Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  “Where would I find him?”

  “There’s a saloon named Jimmy Kelly’s in the Union Square neighbourhood. The Jewish radicals hang out there. But, personally, I wouldn’t go asking questions about Selig or Zelig in that part of town.”

  Mitch took the flyer back and shrugged. “Well, perhaps if he shows up here again you’d be able to give me word?”

  James Reese Europe nodded. “If he comes here, I’ll send for you. But Jimmy Kelly’s is the place.”

  James Reese Europe excused himself and went backstage.

  “I like that boy,” Alma slurred. Her elbow missed the table and she slumped.

  Mitch caught Natalie’s eye and they nodded agreement.

  “It’s time to go,” Natalie said, pulling Alma up.

  They carried her outside in moments and she found her legs again when the cold air hit her.

  “Why are we going home? Such a wondrous evening!”

  Mitch signalled a cab and Alma stumbled into it. With a whipcrack, they jolted off, up Broadway and round Columbus Circle on the corner of Central Park, veering into West 60th Street.

  Natalie got out at number 333 — a row of stately tenements that spoke of quiet class. Mitch wondered if these were still standing in the New York of his present, and if they were, whether they’d become apartments, or if this street was now a row of glass towers.

  “You take care of her,” Natalie said. “Get her home safe and sound.”

  “That’s my job,” Mitch answered.

  But there was something about Natalie’s tone that suggested he might need reminding of that fact. He tipped his hat and Natalie Curtis nodded and skipped up the steps to her door.

  The driver rode on up West End Avenue, parallel with the Hudson, and Alma slumped against him, resting her head on Mitch’s shoulder.

  An elegant street of brownstones, all gone. Sometime soon it would all be wiped away for apartment blocks, and now ghostly quiet draped in golden snow.

  Selig or Zelig, Mitch wondered, as he caught glimpses of dark ships in the Hudson as end roads flitted past. Why would an anarchist want to blackmail the Mahlers? It had to be the gangster, surely?

  The carriage turned into West 72nd, and rattled all the way up to the Majestic. He nudged Alma awake and she stepped out, quite sober. They walked through the quiet lobby and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor.

  He was going to leave her at the door, but she fumbled the lock open and pulled him inside. The lounge dark, where he’d sat with them earlier and discussed the blackmail letter. Where he’d woken with Gilhooly slapping him. So long ago. When had he last slept? Unconscious in the carriage from the Flatiron, but before that, waking up from the storm and the adagietto on the radio that had pulled him in. The adagietto that was Gustav’s marriage proposal to this woman standing here.

  Alma turned to face him, gazing through shadow as if she’d said something he hadn’t heard and was waiting for his answer.

  No, it wasn’t an answer she wanted.

  She shrugged her coat off and let it slip to the floor.

  “Alma, I—”

  She lunged for him and he tasted her lips on his. Desperate, cloying, so easy to sink into her, be lost in her.

  A shuffle and a scramble. The door to the left.

  They jumped apart.

  The governess. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and scuttled back inside.

  Mitch turned and, as he opened the door, glanced back to see Alma staring at the floor.

  She left her coat and walked to the room to the left, where she’d been recuperating that afternoon — a lifetime ago. Gustav was in the room on the other side. Did they have separate bedrooms in this hotel suite, or was she just going through to scold the governess, plead with her, or just to kiss her child goodnight?

  He didn’t want to know the answer.

  He closed the door and stumbled down the long corridor to his servant’s room.

  — 18 —

  MITCH WOKE EARLY AND dressed in Gustav’s suit, walking out to explore the hotel, keen to avoid the Mahlers. A breakfast in peace, before he had to put a wall around himself and submit to their crumbling marriage and parental grief that seeped out and radiated the air around them like a toxic reactor leak.

  Upstairs, the Majestic promised a roof garden and bowling alleys. Plural. How did they mask the noise of skittles clattering for the guest rooms? Down in the lobby, he discovered that the ground floor hosted drawing rooms, music rooms, libraries, a ballroom and a colossal dining room.

  He strolled in, the waft of coffee, bacon and fish gnawing at his belly. Elegantly decorated in Rococo relief, marble pillars, a hundred round tables coated in crisp-white tablecloths and gleaming with silver cutlery.

  He took a table alone and was soon approached by a waiter. The menu was puzzling. Though it was clearly the ‘breakfast’ menu, much of it offered steaks of every type, chops, chicken, fish, potatoes. He picked out various options to compose a full English — eggs, scrambled plain, broiled bacon, sausages, hot house tomatoes, English muffins — and a ‘special coffee, small pot’. The whole thing came to $1.55, which was probably more than he could afford, but he didn’t care. He needed this.

  He wolfed it down and sat back, pleasantly drugged, wondering if he should sneak out and avoid the Mahlers altogether. Head to Union Square and investigate Jim Europe’s tip.

  But he’d been hired to protect Alma. To be with her.

  He couldn’t very well take her across town to a dive joint to ask about some gangsters.

  But he couldn’t just disappear either.

  He took the elevator back up to the eleventh and knocked on the Mahlers’ door. No one answered, and he thought to leave and go on with his plan, but on his third knock he heard a commotion inside. Someone swearing and tramping to the door.

  Gustav opened it, his hair ruffled, squinting through pince-nez, wearing striped flannel pyjamas. “Must I always be interrupted while I work?” He turned and tramped away, leaving the door open.

  Mitch walked in, uncertain. No one in the lounge. He followed Gustav through to his study and then through to the bedroom where Alma had raided Gustav’s wardrobe.

  Gustav was crawling back into bed with a musical score. The remnants of a breakfast pushed to the empty side of the bed. No sign that Alma had slept there.

  “How can I conduct Die Walküre tonight while living in a circus?”

  “Forgive me, Gustav, I came to tell you I’m off to Union Square to investigate our matter. A vital lead came last night, from Marshall’s.”

  “Pah!” Gustav waved a dismissive hand and peered more closely at his score.

  “But I thought I shouldn’t take Alma to that part of town.”

  Gustav hummed to himself, scanning the score, then seemed to hear. “Alma is in bed, recuperating. She is overwrought by last night.”

  Was that a euphemism for ‘hungover’? Was that what it meant? Mitch nodded and turned to leave.

  “If you want to compose,” Gustav said, “don’t enter the theatre.”

  Mitch turned back. “I’m sorry?”

  “I am to attend the last rehearsal this afternoon for tonight’s Die Walküre. You are to return by midday.” Gustav did not raise his eyes from his score, and hummed again, scribbling notes.

  Mitch turned and walked through to the lounge. Beyond it the room where the child slept, and presumably the governess. And Alma.

  They had created a tomb for themselves, scared of the vastness of New York. They had probably never even eaten downstairs in the dining room. Lost to the world. A ghost couple.

  He skipped out of the Majestic, eager for daylight, a crisp layer of white on the ground. Snow piled high in the gutters. A black man with a shovel at the entrance to Central Park.

  Mitch took the path to the left that wound its way along Terrace Drive. A muffled peace, and the staggering sight of the park as one vast porcelain plain.

  Passing a monument to Daniel Webster, the path curled
around to the open road that cut through. Down there to his left, the Bethesda Fountain. Skaters on the lake beyond it.

  He marched swiftly south and stopped at the Beethoven monument. The deaf genius glowered down, snow on his head and shoulders.

  In three years’ time, Mahler would succumb to the Curse of the Ninth. That was all he had left, the poor sod. But he would write The Song of the Earth, the Ninth Symphony and sketch out all of the Tenth in those three short years.

  Mitch veered across the park, and soon saw the buildings along the Upper East Side to guide him.

  Yes, cut across to Fourth Avenue where the green metro line ran right down the island all the way down to Battery Park. It was that way in his present, he remembered, and surely it was already established now.

  He came out at East 69th Street and trudged along it for a few blocks, crossing Madison and Park avenues, till he came to Lexington.

  There was a metro station right there at 68th. He bought a ticket and descended into the bowels of the city. The Metro system was quaint, like a mechanical toy. The carriage rattled down Manhattan and he wondered if he should have taken a horse and carriage, seen it all up there on the streets. He was hiding, like the Mahlers were hiding in their suite high above the city. He was hiding because there was too much of the city. It would overwhelm him.

  As the train sat under Grand Central, he wondered if he should get off, climb the steps and witness it. But he’d seen Grand Central. It would be exactly the same as it was in a hundred years.

  Another four stops and he reached Union Square, where he stumbled up with the crowd to daylight.

  A giant open square, a flower market. Hordes of people. Coaches, carriages, traps all circling, and puttering motor cars too. A man stood in the stream of human traffic, propped up on crutches, a sheaf of newspapers tucked under one arm. One trouser leg hanging limp and empty.

  Mitch asked him where he’d find Jimmy Kelly’s bar and was directed a few blocks east. He set off and passed under an El train bridge, a train roaring above, and turned into what must be the East Village.

  It hit him like a jackhammer, knocking him back a few steps and he reeled, all the breath punched from his lungs.

  — 19 —

  HE REELED, STUMBLING, fighting for breath.

  This was the city’s churning guts. Its nervous system. Its angst. A million voices clamoured, like lost souls in Hell, moaning their pain, their suffering.

  This was not the rarefied Upper East Side. It wasn’t even the Tenderloin, with its shady night life. This was a slum of squalid tenements. The teeming masses the Statue of Liberty welcomed every day were pouring into this part of town.

  He staggered, resting on a water fountain, and closed himself off, chanting a spell. It helped him to see it as a spell, though he didn’t believe in magic. It helped him to imagine casting a ring of light, lassoing it around himself and, when he was satisfied he’d shut out the insane clamour of the city, he opened his eyes and stood straight.

  It was like walking through the metropolis while also floating above it, remote, unaffected. Electric wires enclosing the streets in a net. Rotting food and horse manure piled in the gutters, dust and mud and dirt. The sweat and stink of so many humans. Men in shabby suits, women in cheap calico. In Gustav Mahler’s spare suit, he might as well have worn a gold lamé top hat. Did his clothes mark him out as an outsider, as wealthy, as a mark? Was he a rich tourist wandering into a den of thieves?

  Jimmy Kelly’s bar was open for business. It looked dark inside, gleaming chrome bar taps but brooding mahogany panelling. A serious place to get seriously tight.

  He found a table, ordered a beer, and supped it in silence. Then another. Dulling his senses, cementing the wall he’d built around himself. The East Village was a raging torrent of hate, love, envy, greed, resentment, depression, and the sheer struggle to survive. Its riptide would pull him under if he let his guard slip for a moment.

  Flyer cards on the table, much like the card for Marshall’s he had in his pocket. Who had written Selig Silverstein’s name on it, and what connection did it have to Mahler? For the first time, he considered that this card had nothing to do with the blackmail attempt. What if it was just something left in the alley? He might be on a wild goose chase.

  He scribbled his own name onto the back of a Jimmy Kelly’s Saloon card, and put Majestic Hotel under it. If only someone had done that with Selig Silverstein. It would have made this all so much easier.

  When he had drained the second pint, he looked around him and took in Jimmy Kelly’s saloon.

  A teenage waiter in shirtsleeves, a boater and an apron danced among the tables, singing and whistling — a sort of waiter cum entertainer — and the various drinkers around the place seemed delighted at him. He would stop at a table with a tray of high steins of Pilsner and sing a song, prompting guffaws of laughter from the men and coy titters from the women. It was clear that his act was on the risqué side.

  He left each table with a sidelong, jaunty grin, a stand-up comedian smirking at the scandal he created.

  He came and collected Mitch’s empty glass, singing fragments of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, throwing in the words, “And would you like another drink?” to the tune, without skipping a beat.

  “That’s a nice song you’re singing.”

  “Well, thank you very much, sirree. I made it up all by my lonesome.”

  So he was a fantasist, as well as an entertainer. “You wrote that, did you?”

  “Yes, sirree. Mister Izzy Berlin, songwriter to the stars, at your service.”

  Wait a minute. This was... Irving Berlin? A scrawny teenager serving in a saloon? “What do you call this tune you wrote?” Mitch asked.

  “Say, are you a music publisher? Because I could do with a music deal and I wouldn’t want to be giving out my hard-earned for gratis, if you know what I mean?”

  “I might be,” Mitch said.

  “English, aintcha?”

  “Indeed, I am.”

  “I could tell. I got a musical ear for places. I knew you was English the moment you walked in. I could hear it on you.”

  “I’m a music publisher. I work with HMV.”

  The boy raised his eyebrows and whistled, tilting his boater back. “Say, you’re quite the big shot. You wanna buy my song?”

  “You haven’t sold it yet?”

  “Not just yet, no, mister, but I got a feeling about this one.”

  “What do you call your song?”

  “Well, I ain’t yet fully decided. I’m torn between Mr Berlin’s Ragtime Band, and Come and Hear my Ragtime Band.”

  “Alexander.”

  “Say, what?”

  “Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Just a suggestion.”

  He tried it out, humming to himself. “That’s a good idea. I don’t know who Alexander is but I like the sound of the dude.”

  Mitch smiled. This young kid, Irving Berlin, had no idea what a monster hit it would be.

  “You make sure you don’t sell it for a nickel,” said Mitch. “That sounds like a hit song to me.”

  “You don’t wanna buy it?”

  “I’m more the classical end of the music business.”

  “Ah. What a shame. I thought we could do business together.”

  “Maybe we can. I’m looking for a fellah, and I believe he drinks in this place.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right man, because I know everyone who drinks in here.”

  “Do you know a guy named Selig? If you do, there’s money in it for you.”

  “Selig, eh?” Izzy Berlin stroked his chin. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  “I was told he might be an anarchist.”

  Irving looked around, as if someone might be listening in. “Phoo! Those anarchist dudes put the willies up me. Boy are they angry. Angry about everything.”

  “Or maybe it’s not Selig, it’s Zelig.”

  Izzy practically ducked and cowered close. “Git onto yerself! Big Jack Zelig?
Whoo, you don’t wanna walk in here asking about a man like that, mister. Not if you wanna live to see midnight, lemme tell you that for free.”

  It was clear both Selig and Zelig were no strangers. Both of them drank here. Mitch had no idea what to do now. Irritation flared and he said, “You tell him I’m working with Mahler. Have you got that? And I know his game. The letter is fake, and we won’t be paying. Not a nickel.”

  He tossed the card with his name and address onto the table, shot up and stalked to the door, leaving young Irving Berlin open-mouthed.

  He marched out into the sludge-covered street wondering what he’d just done.

  When you’re uncertain what to do, throw a grenade. See what happens.

  He made for the subway station and didn’t look back, but before he’d punched his ticket, he was laughing.

  Irving Berlin. What a time.

  — 20 —

  HE MADE IT BACK TO the Majestic for midday to find Gustav and Alma eating at the round table in their apartment lounge.

  Alma greeted him with a huge smile and invited him to the table, a third place was set, and chattered about everything but last night. She was going to pretend none of it happened. To her brooding husband, of course, but also to herself and to Mitch.

  He ate roast duck with candied yams and wax beans smothered in butter, realizing how ravenous he was. The walk through the park and that winter air.

  Gustav was as remote as a distant planet, but he wasn’t angry about last night; this was the trance of an artist preparing for a big night, thinking only of that, the real world an inconvenient blur till the curtain rose.

  As they finished and a busboy came and took the plates away on a trolley, the governess came through, taking Anna out again.

  Mitch wondered why the daughter didn’t eat with them. She was a comet flashing through their lives, raised by a stranger in the next room.

  Alma fussed over the little girl, buttoning up her coat and wrapping a scarf tight around her, kissing a flood of German baby talk on her plump cheeks.