The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  ROSEMARY HELPED MARTIN with his tie. With Michael missing and Francis off in his own world, Martin had aged ten years in two days. He had been home only once, briefly, since he started his search and he moved like a sleepwalker. Even the news that Peggy was not, in fact, calling off the wedding hadn’t cheered him, and Rosemary so badly wanted to cheer him up today. She wanted to share the feeling that had seized her when she left the relief office, and she wanted to tell him all about Miss Costigan and her crack team of investigators and her even more threatening pencil sharpener. She wanted to tell him all about Captain MacFarquhar and the iceberg and the Staten Island Symphony and the fire-in-the-blood feeling that led her to dump the relief application in a garbage can but keep the number of the Manhattan WPA office folded neatly in her purse. She wanted to tell him that all of this was a vote of confidence in him and his top secret master plan. She was anxious—that’s just how she was—but they were young and in love and she wanted that to count for something. There were so many others, after all, who were so much worse off—men and women who’d been battered by time and tide and who had to endure the petty cruelties of Miss Costigan in order to get the help they needed. Yes, she wanted to tell all of this to Martin but there was no way to make it come out right. He would hear only the words relief office and it would be one more thing that had gone wrong this week. One brother was missing, another had lost his mind, and now he had made his wife into a beggar.

  And then the telephone rang, and it was the Plaza. By the time he hung up the receiver, the added years had melted away. He had become Rosemary’s Martin again, the very picture of her dashing young bridegroom.

  “I’m coming with you,” Rosemary said.

  “And miss the dinner?”

  “Of course miss the dinner! Do you really think I want to go—alone or otherwise?”

  “But what about your mother, your sister?”

  “We just found out that the worst thing didn’t happen, and now we have a babysitter and a chance to go to the Plaza Hotel. I’ll take my lumps from Peggy and my mother in the morning, and all day tomorrow I’ll be the dutiful, put-upon sister. But tonight we’re going out. When was the last time we painted the town red—or any color at all?”

  Martin looked doubtful, or maybe he was just dazed. He’d barely had twenty winks—forget about forty—and he had to be wondering, Who is this minxy brunette and what has she done with my wife? Rosemary kissed him smack on the mouth and explained it as best she could—that they were adventurers, polar explorers, Thanes of Cawdor, and experts in the Eskimo tongue. “We deserve this,” she said. “We’re MacFarquhars, aren’t we?”

  FIFTH AVENUE

  ANISETTE HAD SEEN FÉLICITÉ for only a minute—one minute of the whole day!—but still her sister had managed to get right under her skin. “I saw your Scotsman,” she had said. “At the Plaza. He invited me up to his room, but I turned him down.” And then Félicité was out the door for a rendezvous with those horrible friends of hers who treated Anisette like she was some kind of broken plaything: a mangled toy, or an easily tricked child who was too slow to understand the adult talk all around her. But she understood just fine—understood the ways that Félicité was always conspiring to rob her of her happiness. She’d been cross with Anisette for getting engaged—Why are you doing this to yourself? You’re too young! And with him?—but that was only because it made her look like an old maid, still single while her younger sister was wed. And she hadn’t shown any sympathy once it all fell apart: “What did you expect?” she heard Félicité tell Maman. “I told you about him.” Félicité had plenty more to say too, but what Anisette heard was I told you so, and hadn’t she heard that from Félicité her entire life?

  It wasn’t any surprise that her sister was up to her old tricks, suggesting that Angus was anything less than a complete gentleman. As if he could ever be interested in Félicité. Hadn’t they had a laugh about her in the park just the other day?

  She would see him for herself tomorrow and all would be well. Since they had parted at the museum, she’d barely heard a word from him; nothing but a brief note delivered to the house, confirming details for tomorrow morning. They were to drive together, and that would give them some time—but of course Félicité would be there with her sour smile and her sneery eyes. And Maman, too, so perhaps she could keep Félicité on her best behavior. Not that anyone could ever do that for long.

  Of course Anisette knew there was something odd about Angus, if that was even his name. Despite what her sister said and her father thought and her mother feared, she wasn’t a simpleton. Yes, she admitted to herself the possibility that there was mischief in him. After all, she’d heard that delightful Scottish burr of his come and go. But he always righted himself, and he was such a gentleman—that didn’t seem to be part of the act. If in the beginning it had been simply politeness or good breeding, something had changed in these past few days. Maybe the outside of him was an act, but she believed there really was something good on the inside: he cared for his brother, he cared for her, and she sensed in him a desire to be not just good, but better. Better than he had been; better than anyone believed he could be. Her sister, her mother, her father—they all worried about her. Poor Anisette. Poor simple stupid Anisette. But she wasn’t stupid, and when she and Angus were together in their house by the sea, her family would understand, or they’d stop thinking about her altogether, because she would be someone else’s Anisette to worry about.

  MRS. BINGHAM CHECKED on Anisette, reminding her that it would be an early night. Both needed their beauty sleep, and tomorrow would be a busy day from first light: their hair was to be done, and any last-minute fixes to their dresses would need to be tended to before their departure for the fair.

  She took the brush from Anisette and began working it through her daughter’s hair. She talked about tomorrow, how it would be a day that Anisette would treasure for the rest of her life. She was going to meet the king and queen.

  “To think,” Mrs. Bingham said, “that you begin your life never expecting that such things could ever happen to you, but dreaming about them, wanting them, and by working very hard to make those dreams come true—”

  “But Maman,” Anisette said, “it’s been so long since you’ve had to work.” She knew that her mother had been a nurse, trained by the nuns at the convent school, but her marriage to Anisette’s father had rescued her from any further toil.

  Mrs. Bingham looked at her daughter’s rosy, untroubled face in the vanity mirror. Anisette had been raised on her father’s stories of pulling rocks from the earth, of controlling things that other men needed and making his fortune from that. He claimed land and sold it. He built mines and towns and railways. He owned houses and boats and estates that he never even visited. He bought men, or at least their opinions, their contracts, their votes. In Montana, in the years before he moved to New York, he had even bought himself a seat in the U.S. Senate, back when that sort of thing had been easier to do. All of that was work, he never failed to point out. Taken together, it formed the epic story of the labors of Emery Bingham.

  But the story her daughter had never heard—not in its entirety, not in its most important parts—was the true tale of just how much work her own life had required. Anisette knew of the tender young nurse despairing over the death of the first Mrs. Bingham, and finding in the widower an answering grief—a grief that gave way to love, and a love that rejuvenated the anguished heart of Anisette’s father. Told like that, it was a story governed by loyalty, sympathy, and the all-conquering power of love.

  The facts of the courtship were considerably more calculated and much less sentimental. As a girl in Montreal, Delphine Loisel had been sent to the nuns, her education purchased through hours spent cooking and scrubbing in the convent kitchen. While she scoured and studied, her father drank himself half to death and her mother tended to a shop that trafficked in tobacco, penny candies, and periodicals (and, for her more worldly customers, in “preventive powd
ers” and other abortifacients). In search of a match for her daughter, Delphine’s mother kept an eye on the neighborhood’s sturdy tradesmen. But the magazines in her mother’s shop had filled Delphine with stories of elegant lawn parties and coastal estates, the playgrounds of Gilded Age excess, and she dreamed of more than a life spent totaling receipts for a good-natured horse butcher.

  At sixteen she found another dreamer with just enough money and very little sense and convinced him to elope with her across the border. Together they traveled as far as Plattsburgh, where she separated him from his wallet and continued alone to New York City. By seventeen, with the aid of letters of reference forged in her own elegant, scripted French, she had secured a position as a nurse to Mrs. Bingham, whose health had been in decline since her husband moved the seat of the Bingham empire from Big Sky Country to this cramped and sunless city. From her first days on the job, Delphine was aware of Mr. Bingham’s interest, and she embarked on a campaign of tortured resistance to his advances. Though he was thirty-five years her senior, she made it clear with lingering looks and sudden blushes that she thought about him almost as much as he thought of her, but she confessed that her Catholic upbringing and the memory of her dearly departed mother would not allow even a kiss. He made offers—of apartments, jewels, clothes, money—but always she resisted. Delphine was playing for bigger stakes.

  When Mrs. Bingham at last relinquished her grip on this fallen world, Delphine in her grief went to Mr. Bingham, who offered comforting words and the greater comfort of his bed. Finally, his long pursuit would reach a sweet conclusion. But just at the moment of surrender, Delphine claimed to hear the voice of her sainted mother (still tending the till of her tabac, unbeknownst to Mr. Bingham), and she fled, leaving her employer inflamed and unfulfilled. Not until his promises of marriage became marriage itself did she allow him to claim his prize. Now that had been work.

  None of that, however, was a story to tell a daughter. Instead she told Anisette that someday soon she would see just how much work it was to have one’s own family: to run a household, to manage the staff and a budget, to plan for meals and entertainments, to organize and attend the never-ending galas and fetes that supported the city’s cultural life, its parks, its hospitals. All of that would be Anisette’s someday soon.

  “But what if I don’t live in New York?” Anisette said. “What if I’m not even in America?”

  “Everywhere has its responsibilities,” Mrs. Bingham said. “I imagine if you were in—oh, let’s say London, or Edinburgh—”

  “Maman!” Anisette said in poorly feigned surprise. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m just choosing cities out of thin air, aren’t I?”

  In the mirror, mother and daughter exchanged a conspiratorial smile.

  “Wherever you live,” Mrs. Bingham said, “you will have to learn where to go, and who to know, and how to behave. Not that you’d have any trouble fitting in.”

  “Would you miss me, Maman?”

  “Terribly,” she said. “But a mother always wants what’s best for her daughter.” She had sometimes thought, during the past thirty years, of sending her mother a letter, just to let her know that she had not succumbed to shame and misery on the streets. But she could never find words that didn’t make her life sound like a fairy tale—I am happily married to a very wealthy man in America—or a complete lie, and eventually a letter seemed pointless. Her own maman had never been a particularly sturdy woman, and Montreal was such a cold city in winter.

  Anisette closed her eyes and leaned back against her mother, who continued to draw the brush through her hair.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Mrs. Bingham said. “If you are interested in Angus—really interested—then we’ll need to act soon. He has been our little secret, but after the royal visit, there will be quite a buzz. He may find that he has more than a few dinner invitations.”

  “He wouldn’t even,” Anisette said.

  “Of course he would,” Mrs. Bingham said. “Unless he’s said something to you that might indicate his… intentions?”

  Anisette had read enough Jane Austen to know that in the best of all possible worlds, you found someone who answered the call of your soul, and together you found a happiness you could never achieve with another. Now she searched her memories of the park for a moment she could point to as proof that he was being more than cordial. But there had been no promise, no proposal, no ring, no letter spelling out the secrets of his heart. Still, she knew how she felt, and she hoped—and almost believed—that he felt the same.

  “He won’t be in New York forever,” Mrs. Bingham said when Anisette didn’t answer, and she rose to turn off the lights. “And if he’s going to make any decisions while he’s here—well, let’s just try to help him make the right ones.”

  THE PLAZA HOTEL

  FIRST, THERE WERE TEARS. The first minutes that Francis spent in the suite with Michael were devoted entirely to weepy hugs and fierce backslapping and arms thrown roughly, possessively, apologetically, around his brother’s shoulders. There was a woman with Michael—Francis imagined she was a minder dispatched by the hotel—but before he could ask her a single question, Martin and Rosemary arrived and the waterworks began flowing anew. Martin had last seen Michael five days ago, on Sunday night, as the two laid hands on the wireless, and he had wondered during these past couple of days if that would be his final memory of his brother. But now they were together again and Martin’s embrace was not just thanksgiving but a promise to Michael, who deserved so much better from his older brothers than he’d gotten. Rosemary wasn’t the type to mist up—honestly, Martin was more likely to cry than she was—but so much had gone wrong this week and now here was Michael, and his life and theirs hadn’t become a tragedy. Maybe it was possible to live under the threat of a disaster, bracing yourself for it, preparing for those first peals of thunder, only to have it blow away, like a morning that had started off gray only to have the sun burst through the clouds.

  It wasn’t until the end of this round-robin of hugs and tears, of rough backslaps between Martin and Francis, of loud joy and unspoken apology, that Martin realized there were two more people in the suite. The man from Thursday evening stood by the window, looking out over the park. His arms were folded into a tight knot and his face had a squashed, sickened look. He wasn’t staring at anything so much as just staring—pouring all of his energy into some faraway point, as if some magic could whisk him out of here and off to there. And then on the sofa there was a woman, rather elegantly taking in the scene before her. Though she sat at a languid angle and let a cigarette burn lazily in her hand, she did not seem unmoved by the joyful reunion.

  In fact, Lilly beamed when she saw the transformation come over her guest. He had been elated to discover the hotel and from the moment they set foot in the lobby they seemed to move through a dream. The barn-then-castle he’d sketched had sprung to life and in it he was greeted as a returning hero. The doorman startled at the sight of him and escorted them personally to the front desk, where another man led them to the elevator and to this suite overlooking the park. The man in the lobby had called him “Sir Malcolm” and spoke of another sir or two who must be notified of his return. Apparently Sir Malcolm’s disappearance had set off a citywide manhunt: every minor noble in New York had been deputized to find him, it seemed, though none had thought to look in the Bowery—it was, after all, not a respectable neighborhood—where he had been nursed to health on a diet of strong tea and fresh knishes.

  Throughout all of this commotion, no one questioned Lilly’s presence. But as cushions were fluffed in the suite and Michael stretched himself out on the sofa with a home-sweet-home look about him, the majordomo finally turned to Lilly and asked how in the world she had ever located the young and desperately missed Sir Malcolm MacFarquhar.

  She answered that he had been her guest these past two days—had no one been notified? When the majordomo inquired as to her name, Lilly thought it best not to in
vite scandal for the young nobleman. She could not allow him to disappear into the care of a commoner, an artist, a woman of—ahem—questionable moral character. “Eudoxia Rothschild,” she said, affecting a posture that would have impressed Madame Bloch herself. “Countess Eudoxia Rothschild.”

  Collier kept an updated copy of Burke’s Peerage in his office to validate the bona fides of the hotel’s guests. While he had not found mention of the MacFarquhars—at least not these MacFarquhars—Collier had no interest in unmasking pretenders for the sport of it. His only concern was in knowing when to extend credit and when to withhold it. More than one brash bounder had tried to assign an unpaid bill to his titled family’s ancestral seat, but Collier had never been gulled. Whoever these MacFarquhars really were, they paid their tabs and tipped generously. Sir Angus was a prince in the eyes of the hotel staff, if not in the pages of Burke’s. And if this woman, who had done such a noble service for his guests, was going to call herself a countess, who was he to object? He issued a coo of pleasure that the hotel would play host to such a red-letter blue blood, and prepared to leave the suite. As he offered a curt bow—nothing fawning; he was never obsequious—he inquired whether there was anything he could provide to make Her Ladyship more comfortable while she awaited the arrival of Sir Malcolm’s brothers.

  Lilly weighed the question with a playful pucker of her lips; how nice it was to have someone asking which of your wishes he could grant for you! “Champagne,” she said. “We have so much to celebrate, don’t we?”

  She could have left Michael in the care of the hotel staff and returned guiltlessly to the studio, but she needed this story to have a happy ending—a Hollywood ending, where all the right people get married and the music swells as the screen fades and the words THE END float on the screen. And she had to admit that she was curious to meet this family, who had managed to lose one of their own but who would now have the good fortune to see him returned. She couldn’t help but wonder if some of that luck, that magic, could rub off on her.