Ripples went through the local music scene last month when velvety voiced chanteuse Kathryn Hammond parted company with the swanky uptown club The Grotto. Any loyal reader of my column knows I’ve never been a fan of Miss Hammond’s. She blew onto the scene a few years ago, brimming with promise and rave reviews, possessing the looks and the pipes to take this town by storm, but despite her undisputed vocal talent, she never rose above outward appearances to accomplish anything of substance. Saddled with a maddening by-the-book approach to her material, her performances neither inspire nor incite one to take the flight of fancy with her, as any musician worth their licks must. That being said, it is rare that I am mistaken and even rarer that I admit it, so hold on to your hats, folks—I was wrong about Kathryn Hammond.
You may recall, Miss Hammond made the news recently for her miraculous comeback after an automobile accident late last year nearly ended her career. Appreciate her musically or not, you couldn’t help but pull for the gal after that. Her voice was a little different (not better or worse, just different), but, sadly, her ho-hum interpretations were the same, so it was out of the mere curiosity of my sentimental heart that I went to see her perform at her first gig post-Grotto at Back Alley Blues last month. As you know, I’ve a soft spot for the blues, and I fully expected Miss Hammond to underwhelm me with her pedestrian approach once again, but a curious thing happened: Kathryn Hammond has been reborn and has bewitched me utterly. Not only did she take me on her flight of fancy, she ripped my heart out and left me in tears—literally. And I wasn’t the only one.
The blues were her genre, I thought, confirmed when she moved on to Essence the following week and wowed that crowd. Imagine my surprise when she hit the Footlight Theater last week and performed lighthearted musical comedy with equal aplomb! I can only guess it was the shortsighted vision of The Grotto’s owner that held the reins on the lovely Miss Hammond and nothing to do with the lady’s devotion to her craft—but that’s for another column!
Absent a distracted dinner crowd and an overbearing boss, Kathryn Hammond has found her heart and soul, and aren’t we the lucky ones!
I caught a rehearsal for this week’s stint at the Savoy-Plaza’s Café Lounge, and look out! Could it be that all those reviewers fawning over Miss Hammond from the beginning were right? I’ve admitted I was wrong; don’t make me admit I’ve been blind as well. It’s bad for business.
Starting tomorrow, Kathryn Hammond is appearing at the Savoy-Plaza’s Café Lounge for one week only. Don’t miss it!
Kathryn watched the drummer fold up his newspaper and nudge the saxophone player, who whistled to get the rest of the band’s attention.
“Here she is.”
Everyone stood and applauded as she arrived for rehearsal.
She shook her head and raised her hand. “Stop.”
“You melted the iceberg, baby,” the drummer said. He retrieved the paper from under his arm and handed her the article. “You can write your own ticket in this town now.”
Kathryn smirked as she folded the article to the inside. “I don’t need Lionel Sinclair’s approval to write my own ticket in this town.”
“Get her,” the saxophone player joked.
Kathryn smiled kindly at their enthusiasm. “Thanks, fellas. Now let’s kick this set, hm?”
Kathryn’s plan was backfiring. She was trying for a low profile, and finally appealing to the toughest critic in town wasn’t helping. She tossed the paper in the garbage on her way out of rehearsal and headed across town to a meeting at headquarters, where she’d have to suffer Holmes’s self-righteous gloating over Bouchaule’s return.
Saddled with a maddening by-the-book approach to her material, her performances neither inspire nor incite one to take the flight of fancy with her, as any musician worth their licks must.
“Sinclair, you’re an ass,” Jenny spat, as she sat on her couch and read the Entertainment section from a rival newspaper. She was tempted to toss out the entire section when she saw Kathryn’s picture staring back at her, but knowing Sinclair’s opinion of Kathryn, she was ready to agree with him, just out of spite. Unfortunately, when she read his intro, he just made her mad, as he always did. That in itself was infuriating. Try as she might to put Kathryn behind her, she was in constant flux between love and hate. The article prompted both, and she crumpled it up and threw it to the floor when a tendril of pride snuck around her hardened heart. She hated Kathryn Hammond. Now, if only her sentimental heart would remember that.
She finished her morning coffee and kicked the paper out of her path on her way to the rest of her day.
Kathryn sat at Daniel Ryan’s lab desk and rubbed her tired eyes after staring at the results of hours of decoding. The notes were all science and medicine now. Earlier pages were half confession, half science, as Dr. Ryan felt the need to explain the sins of desperate doctors from decades ago who were willing to do anything, morals and ethics be damned, to stop a runaway virus that was devastating populations worldwide—the Spanish Influenza of 1918.
Kathryn was too young to remember the hysteria, but she had heard the stories. One in particular was the the tale of an uncle on her mother’s side, whose entire family had succumbed to it within a week. It wasn’t her place to judge Daniel Ryan or his colleagues. Her self-appointed task was uncovering Thierry Bouchaule’s true intentions and keeping everyone involved as far away from Jenny as possible.
Kathryn offered a thought to Jenny in the house above her. She heard her arrive home from work, turn on her favorite nightly radio show, and imagined her making dinner for one.
It was quiet now, and she pictured her reading while curled up on one end of the large russet colored leather couch in the living room, with a fire in the fireplace. She liked to think of Jenny as content, with her life back to normal.
It would never be normal again if the truth was revealed, and Kathryn had all but decided that some things should remain buried.
She shook off thoughts of Jenny—more of a fading habit now than a need—and she turned back to her coded numbers. She was coming to the end of her stolen photographed documents. Soon, she would have no reason to return to Daniel Ryan’s lab, or any opportunity to find comfort in Jenny’s routine. Just as well. Bouchaule was her life now, something Colonel Holmes was all too willing to reiterate in their afternoon meeting.
“I don’t have to remind you, Miss Hammond, your singing career is a cover, and your first obligation is to this agency.”
Kathryn noted the newspaper on Colonel Holmes’s desk turned open to Sinclair’s article.
“No, Colonel Holmes, you needn’t remind me.”
Colonel Forsythe’s smile at her response spoke of both an apology for his colleague and his enduring confidence in her abilities. She appreciated both, though she hated to imagine what he would think of her if he knew of her deception.
“Things are back on track with Bouchaule?” Forsythe asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“How on track?”
“He asked me to move to the estate with him.”
Holmes raised his brow. “And?”
“Not very practical, given my cover, but we worked out a compromise.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that. It smacks of putting your career first.”
“Colonel Holmes, any singer with any self-respect is not going to throw away the opportunities that are coming her way because a man snaps his fingers and says, ‘Here, girl.’ That’s not the kind of woman Bouchaule wants, and it’s not the kind of woman I am. He knows this and understands completely.”
Holmes grunted his reluctant approval.
“What have you learned, Kathryn?” Forsythe asked.
Kathryn went on to explain that Bouchaule had freely given the location of his recent trip to Pennsylvania, and the reason, just as she thought, was that the university had the latest in microscope technology: an electron microscope that enabled him to observe his work like never before. Holmes seemed less than impressed, pointing out that the OSS already had that information.
The point he was missing was that Bouchaule had given the information without prompting. Kathryn stifled a glare and refrained from asking if it was a mere coincidence that the government’s Office for Scientific Research and Development had their Committee on Medical Research chaired by a University of Pennsylvania pharmacologist. It wouldn’t do to suggest a connection between Bouchaule’s “friends in high places” and the U.S. government, but it was in the back of her mind, and it did nothing to dissuade her from her deceptive path. Status quo at headquarters and another point to Bouchaule for his honesty, she thought.
Kathryn shook her head at the irony as she returned to the present and blinked the coded document on the desk into focus. She noted the numbers on the page and thumbed to the proper page in Daniel Ryan’s medical journal. She then ran her index finger to the corresponding line and over to the correct word, which she wrote in her composition notebook. She glanced at her watch and saw she had three more hours before she would meet Bouchaule at the estate. Such was their arrangement when she had no reason to be close to the city. He no longer kept the location a secret from her. Bertrand would pick her up at her apartment and chauffeur her to the estate, no blindfold required, though she did note he kept a watchful eye for a tail and often took a roundabout route if he had the slightest reservation about the car in the rearview mirror. Kathryn and Bertrand had reached a truce. He had been cordial, friendly even, since their initial confrontation.
She absently smiled at how well things were going. Content in her task and steadfast in her purpose, she moved on to the next set of numbers before her. Her concentration was broken when she heard music drifting down from above. She froze with her finger on the page when she recognized the tune and then slowly looked up when the voice she heard was her own. Jenny was playing her record.
Her first instinct was to scream, “Don’t do that!” No good could come of it. Jenny was supposed to be moving forward, not backward. Kathryn was surprised the record still existed. She was sure Jenny would have put it in the roadside trash with the rest of her belongings.
Kathryn climbed the stairs to the passageway leading to the back of the study bookcase and carefully put her ear to the door. Oddly, she had no emotion for the song or the occasion of its giving. Her love for Jenny was such a disconnected memory that she may as well have dreamed it one night.
The music stopped abruptly mid-song, and like an obsessive voyeur, Kathryn listened intently for Jenny’s next move. She was met with silence for several long minutes, but just when she was about to head back into the lab, random notes drifted to her ears from the piano on the other side of the wall. The sound was so close that she backed away from the door for fear her presence could be felt in the next room.
A meager attempt at a song turned into a fistful of sour notes, as Jenny pounded the keyboard and shouted, “I fucking hate you!” to the empty study.
The next thing Kathryn heard was sobbing, and she closed her eyes and put her hand to the door.
No, Jenny, she silently pleaded.
For a moment, Kathryn became the woman Jenny loved, the woman who wanted to burst through the bookcase and take her in her arms and tell her it had all been a mistake. She loved her and she was trying to protect her. Jenny may never forgive her, but the pain of self-doubt would dissolve, and at least she would know their love was real.
The transformation was fleeting, and as Jenny poured out her grief on the other side of the door, Kathryn turned her back to it and slid down to the floor. Intellectually, she knew she was the cause of it, but emotionally, she refused to take responsibility.
She was almost overpowered by the anguishing guilt swelling inside her, but she willed it down. She was through with guilt. She had a new life now, and the guilt was replaced by resentment. How dare Jenny wallow in their defunct love affair and force those feelings up in her.
Just because Jenny was weak was no reason she should suffer. She convinced herself Jenny’s pain was her own doing. She had tried to warn the woman off before their affair started, but Jenny wouldn’t hear of it, and now she was paying the price. Kathryn sat motionless until the wailing in the next room became the unfortunate result of some abstract tragedy and nothing to do with her.
She picked herself up off the floor and walked away from her former life. She systematically packed up the books and notes and left the lab, looking forward to a guilt-free evening in the arms of Thierry Bouchaule.
Jenny sat at the disharmoniously ringing Bösendorfer and buried her face in her hands as she cursed herself for still loving Kathryn Hammond. She hoped the more she tried to hate the woman, the more she would, but it wasn’t working yet. Kathryn had been on her mind all day, ever since the article in the morning paper. Jenny had the urge to catch a show at the Savoy-Plaza’s Café Lounge in the upcoming week, curious to see what changed the mind of the critic she loved to hate, but she was afraid Kathryn would see her in the audience, and the last thing she wanted to do was let Kathryn Hammond think she was giving her a second thought.
Her empty home did nothing to purge the woman from her mind, and she gave in to her relentless memories by playing the record Kathryn had made for her.
Jenny knew it was a mistake immediately. A dagger laced with their tainted love pierced her heart when she heard Kathryn’s voice. She quickly pulled the needle from the grooves, unable to stand the emotions it stirred.
Her sense of loss was overwhelming, no less than the pain she felt the day their relationship ended, over a month ago. She was melancholy in love this day, and she’d wandered aimlessly from the living room to the study and to the piano Kathryn admired so much. She tried to play something, to coax some enjoyment from the instrument, but she was met with nothing but pain, and she broke down, tired of being tortured by grief and taunted by memories that would surely last a lifetime.
When would she stop loving her? Not today, apparently, as she wiped her tear-stained face on her sleeve and left the study. She picked up the crumpled newspaper from the floor where she’d kicked it that morning and smoothed the Entertainment section out on the coffee table. She cut out Kathryn’s article and lovingly placed it in the scrapbook Kathryn’s father had kept. It was only fitting to add it to the book that represented unconditional love for a woman who turned her back on love.
Jenny leafed through the book and imagined the bittersweet pride felt by Kathryn’s father as he added to the book. She could almost see him searching the newspaper every day for a glimpse of the daughter he loved and lost, guilt pulling at him constantly, knowing her loss was his fault. Jenny didn’t feel guilty, but she did feel the pain of loss and a masochistic urge to remain connected to Kathryn. She couldn’t help feeling the tragedy of her life. It muted her hate. The woman was broken after all.
She’s damaged goods, kid, Smitty had said. And as much as we love her, we can’t fix that.
But Jenny wanted to fix that, and in her moments of residual love, she thought she had come so close, and that led her back to wondering what went wrong, which led to a vicious circle of what ifs and more tears.
She closed Jackson Hammond’s last gift to his daughter and vowed not to open it again. It contained someone else’s pain, someone else’s regret, and she had enough of her own. She returned the book to the box of Kathryn’s belongings that now resided on the floor at the back of her closet, having rescued it from the roadside garbage in a moment of weakness, when Kathryn never showed to retrieve it.
She thought about sealing the record in there, but she couldn’t. She made it her ultimate test instead. When she could listen to the record and feel nothing for Kathryn Hammond, she would be over her, and then she would celebrate by purging these last few remnants of her existence from her life.
Until then, Jenny did what she had done every night since their breakup; she pulled a leather-bound journal from the shelf above her writing desk, uncapped the black heirloom Wirt fountain pen with the inlaid mother of pearl barrel, and poured out her feelings, be them love or hate, to the woman who haunted her still.