The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Félicité, for her part, edged away from this sudden effusion of adoration. She wasn’t buying it, not for one minute. Tomorrow she would begin packing for a summer at the Connecticut farm, and if that became as terminally dreadful as she expected, she would tell Father to have the Wyoming ranch readied for her. This city, with its inane people, was suffocating her. If her own family couldn’t see when they were being deceived, then she could try only so hard to save them. Horses were never dishonest; a piano never lied. Each responded to your touch and each could punish you for your mistakes, but at least the touch and the mistakes were yours and yours alone.

  Francis used this upsurge in interest in the Binghams to make his exit. He had meant his speech to be a parting gift for the family, but by day’s end they would no longer be the particular favorites of the queen’s cousin; they would be the dupes who had provided cover for an assassin. The Binghams would be tainted by a scandal that would make the slights against Anisette look like schoolyard taunts. But hadn’t it been like this since the moment he fled his father’s funeral? He left a trail of wreckage behind him, and always it was the ones closest to him who bore the brunt. His turn would come—the day of reckoning was at hand—but first he had to find the king, and add one more bit of wreckage to the pile.

  He was already sweating, feeling the panic rise in him, but halfway through the door, he turned for one last glimpse of Anisette. She was still in the center of the crowd. The crush of the curious obviously unnerved her. As she caught sight of Francis, she started to raise one hand, as if to wave, but something about the gesture must have seemed too extravagant, too public. Instead, she rested her hand lightly against her cheek, and her face lit up into a smile that was just for him. Francis could almost imagine his own hand brushing a strand of hair from her face. He gazed at her a moment longer, wishing this was not the end, and then he was out the door, an ache chewing at his false heart and his traitor’s stomach.

  GRAMERCY PARK

  A FIERCE PAIN JOLTED Cronin, like a hot poker thrust against his skin.

  “I thought that might get your attention.”

  Cronin, bleary-eyed, looked up into the face of the woman—Helen, it was—who brought Gavigan his tea. He was on his back and when he tried to move he found one arm, his good arm, bound at the wrist with his belt, the other end of which was tied around a leg of the desk.

  “For your own good,” Helen said. “And for mine.”

  She had sliced his jacket from cuff to shoulder, then scissored off the bloody sleeve. Now she squeezed a cloth into a basin of water and dabbed at the wound, then knelt with one knee on the palm of his hand.

  “Hold still,” she said. “I think this time will do the trick.”

  Almost as an afterthought, she placed a rolled bit of cloth between Cronin’s teeth, then leaned in close. She probed the wound with what looked like a pair of tongs, the sort used to remove a sugar cube from a bowl. If he had felt a jolt before, this was the whole power station wired through his shoulder. He tried to turn toward the pain, like a bird with a broken wing, but the leather strap held and her weight kept his hand and the rest of the arm immobile.

  “Steady, you big baby,” she said, and then, “Aha!” She withdrew the tongs and waved in front of his eyes the slug she had harvested from his flesh. “Nasty piece of damage that was, but it could have been worse. For you, I mean. I don’t think there was much more you could have done to them.”

  She took her knee off his hand and sat back on the floor, rearranging the folds of her long skirt. He flexed, and while there was a crackle, it was nothing like the raw pulse he had felt when the bullet was still lodged in his arm. She wiped her forehead, where a streak of his blood colored her hairline.

  “I’m not going to ask who shot first,” she said, “but I have my suspicions. Now hold still. I have some sewing to do.”

  She first swabbed his shoulder with iodine, then deftly threaded a curved needle and set to work. Again and again, the needle went in and the needle came out.

  The needle was nothing compared to those tongs, but to keep himself steady Cronin stared at the ceiling. He’d sat beneath it for years but had never paid it any mind. It was pressed tin with some sort of scrolling, filigreed pattern repeated in each panel. Lying there, trying not to think about his shoulder and Helen’s efforts to repair it and the possibility that he might actually walk out of here—to the farm? into a police car?—he stared hard at that ceiling, and as the pain faded and his eyes regained focus, he saw finally that the curlicues were shamrocks, thousands of them.

  What was it about the American-born Irish that made them embrace so fiercely the slogans and symbols of the Old Country? This room, with its shamrocks, its death mask, its tricolor, its Easter Proclamation and all its medals and badges: these were the trinkets of revolution, all purchased with the blood of people Cronin had once considered brothers, sisters, comrades. He would bet that none of them—none who survived—had so many trophies in their homes, but here, far from the action, was a triumphant museum constructed by a man who had never risked the reprisals that came with every ambush: towns put to the torch, men killed in their beds, women and children turned out of their homes by the army, the Black and Tans, the Auxiliaries. Irish Americans sang their songs and drank their beer and wept for Mother Ireland. They lined up for the Body and the Blood and they marched on St. Patrick’s Day. All of them believed they were descended from Irish kings, and that gave them the right to insist that the actual Irish had to keep up the struggle, forever and ever, amen. Struggle kept the men strong and brave, the women pure and chaste, and everyone poor and scared and fretful for the future.

  “I heard him say you had a family.” Helen had nearly finished her stitching. “Tell me: Are you good to them?”

  Cronin looked right at her. He couldn’t find the words to fit her question.

  “Do you knock ’em around? Your wife, the children? There’s plenty of men who don’t see a thing wrong with it.”

  He shook his head. Their faces flared before him, and again he felt that sob welling in his chest. “I’ve never raised a hand.”

  “And what about when you’ve been drinking? You could put away your share and then some, if I remember right.”

  “I gave it up. After I left this place.”

  “You see that it stays that way. I’m not fixing you up so you can add to someone else’s misery.”

  “You have my word,” he said.

  “Words are liars, Mr. Cronin.” She twice looped the needle through the thread, tying off the knot. “Now tell me,” she said, “how old are your wee ones?”

  “The boy is five. Five and a half, is what he’d say. And the baby’s not yet a year.”

  “Five and a half? Then he’s not yours, is he? Unless you were keeping secrets from us.”

  “His own father left him,” Cronin said. “But he’s a fine boy. The best there is.”

  On hands and knees she scuttled across the floor to the desk, where she untied one end of the belt. Cronin shook his wrist free of the other end, and with her help was able to sit, then to stand.

  “It’s good to see that your time here didn’t ruin you,” she said. “Not completely. God knows it’s done that and worse to plenty of others.”

  Both of them looked at Jamie, then at Gavigan. Jamie’s face was a mask, a waxwork version of the living man. Gavigan’s neck was torn apart, his shirt was soaked in black blood, and his mouth hung open in an empty roar. The room was hot, and for the first time the smell of it hit Cronin full in the face.

  “Wait in the hallway,” Helen said. “I’m going to fetch you a clean shirt, though I can’t guarantee a good fit. And you might be out of luck for a jacket.”

  “It’s no bother.” He looked at the desk, where the telephone receiver lay. “You’re not calling the police, then?”

  “I am,” she said. “As soon as I have you packed up and out the door.”

  “You didn’t happen to hear any news on the radio,
did you? Anything from the fair?”

  “Now, where would I find time for that?” she said. “Don’t I have my hands full cleaning up after you?”

  THE WORLD’S FAIR

  ONCE MARTIN WAS AT last off the train, he faced a queue to enter the fair that seemed to stretch for miles. It could take an hour, he reckoned, to get inside. His whole head felt like a cracked tooth, raw and exposed, and he bounced on the balls of his feet like a desperate sprinter preparing for a race he knows he can’t win.

  To the left of the main gate was an entrance marked OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY, and Martin knew he had to risk it. He was Fitzwilliam MacFarquhar, wasn’t he? Surely there was some official business—saving the life of the king and such—that required his immediate attention. He strode toward the gate, the picture of nonchalance, looking neither right nor left. Just as he reached the opening, a man in a uniform emblazoned with a Trylon and Perisphere patch put out a hand to bar his way. Martin grabbed the hand and gave it a hearty shake.

  “Smashing day, isn’t it?” he said. “The king himself couldn’t have ordered better weather.” Martin had aimed his accent toward British lord but he probably sounded more like a cockney bootblack. It was no matter. The man, somewhat perplexed, returned the greeting and Martin breezed into the fair.

  He immediately found himself in a crush of people streaming between the House of Jewels and the Hall of Fashion, blocky white structures that looked as if they had been stamped out of industrial molds. Down one lane towered a two-story mural of a faceless giant celebrating ASBESTOS: THE MIRACLE MINERAL. The aesthetic seemed to be two parts Mount Olympus to one part comic-book hero: the statues and murals all sported hulking chests or ice cream–scoop breasts. And with the skies clear and the brutal temperatures of yesterday having faded to a milder form of heat wave, everyone seemed jubilant. Children waved miniature British flags, and a smiling woman walked past wearing a hat topped with a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. Martin took it as a good sign that the fair didn’t feel like a place that had just witnessed a regicide.

  Indeed, the World’s Fair, in that summer of 1939, was a place full of promise. It promised a world of frozen food and hot jazz, a world that would be better supplied and better organized in power, communications, transport, and amusement. Ribbons of highways would connect skyscraper cities where every citizen had a home in the clouds and a car on the road. Food grew in abundance under glass-domed orchards, or came flash-frozen, or Wonder-baked, or in strips of bacon fanned like playing cards and ready for frying. Not to be outdone by the likes of General Motors, the nations of the world offered their own visions of organization, abundance, and peaceful coexistence. At the Italian Pavilion, a waterfall cascaded from the feet of the goddess Roma to a bust of the famed inventor Marconi, while inside visitors read of the return of a new Roman empire. At the Soviet Pavilion, larger than all the rest, a golden worker hoisted a red star into the godless heavens, while the British Pavilion embraced the whole of its empire, from its northern corner of Ireland to Australia and New Zealand, then on to India and Southern Rhodesia—all connected along a grand Colonial Hall.

  Martin considered the possibility that Francis had lost his nerve—the best outcome, really—or had already tried and failed and was right now dead or in custody. Without a better plan, he had to follow Cronin’s diktat: find the king and you’ll find your brother. Working his way down the glutted Avenue of Patriots, he passed pavilions dedicated to science, religion, and the WPA. In the plaza that surrounded the Trylon and Perisphere, he asked a woman in an extravagantly floral hat if the king had passed by already. “Yeah, mister!” she said. “He went thataway!” and pointed up the long central axis of the fairgrounds, with its gargantuan George Washington, assorted demigods, reflecting pools, and fountains. From far off wafted the unmistakably aggressive brass of a high-school marching band, all trumpets, trombones, and tubas, and he edged his way in that direction. He still carried the morning paper’s special section marking in minute detail the route of the royal visit through the fair’s themed zones—up Constitution Avenue, right on Rainbow Avenue, left at the Pennsylvania Building—and naming every national pavilion that the royal entourage would pass, from Belgium and Japan to Czechoslovakia and Romania. But nowhere did it mention whether Francis was alive or dead, captured or lurking between the Court of Peace and the Town of Tomorrow.

  ONCE HE’D EXITED Perylon Hall, Francis found himself in some sort of circular garden. He was sweating, feeling the panic rise in him, but as he picked his way through the garden, he began to think that perhaps chasing the monarch would actually be easier, in the end, than the tension of standing in line. It would be a game of hide-and-seek played in a dreamworld of gleaming white towers and titanic statues. He had seen the king with his own eyes as he strode past the unlucky members of group 17. He was just a man, like Gavigan had said, as if that was supposed to make it easier. Nothing about this day was easy, and it would have to get so much harder before it was over.

  According to the schedule, the royals would soon begin a slow-motion tour of the fairgrounds. Cronin had told Francis that if the original plan broke down, he should look for the hinges, transitional moments where opportunity lurked: the royal party getting into or out of a car; the protocol-driven hesitation that followed the opening of a door. Franz Ferdinand had been shot when his car took a wrong turn and tried to right itself in a narrow lane. Cronin had told him that the archduke’s assassin had pissed himself before he took the fatal shots. Try to hold your water, will you? he had said. If it was an effort to lighten the mood, then it was Cronin’s one and only attempt at humor.

  On a tourist map of the fairgrounds, Cronin had traced the king’s route with a thick line of ink. Xs marked the hinges where Cronin saw the best chance to act, and now Francis could cross-reference the map with the timetable: 1:00 to 1:50, lunch at the Federal Building; 2:19, Canadian Pavilion; 2:40, Australian Pavilion. It was easy enough on paper to find the king, but in the flesh-and-blood world, Francis faced a crowd unlike anything he had seen before, not to mention the legions of police in their blue tunics and Coldstream Guards in their shaggy black bonnets. Pressing his way toward the fair’s main boulevard, he found himself surrounded by a girls’ pipe and drum corps that had just emerged from the Perisphere, which Anisette said contained the city of the future. So the future would have bagpipes; what a shame for the future. Now merely one among the kilted masses, Francis again checked the map. The best thing to do was get in front of the king, and be ready when the moment came. He put his finger on the last X Cronin had drawn: the British Pavilion.

  He checked his wristwatch. Off in the Bron-ix, Peggy was now a married woman. In another hour, Martin would start warming up his band. And if Miss Bloch had played her part, Michael would be there too, no longer Sir Malcolm but simply Michael Dempsey again.

  AS MARTIN DODGED through the crowd, looking in every direction for his ginger-haired brother, he had to ask himself: Wouldn’t they all have been better off if Francis were still in jail? If Francis were locked up in Mountjoy, Michael would be in the seminary, still in full possession of his senses, and he himself would be setting up at the Croke Park Club for the break that would bring a new and better life. But instead, look at how much Francis had cost them. All around was damage and disarray: first Michael had been hurt, then all of them were put in danger, and now Martin was here—surrounded by some fantasy of the future—trying to stop his brother from killing a king instead of at the reception, where his real future was waiting. His brother’s recklessness knew no limits. Even Peggy had almost called off her wedding after only a few hours with Francis.

  But if not for Francis and his wild schemes, Michael would still be stuck in the seminary and miserable. Francis himself would be rotting away in jail for another year or more, and who could prefer that to the chance of freedom? And without Francis, Martin would have learned of his father’s death through the mail, and likely would have boxed up and set aside whatever pang of guilt
or sadness the news provoked.

  There was something to it—the business of having a family that extended beyond the walls of your own home. He had felt it during the dinner on Sunday and again at the bar with Francis and then all last night as they painted the town. Without Francis and Michael, he would have gone about his life in America without admitting that some side of himself was missing, silenced. If having his brothers around forced upon him a knowledge of his own shortcomings, his own selfishness, then so be it. So much of his and his brothers’ past had been hidden under years of silence and separation. He hoped there could still be time to fit the pieces together—of his past, of his family—and all he had to do to make that possible was stop Francis from one more reckless act.

  Pressing closer to the Court of Peace, where the crowds were a dozen deep, he caught the sound of a band playing loose and fast. He stepped onto a bench for a better view: Clusters of police and a military color guard occupied the near end of the massive plaza, backed by a sea of five thousand teenage Boy and Girl Scouts. At the far end of the court, the monarchs and the mayor dined inside on capons and corn fritters, but the police-and-fire-department band had grown restless with waiting and launched into a Benny Goodman number. Hundreds of the Scouts, always prepared, began to jitterbug. All around Martin, people cheered, and a roar went up when the mayor himself appeared at the window. At least Martin wasn’t the only one at the fair who was supposed to be at Peggy’s wedding.

  Moments later, the dancing stopped and the band launched into “God Save the King.” Fountains spouted water the color of syrupy shaved ice, fireworks popped against a background of cloudless sky, the king reviewed the troops, and then his party mounted a blue-and-orange tractor train, of the type used at a children’s amusement park. If this was the future of royal transport, then the future was sure to arrive slowly. Through the festivities, Martin scanned the masses, his eyes searching for his brother’s face. Police and soldiers seemed almost to outnumber civilians around the court. He could not imagine how Francis could get close, but then Francis was clever, and reckless. If he saw a chance, he would take the shot. Martin was sure of it.