Read Online City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland by Kevin Baker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kevin Baker
Tags: Fiction, Historical
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and how to juggle. I turned magic tricks on a bill between Evelyn Nesbit and Convict 6630, The Man Who Sang Himself out of the Penitentiary. I played the old ten-twenty-thirties, in the stock shows The Earl of Pawtucket and Are You My Father? and What’s the Matter with Susan? and I sang in the chorus of Beautiful Edna May, Salvation Army Girl—
—I tell them to follow, follow Jesus,
but they always follow, follow me—
In short, I did anything, no matter what the degradation. For what was I, but life?
Above all, I kept moving—back and forth, every season, from Lake Quinsigamond to the old German Sharpshooter Park in Chicago; from Euclid Beach to the White City to Paragon Park. For a time, I would stop back on the Bowery and see how the old man was doing, got him a new room when he couldn’t do the act at all anymore.
One season I stopped going back—just stopped. Until, three years later, when I finally mustered the courage to go back and see him one more time, he was gone. Whether he had died or not I could never determine, but his books kept popping up, in raggedy little notion shops and ragpicker alleys all around the Bowery. I always recognized them, even before I saw his name, and the date he had bought them, penciled neatly in on the title page: “Patrick J. Mahoney, Sr.”—that last, conscience-plaguing acknowledgment of my existence. I bought them up whenever I could, but I never found any other trace of him.
And after it all, after all the coon songs and the Carrie Nation lectures, after all the freak shows and the midways, the Chautauquas and the rube towns, after all the endless nights picking up rude bits of knowledge in parlor cars and fleabag hotels and blind pigs—after all that, I had been tossed up on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, on Coney Island, like so much flotsam and jetsam myself.
Was I home now? Outside, the whores slowly drifted away, off to the next batch of customers. I stayed chastely beside my beloved the rest of the night, one arm draped around her so that no hand could take her from me in my sleep. Was I home? I watched her for a long time before I nodded off, dreaming fitfully of us both in a great palace.
THE GREAT HEAD DOCTORS FROM VIENNA
Freud wasn’t sure that he had really seen the man at first. It seemed impossible, like a waking nightmare, or one of Jung’s apparitions.
He had just finished a long stretch of work, writing up the Rat Man case, and he was sitting contentedly on the terrace of the Cafe Landtman with the rest of the Vienna bourgeoisie. Reveling in his cigars and his einen kleinen Braunen, like a pleasure-loving philistine, swapping his favorite old Yiddish jokes with the maskilim. When this vision appeared—
He was both more and less than a man. A monolith, really, something primitive and huge, standing out there on the Ringstrasse. One more refugee from the East, come from a land past all human memory and knowledge, and more than likely having walked all the way. Face swathed in a ragged, aimless beard, tattered skullcap on his head. Plodding open-mouthed up the Ring in his beggar’s rags, past the fairy-tale buildings, the long file of lifeless statues.
Even as Freud watched, some of Mayor Lueger’s bully-boys caught up to him in front of the Landtman. They taunted him for awhile, and he obviously did not understand, staring back at the students in their close-cut hair, their uniform brown suits and black ties. Clutching his little pile of rags closer to his chest. They began to push him about, jostling him more and more seriously until his package fell into the street. They kicked it apart—revealing just more rags, some old vegetables, a few leaves of a book he had got somewhere.
Freud stood up at his table. Everyone else was looking away, all the sheyne yidn, and the contented, gentile burghers, too, staring into their coffee grounds. There was not a policeman in sight—just more shopkeepers and bureaucrats strolling
—I tell them to follow, follow Jesus,
but they always follow, follow me—
In short, I did anything, no matter what the degradation. For what was I, but life?
Above all, I kept moving—back and forth, every season, from Lake Quinsigamond to the old German Sharpshooter Park in Chicago; from Euclid Beach to the White City to Paragon Park. For a time, I would stop back on the Bowery and see how the old man was doing, got him a new room when he couldn’t do the act at all anymore.
One season I stopped going back—just stopped. Until, three years later, when I finally mustered the courage to go back and see him one more time, he was gone. Whether he had died or not I could never determine, but his books kept popping up, in raggedy little notion shops and ragpicker alleys all around the Bowery. I always recognized them, even before I saw his name, and the date he had bought them, penciled neatly in on the title page: “Patrick J. Mahoney, Sr.”—that last, conscience-plaguing acknowledgment of my existence. I bought them up whenever I could, but I never found any other trace of him.
And after it all, after all the coon songs and the Carrie Nation lectures, after all the freak shows and the midways, the Chautauquas and the rube towns, after all the endless nights picking up rude bits of knowledge in parlor cars and fleabag hotels and blind pigs—after all that, I had been tossed up on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, on Coney Island, like so much flotsam and jetsam myself.
Was I home now? Outside, the whores slowly drifted away, off to the next batch of customers. I stayed chastely beside my beloved the rest of the night, one arm draped around her so that no hand could take her from me in my sleep. Was I home? I watched her for a long time before I nodded off, dreaming fitfully of us both in a great palace.
THE GREAT HEAD DOCTORS FROM VIENNA
Freud wasn’t sure that he had really seen the man at first. It seemed impossible, like a waking nightmare, or one of Jung’s apparitions.
He had just finished a long stretch of work, writing up the Rat Man case, and he was sitting contentedly on the terrace of the Cafe Landtman with the rest of the Vienna bourgeoisie. Reveling in his cigars and his einen kleinen Braunen, like a pleasure-loving philistine, swapping his favorite old Yiddish jokes with the maskilim. When this vision appeared—
He was both more and less than a man. A monolith, really, something primitive and huge, standing out there on the Ringstrasse. One more refugee from the East, come from a land past all human memory and knowledge, and more than likely having walked all the way. Face swathed in a ragged, aimless beard, tattered skullcap on his head. Plodding open-mouthed up the Ring in his beggar’s rags, past the fairy-tale buildings, the long file of lifeless statues.
Even as Freud watched, some of Mayor Lueger’s bully-boys caught up to him in front of the Landtman. They taunted him for awhile, and he obviously did not understand, staring back at the students in their close-cut hair, their uniform brown suits and black ties. Clutching his little pile of rags closer to his chest. They began to push him about, jostling him more and more seriously until his package fell into the street. They kicked it apart—revealing just more rags, some old vegetables, a few leaves of a book he had got somewhere.
Freud stood up at his table. Everyone else was looking away, all the sheyne yidn, and the contented, gentile burghers, too, staring into their coffee grounds. There was not a policeman in sight—just more shopkeepers and bureaucrats strolling
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