Curious Toys
Page 31
I will miss our happy times at the studio, Pin—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call you Vivian, I know I said that already but it’s true.
Your affectionate friend,
Gloria Swanson
P.S. Please don’t fret about that middy costume, I never told them at the studio and they will never miss it.
A lightness filled her, the same sense of freedom and anticipation as when her mother had cut her hair months ago, before they moved to Riverview; the same exhilaration she’d felt whenever she watched the film of Harriet Quimby’s flight, or turned the crank on Billy Carrera’s Bell and Howell camera. She slipped Glory’s letter back into the envelope, stuck it inside her book bag, and stood, brushing grass and twigs from her skirt, then hurried home to tell her mother about her new job.
Chapter 104
New York City, November 1977
PIN! AREN’T YOU ready yet?”
Pin sighed and finished tying her shoe. “Where’s the fire?”
“You were the one who wanted to go. Come on, slowpoke.”
Pin stood, tugging at her trousers. They were a nice dark-blue gabardine, and worthy of nicer shoes than the Puma sneakers she wore. But other shoes hurt her feet these days.
“That’s what you’re wearing?”
She looked up to see Angela standing in the doorway of their bedroom. Pin shrugged. “Why?”
“It’s Thanksgiving.”
“It’s dinner with your niece’s daughter and her boyfriend.”
“I want us to look nice.”
“Nobody cares how a little old lady dresses.”
“Two little old ladies,” said Angela. “Only one of them very well dressed.”
It was true—Angela always looked elegant, a carryover from her career as a stewardess for Pan Am. Angela had started there when Juan Trippe ran the company, and now, years after retiring, she could still fit into her uniform. She’d gotten her pilot’s license and continued to give flying lessons in small aircraft, Cessna 150s. Pin had never seen her wearing trousers. Even for Francis’s funeral a decade earlier, and her mother’s a year ago, Pin had never worn anything else.
“Eh, I don’t want to compete with you,” Pin said, and ran a hand over her silvery curls. “Anyway, no one would recognize me if I was in a dress.”
“At least put on some jewelry. That beautiful necklace I gave you three years ago for Christmas—I’ve never seen you wear it, even once.”
Pin sighed. “I’m sorry. I just never—”
“Just wear it.” Angela stepped over to kiss Pin’s cheek.
Pin went to the bureau and began to rummage through the drawer where she kept odds and ends. Old photos from when she worked at the studio, old tax returns, a box of stray buttons and pennies. She didn’t own much jewelry, a few things Angela had given her over the years that Pin had dutifully exclaimed at, then put away and forgotten. Where was that damn necklace?
She found it shoved into a shoebox full of yet more papers, receipts and ticket stubs from plays and movies, a newspaper clipping from when someone interviewed Angela about being a woman pilot. The necklace was still in its original plush velvet box. As Pin picked it up, a bit of cardboard fell to the floor. She retrieved it, sucking her breath in sharply when she saw what it was.
The handmade card Henry had shown her the first day they’d met, the same card he had given her the very last time she saw him outside the hospital, when he’d painstakingly written something on it.
“Pin?” Angela stepped beside her. “What is it, darling?”
Pin shook her head, eyes welling. She handed the card to Angela, who gazed at it, bewildered.
GEMINI CHILD PROTECTIVE SOCIETY
BLACK BROTHERS LODGE
HENRICO DARGERO AND VIVIAN PIN
“‘Henrico Dargero,’” Angela read. “Was that someone you knew in Chicago? I’ve never heard you mention him before.”
“Oh yes,” said Pin, taking back the card. Very carefully, she set it on the bureau, beside the wedding photograph of her mother and Francis, stared at the card for a long time before she finally turned back to Angela. “We were great friends,” she said. “Very great friends.”
Acknowledgments
For three decades as my agent, Martha Millard steered me through the creation of dozens of books, and she walked every step of the way with me through the first draft of this one, before her retirement last year. None of my novels would have been written without her support, inspiration, and encouragement. I owe her more love and thanks than I can express.
Martha passed the baton to Nell Pierce, who has done an amazing job. My gratitude to Nell and everyone else at Sterling Lord Literistic.
Three years ago, Josh Kendall at Mulholland Books read the earliest version of this novel. Without his brilliant suggestions and guidance, and those of Emily Giglierano, this book would never have been written. I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with two of the best editors in the business, along with my publicist, Alyssa Persons, marketer Pamela Brown, and production editor Betsy Uhrig, and to have had the support of everyone at Mulholland who helped bring Henry and Pin’s saga to life.
My copyeditor, Susan Bradanini Betz, did an exemplary job of catching those anachronisms that slipped past me. Her knowledge of Chicago and especially of Riverview enhanced every page she worked on—thank you!
The inestimable Steven Silver volunteered to authenticate and map my 1915 Chicago. He provided me with the names of streets, neighborhoods, buildings, businesses, and streetcars (many of them long gone), going so far as to create a Google map of Henry and Pin’s journeys across the city. I owe him an incredible debt of thanks for sharing his remarkable knowledge of and love for a lost Chicago.
Many people assisted me by sharing or tracking down archival material, books, articles, and documentary footage—among others, Greg Bryant, Kristabelle Munson, Jason Ridler, David Shaw, my sister Barbara Legan, my brother Brian Hand, my sister-in-law Amy Hand, and Ken Barr, who shared his childhood memories of Riverview Amusement Park and Chicago.
Penn Jillette told me about the African magician Black Herman and provided an introduction to the legendary magician Johnny Thompson. Johnny, the Great Tomsoni, spoke to me at length about his experience of working at Riverview as a boy magician, sharing his insight into the park’s history, the characters who populated it, and early twentieth-century magicians in the United States. His kindness and generosity toward a total stranger were exceptional but not at all out of character, as demonstrated by the outpouring of love for him after his death, at eighty-four, earlier this year.
Enza Vescera tracked down a rare copy of Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century. Robert Levy gave me a copy of Henry Darger’s Room: 851 Webster. Ellen Datlow, Gemma Files, Jeffrey Ford, Callie Hand, Cara Hoffman, Carla Hufstedler, Robert Levy, Sharyn November, Bill Sheehan, and Gary Wolfe all read early drafts and gave suggestions for improvements.
Finally, my love to my partner, John Clute, who as ever read multiple drafts, year after year, offering editorial and moral support when it seemed that Henry and Pin’s adventures would never see the light of day, or end. Most of all, my love and thanks to my mother, Alice Ann Silverthorn Hand, who shares my love for Henry Darger’s work, and who thought he would make a good detective.
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On Henry Darger
I’ve been obsessed with Henry Darger since 1979, when I heard a haunting and enigmatic song titled “The Vivian Girls,” by the late avant-garde performer Snakefinger. A few years later, I learned the song was inspired by the self-taught Chicago artist Henry Darger. In 2002, I reviewed John M. MacGregor’s groundbreaking Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal and wrote at length about the similarities between Darger’s work and that of J. R. R. Tolkien, another Catholic visionary artist and author. My notes below are excerpted from that artic
le. You can read it in its entirety at https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2002/eh0210.htm, or visit my website, www.elizabethhand.com.
Born in Chicago in 1892, Henry Darger lived an impoverished life. When he was four, his mother died after giving birth to a girl who was given up for adoption. The infant’s history remains unknown. After a stint in a Catholic boys’ home, twelve-year-old Henry was placed in the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. The reasons: a propensity for aggressive behavior toward other children; setting fires; “acquired” self-abuse. He ran away from the asylum several times and escaped for good in 1909, walking to Chicago, where he found work as a janitor at a Catholic hospital. He spent the rest of his life as a menial laborer and seems to have had only one true friend, Willhie Schloeder, with whom he visited Riverview Amusement Park.
Darger was obsessed with the 1911 abduction and murder of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Czech girl. The loss of a treasured newspaper photograph of Elsie threw him into the tumult of grief and rage that, in part, inspired his magnum opus. In 1932 he moved to 851 Webster Avenue, occupying a single large room until poor health necessitated his move to a Catholic nursing home when he was eighty.
In 1956, the Webster Avenue building was bought by the noted Chicago photographer Nathan Lerner. An extraordinarily compassionate landlord, Lerner never raised Darger’s rent. Along with other residents of the building, he provided occasional meals and, as Darger grew increasingly frail, help with medical care. Darger, a furtive, slight man, just over five feet tall, always wore the filthy ruins of his army overcoat and spent hours poking through trash cans for refuse, which he then brought back to his apartment. His neighbors often heard Henry talking to himself, carrying on lengthy conversations in which he took on different voices. He was in fact engaged in the final stages of a lifelong battle with God.
Not long before Darger died in 1972, Lerner entered his room to clean it. There he found (among other works) fifteen volumes, totaling more than fifteen thousand pages, and hundreds of pictures illustrating a vast epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
Modeled upon the books he loved as a child—L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi stories, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod series—Darger’s epic follows the Vivian Girls through an endless relay of scrapes, plots, imprisonments, battles, tortures, escapes, and cataclysmic storms. Yet, as Darger himself admits, “This is not the land where Dorothy and her Oz friends reside.” Art critics make much of Darger’s luminous use of color and his genius for collage, and many of the paintings in the Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum are breathtakingly gorgeous. But this is not Oz. The Realms is as excruciating and detailed a portrait of the human psyche as we have seen: brutal, banal, transcendental, with flashes of the divine. The timeless urge to create is what made the profoundly damaged, isolated, and lonely man named Henry Darger human. It is also what may make him immortal.
Selected Bibliography
Whenever possible, I relied on primary sources, including myriad period books, magazines, and newspaper articles in archives, online, and elsewhere. This is a very select list of the books I found most useful over nearly ten years of researching this novel.
1. Henry Darger
Anderson, Brooke Davis, editor. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.
Biesenbach, Klaus, editor. Henry Darger: Disasters of War. Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2000.
———. Henry Darger. Berlin: Prestel Verlag, in cooperation with the American Folk Art Museum, New York, 2014.
Darger, Henry. Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Bonesteel. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.
———. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001.
———. Henry Darger’s Room: 851 Webster. Introduction by John M. MacGregor. Tokyo: Imperial Press, 2007.
Elledge, Jim. Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2013.
MacGregor, John M. The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
———. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. Lugano, Switzerland: Fondazione Galleria Gottardo, 1996.
Yu, Jessica, dir. In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. DVD, 2004.
2. Early Film
Ankerich, Michael G. Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993.
Brown, Karl. Adventures with D. W. Griffith. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
Corcoran, Michael, and Arnie Bernstein. Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100+ Years of Chicago and the Movies. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013.
Griffith, Mrs. D. W. [Linda Arvidson]. When the Movies Were Young. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1925.
Kiehn, David. Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company. Berkeley, CA: Farwell Books, 2003.
Nickelodeon: The Director’s Cut. Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich. Columbia Pictures, DVD, 2009.
Smith, Michael Golver, and Adam Selzer. Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry. New York: Wallflower Press, 2015.
Swanson, Gloria. Swanson on Swanson: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1980.
3. Riverview Park and Chicago
Ellis, A. Caswell, and G. Stanley Hall. A Study of Dolls. New York: E. L. Kellogg & Company, 1897.
Gee, Derek, and Ralph Lopez. Laugh Your Troubles Away: The Complete History of Riverview Park, Chicago, Illinois. Livonia, MO: Sharpshooters Productions, 2000.
Haugh, Dolores. Riverview Amusement Park. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004.
Hecht, Ben. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1922.
———. A Child of the Century: The Autobiography of Ben Hecht. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.
Hoffman, Adina. Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.
Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003.
Wlodarczyk, Chuck. Riverview: Gone but Not Forgotten, 1904–1967. Chicago: Riverview Publications, 1977.
About the Author
Elizabeth Hand is the author of more than fourteen cross-genre novels and collections of short fiction. Her work has received the Shirley Jackson Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award (four times), and the Nebula Award (twice), as well as the James M. Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards. She’s a longtime critic and contributor of essays for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, Boston Review, and the Village Voice, among many others. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
Also by Elizabeth Hand
Cass Neary Novels
Generation Loss
Available Dark
Hard Light
Wylding Hall
Errantry: Strange Stories
Radiant Days
Glimmering
Illyria
Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories
Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol
Mortal Love
Bibliomancy: Four Novellas
Black Light
Last Summer at Mars Hill and Other Stories
Waking the Moon
Icarus Descending
Aestival Tide
Winterlong
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