The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “You saw her studio,” Yeats said. “She’s packing for a journey. Who’s to say we weren’t drawn to her for exactly this reason? The spiritus mundi—”

  “Enough about the spiritus mundi,” Michael said. “You said a decent medium could practice psychical healing. I’d like some of that, please.”

  GEORGE? LILLY DIDN’T know any George.

  Eudoxia looked wildly about the room. Was it her daughter, sullen in the kitchen, seeking a child’s revenge by interfering with her mother’s work? No, it was clearly a man’s voice. “I heard George,” she said. “Does this mean something?”

  Tell them nothing, her mother had said, and that was easy enough. She did not know a George.

  Eudoxia closed her eyes again, placed her palms on the table, and began her deep breathing, faster and more ragged this time. A presence crowded close to her and with it, once more, the voice. Less distinct than before, but still palpable. Eudoxia tried to calm her breathing, to quiet herself. France? Francis? Yes, another name: Francis.

  “George and Francis,” she said. “George or Francis? So it is romance—”

  Lilly cut her off. “Your spirits are confused. I don’t know a George or a Francis. Perhaps this was a mistake.”

  “No!” Eudoxia reached out again and trapped Lilly’s hand beneath hers. “Stay! I—I am hearing a voice!”

  “Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”

  “Not like this,” she said. “Never like this. Please, stay.”

  “WE’LL TAKE CARE of you soon,” Yeats said to Michael. “But this is important: George’s ability to contact the world beyond was crucial to my work. My vision was our vision, jointly. We undertook the task together, and I need to tell her that changes must be made for the next edition. She must amend those chapters that my current experience supports or disproves.”

  “Do you think she cares about that?” Michael said. “Her husband is dead. She has children to tend to. Don’t you think that’s uppermost in her mind right now? And not correcting the number of angels on the head of each pin?”

  “You clearly know nothing of my work,” Yeats said.

  “Your work?” Michael had to speak up to be heard. The sound of the medium’s breathing swirled around the room, like the beating of a moth’s wings against his ears. “You said that a medium could provide me with answers, but all you’ve done is shout directions to advance your own interests.”

  “Madame Antonia would have been able to help you.”

  “Bah!” Michael said. “You only think of yourself. You don’t care about me or our host—you didn’t even peek at her question, and now there’s nothing left of it.”

  Yeats sighed, exasperated, and poked through the ashes. “It’s in German,” he said. “‘Should I return to—Prague?’”

  “Prague?” Michael said. “That’s not a German city.”

  Yeats put his lips close to the medium’s ear and spoke in loud, clipped syllables. “No, no, and nein.” He stood and straightened his back, then spoke before Michael could object. “She’ll never find George in Prague.”

  Michael closed his eyes and covered his ears, but the whooshing continued. Then, slicing high above it, a voice he was certain he recognized: Michael! His eyes snapped open, but it wasn’t Yeats who had called him. Yeats remained at the medium’s shoulder and her breathing had become more regular. The ebb and flow of the sound’s tide resumed.

  Michael!

  EUDOXIA RECLAIMED HER pen from Lilly, reached for another sheet of paper, and began scratching madly. The voices had grown less distinct but continued to dictate to her. One moment, the words were as close as a lover’s breath on her neck; the next, farther off, as if shouted from a train as it pulled away from the station. She had dashed down what she could: George, Francis, London, the tower…

  Though Lilly couldn’t make out a word of it, she watched with interest as the medium alternated deep breathing with bouts of intense scribbling. “Excuse me,” she said. “But does any of that answer my question?”

  Eudoxia looked up from the page, and at that same moment the ashes in the dish began to stir. If Lilly had been interested in debunking so-called psychics, this would have been the time to peek under the table in search of some contraption—a foot-operated pump and tube, a small electric fan—that troubled the ashes and made them swirl and rise. Instead, the two women both stared at the dish, unable to move, until Eudoxia broke the spell: “No!” she said. “No, no, and nein!”

  Though he had taken his eyes off the candle, the boy seemed consumed by some invisible goings-on around Eudoxia. He looked intently at her, then to her right, then back to her, then to her right, as if he were following a heated argument. But as the No, no, and nein poured out of her, he clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes up tight.

  IT WAS HIS father’s voice. He imagined his da on the hill above their cottage, under the night sky, calling out to him. Did he know that Michael had left the seminary, undergone some cruel change, and found himself in a far-off city? Had his father played some part in dispatching Francis to New York to reunite the brothers and seek help for Michael? But how was it that his father’s voice could reach him now? Could the cry of a father for his lost son travel on this celestial frequency?

  Michael shook his head as the clutter within grew louder. He heard the hazy static of a wireless, the muffled chatter of voices, the singsong of a children’s rhyme in a language he could not name. All of it threatened to drown out the cries of his father.

  “Mr. Yeats, can you hear this? I’d swear it’s my father’s voice.”

  Yeats rubbed his chin, pensive. “I suppose that’s possible,” he said. “He is on my side, you know.”

  “Your side of what?”

  “Of life. Of death,” Yeats said. “He crossed over just—hello, that must be it. You said you’d been summoned from the classroom one morning, given some bad news. That must have been when you found out.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Michael said, but already the fact of it had seized him.

  “It’s not a question of belief,” Yeats said. “It simply is.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve only just put it together myself. I’ve had quite a bit of—”

  “My God,” Michael said. “Da. Da is gone.”

  LILLY HAD A resounding answer to one question and a list full of mysteries. She was not to go to Prague, but this came from the same voice that had provided a roster of unknowns: George, Francis, London, the tower, and one final addition, hastily scribbled by Madame Eudoxia: Michael. She didn’t know any of these people, and wasn’t the Tower of London the spot where the English kings made people disappear? A place of confinement, of confession, of last nights on earth? Far from a place of refuge, that sounded like the Prague that Josef feared the city would become.

  And what was she to do with the boy? She realized now that she should have asked more questions, different questions—that the reason he drew the hand and eye was not so she could ask about staying or going, but so she could find out more about him. This is how you can know me, he was saying. But within moments of receiving her answer, he was overwhelmed by tears. He put his head in his hands and choked out a horrid wail, a cry of pure misery. There was only one place for him and that was the studio, among the wreckage of boxes and her half-packed suitcase. She would be lucky to find a taxi in this part of the city, but though he was slight, she did not think she could carry him all the way home.

  THE WORLD’S FAIR

  THIS WAS THE MOMENT Peggy would miss the most. Soon, in a line of other girls, she would step to the edge of the pool, wait a beat, and then, with her arms raised, begin her dive. She would feel it all: the spring of her legs, her feet free of the deck, her body flashing through the air, then plunging into the pool, the shock of the water igniting every nerve. She would surface midstroke, the elaborate choreography already under way, as row after row of Aquabelles swam the perimeter of the pool, loope
d back in braided circuits, and formed stars and flowers with their kicking legs, their bobbing heads, their artfully turned arms.

  The Aquacade was the biggest draw in the World’s Fair Amusement Zone. The fair itself might lose money (and it did, by the truckload), but the Aquacade would make a richer man of Billy Rose, master showman and owner of the Diamond Horseshoe, one of the hottest clubs on Broadway. In the weeks before the fair opened, an army of workers had completed a vast grandstand cradling a 250-foot-long swimming pool that stretched from one lofty tower to another. In one of the towers, Vincent Lopez led his orchestra through a peppy mix of popular tunes, while on the other side, daredevil divers and clown acts plummeted into the water below. The headliners were celebrities long before the fair ever started: Johnny Weissmuller, the Tarzan of the silver screen; Eleanor Holm, a champion swimmer better known for getting tossed from the Olympic team for late-night carousing; and a man who never so much as dipped his toe in the water, Morton Downey, the last of the great Irish tenors.

  Along with its star power, the Aquacade amazed the masses with its cast-of-hundreds water-ballet revues. The burly Aquadudes were often the first in the pool, but there were no more than twenty of them and—sorry, ladies!—they weren’t the main attraction. It wasn’t until the women entered the water—row upon row of lithe Aquabelles, Aquafemmes, and Aquagals—in peach-toned bathing suits that suggested no suits at all that the audience really began to cheer. Music blared from the bandstand, fountains sprayed in all directions, and the swimmers sliced through the water, shaping curlicues and sunbursts made up of nothing but arms and legs and white-capped heads. For the big finish to one number, the Aquabelles assembled at the far end of the pool and swam its length in rows of six, their heads perfectly aligned, until they disappeared below the bandstand. That always put the crowd into a frenzy, bidding farewell to that abundance of flesh, of smiles, of joy.

  If Peggy had told them at the audition that she was getting married in June, they never would have picked her. Five thousand tried out and only five hundred were chosen. Even after she got the job, she kept her engagement a secret. Every day before she left home to catch the bus to the fair, she put her engagement ring in the jewelry box in her bedroom. Until she returned to her parents’ house—to the room where she had grown up—she wasn’t Peggy-who-was-getting-married, she was just Peggy. Some of the girls thought she was stuck-up or standoffish, and one of the Aquadudes had called her a cold fish, but she couldn’t risk blurting out something about the wedding that would get her hauled in front of the bosses. It was fine for Eleanor Holm to be married. She was the biggest name on the marquee, and her mister was none other than Billy Rose himself—until recently Mr. Fanny Brice. But Aquabelles, Aquafemmes, Aquagals, and even the do-nothing Aquamaids? That wasn’t a job for wives. Wives needed to be taking care of the home instead of performing four shows a day, seven days a week, for thousands of cheering, ticket-buying customers.

  Peggy’s final day at the Aquacade was supposed to be last week, but she had delayed and delayed and delayed. Don’t think you can climb out of the pool and into your wedding dress, her mother kept telling her. No groom wants a bride who stinks of chlorine.

  But what if Peggy wasn’t going to be a bride? What about that?

  Peggy had always hated the dreary, boring side of life—the side that her mother and Rosemary said was just life itself. But why did that have to be life? Rosemary lived in a shabby apartment with a landlady with cobweb hair who was always looking over her shoulder. And Rosemary was supposed to be the smart one! That’s what Daddy had always said—and look where it had landed her. Mother and Daddy’s house was nice enough but it was cluttery: the china cabinet was stuffed with plates painted with the Tara brooch and the end tables were crowded with pictures of spooky-eyed relatives dead since before Peggy was born. It was all so old—not just from the past but about the past—and every frame, candy dish, and scrap of Old Country lace needed to be dusted every single day. Peggy didn’t want any of that. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as a maid or a museum-keeper.

  She often lingered for hours on the fairgrounds when her shift was up at the Aquacade. Everything at the fair was newer than new: it was the future. The buildings were out of a dream, in shapes that no one in the Bronx had ever imagined, and at night the fair was a magic city of fountains, neon, spotlights, and fireworks. Even Manhattan looked old-fashioned after a day of gazing at Democracity or the Futurama. In the General Motors Pavilion, she saw a city of pristine skyscrapers with landing pads on each roof for helicopters and autogiros. Out one window you had a view of the ocean; out the other, zeppelins waited to whisk you off to Timbuktu. Sign me up! she said. Who wouldn’t want to live in the clouds, in a glass tower with a view of the future?

  Tim had already picked out an apartment for them in Manhattan. A little taste of city life, he had said. Just until we start a family. But she knew they wouldn’t be spending their nights dancing at the Savoy or the Roseland or even that snoozy old hotel where Martin played. Tim had chosen the apartment because it was closer to his office, where he spent all of his time anyway. And the only thing the apartment looked out to was Brooklyn, and who wanted to look at Brooklyn all day? Whenever she brought it up, Tim would say, Swell, then we’ll stay in the Bronx, but she didn’t want that either.

  There were almost a hundred days until the fair closed, and that meant three or four hundred more moments when she could step to the edge, raise her arms, and dive into the water. It wasn’t a bad way to spend the summer.

  But summer would end, and then what?

  Tim was ready to start their life together. He was past ready. He had wanted to get married right away—a two-month engagement, three months tops—but it was her family who put on the brakes. We’re doing it right this time, Daddy had said, as if her wedding was nothing but a big do-over for Rosemary’s. By waiting nine months from the engagement to the wedding, her father could prove a point to the world about the kind of girls he had raised, if anyone cared to notice.

  If Peggy hadn’t been forced to spend so much time with nothing to do but choose hors d’oeuvres and napkin colors for her faraway wedding, she never would have tried out for the Aquacade in the first place. It hadn’t even been her idea. Two of her girlfriends were auditioning and Peggy went with them, and guess who they chose? Tim thought this Aquacade business was all fun and games, but once the fair opened and he saw her swimsuit, and how the Aquadudes gripped the girls by the heels and scissored their legs open and shut during the water ballet, and the way the crowd went bananas through it all—well, he wasn’t laughing anymore. If she chose the Aquacade over being Mrs. Timothy Halloran, even if only for a few more months, she could say good-bye to any chance of being married to Tim, whom she genuinely did love.

  Then what would she do?

  Follow the Aquacade to Cleveland or San Francisco? Make a living doing water ballet at some circus? How awful. Peggy wasn’t like the girls backstage who thought being an Aquagal was going to lead to a starring role in the next MGM picture. Those girls had stuffed themselves on dreams of a Hollywood mansion and life as the next Mrs. Johnny Weissmuller. As far as Peggy could tell, Weissmuller might be the Aquacade’s number one Aquadonis, but when he wasn’t high-diving into a bottle of Dewar’s, he was inviting every Aquabelle in sight back to his dressing room for a private lesson in the breaststroke. Playing Jane to that Tarzan? You’d have to be crazy to want that.

  But hadn’t Peggy gone crazy, too? Wasn’t the heat or maybe something in the pool water driving her absolutely Bellevue-style crazy? That night with Francis: that was something a madwoman did. She had honestly been out of her mind, and when she called Rosemary the next day to say You’ll never believe what happened, the only words that came to her were The wedding is off, because how could she ever say what she had done?

  All she wanted was to plunge. One last time, she wanted to leap and to plunge. This afternoon, when she swam into the darkness beneath the bandsta
nd, it would be toward a future as Mrs. Timothy Halloran. She told herself that wasn’t half bad, when you thought about it. And perhaps this was the best time to stop, because part of her still wanted to stick with the Aquacade. That little bit of wanting would brighten the memory of diving into the pool, and would keep it from fading too quickly.

  The 4:15 show finished with the grandest finale: Morton Downey sang “Yankee Doodle’s Gonna Go to Town Again,” a song Billy Rose had co-written to goose the show with a harmless bit of patriotic swagger. As the horns blared and the crowd cheered, the swimmers and dancers stretched out an American flag that was bigger than a city block. From the edge of the pool to the top of the fan-shaped staircase, the fabric rippled like a waterfall of red, white, and blue. Halfway up the staircase, Peggy gripped the shimmery edge of the flag and smiled so big that her cheeks hurt, and though she would swear it was just the chlorine, her eyes burned red and the tears streamed down her face.

  THE PLAZA HOTEL

  MARTIN HAD BEEN UP and down the city in search of Michael. He’d spent the night canvassing every hospital and morgue north of Fifty-First Street, grabbing a few hours of fitful sleep in the waiting room of Lenox Hill Hospital before continuing his search. He returned to the Plaza in the morning, where the elevator operator—the same one who’d said he was no seafaring man—assured Martin that he hadn’t seen either of his brothers since midday Wednesday. Martin implored the man to let him, the wayward MacFarquhar brother, into the suite, but he refused, in the politest way possible. “Rules are rules,” he said apologetically, though Martin suspected he would have bent the rules for his big-tipping brother. Against his better judgment, he visited the nearest police precinct, but when he was handed a missing-persons form reeking of mimeograph ink and loaded with questions about names and last known addresses, he stepped outside for a breath of air and just kept walking. He tried the park and poured a fortune in dimes into pay phones calling hospitals, police stations, Rosemary, the Plaza. As the day turned toward night, he found himself again at the Plaza, hoping that Michael had returned and wondering what the hell had happened to Francis. He was preparing himself to beg the desk clerk once more for a minute inside the suite—just to see if his poor, sick younger brother was alive or dead—when he spotted Francis himself, crossing the lobby with a man who loomed like a bodyguard, or a brick wall. Martin called out his name, aliases be damned: “Francis! Goddamn it—Francis! Stop!”