Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  * * *

  If intimate friendship and shared memory were nothing but tattered illusions, revelry and drunkenness were ready to step in to fill the gap, or at least to divert one’s attention. The Warburgs’ guests no longer gathered around the dining table; those days were long past. The idea that everyone might participate in one conversation now seemed stodgy. Food, champagne, and chatter flooded the dining room, kitchen, parlor, library nooks, sitting room, even the bedrooms. In the inebriation and noise, some smooched with their friends’ lovers on sofas, played the fiddle, or danced a Charleston. Groups of two or five, sitting or standing, formed and re-formed, trying to outcompete each other in tall tales and exuberance. They smoked, drank, noshed, and soiled the furniture. One drunken man embraced another, who socked him in the jaw. He fell backward onto two women, who screamed. An ingénue with Broadway ambitions allowed men to lick champagne off her dainty ankles and calves, giggling.

  The bartender fixed Katharine a Gin Rickey. She noticed Jimmy leaning against the wall by the door, sipping white wine and observing his guests. He seemed thoughtful, a bit distracted. She tasted her drink and approached him. She had been meaning to ask him about those articles she had seen. She wondered how Henry Ford’s attacks were affecting him, and wanted to let him know she cared.

  “Not at all,” said Jimmy. “I understand why he feels that way. He built his fortune with his hands. He distrusts people who earn money without creating physical objects. It rings false to people like him.” He sipped his wine. “Besides, no one likes feeling dependent on others. Least of all, industrialists. They resent bankers precisely because they need them. None of this is new, Katharine.” He smiled.

  Jimmy’s eyes told a different story—or rather, a variety of stories, all at once. One of those stories was a tale of caution. The subtext was fear.

  There was a knock at the door. As if to change the subject, Jimmy opened it. There stood Alexander “Aleck” Woollcott, the drama critic, next to a smaller man. With a high forehead and circular glasses—his nose, moustache, mouth, and chin scrunched into the lower portion of his face—Aleck cut a bulky, slovenly figure. He wore a cape, dripping with rain, over his suit and spoke in a growl. “Jimmy, Arthur,” he introduced his friend. And, to Arthur: “If capitalism is the font from which all evil flows, this fellow’s the Bernini of fountain architecture.”

  “Thank you for the tribute, though I’m afraid it’s unmerited,” replied Jimmy as he studied the face of Aleck’s guest. “I’ve seen you somewhere,” he said to the stranger.

  “You’ll recognize him if I stomp on his foot,” bellowed Aleck.

  He did so, and Arthur’s mouth gaped in a magnificent, silent howl, which seemed to take over his head. His face tilted backward. His cheeks shot up to his forehead. His round eyes shrank to slits.

  “Harpo!” exclaimed Jimmy.

  The silent shriek vanished. Arthur Marx grinned. “Pleased to meet you.” He shook Jimmy’s hand. His voice, unfamiliar to Jimmy and the Marx Brothers’ theater and movie audiences, was mellow and ingratiating. Without the battered top hat, the loopy wig, and the shabby coat, Arthur Marx looked uncannily serious. It was difficult to imagine him honking a rubber horn and, stooped, chasing girls around cluttered drawing rooms.

  Jimmy ushered them in. Aleck pursued the theme he had evoked when introducing Jimmy to Arthur, discussing economic systems, the Russian revolution, and the ascent of Joseph Stalin. Dottie Parker, Marc Connelly, and George S. Kaufman joined in with the occasional quip. Arthur Marx listened.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea how I became mired in this bastion of capitalist excess,” Woollcott declaimed. “It’s one of the many less-than-amusing pranks that Providence has played upon me. I’m a tear-it-down Socialist at heart.”

  “Olga, tell them how that worked for you,” Jimmy instructed his housekeeper, who was serving drinks.

  Olga threw her shoulders back and announced proudly, “My family were dvoryanstvo. Nobility. We owned a residence in St. Petersburg and a dacha in the Tula oblast. We had so many servants. One whose task was to polish the silver. Another to dust the chandeliers. The Bolsheviks, they stole it all, the work of generations, and murdered many of my relatives. Savages.”

  “The devil’s children inherit the devil’s luck,” said Aleck.

  Olga ignored him, serving Arthur.

  “Now Aleck, that’s out of line,” said Jimmy. “And, need I say it, ungentlemanly. You don’t know her, let alone her lost kin. Olga is a gem.”

  “I was jesting,” Aleck apologized. “You know me. All buzz, no sting.”

  Olga ignored his apology. “Thank you, Mister Warburg.” She huffed off to serve other guests.

  Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman pitched in with bons mots about the swollen stock market, social decay, and revolutionary utopias. Jimmy smiled, shaking his head. “I’m all for people struggling against oppression. But when the envious rise up against the privileged, they always go too far. Look at the French Revolution. The Red Terror. The Taiping Rebellion. They all beat the drum of egalitarianism. What they’re really after is blood.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re rich,” thundered Aleck.

  “On the contrary,” insisted Jimmy. “I’m quite concerned with the moral implications of my work. So is everyone I work with, including—especially—my father.”

  “I haven’t a clue which system is better,” said Dottie. “But I do know one thing about capitalism. It’s terribly démodé.”

  Other guests knocked at the door. This time Katharine opened to reveal her friend Pauline, who stood with a man Katharine recognized all too well, though she had never seen him quite this close. He stood about five-foot-eleven in a tailored, pin-striped suit; but his presence exceeded his physical stature. Katharine noticed the eyes. Dark with a faraway softened look as if focusing on something beyond the party, the people, or the place. They met and acknowledged hers but floated away again, finally alighting on the Steinway grand in the center of the room. He smiled as if he had spotted an old friend stepping off the New Haven Express in Grand Central Terminal.

  George Gershwin.

  “Jascha was beat. I let him sleep,” said Pauline.

  Katharine escorted them in. “I’ll have a Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino,” said Pauline.

  Katharine laughed. “Would you settle for a Frascati?”

  “Whatever.” Pauline took a flute of Perrier-Jouët from one of the waiters’ trays.

  As they glided toward the center of the room, Katharine turned to the composer. “And you, Mister Gershwin? Some brandy?”

  He shook his head brusquely as if the thought had dampened his hair. “Something fizzy.”

  “How about a sparkling gin lemonade?”

  “Sounds swell. But without the gin, and without the lemonade.”

  “Just the bubbles?” laughed Katharine.

  “That would hit the spot. Mind if I—?” He completed his question with a wave at the piano.

  “Of course not. Please!”

  He sat down and began playing a rousing anthem. The conversations and laughter subsided. Gershwin’s hands swept across the keyboard brushing into the air a multiplicity of simple tunes that wound through or bounced off each other, disappeared, reemerged, and recombined in the treble or bass register adorned with grace notes and triplet flourishes. Sometimes he hammered on one tone while moving chords in surprising patterns underneath, contrasting simplicity with sophistication. Other times he flattened the climactic note in a series, layering in a shade of nostalgia or regret.

  Pauline leaned close to Katharine. “He can play, all right. Trouble is, no one taught him how to stop playing.”

  “Is he your date, or a friend?” asked Katharine.

  “He was my date. Now he’s a friend.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem.” And then she corrected herself. “I don’t mean nothing. But, well, nothing.”

  The musi
c pivoted. The mood shifted. A sorrowful melody tinged with philosophical, big chords that slid through half-step gradations, implying key changes, like a man drunk on love swaying and lurching through a gaslamp-lit alley. The room held its breath as the guests congregated around the piano. Olga set a glass of seltzer near the music stand.

  Leading that intoxicated personification of his melody from the alley into a wide-open field, Gershwin ragged-up the same romantic tune. The melody man danced into the middle of the meadow, kicked up his legs, and flailed his arms, throwing back his head. He crouched, spun, and whirled. And slowly crumpled to the ground in a graceful heap.

  Katharine had no idea how long Gershwin had been playing when he paused to sip his seltzer, oblivious to the enchanted crowd. But he could not ignore them long, for they broke into applause. He turned to Katharine, a gleam in his eyes. “Say, I hear you’ve got a wicked left hand, yourself.”

  “Both of my hands are wicked, Mister Gershwin,” said Katharine.

  “Why don’t you serenade us with something you picked up at the Institute?” He rose, clutching his highball glass and ceding the bench.

  “What did you tell him about me?” Katharine whispered to Pauline.

  “Only that you’re blessed with two of the finest ears in the city, and fingers to match.”

  Katharine grimaced and headed to the piano, where she played the portion of the Rhapsody in Blue that she had worked out. The slow portion. After several bars Gershwin lowered his half-empty glass to a side table and crouched behind her, extending his arms on either side of hers. His scent teased her nose, cigars and an eau de toilette mélange of citrus, sandalwood, and bergamot. He began embellishing and soon their melodies intertwined. Katharine glanced up at Jimmy, who stood near the end of the piano watching and smiling in his ambiguous way.

  Gershwin added notes in other implied time signatures, triplets against eighth notes in exotic keys, and bumped up the rhythm so that Katharine soon felt she was his accompanist rather than the other way around. Nor was she adept at this style of accompaniment, which involved reading the other player’s mind rather than looking at notes on a printed page. Flexibility and instinct rather than calculation and precision. Together they waded further beyond her waters. She tried to swim but flailed. It may not have been noticeable to the others but Gershwin knew. She felt uncomfortably warm. A flush she did not care to name or recognize. She worried others might notice but glancing around the room saw no sign they did. As her eyes returned to the keyboard, her fingers stumbled. That was mortifying.

  As if sensing she needed air, Gershwin crossed his left arm over to the treble end of the piano, providing her with a means of escape. The gesture dismayed her but she took the hint and rose. He played on insouciantly while sliding back to the center of the bench. The Rhapsody theme had mutated into a Scott Joplinesque rag. His listeners remained silent, mesmerized.

  The style changed again. “Here’s one we dumped from Lady, Be Good!, our show at the Liberty. If you haven’t seen it, you should bolt over there ’cause they’re beating the doors down.” His fingers relaxed into long, large chords. Quieter harmonies under his New York–inflected voice. “It’s called ‘The Man I Love.’ Too slow for the stage, but we’ll find a place for it.”

  He played the tune as a piano solo, without words. A dialogue between a left hand that descended in half steps, bringing to mind a tight spiral staircase, and a right hand that yearned for ascent in parallel chords yet slowly sank downward as if under the weight of the left. Overall, the minor-key melodic fragments conveyed a mood of pensive longing, if not downright sorrow.

  Which shifted again as Gershwin’s right hand began strumming chords and his left produced a swinging bass line. Instead of playing the new melody, little more than a ditty, Gershwin sang it. His voice soft and murky, untrained but, unlike Jimmy’s, on key.

  It was chance, not romance.

  Now you know, I must go.

  I’m leaving now,

  But wish somehow

  That we had met before.

  Katharine thought his look-at-me show-business ostentation brash and graceless. Her guests’ surrender seemed too automatic, inevitable, and unthinking—the swoon of giggly cheerleaders for the cocky quarterback.

  Not only had he taken possession of her piano but he had cunningly engaged her in a competition. It rankled her that he had controlled the terms and that his victory was so resounding. After all, she was the classically trained professional. Still she had to admit that performing with him had been a jolt. Exhilarating. Intimate, even.

  His song wound to a conclusion. His hands sprang from the keyboard and flipped down the piano lid with finality. Now that I have performed, no one else dare touch it. He stood up and as everyone applauded again, he bowed. Glancing at his Cartier wristwatch he announced, “Well, I’m afraid the ship for Europe isn’t going to wait for me.”

  “Not even a goodbye peck,” Pauline groused as Gershwin shut the door behind himself and the room once again filled with chatter. “That’s George. It’s all about him.”

  Katharine’s feelings mirrored her friend’s. But she wondered whether he too had felt that awkward warmth while they had played together, prior to rushing off as if nothing unusual had occurred. “Why is he going to Europe?”

  “He’s supervising the London production of his new musical play, Tell Me More.”

  “I thought his new show was called Lady, Be Good!, and that it was playing locally.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. He’s a juggler.”

  Katharine considered sitting again at the piano and performing something by Lizst or Strauss, if only to break the mood. Instead she grabbed a cocktail cracker, smothered with caviar. She bit into it and wiped her lips while Pauline prattled on about the cloud of unhappiness that George Gershwin had blown into her life.

  Katharine glanced around the room, lost in thought. Her eyes met Jimmy’s. He was drinking, his back to the wall, watching her. She smiled.

  * * *

  Alexander Woollcott heaped contumely upon middlebrow Broadway confections, mercilessly burying them and reserving his praise for melancholy drama and silly farces. He boosted Eugene O’Neill and the Marx brothers with equal fervor. But the principal subject of his theatrical criticism was his own wit and erudition. The Gershwin impromptu at the Warburgs’ dinner party must have impressed him, for the following week Woollcott reviewed Lady, Be Good! for the World. His column sparkled with references to Restoration Comedy, Jules Moinaux, and even Mozart.

  Perusing this column during Saturday brunch at the Gotham Hotel, Jimmy remarked to Katharine that he considered their friend an intellectual bully. “Woollcott’s an elitist. That’s why he throws in all those references. Which is fine, but rather ironic coming from a Socialist, don’t you think?”

  “Socialists aren’t allowed to be sophisticated?” asked Katharine.

  “Don’t ask me. Ask Stalin,” said Jimmy. “That’s the whole point of socialist realism.” The term was new to Katharine. “To be Socialist and claim sophistication,” Jimmy pontificated, “is hypocritical as hell. Because Socialism means egalitarianism, or claims to anyway, while sophistication suggests hierarchy.”

  “Jimmy,” said Katharine, “have a mimosa, will you? Or better, a double shot of bourbon.” She peppered her omelet. “Aleck doesn’t necessarily agree with Stalin on everything.”

  “No, he’s only a member of the economically ignorant masses, whose misplaced idealism plays into the hands of dolts like Stalin.” Jimmy tasted the melon in port wine.

  “All the same,” said Katharine, “I’d like to see what this ballyhoo is about.”

  “What ballyhoo?”

  “Lady, Be Good!”

  Jimmy raised an eyebrow.

  Katharine smiled. “Aleck may not be an economist, but according to just about everyone he’s a brilliant critic. And he says Lady, Be Good! is a thrill. Why not?”

  While Jimmy took his coffee and read the Sunday Wor
ld, Katharine strolled to the new mercantile behemoth, Saks Fifth Avenue. She picked out a sleeveless peach shift in silk chiffon. Silver stitching and crystals in stylized floral patterns accented the bust, waist, and sides.

  That evening she wore it with nude silk stockings, a possum shawl, a silver-mesh clutch, and a pearl-and-rhinestone hair band. Jimmy dressed in a pair of satin stripe trousers, a white wing-collar shirt with a matching bow tie, a white vest, and a single button jacket accessorized with sterling cuff links, white gloves, and a top hat.

  The show was sold out. The crowd outside chirped with anticipation. Ticket hawkers shouted inflated offers and negotiated with desperate Gershwin fans. Arc lamps and the headlights of passing automobiles added an electric buzz. A few minutes late, the doors swung open and the public spilled in. Katharine and Jimmy located their seats in the middle of the eighth row.

  She had spent the most memorable moments of her childhood in first-tier seats at the Metropolitan Opera at Thirty-Ninth and Broadway. When her father reviewed performances of Lohengrin or The Marriage of Figaro for the New-York Tribune, she tagged along. She loved the elaborate fantasy of opera. In Wagner’s mythological world of gods and beasts, whose turmoil mirrored that of an adolescent girl, she sought refuge from the banality of her parents’ endless financial and social predicaments.

  The Liberty Theatre was no Metropolitan Opera. The room was smaller, the décor plebeian, the seats hard, the audience casually attired. She sensed the energy in the room but felt out of place. The lights dimmed. The curtains parted.

  To watch a Wagner opera was to pluck leitmotifs out of the air and braid narrative strands into shimmering, dark myths. A Gershwin musical was sparkly and wild. The show blended Ziegfeldesque spectacle, legs kicked high, tout ensembles choruses, with the pathos of songs like “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and the throb and swing of “Fascinating Rhythm.” She recognized some tunes and harmonies from those Gershwin had whisked through at her piano. The audience rode a Coney Island roller coaster of absurd storytelling that played on primal emotions: risqué lust, poverty dreaming of wealth, orphans craving family, fraudulent love and true love, alliances and enmities forming and vaporizing, all delivered with a knowing leer as if exploiting and ridiculing the previous generation’s Victorian tastes. The composer, the book writer, the choreographer, the dancers, especially the gravity-defying stars Fred and his sister Adele Astaire, and the invisible boys who followed them with a tight spotlight, had conspired to make the audience forget their troubles and to erase their consciousness of time.