The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Confronted by this earnest, honest country bumpkin—an immigrant, no less—the captain reached for the brass pull that opened the door. “Right this way, sir,” he said.

  The sir reminded Cronin of the way the chemist always called Henry young man whenever the boy was given a chance to choose a piece of penny candy. A compliment that put you in your place.

  “You can tell them at the front desk that the money belongs to Sir Angus. They’ll know what to do.”

  Of course he wasn’t staying under his own name, but Sir Angus? As he crossed the lobby, Cronin asked himself again if this Dempsey was a canny bastard or a complete nutter. At the front desk he related the story and proffered the ten.

  “You’re a good man,” the desk clerk said. “I wish there were more like you in this city.” The clerk slid the ten into an envelope and paused before he sealed it. “May I tell His Lordship the name of his benefactor?”

  “I’m only doing what any man would have done,” Cronin said, an answer that provoked a smile, a silent cousin of the bell captain’s sir. That’s right, Cronin thought. Just a simple man, here to see the sights. He made sure to gawk at the ceiling and at the broad entrance to the Palm Court, with its lush greenery bursting from gold-glazed pots, but kept an eye on the clerk as he turned and slid the envelope into the warren of pigeonholes on the wall behind the desk. Cronin leaned in and squinted: room 712.

  “If you’ll pardon my asking,” Cronin said, “the man outside called the owner of that banknote Sir Angus, and I couldn’t help but notice that you called him His Lordship. Is he some kind of royalty?”

  The desk clerk chuckled and leaned toward Cronin, as if taking him into his confidence. “We treat all of our guests like royalty,” he said. “But the MacFarquhars may just be a little closer to the real thing.”

  “How about that?” Cronin said. He nodded to the man—oh, they were the best of friends now—and forced a knowing wink. What would Alice say if she saw him gabbing with clerks and carrying on like the village idiot? “Well, then, I’ll be on my way,” Cronin said. “Wife’ll be wondering where I’ve run off to.”

  The clerk smiled and Cronin smiled back. His face was going to ache for days after all of this smiling. But now he had it: a name and a room number. He could give Gavigan a map so simple that even that skinny shadow of his could follow it straight to Francis Dempsey. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the Packard. He was ready to pay Gavigan a visit.

  PARK AVENUE

  THE CALL HAD COME at nine in the morning. Dr. Theo Van Hooten had finished his breakfast and was beginning his perusal of the morning newspapers—he had four dailies delivered, including the afternoon edition of the Herald, and over the course of the day he would work his way through each of them. He did not read every word—he had little interest in business news and had never been much of a sports fan—but he often read three or four accounts of the major stories of the day. The papers today were abuzz with news of Saturday’s royal visit: a parade up the West Side Highway, a party at Columbia University, lots of pomp and circumstance at the World’s Fair, and then dinner with the Roosevelts in Hyde Park. He read all about it, with a singular focus that he could never muster in the old days, back when he was actually out in the world, among people caught in the great gears of history. It had been a dozen years since he’d walked in that world, since he’d taken the position as private physician to Emery Bingham, a wealthy man from one of those vast, rectangular western states that Van Hooten, for all of his education, could never quite remember. The job had come with many benefits but a single condition: That if he was summoned by the Bingham family, on the telephone whose number only the Binghams knew, he must answer. Failure to do so would result in his immediate dismissal.

  Van Hooten had not thought much of it in the early years. For a doctor with his background—Harvard education, residency at Johns Hopkins, partnership in a private practice on Park Avenue, all by the time he was thirty-five—jobs were easy to come by. He would have enjoyed a broad safety net except for one troublesome fact: Van Hooten despised the practice of medicine, a revelation that had come to him only after he was too far along in his professional life to seriously consider other options. He saw his days laid out in front of him, a night gallery of sunken chests and drooping scrotums, phlegm and sputum and milky discharges of uncertain origin. He had thought that by treating only the very wealthy he would insulate himself from life’s danker unpleasantries, but his years on Park Avenue had taught him that although the rich might be better perfumed than the poor, shingles was still shingles, a hemorrhoid still a hemorrhoid. Moreover, quitting the profession in disgust was simply not possible. Van Hootens had been doctors since at least the time of Rembrandt. The old Dutch master himself had included a distant Van Hooten forebear in The Anatomy Lesson, the man’s pointy blond Vandyke practically twitching in excitement at its proximity to the flayed arm of the convict. No, abandoning the only profession the Van Hootens had ever known would have required that he admit to himself and all those around him that he had failed miserably, and publicly, at a career in which he had shown such promise.

  So when old Mr. Bingham fell out with the senior partner in the medical practice and Mrs. Bingham asked if Van Hooten would be interested in becoming Mr. Bingham’s personal physician, he leaped at the offer. One patient, even one as elderly and potentially infirm as Mr. Bingham, was just what this doctor ordered. Given Mr. Bingham’s disdain for doctors, Van Hooten figured that he would see his one patient for an annual physical and in between he would be left to a life of semi-luxury—and except for that one codicil in the contract, he would have done exactly that. Theatergoing, speakeasy-visiting, opera-loving, socialite-wooing—all that and more could have been his, if the Binghams had not insisted that he be available to them at any minute of the day or night. They made use of this privilege only rarely, and it was always the missus—only the missus—who called. But had he not been in the apartment when those calls came, the job would have been forfeited, and he would have found himself back at the old practice, examining the lugubrious bulge of an inguinal hernia, exploring the mungy contours of a gangrenous foot, or debriding the bedsores of some sodden-fleshed dowager.

  He still dreamed of a steak dinner at Delmonico’s or a martini and a raft of littlenecks at the Oyster Bar, but the same thoughts left him in a bitter sweat. Even a trip down the elevator and into the lobby could spell doom. He was haunted by the sound of the phone ringing in the empty apartment.

  In the past decade, he had left the apartment no more than a dozen times. Almost all of his excursions were for the Bingham père’s annual physical, which Mrs. Bingham insisted upon and which always led to the same conclusion: that Mr. Bingham was an unwilling patient with the constitution of a petrified tree stump. Time and Bingham’s own cussedness had abraded whatever soft tissue had once clung to his frame, leaving a sentient, rocky core.

  During Van Hooten’s confinement, the big events of the day—the stock market crash, the election of FDR, the end of Prohibition, the rise of the New Deal—were little more than headlines to him. A woman named Foster arrived every morning to prepare his breakfast and tend to his laundry. She set the coffeepot, scrambled his eggs, buttered his toast. Dinners came delivered from a rotating cast of restaurants; the food would arrive in the lobby in folded paper cartons, which a doorman would then ferry to his door. Liquor and other essentials—books, record albums, stamps, typewriter ribbons—came by similar means. Every year a tailor visited to measure him for custom shirts and suits that almost no one would ever see, while a barber arrived every other week to trim his thinning hair.

  His friendships had fallen away years ago—few, then none, wanted to spend hour after hour in Van Hooten’s apartment with never the prospect of a night on the town. He had long abandoned any thought of a wife and children. The demands of family life could only distract from his duties to the Binghams. His dealings with women, like all of his encounters, became transactions. He placed a ca
ll, a woman arrived, and the night ended with the payment of a fee. But in recent years, even sex had lost its appeal. The same squeamishness that had driven him from the medical profession had overwhelmed whatever lusts resided in his heart. His one remaining source of pleasure was chess. He was currently involved in more than a dozen games, all carried out by mail.

  When the telephone rang that morning, Van Hooten had not set foot outside the apartment in nine months. The shock of the ringer jangling in the hallway almost sent his second cup of coffee into his lap. The telephone sat on a console table in a spot Van Hooten had calculated was the center-most in the apartment, equidistant from the bedroom (he slept with the door open), the bathroom (he had not had a satisfying bowel movement since 1927), and the living room (he listened to the phonograph only at very low volume). He raced to the receiver, a heavy black thing that he lifted with a mix of fear and gratitude. The call could only mean that Mr. Bingham had taken ill, and that Van Hooten must venture out to attend to him. O blessed day!

  But no. Mrs. Bingham informed Van Hooten that he was to be visited that morning by a Scottish lord whose younger brother needed medical attention. He was to do everything in his power to assist the young man, who had suffered some grievous harm of uncertain diagnosis.

  “He’s a medical mystery,” Mrs. Bingham said. “But we believe that you’re just the man for the case.”

  The kind words from Mrs. Bingham did little to soothe his disappointment. He so badly wanted to go outside. He kept a freshly pressed suit, a clean shirt, and a new tie hanging in the wardrobe, ready for a venture into the city. He had already promised himself that the next time he was summoned by the Binghams, he would insist on walking back to his apartment, rather than being taken door to door by the Binghams’ driver. But that was for another day. Today, he would have visitors.

  THE DOORMAN RANG him at ten sharp, and presently there were two gentlemen at his door—a strapping redhead and a dark-haired stripling. Van Hooten knew that his social graces had gone rusty, and after a quick exchange of greetings with the redhead, he guided his guests into the library. The bookcases were lined with medical journals—row upon row of bound volumes—but it had been years since he had kept current with the literature. Most of the articles dealt with conditions too boring or, more frequently, too horrid to contemplate. He was fond of reading the evening newspapers in his library, but he had made sure to tidy these up before his patient arrived. He wanted the report back to the Binghams—he knew there would be a report—to mention how serious and even scholarly Van Hooten could be.

  “Now, how is it that I can help you?” Van Hooten said when his Scottish visitors were settled.

  Francis explained that three weeks prior, his brother had suffered an injury that left him badly damaged: deaf, mute, and mentally… scattered. He smiled apologetically at Michael as he relayed his medical history. Damaged, scattered—these were terrible things to say about one’s own blood. When Van Hooten asked the cause of the injury, Francis hesitated. “I’m going to have to take you into my confidence,” Francis said. “The circumstances of his injury—they’re complicated.”

  Francis had thought this through over his morning pot of tea. He needed a story that struck close to the truth if this doctor was to make an accurate diagnosis. He had told anyone on the Britannic who asked that his brother had been injured while foxhunting—trampled by a horse or some other plausibly aristocratic mishap. But would an actual doctor note the absence of a telltale hoofprint on the side of Michael’s head? Would he report his suspicions to the Binghams? Or simply misdiagnose Michael’s condition? If there was a way to sort out what was wrong with Michael, Francis did not want to scuttle it with the wrong sort of half-truths and outright lies. And so before he began, he asked the doctor if he knew anything of Ireland’s recent history.

  “I confess I do not,” Van Hooten said. During the years he had spent in the apartment, the newspapers had been full of FDR and the WPA, Hitler and Chamberlain, the Lindbergh baby and the Dionne quintuplets. News of the quints had especially troubled him. He still shivered whenever he thought of the poor doctor who endured that delivery. More like the work of a veterinarian, if you asked him.

  Freed by the doctor’s ignorance from any strict adherence to facts, Francis spun a tale of his brother’s recent visit to Ireland, where he had been the guest of wealthy landowners who, for the sake of discretion, Francis could not name. These friends had maintained their vast holdings despite the turbulence of the past two decades, but lately had drawn the ire of a splinter group of malcontents who advocated returning the land to the so-called common people.

  “Bolsheviks?” Van Hooten said.

  “Irish Bolsheviks.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Oh, they’re out there. And these particular Bolsheviks detonated a bomb on our host’s property. My brother, quite unluckily, was near the site of the explosion, which razed a small cottage.”

  “He doesn’t look too badly damaged—from the outside, I mean.”

  “That’s why we came to see you,” Francis said. “To find out what happened on the inside.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The inside.”

  Van Hooten hefted a gleaming otoscope and peered into each of Michael’s ears. He noted that both eardrums had been ruptured. Then he studied Michael’s eyes, the way they followed a pencil he drew back and forth across the young man’s field of vision. He ended each phase of the examination with a short hmph, as if time and again he were surprising himself with one of his findings. Van Hooten had Michael remove his shirt in order to get a better listen to his lungs. There were no problems with his breathing, but his torso was speckled with scratches and fading bruises outlined in yellow and purple—proof of the Bolsheviks’ handiwork.

  As he examined Michael, Van Hooten chatted idly—sometimes, it seemed, to himself, and other times directing a question at Francis: How long had he been in New York? What were his impressions of the city? How had he come to know the Binghams? When Francis mentioned meeting Anisette and Mrs. Bingham on the transatlantic crossing, Van Hooten dropped his stethoscope. He made no move to pick it up.

  “The Binghams were in Europe?” Van Hooten said. “How—how—how long were they away?”

  “Two or three months, I suppose.”

  Van Hooten was short of breath. Mrs. Bingham had been out of the country—she had been across the ocean—for two or three months? Two or three months when the phone would not have rung. When he could have left the apartment, left the building, even left the city. His mouth was dry, his fingers numb.

  “I—I wasn’t aware of that,” he said, the words barely audible. When the older Scotsman asked if his brother could get dressed, Van Hooten could only nod. The younger one buttoned his shirt, tied his necktie, and wandered out of the library and into the hallway. “Is he capable of being on his own, unsupervised?”

  “He’s not an idiot,” Francis snapped, then cleared his throat to regain his composure. He had almost said eejit—a dead giveaway for anyone who knew how to tell a Scottish lord from a boy raised in the Irish countryside, though Van Hooten probably wouldn’t have noticed.

  Francis’s tone brought Van Hooten back to the room, the examination, the case before him. He retrieved his stethoscope from the floor and placed it on the table with the other instruments, then withdrew a notebook and pencil from a drawer. He asked if Michael suffered from headaches or other signs of physical discomfort.

  “He has fits,” Francis said. “Less now than right after the blast, but he still gets them. Very bright lights can start him squirming, and he’s liable to faint straightaway.”

  “Has he complained of any other symptoms?”

  “How’s he to complain? I told you, he hasn’t said a word.”

  “Can’t he write?”

  “Not since it happened.”

  Van Hooten hummed again. The news of the Binghams’ overseas jaunt had rocked him, but now he was warming to the task at hand. This was th
e side of medicine that he had always enjoyed: the way that each answer opened the door to other questions, after which you chose the questions that would get you to the next set of answers, followed by more questions, until, like the letters of a crossword puzzle falling into place, you would have a rational diagnosis. For Van Hooten, a diagnosis was a holy grail in a world that resisted reason, a grail reached by treading a cleanly paved mental pathway rather than mucking about in the soupy fens of the body for an answer. In this case, he had precedents, not only general principles, to work from: Hadn’t he seen plenty of cases like this during the Great War? Blank-faced boys whose eyes could never alight on any one thing for long, or whose gazes were permanently fixed on some distant point no one else could see. Of course a blast could rupture the eardrum and send the tiny bones of the ear sprawling helter-skelter. He had seen plenty of men who would never again hear the anguished cries of their brothers-in-arms, or their sweethearts’ voices, or the stirring tones of the songs that had sent them off to Europe in the first place. He had seen men so badly shell-shocked that they ceased speaking for good. Nor was this young man’s inability to read and write unheard of for a wartime casualty.

  “Assuming that his hearing does not return—” Van Hooten said.

  “Are you saying that it won’t?”

  “This type of injury—hearing loss resulting from a single catastrophic episode—is, I must tell you, often permanent. The eardrums can repair themselves, but the real damage runs deeper.”

  Francis wanted to be shocked by this. He wanted to express outrage that the doctor was so quickly settling for this fainthearted diagnosis. Surely there must be something that could be done: some procedure, some bit of arcane medical knowledge, that would make Michael, well, Michael again. But a part of him had known from the beginning that what had happened to Michael could not be unwound.