The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “He’s also a man who lives in fear of his own wife,” Martin said.

  “All smart men fear their wives,” Hooper said. “You could take a lesson, Martin. I still can’t believe you walked out on—what’s his name again? Chestnut Kingfisher?”

  “You think that job’s so great? Then you take it.” Martin extended a palm toward Hooper, offering him a handful of nothing. “Here. It’s yours.”

  “Now, you know Chesterfield would never hire me. He’s got all the trumpets he can handle.”

  The band that night might have been a makeshift operation, but oh, could they play. They jumped right into “Take the A Train,” leaving plenty of room for solos and stepping out, before rolling into a smoky, slow-burn take on “Honeysuckle Rose.” Between songs, Martin and Hooper settled into musicians’ shop talk: who was hot, who was a pretender, who hadn’t paid his band in weeks, who was in the market for a new alto, a new drummer, a new bass. Hooper himself had just come from Smalls, where word was spreading about a scorching horn player from Cincinnati. He had just blown into town, and apparently John Hammond was already working his corner. At the mention of Hammond’s name, Martin perked up. He still hadn’t said a word about Hammond to anyone.

  “Cincinnati!” Hooper sounded astonished. “Cinci-goddamn-nati! Bad enough we got guys from New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City—even Ireland, if you can believe it—trying to take our jobs. Now we’ve got to worry about Cincinnati. It’s enough to make a man give up music and go into the dry-cleaning business.”

  There was a parting in the crowd as the people packed close to the band made room for a late arrival. The lighting over the stage was a simple affair but someone switched on a spotlight covered with a blue gel, and the mood of the room shifted.

  “I knew she’d get here sooner or later,” Hooper said. He leaned in toward Francis and stage-whispered: “Now the show’s about to start.”

  Conversations faded and just as the bass player gave the strings a thrum, a voice filled the room, bright and aching all at once: Sum—mer—time… the rich, plump notes of the bass filled in the gaps she left between syllables, between words…and the livin’ is—ea—sy… She started high, then brought it low. She knew the song was as much a celebration as a bitter joke. The room heard it, and didn’t they know it, too. Five words into the song and every eye in the room was straining for a glimpse of Lorena Briggs.

  HOOPER COULDN’T SAY exactly when he had been swept up in Lorena’s wake. He had first met her when he was thirteen and she was just a year or so younger when she moved into his neighborhood after some family trouble in DC. Baltimore wasn’t far from Anacostia but it was far enough, and Lorena arrived with a sense of mystery around her. Right away her aunt brought her to the church where Hooper’s father was the pastor, and overnight, it seemed, Lorena was the star of the choir. She had never sung in a little girl’s crystalline soprano, at least not since Hooper had known her. Lorena’s voice could rumble like thunder, flare like heat lightning, and soothe the congregation with soft rain. At first the older ladies in the choir didn’t like it, not one bit: Who is this girl who comes out of nowhere and thinks she’s going to be the one? But they couldn’t harden themselves for long against that voice or against the skinny little girl with the ribboned plaits and the grave face. The ladies would cluck their tongues and say that she was an old soul. And with a voice like that but no mama to look after her? The Lord does give gifts but He can ask a heavy price. Lorena had arrived in Baltimore with one aunt, but inside of a month she had fifteen. Later this would make life difficult for Hooper, to have the eyes of so many aunts on Lorena.

  At first, Hooper thought she was just another girl who was always at the church—rehearsing with the choir, helping his mother with the potluck, leading the children’s Bible study—and anyhow Hooper already had five sisters; he didn’t need any more girls in his life. But by the time Lorena was sixteen, she was no longer a stripling girl but a young woman whose body was catching up to that old soul. Hooper wasn’t just smitten, he was signed and sealed for life.

  Music was the language of their love. Hooper could hear light and dark tones in her voice that no one else could. And Lorena would listen to Hooper work his way up and down the valves of the trumpet, listen to him feinting and jabbing with the trombone, even listen when he mauled the piano like a man who thought the keyboard was the steering wheel of a garbage truck. She was never shy about pointing out his limitations, never just an audience, and certainly never a dewy-eyed admirer. She would listen, seemingly rapt, as a teenage Hooper pumped his way through “West End Blues,” doing his best to sound like the second coming of Satchmo, but as soon as he blew the last note she would start with a string of questions that weren’t really questions. These critiques had hurt his boyish pride until he realized two truths: one, she was right, almost without fail, and two, she also believed that he could be one of the greats—she just had a better idea of what it would take to get there. And then there was a third truth, which he realized only after he stopped letting his pride get in the way: he saw that she loved him and that if he wanted that love to grow, he had better listen to what she had to say.

  It was true that Lorena told jokes on him and often turned to his chorus of younger sisters with a Can you believe this fool? look, but she loved him so fiercely that sometimes she thought her body would burn from it. The jokes, the rolled eyes, the Lord have mercys when he told one of his leg-stretchers—those were just the valves that released the pressure threatening to burst her heart. How else could you live with a happiness too bold to be real? How else could you hold on to a love you didn’t think you deserved? Lorena had an uncle in Philadelphia who had bought himself an almost-new car, a two-tone Packard, brown and creamy yellow like a cake in a bakery window. The day he bought it, he took a baseball bat to one of the fenders and made a dent bigger than a dinner plate for everyone to see. “Drive around with a machine this nice and someone’s not gonna like it,” he said. “Now I don’t have to worry about somebody else taking the shine off my apple.” Lorena thought about that sometimes when she was with Hooper. If she was too full of smiles about this man, the world was sure to take notice. Someone wasn’t gonna like it.

  When Hooper left for Howard University, Lorena was sure that someone must have seen, and stolen, her joy. Though it was barely forty miles from Baltimore to Howard, Hooper returned only rarely, and his parents made certain to fill his visits with family time. The Reverend and Mrs. Hooper had always been kind to her, but there was kind and then there was kin. She knew they had more in mind for their only son than life with an orphan girl whose parents were still whispered about. “Such a skinny little thing,” Mrs. Hooper would say. “And so dark.” No one saw Lorena shed a single tear when Hooper left town—You do your crying on your own time, her mama had told her—and she kept on singing on Sundays like nothing had changed. If people in the congregation didn’t notice the knot of hurt that she tied into every song, then they just weren’t listening.

  Although her aunt didn’t like it, Lorena wasn’t singing only on Sundays. A man from church had a brother who owned a nightclub that needed a girl singer for the slow numbers, when the couples liked to take things nice and easy, and Lorena had the voice and the bruised heart to make those songs purr.

  By his second year in college, Hooper was spending less of his time in his lectures and more of it toting his trumpet to any band on U Street in need of the next Louis Armstrong. The summer after his sophomore year, he signed on with a territory band playing beach resorts and one-nighters from Chesapeake Bay to Sea Island, Georgia. For eight weeks, the band slept on the bus in towns where no hotel would take them. They played for white crowds who paid the price of admission and then spat insults between songs. They played dances where a rope was laid across the floor: whites on one side and colored folks on the other. The band had been booked to play late in the tour at a dance hall that practically straddled the Georgia–South Carolina state line. As they approached t
he town, a midsummer carnival appeared to be in full swing: a large crowd had gathered, a bonfire sent sparks into the twilight, and children chased each other through a field. The only thing missing was the music.

  From the back of the bus, the trombone player, who was always cracking wise, said, “Finally, someone decided to roll out the red carpet!”

  But the bandleader, who sat over the shoulder of the driver, got a better look. “Keep driving!” he shouted. He was a steady man, as good-natured as a favorite uncle, and this was not his first tour of the South. His voice cracked when he spoke, and his eyes were fixed on the tree at the center of the crowd. “You just keep driving! There’s no show tonight!”

  As they drove past the turn that would have brought them into town, Hooper watched that fire burn, watched the towheaded children chasing fireflies on the edge of the vast crowd, and strained to see the terrible weight that hung from the tree’s stoutest limb. In the silence that settled over the band, he thought of Lorena; he hadn’t seen her since Easter, when she had taken the solo on “Were You There,” and now as the bus disappeared into the night, he sat alone in the darkness and felt himself tremble, tremble, tremble. When he returned home, he was convinced of two more truths: his next step musically needed to be away from Howard and in a northerly direction, and life was too short to live another day of it without Lorena Briggs.

  By the end of September, Hooper and Lorena were boarding the train to New York City as husband and wife. The Reverend and Mrs. Hooper were capable of moving heaven and earth to bend the world to their will, but even they saw—after a solid week of tears, prayers, and threats—that what bound their son and Lorena was unshakable by mortal force. “I’ll give it a year in New York,” Hooper told them, “and if nobody takes notice I can always go back to school.” The lie, if they chose to believe it, was enough to comfort Hooper’s parents that their son was not condemned to a life of barrooms and dance halls. If they wanted to tell themselves that it was all Lorena’s fault—that their son had been led astray by a no-account jazz singer with dreams beyond her reach—well, they knew that was a lie, too. Hooper might never preach a sermon but he could play like Gabriel himself. As for Lorena, they had heard her voice; they knew the truth.

  WHEN LORENA FINISHED with the song, the crowd clapped long and loud, and then parted as she made her way to the bar. On the stage she looked like a queen in mourning, but up close she was buoyant, even elfin. Her mouth was outlined in red, her eyes shaded in blue, and her skin glowed like molten metal.

  She rested her elbow on Hooper’s shoulder as if he were a street-corner mailbox and turned her attention on the Dempsey brothers. “Which one of you boys is going to buy me a drink?” she said, and then a half beat later—her phrasing always perfect—she burst into laughter and planted a quick kiss on Hooper’s cheek.

  WOODLAWN

  ROSEMARY HAD SUGGESTED TO Peggy that they get together at the apartment, where she could keep an eye on the girls while she talked some sense into her younger sister, but Peggy had balked.

  “No offense,” Peggy had said, “but your apartment is sort of dreary.”

  “How am I not supposed to be offended by that?”

  “It’s not like it’s a secret,” Peggy said. “Mother says it all the time.”

  Instead they settled on Driscoll’s, a lunch spot in Woodlawn where Peggy often met her friends—brides-to-be and newlyweds who lately had taken to sharing strategies for setting up and running a house of your own, free from the interference of mothers, mothers-in-law, or husbands. As much as she felt a sense of duty about setting Peggy straight, Rosemary dreaded the trip into the old neighborhood, just as she dreaded the cost of lunch and what it would do to the budget now that Martin was up to God knows what.

  The lunchtime crowd at Driscoll’s was buzzing. Formica tables gleamed, chrome shone beneath the counter stools and on the legs of the chairs. Two sturdy ceiling fans beat futilely against the muggy air, busboys in wilted white shirts hustled pitchers of ice water from table to table to kitchen and back. Peggy, already a minor celebrity by virtue of her last name, had achieved movie-star status. With only three days until the wedding, everyone had a question, a word of congratulations, a piece of advice. Those who would be attending smiled and parted with a “See you Saturday,” the uninvited tried to ignore the brouhaha, and the decline-with-regrets avoided making eye contact. Rosemary asked for a table away from the window, away from the center of the action, which of course made Peggy pout, but this wasn’t going to be a conversation that Rosemary wanted to broadcast along the invisible wires that connected one Woodlawn home to another.

  Peggy ordered a Waldorf salad and when Rosemary asked only for an iced tea, Peggy loudly scoffed.

  “That’s all you’re having?”

  “Iced tea is fine,” Rosemary said.

  “It’s my treat, all right?” Peggy looked up at the waitress. “My sister will have a patty melt.”

  “I don’t want a patty melt.”

  “Then a Reuben? How does that sound? Or a Cobb salad—yes, a Cobb salad.”

  Rosemary had meant to eat before she dropped the girls with her down-the-street neighbor Angela Videtti, but Evie had been slow to wake from her morning nap and Kate had refused, at first, to go to the Videttis. She said Maria, the only girl among Angela’s six children, was bossy and would not let her play with her best doll. Rosemary had known that Peggy would raise a stink about her ordering only a tea—Peggy was allergic to anything that smelled of lack, of thrift, of self-denial. But she was hungry and didn’t want to make a scene—not yet, at least—so she relented: a Cobb salad.

  “Thanks,” Rosemary said grudgingly, after the waitress left the table.

  “Don’t mention it.” Peggy was enjoying herself. The little sister picking up the tab.

  “So,” Rosemary said. “Are you still thinking about calling it off?”

  Peggy’s smile evaporated. “Maybe. I mean, why shouldn’t I?”

  “Don’t you want to marry Tim?”

  “Sure I do,” she said. “Just—not now. Not yet.”

  “When, then?”

  Peggy threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know. Some other time. After the fair, how about? Has anyone stopped to consider that I actually like the Aquacade, and that maybe I don’t want to give that up?”

  “I’m supposed to believe you’re calling off your wedding to pursue a life in water ballet?”

  “I didn’t say I was going to do it for life, but I like it—a lot!—and going out with Francis made me realize that sometimes you have to—”

  “So this is because of Sunday night?”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “What happened is that I had a wonderful time. And it’s been ages since I’ve had a wonderful time.”

  “Well,” Rosemary said. “You only get so much wonderful.”

  “You sound just like Mother. Maybe I don’t want a life like that.”

  “Your life doesn’t end when you get married. That’s actually when it starts. Your home, your decisions—and Tim is obviously going places. Dad will make sure of that. You’ve got plenty of excitement to look forward to.”

  “Not if I’m stuck at home,” Peggy said. “And you’re not exactly an advertisement for the exciting world of marriage, with that apartment and your ‘just iced tea for me’ and never going dancing or—”

  “I have the girls to look after.”

  “But don’t you want—”

  “You’ll understand when you’re a mother.”

  “I don’t want to understand. Not yet.”

  A waitress, her face sheened with perspiration, appeared with their salads. She set down each plate and dabbed her wrist across her forehead. A pointed paper cap sat perched like a crown on her head. Beneath the cap, her hair was combed tight at the sides and pulled into an elaborate bun. Stylish—the hair, not the cap. Rosemary had seen more and more women wearing their
hair in that way. Were they imitating some movie star, from a film she had not seen?

  “Can I bring you girls anything else?” the waitress said.

  Not until she said “girls” did Rosemary take a closer look at the waitress. She was thirty-five, perhaps forty. Threads of gray hair were visible at her temples.

  “I’ll have a milk shake,” Peggy said. “Vanilla, with whipped cream.”

  The waitress took a pad from her apron and looked to Rosemary. Perspiration stained the armpits of her uniform. This, Rosemary caught herself wondering. Could I do this? It might become necessary if Martin was out of work for long. But who would watch the girls? Was there someone—Angela Videtti, someone else—whom she could pay to watch the girls while she worked the lunch shift at one of the diners on the Grand Concourse? Assuming she could find someone who would charge less than a waitress’s wages? But that was nonsense. She had been to college. She could do better than waitressing, couldn’t she? Typist? Bookkeeper? Could she turn to her father to make an introduction? Her parents would be horrified, of course. The final nail in Martin’s—

  “Ma’am,” the waitress said, one eyebrow lifted.

  “Nothing else for me,” Rosemary said.

  “I’m famished.” Peggy speared a grape with her fork.

  The clatter of silverware against plates. The clink of ice water poured into a glass. The murmur of conversation—You won’t believe… Never in a million years… I told her you play with fire and you’re gonna—spiked with a stifled laugh, or a table for four sharing one bad joke. Rosemary had stopped wondering if the talk was about her. She was old news. There had been other sudden engagements and hurry-up weddings since hers. But she was reminded of why she had moved out of Woodlawn. She missed the neighborhood—she knew every storefront, knew its parks and people—but it was too much her father’s place. Her mother’s place.

  The waitress set down the milk shake, the glass beaded with moisture. A maraschino cherry sank into a dollop of whipped cream. “That will get everyone talking,” Rosemary said. “‘How in the world is she going to fit into her dress?’”