Curious Toys

Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, August 1915

THERE HE WAS again, smoking a cigar in front of the Infant Incubators. A white man not much taller than Pin—and she was small for her age and looked twelve, rather than fourteen—but too tall to be a midget. Something stealthy and twitchy about him: every few minutes, his head would twist violently and he'd punch the air, fending off an invisible assailant.

There was no attacker. Crowded as the amusement park was, Pin saw no one anywhere near him. The young mothers dragging their kids into the Infant Incubators building to escape the heat stepped off the sidewalk onto the Pike to avoid coming within two feet of him. He was a dingbat.

She ran her sweaty hands across her knickerbockers, removed her cap to fan her face. She'd seen the weird little man at the park often—three or four times a week he'd be standing near one of the rides, always watching, watching. He never seemed to change out of the same soiled work clothes. Trousers, shirt, a dark-blue canvas jacket. Heavy boots. A white boater hat with a stained red band; sometimes a bowler.

Today it was a boater. He never rode any of the rides, and never seemed to partake in any of the attractions. Once she'd seen him outside the Casino Restaurant, drinking a glass of beer and eating a sausage. A few times he'd been with another man, older, the two of them like Mutt and Jeff in the funnies: one tall and skinny, the other short with that grubby mustache and dinged-up boater.

But lately the weird little man was always alone. And all he ever seemed to do was watch the kids go in and out of the Infant Incubators, hop off and on the Velvet Coaster, clamber into the boats that bore them into Hell Gate or the Old Mill, then back out again.

He knew Pin was watching him. She could tell by the way his eyes slanted when he cocked his head, pretending to look in the other direction, the way Mr. Lerwin used to look at her younger sister, Abriana. But the dingbat wouldn't know that Pin was a girl disguised as a boy. No one knew, except Pin and her mother.

He talked to himself, too. One of these days she'd sidle up close enough to hear what he was saying. But not this morning. She tugged her cap back down, felt in her pocket for the Helmar cigarette box Max had given her half an hour ago, along with a cuff to the back of her head.

"Don't you go dragging your feet like last time," he'd said. "I can't afford to lose business."

"It was raining. Lionel ain't gonna ditch you."

"It's not raining today. Go."

He raised his hand in warning. She darted out of the dressing room and heard him laughing behind her. "Run, rabbit, run!"

She spat on the pavement, kicking at a squashed stogie, spun on her heel, and headed for the exit gate. When she glanced back over her shoulder, the dingbatty little man was gone.

THE TWO OF them always slept in the same bed, in the back room of a long, narrow apartment where you could hear people coming and going all day and all night, though they were forbidden to enter the room where the children lived. He was afraid of the dark and clung to her the way he'd seen grown-ups do in the other rooms; like the pictures he saw years later of people hanging on to the sides of lifeboats and bobbing planks as the Titanic sank behind them.

His sister didn't mind, even when she got sick, though her coughing kept him from sleeping. He'd cover her mouth with his hand, and she'd angrily slap it away, though as the weeks passed the slap seemed more like a reflex, like when she turned in bed and her arm would flop across his chest and she didn't even know it. Sometimes he didn't know it, either, until he woke. She died like that, in her sleep. No one checked on them for two days, maybe they knew and were afraid to have it proved true, maybe they just forgot. He lay beside her in the dark, frightened, then gradually comforted, by her silence, how still and smooth her face looked. It didn't distress him that her cheeks and arms were cold to the touch. He pressed the thin fabric of her pinafore across his face and bunched the skirt between his fingers. It soothed him. When they finally came into the room and found them and took her away, he wailed uncontrollably until one of them returned and slipped a doll beneath the filthy sheet. It was wearing his sister's nightdress.

"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.

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.

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 face. 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?"