Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  Back in the “nursery,” as his bedroom, being designated for the youngest child, would always be called, Thomas, now wide awake, would turn to one of his sisters’ books, never quite satisfied with what he found within those pages.

  On his twelfth birthday, in 1894, Thomas’s mother threw him a party in a private room of Delmonico’s. The guests, all of them twelve-year-old boys, all born into privilege, and all looking as bored and uncomfortable as Thomas felt in his black woolen suit, encircled a massive table. With the possible exception of Easter morning at St. Nicholas Church, Thomas had never seen so large a gathering of boys his own age. He longed to talk with them, to wrestle with them, to chase them through the park or swim with them in the lake. Instead, he and his guests were forced to sit stiffly, nibbling at one unappetizing course after another.

  That night after he had opened a pile of, as he saw it, useless presents—a silver salver; a leather-bound set of books on economics; a small, dark painting by someone named Rembrandt with which he was supposed to be impressed—Thomas sat in the nursery, looking out the window into the walled back garden of the house. He wondered if any of his sisters had ever met someone like the boys he had once glimpsed from the carriage. He didn’t imagine so; their lives were as contained and regimented as his own. True, they promenaded in the park on Sundays and spent summers with relatives in Newport or Hyde Park, but they did not, to Thomas, seem any freer than he felt. He had just turned away from the window when his governess stepped through the door holding a small package.

  “They missed one,” she said. “A birthday gift from your cousin Zebulon.” She set the parcel on the table by the bed and retired from the room without further comment. Thomas had never heard of any cousin Zebulon, but he pulled the paper off the parcel and discovered the book that would change his life: Ragged Dick.

  By the light of his gas lamp, Thomas had read Ragged Dick, the first and best-selling of Horatio Alger’s many rags-to-riches stories in which poor boys rose to the middle class through hard work, honesty, and often some act of heroism. But to Thomas, who already dwelt well above the middle class to which Alger’s heroes aspired, this was not so much a book about achieving success as a window into the world he had wondered about for so long—a world of what Alger called in his preface, “the friendless and vagrant children who are now numbered by the thousands in New York and other cities.” While Alger may have seen these boys as friendless and vagrant, Thomas saw them as liberated. They lived on the streets and fraternized with one another free from governesses or nurses or sisters. And unlike the gods of Mount Olympus he studied with his tutor or the fantasy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales his sisters used to read to him, the world of Ragged Dick was real—as real as the boys he had seen on that day returning from Mr. Sargent’s studio—and only a short streetcar ride from the mansions of Fifth Avenue.

  From the moment he read the first scene, Thomas longed to dive into that world, to meet bootblacks and pickpockets, to sleep in a box full of straw, to go to a vaudeville show at Tony Pastor’s theater or drink a five-cent cup of coffee and eat a ten-cent beefsteak while wearing ragged clothes. To lonely and isolated Thomas De Peyster, it all sounded like a grand adventure.

  While the world he eventually found on the streets of lower Manhattan was not exactly what he had been led to expect by Horatio Alger, Thomas well remembered the excitement of the first night he successfully escaped Fifth Avenue.

  The plan had taken weeks to set into motion. He had found an old suit of his father’s, out of fashion and forgotten at the back of the wardrobe, and spent time each night, when he was presumed asleep by the rest of the household, ripping the trousers, fraying the coat, and rubbing dirt and grime into the fabric. He stole a knife from the kitchen and used it to scuff the leather of an old pair of shoes. He fashioned his entire look after the frontispiece of Ragged Dick, an illustration showing the hero in his days as a bootblack on the streets of New York.

  Once he completed the costume, except for Dick’s hat, for which Thomas could find no facsimile within the confines of the De Peyster home, he mussed his hair and dirtied his face with ashes from the fireplace. He spent several nights carefully dressing and admiring himself in the looking glass, each time trying to muster the courage to attempt an escape. In the end, leaving home in the dead of night had proved a simple matter. The doors and locks on the mansion were designed to keep people out, not in. Thomas only had to slip out the servants’ entrance and leave the door unlocked for his return. At five minutes past midnight on a crisp October night, he found himself standing in the cool air of Fifth Avenue. He had no idea whether the streetcars (or the Third Avenue El, two long blocks away) ran at this time of night, so when he saw a hansom cab heading downtown, he hailed it.

  The driver brought the horse to a stop, then burst out laughing. “Not usual for a bootblack to pay cab fare,” he said, raising his whip to spur the horse on.

  “I’ve got my fare,” shot back Thomas, pulling a dollar bill from his pocket.

  “And then some,” said the driver. “All right then, in you get. Where to, young gent?”

  Thomas wasn’t quite sure how to answer this question.

  “Where would you expect to find someone like me at this time of night?” he said.

  “The Bowery it is,” said the driver, and flicked his whip.

  Thomas thought he had found reality during years of late-night excursions into the bowels of New York, but now, as the train sped east, he realized he had only scratched the surface of human suffering. He looked again at the book on his lap and thought about what Mr. Hearst had said—“not enough drama.” Maybe he was right. Maybe what Thomas needed more than anything was to write a story filled with drama.

  IX

  New York City, Central Park, 2010

  By the time Robert was halfway home, the flurry had crescendoed into a full-fledged snowstorm. Taxis sloshed their way uptown and crosstown streets turned white. He pulled his knit hat down over his ears, turned left on Seventy-Seventh Street, and headed for the park. If walking a few blocks uptown had made him feel less depressed, then a long walk in the Ramble through the snow now blanketing Central Park would certainly be good for him. To live in the midst of millions of people, and yet to lose himself in a silent wood, carpeted in white, the sound of traffic (except for the occasional cab horn) no more than a muffled memory, was a delight he never tired of, yet he hadn’t been here in months. Within minutes of entering the park he was wandering aimlessly on the Ramble’s maze of footpaths, unable to see more than a few feet ahead of him through the densely falling snow.

  Robert and Rebecca had met nearby at the Bethesda Fountain four years ago. He had been sitting on one side of the fountain reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Rebecca had been on the other side, sketching Angel of the Waters, Emma Stebbins’s 1873 statue that towered overhead. It had been a perfect New York spring day, cool and clear, the blue sky mottled with clouds and the sun glowing through a mist of pale green leaves. When an unexpected shower drove them into the beautifully tiled shelter below the upper terrace, Rebecca and Robert had collided and she had dropped her sketchpad. Robert picked it up and looked at the unfinished pencil drawing of the angel before handing it back to her.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I’m not really an artist,” said Rebecca.

  “That’s okay,” said Robert, waving the book he had been reading. “I’m not really a writer. Not a published one, anyway.”

  “I just like to sketch. And I was thinking about using the angel in a logo for my business.”

  “What sort of business?” said Robert.

  “Interior design,” said Rebecca. “Designs by RGB. I’m RGB.”

  “Robert Parrish,” said Robert, holding out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, RGB.”

  “Rebecca,” she said, shaking his hand firmly. “So if you’re not a writer . . .”

 
; “I do write. Two hours every day no matter what. But since no one is buying what I write at the moment, I’m also a publicist at St. Martin’s Press. Not exactly glamorous, but I get to work in the Flatiron Building.”

  “My office is in Chelsea,” said Rebecca. “Not far from there.”

  The shower ended as suddenly as it had started and the crowd began to move out from under the terrace and into the sunlight that sparkled off the wet pavement.

  “I was planning to take a walk when I finished sketching,” said Rebecca.

  “I was planning to take a walk when I finished reading,” said Robert.

  So they took a long leisurely walk around the lake and through the Ramble. Robert had never met a girl in the park, though he supposed girl was not exactly the right word. Rebecca looked about his age and he would be thirty soon. He always marveled that people could meet total strangers at a bar or a club or a party and simply start chatting, yet this felt natural.

  They were well and truly lost in the Ramble when Rebecca said, “Since you’re a writer, why don’t you tell me a story? Tell me the story of the first time you came to Central Park.”

  And, without realizing the significance of the moment, Robert began his entire relationship with the most important person in his life with a lie. He knew if he told the true story of his first visit to Central Park it would lead to another story and another story and eventually to the one story he didn’t want to tell anyone. So he invented a story about visiting the park for the first time as a teenager—wandering away from a class trip to the Met and nearly missing the bus back to Rockaway Beach. He embellished it with details about following a girl he had a crush on and wandering as far south as the Alice in Wonderland statue. He added a little boy sailing a model boat on the Conservatory Water and a homeless man sleeping under Glade Arch and finished with a mad dash chasing the bus down Fifth Avenue.

  “Did it stop for you?” said Rebecca.

  “Lucky for me there was a red light at Eightieth Street,” said Robert. “I only had to bang on the door about a hundred times before the driver let me in.”

  Rebecca laughed, and when they stopped on Bow Bridge to watch the boaters gliding across the lake and Robert asked if she’d like to get a drink sometime, she said, “Yes.” Robert had long thought the most romantic thing in the world would be to kiss a girl on Bow Bridge. He didn’t do it that day, but it wouldn’t be long before he and Rebecca stood there again with their arms around each other.

  Robbie’s first visit to Central Park had taken place in December of 1989. His mother liked to spend a Saturday in the city every year at Christmastime. The three Parrishes would bundle up and take the subway from Rockaway Beach to Grand Central Station. From there, they walked to Fifth Avenue and headed uptown, as Robbie’s parents did their Christmas shopping. Then his mother always wanted to go to an art gallery or museum, which neither Robbie nor his father much cared for.

  The year Robbie turned thirteen, when he and his father were on about their tenth reading of the Tremendous Trio books, Mrs. Parrish insisted on the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “You enjoy the museum,” said Robbie’s father. “Robbie and I are going to take a walk.”

  “We are?” said Robbie.

  “Sure,” said his father. When they had stowed all their packages in the cloakroom at the museum, Robbie and his father stepped out into the crisp winter air. “Let’s see if we can find Alice Gold’s house,” his father said.

  “But how do you know where she lives?” said Robbie.

  “She says so right in the first chapter of her first book. Remember—she’s in the park with the bicyclist and she tells him she lives at 922 Fifth Avenue.”

  “Right,” said Robbie.

  “That’s just a few blocks from here,” said his father. They walked down Fifth Avenue to Seventy-Second Street, but although they found a nondescript apartment building at 923, they could find no number 922.

  “Well, this is her neighborhood, anyway,” said his father.

  “So she walked from here to the bridge in the park?” said Robbie.

  “Right,” said his father. “We can do that, at least.”

  They entered the park at Seventy-Second Street and strolled past the Bethesda Terrace and onto the Bow Bridge. “This is the spot,” said his father. “The place where the world first met Alice Gold.”

  “Yeah,” said Robbie, “and where she almost got run down by that bicycle.”

  “You know,” said his father, “I’ll bet we could find a lot of the places in those books. It could be fun—finding where Alice Gold and the others had their adventures.”

  And that was how it had started—an innocent suggestion from his father for a way they could spend more time together. It seemed perfectly harmless.

  Now, as he stepped out of the Ramble and onto Bow Bridge, Robert’s previous visits to that spot, with his father and with Rebecca, swirled in his mind like the snow that fell around him. It had been years since he had allowed himself to think of that day with his father, but he thought often about his first encounter with Rebecca.

  The memory of that spring day when he and Rebecca had barely been into their thirties, far enough into adulthood to tremble with the excitement of its promise, but not so deeply mired in it as to fear its uncertainty, seemed now like an old black-and-white photograph—crisp and clear yet recording something wholly unattainable. But Robert still believed they belonged together, just as he had believed it when he said goodbye to her that day. Somehow, he would slog through the mess of his past and win Rebecca back. But standing in the colorless, snow-covered park, he wished for even a sliver of the innocence of that golden day.

  When Robert arrived home, darkness had descended and the headlights of rush hour glowed in the still-falling snow. Robert thought again about phoning Rebecca, telling her that he loved her, that the memory of their first meeting still gave him goose bumps. He could promise to give up writing (or, more accurately, give up not writing) and get a job doing . . . anything—bagging groceries at Zabar’s if it came to that. But he didn’t. He simply couldn’t muster the courage. Instead, he took out his copy of Alice Gold, Girl Inventor by Buck Larson. He made himself a mug of instant hot cocoa and slipped into a cozy chair to read by the light of a single lamp. The snow fell silently through the haze of the streetlights. He would find out everything he could about Buck Larson and the others tomorrow; he would search for The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio tomorrow; he might even call Rebecca tomorrow. He knew he was hiding from the world, hiding from the truths he must eventually face. But he didn’t care. He just wanted to read.

  CHAPTER 1

  Alice Saves the Day

  Alice Gold stood on the curved surface of Bow Bridge in Central Park in her hometown of New York City. She knew that any minute her governess would come around the corner, angry that Alice had slipped away, but Alice didn’t care. She had an idea for a new invention and she needed to watch the way the boats moved through the water beneath the bridge. She and her governess had been taking a walk down Fifth Avenue when Alice had run away while Miss Gander stopped to speak to a gentleman admirer on a street corner. By the time Miss Gander noticed Alice was missing, the twelve-year-old was halfway to the lake.

  Alice loved nothing better than inventing. She read in magazines about the great inventor Thomas Edison and dreamed of one day having her own workshop as big and bustling as his. In the meantime, Alice had to satisfy herself by plying her trade as an inventor within the confines of the family mansion. Alice had already invented several improvements to devices around the house, such as the coffee percolator or the flat iron—although she had not been able to convince either the cook or the laundress to let her try out her ideas, so they remained only sketches in her workbook.

  Today, she was working on an improved version of the house’s flush toilets (which the upstairs maid insisted on call
ing water closets). She needed to understand how water flowed past a moving object, and the best examples she could think of nearby were the boats on the lake in Central Park.

  Alice leaned over the edge of the rail, her toes just touching the bridge, watching one boat after another slipping beneath her. She became so lost in her thoughts that she almost didn’t notice the cry from the bicyclist.

  “Look out! Look out! I can’t stop!”

  Alice looked up to see a young man on a roadster bicycle heading straight for her. The bicycle careened onto the bridge at a frightful speed, and the young driver, who appeared to have lost both his hat and his composure, steered it away from Alice just in time to prevent a collision. At the far end of the bridge stood a group of young schoolchildren, and Alice felt certain that many of them would be injured as the bicyclist sped toward them.

  “Turn to the left,” she shouted, seeing one way the rider could save the children and himself, if not his dignity.

  “Now, turn! Turn!”

  The young man did as Alice instructed and just missed colliding with several of the children. The bicycle bumped down a short embankment and flung the rider into the lake, where he landed with a splash. As Alice dashed to the edge of the lake, she heard several boaters laughing. The young man stood in water up to his knees and was soaked to the skin, but appeared unhurt.

  “Thanks!” he said cheerfully to Alice.

  “I thought you’d rather land in the water than on the footpath or on the stones,” said Alice.