Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  Now she knew him well. An English immigrant, he rarely revealed anything about his personal life in their professional interactions, but she had gradually pieced together his story. Spending most of his early years on the streets of East London, he had escaped first into the pages of discarded copies of Samuel Beeton’s The Boy’s Own Magazine, with its tales of manly adventures, and then, as a young man, to New York, where he worked his way up through the ranks of the publishing industry in a manner inspired by the tales of Horatio Alger, eventually founding his own company. Though he would don a formal suit in order to rub elbows with New York’s elite at Vanderbilt parties or the Metropolitan Opera in the evening, during the business day he cared nothing for his personal appearance. He didn’t even seem that concerned with making money. Now in his late fifties, he just wanted to write and publish adventure stories like the ones that had rescued him from the misery of his childhood. Magda hoped she could play on this central desire as she pushed open his door at five minutes to ten.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lipscomb,” she said softly. Lipscomb, as usual, had a pair of reading spectacles perched on his nose, a manuscript in one hand, and a red pen in the other.

  “Ten o’clock! Ten o’clock!” came a harsh voice from behind him. Mr. Lipscomb’s pet mynah bird, Portia, was a regular fixture in the office, and had a habit of interjecting herself into the conversation.

  “You are wrong, Portia dear,” said Mr. Lipscomb, without lifting his eyes from the manuscript to where the bird perched atop a pile of books. “It is not ten o’clock; it is nine fifty-five, and so I must ask, why am I being disturbed by Miss Stone?”

  “I just wanted to ask you a question before we went over the appointments,” said Magda.

  “Ask then,” said Mr. Lipscomb. “You’ve already interrupted my work.”

  “I just wondered what you would say if I told you I had written a manuscript.”

  “I’d say don’t be ridiculous, Miss Stone. Books are written by men, not women. Especially Pickering books.”

  “But what about Edith Wharton?” said Magda. “She’s written books.”

  “I’ve no idea whom you are speaking of, Miss Stone,” said Mr. Lipscomb, finally laying down his spectacles and looking at Magda as if she were a schoolgirl. “Besides, if I say man is not meant to commit murder and you say, ‘What about Harry Thaw, he killed Stanford White,’ that doesn’t change the validity of my assertion, does it?”

  “But you said you wanted to start selling books to girls,” said Magda. “In the letter that you sent to the ghostwriters last week.”

  “I’m sure men are perfectly capable of writing books for girls, Miss Stone.”

  “So, you would never accept a manuscript written by a woman?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But how would you know?” said Magda. “If you got a manuscript in the mail, how would you know it was written by a woman?”

  “First of all, Miss Stone,” said Mr. Lipscomb, sounding more exasperated with each passing second, “I would know. I would know by the inferior quality just as I would know if I was living in a house built by a woman or riding in a streetcar driven by a woman.” Magda had a sudden vision of Mademoiselle de Tiers sailing her automobile through the air at the Barnum and Bailey Circus. If women are such poor drivers, she wanted to say, how do you explain that? But she knew the point would carry no weight with Mr. Lipscomb.

  “And secondly,” Mr. Lipscomb continued, “I would know because if there is one thing I believe in here at Pickering Brothers, it is personal contact. I would never publish a book without meeting the author or the ghostwriter face-to-face—looking him in the eyes and shaking his hand. I can tell an honest man, Miss Stone, just as surely as I can tell if a book has been written by an honest man or a dishonest woman.”

  What a pig, thought Magda. But she was already beginning to form an idea.

  Tom De Peyster was the most beautiful man Eugene Pinkney had ever seen. Perhaps not objectively—his shoulders were not as broad nor his chin as strong as they might be. But his eyes gleamed with worldliness and pathos and passion unlike any Eugene had seen before, and he had seen a lot of eyes. Gene did not believe in love at first sight. But if he did, he would already be in love with Tom—or at least with his eyes. But Eugene knew that being in love with Tom, though perhaps inevitable, was hopeless. For he did not detect in Tom’s eyes that glint that said I am like you, I share your secret.

  Nonetheless, Gene could not resist the idea of spending more time around Tom. If that meant trying his hand at writing an adventure book for children with some real science in it, why not? Gene had built up a substantial savings over the past eight years; he could afford to take some time off and write a book. It had been years since he had read Jules Verne; he read every new H. G. Wells book as soon as it appeared in the library. But he had never read any of the series books Tom and Magda had mentioned. Gene discovered one reason for this gap in his reading was that the Astor Library didn’t carry any of these titles. A few dollars spent at Putnam’s and Dutton’s on Twenty-Third Street remedied this problem, and Gene was soon ensconced in his room with a stack of books, rolling his eyes every time he came across any hint of “science.” A previously undiscovered lighter-than-air gas; an unexplained “etherium” motor that powers a rocket to Mars; breathable atmosphere on the moon—none of these things made any sense scientifically. Yet, the salesmen at Putnam’s and at Dutton’s said these books sold more copies than H. G. Wells or Jules Verne.

  He skimmed through all the volumes, then set them aside and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pencil. He needed a hero, obviously—perhaps someone who worked for a famous scientist, but also pursued his own experiments and inventions. The main characters in all these series adventures were young boys. Gene thought back to his days at Paresis Hall and how he had loved blurring the line between male and female. He had never felt more honest than when he dwelt in that neverland between boy and girl. Could he do the same thing in a book? The salesmen at the bookstores had said that boys came in every week to buy the new books in the many adventure series. But what about girls? Could Gene create a girl heroine? He wrote at the top of the paper, Alice Gold, Inventor.

  But what would Alice do? What would she invent? And more important, how did it feel to actually be a girl? Gene had hovered in the shadows between boy and girl, but as an only child who had spent the past ten years in the all-male clubs of Paresis Hall and the Tesla laboratories, he had never really known a girl. What did girls feel? How did they think? He needed someone to give him a tour of the mind and heart of a girl. And then he realized he already had someone—Magda. The trio had agreed to eat at Childs again on Wednesday. That would give him a chance to ask Magda if she would help him create a realistic girl. And to look in Tom’s eyes again.

  Tom had felt his facade dropping as he had talked to Magda. Or at least one of his facades. He had lost track of how many masks he wore, of where the real Tom hid behind them all. He had presented himself at Pickering Brothers as a wealthy gentleman, hoping to impress the publisher with his debonair, moneyed demeanor. And Tom did still live with his family on Fifth Avenue. But he never felt that Thomas De Peyster of Fifth Avenue was the real Tom. He had told Magda truthfully that he worked as a journalist, but his journalism, from the earliest days when he wandered the streets of Manhattan dressed as a bootblack and looking for stories, had always involved pretense. He thought back over the past few years of working for Mr. Hearst, years in which he was as likely to be wearing a white tie and interviewing an opera star as to be sitting on a street corner in rags collecting stories about Silent Charlie Murphy or Big Tim Sullivan. Until he met Magda, he had almost always felt the need to hide the real Tom De Peyster.

  Tom had shown his true self one time that he could remember. On that horrible morning just a few months ago in San Francisco, as he watched Isabella sleeping, he had felt that no walls existed betwee
n them. Though he did not know her, had only just met her, though she clearly played the role she was paid to play, Tom had still felt genuine for a few moments. He had felt authentic after the earthquake, too, but that had been different. Then his facade had been forcibly stripped off by death and destruction and horror. But he remembered those few moments before the earth began to shake when he did not feel like a reporter pretending to be someone in order to get a story, or like a wealthy man trying to act the part, but simply like a normal young man, infatuated with a girl.

  Sitting at Childs with Magda, he had started to feel that way again. Though he still wore the fashionable suit and the silver walking stick leaned against the wall next to his chair, Tom felt himself becoming someone less interested in discovering other people’s secrets than in sharing his own. Magda, with the knowing smile that crept across her face when she chided him and the intense intelligence in her eyes, seemed to see right through his pretense. It unbalanced him, at first. He was so used to wearing a mask he had almost forgotten it until Magda peeked behind it. Perhaps he had fallen for Isabella only because she had gone to bed with him; he’d never had time to discover the truth of those feelings. But maybe he was the type who tumbled into love with any woman who could pierce his armor. Whatever the reason, Tom couldn’t get Magda out of his thoughts.

  Now he prepared to see her again, waiting for the elevator that would bear him to the seventh floor and the offices of Pickering Brothers, Publishers. His meeting with Mr. Lipscomb, his chances of shaking off the shackles of Mr. Hearst and becoming a different kind of writer, all that was simply business and business never made him nervous. Knowing he would see Magda again, that she would see through whatever part he played—that was something else altogether.

  XV

  New York City, Upper West Side, 2010

  After lunch, still shaken by his conversation with Rebecca and keenly aware of his deadline, Robert decided to read every article he could find about Edward Stratemeyer and his publishing syndicate. He discovered that when Stratemeyer launched a new series, he issued the first three volumes simultaneously. If these “breeder” sets sold well, the series would continue; if not, Stratemeyer would cancel it and move on. A Stratemeyer title could go from an idea in the publisher’s head to a hardbound book sitting on the shelves of a bookstore in just forty days. Robert thought back over the road to publication Looking Forward had taken—two years of writing, rewriting, and submitting to agents and, even after a publisher bought it, another year of editing, design work, and waiting for a slot on the summer list. That Stratemeyer could move a book from initial conception to the hands of readers in less than six weeks seemed a remarkable achievement. And he did this hundreds of times, without the benefit of digital technology.

  Turning to researching the Tremendous Trio authors, Robert had a brief moment of excitement when he found the name Neptune B. Smythe in several documents from the early twentieth century, but it turned out they all referred to a plumber working in New York City. Robert thought it unlikely that the plumber moonlighted as a children’s author, but the name, including the middle initial, seemed an awfully big coincidence. In a series of digitized New York City directories, he found, beginning in 1902, entries for Pickering Brothers, Publishers, at 175 Fifth Avenue in what was then called the Fuller Building, soon to be known to locals as the Flatiron Building. The last entry for Pickering was in 1912.

  None of this information did Robert much good. Frustrated and exhausted from lack of sleep, he turned in early. His dream followed the plot of The Tremendous Trio at Niagara Falls, but, unlike in the book, Alice Gold’s specially designed breathing apparatus didn’t work, Frank failed to recover the barrel, and Dan Dawson disappeared under the roiling water and did not resurface.

  On Sunday Robert set out to read as many Pickering books as he could get through, hoping he might find clues within the texts to the identities of the authors. As he began comparing volumes, the first thing Robert realized was that Pickering had not always employed the “breeder” system used by Stratemeyer. The first Dan Dawson book bore the notice “Copyright 1906, by Pickering Brothers, Publishers.” Frank Fairfax and Alice Gold also began in 1906. The second volume in all three series was dated 1907 and the third 1908. The Tremendous Trio books, on the other hand, were all dated 1911. Was it coincidence that the three series had proceeded on exactly the same schedule, or had the authors worked together before the crossover series began? Or had Dexter, Buck, and Neptune all been the same person?

  Robert skimmed the first book in each series, moving from volume to volume one chapter at a time. Almost immediately, he noticed something he had taken for granted as a child, but that now seemed important. Each of the heroes had a significant link to New York City.

  Alice Gold lived in that mansion on Fifth Avenue. Frank Fairfax worked for a newspaper baron whose cigar-chomping, make-no-excuses attitude gave him more than a passing resemblance to the popular image of William Randolph Hearst. Although the book made no mention of Frank’s hometown, his father was a founding member of the Explorers Club—hence Frank’s presence on various expeditions to mythical lands. The Explorers Club had been founded in 1904 on West Sixty-Seventh Street. And then there was Dan Dawson, the circus acrobat. In the second chapter of Storm from the Sea, a flashback told how Dan joined the circus, performing for the first time before the crowd at Madison Square Garden.

  That chapter had been the inspiration for another of the excursions Robbie and his father took—this time to the new Madison Square Garden at Penn Station to see Ringling Bros, and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

  “It may not be the same Madison Square Garden where Dan Dawson performed,” said his father as he and Robbie took their seats, “but it’s basically the same circus. Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers both go back to before Dan was born.”

  Robbie had marveled at elephants dancing and tigers jumping through flaming hoops. He had laughed at clowns and gasped at stilt walkers. But his favorite—and his father’s favorite, he had said afterward—had been the acrobats. Watching those figures high on the trapeze or walking the tight rope, Robbie was able to imagine Dan Dawson doing the same act nearly a hundred years ago. On the train on the way home, Robbie’s father had produced their much-loved copy of Storm from the Sea, and read to Robbie until the boy fell asleep, dreaming of flying through the air.

  “Dan, you go on in two minutes,” shouted the ringmaster.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dan from his perch atop the elephant. “I’ll be there.”

  Dan Dawson was not the youngest performer in Anderson’s Circus. Sophie Anderson, the owner’s daughter, was only twelve—a year younger than Dan—but all she did was get shot out of the human cannon, and anyone who could hold still could do that. Dan, on the other hand, was adept at both walking the high wire and doing stunts on the flying trapeze. Among the adult members of the circus, he was also known for arriving at his position at the last possible moment, often spending his time loitering in the elephant’s cage with Bessie, on whom he now sat.

  “I can get from Bessie’s back to the top of the trapeze ladder in thirty seconds,” thought the lad. “I don’t see why Mr. Anderson needs to shout.”

  Dan was right—even after stroking Bessie and feeding her a few peanuts, he still managed to arrive at the top of the trapeze ladder with nearly ten seconds to spare. In another instant, he was flying through the air, tossed from one acrobat to another while the crowd below gasped in amazement.

  Dan was never afraid soaring high above the crowd. He had performed the act hundreds of times. To the crowd below, it may have looked dangerous. To Dan, however, walking on tightropes and flying on trapezes was fun and exciting, but perfectly safe. But little did Dan know, as the wind outside fluttered the flag surmounting the big top, that before the band played to announce the next afternoon’s performance, a storm would arrive, and Dan, and all the rest of the circus, would be in a greater da
nger than they ever imagined.

  Robert had thought of those words, that book, that magical afternoon with his father, years later when he and Rebecca had gone up to Randall’s Island to see the latest big-top extravaganza by Cirque du Soleil. He enjoyed the show, but not in the same way as he had the Ringling Brothers. That circus had been cacophonous and confusing and dirty and felt as if the history of all those years since Dan Dawson’s time clung to every performer. Cirque du Soleil had been clean and slick and all just a little too perfect.

  Now, as he reread the reference to Madison Square Garden in the Dan Dawson book, Robert wondered if the connections between the Pickering books and New York City had any significance. The Tremendous Trio, too, appeared in New York—most dramatically in the scene Robert had read to the children the previous day—when they witnessed Wilbur Wright flying around the Statue of Liberty—a real event, Robert discovered, that had taken place in 1909. Did Pickering write the books himself from his office in the Flatiron Building? Or did he write outlines and, as a New Yorker, set parts of the books in a city he knew well? Or did he hire ghostwriters who lived in New York?

  The sky had grown dark, and the streetlights glowed against the snow as Robert stood and stretched. Time slipped by quickly when he was lost in the worlds of Alice and Dan and Frank, and time was something he did not possess in generous supply. He gazed out the window at the beauty of the city for a moment, then picked up his phone to call Sherwood Whitmore, hoping the collector might be home by now and might be able to shed some light on the fate of the Tremendous Trio.