The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Cronin had never liked this room. If the house was a tomb, this was the chamber that held the corpse. The light that filtered in was pallid, apologetic. In the old days, Cronin would position himself in a chair in the far corner, off the shoulder of the supplicant. It comforted Gavigan to know that Cronin was there in case one of his visitors ever got too full a head of steam. Not that force was ever necessary. Cronin’s presence alone guaranteed that the conversation never went above a simmer.

  Alone in the room, Cronin wasn’t going to take his old post in the corner but neither was he going to sit in the wingback. He stood, one hand on the chair, as if posing for a portrait—the kind where the chair is occupied by the loving and loyal wife, a baby balanced on her knee. Cronin had never had such a picture taken with Alice and the children, but when he returned home he would insist on it. Let Alice laugh. He wanted a family portrait.

  Gavigan, on stiff legs, was preceded into the room by a heavy-bosomed woman with hair the color of iron. She carried a tea tray that chattered with each step. When she set it down on the desk, the steam from the teapot sent a pang through Cronin. His first cup of tea, prepared by Alice each morning after he came in from the cowshed, was one of his great daily pleasures. He missed it, just as he missed everything, everyone, at the farm.

  The woman looked casually at Cronin—another of Gavigan’s boys—before the snap of recognition showed.

  “If it isn’t the ghost of Tommy Cronin!” Helen, that was her name. She had worked for Gavigan even before Cronin came to the house. A nurse in the Great War, she had more than once stitched up Cronin after a night had gotten rough. “I thought you got away clean,” she said, “but here you are again.”

  “I won’t be long,” Cronin said.

  “So you say,” Helen said, and closed the door behind her.

  Gavigan dropped himself into the chair behind the desk. He nodded toward the setup of cups, saucers, sugar bowl, creamer. “Help yourself, Tommy.”

  “I’ll just be on my way,” Cronin said. “I’d’ve left already but your man was in a tizzy, wanting to make certain that the job was done.”

  “And is it?”

  “You asked me to find Francis Dempsey and I’ve found him. I’ve all the details right here.” He withdrew an envelope from his pocket and skidded it across the desk. Gavigan ignored it.

  “It’s interesting to me that you think of it as asking. As if you’ve done me a favor.”

  “Call it what you will. It’s done.”

  Without a knock, Jamie burst through the door, a newspaper in his hand. “Mr. Gavigan,” he said. “There’s news you should see.”

  “What is it?” Gavigan said.

  Jamie shot a look at Cronin—he wanted Cronin out of here almost as much as Cronin himself did—and handed Gavigan the morning newspaper, spatchcocked around a two-column story on page 8.

  As Gavigan read, his jaw began working over some problem, grinding away at the inside of his cheek, his dentures, his own manky tongue. “This happened yesterday?”

  Jamie gave a curt nod.

  “And I wasn’t told? I have to read about it in the newspaper?” The dream again. The double cross. If it wasn’t someone trying to get the upper hand, then it was some joker trying to cut him out entirely.

  “I see you have business,” Cronin said. “So I’ll be off.”

  Gavigan hauled himself to his feet. “You’re not going anywhere!” He tossed the newspaper at the desk, where it clattered against the tea tray’s stock of silver and porcelain. “Just look at that!”

  Cronin waited a beat before picking up the paper. Russell, McGarrity, Detroit, King George. Were these men, and Gavigan with them, still fighting the old battles?

  “Do you see what I mean?” Gavigan said.

  Cronin answered with a blank stare.

  “What were they doing in Detroit?” Gavigan said. “With the goddamn king and queen just across the border?”

  Jamie eyed Cronin, leaned in toward Gavigan. “Russell and McGarrity have been out raising money,” he said. “We knew about that—”

  “You think this was a coincidence? They just happen to be in Detroit, in spitting distance of the king and queen? They’ve got a plan in the works. I can feel it. And I can tell you this, too. It’s another of their half-assed schemes. They jab and they jab but they never throw the knockout punch. They’re flyweights in a heavyweights’ game.”

  “Look here,” Cronin said. “This has nothing to do with me. I did what you wanted, now—”

  “No!” Gavigan pounded his fist on the desk. His face was a livid, angry red. “You’ve been a part of this for twenty years! You do not get to walk away again!” A chain of racking coughs tore through Gavigan, threatening to shred him from the inside. He took one of the teacups and hawked a fat gob of phlegm into it. The coughing had exhausted him, and when he spoke again it was close to a whisper: “There’s too much we don’t know. We’ve got Francis Dempsey, the son of a traitor. He busts out of jail and makes a beeline for one of our garrisons. Which he destroys. Which kills three of our men. And from which he loots thousands of dollars—thousands of my dollars—meant for Russell’s godforsaken Sabotage Campaign.”

  Another fit of coughing ripped at Gavigan’s lungs, forcing him to sit heavily in the chair. Once he had regained his breath, he continued connecting the dots: “Then this Dempsey—this nobody—gives the slip to every IRA man in Ireland and sets sail for America. Where at the same time Russell and McGarrity are on tour, thumbing their noses at the king and queen of England. And I’m supposed to believe that this is all a coincidence? That it’s nothing but dumb luck?” Gavigan hauled himself to his feet and paced unsteadily behind his desk. “It stinks to high heaven,” he said. “We don’t know if Dempsey is working for Russell or some other faction. Holy hell, he could be working for de Valera or the Brits, for all we know.” He put his hand on the desk, steadying himself.

  “This isn’t my fight,” Cronin said.

  “You’ve got a short memory,” Gavigan said. “If nothing else, you owe it to those still in the field finishing what you started.”

  A short memory. Gavigan could be in the funny papers with a line like that.

  Gavigan lowered himself into the chair. Beneath his old man’s wattles, his jaw tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. “Tommy,” he said, “bring in the Dempsey boy, but stash him somewhere out of the way.”

  Jamie spoke up. “I can take it from here. If the information checks out, it’ll be easy work.”

  “Your man’s right,” Cronin said. “I’m done here.”

  “You’re done when I say you’re done.” Gavigan spat the words. “And if I have to send Jamie and half a dozen men like him back to that country shithole to find you again, it’s not going to be a social call like the last time.”

  Cronin thought of the revolver, which Alice had stashed at the bottom of his valise. It was a Webley, taken from an officer of the Black and Tans ambushed by Cronin early in the war. Cronin had used it to grim effect in Cork and later, in Gavigan’s employ. Even if Alice had kept it, how could he expect her to use a thing with such a dark history?

  “Until I know what’s what, you don’t leave this city,” Gavigan said. “Now go and get Dempsey. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

  THE FARM

  OF COURSE HE HAD his secrets. Alice knew that. Despite all that he had told her about his past, about his life in Ireland and then in New York, and about the things he had done that still forced him bolt upright in their bed in the middle of the night, she knew there was more that had been left unsaid. And what he had told her hadn’t come easily. Tom wasn’t a big talker. He was the strong, silent type and that was just fine with her. But in the early days, when they were getting to know each other, when she realized only after the fact that she was falling for him, they told each other things that they would have kept quiet if they’d had any idea that life would bring them where it did: a man and a woman with a little boy and a baby
and a farm to run. If you wanted to catch the eye of a fellow, you didn’t flaunt your fears and your past mistakes, just like a fellow never told you the worst in him if he had any thoughts of winning you over. But she had played by those rules once before, with her husband. She had been full of coy looks and giggles, he had played the devil-may-care Romeo, and look what it had gotten her.

  It had gotten her Henry—that’s what she had to remind herself of whenever she started thinking about the mistakes of the past. At that moment, as she hung the laundry on the line, Henry was scattering chicken feed from a bucket half as tall as he was. He had dragged the bucket from the barn with great effort, but not once had he asked for help. The first sentence out of his toddler mouth had been I do it, and at five, he thought himself no less capable of running the whole farm, if need be. She could credit or blame Tom for that. Tom was a capable man and never one to ask for help, either. Not for the first time, she tried to imagine Henry’s life without Tom. Would it have been worse for him to grow up with his own father or with no father at all?

  Alice should have known better, but what was the use of piling up all of the things that she should have seen, should have known, should have done? Jimmy had been a few years ahead of her in school, one of those boys who from a distance seemed to move through life with an easy grace. She saw that ease and wanted to wrap herself in it, to drown in it. She wasn’t a layabout; far from it. She balanced the farm and schoolwork and cooking and cleaning, and when graduation came, her life was the farm and the house entirely—that’s what life had in store for the only child of a dairyman, a girl whose mother had passed when she was only thirteen. But nothing seemed to weigh heavily on Jimmy’s shoulders. When the mood struck him, he fixed cars at his uncle’s shop outside Poughkeepsie. And when another mood blew in, he would spend the day fishing Wappinger Creek. His life was carefree and Alice let herself believe that once they were joined together, she would learn the secret of this free-and-easy style.

  Only up close did Jimmy’s ease reveal itself to be laziness, a weakness that permeated his bones. She should have guessed at it, should have wondered why all the girls who were his own age passed on him when they began pairing up with boys, choosing ones who were more solid, more ambitious, or more willing to be pushed by the women in their lives. Instead, Alice thrilled at her good fortune when Jimmy’s eye alighted on her, as if he had been waiting for her all along, as if life had kept him out of the clutches of those girls who cut their eyes at Alice when she first appeared in the passenger seat of the Model A or shared a Coca-Cola with him at the counter of the Taghkanic Diner, Jimmy’s jacket draped over her shoulders. Later she would wonder if that look from the other girls wasn’t jealousy but pity. They knew what was coming, but Alice was a farm girl, not a town girl, and so, not being one of them, she was left to care for herself.

  Her father had seen it in Jimmy and warned Alice, but was there any girl who listened to her father about love? That’s what she believed she felt: love. And love doesn’t think about making a living, doesn’t ask if your dear one is ready for a life of rising before dawn and mucking out the barn and trudging through the pasture in the pouring-down rain when one of the cows doesn’t return at nightfall. Love doesn’t care about any of that, but life sure does. Jimmy kept telling her that life would be against them until they could sell the farm and make a go of things in town. An automobile shop, that was one of his ideas. A gasoline pump out front, a garage where he could fix cars, and a small café where she would serve coffee and sandwiches for city folks out for a drive in the country. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and that’s how they would make ends meet. He made it sound like a real adventure, people coming from far and wide to fill up their tanks and sample a slice of Alice’s famous apple pie, but it troubled Alice that his dream depended on—required, even—the dispossession or death of her father before it could be launched. In the meantime he made no effort to prepare for any kind of future. He saved no money, did nothing but grumble about living in the house of his father-in-law, and called himself a slave on the old man’s plantation. That the plantation was no more than a hundred acres of grass and rock and woods in a remote corner of Dutchess County never seemed to dampen his sense that they could someday sell it for a small fortune and really start living.

  Until then, living was precisely what they weren’t doing. Alice and Jimmy seemed trapped in a half-life where little by little they stopped talking to each other, stopped going on picnics by the river, stopped going for drives to Rhinebeck or Millbrook or Pine Plains, stopped doing all of the things they had done before they were husband and wife. Alice had held out against Jimmy’s pleas throughout their courtship and saved herself until the wedding night, and for a while after the big day they’d had a real honeymoon of it. He couldn’t keep his hands off her and she was happy to have his hands wherever they wanted to roam, now that she was Mrs. James Swain. But as he grew more surly, more cramped in the second-floor bedroom, he turned away from her at night. How could he be expected to be in the mood, he protested, when his wife’s father was downstairs, in the room below theirs? It was unnatural. But without steady work for Jimmy, that was life.

  After a year of this not-living, and then another year of it, he announced that he needed to go on the road to see if prospects were better in some other place. Christmas had just passed and during the holidays Jimmy had run into some old high-school pals back in town to visit their folks. One day he told Alice that a buddy of his had work for him in Worcester, and the next day he said that he might try his luck with one of his pals on the docks in New London. He was tired of waiting for life to come to him—by which Alice figured he meant that he was tired of waiting for her father to die—so he was going to go out and make a life for them. Except it wouldn’t be them, not yet. It made no sense to take Alice with him until he could get settled (never mind that she could outwork him any day of the week). In the meantime, he would send back money and sock away the rest for their future. That was the plan, and the glow it cast filled him with an energy he hadn’t shown in a long time. His was the nervous twitch of the horse who has been loaded into the starting gate and who awaits the bell that will release him into a sprint.

  The whole idea of it made Alice’s stomach tighten with dread, but for a week he talked about the jobs he might find and she teased him about city girls taking advantage of her country mouse, and she washed and folded his clothes and packed them neatly in their one good suitcase, the one they had bought for their honeymoon trip to Narragansett Bay. Jimmy worked around the clock to get his Model A up and running. The car had been gathering dust in the barn for more than six months now. The repairs were minor, but how was he supposed to find the time for it when her father was always on him about the cows, and what was the point anyway—where did he and Alice have to go? Now, though, he was in a fever to get the engine humming, and on a Sunday evening—he had skipped church that morning—he turned the crank and the Model A was ready to move. He seemed about to hop in and drive off right then and there, with the sun setting and the trees reaching their frozen fingers into the sky, but Alice brought him in for dinner and told him he would need a good night’s sleep before he set out to seize that new life for them.

  It was a good night. Instead of rolling toward the wall, he turned to her in bed and his hands were all over her and Alice thought, Yes, this is just what we need, but she also feared that Jimmy’s hunger for her wasn’t that of a man saying, Oh, how I’ve missed you, but instead, Once more, for old times’ sake. In the morning she made him breakfast but it was an effort to keep him at the table, so eager was he to set out. She cried and he told her not to be silly, but the tears kept coming and his mood darkened. He knew that she knew, and he wanted to be away from the scene of his crime. She dried her eyes on the cuff of her sweater and folded her arms tight against the January cold. Jimmy started the Model A and drove away from the farm. Alice waved to him but instead of returning the wave or sounding the horn or sh
immying the car side to side in a woozy farewell, as he used to do in their courting days whenever he drove off, he only laid his left arm along the door and tapped out some rhythm with his hand—a victory march, or the signal for a retreat, or just some ditty that stuck in his head when his thoughts should have been on the wife he was abandoning and the baby that would grow in her belly.

  That baby was currently squatting among the chickens, engaged in a heated conversation with a Rhode Island Red. Henry had assigned names to every animal on the farm, even the ones that Alice had cautioned him not to get too attached to. She remembered when she had been about his age, finding out that the main course of their Sunday dinner had only twenty-four hours earlier been a fine white-feathered chicken she had named Pearl.

  Alice removed a clothespin from between her teeth and called to Henry. “Is everything all right over there?”

  It took him a moment to finish what he was saying to the chicken, but eventually he stood and trotted toward his mother. “Little Orphan Annie is not a nice chicken,” he said emphatically. “I put out lots of feed, but she won’t eat it. She just kept pecking the other chickens.”

  He was shirtless in overalls, with bits of feathers and feed in his hair. A real farm boy, down to his boots. He had a pair like Tom’s—he’d insisted on it, even though the ones at the shop were two or three sizes too large. Alice smiled at him, at his little boy’s body growing out of those giant-seeming feet, and swept the hair from his eyes. He had pale, straw-colored hair, like she’d had as a girl. Her father had pointed that out right after Henry was born. As if the strong resemblance to her somehow erased Jimmy’s role in bringing Henry into the world.