The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Lilly reached into her purse and withdrew a pen and a small pad of paper. Flipping past the names of galleries she had visited, phone numbers at the Foundation, the address of the shipping agent, contacts at the Czechoslovakian embassy—when such a place had existed—she found a blank page and drew three choices for the boy to consider: a steaming cup of tea, the Trylon and Perisphere, and a film projector.

  YEATS NUDGED MICHAEL. “Now, she is an artist. Look at how easily she suggests volume with a simple gesture.”

  “You’re not still on that, are you?” Michael said. “Anyhow, I think she wants us to choose one.”

  Yeats studied the pictures for a moment longer—neither of them could make sense of the pair of shapes in the center—then stuck out a hand before Michael could select the teacup. “Don’t choose,” he said. “Take the pen from her and draw exactly what I tell you.”

  He reached for the pen and after a moment’s hesitation, Lilly gave it to him.

  “This better not be another gondola,” Michael said.

  “Draw a palm,” Yeats said. “No, not a palm tree. Like this.” He held out one hand, as if stopping traffic.

  “How is that—”

  “Draw.”

  WORKING SLOWLY, THE boy added a fourth option to her paper: an upraised hand with an unblinking eye in its center. He tapped the picture and, as if apologizing for the drawing and whatever it signified, shrugged his shoulders. Lilly held the scrap of paper until her hand started to shake. To prove to herself that the boy was real and not some hallucination, she put a hand on his chest. She could feel his heart beating in his narrow frame. She could have counted his ribs through the fabric of his shirt.

  Lilly had been looking for signs, and here was one worthy of her own mother. Mediums were one of Madame Bloch’s great affectations; no grand decisions were made without their consulting the tarot, or tea leaves, or the lines of her own hand. And now, just when Lilly had a choice to make—California, Prague, Paris—here was this strange boy suggesting a visit to her mother’s preferred method of guidance.

  But why was it even a choice? Josef was in Prague. Despite what he himself had written, wasn’t that reason enough to return? Wasn’t he essential to her? Her daydreams this past week had flashed through visions of California—a California imagined by one who had just for the first time seen beyond the Hudson River. She knew what California meant for her: a place of escape, of safety. But it was also a repudiation of home and of any pretense that she was capable of love.

  Lilly had passed palm readers’ studios throughout the city, had even photographed men and women pondering what their hands might reveal about the future, but now she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember where a single medium could be found. She took her hand from the boy’s chest and scanned the street from end to end. This did not seem the place for a psychic to set up shop: the men here already knew their fate. Somewhere she had seen a row of gypsy storefronts where dark-eyed women in head scarves smoked blunt cigars. Broome, was it? Or Prince? And then there was Chinatown. Lilly had a mysterious stranger asking to be taken to a psychic, along with an unchecked item on the New York List that read Tea in Chinatown, so perhaps they could do both. Two birds, the Americans said, one stone. She took the boy’s arm in hers and they began to stroll.

  HIGHBRIDGE

  LORENA STOOD IN FRONT of a five-and-dime on 170th Street, surveying the cars moving up and down Walton Avenue. All around her, other women in groups of two or three watched the same cars. The paper-bag brigade, some called them, on account of the bags that held their work clothes and their lunches. The Bronx slave market, others said, because it was along this strip of stores that white women in cars—the madams—hired black women by the hour as maids, housekeepers, domestics. Lorena had come out last week, her first time on this corner, but she was new to this part of the city and she had arrived too late. The early-morning rush of hiring had already come and gone, and the cluster of women still waiting made it clear that this skinny little girl would be last in line for any of the madams looking for a few hours of afternoon housekeeping.

  Hooper didn’t know she was here, but she knew what he would say, she knew how he would feel. That his wife had been reduced to this? If there was anything that would get him to pack up his trumpet in shame and head back to Baltimore, it was this: proof that his plan to be the next Louis Armstrong had failed, and failed so mightily that it had put Lorena on the street begging for work. That was why she wouldn’t tell him, and when he asked her what she did all day long, she would keep alive the lie that she was still tending to an old woman who lived on Sugar Hill. It had been true, right up until last week, when the woman died and Lorena found herself out of a job. Already she was learning that there were things a wife need not tell her husband.

  No, Lorena wasn’t going to let Hooper quit on her behalf, and if he tried to quit for his own reasons—well, she might not let him quit then, either. Two years of trying was a long time, but it wasn’t long enough to give up on the dream they had hatched in his father’s church. If he blanched at the thought of his wife bargaining to clean someone else’s toilet, then those were the notions of a man who had grown up in a comfortable house, the son of a minister and a minister’s wife. He could afford those notions, but she could not. Work was work, and there was no shame in it. Half the women in Reverend Hooper’s choir were domestics, though Lorena wondered now if any of them had to get their work like this.

  Was this the price of living? Or just the price of living in Harlem? They had come north, heedless as children—she was just twenty when they arrived, and Hooper only twenty-one. Most days she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. She could feel the energy coming up through the pavement, and all around her was a Black Metropolis. Ladies from Sugar Hill, looking like they’d stepped out of a fashion magazine, walked like royalty to the beauty parlors on Amsterdam Avenue. Up and down Strivers Row, men in sharp suits—the kind she wished she could buy for Hooper—leaned on the fenders of Bible-black sedans. On the streets, children raced fruit-crate go-carts; on the stoops, the West Indian girls chanted and hand-clapped songs that had no end. Boys in caps and baggy pants and girls in hand-me-down frocks called out to the fruit vendors and to the shaved-ice man. Down the block, older men played checkers and gave stern looks to any child fool enough to offer advice. Older women leaned from windows and paused on the sidewalks to carry on conversations about the heat, about the city, about the old men and their checkers. And at night! Night was when Lorena’s Harlem really came to life, in endless loops of neon, and in music spilling from the doors of the Apollo, and in the breakfast dance at Smalls Paradise, and in the single spotlight that hushed a crowd and gave a singer her chance to shine.

  It was all too easy to get caught up in the dream, but life was no dream. Even if you could find a job, in Harlem the wages were lower and the rents higher than anywhere else in the city. Lorena and Hooper’s apartment was two rooms—a cold-water flat, three stories up, with a shared bathroom down the hall. All winter long, the wind seeped through the windows until ice formed on the inside of the glass, and in the summertime the apartment was hotter than a two-dollar pistol. There had been nights these past weeks when they slept on the fire escape. It was all part of the adventure during their first year in New York, but now, as their second year drew to a close, it was starting to feel like the best they could do—and maybe the best they could ever expect.

  She knew what Mrs. Hooper would say: Lorena had led her boy down the path to ruin. She saw it in the letters that Hooper’s mother sent, full of worry and blessings and the occasional dollar bill. Mrs. Hooper was also fond of including clippings from the Crisis, the NAACP magazine—usually the College and School News column and any articles about a Howard graduate who was already making a difference in the world. Thought you’d like to see this, she would write along the top of the page. Or, Wasn’t he in school with you? Even in her antique handwriting, the message came through like a megaphone blast. In the l
atest packet from Mama Hooper, it wasn’t the article that caught Lorena’s eye but the advertisement on the back of the page: SUMMER CLASSES AT HOWARD STARTING JULY 1. Hooper could be back in DC earning credits toward his degree instead of sweating at the fair for a bunch of tourists who, as Hooper said, didn’t know jazz-all about jazz.

  Watching the first of the day’s cars begin to line up, she wondered what would happen if she told him that she wanted to go back, wanted him to finish school, so that they could—what?—settle down in Baltimore? Was Hooper supposed to be a dentist, an insurance man, a minister? Maybe in Mama Hooper’s dreams, but hadn’t they committed themselves to a different dream? Sure they had. It was just that a place in the paper-bag brigade and the Bronx slave market hadn’t been a part of that dream.

  “You new around here?” An older woman, thickset and swathed in a floral dress, had edged up next to Lorena.

  “Not so new,” Lorena said. “I was here last week.”

  “Last week? You were here last week?” The woman tsked and shook her head like she was enjoying a joke Lorena had just told. “I’ve been working this corner for three years!”

  Lorena tried to seem unconcerned. She wasn’t going to be bullied to the back of the line today, not when she’d been one of the first women here. She crossed her arms and tightened her grip on the rolled top of the paper bag.

  “You’re not one of those Father Divine types, are you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lorena said.

  “Sure you do,” the woman said. “Just last week we ran a bunch of them off this corner and the across-the-street corner, too.”

  Of course Lorena had seen the followers of Father Divine: they were everywhere in Harlem, on the streets and in front of their restaurants, where you could get dinner with all the trimmings for ten cents less than anywhere else in town. With their shouts of “Father is with us!” they told the world that God walked the earth in the form of a pint-size, bald-headed black man who went by the name Reverend Major Jealous Divine.

  “You listen here,” the woman continued. “Last week I had a lady in a Cadillac ready to pay me fifty cents an hour for a full day’s work, and just as I was fixing to get in her car, one of those Father Diviners comes up and says ‘Peace’ and that she’ll do it for thirty cents an hour. So guess who got the ride? Stealing four dollars from me? That ain’t peace! It’s war!”

  “I sure am sorry to hear that,” Lorena said. “But I’m not one of them.”

  They didn’t seem all bad, the angels of Father Divine. Last month Lorena had signed a petition they were circulating to get an anti-lynching law passed. Lorena didn’t see much use in it—how could a letter signed by black folks get white folks to stop doing something they wanted to do?—but she didn’t see any harm in it either. It was one of the things she liked about Harlem, that everywhere you went you heard preachers and soapbox politicians dreaming out loud about the future. The communists said the workers’ revolution was right around the corner and that the days of the bosses were coming to an end. To the sound of tambourines and praises, the preachers said the news pointed to the End of Days and the coming of the Antichrist, while others saw, just over the horizon, the glorious dawn of the Second Coming. The Father Diviners did them one better and claimed that God had already taken up residence on Long Island. But none of those futures, revolution or revelation, made this morning on 170th Street one whit easier to bear.

  The woman who had been robbed by the angels wasn’t done with Lorena. “I’m keeping my eye on you,” she said. “You don’t ask for less than thirty-five cents an hour, you hear?”

  “Martha, will you take it easy on that girl?” Another woman had joined their conversation. Alva was, in both age and size, halfway between the stocky Martha and the reedy Lorena. She wore a blue dress with a wide white collar and a simple silver cross on a chain around her neck. With the ease of someone who had known Lorena all her life, she placed a hand on her arm and gave her an auntish pat.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Lorena said.

  “Of course you are, dear,” Alva said. “Martha’s having one of her moods. Did she tell you about losing that fifty-cents-an-hour job? I’ll bet she did.”

  “I still say that’s why we need a union,” Martha said. “Fifty cents an hour, lunch, and carfare. That shouldn’t be so hard to come by.”

  Now it was Alva’s turn to shake her head. She’d been listening to this union talk from Martha for going on a year. But how could you start a union when you were scrubbing and cleaning all day? And how was Martha going to get any of these girls to say no to forty cents an hour? Or forty-five?

  “A union sounds good to me,” Lorena said. “Fighting each other for work just makes life easy for the madams.” Good Lord, she thought. I sound like Professor Hooper.

  Martha nodded appreciatively. “See? She gets it. And now, if you ladies’ll excuse me, I do believe I’ve got work to do.” Martha lifted her bag from the sidewalk and strode toward a red Buick idling by the curb. This was Mrs. Rubenstein, one of Martha’s regulars, and the other women knew not to bother—not unless they wanted to get an earful tomorrow.

  “That must be nice,” Lorena said. “Once the madams know you, off you go.”

  “And it only took Martha three years on this same corner to make it happen.” Alva said it kindly, but Lorena got the message: Honey, think before you speak.

  Both women craned their necks for signs of cars slowing to the curb. The busiest time was between eight and nine, after the madams’ husbands went to work and the ladies began acting on plans for a clean apartment by dinner. Lorena didn’t want to look too eager, but she didn’t want to miss her turn.

  “You’re sure you’ve done this before?” Alva said.

  “Cleaned a house?” Lorena stifled a small laugh. “My aunt Hessie wouldn’t abide a speck of dust.”

  “That’s a start,” Alva said. “But do you know how this works?” With one hand she indicated the street, the cars, the paper bags.

  “No less than thirty-five cents an hour. I heard it loud and clear.”

  “That’s not the half of it,” Alva said. With one eye on the cars, Alva gave a quick lesson in the life of a brown-bag domestic. She started with the basics—settle on the wage before you get in the car, along with time for lunch and carfare home—but there was so much more. Watch out for madams who set their clocks back to cheat you out of an hour. Watch out for madams who offered you lunch—leftovers, always leftovers—and then deducted it from your pay. Watch out for madams who saw phantom smudges on the windows and refused to pay at all, or paid less, or else made you do it all over again, off the clock. And watch out for the men who drove up after the early rush; they had work for you, but it sure wasn’t mopping and scrubbing.

  Lorena nodded with each item on Alva’s list. She saw how this worked: you fought the other ladies for the privilege of making pennies and then you fought the madam to get paid for what you did. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that song. As she listened, she prepared herself for the days to come. Tomorrow she would arrive even earlier, and she would bring a clock of her own—an old watch, or the bedside alarm clock. But more than thinking of the lessons she would need to master in the weeks or months or—God help her—years ahead, she was wondering what Aunt Hessie would make of all this. Aunt Hessie had taught her to scrub a floor until it shone like the truth, but she couldn’t have imagined that this was what she was preparing Lorena for when she took her into her home.

  Lorena’s parents had exited the scene long ago. For a time, her daddy ran one of the hottest speakeasies in the District of Columbia. He was a cardsharp and a pool player, he wore flashy suits and conked his hair, and anywhere he went, that’s where the party was. To keep the good times going he borrowed money wherever he could get it. Even when the club was so crowded that he had to turn away business, money was always tight. Lorena’s mama was a minor celebrity herself, in her beaded dresses that stopped above the knee an
d her hair as shiny and marcel-waved as Josephine Baker’s. Daddy had once told Lorena that she got her voice from her mother, but just as much as she heard Mama singing, she heard her yelling at Daddy. Hot-tempered, some people called her. A drinker, said the others. Lorena had a narrow bed in a room that was no more than a closet, and from that room she listened to her parents rage at each other. Who had he been dancing with? Who had she been talking to? Where had all the money gone? And how could he be so bad at cheating at cards when he was so good at cheating on her? She knew that Mama and Daddy loved her—she was Lolo, their honey girl—and for weeks in a row, sometimes months, she knew they loved each other, too. Despite the slammed doors, their fights always ended with them cooing in each other’s arms, promising never again to take a match to love and turn it into ashes.

  It was just after Lorena turned eleven that Daddy disappeared. All those men to whom he owed money came collecting, and they wanted more than his cash and his nightclub. He’d been putting them off for too long, they said, trying to play them for fools. They had decided that his was a debt payable only in blood. The grief and the bottle made quick work of Mama. On that morning when she couldn’t get out of bed—when she could barely put two words together—Lorena had run to the upstairs neighbors first, but they had heard too much from Mama, and too late at night, to lift a finger for her now. Lorena raced next door to find a widow who had always been kind to her, and once that woman saw the state of the apartment, and then got an eyeful of Mama, she shooed Lorena out the door. That glimpse of Mama, her satin skin swollen and those bright, dark eyes sinking into her skull, was the last one Lorena ever got.