He was still wondering about it when he got to work the next morning to find out that the dybbuk had tried to burn down Edison’s Luna Park Laboratory.
CHAPTER NINE. The Wizard of Luna Park
NEW YORKERS disagreed about everything else under the sun, but the one thing they all loved was Coney Island. On Coney Island, New Yorkers of every race, religion, and nationality banged elbows with one another in raucous harmony. a Jewish boy from Hester Street couldn’t venture into Hell’s Kitchen or Little Italy without risking injury to life and limb — not to mention pride. But on Coney Island he could mingle with Irish, Italian, German, and Greek boys, all of them bent on nothing more sinister than riding the rides and ogling the peep shows. Everyday jobs and responsibilities and loyalties were forgotten. Coney Island’s philosophy was live and let live. Or rather, play and let play.
Sacha had been there before, of course. Several times a year for as long as he could remember, he and Bekah had piled onto the nickel ferry with their father for the long ride to the famous amusement park. Mrs. Kessler never went; she insisted she had better things to do with her day off than walk up and down the boardwalk wearing out her shoes and gawping like a carp. But Mr. Kessler loved Coney Island. It was the one place in New York where he seemed to be able to forget his worries and just enjoy life. It was the one place in New York where Sacha could imagine that his father and Uncle Mordechai were actually brothers. If anyone had asked him, Sacha would have said he loved Coney Island — but, really, it wasn’t the rides he loved, or the boardwalk, or the hucksters and peep shows and shucked peanuts. It was the person his father turned into when they went there.
Going to Coney Island with Inquisitor Wolf, on the other hand, was a somewhat different experience.
Wolf whisked Sacha and Lily into a waiting cab and straight downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge. then he counted over the unimaginable sum of three dollars at the ticket window and ushered them into the quiet, middle-class luxury of the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad Company Special Express: nonstop to Coney Island in a blistering thirty-two minutes.
Wolf settled into one corner, put his long legs up on the seat, and frowned over a copy of the New York Tribune that he had bought from a newsboy, in between handing out money to three or four panhandlers. then he did the crossword puzzle. In ink. In ten minutes flat.
And then they were pulling into the station and Sacha was chasing Wolf’s flapping coattails off the train, down the platform, and under the echoing glass domes of the Coney Island Railway Terminal.
The first thing Sacha saw when he followed Inquisitor Wolf outside of the station was an elephant — or, rather, the Elephant. The Elephant Hotel was the single most famous thing on Coney Island. It was more famous than Luna Park. It was more famous than the Amazing Revolving Wheel of George W. G. Ferris. Indeed, the Elephant so dominated the amusement park’s exotic skyline that “seeing the Elephant” had become New York slang for every kind of forbidden pleasure.
The Elephant stood in the middle of a vast courtyard whose ornate balconies made it look like the product of a head-on train wreck between the Taj Mahal and the Flatiron Building. Its massive front legs housed a cigar store and diorama. Its back legs enclosed twin spiral staircases (one for going up, one for going down). The balloon-shaped body boasted a shopping concourse and guest rooms, all suspended over six giddy stories of open air by massive steel girders hidden in its wrinkled gray belly. The head contained an astronomical observatory (though critics scoffed that the only “stars” anyone was ever likely to see from this observatory were the electric lights on Luna Park’s Loop the Loop). And high above the rest of Coney Island, at the very summit of the Elephant's great humped spine, perched the World-Famous Starlite Ballroom, Playground to Celebrities and Royalty.
Between the Elephant Hotel and Luna Park ran Surf Avenue. Surf Avenue was sheer pandemonium. Persian palaces jostled Chinese pagodas. Lapland reindeer rubbed shoulders with camels and snake charmers. Sudanese sheiks mingled with South Sea Island mermaids to the wild strains of fiddling Gypsies and Sioux medicine drummers. And that wasn’t even mentioning the rides and the freak shows.
Everywhere Sacha turned, he saw signs advertising Coney Island’s famous (or in some cases, infamous) amusements:
ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH
to Ride the
Shoot-the-Chutes?
Do You DARE
Witness the World Debut of the
TASMANIAN DEVIL BOY?
SEE JOLLY TRIXIE!
It Takes Seven Men to HUG HER!
“Holy Smoke! She’s fat,
she’s awful fat!”
Every sign promised newer, wilder, faster, freakier thrills. And if the signs were blunt, the hucksters calling out from every doorway were even blunter:
“See Little Cairo dance the hootchy-kootchy! Hottest show on earth! If it weren’t for Coney Island’s cool ocean breezes, she’d burn up in her own fire!”
“Step right up, folks! Don’t be shy! See the Mighty Atom in action! Feel his muscles! Hear his story! Watch his mind-boggling feats of strength! Ev-er-y ticket comes complete with a free copy of Bodybuilding for the Millions!”
“Don’t dawdle!” Wolf called out from far up the boardwalk.
Sacha tore his eyes away from Bodybuilding for the Millions. “Sorry! Just coming, sir!”
When he caught up, Sacha found Lily happily sampling a very different kind of Coney Island attraction. Somehow she’d found time to buy a huge ring of fried dough.
“Want some?” she asked him through a cloud of powdered sugar.
It smelled awfully good. But he didn’t want her to think they didn’t feed him at home. And anyway, God only knew what they fried those things in.
“No thanks.”
They were at the gates of Luna Park now, and even Lily couldn’t help staring in amazement. It looked like the entrance to a Turkish seraglio, complete with crescent moons and minarets. Every square inch of the building was encrusted with twinkling electric lights. Sacha had never seen anything like it, even on the Bowery. It was like looking at a building made of stars. And the inside of Luna Park was even more dazzling than the outside. Rides, amusements, exhibition halls: everything blazed with that clear, sharp, starlike electric light. It was brilliant even in the middle of the day. Sacha couldn’t imagine how spectacular it must be after nightfall.
When they finally reached Edison’s laboratory, they found the Wizard of Luna Park doing what he did every morning from precisely 8:13 a.m. to 10:09 a.m., excepting Sundays: sitting in his Inventing Chair, inventing.
Before Edison, inventors had been quaint, gentlemanly eccentrics who dabbled in science for the pure pleasure of it. But Edison had done for inventing what Henry Ford had done for motorcars and Cornelius Vanderbilk had done for railroads and J. P. Morgaunt had done for steel mills and shirtwaist factories and practically every other modern American necessity. Edison had turned inventing into big business.
Every minute of Edison’s time was scheduled down to the last second. Every experiment, every idea, every stray thought was recorded in his famous notebooks just in case it turned out to contain the seed of a valuable invention. Plus, Edison didn’t just wait around for inspiration to strike. He went out and hunted it down.
That was where the Inventing Chair came in. It was a straight-backed wooden chair with paddle-shaped arms. The right-hand arm broadened into a writing desk like the ones children used at school. Two objects rested on it: a sharpened pencil and a black-bound laboratory notebook.