The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Now it was sometime in the evening, the sun low in the sky but still a long way from setting, and he was alone. Abandoned, even, but—what’s this?—not forgotten. In the center of the sitting room was a wheeled cart topped by two silver domes. Under one was a fat T-bone steak and under the other some sort of… well, what? It was a large white orb, perhaps some kind of gigantic onion, with concentric rings of scorched brown marking its lines of latitude. Michael prodded it with a spoon, which revealed the surface to be hard and stiff. A more deliberate jab with the spoon cracked the shell and unleashed gobs of vanilla ice cream. Oh, heaven! He spooned mouthfuls of ice cream flecked with sugary meringue into his mouth. Had he for one moment thought badly of Francis for leaving him alone? If he had, then all was forgiven. Michael settled onto the sofa, and alternating bites of beef with half-melted ice cream, he was certain that Francis was the greatest brother that a brother could hope for.

  FIFTH AVENUE

  MARTIN KEPT ASKING FRANCIS, What’s the plan? But there wasn’t any plan beyond the FC Plan, and that was working like gangbusters. The money and the clothes and the air of well-bred Scottishness had led to the Britannic and its first-class dining room, which had led to the Plaza and now to his next destination: the Binghams. Yesterday he had received a card, creamy paper embossed in gold with the family name and address. On the back, in a chain of tight curlicues, Mrs. B—Delphine, he was supposed to call her—cordially invited Sir Angus and his brother Malcolm to dinner on Monday evening. Even Francis, who had never been formally invited to anyone’s home for dinner, could sense a tremor of urgency behind the invitation. Who dined out on a Monday? Could they really be so worried about losing their monopoly on the attentions of their young Scottish aristocrat?

  Michael, who had been crashed out in bed all day, would have to stay behind. Martin must have dropped him earlier, and all without waking Francis, who had slept until noon, and who could blame him? Blame the gallons of champagne and whiskey at Martin’s, the dancing and the gin at the Savoy, the frenzy of the Lindy Hoppers, the return to the Plaza with Peggy. God, that Peggy! She was another one of the spoils of the FC Plan. He hadn’t even given her the Scotsman act, but the sharp suit and the giant’s bottle and the fat roll of banknotes had certainly promoted his cause. Hadn’t she called him a gentleman? Would any of it—this life he had led since fleeing Ireland—have come to pass if he had been the flat-broke brother of Martin, camped out in some cold-water rooming house or sleeping on the tatty floor of Martin’s apartment? Not one bit of it.

  And now it was on to meet the Binghams. Given the family’s acres of jewels and their months on the Continent, he assumed the Binghams lived fairly high, and friends in high places were the best kind to have. That was one of the central tenets of the FC Plan, or would be, if he ever took the time to write it all down. But when had there been time for anything since the accident? When had Francis had a single moment to sit down and plot his next steps or investigate this persona he had patched together? There was so much he didn’t know about Scotland, and America, and New York, and this business of being an aristocrat. All he could do was steal a few hours on the ship and at the Plaza poring over recent issues of Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, and Esquire, imagining these to be a Burke’s Peerage of the American ascendancy. From these he gleaned that the New World’s aristocracy could be cracked with the right accumulation of steel mills and coal mines—as long as the source of one’s wealth was obscured by the sheen of daughters schooled in French and sons who wore white jumpers and rowed for Harvard.

  To prepare himself for an evening with the Binghams, he had tried to concoct a few stories to burnish his own lordly bona fides, but the best he could manage was some family lore about his great-uncle Mad Fitz, who had acquitted himself so honorably during the Boer War—or should it be the Crimean? Single-handed defeat of spear-wielding Zulus, or the capture of an entire Russian regiment? Or was it the Turks? Tennyson had written a poem about someone the English had fought, but here was the downside of being raised in a flyspeck of a town where your father was the only schoolmaster: if he didn’t teach it, you didn’t know it. As for Francis’s education after his exit from Ballyrath, English military history and Victorian poetry hadn’t been a part of the curriculum. He knew a great deal about books considered too immoral for impressionable Irish minds, knew how to pack salacious French postcards between black pasteboard covers so that they resembled hymnals, knew how to smuggle condoms past inspectors and how to relabel cheap claret as grand cru Bordeaux. He had specialized in luxury goods, or goods that gave the illusion of luxury and sensual abandon. But these weren’t the sort of stories to impress the Binghams.

  Francis checked one last time on the still-snoozing Michael and a few minutes later stepped into a taxi called by the shrill whistle of one of the Plaza’s stewards. Rung by rung, through the Sixties and Seventies, the cab climbed the ladder of streets that jutted eastward from the park. Down each one Francis saw a row of low, elegant buildings in shades of white and gray, like a mouthful of strong, square, American teeth. Iron scrollwork danced up the steps from sidewalk to front door, stood guard along the squat parapets, and swept basketlike below the windows, as if to catch the overflow of abundance that spilled from the homes of the city’s first citizens.

  Not until he reached the address printed on the card did he realize that the Binghams’ house wasn’t a house at all. It was a mansion—no, a palace. It wasn’t at the corner of Seventy-Eighth and Fifth, it was the corner of Seventy-Eighth and Fifth (and Seventy-Ninth, too). From a block away, the building looked like it had been constructed from spun sugar and marzipan. In the late-day sun, the marble walls blazed a brilliant white. It was the white of a welder’s torch, of a star tethered to earth. The top of the building stretched skyward in a riot of turrets, arches, towers, and other architectural excesses that Francis lacked the vocabulary to name. Any casual passerby would be overwhelmed by the froufrou and the frippery—all those details that made the Binghams’ urban château seem like the product of a young girl’s fevered imagination. But closer inspection revealed not a fairy-tale castle but a fortress. Beneath the whipped-cream cupolas were battlements that no siege engine could assail. The foundation was granite and the roofline bristled with sharpened iron rods bent to seem as harmless as licorice sticks, but woe to the barbarian who tried to storm this castle; tant pis to the prisoner who bided his time in this bastille.

  Francis was greeted at the front door by a middle-aged man in a stiff black jacket, a man he almost addressed as Mr. Bingham. Before Francis could commit his first faux pas, the man took his hat and ushered him into a foyer floored in checkerboard marble. Twin staircases snaked upward to right and left, meeting in a center mezzanine that oversaw a chandelier as wide as the crown of a chestnut tree, each leaf filigreed in gold. The ceiling soared to a fluted dome suspended above the foyer like a giant seashell. On each side of the staircase, wall niches displayed busts carved in black or white marble—gods or emperors or members of the Bingham family, for all Francis knew. The butler opened a set of doors twice as tall as Francis and indicated with a nod of his head that he was to enter the room. As Francis crossed the threshold, the butler closed the doors behind him. The back wall of this new room was bookshelves, floor to ceiling, each volume bound in red leather and embossed in gold. Painted on the ceiling was a woodland scene, nymphs in flight, their loose hair covering their most interesting bits. Before he could give it a more thorough inspection he heard a mild ahem from another quarter of the room.

  He turned toward the source of the sound and a smile leaped to his face. Mrs. Bingham was perched in the center of a sofa, cloudlike in her gown, her hair set with silver combs. Anisette was on her left, her pose suggesting that she was aiming for demure but her smile so broad that she seemed ready to burst. To the right of Mrs. B sat a young woman whose face was caught between a sneer and something more like idle curiosity: You’ve got two minutes; impress me or go home. No one spoke. This was
a scene that Francis was meant to admire. He would have tested their resolve—checked his wristwatch and counted up the seconds, just for the fun of it—but he feared that Anisette couldn’t withstand the strain.

  He clapped his hands together and time restarted. “My dear ladies,” he said. “This is indeed a pleasure. Familiar faces in this strange land! What a delight!”

  “Your Lordship—” Mrs. Bingham began.

  “Please, we’re friends. Friends call me Angus.”

  Francis closed the distance between them—his feet did not make a sound on the thick Persian carpet—and took her hand, planting a quick kiss on her index finger. He needed to work on his hand-kissing. He had only seen it done in the movies—posh yokes were made for kissing hands—and of course in church, where the target was some bishop’s fat golden signet. He next pivoted toward Anisette, whose hand was already extended, and offered a quick peck.

  Mrs. Bingham introduced her daughter Félicité, two years Anisette’s senior. Félicité sat back and extended a long, reluctant arm toward Francis. She had completed the transformation of her sneer into something more complicated, something both haughty and sporting. Here was the girl at the carnival who deigns to try the ring toss, because really, how difficult can it be? As Francis leaned in for the last round of hand-kissing, a door in some distant arrondissement of the library slammed shut. Félicité jerked her hand midkiss, popping Francis squarely in the mouth.

  “What did I miss?” A creaky, metal-on-metal voice came from the back of the room. “He hasn’t seduced my daughters yet, has he?”

  Francis could taste blood in his mouth. The older sister had really let him have it.

  “Oh, Emery,” Mrs. B said. “Don’t embarrass our guest.”

  “That’s what he’s here for, isn’t he? To make off with one of the girls? Well, Your Lordship, which one is it going to be? Both of them are pretty enough. The younger one is sweet but a bit too flighty if you ask me. And this one’s got her head screwed on straight but she has a sour disposition.”

  His voice filled the room, but Emery Bingham was not a big man. He was compact and old, whittled down by time. He could have been Mrs. B’s father, perhaps even her grandfather. He looked a bit like a terrier at a dog show, prettified with his close-cut suit and his blunt beard—his mustache an iron-bristle brush that hid his mouth completely—but beneath the veneer he had a lean frame and a killer’s eyes, quick and hungry. The best efforts of the city’s tailors and barbers could not change what he was: a creature bred to enter dark, tight spaces and emerge with his prize clamped between his teeth.

  “Let me get a good look at him,” Mr. Bingham said. “Ever since you got off that ship all I’ve heard is tittering about Sir Walter Scottish.”

  “Father,” Félicité said. “Please don’t include me in their nonsense.”

  “You’ll have to excuse Félicité,” Mrs. B said, with a curt clearing of the throat: Don’t ruin this for your sister.

  “She doesn’t like to see anyone happy,” Anisette said. “Not even herself.”

  If the Binghams had been set to simmer, they now threatened to reach a boil. The tableau was more vivant than ever. Francis stepped back and took a second look around the room, with its wall of books, endless carpet, nail-trimmed wingbacks with their undented leather seats, and the ceiling and its scene of Arcadian cavorting. The satyrs were shaggy-jowled, and wasn’t the leader of the goat-legged pack the spitting image of a younger Mr. Bingham? And the nymph at the center of the composition, the one whose wicked smile spurred the satyrs to their mad pursuit and whose hands made such a lackluster effort to conceal her abundant charms—didn’t she look more than a little like Mrs. B?

  “What a show we’re putting on for our guest!” Mrs. B said. She reached a hand to each of her daughters in a way that would have evoked maternal pride if not for the white-knuckled grip she had on their wrists. The Bingham daughters composed themselves. This was a skirmish they had been waging for years, and one that they were a long way from resolving. They folded their hands, now free of their mother’s grasp, and put on small patient smiles while their eyes darted to ensure the other was observing the truce. The dustup with her sister had cooled something in Anisette, who looked less eager to gobble up Francis. Félicité, however, had gained a spark. Whether it was the sheen of action or simple schadenfreude, whatever she had robbed from her sister, she had added to herself.

  Mr. Bingham gloried in the whole scene. The rapid boil, the flushed cheeks, his wife’s iron hands, all of it provoked real joy in him. No smile was visible beneath his brambly beard, but his eyes had the same mad glint that Francis had seen first in Anisette and then in Félicité. It must have come as a disappointment to him when the butler entered the room and announced that dinner was served. Mrs. B and the daughters rose as one and slowly disentangled themselves from each other. Sharp limbs and thorny stares softened. Bright smiles replaced pouts and glowers.

  Mr. Bingham, rocking on his heels, was the last to leave the room. He had kept a gimlet eye on Francis, had seen the way he took in the books, his daughters, the ceiling. Now he too looked up and let his eyes trace the curves of the nymphs. There was his Delphine leading the charge (she always led the charge) but she wasn’t the only woman he’d known whose likeness graced the mural. That had taken some doing—keeping Delphine in the dark about the models he had handpicked and sent along to that crazy Belgian painter—but it had been worth it. Good times to think back on during sleepless nights. But that sort of fun was all in the past. The only one enjoying himself now was that woolly-legged bastard on the ceiling, though even he was trapped forever in the moment before he got what he wanted.

  THE MEAL PLAYED out like an arcane ritual meant to appease a voracious culinary god—one whose chief commandments were quantity, variety, and luxury. It began with balled cantaloupe served in tiny silver bowls, then progressed to a chilled cream of tomato soup—an acknowledgment of the blistering sun that had set aglow the walls of the Bingham manse. As the ladies pecked at the bits of cold fruit and soup, talk turned to the can’t-miss sights of New York: Had he taken a stroll in the park, or seen the Metropolitan Museum? No? Then Anisette would have to show him around. Mr. Bingham ignored the conversation and the dishes before him; melons and tomatoes were children’s food. His mood improved with the presentation of a Halifax sole, which he smothered in sauce béarnaise, followed by a braised Wiltshire ham. Each course was announced by the butler, like the acts in a vaudeville show. The meat was accompanied by a cart of vegetables: cauliflower in hollandaise, green beans amandine, potatoes Parmentier. While the Binghams picked at their plates, Francis finished every morsel he was served. He assumed that each course was the last—meals in Ballyrath and Mountjoy had been single-plate affairs—but when a roast Philadelphia capon in bread sauce was presented to the table, he began to see himself as a steer being fattened for market, a goose being stuffed for Christmas dinner.

  At the mention of Philadelphia, Francis asked if the dish was in honor of their dinner companions on the Britannic, the Walters. He was trying to sound waggish. High-born gents in the movies always seemed to be displaying their waggishness.

  “Oh, that awful woman,” Mrs. B said, and she and Anisette shared a laugh. Félicité rolled her eyes in annoyance at another of their Grand Tour in-jokes.

  Without looking up from his plate, Mr. Bingham spoke between forkfuls of delicately ribboned ham. “These Walters? Were they Americans?”

  “The worst sort,” Anisette said. “Loud and mean and—”

  Mr. Bingham’s fork clattered to his plate. He pointed at Anisette as if she were exhibit A in an argument he had been having with his wife. “A little time in Europe and already she’s starting to think like one of them! First it’s her fine British gentleman, and now she’s going on about ‘the worst sort’ of Americans.”

  “Daddy, I was only trying—”

  “Before this goes a step further, I want you lovebirds to listen to me.” Mr. Bin
gham jabbed his finger again at Anisette, then wheeled toward Francis. “Do you want to know what sort of American I am? I’m the sort who’s not looking to trade a lifetime of hard work for the deed to a run-down castle full of nothing but history and bad debts.”

  All eyes were suddenly on Francis. He was puzzling over lovebirds and Mr. B’s Before this goes a step further and wondering just what this was. Certainly he was game for a little flirting with the young Miss Bingham, but it seemed that the Bingham family had been buzzing about a much more long-lasting connection in the days since the Britannic had docked. This was a new development in the FC Plan. He didn’t know how long he could sustain being Angus MacFarquhar, but looking around the dining room with its piles of silver, its bottles of Bordeaux, its gilt-framed landscapes, and then at the spray of diamonds on the necks of the younger Binghams, he was willing to keep it up for a while. Right now, he needed a way to say neither yes nor no.

  He dabbed at the corners of his mouth. Bonhomie, he told himself. Aim for loads of bonhomie. “There’s no need to worry, sir. Our castle is in tip-top shape, but I must confess it’s not mine for the trading. My older brother is the heir. Second son of an earl is about as lucky as the fourth son of a baker.”

  While Mr. Bingham swallowed a mouthful of ham, his eyes made it clear that he had more to say. “That’s not exactly settled, is it? Let’s say your older brother drops dead. Doesn’t that make you the heir?”

  Now it was Mrs. Bingham’s fork clattering to her plate. “Emery! Really!”

  “I have a right to ask! It’s a strange way of life—idle days spent wishing bad fortune on others.”