The Boy from Tomorrow

by Camille DeAngelis

  Once he’d read everything of Byron’s—he’d come to think of the playwright by his first name—he turned, almost unwillingly, to Josie’s memoir, for which he filled out a call slip in the main reading room of the New York Public Library. The opening chapters told of her stormy upbringing at the hands of Lavinia Clifford, her adoption by the Jaspers, and of her rise in the ranks of the New York Evening Star alongside Cassie’s early years in show business. Mindful that her sister was following in their mother’s footsteps, she traced Lavinia’s career to its beginning, and wrote of the meetings she’d had with some of the stagehands and chorus girls who’d once asked Lavinia for messages from their departed loved ones.

  She wrote, too, of coming back to Edwardstown for her mother’s funeral in 1927.

  We were all grown up; no one recognized us, and so we overheard far more than we wanted to. With clucking tongues and gasps of horror the ladies of Edwardstown told each other that Lavinia Clifford had drunk herself to death, and that with so many bad investments there was hardly enough money left even to pay the servants’ pensions. And what had become of her silent manservant, who never seemed to age? Either he had left her in her final hours, or he was hiding in the house behind those heavy black draperies.

  If we were to judge by the volume of gossip in the shops and the hotel dining room where we took our meal that evening, we expected we’d see a fine crowd in the church the following day, but at the service it was only myself, Cass, Emily, the servants, and two or three clients who had believed in our mother to the very end. We’d overheard at the hotel that Lavinia had fallen out with Berringsley some years before, which prepared us for his absence at the funeral. It was a relief that we did not see him. Coming face to face after so many years with Mrs. Pike and Mrs. Dowd, who’d never been kind to us, was awkward enough.

  They hadn’t seen their mother in the intervening years, and she’d contacted them only through her lawyer to release the trust accounts her late husband had established for the girls’ financial security. On occasion, she and Cass had both written to her, sending newspaper clippings that proved their accomplishments, but she’d never replied.

  It stung that she should recount her childhood at great length without ever mentioning the talking board or phonograph. When he reached the section on her life and adventures with Dr. Stapleton, he stopped reading. He didn’t know if he’d ever feel ready for that part.

  He brooded over all this until Danny put him straight. “She couldn’t write about you, man! People would think she was crazy.” They were on the phone, and Alec could hear him chewing something as he talked. “And she did write about you. Got her brother-in-law to, anyway. Haven’t you dithered long enough?”

  Danny was right. It was time to write a letter to whomever lived on West 87th Street.

  * * *

  Of course, he’d memorized the address the very day the key arrived in the mail. Someone in the apartment pressed a button to let him in, and he passed through an Art Deco hallway of black marble and gilded trim into a narrow elevator. Part of him wanted to run from this, to put it off for a few more years. There could be no more letters, no second reunion with these strangers who knew all about him.

  He stepped out of the elevator and a door opened at the end of the hall. For a second—just one second, and then it passed—he saw Josie in a striped sweater and gray corduroys, her wild dark hair pulled back from her face in a hasty chignon, careless and elegant at the same time. The long straight nose, the warm, earnest expression—she was Josie, and a moment later she was not.

  “It’s you? You’re Alec?” He nodded, and when she smiled that buried wish tore at his heart. “Amazing, isn’t it? I could’ve sat next to you on the subway and I would never have known you.” For a long moment they stood looking at each other on either side of the doorway.

  Finally the girl held out her hand. “I’m Nora. Cass’s great-granddaughter. Come in. My grandmother—Emily Jane—she’s in the living room.”

  The apartment was well lived in, with pictures and paintings on the corridor walls and shelves lined with old hardcovers. The air smelled faintly of a spice he couldn’t identify. An old woman sat in an armchair by a window, eyes closed, smiling into the afternoon sunshine. There was a plate of hummus and crackers and a pitcher of iced tea with two glasses on a table at her elbow.

  Nora looked down at the packet in his hand. “Are those . . . the letters?” He nodded and handed her the cache of envelopes. “I’ll be very careful with them,” she whispered. “Thank you.” He looked back to Emily Jane and saw the thick, yellowed envelope in her gnarled hands.

  The girl made as if to leave, then turned in the doorway, hesitating. “I used to ask for bedtime stories about the boy from the future. I always wanted to find you—after all, we knew where you lived!—but Gran said you’d come to us when you were ready.” She flushed as she made this confession.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long,” he replied, with the ghost of a smile. She smiled back, and went out of the room as he approached the figure in the chair.

  Emily Jane opened her eyes. “So it’s you, at last. The boy from tomorrow.”

  He sat down beside her. “Your mother named you after Emily?”

  “Oh, yes. The Jaspers raised them, you know. She was my aunt Em.” The woman’s chin trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. But she made an effort to compose herself and gave him a shrewd look. “I imagine you know a little of what it feels like—remembering those who are gone.”

  He nodded. “Thank you for meeting me, Mrs. Newman.”

  “Oh, do call me Emily Jane. You were always Alec to me.” She sighed fondly. “When I was a child my mother read me The Little Prince, and she told me you’d read it to her first, on her seventh birthday. Then I learned the meaning of the word ‘impossible,’ and also that I could never rightly use it.” Emily Jane paused, remembering. “She wrote a letter to the author, you know. To warn him his plane would be shot down during the war. He probably never received it, poor man—not that he would have believed her, anyway. Would anyone? But all that is in the letter, I expect. Aunt Josie always wrote the most interesting letters, didn’t she?” He nodded, smiling, and she held out the envelope. “I know you’ve waited a long time for this—not as long as I have, but long enough. I think I’ll take a nap while you read it.”

  She settled back into the armchair and closed her eyes, but he did not open the letter right away. This was the very last of them and must be savored more than any other. The window looked out over a staggered gray patchwork of roofs, and beyond them he could see the greenery of Central Park. Alec looked around the room, at the framed photographs and knick-knacks arranged on the end-tables. He saw Cass and Byron with Emily Jane on his lap—Josie in her late twenties, dressed in the windswept garb of a girl adventurer—and Emily and her husband with their own three children. He looked down at the envelope in his hands, not so faded as those that had come before it: Mr. Alec Frost.

  The letter was dated December 31, 1949, and it answered all his questions, even the ones he hadn’t wanted to put into words. Her handwriting had changed, but he wouldn’t linger on that. He’d rather think of her as a twelve-year-old girl recounting a dream she’d had of her future life.

  She wrote of how her tutor had written to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children on their behalf, of the early morning Emily and her uncle came for them in the car at five o’clock, and how she’d worried they would be a burden to their new family.

  Mother allowed us the money Father Clifford had set aside, and it was far and away the kindest thing she ever did for us. Still, I fretted that the money, all of it, rightfully belonged only to Cass, and it did not matter that Aunt Nora and Uncle Simon treated us like the children they’d never had. I always had the nagging feeling that I should begin earning my living as soon as I could, and I did. You were right, Alec. When I was sixteen I s
tarted as a secretary at the Evening Star, taking night classes at Hunter College for my B.A.; within two years I was a weekly contributor to the ladies’ page, and the year after that they sent me on my first real assignment. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to see my name in print, at least in the beginning.

  She described Emily’s husband Jack, who ran his own news service, slept in a cubby-hole for ten minutes at a time and drank two gallons of coffee a day, and how Cass kept the theatrical awards she’d collected over the years in a row across the mantel of a painted-over fireplace. These were little pieces of history he’d never find on microfilm.

  I wish you could have seen her on stage and off it too. She will always be the same feisty little imp. Even now I watch her learning her lines and think of how she used to stick out her tongue on the side of her mouth whenever she pressed pencil to paper.

  I must tell you about Byron. He is the sort of man who helps an elderly person cross the street or gives a significant sum of money to a friend in need and mentions it to no one. He is also the sort who would laugh when I recounted your “prediction” that Cass would one day work with a man named Byron F. Grimsby, and how she made fun of his name. He has been a kinder brother than I ever could have hoped for.

  Cass was seventeen when they met. She’d agreed to an unpaid role in a college production as a favor for a friend, and Byron was the playwright and director, a student at New York University. I remember the evening he discovered our connection to Lavinia Clifford. His grandmother had been a devoted Spiritualist in her day, and he’d grown up hearing stories of all the impossible things our mother had said and done in her illustrious career. He was so enthralled, so eager, that I had to leave the room.

  By then we were living on our own, in an apartment just across the hall from Emily and Jack, and in the evenings I sat at my typewriter while Cass learned her lines. I would fall asleep listening to her murmuring to people who were not there, and I inevitably thought of the past.

  And of course, there was The Man From Tomorrow. Cass wanted Byron to name the hero after you, but he said “Alec” was too old fashioned, it wouldn’t be convincing.

  . . . Do you remember my telling you of those times when Mother made that terrible prediction in her trance state—that one of us would betray her? Well, Byron wrote a play about it: the rise and fall of a psychic medium. Mother’s fictional counterpart had no children, and Byron gave her another name, but it was undeniably Mother.

  By then they were married, and Byron had always intended Cass for the starring role. I never let her hide with me in the back hallway outside the reading room, yet it was as if she’d watched through the keyhole just as I had. She was Mother, down to the languid lolling of the head, the booming voice of the “spirit control,” the twitching of the long white fingers. It was difficult to watch, and indeed it was the only one of Cassie’s plays I did not see more than once.

  In a sense, then, Mother’s prophecy had come true. Yet if she had shown the poor child some love and kindness, no such prediction would have ever passed her lips. I suppose you know, library detective that you are, that her memoir was never published. I did not even find a copy in her personal papers. But I’ve said well enough on this subject, haven’t I? My mother cannot defend herself, nor can she repent. I can only wish her peace.

  Now I must tell you of Dr. Jennings. Once we were settled with Emily’s aunt and uncle at their apartment in Chelsea, all five of us met our dear psychical researcher for lunch at the Hotel Knickerbocker, which was quite a treat. The doctor was in fine form, having recently exposed a fraudulent medium who’d been doing sittings for war widows, and I remember that our conversation was full of laughter and fascinating anecdotes. “These girls are much changed since the last time I met them,” he remarked to Uncle Simon. “There is a light in their eyes which ought to have been there always.” How sorry I was when it came time to shake his hand and quit the restaurant! I’d taken for granted that we would see him again, but the years passed quickly, and it was Uncle Simon who broke the news that the doctor had collapsed on the squash court. You did not tell me when he would die, but I thought of you on that day. It was September, 1919. There were so many people at the funeral that we were obliged to stand in the back.

  I want you to know that I often think of the kindness and concern you showed for us in those lonely days before Dr. Jennings made it possible for us to leave. It still stuns me to know that it was I who decided not to have her name added to Father Clifford’s stone, I who arranged for the bramble bush to be planted beside the grave, I who decided we should not be named among her survivors, and I who started the deed of 444 Sparrow Street into the succession of hands that would ultimately lead me to you.

  Sounds from the kitchen tugged him out of her narrative, and for a few moments he watched Cassie’s daughter as she slept. He thought of the letter the little girl had written him after they could no longer communicate through the talking board—I hope I live to be a very old wumman so you can come and visit me wen I am very old—and the memory gripped his heart like a vise. Not exactly, Cass.

  Will it be Emily Jane who has given you this letter? Was it she who sent you the key to the cupboard? I have told her all about you, of course—and she has promised, with the gravitas of a Templar knight, to keep it safe in the meantime. As I write this she is eighteen, and about to leave for her first New Year’s Eve party at the Starlight Ballroom. I am staying with Cass and Byron tonight, and, from where I sit at the spare room desk, I can see Emily Jane standing in front of the bathroom mirror in her high heels, smiling to herself as she applies her lipstick. She has a young man in her life, a naval officer. One time during the war, poor boy, he went for over a year without setting foot on land. I wish you could see her, Alec; she has more than a little of her mother’s panache. How old is she now?. . .

  The phone rang, and it startled him out of the letter. For a moment or two this sensation lingered—of being yanked out of another time and place—but the scent of frying onions wafting from the kitchen returned him to the present.

  Emily Jane was awake now. “You’re still reading,” she observed. “But then, I suppose that’s the longest letter anybody ever wrote you.”

  He nodded. “I think I’ll finish it later, if you don’t mind.”

  Nora appeared in the doorway, twisting a dish towel in her pale hands. “We were hoping you’d stay for dinner.”

  “I’d love to,” he replied, a little too quickly. Emily Jane grinned, and he felt his heart clutch again as the impish face of her mother shone out through the wrinkles. It was gone a moment later, but Alec went on smiling. He turned to Nora. “Do you need any help?”

  “Sure,” she said. “If you feel like chopping some vegetables. I’m just making a stir fry.”

  She led him into the narrow kitchen, the counters and cabinets awash in golden afternoon light. “It was you, wasn’t it?” Alec managed to ask. “You sent the key?”

  Nora laid down a knife and a yellow pepper. She met his eye, and nodded. There was a look on her face, sad and hopeful, and full, too, of some other feeling neither of them would be able to identify for a little while yet.

  Meanwhile, None of This

  Has Even Happened Yet

  39.

  For years I only thought of writing. I imagined hiding letters in places I knew you’d never find: at the back of a cupboard in our apartment near Washington Square, or under the floor-boards in a Vienna hotel room. When Tom died, and then all through the war, I told myself that I must write, but something kept me from it. I hope you will understand, Alec: I knew I should not live my life with my head caught in a future I can play no part in.

  Josie laid down her pen and stretched her fingers. Cass came down the hall and poked her head in. “We’ll leave for Martino’s at nine-thirty. Byron’s made the reservation for ten.”

  Martino’s on Mulberry Street was their New Year’s
tradition. The streets of Little Italy were just as festive as Times Square but much less frenetic. Josie nodded, smiled, and turned back to her letter, thinking Cass would not linger. “Who are you writing to?”

  Josie looked up from the desk, and when she spoke she heard the catch in her voice. “Our old friend Alec.”

  Her sister’s eyes lit up. “That’s marvelous, Josie! You mean you still write to him?”

  “I don’t, really. I tried once or twice, but it simply wouldn’t come as easily as it did then.”

  “That’s only natural. You were children, and now you’re a grown woman writing to a child.”

  “That’s just it,” said Josie. “I’ll never know how old he’ll be when he reads this. He could be twelve, or twenty, or fifty . . .”

  Cass asked, “How are you planning to leave it for him?”

  Before Josie could reply, Emily Jane’s voice sang out from the bathroom down the hall. “Mother, may I borrow your eyeliner?”

  Cass turned in the spare-room doorway and called, “Absolutely not. That make-up’s for the stage, do you understand? I will not have you plastering your face like a vaudeville chorus girl.” She turned back to her sister. “Now, what was I just asking you?”

  Josie grinned. “You were asking to whom I’m planning to entrust the letter.”

  Cass lifted her eyebrows and glanced back at her daughter framed in the yellow bathroom light, then sat heavily on the bed. “I can’t think of how old she’ll be in 2016. Good grief, Josie! I’ll be cold in the ground.”

  Josie patted Cass on the knee. “Which is why I’m leaving it with her instead of you.”

  The sisters looked at each other and laughed. “Well,” said Cass, after a moment. “I’ll let you write. Tell him I still think of him fondly.”

  Cass came into the room just now, and we spoke of you. She thinks of you often and asked me to tell you so.

  I’ve tried to think of all the questions you’d ask me if you could, and there’s one question I find myself reluctant to answer. There are two periods of my life that I look back on with the greatest fondness, even though they were times fraught with uncertainty: there is you, of course, and there is Tom. I wish you could have known him, Alec—he often reminded me of you with his insatiable curiosity, his delight in a good book, his unwillingness to give up in the face of frustrating circumstances.