The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Rosemary understood.

  Miss Costigan explained that before any assistance was made available, an investigation had to be undertaken. Not only would there be a home visit to ascertain the family’s level of need, but the family’s willingness to help themselves had to be ascertained as well. Did Rosemary understand?

  Well, not exactly, she said.

  “You would be surprised,” Miss Costigan said, “or perhaps you would not, to learn that there are those who apply for relief who have no real need. Goldbrickers, we call them. And there are also people who apply for relief who are very needy but have no intention of seeking or accepting work of any kind. These people we call freeloaders. So the first question, Mrs. Dempsey, is whether you are a goldbricker or a freeloader.”

  “I can assure you,” Rosemary said, “that I’m neither of those things. My husband and I are decent people who’ve fallen on hard times.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” she said through a sour smile that did not appear happy. “Then you won’t have any problems with the investigation. We have your address and that’s a starting point, but we’ll need more information before we can really get started.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “Next of kin, for both you and your husband. Often those closest to you are the best source of help in troubled times. Maybe you have a rich uncle who could do for you what you’re asking the government to do instead?”

  Rosemary’s stomach sank. She tried to picture Miss Costigan sitting in her parents’ parlor, on the divan, as her father poured Scotch into an ice-filled tumbler.

  “And we’ll need to contact your husband’s most recent employer.”

  “My husband lost his job. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Yes, but why did he lose it? That’s one of the questions we’ll want to ask. Men lose jobs for all sorts of reasons, only some of which they tell their wives. Is your husband a drinker, for instance? Does he pull his weight? Is he a goldbricker or a freeloader at work? All of these things can help us determine his prospects for finding another job.”

  He’s an occasional drinker who mostly pulls his weight, Rosemary thought. Except for when he quits his job. “My husband is a very diligent man, Miss Costigan.”

  “And what line of work is he in?”

  “He was—he is—a musician.”

  “That’s his job? He gets paid for that?”

  Rosemary had heard variations on this theme plenty of times—boy, had she ever. It was a much easier question when the answer was yes. “He’s quite talented,” she said.

  Miss Costigan made a note on the page in front of her. “But he’s open to other forms of employment?” She spoke without looking up. “Because I can tell you, we don’t see many jobs for musicians.”

  “I thought the Federal Music Project could be a possi—”

  “Budget just got cut for that one,” she said.

  “Or the Federal Theatre Project. He can play piano, clarinet, saxophone—”

  “You don’t want to go within a mile of that one,” Miss Costigan said. “First off, it’s full of Reds. And between you, me, and the pencil sharpener, the word is the whole project will be kaput by the end of the month.”

  Rosemary looked down at her hands. She’d thought this was going to turn out a bit better. “I’m sure there are many other things he could do.”

  “Regardless, we’ll need to talk to his last employer. So I’ll need names, addresses, phone numbers—all of it. And then I’ll need the same for his parents—”

  “My husband’s parents are deceased.”

  Miss Costigan looked up from her note-taking. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “But we’ll need to see death certificates for confirmation.”

  “He’s an immigrant,” Rosemary said. “His parents lived—they died—in Ireland.”

  “We’ll need proof of his citizenship status, then. I assume that you’re from here? You don’t sound like you’re from somewhere else.”

  “Yes, I’m an American.”

  “Then we’ll need the same information for your family. Names, addresses, phone numbers, starting with your maiden name. You left that blank on the form.”

  “Oh, did I?” Rosemary was in a sweat. Why had she started this disaster? She wanted to keep food on the table, to keep Kate in shoes and Evie in diapers and herself from sinking under the weight of a husband who had temporarily lost his mind. She knew the relief office didn’t just hand out cash to all comers, but now the calls and the visits would start and everyone from Mrs. Fichetti to the neighbors to her parents and her sister would know just how bad it had gotten.

  “Mrs. Dempsey? Your maiden name?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, blinking in the room’s dozy haze. “It’s MacFarquhar.”

  “Mac—you’ll have to spell that for me.”

  Rosemary recited it, letter by letter. “It’s Scottish,” she said.

  “And your parents? They can be found—”

  “They’ve passed away, too.”

  Miss Costigan seemed annoyed. “Both of them?”

  “Yes.” Rosemary pressed her gloved hands together, a vaguely prayer-like gesture. Hadn’t her mother taught her that there was no better way to invite tragedy than to speak it out loud? And yet it was all she could do to keep from bursting out laughing. “In a shipwreck,” she said. “My father worked for the Museum of Natural History as a polar explorer. Have you ever seen the polar bears at the museum? In the glass case? Father—Captain MacFarquhar—shot them and brought their hides back to New York. It was his greatest triumph. The King of the Arctic, they called him.”

  Miss Costigan sat stone-faced, but Rosemary felt like her blood had been replaced by something hot and lively: the gin she smelled on Martin’s breath when he came home from the clubs, or the whiskey in the decanter in her parents’ parlor.

  “My mother insisted on accompanying him on his last expedition, to Greenland. It was supposed to have been fairly simple—just mapping the glaciers—but their ship struck an iceberg. I was left in the care of my grandparents, but they’re deceased, too. Just a few years ago.”

  Miss Costigan tapped the pencil, point first, into the stack of papers. Rosemary could see a Morse code of dots and scratches. “Mrs. Dempsey, this is all a bit hard to believe.”

  “Oh, they were quite famous, both of them, in the twenties,” Rosemary said. “I have a scrapbook at home full of newspaper articles, and there’s a plaque in his honor at the museum—right there in the great hall. It mentions my mother as well. She was one of the only people in all of New York who could speak the language of the Eskimos.”

  Outside the window of Miss Costigan’s office, men and women fidgeted on the long wooden benches, waiting for their number to be called. The murmur of voices and the scraping of feet, punctuated by “Faw-oh-ate! Num-bah faw-oh-ate,” came through the transom window.

  “That’s all very interesting,” Miss Costigan said. “But we’ll have to start somewhere else with the investigation. Your husband’s most recent employer was…”

  “The Staten Island Symphony Orchestra.”

  “Staten Island has an orchestra?”

  “They do—well, did. They’ve just recently gone bankrupt. A terrible scandal. Received a great deal of coverage in the Times.”

  IN THE END, Miss Costigan told her to come back at a later date, after Rosemary had gathered the information that would be needed to investigate her claim. There was so much that Rosemary had to collect: a current address and phone number for the conductor of the orchestra; her parents’ death certificates, which Rosemary said she would have to retrieve from the Danish embassy—or whoever it was that now laid claim to Greenland. She could have gone on for hours, unspooling the star-crossed history of the MacFarquhars. She hadn’t even mentioned how her mother came to learn Eskimo (a girlhood spent in the far northern reaches of Canada with her fur-trapper father). And she had only hinted at the tragedies that had befallen her husband’
s family. Long before the orchestra was forced to close its doors—only days before her husband’s first symphony was to have its world premiere—the Dempseys had been a family driven and derided by misfortune, from the era of the Vikings on down through the Great War.

  That feeling of fire in her veins stayed with her until she rose to leave Miss Costigan’s office. It was then that the weight of her mission suddenly settled on her shoulders again. Her family was in need and she had let her pride get in the way of seeking help. She’d had her fun, but when the icebox was empty and the cabinets bare, she would remember this moment.

  Then it struck her: Did it have to be when? Couldn’t it be if? And if it came to that—if Martin’s plans fell to pieces and he was exposed as a fraud or a failure—couldn’t she wait until then to march back into Miss Costigan’s office, children in tow, paperwork in order, her hands bare and chapped, and claim what they needed to survive? For now, she was going to allow herself to believe that Martin had an absolute doozy of a plan. She was going to go home and steel herself for her sister’s rehearsal dinner. She would put on her best dress, the one she had last worn before Kate was born, the one that had made Martin glow at the sight of her. She would shake the hands of the Halloran family and brag about her husband and she would stare into the future that lay ahead of them and she would not blink. After all, she was the daughter of Captain MacFarquhar, the King of the Arctic. Hadn’t her family endured worse?

  “Mrs. Dempsey? Mrs. Dempsey!” Apparently Miss Costigan had been calling her name, but Rosemary had been too distracted to notice.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing around her. “It’s this heat. I’ll be going.”

  “Take this.” Miss Costigan, annoyed and impatient, waved a pink square of paper at Rosemary. “Go on, take it.”

  On the paper was the phone number for a WPA office in Manhattan. There was a new project to produce children’s books for the board of education but the first few editions had been a bust. The problem wasn’t the morals of the stories, which were just what the WPA had ordered—love of country, democratic values, a sense of justice. It was that the stories themselves were, in a word, boring.

  “Thank you,” Rosemary said. “My husband doesn’t have much experience as a writer, but I’m sure he’ll take to it. He wrote a song, you see—”

  “It’s not for your husband,” Miss Costigan said. “It’s for you. Call them on Monday and tell them I sent you. And tell them I said you had a flair for… let’s just call it the dramatic.”

  IN TRANSIT

  WHAT AM I GOING to do with you?” Lilly said aloud. “And what am I going to do with me?”

  Her guest did not answer either question. He sat on the edge of the bed with that distant look in his eye. Lilly had washed his shirt in the large sink and hung it overnight by the windows. As dusty sunlight filled the studio, Lilly watched her neighbors dragging their mattresses off the fire escapes and back into their cramped, overheated apartments. The shirt, which his fit of tears had left a mess, was wrinkled but clean. Perhaps she could buy him a new suit as a going-away present—something nice, so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a vagrant.

  She had stayed up late into the night, labeling and packing. Beneath the bed she had found the city guidebook given to her by the Foundation when she’d first arrived in New York. The book was thicker than a cigar box, too big to carry anywhere, and even in the studio she had only glanced at it. Josef had been right about her: without the New York List, she would have spent three months wandering the city, taking pictures, never knowing where she was and overlooking the red-letter sights pictured on the postcards. But now she thumbed through the index until she found Hospitals. There was a Hospital for the Insane on one of the city’s smaller islands, but the book said it was being “slowly evacuated.” Farther uptown was the Neurological Institute, but the brief write-up described experiments conducted on children—“scientific twins” whose development was tracked by doctors—and Lilly wanted no part of that. There was a Babies’ Hospital, a Doctors’ Hospital, a French Hospital, and a Jewish Memorial. Finally, in the four pages devoted to Bellevue Hospital, Lilly began to believe she might have found a new caretaker for her guest. The guidebook mentioned “pleasant murals,” “clean red brick,” and “a program of modernization.” It was almost enough to obscure the references to overcrowding, a sense of confinement, and patients drawn from the city’s “alcoholics, the sexually unbalanced, and the hysterical.” Her guest was none of these, but neither was he her pet, her plaything, her child, or her lover. He had to go somewhere—just as she did—but it wouldn’t be today. Today would be their last together, and they would spend it as two New Yorkers with busy New York lives.

  Back in April, which now seemed eons ago, Mr. Musgrove had put Lilly in touch with curators from the Museum of Modern Art. She had met with them twice, and there had been talk at the last meeting of including her work in some future exhibition, perhaps even buying some of her street photography for the permanent collection. Despite the great heavy blind that she had tried to draw over any thoughts of life beyond tomorrow, she knew she needed to think about the future. If not for herself, then for her work. A last visit to the museum would get her away from the studio and perhaps allow her to stumble into another item on the New York List. She laid the list flat on the table, its folded lines so frayed that the paper threatened to separate. Next to the list she laid the note from the séance: George, Francis, London, the tower, Michael, no, no, nein. Wouldn’t this be a story for Josef? But she would get to tell him only if she ignored his letter and thrust aside the mystic visions of the medium.

  FROM THE INSTANT Michael opened his eyes that morning he was smothered by the knowledge of his father’s death. There was no moment of half-sleepy forgetting, no zone of questioning whether he’d been dreaming. He came into the day and there it was, just where he’d left it the night before. He lay on his side probing the wound, feeling the ache of loss and knowing that the sharp pain of missing his father would get worse before it ever began to fade. He was still in shock, he knew that. The real pain was yet to come.

  He had abandoned his father, left him isolated and alone. Betrayed him, even. It didn’t matter that his brothers had also left, and neither of them under pleasant circumstances either. Michael was the closest to his father and understood him better than his brothers did, and he knew that his own departure was the biggest shock of the three. Even as a boy, he knew Martin was in a fevered rush to get free of Ballyrath, and Francis had always been restless, too. Michael, by contrast, had seemed content until the blowup about Eileen. Then, at the first sign that his father had failed him, he ranted and ran off. If he was being honest with himself, he would admit that he chose the priesthood in part because he knew the anguish it would bring his father—a man who was barely Catholic. Michael sometimes wondered if his father believed in any god who hadn’t played a role in the Trojan War. To lose a son to the gold-plated promises of America or the cheap come-ons of Dublin was bad enough. But to see Michael cheerfully enlist in the ghastly corps of missionary priests was surely more than a man like Francis Dempsey Sr. could bear. But why had his father been calling out to him from the beyond? Was it to castigate him? To pull him out of the oblivion that followed Whatever Happened? To grab one last chance to say good-bye? He had wrestled with the questions all morning, but he had no answers.

  At no point in his deliberations did it occur to Michael that his departure from Ballyrath was only the latest in a lifetime of abandonments, losses, and disappointments suffered by his father—not to mention the weight of the losses and hurt he had inflicted on others—and that every heart has more than its share of reasons to stop beating.

  Michael hadn’t seen Yeats all morning. Under the guidance of his host, he dressed and prepared to leave, though he didn’t know where they were going. He was content to be led. The studio was sparser than it had been yesterday; even the camera whose flash had knocked him unconscious was safely stowed for trav
el. She seemed aware that he had been devastated in some way, and she was careful not to handle him too firmly.

  They went out from her building to the street market two blocks away, and as soon as he inhaled the damp, yeasty smell of food his stomach gurgled to life. From a paper-lined bin in a pushcart, Lilly withdrew two golden pastries and handed one to Michael. It was hot against his fingers and he blew on it before taking a bite and discovering it was filled with pillowy mashed potatoes rich with salt and pepper. In other bins were braided and knotted and coiled breads, and in the next cart two tall samovars dispensed what his nose told him was tea. He tugged on Lilly’s sleeve and pointed imploringly toward that cart. In a moment he had a cup of tea in one hand and the savory pastry in the other. All around him men in black caps and women toting heavy bags swayed. Children chased each other—the girls in long skirts and the boys in short pants. Michael filled his mouth with crispy pastry and spuds and sipped at his tea. Thirty minutes earlier, he would have sworn that he could taste only ashes, but he enjoyed this good food and the sugared tea even as he felt the sharp ache of loss. Until he could find his brothers and do a proper job of mourning his father, he would honor him here, among the multitudes, with a wish that the afterlife found him in better company than poor, lonely Yeats.

  “HERE IS HOW we should proceed,” Yeats said.

  Michael had been staring out the window of the elevated train, catching glimpses of the East River and the docklands at each cross street. Now he turned to face the poet, who had taken the seat beside him. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he said.

  “About your father?” Yeats said, seemingly surprised by the question. “Because I didn’t know. And then I did.” Yeats folded his hands in his lap. If he had been visible to any of the other riders, he would have seemed ungainly and out of place. He did not look like a man accustomed to mass transit.