Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  I would be happy to deliver to you, either by post or in person, the typescript of the first adventure in the series, which I have already completed.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  Thomas De Peyster

  Robert wasn’t sure whether Thomas De Peyster was Neptune B. Smythe, who wrote stories about a cub reporter called Frank Fairfax, or Dexter Cornwall, who wrote about a different character making fabulous rescues. Frank Fairfax, the cub reporter, did not rescue people from disasters; he went on expeditions to mythical places. On the other hand, Dan Dawson, who did rescue people, worked not as a reporter but as a circus acrobat. Somehow the ideas in Thomas De Peyster’s letter had ended up spread across two series. Possibly Thomas De Peyster was both Neptune B. Smythe and Dexter Cornwall. Whatever the case, Robert had his first useful clue in identifying the authors of the Tremendous Trio.

  With permission from Joseph, Robert took a photograph of the letter with his phone. The next sheet in the file was a carbon copy of Edward Stratemeyer’s response:

  Dear Mr. De Peyster,

  Thank you for your letter. I am not seeking new work at this time.

  Edward Stratemeyer

  Robert grimaced, recalling many similar rejection notes received early in his own career. He wanted to reach across the years and tell De Peyster that the rejections would hurt less over time. He wondered if Thomas had someone like Rebecca to take the sting out of those moments. Only a few months before Looking Forward had found an agent, Robert had sat at the table in the kitchen, staring gloomily at his laptop.

  “What’s the matter?” said Rebecca, breezing into his apartment and shaking the rain off her jacket and all over the floor.

  “Another rejection from another agent,” said Robert. “We regret that your work is not a fit with the Nelson Agency. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.”

  “Great! With this weather, it will be nice to have an excuse to celebrate,” she said, leaning down to give him a soft kiss on the cheek.

  “Celebrate? Jesus, Rebecca, this is my career. My life. You want to celebrate the fact that I’ve been rejected yet again?”

  “No, silly,” said Rebecca, slipping an arm around him. “You’re forgetting what I told you. Every rejection brings you one step closer to acceptance.”

  Rebecca’s mantra to her friends in the creative world—designers, actors, writers—was that each rejection was a necessary step on the road to success. Robert was not wholly convinced, but going out for a celebratory dinner with Rebecca sounded better than sitting at home sulking, so he accepted her embrace and had a lovely evening.

  “Sometimes,” she whispered to him in bed that night, “you have to allow yourself to be happy.” Robert had shivered at the memory of hearing similar words from a therapist he had seen a few years earlier.

  “I’m not sure what’s weighing on you,” the therapist had said. “Maybe after a few more sessions, you’ll be ready to tell me. But I do know that you need to give yourself permission to be happy.” Robert had never gone back to that therapist.

  Robert found no more clues in the 1906 or 1907 files, and at three o’clock decided to stop reading and see what he could find out about Thomas De Peyster. A quick check by Joseph revealed no books published under that name in the New York Public Library collections, nor did there seem to be anything online about an early twentieth-century journalist named De Peyster.

  “Did you try the New-York Historical Society?” said Angela, when Robert and Joseph had told her about Thomas De Peyster.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Joseph. “Good idea.”

  “The Historical Society?” said Robert. “Do you think because he was a journalist, they might—”

  “Bingo,” said Joseph from behind his computer screen.

  “What?” said Robert.

  “I’m in their catalogue and listen to this—‘Album assembled by Thomas De Peyster, circa 1906.’ ”

  “That’s got to be him,” said Robert excitedly. “What’s it mean, ‘album’?”

  “Probably a scrapbook or photo album,” said Angela. “Might be worth checking out.”

  “And this album is at the New-York Historical Society?” said Robert.

  “Yep,” said Joseph.

  “That’s three blocks from where I live,” said Robert. “I’ve been all over the city trying to find out about this guy, and there’s something about him a five-minute walk from my apartment?”

  “That’s the thing about New York,” said Angela. “She will eventually give up her secrets, but only to those who are persistent in their pursuit.”

  “Thank you,” said Robert, excitement edging into his voice as he shook Joseph’s hand vigorously. “Thank you very much.”

  On the way back down to the street, he took the stairs two at a time.

  XXIV

  Coney Island,

  On a Saturday When the World Was Innocent

  Tom and Gene arranged to meet Magda outside her rooming house at nine thirty Saturday morning. Tom had had another fight with his mother the night before on the subject of his future prospects. He had thought that marrying off her four daughters to wealthy husbands would be enough for her, but apparently not. Because of the time Tom had spent with Magda and Gene—about whom he had told his parents nothing—he had missed, according to his mother, several opportunities to court wealthy young women. Tom’s protest that all the women his mother would find desirable were out of the city for the summer held no credence for Mrs. De Peyster. Tom, she said, did not take the necessity of a good match seriously and, as a result, was a disappointment to both her and to his father. But here, Tom thought, she was not entirely correct. He did take the necessity of a good match seriously—but his definition of a good match was not aligned with his mother’s. The fight had ended with his mother in tears and Tom more determined than ever to move out of his parents’ house.

  Magda had been waiting for them on her stoop, dressed in her best summer dress. Soon they were rattling southward on the Ninth Avenue El, the morning sun filling the car with hazy light. They rode the train to its terminus at Battery Place on the southern tip of Manhattan, and when they exited the station Magda found herself back at the site of her earliest memory, gazing on the setting of a story her father had told her over and over, a building she had passed through at age two and not set eyes on since that day when she and her parents had come to see the Statue of Liberty. It was now the New York Aquarium, but the huge round brick building with an American flag rippling in the breeze above its cupola had once been Castle Garden, the center in which immigrants arriving in New York had been processed for almost fifty years. For the past two years Magda had succeeded in pushing thoughts of her family deep down inside herself, locking them away in a place below her heart where they could not harm her. But the sight of Castle Garden, the knowledge that her American life began just a stone’s throw away, ignited an explosion of memories from her gut. Magda staggered for several steps, thinking she might fall as she heard her father’s voice, as clearly as if he, and not Tom, had caught her elbow and steadied her. In the time it took her to walk two steps, Magda heard her father’s entire narrative, from boarding the ship in Hamburg, to the hours spent in Castle Garden and how, at the end, when that massive building had disgorged them onto the streets of lower Manhattan, a passing man had tipped his hat to the Hertzenberger family and said, “Welcome to New York.”

  They skirted the edge of Battery Park, walking closer and closer to that building her father would remember until the day he died on North Brother Island. Magda thought for a moment that this had all been a trick, that Tom and Gene somehow knew her secrets and had brought her here to confront her past. She watched the crowds walking the paths of Battery Park and milling around the entrance to the aquarium waiting for opening time. When Magda finally looked away from the aqua
rium building, she saw a woman holding a small girl in her arms walking briskly toward them. Though she knew that woman could not possess the face of her mother, that the child could not be two-year-old Magda freshly arrived in America, she started as if she had seen a ghost.

  “Is something wrong?” said Tom. The sound of his voice transformed the woman into just another New Yorker out for a walk on Saturday morning. Magda found herself once again not in 1884 with her parents alive and the twins as yet unborn, but in 1906 on a perfect September day.

  “I just . . . remembered something,” said Magda.

  “Well, let’s go make some new memories,” said Tom. “Come on, the steamboat is waiting.”

  “Steamboat?” said Magda, coming to a stop.

  “The Iron Steamboat to Coney Island,” said Tom, pointing to a sign overhead. Magda realized they had been walking toward a pier at the end of which stood a horrifyingly familiar sight—a white-painted steamboat, its three decks crowded with festive people. In the center of the boat, a huge paddlewheel rose above the top deck. Banners fluttered from its flagpoles, and, but for the words Iron Steamboat Company painted across its midsection, it might have been the General Slocum.

  “Don’t you like boats?” said Gene, as Magda stood rooted to the spot.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” said Tom. “The boat has an iron hull. Look at the sign: ‘They cannot burn. They cannot sink.’ ”

  Without realizing it, Magda began to cry. The faces in her mind of a happy couple newly arrived with their two-year-old daughter in a land of opportunity were now replaced with Henry and Rosie plunging into the fire. She began to back away, pulling Tom and Gene with her until she collapsed onto a park bench.

  “Magda, what is it?” said Tom, sitting next to her and taking her by the hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Give her a minute,” said Gene softly. He sat on the other side of Magda as the Saturday morning crowds streamed toward the ferryboat, paying no attention to the sobbing woman on the bench.

  Magda saw it all as clearly as a film in the nickelodeons in Herald Square. The flags in the breeze, the sun sparkling on the water, the smiles on the faces of the twins. And then the wisps of smoke, the crowd rushing to the back of the boat, the joy turning to fear and then terror, the unbearable intensity of the fire, the unbearable darkness of the water. When the film had run its course, when the water had taken her mother and the fire had taken Rosie and Henry, her crying subsided, her breathing returned to normal, and she looked up into the concerned faces of Tom and Gene.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry I never told you.”

  “Never told us what?” said Tom.

  “About the last time I was on a boat,” said Magda, reaching for Gene’s hand. “I need . . . I need to tell you.”

  And so, with a steady voice and gripping the hands of her two best friends, Magda told them what had happened on June 15, 1904. She told them about a day as beautiful and full of promise as the one that stretched before them now, about the shining white steamboat in the sun, about the band playing on the deck, and about her mother plunging into the dark waters and the twins falling into the fire. She told them of the boy climbing the flagpole and of how the nurses pulled her from the water. She did not tell them how she had gotten her own name onto the list of the dead, how she had avoided all the funerals, or how she had left her neighborhood, her heritage, and even her identity behind after that day. She still kept some secrets.

  Gene had read about the Slocum disaster in the papers; Tom had actually gone to the mass funeral for unidentified victims, reporting on the event and interviewing some of the survivors.

  “We don’t have to go to Coney Island,” said Tom, when Magda fell silent.

  “No,” said Magda, forcing a smile. “I want to go.” And she did. As black as the past had been, the future held a day of glorious adventure and she wanted that more than anything. It had felt good to finally share her story with Gene and Tom. She felt no less sad, but a great deal less burdened, and more herself than she had since the tragedy. She had not realized what a knot her secret had tied inside her.

  “We could take the train,” said Tom, “or a streetcar.”

  Magda rose and looked across to the pier. The ten-fifteen ferry had sailed while she told her story, and passengers were streaming onto an identical boat that would sail at eleven fifteen. “They cannot burn; they cannot sink,” she said calmly, walking toward the steamer.

  Tom and Gene quickly followed, and soon Magda found herself again at a stern railing on the top deck of an excursion steamer, the wind whipping loose strands of her hair and the sounds of excitement surrounding her.

  “Are you all right?” said Tom.

  “I think so,” said Magda firmly. She knew exactly why the Iron Steamboat Company had chosen the motto They cannot burn; They cannot sink. It meant—This is not the Slocum. That will not happen here. And of course, it didn’t. As they made their way past the Statue of Liberty, Magda heard once again the voice of her father, saying “Isn’t she beautiful,” as clearly as if he had been there at the railing beside her. They sailed the length of New York Harbor, through the Narrows, and around the end of Long Island until the piers of Coney Island hove into sight. She could see the beaches already packed with bathers and hear laughs of delight drifting across the water. She could hear, too, the exhilarated cries coming from the attractions of Dreamland, Coney’s biggest amusement park. To the left, Dreamland’s magnificent pier and ballroom jutted out over the ocean, and behind it rose the blazing white radiance of Beacon Tower. That Magda would, before the day ended, let out her own shrieks of excitement and even ascend to the top of that tower sent a thrill of anticipation through Magda as the boat slowed to dock at the end of Iron Pier.

  A few minutes later they stood in the Hippodrome, the main courtyard of Dreamland, surrounded by dazzling white buildings and thousands of people. In front of them, horses thundered past in the midst of a Roman chariot race; a dozen “airplane boats” twirled from a tower high overhead to the delight of their occupants; the sounds of roaring lions came from one end of the courtyard and that of squealing passengers “shooting the chutes” from the other. Soaring above it all was the glittering white facade of Beacon Tower, with its views out to the sea.

  “Welcome to Dreamland,” said Tom.

  “Have you been here before?” said Gene.

  “Last summer,” said Tom. “I wrote an article about the Lilliputian Village, but I only saw a few other attractions.”

  “I want to see everything,” said Magda.

  The day proved more wonderful than Magda had dreamed. She felt like a butterfly emerging from the dark, confining space of its chrysalis. Her secrets had been shared, her fears conquered, and she was ready for the most spectacular, the most frightening, and the most thrilling experiences Dreamland had to offer. By her side, through it all, stood her friends, and on that day she thought of them as just that, forgetting in the magnificent spectacle of Dreamland her unrequited love for Gene, and simply laughing and screaming and gasping with the boys.

  At Bostock’s Animal Arena they saw every kind of wild animal act—from tightrope-walking elephants to Bengal tigers, polar bears, lions, jaguars, leopards, and more.

  “I could put an animal act in my next circus book,” said Magda.

  “No research today,” said Tom, as they watched Captain Jack Bonavita and his thirty lions. Bonavita exercised full control over his lions with only one arm, having lost the other following an attack by one of his charges two seasons ago. Magda was especially taken with Black Prince, a Barbary lion with a dark mane and intense eyes.

  “He’s magnificent,” she whispered to Gene.

  Magda liked the rides best of all. At “Hell Gate,” they first watched as a boat full of passengers was swept round and round a fifty-foot-wide whirlpool, before being sucked below the surface amid screams of terro
r and delight. The idea that being pulled under the water could be transformed from the horror she had experienced two years ago into an entertainment thrilled Magda, and soon the three of them were seated in a boat, slowly spiraling around the whirlpool, describing a smaller and smaller circle, building up more and more speed, until they plunged into darkness. Magda grabbed Gene to her left, grasping him tightly in her arms as they seemed to fall; she felt Tom’s hand gripping her arm hard enough to leave a bruise.

  “The whole point of the rides at Coney Island,” she had heard a young lady say on the ferryboat, “is that you get to grab hold of the men.”

  “And they get to grab hold of you,” giggled her companion.

  They all released their grips as the boat steadied, and they sailed through a dim tunnel on the walls of which were illuminated scenes supposed to be of the center of the earth.

  “I shall decline to comment on the scientific accuracy of these depictions,” said Gene with a laugh.

  A few moments later, the boat gathered speed again and, with an explosion, shot upward. This time, the three held both their breath and one another’s hands until the boat surfaced back into the sunshine, on the edge of the great whirlpool.

  “Shoot the Chutes” provided more opportunity for clinging to one another. The ride began by standing on a “moving stairway,” which took them on a pier out across the surf and three hundred feet into the ocean, at the same time carrying them up and up to the top of the ride. There, they boarded a boat, perched atop a steep track. As the boat teetered at the precipice and they linked arms, pulling one another close, Tom shouted, “Who are we?” to which they all replied, as the boat plunged downward, “We are the gods and goddess of children’s books!” The boat seemed to fly through the air, then hurtled under a bridge and splashed into the lagoon at the center of the courtyard, skimming across the surface before finally coming to a stop at the water’s edge. Magda did not stop laughing until they were back on solid ground.