The Tenement of Dreams

The Tenement of Dreams, set in the New York City of 1915, is a novel with a mystery. Christopher Bole, a young and penniless musician, dreams of the day when his operas will make him famous. Until then, he plays piano in a nickelodeon theater or sits in his room in the yellow brick tenement downtown, composing arias and nursing a feverish passion - and hatred - for Rhoda Flanders, the tantalizingly beautiful deaf-mute who lives above him with her elderly husband. Linking the worlds of tenements and mansions, musicians and poets, is old and miserly Jessica Bantling, a withered rag doll of a woman who owns the seedy yellow tenement and personally collects the rents. Jessica's only love is the dollar bill, and her soul has a feast day when rents are due. The entire waltz of her life is money, and there can be no cutting in. Suddenly Jessica vanishes. To find her, a chain of events is set in place that changes the lives of the tenement-dwellers and brings tragedy to one other. Searching for her are an ex-policeman fanatical in his devotion to the business of proving guilt but devoid of imagination and charity, and a business retainer who catches sight of Rhoda Flanders and promptly forgets all about finding Jessica. He is as maddened by Rhoda's extraordinary beauty as her many other lovers, whom she changes as casually as she changes her gloves. Meanwhile, Jessica's blind brother Josiah, who despises his sister, huddles in his Gramercy Park mansion, fearing her disappearance is some deadly ruse. A servant must always be at his side to protect him in his blindness and to wind up his many music boxes and phonographs, and pump away at his player piano, music bringing the only semblance of cheer into the echoing rooms of the mansion. Reigning over the entire establishment is Lucas, Josiah's hugely obese and corrupt major-domo, who is secretly selling off the blind man's furnishings, piece by piece, and drinking up his wine cellar. "Mr. Meagher sees the absurdity at the heart of all tragedy," observed The Saturday Review, "and, like Father Time himself, abides his characters' failures and disappointments without laughter or scorn - using their own kindness and their own cruelty, rather than his own, to fill the book... Full of humor and a kind of glee in the face of life's absurdities, it tells of odd dwellings and still odder dwellers without itself becoming odd." No one interested in old New York will want to miss this book. Against a richly detailed background of trolleys and pony carts, the red "Buddha-like glow" of potbellied stoves and the "live blue loveliness" of gas jets in tenement hallways, the mystery of Jessica Bantling's disappearance deepens and the suspense grows ever tighter. As The New York Times Book Review summed it up, "The reader has no choice but to continue reading until the final snap of the fingers. This, when all is said and done, is true praise for entertainment."