Kay chewed her salad, looking at Adele and reflecting. It is so easy for someone in your position to deride what others think of as unsurpassable achievement. But look at it the other way. How many people, who already have a family and peace and quiet, really feel fulfilled? Aloud she asked, “Are you certain you’ll be happy in Europe? Far from everything, and everyone who loves you?”
“Charles loves me. And you don’t bargain with love. Happy is a big word,” admitted Adele. “Have you been to Europe, Kay?”
Kay shook her head. “Jimmy spends half his life there, mostly in Germany. George is in Paris again. I’m holding down the fort.”
“What fort? Last I heard, East Seventieth Street hasn’t been under attack since the mid-1770s. Why don’t you surprise George? Paris is magnificent.”
“I don’t know. Seems awfully intrusive.” Although, Kay had to admit, the thought of visiting Paris was tantalizing. A change of scene. Famous museums. That Garnier opera house. And to see the expression on George’s face when she bumped into him in Boulanger’s studio—that would be precious. Nor would Jimmy care that she was gone, or even notice; he was away again for who-knew-how-long. The girls would hardly miss their piano instruction. Andrea would practice even in Kay’s absence; April, sadly, would prefer her mother to be gone.
“George adores surprises,” Adele insisted. “Especially when they drive the point home, how much he’s loved. Tell him it was my idea.”
Kay finished her salad, contemplating the prospect of visiting Paris. Its reputation as the world’s capital of sensual pleasure—cream-laden food, elegant wines, marital infidelity—Madame Bovary, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Thérèse Raquin.
While at the Institute, Kay had read so many novels set in France: L’Education sentimentale, Le Lys dans la Vallée, Illusions Perdues, NotreDame de Paris, Les Misérables. She also knew the librettos of La Bohème and La Traviata, both set in Italian-inflected versions of the French capital. In her conception, Paris’s monuments loomed over filthy but lively neighborhoods that teemed with beggars, cripples, sultry gypsies, and destitute painters, and romantic young Frenchmen in love with older, married, society women.
“Kay,” said Adele. “Don’t look now, but the Morality Police just stepped in. Let’s skedaddle.”
Despite Adele’s warning, Kay looked. Two men in gray suits were standing at the front of the restaurant, their eyes sweeping the room. Kay thought they were probably businessmen waiting to be seated.
Adele rose and flounced toward the bathroom. Kay followed nonchalantly. When they reached the rear wall, Adele ordered the elevator operator, “twenty-three, please,” and handed him a five-dollar bill.
At the twenty-third floor Adele broke into a trot, heading for the stairs. Kay followed and they rushed down to the twenty-first floor, where they exited the stairwell and doubled over panting and giggling. It did not matter, after all, whether those two men were ordinary lunch-goers or Prohibition officers. In Adele Astaire’s world, everything was make-believe and every path led to mischief.
Including friendship, Kay supposed.
As Kay walked up Fifth Avenue a quarter hour later she could not help feeling a pang of disappointment. It was a social triumph to lunch with a celebrity like Adele Astaire. She had sensed the other diners’ eyes on them, and that was titillating. She wanted to believe she had forged a new partnership, intimate and mildly subversive. But Adele would soon be living an ocean away. For all her warmth and charm, Adele Astaire had no need of new friends. That was the curse of celebrity. When everyone in the world craves your friendship, what does friendship mean?
* * *
For advice she turned to Julie Glaenzer, who traveled to Paris twice every year on Cartier business. Again she visited him in his office on Fifth Avenue. And again, the concierge offered a goblet of claret.
“My flat happens to be unoccupied at present.” Julie removed a key from his drawer. “A two-minute walk from the cathedral.” He handed the key across his desk.
“Notre Dame Cathedral, of Paris? That is awfully generous, Julie.”
“Not at all,” said Glaenzer, which she interpreted to mean, this is how I do business, my dear. “Pascal, my manservant, will help you with your bags, or drive you anywhere. But in my humble opinion, Paris is better experienced on foot. May I ask what is the purpose of your visit?”
“Sightseeing, I suppose.”
“May I suggest the RMS Olympic? You’ve heard of the Titanic, I’m sure.”
“It sank,” said Kay.
“The Olympic, her surviving twin, will not. In fact,” he added puffing on his cigar, “the Olympic could have rescued the Titanic’s passengers, but was dissuaded from doing so.”
“Why?”
“White Star, the owner, didn’t believe anyone would die. They wanted to avoid a panic.”
“That’s reassuring.”
He tapped his cigar into the Baccarat ashtray. “Following the event they adjusted their emergency protocol. I assure you, the Olympic is every bit as safe as Fort Knox and as elegant as the Ritz. When would you like to sail?”
“How about tomorrow?”
He smiled. “I’m certain she’s booked for at least six months but let’s see what we can arrange.”
He reached for the telephone.
* * *
A week later, she was packing three sets of clothes: one for exploring Paris on foot or in taxis; a second for dinners, plays, and shows with George or solo; and a third for special occasions. Perhaps they would rendezvous with Maurice Ravel at the Opéra, or dine with Nadia Boulanger at Maxime’s. She also threw in novels to read during the crossings to and fro, and in Paris, as well as music-composition notebooks and a jumbo box of George’s favorite Black Jack licorice chewing gum.
It should not be difficult to locate George, she assured herself. He was studying with Boulanger, whose offices were located at the Château de Fontainebleau. Nor did Kay wish to distract him. Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day, she hummed as she tossed a pair of camel calfskin gloves in the trunk.
She heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs. Andrea ran to her bedroom door, out of breath. “Mommy, Mommy, I got into the school talent show!”
Kay read pride and eagerness on her daughter’s face. Just like me, when I was her age, Kay thought. So proud of any recognition. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart! What will you perform?”
“For my audition, I played “Für Elise.” But that’s not what I’m really going to play. I’m going to surprise them with ‘Liza.’ ”
“ ‘Liza.’ Are you sure your hands are big enough?”
“I can do it, mom! But I’m not going to let you hear it until the talent show.”
“And when is that, honey?”
“In three weeks.”
It could not be. Kay knelt at Andrea’s feet, taking her hands. “Oh, Andrea, I so wish I could be there. You see, I’m going to Paris. It’s all arranged, darling. I fear there’s nothing to do.”
“Why?” Andrea pouted. “This is my first show!”
Kay caressed her daughter’s head. “I know, sweet pea, and I’m so sorry! One day you’ll understand. Now Andrea, I want you to know, I’ll be thinking of you and your performance on that day. At the very moment you’re playing, my thoughts, my heart will be right there with you. You give ‘Liza’ everything you’ve got. Such a pretty tune. Maybe you’ll win a prize! Please do try to understand, darling.”
“I understand,” said Andrea turning away.
Kay watched her go, her heart torn. She recognized so much of herself in her daughter, her sense of self but also of unfulfillment; her need to reach higher, always higher, and the anxious awareness that no matter how far she stretched—how much of life she gulped, how brilliantly she performed—it could never be enough.
* * *
Two mornings later Kay was lying on a walnut bed in her suite aboard the RMS Olympic, her nose in a poignant novel of romantic love, social class, self-deception, decadence,
and despair. Pauline Heifetz had met Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda at one of Cole Porter’s lavish parties in Venice and had found her charming and tragic. After reading The Great Gatsby she had passed it along to Kay. “Don’t believe the reviews. Scott’s style will floor you.”
Kay had seen them. The critics agreed: Gatsby was “a dud,” as the New York World put it. Time magazine called it “precious” in the most derogatory way. For H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald’s slim novel was nothing but “a glorified anecdote.”
The story touched Kay, though, and not merely because it described the contours of a love triangle somewhat like her own. Any number of cheap romances might accomplish that. Gatsby was a good story, but it was more than that. It was a meditation on two opposite forms of love. Like Helen of Troy, Daisy Fay Buchanan hardly existed other than as an alluring object, crystallized in men’s desires. She accepted this role, seemingly pleased to play the glamorous flirt. Jay Gatsby’s idealization of her stemmed from indistinct memories of a long-ago tryst, as if no person or activity grounded in present reality could justify such passion. Her husband Tom’s involvement with Daisy, in contrast to Gatsby’s dreamy yearning, utterly lacked emotion. Until Tom realized he might lose her, she represented little more to him than an object of décor, real and corporeal but lacking mystery and depth. When these two opposing forms of love collided, merely ideal and merely physical, the inevitable outcome was catastrophe.
The character who intrigued Kay most was Nick, the narrator lurking in the shadows of the story. Modest, unassuming, and honest, Nick seemed bewildered by the shallowness, the complexity, and the perversity of those around him, but he was also impressed with them. Kay knew a few Jay Gatsbys and several Tom Buchanans, but she had never met a Nick Carraway.
In fact, Tom reminded Kay a little of Jimmy, the high-handed Ivy Leaguer with no concept of life beyond the bounds of privilege. And Gatsby’s romantic desire for Daisy echoed her own elevated feelings about George. She wondered whether she was as ambitious, and as naïve and unknowing, as Jay Gatsby.
Finding these resemblances compelling but unbearable, she lay the book aside and exited her three-room suite for a stroll. She passed the pillared smoking room, the palm-tree-studded café, and the Grand Salon to the polished-wood promenade deck. Men in striped tank tops and cotton-belted shorts sat in high-backed lounge chairs around the swimming pool, discussing the stock market. Women in sleeveless jersey tops and short bathing trunks lay on chaises longues, deliberating the weather in Madrid and the latest styles in Paris. Kay walked to the prow and gazed over the Atlantic like Jay Gatsby staring across the water toward East Egg, the rippling sea reflecting and distorting his aspirations.
* * *
Julie Glaenzer’s apartment was situated in the bustling center of Paris. His footman, Pascal, prepared her an omelette aux fines herbes and coffee. He spoke not a word of English but Kay remembered enough from three years of Opera French to get by. Pascal drew her a map and suggested attractions, but she implored him to drive her to the Château de Fontainebleau. They negotiated a compromise. Pascal suggested she explore the neighborhood while he concluded his morning’s business on behalf of Monsieur Glaenzer, tidying up the apartment and forwarding correspondence. They would meet at the Café de Flore, a twenty-minute walk from the cathedral.
As Julie had explained, Notre Dame de Paris was indeed a two-minute stroll down the tiny Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame. She entered the cool, dark cathedral, with its scents of burning candles, and strolled between the medieval pillars in the dusky blue-and-red filtered light. An organist was playing Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor. The rousing melodies, evocative of floating seraphs, flitted through the cavernous space and bounced off the towering stone walls.
As she crossed the plaza, the sun emerged above Notre Dame’s towers. She stopped, thinking of Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. She imagined the gypsy Esmeralda dancing and her deformed admirer Quasimodo watching, mesmerized. As bells rang, she shook off the vision.
Six days aboard the Olympic and now this invigorating, animated city! Tramways and motorcars, booksellers’ stalls along the Quais de la Seine, cafés that spilled onto sidewalks. She crossed the Petit Pont and entered the Quartier Latin, populated with students of the Sorbonne, artists, and drunkards. She wandered down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Boulevard Saint-Germain and turned right, searching everywhere for George’s face.
A half hour later she stumbled upon the Café de Flore, with its massive over-the-sidewalk awning; its small metal tables, abundant wooden chairs, and big windows; its young men and women engaged in animated conversations, gesticulating and interrupting each other. Pascal, sitting outside sipping a café crème, saluted her.
They rode in a taxi to the Quai de Bercy, where Pascal kept a Delage cabriolet in a padlocked wooden shed. Kay snuggled in the back seat of the long, maroon-colored convertible watching the tree-lined streets flit past and reflecting that the French had perfected the art of catering to the wealthy, educated classes. The corollary of which was an entrenched social hierarchy that the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and Paris’s two-month experiment in pre-Marxian Socialism, the Commune, had failed to eradicate.
This impression was reinforced upon her arrival at the Fontainebleau Castle. Pascal took a seat outside a café in the quaint town, smoking and reading newspapers. A few elderly men were playing a jeu de boules on a grass strip nearby.
With her box of Black Jack chewing gum under her arm, Kay walked to the castle that had been the favored getaway of thirty-four French kings since the eleventh century. She passed through the Gallery of Francis I, decorated in 1528 by Leonardo Da Vinci’s patron; the neoclassical Gallery of Diana; Marie Antoinette’s fastidiously adorned boudoir; and the Emperor Napoleon’s bedroom.
Exhilarated and sated, with a renewed respect for the opulent, decadent history of Europe’s aristocracy, and excited at the prospect of surprising George, she arrived at the first-floor apartments of Nadia Boulanger’s music school. She recognized the harmonies and rhythms of the famous enseignante’s piano, familiar from the compositions of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. She sat in a gilded silk-upholstered chair next to one of Boulanger’s students. When the lesson was over, she entered and introduced herself.
Haughty and severe in her pulled hair and round glasses, Nadia Boulanger dismissed her with a wave as if swatting away an annoying mouche, a French housefly. “Yes, Monsieur Gershwin visited, but I am afraid he is long gone.”
Kay frowned. “I thought it was all set. He was going to study with you.”
Nadia Boulanger raised her chin. “Who told you this? Ravel? Gershwin himself? I did not tell you this, did I, Madame?”
“Do you know where he’s staying?”
“I am not a detective, Madame.”
Deflated, Kay handed her the box of chewing gum. “A little gift from America,” she said as she walked out of the studio.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jimmy was standing at the mail table glancing through a pile of papers when Lionel entered from the kitchen. “Welcome home, sir.”
“Thank you, Lionel.”
“Did you have a pleasant trip?”
“The usual, Lionel. Thank you for asking.” He glanced at the stairwell. “Is Misses Warburg in?”
“She’s gone to Paris, sir.”
Paris? Had she alluded to an upcoming trip to Paris, in any conversation? Not that he could recall. “Did she mention when she’d return?”
“Not to me, sir.”
Jimmy nodded. In the pile of letters and flyers he came across the monthly newsletter of his daughters’ school, announcing new teachers, ambitious projects and prizes, and faculty publications. He skimmed through it quickly, aware that its main purpose was to justify inflated tuition fees. But as he turned it over his eyes caught his daughter’s name in a list of talent show performers. The event would take place this very evening. He visualized little Andrea performing on the school stage, small and alone, sea
rching for a familiar face among the parents and friends in the audience.
And Kay, up to God knows what in Paris.
He glanced at his watch. Barely enough time but he had no commitments this evening and knew he would never forgive himself if he failed to try.
The Finch School was a tony, forward-looking academy for girls that de-emphasized etiquette and spotlighted literature, the arts, and music. The small auditorium was packed. Jimmy stood at the back, his arms crossed as he endured a four-part chorale harmonizing Bruckner’s “Ave Maria,” a young violinist’s rendition of a Lully gavotte, and an amateur magician engaging a volunteer in a mind-reading game.
His thoughts veered to Kay. Her absence. Her unannounced voyage to Paris, probably to meet her lover. That she was enjoying an affair with Gershwin, Jimmy could understand. That she had fallen in love with him… well, that posed a challenge. Bedroom dalliances were one thing, emotional disloyalty quite another.
Normally, a tightening of marital bonds accompanied the process of aging. No honorable man would leave his spouse for his mistress, discard his children for a new brood, or neglect his duties in business because he was lovesick. Only vulgar, nouveau rich saps—and, God knew, Jimmy had encountered his share of those—would comport themselves in such an indiscreet manner.
And here Kay had run off to Paris and was missing the recital of their sweetest daughter. The one who would shake him when he fell asleep reading her stories; who was convinced a ghost lived in their guest room; who had rescued a kitten and brought it to the veterinarian. Kind, eager Andrea.
Yes, Gershwin and Kay shared a passion for music. That hardly justified neglecting their daughter. He advised himself nonetheless to keep his anger in check. Despite Kay’s dissatisfactions, despite her betrayal, his marriage—his family—remained all-important to Jimmy.
Finally, there she was, his daughter Andrea, bowing to the audience and then jazzing through George Gershwin’s “Liza.” Her performance impressed and troubled Jimmy, not just for its audacity. For a girl of only seven, Andrea possessed an uncanny sense of Gershwin’s harmonies, his melancholic and playful moods, his keyboard affectations. The bastard had left an imprint on Jimmy’s little angel. Well, I have only myself to blame, he lamented inwardly.
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