Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  “And you can both help me,” said Gene.

  “We’ll all help each other,” said Tom.

  “So, tell us about your meeting with Lipscomb,” said Magda, turning toward Gene. “Was he as much of a pig as when I talked to him about Alice Gold?”

  “He’s pretty horrible,” said Gene. “He insists that Alice stay at home and invent things like a vacuum duster or an electrical dishwashing machine. Hard to imagine how that is going to lead to exciting adventures. Then, after going on and on about how glad he is I’m a man, because by God, Julius Lipscomb would never pay a woman to write a book, he asks me, since I’m writing a female character, if I know what it’s like to be a girl.”

  “What did you say?” said Magda.

  “I said I have a pretty good idea,” said Gene.

  “You helped me become a boy,” said Magda, “so, like you said the other night, I can help you become a girl.”

  Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Gene cut him off. “It’s the first of August. That gives us about eight weeks. If we’re going to work together, we need a place and a time we can meet every day.”

  “There’s a new library that opened in February just a block from here.”

  “Sure, the Muhlenberg,” said Tom. “I did a story on all the new libraries in the city funded by Mr. Carnegie, and that was one of them.”

  “It’s a block from my house, close to the Sixth Avenue El, so it’s easy for Gene to get home,” said Magda.

  “And I can take the same train uptown,” said Tom. “How late is it open?”

  “Nine o’clock most nights,” said Magda. “And they’re open a few hours on Sunday afternoon. There’s a spot at the back on the second floor that’s usually quiet in the evenings.” She had spent many an evening in the past few months at the Muhlenberg branch of the New York Public Library sitting on the second floor reading—sometimes new novels, sometimes classics. Occasionally she even delved into their collection of children’s books, to compare them to Mr. Lipscomb’s output.

  “Perfect,” said Tom. “I’m writing for the evening paper, so I have to file my stories by three. I can meet any time after that.”

  “I usually leave work around six,” said Magda.

  “I’m unemployed at the moment,” said Gene. “So I’m flexible.”

  “Okay,” said Tom, “we meet at Childs for some dinner at six-fifteen,

  we’re at the library no later than seven, and we work for two hours. Sundays we work in the afternoon. Saturdays we take a break.” And with that pronouncement, Tom ushered in the most glorious two months of Magda’s life.

  Although officially each of them had their own book to work on, in reality they all contributed to all of the stories. Tom wrote most of the rescue scenes for Magda; Gene dealt with any sections that involved mechanics or science; and Magda helped Gene understand the inner life of girls. In doing this last, Magda took the opportunity for a little subtle flirting, but apparently she was too subtle, as Gene never responded.

  “When a girl likes a boy,” Magda whispered to Gene one evening, “she’ll find excuses to touch him, like this.” She laid a hand gently on Gene’s arm.

  “Good to know,” said Gene, turning to record this fact in his notebook. Magda sighed and went on with her work. Tom kicked her gently under the table and smiled when she looked up at him.

  Gene soon decided to push Alice Gold at least a little bit out of the domestic sphere, no matter what Lipscomb said. Together, they came up with a scene in which Alice, during an outing in Central Park, rescues a young bicyclist from crashing. Alice then invents an improved braking system to prevent such accidents in the future. Magda tried to convince Gene that he needn’t go into quite so much detail about the design of the brakes, but eventually gave up when she realized that Gene, in addition to writing a book about Alice, was designing all her inventions in ways that would actually work.

  “I just wish she could invent something more exciting than bicycle brakes or house-cleaning machines,” said Gene. “I want her to build a flying machine.”

  “Didn’t the Wright brothers already do that?” said Magda.

  “Yes, but their longest flight has been what, about twenty-five miles? I want Alice to fly around the world.”

  “Maybe have her invent the dishwashing machine first,” said Magda, “and work your way up.”

  On most nights they each gave an update at Childs on progress they had made, exchanging ideas as they wolfed down sandwiches and soup or plates of corned beef hash. Then they would work at a table in the library, sliding pages back and forth, rewriting one another’s chapters and trying to make these three books better in every way than the Rover Boys and Dave Porter and the Great Marvel series, and the other factory-produced children’s series that had preceded them.

  Magda concentrated on her work, but not so hard that she didn’t steal the occasional glance at Gene, sitting erect at the table, holding a pencil as delicately as a great master might wield a paintbrush. Even if he didn’t respond to her flirting, she still entertained the fantasy that their night on the town had felt as romantic to him as it did to her. And so, she glanced. She glanced at the curls in his hair and wondered how her fingers might glide through them. She glanced at the curve of his cheek, and wondered how it would feel pressed against her lips. She glanced at his slim fingers and wondered what it would be like to have them intertwined with her own. Gene never saw her stealing these furtive looks, though Tom often did. He would only smile ruefully at her and shake his head before returning to his work. It never occurred to Magda that the reason Tom so often caught her was that he was glancing at her.

  As much as she loved those evenings of work and camaraderie, Saturdays were even better. They took it in turns to plan excursions, and Tom always happily paid for the others. Gene chose afternoons at the theater—they heard Maude Raymond sing in The Social Whirl at the Casino and saw a David Belasco play called The Girl of the Golden West. Magda loved the trip Tom organized to Tony Pastor’s vaudeville house where the bill was headed by an act called “The Big Show, A Story of Circus Life,” which featured a variety of circus acts. Magda took copious notes when she got home that evening and used several of the acts in her Dan Dawson book.

  Tom’s favorite act at Tony Pastor’s was DeWolf Hopper reciting the poem “Casey at the Bat.” Tom had, he said, heard Hopper’s famous rendition many times before and even owned a Victor record of the performance, but he still laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Gene preferred the performance of “Eltinge,” a woman who sang and danced and looked for all the world like a Gibson girl until the end of the act when she pulled off her wig to reveal that “she” was actually a man named Julian.

  Tom also loved baseball, so one Saturday the trio rode the Ninth Avenue El up to 155th Street to the Polo Grounds to watch the New York Giants take on the Pittsburgh Pirates. Magda had never seen a baseball game and Tom patiently explained every play to her. The game had lasted eleven innings and ended when Cy Seymour hit a home run to break the tie and win it for the home team. Though Magda and her companions stood where they were, applauding vigorously, much of the crowd swarmed the field to celebrate the victory. Magda felt exhilarated.

  When it was her turn to pick the Saturday excursion, Magda opted for more sedate activities. She had never visited either the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the east side of Central Park or the Museum of Natural History on the west side, and so they went to both. Magda always showed an interest in whatever captured Gene’s attention—such as the sculptures of Greek men in the Metropolitan—but Tom, not Gene, always held the door for her, or offered a hand when they climbed a set of wide marble stairs.

  Early in September, with the three books well on their way to completion, Gene arrived late to Childs. He walked gingerly and held his left arm across his midsection. Magda might not have noticed this, had it not been for the deep purple b
ruise below his left eye, his badly swollen lip, and a cut on his right cheek.

  “What happened?” said Magda, leaping up to help him to a seat.

  “Are you all right?” said Tom as Gene slid into a chair, wincing slightly.

  “It’s nothing, I’ll be fine,” he said.

  Magda longed to throw her arms around him, to protect him or comfort him or heal him in some way, but he clearly wanted no such attention. Still, she could not resist asking one more time.

  “You’re really not going to tell us . . .”

  “I got into a little scrap, that’s all,” said Gene. Forcing a smile, he added, “You should see the other guy.”

  Gene had no intention of telling Magda, who was clearly infatuated with him, and for whom he cared deeply, the real story. He could imagine telling Tom—beautiful, muscular, perfect Tom—someday if the moment was right, but here in Childs he would never describe what happened last night in honest terms; he would only call it “a scrap.” Gene still had the same desires he had had when he’d frequented the fairy resorts. But those resorts were all closed now, so sometimes he would haunt certain street corners, showing a bit of his fairy attire—a red tie perhaps, just enough to make the message clear to those who understood. And sometimes he would meet a man and take him home and his landlady would turn a blind eye and the man would leave an hour or two later. And often the man behaved like a gentleman, kind and sensitive and as longing for connection in a world in which he felt like an outcast as Gene was. But there were times the man was neither kind nor sensitive. On occasion the man saw a fairy as less than nobody—less even than human. A fairy could not only be used and cast aside but, if it made the man feel better, if it made the man feel like more of a man, a fairy could be roughed up a little—or a lot. A fairy’s rooms could be ransacked; his valuables, such as they were, stolen. A fairy could be left weeping and bleeding on the bed the man had so recently used for his own base enjoyment and the man could walk away, knowing the police would never bother coming to the defense of the fairy. It had happened to Gene three or four times over the years. It had happened last night. And it wasn’t the bruises and cuts that hurt the most—they, after all, would heal. Gene felt the worst pain in his heart, where such encounters permanently etched the knowledge of man’s talent for cruelty. He would never forget the delight that the man—Gene would not name him as that would only make him more human—had taken in beating him. He had grinned with glee—not when he climaxed with his face twisted in shame but when he brought blood to Gene’s face. Gene hoped Tom and Magda would never know this, but there was nothing so immeasurable as the capacity for malice and brutality in men. And Gene was doomed to love them.

  They finished early. On Friday, September 21, Magda presented the three typescripts to Mr. Lipscomb. Tom had bought her a new Remington typewriter to keep in her room as well as a small table to place it on, and she had typed all three books over the past week. They had taken no Saturday excursion the week before and spent no evenings at the Muhlenberg Library. Magda had done nothing but type during every free moment that week. She knew the books not only outshone anything Pickering Brothers had ever published, but also anything Stratemeyer had issued. Tom, of course, had been writing since childhood and knew how to tell a story. Gene, it turned out, had a lovely way with words. And Magda had learned from her years of reading the difference between a delicately wrought sentence that danced across the page and one that slogged through the mud. The latter clogged the pages of the typical Pickering book, but not the three volumes she presented to Mr. Lipscomb that Friday afternoon: Storm from the Sea, A Daring Dan Dawson Adventure; Alice Gold, Girl Inventor; and Frank Fairfax and the Search for El Dorado. The books still contained everything Lipscomb demanded—nonstop adventures, frequent cliff-hangers, and moral rectitude—but they had the added benefit of being well written.

  “When will we hear back from him?” said Tom, as they sat eating pie at Childs. Gene’s injuries had healed quickly, though the cut to his cheek had left a small white scar. “Do you think he’ll want us to make changes?”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Magda. “For three reasons. First, he doesn’t care if the writing is good or bad, as long as you follow the Pickering rules, which we have, so you’ll be fine. Second, he’s a hasty editor. He’ll put red marks all over a typescript, but they’re mostly to do with commas and verb tense. As far as story goes, he likes to give his instructions up front and trust his ghostwriters will do exactly as he asks.”

  “And the third reason?” said Gene.

  “The third reason is that he wants these books ready for the Christmas market. He’s already advertised them in the trade magazines. That means they need to be in the stores by early November at the latest. He doesn’t have time for rewrites.”

  “So, we’re through?” said Tom.

  “Nothing left to do but cash the checks and start planning the next books in the series,” said Magda.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said Gene. “I think we should celebrate.”

  “How?” said Magda.

  “It’s the last weekend of the season at Coney Island,” said Tom. “Let’s go to Dreamland.”

  XXIII

  New York Public Library,

  Forty-Second Street, 2010

  At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning Robert mounted the steps between two stone lions, Patience and Fortitude. He wondered why his father had never taken him to this library, or any library, in search of The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio. Robbie had cherished the mystery of the missing book as shared with his father, but he had never considered that his father made no attempts to locate the volume. He now wondered if it was precisely the fact that the mystery had brought Robbie and his father closer together as they speculated about the fate of the three adventurers, that had prevented his father from trying to find the book. And perhaps Robbie’s father wanted his son to have the chance to keep his promise and find the book himself. Robert felt, pressing through the revolving doors and climbing the wide marble staircase, that he was seeing the entire mystery from his father’s point of view for the first time. To him, this had not been a puzzle to be solved, but a point of contact between himself and his son.

  Unlike the massive main reading rooms of the library, in which Robert had spent many happy hours, the elegantly paneled reading room of the Berg Collection occupied a fairly small space. An attendant sat at a desk by the door and two other desks stood empty. At the two reading tables, each large enough for four researchers, no one sat in any of the other seats. On one side of the room, to Robert’s great delight, stood a card catalogue, surmounted by busts of literary figures. Glass-fronted bookcases full of treasures were built into the paneling. Silence suffused the room as if it had taken up residence there a century ago and planned to stay forever.

  Although there was no one to disturb, Angela, the librarian who had ushered him in, and Joseph, the attendant at the desk, spoke in hushed tones as they explained to Robert how to handle the materials. On one of the reading tables stood two large boxes containing the personal and business correspondence of Edward Stratemeyer from 1905 to 1915. Angela had told Robert she had never heard of Pickering Brothers or the Tremendous Trio.

  “But you might try looking through the Stratemeyer correspondence files,” she said. “He might have conducted business with Pickering at some point or maybe used one of the same ghostwriters.”

  Robert eased into an armless leather chair, opened the first box, and pulled out the first file, marked “January 1905.” The first books by Neptune B. Smythe, Dexter Cornwall, and Buck Larson were published in 1906. Robert reasoned that the writers might have worked for Stratemeyer before that, so he decided to start at the beginning of the archive. He opened the file onto the large rectangle of green baize that lay on the table in front of him. The wide brass light mounted down the center of the table illuminated the pages in the dimness
of the reading room.

  Most letters he could tell at a glance had no connections to either Pickering or his authors. But he could not resist stopping his search once in a while to read a letter from Howard Garis (who had assumed the pen name Roy Rockwood) or one from a young reader who wanted to say thank you for the Rover Boys series to Arthur Winfield (Stratemeyer himself). Robert wondered if his own grandfather’s fan letter to Dexter Cornwall sat in an archive like this one somewhere. He dispensed with 1905 in about two hours with nothing to show for it but the excitement of reading original letters to and from some of the authors he and his father loved.

  At this rate, it would take him twenty hours to get through a decade of correspondence. As he began the 1906 files, he proceeded more quickly, avoiding the distraction of fascinating, yet irrelevant, letters. He needn’t have worried; in the first file for 1906, he found what he was looking for, a letter typed on the letterhead of the New York Evening Journal and dated January 12, 1906.

  Dear Mr. Stratemeyer,

  I am writing with an idea for a children’s series that I think you will want to publish. I am an experienced writer, having been a reporter for the newspapers of Mr. William Randolph Hearst for some years. Mr. Hearst would, I’m sure, be happy to vouch for my character.

  The hero of my story is a young boy named Frank Fairfax who goes to work as a cub reporter. Having started my work as a reporter at age seventeen, I have a good understanding of that world. Frank travels around the country writing stories and having adventures. Each book builds to a scene in which Frank is confronted with a disaster—a fire, flood, shipwreck, or something similar. Frank uses his cleverness to save people from death and danger, thus becoming a true hero.

  I think boys would find the adventures exciting and would also enjoy a look at how a real boy can earn a living in the newspaper business. I have had many experiences in my years working for Mr. Hearst that could be incorporated into my stories.