But when, late in April 1911, she received notes from both of “the boys,” as she thought of them, on the same warm spring day, she could not contain her excitement. Tom and Gene were both returning to New York, both wanted to see her, and would both be in town in time for a grand event to which she had been looking forward for years.
To the delight of the fifty thousand people surrounding Magda on the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, the predicted rain had not materialized. The sun shone overhead and the spring breeze wafted away the usual smell of horses and humanity. It was May 23, 1911, and the gods and goddesses of reading smiled on New York. Magda could remember when on this site, between Fortieth and Forty-Second Streets, had stood the Croton Reservoir, a massive and imposing granite structure that looked vaguely like the walls of an ancient Egyptian city. How much more beautiful was the building they had come to dedicate today—the new central library, with its broad steps passing by two stone lions before leading up to the columned portico.
Neither Magda, nor anyone else in the crowd, paid much attention when a single car drove up in front of the building and a lone man got out and mounted the stairs. Surely the dignitaries arriving for the dedication would not come one at a time and without escorts. This man must be a library official or an uninteresting functionary. Then, when the man was halfway up the stairs, someone shouted and Magda, along with the rest of the crowd, took a closer look and realized they had been duped. There was President Taft, waving to the crowd as he ducked into the library entrance. A great cheer went up and Magda experienced a moment of feeling truly American. She had laid eyes on the president of the United States.
The ceremonies took place inside, and Magda would not know what President Taft had said until she saw the paper the next morning. She read the excerpts from his speech several times over, and especially liked the part about how the new library was “the consummation of a noteworthy plan for bringing within the grasp of the humblest and poorest citizen the opportunity for acquiring information on every subject of every kind.”
But, as momentous as the dedication of the library was, and as overwhelmed as Magda felt when she had the chance to walk, with thousands of others, through its spectacular spaces, seeing the library and the president was merely the prelude to the highlight of her day. At four o’clock, she ascended the great marble staircase of the grandest monument to books New York had ever seen, to where Tom and Gene, by prior arrangement, stood waiting for her.
She embraced each of them warmly, secretly pleased to discover that she felt no lingering feelings of either anger or unrequited love, but only a great joy at seeing her two friends again at last. When Tom gave her a light kiss on the cheek and said, “Hello, old friend,” she knew she had forgiven him; apparently he had forgiven her, too.
Conversation proved impossible with the throngs surging around them, and every eatery in the neighborhood overflowed, so they walked down Fifth Avenue to Twenty-Third Street toward the Childs where they had spent so many happy times. Magda felt light-headed as they made their way south. The excitement of the possibility that she might not have to write the Tremendous Trio by herself paled in comparison to the bliss of having the trio reunited.
“So, what brings you back to New York?” said Gene to Tom when they had settled at their usual table. Magda had avoided this question, afraid the answer would be I’m just here for a few days.
“It’s my father,” said Tom. “He’s ill and, well, frankly, he’s dying, and I thought it best, for his sake and for my mother, to spend some time at home.”
“Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry,” said Magda.
“It’s always been a fraught relationship,” he said. “My father wanted me to go to college and become a banker. He never understood why I wanted to write. And of course, all mother ever wanted was for me to marry a rich girl, as if we didn’t have enough money. And now I’m back living in the same house with both of them. It will be a tense summer.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to relieve some of that tension by writing some children’s books,” said Magda.
“Ah, now we come to it,” said Gene.
“The Tremendous Trio?” said Tom.
“Exactly,” said Magda.
“So, she told you about it,” said Gene.
“Wrote a very impassioned letter,” said Tom, smiling weakly at Magda.
“What do you say?” said Magda. “We can work in that glorious new library.”
“I don’t know, Magda,” said Tom. “I’m not feeling very creative these days.”
“It’s not exactly what I had in mind for the summer,” said Gene. He did not add that what he did have in mind was frequent trips to the Bowery of Coney Island. His pledge to ignore his physical desires had faded into a hazy memory and now that he was back in the city, he planned to engage in pursuits that months in Niagara and Pittsburgh had prohibited.
Magda could feel the possibility of a happy summer with Tom and Gene slipping away. She couldn’t bear the thought that this dinner might be the end of their trio and that she would spend her evenings in the library working alone. But she had known the men would take some convincing, and she had come prepared.
“Let me read you something,” she said, withdrawing three folded sheets of paper from her handbag. “These are just samples, but I think they make the point.” Magda spread one of the papers on the table and read.
Dear Mr. Dexter Cornwall,
Thank you for writing the Dan Dawson books. I love those books. I read them over and over and I am only six years old. They are the best books. At school some of the boys call me names and make fun of me because I like to read books instead of playing at sports. Sometimes I wonder what Dan would do if boys called him names. He is so brave. I will try to be brave, too, thanks to Dan. I don’t know what I would do without Dan. Thank you for giving me my best friend.
Your Friend,
Howard
“Very touching,” said Tom. “And it just proves that you are perfectly suited to write books for children.”
“But I’m not the only one who gets fan mail,” said Magda. “Gene, listen to this one.”
Dear Mr. Buck Larson,
My name is Katie and I want to be a scientist when I grow up. Some of the boys and even some of the girls at school say that I cannot be a scientist because I am a girl. But I say they are wrong because look at Alice Gold. She is an inventor and knows more about science than any boy I ever saw. Thank you for writing about Alice and for making me believe that if I want to be a scientist I can be one.
Yours Truly,
Katie Collins
“Okay,” said Gene, “I get the point, but . . .”
“Wait,” said Magda. “No comments yet. There’s one for Tom, too.”
Dear Mr. Neptune B. Smythe,
My family and I live in one room in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. I hate living here because it is so crowded and dirty and noisy. More than anything I want to go somewhere else, but I was always afraid I never would. Then a friend gave me a book about Frank Fairfax. I have read that book over and over because Frank takes me away from my horrible neighborhood to amazing places. I will keep reading your book every time I need to get away and I just wanted to say thank you for writing it. Because of you and Frank, my life is not so miserable now.
Sincerely,
Jacob
Magda looked up to see tears in Tom’s eyes. Gene smiled wryly and shook his head. “That wasn’t playing fair,” he said.
“Fine,” said Tom, “when do we start?”
XXX
New-York Historical Society, 2010
Robert stared at the photos in the De Peyster album for what seemed like hours, trying to see into the eyes of Eugene and Magda and Thomas, trying to divine something of their personalities, their relationships to one another, their plans for the future—both their own futures and that of
their creation, the Tremendous Trio. Of course, the Tremendous Trio books had been published in 1911, five years after the date on this photograph—July 28, 1906. But the first books by Buck Larson and Dexter Cornwall and Neptune B. Smythe were published sometime in 1906, so no wonder these three were already styling themselves the “gods and goddess of children’s books.”
“You can photograph that item if you like,” said a voice at Robert’s side.
“I beg your pardon?” said Robert, looking up to see the librarian who had brought him the album. He was a young man with bright-red hair, a neatly trimmed red beard, and blue-rimmed glasses.
“As long as you don’t use a flash, you can photograph the materials in that scrapbook.”
He had taken copious notes on each item, but Robert thought if he photographed everything in the scrapbook, he could mount those photos into an album of his own. Such a facsimile might keep him from wanting to return to the Historical Society every day.
Robert flipped back to the first page, took out his phone, and began carefully photographing. The Childs restaurant menu seemed closer and closer to detaching completely from its page, and he turned the leaf as delicately as he could. Within a few minutes, he was back on the page with the photos of the three authors, carefully focusing the images on his phone’s screen, and imagining what he might see when he got these photos loaded onto his computer and could enlarge them.
On the next few pages he saw a dozen or so photographs of the woman identified as Magda Hertzenberger. Unlike in the photos at Bethesda Fountain, Magda did not pose in these images. In fact, she never looked at the camera, and Robert imagined they had been taken without her knowledge. Some were blurry or poorly lit, but in all of them, the photographer had captured Magda at a perfect moment. She smiled, gazing up at the light of a Broadway marquee. She looked contemplatively out the window of an elevated train. She sat at a desk typing, her brows furrowed in concentration. Robert sensed that Thomas De Peyster had been in love with Magda Hertzenberger.
The next three pages brought Robert back to the world of children’s series books. Each featured the front panel of a colorful dust jacket—the original wrappers for the three Frank Fairfax books. Pop Pop’s copies had long ago lost their dust jackets, and Robert had never seen these color illustrations. Frank Fairfax and the Search for El Dorado showed the young reporter, camera in one hand and steno pad in the other, perched at the crest of a hill with a glittering city of gold laid out in the valley below him. Frank Fairfax and the Lost City of Atlantis featured Frank in a yellow rain slicker, standing at the prow of a sailing ship, rain whipping past him as he looked into the distance. The jacket for Frank Fairfax among the Mayans pictured the boy atop a pyramid, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting. As far as Robert was concerned, this collection of dust jackets could only mean one thing: Thomas De Peyster had written the Frank Fairfax books; Thomas De Peyster was Neptune B. Smythe.
If De Peyster used the name Neptune B. Smythe, it seemed logical that Magda Hertzenberger must be Buck Larson, that the one female among the Tremendous Trio authors would have chosen to write about a female heroine, Alice Gold. That meant Eugene Pinkney must be Dexter Cornwall, author of the Daring Dan Dawson series.
But was that right? Robert turned back to the pair of photographs at the Bethesda Fountain, and reread the captions. If the pseudonyms were in the same order as the real names then Eugene Pinkney, not Magda Hertzenberger, had written the Alice Gold books. Why would a man in 1906 choose to write about a girl inventor? Robert realized that, though the album was an incredibly rich resource, it might raise more questions than it answered. But he liked those questions. How did these three come to know each other? Thomas worked as a journalist, but what about Magda and Eugene? And what was the meaning of all those other items in the album—the baseball ticket and the postcards and the playbills and the menu? What story did they tell?
Robert had lost interest in telling stories since the publication of Looking Forward, but now he felt what he had felt all those years ago when he began to write about his grandfather’s adventures in the war. He felt a story tugging at him, insisting to be told. He didn’t know if anyone would want to publish it or read it, but he remembered, at last, that that wasn’t the point. He needed to tell the story. That was all that mattered.
He spent the rest of the afternoon immersed in the album, photographing every item and every caption. After the dust jackets came a clipped review of the first Frank Fairfax book. The reviewer wrote, “Frank Fairfax and the other new offerings from Pickering Brothers this Christmas season represent a distinct improvement over the typical fare we have come to expect from these cheap volumes for youngsters.” Robert agreed, but if the Pickering books represented such an improvement, why did so few of them survive? More stories to be told, he thought.
The rest of the album contained more postcards of New York City and studio portraits of several famous New Yorkers of the period, including Stanford White and Nikola Tesla.
Between the page with the photograph of Tesla and one with three postcards of a Coney Island theme park called Dreamland, someone had inserted another postcard as a bookmark. On the back was a one-cent stamp, with a cancellation dated March 27, 1910. The address read: Mary Stone, 316 West 23rd St., New York City. The message read simply: Magda—Working on a project at the power plant here for a few months. I’ll let you know when I’m back in NY. The note was unsigned and the handwriting did not match that of Thomas De Peyster. Who had sent this postcard to Magda and why was her mail in Thomas’s scrapbook? Why was it addressed to Mary Stone? He made a note to investigate the address then flipped the card over to see a familiar image that brought back a flood of memories. This picture of Niagara Falls could have been used as a reference for the illustration printed on the cloth cover of The Tremendous Trio at Niagara Falls. The angle, the placement of the boat on the water, even the building in the background were identical. The falls had not looked so very different when Robbie had stood on the Canadian side, feeling the spray on his face, and pretending to be miserable.
Robbie had, in fact, been excited about the trip to Niagara with his father to follow in the footsteps of the Tremendous Trio. He had done his best to hide that fact, knowing that a teenager shouldn’t be keen to spend time with his father, but he suspected he had not been entirely successful in concealing his anticipation.
The drive, in the family’s aging Oldsmobile station wagon, took seven hours, enough time for Robbie to read The Tremendous Trio at Niagara Falls aloud. They had left early in the morning, so by midafternoon they stood beside the falls, almost where Alice and Frank had stood as Dan’s barrel plunged over the rim. Robbie had not been able to resist the joy of the moment. He felt the power of the falls in his sternum and almost laughed out loud. And then his father had ruined everything.
“This is just the beginning, kiddo,” he said, slapping a hand on Robbie’s shoulder. “Think of the miles we’ll put on that old wagon following the Tremendous Trio, especially Dan Dawson. He went to San Francisco and Chicago and Galveston. Your mother never liked to travel, but you and me, Robbie, we’re gonna see the world.”
Robbie felt his stomach sink, almost as if he had been swept over the falls. He had seen this trip as an ending—the last hurrah of his childhood and a way to say goodbye to that world of series books with celebration and no regret. He had pictured turning away from the falls and never thinking about the Tremendous Trio again; putting on his earphones and listening to music on his Walkman all the way back to Rockaway Beach. But his father saw this trip as a beginning, a new chapter in their relationship built on the only thing they ever managed to have in common.
Staring at that postcard in the De Peyster album, Robert recalled the exact sentence that had formed in his head as he stood in the spray of Niagara, words that, even though he never spoke them, he could never take back: Why won’t my father just go away and leave me alone?
&nbs
p; He hadn’t thought about Niagara in a long time, and the physical pain the memory of those words caused him reminded him why he had buried these events deep out of sight; but the immediacy of that pain also convinced him, more than ever, that he needed to tell these stories. He could almost hear the words Rebecca would say after he described the silent, miserable car ride home from Niagara:
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” she would tell him. “After all, what teenage boy wants to spend all his time traveling alone with his father, talking about a bunch of kids’ books?”
The final pages of the De Peyster album were empty, but a bulging envelope was pasted inside the rear cover. Robert opened this and tipped onto the table several dozen clipped newspaper articles. He carefully photographed each one—articles on the San Francisco earthquake, the Stanford White murder trial, and other major and minor stories of 1906. Robert guessed that Thomas De Peyster had written all of them.
Once he had photographed each article, he gently returned the newspaper clippings to their envelope. He held the volume upright, gave it a light tap against the table, so that the paper would slide all the way back into its container, and was dismayed to see that the Childs menu came fluttering out of the album, its century-old paste having finally released its grip. Robert opened the volume, to return the menu to its proper place, resolving to inform the librarian it had come loose. There on the front page, where the menu had hidden it, was another photograph of a woman.
This was clearly not Magda Hertzenberger. Even a black-and-white photograph showed that Magda had blond hair and this woman’s hair was jet black. She might have been Italian or Spanish; she certainly looked Mediterranean, whereas Magda was clearly of Northern European descent. The photo had no caption, and the story it did not tell intrigued Robert as much as anything in the album. She sat on a bed among a mess of tangled sheets, one of which barely covered the swell of her breasts as she leaned toward the camera. Her smile and the look in her eyes left no doubt about her invitation to the photographer. It had taken two people to get those sheets into such a tangle, and as soon as the camera clicked she would no longer be alone in that bed. But who was she? Where was she? And why had Thomas De Peyster hidden her under a menu from Childs restaurant? Robert could think of a thousand answers. To tell a story, he only had to pick one.
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