“Did she ever marry?” said Robert. “From those candid pictures of her in the album, I got the impression Tom was in love with her.”
“She never mentioned a husband,” said Sarah. “But I think she kept a lot of secrets.”
“What about the woman under the menu?” said Robert. “Did your aunt ever talk about her?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” said Sarah.
Robert reached into the Zabar’s canvas bag he had brought with him and retrieved his re-creation of Thomas De Peyster’s album. He opened it to the first page and set it on the coffee table in front of Magda.
“I sort of made my own version of the scrapbook,” he said.
“Oh, how delightful,” said Sarah. “I haven’t seen this in so long. I always thought it was odd that the first thing in it was something as ordinary as a menu from Childs. Aunt Magda wouldn’t tell me about that. All she said was, ‘Sometimes the most ordinary days are the ones you cherish the most.’ ”
Robert gently lifted up his facsimile of the menu to reveal the woman underneath. “When I was working with the scrapbook at the Historical Society, the menu came loose and I found this photograph underneath.”
“Goodness,” said Sarah, leaning over to examine the picture closely. “There can’t be much doubt about what she has in mind.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“But I’ve never seen her before. I wonder if Aunt Magda knew.”
“I don’t think so,” said Robert. “That menu had been glued down on all four sides. I think she must have been Tom’s secret.”
“Or one of them, anyway,” said Sarah. “I got the impression from Aunt Magda that all three of them had secrets.”
“Did she ever tell you why she dressed up like a man?”
“As I said, she had secrets. But I don’t want you to get the idea that she was a sad old woman living in her secret past. She was an inspiration to me and to my daughter. She was independent and free-spirited and creative and compassionate. She knew every street of New York and she used to take my two children and me on long walks around the city on Saturdays and tell us what each neighborhood was like at the turn of the century. She could paint a picture of old New York so clearly you could practically hear the elevated train rumbling overhead and the horse-drawn wagons rattling down the street. And nothing scared her. When she was in her sixties she slapped a mugger so hard across his face that he just stood there dumbfounded while she walked on. And when they told her she had cancer, she didn’t even flinch. Death didn’t frighten her any more than anything else.”
“And after she died, you gave the scrapbook to the Historical Society?”
“We were cleaning out her things,” said Sarah, “and I thought they might like all those old photographs.”
“I think what you said before is right,” said Robert. “I think there is a great story in this scrapbook, but I’m almost glad we don’t know all the details.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to write a novel about it. About your aunt Magda and Thomas De Peyster and Eugene Pinkney and Dan Dawson and Frank Fairfax and Alice Gold and the Tremendous Trio—all of it.” As he and Sarah had spoken, Robert had begun to see more and more clearly the story he wanted to tell. “I want to tell their story, even if I don’t know what it is. That’s what I do—I tell stories. I want to write about the day they had lunch at Childs and about the days those photographs were taken and I want to imagine the stories of all the places on those postcards—the Flatiron Building and the old Madison Square Garden and Coney Island.”
“Oh, she did used to talk about Coney Island,” said Sarah. “She claimed she had only been there once, but she could describe it in such detail that sometimes I wondered if she was making it all up.”
“There’s something else I want to do,” said Robert, thinking of the children in the library, wide-eyed and ready for a tale. “You might not know this, but there was a fourth Tremendous Trio story. As far as I know they only ever wrote the introductory chapter, but for 1912 it was a bombshell of a chapter.”
“The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio,” said Sarah.
“You’ve heard of it.”
“I have.”
“Do you know if they ever finished it?” said Robert, taken by the idea of writing the book himself, of fulfilling his promise to his father in the most personal way.
“They never did,” said Sarah with a smile.
“That’s a shame,” said Robert, though his heart leapt with excitement.
“I thought the day would never come, but it has,” said Sarah, breaking into a laugh as musical as the tinkling of the coffee cups. “You are the one.”
XXXV
New York City, When the Bad News Arrived
On April 16, 1912, Magda sat at her desk staring at three items and pondering the power of ink and paper. The first was issue number one of Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, containing the first installment of The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio. Mr. Lipscomb had never seen the typescript she had sent to the production office, and the introductory chapter appeared exactly as she, Gene, and Tom had written it. The printing had taken longer than anticipated, and the magazine had not been ready for distribution until the previous day. As it happened, only a few copies would ever make it into the hands of readers, those sold by a newsstand in Madison Square to whom an errand boy working in the production office had delivered a bundle that morning. The rest of the press run sat in a warehouse in New Jersey.
The second item was a telegram that the Pickering office had received six days earlier. Magda had paid it no mind until yesterday. It read simply: sail today from southampton aboard rms titanic. lipscomb.
The third item was the morning paper, with the grim headline: 1340 perish as titanic sinks.
The death of Pickering Brothers, Publishers, was not quite as rapid or dramatic as the death of its founder and sole proprietor, Julius Lipscomb, aboard the Titanic, nor did much of anyone take notice. The company’s demise went unrecorded by the papers and even the book industry publications made no note of the occasion.
The survivors of the Titanic disaster arrived in New York on the evening of April 18. But even then, there was no confirmation that Mr. Lipscomb had been among those lost. That word came four days later, when the White Star Line released the official list of casualties. But all this made no difference. From the moment the word of the sinking arrived in New York, the vultures began circling Pickering Brothers. Magda would discover, in her final few days of employment, that Pickering had been deeply in debt; that, despite the map in his office, Lipscomb had never succeeded in placing his publications in more than a few bookstores, all of them in New York City. Magda suspected that Mr. Lipscomb might have even written some of the Pickering “fan letters” himself. He had, apparently, lived under the delusion that someday his books would be discovered and his warehouse emptied under a deluge of orders. In fact, almost 90 percent of the books ever printed by Pickering Brothers still sat in storage. Before the end of the month, creditors would sell them, along with almost all the copies of Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, for pulp. The end came for Magda on April 23, when she left Pickering Brothers with a copy of Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, the three fan letters she had removed from the files to show Gene and Tom, and the typescript of the second chapter of The Last Adventure, which she had retrieved from the production office, claiming she wished to return it to Mr. Marcus Stone.
She allowed herself to grieve—for Pickering Brothers and for the fact that she could seek no comfort in the friendship of Gene and Tom—for the length of the elevator ride to the ground floor. Then she stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and got on with her life.
Ypres, Belgium, 1915
On a spring night, in a field in northwestern Belgium, Thomas De Peyster finally had the opportunity to rescue
someone. His flight to London had come none too soon. During the weeks it took to settle his father’s estate, his meddling mother had been more insistent than ever that he, with all haste, marry some Vanderbilt or Carnegie or Roosevelt. The time he had spent with Magda, working on the Tremendous Trio books, had convinced him of two things—he would never marry anyone else and he would never marry her. Stepping off the ship at Southampton, he welcomed the promise of a new country, new friends, and a life far from the world of American children’s adventures and Mrs. De Peyster.
He filed the occasional story for Mr. Hearst, but, as he had inherited a substantial fortune from his father, he had no real need to work. He spent much of his time exploring England and traveling on the continent. Except when using his passport, he lived as Thomas Poster. There were enough aristocrats in England with small bank balances and single daughters that if word got out that the unmarried heir to the De Peyster fortune was roaming the English countryside, he would never have a moment’s peace. So, instead of drinks parties at posh London clubs and hunting weekends at country estates, he lived a modest life, never quite settling in one place long enough for people to ask too many questions about his past. Then the war had come and the recruiters in rural Oxfordshire to whom he had presented himself did not show any concern about his slightly odd accent or his lack of proper identification. At thirty-two he was obviously old enough to enlist. He became a private in the British Second Army. By the time he arrived in Belgium, the Western Front had stabilized and trench warfare had begun.
On that night in early April 1915, low clouds hung in the sky, and the German guns had been silent for several hours. An officer in a trench not far from Tom’s decided to send a dozen men creeping into no-man’s-land, in hopes of reaching the German line and inflicting some damage before the enemy noticed them in the darkness. Two minutes after they climbed out of their trench, the sky lit up with artillery shells and machine guns began blazing from German positions. Tom peeked over the edge of his trench to see man after man falling to the onslaught.
In the near daylight of exploding shells, Tom saw not a ravaged Belgian field, covered with barbed wire and strewn with the bodies of soldiers. He saw a hotel room in San Francisco and a woman who could be saved simply by pulling her back from the window a split-second sooner. He saw a man trapped in the rubble of a collapsed house, who needed only a savior of stupendous strength to free him before the fire reached his prison. He saw a woman in the third-story window of a burning hotel, with nothing below her but cobblestones. He saw the faces of all those he could not save that day in San Francisco, and he leapt out of the trench.
The incessant roar of guns and artillery faded from Tom’s consciousness and he believed he could hear the cries of agony from the injured. He raced through the mud, paying no more attention to the barbed wire that tore at his clothes and flesh than to the sound of the battle. Two British soldiers, pale with fear, ran past him the other way, diving back into the trenches. A moment later, four more did the same. Tom had counted a dozen men entering no-man’s-land a minute before; that meant six were still there. Through smoke and fog he found his way to the fallen men, one by one. Whether he had ever seen their faces before, he didn’t know. Men came and went from the trenches with sickening speed—arriving grim and erect, convinced they could make a difference for God and country; departing on stretchers, too often with their faces covered.
The first two men he dragged back to the trench were so splattered with mud and blood that he would not have recognized them if they had been his own brothers. But he did know this—they were alive. The next two he found almost on top of each other. One was uninjured, save for a twisted ankle. But he was frozen with fear, and Tom wasted precious seconds prizing him from the mud and shouting at him to run low and fast for the trench. Tom ran behind, carrying the body of a man who screamed in either pain or fear. Either one meant life, thought Tom.
The last two proved harder to find. One was nearly buried in the mud, his shape almost unrecognizable as human. But in a lull in the gunfire, Tom heard a moan next to him, and found the soldier, limp but breathing, and easy to carry to the trench. He was only a boy.
That left one. Tom had operated on adrenaline and memory for the past several minutes, thinking not about the battle, but about Isabella. A sudden sharp pain in his right shoulder brought him back to the reality of the moment. He was not walking through the streets of San Francisco observing death from a safe distance; he was grabbing death by the hand and daring him to squeeze. He did not stop to examine what he assumed was a bullet wound in his shoulder, but rushed back onto the field, scanning that scene of horror for one more man. The artillery shells stopped, and the darkness rapidly returned. The flash of the machine guns gave little light, but Tom thought if he could not see the field, then the Germans could not see him. For five, ten, fifteen minutes he crawled back and forth in the muck, occasionally stumbling over a body that was cold with a death that had come long before tonight. Then he heard it, the faint sound of a man at prayer. “Please, God,” the voice said. “Please.”
Tom summoned a last bit of strength and dove under a burst of machine gun fire in the direction where he had heard the voice. The soldier was entangled in the barbed wire and, as best as Tom could tell, had a badly wounded left leg. Tom pulled out his knife and slashed at the uniform, freeing the man from the wire. He heaved him over his shoulder and ran for the trench.
From within that trench, men watched this act of heroism; they saw Tom rushing toward them, saw him fling the injured soldier toward the trench. They grabbed that man by the hands and pulled him in, and watched as Tom, two steps away from safety, fell forward lifeless, a bullet in the back of his head.
“Thomas Poster” was buried in a nearby church cemetery and after the war reinterred in Tyne Cot Cemetery in Flanders. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. However, as the address and other information on his enlistment papers proved to be false, the medal was never presented to any family member.
In trying to trace his family, an officer searched the pockets of Tom’s uniform, but found only two black-and-white photographs. One showed the head of a sleeping woman, her hair cascading across a tangle of sheets, the other a different young woman, sitting on a park bench, her head thrown back in laughter.
San Francisco, 1918
Gene did not die the way Tom always feared he would. He was not brutally beaten by a man he had asked into his bed. But a visitor to his bed did kill him—a young man, probably too young for a thirty-six-year-old to seduce, but a man so beautiful that Gene could not resist. He called himself Reginald and he did not raise a finger to harm Gene.
For the previous six years, Gene had been working at Pacific Gas and Electric, helping to modernize their systems. He liked San Francisco. There were no memories here for him. The first day he arrived in the city, he had made it a point to stay at the rebuilt Palace Hotel. He walked the halls of the hotel, trying to feel the presence of Tom, whose tryst with Isabella had taken place there six years earlier, but he felt no sense of connection. He liked that. He had come to San Francisco to forget Tom and it was already working.
Gene met men less often than he had in New York, but, as in that city, he found places in San Francisco where one might encounter men who shared his desires, and when Gene did find a willing partner, he always returned to the Palace—not out of any reverence for Tom, but because, while he had no need to live in luxury, he loved sharing it with others. Reginald had been properly impressed by the soft bed and the crisp sheets and the fireplace in the sitting room. They had spent a Saturday afternoon together in room 719 and then Reginald had left, giving Gene a gentle kiss on the cheek before he did so. Gene saw no reason not to spend the night in the room he had paid for, so, exhausted by the afternoon’s activities, he rolled over and fell asleep. It was October 7, 1918.
The next morning Gene felt feverish and achy. He told the chambermaid he wou
ld stay another night and resolved to sleep off whatever illness was plaguing him. He woke again around midday, gasping for breath and coughing up a frothy, bloody mucus. Three hours later, he was dead.
The chambermaid found his body the following morning. Eugene Pinkney was one of the first residents of San Francisco to die in the great influenza pandemic of 1918; more than three thousand residents of that city would eventually follow him. Because he had registered at the Palace under a false name, the hotel management was unable to locate any friends or family. To prevent panic and fear among the other hotel guests, the management quietly arranged for a burial, with a simple stone bearing only the name Gene had given: Buck Larson.
XXXVI
New York City, Upper East Side, 2010
“What do you mean I’m the one?” said Robert.
“I’ve been waiting for you all these years,” said Sarah. “That’s why I told the people at the Historical Society if anyone ever comes looking at that scrapbook, you be sure to call me. I knew anyone who wanted to see the scrapbook might be the one.”
“Who is the one?” said Robert. “I’m not some sort of prophet. I’m just a writer on the trail of a good story.”
“Oh, you’re more than that, Mr. Parrish,” said Sarah, pulling herself up. “You wait here. I’ll be right back. Oh, to think the day has come at last.” She laughed again as she left the room, leaving Robert alone and perplexed.
From deep within the apartment he heard sounds like moving furniture and falling boxes, but when he called out, “Are you sure I can’t help you?” Sarah replied in a voice strong enough to be heard in the living room, “Not a bit. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Robert returned to the shelf where Magda’s picture stood and picked up the tarnished silver frame. What had happened to her between 1906 and 1922? What, besides the simple passage of time, had turned Magda from Thomas De Peyster’s youthful object of adoration into a middle-aged woman, alone by the river, looking out—he supposed she was looking out toward Hell Gate, the spot where the General Slocum had caught fire. As he looked at Magda’s face, trying to guess what it hid, he felt excited about imagining her story.
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