The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  This was the music everyone was screaming for; everyone, it seemed, except the fresh-faced squares and the gout-riddled couples who flocked to hear Chester Kingsley’s band make good on its motto: The Sweetest Sounds You Ever Did Hear. Through every number, Chester smiled and waved his baton like a hypnotist, further somnambulizing a crowd that was already sleepwalking through the golden age of swing.

  After Martin walked out on Chester, his remedy had been a wide-ranging search for a red-hot band playing “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” or “King Porter Stomp.” He had started in Midtown at the Roseland and the Hickory House, then gone to Harlem for the Savoy and Minton’s and Monroe’s Uptown House. He had hoped to see Webb behind his drum kit, but the word was that the Little Giant was still in the hospital, playing against the only bandleader he couldn’t beat. In his place, Benny Carter held down the main bandstand, but by the time Martin climbed the stairs to the Savoy, the crowd was spilling out onto Lenox Avenue. Carter had called it a night.

  Ten years earlier, Martin had come from Ireland with the dream of being a working musician in New York City, and the dream had come true and then some. Whatever Chester’s faults—and those would take all night to tally—he led one of the city’s most sought-after dance bands. All over Manhattan, well-connected brides-to-be organized their weddings around Chester’s availability, and every August the band headlined a white-jacket tour through Connecticut, the Hamptons, and the finer spots on the Jersey Shore.

  But the years had taught Martin that being a musician alone wasn’t enough if you wanted to make it in music. You had to be a salesman, a politician even, to get where you wanted to go. Maybe that wasn’t true for the best of the best, whose chops were so undeniable that one note could vault them to a spot on any bandstand in the city, but Martin knew he wasn’t one of the anointed. Still, while he may not have been great—not Coleman Hawkins–great, or Gene Krupa–great, or Ella Fitzgerald–great—he wasn’t a complete square. He was a hotshot on the piano, a surefire clarinet, and a half-decent alto sax. He had even penned a song, “That’s More Like It,” that had briefly broken through to the Hit Parade for 1937, and for a while it looked like the start of something. Only there hadn’t been a follow-up. He wrote other tunes but no one put them into their sets at the ballrooms, or if they did, they never bothered to record them, or if they did, no one bought the record or played it on the radio or cued it up in a jukebox. One hit, and he had to wonder if there would ever be another.

  Now as he stepped off the subway and approached the Grand Concourse, he was light-headed and ready for sleep. By some miracle, his clarinet case was still in his hand. He wouldn’t need to retrace his steps in the morning through every bar and subway car in New York. As much as he loved the electric charge that came from moving in a sea of bodies surging from one place to another—crossing a street in the moment the traffic signal changed, a swell of suit-and-tied men and sway-hipped women, each of them racing to get somewhere that seemed so important—there were times when he wanted to call a stop to it, to slow it all down and not be carried along in anyone’s tide. This was why the early-morning hours were his favorite. Walking a nearly vacant street, with only a couple slouched against each other in the distance, steam drifting lazily from a manhole, a splash of neon thrown into a puddle, an after-hours bar whose last diligent drinkers hunched over their highball glasses—this was the New York he had come seeking. The city in a country hour. A time of deserted lanes and privacy amid the millions.

  Not that you were ever entirely alone, not even in the Bronx. At this hour, the subways rumbled and the delivery vans trundled along the side streets and the broad, trolley-tracked avenues. Milk. Eggs. Ice. Bread. Beer. Coal. Newspapers. But it was quieter than in the daytime, more desolate, and Martin felt as if he had slipped through the cracks in time itself. His walk was no more than five or six blocks—a straight shot from the station to the corner occupied by the Bluebird Diner, which in the wee hours shone like a fire in the middle of a dark wood. The Bluebird was a twenty-four-hour joint, its bulbs burning through the street-to-ceiling windows. From a block away he could see the waitress with her fanlike paper hat pouring coffee for the nighthawks at the counter. The counter was L-shaped, so that the backs of some of the men were visible, and the profiles of others. Through these nightly glimpses into the Bluebird, he had come to recognize some of the regulars, though he never knew if they were catching a plate of eggs and hash at the end of their shift or preparing themselves for the start of the day. Among the usual crowd were bus drivers, cabbies, men in the coveralls of utility workers, and always one or two dressed like him—Bronx Beau Brummells on a shoestring budget. They could have been drinkers, carousers, or cardsharps silently totaling the night’s gains and losses, whether financial or physical.

  But who was he to comment on the appetites of others, a man who was dragging himself back to his wife and children at six in the morning with a heart full of hot jazz and a head bursting with the news that he had just quit his job? Once he passed the Bluebird, he was three streetlights from his front door. As he did after every long night in the city, he would count them down, one by one, until he was home.

  “MR. DEMPSEY! MR. Dempsey!” The landlady’s voice rose in volume as Martin ascended the staircase. “Mr. Dempsey!”

  Martin stopped halfway to the top. He had already loosened his tie and opened his collar. His suit jacket was secured over one shoulder by a hooked index finger. There was a window at the top of the stairs through which pink light cast soft shadows on the runner’s faded florals. He cocked his head, offering no more than a profile, to let the landlady know he was listening.

  “There was someone looking for you last night,” she said.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fichetti.”

  “But don’t you want to know who it was?”

  Martin exhaled—not so much a sigh as an admission of defeat. “All right,” he said. “Now, who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not for the life of me. He came last night ringing the bell to beat the band, and Mrs. Dempsey not at home to answer it. Once he was on his way, I knocked on your door and still didn’t hear a sound.” Mrs. Fichetti throttled a handkerchief between her hands. “You and Mrs. Dempsey aren’t having troubles, are you? Because that would be a terrible shame. You had best go to her and beg—”

  “There aren’t any problems,” he said. “Rosemary and the girls spent the night with her parents.”

  “But don’t you see? That’s what worries me. When a woman returns to her parents’ house—well, it’s already too late.”

  “We’re grand,” Martin said, but he could tell that she was not convinced. The Dempseys on the rocks was a better story to share with her bridge partners than any truth Martin could tell her. “Now, about this man. Did he say what he wanted?”

  “He wanted you, but he wouldn’t say what for. And he was a rough-looking one. Hard eyes. A fighter’s nose. Not so big, but beefy—oh, Mr. Dempsey, don’t tell me that you owe money. Are you a horse player? Have you gotten yourself mixed up with bookmakers? I know men have their vices—”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing of the sort.” Martin owed small sums across the city, but most of those were to tailors and haberdashers, not the types to seek out a bum debt in the last hours of a Friday night. And if it was a friend—well, anyone who knew him would know to ask around at one of his regular haunts.

  “You know I’ve had my misgivings about renting to musicians. I’ve always rented to hardworking people. People who need a good night’s sleep to prepare for an honest day’s labor. It’s only on account of your wife that I overlook your late hours. She’s from a good family, and it’s a privilege to have her here.”

  Martin resumed his ascent. “Rosemary is the better half,” he said over his shoulder. “No question about it. But fear not for our marriage. I will seek out this mystery caller—but at a more reasonable hour. For now, I must prepare for another night of dishonest labor.”

 
; Mrs. Fichetti sputtered but Martin pursued his retreat with such purpose that by the time he opened the door to the apartment, he could hear Mrs. Fichetti’s door shutting, followed immediately by the thunk of her dead bolt being thrown. Catching his breath, he added this latest run-in with Mrs. Fichetti to the long ledger of reasons why they had to get into a house of their own. When they had first moved in, they believed this apartment was nothing more than a way station, a place to get settled, where Rosemary could have the baby and they could figure out what it meant to be husband and wife—to be a family. He had never bargained on four years upstairs from Mrs. Fichetti, had never imagined that part of the cost of these rooms was required attendance at their landlady’s spontaneous, rambling sermons on the evils of popular music, strong drink, horse racing, FDR, communism, the way women wear their hair these days, or any other topics of concern gleaned from Father Coughlin’s radio program and the pages of the New York Journal-American.

  Certainly Rosemary would have agreed; she was one who bore the brunt of Mrs. Fichetti’s attentions and opinions. But for now Martin was alone in the apartment, and this was a rare event. Not being alone, but being alone here. He often felt that the apartment belonged to Rosemary and their two girls, Katherine and Evelyn. He was only a visitor, an interloper, whose greatest contribution to these five rooms—other than the rent that kept them here—was the wardrobe that sprawled across one side of the bedroom he shared with his wife. A double-tiered rack ran the length of one wall, bearing up the small fortune in shirts, suit coats, blazers, trousers, ties, and other items of apparel that Martin had accumulated during his first years in New York. The wall was a riot of gabardine, serge, and worsted wool; there were tweeds, plaids, pinstripes, herringbones, windowpanes. The run of shirts was more muted—white, blue—and all French-cuffed. The wall came to life again where Martin draped his neckties: polka dots, rep stripes, batiks, angular geometrics, undulant paisleys. Every color of the rainbow was represented, along with colors that nature had never imagined. Next to this was stationed a hat rack, where fedoras perched like plump, shadowy doves.

  It would have been easy to dismiss Martin as a dandy, but there was more to it. When he had been newly arrived in New York, he was eager to claim the golden, Hollywood-bright destiny that all Americans seemed to believe was their due. He hoped that by attiring himself in the unmistakable regalia of the American man—the suit worn by Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, a hat pitched at the same angle as William Powell’s in The Thin Man—this careful crafting of the outer shell would transform his inner being as well. In the right collar, foulard tie, and double-breasted, broad-shouldered gabardine jacket, he would not only look like an American but become one: a creature freed from the sordid history of the Old World and looking boldly to the future. This half of the room was more than a walk-in closet, more than Martin’s attempt to create in miniature his own Macy’s menswear department. It was an alchemist’s workshop, in which he endeavored, through daily application of cotton, silk, leather, and pomade, to transform his base nature into something more noble.

  But now the wardrobe was outmoded. He kept his clothes in impeccable condition, but the suits were no longer the latest styles, not since Evie had come along. Another mouth to feed, and even with a dresser full of her big sister’s hand-me-downs, there were plenty of other expenses. Martin wasn’t so coldhearted that a new suit came before Easter dresses for the girls—not that Rosemary would have allowed it anyway. Back when his song had been popular, when it seemed that it was all the start of something big, Martin thought they were moving beyond the need to make those sorts of choices. Now every day was full of the small deprivations and constant calculations that always seemed to work their way between him and Rosemary.

  And there was a man looking for him—a hard-eyed, rough-hewn fellow who wanted to know his whereabouts—and what could that be about but money? Apparently the man hadn’t said when he would return, or where he could be found, should Martin want to seek him out. Something about the whole episode struck Martin as queer. If it had happened downtown, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. The Manhattan night world where he spent his time was lousy with bounders and stay-outs, boozers and loudmouths and sloppy drunks who bellowed at all hours and in all places for another round, the loan of a five-spot, a fourth encore, or simply a firm handshake and a slap on the back from a bosom friend of three hours’ acquaintance. He saw it every night, more often as the little hand on the clock ended its climb and began the greased descent through the small numbers leading up to dawn. But it wasn’t a world that followed him back to the Bronx.

  UP THE ECHO chamber of the stairwell came Mrs. Fichetti’s shriek, impossible to sort into words. It was a wavering melody punctuated by the percussion of feet thumping against the stairs. The melody faded and there was only the insistent rhythm of footsteps drawing nearer, a low bass rumble that erupted into the snare-drum crack of a fist against his door.

  “Martin!” a voice called out. “Martin Dempsey! Open the feckin’ door!”

  Martin swung his feet over the edge of the bed and before he was fully awake he was out the bedroom door and into the living room. He scanned the room for something that could double as a weapon, and discounted his shoe (too small) and a secondhand saxophone (too valuable, even secondhand) before yanking an electric cord from the wall and taking up the Bakelite lamp that sat next to the sofa.

  The knocking came again. “Martin! Open up!”

  He stood in the middle of the living room, clad only in his billowy boxer shorts, his hand around the stem of a lamp whose shade was decorated with a tableau of two long-plumed birds of paradise preparing to mate or fight, depending on your attitude and the angle at which you viewed the image. Once again, his mind cycled through names, faces, debts, and other offenses that could have brought this fist, and the person in possession of it, to his door. He placed one hand on the knob, ready to yank it open and gain some element of surprise. But before he could turn the bolt, the voice spoke again, this time a sharp whisper pressing at the seam between the door and the jamb.

  “Open the door, Martin! It’s Francis! It’s your brother!”

  He hadn’t seen Francis in ten years, not since they were teenagers, but the man who stood now in the doorway was without a doubt his brother. He was three years younger than Martin, but had always been stouter, more solidly built. His red hair, once a thicket that defied the ministrations of all combs and brushes, had been pomaded into a rakish wave. His nose was small and fierce like a fist, and his eyes were deep-set and black as peat. There was nothing suave and elegant about his face, but it was a handsome mix of toughness and deviltry nonetheless. It was James Cagney’s face, that’s what it was.

  “Jaysus, but you’re a hard man to find,” Francis said. “I’ve been all across the Bronx looking for you.” He said Bronx like it was two syllables—“Bron-ix.” “Now would you let a man in before that woman has my head.”

  Mrs. Fichetti was laboring to the top of the stairs, her steps slow and her breathing heavy, desperate to be noticed for the effort expended despite her age, the hour, and the likelihood that she would be martyred in defense of her home. So here was his brother and there was Mrs. Fichetti to deal with, but all of this was coming at Martin in a headlong rush: Francis was supposed to be in Ireland. Martin was supposed to be asleep. Mrs. Fichetti did not factor into any sort of reunion between the Dempsey brothers, except here she was, huffing and panting her way along the dim hall, her face red as Christmas wrapping and her gray hair spidering out from her head.

  Martin looked at her, looked at his brother, even took a moment to glance down at himself (bare chest, boxer shorts, birds-of-paradise lamp). He took hold of the lapel of Francis’s jacket and yanked him into the room. “Not a word from you,” he said to the back of his brother’s head as he stepped into the hallway.

  “An awful rumpus,” Martin said to his landlady. “But let me assure you there’s no funny business or foul play of any s
ort.”

  Mrs. Fichetti opened her mouth to answer, but in place of words she took a gasping breath.

  “It’s my brother, you see. Another Mr. Dempsey, and I’m as shocked as you to find him here.” Mrs. Fichetti gulped again, and Martin could sense that words were about to pour forth—questions, threats, ultimatums—that he was in no condition to answer. “I will explain everything,” he said. “You deserve nothing less. But”—and here he looked down at his spindle legs, the wrinkled cotton of his underwear—“I’m not at all presentable for that conversation, you’ll have to admit that.”

  Her eyes bulged, whether from the shock to her propriety or from oxygen deprivation due to her hurried ascent, Martin could not say.

  “Mister. Dempsey.” Each word was propelled with a great puff of air.

  Martin inched toward the door, one hand on the knob, the other on the door frame. “Absolutely, Mrs. Fichetti. We will have quite the chat about this—but not now. We’re neither of us in any condition for that.”

  She inhaled, the next volley forming, but with a single glide step—Astaire himself would have been jealous—Martin bobbed behind the door and shut it with a resolute click. He stood frozen, listening to her breathing, waiting for the torrent to be unleashed. He turned once, locking eyes with Francis, a stern Not a word out of you glare. After half a minute and a sound not unlike a hen unkindly lifted from her nest, Mrs. Fichetti stuttered to the stairs in her slippered feet.