Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  In addition to being the world’s most acclaimed dancing duo, the Astaires were comedians. Adele’s laughter was lighter than air. Sometimes she threw a playful jab at her brother that he seemed not to anticipate. He turned to the audience with a puzzled expression, raising his index finger to his closed mouth as he thought up a rejoinder, then poked her right back, and the orchestra served up another dance number. It was magic, Katharine admitted to herself, but of a ridiculous kind. On reflection, though, no more preposterous than Wagner’s lugubrious Sturm und Drang or the dreamworld forest and castle of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

  When the show ended Katharine and Jimmy floated out of the auditorium, flotsam on a wave of song. Everyone was humming, singing, and whistling. Fans queued in the lobby where representatives of Harms, Inc., Gershwin’s publisher, sold printed sheet music. Katharine pulled Jimmy to the end of the line. “I want to try my hand at these.”

  They reached the table, where piles of sheet music, songs from Lady, Be Good! as well as other Gershwin hits including the Rhapsody in Blue, covered the counter. “Whaddya want?” the sales clerk demanded. “This? Ten cents. Thank you. This? Ten cents. Thank you. This? This?” Katharine glanced at the titles: “Do It Again!,” “The Man I Love,” “Soon”… Had other male songwriters, she wondered, composed so prolifically and touchingly about female longing? Perhaps this was a clue to Gershwin’s mystique.

  “Come on, we don’t have ’til Christmas.”

  “One of each,” said Katharine.

  The salesman’s eyebrows shot up. “All of ’em?”

  She nodded.

  At home she propped “Fascinating Rhythm” on the music stand and attempted its wacky, lopsided jangle. Its subject was nothing more serious or meaningful than the composer’s obsession with his own tune, and having observed Gershwin perform, especially at her party, she believed every word. She wondered whether his melomania was not a form of self-love, a vicious-cycle celebration of his power over his audience.

  A half hour later, she spread open “The Man I Love.” Contemplative and bluesy, a hymn of solitude and longing. The dialogue between the right and left hands mirrored the singer’s hope-in-the-face-of-despair conversation with herself as she wondered what such a man might be like, when he would appear.

  Jimmy stepped downstairs in his pajamas to ask her to stop playing. Unlike her, he pointed out, he had work to finish in the morning.

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, but I’m taking Monday off. I have something to show you.”

  I have work, too, thought Katharine as they trudged upstairs. But that was playing with words. Most people understood work to imply remuneration and predictability, neither of which applied to aspiring composers. Jimmy had once understood the value of music and poetry, devoid of practical utility as they were. She was no longer sure he did.

  She listened to his breathing as it slowed toward sleep, a train approaching some faraway station. As she attempted to join him in that station she thought about her education, popular music and serious music, and her unfulfilled ambitions. She listened to the songs that still rang in her head. Her fingers twitched as if bouncing across an invisible keyboard. Fred and Adele Astaire gyrated, pivoted, and dissolved in shadows.

  * * *

  Jimmy whisked in from the office at eleven the next morning. “Lionel, telegram Benjamin Fairchild. Tell him we’ll be arriving at two.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Looking up from the novel she was reading, Katharine searched her memory. “Benjamin Fairchild?”

  An hour later, they were heading north in a coal-powered New Haven Railroad train. With his monogrammed leather satchel on the wooden bench beside him, Jimmy gazed out the window as the brick buildings of upper Manhattan yielded to forests, fields, and glimpses of the Hudson River.

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Katharine.

  He just smiled.

  They disembarked at the small Greenwich, Connecticut, station. A reedy older gentleman in loose clothes and a lopsided hat approached at the exit. “All ready?” Jimmy nodded and the man led them to his Model T.

  They rode over bumpy cobblestone and dirt roads into back country and then followed a river through a wooded gorge. They turned up a path to an isolated farm and passed a stone dam, an ancient mill, and a lofty chestnut tree. Up ahead, an old house with dormers and a shingle façade. Behind the house, a cliff. Off to the left stretched a pasture and an old red barn. Sparrows were chirping.

  Benjamin Fairchild unlocked the door and escorted them into a large room. The furniture predated the American Revolution. The wide oak floorboards were dulled with use and age. Dust covered everything. At the far end of the room stood a cast-iron Franklin stove. Jimmy motioned for Katharine to sit on the wooden settee. He sat beside her as Fairchild spread open the creaky shutters.

  Fairchild took a sheaf of papers from the corner table and pulled up a Windsor chair, unmindful of the poorly repaired spindle in its back. He placed the papers on the pedestal table between them. “You have what we discussed?”

  “I have more than that, my man.” Jimmy removed a large envelope from his satchel.

  “I don’t need more,” grumbled Fairchild. He pushed a page toward Jimmy. Katharine craned her neck to read it. She saw the word Deed in florid lettering. Below that, the property known as Bydale, and—she looked closer—fifteen hundred acres. “Jimmy,” she asked, “are we buying this place?”

  He nodded. While he read and signed papers, Katharine walked around. No one had updated the house in decades, but the floors were sturdy and the plaster walls, though patched in places, were free of cracks.

  Fairchild joined her at the kitchen sink, a rectangular zinc basin. The shelves and cupboards were unpainted, graying oak. “Seventeen forty-one,” he told her. “In case you were wondering.”

  “I was,” said Katharine.

  “A gentleman named Silas Mead built her. A turncoat. Fled to Canada with Benedict Arnold.”

  “Charming.”

  They returned to the salon, where Jimmy joined her at the window. “How did you find this?” asked Katharine.

  “I’ve been searching,” said Jimmy.

  “As in, visiting places?” she asked, astonished,

  He nodded. “All over the coast. Bydale stole my heart.”

  Katharine looked at the aspen leaves shimmering in a breeze. “And all that time, you said nothing?”

  Jimmy smiled.

  “You rascal,” she said, shaking her head. But as they looked at each other, they acknowledged something in each other’s eyes. Something they rarely spoke about these days. Something almost embarrassing in its poignancy. Especially now.

  That first night at Bydale, in a creaky bed on the second floor, Jimmy took her in his arms and kissed her. She held him, looking into his eyes, and allowed him to make love to her. Comfortably. Warmly. Fervently. Afterward they lay on their backs. “A penny for your thoughts,” said Jimmy.

  She was thinking about their lovemaking. About its meaning. Its sweet nostalgia. Its sadness. But that was not what she said. “Just now? I was listening to the frogs,” she improvised. “And the crickets. And I was thinking, from their point of view, this is their land. We’re just squatters.”

  “That’s what I love about this place,” said Jimmy. “It puts everything in perspective.” He kissed her on the nose and turned onto his side.

  In the morning, while preparing breakfast with Katharine, Jimmy expanded upon what Bydale meant to him in the context of his family’s historical aspirations, or frustrations. “For centuries—millenia, actually—the European aristocrats forbade us to own land. Did you know that?” He struggled to light the gas stove. One of the valves was stuck. “We could trade. We could send ships across the oceans. We could finance their dreams of power and conquest. We could negotiate treaties on their behalf. But they owned the land. Their serfs worked it. That was the bottom line.” A second valve finally twisted an
d whoosh, he lit the flame.

  Katharine squeezed orange juice. “So that’s what this is about?” she asked. “Getting even with European aristocracy?”

  Jimmy placed the glass percolator on the flame. “I should rather say, healing.”

  We could all use some of that, thought Katharine.

  She looked at the trees through the kitchen window. Their bright leaves announcing rebirth and hope and the warmth of summer. She leaned over the counter and opened the window. In a nest under the eaves, new-hatched sparrows were cheeping to their mother, all at once but hardly in unison, the music of hunger and love. Their mother flapped down to the nest, a worm in her beak. Katharine thought of her daughters, of her husband, and of what Bydale might come to mean to all of them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DECEMBER 1925

  Once upon a time, Katharine cared where her husband was traveling, how long he would be away, but it had all grown so complicated and mutable. She no longer paid attention. He was somewhere in Europe, or on the sea, or elsewhere. He would return when he returned.

  She was composing an étude. She was attempting stride piano. She was playing Gershwin songs. Not the way their composer did, loosey-goosey, with shifting tempos. She struck the notes properly, intentionally. But through the music she had gained insight into the man. In his chords, rhythms, and melodies, Gershwin’s moods played and fought like unsupervised youth in the back alleys of the Lower East Side.

  Now, in the music she was composing, she inserted a Gershwinesque key change here and a bouncy rhythm there. She was breaking rules, or at least bending them—but Chopin and Schubert had defied the rules of their era, too. The bigger question concerned not the evolution of her style but her need for an audience. She experienced it as a dark hole in the center of her life. What was the point of artistic expression in music, or any other medium, if it affected only the artist herself? That kind of exercise was akin to self-pleasuring. It might provide release but what she craved was contact, through her music, with other souls.

  She attended the premiere of Gershwin’s New York Concerto alone. The composer, at the piano, wore a fitted beige suit, defying Carnegie Hall tradition, which dictated that black was de rigueur for soloists. Even more eloquently than his attire, his music argued—as he had done in the Rhapsody—that the freedom, spontaneity, and verve of jazz could be captured on the page and translated into an orchestral setting, just as new photographs froze the motion of a horse. But a picture of a horse was not a horse, and some critics heatedly maintained that Gershwin’s sound was not jazz. Whatever it was, his way of blending Rachmaninoff-like lyricism with bumpy-road rhythms captivated her and carried her all the way to the big dissonant chords and soft coda at the end of the New York Concerto.

  Because drinking was still not permitted in restaurants, the conductor Walter Damrosch had organized a celebration in his apartments, which were crowded with Old World oil paintings and sturdy German furniture. He had invited twenty-three friends and students, including Katharine, and provided one beverage per guest, beer he brewed in a dedicated room according to family recipes. Katharine strolled through Damrosch’s flat holding a frosted stein. She recognized orchestra musicians, showgirls whose painted faces and long legs she had admired in Lady, Be Good!, and impresarios she had seen profiled in pencil-sketch busts in the New York Times or the World. Sam Rothapfel was talking with a pretty showgirl. “No, no, contrary to my reputation, I don’t build theaters,” Katharine heard him tell her. “I build dreams.” From time to time Katharine glanced at Gershwin, who stood chatting with a handful of associates.

  He seemed intense and preoccupied. She wanted to reassure him, to tell him how much she had enjoyed his performance, that she had found the New York Concerto brash, bluesy, poetic, and soaring. That his orchestration was inventive and that despite her initial skepticism, his grand project of fusing folk-musical modes, beginning with the blues and klezmer, with late-romantic symphonic structures and harmonies, now struck her as brilliant and original. Most of all, she yearned to share her own musical ideas with him.

  His bearing beckoned no such exchange. Whether deliberately or not, he turned his back to her.

  The hell with him. She approached his older brother, Ira, instead. Squat and pudgy, with a soft face and glasses, Ira reminded Katharine of a factory accountant. He seemed too serious to have co-penned the lyric,

  I won’t say I will, but I won’t say I won’t!

  I don’t say I do, but I don’t say I don’t!

  Kissing of any kind

  Never was on my mind.

  Maybe I can arrange it—

  It’s my mind, and I can change it.

  They talked about, what else, words and music. Ira was an avid reader of Tennyson and Byron, appreciated the witticisms of Gilbert and Sullivan, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, but loved the simplicity and emotion of Puccini’s librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

  “What do you think of Richard Wagner?” she asked him. “When I was a girl, his operas were my fantasy world.”

  “I can hardly sit through them,” admitted Ira. “The overture of Tristan and Isolde? It’s out of this world. So’s the “Liebestod.” But in between? The fella needed someone to tell him, ‘hey, Dick, not every note that pops in your head is brilliant. And not every word, either. Put your tuchus in the seat of the listener once in a while, for Chrissakes.’ ”

  Katharine laughed. “Geniuses sometimes become infatuated with themselves. Why not? Everyone else is infatuated with them.”

  Ira cocked his head and rubbed his chin as if to ask, what are you trying to imply?

  Katharine shrugged as if to say, nothing at all.

  Ira noticed a tall gentleman in a tweed jacket who stood uncomfortably by himself, and waved him over. “Al Stillman, Katharine Warburg. Up-and-coming lyricist, meet up-and-coming composer.”

  Katharine shook Al’s hand. His eyes exuded gentleness and shyness.

  “What do you think of the Wagner libretto?” Ira asked him.

  Al frowned. “Is that that new Italian bicycle?”

  “Built for long distances, but not great for speed,” quipped Ira.

  “But beautiful to behold, soaring through the Alpine wilderness,” said Katharine.

  Al sipped his beer. “All of Vienna was delirious with Johann Strauss’s oom-pah-pah. Why mess with the tried-and-true?”

  Appreciating his irony, Katharine smiled. And glanced at George, whose back was still turned to her.

  * * *

  Weary of cocktail patter and miffed by George’s indifference, she left early. Sure, the man’s music hits a nerve, but what of it? The gall, to ignore me like that. After what we experienced at my piano. As she opened the elevator gate and exited to the ground floor she heard a door slam several flights above. The elevator whooshed back up. She buttoned her coat, bracing for the winter chill, and pulled on her gloves. As she was about to leave the building, the elevator slid down and Gershwin stepped out, wearing a wool coat and hat.

  “Kay,” he grinned.

  “The name’s Katharine.”

  “I know. But to me you’re Kay.”

  “Since when am I anything to you, Mister Gershwin?”

  “Since now. And it’s not Mister Gershwin. It’s George. Hey, what do you say we head uptown?”

  He escorted her to the sidewalk, stuck his pinkies into the corners of his mouth, whistled, and hailed a cab. He opened the rear door for her. Well, she thought, why the hell not? Jimmy’s out of town. Jimmy’s always out of town. Probably drinking, or whatever, with some fräulein in Berlin, or wherever. The thought of spending the evening with another man—with this man—letting him lead her wherever he wanted, within limits of course, thrilled her. She slid into the cab and he followed, jerking the door closed and leaning forward. “One Thirty-Fifth and Lenox.” His mood seemed to have lightened. “Did I mention how much I enjoyed your playing?” he asked.

  “At my party? It felt like I was pit
ching to Babe Ruth.”

  “Nah. We’re on the same team. We’re both musicians, aren’t we?” From his pocket George removed a pale-blue-and-black package of Black Jack chewing gum. “Like a stick?”

  “Why not?”

  He gave her two. She unwrapped both and folded them into her mouth. The sweet bite of licorice. “Look,” said George, “I know jazz isn’t your thing. You attack the keyboard like a mathematician attacks a blackboard.”

  “A sensitive mathematician, I hope.”

  “Me, I play like a trapeze artist,” said Gershwin.

  “A sensitive trapeze artist,” said Kay.

  He chuckled. “Hell, you can’t do what we do without sensitivity, can you? But there’s sensitivity and there’s sensitivity. That’s why we have so much to learn from each other.”

  Whatever that means, she thought. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Nowhere you’d mind,” said Gershwin.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “A friend’s throwing a rent party. Wait ’til you hear his glissandi. It’s like the keys melt into each other.”

  His hand covered hers on the seat. Her heartbeat syncopated uncomfortably, dada-badump, dada-badump. “A rent party?” she asked.

  “There’s quite a few talented pianists, especially in Harlem,” explained Gershwin, “who can’t rub two dimes together. So they put on these shows in their apartments and charge admission. Best stride you’ll ever hear for a couple clams.”