The O'Briens by Peter Behrens Read Free Book Online Page B

and sisters, anyway. Just the salt and the moon and the ocean swell. And a kind of exhilaration flickering, a small flame inside the curious heat of himself.
    ~
    Each day on Coney Island began with Joe throwing himself into the ocean and ended with him sitting by the window in his hotel room with the Iron Pier and the dark sea before him, and the whisky.
    During the day he plunged into waves and trudged up and down the beaches, staring out to sea. His skin darkened and his teeth and eyes glowed. Whenever he thought of the challenges and risks facing him, he felt daunted and afraid to start. The seashore and the hotel room: at certain moments he told himself these might be all and everything he needed from the world. He didn’t really believe that, and most of the time he was perfectly aware they never could be, not for him, who wanted so much more — a wife and children, money and power in the world. But still, every day — every night — some shard of instinct, some whispering inner voice was inclined to stay out there forever. To hide. To freeze. To go no farther. To be content with the sea, the room, and silence.
    He spoke to no one except waiters serving meals and barmen selling whisky. At the end of the week a mass of cold rain struck the shore. With the change of light and atmosphere he felt fresh resolve. Carrying the empty whisky bottles in a sack, he settled his hotel bill, then dumped the sack in a trash barrel on Surf Avenue, caught the steamer back to 10 th Street, and rode the Penn Central ferry across to Hoboken, where he boarded a train for Chicago and the West.

VENICE BEACH, CALIFORNIA, 1912
    The Orphan

I seult had suffered from asthma in New Hampshire and was almost an invalid, but her health had improved when she had come out to California with her widowed mother, who was already ailing herself. In Pasadena Iseult, with her slender hips and full breasts, became almost beautiful — dark and glowing, her chestnut hair lightened by the sun. But after her mother died she thought of selling the Pasadena house and going to live by the seashore, where there were even fewer noxious weeds, where she could breathe cool ocean air.
    She had read about Venice, California, in The Examiner . Mr. Abbot Kinney, an impresario, had drained marshes south of Santa Monica by digging a network of canals, and he was building houses where people could live in the style of the Venetian Renaissance. He’d also built a concrete boardwalk and amusement pier and convinced the Pacific Electric Railway to open a new route from Hill Street Station all the way out to the new community. Seaside Venice had already acquired a raffish, bohemian reputation, all by itself out there on the rim of the world where the white fog — the marine layer — was often bitter and deep.
    On a bright winter Sunday six weeks after her mother’s death, Iseult rode the electric cars into Los Angeles, then out to Venice. Thousands of people had come for the day, and with them she wandered the oceanfront promenade past a barn that billed itself the world’s largest dancehall, and another that called itself the world’s largest roller-skating rink. On the pier a seafood restaurant was built to look like a ship. The vulgar, boisterous atmosphere was as far from Pasadena as she could imagine. She bought a hot dog and ate it while she watched grown men compete in a sandcastle-building contest.
    Strolling out onto Fraser’s Pier, past the Mystic Maze and the Panama Canal exhibit, she came to the Incubatorium. She had read about it in The Examiner : infants prematurely born were cared for there — and exhibited. A gaudy sign insisted
    ONCE SEEN NEVER FORGOTTEN
    while another declared
    ALL THE WORLD LOVES A BABY!
    Babies had been fascinating her lately. She was alone now; she was no one’s daughter and sick to death of her supposedly delicate health. And shewas not fooled by her own good manners and niceness, though