Coney Island, that summer safety valve for the urban masses, that wild playground for grownups, where inhibitions are left behind and raw humanity always rises to the surface….
— FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL PAGE, MONDAY, JULY 16, 1900
THE YOUNG COUPLE DESCENDED THE HIGH TRAIN platform and joined the droves moving down Surf Avenue and then toward the boardwalk, looking like any other couple, he in his soft brown suit and straw hat and she in white shirtwaist and a long navy skirt. The only detail that set them apart from the other shrieking, sun-touched pleasure seekers was her short hair, but one would hardly notice it, tucked under the matching boater she wore, which partially obscured her face. She kept a few steps behind him until they arrived on the boardwalk, and then he reached back and circled her waist in his arms.
“I’ve missed you,” Diana whispered to Henry, biting her bottom lip because she meant it so much. Seeing him was sweeter now, she couldn’t help but feel, after their unjust separation. “I can’t stand being apart.”
“It’s unconscionable,” he replied dryly. Then he laughed and gripped her under the shoulders, lifting and swinging her around him so that her feet flew in a circle above the ground. His slender lips twisted up in a smile. “I think I’m losing my mind,” he added, almost shouting now. “I miss you so much!” But no one on Coney Island cared enough to listen to another pair of sweethearts, driven to foolish excess by their love, and any self-incrimination was drowned out by the squealing and savage laughter, by the whir of the carousel and the crash of waves in the distance. The air was warm, despite the salty breeze, and it didn’t take long for Henry to remove his coat and for the top buttons of his shirt to come undone. They were a long way from the parlors of Manhattan.
The afternoon was young, and for a while they were giddy. They rode the Steeplechase — Henry holding her securely in front of him as the mechanical horses lurched forward — and took in low entertainments. Diana had been all over the country by now, but still her stomach fluttered and her eyes popped at what she encountered there. They saw moving pictures and a bearded lady and a tattooed man and a dwarf and a giant, and afterward they rested under a striped awning and drank beer and ate fried clams. They looked at each other with happy, sun-washed eyes and soaked each other in over happy silences.
“I’d like to do this every day,” Henry said after a while.
Women in flouncing bathing suits revealed naked calves as though it were all very regular, taking in the catcalls and lazy, appreciative smiles of gentlemen with handlebar mustaches, not a one of them appearing scandalized. Diana reached over and let her fingertips graze Henry’s jaw, which had always been for her a favorite part of him. Since they were last together he’d shaved, and the skin was smooth as girl’s now, which contradicted the taut pensiveness in his brow.
“But why shouldn’t we?” she replied, affecting lightness.
“Because you have the strictest mother in all New York…,” Henry began, lifting his bottle of beer to clink it against Diana’s.
“…to whom I pay absolutely no attention…,” interjected his paramour, giggling as she brought her bottle up to touch his, before taking a long sip.
“…and I am married to the most fearsomely controlling socialite this town has ever seen.”
“Oh,” Diana replied insouciantly. “Her.”
“Yes, her. God, why didn’t we elope when we had the chance?” Henry’s voice was dark, although the blinding seaside light struck him with such loving force that his skin appeared all golden, and Diana could almost see through the thin weave of his white collared shirt. He was leaning back in his folding wooden chair, ankle rested against knee, and he would have appeared, to any casual observer, like a man in a perfect state of repose. But Diana had been at his side a great many hours by now, and she heard the worry in his tone. “We should never have let either of those harpies see us. We should never have come back to New York.”
“That’s just what Elizabeth says,” she remarked, almost as an afterthought, as she gazed out to sea. “She says it’s no place for us.”
The wooden folding chair made a noise against the weather-beaten boards as Henry pushed it back. “You told Elizabeth about us?”
“Of course — she’s my sister!” Diana laughed and put her hand, gently, on Henry’s shoulder. “Anyway, don’t make that face, she approves.”
“She does?” Henry shook his head in bemusement. He paused, considering. “What do you suppose she meant, ‘no place for us’?”
“New York, Manhattan, parlors and ballrooms, racetracks, Long Island estates…,” Diana sighed, and shrugged happily, pausing to look out at all the merry passers-by. “She says we’ll never be allowed to be together here,” she added, and though she intended this explanation lightly, she heard her voice become low and portentous against her will. “That to be happy, we must leave.”
Henry stared at her intently and brought his trousered ankle back to his opposite knee. He removed a cigarette from his shirt pocket and placed it between his lips, only looking away from her to strike a match. He shook it out and dropped it between the boards, and as he exhaled he met Diana’s eyes again.
“Let’s go,” he said. The slow, summertime manner was gone, and she stared as his throat worked. Meanwhile the rest of him remained still and poised. Diana reached over and took a cigarette from his shirt pocket for herself. They held each other’s gaze as he leaned across the small round table and lit it for her.
“Go where?” she replied in time.
His black eyes ranged to the waves, the activity on the sand, and back to her. “Where else do Americans go when they are sick of their own country? Paris.”
“Paris?” Diana inhaled and exhaled quickly. Smoking reminded her of the silver streaking rain in Havana. Since running away she had become a more natural smoker, and she found she was glad of the habit now, for her heart was beating fast and the tobacco calmed her. She didn’t know quite why his suggestion made her nervous; chasing after him all by herself had come to her so naturally. But she’d left, that time, with the hard knot in her belly of having committed a terrible act. She had been seeking something quite specific. What Henry suggested would mean giving up everything she had known for a place she had never seen, and a future she could not begin to picture. “But what would we live on?”
“I have a little money of my own, money my mother left me….” Henry exhaled a cloud of smoke that briefly blurred his fine, tanned features, and then flicked the rest of his cigarette away. “I can’t stand pretending, I can’t stand playing children’s games with Penelope. I can’t stand thinking about you all the time and not being able to have you. Please, let’s go; the rest will fall into place.”
Diana closed her eyes and let her assumptions about the rest of her life, and all the days that would fill it, slip away. She nodded to herself, as though to summon courage, and then she felt across the wooden table for Henry’s hand.
“You want to go to Paris with me?”
Both his hands covered hers. “More than I’ve ever wanted anything. I’d go tonight, if you said yes.”
“Then yes. Let’s go tonight.”
A slightly nervous practicality now entered Henry’s voice: “The Cunard line transatlantic sails on Tuesdays. So we can’t actually go until tomorrow.”
When she opened her eyes, the rays of sunlight were too white, too extreme to see anything for several seconds, but she smiled through it, and soon enough Henry’s face came into focus. For a long time neither said anything, while the blood pumped in and out of their chests at wild speeds. The afternoon had begun to fade by the time they left the little wooden table and walked back toward the train, moving more slowly than they had before but with greater purpose. This time they didn’t bother finding seats on opposite ends of the car, and Henry extended his arm over her shoulder when they sat down beside each other. As the train lurched into motion, carrying them back toward their homes, where they would pack a few things and say good-bye to the people that mattered, Diana glanced out the window at the Ferris wheel rising like a full moon above the park. The rest of her life lay out below her, as though she were staring at it from an extreme height, from one of those trembling cages that the Ferris wheel brought up and around. The idea of everything that was yet to be made her feel dizzy, and alive, and terrified, and she was glad Henry was coming with her, wherever it was she was going.