A Moment in the Sun (90 page)

“You coming on your boat.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I’d been there to greet you.”

She turns to study his face. The ferry churns past the Battery.

“And what would ye have said to me then, a great Donegal brute of a girl in a dress made of sacking and her father’s old brogans?”

Harry feels himself blushing, her bright emerald eyes digging in to him. Niles would have something clever to say, some
bon mot
to win a girl’s heart that he’d refined through a dozen flirtations. But he is Harry, the quiet one, the lame one, and can only say the first thing that comes to his head. Which might be the truth.

“I would have been made speechless,” he says, “at the sight of you.”

They are quiet then. Brigid squeezes his arm in hers as they lean on the rail together and watch the wheeling seabirds and the river currents clashing and the other boats speeding to and fro, marveling at the great newspaper towers visible from the water, at the structures being built that will soon dwarf them, steaming around the point of Manhattan and churning giddily, if a boat can be allowed an emotion, toward the Brooklyn shore.

They are nearly to the Island when a group of young sports begin to sing—

I’ve seen the Tower of London

The lights of gay Paree

Now I’m off to see the Elephant

Though it mean the end of me

When the Judge speaks of going to see the Elephant it is stories of slaughter from his service during the Great Lost Cause. But these singers are too young for that War. Harry has been told that in the years before he came to New York there was a hotel on Coney, built in the shape of an enormous pachyderm. The rooms in the creature’s head, with their eye-windows and view of the beach, were more expensive than those in the legs, and for a small fee a non-guest could ascend to the observation deck in the howdah on the elephant’s back. But as the immediate neighborhood grew less wholesome the significance of the term was debased until it could be applied to a visit to any house of ill repute—

You may be wise and worldly

They sing—

A rambler bold and free

But until you see the Elephant

You’re as green as green can be!

Brigid, unaware of this darker connotation, trills along gaily.

There are an unthinkable number of people already on the sand and boardwalk at West Brighton.

“Will ye look at us?” says Brigid as they are swept down the gangplank, bright-eyed and pulling him forward into the crush. “It’s the whole city here to throw off their cares.”

Their feet are no sooner on firm ground then a half-dozen touts begin to chatter at them, vaunting their amusements. The West Brighton Hotel is the only solid body in a Bedlam of activity, the rides ahead gyrating and rolling and tumbling and swooping, a cacophony of musics blaring out from them, leaving Harry stunned and looking to Brigid for guidance.

“I’ve never been to the sea creatures,” she says.

The “park” is fenced in, next to the lot where the Elephant Hotel burned. Captain Boyton’s sea lions leap and dive, balance on balls, play the xylophone with their flippers, juggle objects on their noses and pause frequently to gulp down whole fish thrown into their sharp-toothed maws. There are lots of children in the gallery, their wails of wonder and delight mixing with the screams of the adventurers risking life and limb on the Flip-Flap Railroad behind them, whipped completely upside-down for a terrifying moment. The bodies of the sea lions are shiny and supple and Harry cannot keep himself from thinking how beautiful they would look on film.

“I’ve only seen them dead on the strand,” says Brigid, holding a hand to her chest in awe. “Our fishermen kill them with gaffs when they can.” She looks to Harry, apologetic. “It’s that they tear the nets.”

One shoots up from the depths just in front of Harry, flinging water, twisting to stare at him with liquid black eyes. “They look frantic,” he observes, “but not happy.”

“The sea lions or the spectators?”

Harry smiles, but is not sure if she’s being ironic or not. “I meant the animals.”

Brigid watches as each of the dozen clap their flippers together, then dive backward into the pool. “Content, I would say,” she judges, “but no, not happy. Happiness is only something in the human mind, poor creatures that we are.”

The sea lions scoot away through an underwater passage and are replaced by Captain Boyton himself, demonstrating his famous life-saving suit. He lays on his back in the rubber suit, feet forward as he employs a double-bladed paddle to move himself about the pool.

“There are air-pockets in the suit—” Harry explains.

“No doubt.”

“He had the idea of transatlantic ship passengers wearing it. In case of an accident.”

“The women as well?”

“Of course.”

Brigid watches as the Fearless Frogman paddles below them, a small circle of his face visible within the tight rubber hood.

“They’ll never put it on,” she decides. “To be seen in public dressed like that—”

“Death before dishevelment.”

“If my corpse is to be pulled up from the cold ocean, it will be in decent attire.”

Captain Boyton emerges from the water and gives a very brief lecture, finishing with an invitation to observe the celebrated Diving Dobbin perform in the Lagoon behind them. Harry and Brigid make their way with the others, standing together craning up at the platform where a riderless horse steps cautiously to the edge, head low as a boy raps a rolling tattoo on a snare drum, then at the clash of a cymbal gathers itself and leaps splay-legged into the air. Harry feels himself gasp with the others and then the huge splash and the beast churning its legs to reach the ramp at the far end of the lagoon and he can only think of the haunting Biograph view they’ve been showing at Koster and Bials, mules and horses swimming in the waves off Cuba. Niles and some friends had unhitched an old negro’s carriage horse on an excursion to Lake Waccamaw when they were boys, driving it deep into the water by throwing stones, the horse snorting spray out of its great nostrils as it tired, eyes rolling white in panic, treading desperately till some white men came to chase Niles and his friends and catch Harry, too lame to outrun them, and yank him by the ear to where the Judge sat in the shade telling war stories. The Judge had not whipped him, saving that for Niles later, but forced him to apologize to the old uncle.

“That’s a mean way to do him,” the negro kept saying, shaking his head and dabbing at the cuts the stones had opened on the horse’s hide. “That’s a
mean
way.”

Once Diving Dobbin has climbed out and been led off, shaking himself dry, the Shoot-the-Chutes is back in business.

“Would ye like to try it?” asks Brigid, squeezing his arm and with a hopeful glint in her eye. He hesitates, a lifetime of embarrassments holding him back, and she senses it, adding, “But of course I’d hate to get wet, wouldn’t I?”

They settle for the bleachers and watch the flat-bottomed skiffs sluicing down the channels then flying off the final lip to smack and skitter across the surface of the Lagoon, passengers shouting and laughing and sprayed with water as they desperately grasp the sides and try not to spill out.

“They must have made quite a number of tests for this,” says Harry. “Deciding on the slope of the chute, the design of the boat.”

“Dangerous,” says Brigid, “but not fatal.”

“I’ve never been much of a dare-devil,” Harry admits, then regrets pointing it out.

“There’s not many who are,” says Brigid, rising to leave. “Which is why your fillums are such a sensation.”

They pass under the obscenely grinning Funny Face then, demonic eyes and tombstone choppers gleaming, and into Steeplechase Park. It is another machine with too many moving parts, thinks Harry, and at first he is frozen with indecision, finally allowing Brigid to tug him to a booth where a nickel buys you a dozen chances to break a china plate by throwing a hard black ball. They are a far cry from actual china, of course, but Brigid squeals with glee at each of the three she manages to shatter.

“I knocked one over in a lady’s cupboard last year,” she says, “and it was a day’s wages lost.”

He had thought at first that the plates were prizes, not the object of pleasurable destruction, and is impressed with her skill. “I’d never have hit as many.”

“Oh, we Irish are known for our hurling,” she says, teasing him. “It’s bricks through the landlord’s window and on from there.”

The Steeplechase horses come whizzing around a curve in the track above them, trailing excited screams from the riders. Harry is still smarting from his cowardice at the Shoot-the-Chutes. “There’s not much of a line,” he says, pointing. “We should go.”

Brigid stops to look at him. “Are ye sure?”

“
A half a mile in half a minute
,” he says, quoting the painted advertisement at the entrance gate. “We have to experience that.”

They climb the stairs, Harry pulling himself up the railing, and are in the second group of eight couples waiting to mount. The height and the steep decline of the first section of track begin to work on his nerves, and he calms himself by imagining what alterations would allow a camera operator to ride with the device in hand and crank film through the aperture. Certainly an assistant behind to keep him from falling off, and a special housing to reduce the bulk of the apparatus. But would the image be only a blur? Would the spectator in the theater grab his hat, gasp in fear, suffer a queasy stomach?

“Who’s first?” barks the loader, a slightly cross-eyed man in shirtsleeves.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” says Brigid.

“But I’ll block your view.”

“Ladies first, then,” says the loader and taps his foot with impatience as Brigid anchors her hatpin securely, then steps onto the box and takes his hand, deftly arranging her skirt to throw her leg over the back of the hobbyhorse. Harry has a moment of panic but the loader squats down without comment, offering his shoulder for leverage, and he is able to drag his bad leg over the saddle and get himself centered as the other couples arrange themselves. He feels ridiculous for an instant, a grown man on a wooden horse, but then the starter yells “Ready?!” and he puts his arms the only place they can go, snug around her waist, and the nape of her lovely neck close to his lips, the smell of her hair—he has half closed his eyes with the rapture of it when the bell rings and the horses are released, eight across, eight couples screaming as they plunge down and veer sharply this way and that, Brigid clasping his wrist with one of her hands and he can’t tell if that’s her heart beating with excitement under his fingers or his own, pounding his blood out into his extremities, bits of track and safety wall and sky whipping across his eyes, his hat blowing off his head, squeezing the wooden horse between his knees to keep from being flung out into space and then they are falling abruptly and speeding down the final straightaway, second across the finish line and coasting hoarse-voiced to a stop.

They are helped off the wooden steed, Harry reeling with dizziness and taking her hand as they step through the exit tent and all of a sudden there is air blasting up from the floor lifting Brigid’s dress up over her stockings and a negro dwarf in clown paint and horns poking him with a staff that gives him a jolt while a taller white clown jabs a pitchfork at him, trying to separate him from her, Brigid holding her skirt down with her free hand and the other couples around them now receiving the same, the blowholes flouncing colorful lacy undergarments and the men’s hair shooting up at the dwarf’s electric prod and then Harry hears the laughter and realizes they are on a raked stage, being tormented for the jollification of the people who have just come through the ride themselves.

They escape the Blowhole Theater to the bright outdoors together, both blushing, Harry not letting go of her hand and Brigid not asking him to.

“We almost won,” she says finally.

“All else being equal, the heaviest couple will always win.”

“Well, then I certainly did my part.”

She is perhaps an inch taller than Harry, with broader shoulders, but slender of waist and ankle.

“It felt like more than half a minute.”

“If ye hadn’t been there to hold me,” she says, talking loudly over the shouts and music from the Wonder Wheel to their left, “I’d have fainted dead away.”

There is a bin full of hats by the exit gate, and Harry recovers his own.

They wander then, hand in hand, past the pushcart vendors with their clams and corn, their pretzels and red hots, through the Bowery with its penny arcades and Kill the Coon games, its slot machines and dime museums and kinetoscope parlors, Harry cranking the machine to demonstrate how it is the same but different than his motion-picture camera, past the side show with its lackluster freaks of nature slouching out front, settling finally at a restaurant deck overlooking Tilyou’s Bathhouse and the crowded beach beyond. Harry orders clam chowder and crackers for them and they watch the bathers cavort in the waves.

“One of our earliest numbers was taken here,” says Harry. “
Cakewalk on the Beach
. There are new copies going out every week.”

“You turned a camera on the poor souls.”

Women and men jump and somersault and splash each other in their wet wool costumes, shrieks of joy carried over the steady crash of the waves.

“They were enjoying themselves. You can see that in the view.”

“But they’re being photographed while they’re at it. That changes everything.”

“Does it?”

“Without a doubt. People become shy or they prance about like fools. But they don’t act naturally.”

“Then I suppose we should use a lens that can see from a great distance, like field glasses. Or hide the camera somehow—”

“That would be indecent.”

“To share the joy of these bathers with those who live far from the sea—”

“The story you showed me in the box just now—”

“The kinetoscope.”

“Peeking through the boo-dwar door at some poor woman getting ready for bed.”