The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  At the farm he found Alice, heavy with child, and Alice’s father—an old man bent by a lifetime of work and then broken by a stroke. There was no sign of a husband and no mention of one either. Alice asked Cronin a few questions and when he hesitated she was blunt: Just tell me the truth, she said. If there were questions he did not want to answer, he was to say so. But every word from him had to be the truth. It seemed unwise—no, more than that, it was madness—for Alice to take him on, but there was work to be done and Cronin set about doing it. He tried in the years after Alice came into his life to atone for all that had transpired before. The priests had always said that you could never dig yourself in so deep that Jesus couldn’t pull you out, but what if all you ever did was dig, even when you’d sworn your digging days were done?

  And now, because of the Dempseys, he was back at it, digging himself deeper! Francis Dempsey—that was a name that came roaring out of his past, and yet was as close as last night’s fitful sleep. Black Frank, they had called him. He was the one who’d set Cronin on the path that had poisoned every night for these past twenty years. He had turned a gardener into a killer, fashioning Cronin into a tool useful to the cause, urging him on whenever he felt Cronin’s will faltering, chiding him when he came up short, cheering him when he did the job right. Frank Dempsey had governed Cronin’s every step and even now what Cronin saw when he slept was born of Dempsey’s guiding hand.

  Enough! Cronin had been through all of this, over and over. Frank Dempsey wasn’t the devil, no more than Gavigan was. They were all men, and when Cronin’s time came, he knew his sins would not be assigned to Dempsey’s account. He alone would be damned for what he had done. Alice had urged him to throw himself on God’s boundless mercy, to beg forgiveness for the lives he had taken and the people he had hurt. But Cronin knew that there could be no mercy without contrition; he must, in the words of the prayer, be heartily sorry for all that he had done. And while he longed to avoid the fires of hell, he knew that it was terror alone that would push him into the confessional. As Frank Dempsey had often told him and as Cronin still believed—in a part of his heart that remained off-limits even to Alice—those things had needed to be done. Even at the cost of nightmares. Even at the cost of hell.

  Cronin also believed that the life he had now—with Alice and the boy and the baby, with their cows and their fields and their orchard—this was his heaven, and it was the only heaven he would ever know. If finding Black Frank’s son was the price he had to pay to keep his family safe and to live out his days with them in this earthly paradise, then so be it. He could only hope that there was no God and no final accounting for his actions on this earth—or else put his faith in God being an Irishman who would understand why he did what he did.

  MIDTOWN

  THE ROCKEFELLERS’ MIDTOWN KINGDOM soared above its earthbound neighbors. While their battered faces were smeared with soot and pigeon shit, the RCA Building burst from the pages of a comic book: its faultless lines were inked with shimmering quicksilver; its ascending pin-striped setbacks formed a giant’s staircase from street to sky. Here the promise of the modern world had been fixed in place by tons of granite and Indiana limestone. Murals hatched in fever dreams stretched across the lobby walls and everywhere were muscle-bound statues with jagged beards and roaring mouths and thunderbolts leaping from their hands. It was as if the gods of the past had been put to work building a brighter tomorrow. Waiting to ascend to the observation deck, the crowds of the curious could be excused for thinking they were boarding a rocket ship bound for a shiny future—leaving behind a world of torpor and disappointment and dull, grim streets lined with ruined buildings.

  As she watched her reflection in the elevator’s polished bronze doors, Lilly Bloch let herself get swept along in this tide of optimism. It was Friday morning and she was scheduled to meet with Mr. Musgrove, her benefactor at the Foundation, which had brought her from Prague to America on an artist’s fellowship. During her three months in New York, she had often visited Mr. Musgrove’s office. He was fond of hosting freewheeling soirées with the other artists the Foundation had sponsored—a motley collection of aging Dadaists, surly constructivists, renegade expressionists, and a lonely surrealist who always asked for his cocktail to be served in a man’s hat. I’m beginning to wonder, she had written to her beloved Josef, if I’m the only one who has not pledged allegiance to an ism. Can you suggest the right one for me?

  Two weeks earlier, after Lilly had shared with Mr. Musgrove the latest dire news from home, he had promised to use the Foundation’s considerable clout to keep her in New York and—what’s more—to spirit Josef out of Prague, where life had become precarious since the Reich had invaded and taken up residence in Prague Castle. In their letters to each other, Josef would ask, How is life in the Tower? and Lilly would respond with a blow-by-blow of the most recent dustup from one of Mr. Musgrove’s parties. She would always sign off by inquiring, with growing anxiety, What is the news from the Castle?—as if it were something from a fairy tale, unconnected to reality. The Tower and the Castle: it sounded like a game, but as the expiration date on her visa drew nearer and the reports from Josef became grimmer, the stakes had become impossibly high.

  But today Mr. Musgrove’s promises would become reality; today the Tower would outfox the Castle. She had an appointment at ten o’clock, where she expected Mr. Musgrove would first present her with a fresh bouquet of compliments—he was fond of calling her a Major Talent, a Daring Visionary, and even, once, a Genius. Then he would sit back in his chair—a work of art in itself—with nothing but the clouds and the blue sky behind him and he would present her with a new visa and inform her that a similar document would soon be in Josef’s hands. She could already see the smile wrinkling the corners of his mouth, could almost hear him say, Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of everything? But Lilly didn’t need him to take care of everything. If he could make good on his biggest promise, to find some way to get Josef out of Prague, that would be more than enough.

  As the elevator doors opened for her on the fifty-first floor, Lilly Bloch believed this dream of escape and reunion was still possible. She did not yet know that all of Mr. Musgrove’s promises had already come undone, and that the careless joy of two people in love had conspired against her.

  ONE WEEK EARLIER, Alvin Musgrove—Mr. Mousegrove to the girls in the typing pool—had left his job and his wife and run off with his secretary to Reno to get himself a quickie divorce. At least that was the story circulating around the office. The detail about Reno was based largely on whispers and misapprehensions about Nevada’s divorce laws. What was known was that Mr. Musgrove, director of the Foundation’s arts and culture section, had abruptly announced his resignation on the previous Friday, citing reasons of a personal nature. On the following Monday, just as word of Mr. Musgrove’s sudden departure was creating ripples through the hallways and offices of the Foundation, somebody wondered out loud why his secretary, Carole Turner, was also a no-show that morning. One of the girls called Carole’s home, only to reach her distraught mother, who had spent the weekend grappling with the news that her daughter had run off with a married man. This latest wrinkle sent the Foundation into a tizzy. Carole had never breathed a word of the affair to any of the other girls, and now the story on Carole was quickly being revised from “quiet and sweet” to “stuck-up and scheming.” Who did she think she was, running off with Mr. Musgrove? And how long had this been going on, right beneath everyone’s nose? And of all the girls in the office to run off with, why Carole Turner? And of all the men, why Mr. Musgrove?

  While most of the office debated the wheres and whens of the Musgrove-Turner tryst, Ruby Kadetsky was tasked with cleaning up the mess. Ruby was a trouper; everyone knew that. She was a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of gal, a quit-your-bellyaching-and-get-to-work kind of gal. But still, this was some pickle: losing a senior program officer and his secretary on the same day! And to make matters worse, Ruby couldn’t make heads or tails of
the files. They were like a crossword puzzle without any clues. One of Mr. Musgrove’s pet projects was a scheme that brought European artists to the United States on the Foundation’s dime, but there was no way of knowing who the latest batch of fellows were or whether or not they were still in the country. After three days of digging, Ruby could tell only one thing for certain: Carole Turner had not been prized for her secretarial skills.

  It was typical, really. Girls like Carole got the man with the name on the door, and Ruby got to clean up after them. It was bad enough to get stuck with a thankless task, but what really got to Ruby were the bigger questions. Such as: What if happiness depended on making other people miserable—on robbing them of their happiness? That was what Carole had done. Her mother was a wreck, but mothers were like that: they turned on the waterworks whenever life (yours) didn’t go according to plan (theirs). Ruby knew that story, cover to cover. But what about Mr. Musgrove’s wife, who had to be honest-to-God miserable? Ruined, even, and all so Carole could be happy. But maybe Carole didn’t care. Maybe she was just selfish. Or maybe she told herself—because Mr. Musgrove had told her first—that the Musgroves had a bad marriage and his wife was sick of him and there would be no hard feelings if he left. Ruby couldn’t imagine anyone falling for a line like that, one that made it all so easy. The desperate business of wanting what you did not have was never easy.

  WHEN LILLY ARRIVED for her appointment, she did not find Mr. Musgrove’s quiet, moonfaced secretary, but instead a dark-haired girl in jeweled cat’s-eye glasses surrounded on all sides by stacks of jacketed files.

  “Pardon me,” Lilly said. “I am looking for Mr. Musgrove.”

  “Join the club,” Ruby said. She had spent the past hour trying to square receipts with Mr. Musgrove’s comings and goings. “Mr. Musgrove isn’t here anymore.”

  “But I have an appointment,” Lilly said. A leather-bound calendar was on the edge of the desk, atop one of the piles. “The other girl should have written it down.”

  There was a lot that Carole Turner should have written down, but for the benefit of her visitor, Ruby flopped open the cover to the current week. Every box was blank, which should have been a tip-off, if anyone had been paying attention. The previous week wasn’t much better: Carole’s loopy scrawl indicated the odd meeting or lunch, and at the end of the column for Friday she had written !!!! in red ink. This had made her private-secretary material?

  Ruby snapped the cover shut. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s no appointment, and no Mr. Musgrove.”

  “But where is he?”

  “We’ve got a pool going on that. The smart money says Reno, but it could be Mexico, for all I know.”

  “Mexico?” Lilly tried to absorb what this meant. The girl might as well have said that Mr. Musgrove had gone to the moon.

  “Yes, Mex-ee-ko. It’s a country, just below America.”

  Lilly was losing patience with this girl and her join-the-club, her smart-money, her Mex-ee-ko. Two weeks ago, Mr. Musgrove had promised they would get things fixed. “You just have to know the right people,” he had told her. But now everything was unraveling because she couldn’t make this girl understand.

  “I know where Mexico is,” Lilly said, “but why is Mr. Musgrove there?” She took a deep breath, an effort to steady herself, but it came back out in a series of short, ragged bursts. “Mr. Musgrove,” she said, trying to take it slow, “brought me to New York, for the Foundation. I am from Prague—you know Prague? You know Czechoslovakia?”

  Ruby wrinkled her nose. Did she know Czechoslovakia? Wasn’t her brother talking about it all the time, him and his City College friends? When they weren’t ransacking the icebox at the Kadetskys’ apartment in Astoria, they yammered on and on about the Czechs and Hitler and the Bund and Lindbergh. In the college’s Great Hall, her brother and his friends had already started draping black sheets over the flags of nations that had fallen to fascism: first Germany, then Austria, Czechoslovakia…

  A panic was blooming in Lilly’s chest. When the girl didn’t reply, her words came in gasps. “Check-oh-slo-wa-key-ah,” she said. “Yes? And soon my visa expires, and I must go back. But this is impossible. And he—Mr. Musgrove—he told me he was going to help me. If Mr. Musgrove is not here, then how is he going to help me?”

  Lilly knew she was raving like some kind of lunatic. She balled her fist in front of her mouth like a stopper in a bottle, unsure of what would come out next: a word, a scream, a sob. How had she been so stupid, to place her faith in Mr. Musgrove? Here in the Tower with its polished floors and bronze doors, its bird’s-eye views and cocktails in the clouds, everything seemed possible. But Lilly knew better—she knew that the world was not so easy. Though it defied logic and everything she had seen in Berlin, Munich, and Barcelona, she had let herself believe that she could escape the inevitable, and that she could rescue Josef as well. Only now did she see what a fool she had been.

  Ruby looked away, trying to be polite, trying to offer a little privacy in this suddenly cramped room. She shifted the position of the stapler, moving it away from the box of paper clips. There was a kind of pleasure in bringing order to all this mess, and before this woman made her appearance, Ruby had experienced a mote of satisfaction, a light thrill, each time she ratcheted down the head of the stapler and bound together what had been a sheaf of loose, badly shuffled sheets of paper. But this woman had put a stop to that. She stood in front of Ruby’s desk, hand over her mouth and her eyes burning a hole through the door that still bore Mr. Musgrove’s name.

  Ruby wasn’t trying to be difficult—really, she wasn’t—but she had been given a job that would take five girls to sort through, plus one of the other program officers to decode, and then that wiseacre from accounting would have to run the numbers to see if they all added up. Maybe this lady had been promised help and maybe she really did need it. But you know who else needed help? Ruby Kadetsky, that’s who. And yet here was this woman, not three feet away, and Ruby wouldn’t even look at her—wouldn’t exercise the common decency of recognizing the pain of another human being. She was a regular Carole Turner. No, worse. She was a dime-store version who wasn’t even getting love in return for satisfying her blind, selfish heart.

  Ruby returned the stapler to its resting place and closed the jacket on the file.

  “Ma’am,” she said, and leaned over the desk, as if someone might be eavesdropping or she was about to share a secret. “Can you tell me your name?”

  The sound of the girl’s voice helped in some small way. Lilly nodded and cleared her throat. “Lilly Bloch,” she said.

  “I have to tell you, Miss Bloch, things around here are nutty today, all thanks to your Mr. Musgrove. Frankly I wouldn’t know who to send you to—it’s that bad.”

  Lilly opened her mouth, as if about to speak, but what was there to say?

  “I’ll tell you what,” Ruby said. “You come back Monday morning and I’ll have figured out a thing or two. Somewhere in all this mess is your file, and once I find it, I’ll get it into the right hands. And then we’ll just go from there. How does that sound?”

  Lilly could only nod. She managed a whispered “Thank you,” then a real one, louder than she had intended, which led to a round of nervous laughter—first from her, then echoed by the girl behind the desk. Lilly reached across the desk and touched the girl’s wrist once, lightly. “You are very kind,” she said.

  Ruby smiled. Was that really all it took? She hadn’t promised the woman anything more than a few questions around the office, along with whatever it took for her to dredge her file out of this clerical landfill. She wrote Lilly’s name on a slip of paper and held it up for Lilly to inspect. “Did I get it right?” she asked.

  Lilly had always considered her last name to be blunt and inelegant, but this girl’s B was a swirl of liquid curls that formed a four-chambered heart, and the L on her first name was looped like a bow around a finger, a promise not to forget. Josef would laugh at her for being so superstitio
us, but she needed a sign, and this one would do. “It’s lovely,” Lilly said, her fate now in the hands of this girl who could take a stranger’s name and make it into something beautiful.

  FORDHAM HEIGHTS

  MARTIN DEMPSEY HAD DONE it. He had really done it this time. And he had told the story a dozen times or more, in bars from Fifty-Second to 140th Street, to men who were drawn to his madman’s glow—his flashing eyes! his jet-black hair!—and who stood him round after round of drinks to hear every detail. Martin had just walked out on Chester Kingsley. He had taken his spot in a big band that was heard weekly on the National Broadcasting Company and tossed it right back in Chester’s jowly roast beef of a face.

  The final straw was a new addition to the band’s set list—Chester’s own arrangement of Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” cleaned up and toned down for the geriatric crowd that filled the lounge at the Kensington Hotel, where the Chester Kingsley Orchestra was the reigning house band. Martin had heard the song from Basie himself last summer at the Famous Door, and he had immediately broken his promise to Rosemary—no more record albums until next month’s payday—and snatched up a fresh pressing of the single. “One O’Clock Jump” was a shiny locomotive powered by piano, brass, and drums, but in Chester’s hands it had all the glamour of an uptown bus. Martin stopped playing his clarinet before the band was even four bars into the number, and when Chester shot him a look, Martin took his instrument and walked off the bandstand. Not only mid-set, but midsong.

  Now it was six o’clock in the morning and Martin’s head buzzed with gin and cigarettes and the hot jazz he had used to flush the last traces of sweet dance music out of his head. Sweet—that’s what they called the music that Chester played, but there was no truth in that. The music was stale, lifeless; it had the sweetness of a rose that had wilted and begun to molder. He couldn’t blame the twilight-years crowd, but what baffled him were the younger people who hadn’t gotten the message that sweet had gone the way of the Charleston. They lived in the world capital of hot jazz, the kingdom of the Lindy Hop! It had been more than a year since Benny Goodman had brought jazz to Carnegie Hall. Chick Webb had been demolishing all comers at the Savoy Ballroom for almost five years; band to band with Goodman, Ellington, and Basie—and Webb had always come out on top.