Curious Toys Read online

  “Here, sweetheart,” she whispered. She smelled like spoiled milk and coal-tar soap. “You can play this is her, all right? She don’t need that shimmy now.” He’d lost that doll years ago, and what remained of his sister’s nightdress, a greasy scrap of fabric no bigger than his hand.

  Chapter 5

  FRANCIS BACON REMOVED his helmet and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. The park had opened only an hour ago, and already it was so hot that several people had visited the infirmary complaining of heatstroke, and a kid had fainted outside the Ten-in-One. Served them right for coming out in this weather. If he didn’t have to report for work at the park’s station house, Francis would be down by the riverside or in a dim saloon, drinking a glass of beer.

  In the grove behind him, a small crowd had gathered to wait for Riverview’s giant cuckoo clock to chime eleven. Francis replaced his handkerchief and helmet, withdrew his pocket watch, and counted the seconds until he heard a mechanical whirring, followed by cheers as the cuckoo clock’s automata emerged. They performed their hourly dance, bowing and twirling, a half-dozen brightly painted figures half as tall as he was, until the metal cuckoo bird emerged from a pair of doors and made its grating cry. Francis set his watch back in his pocket and headed toward a water fountain.

  A line had formed, women mostly. Francis took his place behind them, doffing his helmet and stepping aside to let a young woman go in front of him.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and smiled from beneath a stylish straw toque. Francis watched as she bent over the fountain, a spray of droplets spattering her white shirtwaist. No beauty, but she had a nice figure and wore the shorter skirts that were fashionable this summer, her ankles visible beneath the linen hem.

  “You’re very welcome.” He smiled, winking, and she blushed before hurrying to join her friends. Maybe he could find her later in one of the beer gardens.

  He stepped up to the fountain, drank, and returned to his rounds, watching for pickpockets, jackrollers, lost children. It was early for drunks, but sometimes you’d see someone who’d been up all night elsewhere and ridden the streetcar to Western Avenue in hopes of keeping the fun going. But mostly, he gave directions to the washrooms and water fountains.

  Francis had been a real cop years before—detective sergeant at Robey Street station. That was before he got involved with the notorious murder case involving Pietro Divine, the killer for the Black Hand. Francis had found incontrovertible evidence linking Divine to seventeen missing persons, including five members of the same family, mother, father, and three small children, their skeletal remains discovered in a gravel pit in an abandoned Little Hell brickyard.

  He’d also uncovered evidence of corruption in the police department, linking several high-ranking men to the Black Hand. Francis testified against Rusty Cabell and the captain over at Dearborn Street, despite being warned that the judge was also in cahoots with the Sicilians. The case got thrown out of court. Cabell was promoted to captain at Robey Street, and Francis got tossed from the force.

  That had been more than three years ago—around the same time that Bill Hickey, a former colleague of Francis’s, had taken over as head of the amusement park’s police force. They ran into each other at a saloon a few weeks after Francis’s dismissal.

  “Come work with me, Francis,” Hickey urged as he peeled a hard-boiled egg. “Pay’s good. Two dollars a day. Three if you work till midnight and close the place.”

  Francis had stared stonily into his glass of beer and refused to reply. Hickey shook his head.

  “You got snookered, Francis, I know that. But you need a job, and it would be good to have another policeman working with me—they’re detailing everyone from the force to the Loop these days, or Little Hell. Half my staff are night watchmen from the meat plants, they don’t know a bunco artist from their auntie’s arse. It’d be a favor to me, Francis.”

  Francis snorted. “Misery loves company.” But he took the job.

  The amusement park was seasonal work, but it paid well, and it was better than walking the haberdashery floor at Marshall Field’s, which is what Francis did during the rest of the year. The stray kids who ran around the park called him Fatty, but Bacon was tall and well built, with auburn hair and very light grey eyes. The summer sun had burnished his ruddy skin and streaked his mustache gold. Come fall, he’d be wearing an ill-fitting suit and escorting light-fingered men and women back out onto State Street.

  “Hey, Bacon.”

  Francis turned to see another Riverview sergeant hurrying toward him. O’Connell, the lanky young man who worked at the station office. He stopped beside Francis, flapping his hand in front of his face. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

  “You ran out here to tell me that?”

  “Nope. Lady said her reticule got stolen, over by the incubators.”

  Francis made a face. “Isn’t D’Angelo over there?”

  “Nope. Hickey’s got him at the Velvet Coaster, they got a big crowd, and Hickey don’t want things to wind up. Kind of a fat old lady, she’s waiting in the station. Hickey says check the incubators first, then come talk to her.”

  “All right.” Francis sighed and walked toward the Infant Incubators.

  Chapter 6

  PIN HADN’T ALWAYS lived at the amusement park—only since her mother, Gina, started working there as a fortune-teller. Pin had been born when her mother was the same age as Pin was now, her sister, Abriana, two years later. Back then they lived in a tenement in Little Hell, the Sicilian slum on Chicago’s North Side. Over the years Gina had told Pin that her father was dead; had moved back to Italy; was mining gold in South America; had run off with the woman who owned the Chinese laundry in Larrabee Street.

  Until one day when Pin asked about him, Gina slapped her so hard her left ear rang for an entire day. She never brought it up again.

  Little Hell was overshadowed by a huge gashouse, which belched flames and fumes that blotted out the sun. Day and night, red-neckerchiefed men shoveled tons of coal into the furnace, then doused the glowing coals with water from the river. The resulting gas was stored in huge tanks, their cylinders rising during the day, then dropping overnight as the gas was piped into the surrounding tenements for lights and heat and cooking. As a very young girl, Pin had mistaken the furnace’s deafening thunder for that of approaching trains.

  The women from the Relief and Aid Society complained constantly about how their white uniforms turned black as they approached Little Hell. They never drew near to Death Corner, where the Black Hand gangs that ruled Little Hell dumped the bodies of their victims beneath a dead tree twisted as a corkscrew. Pin had stopped counting the number of murders when it reached a hundred.

  They had left Little Hell in May, when Gina started working as a Gypsy fortune-teller at Riverview. She also worked at the park’s vast ballroom, teaching customers the latest dance crazes—fox-trot, turkey trot, grizzly-bear hug, bunny hug. Before, she’d sewn ribbons onto women’s hats for a milliner in State Street. But hat sales had dropped after Christmas and never picked up again, and the shop closed in April.

  There was no money for the rent. For a week they’d eaten nothing but coarse wheat flour boiled in water.

  The night before they fled their tenement, Gina had locked the door to the room. Pin didn’t know why she bothered; they had nothing to steal. The floors were bare dirt and the walls patched with cardboard; you could punch your hand right through. There was a hole she used to spy on the family who lived next to them, a scrawny man who used to climb on top of his wife on the kitchen table and, sometimes, his daughters.

  Putting a finger to her lips, Gina dropped to her knees in front of the sofa and dragged out a burlap sack Pin had never seen before. Her mother rummaged through it, pulling out a pair of knickerbockers and a white cambric shirt.

  “Get undressed and try these on. Mrs. Puglia gave them to me after her son ran off to Montana.”

  Pin stared at her, dumbfounded, until Gina threw the clothes in her f
ace. Pin grabbed them, tore off her pinafore and chemise, and kicked them across the floor. She pulled on the knickerbockers and shirt, fingers shaking so she almost couldn’t button them. There was no mirror in the room, but her mother’s expression told her what she needed to know.

  “Am I…?”

  Gina nodded.

  Pin bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry. For as long as she could recall, this was all she’d wanted. When she remembered her dreams, she recalled being neither girl nor boy, only flying, nothing between her skin and the wind. She hated waking up, even more so in the last six months since she’d first menstruated and her mother had explained, or tried to, what the blood on her drawers portended. Childbirth, babies—the end of freedom. The end of everything.

  Being a girl was like a huge scab she couldn’t scrape off, no matter how hard she tried. As she stood there in her new clothes, her mother produced the shears she used to trim ostrich willows. She grasped a handful of Pin’s unruly curls and began to cut.

  At last the snicking of the shears stopped. Pin ran a hand across her cropped head, then took a few deep breaths so she could feel the air moving inside this strange new creature, herself. Her mother handed her an elastic truss, designed for a small man.

  “Your titties are so small, you hardly need this,” she said. “But wear it anyway. You have to stay safe. We’re not going to use our real names—I don’t want anyone knowing who we are.”

  “Why?”

  Gina slapped her, hard enough Pin’s eyes sparked. “You know why! If anyone asks, your name’s Maffucci. Not Onofria: Maffucci.”

  Pin turned so her mother wouldn’t see her tears. “What about yours?”

  “Maffucci, the same as yours. Of course it will be the same. I’m still your mother.” She pulled Pin close and embraced her for a heartbeat, Gina’s breath scented with Sen-Sen and schnapps, then quickly pushed her away. “In the fall it will be different. Till then, you need to stay safe.”

  Safe? Pin bit her lip to keep from arguing with her. No one was ever, ever safe.

  Chapter 7

  PIN CAUGHT THE streetcar to Uptown, clutching her cap as she pushed her way past the straphangers to poke her head out a window in the back. She closed her eyes and pretended she was by the lake. She’d been there only once, the summer before her younger sister, Abriana, disappeared. The boys from Riverview went sometimes, but she couldn’t take the risk. It was hard enough to keep her shirt on when everyone else peeled theirs off in the heat to go swimming, and to feign being pee-shy when they urinated in the river.

  She drew her head in as the streetcar’s bell jangled, signaling her stop. Its wheels threw up sparks as it screeched around a corner and slowed. She pushed her way to the door, jumped off, and hurried across the intersection, dodging an automobile.

  Essanay Studios took up a whole city block, its name above the entrance with its distinctive logo, the profile of an Indian chief wearing an eagle headdress. Outside, the building looked like a factory. Inside, the heavy air smelled of drugstore perfume and cigarette smoke, cleaning fluid, greasepaint, and a peculiar, sweet odor that came from the long spools of motion-picture film. Sometimes she heard hysterical laughter or sobs in here, or a dog barking. Once a man had raced past her, stark naked except for a towel clutched to his privates. Another time she’d ducked into a closet as a dozen policemen strode down the hall, only to realize they were in costume.

  She halted when she reached a row of doors. She pushed open the one that bore a sign with the names GLORY and VALERIE on it, revealing two girls in shimmies. They stood side by side, perusing a clothing rack.

  “Hi, Glory.”

  Glory, the smaller of the two, turned to greet her, baring big white teeth in a smile. “Hiya, Pin. C’mon in,” she said absently, and continued her inspection of the costumes. She wore a silk teddy bare, a sleeveless chemise that clung to her breasts and barely grazed the tops of her thighs. Like Pin, she was slight, just under five feet tall, and deeply tanned, with an olive tinge to her smooth skin, thick black hair, and striking sapphire-blue eyes. She had a mole on her chin that she covered with powder when she had to go in front of the camera, and she smelled of cardamom and sugar and toasted almonds—her aunt Inga often sent her to work with pastries to share.

  Lionel jokingly referred to her as Princess Glorious, or the Spanish Princess, and Pin almost believed it. Small as she was, Glory could command a room. She wanted to be an opera singer, not an actress, but the studio paid her well—thirteen dollars for a week’s work as an extra, whether they used her or not, with Sundays off. Only sixteen, Glory looked older, especially when she tilted her head and regarded Pin through narrowed eyes. She regularly got cast as an imperious matron or headwaitress.

  She held up a faded-blue satin gown with half-moon stains beneath the sleeves. “What do you think, Pin? Suit me as a banker’s wife?”

  “Sure.” Pin took off her cap and fanned herself. The tiny room was hot enough to melt wax. “That color’s nice with your eyes.”

  The other girl, Valerie, grimaced. “God, it’s ugly. You have such nice things, Glory, why would you even want to wear it? It makes you look thirty.”

  “I’m supposed to look thirty.” Glory reached for a pincushion and gave Pin a sideways glance. “You looking for Lionel? He’s down in the studio. Here, hold this for me.”

  Glory shoved the mass of blue satin into her arms. Pin wrinkled her nose. You’d think the fancy clothes they wore in the movies would smell of perfume and eau de cologne. Instead they reeked of tobacco smoke and perspiration, and sometimes of scorched hair, if whoever’d been wearing them had stood too close to a spotlight.

  “I’m heading out.” Valerie pulled a mohair bathing suit over her chemise and plucked a smoldering cigarette from an ashtray. “They want pictures for that Sweedie movie they did at the lake. Newspaper advertisement. See you later, Glorious. Bye, Pin.”

  Valerie swanned from the cubicle. When she was gone, Glory rolled her eyes. “She is not going to get her picture taken. Guess who’s here?”

  “Who?”

  “Charlie Chaplin. Spoor’s trying to sweet talk him to stay with the studio—they’re all down on the stage. Lionel’s with ’em, even though he can’t stand Charlie. Probably the only reason Lionel even came in today is that he’s waiting for you. Don’t you ever worry about bringing that stuff here? Or anywhere?”

  Pin flushed and Glory laughed, reaching to stroke her neck. “Ow, you’re hot!”

  Pin forced a grin. She lived in terror that one of the Riverview boys would figure out her secret. Far worse if Glory did, with her white teeth and rouged mouth and all that soft black hair. But Glory’s attention had already returned to the satin dress. She held it in front of her. “Too long?”

  Pin could clearly see Glory’s nipples through the pink charmeuse of her teddy. “N-n-no,” she stammered. “It looks just right.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Glory stepped into the dress. Pin hoped she’d ask her to button it, blushing again when she realized the buttons ran down the front.

  “I better go,” she said at last.

  “Bye,” replied Glory without looking up.

  Chapter 8

  LIKE FLOATING. HE could see the different parts and move them around. Cut off the top of the big flower and move it around. Cut off the other one and move it here, the girl’s head too. After his head hurt goddamn it to hell he hated God yes he said it Hated Goddamn it close your eyes damn it he said I told you what did I say to you

  Chapter 9

  THEY WERE SETTING up a scene when Pin arrived. She found a space along the wall where she could observe the frantic goings-on. Pin was fascinated by the cameramen, watching as they cranked the handles on the old Pathé cracker-box cameras, which were always being repaired with tape; adjusting their speed, then replacing reels and processing the film, and finally taping bits of paper to indicate where the splices should go, once the film went to the girls who worked as joiners. An older cam
eraman named Billy Carrera had taken a shine to Pin, patiently answering her questions when he took a break. He put her to work sometimes, asking her to retrieve a fallen prop or climb a ladder to move one of the heavy arc lamps. He boasted he could calculate how many frames were left on a reel, not just by how many times he’d turned the crank, but by hearing each individual frame click on the sprockets inside the magazine. He taught Pin that people could read only a single word per second, which was why you shot title cards slowly, a foot of film for each word.

  “It’s all numbers, kid,” he told Pin. “Three hundred feet for a five-minute short, a thousand feet for a one-reeler. Seventeen minutes. Can you do the math in your head?”

  She bit her lip, thinking. “Sixty?”

  “Congratulations! Now go make a movie.”

  She watched as he strode across the set, pausing to check the placement of the Mazda lights.

  “That number three needs to be hotter,” Carrera shouted. “We need it on the girl who plays the doll. Make it look like a moonbeam.”

  The set was the interior of a toy shop. A wall of shelves held cheap celluloid dolls, all unclothed. Doll heads covered a long table in the middle of the set, along with hammers and other tools.