Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  On the walk home from the Historical Society, Robert detoured by an art supply store and bought a glue stick and a scrapbook that was the closest thing to Thomas De Peyster’s photo album he could find. He spent the rest of the evening printing out photographs of every item from the original album and pasting them into his new scrapbook. The facsimile of the Childs menu he attached only at the top, so he could lift it up to see the uncaptioned photograph of the mysterious woman. He even glued a manila envelope inside the back cover and filled it with the copies of the newspaper articles. In as close an imitation of Thomas De Peyster’s handwriting as he could manage, he copied out all the captions onto the pages of the modern scrapbook. Rebecca would have done a better job of this. She had taken a class in calligraphy last year.

  On his computer he enlarged the photographs to get a closer look at the faces. Only then did he see that the man captioned “Marcus Stone” was not a man, but a woman—the same woman in all those candid photographs, Magda Hertzenberger. But why had she dressed as a man? He loved questions like this. When he wrote, he began with questions. Not just prompts to the imagination, but questions he desperately wanted to answer. Recently, he hadn’t known what questions to ask, but now the questions exploded out of everything on his desk.

  The first issue of Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, for instance. Was there ever a second issue? And if not, why? Had something dramatic happened to bring the entire enterprise crashing to the ground? And if there was no second issue, was there any way he could keep his promise to his father to find out what had happened to the Tremendous Trio? Robert hadn’t found any books published by Pickering later than 1912. Maybe the first issue of Tales of Excitement had been Pickering’s final publication. But why?

  One item on his desk did not relate directly to his search for answers, but was more important to him than all the rest—a framed picture of Rebecca standing on Bow Bridge in Central Park. She wore a blue-and-yellow sundress and a perfect smile. It had been a Sunday afternoon in early summer. They had gone to a matinee at Lincoln Center Theater and decided to walk in the park afterward, gravitating, as always, to the Ramble. When they emerged onto the usually crowded bridge it had been empty, and Robert insisted that Rebecca pose for a picture. The late afternoon sun glimmered off the water behind her, reflecting the lush greenery and the taller buildings of the Upper West Side. Robert didn’t remember the play, but he remembered that instant. He was an unsuccessful novelist. She was a successful interior decorator. They had never been happier.

  During their walk in the Ramble, Rebecca had said to Robert, “What do you think about children?”

  “In general or belonging to us?” he said, suddenly panicked.

  “Belonging to us.”

  “The idea scares me to death,” said Robert.

  “Okay,” said Rebecca, laying a hand on his arm. “I just wondered.”

  “What do you think?” said Robert.

  “Maybe one day,” she said. “But only when it doesn’t scare you to death. Only when it scares you just a little bit.”

  But in the moment that he snapped that picture, Robert suddenly thought it might not be such a bad thing to make a child with this woman, that he might someday be able to reach the point of only being scared a little bit.

  Then Rebecca had run off the bridge and he had chased after her and they had laughed all the way home and made love in his apartment and eaten delivery in their bathrobes while watching North by Northwest on TNT. The next morning the phone rang and Robert’s novel sold and everything changed.

  He set the picture down, longing for Saturday morning, for the chance to finally share his stories—all his stories—with Rebecca. And maybe after that, he would have a new story to tell—a story of three writers and the book they never finished. He took out a sheet of paper. Although he composed at his computer, he liked to take notes and brainstorm with old-fashioned pencil and paper. At the top of the page he wrote: The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio. Below that he wrote the word Questions. And then he began to ask.

  The batteries on Robbie’s Walkman had given out a couple of hours after they had left Niagara Falls, but he had pretended it still worked, leaving the headphones on and hoping his father wouldn’t notice that the sound of the tape turning had stopped. Robbie had stared out the window at the blur of passing trees, never turning to even look at his father. When they finally arrived home he had gone straight to his room, feigning exhaustion. But he had heard the conversation between his parents through the thin walls.

  “He’s a teenager,” said his mother. “He likes to listen to music.”

  “His music gave out before we got to Syracuse,” said his father. “I’m afraid I’m losing him.” Robbie had never known until that moment that resentment and guilt could be so intermingled.

  The phone woke Robert the morning after his visit to the New-York Historical Society, perhaps because he had been up until nearly three taking notes and writing questions about the Tremendous Trio and its creators.

  “This is Edward at the New-York Historical Society. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  Robert glanced at the bedside clock and winced to see it was 10:35. Doing his best to sound caffeinated, he replied. “Not at all, thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”

  “I found the donation file for that scrapbook, and there was a note in it that said . . . let me read it to you. ‘If anyone shows an interest in this item, please contact the donor, Mrs. Sarah Thomas.’ And there’s a phone number.”

  Robert scrambled out of bed and dashed toward his study to get something to write with. “Can you give me the number?” he said.

  “No,” said Edward.

  “She’s dead,” said Robert, sinking into his desk chair. “I knew she would be dead.”

  “She’s not dead, it’s just that the note specifically said we are to notify her.”

  “Well, notify her,” cried Robert. “Let her know that I’d very much like to speak to her.”

  “I did,” said Edward. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with her, and she said to ask you if you can come to her apartment at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I can. Do you have the address?”

  Edward gave Robert an address on the Upper East Side, only a few blocks from where Sherwood Whitmore lived with his collection of children’s series books. As he dressed and swallowed a cup of coffee and two slices of toast, Robert wondered if New York was about to reveal another of its secrets.

  XXXIII

  New York City, On the Day of a Funeral

  “We’ve had a nice response to the Tremendous Trio,” said Mr. Lipscomb to Marcus Stone as they sat in his office on a January morning in 1912. He had dictated a letter to “Mr. Stone” a few days earlier asking for a meeting and obliging Magda to resurrect the Philadelphia writer. Lipscomb had dictated similar letters to Thomas De Peyster and Eugene Pinkney, but Magda knew those would go unanswered. She had sent three letters each to Gene and Tom over the past few months and received no response. She tried to believe that Tom’s had not been forwarded from his New York address to Florida and that Gene’s were waiting at his rooms on Carmine Street for his eventual return to the city. But, as the days and weeks and months had gone by, she had become more resigned to the possibility that she would never see or hear from either of them again. If the summer of 1911 had proved anything it was that, no matter how much everyone had forgiven everyone else, they could never really escape Dreamland. Yet Magda also found, as time passed, that she thought less and less about Tom’s betrayal and Gene’s unrequited love and remembered them as they had been for most of that summer of 1906—friends. And it was her friends that she missed, though their absence became easier to bear with each passing day.

  “When I say nice response,” said Lipscomb, “I mean in comparison with some of our other titles. It’s tough going up against Strate
meyer, which is why I wanted to try something new.”

  “And what does that have to do with me?” said Mr. Stone.

  “You’re the only one of the Trio authors who would even answer a letter,” said Lipscomb. “So you get the offer. I want to launch a monthly magazine for children. Nice color cover, cheap printing inside, lots of adventure stories and serials, and as many advertisements as I can sell—that’s where the money comes from.”

  Magda had seen such cheap magazines on the newsstands and in Putnam’s and Dutton’s—magazines like Argosy and Adventure that sold for ten cents an issue. She had actually bought a copy of one of these magazines a week ago—a publication called All-Story, in which she had read the intriguing opening chapter of the serial Under the Moons of Mars by a writer named Edgar Rice Burroughs. She could understand why Lipscomb would want to launch a similar venture. Most children could more easily spend ten cents than fifty, and once you got readers hooked on a serial, they would buy a new magazine every month.

  “So you’d like me to write something for this magazine?” said Mr. Stone.

  “I’d like you and your partners to write a Tremendous Trio serial. I even have a title for you. The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio.”

  “Does that mean you won’t want any more after this one?” said Mr. Stone.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mr. Lipscomb. “Haven’t you ever heard of Sherlock Holmes? He dies falling over a waterfall in 1893, ten years later he’s back, tells Watson he faked his death, and on he goes. But if we tell the readers this is the final adventure—well, that’s intriguing, isn’t it? And that much more exciting when we bring them back in a year or two.”

  “And what if my partners are not interested?”

  “Then write it yourself,” said Lipscomb. “I don’t care. I’ll put all three names on it either way. It’s easy money for you—short chapters, fifteen of them. Five dollars a chapter. I need the first one in two weeks.”

  “But in two weeks . . .” Magda had been about to say, you will be sailing for Europe, but she caught herself just in time, remembering she was not Mary Stone, personal secretary to Julius Lipscomb, who had booked his passage on the Olympic, but Marcus Stone, who knew nothing of the publisher’s movements.

  “In two weeks I am to be married,” said Mr. Stone. It was the first thing Magda could think of.

  “You can always send it sooner,” said Mr. Lipscomb. “Are we in agreement then?”

  “Can I let you know tomorrow?” said Mr. Stone.

  “No later than midday,” said Mr. Lipscomb. “If you don’t write the Tremendous Trio, I’ll find someone else to do it. Our first issue will be dated April, but I’ll need your first installment by the end of February. I shall be out of the country, but I’ll have my secretary send everything directly to the production office.”

  Even if the pain of Tom’s and Gene’s absences had eased, Magda hated the thought of writing a Tremendous Trio story by herself. However, the idea of a total stranger writing about the characters she and Tom and Gene had invented was even worse. She decided that Mr. Stone would accept the commission, which he did later that day by telegram. She would make one last effort to contact Tom and Gene, hoping they would be willing to have at least a little input into the serial—there wouldn’t be time for a lot of exchange of letters in only two weeks, but still, they might have ideas she could use in future installments.

  After work she put on her very best clothes and rode the Sixth Avenue El to Fifty-Eighth Street. She would present herself at the De Peyster home on Fifth Avenue, a house she had never been inside, but which Tom had pointed out one time when the trio were heading into Central Park. With luck, she could convince someone there to give her an address where Tom could receive a telegram.

  The house, though not as imposing as some of the palaces in nearby blocks, intimidated Magda with its wrought iron fence and its heavy stone portico. She stood on the doorstep for a full minute before she mustered the courage to lift the heavy knocker and strike it against the door three times. It took no more than a few seconds for the door to open and for Magda to find herself looking into the face of Tom De Peyster.

  “Magda,” said Tom soberly. “It’s so kind of you to come.”

  “There just wasn’t time to wire everyone,” said Tom, “but of course Gene saw the notice in the paper. He wired that he’s on the way up on the train from Philadelphia. I knew you would see it, too.”

  It had taken Magda only a few seconds, after being led into a vast reception room full of people dressed in black, to realize that Tom’s father had died. She had been so busy transforming into and out of Marcus Stone that she had not read the papers that day; otherwise she might have seen the obituary and the announcement that the funeral would take place that afternoon at four o’clock at St. Nicholas Church on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street. Magda had missed the funeral but arrived at the house during the exact time that the family had announced they would receive visitors.

  Magda did not admit to Tom that her arrival had been a matter of coincidence. It seemed in poor taste to bring up the Tremendous Trio, and anyway, before she had a chance to even consider doing so, Tom had rushed back to the door to welcome newly arriving guests, leaving her alone in a room full of people she didn’t know and who, she assumed, must be looking down on her. She, after all, was the one person not wearing black—thank goodness it wasn’t summer, or she might have shown up in white. Still, her deep-burgundy dress must have marked her as a misfit. She spent the next two hours creeping from room to room, listening to snippets of conversations without ever joining in. Tom remained too busy to pay her the least notice and Gene had not yet arrived. She felt awkward and miserable and yet she knew she had no right to be despondent—it wasn’t her father who had just died. The clock in the hall was just striking eight and Magda had narrowly escaped a face-to-face encounter with Mrs. De Peyster, when Gene finally appeared.

  Once Tom had greeted Gene with a firm handshake and ushered him into the largest of the several rooms in which the “receiving” was taking place, Magda sidled up to him.

  “Do you feel as out of place as I do?” she whispered.

  “Magda!” Gene said, grabbing her hand. “How good to see you. I was hoping you’d be here.”

  “Because you don’t know anyone else in the room?”

  “Actually,” whispered Gene, “do you see that man next to the silver punch bowl?”

  “The bowl that’s big enough to go bathing in?”

  “As it happens, I do know that gentleman. Though I wouldn’t describe him as gentle.”

  “You mean?” said Magda, blushing deeply.

  “Does that shock you?”

  “I am a bit surprised that someone so . . .”

  “A bank balance with many zeros does not dictate one’s desires,” said Gene. “It only means, as I learned years ago from Stanford White, that those thirsts are more easily slaked.”

  “I wrote you,” said Magda, “at Carmine Street. But you never wrote back.”

  “I don’t keep the rooms in New York anymore. I’m staying at the Astor tonight and in the morning I’m off to San Francisco.”

  “Is there a job there?” said Magda.

  “I’ll find out when I get there. I decided I’ve had enough of the East Coast. I thought I’d start over out West. Do me good to be as far as possible from you-know-who,” said Gene, nodding toward Tom.

  “So you’re moving. For good.”

  “That’s the plan,” said Gene.

  Magda digested this bit of information for a moment. Even though she hadn’t seen Gene in many months, she still believed he would always be a part of her life. Now he was moving across a continent.

  “Oh my god, is that Tom?” said Gene, grabbing Magda’s arm.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “He’s still greeting—”


  “No, not Tom. I mean, not the real Tom. That painting of the miserable-­looking little boy surrounded by silk and satin.” He pointed to a large canvas in a gold frame hanging above the fireplace. A grown woman and four girls sprawled across an expanse of divan, surrounding a boy dressed in black.

  “Oh my,” said Magda, stifling a giggle. “That is Tom.”

  “All those silky dresses,” said Gene. “Lucky boy.”

  “Only you would think that,” said Magda, giving Gene a good-­natured jab in the ribs with her elbow.

  “I beg you to admire any other work of art in the house, my literary friends,” said Tom from behind them as he slapped a hand on each of their shoulders. “Now, the wolves are retreating, the punch is running low, and Mother is starting to ask if the beautiful woman in the burgundy dress is available to marry her stubborn son. What say we adjourn upstairs where we can have a proper reunion?”

  Magda got the impression that Tom had had more than his fair share of punch, but she didn’t care. If she could have a few minutes alone with him and Gene, what did it matter if he was a bit tipsy? She and Gene followed Tom through a series of gradually narrowing hallways until they arrived at a small winding staircase.

  “Servants’ stairs,” said Tom. “No chance of Mother running into us here.” He took them up two flights and into a long, carpeted corridor with doors on either side. “Guest bedroom,” he said, opening the third door on the left. “One of many.” The room was small by the standards of this house, but still dwarfed any bedroom Magda had slept in. A fire burned in the fireplace and a bottle of brandy and three glasses stood on the mantel. Three upholstered armchairs sat in front of the fire.

  “Three chairs in a guest room?” said Gene.

  “And three glasses?” said Magda.

  “I was hoping you’d both come,” said Tom. “One last evening before . . .”

  “Before what?” said Magda.

  “Before Gene goes to San Francisco, if what he said in his telegram is true. Though if he does go, it will be against my better advice. And before I go to London.”