Jimmy’s position in Washington devolved into a multitentacled headache. “I’m arguing with aviation engineers in New York, negotiating with a compass manufacturer in Boston and riveters in Pittsburgh, and meanwhile we’ve got fleets of grounded planes in several states, as well as Europe,” he wrote to Katharine.
In an angular script on linen stationery, his weekly letters ran to ten or twelve pages. The ink, always Carter’s blue, carried a chemical odor but Katharine detected a hint of his European cologne as well. He wrote of his work, the war, the operas and exhibits he attended, and his future with Katharine. In their salon they would host gatherings of New York’s literati and musicians. They would raise real American children, for whom concepts like monarch and ghetto would be as abstract as imaginary numbers. Jimmy would chomp on hot dogs and cheer with their son at baseball games. Their daughter, with satin bows in her hair, would perfect her croisé in ballet class. Occasionally, tired of the hustle-bustle, Jimmy and Katharine would retreat to their estate in the country, where they would ride horses and play tennis.
Not quite prepared to dwell upon the prospect of raising children, Katharine folded these letters back into their envelopes. Music remained her focus. Music was her future. That was not negotiable. But she comforted herself that in the highest echelons of society, nurses and nannies usually attended to the young ones.
She wrote back: the Edith Rubel Trio was attempting a new direction, performing with a mezzo-soprano who sang folk songs from around the world. Katharine arranged the material, assigning harmonic and melodic support to the cello, violin, and piano. “No rehearsal necessary and the audiences eat it up.” What she did not mention was that even the enthusiasm of twelve or twenty amateur ethnomusicologists left her feeling irrelevant. In her moments of frustration, thoughts of Jimmy soothed her. “I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about you.”
“Great to know I’m not alone. Keep dreaming that, my love,” he urged.
Katharine remembered their evenings together, their mischief, and as time passed, her reveries acquired an erotic hue. “Mother is asking to meet you,” she wrote. And a few weeks later: “The next time you’re in the city why don’t you stay at our place? Mother agrees!”
“Why, that would be heaven!” Jimmy wrote back. “Simply to breathe the same air as you.”
After reading these words she folded the letter and held it to her breast. Life was full of twists and the most stunning of all was love, that crazy, blood-heating mélange of discovery and certitude.
She had never seen her mother so flustered as on the day of Jimmy’s visit. He had provided two weeks’ notice but Ellen acted as if two years would not suffice. All talk of vampires and strange accents vaporized and in its place, “help me push this divan, will you, Katharine? What we need is a fresh coat of paint. Are you listening? And these floors,” she groaned. Then, snapping her fingers, “a rug, we need a bloody rug!”
Nor had her mother ever devoted so much attention to the preparation of a meal. Ellen, who had hitherto professed to dislike everything French, borrowed a tattered copy of Easy French Cookery and selected a recipe for baked loin of lamb and potatoes. Due to war rationing, potatoes were scarce and costly. That made them all the more delicious. Ellen mumbled something about advance payment for her work, but Katharine suspected she had pawned an inherited jewel or two. Her mother fussed over the oven while Katharine beat cream and castor sugar for the baked apples and whipped cream dessert.
The knock came twelve minutes sooner than expected. Still in her apron Katharine opened the door. The young man standing before her, in a tweed suit, holding a leather suitcase as well as a shopping bag, was taller and more alluring than the Jimmy she remembered.
Her mother’s voice broke the spell: “Katharine, where are your manners? Please do come in, Mister Warburg. I am so very pleased to make your acquaintance. Charmed. As they say in Spain, mi casa es su casa.” She chuckled.
Jimmy produced a bottle of 1915 Beaune Premier Cru “Les Aigrots” and a box of Jean Neuhaus chocolate truffles. Placing them on the table, he asked how he could help with the preparations.
“Now, now, none of that,” Ellen chided him. “Katharine, offer Mister Warburg a glass of Madeira, won’t you?”
Over dinner Ellen reminisced about her childhood in Leicestershire, her career as an apartment décor specialist, and her taste in music. Katharine glanced at Jimmy, a little embarrassed. The purpose of the meal was not to honor Ellen, after all. But she knew her mother’s volubility reflected nervousness rather than self-centeredness.
Jimmy listened, his chin on his fist, and posed questions. He learned that Ellen was fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, Offenbach, and Kern. Jimmy nodded as if he knew of no greater composers. He refilled Ellen’s wine glass as soon as it emptied. By the end of the meal, he had conquered her.
She insisted on lending him her room. “The bed my dear departed Sam slept in. He would approve, I assure you, my Sam would.” She offered to sleep on the divan in the parlor, and would not be talked out of this arrangement.
Katharine lay awake much of the night, aware of Jimmy in the next room. She imagined he was awake, too, thinking of her.
In the morning, while pouring coffee, Ellen related her dream. She took great stock in dreams and loved to ramble on about them. “You were riding in a train, Katharine. I must have been sitting in the seat opposite because I was watching you. It was the loveliest train. The Orient Express perhaps. Walnut, brass, leather, crystal. And you in a white organza dress, with a hat and parasol. Looking out the window at the passing countryside.” She smiled, pushing the coffee cup toward Jimmy. “That’s all I remember. But that’s plenty.” She served Katharine. “You’re on this train. You’re going somewhere.”
“On what train?” asked Katharine, annoyed by her mother’s veiled prognostication.
“You may not know what storms lie ahead,” said Ellen, “or what land you’re heading to. That is precisely what makes the journey so thrilling. But at least you’re riding in a nice car.”
“Speaking of going somewhere, and despite this delightful conversation and memorable coffee, I’m afraid I’m expected elsewhere,” said Jimmy glancing at his wristwatch. “I have a meeting downtown in forty minutes.”
At the door Katharine kissed him goodbye, feeling suddenly settled despite herself. As if they already lived in matrimony and he were running to the office.
On a treadle table in the bedroom she had shared with Sam, Ellen kept her Singer sewing machine, black with gold-and-red painted-filigree adornments and a big stop-motion wheel. She handled this contraption the way Katharine played piano, with resolve, reverence, and pride. After purchasing yards of satin and lace and a bag of beads, she devoted her free time to designing and sewing a fashionable gown that would showcase Katharine’s figure without sacrificing her mystique, as well as a beaded headpiece.
The Warburg clan requested that Katharine convert to their Jewish faith but neither Jimmy nor Katharine would hear of it. “I will not ask you to be anyone other than who you are,” he wrote. “And we can do without the mazel tovs and the pageantry, as well.”
“What is a mazel tov?” she wrote back.
“They insist on throwing these silly terms around,” Jimmy replied, “like passwords in a defunct language. I told them we are planning a simple civil ceremony. In your mother’s flat, perhaps? With a justice of the peace. This wedding will be ours. On our terms. Not theirs, for Pete’s sake.”
“My mother’s flat? Why not?” Katharine wrote back.
Why not was that although Jimmy’s parents cared little about religiosity, they were seen as leaders of the Jewish community in New York City. The idea that their son would be marrying a gentile woman, in a humble apartment on the Upper West Side, appalled them, although they knew better than to say so.
Jimmy’s father hoped at least to participate in the selection of an officiant, perhaps a Supreme Court justice or the mayor of New York City. But as fate would have it, the man they settled on fell victim to an attack of the gout the day before and everyone had to scramble for a replacement. Rather than see a confounding omen in this complication, Jimmy and Katharine found it amusing. Deflating, in a way that Jimmy in particular enjoyed.
They had cleared the furniture in Ellen’s front room, except the upright piano, and set up folding chairs. In a nod to Jewish tradition, and for its exotic touch, Ellen draped flowers and sprigs over an embroidered canopy. To hold up this baldachin, and to complement it with Greco-Roman flair, she placed four art-nouveau caryatids representing Venus and Adonis and wrapped with branches, sprigs, tendrils, and flowers.
The Edith Rubel Trio, including Katharine in her striking wedding dress, performed Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, and Mozart as guests entered. A few of Jimmy’s Harvard friends, in naval and air force uniforms, acted as ushers, seating twenty-three members of the Warburg, Schiff, and Seligman families, as well as seventeen relations and friends of Sam and Ellen Swift. A handful of Katharine’s fellow graduates of the Institute also attended, and two of her instructors, including the celebrated German orchestra conductor, Walter Damrosch.
The judicial officer who hobbled up the stairs to Ellen Swift’s crowded apartment on that blistering afternoon of June 1, 1918, was the magistrate of New York City’s Domestic Relations Court, whose daily task was to preside over marital disputes. “And the amazing thing,” he told the guests after sipping cold water and wiping his sweat-beaded brow, “is how similar most of these stories are. It always comes down to a lethal combination of too much booze and too little money. And that is why I am the bearer of good news for you today. You see,” he looked at Katharine and Jimmy, “although I don’t have the pleasure of knowing you personally, I do know enough about both of you that I can assert with confidence that I won’t be hearing that familiar complaint—too much booze, too little money—from either of you any time soon. And that fact alone is surely a powerful incentive to take delight in pronouncing you”—he rotated his head from one to the other—“man and wife.”
Katharine felt Jimmy’s palm on the back of her head and realized she was expected to perform in a public demonstration of their bliss. Her lips met his. Everyone applauded or honked, blowing their noses into linen handkerchiefs. She inhaled the sweet Rhinewater of his eau de toilette, tinged with perspiration and longing.