Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  “You could say the same about the French Revolution,” said Katharine. “But that Trotsky, he had this… this raw power, don’t you think?”

  Edith shook her head. “I thought him positively ugly.”

  “No one is asking you to marry him,” said Katharine.

  They giggled. Perhaps nervously, because the thought of it, any thought of marriage actually, posed a threat to their fragile consortium. Matrimony and its inevitable harvest of children and housekeeping might stress their triumvirate, their shared and exclusive dedication to music, their readiness to travel far away together, if necessary, at any time. If only that time would arrive…

  Katharine’s eyes wandered to the window and the gaslamp-lit street. All the white-hot discussions of inequality, war, and injustice had only made her feel peripheral and helpless. She would never reach her destiny, or contentment, in soirées, champagne, and propaganda although she might momentarily escape sadness and penury. The Edith Rubel Trio was at best a vehicle, not a destination.

  * * *

  Between her musical engagements, while her mother was out matching silk moiré wall panels with Jacquard-upholstered settees for newspaper tycoons and surgeons’ mistresses, Katharine applied herself to her piano technique. As she sat at the keyboard cutting a trail through the forest of chords, a trance-like feeling washed over her, a refined blend of elation and melancholy. It almost felt as if her father were leaning against the wall behind her, his arms crossed, listening.

  The brass doorbell jangled, signaling a telephone call—a real-world event. She sprinted for the hallway, where the candlestick telephone sat on a wooden stand. Mrs. Grissom, a neighbor, cracked open her door, peeked through, and closed it again. Katharine pulled the earpiece from its holder and, clutching the stalk in her left hand, spoke into the mouthpiece. “Hello?”

  “Soon-to-be naval officer Jimmy Warburg here. Remember me?”

  She smiled and thanked heaven he could not see her smiling through the telephone. “How could I forget? No one in a navy uniform has ever misquoted Shakespeare to me before.”

  “Don’t you worry, I can misquote more than that,” said Jimmy.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Let’s see. Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio—” His Italian accent was preposterous but the words were correct.

  “Or di foco, ora sono di ghiaccio,” Katharine completed the line. “But I’m afraid that’s not a misquote. That’s just a quote. ‘I no longer know what I am, what I do; now I’m all fire, now all ice.’ Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro.”

  “So it doesn’t count?”

  “Depends what you’re counting.”

  “I’m counting other passionate opera lovers of my generation,” said Jimmy. “And unfortunately I can count them on one hand. On one finger, in fact.”

  “That would be moi,” said Katharine.

  “For better or worse. But the former, I hasten to add.”

  Katharine leaned against the wall. “My father was the Tribune’s opera critic. I spent my childhood playing backstage with Louise Homer’s daughter.”

  “The contralto?”

  “Among others.”

  “Well, that’s swell. As a matter of fact, I happen to have an extra ticket for Le Nozze di Figaro, Thursday. Sorry, so last minute. Care to join me?”

  “Thursday, Thursday…”

  “The day before Friday and after Wednesday.”

  “Oh, that Thursday.” Well, she was free—of course she was free—but she had her pride.

  “Why don’t we meet beforehand? Sam’s Deli, Thirty-Eighth and Broadway. You know the place?”

  “I lunch there all the time, pretty often anyway,” she lied.

  “It’s settled, then. Six-thirty, sharp. Enough time to chat before the show.”

  “Va bene,” she agreed.

  As she hung up, Mrs. Grissom’s door creaked open again. Enough that Katharine could make out the blue flowers of her housedress and her loose hair. Katharine smiled defiantly and the door slammed shut.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sam’s Deli: wood-paneled walls; high, pressed-tin ceilings; fans; cigar smoke; waiters in stained, loosely tied aprons. Katharine arrived on foot and stood inside the big front window watching the carriages, the horse-drawn trolleys, the motorcars, the pedestrians’ hats. The hard felt bowler, perched askew, denoting middle class aspirations, raised with a slight bow when its wearer greeted a woman. The wool cap, low on the forehead, of the working man with no pretensions. The flat straw boater with a seersucker jacket and a cane to twirl, indicating leisure and insouciance. The top hat, frock coat, and beard of the man of consequence. That was New York, for better or worse: rich and poor, Italian and Jew and Irishman, rubbing elbows at the intersection of tradition and modernity.

  Jimmy pulled up in a five-passenger vehicle with robin’s-egg-blue wheels, wide curved fenders, and a black cloth roof. The automobile vied for space curbside with two buggies, then halted in the middle of the road. As other drivers cursed, Jimmy stepped down to the street looking like a high school boy dressed for a class dance in his silk hat, black tailcoat, and patent pumps. Katharine glanced down at her long, plum-colored dress, the best she owned but a little dated. Would he notice? She smiled and adjusted her posture, trying to project confidence.

  Jimmy navigated past a horse’s rump to the sidewalk and through the pedestrians. The bells hanging on the door chimed as he stepped in. He waved away the driver and the passenger in the motorcar, which honked like a goose and rumbled off.

  “Navy pals,” he told her. “Both shipping off to officer school next week. Boy, will I miss those flyboys.” He escorted Katharine to a dark-wood booth.

  “And when are you shipping off?”

  They sat down.

  “They never tell you, no matter how much you bribe them.” Jimmy placed his hat on the bench. “I’ve completed ground training. Go ahead, ask me about the ailerons on a Curtiss Jenny.”

  “Okay. Are they good?”

  He laughed. “I certainly hope so.”

  “So… a couple of weeks? A month?”

  “At most.”

  Well, that answers that. Not that she was expecting their camaraderie to lead anywhere. What a preposterous idea. Just about the only thing she knew about Jimmy Warburg was that he had access to more money than anyone she had ever met. And that he was handsome, of course. And funny, in a way. And a tad pretentious, like a boy posing with a serious expression in a suit that was a half size too large.

  She wondered, though, whether there was the hint of a possibility in his mind that their nascent friendship might evolve into… something. After all, he had called her three and a half months after meeting her. He must have been thinking about her. He must have asked his sister for her number, perhaps even pestering Bettina until she dug it up.

  “Why do you want it so much?” Katharine asked.

  He scratched his cheek. “The navy?”

  She nodded, although that was perhaps not what she really meant.

  Jimmy leaned forward slightly, crossing his arms on the table. “An overbearing, aggressive empire has attacked our allies. Are we supposed to avert our eyes?”

  “And that empire would be…?” This war was such a bloody mess. So many nations were involved. No one wanted it. Nevertheless, everyone had piled onto the fray.

  “The Austro-Hungarian one.” Jimmy allowed the waiter to pour their coffee. “A slice of apple pie, à la mode?” he asked Katharine.

  “Sounds far too pleasurable,” Katharine weakly protested, “to be entirely moral.”

  “What did Nietszche say about morality?” asked Jimmy. “A fiction used by inferior human beings to hold back the superior ones.”

  “Apple pie it is,” agreed Katharine.

  The waiter nodded and stepped away.

  “There are personal reasons too,” said Jimmy.

  Katharine stirred sugar and cream into her coffee. “For going to war?”

  He nodded. “I
came to America as a child. This great country adopted me. Now she’s asking for my help. Frankly, I consider it my duty to answer that call.”

  She sipped. “Your father disagrees.”

  “He sees no heroism in defending one’s country.” He tasted his coffee black.

  “Ah. Heroism.”

  “Well, yes,” insisted Jimmy. “Ever since ancient Rome and even before that, the idea that there’s virtue in exposing oneself to danger, to defend one’s people—that has always been the highest calling, upon which civilization rests. The notion that the individual life, even one’s own life, matters less than the culture, the history, the civilization.”

  The waiter set their pie with vanilla ice cream on the table.

  “I suppose I can see merit in self-sacrifice, under certain circumstances,” admitted Katharine. “But what about killing? After all, the people you’re fighting share the same sentiments as you. Defending their culture, their history, all that business. Why should they die?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch, a delicate jewel-like rectangle of gold with a beveled crystal. Katharine, who had never before seen a wristwatch, marveled at its compactness and beauty. “You’re quite right,” said Jimmy, slicing into the ice cream and pie with the edge of his fork. “Both of us are placing our destinies in the hands of the gods, as the Romans would say. Letting them choose the victor. That’s the whole enjeu.”

  “The enjeu,” echoed Katharine. It sounded French, but it did not appear in any Bizet libretto.

  “The sport of it.”

  “So you see war as a game?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Although that does trivialize it, doesn’t it.”

  “Like a gladiator fight?”

  “More like the Ludi Romani, scaled up to the proportions of modernity.”

  “You do have a way with words, Mister Warburg.”

  “Jimmy. And thank you. Poetry happens to be my passion.”

  “I didn’t realize we still lived in ancient Rome.” Katharine tasted a forkful of pie and ice cream. “That explains a lot.”

  “We’re all heirs of Rome,” said Jimmy.

  She grinned, finding this statement even more ridiculous than the Lower East Side Trotskyites’ predilection for the music of Borodin.

  His face eased into a lazy smile. “Let’s enjoy each other’s company while we can, shall we?” He placed his left hand atop hers on the table.

  And what precisely did he mean by that? She withdrew her hand. No well-bred lady would accept such a proposition without questioning her companion’s intentions. But she did not wish to discourage him, either. “That would be lovely. Within the constraints of my schedule, and of propriety, of course.”

  “Your schedule?”

  “The Edith Rubel Trio. Some of us work for a living.” To soften the sarcasm, she returned his smile.

  He nodded but she suspected he did not understand. How could he imagine what it was like to be the daughter of a working mother who could never earn enough to cover rent, food, and other necessities?

  They strolled afterward to the opera, where they sat close to the stage and centered. The music and spectacle entranced Jimmy, who laughed full-throatedly at its inspired silliness and briefly clutched Katharine’s hand at the end, when the count begs forgiveness of his wife, whose affections he has so doggedly tried to betray. After the show, Jimmy hired a horse-drawn phaeton and accompanied Katharine home. As the horse clipped north on Broadway, he sang aloud: In qual laccio cadea? “What trap have I fallen into?” His pitch was so wavering that Katharine had to suppress a grimace, but she answered good naturedly with an aria of her own:

  Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro,

  Al mio duolo, a’miei sospir!

  “Oh, love, give me some remedy for my sorrow and my sighs.” Jimmy laughed, delighted, as the carriage trotted to the curb in front of her mother’s apartment. We can have a jolly time together, can’t we, thought Katharine as she bade him good night. He held her hand as she stepped down, bathed in the warm glow of a gaslamp.

  * * *

  They met again a week later at the spacious, crowded, noisy Café des Beaux Arts on West Fortieth Street. It was the second time Jimmy had seen her in her plum dress but he hardly noticed.

  They sat at a small table. The waiter approached. “Chablis and oysters,” said Jimmy. Then, as if realizing he was not alone, “will that be okay?” he asked Katharine.

  She had never tasted oysters. But she nodded.

  Resuming the conversation they had begun at Sam’s Deli, Jimmy mused about his ambitions and frustrations. “America’s about to roar into this conflict in Europe. They need me in the cockpit, not on the ground in Delaware. I should be buzzing over Pensacola. Hell, I should be on a boat heading to Belgium. What are they thinking?”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” tried Katharine, who thought it absurd to see war as a social event or a rite of passage. At the same time she enjoyed Jimmy’s candor, especially perceived through a haze of Chablis.

  “Well if I have to be on the ground, I can think of no better company.”

  That was Jimmy. Occasionally he would say something that would melt her stockings, and then move on.

  The waiter returned, and Katharine tasted raw oysters for the first time. Salty and acrid with a slimy, runny texture. She grimaced and washed them down with wine.

  “In college,” Jimmy told her as the waiter refilled their goblets, “my focus was history, but music and English literature vied equally for my affections.”

  “A man of many loves,” observed Katharine.

  He nodded. “My classmates elected me class treasurer. Why? I never asked for the honor. Economics wasn’t my passion.”

  “It must be tough, being a Warburg,” she said in a tone of mock pity.

  “Well, it is, actually. Anyway, that was yesterday, and the skies of Belgium are tomorrow, and now is now, so there’s nothing to do but celebrate our youth.” He held up his glass, she held up hers, and they clinked. He sipped. “Do you enjoy dancing?”

  “Why, yes, of course. Doesn’t everyone?”

  Jimmy charioted her not to a ballet or cotillion but up to a Harlem ballroom crowded with sweaty Polish, Italian, and Irish immigrants, colored folks, blaring saxophones and trumpets, and an out-of-tune upright piano used primarily to emphasize the beat and to gesticulate in tinkling musical adornments. A palace of commercialized leisure where people who worked hard could play hard. More specifically, the dungeon of that palace, a basement bursting with cheap liquor, socially stratifying brawls, and furtive dalliances. The last place where Katharine would have expected a Warburg, a Harvard man, to unwind.

  Her fox-trot left something to be desired, as did his, but the wine they had enjoyed with dinner, combined with the vigor and agitation around them, made it all more than tolerable.

  “Boy have we got a treat for you,” announced the bandleader, who looked so juvenile Katharine wondered how he had slipped past the bouncer. He introduced a colored lady in a hat and flowing long dress just up from Atlanta named Bess Smith. “And she’s gonna yodel a toe-tapper by a fella calls himself Irving Berlin.” He pronounced the name Oivin Boylin. “I think ya know the guy.”

  Everyone cheered. The band started playing. Hands and feet flailed. And then the bandleader stopped them, waving his arms. “No, no, no,” he told them. “That ain’t what we’re doin’ here tonight. We ain’t here to dance. That we can do any night. We’re here to crazy dance!”

  The band resumed playing, more up-tempo, and this plump, unprepossessing Southern woman belted out a song called “I’ve Got to Have Some Lovin’ Now.”

  The beat was as asymmetrical as the rhyme, and the music as lively. Giddy with the scent of booze and Jimmy’s Rhineland cologne and the wild primitiveness of the music, Katharine waved away all sense of propriety and decided to make a fool of herself, flinging her arms and feet like a drunken frog. Crazy dancing, the recent discovery of a culture in flux. Perhaps not Katharine’s c
ulture, or Jimmy’s either, but that made it all the more exhilarating.

  Her exposure to dance had taken place solely within the context of musical instruction. The pedagogues at the Institute had emphasized the physical basis of musical rhythm. In order to perform Telemann, Vivaldi, and Bach, one had to master the seventeenth-century bourrée and gavotte; for Liszt and Schubert, the nineteenth-century quadrille and the waltz. In a spirit of magnanimity and with a nod to modernity, her teachers had also introduced their charges to risqué newer dances, the tango and the fox-trot. However, Victorian restraint had cast its shadow upon these academic gyrations. No one had mentioned the correlation between musical pulse and sexual thrust. Females danced with females; males with males. Within such pairings, physical attraction was unthinkable.

  “How do you know this place?” she shouted to Jimmy after Bessie Smith finished, while everyone was clapping, stomping their feet, and whistling.

  “Navy fliers know how to whoop it up!” he shouted back.

  “I’ll say!” But she wondered what he meant, what kind of dissolute life he was leading at the naval reserve’s air pilots training camp in Delaware.

  When a man, wobbly with giddiness and booze, bumbled into her, she fell into Jimmy’s arms. They looked into each other’s eyes and broke out laughing.

  * * *

  “Katharine, a gift from your beau!”

  She opened her eyes. It was morning. How early, she was not sure. But too early, anyway, based on the street sounds and the blush of light on her wall.

  “My beau?”

  “Mister James Paul Warburg,” chirped Ellen. “I’m setting it on the table. Quite sumptuous, really.”

  Katharine heard her mother close the door and traipse downstairs.

  She tried to fall back asleep but the Angel of Curiosity, an old and irritating acquaintance, grasped her dangling hand and yanked her out of bed. As she tightened the belt of her robe she noticed the spray of roses and tulips on the dining table. The swirled crystal and silver vase that held them. And, tied around it with a ribbon, James Paul Warburg’s calling card.