Escaping Dreamland Read online

  “Right ho,” said the bicyclist.

  “You know, I can improve the brakes on that bicycle,” said Alice as the young man waded toward the shore. The bicycle lay on its side, one wheel still spinning.

  “I built that bike myself,” said the young man. “But I guess I’m not very good at building brakes. What I need is a proper inventor.”

  “I am an inventor,” said Alice, holding out her hand to help the young man as he reached the shore. “I’m Alice Gold.”

  “Alice Gold, come away from that water this instant!” came a shouted voice from the bridge.

  “My governess,” whispered Alice to the bicyclist. “If you want help with those brakes, my address is 922 Fifth Avenue.”

  Alice scampered back up the hill to where Miss Gander stood, hands on her hips and a furious expression on her face.

  “Just what do you think you are doing, young lady?” said Miss Gander.

  “Saving all those children and getting a new customer for my inventing business,” said Alice with a toss of her head as she walked past Miss Gander and back across the bridge. “Oh, and thinking about toilets,” she added.

  Just as he drifted off to sleep, Robert thought again about the walk with his father in search of Alice Gold’s house. He wondered if there had ever been a 922 Fifth Avenue, and if so, whether Alice’s creator, Buck Larson, might have lived there.

  X

  New York City,

  When Ladies Danced on the Roof

  Eugene Pinkney slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the cool surface of the silver cigarette case that nestled in his pocket. He didn’t smoke, but he had bought the case two years ago to prove to himself how far he had come from the bakery on Houston Street.

  On a warm summer night in June 1906, Gene sat at his table at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden on Twenty-Sixth Street and wondered if Mr. White would show up. To his left the illuminated Moorish tower that Mr. White had built as part of the complex rose over Twenty-Sixth Street; in front of him chorus girls danced and sang their way through some frothy bit of entertainment called Mamzelle Champagne. Eugene admired the costumes and the feminine beauty of the dancers, but didn’t think much of the music. Certainly he had seen better shows—among them Floradora, to which Mr. White had treated him on two occasions. Eugene had never been certain if Mr. White was trying to seduce him or if he had simply taken a shine to him. Nor did Eugene much care which. He enjoyed spending time with Mr. White for two reasons—the man was wealthy enough to treat Eugene to fine restaurants, the best shows, and expensive champagne; and, more important, Stanford White was the only person who had ever seen the two faces of Eugene Pinkney.

  Gene’s parents, who should have known him better than anyone, had seen neither side of his true self—neither the character he had displayed in the daylight on the top floor of a building on Houston Street, nor the persona he used to assume at night, at Columbia Hall on Bleecker Street. Just a few blocks separated these two buildings, which had nurtured the two parts of Gene, yet their spheres were completely disconnected, and both his artistic self and his scientific self felt as removed from his childhood home as the earth was from the moon.

  Science had fascinated Gene for as long as he could remember. From the time he was ten years old, Gene made the twenty-minute walk to the Astor Library on Lafayette Street by himself at least twice a week to check out books on science. Even when his father made him begin helping with the early deliveries for the bakery and Gene rose at three o’clock every morning, he still found time for reading. Despite minimal schooling, he had learned to read quickly, and had digested the works of Jules Verne by his tenth birthday. He loved Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon, but he wanted to know more about the science that made Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and the Columbiad space gun work.

  And so, Gene had moved on to books about science—specifically books about mechanics and electricity. Then, in 1895, at the age of thirteen, he read a new book, The Mechanics’ Complete Library of Modern Rules, Facts, Processes, Etc., compiled by Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Gene read the book over and over, memorizing long passages, especially the sections about electricity, dynamos, batteries, telephones, and lighting. While other boys his age read Horatio Alger and dime novels, Gene read the “Rules and Regulations for Properly Wiring and Installing Electrical Light Plants,” learned the difference between voltaic and galvanic electricity, and committed to memory a chapter titled “A Few Points for Inventors Regarding Patents.”

  Gene’s father did not approve of his “wasting his time” reading, so as Gene became more fascinated by and schooled in science, he also became more adept at hiding his books. He eventually loosened a few floorboards under his bed to create enough space to store several volumes. By then, books were not the only things Eugene Pinkney had to hide.

  He was fourteen the first time he went to a fairy resort. Soon thereafter, he first kissed another boy in a dark corner of the dance floor at the Black Rabbit. At fifteen he slipped behind the curtain into one of the private booths at Columbia Hall, known to its patrons as Paresis Hall, a nickname Gene would later discover came from a term for syphilitic insanity. There he earned a dollar from a middle-class man who was slumming and looking for a thrill. By his sixteenth birthday, Gene had been a regular at Paresis Hall for nearly a year, making more money than he ever could delivering bread by waiting tables, flirting with men from uptown, and engaging in activities in the upstairs rooms which, though lucrative, would have sent his father into a rage and set his grandmother spinning in her grave.

  Gene had never particularly questioned his interest in boys. He liked boys more than he liked girls, or at least in a different way. That was simply part of his being, and one of many things—his love of science, his constant reading, his distaste for manual labor—that made up the chasm separating him from his parents. To him, the fact that boys, and then young men, and even not so young men, turned his head in the streets while girls did not seemed no more “degenerate,” as he would later hear people call it, than any of his other eccentricities. In fact, thanks to clubs like Paresis Hall, he found it much easier to connect with those who were like-minded on this subject than with fellow enthusiasts of electrical theory.

  Paresis Hall stood on the Bowery, near Fifth Street. A rather plain building from the outside, inside it consisted of a saloon downstairs and a number of smaller rooms upstairs where private “entertainments” took place. Gene had discovered the place almost by accident. Unable to sleep one night, he had gone out for a walk and saw a young man not much older than himself standing on the corner of Bowery and Fifth. He wore trousers that flared at the ankles and cinched in tightly at the waist, emphasizing his round behind. His shirt was a frilly affair, though mostly covered by a fur-trimmed jacket that looked like something a Fifth Avenue grande dame would wear to the opera. His hair was longer than was stylish, and perfectly coiffed. His cheeks were rouged and his lips lined with artificial color. He held a cigarette in a silver holder and spoke in a high voice. Gene had never seen anyone like this man, had never heard the word fairy, but he felt instantly drawn to the strange figure in the shadows.

  “Give a girl a light?” said the man.

  “Sorry,” said Gene. “I don’t have one. Are you . . . ?”

  “Princess Petunia,” said the man, holding his hand loosely in front of Gene’s face. Gene locked eyes with this odd character, and though he sensed exactly what the man wanted him to do, he hesitated. “No one’s around,” said Petunia. And so Gene leaned in, took Petunia’s hand in his, and lightly kissed it.

  “You like that?” said Petunia.

  “Yes,” said Gene, shivering. Excitement crashed over him like a tidal wave the moment his lips touched Petunia’s soft skin.

  “Come on in,” said Petunia. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Inside Gene found a new world, a world
in which he felt not alien, but welcomed with open arms. Men filled the tables and stood two deep at the bar. Among them flitted many more boys and men like Petunia—dressed in a feminine style, wearing makeup, and using mannerisms one would expect from chorus girls. Some were even more feminine in their dress and behavior than Petunia. Most seemed to be in their late teens. All of them were, to Gene, exquisitely beautiful. By the end of the evening he had met the Duchess of Marlboro, the Queen of Sheba, Lady Lily, and a dozen others who, though certainly men, dressed to varying degrees like women and used flamboyant pseudonyms. They all treated Gene with kindness—including him in their jokes, buying him drinks, and kissing him on the cheek, always careful to rub away telltale lipstick marks afterward. He left the club just in time to turn up at the bakery at three a.m. To his father, he looked no different than usual, but Gene felt transformed.

  Gene learned quickly enough the locations of the other “fairy resorts”—the Black Rabbit on Bleecker Street; the Palm Club on Chrystie Street; Little Bucks, across the street from Paresis Hall; and several more. While on some nights he would wander from one to another, he generally ended up at Paresis Hall, often chatting with Princess Petunia and the other “girls” when they weren’t busy charming men, dancing, and even singing for the delight of the crowd. These friends not only didn’t consider Gene abnormal because of his attraction to boys, he got the feeling they would have found him odd if he were not attracted to boys. Everyone at Paresis Hall liked boys. Gene had found his people.

  Soon enough he started flirting with men himself—especially after he learned that he would get a percentage of every drink he sold. He would drink glass after glass of water, for which unsuspecting slummers had paid the price of gin. When he told his father he had gotten a job on the night shift of a bakery in the West Village, Mr. Pinkney asked no questions. All that mattered was that Gene brought home good money. Gene knew that money would be much better if he looked the part. So, one evening, not long after his fifteenth birthday, he went to Princess Petunia for help.

  “You’ve come to the right girl,” said Petunia. “You don’t need to wear a dress. You just need flair.” Petunia showed Gene how to pluck his eyebrows and how to apply rouge to his cheeks. She (Gene had learned by now that in the context of Paresis Hall, his fellow fairies preferred to be called “she”) helped him shop for clothes that had, as Petunia had put it, flair, capping his outfit with a large red neck-bow and a pair of white kid gloves.

  As they stood before a dusty mirror in a back room of Paresis Hall, Princess Petunia smiled as Gene gazed, awestruck, at the image before him. From an unknown source in his depths welled up the sensation that he was looking at his true self for the first time.

  “Don’t start crying,” said Petunia, “or we’ll have to put fresh powder on.”

  But Gene couldn’t help it. He stood immobile, staring at the real Gene Pinkney, tears leaving wet streaks on his powdered cheeks. Petunia embraced him from behind; Gene had never been so happy.

  “Now,” whispered Petunia, “you need a name.”

  “Eugene Pinkney,” said Gene dully. “It’s not much.”

  “But it’s something to work with,” said Petunia with a smile.

  And so Dame Pinky was born. Soon she was earning more money than any bakery would pay, and Gene opened an account at the Butchers’ and Drovers’ Bank on the Bowery. Petunia had told him that the oldest fairies working Paresis were twenty-one. That gave Gene six years. In that time, he could easily save enough money to be independent from his parents.

  On a warm night late in the summer of 1898, Dame Pinky stood at the bar fanning herself and chatting with the Duchess of Marlboro. Business dragged, but it was early yet.

  “Ooh, I wish I could look like her,” cooed the Duchess, nodding toward the door.

  Gene turned around and saw an unusual couple settling themselves at a table just inside the saloon. The man presented a reasonably conventional exterior—tall and broad-shouldered with striking red hair and a bushy handlebar mustache, impeccably dressed, and exuding wealth and charisma even from across the room. He was just the sort of gent Gene and his cohorts loved to see at Paresis Hall—a man swimming in both money and sexual curiosity who had decided to leave his uptown mansion or his suite at the Waldorf to go slumming in the clubs and resorts of the Bowery. He had the added qualities of handsomeness and magnetism. But on his arm hung something rarely seen in Paresis Hall.

  “Is she?” said Gene.

  “Yes,” said the Duchess. “She’s a real girl. And what a beauty.”

  “But I thought you . . .”

  “Just because I don’t want to take them to bed doesn’t mean I can’t admire them,” said the Duchess. And Gene had to admit, the real live girl who slipped gracefully into the chair next to her towering companion deserved admiration.

  She had the face of a china doll—skin so pale it was nearly white, a delicate nose and diminutive lips, and dark eyes that matched the cascade of hair falling in ringlets across one shoulder and over her white cotton dress. She wore an inscrutable expression and a superfluous fur wrap that she instantly shed onto the back of the chair. She couldn’t have been a day over sixteen.

  “You go,” said the Duchess, nudging Gene in the ribs. “I don’t trust myself around anything that beautiful.”

  Gene approached the couple feeling more nervous than he had since his first night at Paresis Hall. For almost two years now he had slept during the day and spent long nights working at the resort. He had not had a conversation with a beautiful girl his own age since before girls his own age had blossomed.

  “May I get you a drink?” Dame Pinky said to the red-haired man, averting her eyes from the radiant young woman by his side.

  “Why don’t you join us,” said the man, “and let someone else fetch the drinks.”

  This was not an unusual request at Paresis Hall. Some men simply wanted to spend a few minutes chatting with a fairy for the novelty; others would talk your ear off all evening; and some, of course, wanted to take you into the back room and . . . take you. The third scenario seemed unlikely in this case, as the man in question had a girl by his side, but Gene slid into the chair next to the redhead, trying to do so with the same grace his female companion had shown a moment ago.

  “Stanford White,” said the man, holding out his hand to Dame Pinky. She took the hand lightly in hers and, instead of shaking it as he clearly expected, raised it to her lips and kissed it firmly enough to leave a lipstick mark.

  “Charmed, I’m sure. You can call me Dame Pinky.”

  The red-haired man let out a guffaw even as the young woman leaned around her companion to look more closely at Dame Pinky.

  “Surely that’s not your real name,” said the man.

  “In here it’s my real name,” said Dame Pinky.

  “Very well,” said the man. “In here my name is Stanford White, and this is Eliza Fuller. Eliza is about to star on Broadway in The Fortune Teller.”

  “Not star,” said Eliza, still staring intently at Dame Pinky. “I’m in the chorus.”

  “Has Mother Nature ever crafted a creature more delectable than the chorus girl?” said Mr. White in a low voice.

  “Wait, are you the Stanford White? The architect?” said Dame Pinky, forgetting for a moment her affected voice.

  “The one and only,” said Mr. White. “But how have you heard of me in a place like this?”

  “We do have access to newspapers here on the Bowery,” said Dame Pinky. “You designed the arch in Washington Square—that’s just a few blocks from here. And you show up in the society pages quite a lot. You’re a collector as well. Art and antiques.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to see some of my paintings sometime,” said Mr. White.

  “Perhaps.”

  Stanford White, it turned out, just wanted to talk. While Eliza Fuller distractedly stirred her drin
k with her finger, boredom sapping her face of its charm, White peppered Dame Pinky with questions and regaled her with anecdotes. He was curious about the life of a fairy, curious about how Gene (for he eventually admitted his given name) transformed into Dame Pinky, and curious about what went on in the rooms upstairs, though he claimed to have no interest in participating.

  Gene found it easy to talk with Mr. White, and when the chorus girl finally fell asleep, her head on the table and the drool dripping from her mouth erasing the last of her allure, the tête-à-tête turned from idle chitchat about fairy resorts and Broadway plays to more serious topics.

  “You can’t stay in a place like this forever, no matter how comfortable it makes you feel,” said Mr. White. “Sooner or later you have to go back to the real world.”

  “This isn’t any less real than the world you live in,” said Gene.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. White, “it’s substantially more real than the world I live in. That’s what brings me here. But I have money to stave off reality. What do you have?”

  Gene thought for a long minute. What did he have? What would he turn to when he was too old to charm men at Paresis Hall? “Science,” he said.

  “Science?” said Mr. White. “That’s an interesting answer.”

  “I know a lot about science,” said Gene. “Especially electricity and mechanics. I read all the articles in the scientific journals, and I’ve practically memorized this book by George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison.”

  “You’re a fan of Thomas Edison?” said Mr. White.

  “Outside these walls,” said Gene, “nothing makes me happier than to read about Edison and his latest inventions.”

  “What about Tesla?”

  “Nikola Tesla?” said Gene. “Oh, he’s great, too. I’ve read his articles on alternating current motors and on electrical discharge in vacuum tubes in The Electrical Engineer. Did you read the speech on ‘The Age of Electricity’ that he gave in Buffalo after the Niagara power plant opened?”