Curious Toys

by Elizabeth Hand

  She ducked in and out of the throngs of line lice, kicking up dust as she scanned the ground for coins or feathers, hatpins, cigarettes. A boy she knew had once found a silver powder box on a ribbon. She spied a pink carnation fallen from a dude’s buttonhole, grabbed it, and stuck it into her own buttonhole. It smelled like Glory, sweet and slightly dusty.

  A wave of longing overcame her. She imagined standing next to Glory, taking turns at the Mutoscope; but would an actress even want to see a moving picture?

  And what if Glory wanted to see where she lived? Almost everyone Pin knew at Riverview lived elsewhere. Near indigents, like Pin and her mother, squatted in makeshift shelters so they could save enough to pay for a tenement room during the winter months. Pin and Gina’s tiny shack—constructed of plywood and plaster lath, painted to look like a log cabin—was a castoff from the Sunny South minstrel show, where colored actors danced the cakewalk and sang “Dixie” for audiences made up of white immigrants from Germany and Sweden and Ireland. When Ikie learned where she lived, he’d stared at her with open contempt.

  “You living in a slave shack? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Since then, she avoided the shack except as a place to catch a few hours of fitful sleep. On nights when Gina worked as a dance teacher—ten cents a dance, no hugging—Pin lay alone on the pallet they shared.

  Once her mother didn’t return until late the next morning. Abriana’s disappearance had been like this, a splinter of worry that grew septic as it worked its way through Pin’s body: now, as then, she paced to keep from throwing up. When her mother did return, eyes sunken with exhaustion, her dark hair unbound beneath her straw Panama, all she said was “I met a friend.”

  Pin wouldn’t show Glory the shack for cash money. Just the thought made her hot with shame. She trudged along the Pike, pausing to buy a slice of watermelon from the watermelon man, ate it, and tossed the rind into the trash pail. Food made her feel better. She wiped her fingers on her knickerbockers and decided she’d go to Hell Gate.

  Chapter 15

  BACK IN HIS room, Lionel lit up one of the hashish cigarettes Max’s boy had delivered and inhaled deeply. He’d left Essanay in a rage after yet another argument with Spoor.

  “What is this garbage, Mr. Gerring? Women buried alive, skeletons in tombs—” Spoor had tossed the pages of Lionel’s most recent photoplay back onto his desk.

  “She gets saved,” Lionel protested. “It’d be perfect for Bushman.”

  “Bushman would follow Chaplin to California if he ever got a whiff of this. Garbage,” he repeated in disgust.

  “It’s from Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Dieter’s already working on Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Raven,’ lots of spooky stuff. And where’s the love interest? That’s what the ladies want to see. Something funny and exciting. Brewster’s Millions, why didn’t you come up with that one before DeMille?”

  “Because George Barr McCutcheon already did, years ago. In a book.”

  “No one wants to watch a story about a murderer.”

  “He gets captured! We see him brought to the gallows in chains!”

  Spoor’s face crinkled in distaste. “No one wants to see that, either, Gerring.”

  A week earlier he’d pitched a flicker inspired by The Tales of Hoffmann, which he’d seen before he fled New York. He’d been especially intrigued by the segment featuring a life-size toy, an automaton that could dance and sing. Lionel had typed up a photoplay, six scenes, all but the last set in a toy shop.

  “You’ve got something here,” Spoor had said. “I like the toy shop, the dolls, too. But it’s too spooky. And kissing the doll, that just strikes me as peculiar. Maybe these…notions…are accepted back East, Mr. Gerring, but not here. I don’t want to see any more girls buried alive, or men fondling kids dressed like dolls. Spoiled my dinner, reading that. Made me think of my own little girls.”

  Lionel didn’t bother pointing out that half the movies shot in Chicago and New York starred girls under sixteen, or women cast because they looked like children. Or that some of the most successful moving pictures of the last few years were what Spoor called garbage: The Body in the Trunk, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Skull.

  Spoor handed the sheaf of typescript back to Lionel. “But it’s a funny idea. I mentioned it to Wally, it’s a good fit for him. Write it funny. Get it to me by Wednesday, we can begin shooting next week.”

  That had been just over a week ago. Sweedie’s Tell-Tale Toys had already opened and was raking in the nickels. There’d been no point in arguing. Lionel got paid a hundred and fifty dollars for a Sweedie scenario…

  But he’d felt a chill at the way Spoor had paused before enunciating the word notions. Because it was true, back in New York he had been able to hide his tastes even while indulging them; had learned to recognize men whose expressions, at once avid and fearful, mirrored his own. He knew his stories and photoplays were efforts to disguise his desires—obviously futile efforts, to judge from Spoor’s icy stare. He had grabbed his pages and left the studio, choosing to walk rather than take the streetcar, in hopes that his anger and fear might burn off.

  They hadn’t. Thus, the hashish.

  He took another puff, then hid the photoplay in a drawer alongside the notebook where he wrote down his ideas, leaned back in his chair, and gazed at the stained ceiling; its pattern of cracks and bulges gradually transformed into a counterpane and a girl floating in the air, a girl who fragmented into hundreds of Kewpies, their tiny hands and tiny feet pattering against his face like rain as they melted away, one by one.

  Chapter 16

  DARK RIDES LIKE Hell Gate or the Old Mill weren’t popular on hot afternoons. Visitors preferred the Thousand Islands, where they rode outdoors in canoes, or the Scenic Railway, which wasn’t a railway but a coaster that whizzed past painted backdrops of the Alps and North Pole. The line for the Thousand Islands stretched almost to the park’s entrance, dozens of crying babies and fighting children, parents at the end of their rope.

  Hell Gate towered above the opposite end of the midway, the only attraction devoid of the red, white, and blue flags and bunting that fluttered from every other building in the park. Hell Gate’s ominous white pavilion looked more like a church than a ride: a church with an enormous red devil perched on its roof.

  The devil was plaster and lath, but Pin’s mother still crossed herself every time she walked past. It had black horns, a leering mouth and enormous eyes, immense bat wings that shaded the ride’s entry like a black umbrella. Horace, a sour man who’d served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, ran the dark ride. When an imperious suffragist once confronted him about the lack of flags on the pavilion, he spat in the canal and said, “Ain’t no American flags in hell, ’cause there ain’t no Americans there.”

  Today, only a few dozen people waited in line beside the canal. Pin removed her cap and flapped it at her face. Goddamn it was hot. Squinting, she tried to see who was behind the ticket booth: Larry, a bespectacled college boy, one of the only Negroes at the University of Chicago. Larry read the same kinds of magazines that Pin liked and passed them on to her when he’d finished reading them.

  She strolled over to where Larry slumped behind the HELL GATE 10 CENTS sign, immersed in the latest Adventure magazine.

  “Hey, Larry.” Pin peered over the railing. “Any good?”

  Larry held up an illustration of a man in a loincloth stabbing a shark with a knife. “So-so. Not as good as that Yasmini story.”

  He set the magazine aside to take two dimes from a pair of high-school girls wearing flared skirts instead of the hobble skirts that had been fashionable for the last few years. “Watch your head inside the boat, ladies; Horace there will help you.”

  He watched the girls walk off, their skirts barely grazing their ankles, and whistled softly. “They’re about fryin’ size,” he said, and turned back to Pin. She twisted her head to read the title of the story he’d been reading.

  “Can I borro
w that when you’re finished?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Larry folded the magazine and stuck it in his back pocket, eyeing several more girls as they approached the booth. “Come by later, I’ll be done by then.”

  With a mocking salute, she ambled off, idly watching as the line for Hell Gate grew longer. People her own age or a few years older waited for the rowboats to appear, one at a time, alongside the loading area. Three young couples amused themselves by kicking each other’s feet. The boys wore boaters and sailor suits, the girls blue-and-white sailor dresses and Panama hats. One boy grabbed a girl by the shoulders and pretended to push her into the canal.

  She shrieked, and Pin whispered a curse. She hated girls who acted like sissies, and hated even more that boys liked it. Sometimes Ikie and the others would grab some girl’s hat on the Pike, just to make her scream. Pin refused to join in.

  “What if that was your sister?” she said once to Ikie.

  “You ain’t got a sister, why d’you care?” he retorted.

  She replied before she could stop herself. “I used to have a sister.”

  Ikie laughed. “Used to! Used—”

  She punched him and ran off before he could retaliate.

  “Billy, stop!” The girl in line for Hell Gate shrieked again. With a scowl, Pin stalked toward a small rise, a man-made hill where a stand of tired-looking sycamores provided some shade.

  Up here you could catch the wind, even on the hottest days. Pin sat on the grass and shut her eyes against the sky’s blue glitter. After a minute, she opened her eyes, turned, and looked back down at Hell Gate.

  Two more people had joined the line, a man and a young girl. The man wore a boater, like just about every other dude at Riverview, a suit, and a bow tie. The girl wore a buttercup-yellow dress, her dark ringlets spilling from beneath a floppy yellow bow nearly the size of her head.

  Pin frowned. She recognized this girl—she’d seen her at Essanay that morning, one of the two costumed to look like twins.

  Pin shaded her eyes. Was the man Charlie Chaplin? From this distance, she couldn’t tell. He gestured toward the canal, then leaned in to whisper in the girl’s ear. Ahead of them, the last of the three couples waited as Horace used his boat hook to pull a boat toward the wooden walkway. The boat rocked slightly as the boy stepped in. He took the girl’s hand, pulled her onto the seat beside him, and slid his arm around her shoulders as Horace pushed them off.

  After a few minutes another empty boat appeared. Horace snagged it so that the man and the girl in the yellow dress could step inside. The man sank onto the plank seat, and instead of sitting beside him, the girl settled onto his lap. Horace pushed them off, straightened, and wiped his forehead, leaning on his boat hook as he waited for the next customer. He pulled a stogie from his pocket, lit it, and began to smoke.

  A strange sick heaviness weighted Pin, like one of the nightmares after her sister, Abriana, disappeared. Abriana had been born backward, their mother said. The woman who’d come to help had pulled the baby out by her feet as Pin watched. She was only two, so she didn’t remember, but she’d heard Gina tell the story so many times that she’d never been able to get the image out of her head. Later, when their mother explained to people that Abriana was slow, Pin thought it was because her sister’s feet had been injured when she was born.

  As she got older, Pin realized that slow meant Abriana would never, never learn to read or write, never remember the rules of ringolevio or stickball or even checkers. She’d never learn not to talk to strangers or follow an organ-grinder, no matter how often you told her. Pin would beat up other kids who called her sister numb in the head, though sometimes Pin felt like saying the same thing herself.

  You couldn’t tell by looking at her that something was wrong; not unless you watched the way her smile seemed disconnected from her eyes. That was something else their mother said: that Abriana had been born smiling, the way that Pin had been born dissatisfied. Abriana might have been born backward, Gina said, but Pin had been born sideways.

  Her sister couldn’t go anywhere alone. Pin had to constantly watch that she didn’t eat herself sick with sweets. Abriana would mash her face against the window of the German bakery on Kingsbury Street, in hopes that the owner would give her a cruller. She smiled at Jack the shoeshine man, who gave her penny candy, and the old lady who ran Ionucci’s Grocery, who chased them away with a broom because she thought Abriana scared off customers.

  Abriana, too, had been wearing a yellow dress, her Easter dress. Pin searched until she spotted the boat that held the girl from the movie studio. The man had slipped his arm around her and hugged her close to him, his hat tipped so Pin couldn’t see his face. She watched as the boat bobbed along the spiraling canal, pulled by the man-made current in ever-tightening circles as it moved toward the center, until at last it reached the chute that gave the ride its name, and plunged out of sight.

  Chapter 17

  DON’T BE AFRAID, he murmured, moving his hand from her silky hair to the even-softer folds of her dress, a buttercup held to the sun. Don’t be afraid, none of it’s real, pretend they’re toys, that’s what I do. The fabric bunched between his fingers, nothing softer than that, not skin or hair or their mouths. Hush now, I mean it, be quiet, no one can hear you.

  Yes, that one was scary.

  There, now you’ve done it. What did I tell you?

  Chapter 18

  SHE MIGHT HAVE dozed there on the knoll, lulled by heat and the strains of ragtime from the bandstand. The flicker of sun and shade on her eyelids made her think she was in the Comique, watching Charlie Chaplin and the girl with the big yellow bow. The girl was her sister, how had she forgotten that?

  Abriana, she said, and her sister nodded. Where did you go?

  I’m right here, said Abriana, and got very small. Chaplin started dancing, one hand held out to Pin. She reached for it and jolted awake.

  She was sitting cross-legged on the grass. Overhead, leaves stirred in the hot breeze. She blinked, her mouth tasting of grit, rubbed her eyes, and stood. Where was she? A glance down the hillside and she remembered: Hell Gate.

  A dust devil whipped along the sidewalk. Something moved at the far end of the pavilion, where the boats returned from their underground journey and the passengers disembarked. A skinny stray dog, one of the trained terriers from the dog-and-monkey show, cut loose because it bit someone.

  The dog nosed at the wooden boardwalk as a boat approached along the canal. Pin recognized two of the high-school kids from earlier. Horace stepped from the pavilion, put out his foot, and stopped the boat so they could scramble out. The girl clutched her Panama hat, her hair wild about her shoulders. The boy grinned at Horace, took the girl’s hand, and pulled her after him onto the Pike.

  Horace leaned on his boat hook and watched them go, then pushed off the empty boat and turned to wait for the next one. A few yards away, the skinny terrier paced back and forth, pausing to scratch at the dirt. Horace threw a rock at it, and it ran off.

  After a few minutes, another boat appeared and halted when Horace set his foot on its prow. A young couple, Pin recognized them, too. The girl slapped the boy’s hand when he tried to help her from the boat and hurried off without waiting for him.

  Pin plucked a long piece of grass and chewed the white pith at the bottom. Pieces of her dream came back to her, and her heart constricted as she remembered that her sister would have turned twelve this past April. Pin had forgotten her birthday. So had their mother.

  Tears pricked at her eyes. It was her fault that Abriana had disappeared—Pin had stopped in a vacant lot near the gasworks to play a round of mumblety-peg, which she lost. When she turned, Abriana was gone. Lily Mikowski, a girl who’d been observing the game, said Abriana had followed an organ-grinder down the alley. He’d been playing “After the Ball,” Lily remembered that. Abriana was never seen again.

  No one blamed Pin: they all blamed her mother. Gina did blame Pin, screaming and cursing for hours that first
night. In the days that followed she fell into a strange rapt silence, as though she were sitting in church during the Easter vigil. Gina never blamed her again, but Pin knew the truth. Even if no one else knew, even if no one but Pin and her mother remembered Abriana, it would always be her fault.

  Pin wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked back down at the pavilion. Here was the next boat, the one that the man and young girl had entered.

  She hesitated, then hurried down the slope. If the man was Chaplin, she wanted to be able to tell Max that she’d seen him. The boat slipped along the black water, the last bars of sunlight striping it as it slowed. Horace continued to smoke, his back to the canal. The boat rocked as the man in the boater hat hopped out onto the raised wooden walkway and strode rapidly down the Pike. Pin frowned. Where was the girl?

  Horace dropped his cigarette in the canal, turned, and used his boat hook to snag the empty vessel and pull it toward him. He glanced inside, set his foot against the stern, and pushed, watching as the boat floated on to join the others that awaited passengers at the opposite end of the pavilion.

  Pin turned toward the Pike. Now that the sky had begun to darken, with the promise of cooler air, a line had formed in front of Hell Gate. Nearly every man she saw wore the same straw hat and white shirt and ice-cream suit, the exact color of its pastel stripes impossible to discern at a distance. She saw no sign of the girl in the yellow dress and matching hair bow. Like Abriana, she had disappeared. It was like she’d never been there at all.

  Chapter 19

  PIN SPENT THE next ten minutes searching the park, looking for any sign of the girl. Finally reaching the Grand Lagoon, she gave up. She stood and stared at the Hippodrome reflected in the shimmering water. It was supposed to be a marvel, its angel figurehead even taller than Riverview’s Eye-Full Tower and supposedly visible beyond the city itself.