The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  IN THE LIVING room, which Birdie insisted on calling the parlor, Dennis Dwyer poured himself a drink. He’d learned long ago that if you kept the booze in its bottle, you looked like a drunk, but if you emptied it into a fancy cut-glass decanter, you were a man who appreciated the finer things in life. He knocked the first back in one go, and as the heat spread down his throat and through his limbs, he stared into the glass as if it contained more than a space for his next drink. His second was bigger than the first and as he raised it to his lips he became aware that he wasn’t alone. Kate had commandeered the sofa—which Birdie called the divan—and was lining up a row of straw-haired dolls in pinafores and crinolines. She worked methodically, her little mouth quietly shaping some nursery rhyme, or else a conversation between her and the dolls. Dwyer stared at her, waiting for her to notice that her grandfather was in the room. She worked her way down the line of dolls, patting some on the head and poking others in their glassy, unblinking eyes. When she reached the end, she turned toward Dwyer and pasted on a big toothy grin.

  Dwyer sipped the second Scotch. The girl still had that frozen smile on her face.

  “What are you looking at?” he said.

  She shrugged, a big stagy shrug—the Our Gang movies, that’s where that one belonged—and turned back to her dolls. Dwyer had another sip and eased himself into the armchair, which Birdie hadn’t yet come up with a better name for. He regarded the drink in his hand. He would nurse it, make it look like his first.

  Why did each daughter’s wedding have to come with such a bitter taste? Years ago, he had steeled himself for the sucker’s bargain you made when you threw a wedding: the women make all the decisions and you write the checks. And then on the big day you walk your daughter down the aisle and hand her over to some sweaty-palmed happyjack. You get her back for one dance at the reception, you make your toast, and you watch your wife cry her eyes out all day long and into the night. Fine, he got it. There were even moments that he regarded as his by right, those rituals that he looked forward to performing. The stately walk into the church, the toast—he had never been much for dancing—those were all things he could do, and do well. Birdie’s crying was something he would have to endure, but there would be her sisters, those old biddies, to help absorb some of the tears.

  He hadn’t counted on the fiasco with Rosemary. Knocked up by that piss-poor Irishman, fresh off the boat and looking to stick his thing into the first American girl stupid enough to open her legs—and that girl had been his Rosemary, whom he’d raised to be better than that. Loads better. And a musician! Dwyer knew that Martin spent his time with the coloreds, so what could you expect? If Rosemary had been looking for a way to put a knife into her father’s heart—to pay him back for setting her curfew too early when she was at St. Barnabas, or for telling her she had to go to Mount St. Vincent instead of one of those New England colleges where the girls ran around with Protestants or else with each other (he’d heard those rumors)—well, mister, then she had found it. And it wasn’t exactly a private disappointment, the kind where you can close your door and keep it in the family. Was there anyone in the Bronx who didn’t know that Dennis Dwyer’s daughter had gone to the altar with a bun in the oven? By God, that had cost some votes. He tried to explain the hurry-up wedding as two crazy kids in love—They’ll drive you nuts, what can you do?—but once the baby was born you just had to do the math.

  Dwyer did his level best to make them look respectable. He even offered that filthy mick—his son-in-law, if you could believe it—a job in the Department of Public Works. And the little nobody turned him down cold. The runt said Thanks but no thanks on the job, as if it were beneath him. Men, real American men who were twice as good as him, were standing in the street begging for work, and little Martin Dempsey tells Dennis goddamn Dwyer that he’s going to keep blowing his horn till all hours with a bandstand full of Negroes beating out jungle music. That’s going to put food on his daughter’s table? And that’s going to raise his grandchildren?

  More than once he had thought about closing his doors to them—closing his wallet, too—and telling Rosemary that she had brought enough shame on the family to last a lifetime. But blood ran thick. Blood bound you together with all of those who shared your name and it made the things you felt—love and anger and disappointment, mostly—stick to you like glue. There were claims of blood that even he was powerless to dissolve, but he knew that there was more to it. He knew that if he cut off Rosemary and her ill-conceived family, they were sure to fall, and fall far. And he knew what it would do to him to hear stories circulating about his daughter living in some cold-water tenement in Harlem, dumped by her deadbeat husband and shacked up with some other musician—only this time, a colored one. That was sure to put him in his grave. At the very least, it could cost him an election. He deserved better than that.

  Peggy’s wedding was supposed to be different, a rare chance at a do-over that would erase, or at least outshine, the first Dwyer family wedding. The church and the banquet hall would be a one-two punch of flowers and ribbons, champagne and chandeliers, silk and chiffon, and a cake that was bigger than the tenement where Dennis Dwyer’s parents had raised their eight children. But more than all of that, there would be a guest list that would testify to the place of the Dwyers in the hierarchy of the unruly kingdom of the Bronx. He wanted La Guardia there, sure, but more than that he wanted Edward Flynn, who had been for twenty-five years the king of the Bronx power brokers. Flynn wasn’t even fifty yet, and already he had been the chairman of the county Democratic Party, the secretary of state for all of New York, a member of the Democratic National Committee, and a boon companion of FDR himself.

  But they had all screwed Dwyer, and none worse than La Guardia—the same “Little Flower” who had practically begged Dennis Dwyer to throw his weight behind him in his first bid for mayor. Dwyer had taken a big risk: La Guardia was a Republican, for Christ’s sake, and the mayor knew he owed Dwyer, and a dance with the bride was one way he was supposed to make good on that debt. Not because Dwyer had any interest in seeing his little Irish rose in a clinch with that runty Italian, but because having the mayor make time for the wedding would show a banquet hall full of voters, officeholders, and party operatives—not to mention everyone who saw the photo that was sure to run in the society pages of the Bronx Home News—that Dwyer was a man with influence. A man who could not be ignored. But La Guardia backed out, and then to rub salt in Dwyer’s wounds he appointed Flynn the city’s ambassador to the World’s Fair, which would require Flynn to squire the royals around when he should be toasting Peggy’s future.

  Dwyer briefly considered changing the date of the wedding—“Damn that La Guardia,” he had said. “Doesn’t he know the king and queen don’t vote!”—but he ran up against the limits of his own power: the church was triple-booked on every other Saturday in June, and the club didn’t have an opening until the end of September. Even Dennis Dwyer couldn’t push another bride and her family of registered voters out of their reserved and deposit-paid spot. Every other option smacked of the kind of pasted-together wedding that they had been forced to organize for Rosemary. No, Peggy’s wedding needed to be set in stone, proof that certain events could be planned, anticipated, and held in abeyance until the appointed hour. In a stab at finding a silver lining, he also convinced himself that there was political hay to be made here: for years to come, Dwyer would tell his constituents the story of how he was invited to meet the king and queen—which indeed he had been—But I said, No, thanks, Your Highnesses, that’s the day my princess is getting married.

  Dwyer knew already how things would play out on his princess’s wedding day. Just as he was leading her down the aisle in front of a crowd of nobodies, some Young Turk at the World’s Fair with his eye on leapfrogging Dwyer would be pouring his smooth talk into Flynn’s ear. He’d wonder out loud, Where’s Dwyer? Didn’t he make the cut? And if somebody said it was his daughter’s wedding day—if they remembered that much—tha
t would just start the talk all over again. Wedding, huh? You heard about his older girl, right?

  FROM ABOVE, WITH its circles and spokes of names, the dining-room table looked like some kind of delicate machine. Each lacy white cog could be jammed by a stray touch or blown apart by the slightest breeze. Peggy had left for the fair, and her mother was supervising the cleanup of glassy-eyed dolls that Kate had dragged downstairs and scattered across the parlor. With the dining room quiet and his temper cooled, Rosemary’s father fixed his eyes on the jumble of seatless guests and half-filled tables.

  “Maybe you had it right all along,” he said. “You saved us this headache, at least.”

  Rosemary sighed, closed her eyes for a moment. “I think I’ve got this figured out. I’m going to move the Quinlans to table three. The across-the-street Kellys move to six. And Aunt Bridget moves to four, with the Beauchamps. That just leaves the Boston aunts.”

  “The nuns?”

  “They aren’t actually nuns.”

  “Never been married, always in black—might as well be nuns.”

  Rosemary smiled in spite of herself. She wanted her father to know that he had crossed the line, yelling and cursing. She didn’t want Kate to hear that kind of language from her grandfather. A smile was a reward he didn’t deserve.

  “Ah, Rosie. This could have been yours.”

  Her smile collapsed. “Not now, Dad.”

  “I’m not just talking about the fancy wedding. You could take this Halloran kid and turn him into a congressman, maybe even governor.”

  “What happened to mayor?”

  He winced and stuck out his tongue. “He doesn’t have the balls to be mayor. Even you couldn’t do that for him.”

  “I’m sure Peggy will get him where he needs to go.”

  “Congressman,” he said. “That’s still on the board. Peggy knows enough to get him there. Still—it should have been you.”

  “I don’t want to marry Timmy Halloran. I picked Martin—”

  “You didn’t pick—”

  “—because I love him. You need to know that. I married Martin because I love him.”

  “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie.” His face broke into a toothy, yellowed smirk. “Don’t pull that crap on me. You’re better than that. At least, I thought you were.”

  BIRDIE DWYER HAD said good-bye to Rosemary and given each of the girls a kiss. She was already worried about the older one: too much of her mother in her and look where that had led. Too much time around men, especially men like her father—that had been Rosemary’s problem. A man could tell himself that life was one big pleasure palace built just for him, but women were supposed to know better. Rosemary thought like a man, she had mannish habits, mannish appetites. It wasn’t something a mother was supposed to think about her own daughter but there it was.

  Peggy could be brash and you wouldn’t call her ladylike, but she knew how to attract the right kind of attention. Men liked her and she liked men, but she also knew that they were good for only so much. Peggy, like her mother, knew you couldn’t trust them, couldn’t be friends with them. It wasn’t their fault and it certainly wasn’t yours; it just was. But Rosemary—well, sometimes Rosemary seemed too eager to be one of the boys. She knew too much about baseball and politics, and not just the sorts of things that appeared on the front page of the paper. Rosemary knew who ran the Sanitation Department, and whom he had supported for county sheriff, and who his wife was, and why the wife couldn’t possibly sit next to Aunt Pauline at the wedding.

  Dennis had gotten his hooks into her from the start, dragging her in front of his cronies from the time she was four to recite the starting lineup of the Yankees or the past ten mayors of New York. These memory games had become his favorite party trick. Dennis imagined that her cutie-pie act smoothed his own rough edges in the minds of voters and potential patrons, but Birdie knew it never worked that way. Rosemary had never been cute. It was unnerving, really, having a child rattle off the names of everyone on the city council when she should have been dressing up dolls, hopscotching on the sidewalk, and hiding from her blustery father.

  And maybe college had been a mistake. Birdie thought it would keep her busy with something other than her father’s latest campaign. She would meet other girls who would bend her interests in more realistic directions: dances, marriage prospects, the business of running a family. But the only thing those years at Mount St. Vincent’s did was make Rosemary restless—she complained about the nuns, about the other girls, about the Fordham and Manhattan boys who circled the campus like sharks—and then at the graduation dance she fell for that Martin of hers.

  Maybe that had been for the best. It wasn’t like suitors were lining up at the door. Boys didn’t know what to make of her. She was either their pal or a way to get closer to Peggy. Rosemary was too quick, too sharp, when she talked to boys her own age. She thought she was having fun with them but men bruise easily; Birdie had tried to teach her that. Couldn’t she see it in her father? He let on as if he liked roughhousing, but only as long as he was the one landing the punches. He was like bone china: hard to the touch, but brittle. Fragile, even, if you didn’t handle it properly. But Rosemary, for all her book smarts, never really understood men. Not the way a woman is supposed to.

  Maybe if she and Dennis had had a boy. That might have made Rosemary realize she wasn’t her father’s son and that there was no point in pretending. It’s not like they hadn’t tried—God, how they’d tried. She lost one before Rosemary, then two more between Rosemary and Peggy, then the last one when Peggy was barely nine months. That time almost did her in, and afterward Dr. Reimer said that they should be done—that they were lucky to have the two girls and it was best to count your blessings and not your losses. She never asked if the doctor did something to put a stop to it or if her body called it quits. There had been so much blood that last time, so much more than any of the other times. And who knows, they could have all been girls anyway, and then look where they’d be: four more Rosemarys or a houseful of Peggys. That wouldn’t have made life with Dennis any easier, to say the least, and what would it have done for her? It was best not to think about what might have been. If it’s to be, it’ll be. That’s what her mother had taught her. And so Birdie felt responsible for Rosemary, but only so much.

  THE PLAZA HOTEL

  NEW ROOM, SAME OLD man: Michael’s jailer or doctor. The angel or the devil. Michael still hadn’t cracked that mystery. It had been a few days since he’d first seen the man on the boat, but they had docked and disembarked and there had been a ride in a car. They were in a city—if he was forced to guess, he’d say New York, but there was another mystery for you. What were they doing in New York?

  The old man wasn’t offering any answers. He stared at Michael and tented his fingers on the ridge of his heron’s-beak nose, as if whispering secrets to himself. They were in a stalemate—the old man on a white-and-gold sofa engorged with stuffing and Michael adrift on a great raft of a bed, where he’d been coming in and out of wakefulness all morning. Each time he woke he peered in the old man’s direction and there he was, with a great thatch of white hair sweeping up and away from his angular face. As soft and cloudlike as his hair was, his spectacles seemed cut from iron. They framed those agate eyes, which danced from boredom to bemusement to consternation. If he didn’t know better, Michael might think that he was just an old man contemplating a snooze or a snootful of brandy.

  Since their earlier encounter, when the old man had opened his mouth and emitted a sound like hell’s own bells, Michael had not attempted to engage him in conversation. The man ignored him and he ignored the man. He hadn’t heard the Noise, not in its full force, since the man had last opened his horrid mouth, but he was still plagued from time to time by hammer-to-the-temples headaches and edge-of-the-cliff vertigo that made it impossible for him to fix his attention on any one thing, including the passage of time, for very long.

  Michael’s mind had always been prone to wander—a cause for r
ebuke from his priestly schoolmasters. His mental rambles were slow and leisurely; he could spend an afternoon pondering the way the light played on the surface of a stream, or devising a more scripturally illuminating homily about the woman who meets Our Lord on the road to Emmaus, or imagining a host of scenarios in which he and Eileen Casey were caught in a rainstorm and forced to take refuge in the Cooneys’ barn. He could work through all the possible directions that such an episode could lead, even though thoughts of Eileen were constant reminders of the weakness of the flesh and made up a sizable percentage of his weekly confessions. Often it was only the cane across the back of his neck that called a stop to such voracious flights of fancy.

  But he could no longer sustain such efforts. His mind had become like a hummingbird that bobbed from this bloom to that; he sipped but never drank too deeply. It was another by-product of whatever had befallen him, one that he hoped would fade in the days or weeks or months ahead. But this ongoing visitation had him worried that rather than ascending into better health he was spiraling into the abyss.

  He marked time this way: Before the Noise and After the Noise. The line between the two epochs of his life was a ragged gash in his memory. The Noise had obliterated his sense of time on either side of the event. On the border of the Before side, he was in a church, he remembered that much, with his brother Francis (he had awoken one morning on board the ship with a full and sudden knowledge that the Ginger-Haired Man was his brother). At the back of the church stood a man in dark blue serge—a uniform, it seemed—and throughout the Mass, Francis would look over his shoulder at the man, who never once sat or knelt. Incense rose from the altar. There was a boy in a cassock and surplice, and an old priest with a purple stole. The After period began in fragments: Francis’s face streaked in black; the ceiling of an automobile with the blue sky edging through the windows; the smell of brackish harbor water momentarily swept aside by a gust of sharp, sweet salt air. These events raced by in a whoosh that filled his ears, like the tail end of a comet that had smashed his life in two. He wasn’t so much deaf as deafened, as if he were subjected to the endless hollow moan of a conch shell the size of a castle. He had tried to speak but could not tell what sounds, if any, came out of him. He tried to read but the letters refused to make sense. He could see them just fine, but felt like he was stuck in the moment right before the symbols could be deciphered, each word forever on the tip of his tongue. Writing posed a similar hurdle. As he moved the pen, the ink flowed onto the page and never stopped moving. It was animated, restless, and he hadn’t yet found a way to fix the letters—letters he could not read—in place.