The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Slumped behind the wheel of the Packard, his shirt plastered to his back and his collar chafing him like a yoke, Cronin thought again of Gavigan. Of how he’d appeared at the farm, acting as if finding Frank Dempsey’s wayward son were Cronin’s responsibility. But what did Gavigan know? He had never even met Frank Dempsey. He knew him only by his legend—first as a hero of the cause, then as a sticky problem that had to be solved. Cronin knew them all, though it had been a long, long time since he’d set eyes on Frank or Bernadette or their boys.

  It was Gavigan’s mention of music—of the oldest boy being a musician—that had first sent a shock through Cronin’s veins, a shock he hadn’t quite shaken in the days since. Of course his mind went straight to Bernadette—to Mrs. Dempsey. God, what a beauty, and God, what a voice! All through the war, she had offered music lessons from the family home, just down the street from the university where Mr. Dempsey taught, and where Cronin worked for the groundskeeper. When the Dempseys took notice of him, he was flattered by the attention. Even then, he saw the couple through a golden haze: These were educated folks who organized marches and published articles in the nationalist newspapers, and now they wanted Tom Cronin, with his turfy fingernails and his three years of schooling, to join them. They invited him to meetings where the talk was all about the struggle against the English, about the need for Ireland to be free. There were men at those meetings who had survived the Easter Rising and they spoke of how they had struck the match and watched the fuse burn for years and now it was time for the powder keg to blow.

  Cronin had never cared for politics, but these meetings fit his own life into a bigger story: Hadn’t his own brother died in the Great War, fighting for the same empire that oppressed them all? The Dempseys were the first to make him feel like he had an important part to play in building this new Ireland, like he was the man to put the muscle behind these speeches and grand plans. If he was a little bit in love with Bernadette Dempsey, what was the harm in it? Everyone loved her. When she spoke, she could outpatriot any of the men. And when she sang one of the old songs, all of their eyes shone with tears and their hearts filled with rebel blood.

  Cronin had a memory from those early years of young Martin plinking out a tune on the piano. The boy couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time, but it was brilliant to watch his little fingers running up and down the keys. His mother stood behind him and beamed, her lips moving silently as she counted out the tune. Her hair, coppery red and lively as silk, was pinned up and away from her face, with a single strand dancing against her swan’s neck.

  He stopped himself short. He didn’t deserve these memories, not when he was the one who had put her in the ground, who had robbed those boys of their mother’s love. The war against the English ended but it seemed only days before it became a war of Irish against Irish, and in that war Frank Dempsey chose the wrong side—he stayed loyal to Michael Collins, the Chief, who had made the bad bargain and left them short of the full freedom for which they’d toiled. Cronin stood with the men who wanted full payment for the blood they had spilled. They had no time for talk of a three-step path to independence or of an Irish Free State. They wanted a completely free Irish Republic. What Cronin couldn’t stomach was the notion that he’d risked eternal damnation in service of a halfhearted victory. He wanted to punish Frank Dempsey and the men like him who’d put Cronin’s soul on a scale and shown him how little it purchased. It should have been a simple enough task, the kind of job that Frank himself had trained him to do, but Cronin had botched it. The bomb in the car was meant for Frank. What business did Bernadette have taking a drive so early in the morning? Where could she have been going?

  The click of a woman’s heel on the front stoop shook Cronin out of his reverie. He hadn’t noticed her in the rearview mirror or through the windshield when she crossed the street two cars ahead of him but suddenly there she was, struggling up the front steps with a baby in her arm and holding a little girl by the hand. The baby could have been Gracie and though the girl was younger than Henry, with the car windows down in this awful heat, Cronin could hear her peppering her mother with the same sorts of questions that his Henry had for him. If Martin Dempsey lived here, then this had to be his family, and the sight of them stickpinned Cronin to his seat. Here he was, thinking about the men from his past who could bring sorrow to his doorstep and about the sorrow that he himself had wrought, while this family before him, one very much like his own, could not see the monster lurking at their gate. He sat in the car, sweating more than ever, and composed a silent litany. Lord, protect those in that home who are innocent. Lord, let me not be the agent of their undoing. Lord, though I am full of darkness, help me to restrain the evil I carry within me. But as soon as the door closed heavily behind the woman and her children, his thoughts returned to Alice and Henry and Gracie. They were the ones he would make any bargain to protect. They were the ones who deserved his prayers. Why was he wasting his breath on strangers?

  He mopped his face with his handkerchief and added a final line: Lord, if I must act, understand what I do and why it must be done.

  MIDTOWN

  FRANCIS DIDN’T CARE WHERE he and Michael were going. As long as he was moving, life was grand. Since he had left the prison, where the best you could hope for was walking in circles, he had been on the move; whether by car, by ship, by taxicab, or even by the power of his own feet, his momentum had been constant. In the hotel with Martin he had felt like he was back in Mountjoy, with the four walls and the questions and Martin looking right at him. But Martin was snoozing and Francis had had a hot-lather shave followed by a lunch in the Oak Bar that could have filled five men, and now he was out on the street with Michael in tow.

  The city was a revelation. Energy pulsed up through the sidewalk, propelling each of his steps. Everyone he passed seemed to feel it too. They moved quickly and with purpose. The men’s suits were new and sharply tailored, like the uniforms of palace guards. The women beamed, their eyes bright and their bodies surging beneath summer blouses and close-cut dresses. It was only the first week of June, but the city was alive with the promise of summer: the air was warm but not humid, it kissed rather than stifled. In Dublin, every soot-stained façade—every English-built edifice rechristened in the name of the new Ireland—glowered at you, asking what business you had there. Eyes down and move along, that’s what the streets of Dublin said. It was a city of iron railings and weathered brick, and the people didn’t fare much better than the buildings. The worst parts of the city were overrun with thick smoke and women gone toothless by forty from too many children and not enough decent food or fresh air. The men, even in the best parts of the city, were angry-faced and closefisted, desperate to protect whatever they had carved from the nation’s piss-poor larder. But why think of Dublin here? If Dublin was hunched and cowering, then New York soared and carried the spirits of every man and woman with it. It was a city that said Look up! A vertical city, a transcendent city that set the mind on higher thoughts. Sure, times were hard, but New York at its worst was leagues ahead of Dublin at its best—and when had Dublin ever seen its best?

  As they left the shelter of the hotel, there loomed behind them a sparkling equestrian eminence: a rider erect in the saddle, a goddess heralding his arrival. There were no somber marble wreaths, no veiled women forming a train of weeping and regret—even the horse looked haughty. Francis threw an arm around Michael’s shoulder and propelled him across Fifty-Seventh Street, dodging taxicabs and plunging into the scrum of pedestrians moving in the opposite direction. New York might be beautiful but if you stopped to admire it, you were cooked. Each new block was an island, each street a narrow ocean. As you put the last block behind you, each crossing washed you clean. Who had time to dwell on the then when the crush of bodies forced you to pay attention to the now?

  Michael took a deep breath. It seemed years since he had been outside and under his own steam. The city itself had reanimated him, and now it carried him along thro
ugh a fairy-tale world: inside every window sparkled constellations of diamonds. Even the windows were outlined in gold. Up the façade of one building, gold tracery followed the angles of each window, scrolled around the doors, and illuminated a set of small stone figures carved into the cornice of the entryway. Michael tugged on his brother’s sleeve and pointed to these bird-bodied, lady-headed Harpies baring their teeth and talons. Francis smiled back at Michael. Their father had drilled enough of Homer and Virgil into them that he could tell a Harpy from a Fury at forty paces.

  They walked down Fifth Avenue, drawn into the crowd, and all around was glittering commerce. Department stores rose like palaces, their windows offering a peek at the treasure hoard of the king. BERGDORF GOODMAN and BONWIT TELLER were chiseled in stone and scripted in gold. Their great revolving doors admitted a steady flow of pleasure seekers and disgorged an equal number of treasure takers. In the windows the mannequins, calm and composed, enacted scenes from a better world. Blank-faced, they danced in chiffon summer gowns or lifted champagne flutes above a picnic basket, their arms showcasing the freedom afforded by a light summer frock. The sun was high in the sky and everything sparkled—the windshields of the taxicabs, the chrome details of the fat black cars, the high windows of the towers that lined the avenue. They were in a city of glass and white marble, bleached and made clean by every sunrise. It was the city of the future that the adverts for the World’s Fair promised.

  Francis hadn’t come to America looking for anything more than an escape from the mess he had made in Ireland. But strolling through the city gave him a thrill. He wasn’t just watching this parade of opulence, he was a part of it. He and Michael could be hiding in some rainy hovel right now, dreading the kick at the door that would signal the end. But he had chosen a different sort of refuge, and damn him if the idea hadn’t been the best he had ever had. They had a room at the Plaza, fine clothes, and enough money to bluff their way into any corner of the city where their feet could carry them. Even Michael seemed enlivened by the shine of the street. His eyes darted skyward, his cheeks were flushed with the glow of good health, and his mouth fairly gaped.

  But what had caught Michael’s attention wasn’t the bared legs of the mannequins or the walnut-size diamond in the window of the jewelry store or the way that women not so subtly sized up Francis (he was a handsome fellow, and the suit gave him the aura of wealth and good breeding), nor was it the yellow taxicabs and the beetle-bright cars that lined the avenue. He was taken in by the sight of a worn, red-stone church looming on the next corner. Its carved steps led to an entrance that was austere in the extreme—a rebuke to all of this shimmer and bustle, but one that must have been issued years earlier, preemptively. The church had long ago set an example that none of the newer buildings cared to follow. For these new buildings, the trick was to seem permanent and fundamental to life while at the same time projecting an air of modishness. Each was a temple not merely to the current moment, but to the coming season. The future. The church, however, was plain, but on purpose, not because of a lack of funds or imagination. It seemed as if it had been built and then abraded with copper-wire brushes to deny itself, even in the first moments of life, any sense of freshness, any of the vanity that came with the new. It had all the shine and polish of rumpled butcher’s paper. Michael imagined an interior of white walls and simple wooden pews. Presbyterians? It seemed the sort of church that they would build: a monument to self-denial surrounded on all sides by the serious business of making money.

  Michael wished he had a notepad—he wished he could still write!—so he could jot all this down for his next visitation from Yeats. Maybe Yeats wouldn’t care to read the finer points of difference between one church and another—wasn’t Christianity just another source of metaphor for modern poets?—but maybe he would make something of the red-stone church’s down-the-street neighbors. A Gothic-spired cathedral flying the papal flag faced off across the avenue with a massive bronze Atlas bowed under a steel-ribbed globe. Farther ahead, a golden giant fell while a fire crackled in his hand, and behind him a bearded eminence used his burning fingers, sextant-like, to measure the darkness. Above this figure rose the tallest tower Michael had ever seen: a slim sheaf of unbroken lines that soared into the cloudless blue.

  This wasn’t sightseeing; it was an extended hallucination. A city of golden doors and particolored churches, of Titans who had populated the myths of Michael’s childhood, symbols of state power and godly authority and freedom and rebellion and punishment. He wanted to take Francis’s sleeve and ask, Can you see this? Is this only in my head? But he knew that Francis would only give him that patient, pitying look. Yes, he would have to ask Yeats about all of it, and as he formulated that thought, he had to laugh. I’ll ask my ghost to decipher my hallucination. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

  FOR THE SECOND time that day, Martin found himself on the IRT bound for home. On his early-morning ride he had been drunk but happy. Now, his hangover had caught up with him. It had been lurking in the shadows, waiting for Martin to doze, and though he had made it wait and wait—perhaps the only benefit of staying up through the night and deep into the next morning—a hangover was a patient creature. Martin’s head was as brittle as a rusted bell and his limbs were sapped by the burn-off of the adrenaline that had hit him with the sudden appearance of first one brother and then the other.

  When he had awoken at the Plaza, with no sign of Francis or Michael anywhere, he could almost believe that it had all been a dream. Had he come to a party at the Plaza last night, blacked out, and imagined the whole thing? That was a more plausible explanation than finding his brothers in New York, living like a couple of millionaires on holiday. A quick search turned up a few suits hanging in the closet, along with a collection of plaid waistcoats, which jibed with his memories of Francis and the Scottish alias. Martin pissed in the toilet and checked himself in the mirror haloed by bulbs. There was no denying it—he looked like hell. He had all the charm of an unmade bed. He collected his hat and as an afterthought scrawled a note, which he propped on the desk in the suite.

  F & M

  Dinner at my place. Tomorrow at 4:30.

  Meet your American relations!

  —M

  On his way out of the lobby, he was asked by the porter if the gentleman required a cab, and for a split second Martin considered it. Then he thought of Rosemary. If she saw him putting a dent in their grocery budget to pay a cabbie, she’d have his head.

  Rosemary. She would be wondering what had happened to him. What a story he would have for her: Francis and Michael in New York City, the Plaza Hotel—but what was he to tell her about the circumstances of his brothers’ escape? That was a question for another time. It was all too much for now, past midday on a Saturday when he hadn’t truly slept since Thursday night and in the meantime had traveled from the Bronx to Broadway to Harlem, then back to the Bronx and from there to the Plaza Hotel. At least he wouldn’t need to be back at the Kensington in time for tonight’s show—but there was another bit of news he had to break to Rosemary. She would have more than his head when he told her he’d quit playing for Chester.

  And then there was his father. Da was dead. Martin stared at the train window now, mirrorlike in the darkness of the subway tunnel. All around him mothers fussed with children, and men and women talked and laughed or carried on whispered arguments, but Martin tried to quiet his mind and let silence lead him toward an answer to the question that had tugged at him all morning long: How do I feel about this? He certainly didn’t take any delight in his father’s death—he wasn’t a monster—but was he saddened by the news? He felt a weight in his stomach and a light and empty space in his head. It wasn’t sadness so much as a gnawing uncertainty, or the awareness of a distance between how this news should make him feel and how he actually felt. Martin had known the moment he left Ireland that he would never see his father again. Shortly after he had landed in New York, he wrote to say that he had arrived safely, to convey an address wh
ere he could be reached, and to explain as best he could his reasons for leaving. Looking back, he would guess that the letter was probably too grandiose—more manifesto than Remember me, dear Papa—but he was nineteen and drunk on America. His father sent a terse reply, which brought to an end the correspondence between father and son.

  This didn’t seem a fitting memorial. Quarreling with a ghost about who was to blame for the failure of their correspondence and, to be honest, for so much else. They were headstrong, the both of them, and Martin had been so preoccupied with his plans for America, and then by the place itself, that he was quick to consign his father to the ash heap of things he had left behind when he sailed from Ireland. His father was an item on a long list of failings and untenable situations, or, to give him his due, he was a force that had kept Martin mired in a life he did not want, and which he believed he could escape only through careful planning and great effort. Any contact with his father threatened to pull him back to the old country, the old life. Or so he had told himself. Why, he reasoned, should I carry with me into a new country, a new life, this anger and guilt—the guilt itself engendered by the anger he directed at the old man? Better to forget it all, or treat it as some fever dream that had plagued him for a time, but would recede from memory as the sun rose and a new day began.

  The train rocked on its rails, slowing into one station before speeding toward the next. What would his father make of this—dead more than two weeks and Martin still arguing his case? It wasn’t as if he knew nothing of his father since his departure. Traces of life in Ballyrath had made it into Michael’s letters: his father had taken ill two winters ago but had regained his health; Mrs. Greavey, the woman who took care of his cooking and washing, had procured a nanny goat, believing as she did that goat’s milk was the key to a long life, but his father could not develop a taste for it; the O’Brien boy had demonstrated great potential with his Greek, almost as much as Martin had once shown. This news was accompanied by a heartfelt wish—Michael’s, he assumed, and not his father’s—that Martin had continued his study of Greek, as the consequences of wasting such a gift were well illustrated in the parable of the talents.