THE FIRST CABBIE he saw spelled it out for him: because of the royal parade and the millions gawking along the route, half the roads leading to Flushing were closed and the other half were twice as crowded. “You can get in,” he said, “but the meter’s gonna run for hours. How about it, Mr. Rockefeller?” No, the train was the only way, and that meant two, maybe three transfers, and that meant an hour or more, on a good day. This was not a good day. He bought a paper at the newsstand and gutted it for the special supplement on the royal visit. Photos of the king and queen filled each page: walking among a crowd in Canada, their path picketed with soldiers; riding in an open-topped carriage at the coronation; posing on a Scottish hillside with their two girls when the littlest was no more than Kate’s age. An inside page listed the itinerary for the day, from the moment they arrived by boat at the Battery to the long trek up the West Side Highway and then on to Queens. A close-up of the fairgrounds marked points of interest with numbered dots: the Trylon and Perisphere, Perylon Hall, the Federal Building, the British Pavilion, the Lagoon of Nations. The royals would see it all in a motorized cart at a touring speed of three miles an hour—faster, Martin believed, than the subway train that was slowly, slowly approaching the tunnel that would take it from the Bronx, to Manhattan, to Queens, and, if the stars aligned, would deliver Martin to the fair before Francis could blow the Court of Peace to pieces.
All that had been pent up during this mad week came at Martin in a rush: the funeral, the questions about their father, the men with their map to the bomb factory, and this hanger-on, this stormcock—what was his name?—who sent Martin on a cross-city chase and then ran off as the family gathered last night, only to call again with news that Francis, with his party of millionaires’ daughters and wives, was going to kill the king of England. Martin wouldn’t have believed a word of it if not for that voice; the man was right, Martin had known it before, in Cork, in the house where he was a boy. The man knew the house, the piano, the mantel, the clock. His mother had carried that clock home from a trip she and Da had taken to France, much to Da’s consternation. Ares on one side, Aphrodite on the other, both slouched against the mother-of-pearl face. Is that supposed to be me? Da had said, pointing to the bearded Ares leaning shirtless on his shield. Of course not, she said. That’s me. You’re the pretty one on the other side. Mam always got a laugh from that story. For his part, Da would play the peacock, pretending offense while he primped his necktie. After the flight from Cork, Martin never again saw that side of Da—playful, rising above his resentments. The clock was one of the few items Da took with them to Ballyrath, where it marked the minutes and hours of their shared confinement.
As the train lurched and scraped its way beneath the city, Martin thought back on those early, happier days. Tossing paper boats in the river near the university gates and racing to see which were first to reach the weir. Sitting with his mother in the opera house, her eyes full of tears, and learning from her how deeply music could cut, and that it was good to open yourself up to that ache. Walking with his father through the smoldering ruins the morning after the Brits had put the city to the torch. December, was it? He couldn’t have been more than ten. The air was wet and the smell of charred wood and the fog of crushed brick clung close to the ground. A man who had seen it burn said the clock on the city hall had chimed all the way until it collapsed into the rubble. Martin secretly hoped that the statue of Father Mathew might have burned—he’d always been afraid of the way the Apostle of Temperance glowered at the river—but the bronze priest had stood his ground. When Martin and his father returned home, their faces were streaked in soot and their clothes reeked of smoke. His father crouched in front of him, his thick hands on Martin’s shoulders. Who’s going to build it back, Martin? Da said, and then answered his own question, like a catechism. You are, that’s who.
Martin remembered this, too: Walking the twisty uphill lanes to the candy factory near Shandon, Francis in tow and a few shillings in his pocket. Most of what they bought, they gobbled on the spot, but Martin had learned to save a few sweets to bribe the rough boys who controlled safe passage from the Butter Exchange to the river. In those days, he would watch the ships at the port and in a notebook sketch their flags and list their countries of origin. He walked the bridge over Patrick Street, marking the low tide that exposed the barnacled walls of the quays and the high tides that lapped the underside of the other bridges. He listened to the gulls careening for bits of bread and river trash, the echo of the newsmen on George’s Street, the clop of dray horses toting jugs of milk, each tolling its own bass timbre. All of this was music to him. He heard every note and stitched them into unwritten compositions. By the time he was ten, he spent more than an hour a day at the piano and when Francis pestered him to kick a ball or line up a column of lead soldiers, he would practice for twice as long. He also played the tin whistle, the clarinet, the French horn. In the months after their last Christmas party, he had begged to be taught the violin. His mother had just arranged for him to take lessons, and then Mam was gone.
He was in the parlor playing Scott Joplin—his mother had been mad for Joplin since her days at the conservatory in Boston—when a boom from the street rattled the windows and shook the china plates on their stands. He paused his playing for only a moment, waiting to see if the sound would repeat, and then he resumed, his fingers bouncing over the keys, right hand chattering with the left. Then came the thunder of his father on the stairs, not even like feet on the treads but like a whole body tumbling end over end, and then the wrenching of the front door and the clack of the knocker against the brass plate, then a shout. None of it stopped Martin from playing. He played faster and louder, an endless loop, just the way that Joplin wrote it, until his father burst in, smoke-stained and wild-eyed, with a look Martin had never seen but would come to know well in the years ahead. Leave it! he said. For God’s sake! Leave it, will you! Martin pulled his hands away like the piano had been electrified. It was six months, at least, until his father arranged for him to use the piano in the pub in Ballyrath, and only in the mornings when the pub was closed, and only if he didn’t play too loud, and for God’s sake, he was never to play any ragtime.
THE WORLD’S FAIR