Lair of Dreams

  Dear Miss Chan,

  Greetings! I had great success in locating the Louis particle of which we spoke. In the interest of science, let us please repeat our experiment. If this suits you, I suggest that we perform the experiment this evening at precisely the same time and in the same manner as last evening. If you find this agreeable in the name of science, please ring me at the New Amsterdam Theatre, where I am attempting to steer those lost, immoral souls away from a life of sin. The money is a donation for the poor, naturally.

  Sincerely,

  Henry B. DuBois IV

  Secretary and Chief Musical Director

  Science Club

  Nicely done, you idiot, Ling thought, smiling a bit.

  “Who is this young man?” Ling’s mother asked. Her expression wavered on the knife’s edge between suspicion and hopeful expectation.

  “An annoyance,” Ling answered, cutting off further inquiry. “I’ve been tutoring him in his schoolwork. He’s a little dumb. May I use the telephone to call him back?”

  “Ling!” Mrs. Chan sighed and jerked her head toward the kitchen. “Go on, then, but be quick about it. There’s work to be done. And remember: A bit of kindness goes a long way, my girl.”

  Ling made her way to the telephone in her father’s office adjoining the steamy kitchen and put a finger in her ear to tune out the rattle of pans, the hiss of hot oil on the stove, and the rat-a-tat call-and-response of the cooks and waiters—the noisy, sometimes contentious comforts of home. A weary voice answered at the New Amsterdam and announced that Mr. DuBois wasn’t yet in.

  “I see. Could you deliver a message? Please tell him that Miss Chan has considered his proposal, and her answer is pos-i-tute-ly.”

  “There she is! It’s the Sweetheart Seer! Evie—over here! Evie!” Fans clamored as Evie emerged from her chauffeured Chrysler, waving to them and blowing kisses. Reporters stood ready with their notepads. T. S. Woodhouse tipped his hat. His expression was trouble. Evie acknowledged him with a polite smile.

  “There’s Sam!” someone shouted as Sam came whistling up the sidewalk, shaking hands and waving genially to the crowd.

  “Sam! Sam!” they called, and Evie had to fight to keep her smile fixed in place. Sharing the spotlight with Sam was irritating, but she could make it work for four weeks.

  “Pork Chop!” Sam ran to Evie and kissed her hand. In the streets, people cheered.

  “Oh, aren’t they the dreamiest couple you ever saw?” a woman in the front row said.

  “Pouring it on a little thick, aren’t you?” Evie whispered in Sam’s ear, never losing her smile for the public.

  “Nothing succeeds like excess, Baby Vamp,” he said, leaning in close. “Besides, when this circus is over in a few minutes, you’re gonna do me a big favor.”

  “Now, wait a minute. I—” Evie’s retort was cut short by an electric squawk as Mr. Phillips stepped up to the microphone and the speakers carried his voice out onto Fifth Avenue. “Ladies and gentlemen, WGI is delighted to present New York City’s liveliest couple since Scott and Zelda! Their love has taken the city by storm! And now you can hear Miss O’Neill on this very station two nights a week on the Pears Soap Hour! Without further ado, let me present to you: the Sweetheart Seer, Evie O’Neill, and her very own sweetheart, Sam Lloyd!”

  “Hold it!” A cameraman’s flash popped. “Thanks.”

  The reporters shouted for Sam and Evie’s attention. But Evie knew who to turn to first.

  “Mr. Woodhouse?”

  “Why, thank you, Miss O’Neill,” Woodhouse purred. “Or should I say the future Mrs. Sam Lloyd?”

  Evie’s eyes flashed. “Miss O’Neill is just fine for now.”

  T. S. Woodhouse’s pencil hovered over his notepad. “I’m sure we’re all dying to know how you two lovebirds first met.”

  “Well—” Evie started.

  “It was a moonlit night,” Sam interrupted. “A full moon, as I recall. Just the prettiest September moon you ever saw. I’d lost my dog—”

  “Sparky.”

  “Right. I was calling, ‘Here, boy, here, Sparky!’”

  “It was the most heartbreaking sound you ever heard,” Evie said. “I wanted to cry just hearing it. I still want to cry when I hear Sam’s voice.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow at Evie’s jibe. She smiled back. The smile was a challenge.

  “Go on, darling,” she said, batting her lashes. “Tell them the rest.”

  “Riiiight,” Sam said, suppressing a smirk. “Well now. That was some night. Yes, sir, some night. You see, the glamour girl standing before you was not the dame I first laid eyes on in Penn Station. In fact, at first I thought she was the charwoman. Don’t you remember how frightful you looked that night, Honey Pie?” Sam patted Evie’s hand. Her strained smile pleased him. “She was sooty and grimy. Had on her mother’s dress and those thick woolen stockings that grandmas and war orphans wear. And one of her teeth was missing. Ghastly. But I was smitten.”

  “Oh, Daddy, you might need a visit to the dentist soon yourself.” Evie laughed and tightened her grip on Sam’s hand. She hoped it hurt. “Yes. It had been a long journey from Ohio. Not that Sam minded what I looked like. He was just so surprised to be talking to a real girl. Girls don’t usually talk to you, do they, dear? Poor baby just never had a bit of luck with the female species. Why, it was almost as if dames were repulsed by you, weren’t they, darling? Didn’t you tell me they’d shrink from your touch?”

  “But you could see the good deep in my heart, couldn’t you, Pork Chop?”

  “Yes. I had to look with a magnifying glass, but there it was.”

  “What does this have to do with a missing dog?” someone shouted.

  “Well, despite being covered in filth and smelling like a Bowery ballroom, Pork Chop here offered to read Sparky’s leash. Naturally, I assumed she was an escaped lunatic. You can understand, with her looking and smelling the way she did and claiming to have special powers. I figured any minute she’d introduce herself as Marie Antoinette and I’d have to call a cop.”

  “Hahaha—oh, you, you, you…” Evie pinched Sam’s cheek. Hard. “Dear little tiny man. You’re just five feet, three inches of pure joy. My own lucky leprechaun.”

  Sam glowered. “I’m five-foot-ten.”

  “Are you?” Evie said in astonishment. “Well, now, let’s see. I’m five-foot-two.…” She swooped a hand across her head to Sam’s neck, putting Sam’s claim to the test. The crowd roared.

  “Five-foot-nine.” Sam’s smile was strained.

  “Love these two. Put them on the radio together. They’d be funnier than Sam ’n’ Henry,” the reporter said.

  “Now, now, only one of us is on the radio. Isn’t that right, darling?” Evie said. She cut her eyes at Sam in warning.

  “True,” Sam said. “Only one of us has enough hot air for two nights a week.”

  The crowd laughed anew, delighted. Off to the side, Mr. Phillips stood with his arms folded, looking as pleased as if he’d invested in a Thoroughbred expected to win its race. The press took it all down, greasing the wheels of tomorrow’s star machine.

  “When’s the wedding?” someone shouted from the crowd.

  “Yeah, when is the big day?” Woodhouse asked, and Evie could swear by his tone that he was on to them. “I wanna make sure I have time to get my suit pressed.”

  “Um… June?” Evie hedged.

  “You two lovebirds think you can wait that long?”

  “Oh, I think I could wait forever,” Evie sniped. “If it meant waiting for dear Sam.”

  “Mr. Phillips—you gonna broadcast that wedding over the radio?”

  “You bet I will!” Mr. Phillips barked.

  “Sam! Evie! How’s about a picture for tomorrow’s papers, huh?”

  “Of course!” Evie moved slightly in front of Sam, making sure they could capture the full glory of her new dress.

  The photographer waved her back. “Evie, honey, could you step back beside Sam? We want yo
u two crazy kids together.”

  Sam waggled his eyebrows at her, that annoying smirk firmly in place. “Yes, future Mrs. Lloyd. I’m lonely without you beside me.”

  “Come on, you two. Show us some of that magic,” the photographer shouted. At the crowd’s urging, Sam wrapped his arm around Evie’s shoulder and pulled her in close.

  “Beauuuutiful! Give us a big smile—say ‘Cheers.’”

  “Cheers!” Sam said, showing his teeth.

  “Four weeks,” Evie said, gritting hers.

  “That was ducky,” Mr. Phillips said a few minutes later, pumping Sam’s hand after he and Evie had posed for several more pictures with the WGI letters featured prominently above their heads. “Just ducky!”

  “Wasn’t it, though?” Sam agreed. Behind Mr. Phillips, Evie glared at Sam.

  “Go home and rest up before your big date tonight,” Mr. Phillips said on his way out. “You lovebirds will be out every night. Oh, and of course you’ll be sure to mention WGI.”

  “Every chance I get,” Sam promised.

  “Evie, I like this young man of yours,” Mr. Phillips said, his parting shot.

  Evie gave her boss a bright smile, which faded as soon as he was gone. “‘Every chance I get’?”

  Sam shrugged. “People are like puppies. You just have to know how to scratch their tummies. Speaking of…”

  Evie cut her eyes at him. “You’re not getting near my tummy.”

  “Don’t worry. My ticklers are put away. I need to speak to you. Privately.”

  “Follow me,” Evie said with a heavy sigh.

  Sam let out a whistle as Evie led him down the gilded halls of WGI. “This is some place.”

  “Don’t get too sentimental about it. You have a limited engagement here.” Evie smiled sweetly at the coat-check girl. “Mildred, darling, do you mind if we borrow the shop for a few minutes?”

  “Of course not,” Mildred said, slipping out through the half door. “Anything for you two lovebirds.”

  Evie hung the BACK IN FIVE MINUTES sign outside the door and shut both halves. She leaned against the rack of coats with her arms folded across her chest. “You have two minutes, Sam.”

  “I’ll dispense with the charm, then.”

  “That was charm? Ha!”

  “I’ve brought you a present, future Mrs. Lloyd.”

  “Future Mrs. Lloyd,” Evie scoffed. “Gee, now I kinda hope you brought me cyanide.”

  “I hear that’s the first-anniversary present. Here.” He handed Evie the envelope. “Whaddaya make of this?”

  She turned it upside down, confused. “It’s empty, Sam.”

  “No kidding. Turn it over. That particular empty envelope is addressed to my mother. Sent by Will’s dead lover.”

  Evie frowned. “Where did you find this?”

  “Here’s where it gets interesting. I found it in a dusty old crate pulled up from the cellar of your uncle’s museum.”

  “On the level, Sam?”

  “My right hand to God.”

  “Why would Unc—why would Will have this?”

  “That was my question. I need your reading services, Sheba.”

  “Oh, Sam. Now?”

  “A deal’s a deal, Lamb Chop,” Sam said pointedly.

  Evie closed her eyes and pressed the envelope between her palms. The envelope was old and hadn’t been touched by anyone other than Sam for some time. To dig into its secret past, she’d really need to work at it, and Evie didn’t feel like having a throbbing headache for the next hour. “Sorry, Sam. Nothing’s coming up.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I did try!”

  “Don’t give me that wad of chewing gum. You barely broke a sweat.”

  “There’s something defective about your objects, Sam. It’s just like when I tried to read the postcard in your jacket—” Evie clapped a hand over her mouth as she remembered a second too late that she had never told Sam about that.

  “You what?” Sam’s eyes narrowed. “First you take my jacket, then you read my postcard? Why, you little—”

  “I was curious!”

  “That was my private property, sister!”

  “YOU STOLE MY TWENTY DOLLARS!” Evie yelled.

  The coat-check girl’s voice came from the other side of the closed door. “Everything copacetic in there?”

  “Just ducky!” Sam shouted back. To Evie, he said, “So you couldn’t get a read from my mother’s postcard?”

  “I just told you that, didn’t I?”

  The muscles at Sam’s jaw tightened. “Look here: I’m gonna ignore the business with the postcard. But you owe me a good read on this one.”

  “Yes, but Sam—”

  “We have a deal, Evie.”

  Evie narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”

  “If I were the last man on earth it’d be because you drove the other poor suckers to early graves. Read.”

  With a grunt at Sam, Evie closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and employed the tricks she’d learned on her radio show over the past two months when an object’s history proved elusive. She pressed the flat of her palm against Rotke’s handwriting, personal as a thumbprint, hoping it would provide an opening. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get much there—just frustrating blips of memory that wouldn’t stay. Undaunted, she concentrated on the scrawled Return to Sender message, rubbing her thumb back and forth as if she were reading Braille. A spark of the past flared promisingly, then began to burn down.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Evie whispered, kneading harder with the pads of her fingers. The wobbly vision steadied on the front window of a kosher butcher shop hung with thick rations of marbled beef. The door opened and an unfamiliar woman came out. The vision seemed to want to stay with her.

  “I’ve got something,” Evie said, a little dreamily. “Does your mother have reddish hair?”

  “No. Dark, like me.”

  Sweat beaded on Evie’s forehead as she pressed deeper. The red-haired woman ambled down a crowded street bordered by pushcarts piled high with various wares. Several women draped in sashes reading VOTES FOR WOMEN stood on the sidewalk, and Evie could feel a hint of the red-haired woman’s disapproval of the suffragettes, just as she could feel that the disapproval masked a deeper desire to join them. Evie stayed with the woman as she moved past two men unloading a steaming block of ice from the back of a truck with huge tongs.

  “I-I can’t get a place yet,” Evie said, moving her thumb along the envelope. “O-R-C-H… Orchard Street!”

  A man in a yarmulke and butcher’s apron trundled after the woman, waving a sheath of letters. “There’s a man. He’s… he’s calling to her. ‘Anna!’ he’s saying. ‘Anna, you forgot your mail.’”

  “Anna…” Sam repeated, trying to place the name.

  The red-haired woman stopped to leaf through her mail. Some of it was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Itzhak Rosenthal.

  “Mrs. Rosenthal?” Evie mumbled in her trance.

  “I don’t know a Mrs. Rosenthal,” Sam said.

  Evie kept at it. The red-haired woman leafed through the last two letters. One was addressed to someone named Anna Polotnik. The last letter was the one from Rotke to Miriam.

  “Got it!” Evie came out of her trance. “Who is Anna… P-o-l-o-t-n-i-k?”

  “Anna… Anna…” Sam snapped his fingers as it came to him. “Of course! Anna Polotnik!”

  “Of course! Dear old Anna,” Evie mocked.

  “She was our neighbor when I was a kid,” Sam explained. “Came over on the same ship with my parents. Nice lady. When she made borscht, the entire building smelled like cabbage for days. The borscht was good, too. Now I remember—she used to go around with a fella named Rosenthal, Itzhak Rosenthal. She musta married him. Did you see anything else—anything about my mother?”

  “No. But Anna didn’t look too happy about this letter, Sam. She seemed angry or worried.” The aftereffects of going so deep caught up to
Evie. Her knees buckled, and Sam helped her to Mildred’s chair.

  “You okay, Sheba?” Sam took out his handkerchief and blotted at her forehead.

  “You’ll take all my paint off,” Evie said, angling her face away. The dreaded headache had started. “I don’t understand why Will had this letter. He told you he didn’t know your mother.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Sam said. “This was in a collection of Rotke’s books. Maybe she was the one who knew my mother. I just hope Anna Polotnik can supply the answers. Once I find her.” Sam tucked the envelope back into his pocket, along with the handkerchief. “One more thing—now that you’ve got two nights a week on the radio, it sure would be swell if you could talk up the Diviners exhibit.”

  “WGI and Pears soap don’t pay me to shill for the Creepy Crawly, Sam.”

  “Just work it into the act: ‘All ghosts swear by Pears! The cleanest ghosts in town will be attending the Diviners exhibit at the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult!’”

  “Sam, how is it that you can take a perfectly ordinary day and turn it crossways?” Evie asked, rubbing her temples.

  Sam grinned and spread his hands wide. “Everybody’s got a talent, kid.”

  Mildred knocked again. “Miss O’Neill? Will you be much longer?”

  “That’s your cue to leave,” Evie said, pushing Sam toward the door. “Don’t forget about our date tonight—the party at the Pierre Hotel hosted by some rich Texan who made all his money in oil. He’s swimming in it—money, not oil. It’s good press.”

  Sam winked. “Well. As long as it’s good press. See you tonight, doll.”

  “Lucky me,” Evie said, and for a second Sam couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not.

  Sam turned up Fifty-seventh Street toward the Second Avenue El. As he walked, he examined the mysterious envelope again. It was his first big break in some time. Hopefully, Anna Polotnik would know something that would lead Sam to his mother. But first, he had to find Anna.

  An open-air touring car draped in advertising bunting for Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir advanced slowly. A man stood holding on to the windshield, calling out to people on the street over a bullhorn: “Protect yourself from exotic disease with Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir—every bottle made with the goodness of real radium for radiant health! Do not allow your loved ones to fall to the Chinese Sleeping Sickness! Purchase Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir today!”