The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  At twenty, Lilly had set out for Paris, where her mother’s reputation allowed for a rapid entry to salons and ateliers. A canny gallery owner whose country home in Brittany was largely funded by Madame Bloch’s purchases introduced Lilly to Man Ray, and in the years that followed she sought out others whose experiments, in studios and on the street, extended the borders of what film could be. All the while, her mother fretted that entering the art world as an acolyte rather than a patron would only doom Lilly to the role of dilettante, hanger-on, or—horror of horrors—muse. Madame Bloch had had the misfortune of meeting many self-styled muses over the years—they were a necessary inconvenience if one was to consort with artists—and found them to be a generally hysterical lot. More than once, a teary, bandit-eyed girl had come to the house begging to know the whereabouts of some painter Madame Bloch had hosted the previous week, and who had left it to his patron to break the news that he had already returned to Madrid or Paris or Moscow or Berlin. Madame Bloch did not want her daughter among this disposable, pitiful tribe.

  Lilly had also grown up around these women and had seen them transformed in weeks or months from my muse to that impossible woman, had seen these men of genius flee Prague while their muses’ bellies grew big and their hearts broke wide open, and she set rules for herself to avoid their particular fate. Not that she was a nun during her years in Paris and elsewhere. In time, her predilections became a running joke among her circle, for though she served as apprentice, student, amanuensis, and sometime model, she would not sleep with other artists. As she had once told a friend, she drew a strict line between the darkroom and the bedroom.

  But that life, that world—it was all gone or quickly going. It had been years since Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had purged themselves of degenerate art and the degenerate artists—her friends and rivals—who created it. Surely Prague would be next, and while Paris was still Paris, it was foolish to believe that could not change in one blink of the camera’s eye. The poison was sure to keep spreading. Who was there to stop it? She often wondered what her mother would have thought of this latest turn of events. Madame Bloch never considered her salons to be merely some rich lady’s exercise in luxury and self-congratulation. No, her efforts among the avant-garde were more than a private indulgence. They were a bulwark against idiocy. Art, to her, was a light in the darkness, and if it burned brightly enough it could dispel the dark forces altogether. Such a funny thought for a woman who saw herself as a latter-day Medici. When had one of Raphael’s frescoes ever stopped the Florentines from marching against Pisa, or kept the Spanish from the gates of the Tuscan republic? Lilly’s mother had been lucky enough not to live to see one of her most cherished values overthrown by columns of brown-shirted troops marching, unimpeded, across the Charles Bridge.

  Lilly wasn’t an idealist, and she didn’t see a virtue in walking boldly into the lion’s maw. If the lion wanted to eat you, it would eat you—and how then could you continue to create? With the collapse of Mr. Musgrove’s plan, and the likelihood that she would have to leave New York after all, she had begun to wonder if there would be some way to jump ship in Marseille and make her way to Paris. But France was in no hurry to draw in Europe’s outcasts and oppressed artists. If her family still had money, there might have been a way to gain entry through doors otherwise locked, but her father had died years ago and when the board of directors learned just how expensive Madame Bloch’s art collecting and artist-supporting had become—and of the debts that Meyer Bloch had accrued to make both possible—they shut off the flow of funds that had nourished Madame Bloch’s künstlergarten. The house had to be sold, and Madame Bloch decamped to a flat in a once-fashionable district now known for its faded charm and the poor water pressure of its pipes. Toward the end of her life, she was selling her greatest finds for a pittance just to keep the lights on. When her mother died last year, Lilly had been back in Prague for only six months, watching her mother struggle against emphysema and the indignities of an empty sitting room and walls that grew more bare with each month’s rent.

  How would she have made it through those months without Josef? She had been in Barcelona running with a crowd of journalists and war photographers, then bounced back to Paris, where she continued her street photography and began to experiment with frank, unadorned portraits. News of her mother’s rapid decline had brought her home, where Madame Bloch commented frequently on how much her daughter had aged in the intervening years and confided to her that her looks (which Lilly questioned) and talent (which her mother questioned) could be used as bait for only so long. Lilly’s chances of snaring a husband to support her and restore the Bloch family’s curatorial prominence were dwindling with each line on Lilly’s face, each night she wasted in the darkroom, each painting that disappeared from the apartment’s walls.

  It was on a rare night out at the Café National, after a heated argument with a group of drunken surrealists—why did she always find herself tangling with surrealists?—that her friend Magda introduced her to Josef, a lawyer and a columnist for one of the city’s antifascist newspapers. Lilly, an incorrigible skeptic when it came to love, arrived back at her mother’s flat completely smitten. Josef was dark and small, almost waifish, but he was lively and funny and when she spoke he seemed to be weighing the value of every word she said. Within a week he had met her mother and Lilly never would have guessed what a blessing that would be. On the first night he visited the flat, Josef plunked himself down on a sofa and argued—seriously and jovially—with Madame Bloch for over an hour. They shared a few opinions on art—Braque was a genius, Dalí a charlatan—but were at loggerheads on music and theater. Madame Bloch was annoyed by Brecht, whom Josef revered as a giant. After that first night Josef became a regular fixture in the flat with its musty, faded wallpaper and haphazard assortment of furniture salvaged from the former Bloch manor. He would often arrive when Lilly was not at home and banter with Madame Bloch until she returned, after which he and Lilly would meet friends at the Café Slavia or take in one of the American or French films playing at the Cinema Julis at Wenceslas Square. Sparring with Josef—educating him was how she saw it—brought Lilly’s mother great pleasure, even if she was loath to admit it. Oh, that boy, she would say. Where does he get these ideas?

  Lilly’s mother had died in December, and it was only a few days after her burial that word reached Lilly that she had been offered a grant by the Foundation. She had made an inquiry in the late spring, back when she was still in Paris, and only now, in the depths of the Prague winter, did she receive a letter from the woman who had taken over her Paris flat informing her that a man called Musgrove had been trying for months to contact her.

  A WOMAN WITH platinum-blond hair poked her head into the lounge where Lilly sat and told her that it was time. She led Lilly down a hallway to a door that looked much like Mr. Musgrove’s except for the name stenciled in gold on the lustrous wood: Crabtree. It was not a name that suggested good fortune.

  At first glance, Mr. Crabtree’s office was much like Mr. Musgrove’s: a broad, dark-stained desk; a plush carpet in a golden hue that matched the name on the door; and a tall window that looked out into the blue sky, far above the buildings below. But where Mr. Musgrove’s office was dominated by a Matisse odalisque that he had bought from the artist himself, this office was a Wunderkammer devoted to the American West. On one wall, a tableau of cowboys on horseback raced at a breakneck pace among a horde of long-horned cattle. The stuffed head of a thick-tongued bison hung above the door. A console table supported a shirtless, breechclouted Indian who knelt before a sacred fire while bronze smoke wrapped its fingers around him. And on the credenza behind Crabtree’s chair, a war bonnet adorned the head of a blank-faced mannequin. With its spiked plumage and riotous tail of black and white feathers, it looked like a demon bird perched above the shoulder of its captor, Mr. Crabtree.

  Lilly began by explaining her predicament and the promises made by Mr. Musgrove. Didn’t the Foundation, with its money
and its board of directors whose names were cast in solid-gold letters, have the power to make calls, to pull strings, to grease wheels, to cut red tape, to employ any of the metaphors Mr. Musgrove had used in reference to his efforts to extend her visa and allow her work to continue? He had even said it would be possible to bring Josef to America, because wasn’t Josef—a champion of the downtrodden and an enemy of the occupation—equally deserving of the Foundation’s largesse?

  Invoking the name of Mr. Musgrove and the promises he had made did not endear her to Mr. Crabtree. At first he smirked, as if wondering what else Mr. Musgrove must have pulled, greased, or otherwise employed on her behalf. Then he explained to Lilly that European art was not his bailiwick, and that he was generally opposed to the idea of expending the Foundation’s munificence on living artists. It made them soft, he believed. Complacent. And as for the program run by Mr. Musgrove, there had been discovered certain improprieties—financial in nature—in addition to the air of moral perfidy that now hung about the whole operation. Despite his expansive vocabulary and the frequent digressions in Mr. Crabtree’s disquisition, the message was easy enough to grasp: Lilly’s connection to Mr. Musgrove had been transformed from lifeboat to lead weight.

  Still, she invited Mr. Crabtree or whoever replaced Mr. Musgrove to visit her studio and see her work firsthand—to see that he and the people he represented had gotten their money’s worth. She had spent the days since her last visit to the Foundation organizing her studio in preparation for just such a visit. She should have been packing but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. To box up this life here would be to admit that she was really leaving, and that her plan to use New York as a refuge had failed.

  Mr. Crabtree glanced at the address listed in her file and startled, as if some stench had risen up from the pages. “That is not a respectable neighborhood,” he said. And then: “You simply cannot live there.”

  But that was exactly what she had been doing for the past three months: living in her studio, taking pictures of strangers, walking the streets of this glowing coal-dark city. Meanwhile back in Prague, Josef existed in some half-state, wondering when the next directive would come from the Castle. Would he be forced to move again? Where could he go? And where could he not go? One landlord had already asked him to leave. He was becoming too outspoken, too notorious. In his last letter, written almost a month ago, he had begged her to stay in New York. Save yourself from this madness, he had written. Allow me to know that you, at least, are safe. She didn’t even have a reliable address for Josef, yet she continued to send letters, sometimes three or four a week. Lilly had placed her hopes in some imagined neighbor at Josef’s old flat, someone who would see the pile of feathery blue airmail envelopes with their eagle clutching a cracked bell and would know how to reach Josef. It was a fantasy, she knew, but believing in this kindly neighbor was easier for her than not writing at all. That would have been to admit more than could be spoken. And now as the weeks wore thin and the date on her return ticket became more stark (less than a week!), contacting Josef became a practical matter as well. Where was she to find him? What would she do when she returned home? Was it still her home?

  She reached again for something Mr. Musgrove had told her, though she knew better than to attach his name to the thought: Hadn’t the Foundation had great success these past five years in bringing to safety in the New World people like her, like Josef—artists, writers, public figures facing persecution by the enemies of culture?

  Mr. Crabtree rubbed his eyes wearily. “Have you been the victim of persecution, Miss Bloch?”

  “My country was invaded by—”

  “But do you have reason to believe that you will be persecuted on your return?”

  “The whole country is being persecuted,” she said.

  “We can’t exactly relocate all of Czechoslovakia to the United States.” He chuckled, amused by the thought. “Where would we put it?”

  Lilly had a notion about where he could put it, but a daughter raised by Madame Bloch did not say such things aloud.

  “Miss Bloch, the government of the United States does not grant visas lightly, and we at the Foundation need to keep our powder dry, so to speak, for those truly deserving cases. At the current time, we’ve no evidence that you face any direct threat upon your return.”

  “Mr. Crabtree,” she said, almost in shock; how plainly did she need to state this? “I am a Jew, and you’re asking me to return to a city under the control of the Nazis.”

  “Yes, and I understand that carries with it certain… complications,” he said, “but are you an activist of some sort? Perhaps a communist, or—”

  “I am an artist.”

  “Is your art political?”

  She shook her head quickly, trying again to find the words to combat this madness. “To ask if art is political—that means everything, and nothing.”

  “Cryptic answers aren’t going to help your case. The men the Foundation has resettled can point to very specific instances of persecution. One man was barred from employment at every university in Germany. Another had his laboratory ransacked by hoodlums on the payroll of the party. Another had his home burned. He lost his entire library.” He sat back in the chair, the eagle-feather headdress looming over him. “Has anything like that happened to you or to this Josef?”

  “He has been evicted from his apartment. He has lost his job.”

  “Times are hard everywhere,” Mr. Crabtree said.

  “He did not fail to pay his rent. He was forced out, by the occupation. And Jews have been barred from practicing law.”

  “But you yourself—have you faced—”

  “I left Prague one week before the Reich invaded.”

  Mr. Crabtree squinted, either deep in thought or in search of relief in the painting of the cattle drive. The lead cowboy jutted his chin, one hand squashing his hat to the top of his head. With his other hand he lashed the horse’s shoulder with the reins. “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you return as scheduled and reconnoiter the situation?”

  “Reconnoi—”

  “Yes, take the temperature of Prague,” he said. And if it happened that Prague was, in fact, running a fever, he said, then she and Josef could prepare for a more orderly departure. She could again make application to the Foundation through one of its European offices—one that hadn’t been shuttered in the past few months due to the situation, as Mr. Crabtree referred to it—and in no time at all Lilly and Josef would be walking arm in arm in Central Park. When that happened, and Mr. Crabtree believed it would, the first order of business would be to find them a more respectable neighborhood. Because she couldn’t live where she was living. It just wasn’t possible.

  Except that it was. She had proven it. But what she didn’t know was whether it was possible to live in Prague.

  Not for the first time she wished that war—a recognizable, guns-and-tanks-and-aerial-bombardment war—had broken out, and that return was impossible. Then the man with the office full of eagle feathers and buffalo heads and beaded belts and tomahawks would understand, and levers would be pulled and ears bent and chips cashed to keep Lilly in New York and to extract Josef from Prague. But this half-lit war, this agreement not to call it what it was for fear that the name would force some necessary action, required Lilly to participate in a lie that Mr. Crabtree was eager to spread: that things would be different at home, but only by degrees.

  FIFTY-SECOND STREET

  ELSTON HOOPER HELD THE last note and wouldn’t let it drop. When the sound from the golden bell of his trumpet ceased, the song would end—and no one wanted that to happen. This was the last rehearsal before their one and only gig and the eight men on the bandstand wanted to savor every note. They had been meeting once a week for the past three months and after the second session it was clear that they didn’t need to rehearse: they were all pros, and any pro worth his salt could motor through a wedding repertoire on four hours of sleep, half a hangover, and nothing but t
he opening key to guide him. They had taken a few weeks to rev up these tunes, to add more verve than your typical wedding band could muster, but the set list had been settled by the end of March, and the band that Martin had assembled turned its attention to music built for nightclubs and ballrooms. Every rehearsal began with a warm-up, a play-through of two or three songs for the reception, each one set to simmer. But it never took long for one of those wedding songs to metamorphose into something wondrous. Teddy Gaines on the drums would pick up the pace, demand a solo, and take this locomotive made of shining brass and polished wood down a different, more thrilling line. Or Hooper, on the trumpet, would turn a quick flourish into a fanfare. The band responded every time. They knew the rules of the game. We’ll see how long we can go with that wedding-party music but sooner or later—and please, Lord, let it be sooner—someone is going to ring that bell.

  So it was a game, but it wasn’t a joke. How could it be, when Martin treated each session like the second coming of Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall?

  The others in the band saw how much it meant to the little guy, and if they thought he was crazy to take it all so seriously, they kept it to themselves and played along. At first they figured he was trying to make nice with his wife and score points with his in-laws, Bronx big shots who had the juice to make life’s bitter pills go down that much easier. But that was hardly enough to make each man pour his heart and soul into a three-hour set for a clutch of half-drunk Irish squares who wouldn’t know Lester Young from Coleman Hawkins and who would probably use the same hateful name for them both. No, they showed up on time and rolled up their shirtsleeves in the afternoon heat at the Dime, a shoe-box club on Tenth Avenue—the western frontier of night-town—and played with everything they had because they knew this band could swing. Martin had assembled the group from the hottest spots in the city: these were men who regularly played the Roseland and the Famous Door, Café Society and the Hickory House. He had ventured as far as Minton’s, the Harlem hothouse where cutting contests sorted the wheat from the chaff. These all-night jam sessions let him see what these men could do when they were playing under their own steam rather than the baton of a bandleader, and after weeks of praising, cajoling, and pleading he had assembled the best band that his small budget could buy. It was one advantage of the hard times and the skinflint wages paid by most bandleaders: horn players were always looking for something on the side.