Escaping Dreamland

  Copyright © 2020 by Charlie Lovett

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Sean M. Thomas

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

  publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Any historical figures and events referenced in this book

  are depicted in a fictitious manner. All other characters

  and events are products of the author’s imagination, and

  any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982629-42-7

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982629-41-0

  Fiction / Historical / General

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

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  History is happening in Manhattan,

  and we just happen to be

  in the greatest city in the world.

  —Lin-Manuel Miranda

  VE Day, May 8, 1945

  On those rare occasions when Magda thought of the past, she didn’t recall the flames and the screams and the rows of bodies; she came here—to these mementos gathered in an old shoebox, souvenirs not of tragedy but of happiness. She was old enough now, she thought, to know that she had loved them both, but had not been in love with either one of them. Perhaps if she had realized that at the time, the particular happiness she had felt that golden summer would have lasted longer, but that didn’t matter now. There had been many more days, and months, and years of happiness in Magda’s life—sometimes enriched by the occasional glance back, but never dependent upon the contents of that box and the summer they evoked. The box contained only paper and ink, only glimpses into who she had been, who the three of them had been together. But her memory, even at this far remove, held all those long summer days of her youth, and she could return to them, and to Dreamland, whenever she liked, not with wistful regret, but with true joy.

  Before Magda replaced the contents, she gently laid the two letters in the box. She doubted they would ever be opened, but their presence comforted her. While her memory held happiness, the box held secrets and hopes. By closing that lid, Magda allowed herself to go on with her life not burdened by those hopes, but secure in the knowledge that, so long as that box survived, those hopes would not be extinguished. She slid the box onto the top shelf of her closet and stepped outside to join the celebration in the streets.

  I

  New York City, Upper West Side, 2008

  It had been such a perfect day that he had nearly told her. As much as he loved Rebecca, as excited as he was to finally sell a short story to an established literary magazine, as beautiful as Central Park had looked as they took their afternoon walk, Robert’s favorite part of that day had been those four hours from ten until two when he sat alone doing what he had dreamed of doing since childhood—writing. He never had any illusions that writing would be easy, especially since, in college, he had felt the pull toward literary fiction. He knew he would not sit at a computer as words streamed like clear water from a mountain spring. But the difficulty of the task, the frequent drudgery of forcing words and sentences and paragraphs out of his head and onto a blank screen, made those days when the words did flow effortlessly all the more glorious. On that spring day, with the window of his rented room on West End Avenue open, the cool air wafting in, and the cacophony of New York punctuating his work, Chapter Eight had appeared before him almost unbidden. It had taken months to write Chapter Seven, and Robert did not begrudge a minute of the time he had spent prying that narrative loose, banging at it, shaping it, honing it. He embraced every one of ten false starts and scores of discarded pages because each had led to a realization, an understanding of where his words needed to go. Yes, he loved the sheer, sweat-inducing work that writing demanded of him most of the time. But how much more did he love those days, so few and far between, when the starts were not false, the pages not discarded, and the words—instead of clinging to the ether until he wrenched them free—exploded onto the page almost of their own volition.

  At two o’clock, when Robert felt that hardly ten minutes had passed since he had sat down to work, Rebecca had sailed into the room bearing pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s and a smile that sparkled like the sun on the Hudson. They had been seeing each other for just over a year, and that smile smote him every time.

  “I love having a client on the Lower East Side,” she said, kissing him on the cheek and handing him a thick foil packet. “They may be a bit soggy after the ride uptown, but Katz’s still has the best pastrami in town. How is your day? Because mine is great.”

  Nothing could make good news better like sharing it with Rebecca, and as they sat cross-legged on the floor savoring thick slabs of pastrami between dissolving slices of rye bread, Robert narrated his day—first the mail informing him that his story “Novelty and Romancement” had been accepted by Ploughshares and then the fountain of writing that had produced a fully formed chapter in a single sitting.

  “Okay,” said Rebecca, leaning back against the sofa with a groan of the gluttonous and not bothering to wipe the mustard from her face. “Your day is clearly even better than mine. Read to me.”

  Rebecca was Robert’s most careful, and most honest, critic. It was one of the reasons he loved her. She thought deeply about his writing and reacted to it with complete candor and profound wisdom, never afraid to tell him to throw something away and start over. Robert could not easily earn her praise, so it came with weight when she did bestow it. That day she had sat with eyes closed and hands folded over her pastrami-stuffed belly as he read Chapter Eight.

  When he finished, Rebecca remained silent for a long minute. Robert knew she needed time to digest his words. Finally, she opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and looked at him.

  “You wrote that all today?”

  “It sounds like it, doesn’t it,” said Robert. “I rushed it. I shouldn’t have rushed it. It just . . .”

  “No,” said Rebecca firmly, silencing Robert’s blathering. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Really?”

  “A tweak here and there, you can go over it sentence by sentence later on, but where it goes and how it gets there—Robert, this is some of your best work.”

  Robert felt light-headed as he looked into her eyes with a swell of pride. “You really think so?”

  “All that work you did on Chapter Seven made this possible, you know.”

  “Do you think?”

  “What is it?” said Rebecca. “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “I just suddenly really want to kiss the mustard off your face.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Rebecca, biting her lower lip ever so slightly.

  “So?”

  “So,” she said, pulling him toward her, “you know when your writing astounds me, it’s just about the sexiest thing in the world.”

  Afterward, Rebecca made Robert read her the chapter again, and then they walked down Seventy-Second Street and into the park, meandering through the Sheep Meadow and ending up watching children on the carousel.

  “I remember when I was that age,” said Rebecca, nodding at a gaggle of preteen girls climbing onto the horses. “God, you would have hated my childhood literary tastes. I couldn’t get enough of Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls and Cherry Ames. You know those horrid series books? I cringe to t
hink how many hours I spent with them when I could have been reading something good.”

  Robert let her words hang in the air without comment, hoping they would drift away on the music of the carousel, but just when the topic seemed about to evaporate, she added, “How about you? What did you read as a kid? Probably Dickens or George Eliot.”

  And there it was—the opportunity to begin a conversation he had been putting off for months, a conversation he had avoided with every woman he had ever met, a conversation that began so simply with the words, “I loved series books, too! I loved the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and the Great Marvel books and, yes, Nancy Drew.” A brave man would have dived right in. A wise man would have known the moment had come at last. But, Robert thought, he was neither of those things. He was a frightened man, a cowardly man, a man just smart enough to recognize that his own insecurities efficiently destroyed relationships.

  Maybe if the day had not been so perfect—if he had received a rejection slip in the mail and had labored for hours to write a few sentences, if it had been hot and humid or cold and rainy, if Rebecca hadn’t brought him Katz’s pastrami and made love to him on the floor—then he might have told her. Not everything, perhaps, but at least the beginning, at least enough so that the rest could unfold over the next days and weeks. But he had neither the heart nor the courage to turn the compass of such a rare day toward things he had done his best to forget for so long.

  “It took me a while to develop a taste for fine literature,” said Robert. It wasn’t a lie; it simply didn’t delve deeply into the truth. “How about some ice cream?” He took Rebecca by the hand.

  “Can we eat ice cream after all that pastrami?” she said.

  “On a day like this,” said Robert, “anything’s possible.”

  That night, as Rebecca lay sleeping in the Murphy bed, Robert sat at the table—which served as both dining room and office—looking at an envelope from Ploughshares addressed to “Mr. Robert Parrish,” a printout of Chapter Eight with a few minor edits in Rebecca’s hand, and a wadded-up ball of foil that still smelled of pastrami. He saw them as items in a scrapbook, souvenirs of the sort of day that made all his work worthwhile. But niggling in the back of his head as he delayed cleaning off the table for a fresh start tomorrow, was the conversation he had avoided with Rebecca at the carousel. She had grown up on Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls. She had spent rainy afternoons with Cherry Ames. She would certainly understand his repressed love for the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and the Tremendous Trio.

  It had been a long time since he had thought about the Tremendous Trio books—they didn’t come up during discussions in MFA programs or over coffee with the members of his writers’ group. That Rebecca had given him a conversational opening to reminisce over the books that first made him want to write only proved how well-suited they were as a couple. But he simply couldn’t bring himself to dredge up all that now, when life seemed so perfect.

  Still, Robert fell asleep thinking of those adventure stories and of how they had changed his life for the better. And for the worse.

  “Robbie” Parrish had been born in 1976, much too late to have bought any of the books he cherished new at a bookstore. The books themselves might not have seemed so important, if it hadn’t been for the way they changed his relationship with his father. Robbie was a scrawny introvert, his father a hulking sportsman with a booming voice and a backslapping personality perfectly fitted to his career as a car salesman. Not that Robbie’s father didn’t make every effort to connect with his son. He took Robbie to baseball games and built endless sandcastles with him on the beach. He let Robbie pick the TV shows each evening and talked to him about Happy Days or Little House on the Prairie the next morning at breakfast. But Robbie could always sense the effort, and just as he didn’t care for the baseball games, he knew his father didn’t care for Robbie’s favorite shows. Despite his best intentions, Robbie’s father remained something of a stranger.

  This was never truer than during the family’s annual summer visit to Robbie’s grandfather, Pop Pop, in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Pop Pop was a career army man, and even in his seventies he remained more rough and tough and loud than Robbie’s father. The two men would try to include Robbie in their boisterousness, but the boy preferred to sit on the tiny front porch and read. Then one summer during this sojourn, a hurricane struck and flooded the streets of Bloomfield. When Pop Pop discovered water in the basement, he enlisted Robbie’s help in moving some boxes upstairs.

  Robbie set one of the boxes down on the Formica counter of Pop Pop’s kitchen and idly lifted the loose cardboard flap. Inside, he saw four neat stacks of cloth-bound books, their covers frayed and worn. He could still remember the four books on the top, the first four volumes of the Great Marvel series: Through the Air to the North Pole, Under the Ocean to the South Pole, Five Thousand Miles Underground, and Through Space to Mars. Each book had a picture on the cover—an airship, a submarine, a flying boat, and a space rocket.

  “What are these?” said Robbie, carefully lifting Through Space to Mars from the box.

  “Those are my childhood,” said Pop Pop, taking the book from Robbie.

  “My childhood, too, Dad,” said Robbie’s father, removing a book from the box to reveal another tantalizingly illustrated cover underneath. “How many hours did we spend reading these together?”

  “Hundreds,” said Pop Pop.

  “Can I read one?” said Robbie.

  “Honestly, Robbie,” said his mother, who had just stepped into the room. “Can’t you read a good book?” Robbie’s mother had strong opinions about what constituted “good” reading. His usual fare of comic books and Mad magazine did not qualify.

  “What’s wrong with them?” said his father.

  “They’re . . .” his mother began.

  “You’ve never read a single one of these books, have you?” said his father.

  “I don’t have to read them,” said Robbie’s mother.

  “Here,” said his father, handing Robbie Through the Air to the North Pole. “Start with this one.” He leaned over and whispered into the boy’s ear. “And don’t listen to your mother.”

  At eight, Robbie would have been intrigued enough by the titles and the illustrated bindings of his grandfather’s childhood books to read at least one. That his mother disapproved made them that much more desirable. But that reading these books might provide some common ground with his father, a shared conspiracy even, sent Robbie straight to his room, clutching the book like some rare treasure.

  The book his father had handed him exuded a musty, slightly mildewed odor. Robbie would grow to love that smell. He would love the rough texture of cheap wood-pulp paper between his fingers and the random blotches and smudges that came with poor-quality printing.

  By the end of the afternoon, he had seen teenagers Mark Sampson and Jack Darrow (along with Professor Henderson, the inventor) safely to the North Pole and had started on another book. Two days later, as the family packed to return home to Rockaway Beach, Pop Pop put a box of books in the back of the Oldsmobile station wagon. On the drive home Robbie’s father peppered him with questions about the first two Great Marvel books. Even though he hadn’t read the books in decades, he remembered enough to talk to Robbie about Professor Henderson and Mark and Jack all the way home. It was the best conversation Robbie had ever had with his father.

  Over the next three years, all of the books Robbie and Pop Pop had rescued from the basement that rainy summer migrated to the rough shelves of Robbie’s bedroom closet—not just the Great Marvel series by Roy Rockwood, but adventure series like the Dave Dashaway books about a young aviator, sports books like the Baseball Joe series, and school stories like the Rover Boys. The exploits of the boy inventor Tom Swift filled two shelves—dozens of adventures involving prescient stories of inventions like his wizard camera, his photo telephone, and his electric rifle. And of course, there were th
e mystery series, especially the Hardy Boys.

  Robbie read every series over and over, often aloud with his father. When he read alone in his room, he would rush to talk to his father about each adventure as soon as he finished the book. Robbie’s mother rolled her eyes whenever her son or husband brought up the topic of Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys, but Robbie often caught her smiling when she turned her head away. Mrs. Parrish was as happy as Robbie that he and his father had discovered a shared passion.

  Pop Pop died when Robbie was eleven, leaving in the Bloomfield house a box marked “For Robbie.” Inside, he discovered four short-lived series that had never made it past their first three volumes: Daring Dan Dawson, a series about a young circus daredevil who was always in the right place to perform spectacular rescues after dramatic disasters; Alice Gold, Girl Inventor, about a brilliant girl whose inventions are largely confined to the domestic sphere; Frank Fairfax, Cub Reporter, about a boy who goes to work for a newspaper and is assigned to various expeditions in search of lost civilizations; and, finally, a series involving all three of these youngsters and their adventures together—the Tremendous Trio.

  “These were my favorites,” said Robbie’s father, surreptitiously wiping a tear from his eye. “And your grandfather’s as well. We read them over and over together.”

  They became Robbie’s favorites, too. He had not encountered the authors (Dexter Cornwall, Buck Larson, and Neptune B. Smythe) in any of the other series he had read, but their style seemed superior to the likes of Roy Rockwood and Victor Appleton. At an earlier age, Robbie might not have noticed this distinction, but the prose of Buck Larson made even the tame adventures of Alice Gold, condemned by the mores of the early 1900s to invent housecleaning machines and kitchen gadgets, exciting. Dan Dawson’s adventures teetered closer to reality than any of the series he had read. Robbie’s father explained that the unnamed disasters of Dan’s first two books were based on real catastrophes—the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Years later Robert would realize that the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago inspired the third volume, Dan Dawson and the Big Fire. The expeditions in the Frank Fairfax books mostly provided an opportunity for Frank to get into and out of trouble, but every now and then he would overhear a snippet of conversation that made Robbie sense there was a much more adult sort of danger bubbling under the surface of those escapades.