Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  “All the time,” said Dottie. “And when I do, I smear on some lipstick, screw on a hat, and dart out to the theater. Maybe a light opera. Maybe a tragedy. A distraction. Someone else’s sorrows and laughter. A context for our own. That’s what this thing they call culture is really about, darling. That’s how we cope with our substratal anguish.”

  Katharine had no idea what substratal meant but understood the gist of Dottie’s complaint and prescription. They held hands in silence, listening to the monotonal music of the indistinct voices downstairs.

  * * *

  In her sleep, once again a scrubbed girl wearing a white dress and ribbons, Katharine revisits her father’s One-Lock Adjustable Reamer Company. She is aware that she has experienced this moment before, but each time with dramatic differences. Looking at her hands on the keyboard she notices blemishes. Bruises. Her dress is stained and tattered. The music has turned strange. The audience, her father’s workers, are laughing.

  Awaking with a start, Katharine wondered why this dream recurred. The event never happened, did it? Even the underlying circumstance, her father’s ownership of that factory in Connecticut, had been ephemeral. From the time his father bequeathed the enterprise to him until the time it failed, little more than a year had elapsed. But the failure of the One-Lock Adjustable Reamer Company cast a shadow over the rest of Sam Swift’s life. Even if he never mentioned it.

  She felt queasy. It was too early to rise. She tried listening to her breathing instead of her thoughts.

  When she opened her eyes again, her dyspepsia had intensified into nausea. Her face in the bathroom mirror had paled three shades. No, she thought, realizing she had missed her menstrual flow. Not again. Not now.

  For Katharine, pregnancy had never been a time of exhilaration. Discomfort and dread better described the mood. The first two times had been semivoluntary, an exigency of wedlock. But this, arriving now, could only be characterized as negligence, a mistake. She felt a pang of guilt as she descended to the parlor, admitting to herself that neither pregnancy nor its consequence, maternity, had ever been her ambition.

  On the breakfast table she discovered a pearl-and-ruby choker. Jimmy’s note read, “You’re my gal. Never forget that, Katharine.” She brought the note to her nose to smell Jimmy’s Carter blue ink and eau de cologne.

  CHAPTER TEN

  APRIL 17, 1925

  A rainy morning. A day to remain inside. Katharine found a book on the mail table. Porgy, by DuBose Heyward. It had arrived the previous afternoon. As she opened it, a handwritten note fell out.

  Dear Katharine,

  We hope you enjoy reading DuBose’s novel.

  Dorothy

  Below the signature, Dorothy Kuhn’s phone number and address.

  Katharine remembered the gangly young actress from Ohio who had studied theater at Radcliffe, won a prize for her dramatic comedy, The Dud, and seen it produced on Broadway retitled Nancy Ann. Based on Dorothy’s life, the play drolly depicted the awkward social adjustments of a girl from Midwestern high society, who leaves proms and debutante balls behind for the adventure and unpredictability of a life in theater.

  It was the first—and remained the only—Broadway-produced play written by a woman. Unfortunately, life mirrors art, the play had been a dud, closing after forty performances. But Katharine and Jimmy enjoyed it. And the fact that a female playwright had managed to get her work produced on Broadway thrilled them. She telegrammed Dorothy, in care of the theater, inviting her for dinner. They conversed over roast beef and Chablis, but Dorothy was already packing for South Carolina to marry DuBose, an aspiring novelist. Since then, not a word… until Porgy tumbled out of the mail slot a year and a half later.

  Katharine sat in an armchair by the window and opened the book. Soon she was strolling through Catfish Row, a tiny ghetto in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina, and a world unto itself. Laughing and gabbing with its inhabitants, the Gullah people, whose dialogue was challenging but whose hearts were bursting with humanity; seeking shelter in tenements from an impending storm; weeping over the body of a murdered man; resenting the foreign, white hand of law enforcement. Written in a lofty, refined style, rich with description, detailed shading, and compassion, Porgy represented the probing regard of an educated southern gentleman exploring a culture not his own, which burgeoned under his eyes with love and violence.

  A few hours later, the wailing of her infant Kathleen jolted Katharine out of her South Carolina sojourn, followed by the pitter-patter of April’s and Andrea’s feet and the clump-clump of clogs. That would be the nursemaid, Jo. Finally the squeals died down.

  When she and Jimmy had purchased the adjacent townhouse and opened doors between the two structures, she asked the architect to provide acoustic insulation so she could practice piano at night. He shrugged, raising his hands. “Eh? One can only do so much in this regard, Madam Warburg. If I may speak in a—how shall I say?—in a Mediterranean manner; which is to say, candidly…” He raised his bushy eyebrows.

  “Please do,” said Katharine.

  He glanced at the piano and back to her. “When one decides to have children, one invites chaos into one’s acoustical environment. It cannot, if I may say so, be helped, my dear Madam Warburg.”

  Chuckling at the memory of this rotund Frenchman’s pomposity, she pulled on her robe and shambled down to the kitchen, where she finished the room-temperature coffee Jimmy had left and looked at his newspapers. Jimmy received five or six of them daily, air mailed in paper-and-string packets from M. M. Warburg Bank offices and affiliates in London, Hamburg, Mexico City, and elsewhere.

  This morning, it seemed, he had focused on several back issues of a Detroit broadsheet, the Dearborn Independent. The typed letter that accompanied this package, from a law firm in Detroit, commented that the paper was more widely read than any other in the country except the New York Daily News. Its owner and publisher, Henry Ford, required every Ford Motors dealership to carry it and provide it free of charge to customers. As Katharine browsed, it became clear why Jimmy’s lawyers had brought the Dearborn Independent to his attention. In a series of headline articles, Henry Ford had fashioned Warburg-hatred into a cause célèbre.

  As far as Katharine knew, Ford had never met Jimmy, Paul, or any member of Jimmy’s extended family. He studied them from afar and his animosity derived not from knowledge but from ignorance and fear. The unreality of his perceptions, however, did not render his accusations less brutal or painful. Katharine could only imagine how Ford’s public, vociferous, and relentless denunciations affected Jimmy, his family, and their associates. She scanned the front-page headlines:

  JEWISH IDEA IN AMERICAN MONETARY AFFAIRS:

  The Remarkable Story of Paul Warburg

  JEWISH IDEA OF CENTRAL BANK FOR AMERICA:

  The Evolution of Paul M. Warburg’s Idea

  HOW JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FINANCE FUNCTIONS:

  The Warburg Family and Firm Divided the World Between Them and Did Amazing Things Which Non-Jews Could Not Do!

  JEWISH POWER AND AMERICA’S MONEY FAMINE:

  The Warburg Federal Reserve Sucks Money to New York

  THE ECONOMIC PLAN OF INTERNATIONAL JEWS:

  An Outline of the Protocolists’ Monetary Policy, With Notes on the Parallel Found in Jewish Financial Practice

  Ford’s articles were poorly constructed, meandering, and devoid of serious thought but as she perused them, a few themes emerged: the Midwesterner’s animus toward East Coast privilege; the self-made American yokel’s envy of European refinement, education, and gentility; and especially, the manufacturer’s resentment of the class of people who had provided him, at a cost, with the means to build his empire. But Ford did not direct his ire toward the entire class of New York bankers, nor even to all the recent immigrants among them. Ignoring the power and influence of Amadeo Giannini, Charles Edward Merrill, or the house of J. P. Morgan, he focused on the Baruch and Warburg families—and on their ethnic identity, which he confused w
ith religious faith.

  Part of the irony was that the Warburgs’ religiosity was faint, in fact hardly detectable. When they bothered to attend synagogue, once or twice per year, their motivation was social, a form of noblesse oblige. Katharine’s family had been far more pious than any of the Warburgs. But the absurdity of Ford’s contentions hardly ended there. For Henry Ford, one of the richest men in the country, to rail against the privileged class on behalf of the honest, hardworking, common American was so ludicrous it would have made Katharine laugh, had it not been so pathetic. And although Paul Warburg had played an important part in the creation of the Federal Reserve, he had not done so for his own gain but out of devotion to his new country. Paul admitted privately, with pride and regret, that his efforts in Washington had cost him a fortune in lost revenues due to the time and effort involved.

  The most ridiculous and alarming of all Ford’s accusations, from Katharine’s point of view, was that Paul Warburg and other German Jews had dragged America into the Great War, in effect murdering millions of Christians for personal gain. Had Ford researched the question even minimally, he would have learned that Katharine’s father-in-law had argued—personally, to President Wilson—against American involvement in the war. She could not help wondering: was Ford deliberately lying, or was he just insane?

  Henry Ford was hardly alone, as Katharine knew all too well, in his distrust of the Warburgs and their ilk. Such attitudes were, in fact, increasingly fashionable. Katharine had read Frank Norris’s celebrated novel McTeague, which portrayed the Jewish Zerkow, “groping hourly in the muck-heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It was his dream, his passion.” Sitting beside Jimmy in the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, Katharine had winced during a production of Theodore Dreiser’s The Hand of the Potter, in which a Jewish man murders an eleven-year-old Catholic girl and his Yiddish-accented family covers up his crime. And in several of T. S. Eliot’s contemplative, modernist creations including Gerontion and Burbank, the famous poet—who worked at a bank, himself—had molded lower-case derision into verse.

  The rats are underneath the piles.

  The jew is underneath the lot.

  Money in furs.

  But Henry Ford’s diatribes were neither fiction nor poetry. They were accusations; they were personal; they were obsessive; and they were public.

  M. M. Warburg and Company, or any of its affiliates, could have created its own publishing organs. They could have hired journalists to refute or counterattack their accusers. But to do so, to amass and exercise that much influence, would be to vindicate the claims of people like Henry Ford. In the age-old tradition of court Jews, Jimmy and his family preferred to distance themselves and their operations from the public view.

  As Katharine sipped a second cup of coffee she remembered when, shortly after moving into their townhouse, Jimmy and she had invited his parents, Paul and Nina, for dinner. Much of the animosity between Paul and Jimmy had faded, but when discussion ran to questions of identity, the truce broke down.

  “Don’t believe me,” Jimmy told his father. “Believe the Scriptures. How do they characterize the Hebrews? A tribe. And what is tribalism? Whom do you trust? Whom do you not trust? You don’t trust the goyim.”

  “Everyone takes pride in their group, as they should!” said Paul. “It is only human. Why should we be different?”

  “The world is changing,” said Jimmy.

  “Those who say the world is changing, they are a group, too,” insisted Paul. “They imagine their club is superior to all the others, but it’s just another ghetto. And let’s hope you never have to leave it. You might find yourself pretty lonely.”

  The subject had come up again during subsequent family reunions. Jimmy wanted to change the culture of the bank and its reputation. Paul resisted in principle but little by little yielded control to his son. One by one, Jimmy let the alter kockers go, replacing them with Harvard friends who had names like Rutherford and Howe. So far, though, Jimmy’s strategy had not made an impression on Henry Ford and his comrades in journalistic arms.

  Katharine turned to the European papers. There at last she encountered pleasant news. Following Jascha Heifetz’s tour of Europe, a year ago, the French and the Germans had clamored for him to return. He had finally done so, a brief whirl through the most glamorous concert houses, and the reviews were ecstatic.

  Katharine asked the telephone operator to connect her with Roosevelt twenty-three seventy-two. She picked up a pack of Marlboros, the luxury smoke for ladies that featured a red band to hide lipstick smudges, and flicked a cigarette out of the box. “Miss Heifetz, please. Katharine Warburg.” Lionel lit her cigarette. “Thank you,” she whispered. She inhaled and blew the smoke upward.

  “Oh, Pauline darling, so delighted I caught you. I hear your gifted brother is back. That his tour was a smash. Jimmy was dying to see him in Berlin.” Another puff. “He did catch the headline, of course.” She read from a battered newspaper. “Der größte lebende Geiger.” The greatest living violinist. “That’s the Berliner Tageblatt but from what I gather they all agreed. Paris, Rome, Vienna. Pauline, our Jascha’s on top of the world. Isn’t that wonderful.” Another puff. “Listen, we ought to celebrate. Especially with this dreary weather. Oh, absolutely! Of course you can bring a companion. Who is it?” Another cloud of smoke. “Surprise me, then!”

  In addition to Dottie Parker, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, and Averell Harriman, the Warburgs’ circle had ballooned to include the playwright Robert Sherwood, the satirical columnist Franklin Adams, and the drama critic Alexander Woollcott. Nor was a group of fifteen or twenty, including a handful of strangers, unusual these days at 34 East Seventieth Street.

  A gossip columnist or two sometimes slipped in as well. The drinking and antics of banking magnates, stage stars, and writers guaranteed the sales of morning papers. Indeed, terms like creative people, as used in William Randolph Hearst’s gazettes, implied that common rules of decency did not apply. “Creative people” possessed or thought they possessed the power to invent their own moral codes. Their vainglorious, seemingly continuous celebration of freedom fascinated the masses, who traveled and worked within inherited bounds of decency, honor, and virtue—or at least pretended to.

  Katharine hoped Jascha would bring his Stradivarius. Just one partita would set her soirée aflame. “Of course. Check with him and get back to me. Kissy kissy.” She blew a final puff, hung up the phone, snuffed out her cigarette in a silver and crystal ashtray, and headed upstairs to get ready for a long-overdue lunch with Edith Rubel and Marie Roemaet at the conjoined Waldorf and Astoria hotels.

  * * *

  The three musicians sat in the bright lobby-restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street. A careless pianist, wearing an ill-fitting suit, exhibited Tchaikovsky’s Waltz in E-flat Major as if sloppily hanging aural wallpaper. Katharine, Edith, and Marie nibbled on radish roses, shrimp cocktails, and lamb roast seasoned with rosemary and mint jelly. Katharine had planned the get-together and all three understood she would foot the bill. Although they had not performed together in years, she hoped they would share enthusiasms about the musical scene, maybe even revive their collaboration.

  “Did you hear Jascha at Carnegie Hall in December? What a delight.”

  “Jascha?” asked Marie.

  “Jascha Heifetz,” said Katharine.

  “We know who Jascha is,” said Edith, glancing at Marie.

  Katharine regretted referring to him by his first name. What a terrible faux pas.

  Marie smiled and with a sideways nod admitted that neither of them could afford it.

  And thus the lunch proceeded, mournful rather than gay, as if they were memorializing rather than celebrating their friendship. Although they smiled and attempted a few giggles, the restaurant ambiance and inflated prices heightened Katharine’s sense that she now dwelled in a rarefied social stratum where wastefulness was de rigueur and elegance a matter of means rather than taste.
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  She wondered whether her friends envied her. Perhaps the desire for wealth and conspicuous consumption was universal, and martyrdom for Art merely the self-protective posture of romantic misfits like Katharine’s father. She inwardly cringed at the thought.

  She suggested that the Edith Rubel Trio try new material. Perhaps something original. “I’ve been composing, you know.”

  “We would love to.” Edith smiled. “But…”

  “But what?”

  Again Edith glanced at Marie. “We’re working with another pianist.”

  “Lillian Abell,” said Marie.

  “Oh yes. Lillian.” Katharine smiled. “She’s quite adequate.” She realized she sounded bitter. But again, she felt a little bitter.

  “She needs the income as much as we do,” said Edith.

  Katharine considered donating to the coffers of the Edith Rubel Trio but dismissed the idea. It would only bruise her friends’ pride.

  “The last times we called you, you were out of town,” apologized Edith.

  “We were in Boston. And then D.C.” Katharine tasted the Waldorf Salad. “I understand, really.”

  Her mind did understand. But not her heart. For Katharine, their musical partnership had been more than a business. It had been a sisterhood. Even if she had taken time off to bear children and attend to family obligations.

  The pianist hacked his way through Chopin’s Mazurka in B-flat Major. Katharine, Edith, and Marie moved on to profiteroles, musing about old times and the more affordable of the recent concerts and operas. But their mood had collapsed. Their friendship no longer felt natural.

  She asked herself how money, social standing, or marriage could degrade something as vital and supposedly resilient as friendship. Was true friendship, meaningful connectedness independent of worldly circumstances, an illusion?

  That’s what culture is for, Dottie Parker had told her. To distract us from these sad truths.