Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  They found a spot near the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway and joined in the celebration, blowing horns and laughing. Mr. Fischler tried to dance with his wife, but there was not enough space among the revelers for more than a shuffle. Magda watched for a moment, then slipped farther down Broadway with the crowd. This was, perhaps, the only night of the year when a young woman could walk down Broadway unaccompanied. She didn’t care what her father thought—Magda longed to be independent, and although at the moment she couldn’t even control the direction she was moving in, she had never felt as free as she did now, swept along on a tide of strangers.

  How delighted she was not to be at home, looking after the twins, her unexpected two-year-old brother and sister, while her father celebrated at the beer garden with his friends and her mother attended the watchnight service at church. Mrs. Heidekamp had kindly offered to let Henry and Rosie stay over at her apartment until Magda’s mother returned home from church.

  The movement of the crowd slowed as the doors of the church came into view, but the noise did not abate in the slightest as the music of the church bells rang out. Magda laughed with delight—no parents to watch her, no Mrs. Fischler to chaperone her, and a crowd of happy people as far as she could see. As the light shining from the church doors signaled that a new century had dawned, Magda turned to the woman next to her and without the least sense of awkwardness or self-consciousness the two women threw their arms around each other and embraced.

  “Happy New Year!” she said to the stranger.

  “And to you!” said the woman, and then she disappeared in a sea of overcoats.

  Alone on the cable car heading up Broadway, Magda thought about the 1900s. She knew that back at the watchnight service, her mother had prayed for an end to hunger and poverty, for cooperation among nations, for justice and kindness to triumph over hatred and evil. Everyone prayed for those things, and Magda believed that the century ahead could truly be one of peace for the world. But she also hoped the new century would bring her a new life and, although she did not know what she wanted that life to be, she whispered a prayer that she might be the one to guide her own path.

  Magda’s father thought she should go to work full-time and provide an income to help the family. She liked the idea of a job, and had worked as a shopgirl at a haberdashery on Avenue B for a few months last year, but Mrs. Hertzenberger pointed out that she could earn much more than Magda if Magda would only stay home and care for the twins. This had begun the great tug-of-war between her parents. Her father thought Magda should be out working and her mother wanted her at home to look after Henry and Rosie. Magda wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she knew she did not want to be the object of her parents’ disagreement, and she didn’t want them to decide her path in life. She wanted, she thought, things that were difficult for a woman to have in 1899—independence, first and foremost. Maybe 1900 would be different.

  As Magda walked the few blocks home from the cable car stop, she heard occasional shouts and the toots of horns from other revelers returning from Trinity Church, or from one of the many beer gardens in Kleindeutschland. Soon, the streets would be as quiet as usual at this early hour of a Monday morning—quieter, since New Year’s Day was a holiday. Tomorrow morning her mother would want her to help with the chores and her father would start in again about finding a job, and eventually a husband, but for a few more moments Magda could stand on the street alone, the mistress of her own destiny, as a new century stretched before her.

  Eugene Pinkney pulled at the collar of his shirt as he made his way east on Rector Street along the edge of Trinity Churchyard, toward Broadway. He had decided not to venture into these crowds in his preferred evening attire and instead wore the formal evening suit purchased for him by Mr. White for excursions to Broadway theaters and fine restaurants. But Gene, as he now called himself, was never completely at ease in a starched collar. People swarmed everywhere, even—he noticed as he passed by—hanging off the massive stone monument that marked the resting place of some founding father or other. He thought it might be Hamilton.

  Gene’s friends in the Bowery had asked why he wanted to come here. If he wanted crowds and noise and revelry, the Bowery resorts could provide that any night. One needn’t wait for the end of a century. The truth was, Gene didn’t know why he felt drawn here. While there were many places, diverse places, in New York where he felt at home, a crowd on Broadway in front of a church was not one of them. Perhaps that was why he had made the trek downtown; perhaps he felt it was a rare chance to see every person in New York as an equal, to walk in a crowd of thousands without anyone forming an opinion about him.

  He paused on the corner of Rectory and Broadway to buy a tin horn from a vendor. It seemed a silly thing to do—he could not possibly add any further noise to the cacophony around him. But he wanted to join in, wanted to feel a part of this crowd of people who were . . . not like him. Just inside the churchyard, he saw a group of a half dozen young men who had obviously been celebrating with the bottle for some time. If there was one thing Gene knew, it was how to talk to drunken men, though talking would clearly be difficult in the circumstances.

  Squeezing his way through the crowd, he approached the men and blew his tin horn into their midst as a greeting. The men—if you could call them men, for they couldn’t be much older than Gene and he was only seventeen—hooted their horns back at him in reply and welcomed him into their circle with the offer of a swig from a bottle and some considerable backslapping. One of them had almost white-blond hair onto which he had not rubbed the slightest hint of Macassar oil; consequently, it kept falling over his eyes. After another minute or so of tooting on their horns, the blond sidled up to Gene and shouted, “Are you from New York?”

  Gene nodded yes, without attempting a verbal response.

  “It’s almost midnight,” said the man, pulling out his pocket watch and dangling it an inch or two from Gene’s face, as if none of them could see the clock on the tower just above them. “What do we do next?”

  Gene smiled and just as the door of the church opened to let out the light of the new year, he motioned the men to make their way to the cable car. It took some fighting through the crowd to reach a car that was making its slow way up Broadway, but Gene enjoyed letting the men from the churchyard do all the work as he followed in their wake. When the car was a few blocks clear of the crowd, the blond turned to him and said, “Where are we going?”

  “A place I know,” said Gene with a smile. Even though midnight had passed, the celebrations at his usual haunts would be in full swing. His friends at the Bowery resorts might not recognize him in his formal evening wear—but that would be half the fun.

  As the cable car picked up speed, Gene smiled at the thought of how these out-of-towners would react to what they were about to see. A wind blowing off the East River hit the car as it crossed Canal Street. Gene pulled his overcoat tightly around himself. As he watched the men joke and laugh, he wondered what the 1900s would bring, and if the world would be a different place for the likes of Eugene Pinkney by the time that century ended and the next one began.

  V

  New York City, Upper West Side, 2010

  Robert slept sporadically that night—waking frequently and instinctively reaching to the other side of the bed to feel for Rebecca. Only there was no Rebecca, and every time his hand fell into that void the ache returned and he lay staring at the ceiling unable to get back to sleep.

  He hated the way he had acted, hated himself for pretending that just hating his behavior was enough. Robert knew there were plenty of men who were horrible and thoughtless and insensitive, men who hid their pasts and refused to be honest with their partners, and who didn’t care about any of that. He couldn’t imagine not caring. He ached about his own weaknesses every day. And then he ached about the fact that he just sat there aching instead of doing something about it like a real man.

  He final
ly got up around dawn and drank two cups of coffee that had no more effect on him than warm water. Rebecca was both present and absent, his heart was both full and empty, and the abyss of the future yawned in front of him. He spent most of the day staring out the window at the gray sky. He tried reading a book Rebecca had recommended, but he heard her voice with the turn of every page and looked up only to be reminded again that she was gone. He stared at her number on his phone for minutes on end, wondering if it was too soon to call. But what would he say? So he started another book—an advance copy of a new novel his agent had sent. He read the first page six times before giving up and going back to staring out the window.

  Robert slept no better that night, but the following morning he decided he had to do something. He couldn’t just sit there and read. Or maybe sitting and reading was exactly what he needed to do, exactly the way he should start the process of growing up so that he might be worthy of Rebecca and precisely the way to prepare to tell her the story he needed to tell. Maybe, before he could move forward, he needed to go back.

  An hour later, Robert stood in front of a stack of boxes he had not opened for the sixteen years since his mother moved to Florida during his freshman year at Columbia. The storage locker in which he kept them was another secret from Rebecca. No bills came to the apartment; he paid the monthly rent in cash and in person.

  He managed to fit the eight cardboard boxes in the trunk and back seat of a taxi, and after eight climbs up four flights of stairs hauling books in the New York steam heat Robert stood sweaty and panting in his study despite the cold February day outside. He cleared a bookcase of the many unread books sent to him by publishers hoping for an endorsement and began to decant the contents of the boxes onto his shelves. It took nearly an hour of sorting to get the books neatly arranged in the bookcase, each series standing together, just as they had in his childhood home.

  Robert felt oddly moved by the sight of those uniform rows of books. Certainly, he had known happiness many times in the years since he and his father had read those stories together, but even in his moments of greatest joy—the day Rebecca moved in, the day his book sold—reality intruded. Holding Rebecca’s hand as they stepped into the apartment, talking to his agent on the phone—he was happy at those moments, but also deeply aware of the responsibilities that came with that happiness. During all the afternoons that he lay on his bed reading, or secretly stayed up late in his closet with a book and a flashlight, or best of all, lounged on the back porch listening to his father’s voice narrating the adventures of the Hardy Boys or the Tremendous Trio, he had felt no such onus. That childlike, innocent, unfettered joy now peeked around the dark edges of his current situation as he ran his hand across the frayed bindings. He thought only of how his relationship with these books had begun, not how it had ended, and that memory allowed a ray of light to pierce his heart. But then he remembered there was a darkness behind that light, that he was no longer approaching these books as an innocent child, but as a man with everything to lose if he did not complete the journey those volumes mapped out for him.

  Robert decided to begin at what, to him, had always been the beginning—the book his father had handed him twenty-six years ago at Pop Pop’s house: Through the Air to the North Pole; or, The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch, the first installment in the Great Marvel series. The two teenage heroes were orphans—a handy condition for adventurers, as it prevents a meddlesome mother reminding you about bedtime just as you climb into a submarine or a space rocket. It took Roy Rockwood only a few pages to trap Jack and Mark on a runaway train and set the tenor of the book. After all, if their lives were not in serious danger at least once every few chapters, they couldn’t be on a real adventure.

  Robert had forgotten—or perhaps in his youthful zeal he had simply not realized—just how bad some of the writing was, but having endured a diet of serious literary fiction for the past few years, he reveled in the overblown prose. He had forgotten, too, the overt racism of some passages. Professor Henderson’s assistant, Washington, was an African American whose elaborately convoluted syntax was clearly meant to be comic. As a boy Robbie had found this old-fashioned and at times even quaint—just another part of the naiveté of the world that had produced these adventures. Now he could see Washington’s portrayal, and his use of words like massa, as blatantly offensive—a tool for indoctrinating young people into an insidious institutional racism. Robert skipped over parts of the Washington scenes as he read—censoring the text as he had never done as a child.

  But if Roy Rockwood’s attitude toward race showed little forward thinking, his fictional inventions and his vision of the future world were prophetic. The Great Marvel series, like the Tom Swift books and Alice Gold’s adventures, were essentially early works of science fiction. They may not have lived up to the standard set by H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, but Through the Air to the North Pole was published in 1906, two years before anyone actually reached the North Pole. Marveling at Rockwood’s ingenuity, Robert finished the book in a little over three hours.

  He was about to reach for the second of the Great Marvel books, Under the Ocean to the South Pole; or, The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder, but the portrayal in the first volume of Washington, along with the depiction of the “Esquimaux” as human-sacrificing savages, had soured the experience of reading the first book.

  He could almost hear Rebecca’s voice—How could you read trash like this? She wouldn’t say it in an accusatory or condescending tone, but in one of genuine curiosity, and behind that curiosity would be relief, because she had loved Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls maybe as much as he had loved the Great Marvel books. How could he read such trash? Why did he need to read such trash? That was exactly what he needed to tell her. Reading those books seemed the best way to begin to confront where they had led him all those years ago. He scanned the bookcase for his next adventure, trying to remember if any of the series were a bit more enlightened.

  On the bottom shelf he saw them—three trios of books featuring Dan Dawson, Alice Gold, and Frank Fairfax, respectively—plus the trilogy in which these young adventurers joined forces as the Tremendous Trio. These had been the favorites of three generations of men in his family, and only now did it occur to him that part of the reason might have been not just the quality of the writing, but that the authors, Dexter Cornwall, Buck Larson, and Neptune B. Smythe, avoided the sort of racism found in Roy Rockwood’s books. The cast of characters was hardly diverse—being all white and middle or upper class—but at least there were no black servants calling people massa or tribes of “savages” existing only to be shot at by the heroes.

  Robert opened the front cover of Storm from the Sea: A Daring Dan Dawson Adventure, and saw a familiar browned sheet of letterhead which had been folded and unfolded so many times it seemed about to fall into small, rectangular pieces. He smoothed it out on the desktop and read, letting the memories flood over him.

  Pickering Publishing

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York

  From the Desk of Dexter Cornwall

  April 22, 1911

  Dear Howard,

  Thank you so much for your letter. I am glad you have enjoyed reading about Dan Dawson’s adventures. You say that you don’t think you would be brave enough to do the things that Dan does, but I am not so sure. After all, you were brave enough to write a letter to me and I can tell you, not many six-year-old children do that. I think that if you encountered a situation like the ones Dan finds himself in, you would act in much the same way. Courage, after all, is not something we know we have until we are tested. Only when an act of courage is required of you will you know whether you are truly brave. I believe you are. As for those boys at school who call you names—bravery is not fighting with a bully. Bravery is being who you are and not caring what other people think. So, Howard, if you can be brave enough to ignore those boys now, you will be brave enough for anything the future holds. />
  Your Friend,

  Dexter

  Robert stared for a long minute at the elaborate loops and whorls of that century-old signature. It reminded him that Dexter Cornwall, and all the other authors whose books he had devoured as a child, were real people. He supposed his own readers felt like this when they came to a book signing. They sought the same personal connection that Pop Pop had pursued by writing a letter to his favorite author.

  Robert gently turned over the paper to read the words penciled on the back in his grandfather’s handwriting, words that still raised goose bumps on his skin: Carried with me in France, 1944–45.

  Robert remembered the first time he had seen those words. He and his father had been reading Dan Dawson and the Big Fire when the letter fell out from between the pages. Robbie had been impressed that his grandfather had received a personal letter from Dexter Cornwall, but at eleven he hadn’t understood the note on the back. So his father had told him a story. And as much as they had bonded over their shared love of the fictional stories in those series books, this true story brought them even closer. That had been the moment Robbie had realized the power of storytelling, the moment that set him on a path to being a novelist.

  “Your Pop Pop probably could have spent the war riding a desk,” Robbie’s father began. “He joined the army in 1926 and he was already thirty-five when America got into the war.”

  At eleven, Robbie had only the vaguest idea of the politics of World War II, but he understood the difference between working at a desk and carrying a gun into a battle.