The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Late that same night, an aunt she barely knew claimed Lorena and took her up to Baltimore. Within a week, word came that Mama had died, and the hurt of it almost swallowed Lorena whole. She hadn’t even said a proper good-bye. She hadn’t said any kind of good-bye at all. In the years that followed, she worked hard to un-remember that last moment; to preserve Mama in her memory as the woman with the lilac perfume dabbed behind each ear, the skin that glowed like bronze in the sunlight, and the voice that rang out high and then dove down low—like an angel, her daddy had once said, who’s down to her last dollar.

  Aunt Hessie had pitied Lorena and felt obliged to care for her, and that was more than some girls got. Lorena could have easily found herself with far less. Perhaps Aunt Hessie even loved that part of Lorena that reminded her of the baby sister she had raised, but then hadn’t she let Lorena’s mother slip away to a life no honest woman should lead? She wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Lorena, whose life in Baltimore was school and chores and church and little else. Only in the choir could she raise her voice. Only with the pack of Hooper children could she play like she had back at home.

  What would Aunt Hessie, dead these past three years, think of her now? Married to Reverend Hooper’s oldest son—that would have been a surprise. But with barely two dimes to rub together, and singing till all hours in smoky clubs? That was just what Hessie had feared.

  Still Lorena sang, hoping to turn a song into a set into a regular gig. There had to be a thousand other girl singers like her—coal-scuttle canaries—and who needs you when Ella is at the Savoy and Billie is at Café Society and most of the ballrooms, clubs, and lounges in between have a blondes-only policy for the sole lady on the bandstand? But that was the dream anyway, and some nights it was so close that she could feel it like a spotlight on her face. Then came a morning like this: standing on the curb, paper bag in hand, hoping for the chance to clean some white woman’s bathroom, to dust and mop and scrub and bleach until her fingers ached and her knees went raw and ashy. All for a few cents and the chance to do it again tomorrow.

  A new car, its chrome grille sparkling like a crown, swept into a spot only a few feet from Lorena. A woman who had been standing in the shade of the awning moved toward it, but Lorena froze her with a look. This one’s mine. She tightened her grip on the paper bag and smiled her biggest smile, ready for what came next.

  LITTLE ITALY

  WHERE AMONG THE FRUIT vendors and the barber colleges and the stores selling suits for ten cents, the taverns and the cheap cinemas and the tenements and the sweatshops, had Lilly seen signs for palm readers? She headed west, away from the Bowery, toward the Italian and Chinese neighborhoods, where there was sure to be a fortune-teller wedged between the shrines to weeping saints or ancestors buried thousands of miles away in a land that had once been home. In Prague, there had been a Hungarian woman to whom her mother turned in times of turmoil, and Madame Bloch had always been doubly pleased when voices from beyond seconded an opinion she held. You see, Lilliana! she would say. Even the spirits agree with me!

  A church bell announced that it was noon, which gave Lilly exactly forty-eight hours to get her luggage to the shipping agent. She would have to finish her labeling tonight, and pack the negatives and plates tomorrow, so they could be unpacked when she resettled in Prague. And wasn’t that the story that she had agreed to, the one that ended with her safe and sorted in Prague? After a few months or years, she would develop the photographs, and the time she had passed in New York City, back in the ancient days of yesterday, would strike her as strange and long ago.

  But there was another story, one in which she listened to the chorus inside her head that grew louder every day: Stay! If not in New York, then in America. Stay! She was not brave. She didn’t believe that one of her photographs could stop a tank or topple a dictator. Even Josef had joined the Stay, don’t go chorus. She had friends in Munich and Berlin; she knew the laws that had redefined their lives, and she knew that these same laws would soon surface in Prague. But if Hitler wanted Prague so badly and he didn’t want her in it, then she could make other arrangements. She could go to California, or she could simply disappear from her studio one day and set up in Greenwich Village, where she could glut herself on jazz and communism. Change a few letters of her name, become someone new, and hope that the government had more important things to do than find one missing Czechoslovakian. Her nation didn’t even exist any longer! How could she return to a place that didn’t exist?

  But that was all for later. Today she had to find a psychic, an item that Josef would never have thought to include on the New York List.

  The boy looked from shopwindow to storefront, searching for the telltale hand and eye. Two blocks down Broome Street, Lilly saw a window with the word TAROT outlined in thick red letters, but when she tried steering him toward the door, he shook his head almost apologetically and kept walking. Another sign promised PSYCHIC READINGS but after a pause, during which he seemed to consult with himself, he again shook his head and moved on.

  Michael was convinced that their host would soon lose patience with him, but Yeats persisted in his search for a first-rate medium. If not Madame Antonia, then someone of her caliber.

  “These aren’t mediums, they’re charlatans,” Yeats said as they passed a storefront decorated with poster-size tarot cards: the Fool, the Sun, the Lovers. “Sad to say, but the spiritualist community is rife with rascals and frauds.”

  Michael tried to look sympathetic to the problems besmirching the otherwise sterling reputation of the spiritualists. “So you can smell it on them?” he said. “The spiritus mundi?”

  Lilly took his elbow and guided him across the street. This was the sign she’d recalled, the one that had flared brightly in her memory when he’d drawn the hand and eye. The building was a narrow tenement next to the shop where she’d purchased a block of flaky Parmigiano-Reggiano and another of pungent Gorgonzola. For the past month, she had subsisted on little more than black coffee, cheese, bread, and cheap red wine. She put her hand on the knob of a door that led beneath the tenement stoop, then turned to him and raised one eyebrow.

  “Well?” Michael said.

  “It’s not Madame Antonia, but it will have to do.”

  Michael nodded vigorously to Lilly, who gave the door a shove. They found themselves in a cramped anteroom. The red walls were graffitied with standard-issue symbols of the occult: pentagrams, all-seeing eyes, signs of the zodiac, a prime number or two. At the other end of the room, a door that was ajar bore a placard with the words ENTER AND BE KNOWN on one side and WAIT AND BE SILENT on the other. Lilly knocked on the door as she swung it open into a low-ceilinged room hung on all sides with tapestries, velvet drapes, and iridescent bolts of raw silk. It looked like laundry day at a gypsy camp. In the center of the room sat a round table where a candle mounted in the neck of a bottle raised a single weak flame. A damp moldy smell competed with the tang of incense.

  Lilly called out a hello. She rapped again on the door, louder than the first time. Behind one of the curtains a pot lid clanged, followed by the sound of utensils being dropped and a muttered curse. A woman emerged, and with her came a billow of steam and the smell of cabbage, onions, garlic, oregano.

  “It seems we have interrupted her luncheon,” Yeats said.

  She was a small woman with a large head crowned with a pouf of black hair shot through with gray. The hem of her black dress, which was buttoned to the neck, swept the floor as she bustled into the room. She gripped around her shoulders a brightly hued, densely patterned shawl on which tigers cavorted, teeth to tail, and elephants paraded, bearing sultans on canopied palanquins.

  “How you get in?” Her voice was like the chirping of an angry sparrow. “The door was locked!”

  “It was open,” Lilly said, “but if we are intruding—” She laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder to turn him toward the door.

  “No, no, no,” the woman said. “Take a seat. Sit! Sit!”


  Lilly and Michael sat side by side at the table, opposite an ornately carved chair. From its upholstered back rose a double-headed eagle whose twin tongues burst through open beaks. Yeats, meanwhile, was inspecting a tapestry depicting a palace scene in some Eastern kingdom: a crowned man sat shirtless and cross-legged on a platform while around him women danced and fruit trees bloomed.

  “You wait? Yes? You wait? Then we… begin?”

  There was something sardonic in the woman’s voice, as if all of this—the tapestries, the shawl, the single candle, the promise of clairvoyance—were some big joke she was compelled to tell. She disappeared behind the curtain and again came the clattering of pots. She yelled twice, quickly: a name, orders being given, in a language Lilly did not recognize. Not French or Spanish or German or Czech and certainly not English. A child’s voice argued back—the whining tone of the falsely accused—until a slap and a renewed clattering of lids brought the back-and-forth to a close.

  The woman reappeared, her cheeks flushed, and took her place at the table. “Now, what you want?” she said.

  Lilly looked at Michael; all of this had been his idea. He sat stock-still, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes fixed on the candle. She tapped his knee but he only smiled at her and then resumed his vigil. The woman looked from one to the other, impatient, her mind clearly focused more on the kitchen than on the goings-on in the parlor.

  “I have a decision to make,” Lilly said, surprising even herself.

  “About him?” The medium pointed to Michael.

  “No, he’s just—he suggested I come to you.”

  “So, a decision,” the medium said. “Is it a romantic decision or a money decision or…”

  Lilly’s mother always said that it was important to tell the medium as little as possible. Make the spirits do the work, she had said. Of course, Madame Bloch habitually violated this rule; she couldn’t keep herself from talking, in detail, about whatever was on her mind. She barely left room for the spirits to do more than nod in agreement or raise vague, easily dismissed objections.

  “Just a decision,” Lilly said.

  The medium introduced herself as Eudoxia—“‘You-doh-key-ah,’ you understand, yes?”—and asked if Lilly had a preference: A palm reading? The tarot? Tea leaves? An astrological chart? She could consult a crystal ball, if that’s what Lilly wanted, or even take up the Ouija board, though this last possibility she offered in a way that suggested that the option was exhausting or simply ridiculous.

  Again, Lilly looked to Michael, whose attention now seemed fixed on Madame Eudoxia herself.

  “Why don’t you choose?” Lilly said. “Whatever way works the best.”

  EUDOXIA DIDN’T KNOW if the woman was challenging her or truly did not care. Many of her customers were simply lonely and tired of wrestling in solitude with some nagging question. Why can’t I be happy? Is she cheating on me—and what’s the mug’s name? Did my mother ever love me? They would duck through the door and spill their guts for her to augur by appealing to the tarot or the stars or the lines of their own palms. Eudoxia was good at mixing hopeful prescriptions for future success with painful truths gleaned during the time it took to offer a reliable reading: Stop expecting so much of life. Not yet, but she will stray if you do not learn to trust her. Your mother loved you but didn’t know how to tell you. For her regulars, she provided warnings of dangers easily imagined and, with a little effort, avoided. She had learned long ago that she was good at giving advice, though good advice was easy to ignore. But advice backed up by the weight of the spirit world? That was worth paying for.

  So here was this woman and she had a decision to make. She had good English but was European—an immigrant like Eudoxia or perhaps only a visitor to the city. The boy, who had not spoken, behaved in an odd manner, and the two did not appear related or linked by love. More would reveal itself. It always did. Eudoxia was smart, and truth be told, she possessed more than her share of intuition. At times, she even suspected that her powers went beyond that—but she wasn’t the one who needed to believe. As long as the customer believed, then the rent got paid.

  “JUST WHAT ARE you expecting, Mr. Yeats?”

  Yeats returned from his inspection of the decor and stood next to the medium’s chair, which he eyed with apparent distaste. “The experience can take a variety of forms,” he said, “depending on the sensitivities of this medium. Direct drawing, direct voice, spirit photography, even levitation—I have seen all of that and more at séances past.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What are you expecting to gain from all of this? How are you going to find the answers you’re looking for in here?” Michael worried that the ceiling might come down on top of them. Already it seemed to sag in the middle, and with the walls swathed in fabric, finding an exit could prove difficult.

  “This is but the first step,” Yeats said. “But if we can use her to reach our host, and through her reach George, then the real work can begin.”

  First they had set out to find the elusive—and possibly nonexistent—Madame Antonia, and now Yeats proposed contacting his wife, who by Michael’s guess was thousands of miles and one vast ocean to the east. “Why do we need to contact your wife?” he said.

  Yeats shushed Michael and pointed to the medium. “I think she is ready.”

  THIS WAS WHAT Eudoxia proposed: Lilly would write her questions on scraps of paper and then set the paper alight from the candle. As the smoke rose from the dish where Lilly was to place the burning paper, Eudoxia would consult the spirits and communicate their answers to Lilly. It had been some time since Eudoxia had used this method, but it always delivered on the mystery and wonder that most gawkers came seeking from a fortune-teller. Eudoxia also offered her standard disclaimer: that the spirits often answered indirectly, as the truth could never be approached along a straight path.

  From a small table on her left, Eudoxia withdrew a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. She tore the paper into strips and handed these and the pen to Lilly. “Write what you want to know,” she said. “And then the fire, and then the plate.”

  Lilly examined the pen in the dim light, then offered it to the boy. She hoped that he would find a way to involve himself in this visit—that he had his own reasons for wanting to consult a psychic. Odd enough to have taken in a voiceless stranger prone to fits of fainting and mapmaking. To have him also turn out to be some sort of prophet, nudging her toward a decision of great magnitude, was more than she could manage this week.

  He waved off the pen, leaving Lilly to stare at the first blank scrap of paper. This was preposterous, she told herself, but wasn’t it just the sort of story that Josef wanted to hear? Lilly’s Adventures in New York, chapter 5: the time she consulted a basement psychic about whether to return to Prague or disappear into America.

  In her jagged script, she wrote, Should I return to Prague? As the words emerged from the pen, she saw that the ink was red.

  Eudoxia’s eyes were closed, her hands flat on the tabletop. She inhaled deeply through her nose and then out through her mouth in a rhythm that became like a drumbeat in the room. She looked like an ancient oracle, and Lilly let slip a whispered curse that she’d left her camera in the studio. Lilly held the scrap of paper over the candle and watched as the edges browned, then glowed, then caught. When the flame had consumed half the paper, she set it down in the dish and the smoke wound toward the ceiling.

  MICHAEL BECAME AWARE of a pulsing, a rumbling, like waves against rocks, crashing and receding. He feared it was the Noise, coming to lay waste to him, but then he saw the medium inhaling so deeply that she lifted her body away from the table. “It’s her,” Michael said. “I can hear her breathing.” The sound was faint, a background noise, really. But after weeks in a kind of vacuum, even the sound of a single breath was a gift.

  Yeats clapped his hands together, more gleeful than Michael had yet seen him. “A proper medium opens a window between the spirit world and the material plane so that voices can
flow through her in each direction.” He leaned in close to the medium. His lips almost grazed her ear as he spoke: “You must find George!”

  EUDOXIA JUMPED IN her chair. The deep breathing was meant to heighten the tension before she began speaking. A dramatic pause, followed by half statements and questions that would lead her, little by little, to a satisfying answer to the question burning on the plate. Long ago, when all of this started, the breathing had helped to ready her for what was to come, but it had been years since she had genuinely felt—what? What had she called it, in the beginning? Touched was a word she had used. Guided, even. But never called, never spoken to, never—like this.

  She heard it again: George, the voice said.

  She lunged across the table and gripped the woman’s hand. “Who is George?”

  “THERE’S MILLIONS OF Georges in the world,” Michael said. “And how is she to know that your George is a lady?”

  Yeats waved him off. He placed a hand on the medium’s shoulder and leaned in close, unspooling a list of names and then places where his wife might be found: Georgie Hyde Lees. George Yeats. France, London, the tower at Thoor Ballylee, Dublin.

  None of it made sense to Michael. Even if the psychic could hear Yeats, how was she supposed to make sense of the poet’s babbling? Yeats looked like one of the old priests barking into the mouthpiece of the seminary’s candlestick telephone. “And our host is not going to board a ship to France,” he said, “simply because some barmy psychic told her to find George.”