The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Rosemary seemed as resigned to this course of events as Martin was. She knew Peggy, and knew that trying to keep her from going her own way would only stiffen her sister’s resolve. It had been like this for years, back to the days when they shared a bedroom and Rosemary took it on herself to shield Peggy’s shenanigans from their parents. Nights when the house had the hollowed-out calm of a bell that has finally stopped ringing, Peggy could open the door, slide through a span no wider than a fist, and move from inside the house to outside in the interval between one breath and another. From their bedroom, Rosemary imagined her sister’s bare feet on the flagstone path, Peggy with her shoes in her hand and a boy waiting, always a boy waiting, around the corner or in a car that would coast for two or three houses before roaring to life—every boy a Romeo snatching his Juliet from under Mr. Capulet’s whiskey-blasted nose.

  Peggy was always back in bed before Rosemary woke up, having drifted in as quietly as she’d left, and when the girls were called to breakfast, Peggy was the one who was chipper, refreshed, and rested. Rosemary would be worn down by a lousy night’s sleep, her dreams tortured by what-ifs—because if Peggy was the carefree Juliet, then Rosemary was the nurse, the maidservant, the worrywart older sister.

  FRANCIS AND THE blonde were gone and Rosemary had gone to bed. In the living room, Michael sat up with Martin, who was gamely trying to mime a series of questions. Would you like a drink? was easy enough, but how was he to suggest a cup of tea? After a flurry of halfhearted attempts to shape a kettle with his hands, he decided it was best to go to the kitchen for the real thing. Martin paused at the wireless on his way out of the room and switched it on. The light came up on the dial, but after he’d fidgeted with the knob he caught himself and, embarrassed, switched it off.

  Michael shook his head, waved his hands in front of him, tried to suggest it was all right, that Martin should listen, but his brother didn’t seem to catch his meaning and instead sat heavily in an armchair upholstered in a nubby blue fabric.

  This was all getting to be too much. There was so much Michael wanted to talk to Martin about, but when had Martin ever really listened to Michael? They hadn’t been face to face in ten years, and back then Michael had been only a little spiv and Martin already fixated on his dream of America. Michael had tried through his letters to give his brother a sense of his life and of himself, but that attempt had been banjaxed by unbroken codes and bollixed lines of communication. Martin might have read the words, but he didn’t really read the letters. If he had looked closely, the code would have offered itself up for the cracking. Michael couldn’t make it too obvious, for fear that Brother Zozimus or one of the other priests charged with monitoring the correspondence of the seminarians for blasphemous, prurient, vulgar, scatological, or otherwise unwholesome content would consign the letter to the basement furnace. Still, Michael had hoped the tone of his letters would be enough to alert his brother—his actual, flesh-and-blood brother—to the presence of hidden messages lurking in the typewritten pages: the perils into which Martin placed his soul by attending the cinema (a place whose interplay of light and darkness approximates the fires of hell and the shadow cast by the refusal of God’s mercy); the sinful nature of jazz music (a bestial rhythm which inspires gyrations that taunt all notions of Christian purity and mimic the seizures of the possessed whom Christ Our Lord exorcised); and the flesh- and spirit-rotting qualities of strong drink (a poison that seduces the body and debases the soul and deprives men of the ability to govern, with firm hand, their animal nature). Martin couldn’t think he was serious about any of it. Michael figured his brother would have a good laugh at each month’s tortured missive, and then enjoy some cryptographic fun unearthing Michael’s dispatches from the front lines of pastoral education: PRIESTS OLD AND DAFT, STUDENTS YOUNG AND DAFT, or HAVE I MADE A MISTAKE? PLEASE ADVISE, or MY GIRL, MY GIRL, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

  Michael began to realize with the passage of time and the receipt of too many stale, codeless replies that while they may have been born of the same parents, he and Martin were strangers. Even when they’d lived under the same roof, Martin was always off practicing in some empty shed, or in the shell of the great house over the hill, a once-grand manse that the locals had burned during the war to settle accounts with their landlord. And when Martin wasn’t blowing that clarinet of his, or wrestling with the pub’s rickety upright—the only piano in town—then he was working to put aside a bankroll for his American plan. Now here they were, face to face, and both were struggling with anything more complicated than a yes-or-no question. More than that, Michael couldn’t deny the way his own brother fidgeted in his chair, uneasy with the presence in his own home of poor, young, damaged, God-mad Michael.

  It was too much. Michael stood quickly—and so unexpectedly that Martin flinched—and moved to the wireless. He punched the button, and the golden half-circle of the numbered dial glowed. One hand was on the webbing that covered the speaker and when the signal popped, Michael felt a pulse under his fingers. He turned the volume knob and the pulse became a thrumming—his hand was like an insect’s antennae. He could feel the music, the pounding of the drums, the buzz of the horns, pinpricks from a piano. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want any interference. He imagined that if he could force all sense impressions to enter through a single door that he could concentrate the experience and feel it more vividly. Sound was nothing more than vibrations and here those vibrations came into his hands, as if he were a blind man reading the humped code of a Braille page. He could have hummed the tune. He could have sung along. And then he lost it.

  His eyes snapped open and Martin was at his side, one finger pressed to his lips, the other hand cutting the volume to nil. Michael felt hollowed out, but his brother only pointed to his wristwatch, then put both hands together, as if in prayer, and laid them on the side of his head. Quiet. It’s late. Everyone is sleeping. Michael, wounded, nodded. Martin was talking—his jaw was moving and Michael assumed that he was producing words—but Michael could only stare at his own hands.

  Since Michael’s appearance yesterday, he’d worn a look of blissful perseverance. Martin had wondered if he was some sort of holy fool, offering up his suffering to the greater glory of God. Now, for the first time, Michael looked like someone from whom every treasure he’d ever carried had been snatched. Martin touched Michael’s shoulder, enough to get his attention, and began to play the air in front of him as if it were an invisible piano. With the fingers of his right hand he worked the valves of a make-believe trumpet. He took Michael’s hands in his own and placed them back on the speaker, and as he punched the button, the eye of the wireless glowed again. Martin nodded yes-yes-yes and that idiot’s grin came back to Michael’s face and he smiled and nodded back, a mirror of his brother, and squeezed Martin’s hand. Having Martin understand meant the world to him.

  Michael could feel the music coming through the speakers again, but the song had changed. This one was a light rainfall on his palms instead of the thunderstorm of the earlier tune, but he could feel it, could almost hear it, and he had been so parched for sound that even this quieter number made his senses bloom. He closed his eyes and leaned, stock-still, against the cabinet. Martin stayed with him, his hand over the other speaker, trying to feel what his brother felt.

  AN HOUR LATER, Michael was alone, the apartment dark. Martin had mimed sleep; it was becoming a game for the two of them now, not the earlier grim attempts at communication but a contest to see who could out-charade the other. He left the room and returned a few minutes later with a pillow and a bedsheet for his brother. Michael wondered if this meant that Francis wasn’t coming back. Had Michael been exiled from the fancy hotel? Had this been Francis’s plan all along: to convey Michael to the United States and deposit him with Martin? Had he been traded, if only temporarily, for the blond girl? On the sofa, Michael knit his fingers together and webbed them over his still-full belly. He rested his chin on his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them—te
n minutes later, maybe an hour—Yeats was sitting in the same chair Martin had occupied earlier in the night.

  “Where have you been?” Michael said.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “I’ve been here for hours.”

  “So have I.” Yeats made a steeple of his long fingers and tapped them against the bridge of his nose. “This Bronx is a very strange place.”

  “Only the Bronx?” Michael sat upright on the sofa. He ran his hands roughly over his face, shaking off the last traces of sleep. “Mr. Yeats, I can’t make sense of a single moment I’ve spent in America. And I’ve got a theory I’d like to run by you—about your nature, your origin, the substance of your being—but you have to promise not to take it personally.”

  Yeats crossed his legs and sat back in the chair.

  “I’ve been speculating that you might be a figment of my imagination. That your apparent presence is the result of some psychological or physical injury that I’ve suffered—an injury which has rendered me somehow off balance, mentally speaking.”

  “You’re saying I am a delusion.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. And you must admit that if our roles were reversed, you’d be asking yourself the same question.”

  Yeats seemed about to answer, but paused and composed himself. “Why is it so difficult to accept that communication is possible between the spiritual and material planes?”

  “I don’t deny it at all. But the sort of visitation I’m familiar with is Virgin-Mother-on-a-mountaintop, not dead-poet-in-New-York.”

  “And yet, here I am.” Yeats stood and began pacing the room.

  For all of his doubts, Michael didn’t want Yeats to be a figment; it was more comforting to think that he was a ghost or some other entity from the world beyond. If he was a delusion, then Michael was only talking to himself, although a part of himself that wore a Yeats mask. But if Yeats was real, then it was a sign that some outside assistance was available. Or perhaps it was simply, and necessarily, companionship—contact with a mind other than his own.

  “So tell me,” Michael said. “What’s so strange about the Bronx?”

  Yeats stopped his circuit of the room. “I was in this flat, but all was in a state of flux. The weather changed minute to minute: sun and then clouds, hotter and colder, pouring rain and then blue skies. At the same time, the buildings themselves aged. Freshly laid bricks one moment and derelict the next. I saw this flat as it is now, and as an empty lot, and as a clapboard-covered house. I saw it as a run-down tenement—squalid in its appearance, one window covered in boards, its bricks scored by black smoke.”

  “A vision of the future, do you think?”

  “The future, the past, the current moment. It was as if I were flipping through an enormous book, forward and backward, trying to locate a particular page. It may have been the most peculiar part of this entire experience.”

  “Simply existing, months after your death—that’s not the most peculiar part?”

  “Of course not. I expected some sort of existence after my physical death. But this sensation of time, of the way it fluctuated—it was unsettling.” Yeats peered out the window. Across the street, a row of identical houses. Over the roofline, the hazy glow of the Grand Concourse was visible. “Gradually, the pages became somewhat easier to control. I could slow their movement, explore each before turning to another. I have seen many people in this flat, and I have seen inventions that Wells or Verne could not have imagined.”

  “The future, eh? I’ve always imagined the skies full of zeppelins, and—”

  “It’s as ragged as the present. Worse, even. Fires burning unchecked, whole city blocks in ruin. The past, at least, was quieter. This land is newly settled, and you need only scratch away the veneer of asphalt and brick to see the land for what it was. Meadows. Hillsides. Forests. The imprint of mankind’s efforts is widespread, but it does not run deep. What was built here could be swept away in no time at all.”

  Yeats seemed uncomfortable, fidgety even. Michael had seen him sit, legs crossed, for hours on end, but now Yeats paced, shifted, looked quickly in one direction and then another.

  “Are these your new accommodations?” Yeats regarded the sofa, the chair where he had been sitting, the oval coffee table. He seemed disappointed by the lank drapes, the faded floral rug, the narrow polished breakfront with its collection of cups.

  “I don’t know. Francis was here earlier but he left with a woman.”

  “A woman?” Yeats seemed more interested in this than in anything Michael had yet said. “What sort of woman?”

  “A pretty one. She arrived during dinner and later the two of them left. There was some sort of a row about it. She was a bit of a wild one, I think.”

  Yeats let out a sharp laugh, almost like a seal’s bark. “Do you have much experience with wild ones?”

  “I didn’t spend my entire life in the seminary,” Michael said. “And I saw enough to know that she fancies Francis. She kept touching his arm while she was talking to him.”

  Yeats took in this information and continued his pacing, as if working through a mathematical equation. “Knowing what I do of your brother, and what his inclinations might be in the presence of a wild young woman, it is likely that he is otherwise engaged tonight.”

  “You didn’t see any of this in your giant magic book of the future, did you?”

  Yeats stared at Michael for a moment, and then looked away.

  “So it’s to be the sofa for me, is it?” Michael said. “Well, I’ve slept on worse.”

  Yeats ceased pacing. “We could strike out on our own.”

  “Just the two of us?”

  “If your theory is correct and I am only a delusion, then it would be you alone.”

  “It’s more of a hypothesis,” Michael said.

  “I suppose I understand your hesitation,” Yeats said. “Perhaps you prefer to be carted about like a child, or treated like an invalid. You are the youngest of the brothers, are you not?”

  Michael paused for only a moment before hauling himself to his feet. “So you’re going to shame me into action, is that it?”

  “That depends,” Yeats said. “Have you any money?”

  Michael had a few crisply folded bills of uncertain denomination that Francis had given him before their Saturday walk. The money gave him a certain confidence, but there were other logistical difficulties to be overcome when a deaf-mute traveled with a ghost. He thought of the stilted exchange of gestures that vexed him and Martin. “Assuming we can find a taxi,” he said to Yeats, “how am I supposed to mime ‘big hotel’?”

  “Check your pocket,” Yeats said, nodding toward the suit coat draped over the arm of the sofa. From the breast pocket Michael withdrew a business card; the gold-embossed crest at the center matched the one on the doors and awnings of the hotel.

  “Where did that come from?”

  Yeats shrugged. “Perhaps I put it there when you weren’t looking.”

  “You tricky poltergeist!” Michael clapped his hands together. He hadn’t felt so full of life, so ready for adventure, since… since any moment he could remember. “Well, then,” he said. “Let us arise and go now.”

  “Are you quoting me to me?”

  “One of us was bound to say it. I thought it better for the both of us if I was the one to do it.”

  HARLEM

  THE SAVOY BALLROOM WAS the mecca of New York big-band jazz, the mile zero of swing, the hottest spot in Harlem—“the Home of Happy Feet!”—and it drew dancers from every shade on the color line: black, brown, beige, and white; jitterbugs and Lindy Hoppers; hep cats and duchesses. And the Savoy was all class; men were gentlemen or else they were gone. Charlie Buchanan, who had a tin ear for music but managed every detail of the Savoy down to the three-times-a-week floor polishing, insisted on that. More than once the bouncers—all of them ex-boxers, all of them in tuxedos—had shown an ill-mannered lady-killer to the door, to the sidewalk, and right
into the Lenox Avenue gutter. The ladies of Harlem knew they were safe, if safe was what they wanted, and that meant they flocked to the Savoy, which meant that men flocked there double. The Savoy boasted two bandstands, the floor held four thousand, and the music didn’t stop until two in the morning—and that was the only math that mattered on a night out in the city.

  As Francis and Peggy pushed through the front door and up the staircase that led to the second-story ballroom, Benny Carter was in the house and the joint was hopping. The Savoy was long and narrow—the Track, they called it—and by ten o’clock the floor was packed with couples swinging under the watchful eyes of the bouncers and the dime-a-dance hostesses. Carter was a sax man—one of the finest altos in New York City, and that meant in the world. When he stepped out to solo, the jitterbugs spun faster, black and white pairs weaving within inches of each other. At midnight, the weekly opportunity contest began and the dancers cleared the floor, or as much of it as they could; there must have been a solid few thousand on the Track that night. Pair by pair, the dancers in the competition took the floor and showed what a Lindy Hop could be if only it were given space to breathe and room to fly. Thirty minutes was an eternity for the onlookers to wait their own turn to cut it up again, but who could tear themselves from the spectacle of Carter’s orchestra pushing the show ponies and being pushed by them? After each couple finished, the crowd went mad with applause (or didn’t) and finally the night’s champions were crowned. The winning couple barely had time to embrace and claim their prize before the bandstand jumped back to life, practically midnote, and signaled the crowd to retake the floor and keep stomping until they felt the room shake.

  The dancers never let up. They spun and kicked, dipped and swayed, shimmied and sashayed, all propelled by Carter’s electrifying arrangements. He ran them through “Blues in My Heart,” “Oh, Lady Be Good!,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” But what sent the crowd into a frenzy—and what had been driving the Savoy dancers into a dervish whirl for three nights straight—was a new addition to the band’s repertoire: a light, popular tune from a few years back that Carter had reengineered into a full-blown stomp. The original had been breezy, lilting; a melody for whistling on a balmy day in May, with the sun shining and your best girl’s hand in yours. Carter had turned the song into a heavyweight-title fight pitting the sax against the trumpet. The horns bobbed and weaved, feinted and jabbed. As the song gained steam they began to assemble combinations: haymakers from Carter’s alto followed by a roundhouse from the trumpet. But the kicker, the essential element that drove the dancers into the stratosphere of joy and motion, was a hesitation between each round in this slugfest—the vocal equivalent of the ring girl parading across the canvas with a numbered card held high above her lipsticked smile. At the end of each rapturous solo, Carter leaned in close to the microphone and hissed, “Now that’s more like it!” It was the only lyric he had salvaged from the song—the tune’s title, in fact—and the crowd began to anticipate it, to want it, and so Carter withheld it that much more. The horns would scream and die, the band would crash to a halt, and Carter would slowly draw the microphone to his mouth, dragging out each word as the Savoy faithful whooped and hollered. Just as suddenly as they had stopped, the band would reignite, burning hotter and hotter until it seemed that the ceiling of the Track was about to blow sky-high.