. It crossed my mind that Ben and company might be able to spot me if they chose to go looking, and so I breathed easier when we were tucked in the corner nearest the building itself, surrounded by other patrons, not out on display at the edge. To find me, someone would have to be looking hard.

  “Stefan!” shouted an old waiter with a stiff white moustache, who rushed over to drop tattered menus in our hands. They spoke to each other in a musical rapid-fire language I recognized as Italian, though I couldn’t speak it myself. My only other language was French – it was more important to my mother than mathematics. At last Stefan shooed him away.

  “I beg pardon – to speak in another language not too nice,” he said to me earnestly over the checkered tablecloth.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “So… you’re Italian?”

  “I live six years in Rome and Milan before coming to America, but no, I’m not Italian,” he said. I waited for him to clarify his country of origin. He did not.

  “I order oysters, I hope you like them, Peggy.”

  I let it go; I smiled and said I did, while enjoying yet again the way he pronounced my name, unlike how any other person, male or female, had ever said it. I was so very curious about him, but before I could pose my questions, he queried me. How long had I worked at Moonrise Bookstore? What did I do? He was as curious about me as I was about him. I didn’t have to lie about my job, and I answered everything.

  When I told him that the novels of Dostoyevsky were much in demand at Moonrise Bookstore, he shook his head decisively. “No, he needs to be read in Russian – no translations can do justice.”

  I said, “Are you Russian then, Stefan?”

  “No.” Then, so definitively that I thought it might be a trick of the light were we not sitting outside, Stefan’s bearing, his attitude, changed completely. His eyebrows gathered; his smile withdrew as he sat back in his chair. An indefinable expression filled his hazel eyes, as if he could see far beyond me, the table, the restaurant, Coney Island, everything. “I understand Russian well – they are brothers to me,” he said softly.

  At that moment, the waiter appeared with a tray of oysters strewn across ice. Stefan shook himself out of his reverie. “Very good!” he said. “And our beer.”

  Now, I’d never drunk beer in my life. Nor had I ever eaten oysters dumped on ice so sloppily, without fresh cut lemon slices adorning them.

  “I apologize,” Stefan said, his face crinkling with concern. “The oysters, this is too… new?”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I insisted. My fingers edged toward the large, lumpen gray-and-white oyster shells.

  “Peggy, watch me,” he said, evidently thinking I needed instruction on how to eat an oyster. He turned his head sideways, tilted back slightly, and put the shell to his lips. I saw him nudge the soft whiteness of the oyster into his mouth, his tongue darting to pull it inside.

  It was my turn. I picked up an oyster and tilted it into my mouth. Though I missed the presence of lemon, the oyster tasted so good that I closed my eyes for a few seconds. When I opened them, Stefan was watching me closely. He shook his head a trifle, as he had before to bring himself out of his meditation on Russia, then raised his mug of beer, questioningly. I very much needed a drink right now, and I raised mine in answer. But the taste was terrible: thickly sour and harsh. I couldn’t help coughing.

  “Never had beer before?” he asked.

  “No,” I gasped.

  “First time – can be difficult,” Stefan said. “It gets easier.”

  We finished our oysters, and I did try another sip of beer, which, he was right, wasn’t as noxious. Our plates of fried clams and chopped green beans and brown bread followed. It tasted quite good; Ben had unfairly called the food of Coney Island “terrible.” I w
as surprised by how comfortable this all felt. In my world there were rules about how to respond to a strange man tipping his hat to a girl he hadn’t been introduced to. It was unthinkable to agree to go to a public restaurant with such a man.

  Stefan did not seem to appreciate this shocking break with propriety. Indeed, he took it upon himself to give me advice on my life.

  “You love books – you should be writer,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not a writer.”

  “Do you paint?”

  “My paintings are worse than my poetry,” I said lightly. But Stefan did not laugh in response. He looked puzzled.

  “I don’t possess a natural talent for writing,” I said. “Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. I’m not good enough to make an endeavor such as that my calling.”

  “What is ‘good’?” he asked. “You have something to say, that is the key to it. You should go to university. You’re intelligent woman. You have ideas. You have taste.”

  “Because I like your art?” I asked, laughing.

  “Exactly!” he joined me in laughter. “But to be serious, I know it costs much money, Peggy, but you could find way. Use your intelligence. I worked on the streets, in shops, every day so could attend art school in Rome. It can be done. It’s not right for you to – how you say? – degrade your mind, your thoughts.”

  I felt my first serious pang of guilt. It was lousy to mislead Stefan this way. Especially when he was showing more genuine interest in my potential than anyone in my own family. The truth is, I’d wanted to go to college, but my mother, my sister, my female cousins including Ben’s older sister – they had all talked me out of it. Batternberg women didn’t go to college. It would make us less appealing to husbands, that was the thrust of it. The men all took degrees, of course. Ben took an undergraduate degree at Columbia and was studying law at Yale. But it wasn’t a place for any female who was One of Us.

  I also felt a wide gulf between Stefan and myself in our attitude toward accomplishment. No one in my family or my circle of friends would dream of admitting to a desire to write or paint or sing – much less to announce a talent for it. That’s not to say such aspirations didn’t exist. But they were hidden or denied in some attempt at modesty, or perhaps to ward off the possibility of ridicule, always the worst fate imaginable. It didn’t make any sense, really. I was weary of my own world and eager to delve into that of the man sitting opposite me, a true artist.

  “Why did you leave a city like Rome to come here?” I asked. It baffled me why an artist of Stefan’s gifts would leave Europe, where the art world was centered. I knew little about the avant garde movement, except from what I saw in magazines mailed to Moonrise Bookstore and gleaned from my trips to the Stieglitz Gallery. Stefan’s work seemed to be part of that. Yet New York City had little to offer devotees of modern art compared to Paris, Rome, or Milan. Or any serious culture, really. The United States was the home of Mark Twain and John Phillip Sousa, both of whom left me cold. It seemed to me that when an American possessed true talent, he or she decamped for Europe, like Henry James pretending to be English or Mary Cassatt refusing to budge from France.

  He frowned and hesitated, searching for words. “Many reasons. Hard to explain. But in my work, my life, I think about… future. America is future in all things. That’s what I believed.”

  “Believed – past tense?”

  He smiled. “Past tense? Not sure of meaning.” Just then, the bill arrived, and he paid it – I feared it totaled half of what I’d paid him for his paintings – before he rose and came around to pull out my chair. “You want to know what bring me here, to Coney Island?” he asked. “I show you.” I nodded, rose, and took his arm.

  We walked past a building bearing the sign “Infant Incubators.” I pointed at it in disbelief, but Stefan said, “It’s truth, infants in there. Science amazing.” As he was explaining the building for infants, a new sound of screaming bells ripped through the cacophony of Coney Island. Turning toward the source of the screeching, I saw dozens of firemen racing toward a six-story building. Stefan explained that “Fighting the Flames” was a nightly attraction offering disaster. The fire was carefully controlled, just one of the pulse-pounding attractions. Each night the firemen rescued all those in distress.

  A few minutes later, we approached a long row of people standing on a platform. A closer look revealed they were all young women except for a man in the middle, wearing a red stovepipe hat, who shouted at the crowd, “The most beautiful girls in all of Coney Island! All of them featured performers at Henderson’s. Play the game and win the prize: a photograph taken with you and her!” A line of men ogled the women.

  We were almost past the platform when one of the women shouted, “Stefan, oh Stefan! Ha! Yes, I see you!”

  The woman looked to be about my age but unlike me in every other way. Fiery red hair cascaded over her shoulders in glorious curls. She had a heart-shaped face, and a voluptuous figure spilling out of her tight bodice. “Not a moment for me today?” she called out, with, I swear, a wink.

  Stefan shook his head, laughing. We kept moving; he gave no explanation, and of course, none was owed. All we had shared was a dinner.

  Yet I felt a tug of jealousy.

  The sun was low in the sky, its golden glow turning orange, when Stefan guided me to the Dancing Pavilion, a truly massive wooden dance floor also looking out at the ocean. Hundreds of couples swirled across the floor while an orchestra played.

  “You came to Coney Island to dance?” I asked in disbelief.

  He took a step closer to me to make sure I could hear him over the music. I was quite happy that it was necessary for him to do that.

  “On the ship, I was on it many, many weeks, and I had cheapest ticket, bad food. Half boat sick. We reach New York City – we see Statue of Liberty, not well, but we see it with mist. I hear such music. I see… nothing. But I hear it. Like dream. After I go through lines, I stay with friends, try to sell work, nothing. Not a penny. ‘Too strange,’ everyone says. I tell people I heard music day I came to America, they laugh. Stupid foreigner, must be madman. One day I come out to Coney Island to see what it’s like – and I hear same song, same instruments. This was it! I heard it. It was real. I moved to this part of Brooklyn next month, took jobs to live while I painted.”

  I knew instinctively that this was the truth, that Stefan had opened himself up to me. It was the opposite of how the people in my life communicated with one another; we rarely told the whole story about anything or explained our true feelings, it was far too embarrassing.

  “There are so many dancers,” I said, like an idiot.

  “Workers of New York, dance – you have nothing to lose but your chains,” Stefan said.

  I recognized his reference, and his joke, after a minute. “Karl Marx?” I asked. He nodded, pleased that I understood.

  “Would you like to dance with me?” I blurted.

  “Very much.”

  With a smile, I turned toward the others. “Shall we join them, then?”

  He laughed. “We must buy dance tickets first, Peggy, and wait for next set. You haven’t been to dance hall?”

  “Well. I have danced before,” I assured him.

  He looked puzzled again, as if with me he were trying to work out a challenging sum in his head. He purchased the tickets, and we joined the next throng. The first song Stefan and I danced to was a sentimental, syrupy waltz – who the composer was I didn’t know. It was the kind of music I might have cringed at in other circumstances, but I shall never forget the sound of those violins, the brass, the piccolo, the piano and drum. His fingers grazing the small of my back, his arm extended in perfect correctness, shoulders thrown back, Stefan led me across the floor like an old Victorian gentleman exhibiting the utmost propriety, except for the crinkling smile of his eyes as he looked at me. He is handsome, I realized in a rush, with his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. I’d said yes to dinner with a foreign workman as a lark, furious
at my family, but this man could cut a figure in any room, any setting.

  Something is happening to me, I thought, as I swirled across the Coney Island stage, surrounded by the hundreds and hundreds of strangers.

  Afterward, struck with a new shyness, I could think of nothing to say except that he was a fine dancer, and I inquired where he learned to waltz.

  “Military academy,” he said, dryly.

  That was not what I expected to hear. There were so many parts to this man, fitting together in ways that puzzled.

  We returned to the booth where he sold his art, and Stefan made the paintings into a long package protected by plain wrapping paper, a string handle fashioned atop. Darkness would fall within the hour. He led me out of Dreamland, finally, passing under that giant statue, the winged, bare-breasted female that provoked a quarrel that seemed like a century ago.

  I couldn’t help peering around, uneasily, but there was no sign of Ben, Paul, or Lawrence. For the first time I wondered what they told my mother when they returned to the hotel without me. There would be quite the uproar over my behavior. I hastily pushed that out of my head.

  Stefan asked me which way to the hotel, and I pointed west. “It’s quite a walk, I’m afraid.”

  “Good. That right direction. You heard my favorite sound, I want to show you my favorite sight.”

  By now my hand wasn’t in the crook of his arm. We held hands as I savored the sound of his “Peggy” and thrilled to the feel of the roughened grooves of his palm. The promenade was crowded with other people. We could have talked over the din, but after twenty minutes or so neither of us did. We walked along in a silence, although I couldn’t say it was a comfortable one. My mind was racing, my heart was not far behind. Everything about Stefan interested me; he was so new. I’d been lamenting the long summer that stretched before me in Brooklyn. Could Stefan become a way to make the weeks pass far more quickly?

  “This is perfect,” he announced, coming to a stop.

  “Is it?” I asked, looking around, confused.

  He led me off the pavilion walk and onto the beach. My shoes kept sinking in the sand as we walked toward the ocean lapping the shore. We walked alongside a long wooden piling snaking across the white sand, drawing closer and closer to the water.