The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  During the war years, Rosemary wrote almost two dozen books for the New York City Board of Education, so many that Martin took to calling her Rosie the Writer-er. Her tales of polar bears, baseball players, Scottish terriers, and leepercons each imparted an important civic virtue: decency, loyalty, citizenship, hand-washing. She continued writing children’s books after the war, and in her correspondence with Lilly Bloch they often spoke of collaborating, though it never came to be. Schedules were difficult to manage, and truthfully Lilly’s photos never really lent themselves to stories for children. Rosemary once joked that it would be the saddest children’s book ever written, a guarantee of bad dreams or long, sleepless nights.

  Michael lived with Rosemary and the girls throughout the war. He walked Kate home from school every day, and the two of them played cards and drew pictures while Rosemary tended to Evie or worked on her latest book. Michael had a special fondness for Peggy’s son, Jack, a redheaded bruiser born almost nine months to the day after her wedding. They all had their suspicions, but no one spoke them aloud, not with Peggy and Tim just starting out as husband and wife, and certainly not once Tim was deployed to Europe as an aide-de-camp to a brigadier general, and definitely not after Tim was killed in action in Italy. Jack would be Peggy’s only child, even after her second marriage, to a man whose family owned the biggest department store on the Grand Concourse. Jack would grow up surrounded by cousins—Martin and Rosemary’s girls, then the boy born to them after the war, and later Michael’s children—who regarded him as a brother, albeit one lucky enough to have his own bedroom and a houseful of his own toys.

  It was during the war that Michael began frequenting the library at Fordham and then, later, at Columbia, where he was eventually offered a fellowship in the classics department. While receiving his doctorate for his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues, he taught himself Italian, and began work on the edition of the Divine Comedy that became a standard college text after its publication in 1964.

  As for Francis, his path was never easy to trace. After he left New York, he posted letters from Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and points in between. He reported that he was engaged in the import-export business, which raised fears in his brothers that he would soon find himself behind bars again. He itched to return to Ireland, but both the government and the IRA had a claim on his body, and he didn’t want to end his days in a prison cell or earn himself a boggy grave. He had long fancied himself a man of the world, but often, as he felt the creeping suspicion that he needed to move on, he caught himself thinking of Anisette’s house by the sea and wondering if he could ever find for himself a place of such peace and security.

  On a rain-spattered fall day in 1943, he made a brief, unexpected appearance in New York to have dinner with Michael and Rosemary. He had done well for himself and as the wine was poured, he announced that he was going all the way back home, to Cork, though under a new name: “Call me O’Donovan,” he said. “There’s loads of them in Cork, and even they can’t tell one from the other.” His plan was to patch things up with the IRA and then to buy one of the fine Georgian homes that overlooked the city. He would get himself an office on the South Mall, conduct business in the lounge of the Imperial Hotel, marry a feisty Cork girl, and raise a rowdy brood of his own.

  This was his new plan, his FC Plan Mark 2, but he never had the chance to put it into action. Two days out of Boston, his neutral, Irish-flagged freighter was sent to the ocean floor by a German U-boat prowling the North Atlantic. When Rosemary wired Martin in San Diego, telling him that Francis was dead, he wanted to believe that it was another of his brother’s schemes: a death certificate would wipe clean his accounts. Francis would be free to resume his life as Angus MacFarquhar, find his heiress, and spend his days in luxury. But Martin knew the truth. He felt it like a lump in his chest, choking the breath out of him. After ten long years apart, that week in New York was all the time that he would ever have with his brother. Francis would never appear at his door, decked out in a costume and with a story to tell. He was gone.

  MORE THAN FOUR decades later, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City collected Lilly’s photos of life in Vichy France. At the opening reception, Lilly and Rosemary were reunited for the first time since they’d said good-bye in 1939. Lilly had brought with her a packet of photos from her first visit to New York, the negatives of which had survived through the years at the home of a friend outside London. Martin had died two summers earlier, but in the pictures from the suite at the Plaza he and Francis were young and full of life. Kate and Evie, now in middle age, couldn’t get over how beautiful their mother looked and how dashing their father had been as they held hands beneath a glittering marquee. Their younger brother, Francis, named for the uncle he had never known, was keen to see a photo of his namesake raising a glass in a toast at the 21 Club. Michael’s wife signed to her husband that he was so small back then she could have knocked him over with a single breath, but Michael could only stare at the pictures of his lost brothers. His hands, which were always so lively on the subjects of love and loss and poetry, were stilled.

  On that Saturday evening when Lilly took their picture, they could not have known that it would be the last night they would all spend together. Nor could they have known that the story of the months and years ahead would be broadcast in boldface headlines and urgent radio bulletins. It would be told in V-Mail and telegrams from the War Department and in prayers offered in church. More than they could know, it would be written in silences, absences, and empty spaces. But the story of those years would also be told in love letters saved and bundled in ribbon, and in songs dreamed up during nights in the barracks, and in the warmth of the spotlight before the first note was sung, and in sunlit hours when it was possible to believe that everyone you had lost was only late, and would be home soon enough.

  ON THE NIGHT he left the Dempseys for good, Cronin was reaching the end of a long journey. The Bronx was now a hundred miles behind him. Even so, as city became town became country, he grew anxious. In the city, the Packard was practically invisible, a dime-a-dozen car that witnesses would have trouble identifying. But as he drove north, past the neatly organized towns of Westchester and out among the farms, the car made him feel conspicuous. Against the tasseled grass and the sprays of forsythia, it was a boxy black slab, a storm cloud on the move. He wanted to believe that the only men who knew where to find him were dead, but he would need to be vigilant. After all, the dead had their stories to tell, too. They could be restless in pursuit of the living.

  But his anxiety was about more than that. He was returning to Alice with his arm in a sling, stitches in his shoulder, and the blue suit that Dempsey had purchased for him: his Plaza Hotel outfit. Alice would have a laugh at the idea of him, her Tom, squirming in that suit among the millionaires and the socialites. But how could he tell her any of the story without telling her all of it? Or would she already know, just from the look of him?

  The terrain was becoming familiar. The hills, bursting with green, were illuminated by the low-angled sun. Fat white clouds billowed upward, pinking at their edges. He wanted to reach the farm before dark. He didn’t want to creep into the house like a thief, nor did he want the dark to provide any cover. He wanted Alice to see him—all of him, who he once was and who he was now—so he could tell by her eyes if he was still her Tom.

  He knew this road now. He had driven this way when he took Henry to the county fair last summer. Alice had been pregnant with the baby—a surprise, though it shouldn’t have been; a blessing, and one he could never do enough to deserve. She needed her rest and could never get it with Henry about, so she’d sent them both out for the day. They had all been to the fair already, just like a family, but Alice had kept them from the livestock sheds. Didn’t she get enough of that at home? Without her, Cronin and the boy spent hours surveying the Holsteins and the new milking machines. They considered the sheep and gaped at the hogs, all the while sweltering happily among the loamy scent
of hay and manure. Henry, only four, stayed with Cronin step for step, shaping his folded arms to match Tom’s, cocking his head the way Tom did when he listened to one of the 4-H’ers extol the virtues of Jersey milk. Riding home in the truck afterward, Henry slept across the bench seat, his little belly full of lemonade and cotton candy. There were worse things you could do than spoil a boy at the county fair. When Cronin carried Henry into the house, Alice was sitting on the sofa knitting something soft and pink. She looked at him and at the sleeping boy, so slight in his arms, and Cronin could have sworn that tears welled in her eyes. He had never in his life seen anyone so beautiful.

  At last he turned, and the road leading to the farm was like a cave through the forest. On each side, the trees bent toward the center of the road. The leaves, backlit by the fading sun, glowed like stained glass. He pressed the gas pedal and felt the Packard respond. Down this road and then to the right. He was almost there.

  Alice had been waiting on dinner, later each night, pretending to herself that Tom had lingered in the fields looking for the calf that never seemed to return with the rest of the herd. But she could make a five-year-old wait for his food only so long, and then they sat in silence. Tonight, Henry had looked at her once, about to speak, but he had swallowed his words and returned to the mess of chicken and dumplings, his favorite meal, which he’d been pushing around his plate. He was learning that there were questions it was best not to ask.

  Alice was in the kitchen now, a plate in each hand, as a pair of headlights swept the front of the house. A car she did not recognize drew up between the barn and the milking parlor, out of sight of the road. She set the plates down unsteadily. The sun had nearly set, and in the onrushing twilight, with the cicadas rattling their last song, she heard a car door shut, heard footsteps on the gravel, and for a moment her eyes went to the hutch, where the loaded gun was sheltered. But then she saw his silhouette over the lilac hedge he had planted last year. Before Tom could reach the front door she was running to him. Her arms were open and she called out his name and then she had him, and Henry was at the screen door, his little boy’s voice singing, He’s home! He’s home! He’s home!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began as a single handwritten page in the summer of 2009. Most of the pages that followed were written in coffee shops, libraries, or at the kitchen table. I’d like to thank the coffee shops of Berkshire County for space and caffeine—especially Lenox Coffee, Haven, Dottie’s, Fuel, Rubi’s, and Six Depot—and the Lenox and Stockbridge libraries for their tables and stacks. Thanks, too, to the Mount for allowing me to write in the haunted sewing room, just down the hall from Edith Wharton’s bedroom.

  This book needed space and time, but it also needed the support of true believers. And so I offer a thousand thanks to my editor, Ben George, a comrade in the cause who saw from the first pages where this long journey could lead. And a thousand more to my unflappable agent, Gail Hochman, for her patience and wise counsel.

  For their generous support, I would also like to thank the University of Virginia, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Martha Boschen Porter Fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Simon’s Rock Faculty Development Fund, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Fulbright Commission of Ireland.

  Crucial to the shaping of this book was a semester my family spent in Ireland. For making that time possible, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Claire Connolly and everyone at the School of English at University College Cork. And for making six wayward Yanks feel right at home, cheers to Claire, Paul O’Donovan, Linda Connolly, Andy Bielenberg, Kieran and Sheila Hannon, Nuala Fenton, Mick O’Connell, Tony McGrath, the members of the Sidney Park Men’s Debating Society, and the staff and families at St. Luke’s National School. Thanks as well to Paige Reynolds, who put it all in motion.

  Thanks to my colleagues and students at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and to my friends in the Berkshires and beyond who cared enough to ask, How’s the novel going?—and actually wanted to know. Thanks also to Mary Beth Keane for reading a much rougher version of this book, George Valli and Mel Goldberg for their memories of the Bronx, and Beverly Kellar for always being here when we need her.

  Special thanks to my grandparents, Eileen and Thomas McKiernan, who left the Bronx for Dutchess County, and Helen and Peter Mathews, who united Queens with County Meath. And of course to my own band of brothers, Colin, Devin, and Kiernan, who breathed life into the Dempseys, and to my mother, Susan McKiernan Mathews, and my father, Robert Emmet Mathews, who raised us in families with plenty of stories to tell.

  Finally to Nora, Fiona, Cormac, and Greta, who cheered me on from first page to final draft, and who often asked at dinner, Did you finish your book today? And to Margaret: my first reader, toughest critic, and fiercest champion, who always believed and whose love has sustained me all these years.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRENDAN MATHEWS was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland and a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received his MFA. His stories have twice appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, and the Cincinnati Review, among other publications. He lives with his wife and their four children in Lenox, Massachusetts, and teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

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