Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  “A couple clams?”

  “Two dollars. Even one’ll get you in but the point is not to save money.”

  * * *

  Harlem felt like the flip side of the world. George paid the driver, instructing him to wait all night if need be. “Head up to a Hundred and Forty-Second Street, the Cotton Club. You know the joint? Open all night, and you can park in front. Tell ’em Gershwin sent you. They’ll treat you right. Have a drink on me. Hell, have three. The music’ll cost you nothing. We’ll meet there later.”

  The driver swung his beefy face around. “Gershwin? You’re George Gershwin? Holy moly. My wife won’t believe it. She’s crazy about you. Can I have an autograph?”

  “Later.” George patted his shoulder. He and Katharine stepped out to a low-rise brick building that shook with music and chatter. The crowd spilled onto the sidewalk and the Negro partiers brazenly ignored Prohibition, guzzling, gabbing, and kissing in the stairwell—and narrowing the path to the third floor so much that Katharine’s hips touched Gershwin’s as they climbed. That certain feeling washed through her as she crossed an invisible boundary, ignoring the warning signs: excitement, anticipation, a tinge of fear. The third-floor apartment roared with piano-playing, hoots, and laughter. Cake-walkers wiggled their hips, slapped their thighs, and shook their hands toward the heavens. The man at the door knew George, who stuffed not four dollars but forty into the collections hat.

  “Hey, Georgie, I knew you’d make it! How’d it go, boy?”

  “It went okay,” said George with uncharacteristic modesty.

  “The New York Concerto? Oh, it went exceptionally well,” Katharine corrected him.

  “Who’s the lovely lady?”

  “Luckey Roberts, I’d like you to meet Kay Warburg,” said George. “A pianist and composer, like you. Like me. Like him.” He pointed to the big fellow at the piano.

  “Katharine,” she corrected him again.

  Luckey Roberts rose and kissed her hand. George reached into the ice bucket, grabbed a seltzer and a bottle of gin, and mixed drinks for Katharine and Luckey. “Luckey taught me so much when I was a kid,” he told her. “I used to ditch school and roller-skate over to his place.”

  “That ain’t no lie,” said Luckey. “Only now you’re playing Carnegie Hall and your teacher’s still working the bars. And that’s when things are rolling.”

  George handed him a glass. “Luckey, I can get you into private parties. I can get you into clubs. I used to play that circuit myself, you know that. But Moses himself couldn’t part the stage curtains of Carnegie Hall for a colored man.”

  “Moses and Jesus together,” laughed Luckey.

  George handed Katharine her drink. “I remember when Jolson sang “Swanee” at Carnegie Hall in blackface. My first big break. Management was beside themselves. A colored man on the Carnegie stage! And the crowd’s going wild! Al thought they might change their policy.”

  A scowl etched Luckey’s expressive face. “He wasn’t tellin’ ’em that, Georgie. He was just showing ’em one more time that white folks can mock the Negro and get paid for it.”

  “That isn’t how Al meant it, Luckey,” said Gershwin.

  “Maybe that ain’t how he meant it. But that’s what it meant anyway, ain’t it.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Luckey poking George in the chest. “Say a white man put on a long black coat and side curls and a fake nose and—what do you call that little hat?”

  “A yarmulke.”

  “And say this fellow rubbed his hands together hunched over like an ape, counting his money. And all these fat white men watching him, these Stanleys and Freds slapping their thighs and laughing ’til tears rolled down their cheeks. How would you feel about that, my friend?”

  Gershwin’s face fell, his lips pursed. He stared at his feet, deep in thought, then placed his hand on his mentor’s shoulder and nodded his understanding.

  “Moses and Jesus can’t do it?” said Luckey. “Well, I’m gonna do it. They’re gonna let me on that stage sooner or later. They’re gonna beg me—or someone just like me.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said George, and they clinked glasses.

  The gentleman at the Chickering upright sang in a melodious tenor punctuating his lyrics with chuckles, wiggling his eyebrows, and joshing with the dancers. His right hand raced over the keys with uncanny alacrity while his left jumped like a grasshopper. “Who is that?” asked Katharine, sipping her drink.

  “Everyone calls him Fats.” George smiled. “I call him a genius.”

  Fats Waller’s technique was even more virtuosic than George’s, but drew on a narrower range of styles. There was little or no Debussy in his fluid, extroverted, blues-soaked tunes. His playing resembled nothing Katharine had studied at the Institute. Her teachers either had no idea such music existed or willfully ignored it.

  “Hey, Georgie!” Fats cried out. He continued playing with his left hand while he waved with his right. “Come on over here, you crazy man. Put your twitchy fingers where they want to be. I feel like shimmyin’!”

  George and Katharine waded through dancers to the piano, where George took over hammering out one of his earliest tunes, “The Real American Folk Song.” An elegant woman with a radiant smile, a long teal dress, and pearls approached the piano. “Ladies and gentlemen,” George shouted. “The great Sara Martin from Louisville, in the green state of Kentucky!”

  As Sara Martin belted out the lyrics, Fats Waller dragged Katharine into the dance zone at the center of the crowded apartment and started flailing his arms and feet. She tried to emulate his vim and elasticity. Fats pulled her close and released her. The gin was doing its job and she was starting to enjoy the scene. She sent her shoes flying across the room and swung and flapped and thrashed with him. Sweaty and flushed she jumped, twisted, and finally collapsed to the ground, laughing.

  George stopped playing, stood on the piano bench, and clapped his hands. “Hey, all of you want to hear something? We hit the jackpot not once but four times tonight. We got a highly trained classical pianist with us. Get your ears ready for something special now. Kay, swing over here, will you?”

  Fats led her to the piano.

  “Show ’em what you’re made of,” George said into her ear.

  The room quieted. Katharine caught her breath, lowered her hands to the keyboard, and began playing Chopin’s soft, haunting opus 9, number 1. If she had given the matter a moment’s thought, she would have chosen any other piece for this night, this crowd. A rousing Beethoven piano sonata, perhaps? But Chopin’s quiet contemplation was what burst out of her.

  She felt her father’s presence. Sam was guiding her fingers. As the notes drifted from the upright piano, the chatter and hum of the room quieted and the partygoers, glistening with sweat, succumbed to the Polish composer’s mood. She finished to applause, whistles, and whoops, then stood and curtsied. Tears shone in her eyes.

  She had never before associated with colored folks other than her servants, never sought out their company or requested their friendship. The warmth and unabashed sentimentality of people like Luckey Roberts, Fats Waller, and Sara Martin touched her. And the talent! Their ability to snatch moments of exuberance from lives filled, she presumed, with toil and penury. Their courage to laugh in the face of despair. Unlike the snide titters of so many of her friends, theirs was not the laughter of derision or mockery, but an uncowed celebration of life.

  * * *

  She and George stumbled giddily up Lenox Avenue. Although Katharine harbored no ill will toward others, regardless of their origins, she would have felt uncomfortable in this neighborhood prior to this evening, if only because it was so unfamiliar. But walking with Gershwin, who had spent part of his childhood in Harlem, she felt privileged and at ease, as if she had discovered a window that offered a different view of their surroundings. “That’s the thing about music,” she told him. “You grew up primarily on the Lower East Side. I can’t i
magine your childhood. What did you do?”

  “I broke rules,” said George. “I guess I’m still doing that.”

  “I spent mine on the Upper West Side. Museums, operas, and my home away from home, the Institute of Musical Art.”

  “That’s not a childhood,” said George. “That’s a miniature adulthood.”

  “And Fats Waller and Luckey Roberts, all they knew was Harlem, right? But then the music starts, and everyone’s legs and arms are flying, and in that moment whatever we’ve experienced, all our grudges and resentments and rivalries, it all vanishes. And that’s priceless.”

  “You think so?” asked George hopefully.

  “I know so. That’s why you and I do what we do, George.”

  “And I thought I was just in it for the money.”

  “No you didn’t, you lying bastard.” She looped her arm through his, feeling giddy.

  A beggar slammed his palm onto George’s coat and pitched forward. “Can ya help a man’s got nothing? I came up here five months ago. I was a sharecropper down in Louisiana. It’s rough down there. The farmers in Louisiana, they’re starving, brother.”

  George opened his wallet, handed the man ten dollars, and patted him on the shoulder. The beggar stared at the bill. “Buy yourself a coat,” George told him.

  “Praise Jesus,” muttered the man.

  “He’s only going to buy himself booze,” said Katharine as he stumbled away.

  “Same as us,” George remarked as the Cotton Club came into view.

  Fancy automobiles—Chrysler B-70s, Oakland Sixes, Packards, a Bugatti—lined both sides of Lenox Avenue, the storied vehicles of gangsters and show business executives. Inside, at almost two in the morning, Harlem’s prime watering hole was swinging. Piano, blaring brass, tom-toms beating African rhythms; dancers in sequin-fringed outfits; beer and moonshine, Prohibition or no Prohibition.

  “How do they get away with it?” Katharine shouted over the din.

  “It’s all politics,” George shouted back. “Money. Guns.”

  The celebrated gangster Owney Madden, proprietor of the Cotton Club, emerged from the noisy crowd to greet George, who introduced Katharine, again calling her “Kay.”

  “There’s a couple of folks waitin’ for you,” Owney said as he led them to the back. On the way, George returned friends’ and admirers’ smiles. At the table of Al Jolson, who sat with three young women, he stopped and introduced her. “Kay Warburg, Al Jolson. The man who gave me my start in show business. I’ll never be able to repay him.”

  Jolson wore a fitted silky-gray jacket, a crisp white shirt with onyx cufflinks, a matching tiepin, and a geometrical necktie. He stood to kiss Katharine’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She smiled. “I met you once before. Well, almost met you, at a party. Madam C. J. Walker?”

  “Of course I remember,” said Jolson. “A beautiful face like yours.”

  She smiled. Professional charmers—that’s what these fellows are. It hardly mattered whether Al really remembered her. That portion of her life was so far away. She was no longer that person, the young woman who fell in love with Jimmy Warburg.

  Owney Madden escorted her and George to a corner booth, where Mayor-elect Jimmy Walker sat engaged in tipsy conversation with the cab driver who had escorted them uptown.

  “You two know each other?” George addressed the cab driver as the mayor rose unsteadily.

  “We do now!” Jimmy Walker pumped George’s hand. “So pleased to make your acquaintance, Mister Gershwin.”

  Goodness, Katharine wondered, what do the mayor-elect and the cab driver have in common, that they spent their evening guzzling together? Then she realized. Walker must have been told that the cabbie was waiting for Gershwin and decided he was as worthy a drinking partner as anyone. And his vote as good as anyone’s, too.

  Katharine had not voted for Jimmy Walker. She had not voted at all. She had been thrilled when women earned the right to vote in 1920, and she agreed with much of the Tammany Hall chicken-in-every-pot agenda, but she despised their reputation for thuggery. She tried to hide her contempt as she regarded Jimmy Walker’s glistening teeth and obsequious smile. A dandy with the handshake of a machinist, he looked into her eyes and then George’s, simpering tentatively like a charlatan who felt demeaned in the face of achievement and grace. “Anything I can do for you, George. You just let me know.” He winked.

  * * *

  She awoke in George’s arms. Sunlight flooded her bedroom. He still wore his undershirt and tweed trousers. She had retained her silk slip.

  She remembered returning home with him the night before, both of them flushed with desire and fatigue as dawn approached. “You probably find yourself in this situation fairly often,” she had surmised aloud.

  “Often enough,” admitted George.

  “Well, keep your trousers buttoned. I’m not one of your showgirl floozies.”

  “They’re not all floozies but I’ll try to be a gentleman,” he agreed drowsily. “Just this time.” And he drifted off to sleep without so much as touching her.

  She listened to his quiet breathing. She felt his warmth. Go to sleep! she told herself. And then, an hour later, go to sleep, again.

  That was last night. What time was it now? She glanced at her father’s gold pocket watch on her nightstand. Ten-thirty. Katharine wrapped herself in an organdie robe. George opened his eyes, smiled, and clambered to his feet. He slipped on his shirt and tied his shoes.

  “You don’t need to get dressed,” she told him. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “You’re a doll but I can’t stay,” he said.

  Disappointed, she led him down to the kitchen. At the threshold she stopped in her tracks.

  Dressed for work, Jimmy sat at the table sipping coffee and reading the New York World. Just like any other morning although much later than most. He glanced at her and George. George smiled sideways uneasily. Katharine’s heart pounded.

  She did not however avert her eyes. Freedom in our marriage, isn’t that what you wanted? Jimmy nodded as if reading her thoughts and returned to the news.

  Katharine marveled at his self-restraint. Well, that’s that, she thought. But then she asked herself, that’s what? That one stumped her. She had to say something. Anything. “When did you get home?” she managed.

  Jimmy glanced at his watch. “Before you.”

  “How was your trip?”

  He turned the page of the newspaper.

  Lionel poured an additional cup of coffee. “Lots of sugar,” George told him.

  He and Katharine fiddled with their beverages at the counter. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  Jimmy allowed the question to linger. “Are you asking me?” he asked finally, his eyes still buried in his newspaper. “Could have been worse.”

  “How about some music?” Katharine proposed in a tone of forced enthusiasm.

  “That’s a swell idea, Kay,” mumbled George.

  Jimmy turned. “Kay?”

  “Kay,” she confirmed.

  Jimmy nodded. “Kay.” His eyes met George’s. “Mister Gershwin.”

  “George.”

  “I’d wager ten dollars you haven’t read this yet.” Jimmy pointed to the paper.

  “I don’t gamble.”

  Jimmy read aloud from Samuel Chotzinoff’s review of the New York Concerto début:

  The truth is that George Gershwin is a genius. He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in motion, its lapses into rhythmically exotic melancholy.

  George stepped to the table and leaned over the article. “I would have been delighted to attend,” said Jimmy.

  George read the review, sipping his coffee. Kay stood behind him looking down over his shoulder. When he reached the end she gripped his hand. “Come, George. Let’s play some piano.”

  He cocked his head and looked down his nose at Jimmy as if asking permission. Which seemed a surprising thing for George to do. Jim
my returned his glance with the hint of a nod, not so much offering his blessing as accepting the inevitable. Which also seemed strange.

  Kay led George into the drawing room. On the music stand, her work in progress. She sat down and patted the bench. “I’d love your take on this.” She began playing.

  George listened attentively, rubbing his cheek with the back of his hand and studying her notation. “It’s swanky, the way you dodge cadences,” he commented as the last chord faded. “Clever, the tonal ambiguity. You learned your lessons well at the Institute.”

  She sensed he was holding back. “But?” she asked, bracing herself for more not-so-subtle irony.

  “But Kay,” said George, “music isn’t just… machinery.”

  She frowned, wondering why he would say such a thing.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” added George. “I love a well-built machine. But there has to be something else. I don’t know what to call it. The mainspring. No—the energy in the mainspring. The spark of life in the heart of the song. It comes from somewhere else.”

  A part of her took umbrage at his lofty attitude. Another part appreciated his unabashed honesty, and wanted more of it. “From where?”

  “You just have to listen.” He looked at his watch. “And I have to run.”

  Kay touched his arm. “Right now? Is it…” She pointed toward the kitchen.

  He shook his head. “I’ve got work to do. If I pounded the keys from morning ’til midnight, and wore my pencil down to my fingertips, I’d never reach the end of it.”

  “I could assist you, George.” Still seated at the piano, she picked up her music pad and pencil. “I’m good at transcription. How much time would that save you? Go ahead, whistle something.”

  He whistled the first ten notes of “Somebody Loves Me,” one of his early blues-inspired tunes. She jotted them down, tore the page from the pad, and handed it to him.

  He looked at it and gave it back. “I’ll keep that in mind. Meanwhile, I’ll be touring the New York Concerto. You won’t see me for a while.”

  “Where are you going?”