Escaping Dreamland by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-03T18:45:43+00:00

Twenty minutes later, they sat in the gentlemen’s smoking lounge at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street. Gene had hailed an electric taxicab on Sixth Avenue and they had been whisked uptown in style.

“I’ll bet you understand how this thing works,” said Magda.

“It’s very simple,” said Gene, and for the rest of the ride he had explained the principles that propelled them onto Broadway and into the recently renamed Times Square in words that Magda understood no better than if he had been speaking Cherokee. On a summer’s evening the smoking lounge was hot and stuffy, but none of the gentlemen gathered there gave Magda a second look. Shortly before eight thirty, she and Gene climbed up to the Aerial Gardens, a rooftop theater that was far more elaborate than the one Gene had so recently attended atop Madison Square Garden. Magda had never visited a Broadway theater, and to enter through a garden terrace ten stories above Forty-First Street into an elegant auditorium fairly took her breath away. They found their seats and settled in to watch a musical play called The Governor’s Son, in which a young man named George M. Cohan sang and danced his way through the evening.

“Mr. White took me to see Cohan in Little Johnny Jones a couple of years ago,” Gene told Magda. “When he sang ‘Give My Regards to Broadway,’ and the audience went mad with delight, Mr. White told me, ‘Mark my words—that boy is going to be a star.’ ” Throughout the performance, and during the intermission when they stood in the garden sipping champagne and looking out over the traffic below, no one gave the slightest indication that they thought Magda was anything other than a man.

After the play, they strolled over to Fifth Avenue and, to Magda’s delight and surprise, Gene pulled her under an awning at Forty-Fourth Street and into the lush interior of Delmonico’s restaurant. Never had she seen such elegant paneling, such meticulously carved ceilings, and such an endless array of silver, crystal, and fine china. A smiling maître d’ greeted them at the door.

“Mr. Pinkney, so good to see you. Mr. Tesla is not with us this evening.”

“I shall be dining with my friend.” Gene hesitated for just a moment. Magda realized that, though they had perfectly disguised her, they had failed to give her a name.

“Mr. Stone,” said Magda in as deep a voice as she could manage. “Marcus Stone of the Philadelphia Stones.”

“Of course, Mr. Stone. Welcome to New York. A friend of Mr. Pinkney’s is a friend of Delmonico’s.”

For years Magda had dreamed that a young man might one day take her to a Broadway musical and dinner at Delmonico’s. Now, as they sat down at a table in the far corner of the main dining room, she smiled at Gene. Surely he had not planned an evening as romantic as this simply to test her disguise. He must feel at least some of the affection for her that she felt for him.

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