The other guests pretended not to notice as Jimmy stomped back outside, squeezing his tumbler like a perfume vaporizer. In that moment Katharine forgot about Paul Warburg’s offer and about decorum and rose to follow Jimmy outside.
He glanced at her as if he had expected her. “That’s it.” He leaned against the wall staring across Fifth Avenue, where a big motorcar lumbered by. “It’s over.”
“Your father is right. You could have died.”
He turned and looked at her, his eyes vibrant and probing. His mouth twitched. His hair fell on his forehead in a rebellious side bang. In his moment of exposure, of weakness, she yearned to touch him. Before she could act upon this impulse, however, he pulled her close and kissed her.
She squirmed. This was not acceptable behavior in her circles. At least, not under the glaring city lights.
Then she yielded.
CHAPTER FIVE
As a girl, Katharine had been an early riser. The crank-start grindings, scrapings, honks, and whistles of a great, still-young city bursting to life had roused her. In autumn the first rays of dawn pinked the far wall of her bedroom. Every new day was a territory to explore.
Since graduation, her morning routine had changed. Her mother took appointments first thing, visiting clients’ lodgings to assess their taste and their pocketbooks. Having invented the vocation of apartment décor specialist, Ellen had few competitors, but the upper middle class, her clientele, had not quite caught on. The very wealthy bought their furniture in Europe, where graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, affecting admiration and friendship, solicitously guided them through museums and explained the difference between a Louis XV chair and a Mucha print. The less wealthy yearned for furniture that suggested luxury without the hassle or expense. Ellen’s British accent lent her cachet and authority, but no one had heard of an apartment décor specialist and half her job consisted in explaining the concept and its utility.
When she had no appointments Ellen strolled to Eliza’s Tea and Biscuits, a picturesque refuge on the other side of Central Park. Despite her professed sympathy for the downtrodden, Ellen preferred to take her Ceylon Black in elegant neighborhoods. As a result, if Katharine lingered in bed until eight-thirty, she had the flat to herself.
And so she perused Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, drifted back to sleep, contemplated her uncertain future, and ruminated about the song or string quartet she was composing—the obscure mathematics of harmony, the clever ways she might twist and spin a melody. Sometimes, in this semiconscious state, she felt she was gliding on a lake on a sunny day. Other times she was gulping water. She cherished the solitude and peace but chided herself for her laziness, then congratulated herself for it.
Beauty, or the contemplation of it, was a leisure-time pursuit, a luxury. What would life be, devoid of such little sins? She thought of Débussy’s “Rêverie,” the self-indulgence and dissipation implicit in the title itself. Had music of more exquisite clarity, evocativeness, and lavender fragrance ever been penned? Beauty and Idleness were fond companions, Pleasure and Sensuality their love children. When the ancient Greeks contemplated Beauty they visualized naked human forms: Aphrodite, Adonis.
This was the sort of circuitous path her thoughts took on a typical morning. It led to no destination. But this was not a typical morning. This morning her ruminations led her back to Felix Warburg’s mansion, Paul Warburg’s gall, and Jimmy’s kiss.
At the age of twenty Katharine Swift remained a virgin, emphatically so, but she could hardly help imagining what lovemaking would be like, or should be like. A summer picnic on a mountain top. Diving off that summit and sailing in the wind. Wild and extravagant, natural and invigorating.
A sharp click interrupted these musings. Then another.
She peered at the gold pocket watch on her nightstand. It was ten fifteen, technically rather late to be lingering in bed no matter what justifications she could invent. She pulled on her white kimono, stepped out to the parlor, and glanced around: the wallpaper, the divan, the table. She was alone. Again that rapping. The window. She tightened her robe and looked down to the street.
In a gray suit and a sky-blue shirt that matched his pin-dot bow tie and his striped fedora band, Jimmy Warburg hurled an object. Katharine opened the window. “Just what do you think you’re up to, Mister Jimmy Warburg? Some gentleman you are!”
“Gentleman, shmentleman,” he called back. “Gentlemen are dull. Besides, they’re usually four-flushers. I would suggest you avoid them like the devil.” He flung another object.
Katharine ducked as a half-dollar coin sailed into the room. “What’s a four-flusher?”
“One card short of a winning hand.” He tossed another coin.
“Have you nothing better to do, Mister Jimmy Warburg, than hurl coins at unsuspecting, half-sleeping maidens?”
“Half-sleeping?” He checked his wristwatch. “Why, it’s only ten twenty. How impertinent of me!”
Others were looking from their windows and storefronts. “Ten fifteen, three thirty—it is always too early, Mister Jimmy Warburg, to be—”
“Will you please quit it with this Mister Jimmy Warburg business?”
“That is your name, isn’t it?”
“First name, Jimmy, yes. That’s what the flyboys call me. Last name, unnecessary.”
“It’s always too early, Mister Jimmy Warburg, to be loitering on a public sidewalk, shouting inanities at a self-respecting girl in her a.m. kimono.”
“In that case, why don’t you invite me in? Did you say kimono?”
“I said a girl in her kimono, yes. But she could just as well be perched in a madrono, talking on the telephono. What’s the difference? Point is, she deserves a modicum of privacy.” Katharine tried to close the window but it resisted.
“What’s a madrono?”
“A beautiful tree. A leafy retreat for thrushes and quail.”
“Why don’t you flit down from that beautiful tree?” suggested Jimmy.
Finally, she managed to slam the window shut.
I’m in no hurry! If Jimmy Warburg wished to visit, that was swell. She had been hoping for another encounter. Perhaps an opera or dinner. But she did not appreciate the notion that he might call upon her whenever it struck his fancy or that she should interrupt everything to accommodate him. Yes, there was a power differential between them. A wealth gap wider than Central Park. But he should not call attention to it, darn it.
It took her ten minutes to slip on her long black skirt, buttonless blouse and lace-up boots and boil water for tea, but there was no cream in the icebox so she stepped out for the corner grocery. Any witness to her banter with Jimmy would have vanished by now or would at least pretend not to have noticed. She slapped on her mother’s wide-brimmed hat, with that silly peacock feather. Not the way she usually dressed for a morning cream-fetching excursion, but not too fancy, either.
Fifteen minutes in all by the time she reached the street, and there he was still, leaning against a brick wall, his nose in a newspaper. “I knew you’d come up for air sooner or later.” He folded the paper.
“The flat does not lack oxygen, thank you.”
He looked up to her apartment, squinting. “That right?” He threw the newspaper into a trash bin and they began walking.
“And I did not come up for air. I came down for cream.”
“Ah, I know just the place.” He led her to a buggy that was waiting at the corner and helped her in.
* * *
The Century Theatre was closed to the public during the day. But the doorman recognized Jimmy, whose family had financed construction of the building, and the elevator operator whisked them up in his polished-brass cage to the enclosed portion of the Roof Garden Pavilion, where a disk was spinning on the Victrola while maintenance employees swept the floor and set tables. Eddie Cantor, backed by an orchestra, sang—
Every lyric writer since the world began
Has put in overtime in raves about the moon.
> And when the animals descended from the Ark
They sang a song that rhymed with June
And tune and spoon.
Apart from the restaurant staff and the invisible singer and his orchestra, Jimmy and Katharine had the spacious glass room to themselves. As they proceeded to a table at the far end of the room, Katharine wondered whether Jimmy had not prearranged the entire scene, including the music. It all seemed too picturesque and dreamlike to be entirely spontaneous.
“I should apologize,” said Jimmy as they sat down.
“For throwing coins at my window? Darn right, you should. You could have cracked it!”
He shook his head. “For last night.”
“Oh.” She smiled, feeling heat rising in her cheeks. “That was nothing. Just a… a moment.”
“The state I was in. I didn’t fancy your seeing me like that.”
The waiter brought a teapot, cups, and a plate of petit fours. Jimmy tasted one of the miniature cakes. “So the mystery is solved,” he announced. “I won’t be flying. They’re dumping me in an office in D.C.”
“What will you do there?”
“At the base in Delaware, I designed a new kind of compass in my spare time,” he said with uncharacteristic modesty, as if announcing he had discovered a clever way to knot his tie. “Specifically for aviation. They had the damn things mounted on the floorboards. You had to take your eyes off the windscreen and wait for your irises to adjust so you could read the compass, and then if you could even see the darn thing, you were squinting like a bag of nails when you turned your eyes back to the sky. I figured out a way to mount a rotating magnetic card inside a glass ball and position it right in front of the pilot’s eyes. So he’s looking at the horizon rather than his feet.” He waved the waiter over. “Bruno, would you mind bringing me a foot or so of butcher paper?”
Eddie Cantor had ceased singing and the shellac disk was spinning noisily. Before going back to the kitchen, the waiter lifted the needle. He returned a moment later with a length of torn-off paper. Jimmy removed a Parker Lucky Curve pen, black with gold filigree, from his breast pocket and sketched. “Imagine a snow globe, sans castles and reindeer.” He illustrated the sphere and rotating magnetic card, added a perspective view of the Curtiss panel, and pushed it across the table. “Now they want them on all the military planes, and they’ve put me in charge of having them mass-produced and installed.”
“Why, that’s terrific. Here you are, all of twenty years old and—”
“Twenty-one, thankfully.”
“Twenty one and already in charge of… Jeepers.”
“I’ll be buzzing down to Washington this afternoon. Which is why I took the shocking liberty of rousing you so early.”
She smiled to conceal her disappointment. “That’s how you bid a girl adieu? Pelting her window with pennies?”
“Half-dollars. And no.”
“No, what?”
“That’s not how I bid a girl adieu.” He pushed a lock from his eyes. “I guess, well, yes, I needed to see you. But not to say goodbye.” He collected her hands in his. “I’ve decided I want to see you every day of my life. If you consent, that is.” He blinked twice, just like his father—an unconscious gesture that pinched her heart. So Paul Warburg was right, darn it. “What do you say?” he pressed her.
In addition to his intelligent good looks, Jimmy was adventurous, always ready with a quip, and a smidgen vulnerable. This latter quality touched her particularly.
“Your father was right about you,” she teased.
“That I’m a blight on my family name? Or that I’m crackers?”
“Does it have to be one or the other?”
He reached for her teacup and sipped. “I suppose it could be both.”
“He’s right that you’re impetuous. You get an idea and act upon it, just like…” She pointed. “Like sipping from my teacup. How do you know I don’t have some exotic disease?”
“If you do, I want to share it with you. I want to share everything with you.” He drained the cup, refilled it, and pushed it back across the table.
She chuckled. “You hardly know me, Jimmy Warburg.”
“I like what I see,” said Jimmy. “I like what I hear when you play the piano. I like your accommodating ways as well as your contrarian ones. You’re a bit of a caged lynx. Also, Katharine Warburg has a ring to it.”
She laughed. “What kind of ring?”
“Why, diamond, of course. Or any stone of your choosing.”
She rested her chin on her hand. “Can I give it some thought?”
“Why don’t you think about it until June.” He uttered it like a statement, a directive.
“June?” She had no desire to think that long. Maybe a day or two, or a few minutes. “Why June?”
“Because it rhymes with moon, and tune, and spoon.” Jimmy leaned closer. “In the meantime, I’d like to take something from you. Something that will keep me dreaming.”
My virginity? Is that what you’re implying? Would I allow you, on nothing but a promise? You bet I would!
It would be the most momentous decision of her life.
“Katharine?”
“Yes?”
“A pose,” he corrected her as if he knew what she was thinking. He signaled to someone at the far end of the room. Katharine turned to see two men entering: a mustachioed gentleman in a black suit with a silk neckerchief, and his assistant in baggy cotton dungarees, wheeling a wooden tripod, a large camera with a hood, and a flash.
CHAPTER SIX
Sunday morning, Ellen rapped at Katharine’s door. “Out of bed! We’re heading to church.”
Katharine shuffled out of her room and poured herself tea. “We haven’t sat in a pew in months. Why all of a sudden?”
“They’re honoring your grandmother.”
Decades earlier Katharine’s paternal grandmother, Gertrude Swift, had composed and published a book of devotional songs. Katharine’s father, who occasionally played the organ at St. Ignatius of Antioch, had taught the hymns to the choir.
Father Ganter delivered an impassioned gloss on a passage—“be ye therefore sober”—from the First Epistle of Peter. “As in the time of Saint Peter, so in ours,” he warned, peering at his congregation through horn-rimmed spectacles that reflected the gem colors of the stained-glass windows. “Never before have we seen the family in such a shambles, our fathers so ambitious, our mothers so neglected, while our youth dance and carouse as if there were no tomorrow.” He pushed his glasses back on his nose. “Drink is the scourge of our time. Women come to me in tears. Their husbands guzzling, squandering their vitality. Ultimately sacrificing their positions and reputations as well as their souls. The answer to this wickedness, the path to healing, lies in Prohibition. I urge you, brothers and sisters in Christ, for the sake of our communities, our families, our church, and our country: support Prohibition.”
Several congregants muttered amens.
Prohibition. Katharine had followed the fiery debates in newspapers. Prohibition signified everything she had not been doing with Jimmy. She glanced at her mother. Was this why Ellen had dragged her here?
His voice rising, the reverend resumed: “I know, I know, you’ve heard the sophistries of the Papists, the Germans, and the beer barons. I urge you: pay them no heed. If you want to see where that Hofbräuhaus philosophy leads, look at what’s happening in Europe.” He swallowed and sighed, clasping the lectern. “Let us now join together in Gertrude Swift’s eloquent arrangement of ‘Christ Our Passover.’ ”
The organ played a few introductory chords. Choir and congregation sang:
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.
Therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
“The leaven of malice and evil.” The words reverberated in Katharine’s mind. Her grandmother, whose memory Katharine ho
nored, had composed this music. She remembered Grandma Gertie’s laugh, the dresses she sewed for her, her piety, evenings spent at her piano. The thought that she, Katharine Swift, might soon be leaving home to join a clan with foreign traditions saddened her. But she also remembered that during her father’s last years, doubt had crept into his heart and metastasized into an inverse faith. Much to his wife’s dismay, Sam Swift had died an atheist.
Although Katharine cherished her heritage, she refused to let it shackle her. She knew that Jimmy Warburg, coming from a very different background, held similar views. America no longer belonged to Sam Swift’s Puritan ancestors, if it ever had. America encompassed steel and farming, the telephone and moving pictures, women’s suffrage, the assembly line, and the Silent Parade. America was the bustling city with its odors of garlic, seared beef, borscht, fried chicken, cabbage, soy sauce, horse manure, and automobile smoke. On her meandering coasts, in the Appalachians and the Rockies, and in the wide-open prairie, there was plenty of room for historically incompatible traditions to mingle—room for the Irish as well as the English, the Germans as well as the French, the Poles and Ukrainians as well as the Russians—provided they set aside the sectarian ways of their Old Countries, the tribal dissonances of their tired Old World.
Thoughts of the Old World and the new brought Katharine’s mind back to Jimmy, who had immigrated at a young age, who remained fascinated with the idea of America, who had so fervently sought to fight in her naval air force. And to the question he had posed in the Roof Garden Pavilion of the Century Theatre.
Now he was in Washington. Was he thinking of her? Would his father’s objections hold sway? If Katharine accepted Jimmy’s proposal, would she be stumbling into a hornet’s nest?
CHAPTER SEVEN
JIMMY. WASHINGTON
Wearing his naval reserve uniform, Jimmy looked out from the sliding door as his train rolled into Union Station. There was his driver, in a seaman apprentice uniform. Jimmy waved and the driver saluted him. Two porters, also sailors, rushed to help with his trunk.
Rhapsody Page 7
