Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  “Deduced what?” said Magda in frustration.

  “The identity of Gene’s friend and the chorus girl,” said Tom. “Unless I am mistaken you saw the girl again at the rooftop theater at Madison Square Garden, the same building where the story began.”

  “Correct,” said Gene. “On a night the horror of which I shall not soon forget.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Magda.

  “Perhaps you don’t read the papers,” said Tom. “And if that is the case, I take offense as a journalist.” He smiled at Magda as he said this. “But I doubt you can have missed this story. Gene’s friend was Stanford White and his chorus girl companion was Evelyn Nesbit.”

  “The Stanford White,” said Magda, “the one who was murdered?”

  “Murdered right in front of me,” said Gene, his voice shaking. “The most frightening experience of my life, and one that left me without friends, until I found you two.”

  “Is it true what they say in the papers?” said Magda.

  “Why, Magda,” said Tom in mock seriousness, “we journalists would never print anything but the truth.”

  “It’s not for me to say,” said Gene. He had read some of the horrible things the papers had printed about Mr. White, and he could certainly believe that the architect had behaved shamefully toward more than one underage girl. “He treated me well; he got me a job; and we planned to meet that night because I needed another one. Now, I’ve rambled on for much too long. I’m sure we should all be going.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Magda, I will meet you in front of the Flatiron Building tomorrow evening at six o’clock.”

  “What for?” said Magda, her heart leaping. Might she be able to entertain Gene with as much charm as Evelyn Nesbit had apparently shown?

  “To show you how to turn yourself into a man.”

  XVII

  New York City, Upper East Side, 2010

  Sherwood Whitmore lived in a penthouse apartment on East Eighty-Seventh Street, between Park and Lexington. To reach his building, Robert had walked across Central Park, skirting the bottom of the reservoir where Rebecca liked to run. The paths were slushy with melting snow, and the park was nearly empty of people. Rebecca had taken up running when they moved into the new apartment and loved to do laps on the cinder track that wound more than a mile and a half around the reservoir. On sunny mornings, Robert would walk with her to the South Gate House, where he would sit reading on a bench while she ran, passing him every fifteen minutes or so. He could always sense her approach, and always looked up in time to see her smile and wave, holding up two or three or four fingers to let him know how many more laps she had planned. They hadn’t done that for several months and, as he walked within sight of what had been his usual bench, Robert suddenly missed that routine with a pain that stabbed his chest like a cardiac needle. It shocked him, this physical reaction to the absence of a once ordinary event.

  By the time Robert stepped onto Fifth Avenue at Eighty-Fifth Street the pain had eased slightly, and he understood he did not miss sitting on a bench watching Rebecca run; he missed Rebecca herself. He felt tears welling up as he turned uptown. How could he have let his own fears, his own haunting past, interfere with the one relationship he truly cared about?

  Robert stopped on the corner of Fifth and Eighty-Sixth and tried to catch his breath, wiping a sleeve across his face. Should he give up this ridiculous quest, forget about the deadline, and call her, tell her everything right now? He pulled out his phone and stared at the dark screen. He had asked for a week, he thought. He should take it. He should try to finish what he had started and prepare himself for the story he must tell Rebecca. As he crossed Fifth Avenue, he promised that if she came back, he would never take her for granted again. Maybe he would even run with her.

  Now, Robert stepped from the lobby of marble and polished brass into the elevator that would take him to meet a retired investment banker obsessed with children’s series books. He liked meeting new people. It had become a way to cope over the years. New acquaintances never delved too deep. They expected superficial conversation, and Robert felt comfortable providing just that.

  The elevator opened into a wide reception room, with French doors leading onto a balcony at the far end. Every inch of wall space was lined with glass-fronted bookcases. Within each gleamed the plastic-covered dust jackets of hundreds, if not thousands, of volumes.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up,” said a man who sat in a Queen Anne chair at a wide oak library table. “I’m not as spry as when I started this collection. I’m Sherwood Whitmore.”

  Robert tore his eyes away from the bookcases and strode across the room to greet his host. He guessed that Sherwood was somewhere between eighty and a hundred years old—his body looked shrunken and only a few wisps of hair sprouted from his spotted scalp. He wore a pair of tailored trousers, a starched and ironed button-down shirt, and highly polished leather slippers. A pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, and a pen and a book of sudoku puzzles lay on the table in front of him. He held out a hand as Robert approached.

  “Robert Parrish,” said Robert. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

  “I always enjoy having a visitor,” said Sherwood, taking off his glasses. “Especially one who shares my peculiar passion.”

  “This is amazing,” said Robert, turning his attention to the rows and rows of books. Some titles he recognized, but others were completely new to him—series like Tommy Tiptop, Ralph of the Railroad, Boys of Pluck, and many others.

  “I am rather proud of them,” said Sherwood.

  “I didn’t know they were all issued in dust jackets,” said Robert. “May I?”

  “Please,” said Sherwood. “There is no point in having these things if we don’t ever have the pleasure of looking at them.”

  Robert opened the door to one of the cases and pulled out a pristine copy of Under the Ocean to the South Pole, one of the Great Marvel books. The bright, gaudy dust jacket showed the two heroes in the control room of Professor Henderson’s ship, the Submarine Wonder, being pitched off their feet by some unseen crisis.

  “Beautiful,” said Robert.

  “Not a first edition, unfortunately, but the earliest copy I’ve been able to find in a dust jacket.”

  “You must have been collecting for a long time,” said Robert, carefully returning the book to the shelf.

  “I bought my first Stratemeyer book in 1933,” said Sherwood. “The Hardy Boys in Footprints under the Window.”

  “I read my grandfather’s copy of that when I was nine,” said Robert.

  “I was eight,” said Sherwood, “and an immediate addict.”

  “If you bought it in 1933, it must have just been published.”

  “That’s right. It was the heyday for children’s series. I bought a new book every five weeks.”

  “Why every five weeks?” said Robert, sitting in a chair across from Sherwood.

  “I got an allowance of ten cents a week,” said Sherwood. “That meant in five weeks I could save up fifty cents, which was all it took. Can you imagine? Fifty cents for a hardcover book of twenty-five chapters with illustrations, all wrapped up in a colorful dust jacket.”

  “That must have been exciting,” said Robert. “To take your fifty cents to the bookstore and come home with Frank and Joe Hardy.”

  “We lived in New Jersey, but when I had saved up my fifty cents I would demand a trip to Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue. What a glorious bookstore, with its wrought iron railings and two-story main level. Mr. Brentano would greet us at the front door, and I would dash up to the mezzanine where they kept the children’s books, where I had to make that deliciously painful decision about which book to buy. Would I choose the X Bar X Boys, or Don Sturdy, or Roy Stover? I wasn’t sexist, either; I sometimes picked Nancy Drew or the Dana Girls. And of course, if there was a new Hardy Boys or To
m Swift I couldn’t resist. I would take my choice up to the counter, cradling it like a puppy and counting out my five dimes. Then the clerk would wrap the book in brown paper, and I would insist on holding it all the way home. I wouldn’t let myself peek inside that wrapper until I got back to my room. Then I would peel back the brown paper until I got just a glimpse of the dust jacket—maybe Bomba’s curly hair or Nancy’s white dress or Teddy Manly on a horse—but that first peek would satisfy me for a while. After all, I had to make that book last for five weeks.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to wait,” said Robert.

  “I never held out long,” said Sherwood. “I’d usually read the book through by the second or third day. I always took off the dust jacket when I read and replaced it before I shelved the book on a bookcase my father had built for me. I remember looking at that shelf at the end of the first year. I had bought eight books with my own money and received four more as Christmas and birthday gifts. Twelve books. That’s when I started to think of myself as a collector.”

  “How many do you have now?” said Robert.

  “Four thousand two hundred and seventy-three,” said Sherwood.

  “Wow,” said Robert. “All children’s series books?”

  “All Stratemeyer books and all published before World War II. You have to set some boundaries as a book collector.”

  “I had no idea he published that many titles,” said Robert. “I’d read it was several hundred, but four thousand?”

  “They’re not all unique titles,” said Sherwood. “I started out trying to find one copy of each title, then upgraded to getting each title in a dust jacket, then each in a first edition, and then I started in on later printings, changes in the dust jacket designs, and so on. It’s a funny thing about book collecting—no matter how tightly you define your collection, it keeps expanding.”

  “Do you still read them?” said Robert.

  “Mostly to my great-grandchildren,” said Sherwood, “though occasionally I pull one down if I’m feeling nostalgic.”

  “What do you read when you’re not feeling nostalgic?”

  “I’ve read your book,” said Sherwood, with a sly smile. He had not previously given any indication that he recognized the name Robert Parrish. “I try to keep up with contemporary fiction and I read a lot of biographies—especially political figures. And of course, the Times and the New Yorker.”

  “So you surround yourself with all these children’s books, but you read Looking Forward and the New York Times?”

  “By the time you’re my age, perhaps you’ll have learned that childhood is something you should never forget or leave behind, but that doesn’t mean you should dwell in it. There is a great chasm between a man who always has a childlike part of his spirit and one who is eternally childish.”

  “But you’ve devoted your life to children’s books,” said Robert.

  “I’ve devoted some of my spare time to preserving a piece of childhood culture. These books are worth collecting, but that doesn’t make them great literature. Food that is perfectly suitable for the mind of a child will not nourish that of a man. And I have done a few other things in my life—raise a family, build a business, and the war of course.”

  “You fought in World War II?” Robert asked.

  “US Army Air Corps,” said Sherwood. “I think it must have been all those flying stories—Ted Scott, Slim Tyler, the Sky Flyers. I enlisted as soon as I could. I flew transport missions and then flew a C-47 full of paratroopers over Normandy on D-Day.”

  “My grandfather fought in Alsace,” said Robert. “He carried a letter with him from Dexter Cornwall.”

  “Who’s that?” said Sherwood.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m researching three writers of children’s series books—only they didn’t write for Stratemeyer. They were all published by a company called Pickering Brothers. Dexter Cornwall, Buck Larson, and Neptune B. Smythe. I wondered if you knew anything about them—or about Pickering.”

  “Probably pseudonyms,” said Sherwood.

  “That’s what I thought, too. But you know the identities of a lot of the writers behind the Stratemeyer pseudonyms, right?”

  “Most,” said Sherwood, “but not all. What books did they write?”

  “Daring Dan Dawson, Alice Gold, Frank Fairfax, and the Tremendous Trio,” said Robert.

  “I vaguely remember the Tremendous Trio,” said Sherwood. “When I started collecting seriously in the 1950s, I didn’t even know about Stratemeyer. I just collected anything that looked like the sort of series books I had loved as a child. Eventually I focused on Stratemeyer and got rid of anything he didn’t produce. Everything else is long gone.”

  “But Stratemeyer wasn’t the only one publishing children’s series?”

  “Oh heavens, no—just the most successful and the one who carried on the longest. The family controlled the syndicate until 1987, when they sold it to Simon and Schuster. But there were scores of others, probably publishing hundreds of series. When did your Pickering Brothers books come out?”

  “The ones I have are from 1906 to 1911.”

  “Let’s see, around then outside of Stratemeyer you have adventure travel series like the Four Boys—I especially liked Four Boys in the Yellowstone. Then you have school series like Raymond Benson and Jack Lorimer, and pretty soon after that you get the Pony Rider Boys and the Auto Boys and the Border Boys and the Submarine Boys. By 1912 you have the Aeroplane Boys, the Inventor series, the Big Game series, the Boy Scout series.”

  “That’s a lot of books.”

  “Of course a lot of them came and went like summer flowers—now long forgotten even by collectors like me.”

  “Can I show you something?” said Robert, pulling a file folder from his messenger bag.

  “By all means,” said Sherwood.

  Robert laid the folder on top of the sudoku book and opened it as Sherwood put on his reading glasses. “This was in the back of one of my grandfather’s books. It’s the first few pages of a Tremendous Trio story, but I can’t find the rest of it. It’s like the book never existed.”

  Sherwood leaned over and read, carefully turning over each fragile page. When he finished, he sat back in his chair and looked at Robert over his glasses. “That’s some opening. But it’s possible the book never did exist,” he said. “Certainly these pages are not from a book.”

  “What do you mean?” said Robert.

  “Look at the page numbers. This is the first page of the story, but the page number is thirty-six. These are from a pulp magazine.”

  “What’s that?” said Robert.

  “Open up that case to the left of the fireplace and look on the bottom shelf.”

  Robert did as he was told, squatting down to examine a row of paper-covered magazines, each in a glassine envelope.

  “Bring a couple over here,” said Sherwood. Robert pulled out two of the magazines at random and took them to his host.

  “These aren’t really part of my collection, but my brother gave them to me, so they have sentimental value. When I was upstairs on the mezzanine of Brentano’s, my little brother was in the basement, where his fifty cents would buy five pulps. His favorites were Amazing Stories and Adventure. Each issue had five or six stories; some of them were serials that continued from month to month.”

  “So you think my Tremendous Trio story came from one of these magazines?”

  “Probably this Pickering fellow published pulps as well as books and he used them to promote his series.”

  “But if the books are hard to find, won’t the pulps be even harder?”

  “There are plenty of them out there,” said Sherwood. “But if you don’t know what title you’re looking for, it’s a needle in haystack.”

  “How did people find out who really wrote the Stratemeyer books?” said Robert.
“I mean, the actual authors behind the pseudonyms.”

  “Collectors and researchers have been working on Stratemeyer for a long time,” said Sherwood, “but the best source of information is the archive of the syndicate itself. It’s at the New York Public Library—hundreds of boxes of correspondence and manuscripts going all the way back to 1905. You might talk to the archivist there—woman by the name of Susan something. Afraid my memory’s not what it used to be. Susan . . . or Sarah. Dark hair, tall girl. Anyway, maybe she’s heard of your friend Pickering.”

  “Thanks,” said Robert. “I’ll do that. Shall I put those pulps back on the shelf for you?”

  “I need something to read to my great-grandson when he comes to visit this afternoon,” said Sherwood, “so you can leave them here.”

  “Does he like your collection?”

  “Loves it,” said Sherwood. “He’s ten, and it drives him crazy that I won’t let him take books home with him.”

  “What will happen to all these books when . . .”

  “When I die?” said Sherwood. “They’ll join the syndicate archives at the New York Public Library. They have a lot of the books in the archive, but there are some missing, and a lot of theirs are lacking the dust jackets. Finally there will be a complete collection of Stratemeyer titles in a library in this city. I’m sorry I can’t help you more with your project.”

  “You’ve been a great help,” said Robert. “Knowing this story is from a magazine and not a book—that’s fantastic.” He looked around the room once more, amazed by what surrounded him. “Your collection is magnificent.”

  “Thank you,” said Sherwood. “It’s nice to find someone who appreciates it. You must come back sometime and browse.”

  “I’d like that,” said Robert.

  “Now, believe it or not,” said Sherwood, lifting himself slowly from his chair, “I have a trainer coming in a few minutes, so I need to change into my exercise attire.”

  Robert smiled. “Of course,” he said. “You’ve been very kind. I hope we can meet again soon.”