Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  “So, here’s a funny story,” he said. He thought of the joy he had felt when reading to the children at the library, the life he had seen in their eyes. “But I’ll start with the ending of this one. You remember how you’re always saying you think you might want to have children and I’m always changing the subject?” The light turned green and they crossed into their future.

  It had been an exhausting day—at times wonderful, at times awkward, at times painful. One moment it felt like a first date and the next like Robert and Rebecca had been married for ten years. They had eaten bagels and talked about children and that had been lovely. He had told her more about his father and that had been tough. She had told him about places she had visited around the city while trying to “give Bradley some privacy”—from Grant’s Tomb in Morningside Heights to Castle Clinton in Battery Park. During Rebecca’s entire narrative Robert had wanted to throw his arms around her, but they stayed on opposite ends of the sofa, not quite ready for intimacy yet. Robert had told her about his adventures of the past week, about Sarah Thomas and the way he had discovered to keep his promise to his father. They had ordered delivery from a Turkish restaurant around the corner, and he had read her a few chapters of his revised version of The Tremendous Trio around the World. Then, with no emotional energy left for talking, they watched His Girl Friday on TCM. At times, they even laughed.

  Robert had told her if she would stay the night he would sleep on the sofa. They both thought it best for the time being.

  “Just for now,” said Rebecca. “I hope.”

  He gave her a chaste kiss good night and quietly closed the door to the bedroom, but instead of curling up in the living room, he turned on the light in his office. He wouldn’t write for long, he told himself, but today was a day for beginnings. He flicked on his computer and opened a new file. Starting a new book was both exciting and intimidating, but Robert was ready. He would begin work on the Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio soon, but tonight he wanted to start the novel about Magda and Tom and Gene. He wanted to imagine what had happened to Magda on the Slocum and why she and Gene and Tom had stopped writing together. He wanted to imagine the stories of the mysterious woman under the Childs menu and the picture of Magda dressed as a man. If he couldn’t find out what had happened to Tom and Gene, then he wanted to imagine that, too. He wanted to imagine how three young people had created the world of the Tremendous Trio, and why The Last Adventure had never been finished, and why an amusement park called Dreamland had seemed so important to them. He wanted to imagine it all.

  There were so many ways he could begin—with a baseball game or a day in Central Park; with the Flatiron Building or Niagara Falls; even with a young boy and his father sitting on the porch in Rockaway Beach, sharing a story. For now, though, he would begin with the ending.

  On those rare occasions when Magda thought of the past, she didn’t recall the flames and the screams and the rows of bodies; she came here—to these mementos gathered in an old shoebox, souvenirs not of tragedy but of happiness.

  XLI

  Gazing South, Across the Years

  After Rosie left, Magda shifted her body so that she looked not north toward the real Hell Gate, but toward another Hell Gate—the whirlpool ride at Dreamland that had given her the opportunity to hold on so tightly to Tom and Gene, the same ride where the fire that destroyed Dreamland had begun. Unlike her sister, she had no interest in dredging up memories of the Slocum, not even once a year. But Magda did allow herself this indulgence as she waited for Sarah; she did sit for a few minutes and remember that night at Coney Island.

  She closed her eyes and saw the lights of Dreamland as crisp and clear as though they were still spread out below her. She imagined a scene that had flitted into her girlish head all those years ago on the night before Dreamland, the night before her dream of a happy life with Gene ended.

  On a pier, jutting out over the black water from Dreamland, stood the largest ballroom in America. In her daydream, Magda felt the cool of the evening as Gene escorted her across the main courtyard. Seeing her shiver, he slipped an arm around her and pulled her close and in another moment, they stepped into the warmth of the ballroom where hundreds of couples spun around the floor to the tune of a waltz played by an orchestra on a balcony at the far end of the massive space. The dance floor was lined with decorative arches below and overlooked by balconies above. On the ceiling, a thousand tiny light bulbs glittered, shining off the slicked-back hair of the men as they glided their partners around the floor. The song ended, and Magda stepped into Gene’s arms as the band began their signature tune, “The Dreamland Waltz.”

  Gene did not dance like a scientist; he danced like an artist, like a man who had attended the swankiest clubs with men like Stanford White. With a grace Magda had always suspected lay beneath his guarded exterior, he swept her across the floor, weaving through the other couples as if they weren’t even there. Magda did her best to keep up, feeling she was on yet another thrill ride as they swirled around the floor and darted through openings in the crowd. She laughed with the delight of it all and Gene laughed back. In that moment, Magda felt so giddy with happiness that she thought she might faint. This was the dream she allowed herself once a year—not the nightmare that her sister remembered on this day, but the joy of what never happened.

  Gene and Tom would always be with her. They had given her the strength to do so much; they had given her the courage to be an independent woman and the wisdom to cherish every moment of life. Though Magda had gone home alone on that night so many years ago, in her daydream she stood flanked by her best friends, holding hands and watching the magical glow of Dreamland and all the rest of Coney Island from the vantage point of the sea as the ferry pulled away. They stood at the rail and as the sounds of music and shouts of glee and the splashing of Shoot the Chutes faded slowly into the night, they watched the unnatural beauty of those shining lights until the boat rounded Norton Point and Dreamland became nothing more than an aura in the east, wiping all trace of stars from the sky.

  The End

  Author’s Note

  Most of the historical events in this novel actually happened and are depicted as first reported at the time, including the arrival of the SS Hammonia in New York Harbor on October 29, 1886, the 1899 newsboys’ strike, the celebration of New Year’s Eve 1899, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the General Slocum disaster, the murder of Stanford White, Camille Saint-Saëns’s performance at Carnegie Hall, the flight of Wilbur Wright up the Hudson, the opening of the New York Public Library, the Dreamland fire and the death of Black Prince, the 1911 Ziegfeld Follies, the 1911 heat wave, the sinking of the Titanic, and the homemade American flag flying over Turckheim in 1945. The stories that Robert finds published during the first week of October 1906 all appeared in the New York papers that week. The 1906 Christmas window displays at Siegel’s showed a panorama of Coney Island, just as described in the text.

  While in some cases fictional dialogue has been attributed to them, the locations and actions of the following historical figures was, in broad terms, as depicted in the text: Grover Cleveland, John Singer Sargent, Edwin Booth, Enrico Caruso (whose spat with Olive Fremstad was as recorded here), Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Thaw, Nikola Tesla, Samuel Clemens, Mademoiselle de Tiers, the Florenz Troupe, Murray Hall, George M. Cohan, Tiny Tim the newsboy, Kid Blink (whose speech rendered by Tom is exactly as reported in the papers), Emma Stebbins, Maude Raymond, DeWolf Hopper, Eltinge, Cy Seymour (whose eleventh-­inning home run beat the Pirates on August 11, 1906), Marie Dressler, Camille Saint-Saëns, and William Howard Taft. I have, perhaps, been a bit more liberal with William Randolph Hearst, but I do not believe he, in the pages of this book, acts wholly out of character.

  Edward Stratemeyer and his syndicate remain one of the great success stories in American publishing. All the books and magazines mentioned in the text (except those published by the fictional Pickering Brot
hers and the novel Looking Forward ) are real.

  Many of the buildings and sites mentioned in the historical portions of the text can still be found in New York City. Among my favorites are the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Castle Garden (later the New York Aquarium and now Castle Clinton National Monument), the Freie Bibliothek (the city’s first free library and now the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library), the General Slocum memorial, the Astor Library (now the Public Theatre), Trinity Church, the Flatiron Building, the New Amsterdam Theatre (though the Roof Garden is long gone), Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue (no longer a bookstore but still there), Carnegie Hall, Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the St. Agnes and Muhlenberg Branches of New York Public Library, and, of course, the main branch of that library. You can still eat at Delmonico’s, though not at the midtown location.

  Other New York sites and institutions have vanished long ago, and we can only dream of the second Madison Square Garden with its Moorish tower and rooftop theater, St. Nicholas Church at Forty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Tesla’s lab at Wardenclyffe, Columbia Hall (a.k.a. Paresis Hall), Childs Restaurant (of which there were several in the city), the bookstores of Twenty-Third Street including Dutton’s and Putnam’s, the Polo Grounds, Tony Pastor’s vaudeville theater, the Jardin du Paris (atop the New York Theatre) at Broadway and Forty-Fourth Street, and the Iron Steamboat Company. North Brother Island is now a wildlife sanctuary and generally off-limits to visitors, but the ruins of its hospital buildings remain. The Dreamland amusement park was completely destroyed in the fire of 1911. It was never rebuilt.

  Both the surnames and given names of all the German characters in this novel are taken from the list of those lost in the Slocum disaster. May they rest in peace.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to scores, if not hundreds, of sources, but in particular to the New York newspapers archived by the Library of Congress on the website Chronicling America. These papers provided not only detailed firsthand accounts (and in some cases the only accounts) of events in New York City, but sometimes bits of the actual prose I used in my own descriptions. Details such as the little boy climbing the flagpole of the General Slocum, President Taft sneaking up the front stairs of the library, or the death of Black Prince rarely make it into the history books, but newspaper accounts are filled with such details and provide the novelist and historian alike a unique look into the past. Digitized materials from the New York Public Library and New-York Historical Society, including menus, photographs, maps, and city directories, also proved invaluable.

  I could not have created Gene without the help of George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. Other books that proved especially useful included A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester, New York, Year by Year: A Chronology of the Great Metropolis by Jeffrey A. Kroessler, and The Gilded Age in New York, 1870–1910 by Esther Crain. The excerpt from The Outlook magazine is reprinted verbatim.

  I grew up on the 1960s versions of the Hardy Boys books, and so I, like so many others, must thank Edward Stratemeyer for producing the books that first got me excited about reading. In researching this book, I read, or reread, many of the books mentioned in the text, particularly the Great Marvel series by Roy Rockwood (a.k.a. Howard Garis) and works by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

  Descriptions of Dreamland, its various attractions, and the fire that spelled its doom came from newspaper accounts and from Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008 by Robin Jaffee Frank, et al; the Heart of Coney Island website; and from a careful examination of postcards and photographs of Dreamland.

  Special thanks are due to Anna Worrall who believed in this novel from the beginning and shepherded it through many rewrites with patience and kindness. Thanks to Madeline Hopkins for her expert and careful editing, to Josh Gross for his meticulous copy editing, to Sean Thomas for his beautiful design, to all the rest of the team at Blackstone, to my early readers Janice Lovett and Stephanie Lovett, and to Jimmy Lovett, who offered judicious advice especially for the binding scene. The aforementioned Lovetts and Jordan Xu provide the love and support without which the life of a writer is impossible.

  To the many readers, book clubs, librarians, and booksellers who have supported my work over the years, and especially to the staff and volunteers of Bookmarks, thank you for waiting for this book. I hope you enjoy it.