The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “I am,” she said. “Though I’m finding it very difficult to say good-bye.”

  “What happened there?” He nodded toward Michael’s arm.

  “Oh, just a little slip at the hotel. And you?”

  “Something like that, I suppose,” he said.

  Michael followed the movements of their mouths and tried to guess at the course of the conversation. He could be doing a lot of this, he imagined, in the years to come.

  “I came to drop this.” He set the bag next to Michael. “It belongs to him and his brothers.”

  “You’re welcome to wait with us,” Lilly said.

  Cronin shook his head. “I’ll be on my way,” he said, but he did not move. Michael’s nose and eyes were so like his mother’s, and his hair was as thick and black as his father’s had been.

  Michael squinted up at him, this big man with the sun behind his head.

  “So,” Cronin said. The word had a finality to it, as if he were bringing an end to one thing, and whatever came next would be something new. He wanted to be home by nightfall. He had decided to keep the car, so when the family drove to church tomorrow and all the Sundays that followed, they could do so in the Packard and not in the truck. He also kept the five hundred that Gavigan had stacked up on his desk, all but the one bloodstained bill that he’d left behind. The Webley would go back into its box among Alice’s hats at the top of the closet. Cronin hoped that he would never again feel its grip.

  Michael and Lilly watched as the car rolled away, turned left, and made for the Grand Concourse. Michael had brought a pad of paper emblazoned with the Plaza’s crest, but he wouldn’t need it for these questions. He pointed to the bag and shrugged. What’s this about? Lilly raised an eyebrow and waved one hand: Why don’t we open it? Michael, in his sling, could not manage the clasp, so Lilly set the bag between them, released the catch, and opened the hinged top. She let out a shriek at the stacks of dollars and bundles of pound notes and slammed the bag shut. She and Michael exchanged a goggle-eyed look, like two children who had stumbled on a pirate’s treasure. Lilly opened the bag again and shut it just as quickly. It was barely pin money for Countess Eudoxia Rothschild and Sir Malcolm MacFarquhar, but to Lilly Bloch and Michael Dempsey, it looked like a fortune.

  WOODLAWN

  WHENEVER HE TOLD THE story of his big break, Elston Hooper—Fess to generations of jazz aficionados—would say it all started at an Irish wedding in the Bronx. It was a onetime gig, cooked up by a cat he’d met at a late-night jam session, a white fellow from one of the Midtown bands who was always hanging around the Harlem hot spots: Minton’s, Monroe’s Uptown House, Tillie’s, Club Hot-Cha. How he’d talked Hooper and Teddy Gaines into playing in a wedding band was a mystery for the ages. He must have been one of those gift-of-gab Irishmen who could argue a leprechaun out of his pot of gold—or convince two black musicians that they’d be welcomed with open arms at a social club in the whitest neighborhood in the Bronx. The way Hooper told it, things looked ugly at the get-go: the bride’s father was a local bigwig who carried on like they’d stepped in the wedding cake; the club’s manager said they didn’t have a policy against integrated bands, they’d just never done it before; and to top it all off, the fellow who’d put the whole job together—the bandleader and, if you can believe it, the brother-in-law of the bride—was a no-show. Apparently, he’d cut out to see the king of England at the World’s Fair and hadn’t even told his wife. It was that kind of gig.

  What could they do but play? They started off slow, some nice and easy numbers, though with a change here and there on account of losing their piano player, who also happened to be the bandleader, the brother-in-law, the husband at the fair, et cetera. But Hooper hadn’t signed up for a snoozy set of light-and-sweet. After the happy couple’s first dance, “Begin the Beguine,” they turned up the heat song by song until the joint was ready to boil. That room might have been chockablock with old folks expecting to shed a tear or two to “Danny Boy”—there was even a table full of nuns!—but the bride wanted to dance and she had a dozen friends who were ready to help her cut loose. After the floor had filled and the young folks realized there was a party in the works, Hooper leaned into the microphone and, in his best radio-announcer voice, said, “I know we’re in Woodlawn, but how about we try ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside’?”

  This was the part of the story where Hooper had a tendency to play the professor. His wife of fifty-plus years, the incomparable Lorena Briggs, would say that he had always been that way, that even straight off the train from Baltimore, with his feet having been on the sidewalks of Lenox Avenue for only a day, he was already telling everyone in Harlem how it was done. Maybe it was bred in the bone, and maybe it was his late-in-life turn as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at Rutgers, but Hooper couldn’t resist explaining the difficulties of launching into “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” with an eight-piece outfit and no piano. People had to understand just what sort of on-the-fly improvisation it required to pull off a stunt like that—improvisation, he would remind students and listeners alike, that was grounded in years of practice and a reverence for the possibilities of one’s instrument.

  By the time the band took its first break, the room was really hopping. The bride was a blur of blond hair, white veil, and klieg-light smile. The groom, a string bean who had to be coaxed out for the hot-jazz burners, had undone his bow tie and loosened his collar and was dancing like a man still trying hard to get the girl.

  Hooper wasn’t about to mistake this good feeling for what it wasn’t. During the break, he didn’t set foot in the dining room, didn’t even cast a look at the bar, where the white fellows in the band were ordering club sodas with—when the bride’s father wasn’t looking—a shot of something extra. While Teddy Gaines took five outside, Hooper waited in a back hall close to the kitchen, wiping his head, his neck, his face with a cold towel. A lanky white man in a Park Avenue suit approached him with a tall glass of ice water and asked if he had a minute. After the man handed over the glass, Hooper said sure, he’d give him two, maybe even three. And when the man introduced himself as John Hammond, Hooper told him he could take all the time in the world.

  AS THE BAND returned for its second set, Rosemary gave up on Martin making an appearance. All of the hard work had been done without him, anyway. She told her parents that there was a family emergency: “Since when does he have a family?” her father said. She had intervened when the club’s manager refused to let Hooper and Gaines change in the men’s locker room: “This is my father’s favorite band,” she said. “Are you going to tell him they’re not welcome?” And when the music started, she’d seen that Martin was right about the band—they were brilliant—but she was also right about her father. “What kinda crap is he trying to pull?” was the kindest of the assaults unleashed on her husband.

  It was a wedding where the guests could truthfully say they had never seen a more beautiful bride, and where the toasts about the bright future that lay ahead of the happy couple—the daughter of Dennis Dwyer wed to a scion of the Hallorans, another family of Bronx-Irish royalty—had, if anything, underestimated just how fortunate these two could be. And yet Dwyer himself spent most of the reception grinding ice between his teeth, as if he needed to crush the bones of every Scotch on the rocks that touched his lips. As he scanned the tables, no longer paper doilies but the real deal, life-size and occupied by the Boston aunts, he counted the ones who weren’t there: La Guardia and Flynn, sure, but also dozens of others who thought the smarter play was bootlicking the big shots invited to see the royals, rather than hoofing along to some half-colored band at Dwyer’s daughter’s wedding. If he had known that Martin was also at the fair, and that he had been not ten feet from the king, and that he had stopped his brother from pulling the trigger? Well, he’d have said, thanks for nothing. If you actually gave a rat’s ass about this family, you’d’ve let him kill the guy who tried to make a monkey out of me.

  THAT DAY IN Woodlawn wa
s the start for Hooper, and for Lorena, too. Basie needed a new trumpet and Hammond had heard enough to know that Hooper was his man. On Monday he would be on a train bound for Chicago—good-bye, World’s Fair!—and in the fall he would tour the West Coast as the newest horn player in the Count Basie Orchestra. He tried to convince Lorena to follow him to Chicago but she wasn’t having it. Set up home in the Windy City while Hooper was all the way out west? Had he looked at a map lately? There was a reason why they called it the Middle West.

  No, she wasn’t going to follow him to a place where she was unknown and knew no one, but she would happily take a nicer apartment in Harlem, one that wasn’t so cold in the winter, so stifling hot in the summer, and so noisy all the time. Maybe in one of those newer buildings on the edge of Sugar Hill? She would keep on making a place for herself in New York, and once Hooper had professored Basie into realizing that the Big Apple was the one and only place to be, he would find his wife and his home waiting for him. So she said, and so she did, but though her pride would never let her admit it, she missed him terribly during the months they were apart. All through the fall, as the nights grew longer and the knife-edged winds swept in from the Hudson, she sang like she was back in Reverend Hooper’s choir when Hooper was off at Howard and Lorena was sure he was gone for good. Then one night in November, after months of Hooper saying that his wife could sing like one of God’s own angels, Hammond caught her late-night set at the Lenox Lounge. Early the next morning, he sent a telegram to Count Basie—FOUND YOUR NEW GIRL SINGER—and by the end of the day, Lorena was in a sleeper car racing west. Years later, when remastered copies of her early recordings were issued, a critic for the Village Voice would write that no lovers could say they’d been heartbroken until Lorena’s voice told them how it really felt.

  MICHAEL AND LILLY HAD walked to the corner store, Lilly in charge of the satchel, and returned with six cans of beer and a church-key opener. Sooner or later, they figured, they would have company, and sure enough, while the cans were still sweating, the older Dempsey brothers arrived and claimed places on the steps. While they drank and smoked, Lilly related the drama that had occurred in the hotel room—the window, the blood, the doctor—and almost as an afterthought, Michael nudged Francis and showed him the bag. Where in the world? Francis thought, but he realized that he knew, and a greater sense of how Cronin must have spent his day settled over him. They had both walked into the trap, but it was Cronin who found a way to spring them. When Lilly asked Martin how the wedding was, he nodded toward the cab slowing to a stop in front of the house and said, “You’ll have to ask Rosemary.”

  With the baby in her arms and Kate by her side, Rosemary opened the gate and took in the scene: Lilly, the red scarf around her neck, elegant and relaxed, laughing at something Martin had just said; Michael, his arm heavily bandaged and in a sling, but his eyes lively and alert; Francis bedecked in a tartan kilt, his shirt scuffed and torn, and blood caked in his hair; and Martin, rumpled and exhausted, his tie askew, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his jacket thrown over the steps.

  “Daddy, you missed the party!” Kate said, and Martin put his hand on her head, her curls thick in the humid air.

  Rosemary sat between Martin and Lilly and opened the last can of beer for herself. She took a long drink and looked at her husband. “Do I even want to ask?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “you’re not going to believe what the MacFarquhars got up to today.”

  Before they went inside, Lilly snapped a picture of the family: Martin and Rosemary and their girls across the top step, Francis and Michael just below. With their bandages and bruises, their torn clothes, the plaid kilt, the matron-of-honor and flower-girl dresses, they looked as if they had survived a fight in a costume shop and come out smiling. Visible just behind Martin’s back was the satchel containing the family fortune, and over his shoulder the shadowy outline of Mrs. Fichetti, peering through her curtains at the ruckus on her steps.

  After they had cleaned up Francis and changed out of their battered finery, they walked around the corner to an Italian restaurant, where they tried their best to make sense of the day and all that had led up to it—more than one night’s work, they knew, but a start. Then, over glasses of fiery grappa, they decided how to divide the contents of the satchel. Lilly was granted a full share for saving Michael not once but twice, and when Francis suggested naming her an honorary Dempsey, Rosemary put a consoling hand on her arm: “Careful,” she said. “It’s really not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, a print of the family photograph arrived in a stiff cardboard envelope with a Los Angeles postmark. The next letter from Lilly would come the following March, postmarked London, and then another from Paris in May, a month before the Germans took the city. Then the letters ceased, and Rosemary did not know that Lilly fled Paris, or that she was arrested on the train to Marseille and sent with other foreign-born Jews to a camp near the Spanish border. Nor could Lilly write to her American friend about the night that she and two of her fellow inmates escaped in the bin of a truck used to transport rubbish. She could not write about how she fell in with the Resistance, and used her camera for reconnaissance and her abilities in the darkroom to create identification documents. She could not write of the countless times she was stopped by Vichy policemen demanding to see her papers, and how she would raise that great Gallic-seeming nose of hers and heave a sigh as only a long-suffering Frenchwoman could—a sigh she had learned from her mother as she cast aside the first price offered by the Parisian gallery owners.

  Rosemary knew only that Lilly had disappeared. Then, shortly after V-E Day, five years after Lilly’s last letter, Rosemary flipped through Life magazine and came upon a picture of a Frenchwoman, her head shaved, being paraded through town for having had an affair with a German soldier. The picture shocked her: the stoic set of the woman’s face, the sneering rage of the crowd. She studied the photograph, poring over every detail, and when at last she glanced at the credit line and saw LILLY BLOCH, she was overcome with tears. So many had been lost during those years, but here was proof that Lilly, her fast friend of two days’ acquaintance, had survived. Rosemary wrote a letter to Lilly in care of the magazine and three months later she received a reply posted from the American zone in Germany. Lilly was returning to Paris, she wrote, after having seen for herself the death camps that had consumed Josef and so much of the world she had once known. Her correspondence with Rosemary would continue for the rest of their lives.

  EVEN AS THEY posed for the photograph, Francis knew that he must leave. Gavigan was gone but he was not the only one who could connect Francis to what had happened at the house outside Cork. Someone had passed his name to Gavigan in the first place and could pass it to someone else just as easily. As long as he stayed, he put all those around him in jeopardy. It was not a lesson he needed to learn twice. He told Martin that same night that he would go, and Martin, despite his anguish, agreed it was for the best.

  “What about your heiress?” he said, but Francis had accepted that he could not take the risk, for her sake or for his. There was no way to ensure Anisette’s safety, and sooner or later he would have to produce an actual castle and a family of kilt-wearing lairds. Francis considered writing a letter to explain his disappearance—some secret mission on behalf of the king—but he couldn’t bring himself to lie again to Anisette. As for the truth, he could never find the right words to explain himself, and how he felt.

  In the end, Félicité saw his disappearance from the fair and from their lives as proof that her run-in with Angus—or whoever he was—in the lobby of the Plaza had served its purpose. He had been gallant enough to accompany Anisette to the fair, yes, but not so gallant that he was ready to make a match with such a delicate, notorious girl. Mrs. Bingham let it be known around town that the dashing young Scotsman who had made such a splash at the fair had been summoned home on urgent business, and with the outbreak of the war she scripted a rotating series of suitably noble end
ings for him: on the road to Dunkirk, in the skies above the Channel, in the sands at Tobruk. He always died so valiantly. Anisette did not abandon his memory so easily. She pressed her parents to hire private investigators, Pinkertons, anyone who could locate Sir Angus, but his trail had gone cold almost from the moment he left Perylon Hall. In the years that followed, she often retraced their walk from the carousel to the museum, wondering what he hadn’t told her, and what he really wanted from life. Her walks always ended in the same gallery, with the dour, shadowy faces of the old masters the only witness to her grief.

  THE MONEY FROM the satchel allowed Martin and Rosemary to rent a small house with a piano and room enough for Uncle Michael. While Martin had missed his chance with Hammond, there were others who had listened: Artie Gold had grown tired of the in-and-out bookings at the Dime and reached out to Martin to form a house band. A bandleader at the Dime made little more than a clarinet player for Chester Kingsley but more than an out-of-work musician or an entry-level clerk at the Department of Sanitation, and Martin said yes before Artie could even finish making his pitch. For the next two and a half years, the gig let him sharpen his chops as an arranger and add an occasional original into the band’s repertoire, and while the Dime never drew the hordes that flocked to the Famous Door or the Hickory House, Martin’s eye for talent made his band a proving ground for young musicians new to the city and on the rise. His run at the Dime ended in early 1942, when he was drafted into the navy and posted to New Jersey, then Corpus Christi, and finally to a naval base in San Diego, rigging parachutes for carrier pilots. In his letters home, he ached to see his “Rose of my heart”; he wrote of wading in the Pacific surf and promised a trip to California when the trains were no longer full of soldiers. When the war ended, he worked out a deal to buy the Dime from Artie. Big-band music was on the wane, but in the decades after the war, the Dime became one of the spots where a new generation of musicians took part in the remaking of jazz. Fess Hooper’s contribution to the Live at the Dime series, recorded in 1959, long remained one of the era’s most coveted live albums—not least for Lorena’s rendition of “Darn That Dream.”