The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Martin sighed heavily and turned to face his brother. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said. “How in hell did you get here?”

  “How’s that for a warm welcome?” Francis said. “My own flesh and blood, and you’re raining curses on me. Do you know what a trial it was to find you? If there’s a better hidey-hole in all of New York then I’d sure like to see it.”

  “Look at your man, already an expert on New York.”

  Francis broke into a grin that set a shine in those black eyes. “Would you look at the two of us,” he said. “Major Cat and General Dog, just like Mam used to say.” He opened his arms wide and Martin stepped into his embrace. The two men pounded each other on the back, then held the clinch a moment longer, like boxers waiting to be separated by the referee.

  “You’re a sight,” Martin said, “but what are you doing here? How did you get out?”

  “Of Ireland?”

  “No—of jail.”

  “Oh, they let me out,” he said. “On account of good behavior.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? If it wasn’t for Michael’s letters I wouldn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

  Michael’s letters to Martin, sent to commemorate various Holy Days of Obligation, were full of spiritual uplift and fond wishes for those actions necessary to secure the salvation of his eldest brother’s soul. (I pray that you are partaking of the sacraments, that you are honoring your marital vows, and that you are living a life free from the demonic effects of vile liquors.) It was all a bit difficult to take seriously from a boy who had been seven when Martin left home, and little in the way of news—a word that smacked of worldly concerns—could be gleaned from the lofty skywriting of Michael’s epistles. It had been two months since he’d received Michael’s Easter letter—the Ninth Letter of Michael to the Americans, he called it—and it hadn’t breathed a word of Francis’s impending release from prison.

  “You got those, too?” Francis drew a sharp breath across his teeth. “All that talk of my immortal soul and the perils I’d put myself in. It was taxing, reading one of those—but the joke’s on us, apparently. Michael says they were all written in code.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Of course, at the—look, Martin, get yourself dressed. We’ve got places to go.”

  “I’ve had an hour’s sleep, Francis. I’m knocked over seeing you here, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I’ve got a thing or two to tell you, and—”

  “So tell me. The landlady won’t be back to bother us, not for a while yet.”

  “What about the missus? Or did she find herself a better piano player?”

  “She’s at her parents’ for the night.”

  “Trouble in—”

  “You’re as bad as the old woman. Now, what’ve you got to tell me?” Martin dropped down on the sofa and crossed his legs. He couldn’t help but notice his brother’s suit: pale gray and expensively made, it was distinctly Savile Row. Rather than flaring winglike before wasping back to his waist, the jacket was cut close to his frame. His tie was a deep crimson overlaid with a grid of white diamonds—a harlequin pattern.

  “It’s Da.” Francis fidgeted with his hands before folding them in front of him, as if in prayer. “He’s dead.”

  Martin heard himself say, “How?” but what he thought was, This can’t be real. He’d had too much to drink and hadn’t gotten into bed until dawn and now he was in a dream with Francis and Mrs. Fichetti and Da is dead. That had to be it. He was sitting in nothing but his boxer shorts, and Rosemary and the girls were nowhere to be found, and here was Francis, dressed like a gentleman instead of a prisoner, and he was telling Martin that he had just seen Michael, and now he was saying that their father was dead. Martin reached for the box of cigarettes on the coffee table and plucked one out. He lit it in one clean motion, hoping that this exercise of will would snap him awake.

  “His heart. Doctor said he must’ve had a bad heart.”

  Martin took a drag of his cigarette. “Did he suffer?”

  “Now, that’s a big question, isn’t it?”

  “You know what I mean. Did he linger?”

  “No one knows. One of the neighbors found him, facedown in the garden. Said it looked like he’d been struck by a bolt from the blue.”

  Martin tried to conjure an image of his father’s face, but what he got was faded and ragged around the edges, like a photograph left in the rain. He foundered for something to say. “When did it happen?”

  “It’s been two weeks,” Francis said.

  “Two weeks! And you’re only telling me now? You couldn’t have sent a telegram—a letter, even?”

  “I thought you should hear this in person, from someone who shares your blood.”

  “You came all this way to tell me that Da is dead?”

  “Would you’ve rather gotten the news alone, with nothing but a torn envelope in front of you? We’re family. That’s what family does for family.”

  Francis offered a weak smile, a show of sincerity, but there was something odd in his manner. He had an edge in his voice and Martin couldn’t tell if he was making a joke or saying it straight. They had shared a bedroom almost from the moment Francis was born, and Martin thought he knew his brother’s every twitch and sigh, but Francis had changed. He had acquired expressions and ways of speaking that Martin could not decode. Or maybe nothing had changed, and Martin was simply out of practice.

  “Look, it’s more than just that,” Francis said. He went to the front window, looked up the street and then down the other side. The sun was on the curtains, the heat of the day already coming into the apartment. “Come with me and I’ll explain everything.”

  “I’ve been up all night—”

  “Get yourself dressed. Something nice. Something sophisticated.”

  What was the point of arguing? Here was his brother, appearing as if by magic. If this was a dream, then going off with his brother was the logical next step. His head was still scrambled by the late night and the lack of sleep, the shock of seeing Francis and the news of his father’s death. This last item was the hardest to account for. He did not know how or what to feel about it; it was curiously without shape or weight. He knew that there would come a time when the full force of his father’s death would hit him—his absence not only from the world, but from Martin’s life—but for now, the fact of his father’s death didn’t change anything, or so he thought in those earliest moments. It would matter later—or so he hoped, because if it didn’t then Martin must be a cold, soulless son of a bitch. I’m in shock, he told himself, even as he knew that he was not.

  WOODLAWN

  EVERY TIME ROSEMARY CAME back to the house, she felt the old routines waiting for her, like a shawl that hung by the door. All that she had become—Martin’s wife, a mother twice over—melted away in the face of those older identities: list maker, load bearer, peacekeeper, daughter. Married or not, she would always be their daughter, but she had hoped that a family of her own would alter how her parents thought of her. And it had—just not in the way she had imagined. Her father took it the hardest, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. She was the oldest, and hadn’t he always expected great things from her, or at least that she would lead a husband to great things? Her hasty marriage to Martin put a stop to all that. A penniless immigrant musician, he had called Martin. Rosemary’s dirty little tinker. What kind of a girl would—

  The baby helped. Kate was fat-faced and full of smiles and from her earliest days had reserved a special grin for her grandfather—as if she knew that he was the hardest to win over and the easiest to disappoint. Evie was only a baby but she was more standoffish; more like her grandfather than Kate was, and so more likely to vex him. He was still awaiting a grandson so that he could pour his ambitions directly into a more reliable vessel.

  Where Rosemary had made a hash of her father’s designs, her sister, Peggy, was sticking with the plan. In one week she would marry Timothy Halloran, a Fordham Law
School graduate who had landed a job in the Manhattan DA’s office. The wedding would be held at the best church, St. Barnabas, with a reception to follow at the best banquet hall, the Croke Park Club. The original guest list had topped five hundred, with its legions of cousins, aunts, and uncles reinforced by squads of favor seekers looking to score points with the father of the bride: Dennis Dwyer, the vice chairman of the Bronx Democratic Committee, was a man whose goodwill could deliver half the Bronx come election day, not to mention a fortune in contracts for all manner of city services.

  The wedding gave her father a chance to do what he did best: turn any family milestone into a campaign rally. It was not only the public launch of his younger daughter’s glorious future but also an opportunity for him to demonstrate to the voters and the power brokers that, despite rumors to the contrary, Dennis Dwyer was still a man who could not be ignored.

  But a seismic shift had struck the Dwyer-Halloran nuptials when it was announced that Their Royal Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth would be visiting the World’s Fair on the same day as the wedding—a date that the Dwyers had chosen almost ten months earlier. The royal visit and the official functions attached to it immediately siphoned off the most prominent names on the guest list, including the mayor himself. And once La Guardia sent his regrets, lesser lights in the city’s political firmament lined up to undo the Pleased to attend they had checked on the cream-colored response cards.

  Rosemary’s father had been chewing glass for months about another botched wedding, and how there must be a curse on the family, but if there were curses in this world, Rosemary knew that none of them had ever, or would ever, land on Peggy. She had always led a charmed life. All the royal visit did was peel away the bounders and the party hacks from the guest list—people that Peggy had never wanted to invite in the first place. She wouldn’t be able to pick the deputy mayor out of a lineup, so why would she want him at her wedding? No, Rosemary knew how this would all play out: Peggy and her perfect husband would recover from the not-quite-perfect wedding, and have a boy and then another and another, and with each one her father would busy himself with plans that would save the boys from ever having to think about where life would take them. Do as Papa says and all will be right with the world. One of them in the mayor’s office, another in the governor’s mansion, and the third in Washington. Peggy’s job would be to shepherd them along, keep their faces clean and their hair combed straight, and make sure that her husband didn’t interfere with the comet-force dreams of Dennis Dwyer.

  ROSEMARY ARRIVED AT her parents’ house on Friday evening for the final run-through before the wedding. She should have ignored her mother’s backhanded compliment, delivered as the plainspoken truth—Peggy is better at making choices; you’re better at making decisions—and come over early on Saturday when they could all start the day fresh. Despite what her mother had said on the telephone, she knew the details would not get sorted over dinner. Sure enough, her father was in no mood to ruin his meal with wedding talk and as soon as the plates were cleared he was into the Scotch and then it was time to put the girls to bed. When Rosemary came downstairs, her father was hazy around the eyes and her mother was brooding over her teacup. And Peggy? When she finally returned from the World’s Fair, where she was performing as an Aquagal in a water-ballet revue with a cast of hundreds, she insisted that she had already made plans for one last night out with her best girlfriends—all of which led to another dustup with her mother about how Peggy wasn’t taking the wedding seriously: Why was she splashing around in a pool when she should have been thinking about the seating chart?

  Rosemary slept badly in her old bedroom, thanks to the narrow mattress and Kate kicking in her sleep and the baby up every two hours. She came downstairs convinced that the day was going to be a wash, but wouldn’t you know it, by midmorning they had settled on the hymns, double-checked the centerpieces with the florist, triple-checked the order with the liquor store, and compiled the checklist for the photographer (wedding party, bride & groom, b&g w/ her parents, b&g w/ his, etc.). Peggy had already been fitted for her wedding gown, and the dress now hung upstairs in the closet of Rosemary’s old room. Even Martin had been brought into the fold. Rosemary had assumed that he would approach the wedding with equal parts complaint and dread, but when he was conscripted into fielding a band for the reception—his first stint as a bandleader—he took to the project with gusto.

  It was the seating chart that bedeviled them. Every time it seemed settled, the next day’s mail would scatter the artfully arranged tables like some mad game of fifty-two pickup. It was bad enough that the head count continued to drip-drip-drip as putative guests scored invitations to one of the official receptions for the royal visit, but the Dwyers also had to contend with less majestic upheavals: the Baltimore aunts had stopped speaking to the Boston aunts, the Teamsters’ chief was feuding with the head of the pipefitters’ union, a city councilman facing indictment had to be moved from the center of the room to a more distant orbit.

  Rosemary scanned her parents’ dining-room table, crowded with numbered paper circles and strips the size of fortune-cookie predictions bearing the name of each guest at the reception. It resembled a tabletop battlefield where generals maneuvered armored divisions with a croupier’s rake. Peggy and her mother sat at one end, the latest guest list in front of them, while Rosemary and her father considered ways to group the unassigned second cousins, maiden aunts, party faithful, and midlevel cronies. They worked their way down the list, ticking through the names.

  “What about the Hartigans?” Rosemary said.

  “Oh, they canceled last week,” her mother said.

  This news snapped her father to attention. “Do you mean to tell me that given the choice between seeing our daughter get married and standing in a crowd with a million idiots hoping for a five-second looky-look at the crowned heads of Europe, they chose the goddamn king and queen? John Hartigan can go to hell for all I care.” Her father stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray that resembled a lead-crystal brick. What kind of message did it send if John Hartigan—who owed half of his wrecking firm’s city contracts to the good graces of Dennis Dwyer—thought he could get away with skipping the nuptials? “This whole thing is looking like one big mistake.”

  “Daddy, please do not refer to my wedding as a mistake.”

  “Your wedding is not a mistake. The timing of your wedding is a mistake.” He worked his jaw as if he were grinding a piece of hard candy between his molars, a habit he’d had as long as Rosemary could remember; another of those familiar signs of home, as timeless as the floral couch with its stiff plastic cover.

  “I don’t know why you’re getting mad at me,” Peggy said. “Tim and I wanted a short engagement. But for some reason, you insisted I had to be a June bride—”

  “I never insisted on anything. I haven’t made a single goddamn decision since this whole fiasco got started!”

  “So first it’s a mistake and now it’s a fiasco?” Peggy flopped the list onto the table among the slips of paper, the squat black telephone, the Waterford sugar bowl, the ashtrays. “How can anyone think in here?” She moved closer to the window, fanning herself with one hand. The eyelet curtains hung limp from their rods.

  “Sit down, young lady.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “And besides, I’m late as it is. I’ve got two shows today and I should have left an hour ago.”

  “That’s all we need,” her father said. “The bride swimming down the aisle in her bathing suit.”

  Peggy narrowed her eyes. Whatever she was about to say, Rosemary knew it would be another mess for her to clean up. “Peggy,” she intervened. “We really need to finish this.”

  “Then plan your own wedding, why don’t you?” Peggy darted through the door into the hallway. Her feet clacked rapidly up the stairs. Their father wasn’t far behind. Soon enough came the clinking of the stopper in the crystal decanter, then the decanter’s lip against the rim of a highball gl
ass.

  Her mother pursed her lips. Any mention of Rosemary’s wedding put the same queasy expression on her face. “I’m sure she didn’t mean that,” she said. “It’s just nerves.”

  Rosemary gave her own grim smile and retrieved the scattered slips of paper, one for each guest who had circled Peggy’s big day on the calendar. Rosemary’s wedding day hadn’t had the mayor, the borough president, or a single city councilman. It hadn’t had much of anything. The service was conducted in a small side chapel used for baptisms, and was followed by a somber lunch at an Italian restaurant. There hadn’t been time to get a proper wedding gown made, and even with alterations, the gown her own mother had worn twenty-five years earlier would never have fit her. She settled for something off the rack in Bloomingdale’s bridal shop. As the pinch-faced clerk rang up the purchase and stowed the gown in a pink box, she stared rather obviously at Rosemary’s midsection. But for all the humiliations surrounding her not-so-big day—and there were plenty—what Rosemary remembered most clearly was the weather: piercing cold beneath a crystal-blue sky, the kind of cold that brought sharp tears to your eyes and sucked the breath out of you. As they exited the chapel, the wind came hard off the Hudson and absolutely ransacked them; it pushed through their coats, riffled their pockets, snatched at hats and scarves. It was the first time that Mr. and Mrs. Martin Dempsey had stepped into the light of day, and no doubt Rosemary’s mother saw it as an omen, an ill wind to chill their hearts and remind them what comes of giving in to fiery passion.

  But that’s not how Rosemary saw it. The wind hit her and she laughed, high and joyous. It was an odd thing to do with everyone else so stoic and resigned—everyone except for her and Martin. When she laughed he took her hand and he kissed her. Not the chaste kiss they had exchanged in the chapel in front of a small knot of friends and sad-faced aunts. This was a full-on-the-mouth kiss and it thrilled her the way that blast of cold air had. Her parents heard her laugh, they saw the kiss, they did not approve—but what did she care? She was a fallen thing in their eyes, never to be made whole. Through long weeks of shame and tears, she had seen herself as they saw her, but in that moment she was free. The life that came next would be hard, but it would be hers—hers and Martin’s. She had crossed over into a country from which there was no return, and if it was the custom of this land to kiss your husband in broad daylight, buffeted by a wind that burned your flesh but made you feel alive, then so be it. They would cross the border, hand in hand.