Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  With nothing else to do, rather than waste his time watching comedy clips on YouTube and not laughing at them, which he had done a lot of over the past few months, Robert logged into a digital newspaper archive and began reading stories from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal published in 1906. Though the articles had no bylines, Robert liked to think Thomas De Peyster had written some of them. He chose, at random, the first week of October and was surprised to find several stories that seemed almost drawn from the pages of children’s adventure books like the Tremendous Trio.

  On October 2, the paper published an article about Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, an American who had won a long-distance balloon race beginning in Paris. He had traveled 415 miles, across the English Channel and much of the length of England, to land on the edge of the North Sea in Yorkshire.

  Two days later came an article about Colonel Max Fleischman and his wife, newlyweds from Cincinnati who had spent four months exploring the far north, prevented only by pack ice from arriving at King William Island, Canada. Their party included at least one other married couple, who seemed to enjoy hunting and dressing in leather and sheepskin. After four months in the Arctic, they had returned in order to watch an automobile race. Colonel Fleischman had brought a polar bear cub back with him as a pet.

  October 5 brought the tale of another couple exploring the icy north—Stephen Tasker and his “young bride,” who had traveled by dogsled farther north in Labrador than any “white man” ever had before. They had left some months ago and had been presumed dead until Tasker’s mother received a telegram attesting to their safety. When warned before the expedition that she could face death at every turn, Mrs. Tasker said only that she wished to accompany her husband.

  The next day, Louis Wagner, a Frenchman, won the third annual running of the Vanderbilt Cup, the Long Island automobile race that had brought the Fleischmans and their friends back from the Arctic. He finished the 297-mile race in just over 290 minutes. Over 250,000 New Yorkers traveled out from the city to line the twenty-seven-mile course and fill the grandstands at the finish line. Robert could imagine Tom Swift or the Motor Boys or even the Tremendous Trio competing in a race like this.

  All of these stories—of amateur exploration in the Arctic when man had not yet reached the North Pole, of balloon and car races when such competitions were new and novel—had taken place in the span of a single randomly chosen week in October 1906. Robert began to see not just the Tremendous Trio, but all the early twentieth-century adventure series, in a broader context. Yes, he had been delighted by these adventures as a boy, but at the time they had been written, real adventures were splashed across the front pages almost every day. Explorers would reach both the North and South Poles for the first time during the years that Dexter Cornwall and Buck Larson and Neptune B. Smythe were writing. Powered flight had begun just a few years earlier. The Explorers Club had been founded in 1904. When the Tremendous Trio books were published, radio and motion pictures were exciting new technologies.

  If a young married couple could take a dogsled across Labrador, reaching places no non-native had ever gone; if an American balloonist could land on the front page and a Frenchman driving at sixty miles an hour could draw a quarter of a million people to the side of a dusty road on Long Island—then why couldn’t a teenage boy pilot a submarine or fly an airplane; why couldn’t a circus acrobat save a group of children in a hurricane; why couldn’t the Tremendous Trio fly round the world or navigate over Niagara Falls or explore the darkest reaches of the Amazon?

  Those series books, which had seemed so outrageously fanciful when Robert first encountered them, suddenly seemed much more real, and the most realistic of them all were the Tremendous Trio books. In those three volumes, Dexter and Buck and Neptune seemed to take pains to avoid the outrageous, to present science and discovery as they might reasonably be, and yet, even within those strictures, they offered amazing adventures.

  Those articles about amateur Arctic exploration reminded Robert of Through the Air to the North Pole. It had been the book in which he had first found, as he got older, the clunky prose that characterized those series books beginning to wear thin. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hang out with his father instead of with his friends. On his fourteenth birthday his father had appeared in his room, waving Pop Pop’s copy of Through the Air to the North Pole.

  “How about a few chapters for old times’ sake,” he said.

  “It’s so awful, Dad,” said Robbie.

  “You didn’t used to think so.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t used to have friends and actual, you know, stuff to do.”

  “What stuff do you have to do on your birthday that doesn’t leave time for a chapter or two with your old man?”

  “I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons,” said Robbie. “And I’m already late.” And with that, he had shouldered past his father, knocking Through the Air to the North Pole from his hand onto the floor.

  That moment had, more than any other perhaps, led to everything that followed. Robert wanted to reach across time and shake his teenage self by the shoulders and tell him not to be such an ass. Spend twenty minutes with your father reading a book and you might be able to avoid everything. But that instinct, to reach out to his former self, made him wonder: Was he punishing himself for a crime committed by someone else? Was thirty-four-year-old Robert Parrish the same person as fourteen-year-old Robbie? Was it time he returned his mother’s phone calls and talked openly about the past and allowed himself to be happy?

  Robert thought how much his father would have enjoyed reading these old newspaper articles that seemed ripped from the pages of the Great Marvel series. He snapped off his computer at two a.m. and fell asleep wondering how he might incorporate into his modern retellings of the Tremendous Trio that ever-present sense of possibility that pervaded the world of 1906.

  XXVI

  Carnegie Hall,

  The Day Camille Saint-Saëns Played Beethoven

  After Dreamland, Magda was not surprised to discover that Tom had left town. She had not seen him since that day. She heard from him in mid-­November, when an envelope postmarked “Chicago” and addressed to Mary Stone arrived on her desk at Pickering Brothers. She recognized Tom’s handwriting, and inside found a ticket to a Sunday afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall with an unsigned note reading, I sent the other ticket to Gene. Magda liked the idea of seeing Gene, especially at a concert, where little conversation would be necessary. She missed him, and though she knew it might be hard for him to see her, she didn’t want all that had happened at Dreamland, and all of Gene’s unspoken secrets, to ruin their friendship. She had, as the weeks passed, become resigned to the truth of what Tom had told her, however cruelly—that Gene would never love her in the way a husband loves a wife. But, even with that knowledge hovering in the air between them, she thought she could bear to see him. Magda hoped they could find a way to be friends that wouldn’t feel awkward. The concert was in honor of Camille Saint-Saëns, the featured soloist that afternoon. Tom probably bought the tickets weeks ago, before Dreamland, when he pictured November as an altogether different month.

  Magda took the Sixth Avenue El up to Fifty-Eighth Street and walked around the corner to Carnegie Hall. Without Tom or Gene by her side, she felt out of place among the stunningly dressed men and women who streamed into the elegant auditorium. She had worn her finest dress, but she imagined many of the people who surrounded her had servants who dressed better than she did. This was Tom’s world, she thought. No matter how far she had come from Kleindeutschland, she could not imagine ever fitting in here.

  Magda’s seat was near the center of the first balcony, allowing her a perfect view not only of the stage but of the cream of New York sitting below and around her. She arrived almost a half hour early and sat quietly as the seats filled. Her heart raced every time she saw a gentleman’s shoes appear at the top of the balcony stairs. But
every time those shoes belonged to a gentleman who was not Gene. The lights dimmed and the orchestra tuned their instruments as Magda slumped into her seat, resigned to the fact that, just because she felt ready to see Gene and to pretend that everything was fine, didn’t mean he felt the same way. Then, as the first notes of music rang out in the crowded hall, she felt someone slip into the empty seat beside her.

  “Sorry I’m late,” whispered Gene.

  Magda felt a weight lift from her shoulders and relaxed into the music. At intermission, Gene excused himself to go to the gentlemen’s lounge, but Magda didn’t care. She could understand if he didn’t want to talk to her yet. She was just happy to have him sitting beside her in the dark as the music washed over them.

  But after the concert, as the crowds poured out onto Fifty-Seventh Street, they did talk, if only briefly.

  “Have you heard anything from Tom?” said Gene.

  “Just the ticket,” said Magda.

  “He wrote me a note. Not much—just to say he took a newspaper job in Chicago. And to say he was sorry.”

  “It was a horrible thing he did,” said Magda.

  “I just hate you had to find out that way,” said Gene. “I should have told you.”

  “You would have told me,” said Magda. “Eventually. He didn’t need to do that.”

  “Don’t stay angry with him forever,” said Gene. “It will only hurt you.”

  “Are you still angry with him?” said Magda.

  Gene smiled ruefully, but did not answer.

  “Suppose we talk about something else,” said Magda, as they emerged onto the sidewalk and into a cold wind.

  “I’d love to,” said Gene, “but I really should get going. I’ve got a job now, with United Electric. Crazy hours.” Gene leaned forward and gave Magda a light kiss on the cheek. He had never kissed her before. “We’ll get together again soon.” And with that he turned and disappeared in a sea of black coats. Magda stood for a moment, letting the crowd swirl around her like the waters of a violent stream, then allowed herself to be swept along toward the El station. As she watched the lights flash by the windows of the train, she felt a chink in the armor of her anger at Tom. He, after all, had orchestrated her reunion with Gene.

  On the first Saturday in December, Magda and Gene stood on the sidewalk outside Putnam’s on Twenty-Third Street. She had dropped him a note suggesting that they meet there. She knew Gene would want to see what stood on the shelves inside.

  “How did they turn out?” said Gene.

  “Beautifully,” said Magda. Her job dealt strictly with Mr. Lipscomb’s immediate needs and the handling of incoming and outgoing correspondence from his office, but in the case of these three books, she had sneaked upstairs and had long conversations with Max Stein, the man creating the artwork for the cloth covers and for the dust jackets. Max worked for a magazine based in the same building, and Mr. Lipscomb hired him on a contract basis whenever he needed an illustration. With no instructions from Mr. Lipscomb other than to read the books and paint the pictures, Max happily took guidance from Magda, assuming her instructions came from Lipscomb. The publisher had not been thrilled with some of the choices Max had made, but he was too parsimonious to ask the artist to paint new versions, so Magda had gotten her way and the results were, she thought, perfect.

  Magda had not seen the finished books until she had found them at Putnam’s a few days earlier. For the past two weeks she had stopped there every day after work, checking the shelves just in case. Now she and Gene went inside and made their way to the children’s section where a case of series books greeted them, most, they knew, published through the syndicate of Edward Stratemeyer. But sprinkled among the Great Marvel adventures and Rover Boys and other Stratemeyer series, they caught sight of the occasional Pickering title. Magda carefully scanned the display and pulled out three books, sparkling in their freshly printed dust jackets.

  “We did it,” said Gene softly, as Magda laid the books on a table. He picked up Alice Gold, Girl Inventor and smiled. “She looks just as I imagined.”

  Alice, to Mr. Lipscomb’s disgruntlement, was not depicted on the cover holding a parasol and wearing a flouncy white dress, but holding a wrench and clad in a pair of greasy blue coveralls. Her hair was pulled back and a tiny bead of sweat glistened on her forehead as she leaned over a collection of gears, rods, and other mysterious metal items.

  If Alice Gold looked somewhat like a boy on the jacket of her book, Dan Dawson looked ever so slightly like a girl on the jacket for Storm from the Sea. Magda had been inspired by the Florenz acrobats she had seen the previous year at Madison Square Garden, and especially by the little boy who dressed as a girl. While Mr. Lipscomb would not allow her to include this detail in the text of her book (for he did, in the end, read through the three typescripts she presented him), she did manage to tip a hat to the little Florenz boy in the illustration of Dan Dawson on the dust jacket. The picture showed him stepping onto a high trapeze, the colorful stripes of the big top behind him and the tiny figures of the amazed audience members far below. Dan’s hair was just a little longer than one might expect for a boy of his age, and his costume had an element that could easily be mistaken for a skirt. He had the soft, feminine features of a boy several years younger than himself, or of a girl, or, Magda thought as she looked proudly at the picture, of Gene.

  “Is that Tom’s face?” said Gene, pointing to the cover of Frank Fairfax and the Search for El Dorado.

  “I thought I did a good job of telling the artist what he looked like,” said Magda. “I just closed my eyes and remembered the summer.” Describing Tom’s face to Max Stein while remembering the happiest days of that summer had, Magda thought, been a step toward forgiving Tom. She still had many steps to go.

  “Would you like to get some coffee?” said Magda.

  “Magda,” said Gene, turning to her. “You know what Tom told you?”

  “It’s okay,” said Magda. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I just want you to understand,” said Gene. “It’s who I am. And I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you about that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care for you, it just means that I can’t . . .”

  “I know,” said Magda.

  “Why don’t we walk,” said Gene. “I like to stroll the Ladies’ Mile at Christmas to see all the window displays.”

  “Sounds lovely,” said Magda.

  “But first, I’m going to buy a copy of this book,” said Gene, holding up Alice Gold. “Do you have one yet?”

  “I bought one of each a few days ago.”

  “Well, give your Alice Gold to a friend. I want to give you one signed by the author. And I want you to sign your book for me.”

  “How literary,” said Magda.

  Gene took two copies of Alice Gold and one of Dan Dawson to the counter and joined the line for the cashier. The stores were crowded with Christmas shoppers, and he had to wait a few minutes. Magda looked back at the shelves. Putnam’s had only a few copies of each of the Pickering titles in stock. Mr. Lipscomb had been having a harder and harder time competing for shelf space in the big stores with all the Stratemeyer books.

  “Here you are,” said Gene, handing Magda a book wrapped in brown paper. “No peeking until Christmas.”

  “I’ll never be able to guess what it is.”

  “I had to borrow a pen from the cashier. Here, you can sign Dan Dawson for me.”

  Magda took the book from Gene and laid it on a display table, opening to the blank first page. She had never signed a book before—it seemed like the sort of thing that Mark Twain or H. G. Wells would do. That she was raising a pen to put her autograph in a book she had written suddenly made the act of creation much more real to her. This simple act validated her work in a deeper way than depositing the check from Pickering Brothers in her bank account ever could. Before she had even made a single
stroke she felt a deep sense of pride. She wrote, For Gene, who is more like Dan Dawson than he will ever know. Fondly, Magda. She had thought about putting with love, but she didn’t want Gene to feel uncomfortable.

  “I’m really an author now,” she said, handing the book to Gene.

  “You are,” he said.

  The Ladies’ Mile shopping district ran from roughly Twenty-Fourth Street to Fourteenth Street along Sixth, Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues. Here most of the major department stores and high-end specialty retailers had built their grand emporia in the late nineteenth century. Though some, like Macy’s and B. Altman, had now moved farther uptown, this was still the center of the city’s upscale retail business, and every store had a fancy window display designed to lure in Christmas shoppers. Magda and Gene strolled down Sixth Avenue, stopping to look at these windows. O’Neill Adams, which took up two blocks between Twenty-Second and Twentieth streets featured everything from jewelry to silk umbrellas, sewing machines, furniture, and lace curtains in their displays. Both Cammeyer and Franzin & Appenheim invited customers to visit Santa Claus while shopping for shoes. At Simpson Crawford Dry Goods, Gene insisted on going in, passing under the imposing granite columns and the Beaux Arts facade that glowered at its lesser neighbors.

  “Have you ever been in here?” said Gene.

  “Never,” said Magda, who wasn’t sure she could afford anything in the store.