Escaping Dreamland

by Charlie Lovett

  “Here we are,” said Sarah, stepping back into the room. She stood more erect than before and looked ten years younger. Robert had the feeling this would not be his last visit to this apartment and he thought how much Rebecca would enjoy getting to know Sarah. She had a talent for engaging with older people. Robert had seen it in casual encounters in shops and restaurants, and in the way Rebecca would pal around with her mother’s friends.

  Sarah carried a rectangular cardboard box covered in peeling paper. Robert could just make out the word Siegel’s on a bit of paper still adhered to the side. Sarah sat down and clutched the box in her lap.

  “It will be such a weight off my shoulders to give this to you,” she said. “I was beginning to worry about what I should do with it since no one ever came.”

  “What is it?” said Robert.

  “Aunt Magda called me into her room the night she got her cancer diagnosis and gave me this box. She didn’t show me what was in it, and she made me promise not to look even after she died, though I admit I broke that promise a few years later. That night she explained to me that someday, someone might turn up asking about The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio, and if that happened, I should give them this box. I supposed at the time that she thought Gene or Tom might still be alive and might come looking for her. But that was thirty-four years ago. Magda was born in 1882. I gave up on any of her friends still being alive a long time ago. But I kept waiting, and finally you came. You’re the one she meant.”

  “But she can’t possibly have known that I would come knocking on your door trying to find out about the Tremendous Trio,” said Robert.

  “No,” said Sarah, “but I think she hoped that sooner or later somebody would. So now I can give you this and stop worrying about it.” She held the box out to Robert reverently and he took it in both hands. It was heavier than he expected and he felt his breathing and pulse quicken as his hands touched the worn corners. Magda Hertzenberger, also known as Dexter Cornwall, had reached out across nearly a century to send him a message.

  What would Robert’s teenage self think if he knew that the secret treasures of one of the authors of the Tremendous Trio lay hidden in a box just a few miles from his home? In the months that followed the ill-fated Niagara trip, months during which Robbie rarely initiated a conversation with his father, he often sneaked into the den late at night when his parents had fallen asleep. He sometimes read a chapter or two of the Tremendous Trio, but more often he pulled out those mysterious pages that began The Last Adventure and read them over and over. He felt guilty that he had lost interest in sharing the books with his father. But reading those pages always made him feel better. Knowing that he was not the only person with dark thoughts and anxieties and confusion lightened his load ever so slightly. And every time he finished reading those pages, he longed for even a hint of what might happen next.

  “Do you mind,” said Robert, setting the box on the coffee table, “if I open it here?”

  “Not at all,” said Sarah.

  Robert gently lifted the lid and set it aside. On top of the contents lay a yellowing piece of letterhead Robert recognized—the same letterhead his grandfather had carried with him in Alsace bearing a letter from “Dexter Cornwall.” This sheet of Pickering Brothers stationery was blank and Robert removed it to see what treasures it hid.

  First was a near pristine copy of Alice Gold, Girl Inventor in its original dust jacket. He lifted the book out, smiling to see, in the bright colors of the jacket art, Alice just as he had always imagined her—boyish, a bit grimy, clad in greasy blue coveralls, and holding a wrench. He opened the front cover of the book and read the inscription: To Dexter Cornwall from Buck Larson, in memory of a summer day. Christmas 1906.

  The next item had been carefully wrapped in brown paper, and Robert unwrapped it to discover a copy of Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, issue number one, identical to the borrowed copy he had at home. Now he could return that copy to Tony Esposito. Again, it looked as bright and crisp as the day it was published.

  Robert peered into the box and saw a mass of papers, yellowing and furled at the corners. “Is there somewhere I could spread this out?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Sarah. “You can use the dining table. Why don’t you empty it out there and we can see what you’ve got. Even when I did look into that box years ago, I didn’t understand most of what I saw, but I’m sure you’ll explain it all to me eventually.”

  At the dining table, Robert reached into the box and pulled out the stack of papers. Over the next two hours he and Sarah paged through each sheet. Some of them astounded him, some confounded him, but they all seemed to be fragments of a story longing to be made whole.

  Most of the material clearly related to The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio. There was a typescript, headed Chapter One, of the chapter that had been published in Tales of Excitement for Boys and Girls, marked up with notes and emendations clearly written by three different people. Clipped to this document with a rusty paperclip were several pages of cryptic notes in the same three hands. If Robert was looking for questions, these notes would provide hundreds of them. Hardly a single line in these pages made any sense, and he did not read them all there with Sarah, but they did take turns, for a while, deciphering some of the fragments.

  Dan like Gene. What are secrets of G, T, M? Inventions—War? Explosives from aeroplane. Truth about parents. Alice suicide? Poverty in Lower ES. Children on streets. Enslavement of locals? Triangle fire? DL fire? Love triangle.

  There was much more like this, giving Robert the sense that The Last Adventure of the Tremendous Trio, had it ever been completed, might have been a very dark book, especially by the standards of children’s books in 1912. What sort of scandal would have ensued in the pages of The Outlook if Pickering had published a book for children that dealt with suicide and weaponry and death and slavery and sex?

  The next item in the box was, perhaps, the most exciting and the easiest to understand. It was another typescript, this one without any stray markings on it. At the top it read merely, Chapter Two.

  XXXVII

  Lower East Side, As the Twenties Began to Roar

  On a warm June afternoon in 1922, Magda Hertzenberger stood in Tompkins Square Park looking, for the first time, at the memorial to those lost on the General Slocum, dedicated in the autumn of 1906. It was a slab of pinkish marble, with a bas-relief of two children, the younger of whom could have easily been her sister, Rosie. An inscription above them read, they were earth’s purest children, young and fair.

  Magda had not thought about Henry and Rosie for a long time. She had not been back to Kleindeutschland since the days following the disaster, and as she had walked to Tompkins Square from the Eighth Street El station, she no longer heard German spoken in the streets of her old neighborhood. A few days ago, she had noticed a small item in the Herald:

  The seventeenth annual memorial service for the unidentified dead of the steamship General Slocum, which burned in the East River on June 15, 1904, with the loss of nearly a thousand lives, was held yesterday afternoon in the Lutheran Cemetery at Middle Village, Queens. More than a thousand persons attended.

  Magda did not often think of the past—yes, she cherished her memories of Tom and Gene and of the work they had done together, occasionally letting her mind wander back to Dreamland and the summer that had led there; but she almost never thought about the Slocum. Life was too short, she thought, to dwell on tragedy. She was proud of the work she had done and the life she had led since the demise of Pickering Brothers. But that notice in the newspaper telling her that nearly a thousand people had attended a memorial service for the twins—both of whom fell into the category of “unidentified dead”—while she had never paid a visit to the mass grave and memorial on Long Island, awakened a guilt Magda had not felt for many years. She wasn’t sure she could face the trip to Middle Village, so she resolved to
return to Tompkins Square Park and visit the memorial there. She found it a quiet, peaceful spot—not the sort of place to remind her of the rambunctious Henry and Rosie in the slightest. She had brought a rose with her and she quietly laid it at the base of the memorial, but she felt no connection to her departed siblings. Magda saw no point to wallowing in painful memories.

  She rationed her happy memories, but allowed them in moderation. After Mr. Lipscomb died, Magda had packed away all the remnants of the Tremendous Trio in a box and promised herself not to open it until either Gene or Tom returned. She did not keep that promise. Every year, on the anniversary of their Dreamland trip, Magda opened the box and read Chapter Two of The Last Adventure.

  Once upon a time there were three children who had secrets. You might know them as Alice, Dan, and Frank, but the secrets began right there, because their real names were Gene, Tom, and Magda. No one knew Magda was named Magda, everyone thought she was named Mary. Most people thought Tom’s last name was Poster, though it was really De Peyster. A few people thought Gene was a girl, even though he was actually a boy. And some people knew this trio as Buck, Neptune, and Dexter. Confused? Well, life is confusing, so you may as well get used to it.

  For the purposes of this story, we will call these children Alice, Dan, and Frank, and we will say that they were fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. But just remember, no one is exactly who they say they are. Everyone has secrets. Everyone has desires. And everyone has secret desires. Alice and Dan and Frank were no exception.

  Our story begins on what should have been the happiest day in the lives of these three heroes. They had just returned to New York City from a trip around the world in an aeroplane of Alice’s own invention. On a sunny afternoon in May, they sat together in the back of a fancy automobile, driving up Broadway and waving at the hundreds of thousands of people who cheered for them. Ticker tape streamed down on them from the windows of tall office buildings. Preceding them was a marching band playing a new tune by John Philip Sousa which he had composed in their honor. From the moment Alice’s aeroplane had left Governor’s Island in New York Harbor four months earlier, they had dreamed of this moment. They all should have been deliriously happy. None of them were.

  They smiled and waved at the crowds and looked as cheerful as any three children had ever looked. No one knew what they were really feeling. Not one of them knew what the other two were feeling.

  Alice, who gritted her teeth behind her smile, seethed with anger. She could not believe that Dan would say to her what he had said. She did not believe it was true and if it wasn’t true then the only reason for him to say it was to hurt her—and he had hurt her. Alice hated that she could be blood-boilingly angry at the same time she was soppy in love, that she could want so achingly to throw her arms around him and also to slap him as hard as she could across the face. It just wasn’t fair.

  Frank, who waved enthusiastically at the crowds and shouted greetings to every pretty girl who waved back, had never felt so sad in his life. How could he be so close to what he wanted, what he desperately desired, and yet be unable to get it, unable to even ask for it? The world was a cruel place and he could feel it turning him into a cruel person. What was the point in being kind when the world would never repay you? Better to be callous, to build up the calluses he would need to protect himself from the pain of reality.

  Dan shook his hat in the air with one hand and swept away cascades of ticker tape with the other. He looked bravest of the three, and everyone who lined the streets knew about his acts of heroism. They had read in the newspapers how he had saved Frank and Alice in the desert and how he had saved those children in the jungle and that man in the sea. But, of course, Frank had written those articles and no one in New York had been there to see the truth. Dan was so filled with fear that he wanted to hide away from the adoration of that crowd and never show himself again. Dan was afraid they would discover who he really was—not a hero but a coward. In his nightmares Dan saw not the faces of those few people he had saved, but of the many he had not.

  And so, they rode up Broadway, smiling and waving, and each thinking he was the only one in abject misery. But that’s the thing about misery, isn’t it? One of the things that makes it so miserable is that you keep it to yourself. If Alice and Dan and Frank had each admitted to the others what they were feeling, they would not have felt quite so bad. But of course, that was not going to happen.

  As the parade crossed Twenty-Third Street and into Madison Square, the children noticed a commotion in front of the Flatiron Building. A horse pulling a wagonload of produce, spooked by the noise of the parade, had ignored his driver and was galloping at full speed down Broadway where the crowd spilled across the street. In that instant Alice and Dan and Frank felt that, if they were true heroes, they would know what to do to prevent what looked like certain disaster. But none of them made the slightest move to do anything. They looked away, pretending they hadn’t seen the horse or the wagon rattling dangerously behind it.

  As it turned out, the crowd drew aside, the driver slowed the horse, and no one was hurt. No one noticed that the children had ignored the incident. The cheering crowds assumed the heroes simply hadn’t seen, in all the noise and excitement. But the three children in the car knew better. When the parade had ended, when the mayor had presented them with the key to the city and a prominent inventor had treated them to dinner at his club, they found themselves alone at last in the drawing room of Alice’s house.

  Only then did they speak of what they had seen and at that moment they all agreed—they were not heroes. They were not even particularly good people. They had taken unnecessary risks, disobeyed their parents, and put the lives of both friends and strangers at risk. And for what? For adventure? For a ticker tape parade? Or just to prove to themselves that, as long as they didn’t mind what harm they did to others, they could do whatever they liked?

  “So we’re agreed,” said Dan, doing his best to push away his fear. “We are thoughtless, self-centered, ill-behaved, reckless gadabouts.”

  “Indeed,” said Alice, trying to forget her anger. “With a heartless disregard for the safety of others or the consequences of our actions.”

  “And,” said Frank, swallowing his sadness, “a complete lack of sympathy for our fellow human beings.”

  “We should be locked up,” said Alice.

  “We should be thrashed,” said Dan.

  “We should on no account be given a parade of any sort,” said Frank.

  “Good,” said Alice. “Now, since we are all in agreement, the question is, what do we do now?”

  “Where do we go?” said Frank.

  “I’m glad you asked that,” said Dan, unfolding a map on the table. He pointed to a big X he had made on the map in red ink. “I thought we could go here.”

  “Brilliant,” said Alice.

  “Brilliant,” said Frank.

  They sat down and began to plan.

  XXXVIII

  New York City, Upper East Side, 2010

  Under the Chapter Two manuscript Robert found a set of bizarre-looking schematics and technical drawings he assumed represented some of the inventions of Alice Gold.

  “Now these I recognize,” said Sarah, after Robert had removed the drawings from the stack of papers. She picked up three postcards of the Dreamland amusement park on Coney Island.

  “They’re the same cards that were in the scrapbook,” said Robert.

  “Yes,” said Sarah.

  On the back of each of the postcards was a date written in ink: September 22, 1906. “And that’s the same date as in the captions Thomas De Peyster put under these cards. Maybe they both went to Dreamland that day.”

  “Maybe so,” said Sarah. “I don’t think she would have kept these if they didn’t mean something.”

  “But she did keep them,” said Robert.

  “Yes,” said Sarah, “and this.”r />
  The next item in the pile was a clipped newspaper article with the headline dreamland fire destroys more than park.

  “There was a fire?” said Robert.

  “Read,” said Sarah.

  The last items in the box were three folded letters and three envelopes. The letters were pieces of fan mail, clearly written by young children, one to Buck Larson, one to Neptune B. Smythe, and one to Dexter Cornwall. Robert read them through quickly and was just about to set them aside when he noticed the signature on the letter to Dexter Cornwall. The letter was from a boy named Howard, a boy who feared his own lack of bravery in the face of bullies. Robert’s grandfather had been named Howard. Could this possibly be the letter Howard Parrish had sent to Dexter Cornwall? The letter to which Magda, as Cornwall, replied, writing the words his grandfather would carry with him in Alsace? The text seemed to fit with Cornwall’s reply. Trembling, Robert set the letter aside, now convinced that, as Sarah had said, he was the one.

  Two of the envelopes from the packet were still sealed and bore the names Eugene Pinkney and Tom De Peyster.

  “I never opened those two,” said Sarah. “Not even when I looked in the box before. Only you should open those.”

  Robert picked up the third envelope, which had been mailed, and opened by its recipient. It was addressed: Mary Stone, 316 W. 23rd St., New York. The paper that Robert withdrew was a thick creamy stock, engraved at the top with the initials TDP.

  June 11, 1912

  Dearest Magda,

  After some delay in settling my father’s estate, I sail for London tomorrow on the Mauretania. I am sending under separate cover an album of photographs and other scraps that I think it best for me to leave behind. It will hold meaning only for you and Eugene, and mostly for you. Perhaps someday, when all else is forgotten, you will peruse its pages and remember that there was once a summer when the sun was always warm and the breeze was always cool and when anything could happen.