Read Online City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland by Kevin Baker - Free Book Online
Authors: Kevin Baker
Tags: Fiction, Historical
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might bolt once she saw the Tin Elephant. I kept telling her it was only temporary the whole way up the spiral stairs, the coachman bumping her trunk carelessly along behind, grinning and quipping with the whores. There was no disguising the place—but to my surprise she took it all in stride.
“To true royalty there are no indignities,” she said with regal equanimity.
Somehow, she didn’t mind it—not even the moldy, salt-etched walls and the hookers, the deliberately leering, suggestive signs in the halls: BATHERS WITHOUT FULL SUITS POSITIVELY PROHIBITED BY LAW .
That first night, she sat on my bed in a dark blue evening gown she put on especially for the occasion. I know it was silly, it was silly as young love and honeymoon nights, but I loved it.
The whores stood out in the hail and sang us a drunken shivaree. A blind girl they called the Yellow Kid led them. She wasn’t much to look at, a stringy, jaundiced street whore, but the johns all loved her because she played the zither and sang sad, homesick songs from Kiev to Dublin in a sweet, clear voice:
She’s as white as any lily
As gentle as a dove
She threw her arms around me
Saying Johnny I love you still
She is Nell the farmer’s daughter
The pride of Spancil Hill . . .
“You may undress me,” my empress said, her voice calm and self-assured as ever.
“I never—I mean, I didn’t plan —”
“Go ahead,” she commanded, and I began to undo the stays on her dress.
“You will have your palace. I swear it.”
“I know.”
I undressed her the way I might have undressed a child, or indeed a doll—my sweet, pretty bride, how many things were you? Mad queen; mechanical wonder; lost, wandering freak. Reverently, carefully, I pulled the midnight blue dress down over her perfect, white shoulders; it made a gorgeous rustling sound.
She sat comfortably through it, moving just enough to accommodate me here, help my thick, clumsy fingers with a catch or a stay there. I took off her clothes layer by layer, first the dress, then the outer petticoats, then her slips and stockings, until she sat small and naked and even more beautiful on my rough bed—still as regal as ever.
I dreamt I held and kissed her
as in the days of old
Saying Johnny you’re only joking
As many’s the time before
But the cock he crew in the morning
He crew both loud and shrill
I awoke in California many miles
from Spancil Hill
I touched her all over, unable to help myself in the face of such unmitigated beauty. And she sat there, and let me, and then she was holding me, kissing me back, her arms around me, soft and giving.
It wasn’t simply the lust. The popular imagination has it that we are all freakishly lusty creatures, diddling away like little demons. It couldn’t be further from the truth; after all, the only partners usually available to us are other freaks—the bearded lady, the fat woman, the alligator man—or prostitutes, or thrill-seekers—or those like ourselves. It becomes a degraded act, filled with self-loathing, in which the best one can hope for is an all-too-accurate mirror of one’s own, despised self.
But this was different. She was beautiful, and she offered herself up to me freely, and unabashedly. Afterwards, I bathed her in my wash basin, kneeling before her, until her skin shone. She put on a fine, white, embroidered nightgown—where she obtained such things I could only imagine—and then she rolled over and fell asleep in my bed, trusting as a child. I sat up for a long time, and watched her, stroking her hair.
After my revelation in the anatomical museum, I had run back home to my poor, deluded father—his already feeble act beginning to falter as he forgot his lines, his brain marinated in brandy by now.
I kissed him good-bye, took one trunkful of books for my own, and hooked on with Proctor’s, then the old Sunday School Circuit, doing anything I could. I learned a little tumbling and how to tell jokes,
“To true royalty there are no indignities,” she said with regal equanimity.
Somehow, she didn’t mind it—not even the moldy, salt-etched walls and the hookers, the deliberately leering, suggestive signs in the halls: BATHERS WITHOUT FULL SUITS POSITIVELY PROHIBITED BY LAW .
That first night, she sat on my bed in a dark blue evening gown she put on especially for the occasion. I know it was silly, it was silly as young love and honeymoon nights, but I loved it.
The whores stood out in the hail and sang us a drunken shivaree. A blind girl they called the Yellow Kid led them. She wasn’t much to look at, a stringy, jaundiced street whore, but the johns all loved her because she played the zither and sang sad, homesick songs from Kiev to Dublin in a sweet, clear voice:
She’s as white as any lily
As gentle as a dove
She threw her arms around me
Saying Johnny I love you still
She is Nell the farmer’s daughter
The pride of Spancil Hill . . .
“You may undress me,” my empress said, her voice calm and self-assured as ever.
“I never—I mean, I didn’t plan —”
“Go ahead,” she commanded, and I began to undo the stays on her dress.
“You will have your palace. I swear it.”
“I know.”
I undressed her the way I might have undressed a child, or indeed a doll—my sweet, pretty bride, how many things were you? Mad queen; mechanical wonder; lost, wandering freak. Reverently, carefully, I pulled the midnight blue dress down over her perfect, white shoulders; it made a gorgeous rustling sound.
She sat comfortably through it, moving just enough to accommodate me here, help my thick, clumsy fingers with a catch or a stay there. I took off her clothes layer by layer, first the dress, then the outer petticoats, then her slips and stockings, until she sat small and naked and even more beautiful on my rough bed—still as regal as ever.
I dreamt I held and kissed her
as in the days of old
Saying Johnny you’re only joking
As many’s the time before
But the cock he crew in the morning
He crew both loud and shrill
I awoke in California many miles
from Spancil Hill
I touched her all over, unable to help myself in the face of such unmitigated beauty. And she sat there, and let me, and then she was holding me, kissing me back, her arms around me, soft and giving.
It wasn’t simply the lust. The popular imagination has it that we are all freakishly lusty creatures, diddling away like little demons. It couldn’t be further from the truth; after all, the only partners usually available to us are other freaks—the bearded lady, the fat woman, the alligator man—or prostitutes, or thrill-seekers—or those like ourselves. It becomes a degraded act, filled with self-loathing, in which the best one can hope for is an all-too-accurate mirror of one’s own, despised self.
But this was different. She was beautiful, and she offered herself up to me freely, and unabashedly. Afterwards, I bathed her in my wash basin, kneeling before her, until her skin shone. She put on a fine, white, embroidered nightgown—where she obtained such things I could only imagine—and then she rolled over and fell asleep in my bed, trusting as a child. I sat up for a long time, and watched her, stroking her hair.
After my revelation in the anatomical museum, I had run back home to my poor, deluded father—his already feeble act beginning to falter as he forgot his lines, his brain marinated in brandy by now.
I kissed him good-bye, took one trunkful of books for my own, and hooked on with Proctor’s, then the old Sunday School Circuit, doing anything I could. I learned a little tumbling and how to tell jokes,
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