Dreamland Social Club(78)

He stood by the projector set up in the room’s center aisle, and its tube of light shot through the room to the screen. The words, white on black, said “BATTLE OF MAFEKING, April 28, 1900, Thomas A. Edison.”

It was even harder to see what was going on here than it had been with Topsy. There were two groups of people in a field—one line in the distance and another in the foreground with their backs to the camera—and there were frequent bursts of smoke, presumably made by gunfire, and then one group appeared to charge forward and the other retreated but not fast enough, and they clashed. Some men rode by in the foreground on horses.

Immediately following that reel came Capture of a Boer Battery, in which a bunch of people stood in a field firing into the distance. Then a group of men on horseback charged at them from the distance and captured some of them, and then you could see that the men on horses were wearing kilts. They were taking the Boer peasants prisoner.

After that came one called Boers Bringing in British Prisoners—Edison sure was fascinated by the Boer Wars—which was basically just a bunch of people walking through a field together, with some horses. The man at the back took off his cap and waved it, as if to signify victory.

“Exploitation,” Mr. Simmons said, after the last film was over and he asked Babette to get the lights. “We talked about exploitation, meaning to treat poorly or take advantage of, earlier, but there is a second definition, which is merely the act of making some area of land or water more profitable or productive or useful. There isn’t, in those cases, any wrongdoing or ill intent.

“People have been trying to exploit land and water the whole world over as long as humans have been roaming the planet.” He was pacing the aisles. “To raise more, better crops, for example. To find oil to fuel our cities. To provide seaside amusements and services on beaches much like our own. So Coney has exploited and also been exploited. And, as we all know, it is still happening now.”

He seemed distracted, unfocused, like he’d sort of forgotten what he had been planning on teaching. “Uh, Mr. Simmons,” Leo said. “Why bore us to death with the Boer War?”

“Africa,” Mr. Simmons said, “in the nineteenth century was the victim of an unabashed landgrab by the more wealthy, industrialized nations of Europe. France, Germany, Italy, and even Belgium carved up Africa arbitrarily. And the Boers, understandably, didn’t like it. It was their land. But then again, they—the Boers—were Dutch settlers. They’d just gotten there first.” He looked meaningfully at Leo, and Leo said, “Is this a call to arms, Mr. Simmons?”

“Something like that,” Mr. Simmons said. Then he sat and his desk and said, “You can all use the rest of the period to read or catch up. Whatever you want.”

Jane got her book out and pretended to read but was mostly looking over at Leo, who was doing a very good job of not making eye contact with her and who kept touching his seahorse, like the creature itself had an unscratchable itch.





All day she looked around for fliers announcing a meeting of the Dreamland Social Club—surely Babette couldn’t stand for things to stay the way they were for long—but none appeared. Jane half feared they never would again—that she had destroyed her mother’s legacy and that her moment as a mermaid would never come to pass.

When she found Cliff Claverack waiting by her locker near day’s end, she thought she might have to disappear into the girls’ room for a good cry. But when he saw her, he waved sort of timidly, so she decided to approach.

“I heard about what you did yesterday,” he said, and his voice actually sounded nice, normal. “Showing my gramps the horse.”

“Yeah, and?”

He stared at the floor, fidgeted. “And, I don’t know, it made my gramps happy.”

“Is this your way of saying thank you?” Jane asked.

“Don’t push your luck, Preemie.” He actually tousled her hair, like she was a child, and then he walked off, leaving her awash in relief. When Cliff Claverack made your day, it was obviously a pretty bad day.





Fueled by that interaction, she went down to the museum after school with her list and handed it over to the man at the desk. He’d looked bored by her mere presence, then taken aback when he said, “You have a Claverack horse?”

“I do.”

“Give me a minute, will you? Have a look around.”

In other words, buzz off for a second.

He picked up the phone, dialed a number.

Jane could hear his side of the conversation only in muffled tones as she strolled around the museum. She hadn’t been there since her first day of school, and that seemed somehow wrong; then again, she had practically been living in a Coney Island Museum the whole time. Still, when she came upon a large bell and saw that it was a bell that had been on a pier at Dreamland, she could not resist the urge to ring it, not with anything loud but with a few taps of her fingernails. Just enough to hear a tiny ding. She also couldn’t resist the urge to take out her keychain and see if the Bath key opened any of the museum’s bathhouse lockers. But it was entirely the wrong kind of key.

The guy came into the room just as she moved away from the lockers. “And you said you want to donate it, right? You don’t expect any payment?”

Jane nodded, then he said, “Back in a second.”