The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Maybe this was a fitting memorial: Da knew better than anyone else how hard it was to break off a conversation simply because death had intervened. Hadn’t their mother remained a constant presence in his life? Hadn’t his efforts to escape from his own sorrow and guilt and anger—at the world for taking her, at God for letting her go, at Bernadette herself for leaving him—driven him to move to the farthest point on the island from the car wreck that had killed her? That was the shocking part about the cause of his father’s death: his heart. Martin had long believed that his heart had already been blown to bits the day their mother died. If he had managed to preserve some piece of it for himself, he had never let his sons see it.

  He had hoped the train would give him a few quiet moments to think through the events of the day, and look where it had gotten him: worked up into a lather about a life he had left behind. His father was dead, and Martin could think of no way to mourn him.

  IN CHURCH

  IN THE PARISH CHURCH in Woodlawn where she had made her First Communion, knelt through confession and Stations of the Cross, and lit countless votives before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, Rosemary had always had her favorite saints. Agnes with her lamb, Stephen and his pile of stones, Lucy with her eyes on a plate. She had no interest in the pious men in their broad red hats and their dusty books; even stained glass couldn’t brighten their sour faces. The popes’ crowns all looked like hard-boiled eggs and the nunnish wimples were proof that these moldy old men had never gotten outside to mix it up with the crowd. Rosemary preferred the virgin martyrs to the doctors of the church any day. Hadn’t Saint Catherine of Alexandria argued with the king’s philosophers until they chopped off her head with a sword? That was going to be Rosemary when she grew up, or so her younger self had thought. She wanted the forthrightness and the refusal to give an inch, but now, kneeling in prayer in this foreigners’ church in Fordham Heights, she wondered if she had taken on the suffering but forgotten to ask for the glory, the grace, or the clarity of purpose.

  But who was she to be picky? Any saint here would have to do today, because Rosemary had plenty to pray for. She wanted patience for the next round of wedding planning, but then what was the point of praying about the wedding, or her sister, or her parents, now that Martin had come shambling back into the apartment looking punch-drunk and poorly shaved, telling her that his father was dead and his brothers were in town and the youngest was in some kind of state and the two of them were holed up at the Plaza—the Plaza, could you imagine the cost?—and right at the end, almost like an afterthought, mentioning that he had quit Chester’s band? And over what? The songs didn’t swing?

  Perhaps she could look to Saint Monica, patron saint of wives, but prayers to her tended to be pleas for forbearance, and Rosemary wanted more than forbearance. And there was always Saint Jude, who handled lost causes. But it hadn’t gotten that bad. Not yet.

  She knew that once you married a man, you were tied to him for good or bad—sickness, health, richer, poorer, till death did you part. A husband’s good decisions could make your life easier, and his bad decisions, or bad habits, could absolutely ruin you. She had seen it in her parents’ home and had vowed that she wouldn’t fall into the same trap. Her father was a blusterer and a bully. He made enemies, he stepped on toes, he took from men the things he had it in his power to take and he gave to men what it benefited him to bestow. That was politics. And her mother, who had hitched herself to him when the two had little in life, had become an imperious, lonely woman. Suspicious of people who had less, resentful of those who had more. Did she have anyone she could count as a friend, a confidante? Or did everyone fear that sharing the least bit of their own troubles with Birdie Dwyer would surely find its way back to Dennis, whereupon it would be filed away until it was useful? Still, her parents had mounted a charge that got them most of the way to the top. It was a good life. Most had far less. But it wasn’t a life that Rosemary had ever wanted for herself.

  She had gone and hitched herself to Martin, and for all that was good about him—he was no blusterer, no bully—he had proven himself to be capricious at times. She knew that men made decisions for their own reasons and you hoped that you could fit those decisions into the life you thought you were making, but she was starting to see that life was like being handed the ingredients one at a time for a meal you were supposed to make, never knowing what was next. You might start with a chicken, a few carrots, a sack of potatoes, and think, Now we’re getting somewhere—but the next three items would be a bicycle tire, a top hat, and a bag of penny candy, and you had to figure out how to use it all. There was no chance to slip any of it into the trash, or set the hat on your head, or pretend you never saw the tire.

  Martin claimed he had a plan and maybe that was true, and maybe it was even a good plan. But a good plan—a truly good plan—wouldn’t have left Martin out of work, wouldn’t have left her wondering how on God’s green earth she was going to square their expenses in the black-bound ledger where she tracked every nickel spent with the grocer, the butcher, the butter-and-eggs man, the cobbler who would fix the heel on the old shoes she would wear to the wedding.

  A truly good plan—one that would be good for her, too—wouldn’t need to be cloaked in secrecy. Because if it was truly good, Martin would have been bursting to tell her all about it. He would have talked to her about it over his cup of tea, after the girls were in bed, on one of those rare nights when he was home instead of at the Kensington or somewhere on Fifty-Second Street or in Harlem. They could have formulated this plan together. She thought again of the kiss outside the chapel on the day they’d gotten married. Was she wrong to see that as a promise? Or just wrong to think that promises couldn’t be broken?

  MILES TO THE south, on the island of Manhattan, in another church of the same faith, John Gavigan bowed his head in prayer. The priest had raised the Host and it was a time for all good Christians to fall to their knees, but if Gavigan perched his wrecked skeleton on the padded kneelers for even a second he would need to be lifted back into his seat. So he would risk blasphemy to save himself from that humiliation.

  He bowed his head and turned his thoughts to his own mortal end. He wasn’t bloody-minded but seeing Tommy Cronin again had gotten him thinking about how the time had passed. For a dozen years, Tommy had been faithfully at his side. Gavigan’s shadow, they called him. And then one day he was gone, and with his disappearance some of Gavigan’s foes whispered that Gavigan was get-able. That Cronin hadn’t been just a shadow but a shield. Here Gavigan was, though, years after Cronin had walked off his post, and no one had gotten him yet.

  Most of the men he had known in life had not made it this far. The loudmouths and the brawlers, the ones who were too quick to provoke or too bullheaded to ever back down, were the first to go. They seldom made it out of their teens, which was the Decade of Not Being Too Stupid. Then you’re in your twenties, the Decade of Hustle, where you’ve got to keep your eyes open for every opportunity, whether it knocks or not. That would get you into your thirties, the Decade of Luck. Gavigan had seen plenty of guys who were full of get-up-and-go lose it all because they picked the wrong side of a turf dispute in the old neighborhood, or got swept off to Rikers Island for not bribing the right cops (or for trying to bribe the wrong ones), or claimed too big a slice of some union’s bankroll only to find out firsthand how many bodies you can hide in a building’s foundation, and how quickly the concrete sets. You saw enough of that and you realized you had to find a way to bleed the luck out of the system, to make it all about the right decision instead of the wrong one. That’s when you entered the Decade of Being Smart, and if you knew what was what, you kept being smart for the rest of your life. But if you were no good at being smart, or if you were one of those guys who had been lucky and who thought that the luck would never run out, then you became one of the men whom Gavigan sheared like sheep, taking from them year after year, until they were good for nothing but mutton.

  Gavigan had ma
de it. Through all the traps littering the streets of the city, he had made it. But now, as his knees turned into rusty hinges and his lungs filled with a vile sludge, he had begun to wonder what all the decades of hustle, luck, and smarts had gotten for him, and what relics of his trials and victories he would leave behind. He had never had a wife, never had children. He wasn’t about to make like his fancy-pants neighbors and leave what he had to build a museum full of watery French landscapes or hand it all over to the opera, where the rich sat bawling in their seats while some fat Italians screeched about lost love.

  He had hoped to make his mark with this Ireland business, bankrolling the operation for going on forty years: the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the anti-Treaty side of the civil war. He was convinced that none of it would have happened without the money and the guns and the yet-more-money he had dispatched to the Old Sod. His mother had raised him on stories of the Famine, the shame of the workhouse, uncles led in chains to Australia, a hunger so raw no lifetime could ever satiate it. But it wasn’t the old stories alone that had raised the banner in his heart. Just before the turn of the century, as he began to get a little money in his pockets, he had taken his mother to the Odeon in the old Five Points neighborhood to see one of the great Irish tenors. The performance turned out to be some kind of Fenian fund-raiser and while the singer caught his breath, another man took the stage and gave such a fiery recounting of the sins against the Irish people that Gavigan pledged himself right then and there to the cause of a free Ireland. It wasn’t long before he was meeting at white-tablecloth steak houses with the up-and-coming class of Irish-Catholic merchants and lawyers—the strivers of New York with their fine suits and Jesuit manners, men who would have otherwise looked down on a gutter rat like John Gavigan. Only now they were drooling to get their hands on the money he could give to free Mother Ireland from British rule. When it was guns they needed, Gavigan knew how to get them, and when they needed men on the docks who could label rifles as machine parts—well, Gavigan took care of that, too. But what did they need from Gavigan now? Did they come to him for his general’s eye for strategy, his banker’s eye for business, his soldier’s eye for knowing when to pull the trigger?

  No, Lord, they want none of that. Only my money, Lord, to spend on schemes that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell—forgive me, Lord, but I sometimes lose my temper, just as You did when the moneychangers took over the temple. And I know how that is, Lord, when you’re trying to stay true to the cause but all around you is incompetence and idiocy. I know a thing or two about staking out turf and keeping it yours, but does that get me listened to? It sure as shit does not. And forgive me again, Lord, for my rough language but You know that I am an uncouth soul, and You seem to love me for it anyhow. So thanks there, too, Lord.

  This was the part that burned a hole in his gut—because what had their years of ignoring Gavigan’s best ideas gotten the Irish? Only a piece of the island, with a big bite taken out of the top. He for one wasn’t going to say that was good enough and call it a day. The south had purchased its independence—And goddamn it, they hadn’t even gotten that, not all the way—and the price was the blood of every northern republican trapped in servitude to an English king and subject now to constant persecution by the murderous Ulster unionists, who were more determined than ever to keep themselves in the fold of the empire. Having been deserted by their cowardly, self-satisfied brothers in the south, the Catholics in the north were both poor and powerless. He thought his money had built a generation of revolutionaries, but they were content to be a nation of civil servants. They had sold their own kin for a comfortable pension.

  And even the IRA, the ones who were supposed to finish the job come hell or high water, had fallen into weakness and disarray. He had urged and argued for something big, something that would kick the English square in the balls. Kill the whole cabinet in one swipe! Instead, they had launched this pitiful Sabotage Campaign, with its bombs in mailboxes, bombs in trash cans. It was an annoyance, nothing more. Gavigan called for an all-out assault on the north, a coordinated strike that would be the signal for a larger uprising. Just what they’d intended in ’16, only better organized, with enough guns and men to force Parliament to throw up its hands and say, Enough is enough! These Irish will never be quelled! But no. The Army Council knew best. Gavigan told them they were mad and worse, that they had no stomach for a real fight. But still he opened his wallet because without him there would be no action at all.

  And will you look at what’s happened now, Lord? This little nobody walks in and robs them blind and then lights out for America, his pockets full of my money. So now it’s up to me, once again, to clean up the mess they’ve made. Stupid fucking micks. Pardon my language, Lord, but it’s true what they say: Every Irishman worth a damn has either emigrated or been executed. The simpletons who stayed behind need constant supervision.

  Gavigan still dreamed of one last score. Something so big that it would sweep away the small-timers. And if it wasn’t going to come from Ireland, then the American-born Irish would show them how it was done. There had been chatter around New York a few years back about flying a plane across the Atlantic, Lindbergh-style, to bomb the House of Commons. The plan had been to fly from the edge of Long Island, rain fire on the Parliament, and ditch the plane in sympathetic France. Gavigan lined up just such a plane. He found men willing to carry out the plan. But when he laid it all out for his supposed comrades, they balked. It was just talk, they said. Eyes full of stars, heads full of whiskey. Gavigan knew the truth, that they were scared of their own ambition.

  But You know me, Lord. I’m not scared of nothing. Show me a sign, Lord, and I will not let You down. You have given me some good times on this earth, more than a man deserves, but if You give me one last score before we meet face to face then I will die a happy man. I’ve never asked for anything it wasn’t in Your power to give, and to be honest, I have tried my best to take care of myself and go easy on the asking. So if You can see Your way to helping me go out a winner, then we can call it even. Amen.

  FORDHAM HEIGHTS

  MARTIN AND ROSEMARY’S OLDER daughter, Kate, had been perched at the front window awaiting the arrival of these strange new creatures, her uncles, and when she saw the taxi at the curb, she sent up the alarm: “I see nuncles! The nuncles! The nuncles!”

  Martin tromped down the stairs to meet them, and moments later, Michael and Francis, their arms brimming with presents, pushed through the front door. Before Mrs. Fichetti could interrupt the reunion, they swept upstairs for a round of introductions: brothers to their sister-in-law, uncles to nieces, and nieces to uncles. Francis gave a broad smile as he sized up Rosemary: Dark hair and a pretty face, though she looked a bit too serious. Still, she had a nice bosom and a slim figure, even after the two babies. Good fun to be had there, he thought. Well done, Martin. He had never known Martin’s type of girl. There were so few options among the country lasses in Ballyrath, and anyway Martin had always seemed more interested in music than girls. He wasn’t going to tie himself down while his sights were set on America.

  Michael was tottering under the weight of a giant bottle of champagne—“It’s bigger than Evie!” Martin said—and as Michael was relieved of the bottle, Francis began dispensing presents. For Rosemary there was a brooch from Henri Bendel, which she said was too extravagant, all the while pinning it smartly to her blouse. For Kate, a Madame Alexander doll. “My baby!” she cried with rapturous glee when the box was opened. And for the littlest Dempsey, a silver teething ring in a powder-blue Tiffany box. Evie took hold of it in one fat fist and began madly drooling. Francis patted his pockets in a show of forgetfulness—“Now, what have I got for Daddy?” he said, winking at Kate—before producing another Tiffany box, this one containing a tie clip made up of thin lines of silver dotted with quarter notes. Francis beamed throughout this Santa Claus in June ceremony while Michael stood by his side with his alert, happy-but-not-idiotic smile, a look he had been
practicing in the mirror that morning.

  Martin’s smile was more pained as he tried to tally up the dent his brother’s largesse had made in the budget for Michael’s medical care. Michael himself looked like a little boy dressed up for some fancy family outing: his aunt’s wedding, his brother’s First Communion. With his thin neck, large head, and black hair pomaded flat against his skull, he resembled a dapper, man-size lollipop.

  Michael hadn’t known where they were going, but the pieces were falling into place. Martin had sent him a photograph of his family and here they were in the flesh. The wife was Rosemary, the daughters were Katherine and Evelyn. Rosemary seemed nice enough: she’d given Michael a hug and a kiss on the cheek when he entered and had looked at him with pity and concern. He was sure that she had said something kind, something comforting. Once he had been relieved of the bottle, Kate immediately instigated a game of peekaboo with Michael, popping her head behind her father’s armchair and then reappearing, her chubby, cheeky face exploding into what he surmised were peals of laughter. He reciprocated with a pop-eyed look of surprise while trying to let on to the adults that he was playing a game and not slipping to some new, deeper level of enfeeblement.

  But where was Yeats? Apparently he hadn’t made the trip from the Plaza. Perhaps he had become accustomed to the high life. Perhaps Yeats was merely a cantankerous old bollocks who kept his own hours and was frequently detained by the goings-on in the spirit world. Could any halfway decent medium summon him away from Michael and toward some dimly lit table, where the poet would be put to work pecking out cryptic nonsense on a Ouija board? Or was he right now in some celestial parlor, sitting down for a chat with sharp-penned Swift and mad-brained Blake and poor doomed Keats, talking poetic meter and the oddities of a language in which Keats and Yeats did not rhyme?