Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  “I hope so, too,” said Sherwood.

  Before Robert even made it back to the park, he had the New York Public Library on the phone, trying to find an archivist named Susan or Sarah who was in charge of the Stratemeyer collection.

  XVIII

  New York City, When George M. Cohan was a Star

  “I did what Tom suggested,” said Gene as he and Magda walked west on Twenty-Third Street the next day. The summer had grown hot and even though evening had arrived, the air felt stifling, but Magda did not notice. She was alone with Gene; that was all that mattered. She knew she should be scandalized by what he had suggested when they met in front of the Flatiron Building, but she didn’t care. After all, who would know? Magda had no father to be outraged, no mother to be ashamed, no sister to be tainted by association, no brother to be roused to defend her virtue. As long as Mr. Lipscomb never found out—he would stand for no moral turpitude among his employees or his ghostwriters.

  “And what did Tom suggest?” shouted Magda, as the Sixth Avenue elevated train rumbled overhead, sending a cascade of ash down on them.

  “That I write a book for your employer using real science.”

  “You wrote a book since last Friday?”

  “Not a book,” said Gene, “but a proposal.”

  “Give a lady a hand,” said Magda, holding out her gloved hand as they mounted the steps leading up to the El platform. She lifted her skirts with one hand as Gene took the other. She was perfectly capable of climbing the stairs to the platform without assistance. She had, after all, been doing so for years. But she sighed inwardly as Gene took her hand. He seemed oblivious to the notion that holding her hand could be a sign not just of chivalry, but of affection. Just because she had felt herself falling for Gene almost as soon as they met didn’t mean he would reciprocate immediately. Still, they were on their way to his lodgings, a single woman and a single man. Whatever the official purpose of the visit, Gene must have some feelings for her to take such a risk.

  Five minutes later they were crammed into a crowded, airless train car, rattling downtown. Magda caught glimpses of domestic scenes as they raced past windows. She was glad her room did not look out onto the El, although she could hear the Ninth Avenue trains, just a block away, through her open window. They got off at Bleecker Street and walked the few blocks to Gene’s rooming house.

  “Will your landlady allow you to take a woman to your rooms?” said Magda teasingly.

  Gene laughed. “You might be surprised at what my landlady allows,” he said. “As far as she is concerned, my rooms are my own home and who I bring to them is my own business, as long as I pay my rent. It’s one of the reasons I chose her rooming house.”

  What happened in Gene’s rooms was both less intimate and more intimate than Magda had hoped. Certainly, she had never taken her clothes off in the home of a man before, nor had she expected that such an unveiling would be so uneventful.

  The rooms occupied part of the third floor of a four-story house, tucked between a butcher shop and a café in the middle of a block of Carmine Street. The staircase was poorly lit, but when Gene opened the door to his rooms for Magda she found a cheerful, clean, and neat sitting room, flooded with early evening light from the large window looking onto the street.

  “Some of the lodgers only have one room,” said Gene, “but I have a royal suite.”

  “How long have you been here?” said Magda, turning to take in the room. There was a settee under the window, two armchairs sitting in one corner, bracketing a small case full of books, and a wooden chair and table standing against the far wall, covered with neat stacks of papers and precisely sharpened pencils. Draperies in a floral pattern of blue and pink flanked the window, and a well-worn rug covered much of the floor.

  “I first moved here a couple of years after I started with Mr. Tesla,” said Gene, “nearly six years ago. His lab was not far from here, and the location worked for . . . other places I liked to visit. While I was working at Wardenclyffe I lived on Long Island, but lucky for me Mrs. Garner, the landlady, had these rooms available when I came back—even nicer than the ones I had before. And, as I said, she doesn’t ask questions.”

  The landlady had greeted Gene as he came in the street door—she seemed surprised to see him with a young woman, but to Magda had only said, “How lovely to see you,” before returning to her dusting.

  What Gene did not tell Magda was that his landlady had not been surprised to see Gene take a companion up to his rooms. He had done that on a regular basis for six years—though perhaps less often in recent years than when he first moved in. But in all those years, Gene had never escorted a woman into the house. Mrs. Garner had raised an eyebrow not because she was scandalized to see a man taking a woman up to his rooms, but because she was shocked to see Gene Pinkney in the company of a female.

  He had been busy since last night’s dinner, making stops at a tailor on Bleecker Street and a pharmacy on Houston before taking the train uptown to a theatrical supply company on Forty-Second Street. He walked back downtown, stopping at Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street before taking the El back downtown from Thirty-Third. Now a pile of parcels lay on his bed in the next room, waiting for Magda.

  In his years of haunting the nightspots of the Bowery, Gene had often come into contact with women dressed as men. He had met one such woman at a private event in 1901, shortly after the death of Murray Hall, a politician and bondsman who had been revealed as a woman only at the time of her death. Hall had lived with a wife, and had, for more than twenty years, drunk and played cards with the men of Tammany Hall, with whom she was, as one paper described it, a “hail-fellow-well-met.” Gene loved that Hall had successfully duped the powers of New York for so many years. When he happened to find himself in a conversation with a “man” of similar talents, known to him only as Terence, he asked how the deception was accomplished. Terence, for whom Hall had quickly become an idol, had given Gene a somewhat drunken lecture on the process, and Gene had thought no more about it until Magda’s account of her frustrating conversation with Mr. Lipscomb.

  Magda trembled as Gene opened the door to his bedroom. That single gesture was more forbidden than anything she had ever experienced with a man. The narrow bed below a tiny window seemed alive with potential. A wardrobe in the corner was the only other piece of furniture in the room. While the sitting room had felt homey and hospitable, this room had all the charm of a monastic cell.

  Gene seemed oblivious to the unspoken meaning of a man ushering a woman into his bedroom. Rather than gazing adoringly at her beauty as she stepped across the threshold, he eagerly began to tear the paper off one of the parcels on the bed.

  “Now,” he said, “this is the trickiest part, other than the hair.” He held out a large roll of bandaging. “After you . . . you undress, you’ll have to wind this around your . . . you know . . . your torso. It will . . . well, it will flatten out . . . things. And here are some pins to fasten it.”

  Magda had never heard Gene stumble over his words like this. His face had turned a deep red. If he wasn’t going to throw her down on the bed and rob her of her virtue, she thought, then at least she would have a little fun with his embarrassment. She took the bandaging from him and began to unroll it.

  “So, this gets wrapped around my breasts,” she said nonchalantly. “And will you help me out with that part?” She put the bandaging onto the bed and began to unbutton her shirtwaist.

  “No,” said Gene loudly, turning away from her. “No, I think . . . that is I believe . . . you should do that part on your own.”

  “Calm down,” said Magda playfully. “I’m not going to undress in front of you. And by the way, my breasts aren’t so terribly horrifying.”

  “It’s just that, as a gentleman . . .”

  “Yes, yes, you are a gentleman, Gene. I can tell by the way you invited me into your bedroom and asked me to undress. Now
tell me what else to put on besides this roll of gauze and then you can take your gentlemanly leave of me.”

  Magda wished he would take no such leave. She knew the rules of society, but by coming to Gene’s rooms, she had broken those already. She hadn’t really expected he would behave in an improper manner, but she had thought, with a woman about to undress in his bedroom, Gene would at least flirt a little. She wanted Mr. Lipscomb to act like a gentleman and he acted like an ass; she wanted Gene to act like a cad and he acted like a gentleman.

  “Here is a suit of clothes,” said Gene in a businesslike tone. He seemed to have regained some of his composure as he unwrapped another of the packages. “I chose double breasted because I thought it would do a better job of hiding . . .”

  “My double breasts?” said Magda.

  “Your figure,” said Gene. “I got the smallest one I could find, but we still may need to take in the trousers, and you’ll probably need pads in the shoulders.”

  “Because of my tiny waist and my womanly shoulders?” said Magda.

  “Well, yes, just because you’re . . . you know . . .”

  “A woman,” said Magda.

  “And in this package is a shirt and tie and a pair of socks, and these are your shoes—I think they’re small enough. I wasn’t sure about . . .”

  “Underthings?” said Magda.

  “Yes, well . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I can manage.” She leaned forward and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Now run along, or you might see something.”

  Wrapping herself in bandaging to make her breasts disappear was neither easy nor comfortable. By the third unsuccessful try, Magda began to wish she had a mother, or an ungentlemanly gentleman, to help her. She had never given much thought to the fact that her breasts were a bit smaller than those of many of the fashionable women of New York, but now she was thankful for that. Even so, the flesh had a way of squeezing out at the wrong place just when she thought she had herself properly wrapped. Magda finally managed to successfully bind herself by pulling the bandages so tightly they dug painfully into her flesh. Compared to this, she thought, a corset was the height of comfort. By the time she had put on the rest of the clothes—barring the tie, which she had no idea how to knot—she had managed to contrive to move a little less stiffly in the binding, but she still couldn’t take a deep breath, so tightly constricted was her rib cage.

  With the outfit nearly complete, she opened Gene’s wardrobe and found a mirror on the back of the door. Aside from her overly long trousers, from the neck down she looked like just the sort of person Mr. Lipscomb would want as a writer.

  “It’s a start,” said Gene, as he knelt in front of her and began marking the length of her trousers with a piece of chalk.

  “So, you’re an electrical genius and a tailor?” said Magda.

  “I can hem a pair of trousers,” said Gene. Years of adjusting clothes for his nights at Paresis Hall had made him adept at sewing. “How’s the waist?”

  “It’s a bit cinched in,” said Magda. “But only a bit. I guess my figure is not as ladylike as I thought.” This, of course, was Gene’s cue to say, Why, no, your figure is most ladylike, but instead he simply stood up and began adjusting her jacket.

  “Just be sure you keep the jacket buttoned, and no one will see your waist. Now, the hair,” he said. Magda wore her long hair piled atop her head in the style of a Gibson girl. “I’m afraid that’s where my expertise is lacking. But you’ll have a high collar in the back, and I’ve got you a silk scarf. It’s not quite the thing for a daytime suit, but it will have to do. See if you can get your hair pulled back tightly and hidden away under your collar as much as possible. Here’s some Macassar oil and a few combs—I wasn’t sure exactly what kind to get you, so you have some options. In the meantime, I’ll hem your other trousers.”

  “My other trousers?” said Magda.

  “I have a little surprise for you.”

  A half hour later Magda stood once again before the mirror, this time with Gene standing beside her. Her hair was slicked back with oil and, from the front, looked like that of a gentleman who had not quite mastered the art of personal grooming. She wore the “little surprise,” a full evening suit with a cutaway jacket and white bow tie, which Gene had knotted for her. Above her upper lip was a small mustache, fashioned by Gene with material from the theatrical supply company and attached with a pungent-smelling glue. A pair of similarly attached sideburns completed her ensemble.

  “You look very handsome,” said Gene, who also wore an evening suit.

  “Tom wanted me to take a picture. He loaned me his camera.” Gene disappeared into the bedroom and appeared a moment later with Tom’s Brownie camera. Magda had asked Tom about the camera when he arrived at Childs with it hanging around his neck.

  “I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to photography,” he had said, “but I enjoy it. It sometimes allows me to . . . to capture a moment.” Tom had sounded wistful and Magda had not pressed him further on the subject.

  Now, Gene posed Magda in front of the fireplace, where the light from the window illuminated her face.

  “If you take a picture of me,” said Magda, “then I get to take a picture of you.”

  “Fair enough,” said Gene, “but hold still.”

  After both pictures had been taken, Gene quickly returned the camera to his bedroom. “Now, we’d better be going,” he said, “or we’ll be late.”

  “Late for what?” said Magda.

  “We need to be sure this will work,” said Gene. “So, I’ve arranged a night on the town.”

  “How do you know I don’t have plans with some other gentleman?” said Magda.

  “Do you?” said Gene.

  “Where are we going?” said Magda.

  Twenty minutes later, they sat in the gentlemen’s smoking lounge at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street. Gene had hailed an electric taxicab on Sixth Avenue and they had been whisked uptown in style.

  “I’ll bet you understand how this thing works,” said Magda.

  “It’s very simple,” said Gene, and for the rest of the ride he had explained the principles that propelled them onto Broadway and into the recently renamed Times Square in words that Magda understood no better than if he had been speaking Cherokee. On a summer’s evening the smoking lounge was hot and stuffy, but none of the gentlemen gathered there gave Magda a second look. Shortly before eight thirty, she and Gene climbed up to the Aerial Gardens, a rooftop theater that was far more elaborate than the one Gene had so recently attended atop Madison Square Garden. Magda had never visited a Broadway theater, and to enter through a garden terrace ten stories above Forty-First Street into an elegant auditorium fairly took her breath away. They found their seats and settled in to watch a musical play called The Governor’s Son, in which a young man named George M. Cohan sang and danced his way through the evening.

  “Mr. White took me to see Cohan in Little Johnny Jones a couple of years ago,” Gene told Magda. “When he sang ‘Give My Regards to Broadway,’ and the audience went mad with delight, Mr. White told me, ‘Mark my words—that boy is going to be a star.’ ” Throughout the performance, and during the intermission when they stood in the garden sipping champagne and looking out over the traffic below, no one gave the slightest indication that they thought Magda was anything other than a man.

  After the play, they strolled over to Fifth Avenue and, to Magda’s delight and surprise, Gene pulled her under an awning at Forty-Fourth Street and into the lush interior of Delmonico’s restaurant. Never had she seen such elegant paneling, such meticulously carved ceilings, and such an endless array of silver, crystal, and fine china. A smiling maître d’ greeted them at the door.

  “Mr. Pinkney, so good to see you. Mr. Tesla is not with us this evening.”

  “I shall be dining with my friend.” Ge
ne hesitated for just a moment. Magda realized that, though they had perfectly disguised her, they had failed to give her a name.

  “Mr. Stone,” said Magda in as deep a voice as she could manage. “Marcus Stone of the Philadelphia Stones.”

  “Of course, Mr. Stone. Welcome to New York. A friend of Mr. Pinkney’s is a friend of Delmonico’s.”

  For years Magda had dreamed that a young man might one day take her to a Broadway musical and dinner at Delmonico’s. Now, as they sat down at a table in the far corner of the main dining room, she smiled at Gene. Surely he had not planned an evening as romantic as this simply to test her disguise. He must feel at least some of the affection for her that she felt for him. She trembled to imagine how the evening might end—a kiss goodnight . . . or more? In her wildest fantasy, Gene brought her blessed relief by unwrapping the awful binding that still restricted her breathing.

  As they ate, Gene told her about a few of the many times he had come here with Mr. White, often meeting Mr. Tesla. Gene spoke with genuine affection for the two men, one of whom was now dead and the other fallen on economic hard times.

  Gene told her, too, about his idea for a children’s series that would include what he called “real science.”

  “It’s about a girl inventor who lives here in New York,” he said.

  “Why a girl?” said Magda.

  “I did a round of the bookstores,” he said, “and all the series books I found had boys as heroes. But girls read, too, right? And I felt I really wanted to create a girl.”

  “Do you think you can write a girl character? I mean you’ve never been . . .”

  “If you can be a boy,” said Gene, “I don’t see why I can’t be a girl. And besides, I thought I might find a real live girl to help.” He winked at her and she melted a little more.

  After the waiter cleared away the dishes from their dessert of brandied pears, Magda leaned across the table.