Sucking her thumb, April looked up at her.
“Say ‘Good morning, Mama.’ ”
“Good morning, Mama,” April recited.
“Come here, you little ragamuffin, so I can give you a smooch,” said Katharine.
April glanced up at Miss Louisa, who nudged her forward. Katharine gave her a peck on the forehead.
Two-year-old Andrea struggled and pointed. Miss Lainey set her down. Katharine opened her arms, but Andrea darted toward the gray cat on the corner table. The cat leapt off, dashed away, and squeezed under the sofa. Startled, Andrea began crying.
“It’s all right,” said Miss Lainey crossing to pick her up again. “It’s just a kittie.”
“We was going to go to the park,” Miss Louisa informed Katharine.
“That sounds delightful.” Katharine glanced at the window. “The weather is perfect, isn’t it.”
“It most certainly is,” agreed Miss Louisa with a toothy smile.
After they went out, Katharine stared at the piano feeling blue and unfulfilled, chiding herself for resenting her children’s interruption. They are not that disruptive. They are adorable.
She resumed playing, allowing her hands to guide her away from the present. She dipped into a Mendelssohn sonata, and another by Brahms, and finally traveled back to Beethoven. Music she found celebratory rather than contemplative.
Celebratory of what? Of their early days together. Hers and Jimmy’s. Of their courtship. Of a languid summer day, seven years ago.
CHAPTER TWO
SUMMER 1917
A heathered sky. Sun-drenched grass and flowers. A sweeping lawn. Rolling hills. A sculpted garden of roses, hydrangeas, and peonies. Her short dark haircut and bangs framing her saucer eyes and high cheekbones, Katharine sat at a Steinway grand that had been rolled onto a plank dais for the occasion. Her friends Edith, holding a violin, and Marie, cradling a cello, wore long neo-Grecian dresses similar to hers.
On Katharine’s nod they began plucking, bowing, and hammering: Beethoven’s Opus 97, a piece Katharine cherished for the way it wove melancholy and playful motifs into one unified whole. Beethoven had composed it while recovering from an ill-starred love affair at a friend’s lakeside retreat. Katharine heard this in the music: its composer’s solitude, his slow healing, rambles along flowering trails.
The guests clustered in small groups under a vine-clad pergola and on the lawns and walkways. Under towering top hats, New York’s bankers and politicians discussed the war in Europe, the price of steel, and The Immigrant, a new celluloidal dramedy by that diminutive British wunderkind, Charlie Chaplin. Between movements, as she glanced into her audience, Katharine noticed a striking young man with wavy black hair. He wore a naval reserve pilot’s uniform that stood out in the sea of tailored suits.
At the break, Bettina Warburg approached. She was three years younger than Katharine but seemed older in her dowdy dress and hair bun. “How about a drop of giggle water for the keyboard whiz?” She led Katharine down the promenade. “Everyone is positively drooling over your performance.”
“As long as they don’t drool into the giggle water,” said Katharine.
“We have measures to prevent that,” said Bettina.
“Such as?”
“Corks.” Bettina raised a bottle of Dom Perignon and handed it to a sommelier, who twisted it open with a muted pop.
“Is Margaret here?” Katharine glanced around.
Margaret Seligman, whose grandfather had financed the Union during the Civil War, had studied with Katharine at the Institute of Musical Art. Evidently burdened by a social-class obligation to master the rudiments of piano performance, Margaret had learned to execute a baroque trill and a legato slur with finesse, if not bravura. A dear friend of Bettina, she had recommended Katharine and the Edith Rubel Trio for today’s entertainment.
“Margaret is attending an event at the art museum,” said Bettina. “Invited me but museum appetizers bore me to tears.” The sommelier poured the sparkling wine. “Anchovy canapés, celery olives, crabmeat croquettes, and whatnot.” She handed Katharine a flute of champagne.
“Oh yes, museum events, terribly boring,” agreed Katharine. “Unless you happen to fall into that small contingent of humanity, only about ninety-nine percent, that has never set eyes on a crabmeat croquette. Is that something they hit with a mallet over in England?”
Bettina laughed. “You are exactly as Margaret described you. Petite, proper, and pétillante.”
Katharine understood the French term. Pétillante meant “sparkling, bubbly,” and in certain contexts “quick-witted.” And it was true that she enjoyed the challenge of a brisk verbal duel. In a contest of wits, the sparring partners, no matter their social milieu, stood on a level stage. Like piano performance, that was the kind of contest in which Katharine could excel. And although terms like pétillante hardly defined her, her public persona was all that the likes of Bettina and Margaret needed to know. Self-doubt and struggle were not concepts they could understand, but merriment and naughtiness they grasped with ease.
“Is that all she told you about me?” asked Katharine, remembering the time she and Margaret were caught smoking in a bathroom.
Bettina smiled. “She also said you were pretty, steel and silk, and tralala tralala.”
“Steel and silk?”
“Graceful. Charming. Determined. It’s a compliment.”
Determined. Just the kind of thing a rich woman would say about a social climber, thought Katharine.
“We’re cousins, you know,” continued Bettina. “Margaret is a Loeb as well as a Seligman. And I’m a Loeb on my mother’s side as well as a Warburg on my father’s. And of course, Margaret will soon be a Lewisohn, as well. Marrying Sam in February. Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Sam’s a lawyer. Went to Princeton. Also fancies himself an author. His sister Adele married Arthur Lehman, of the Lehman Brothers family.”
Katharine nodded. Margaret Seligman’s engagement to Sam Lewisohn had lit up the society pages. The monstrous stadium up at 136th Street was named for Sam’s father. Not that Katharine bothered with the society pages—but her mother did. Aloud.
Much more important, for Katharine, was the involvement of Bettina’s parents, Margaret’s, and a few others in the financing of the Institute of Musical Art. The ink on Katharine’s diploma had been purchased with Warburg, Seligman, Lewisohn, and Kuhn gelt—as had all her scholarships and grants. And here she stood a couple of months after graduation participating in their private affair, albeit not as an equal but as an entertainer.
And with good reason. She had been a star at the Institute. The star. Everyone expected her to become its first celebrity graduate. She still recalled the remark of the visiting German composer Gustav Mahler to her instructor, New York Symphony Conductor Walter Damrosch, following her command performance of Schubert’s C Minor Sonata D. 958 at the age of ten. “Dieses hier,” said Mahler, pointing at her and nodding. “This one.” Coming from the conductor of the Vienna Opera—and the composer of Das Liede Von Der Erde—those two words were as powerful a compliment as one could hope for in a lifetime. No, not just a compliment, she told herself. A prophecy.
The very idea of an American pianist ascending to the stratosphere of world-class musicians seemed outrageous to many. But that was precisely what her sponsors expected of her. For if the Warburgs, the Loebs, the Lewisohns, the Schiffs, and the Seligmans were passionate about any cause, it was the cause of American culture. Everyone agreed that America was emerging as the world’s dominant economy, but if America sought the respect of the old continent, she would have to raise her unique voice above the din. And that could only be accomplished through artistic excellence. This was their mission, their pet charity, as Katharine knew. Indeed, through her trained hands, she was to be their emissary.
“Excuse me.”
Katharine turned. The lilting voice belonged to the young man in the naval reserve uniform.
A handsome gen
tleman. No, gentleman was too grown-up a word, what with his boyish cheeks. His long thin mouth conveyed a soupçon of amusement. Katharine also detected a gravitas and energy in his fiery blue eyes, his square cleft chin, his assertive eyebrows.
“I wanted to express my gratitude, Miss Swift. And to thank Tina for luring you here.” He held a tumbler of whiskey. It seemed too strong a drink for such a young mouth. “I’m an admirer of the Archduke Trio.”
So he knew the nickname for Beethoven’s Opus 97, which the composer had dedicated to his favorite student, Archduke Rudolf of Austria. Katharine cocked her head. “I didn’t know navy boys fancied Beethoven trios.”
He smiled. “Don’t believe what you hear about navy boys. Especially officers.”
“Oh, gee, so you’re an officer now?” cracked Bettina.
“Soon enough, Tina. Or I should say not soon enough.” He sipped his whiskey. “But sooner than not.”
Bettina turned to Katharine. “Jimmy’s twenty, going on thirty-five. Always in a hurry.”
“Well, isn’t that grand,” said Katharine. “Twenty is my favorite number. One of them, anyway. Matter of fact,” she turned to Jimmy, “I happen to be twenty, myself.”
“For me, being twenty is a disease, like mange or dropsy,” he replied. “But the good news? We’ll recover.”
“Oh, did I mention? Jimmy fancies himself a champion tongue-wagger,” added Bettina.
“Jimmy—?” Katharine fished.
Bettina wiped her forehead with her napkin. “James Warburg, Katharine Swift. Voilà.”
“Your brother,” said Katharine, looking for a resemblance.
“So they say.”
“And they should know,” observed Jimmy glancing at a gentleman with a wide, thick moustache, who wore a sober black suit and who was refilling his glass with soda water. His glistening bald dome, and the thinning black hair at the sides of his head, made it appear as if his forehead stretched all the way to his crown. Katharine recognized Paul Warburg, father of Jimmy and Bettina. She had seen him from a distance at a couple of Institute events. Like every student there she knew he was a director of the Wells Fargo Bank and the chief architect of the Federal Reserve system, although she had no inkling what that was.
“Come here, Dad.” Bettina waved him over.
“Thank you,” Paul Warburg told Katharine, taking her hand and bowing. “We all appreciate your playing.” In his German accent, playing sounded like plenk.
“Jimmy was just explaining how naval officers fancy Beethoven,” said Bettina, covering Katharine’s momentary loss as she tried to decipher what the older gentleman had just said.
“Bitte verschone mich,” Paul Warburg told his daughter. Katharine, who knew some of Wagner’s librettos by heart, understood his German more easily than his English. “Please, spare me.” He bowed again to her. “Excuse me, I don’t want another dispute mit mine son.” And strolled away.
Katharine frowned. Until she realized she was frowning. And then she smiled. She did not wish to be caught frowning at anything Paul or any other Warburg had to say.
“The patriarch’s in a flap,” remarked Jimmy over the top of his whiskey tumbler.
“Why?”
“I suppose because out of all my various and sundry outfits, of which I own at least two, I happened to select this uniform.” He pinched his lapel.
“He doesn’t like the navy?”
“Oh, he has no beef with the navy. He just doesn’t like what they do.”
“What do they do?”
“They fight wars.”
“Dad grew up in Germany,” explained Bettina as if it were not obvious. “We have relatives there. Oodles of them, apparently. Wilhem the Second’s one of his best friends.”
“Or so he thinks,” Jimmy said. A calico cat, wandering through the yard, rubbed itself against his leg.
“You don’t think so?” asked Katharine.
“My opinion?” Jimmy picked up the cat and stroked its neck. “The Kaiser’s hardly worth the effort. To quote Shakespeare, or to misquote him at any rate, he may have more wealth than hair, but he has more hair than brains.”
“Misquoting Shakespeare should be punishable,” said Bettina. And to Katharine: “It’s a naval officer thing. Or should I say, a future naval officer thing.”
Jimmy laughed. “A Harvard thing, actually.”
Katharine smiled again, amused as much by Jimmy’s arrogance as by his wit.
“You mean a Harvard crime,” Bettina said. She turned to Katharine. “Well at least the Harvard part is real.”
“Which part isn’t real?” asked Katharine.
“The costume,” said Bettina.
“You’re not in the navy?” Katharine asked Jimmy, utterly confused.
Jimmy smiled. “I will be, soon enough.”
“Well, you had me fooled,” said Katharine. “Or your uniform did, anyway.”
“I’m in training.”
“What do they teach you in that training?” asked Bettina. “How to shine your buttons?”
“How to ignore insults,” quipped Jimmy.
“A lot of good that’ll do at ten thousand feet, with German fighter pilots shooting at you.”
Katharine was starting to feel like an accessory to family discord. “Perhaps we should be winding up our break,” she suggested, glancing across the lawn toward Edith and Marie, who stood talking to each other shyly.
The trio reassembled on the dais, adjusted their tuning, and launched into Schubert’s Trio no. 1 in B-flat Major. Katharine performed with renewed spirit, hoping at least one person in her audience was actually listening.
So often she felt her role at events like this was to provide ambience. People associated classical music with aristocratic taste. As a result, the newly rich and the newly almost-rich, who aspired to an appearance of nobility, surrounded themselves with it, at least in society functions. Usually their appreciation stopped there. This crowd, though, was not newly anything. And Jimmy Warburg had recognized the Archduke Trio. So she played, perhaps, with a tad more sensitivity than usual.
Katharine’s father had bequeathed to her a mission, to use sound for exploration as others might use a lamp, a compass, a machete, or a scalpel. Sounds could serve many purposes, but the one that had interested Sam Swift, and which fascinated Katharine, was a finely balanced tool, nuanced, elegant, and complex, for probing the human soul. Schubert had understood the capabilities of this tool. So had Chopin and Beethoven. To recreate their discoveries was to peel back the layers of human experience and expose its moist, pulsing heart. For this gift, and for a thousand memories, she felt gratitude to her departed father.
Glancing at Jimmy near the conclusion of the scherzo, she noticed him in spirited conversation with a woman whose hand lingered on his arm, a statuesque blonde whose back was turned to Katharine.
Jimmy’s eyes, past the woman’s shoulders, wandered to Katharine’s. Her fingers delayed a run of triplets by a quarter beat. Nothing anyone would notice, other than Edith and Marie. And perhaps this young man in the navy costume.
* * *
“Do tell me everything,” demanded Katharine’s mother, Ellen, in her singsong Leicestershire accent.
Her hair swooped up and piled high, she reclined on the faded damask divan in her blue and pink kimono, which almost matched the old-fashioned flowered wallpaper. Although Ellen worked as an apartment décor consultant for well-heeled Upper East Side clients, she exerted little effort improving her own accommodations. In her left hand she held Booth Tarkington’s latest novel, Seventeen. The upright piano, the bookshelves, the cupboard, the dining table, and the rug were shrouded in shadow.
All this, and the sweet, peculiar scent of Ellen’s homemade furniture polish, a mixture of boiled linseed oil, turpentine, and vinegar, were as familiar to Katharine as her reflection in the mottled wall mirror. This was Katharine’s home, the one place where she had always felt almost as comfortable as at the Institute of Musical Art. Until her fa
ther’s death. Now these stodgy rooms felt as restrictive as an old corset.
“Everything about what?” she asked.
“Oh, come now, Katharine. A sip of verbena?” Ellen refilled the cup on her side table. “Why, your garden party, of course. The masters of this mysterious banking empire. Their great hall, or hilltop castle, or whatever extreme architecture such people dwell in.”
“You make it sound so Gothic.” Katharine put down her satchel and plopped into a dining chair.
“Well it is Gothic, isn’t it. Very Bram Stoker, I’d say.” Ellen handed her the cup.
“More like, the Wall Street Journal.”
“Same thing,” snorted Ellen. “Dreary fortunes; ominous accents; bloodthirsty old fogies.”
“Otherwise known as gentility.”
“Oh, they’re gentile, are they?” asked Ellen.
Katharine sipped her infusion, choosing silence over a pointless dispute; preferring not to allow Ellen the pleasure of getting her goat.
“Why don’t you tell me about their pooch,” tried Ellen. “I judge gentlemen by their dogs, you know. Do they even have one? An English setter, is it?”
Katharine shook her head. “They’re German.”
“Not bloody German shepherds, I hope, or those brutish Dobermans. Dachshunds?”
“I did spot a cat,” said Katharine.
“Siamese? Abyssinian?”
“Calico.”
“How terribly pedestrian. I suppose they figure if you have enough money, you can get away with anything. Which, alas, happens to be true.”
Katharine set down her teacup. Her mother pretended to peruse her novel, looking up again as Katharine crossed toward her bedroom. “Any eligible gents?” she asked in feigned afterthought.
Katharine sighed. Her mother saw no contradiction in her contempt for bloodsuckers, on the one hand, and her desire to see her daughter advantageously wed, on the other. “It was a job, Mother. We performed. They paid us.”
“Well, fine and dandy,” said her mother. “You were paid.” The unstated implication: a lot of good your paltry, sporadic income does for us.
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