APRIL 17, 1925
A rainy morning. A day to remain inside. Katharine found a book on the mail table. Porgy, by DuBose Heyward. It had arrived the previous afternoon. As she opened it, a handwritten note fell out.
Dear Katharine,
We hope you enjoy reading DuBose’s novel.
Dorothy
Below the signature, Dorothy Kuhn’s phone number and address.
Katharine remembered the gangly young actress from Ohio who had studied theater at Radcliffe, won a prize for her dramatic comedy, The Dud, and seen it produced on Broadway retitled Nancy Ann. Based on Dorothy’s life, the play drolly depicted the awkward social adjustments of a girl from Midwestern high society, who leaves proms and debutante balls behind for the adventure and unpredictability of a life in theater.
It was the first—and remained the only—Broadway-produced play written by a woman. Unfortunately, life mirrors art, the play had been a dud, closing after forty performances. But Katharine and Jimmy enjoyed it. And the fact that a female playwright had managed to get her work produced on Broadway thrilled them. She telegrammed Dorothy, in care of the theater, inviting her for dinner. They conversed over roast beef and Chablis, but Dorothy was already packing for South Carolina to marry DuBose, an aspiring novelist. Since then, not a word… until Porgy tumbled out of the mail slot a year and a half later.
Katharine sat in an armchair by the window and opened the book. Soon she was strolling through Catfish Row, a tiny ghetto in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina, and a world unto itself. Laughing and gabbing with its inhabitants, the Gullah people, whose dialogue was challenging but whose hearts were bursting with humanity; seeking shelter in tenements from an impending storm; weeping over the body of a murdered man; resenting the foreign, white hand of law enforcement. Written in a lofty, refined style, rich with description, detailed shading, and compassion, Porgy represented the probing regard of an educated southern gentleman exploring a culture not his own, which burgeoned under his eyes with love and violence.
A few hours later, the wailing of her infant Kathleen jolted Katharine out of her South Carolina sojourn, followed by the pitter-patter of April’s and Andrea’s feet and the clump-clump of clogs. That would be the nursemaid, Jo. Finally the squeals died down.
When she and Jimmy had purchased the adjacent townhouse and opened doors between the two structures, she asked the architect to provide acoustic insulation so she could practice piano at night. He shrugged, raising his hands. “Eh? One can only do so much in this regard, Madam Warburg. If I may speak in a—how shall I say?—in a Mediterranean manner; which is to say, candidly…” He raised his bushy eyebrows.
“Please do,” said Katharine.
He glanced at the piano and back to her. “When one decides to have children, one invites chaos into one’s acoustical environment. It cannot, if I may say so, be helped, my dear Madam Warburg.”
Chuckling at the memory of this rotund Frenchman’s pomposity, she pulled on her robe and shambled down to the kitchen, where she finished the room-temperature coffee Jimmy had left and looked at his newspapers. Jimmy received five or six of them daily, air mailed in paper-and-string packets from M. M. Warburg Bank offices and affiliates in London, Hamburg, Mexico City, and elsewhere.
This morning, it seemed, he had focused on several back issues of a Detroit broadsheet, the Dearborn Independent. The typed letter that accompanied this package, from a law firm in Detroit, commented that the paper was more widely read than any other in the country except the New York Daily News. Its owner and publisher, Henry Ford, required every Ford Motors dealership to carry it and provide it free of charge to customers. As Katharine browsed, it became clear why Jimmy’s lawyers had brought the Dearborn Independent to his attention. In a series of headline articles, Henry Ford had fashioned Warburg-hatred into a cause célèbre.
As far as Katharine knew, Ford had never met Jimmy, Paul, or any member of Jimmy’s extended family. He studied them from afar and his animosity derived not from knowledge but from ignorance and fear. The unreality of his perceptions, however, did not render his accusations less brutal or painful. Katharine could only imagine how Ford’s public, vociferous, and relentless denunciations affected Jimmy, his family, and their associates. She scanned the front-page headlines:
JEWISH IDEA IN AMERICAN MONETARY AFFAIRS:
The Remarkable Story of Paul Warburg
JEWISH IDEA OF CENTRAL BANK FOR AMERICA:
The Evolution of Paul M. Warburg’s Idea
HOW JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FINANCE FUNCTIONS:
The Warburg Family and Firm Divided the World Between Them and Did Amazing Things Which Non-Jews Could Not Do!
JEWISH POWER AND AMERICA’S MONEY FAMINE:
The Warburg Federal Reserve Sucks Money to New York
THE ECONOMIC PLAN OF INTERNATIONAL JEWS:
An Outline of the Protocolists’ Monetary Policy, With Notes on the Parallel Found in Jewish Financial Practice
Ford’s articles were poorly constructed, meandering, and devoid of serious thought but as she perused them, a few themes emerged: the Midwesterner’s animus toward East Coast privilege; the self-made American yokel’s envy of European refinement, education, and gentility; and especially, the manufacturer’s resentment of the class of people who had provided him, at a cost, with the means to build his empire. But Ford did not direct his ire toward the entire class of New York bankers, nor even to all the recent immigrants among them. Ignoring the power and influence of Amadeo Giannini, Charles Edward Merrill, or the house of J. P. Morgan, he focused on the Baruch and Warburg families—and on their ethnic identity, which he confused with religious faith.
Part of the irony was that the Warburgs’ religiosity was faint, in fact hardly detectable. When they bothered to attend synagogue, once or twice per year, their motivation was social, a form of noblesse oblige. Katharine’s family had been far more pious than any of the Warburgs. But the absurdity of Ford’s contentions hardly ended there. For Henry Ford, one of the richest men in the country, to rail against the privileged class on behalf of the honest, hardworking, common American was so ludicrous it would have made Katharine laugh, had it not been so pathetic. And although Paul Warburg had played an important part in the creation of the Federal Reserve, he had not done so for his own gain but out of devotion to his new country. Paul admitted privately, with pride and regret, that his efforts in Washington had cost him a fortune in lost revenues due to the time and effort involved.
The most ridiculous and alarming of all Ford’s accusations, from Katharine’s point of view, was that Paul Warburg and other German Jews had dragged America into the Great War, in effect murdering millions of Christians for personal gain. Had Ford researched the question even minimally, he would have learned that Katharine’s father-in-law had argued—personally, to President Wilson—against American involvement in the war. She could not help wondering: was Ford deliberately lying, or was he just insane?
Henry Ford was hardly alone, as Katharine knew all too well, in his distrust of the Warburgs and their ilk. Such attitudes were, in fact, increasingly fashionable. Katharine had read Frank Norris’s celebrated novel McTeague, which portrayed the Jewish Zerkow, “groping hourly in the muck-heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It was his dream, his passion.” Sitting beside Jimmy in the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, Katharine had winced during a production of Theodore Dreiser’s The Hand of the Potter, in which a Jewish man murders an eleven-year-old Catholic girl and his Yiddish-accented family covers up his crime. And in several of T. S. Eliot’s contemplative, modernist creations including Gerontion and Burbank, the famous poet—who worked at a bank, himself—had molded lower-case derision into verse.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.
But Henry Ford’s diatribes were neither fiction nor poetry. They were accusations; they were personal; they were obsessive; and they were public.
M. M. Warburg and Company, or any of its affiliates, could have created its own publishing organs. They could have hired journalists to refute or counterattack their accusers. But to do so, to amass and exercise that much influence, would be to vindicate the claims of people like Henry Ford. In the age-old tradition of court Jews, Jimmy and his family preferred to distance themselves and their operations from the public view.
As Katharine sipped a second cup of coffee she remembered when, shortly after moving into their townhouse, Jimmy and she had invited his parents, Paul and Nina, for dinner. Much of the animosity between Paul and Jimmy had faded, but when discussion ran to questions of identity, the truce broke down.
“Don’t believe me,” Jimmy told his father. “Believe the Scriptures. How do they characterize the Hebrews? A tribe. And what is tribalism? Whom do you trust? Whom do you not trust? You don’t trust the goyim.”
“Everyone takes pride in their group, as they should!” said Paul. “It is only human. Why should we be different?”
“The world is changing,” said Jimmy.
“Those who say the world is changing, they are a group, too,” insisted Paul. “They imagine their club is superior to all the others, but it’s just another ghetto. And let’s hope you never have to leave it. You might find yourself pretty lonely.”
The subject had come up again during subsequent family reunions. Jimmy wanted to change the culture of the bank and its reputation. Paul resisted in principle but little by little yielded control to his son. One by one, Jimmy let the alter kockers go, replacing them with Harvard friends who had names like Rutherford and Howe. So far, though, Jimmy’s strategy had not made an impression on Henry Ford and his comrades in journalistic arms.
Katharine turned to the European papers. There at last she encountered pleasant news. Following Jascha Heifetz’s tour of Europe, a year ago, the French and the Germans had clamored for him to return. He had finally done so, a brief whirl through the most glamorous concert houses, and the reviews were ecstatic.
Katharine asked the telephone operator to connect her with Roosevelt twenty-three seventy-two. She picked up a pack of Marlboros, the luxury smoke for ladies that featured a red band to hide lipstick smudges, and flicked a cigarette out of the box. “Miss Heifetz, please. Katharine Warburg.” Lionel lit her cigarette. “Thank you,” she whispered. She inhaled and blew the smoke upward.
“Oh, Pauline darling, so delighted I caught you. I hear your gifted brother is back. That his tour was a smash. Jimmy was dying to see him in Berlin.” Another puff. “He did catch the headline, of course.” She read from a battered newspaper. “Der größte lebende Geiger.” The greatest living violinist. “That’s the Berliner Tageblatt but from what I gather they all agreed. Paris, Rome, Vienna. Pauline, our Jascha’s on top of the world. Isn’t that wonderful.” Another puff. “Listen, we ought to celebrate. Especially with this dreary weather. Oh, absolutely! Of course you can bring a companion. Who is it?” Another cloud of smoke. “Surprise me, then!”
In addition to Dottie Parker, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, and Averell Harriman, the Warburgs’ circle had ballooned to include the playwright Robert Sherwood, the satirical columnist Franklin Adams, and the drama critic Alexander Woollcott. Nor was a group of fifteen or twenty, including a handful of strangers, unusual these days at 34 East Seventieth Street.
A gossip columnist or two sometimes slipped in as well. The drinking and antics of banking magnates, stage stars, and writers guaranteed the sales of morning papers. Indeed, terms like creative people, as used in William Randolph Hearst’s gazettes, implied that common rules of decency did not apply. “Creative people” possessed or thought they possessed the power to invent their own moral codes. Their vainglorious, seemingly continuous celebration of freedom fascinated the masses, who traveled and worked within inherited bounds of decency, honor, and virtue—or at least pretended to.
Katharine hoped Jascha would bring his Stradivarius. Just one partita would set her soirée aflame. “Of course. Check with him and get back to me. Kissy kissy.” She blew a final puff, hung up the phone, snuffed out her cigarette in a silver and crystal ashtray, and headed upstairs to get ready for a long-overdue lunch with Edith Rubel and Marie Roemaet at the conjoined Waldorf and Astoria hotels.
The three musicians sat in the bright lobby-restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street. A careless pianist, wearing an ill-fitting suit, exhibited Tchaikovsky’s Waltz in E-flat Major as if sloppily hanging aural wallpaper. Katharine, Edith, and Marie nibbled on radish roses, shrimp cocktails, and lamb roast seasoned with rosemary and mint jelly. Katharine had planned the get-together and all three understood she would foot the bill. Although they had not performed together in years, she hoped they would share enthusiasms about the musical scene, maybe even revive their collaboration.
“Did you hear Jascha at Carnegie Hall in December? What a delight.”
“Jascha?” asked Marie.
“Jascha Heifetz,” said Katharine.
“We know who Jascha is,” said Edith, glancing at Marie.
Katharine regretted referring to him by his first name. What a terrible faux pas.
Marie smiled and with a sideways nod admitted that neither of them could afford it.
And thus the lunch proceeded, mournful rather than gay, as if they were memorializing rather than celebrating their friendship. Although they smiled and attempted a few giggles, the restaurant ambiance and inflated prices heightened Katharine’s sense that she now dwelled in a rarefied social stratum where wastefulness was de rigueur and elegance a matter of means rather than taste.
She wondered whether her friends envied her. Perhaps the desire for wealth and conspicuous consumption was universal, and martyrdom for Art merely the self-protective posture of romantic misfits like Katharine’s father. She inwardly cringed at the thought.
She suggested that the Edith Rubel Trio try new material. Perhaps something original. “I’ve been composing, you know.”
“We would love to.” Edith smiled. “But…”
“But what?”
Again Edith glanced at Marie. “We’re working with another pianist.”
“Lillian Abell,” said Marie.
“Oh yes. Lillian.” Katharine smiled. “She’s quite adequate.” She realized she sounded bitter. But again, she felt a little bitter.
“She needs the income as much as we do,” said Edith.
Katharine considered donating to the coffers of the Edith Rubel Trio but dismissed the idea. It would only bruise her friends’ pride.
“The last times we called you, you were out of town,” apologized Edith.
“We were in Boston. And then D.C.” Katharine tasted the Waldorf Salad. “I understand, really.”
Her mind did understand. But not her heart. For Katharine, their musical partnership had been more than a business. It had been a sisterhood. Even if she had taken time off to bear children and attend to family obligations.
The pianist hacked his way through Chopin’s Mazurka in B-flat Major. Katharine, Edith, and Marie moved on to profiteroles, musing about old times and the more affordable of the recent concerts and operas. But their mood had collapsed. Their friendship no longer felt natural.
She asked herself how money, social standing, or marriage could degrade something as vital and supposedly resilient as friendship. Was true friendship, meaningful connectedness independent of worldly circumstances, an illusion?
That’s what culture is for, Dottie Parker had told her. To distract us from these sad truths.
If intimate friendship and shared memory were nothing but tattered illusions, revelry and drunkenness were ready to step in to fill the gap, or at least to divert one’s attention. The Warburgs’ guests no longer gathered around the dining table; those days were long past. The idea that everyone might participate in one conversation now seemed stodgy. Food, champagne, and chatter flooded the dining room, kitchen, parlor, library nooks, sitting room, even the bedrooms. In the inebriation and noise, some smooched with their friends’ lovers on sofas, played the fiddle, or danced a Charleston. Groups of two or five, sitting or standing, formed and re-formed, trying to outcompete each other in tall tales and exuberance. They smoked, drank, noshed, and soiled the furniture. One drunken man embraced another, who socked him in the jaw. He fell backward onto two women, who screamed. An ingénue with Broadway ambitions allowed men to lick champagne off her dainty ankles and calves, giggling.
The bartender fixed Katharine a Gin Rickey. She noticed Jimmy leaning against the wall by the door, sipping white wine and observing his guests. He seemed thoughtful, a bit distracted. She tasted her drink and approached him. She had been meaning to ask him about those articles she had seen. She wondered how Henry Ford’s attacks were affecting him, and wanted to let him know she cared.
“Not at all,” said Jimmy. “I understand why he feels that way. He built his fortune with his hands. He distrusts people who earn money without creating physical objects. It rings false to people like him.” He sipped his wine. “Besides, no one likes feeling dependent on others. Least of all, industrialists. They resent bankers precisely because they need them. None of this is new, Katharine.” He smiled.
Jimmy’s eyes told a different story—or rather, a variety of stories, all at once. One of those stories was a tale of caution. The subtext was fear.
There was a knock at the door. As if to change the subject, Jimmy opened it. There stood Alexander “Aleck” Woollcott, the drama critic, next to a smaller man. With a high forehead and circular glasses—his nose, moustache, mouth, and chin scrunched into the lower portion of his face—Aleck cut a bulky, slovenly figure. He wore a cape, dripping with rain, over his suit and spoke in a growl. “Jimmy, Arthur,” he introduced his friend. And, to Arthur: “If capitalism is the font from which all evil flows, this fellow’s the Bernini of fountain architecture.”
“Thank you for the tribute, though I’m afraid it’s unmerited,” replied Jimmy as he studied the face of Aleck’s guest. “I’ve seen you somewhere,” he said to the stranger.
“You’ll recognize him if I stomp on his foot,” bellowed Aleck.
He did so, and Arthur’s mouth gaped in a magnificent, silent howl, which seemed to take over his head. His face tilted backward. His cheeks shot up to his forehead. His round eyes shrank to slits.
“Harpo!” exclaimed Jimmy.
The silent shriek vanished. Arthur Marx grinned. “Pleased to meet you.” He shook Jimmy’s hand. His voice, unfamiliar to Jimmy and the Marx Brothers’ theater and movie audiences, was mellow and ingratiating. Without the battered top hat, the loopy wig, and the shabby coat, Arthur Marx looked uncannily serious. It was difficult to imagine him honking a rubber horn and, stooped, chasing girls around cluttered drawing rooms.
Jimmy ushered them in. Aleck pursued the theme he had evoked when introducing Jimmy to Arthur, discussing economic systems, the Russian revolution, and the ascent of Joseph Stalin. Dottie Parker, Marc Connelly, and George S. Kaufman joined in with the occasional quip. Arthur Marx listened.
“I haven’t the faintest idea how I became mired in this bastion of capitalist excess,” Woollcott declaimed. “It’s one of the many less-than-amusing pranks that Providence has played upon me. I’m a tear-it-down Socialist at heart.”
“Olga, tell them how that worked for you,” Jimmy instructed his housekeeper, who was serving drinks.
Olga threw her shoulders back and announced proudly, “My family were dvoryanstvo. Nobility. We owned a residence in St. Petersburg and a dacha in the Tula oblast. We had so many servants. One whose task was to polish the silver. Another to dust the chandeliers. The Bolsheviks, they stole it all, the work of generations, and murdered many of my relatives. Savages.”
“The devil’s children inherit the devil’s luck,” said Aleck.
Olga ignored him, serving Arthur.
“Now Aleck, that’s out of line,” said Jimmy. “And, need I say it, ungentlemanly. You don’t know her, let alone her lost kin. Olga is a gem.”
“I was jesting,” Aleck apologized. “You know me. All buzz, no sting.”
Olga ignored his apology. “Thank you, Mister Warburg.” She huffed off to serve other guests.
Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman pitched in with bons mots about the swollen stock market, social decay, and revolutionary utopias. Jimmy smiled, shaking his head. “I’m all for people struggling against oppression. But when the envious rise up against the privileged, they always go too far. Look at the French Revolution. The Red Terror. The Taiping Rebellion. They all beat the drum of egalitarianism. What they’re really after is blood.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re rich,” thundered Aleck.
“On the contrary,” insisted Jimmy. “I’m quite concerned with the moral implications of my work. So is everyone I work with, including—especially—my father.”
“I haven’t a clue which system is better,” said Dottie. “But I do know one thing about capitalism. It’s terribly démodé.”
Other guests knocked at the door. This time Katharine opened to reveal her friend Pauline, who stood with a man Katharine recognized all too well, though she had never seen him quite this close. He stood about five-foot-eleven in a tailored, pin-striped suit; but his presence exceeded his physical stature. Katharine noticed the eyes. Dark with a faraway softened look as if focusing on something beyond the party, the people, or the place. They met and acknowledged hers but floated away again, finally alighting on the Steinway grand in the center of the room. He smiled as if he had spotted an old friend stepping off the New Haven Express in Grand Central Terminal.
George Gershwin.
“Jascha was beat. I let him sleep,” said Pauline.
Katharine escorted them in. “I’ll have a Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino,” said Pauline.
Katharine laughed. “Would you settle for a Frascati?”
“Whatever.” Pauline took a flute of Perrier-Jouët from one of the waiters’ trays.
As they glided toward the center of the room, Katharine turned to the composer. “And you, Mister Gershwin? Some brandy?”
He shook his head brusquely as if the thought had dampened his hair. “Something fizzy.”
“How about a sparkling gin lemonade?”
“Sounds swell. But without the gin, and without the lemonade.”
“Just the bubbles?” laughed Katharine.
“That would hit the spot. Mind if I—?” He completed his question with a wave at the piano.
“Of course not. Please!”
He sat down and began playing a rousing anthem. The conversations and laughter subsided. Gershwin’s hands swept across the keyboard brushing into the air a multiplicity of simple tunes that wound through or bounced off each other, disappeared, reemerged, and recombined in the treble or bass register adorned with grace notes and triplet flourishes. Sometimes he hammered on one tone while moving chords in surprising patterns underneath, contrasting simplicity with sophistication. Other times he flattened the climactic note in a series, layering in a shade of nostalgia or regret.
Pauline leaned close to Katharine. “He can play, all right. Trouble is, no one taught him how to stop playing.”
“Is he your date, or a friend?” asked Katharine.
“He was my date. Now he’s a friend.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem.” And then she corrected herself. “I don’t mean nothing. But, well, nothing.”
The music pivoted. The mood shifted. A sorrowful melody tinged with philosophical, big chords that slid through half-step gradations, implying key changes, like a man drunk on love swaying and lurching through a gaslamp-lit alley. The room held its breath as the guests congregated around the piano. Olga set a glass of seltzer near the music stand.
Leading that intoxicated personification of his melody from the alley into a wide-open field, Gershwin ragged-up the same romantic tune. The melody man danced into the middle of the meadow, kicked up his legs, and flailed his arms, throwing back his head. He crouched, spun, and whirled. And slowly crumpled to the ground in a graceful heap.
Katharine had no idea how long Gershwin had been playing when he paused to sip his seltzer, oblivious to the enchanted crowd. But he could not ignore them long, for they broke into applause. He turned to Katharine, a gleam in his eyes. “Say, I hear you’ve got a wicked left hand, yourself.”
“Both of my hands are wicked, Mister Gershwin,” said Katharine.
“Why don’t you serenade us with something you picked up at the Institute?” He rose, clutching his highball glass and ceding the bench.
“What did you tell him about me?” Katharine whispered to Pauline.
“Only that you’re blessed with two of the finest ears in the city, and fingers to match.”
Katharine grimaced and headed to the piano, where she played the portion of the Rhapsody in Blue that she had worked out. The slow portion. After several bars Gershwin lowered his half-empty glass to a side table and crouched behind her, extending his arms on either side of hers. His scent teased her nose, cigars and an eau de toilette mélange of citrus, sandalwood, and bergamot. He began embellishing and soon their melodies intertwined. Katharine glanced up at Jimmy, who stood near the end of the piano watching and smiling in his ambiguous way.
Gershwin added notes in other implied time signatures, triplets against eighth notes in exotic keys, and bumped up the rhythm so that Katharine soon felt she was his accompanist rather than the other way around. Nor was she adept at this style of accompaniment, which involved reading the other player’s mind rather than looking at notes on a printed page. Flexibility and instinct rather than calculation and precision. Together they waded further beyond her waters. She tried to swim but flailed. It may not have been noticeable to the others but Gershwin knew. She felt uncomfortably warm. A flush she did not care to name or recognize. She worried others might notice but glancing around the room saw no sign they did. As her eyes returned to the keyboard, her fingers stumbled. That was mortifying.
As if sensing she needed air, Gershwin crossed his left arm over to the treble end of the piano, providing her with a means of escape. The gesture dismayed her but she took the hint and rose. He played on insouciantly while sliding back to the center of the bench. The Rhapsody theme had mutated into a Scott Joplinesque rag. His listeners remained silent, mesmerized.
The style changed again. “Here’s one we dumped from Lady, Be Good!, our show at the Liberty. If you haven’t seen it, you should bolt over there ’cause they’re beating the doors down.” His fingers relaxed into long, large chords. Quieter harmonies under his New York–inflected voice. “It’s called ‘The Man I Love.’ Too slow for the stage, but we’ll find a place for it.”
He played the tune as a piano solo, without words. A dialogue between a left hand that descended in half steps, bringing to mind a tight spiral staircase, and a right hand that yearned for ascent in parallel chords yet slowly sank downward as if under the weight of the left. Overall, the minor-key melodic fragments conveyed a mood of pensive longing, if not downright sorrow.
Which shifted again as Gershwin’s right hand began strumming chords and his left produced a swinging bass line. Instead of playing the new melody, little more than a ditty, Gershwin sang it. His voice soft and murky, untrained but, unlike Jimmy’s, on key.
It was chance, not romance.
Now you know, I must go.
I’m leaving now,
But wish somehow
That we had met before.
Katharine thought his look-at-me show-business ostentation brash and graceless. Her guests’ surrender seemed too automatic, inevitable, and unthinking—the swoon of giggly cheerleaders for the cocky quarterback.
Not only had he taken possession of her piano but he had cunningly engaged her in a competition. It rankled her that he had controlled the terms and that his victory was so resounding. After all, she was the classically trained professional. Still she had to admit that performing with him had been a jolt. Exhilarating. Intimate, even.
His song wound to a conclusion. His hands sprang from the keyboard and flipped down the piano lid with finality. Now that I have performed, no one else dare touch it. He stood up and as everyone applauded again, he bowed. Glancing at his Cartier wristwatch he announced, “Well, I’m afraid the ship for Europe isn’t going to wait for me.”
“Not even a goodbye peck,” Pauline groused as Gershwin shut the door behind himself and the room once again filled with chatter. “That’s George. It’s all about him.”
Katharine’s feelings mirrored her friend’s. But she wondered whether he too had felt that awkward warmth while they had played together, prior to rushing off as if nothing unusual had occurred. “Why is he going to Europe?”
“He’s supervising the London production of his new musical play, Tell Me More.”
“I thought his new show was called Lady, Be Good!, and that it was playing locally.”
“That’s what I’m saying. He’s a juggler.”
Katharine considered sitting again at the piano and performing something by Lizst or Strauss, if only to break the mood. Instead she grabbed a cocktail cracker, smothered with caviar. She bit into it and wiped her lips while Pauline prattled on about the cloud of unhappiness that George Gershwin had blown into her life.
Katharine glanced around the room, lost in thought. Her eyes met Jimmy’s. He was drinking, his back to the wall, watching her. She smiled.
Alexander Woollcott heaped contumely upon middlebrow Broadway confections, mercilessly burying them and reserving his praise for melancholy drama and silly farces. He boosted Eugene O’Neill and the Marx brothers with equal fervor. But the principal subject of his theatrical criticism was his own wit and erudition. The Gershwin impromptu at the Warburgs’ dinner party must have impressed him, for the following week Woollcott reviewed Lady, Be Good! for the World. His column sparkled with references to Restoration Comedy, Jules Moinaux, and even Mozart.
Perusing this column during Saturday brunch at the Gotham Hotel, Jimmy remarked to Katharine that he considered their friend an intellectual bully. “Woollcott’s an elitist. That’s why he throws in all those references. Which is fine, but rather ironic coming from a Socialist, don’t you think?”
“Socialists aren’t allowed to be sophisticated?” asked Katharine.
“Don’t ask me. Ask Stalin,” said Jimmy. “That’s the whole point of socialist realism.” The term was new to Katharine. “To be Socialist and claim sophistication,” Jimmy pontificated, “is hypocritical as hell. Because Socialism means egalitarianism, or claims to anyway, while sophistication suggests hierarchy.”
“Jimmy,” said Katharine, “have a mimosa, will you? Or better, a double shot of bourbon.” She peppered her omelet. “Aleck doesn’t necessarily agree with Stalin on everything.”
“No, he’s only a member of the economically ignorant masses, whose misplaced idealism plays into the hands of dolts like Stalin.” Jimmy tasted the melon in port wine.
“All the same,” said Katharine, “I’d like to see what this ballyhoo is about.”
“What ballyhoo?”
“Lady, Be Good!”
Jimmy raised an eyebrow.
Katharine smiled. “Aleck may not be an economist, but according to just about everyone he’s a brilliant critic. And he says Lady, Be Good! is a thrill. Why not?”
While Jimmy took his coffee and read the Sunday World, Katharine strolled to the new mercantile behemoth, Saks Fifth Avenue. She picked out a sleeveless peach shift in silk chiffon. Silver stitching and crystals in stylized floral patterns accented the bust, waist, and sides.
That evening she wore it with nude silk stockings, a possum shawl, a silver-mesh clutch, and a pearl-and-rhinestone hair band. Jimmy dressed in a pair of satin stripe trousers, a white wing-collar shirt with a matching bow tie, a white vest, and a single button jacket accessorized with sterling cuff links, white gloves, and a top hat.
The show was sold out. The crowd outside chirped with anticipation. Ticket hawkers shouted inflated offers and negotiated with desperate Gershwin fans. Arc lamps and the headlights of passing automobiles added an electric buzz. A few minutes late, the doors swung open and the public spilled in. Katharine and Jimmy located their seats in the middle of the eighth row.
She had spent the most memorable moments of her childhood in first-tier seats at the Metropolitan Opera at Thirty-Ninth and Broadway. When her father reviewed performances of Lohengrin or The Marriage of Figaro for the New-York Tribune, she tagged along. She loved the elaborate fantasy of opera. In Wagner’s mythological world of gods and beasts, whose turmoil mirrored that of an adolescent girl, she sought refuge from the banality of her parents’ endless financial and social predicaments.
The Liberty Theatre was no Metropolitan Opera. The room was smaller, the décor plebeian, the seats hard, the audience casually attired. She sensed the energy in the room but felt out of place. The lights dimmed. The curtains parted.
To watch a Wagner opera was to pluck leitmotifs out of the air and braid narrative strands into shimmering, dark myths. A Gershwin musical was sparkly and wild. The show blended Ziegfeldesque spectacle, legs kicked high, tout ensembles choruses, with the pathos of songs like “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and the throb and swing of “Fascinating Rhythm.” She recognized some tunes and harmonies from those Gershwin had whisked through at her piano. The audience rode a Coney Island roller coaster of absurd storytelling that played on primal emotions: risqué lust, poverty dreaming of wealth, orphans craving family, fraudulent love and true love, alliances and enmities forming and vaporizing, all delivered with a knowing leer as if exploiting and ridiculing the previous generation’s Victorian tastes. The composer, the book writer, the choreographer, the dancers, especially the gravity-defying stars Fred and his sister Adele Astaire, and the invisible boys who followed them with a tight spotlight, had conspired to make the audience forget their troubles and to erase their consciousness of time.
In addition to being the world’s most acclaimed dancing duo, the Astaires were comedians. Adele’s laughter was lighter than air. Sometimes she threw a playful jab at her brother that he seemed not to anticipate. He turned to the audience with a puzzled expression, raising his index finger to his closed mouth as he thought up a rejoinder, then poked her right back, and the orchestra served up another dance number. It was magic, Katharine admitted to herself, but of a ridiculous kind. On reflection, though, no more preposterous than Wagner’s lugubrious Sturm und Drang or the dreamworld forest and castle of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
When the show ended Katharine and Jimmy floated out of the auditorium, flotsam on a wave of song. Everyone was humming, singing, and whistling. Fans queued in the lobby where representatives of Harms, Inc., Gershwin’s publisher, sold printed sheet music. Katharine pulled Jimmy to the end of the line. “I want to try my hand at these.”
They reached the table, where piles of sheet music, songs from Lady, Be Good! as well as other Gershwin hits including the Rhapsody in Blue, covered the counter. “Whaddya want?” the sales clerk demanded. “This? Ten cents. Thank you. This? Ten cents. Thank you. This? This?” Katharine glanced at the titles: “Do It Again!,” “The Man I Love,” “Soon”… Had other male songwriters, she wondered, composed so prolifically and touchingly about female longing? Perhaps this was a clue to Gershwin’s mystique.
“Come on, we don’t have ’til Christmas.”
“One of each,” said Katharine.
The salesman’s eyebrows shot up. “All of ’em?”
She nodded.
At home she propped “Fascinating Rhythm” on the music stand and attempted its wacky, lopsided jangle. Its subject was nothing more serious or meaningful than the composer’s obsession with his own tune, and having observed Gershwin perform, especially at her party, she believed every word. She wondered whether his melomania was not a form of self-love, a vicious-cycle celebration of his power over his audience.
A half hour later, she spread open “The Man I Love.” Contemplative and bluesy, a hymn of solitude and longing. The dialogue between the right and left hands mirrored the singer’s hope-in-the-face-of-despair conversation with herself as she wondered what such a man might be like, when he would appear.
Jimmy stepped downstairs in his pajamas to ask her to stop playing. Unlike her, he pointed out, he had work to finish in the morning.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she reminded him.
“Yes, but I’m taking Monday off. I have something to show you.”
I have work, too, thought Katharine as they trudged upstairs. But that was playing with words. Most people understood work to imply remuneration and predictability, neither of which applied to aspiring composers. Jimmy had once understood the value of music and poetry, devoid of practical utility as they were. She was no longer sure he did.
She listened to his breathing as it slowed toward sleep, a train approaching some faraway station. As she attempted to join him in that station she thought about her education, popular music and serious music, and her unfulfilled ambitions. She listened to the songs that still rang in her head. Her fingers twitched as if bouncing across an invisible keyboard. Fred and Adele Astaire gyrated, pivoted, and dissolved in shadows.
Jimmy whisked in from the office at eleven the next morning. “Lionel, telegram Benjamin Fairchild. Tell him we’ll be arriving at two.”
“Yes, sir.”
Looking up from the novel she was reading, Katharine searched her memory. “Benjamin Fairchild?”
An hour later, they were heading north in a coal-powered New Haven Railroad train. With his monogrammed leather satchel on the wooden bench beside him, Jimmy gazed out the window as the brick buildings of upper Manhattan yielded to forests, fields, and glimpses of the Hudson River.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Katharine.
He just smiled.
They disembarked at the small Greenwich, Connecticut, station. A reedy older gentleman in loose clothes and a lopsided hat approached at the exit. “All ready?” Jimmy nodded and the man led them to his Model T.
They rode over bumpy cobblestone and dirt roads into back country and then followed a river through a wooded gorge. They turned up a path to an isolated farm and passed a stone dam, an ancient mill, and a lofty chestnut tree. Up ahead, an old house with dormers and a shingle façade. Behind the house, a cliff. Off to the left stretched a pasture and an old red barn. Sparrows were chirping.
Benjamin Fairchild unlocked the door and escorted them into a large room. The furniture predated the American Revolution. The wide oak floorboards were dulled with use and age. Dust covered everything. At the far end of the room stood a cast-iron Franklin stove. Jimmy motioned for Katharine to sit on the wooden settee. He sat beside her as Fairchild spread open the creaky shutters.
Fairchild took a sheaf of papers from the corner table and pulled up a Windsor chair, unmindful of the poorly repaired spindle in its back. He placed the papers on the pedestal table between them. “You have what we discussed?”
“I have more than that, my man.” Jimmy removed a large envelope from his satchel.
“I don’t need more,” grumbled Fairchild. He pushed a page toward Jimmy. Katharine craned her neck to read it. She saw the word Deed in florid lettering. Below that, the property known as Bydale, and—she looked closer—fifteen hundred acres. “Jimmy,” she asked, “are we buying this place?”
He nodded. While he read and signed papers, Katharine walked around. No one had updated the house in decades, but the floors were sturdy and the plaster walls, though patched in places, were free of cracks.
Fairchild joined her at the kitchen sink, a rectangular zinc basin. The shelves and cupboards were unpainted, graying oak. “Seventeen forty-one,” he told her. “In case you were wondering.”
“I was,” said Katharine.
“A gentleman named Silas Mead built her. A turncoat. Fled to Canada with Benedict Arnold.”
“Charming.”
They returned to the salon, where Jimmy joined her at the window. “How did you find this?” asked Katharine.
“I’ve been searching,” said Jimmy.
“As in, visiting places?” she asked, astonished,
He nodded. “All over the coast. Bydale stole my heart.”
Katharine looked at the aspen leaves shimmering in a breeze. “And all that time, you said nothing?”
Jimmy smiled.
“You rascal,” she said, shaking her head. But as they looked at each other, they acknowledged something in each other’s eyes. Something they rarely spoke about these days. Something almost embarrassing in its poignancy. Especially now.
That first night at Bydale, in a creaky bed on the second floor, Jimmy took her in his arms and kissed her. She held him, looking into his eyes, and allowed him to make love to her. Comfortably. Warmly. Fervently. Afterward they lay on their backs. “A penny for your thoughts,” said Jimmy.
She was thinking about their lovemaking. About its meaning. Its sweet nostalgia. Its sadness. But that was not what she said. “Just now? I was listening to the frogs,” she improvised. “And the crickets. And I was thinking, from their point of view, this is their land. We’re just squatters.”
“That’s what I love about this place,” said Jimmy. “It puts everything in perspective.” He kissed her on the nose and turned onto his side.
In the morning, while preparing breakfast with Katharine, Jimmy expanded upon what Bydale meant to him in the context of his family’s historical aspirations, or frustrations. “For centuries—millenia, actually—the European aristocrats forbade us to own land. Did you know that?” He struggled to light the gas stove. One of the valves was stuck. “We could trade. We could send ships across the oceans. We could finance their dreams of power and conquest. We could negotiate treaties on their behalf. But they owned the land. Their serfs worked it. That was the bottom line.” A second valve finally twisted and whoosh, he lit the flame.
Katharine squeezed orange juice. “So that’s what this is about?” she asked. “Getting even with European aristocracy?”
Jimmy placed the glass percolator on the flame. “I should rather say, healing.”
We could all use some of that, thought Katharine.
She looked at the trees through the kitchen window. Their bright leaves announcing rebirth and hope and the warmth of summer. She leaned over the counter and opened the window. In a nest under the eaves, new-hatched sparrows were cheeping to their mother, all at once but hardly in unison, the music of hunger and love. Their mother flapped down to the nest, a worm in her beak. Katharine thought of her daughters, of her husband, and of what Bydale might come to mean to all of them.