The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Cronin had come to understand that service to Gavigan had no end. He thought of the moment at the farm when Gavigan saw his desire to strike the old man dead. If it hadn’t been for Jamie, there at the end of the lane with the long gun laid across his lap, he would have done it. Alice would have accepted it. He had told her enough. But then he thought of the boy. What would it have done to him to see “my Tom,” as he called Cronin, take the life of another man? Even a bad man like Gavigan? There would be a time for teaching the boy that the world was a dangerous place full of bad men—men like Gavigan, men like Cronin himself—but that time was not now.

  Gavigan had packed Cronin and Dempsey into one of the taxis earlier that evening. He had a list of instructions for Cronin, none of which Cronin was keen to perform. He needed to round up formal attire for the boy—Francis couldn’t meet the king dressed for a day in the park—and a new suit for himself. “In that country getup at the Plaza,” Gavigan had said to Cronin, “you’re going to stick out like a nun in a whorehouse.” Gavigan wanted Dempsey back at the hotel in case his wealthy friends needed to contact him about the royal visit, and if Cronin needed any pocket money, he was free to tap into the cache Dempsey had spirited out of Ireland. It had been meant to finance a major operation, and what operation, in the whole history of the IRA, was bigger than this?

  And then there was this last item on the list: to instruct Dempsey in the use of the weapon he would carry for the job. Gavigan owned an old carbarn below the meatpacking district, a place where trolleys had once been serviced and stowed. The cavernous space sat beneath the elevated tracks, swathed in a constant din that made it an ideal shooting range. That was where Dempsey would practice the quick draw, the arm extension, and the spasm of finger on trigger that could send history careening in unforeseen directions.

  Gavigan’s plan was pure madness, and Cronin suspected that even Gavigan knew that he was way beyond the pale. Why else did he need Cronin? Why else wouldn’t he keep Dempsey at Gramercy Park himself until he was ready to unleash him? He didn’t want his own fingerprints on this bomb he was preparing to toss.

  This was what Cronin now realized: that Gavigan had kept his own name out of the boy’s ears, but had freely thrown around Cronin’s. If Dempsey carried out his task, he would not know the name of the man who had put him up to it, but he would know Cronin’s. That was a name the police could wring from him, if he survived. So now it was in Cronin’s interest to make sure that Francis did what he was told and then see that he didn’t leave the fairgrounds alive. Of course Gavigan saw that, and of course Gavigan knew that Cronin saw it, too.

  THE BOWERY

  MICHAEL FOUND HIMSELF IN bed, the same bed where he had slept the night before, and that had to be some comfort. The pale glimmer of the street lamps bled through the windows and next to him the woman—his benefactor, his caretaker—slept serenely, her back to him. He thought that if she could roll over and throw an arm around his shoulder, that might make the night a biteen more bearable.

  Da was dead and there was no one to console him. Francis had been in the church, he remembered that now, and of course Martin had to know. They must have assumed that he remembered the funeral, if nothing else, and that explained the duration of the embraces he’d received from Martin and Rosemary. Here was Michael, the youngest, battered in some terrible way, and he had lost his father. The sight of him smiling like an idiot through dinner must have confirmed that he had gone simple—Michael, who had spent so many years alone with Da, the two of them ticking like the gears of a watch, barely touching but always in concord. How many hours had the two of them passed together, each with a nose in a book and rarely a word exchanged, yet each happy in his own way. Hours? It had been years. A lifetime, really.

  Michael had called an end to those slow, quiet hours. After Eileen broke his heart, he looked for the surest way out of Ballyrath. He wanted to be rid of the place, and Da was part of that bargain. When he first heard that Eileen was to marry Old Doonan, he concocted wild plans of escape: they would run off to Dublin, to London, even America, if necessary. He begged his father to speak to Mr. Casey, to propose Michael as a better match for Eileen. His father had been reading and he kept his eyes on the page—Aeneid, book VII—all through his son’s plea that he talk some sense into Eileen’s father. How could he force his daughter to hitch herself to a slatty-ribbed, toothless bachelor coming up hard on his fiftieth birthday? There had to be a reason that such a man had never found himself a wife.

  Michael’s father put the book in his lap and told Michael not to waste his time. His own, for thinking he could put a stop to this marriage, and his father’s, for hectoring him about such a futile mission.

  “Casey is a peasant farmer,” his father had said, “and the only language he understands is acres and cattle. How many acres will you be gifting to your new father-in-law when the deed is done? And how many bulls?”

  “He wouldn’t sell his own daughter,” Michael said.

  “He already has, and for a price you could not match.” Da lifted the book from his lap, ready to return to Aeneas, last seen trudging through the underworld in search of his own father. He stared at the page, seemingly unable to find a toehold in the text. “Michael,” he said at last. “She’s a fine girl but you’re too young to get married anyhow.”

  “But Da,” he said. “I love her.”

  His father’s eyes were back on the page, scanning lines. “If only that were all it took.”

  Michael waited for his father to say more, to look at him again and tell him that they would take this matter in hand. Go to Mr. Casey and talk some sense into him: Couldn’t he see that Michael and Eileen were meant for each other? They were young, but they could wait. Michael would someday soon go out into the world. His father had promised him a university education, and who knew where that could lead? Give him time to get established and he could do more for Eileen than Doonan ever could. A man like that was likely to leave her a widow before too long, and then where would Eileen be? But Michael already knew the answer, and he knew that Mr. Casey had made the same grim calculations. Eileen and however many babies Doonan could get from her—the thought of it made him sick—would inherit all that he had piled up in his mean existence, and Casey would add these holdings to his own meager scrap.

  Was this why Eileen had been so cold to him in recent days, had refused to listen to his plans for escape, for an elopement that would prevent a union with Doonan? “For the family, Eileen.” That’s what her father had told her when he broke the news of her engagement. “You’ll do this for your family, you selfish girl.” Maybe Eileen had always known that this would be her fate. Maybe she had known for years; had known that her time with Michael—walking through fields and sitting among the stone walls, rock upon rock, and those few quick eternally burning kisses—was limited. She was snatching happiness where she could. What was the point of burdening Michael with that same foreknowledge of doom that hung over her? She knew that he’d rail against the marriage and her father and the world in a way that she no longer could. The effort had exhausted her long ago. She knew that Michael would also rail against her, for not refusing, for not running off with him toward happiness and away from the ruin of her family.

  He could not live in that place any longer. He wanted to be out of Ballyrath before the wedding, which gave him little time to act. Martin was in New York, but with America closing itself to newcomers, it could take years, he now realized, to emigrate. Francis had recently landed in Mountjoy, and wouldn’t be hosting visitors anytime soon. Father Hogan had been telling Michael for years that the door to the priesthood was always open. With no other means of escape that he could see, he marched away from his father and his Aeneid and straight to the rectory, where the old priest was reading an American detective novel. When Michael told his father that he was bound for St. Columbanus, it was Da’s turn to rail: an infantile decision, he told his son. Mooning over a country girl was no reason to make a mistake that woul
d ruin the rest of his life.

  Michael had never seen him so animated. He had certainly never had so much attention directed his way. But he was resolute. “I have a calling,” Michael said.

  “Bollocks,” his father said.

  “Am I supposed to stay in Ballyrath the rest of my life? Is that it?”

  “You’re giving up the whole world over a rash, stupid decision.”

  “The world?” Michael said. “What’s that? Something I only know from my brother’s letters.”

  “Go, then,” his father said. “You’re old enough to make your own mistakes.”

  And so he went. He said a terse farewell and made his way to the next town over, where a bus brought him to the gates of St. Columbanus. He often imagined his father sitting, a book in his lap, before the turf fire. His own chair empty. But as bad as things were at the seminary, he would not trade it for his old chair by the fire. Ballyrath was the past. Eileen was the past. At the time, he wasn’t as sure about consigning his father to the long-ago—he still imagined some kind of reunion, if not a reconciliation—but now, as the séance had shown him, that decision had been made for him. That was the news he’d received that rainy morning when he was called out of the classroom. That was the reason for the desolate transit to the small church where he and Francis had sat, side by side, only an arm’s length away from the box containing their father’s body.

  MORRISANIA

  WHAT WAS THE PROPER way to dress when applying for relief? Was it better to go in rags, to create a picture of desperate poverty that would prick the sympathy of the agent processing your application? Or was it better to go in your Sunday best, dignity intact, even as you admitted to a stranger behind a desk that you could not provide for yourself? Rosemary had opted for Sunday best: a blue dress, a short white jacket, gloves, pearls. The pearls might have been overdoing it, and as she sat on the long bench, the forms in her lap, waiting to hear her name called, she stealthily tucked the strand—a graduation gift from her parents—under her collar. She didn’t know if this was a busier than usual day at the relief office or if the place was always this crowded. She had waited in line for an hour just to get inside and that had been the worst part so far. The standing she could manage; what ate at her was the fear of being recognized. Rosemary? What are you doing here? She assumed that everyone in the line would feel the same way, and sure enough there were plenty who studiously avoided catching the eyes of the others. She thought about the men she’d seen in breadlines, and how they had looked stooped to half their height. She’d figured that life had broken them like matchsticks. Now she knew that it wasn’t weariness but shame that caused them to hide their faces.

  How then to explain the others in line—men and women both—who chatted like this was some kind of social hour? One woman fanned herself with a copy of the Bronx Home News while her friend rattled on about someone named Jimmy and how if he thought that she was going to put up with that kind of malarkey, well, then, he has another think coming. Two men smoked and talked boxing. One said Joe Louis was washed up, a palooka, ready to call it quits. “Washed up?” the other said. “Why you gotta admit, out here in public, in fronta the whole world, that you don’ know nothin’ about boxing?” A few years ago and Rosemary would have jumped right into that conversation. Her father had been a bantamweight in his younger days and she had grown up with stories of the night he knocked out a bruiser from Far Rockaway in less than a minute. As a girl, she read the sports pages every morning, and for her tenth birthday, her father took her to a boxing match at Madison Square Garden. She could still remember the glare of the overhead lights punching through the haze of sweat and cigarette smoke. The shouting surged as a scrappy flyweight pinned his opponent against the ropes with a flurry of jabs. Later the Garden exploded when a heavyweight landed a sledgehammer right to the head. But nowadays she barely glanced at the sports pages. Martin had little interest in sports—or sport, as he called it, in his funny Irish way—and the other mothers she knew wouldn’t recognize Joe DiMaggio in a police lineup, and couldn’t tell you who the heavyweight champion was if you offered them five dollars to do it.

  Once Rosemary was inside, she gave her name and was handed a number, just as if she were at the bakery. She tried to imagine what it would sound like if they called out her old name, Rosemary Dwyer, and it was too terrible to contemplate. The Dwyers didn’t go on relief. They helped out the unfortunate—found them jobs with the borough, connected them to the few people hiring these days—and they felt good about doing it. Public service, after all. But a Dwyer on the receiving end of a handout? Never. At least she had found an office far from Woodlawn, and far enough from her own apartment that she was unlikely to run into any neighbors. She hadn’t even told Angela Videtti why she was going out, only that she needed her to watch the girls for an hour or two. Rosemary could hardly imagine the stories Angela would tell—dressed up nice, and twice in one week?—or the size of the favors Angela would call in as compensation.

  At least the name on the forms would be Dempsey, and there were no Dempsey relatives to mortify—other than Martin. He had his pride, and he would have refused to let her come here, which was why she didn’t tell him. Four years married and here she was, keeping secrets. But what was she supposed to do? He had lost his mind, quitting his job, and all he could offer her was a secret plan that would make it all better. In the meantime there were two little girls who needed to eat and have cozy beds where parents could tell them a story and tuck them in at night. That part seemed to have slipped his mind. She believed that he would come to his senses, but unless she could find a way to bring in some money, what would be left when he finally came around?

  She thought again of the waitress at Driscoll’s—she could do that; she could work all day without a word of complaint—and she thought again of Peggy. Everything came so easy to Peggy. Even asking for things was easy for her. She felt no guilt in stretching out her hand, perhaps because she believed that she deserved whatever came her way. Why not ask Daddy for a few dollars to bring her friends to the movies, and why not compel their mother to buy her a new pair of shoes? She wanted to go to the movies. She wanted a new pair of shoes. End of story.

  Rosemary had always had trouble asking, and now asking was out of the question. How could she tell her parents that Martin had quit his job? It wasn’t even their derision that bothered her—they couldn’t think worse of him than they already did. It was their pity that would choke her. Poor Rosemary, who could have done so much more. Who could have been so much more. Now every misfortune confirmed for her parents all of the horrible things they had first said to her, and about her, when she told them she was pregnant. If she told them that Martin had quit his job and that they were on relief, the weight of their pity would obliterate her.

  Of course Martin would be humiliated that she had even set foot in the relief office, but why did she always have to be the one who kept a level head and made the right decisions—the one everyone counted on, at the same time that they chided her for being too serious, for not knowing how to have fun? This was where her mother’s voice chimed in: Because the one time you thought that you could let go, give in, have fun—look what happened. Martin said he had a plan, but she didn’t want a plan. She wanted a husband who understood his responsibilities to his family. To his children. To her.

  A WOMAN CALLED out, “Dempsey! Four-oh-one!” It took a moment for Rosemary to remember: yes, that was her name and that was her number. She gathered her purse and stared for a moment at her hand, which felt curiously empty. Kate’s hand was always in hers when they were out of the house. The woman who had called her number waved a clipboard to indicate the office where Rosemary was to sit. In the room, a different woman was turning the crank on a desk-mounted pencil sharpener. She removed the pencil, now pointy as a knitting needle, stuck in another blunt-nosed pencil, and churned the handle: another needle.

  “I just got this thingamabob and I love it,” she said. “It does exa
ctly what it’s supposed to, every time.”

  “It’s very nice,” Rosemary said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how fast we go through these things.” She held up a sharpened pencil. “We get people coming in here every day, sitting right where you are now. Wears out the pencils, then it wears out the sharpeners, then it wears out the people doing the sharpening.”

  Rosemary wasn’t sure whether it was meant lightheartedly or as some kind of accusation. Either way, the woman stared at her without smiling. Her hair was combed into a tight bun and although perspiration dotted her forehead, over her shoulders was draped a pale blue cardigan, secured at the neck with a silver chain. In the corner of the room an electric fan spun languidly, faintly scraping its cage with each rotation. The air smelled of dust and old paper livened up only by a hint of mimeograph ink. The woman tapped a tall stack of papers on her desk with the pencil. Rosemary recognized her own handwriting, upside down, on the form at the top of the pile.

  Maybe the gloves had been too much.

  As if reciting a script for a role she had grown tired of playing, the woman introduced herself as Miss Costigan. She would be Rosemary’s relief agent. Any question Rosemary had was to be directed to her and her only. Attempting to contact another relief agent, either in this office or in another relief office elsewhere, would only create confusion, and would be sure to delay the answer to any queries that Rosemary might have. It would also require duplication of effort, which was wasteful, and this was not an agency that looked kindly on waste. Waste would not be rewarded. Did Rosemary understand?