Francis hadn’t come to America looking for anything more than an escape from the mess he had made in Ireland. But strolling through the city gave him a thrill. He wasn’t just watching this parade of opulence, he was a part of it. He and Michael could be hiding in some rainy hovel right now, dreading the kick at the door that would signal the end. But he had chosen a different sort of refuge, and damn him if the idea hadn’t been the best he had ever had. They had a room at the Plaza, fine clothes, and enough money to bluff their way into any corner of the city where their feet could carry them. Even Michael seemed enlivened by the shine of the street. His eyes darted skyward, his cheeks were flushed with the glow of good health, and his mouth fairly gaped.
But what had caught Michael’s attention wasn’t the bared legs of the mannequins or the walnut-size diamond in the window of the jewelry store or the way that women not so subtly sized up Francis (he was a handsome fellow, and the suit gave him the aura of wealth and good breeding), nor was it the yellow taxicabs and the beetle-bright cars that lined the avenue. He was taken in by the sight of a worn, red-stone church looming on the next corner. Its carved steps led to an entrance that was austere in the extreme—a rebuke to all of this shimmer and bustle, but one that must have been issued years earlier, preemptively. The church had long ago set an example that none of the newer buildings cared to follow. For these new buildings, the trick was to seem permanent and fundamental to life while at the same time projecting an air of modishness. Each was a temple not merely to the current moment, but to the coming season. The future. The church, however, was plain, but on purpose, not because of a lack of funds or imagination. It seemed as if it had been built and then abraded with copper-wire brushes to deny itself, even in the first moments of life, any sense of freshness, any of the vanity that came with the new. It had all the shine and polish of rumpled butcher’s paper. Michael imagined an interior of white walls and simple wooden pews. Presbyterians? It seemed the sort of church that they would build: a monument to self-denial surrounded on all sides by the serious business of making money.
Michael wished he had a notepad—he wished he could still write!—so he could jot all this down for his next visitation from Yeats. Maybe Yeats wouldn’t care to read the finer points of difference between one church and another—wasn’t Christianity just another source of metaphor for modern poets?—but maybe he would make something of the red-stone church’s down-the-street neighbors. A Gothic-spired cathedral flying the papal flag faced off across the avenue with a massive bronze Atlas bowed under a steel-ribbed globe. Farther ahead, a golden giant fell while a fire crackled in his hand, and behind him a bearded eminence used his burning fingers, sextant-like, to measure the darkness. Above this figure rose the tallest tower Michael had ever seen: a slim sheaf of unbroken lines that soared into the cloudless blue.
This wasn’t sightseeing; it was an extended hallucination. A city of golden doors and particolored churches, of Titans who had populated the myths of Michael’s childhood, symbols of state power and godly authority and freedom and rebellion and punishment. He wanted to take Francis’s sleeve and ask, Can you see this? Is this only in my head? But he knew that Francis would only give him that patient, pitying look. Yes, he would have to ask Yeats about all of it, and as he formulated that thought, he had to laugh. I’ll ask my ghost to decipher my hallucination. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
FOR THE SECOND time that day, Martin found himself on the IRT bound for home. On his early-morning ride he had been drunk but happy. Now, his hangover had caught up with him. It had been lurking in the shadows, waiting for Martin to doze, and though he had made it wait and wait—perhaps the only benefit of staying up through the night and deep into the next morning—a hangover was a patient creature. Martin’s head was as brittle as a rusted bell and his limbs were sapped by the burn-off of the adrenaline that had hit him with the sudden appearance of first one brother and then the other.
When he had awoken at the Plaza, with no sign of Francis or Michael anywhere, he could almost believe that it had all been a dream. Had he come to a party at the Plaza last night, blacked out, and imagined the whole thing? That was a more plausible explanation than finding his brothers in New York, living like a couple of millionaires on holiday. A quick search turned up a few suits hanging in the closet, along with a collection of plaid waistcoats, which jibed with his memories of Francis and the Scottish alias. Martin pissed in the toilet and checked himself in the mirror haloed by bulbs. There was no denying it—he looked like hell. He had all the charm of an unmade bed. He collected his hat and as an afterthought scrawled a note, which he propped on the desk in the suite.
F & M
Dinner at my place. Tomorrow at 4:30.
Meet your American relations!
—M
On his way out of the lobby, he was asked by the porter if the gentleman required a cab, and for a split second Martin considered it. Then he thought of Rosemary. If she saw him putting a dent in their grocery budget to pay a cabbie, she’d have his head.
Rosemary. She would be wondering what had happened to him. What a story he would have for her: Francis and Michael in New York City, the Plaza Hotel—but what was he to tell her about the circumstances of his brothers’ escape? That was a question for another time. It was all too much for now, past midday on a Saturday when he hadn’t truly slept since Thursday night and in the meantime had traveled from the Bronx to Broadway to Harlem, then back to the Bronx and from there to the Plaza Hotel. At least he wouldn’t need to be back at the Kensington in time for tonight’s show—but there was another bit of news he had to break to Rosemary. She would have more than his head when he told her he’d quit playing for Chester.