The Age of Dreaming
Page 35
It is now a full month into the baseball season, and next week we’re taking Charlie to a game. Dodger Stadium sits high on a hill just off the Pasadena Freeway, and on Saturday afternoon we will pick him up and take him there. I am told that the view of the mountains from inside the stadium is lovely, particularly when they’re lit orange and red at sunset. I am told that the Dodgers’ former star and one of Charlie’s heroes, Jackie Robinson, grew up in Pasadena, and perhaps after the game we will try to find his house. The weekend after that we will go to Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel and several other rides have opened on the pier. Soon after that we will go to the zoo, which has just received two new lions. There appear to be an infinite number of activities in Los Angeles, things I never thought to do until recently. But my son is interested in everything, and wants to go everywhere, and Mrs. Bradford is always happy to join us. She has her own suggestions for places we might visit, and she and Charlie talk excitedly about where they want to go next. My plan is simply to take them wherever they wish. I am sure that they will keep me quite busy.
Author’s Note
I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: Jennifer Gilmore and Kyoko Uchida, my indispensable readers. Richard Parks, for his patience and belief. Johnny Temple, for being the most committed and conscientious publisher any writer could ever hope for. Johanna Ingalls, for her tireless work and unflagging sense of humor.
I am indebted to several written works and their authors, particularly Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By … and Behind the Mask of Innocence—Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era; Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion; Sessue Hayakawa, Zen Showed Me the Way; Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, A Cast of Killers; John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles 1900–1942; and Tony Villecco, Silent Stars Speak: Interviews with Twelve Cinema Pioneers. I am also grateful to Daisuke Miyao for his brilliant work on Hayakawa, which helped me understand the kinds of roles my own fictional actors would have been able to play. In addition, I learned a great deal from movie magazines of the silent film era, particularly Photoplay and Motion Picture Classic.
There are a few intentional adjustments in the dates, names, or histories of particular real places, variations from fact that I kept in service to my story. Scenes occur at the Pasadena Playhouse or Runyan Canyon Park, for example, when those places did not actually open until several years after the events of the novel. But by the time I learned the true dates, those settings were so integral to the story and so entrenched in my imagination that I could not bear to find alternative locations.
I am grateful to Jason Reed, who let me stay in his cabin and introduced me to my favorite place on earth. Thanks also to Stephanie Vaughn and everyone else at Cornell, who afforded me the quiet and space—again—I needed to complete this book; and to my friends and colleagues at Children’s Institute, who gave me fiexibility, understanding, and time.
Finally, my love and gratitude to Patsy Cox—for all the things I’ve already thanked her for, and the many more I haven’t.
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
.