The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Francis and Peggy had chugged through the first few numbers, feeding on the energy of the other dancers, but as the band tore into this new floor-burner, they retreated into the mob of spectators basking in the union of music and motion. The band fed the dancers and the dancers pushed the band: Hotter! Louder! Faster! The band and the dancers skated together on the edge of the precipice, and the thrill of seeing them, or being them, came from the sense that all of this could collapse into chaos but that right now, in this moment, it had not and would not. They were an engine that ran on rocket fuel, the gears in perfect alignment, the pistons humming.

  And through all of this, it never once occurred to Francis or Peggy that this song was Martin’s song—that what Benny Carter had rearranged was in fact Martin’s one entry to the Hit Parade, the ditty that had briefly raised his hopes about a prosperous future, and that now seemed to him like a mirage he had been foolish enough to mistake for a leafy oasis. They’d heard Martin’s version as recorded by the Chester Kingsley Orchestra in 1937, but hearing that song in this one would have been like recognizing the face of the model in a painting by Picasso. And in those moments, Francis and Peggy were too drunk and happy, too hot and overwhelmed by the music and the dancing and the play of shadow and light, to trace the ways that Benny Carter had added muscle to the bones of Martin’s song.

  OUTSIDE THE SAVOY, in a car parked on Lenox Avenue, Cronin kept an eye on the doorway of the ballroom. If anyone noticed him they tried hard not to show it. A man his size and his color, camped out on the busiest street in Harlem, could only be in the employ of the police or some gangland boss. Either way, he wasn’t someone you wanted to cross.

  After spying the missus and her children the day before, he’d had to wait only another fifteen minutes before he saw someone else bound for the apartment house. The man crossing the street was unmistakably a Dempsey. His profile gave him away; he was his mother’s son and there was no doubting it. Cronin should have felt some satisfaction—he was one step closer to finding his quarry—but all he felt was whiplash. Everywhere he turned, he saw reminders of other places he should be and older times he could not forget.

  Cronin was ready to follow Martin wherever he went—sooner or later he would go to his brother, Cronin was sure of it—but hours later, when the last upstairs light was finally switched off, Cronin called it a night. His instincts were failing him. He was rusty, plain and simple. On Sunday, he had returned to a spot down the street from the apartment house and sat watch all through the day, but aside from morning Mass, the Dempseys stayed close to home. He was expecting another wasted day when a taxicab rolled to a stop in front of the apartment and disgorged a stout redhead and his spindly companion, who was coming out on the losing end of a wrestling match with an enormous wine bottle.

  Again, it was Bernadette—Mrs. Dempsey—who confirmed what Cronin suspected. She had marked each of her sons as her own. Martin had her face, as did the younger one, who had been a baby when Cronin had—when she—when Bernadette died. Francis was built like his father but he had his mother’s wild shock of red hair. It rose above his head like a flame, as though he didn’t care who saw it.

  Cronin could have taken him, but he stuck to his promise—his vow—to give the front door a wide berth. He didn’t approach Dempsey then, just as he didn’t approach him later when he came down the steps with the blonde on his arm. If he’d done that, Dempsey and the girl might’ve made a break for the cab and he might’ve lost them. It was possible Dempsey had a gun on him—hadn’t he left three dead already?—and who knew who this girl was, and whether she meant anything to him. He might use her for cover. Cronin had seen men do that before. Or she could turn out to be a witness, someone who could point the finger at Cronin, and he’d be forced to do something about that.

  He could say he was playing it smart, but he knew what Frank Dempsey would say: that he had gone soft. Cronin spots a woman and two children walking up the front steps and suddenly the house and all who enter it are off-limits? It had to be a joke. The old Tom Cronin wouldn’t have let a houseful of children put him off his task. Hadn’t he gut-shot a police inspector in Cork—what was his name? Browne? Yes, William Browne. Hadn’t he gut-shot William Browne in the front hall of his own home with one of the man’s children watching it all from between the spindles of the staircase? Cronin had waited until the family gathered for their supper—he figured that would be the moment when he would have Browne to himself at the front of the house while the rest of the family feasted in the back. He didn’t count on the boy still being upstairs. Hadn’t the boy heard his mother calling him down to eat, when Cronin himself had heard her from the alleyway? Why had the boy lagged behind so? It troubled Cronin, the way it happened, but it didn’t stop him. And it wasn’t as if he noticed the lad’s saucer-eyed face only after he shot his daddy dead. First he saw the boy, then he looked Browne square in the eye, and then he pulled the trigger. The boy’s shriek followed Cronin down the front steps, out into the street, and down through the years. But it didn’t stop him the next time. Or the time after that.

  This was why Frank Dempsey had chosen him. Not because he saw Cronin as a diamond in the rough. Not because he thought the fire of revolution burned in Cronin the same as it did in him and his sainted wife. Not because he liked Cronin, or saw him as a comrade-in-arms and boon companion. Frank Dempsey had singled out Cronin and cultivated him because he knew that Cronin was the kind of brute who could stand at a man’s front door with the man’s own son looking at him and pull the trigger that would put the boy’s daddy in the ground.

  It was a simple thing when you considered the mechanics of it, but most men couldn’t do it. Their skin went clammy and their hands shook. The gun weighed a thousand pounds and they would stutter and stammer at the point of action. He had seen men piss themselves when they should have been pulling the trigger. But not Cronin. He was a man who could do it, and Frank Dempsey knew that about him. He had read it in Cronin’s eyes. He had seen it inked on his skin. He knew it even before Cronin did.

  All that he had done before he had done for reasons he could never quite explain, not even to himself. How could he go soft now, when the cause he served was the safety of his own family? No, Cronin had to remind himself that he was still that man, despite all of Alice’s talk about him being a changed man. Only the old Cronin could stand guard on the walls that protected the life that he and Alice had built. Isn’t that why Gavigan had come for him—because he could do things that other men could not?

  Soon Francis Dempsey’s moment would come. He had eluded his pursuers in Ireland and for a few days given them the slip in New York, but he had not counted on a man like Cronin coming for him. Dempsey was either brash or stupid or simply naive enough to think that no one would catch up to him, or that going to another country meant leaving his crimes and enemies behind him. Cronin knew better, and the next time he had Dempsey in his sights he would not hesitate. He would follow Dempsey until he came to a rest and then he would swoop down on him like an owl taking a mouse. He would give Gavigan his prize, he would once again wash his hands of all of this, and then he would go home.

  PEGGY ASKED HIM where he was staying and he said, “The Plaza,” like it was the obvious answer and she said, “You are not,” and he said, “Why don’t you see for yourself?” and she hesitated for only a second—she was getting married in six days—and then she said, “I’m calling your bluff, Mr. Dempsey”—she was getting married in six days!—and they were down the stairs and out the door of the Savoy and there was a cab waiting for them, just like they’d called ahead for it. It was eighty blocks to the Plaza but the ride slid by in no time at all. They talked about the music and the dancers, they looked out the window and joked about the couples they saw pressed into each other and the men slumped against walls, and they laughed at anyone who raised an arm to hail their cab. Sorry, buddy, they’d say. Next time, Mac. Francis practiced his American accent and Peggy laughed so hard her sides hurt. She g
ave him words and whole phrases that he would mangle with a slow drawl he had learned from watching Gable and Cagney and Astaire and Errol Flynn. She tried out her brogue and it was his turn to laugh.

  Before they knew it they were passing the Metropolitan Museum and then the cab was coming to a stop in front of the broad steps of the hotel. He paid the cabbie, he held the door for her, and when the porter tipped his cap to Francis, he remembered—Angus, I’m Angus in here—and he gave the man a bob of the head and he and Peggy crossed the lobby, lights ablaze but otherwise empty, hushed for a moment by the after-midnight grandeur of a Sunday that had turned into Monday. Peggy kept expecting him to turn back and she almost laughed again when she heard him use an even funnier accent at the front desk, but the man behind it only nodded and handed over a room key with some degree of ceremony, and then they were on the elevator and in the hallway and then the key was in the lock and they were inside, alone together.

  Six days. She was getting married in six days. And yet here she was, in the Plaza, long after midnight with a man she hardly knew. She’d been sparring with her parents for months about seating charts and centerpieces and wedding showers and the stupid World’s Fair. Tim had been at the DA’s office all weekend—he was always at the office—and she had begun to wonder if this was the life she was walking into. They weren’t yet married—six days!—and already Tim had stopped courting her, wooing her. He wasn’t treating her like his sweetheart anymore. He was treating her like a wife. And it wasn’t that she wanted him around all the time (who could stand that?), but every now and then she wanted a night out, a bouquet of roses, a velvet-skinned box with a jeweler’s name stamped in gold letters. There hadn’t been any of that since they’d announced their engagement, and she was beginning to feel like she was little more than the porcelain bride standing on top of the cake. She had a place to be and a role to play, but no one expected her to talk, to move, to ask, to want.

  When Francis closed the door, she turned into the darkness of the room, which wasn’t just a room, but a whole suite, with a big window that looked out on the park, and at this time of night the park was an inky lake surrounded on all sides by city, or else every window and streetlight was a star and the park was a hole in the night sky, and you only had to reach out your hand and you could touch that void and disappear into it. Life as she knew it had become stretched and thin and she had slipped through some tear in the fabric and found herself here with him. Francis had a big grin on his face. She had called his bluff and he had shown her four aces, a full house, a flush—that was it. Francis held a royal flush and she didn’t want to say another word in her own voice or in a funny accent or in any language at all. She walked slowly toward him and when they were face to face she put her arms around his neck and his hands went to her hips and she drew his mouth to hers.

  MIDTOWN

  MONDAY MORNING, AND LILLY awaited an audience with another man at the Foundation. She wished she felt more lively, more ready to make her case, but last night she had ventured as far as Harlem and by the time she returned to her studio it was long after midnight. Even on a Sunday, incandescent bulbs had pulsed on the dance-hall marquees, illuminating the faces of young men and women dressed for a night on the town. She hadn’t time to develop anything, but she had high hopes for a few of the shots: a darkly radiant woman checking her reflection in a shopwindow, red lipstick poised at her puckered mouth; a man with coppery skin, his hat rakishly askew, pausing to buff his two-tone shoes with a handkerchief; a white couple at a ballroom entrance where the man, a strapping redhead, grinned goggle-eyed at the lights swirling overhead. Later, just as she was preparing to leave, she snapped a shot of a lone white man behind the wheel of a parked car, staring balefully at the same ballroom entrance.

  This was the New York that Lilly had come seeking—a city of stolen moments and sidelong glances, back streets and narrow alleys. She wandered Chinatown at night, among the restaurants scrawled in neon and the dark shops with their jars full of mystery: shaggy tree bark, tendriled mushrooms, a root that resembled a withered hand. Or alone in the Bowery among the hollow-cheeked men so worn down by life that even the once-sharp hunger of their eyes had gone dull. Or roaming the docks that jutted into the Hudson, where she once had come upon two men, their hands in each other’s trousers, coiled in a rough embrace. Camera at the ready, Lilly stalked her subjects along the marble-faced avenues of Wall Street and among the market stalls of Little Italy. It was on the street that you could see people as they really were, but only if you knew how to look, and when. And Lilly knew. She had the eye, the sense of timing. She waited for those moments, often in great crowds, when people believed that they were insulated by anonymity, and so they dropped the masks they wore in more direct encounters. A friend of hers in Paris had painted his Leica black in order to make it less obtrusive. A secret eye. He didn’t want the glint of chrome to alert his subjects to the presence of a camera. But Lilly didn’t need any of that trickery. People were willing to overlook a woman with a camera, especially if she was no great beauty. And if they did see her, she was easy to dismiss: just some tourist. What harm could she be?

  For all of her success, even Lilly would admit that this was not the life her parents had imagined for her. Lilly’s father had been the director general of a large dye factory, where he spent his days poring over ledgers and finalizing order sheets. The Great War had been hard all around, but Meyer Bloch’s factory had produced the dye used in half the uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian army and so the family had prospered. Even as that prosperity waned in the postwar years, Lilly’s mother maintained their home as one of the liveliest salons in Prague. Artists, musicians, writers, and hangers-on filled the grand house as Madame Bloch puppet-mastered conversations, arguments, liaisons, house concerts, and exhibitions. She often explained to Lilly the vital role of the patron, and how it was her calling to transmute the base coin of industry into the pure gold of art. It had been her mother’s great wish that Lilly would follow in her footsteps, and throughout her youth, Lilly had accompanied her mother on trips to Paris—always Paris—to find which way the winds of culture were blowing. Every gallery in the City of Light knew Madame Bloch and knew not to waste her time with Monet, Seurat, or you-must-be-joking Corot. She sought only the new, she had a discerning eye, and she could negotiate a sale the way Talleyrand hashed out a treaty. Madame Bloch imagined that one day Lilly would marry well, recharge the family coffers, and devote herself to her own style of alchemy—curating not only art but artists.

  But Lilly did not want to curate, to collect, to purchase—she wanted to make. If her mother’s genius lay in her ability to recognize art that would matter (or that she would make matter), Lilly’s talents lay in sensing the moment and having the reflexes to capture it. She had first tried her hand at painting but was soon seduced by photography. Perhaps it was because her mother had so little interest in this field; the camera, to her, was nothing but a machine for creating ghastly portraits drained of life and color. To Madame Bloch, there was something too coldly industrial about the camera for its products ever to be elevated into the leafy glade of art. Only a painting—an image filtered through the mind of a true artist—could depict the soul of its subject. Could a photograph match the raw beauty of a Schiele portrait? Or Matisse’s riots of color and shape—could those be re-created on a sheet of chemical-soaked paper?

  Lilly could not be dissuaded, and her choice of the camera over the paintbrush may have been an unspoken oath of allegiance to her father. While she loved her mother—and she did love her, everyone loved Madame Bloch, who allowed no other choice, with her grand manners and vast expressions of delight, her life lessons cast into compact aphorisms and her freely offered pronouncements, her stock of stories and her devil-may-care generosity—Lilly’s father offered a simpler and more doting kind of affection. Lilly knew he cared for her, even if he never said it in as many words. He could have come out against her attending the Arts Academy, but did not, could ha
ve forbidden the installation of a darkroom in what had previously been a linen closet, but did not. Photography was somehow a recognition of the role of industry—dirty, smelly industry—in making her who she was. From a cocktail of toxins and metals, her father extracted money, her mother a persona, and Lilly—a reason for being.