Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  Katharine felt Jimmy’s palm on the back of her head and realized she was expected to perform in a public demonstration of their bliss. Her lips met his. Everyone applauded or honked, blowing their noses into linen handkerchiefs. She inhaled the sweet Rhinewater of his eau de toilette, tinged with perspiration and longing.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  SIX YEARS LATER. FEBRUARY 1924

  Katharine stood in her walk-in cupboard, adjacent to the kitchen, looking over the plates, saucers, and cups. A kaleidoscope of the finest American and European designs. She had never hoarded china. Her collection had simply materialized, starting with her mother’s wedding gift of Johnson Brothers semiporcelain, adorned with roses and garlands, which remained untouched behind the cabinet doors as a reminder of everything Katharine disliked about Victorian fussiness; proceeding through a modern Viennese porcelain collection with black-and-white semicircles and gold vertical and horizontal lines; all the way to a miscellany of abstract designs by Nikolai Suetin, which the artist had shipped to Jimmy after their meeting at the 1920 Olympic games in Antwerp.

  People showered the Warburgs with gifts. It was one of life’s vinegar ironies. When Katharine was penniless, no one had offered a dime’s assistance. Six years into her marriage with Jimmy Warburg, strangers burdened her with everything she no longer needed. She selected a hand-painted Wedgewood fantasy collection with insets of gardens, fireflies, and castles. Her favorites. Numbered, signed, and irreplaceable.

  Tonight, they would celebrate. Jimmy, who had long aspired to become a romantic poet in the tradition of Keats and Tennyson, had finally seen his work published. Just one poem, but a respectable launch. A vindication. He was proud of his entrée into the Western literary canon and Katharine aimed to support his glee.

  “No lace tablecloth tonight,” she instructed Olga.

  “Lace would detract from these dishes, I quite agree, madam. Something simple. Elegant. Maybe this one with the gold stripes. How many guests?”

  Katharine counted on her fingers. “Dottie, Marc, George, Averell, plus Jimmy and me. That makes six, at eight thirty.” She had considered inviting her old friends from the conservatory, Edith Rubel and Marie Roemaet, but the last few times she had asked them over they had mumbled excuses. Katharine understood: her former schoolmates felt out of place in the company of smug bankers and fame-chasing literati. “And also the beverages, Olga. Port wine, claret, gin.”

  “Naturally, madam.”

  Prohibition was now the law of the land, so what was there to do but drink? Prohibition had made drinking more risqué and pleasurable. It had driven intoxication out of public places and into residences and speakeasies, private living rooms and remote, lawless outposts, where, lubricated beyond inhibition, a distinguished merchant might shout obscenities and an otherwise well-mannered married woman might kiss another woman or disrobe without shame or fear of arrest. Katharine did not ask how Lionel and Olga obtained the liquors and spirits. Gangsters were surely involved, if only indirectly. That was another achievement of the Prohibition: it made gangsters rich. And power followed wealth as surely as blood followed a fusillade. She smiled at the irony of it. I suppose I do support Tammany Hall, after all, if only indirectly.

  * * *

  Her guest count was off by one. Jimmy had invited Elizabeth Lange Donahue, an office secretary. Liz was all glistening green eyes, dimples, and black ringlets, but Katharine worried the other guests might prove heady company for a girl of twenty-two—forgetting that she herself had been two years younger than twenty-two when she met Jimmy.

  They dined at table like a family. A family that skewed artistic and a bit eccentric, to be sure. Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, the satirical playwriting team, could not have appeared more ill-matched. Connelly was bald and gregarious. Kaufman, who wore his dark hair straight up and slicked back, elongating his already lengthy face, fidgeted with his napkin or spoon. Their friend Dottie Parker, famous for her cultivated poverty, sultry gaze, and passionate love affairs, had published several oh-so-clever ditties and vignettes in Vanity Fair and Vogue. Dottie, Connelly, and Kaufman took inordinate pleasure in jibes, barbs, and insults, which they incessantly hurled at each other, at others within their sights, and at more established authors, whom they regarded as competitors but who never bothered to acknowledge their existence in return.

  Jimmy’s other guest, Averell Harriman, had recently inherited the largest fortune in America and looked the part in his pin-striped wool suit. Like Jimmy, he worked in the banking sector, with expertise in financing railroads. Unlike Jimmy, and an unending source of ribbing between them, he was a graduate not of Harvard but of Yale.

  The preponderance of artists at the table was no coincidence. Katharine was a respected pianist and an aspiring composer; her husband fancied himself a poet. “As a matter of fact,” he announced while pointing to Liz’s wine goblet and nodding to Lionel, who refilled it, “I don’t know whether you’ve picked up the new issue of Century Magazine.” He brandished the prestigious journal. “After all these years wandering in the literary desert, at long last…” He flipped it open and displayed a sonnet entitled “The Dark Star” and signed, “James Warburg.”

  “Bravo!” Connelly raised his glass.

  “I have a wicked idea,” said Kaufman, folding his napkin into a triangle. “Why don’t you read it?”

  “Since you’re dying to anyway,” put in Dottie in her dark, cloudy voice.

  Jimmy stood, cleared his throat, and began:

  Thou art the sun, Love; I am but the moon,

  That palely glows with thy abandoned light,

  Absorbed and hoarded for my lonely night—

  “Say, I have an even better idea!” Dottie interrupted.

  Jimmy frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “Why don’t you not read it?”

  “Bravissimo!” exclaimed Connelly with a laugh, applauding.

  Katharine bit her lip. Although nearly as capable of a sharp quip as some of his guests, Jimmy sometimes took criticism personally.

  He handed the magazine to Lionel and sank into his seat. “What did Ovid say about envy? Oh, yes: Summa petit livor: perflant altissima venti.” Marc Connelly registered no recognition. “Oh, forgive me,” said Jimmy. “They don’t teach that where you went to college? ‘The winds howl around the highest peaks.’ Freshman Latin.”

  Dottie jumped in. “Unfortunately, the good Lord endowed me with a handicap far more distressing than mere envy.” She touched her earlobe. “Delicate ears.”

  Jimmy sliced into his beef. “I guess I’m fortunate, then, that the editors of Century Magazine are tone-deaf.”

  “Tone-deaf? I doubt it,” said Kaufman, toying with his peas. “That name, Warburg, has a certain ring to it.”

  Dottie smiled. “Rather reminds one of the chimes in a cash register, doesn’t it.”

  Connelly held out his glass, and Lionel refilled it. “I hear Century Magazine may have to close shop if they don’t find benefaction.”

  “Unfortunately, though,” remarked Kaufman, “trying to buy one’s way in rarely works in the long run.”

  “You get to be a moneyman or a scribbler, darling,” Dottie confided to Jimmy. “Not both. It smacks of insincerity.”

  “Leave the arts to those who suffer,” said Connelly.

  “And who doesn’t suffer?” Jimmy shot back. “You think misery is the unique privilege of the poor?”

  “Not their unique privilege,” admitted Connelly. “But the poor are pretty good at it.”

  Averell cast a murderous glance in his direction. “Meanwhile, you don’t seem to mind the free filet mignon.”

  Through all this rapid-fire verbal one-upmanship Katharine had watched Jimmy, who pretended to take the taunting in stride. She feared any overt defense would backfire so she offered a weak smile that, in his pride, he refused to acknowledge.

  “You got lucky, darling,” Dottie told Jimmy, “long before Century Magazine printe
d your sonnet. Your birth manger was a gold mine. I say, make the most of it! Why squander your glorious intelligence on silly poetry, anyway?”

  “Banking is an entirely reasonable occupation,” Kaufman concurred. “While the arts are madness. How can one be practical and insane at the same time?”

  “Well, there go my ambitions!” said Katharine, trying to change the subject.

  Connelly poured himself a glass of water. “Weren’t you writing a song cycle? Or was it a symphony?”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” Katharine shook her head. “I’m not falling into that trap. Not after what you just did to my husband.”

  “I quite liked Mister Warburg’s poem. Loved it, actually.” Liz had been watching this exchange, and especially her boss’s face, with concern.

  “What did you like about it?” asked Dottie. “The part about the moon, or the part about hoarding?”

  Liz gazed at Jimmy with what seemed to Katharine a blend of adulation and guile. “It was sincere. That is precisely what a poem should be. Not cocky. Not clever. Sincere. Was Wordsworth cocky? Was Tennyson clever?”

  “Checkmate,” said Dottie. “Wordsworth was never cocky. Nor, by the way, could he dance the Charleston.”

  “Maybe Jimmy hasn’t quite found his voice,” said Katharine, determined to show no reaction to Liz’s brazen coquetry. “Maybe he’s still searching. But isn’t that how art works? It’s about searching.”

  A frown creased Jimmy’s brow and vanished. Katharine regretted her comment.

  “Voice, shmoice,” said Liz. “Mister Warburg’s poem was touching. Romantic. He is every bit as brilliant as he is debonair. And you are all quite insensitive.”

  Jimmy smiled.

  “If you have other poems, I for one would love to hear them,” purred Liz. “You know, I write poetry, too. I believe everyone should write poetry. It cleanses the soul.”

  “I’d be happy to hear some of your work,” said Jimmy.

  Katharine thought his tone condescending, but Liz failed to take it that way. “Say, why don’t we read each other’s poetry on the boat to Germany?” she asked Jimmy.

  As Katharine sipped her water she felt the blood draining from her face. “You’re traveling together to Germany?” Her husband had never invited her on a trip abroad.

  Jimmy scratched his chin. “Liz’s mother is German. She speaks fluently, and…”

  “Habe ich etwas Verletzendes gesagt?” Liz whispered. “Did I say something wrong?”

  He smiled and shook his head. It’s nothing.

  “Ich verstehe auch deutsch,” Katharine warned her with a smile. “I too understand German.”

  Dottie exchanged a look with Connelly. Kaufman walked his fork on the table. Averell cleared his throat.

  It was anything but nothing. That wag of Jimmy’s head sharply twisted the valve of Katharine’s mood. She looked down, trying to calm herself. Jimmy was no angel but this public display? With a little Schlampe, a slut? It was insulting and injurious. “Oh, to hell with it!” Katharine swept her one-of-a-kind, hand-painted Wedgewood Fantasy dessert plate off the table. “I’m done.” She flitted out of her chair and flew upstairs like a wounded sparrow.

  * * *

  She lay down in the dim bedroom. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the contours of the crown molding and the Venetian glass chandelier. Downstairs the chatter resumed muted but unvanquished. Katharine inhaled, exhaled, and instructed herself to relax.

  Jimmy traveled often, spending months abroad. He delighted in sexual escapades. This he had confessed four years ago, after Katharine happened upon evidence. A slow earthquake had begun rumbling through their domestic life. It had never ceased despite her attempts to ignore it.

  She remembered the incident all too vividly. Four years younger but a lifetime more naïve, she was lying on this same bed flipping through a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. He stepped into the bedroom from the shower, a towel around his waist. “Would you mind digging through my steamer for a pair of shorts?”

  “You got it, sailor.” Katharine pulled open the leather-and-wood trunk. Inside the lid, someone had scrawled a heart in lipstick. Stung, Katharine looked at him.

  “Oh, that’s awful,” he admitted.

  She flung the underwear at him and stormed out of the room.

  A half hour later he asked her to join him for a walk in Central Park, away from servants and children. She still recalled the overcast late-autumn day, the leaves breaking free, the rumbling thunder announcing an oncoming storm, the sound of horses’ hooves in the park, and that cold, haze-obscured sun. Jimmy walked with a contemplative stride, looking down.

  “What does she look like?” Katharine demanded. “Does she flatter you? Is she clever? Does she squeal like a pig?”

  “Please, Katharine.”

  “Don’t please, Katharine me! What does she look like?”

  She imagined a statuesque blonde like the one she had seen from behind on the day when she first met Jimmy. She visualized high cheekbones blushed with the Prussian chill. Icy, sparkling eyes. A body as curvaceous and heated as an Edison bulb but perhaps a smidgen softer.

  “What difference does it make? By God, Katharine, the whole affair was as inconsequential as…” Jimmy looked at the horizon. “As a flash of lightning.”

  “Inconsequential? Not to me, Jimmy. Not to your little girl’s mother.”

  “I suppose Helga was pretty enough,” he conceded. “But that isn’t the point.”

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  “It is the point,” he admitted. “But it’s not important.” He took her hands in his. “I chose you to be my wife, Katharine. Not her. And I would do it again.”

  She withdrew her hands. “Then why?”

  Jimmy sat on a bench and patted its wood slats, inviting her to sit beside him. “I can’t help it if I’m a romantic,” he said. “I was born that way.”

  “A romantic!” spat Katharine, still standing. “A romantic is just a fellow who needs women to admire him. No, not to admire him, to worship him. To idealize him. And when he meets that kind of woman, the fool mistakes her coy smile and playful eyes for love. She’s not in love with him. How could she be? She doesn’t even know him. Certainly not the way his wife does. She’s in love with a fantasy.”

  “She was a sweet girl.” Jimmy stretched his legs, crossing them. “Innocent and morose. What I offered was a moment of escape.”

  “How charitable.”

  “Not charitable. But not a lifetime either. A moment.”

  “An innocent, sweet girl does not have an affair with a married man. She runs the other way. Oh, God.” She sat down, away from him.

  “You’re being awfully dramatic, Katharine.” He looked at the gleam of his polished oxfords beyond the pressed wool cuffs of his trousers.

  “Why did she smear your trunk with lipstick?” asked Katharine. “Probably while you were in the bath rinsing off the residue of your lust. Who was that message meant for—you, or me?”

  “That was vulgar,” Jimmy admitted. “And terribly unfair. But you can’t blame me for her indelicacy.”

  “I wouldn’t call it indelicacy. I would call it deliberate and calculating.”

  “Perhaps, but you can’t blame me for that, either, can you?”

  “Oh, yes, I can blame you. How stupid I’ve been!”

  “I wouldn’t say stupid. A bit ingenuous? But that’s part of your charm.”

  “My trust and ignorance are part of my charm?” she asked. “Well, kiss them both goodbye.”

  “I’m sorry if this caused you pain,” said Jimmy. “But Katharine, I can’t be sorry for being who I am.”

  “Oh,” she assured him, “I can make you sorry for that, too.”

  He looked at her with a side smile “Ha! You’re plotting revenge.”

  “Lust is a disease, you know,” affirmed Katharine. “And, dare I say, it’s catching.”

  “You’re threatening to stray?”

  “Not threatening. P
romising.”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “As long as our union remains our priority, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Marriage isn’t about ownership, it’s about sharing.”

  She looked at him hard. “It’s chilly. I’m heading home.”

  That was four years ago. Now as she lay on her bed listening to the conversation downstairs, the tinkle of silverware and dishes, she acknowledged to herself that although something remained between Jimmy and her, a bond of sorts, it was not what she had once expected.

  Footsteps. A knock at the door. Repeated. “Come in.”

  Dottie entered, sat down on the bed and took her hand. “Men are swine.”

  “What do you have against swine?” asked Katharine.

  “You’re right. I didn’t mean to insult our charming porcine zoological neighbors.”

  “The problem is not pigs,” sighed Katharine. “Or even men. The problem is marriage. The fire dies… and then it’s dark. And you’re in a room by yourself.” Her eyes searched Dottie’s in the obscurity. “The only thing worse than marriage, I suppose, is being single.”

  “Oh dear, dear Katharine, I shall never get married,” said Dottie. “I shall fall madly in love. I shall drink myself silly on love and sing and dance on tables and shout with joy and make love with some rogue just as tortured as I am. And when it’s over, really over, I shall sob into my pillow like a girl whose kitten just fell off a cliff. Rinse, towel-dry, repeat.”

  “Do you ever feel like running away?” asked Katharine.