Escaping Dreamland Page 5

  “He never talked much about the war,” Robbie’s father continued. “I was about your age when he came home, and I loved stories, these stories,” he said, holding Dan Dawson and the Big Fire up, “as much as you do. But what I really wanted to hear were Dad’s stories about the war. He only ever told me one. I wish I could tell it as well as he did—he could paint a picture with words, your grandfather, though he rarely did. And he never talked about the actual fighting, even though I begged him to. He was part of the Allied force that drove the last of the Germans out of France in the winter of 1945 near the city of Colmar. The day he told me about they liberated a village called Turckheim. The snow in the open fields around the village was hip-deep and they had to dig out holes to sleep in. The rations were running low, and that morning he had a Hershey’s chocolate bar for breakfast. It was so cold he had to warm it up under his shirt before he could bite into it. And then I guess the fighting began, but the only thing he would tell me about that was that whenever he got scared he would think of Daring Dan Dawson and that letter from Dexter Cornwall folded up in his pocket. After the Americans took the village, the residents came out of the basements where they had been hiding to welcome them. Dad was the oldest soldier there—a married man of almost forty leading a platoon of teenagers. So, he hung back and let the boys enjoy the embraces of the young ladies of Turckheim. But then he saw something he never expected—a woman about his age stood on top of a pile of rubble, waving an American flag. This village had been overrun by Nazis for the past several years, and he couldn’t imagine where she had gotten the Stars and Stripes. So, he climbed up to her and tried to ask her. She didn’t speak more than a few words of English, but Dad had learned a little French. She held the flag out to him, tears streaming down her cheeks and just kept saying merci over and over.”

  “What’s that mean?” said Robbie.

  “It means thank you. Finally, Dad managed to ask her about the flag, and she told him she had made it herself in secret out of scraps of cloth, keeping it for the day the Americans finally came. That flag had given her hope that one day she would be free again.”

  Robbie looked up to see tears in his father’s eyes and realized what stories could do. That day, a month before his twelfth birthday, he became a writer. Over and over again, he wrote the story of Pop Pop marching across France and liberating Turckheim, ripping up each version, always afraid it wasn’t good enough and never quite brave enough to share his efforts with his father. The stories always ended with the woman holding the flag atop the pile of rubble.

  In Robbie’s versions of Pop Pop’s story, none of the Allied soldiers ever got killed. But, Robert wondered if the reason Pop Pop never told his war stories was because he had lost so many friends. Was it possible that he had inherited his ability to suppress the tragedies of the past from Pop Pop? Even as Robert thought it, he realized that inheritance was no gift. His failed relationships, his estrangement from his mother, and his occasional periods of depression and isolation must all be linked to the guilt he refused to talk about. He wondered, for the first time as an adult, what had really happened on the frozen fields of France and why Pop Pop had never spoken of it.

  Robert decided not to refold the letter. One more crease might spell the end for the fragile paper. He slipped it into a file folder and slid it into his lower desk drawer, wondering if a children’s author named Dexter Cornwall, answering a fan letter from a little boy in 1911, could have had any idea that he would give courage to a soldier in the waning stages of World War II, thirty-four years later. And he wondered if that author, and his letter, could, in any way, give Robert the courage to confront the story he had avoided for so long. He imagined Dexter Cornwall sitting behind a wide oak desk, sipping tea from a fine set of china and looking out across a lawn to the Hudson River below his country estate. How could such a man know anything about courage?

  VI

  New York City,

  On the Day of Kleindeutschland’s Grand Excursion

  Magda saw absolutely no reason why a woman’s dress or skirt ought not to have pockets. She would have loved the freedom of slipping a book into a pocket and not having to carry anything.

  Books almost made Magda miss the boat. Imagine, she thought, if she had—if she had spoken to Mrs. Heidekamp a little longer, or if she had not thought to cut through Tompkins Square and instead had been caught in the traffic and bustle of Avenue A. If she had stopped by to check on Mrs. Ottinger, who had missed church on Sunday on account of a chest cold, or if she had paused at the bakery at the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B to add some strudel to her basket, then she might have arrived at the pier just in time to see the General Slocum pull away—loaded with the women and children of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church heading to their annual summer picnic on Long Island without her. June 15, 1904, might have been a very different day for Magda. She might have heard the music of the band drifting over the sparkling water of the East River, waved at the receding steamer, its flags and banners rippling in the breeze, and then turned away, disappointed to miss the festivities, but nonetheless looking forward to a quiet day. But if she had—if she had stood on the pier waving as the boat plowed up the river and then walked slowly home, perhaps stopping in the park to read on a bench for an hour or so—would it have changed anything?

  “Magdalena,” cried her mother, pulling the covers off the narrow bed, “du wirst spät sein!”

  “Speak English, Mother,” said Magda. Ever since her husband’s death of tuberculosis two years ago, Magda’s mother had slipped back into speaking German.

  “Late you are to be,” said her mother. “Henry and Rosie they are . . . bereit.”

  “Ready, Mother. They are ready! You must practice your English. We have lived in America twenty years.”

  “What am I to need with English?” said Mrs. Hertzenberger. “I live in Kleindeutschland. All my friends, they are German.”

  “You live in America,” said Magda. “And how are Henry and Rosie to learn proper English if you always speak German? They are eight years old now. And they are Americans.”

  “You speak them English,” said her mother. “But you are to hurry. The twins wish to go. They wish a spot at the rail so to see the view of city. Now they are outside with the Lunnarmans.”

  “The boat does not leave until nine thirty, Mother, and you know as well as I do that Pastor Haas will wait for Mrs. Fickbohn and Mrs. Kessler and they will certainly not be on board until nearly ten. You know what trouble they have with those broods of children.”

  “Do not speak such of Mrs. Fickbohn,” said her mother.

  “You and the twins go on to the pier,” said Magda. “I will be there in time, I promise.”

  Magda sprang up the four steps to the doors of a narrow redbrick building near the corner of Eighth Street and Second Avenue. Even though she entered under the German words Freie Bibliothek, forever set in terra-cotta, to her this was the free library. Magda did not think of herself like her mother did—as a displaced German. She had been only two when the family stepped off the SS Hammonia onto the barge that ferried them to New York City and the vast immigrant-processing center known as Castle Garden. She had no memory of life in the little town of Buxtehude where her father had worked as a shipping agent, no memory of boarding that steamship in Hamburg one spring day in 1884, no memory of the tears that glistened in her father’s eyes as they came in sight of the buildings of Manhattan and he murmured to his wife, “Willkomen in Amerika.” She had heard the stories—stories of life in Germany, of that fourteen-day passage packed in steerage so that the family savings could be invested in their new life, of the long lines at Castle Garden under the stern eyes of the medical examiners, of finally emerging into the great rotunda and then onto the streets of lower Manhattan—but to Magda these were only stories. She had only ever known life as a New Yorker, and at twenty-two, more than anything else, she wanted to leave all remnants of her G
erman past behind and to be an American.

  “Guten Morgen, Magdalena,” said the smiling blond woman behind the desk as Magda pushed through the door.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Heidekamp,” said Magda breathlessly.

  “And how are your mother and little Henry and Rosie?”

  “They are well, but I’ve no time for chatting. Today is picnic day. We steam up the river in just a few minutes and I must have a book to read.”

  “You are just like New York, Magdalena. Always in a hurry.”

  “I don’t want to miss the boat.”

  “I’m sure Pastor Haas will wait for you. I had the day off last year for the picnic. We lay in the sun and watched the waves. I shall miss being there this time.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Magda, “and I shall miss being there as well if I do not hurry.”

  “And what sort of book would you like for picnic day?”

  “A book in English. Something with adventure in it.”

  “You never check out books in German anymore, not since your father died. What would he think?”

  “He would think,” said Magda firmly, “that his daughter is an American.”

  “An adventure book?”

  “Yes, and do hurry. Mother will be ever so cross if I keep them waiting.”

  “You do sound American,” said Mrs. Heidekamp. “Have you read H. G. Wells? Willie Müller returned this book yesterday.” She slid a pale green book across the counter. On the cover was a decorative design that reminded Magda of the unopened chrysanthemums a street vendor had been selling around the corner.

  “The War of the Worlds?” said Magda. “I’m not sure I want a book about war.”

  “It’s not quite what you think,” said Mrs. Heidekamp. “It’s about immigrants.”

  “Oh, very well,” said Magda. “I suppose it will have to do.” She signed her name on the circulation log and slipped the book into her basket.

  “Have a lovely day,” said Mrs. Heidekamp, but Magda was already on her way out the door.

  Magda walked briskly down St. Mark’s Place and under the elevated railway tracks at First Avenue, where a train rattled overhead on its way uptown. At Avenue A, she dashed across the road through horse-drawn carts and a sputtering motorcar to enter the relative peace of Tompkins Square. She loved this oasis of calm in the middle of her bustling, boisterous neighborhood. She could hear children playing on the separate boys’ and girls’ playgrounds as she wound her way across the park. As she stepped out of Tompkins Square and into Avenue B, she reentered the din of the city. Merchants called out from their carts, all manner of vehicles jostled for position, and crowds surged along the sidewalks. The smell of fresh-baked bread mingled with the sweat of men and the dung of horses. Magda could have closed her eyes and known she stood on Avenue B—the so-called German Broadway. She lifted her skirts to avoid some—at least—of the dirt and refuse that clogged the gutters and spilled onto the street, and then picked her way carefully across the chaos. Striding down Seventh Street, she found the sidewalks soon cleared and in another few minutes she had turned down Avenue D to Third Street and was walking carefully across the cobblestones that fronted the Recreational Pier, where flags flew from the roof, and a clutch of people gathered at the rail on the upper level to watch the morning.

  The sun streamed into the lower level of the pier, where a few members of the congregation still made their way toward the East River. Magda’s feet clicked on the floorboards as she hurried down the length of the pier. She was fifteen minutes late but, as she had predicted, Pastor Haas and Pastor Shultz still stood at the foot of the gangplank, greeting the latecomers, including Mrs. Fickbohn and Mrs. Kessler with their crowds of children.

  “Guten Morgen, Magda,” said Pastor Hass.

  “Good morning,” said Magda.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  And indeed she was. The General Slocum idled at the end of the pier, a vision in white. Three decks high and festooned with bunting and streamers, she shone in the morning light, a diamond set in the sparkling waters. Flags and banners rippled in the breeze from her four flagpoles. The steamer measured over two hundred feet long, and every inch of her railings on every deck was crowded with women and children, eager for the journey to get underway. On her top deck, a band played, the music drifting on the gentle breeze back across the streets of the Lower East Side. Smoke drifted in wisps from her smokestack, and just behind amidships her thirty-one-foot paddle wheels rose above the top deck, ready to begin churning upstream.

  “I believe you are the last one, Magda,” said Pastor Schultz, as Mrs. Kessler’s children tottered up the gangplank.

  “I told Mother you wouldn’t leave without me,” said Magda, smiling.

  “She’s on the top deck at the rear rail with the twins,” said Pastor Haas, following Magda up the gangplank onto the boat. In another minute, Magda felt the engines rumbling beneath her and watched as the shore slowly slipped away. She found her mother and the twins at the rear of the top deck, just as Pastor Haas had said.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Rosie, clinging to her mother’s dress as she pointed at the Stars and Stripes fluttering above them.

  “You are late,” said her mother, scowling.

  “I’m here,” said Magda, “and the band is playing your favorite—‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’ You should smile.”

  “ ‘Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,’ ” said her mother sternly, but Magda was right. Wilhelmina Hertzenberger could not stay angry with her oldest child. The day was too perfect. She breathed in the fresh air and hugged the twins close as the boat picked up speed. The music played, the sun sparkled, and the busy streets of Manhattan slid past them with increasing speed, promising to soon give way to the peaceful seaside of Long Island.

  Magda reached into her basket and clutched the book Mrs. Heidekamp had given her. She had hoped to read on the boat trip, but the boisterous shouts and laughter of the hundreds of children were too distracting for her to concentrate. She took a deep breath of the fresh air blowing in from the sea and smiled at her mother and the twins. Later, she would wish she could have that moment back, frozen forever—the moment before everything changed.

  The boat pressed up the river, passing under the construction of the new Queensboro Bridge and up the length of Blackwell’s Island. From her spot at the stern rail Magda could see the occasional dockworker in Astoria waving to the passing crowd. No more than five minutes later, Magda turned to her mother to ask if she smelled smoke, but Mrs. Hertzenberger was speaking German loudly with Mrs. Kessler and did not hear her daughter. And then, the alarm sounded.

  “Mother,” cried Magda, shaking Mrs. Hertzenberger. “Mother, I think there is a fire.”

  “Not to be silly,” said her mother. “It is only a . . . ein Feuerübung.”

  A fire drill, thought Magda. She relaxed for a second, then heard the shout from the direction of the bow. “Fire! She’s on fire!”

  She had no time to react to this news before a mass of humanity suddenly surged toward the rear of the boat. Magda found herself pressed against the railing, and she reached to grasp Rosie’s hand as her sister looked up at her.

  “What is it?” said Rosie, a look of concern clouding her usually sunny face.

  “Hold tight,” said Magda. “Just hold me tight.”

  The crowd had pushed Mrs. Hertzenberger and Henry a short distance away from Magda, but they still stood next to Mrs. Kessler, who was shouting for her oldest daughter. “Frieda! Where are you, meine Frieda?”

  Magda tried to reach out to her mother with her free hand, but the crowd pressed against her even harder as screams came from the front of the boat and the heat of what was certainly a fire suddenly enveloped her. Those around her were strangely quiet, as if holding their collective breath. Even Mrs. Kessler quieted enough so that, a minute later, as the air began to
thicken with smoke, everyone could clearly hear a voice shouting—“Look! In the water! There are children in the water.”

  Magda looked over the port rail and beheld a horrifying sight. Three children, one badly wounded in the head, floated past the stern of the boat. They did not flail or try to swim. Just as the bodies were being pulled beneath the surface of the water, Magda, and everyone else, heard the shriek of Mrs. Kessler.

  “Frieda!” she screamed. “Meine Frieda!” Before Magda could reach to stop her, Mrs. Kessler climbed on a seat and threw herself over the rail. In an instant she sank, sucked into the swift current. In that moment, Magda felt panic welling up within her. She could now see flames rushing back from the bow and hear the roar of the fire as it devoured the wooden decks. The passengers, so quiet just a few moments before, now screamed all around her, and many more plunged into the water to avoid the flames. As Magda watched, nearly everyone in the river was pulled under by their heavy clothes and the roiling waters. Neither she, nor anyone in her family, knew how to swim.

  The flames leapt high into the air above the top deck and spread rapidly toward her as Magda, through an extreme effort, moved toward the port side to reach her mother and Henry. Henry cried, and Mrs. Hertzenberger’s face had gone pale. She leaned against the rail and murmured, “Mein Gott.”

  Just at that moment, with a loud cracking noise, a long section of the port railing gave way. Magda watched in horror as her mother fell back toward the water with dozens of others. Henry cried out and Magda grabbed his hand, pulling him back from the broken rail. She turned away, unable to bear the sight of her mother striking the water.

  Magda clutched Henry and Rosie to her sides, pushing forward and away from the broken rail. Now chaos surrounded her. More and more people plunged into the water, many with their clothes in flames. The thick smoke burned her eyes and she longed to wipe her face, but she didn’t dare let go of Henry and Rosie. The twins screamed in terror as the flames roared closer. Magda held her ground, not allowing the crowd to push her toward the broken rail and into the river but not moving any closer to the heat and flames. Surely the captain would beach the boat soon. Surely other boats would come to rescue the survivors. Surely the crew would battle the flames and douse the fire. She only had to keep holding on, keep her brother and sister close, and try not to think about what had happened to their mother. For a few long minutes, Magda thought they would make it. The boat steamed forward even as the fire consumed the entire front end and drove more and more passengers into the river. And then, just as she was thinking that rescue must come at any moment, there was a deafening roar and a red starry cloud of sparks and smoke shot up as the greater part of the rear structure collapsed forward into the flames. Magda could feel the twins being pulled toward the inferno as the deck in front of her fell away. She tried to pull back, but her hands were slick with sweat and Henry and Rosie slipped from her grasp. The noise of the fire was so great that she could not hear their cries; she could only watch as they disappeared into the inferno.