Neverland
I married well. That's really the best way to describe it: Joseph is a doctor, and when I nearly died of pneumonia, the winter I turned twenty, he nursed me back to health. My father did die, which left the family in a terrible situation. David and Les both worked long hours to try and raise the money to keep our tenement and to pay Joseph for his troubles, but Joseph refused to take a dime of it.
Instead, he asked me to marry him. And of course I said yes. Joseph was only a few years older than I was, and he was handsome and charming, and fairly well off. We were married within a month, and Mother moved in with us, so that David and Les could be free of another mouth to feed.
I have never doubted that marrying Joseph was the right thing to do. He loves me, he's a good father to our children, and we are a happy family. He's intelligent and kind, everything my father—God rest his soul—would have wished for in my husband.
But he's not Jack.
We have two children, a son named Mayer and a daughter named Ruth. Mayer is nearly seven, and Ruthie has just turned five; they make our family complete, and caring for them is the highest calling I could imagine. So I feed them, clothe them, bandage every scraped knee, and send them off to school. In the evenings, sometimes, I read to them.
Mayer's favorite story is Peter Pan.
I hate Peter Pan, but he's my son, so I read it to him anyway. I suppose I can see the beauty in it, when I try; I can see why a young boy would love it. It's the story of a young boy, after all, one who never grew up. It's the story of boys who played all day, and fought off an evil tyrant, and it's the story of the girl that Peter eventually forgot.
I hate it because every time I read it, I remember when I lived in Neverland, and when Jack was my Peter Pan.
The first time I ever read the story, I found myself crying late at night.
Wendy was a silly young girl who met a sillier boy, and fell in love with him.
I was a silly young girl, and Jack was the most dashing, handsome, courageous boy I ever met. Our Neverland was in the streets of New York, and our Captain Hook was Joseph Pulitzer. And, as I was Wendy, I even had a John and Michael; David and Les were as captivated by Jack as Wendy's siblings were by Peter. And there were lost boys, hundreds of them; boys who never knew their parents, and who considered selling papers in poverty a playtime that never ended.
But Jack was Peter, and I was Wendy, and we loved each other in our own Neverland. Our love was perfect, and it made New York a magical place. It made it possible to defeat Pulitzer, it made us forget that there was any sort of evil we couldn't overcome.
But, like Wendy, I had to grow up; and like Peter, Jack never could.
September came all too soon, and my parents insisted that David and Les go back to school. The other lost boys began to grow up, whether they wanted to or not; they stopped selling papers, their eternal playtime ended at last, and they began to do honest work in factories and shops across the city. But not Jack.
It's not that the thought of real work frightened him, or that he couldn't do it. It was that the thought of growing up—leaving Neverland, marrying his Wendy, being responsible—that frightened him. Jack had never been anything but an overgrown boy, even at seventeen, and he didn't know how to become an adult.
And one morning, he was gone.
We all looked for him, of course, but he was gone. Probably to Santa Fe, at last; if New York was the Neverland we had together, then Santa Fe was the one he kept to himself. The one he could never share with me or the others; the one he dreamed of alone, the one he was certain would let him live without growing up.
Jack never said goodbye, and, like Wendy, I never heard from him again. Perhaps someday, when I'm an old woman, he will reappear—doubtlessly as young and energetic as I remember him—and try to whisk me off again. But it will be too late: I've married Joseph and have children of my own. I left Neverland for good.
But I loved Jack. I will always love Jack, and I'm sure Wendy always loved Peter. I'm sure the years she spent watching her window at night, praying for his shadow to appear against the curtains, were painful. I'm sure she cried at night sometimes, and cursed him for ever finding her much more so than for leaving her. I'm sure she dreamed of Neverland, and corresponded with the former lost boys, and they never once mentioned the adventures they'd shared. They were too long ago, things that happened in another world, to other people, in another lifetime.
But I'm sure Wendy cried for Peter, because I cry when I remember Jack.
David is a journalist now, and Les is in college. Racetrack works at a pub, Blink is on a Vaudeville circuit somewhere, and Mush has disappeared. He tried to stay in Neverland, too; he took over the lodging house when Kloppman was too old to continue his work. But Neverland was gone, and now Mush is, too, and another old man sits behind Kloppman's desk.
I hate the story of Peter Pan, because it is my story. I hate Peter, because I hate Jack; and I hate Wendy, for letting Peter go. I hate her, even though I know I could never have held on to Jack. I needed to grow up, and he needed Santa Fe.
He wasn't real, I sometimes think. He was a fairy tale that we all made up, and he vanished when we stopped telling each other stories about him.
But I suppose it doesn't matter. Peter Pan puts Mayer to sleep, so I dutifully read it to him at night. Then I fall asleep next to Joseph, who will never leave me for a dream, and know that I'm better off.
But I still cry when I think of Jack.