Jimmy had read Freud’s international bestseller, The Interpretation of Dreams. The troubles in his marriage, it seemed, reflected unresolved conflicts within himself and his wife. He had no desire to shirk from self-examination. On the most obvious level, his desire for sexual freedom and his expectation of a serene domestic life now seemed at odds with each other, even if upper-class Europeans including his forebears had pulled off this high-wire act for centuries. Although he blamed Kay for taking things too far and for her—and George’s—lack of discretion, he had taken things too far himself on more than one occasion. He had flailed in love with two or three helpless paramours. Later, when the sentiments had evaporated and he had found himself stranded on emotional dry land, he had asked himself how in the name of everything he held dear he could have been drawn to such shallow, ordinary women.
None of them compared with Kay. What had he seen in those women that appealed to him, apart from their looks? Kay was on target when she defined a romantic as a man in search of women to idealize him.
Psychoanalysis offered a method to examine the wheelwork of his psyche, perhaps to tune it up and repair its broken cogs. He sought the most renowned practitioner and settled on a short Upper East Side Ukrainian doctor, Gregory Zilboorg.
At first Jimmy treated his sessions with Doctor Zilboorg like a secret diplomatic mission or an Austrian love affair, refusing to divulge their nature or content. Then one evening, returning home after what he described as a brutal double session, he told Kay that Doctor Zilboorg wished to speak with her.
Kay was lying on the floor, working on a coloring book with their middle daughter, Andrea. Kay derived no pleasure from coloring books, nor did she understand how anyone could. But Andrea loved them and Kay was doing her best to take pleasure in the exercise. She looked up. “Doctor Zilboorg? Why?”
“Moiré interference,” said Jimmy. “Between our psyches.”
“Moiré interference?”
“When two expanding circles of waves collide,” explained Jimmy, “creating offshoot wavelets that roll away in many directions.”
“Right,” said Kay. “I’ll keep it in mind.” It sounded poetic enough, but trivial. What mattered now was that George was in Paris, and that Kay had no idea when he would be returning. That would be decided by Madame Nadia Boulanger, the famed French teacher of illustrious American composers including Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The woman who was providing George with the instruction in harmony and counterpoint that Kay had offered to provide…
“Mommy,” said Andrea, frustrated with the effort to color on her own. She had not yet mastered the art of shading within lines.
A metaphor for my own issues, thought Kay as she resumed helping her daughter.
“Please, Kay.” Jimmy sat down. “Give Zilboorg a try.”
Again, Kay looked up. “I just wonder how this is going to change you. Suppose Doctor Zilboorg does solve the puzzle of your neurosis. What kind of man will you become? The one I married, or some stranger?”
“I don’t know that I ever was the man you married.”
That statement gave her pause.
“Mommy.” Andrea pulled on her sleeve.
Kay helped her daughter shade the drawing of Pegasus. “We all change, I guess,” she said to Jimmy. “In which case, what does commitment even mean?”
Jimmy looked at his watch. “Andrea, it’s time to get ready for bed. Mommy and I have a dinner engagement.”
Once a month the members of the all-male Harvard Club were allowed to invite their all-female spouses inside. Over a candlelit meal Jimmy informed Kay that… well, just that the world’s economy was about to collapse. “To pay its war debt to France and Britain under the Versailles Treaty,” he explained, “Germany has borrowed heavily, as you know. Now they’re devaluing the Reichsmark, so their repayments are worth nothing.”
She had read about hyperinflation in Germany, which had drained almost all value from the German coin. “Sounds awful. But Jimmy, Germany is not the world.”
Jimmy sipped his bordeaux. “France and Britain also borrowed. To finance their side of the war. And without credible German repayments to them, per the Versailles Treaty… You get the idea.”
Kay got it, all right. M. M. Warburg & Co. stood smack in the middle of a world-engulfing financial quagmire. How would these developments impact the Warburg-Swift household?
“Added to which,” said Jimmy, “we have issues domestically. And not insignificant ones.”
“Domestically?” asked Kay.
“In America.”
“Are you referring to the floods in Mississippi and Vermont, the explosions in Ohio and Pittsburgh, or the Bath School massacre?” asked Kay. All these two-inch-headline events had involved ghastly fatalities and displacements.
“I’m referring,” Jimmy sighed, “to our massive farm debt.”
All that was far away, though, was it not? Somewhere in the twangy Midwest? In New York City and Southern Connecticut, people were still celebrating the booming stock market. The waiter brought their table d’hôte meals of lobster and rice. “We’re going to jettison most of our investments,” Jimmy informed her as he dipped a forkful of lobster into butter. “But this is so much larger than us, Kay. I’m afraid I’ll have to leave again for Germany,” he sighed.
She tasted her lobster. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You are?” He raised an eyebrow.
“I wanted to get started on our next show. We’re not going to let Say When knock us sideways, are we, Jimmy?”
He smiled. “Why don’t you sketch out the music, then. I’ll think about the lyrics. What shall we call it?”
“How about Fine and Dandy,” suggested Kay. “Because that’s how everything will turn out. The international economy, the domestic—” and she completed her sentence with a flip of her hand—the domestic whatever.
Jimmy raised his goblet. “Let’s write songs that people will hum in their bathtubs.”
Everything would be Fine and Dandy. And Fine and Dandy would be everything. The little white lie that the occasion required. Like the uplifting music of the string quartet that played on the deck of the sinking Titanic. They clinked glasses, drank to their next Broadway production, and dined quietly, absorbed in their thoughts.
Two weeks later, with both Jimmy and George once again out of the country, Kay felt deflated and depleted. She cursed herself for feeling that way. She did not need a man—her father, Jimmy, or George—to provide a sense of purpose and significance. She only had to fill her days and evenings with meaningful activities.
She tried to spend more time with her children. She read to them, taught them piano and do-ré-mi singing, and walked with them in the park. She attended every hit Broadway show, notebook in hand to record her thoughts and snippets of song. Which dramatic or musical devices affected her? Which failed? She invited Adele Astaire to lunch at the Waldorf. The waiter seated them front and center among the tables in the lobby, where everyone could gaze at them.
“Why don’t we start with a good rouge,” suggested Adele. “How about a carafe of bordeaux? Oh, do you know Kay Swift?” she asked the waiter. “George Gershwin’s gal.”
“Delighted, Madame,” he told Kay. “But as you know quite well, Miss Astaire—”
“Oh, please, Jean-Pierre, I know you have a stash of ’twenty-six Margaux in your cellar, just dying to be savored by your spoiled clientele, who love to be treated like they’re unaware of the law.”
He nodded noncommittally and strolled off, a towel draped over his sleeve.
“Jean-Pierre is such a putz,” said Adele, buttering a slice of bread. “He always protests, but he always delivers.”
“I can’t blame him,” said Kay. “That’s precisely what I do with my husband.”
“Perhaps,” said Adele, and then added, with all the confidence of a certified Yiddish scholar, “but by definition, a woman can’t be a putz.”
Jean-Pierre returned with a carafe, wrapped in a towel, and two goblets. He leaned down and addressed Adele in a conspiratorial tone. “I implore you, be discreet. If anything should happen, you brought this from home.”
After he took their order, Adele turned to Kay with a serious expression. “George will always give more than you ask for,” she said. “I don’t mean romantically but in other ways. I sure am going to miss him, the scoundrel.”
“Miss him?” asked Kay.
“Oh, Kay, I’ve met someone. Someone terrific.” She set her water glass on the table. “Charles Cavendish,” she announced in a mock British accent.
The name did not register.
“Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish,” Adele expanded. “We literally bumped into each other at a party after the premiere of Funny Face in London last year. Causing his drink to spill. So I guess I owe this to George.” And she softly trilled the title song, “Funny Face,” in which Ira humorously and warmly explored the subject of mutual attraction between two people who know they are not outwardly pretty. “Isn’t it just darling, how Ira writes for every Joe and Jane?” enthused Adele. “You don’t have to be a knockout to be worthy of love. I guess my Charles agrees.”
“Oh, kill it,” said Kay, laughing. “You’re hardly a plain Jane, Adele. Tell me about him.”
“He’s a banker. Served in the Royal Tank Regiment. Studied at Cambridge. Oh, and his father is, wait for this, the Ninth Duke of Devonshire.”
“Sounds like my husband in more ways than one,” remarked Kay. “Powerful father. Good college. And Jimmy wanted to serve in the war, too.”
“Charles may not be all there, mentally,” said Adele. “But then, I’m not all there, either. So we have that in common. And he does have that accent.”
“Where will you live?”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to hole up in a drafty castle in Ireland. That is, when I’m not moping around Chatsworth, our pied-à-terre in Derbyshire. Such are the sacrifices one makes.”
“Oh please, do hand me a handkerchief,” said Kay. “What about Fred?”
“There’s a battalion of nimble-toed gals out there, eager to tap dance up to my tape marks. I’ll miss my brother but there’s more to life than hopping around on scratched-up stages, taking bows, and reading about yourself in the papers. I’ll be delighted to throw all that on the refuse heap of memory and set it ablaze with one of those dainty Blue Britannia matches they hand you with every pack of Wild Woodbine fags. I’m more than ready for private life, Kay. Peace and quiet. A family.”
Kay sipped her Château Margaux. “Who else knows?”
“No one except Charles and Fred. And George, of course.”
Kay chewed her salad, looking at Adele and reflecting. It is so easy for someone in your position to deride what others think of as unsurpassable achievement. But look at it the other way. How many people, who already have a family and peace and quiet, really feel fulfilled? Aloud she asked, “Are you certain you’ll be happy in Europe? Far from everything, and everyone who loves you?”
“Charles loves me. And you don’t bargain with love. Happy is a big word,” admitted Adele. “Have you been to Europe, Kay?”
Kay shook her head. “Jimmy spends half his life there, mostly in Germany. George is in Paris again. I’m holding down the fort.”
“What fort? Last I heard, East Seventieth Street hasn’t been under attack since the mid-1770s. Why don’t you surprise George? Paris is magnificent.”
“I don’t know. Seems awfully intrusive.” Although, Kay had to admit, the thought of visiting Paris was tantalizing. A change of scene. Famous museums. That Garnier opera house. And to see the expression on George’s face when she bumped into him in Boulanger’s studio—that would be precious. Nor would Jimmy care that she was gone, or even notice; he was away again for who-knew-how-long. The girls would hardly miss their piano instruction. Andrea would practice even in Kay’s absence; April, sadly, would prefer her mother to be gone.
“George adores surprises,” Adele insisted. “Especially when they drive the point home, how much he’s loved. Tell him it was my idea.”
Kay finished her salad, contemplating the prospect of visiting Paris. Its reputation as the world’s capital of sensual pleasure—cream-laden food, elegant wines, marital infidelity—Madame Bovary, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Thérèse Raquin.
While at the Institute, Kay had read so many novels set in France: L’Education sentimentale, Le Lys dans la Vallée, Illusions Perdues, NotreDame de Paris, Les Misérables. She also knew the librettos of La Bohème and La Traviata, both set in Italian-inflected versions of the French capital. In her conception, Paris’s monuments loomed over filthy but lively neighborhoods that teemed with beggars, cripples, sultry gypsies, and destitute painters, and romantic young Frenchmen in love with older, married, society women.
“Kay,” said Adele. “Don’t look now, but the Morality Police just stepped in. Let’s skedaddle.”
Despite Adele’s warning, Kay looked. Two men in gray suits were standing at the front of the restaurant, their eyes sweeping the room. Kay thought they were probably businessmen waiting to be seated.
Adele rose and flounced toward the bathroom. Kay followed nonchalantly. When they reached the rear wall, Adele ordered the elevator operator, “twenty-three, please,” and handed him a five-dollar bill.
At the twenty-third floor Adele broke into a trot, heading for the stairs. Kay followed and they rushed down to the twenty-first floor, where they exited the stairwell and doubled over panting and giggling. It did not matter, after all, whether those two men were ordinary lunch-goers or Prohibition officers. In Adele Astaire’s world, everything was make-believe and every path led to mischief.
Including friendship, Kay supposed.
As Kay walked up Fifth Avenue a quarter hour later she could not help feeling a pang of disappointment. It was a social triumph to lunch with a celebrity like Adele Astaire. She had sensed the other diners’ eyes on them, and that was titillating. She wanted to believe she had forged a new partnership, intimate and mildly subversive. But Adele would soon be living an ocean away. For all her warmth and charm, Adele Astaire had no need of new friends. That was the curse of celebrity. When everyone in the world craves your friendship, what does friendship mean?
For advice she turned to Julie Glaenzer, who traveled to Paris twice every year on Cartier business. Again she visited him in his office on Fifth Avenue. And again, the concierge offered a goblet of claret.
“My flat happens to be unoccupied at present.” Julie removed a key from his drawer. “A two-minute walk from the cathedral.” He handed the key across his desk.
“Notre Dame Cathedral, of Paris? That is awfully generous, Julie.”
“Not at all,” said Glaenzer, which she interpreted to mean, this is how I do business, my dear. “Pascal, my manservant, will help you with your bags, or drive you anywhere. But in my humble opinion, Paris is better experienced on foot. May I ask what is the purpose of your visit?”
“Sightseeing, I suppose.”
“May I suggest the RMS Olympic? You’ve heard of the Titanic, I’m sure.”
“It sank,” said Kay.
“The Olympic, her surviving twin, will not. In fact,” he added puffing on his cigar, “the Olympic could have rescued the Titanic’s passengers, but was dissuaded from doing so.”
“Why?”
“White Star, the owner, didn’t believe anyone would die. They wanted to avoid a panic.”
“That’s reassuring.”
He tapped his cigar into the Baccarat ashtray. “Following the event they adjusted their emergency protocol. I assure you, the Olympic is every bit as safe as Fort Knox and as elegant as the Ritz. When would you like to sail?”
“How about tomorrow?”
He smiled. “I’m certain she’s booked for at least six months but let’s see what we can arrange.”
He reached for the telephone.
A week later, she was packing three sets of clothes: one for exploring Paris on foot or in taxis; a second for dinners, plays, and shows with George or solo; and a third for special occasions. Perhaps they would rendezvous with Maurice Ravel at the Opéra, or dine with Nadia Boulanger at Maxime’s. She also threw in novels to read during the crossings to and fro, and in Paris, as well as music-composition notebooks and a jumbo box of George’s favorite Black Jack licorice chewing gum.
It should not be difficult to locate George, she assured herself. He was studying with Boulanger, whose offices were located at the Château de Fontainebleau. Nor did Kay wish to distract him. Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day, she hummed as she tossed a pair of camel calfskin gloves in the trunk.
She heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs. Andrea ran to her bedroom door, out of breath. “Mommy, Mommy, I got into the school talent show!”
Kay read pride and eagerness on her daughter’s face. Just like me, when I was her age, Kay thought. So proud of any recognition. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart! What will you perform?”
“For my audition, I played “Für Elise.” But that’s not what I’m really going to play. I’m going to surprise them with ‘Liza.’ ”
“ ‘Liza.’ Are you sure your hands are big enough?”
“I can do it, mom! But I’m not going to let you hear it until the talent show.”
“And when is that, honey?”
“In three weeks.”
It could not be. Kay knelt at Andrea’s feet, taking her hands. “Oh, Andrea, I so wish I could be there. You see, I’m going to Paris. It’s all arranged, darling. I fear there’s nothing to do.”
“Why?” Andrea pouted. “This is my first show!”
Kay caressed her daughter’s head. “I know, sweet pea, and I’m so sorry! One day you’ll understand. Now Andrea, I want you to know, I’ll be thinking of you and your performance on that day. At the very moment you’re playing, my thoughts, my heart will be right there with you. You give ‘Liza’ everything you’ve got. Such a pretty tune. Maybe you’ll win a prize! Please do try to understand, darling.”
“I understand,” said Andrea turning away.
Kay watched her go, her heart torn. She recognized so much of herself in her daughter, her sense of self but also of unfulfillment; her need to reach higher, always higher, and the anxious awareness that no matter how far she stretched—how much of life she gulped, how brilliantly she performed—it could never be enough.
Two mornings later Kay was lying on a walnut bed in her suite aboard the RMS Olympic, her nose in a poignant novel of romantic love, social class, self-deception, decadence, and despair. Pauline Heifetz had met Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda at one of Cole Porter’s lavish parties in Venice and had found her charming and tragic. After reading The Great Gatsby she had passed it along to Kay. “Don’t believe the reviews. Scott’s style will floor you.”
Kay had seen them. The critics agreed: Gatsby was “a dud,” as the New York World put it. Time magazine called it “precious” in the most derogatory way. For H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald’s slim novel was nothing but “a glorified anecdote.”
The story touched Kay, though, and not merely because it described the contours of a love triangle somewhat like her own. Any number of cheap romances might accomplish that. Gatsby was a good story, but it was more than that. It was a meditation on two opposite forms of love. Like Helen of Troy, Daisy Fay Buchanan hardly existed other than as an alluring object, crystallized in men’s desires. She accepted this role, seemingly pleased to play the glamorous flirt. Jay Gatsby’s idealization of her stemmed from indistinct memories of a long-ago tryst, as if no person or activity grounded in present reality could justify such passion. Her husband Tom’s involvement with Daisy, in contrast to Gatsby’s dreamy yearning, utterly lacked emotion. Until Tom realized he might lose her, she represented little more to him than an object of décor, real and corporeal but lacking mystery and depth. When these two opposing forms of love collided, merely ideal and merely physical, the inevitable outcome was catastrophe.
The character who intrigued Kay most was Nick, the narrator lurking in the shadows of the story. Modest, unassuming, and honest, Nick seemed bewildered by the shallowness, the complexity, and the perversity of those around him, but he was also impressed with them. Kay knew a few Jay Gatsbys and several Tom Buchanans, but she had never met a Nick Carraway.
In fact, Tom reminded Kay a little of Jimmy, the high-handed Ivy Leaguer with no concept of life beyond the bounds of privilege. And Gatsby’s romantic desire for Daisy echoed her own elevated feelings about George. She wondered whether she was as ambitious, and as naïve and unknowing, as Jay Gatsby.
Finding these resemblances compelling but unbearable, she lay the book aside and exited her three-room suite for a stroll. She passed the pillared smoking room, the palm-tree-studded café, and the Grand Salon to the polished-wood promenade deck. Men in striped tank tops and cotton-belted shorts sat in high-backed lounge chairs around the swimming pool, discussing the stock market. Women in sleeveless jersey tops and short bathing trunks lay on chaises longues, deliberating the weather in Madrid and the latest styles in Paris. Kay walked to the prow and gazed over the Atlantic like Jay Gatsby staring across the water toward East Egg, the rippling sea reflecting and distorting his aspirations.
Julie Glaenzer’s apartment was situated in the bustling center of Paris. His footman, Pascal, prepared her an omelette aux fines herbes and coffee. He spoke not a word of English but Kay remembered enough from three years of Opera French to get by. Pascal drew her a map and suggested attractions, but she implored him to drive her to the Château de Fontainebleau. They negotiated a compromise. Pascal suggested she explore the neighborhood while he concluded his morning’s business on behalf of Monsieur Glaenzer, tidying up the apartment and forwarding correspondence. They would meet at the Café de Flore, a twenty-minute walk from the cathedral.
As Julie had explained, Notre Dame de Paris was indeed a two-minute stroll down the tiny Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame. She entered the cool, dark cathedral, with its scents of burning candles, and strolled between the medieval pillars in the dusky blue-and-red filtered light. An organist was playing Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor. The rousing melodies, evocative of floating seraphs, flitted through the cavernous space and bounced off the towering stone walls.
As she crossed the plaza, the sun emerged above Notre Dame’s towers. She stopped, thinking of Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. She imagined the gypsy Esmeralda dancing and her deformed admirer Quasimodo watching, mesmerized. As bells rang, she shook off the vision.
Six days aboard the Olympic and now this invigorating, animated city! Tramways and motorcars, booksellers’ stalls along the Quais de la Seine, cafés that spilled onto sidewalks. She crossed the Petit Pont and entered the Quartier Latin, populated with students of the Sorbonne, artists, and drunkards. She wandered down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Boulevard Saint-Germain and turned right, searching everywhere for George’s face.
A half hour later she stumbled upon the Café de Flore, with its massive over-the-sidewalk awning; its small metal tables, abundant wooden chairs, and big windows; its young men and women engaged in animated conversations, gesticulating and interrupting each other. Pascal, sitting outside sipping a café crème, saluted her.
They rode in a taxi to the Quai de Bercy, where Pascal kept a Delage cabriolet in a padlocked wooden shed. Kay snuggled in the back seat of the long, maroon-colored convertible watching the tree-lined streets flit past and reflecting that the French had perfected the art of catering to the wealthy, educated classes. The corollary of which was an entrenched social hierarchy that the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and Paris’s two-month experiment in pre-Marxian Socialism, the Commune, had failed to eradicate.
This impression was reinforced upon her arrival at the Fontainebleau Castle. Pascal took a seat outside a café in the quaint town, smoking and reading newspapers. A few elderly men were playing a jeu de boules on a grass strip nearby.
With her box of Black Jack chewing gum under her arm, Kay walked to the castle that had been the favored getaway of thirty-four French kings since the eleventh century. She passed through the Gallery of Francis I, decorated in 1528 by Leonardo Da Vinci’s patron; the neoclassical Gallery of Diana; Marie Antoinette’s fastidiously adorned boudoir; and the Emperor Napoleon’s bedroom.
Exhilarated and sated, with a renewed respect for the opulent, decadent history of Europe’s aristocracy, and excited at the prospect of surprising George, she arrived at the first-floor apartments of Nadia Boulanger’s music school. She recognized the harmonies and rhythms of the famous enseignante’s piano, familiar from the compositions of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. She sat in a gilded silk-upholstered chair next to one of Boulanger’s students. When the lesson was over, she entered and introduced herself.
Haughty and severe in her pulled hair and round glasses, Nadia Boulanger dismissed her with a wave as if swatting away an annoying mouche, a French housefly. “Yes, Monsieur Gershwin visited, but I am afraid he is long gone.”
Kay frowned. “I thought it was all set. He was going to study with you.”
Nadia Boulanger raised her chin. “Who told you this? Ravel? Gershwin himself? I did not tell you this, did I, Madame?”
“Do you know where he’s staying?”
“I am not a detective, Madame.”
Deflated, Kay handed her the box of chewing gum. “A little gift from America,” she said as she walked out of the studio.