Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  Heart cut open and splayed on a dissecting table. Torn apart. Hate even here amid love.

  Death.

  A song of bitter envy. That way, through stinking alleys, tenements brooding in gloom squashed against each other. In here they live and breed and die these wretched masses, beggars clawing at his coat. Scenting a thread of hate and

  Death.

  Stumbling on out onto another wide street of pounding carts and trams, the sidewalk a river of teeming life.

  Death.

  Here they burned thirteen black men at the stake, oh their flesh frying in the fetid air as the whites laughed and jeered. Am I not a man?

  Death.

  Surfing that tsunami of torment, he focussed on the particular violin solo of hate weaving a thread through the air.

  Death.

  Out into the blaze of a square. A throng of people. Placards. Righteous anger. Anarchist demonstration. We demand our freedom. Adventure, the scent of life here. Love again, the love for all men and women. Blazing light of love. A child for its mother.

  There. Running dizzy to the call of a child ringed by a pack of wolves. There. Little Anna. Anna Mahler of Alma Mahler. Alma Mater. There.

  A knife pierced his heart and he fell. One trumpet note held over a blaze of discord. The heart attack chord.

  He sank to the floor, slid down the wall, pointing.

  There. In there.

  They rushed in, Gilhooly and the others. An Irishman, a doctor, a black man and a Jew went into a nickelodeon. Let me tell you this, you’ll just die.

  Slumped in the street. Clammy balm on his face. He sank to the floor, sliding down the wall. Pointing, or reaching. Not waving but drowning.

  Kaleidoscope kinematograph nickelodeon new pictures changed daily five cents only.

  There. Sweet Anna. Little Gucki.

  The doctor bounded out, clutching the girl to his breast. Looked all around, his eyes falling on him. He saw Mitch’s smile rising from the gutter. Let me tell you this one. You’ll just die.

  The girl, screaming and writhing in the doctor’s arms. Safe.

  Sinking into sweet bliss.

  Surrender.

  I live alone in my love.

  I have done this if nothing more.

  Mitch clawed at his breast, ripped open his shirt, so hot, no air. Lifted the locket to his face. Eleanor.

  To live for you. To die for you. To miss you. Broken on the rocks, a shipwrecked sailor so far from home.

  He slid like a toppled tree, the cool pavement on his cheek. Eleanor’s face in his palm.

  Fraenkel’s patent leather shoes nudged his hand.

  The girl reached for the locket, her stubby little pink fingers closing on Eleanor’s face.

  To live for you.

  She was safe now. Back to her mother. To Alma.

  To die for you.

  Almschiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

  — 54 —

  THE TASTE OF A SINGLE malt from Islay. Peat, phenol and coal tar. Pungent iodoform. The echo of footsteps and voices down empty corridors.

  He flinched and blinked harsh white light.

  Hospital. He was in hospital.

  He tried to call out but his words choked in his throat.

  “Hey, you’re awake.” James Reese Europe leaned in and smiled.

  Mitch gasped and a razor blade slid down his throat.

  “Here. Drink.”

  James brought a glass of water to Mitch’s lips. Cold ice water hit his throat and he shuddered with the shock. He gulped on, thirsty, feeling it revive him with each frozen swallow. It seeped through him and his body ached like someone had kicked every one of his bones.

  “What happened?” he croaked.

  “You had a heart attack. But you’re gonna be just fine. You’re in Bellevue hospital. You’ve been out for five days.”

  “Five days?”

  “Out cold. We thought you were never going to wake up. They said yesterday you were showing signs of recovery. You’d talked in your sleep. You were calling out for someone called Eleanor.”

  Mitch coughed and his internal organs rattled in his bag of bones body. A heart attack. He’d fallen out of the agony tree and hit every branch on the way down.

  “The girl is safe?”

  “Yes. Thanks to you. She’s back with her parents and they’re very happy. I don’t know how you knew it but you led us right to the door. Of all the nickelodeons in Manhattan, you took us right to the one where they had the girl.”

  “What happened?”

  “We stormed in. Gilhooly took the lead and Dr Fraenkel right behind him. Me and Izzy pounded in behind. Well, it was all a confusion. I think Gilhooly got it out of the ticket taker where the office was because he pretty much straight ran for some stairs and we just followed. I almost knocked Dr Fraenkel over as I went in because he had the girl and was already rushing out. Gilhooly was standing over the governess and her man. He was knocked out right there on the floor and she was crying over him.”

  “One punch? That was all it took?”

  “Yeah. Have you seen the size of his fists? I wouldn’t like to take the full force of one.”

  “Did they arrest them?”

  James shook his head. “Gilhooly took out his gun and said if he ever saw them again he’d blow their brains out. Then we walked right out of there. I heard they skipped town right there and then. Gilhooly said the Mahlers didn’t want to involve the police.”

  That made sense. An arrest would mean publicity. The news would be all over New York and then the world. Famous composer. Kidnapping scandal. Blackmail plot. Secret compromising letter.

  “Your magic trick was mighty impressive.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Oh yeah?” James rolled his eyes and indicated all of this: the hospital room, his heart attack. “Gilhooly thought you must have known where the girl was — that you were involved, somehow — but Dr Fraenkel put him straight.”

  “I kind of thought he wouldn’t believe it.”

  “What can you believe when you’re presented with the impossible?”

  “Yes,” said Mitch. “I guess he’ll never quite accept it.”

  James nodded sadly. “So were you involved?” He broke out into a wide grin.

  Mitch slapped his arm, weakly. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Oh no, my friend, you need to rest up.”

  “I’ve had five days’ sleep. It’s time to go.”

  He flung back the covers and creaked out of bed. Every muscle in his body shrieked in protest.

  He found his suit, Mahler’s suit, in the closet, and climbed into it like a ninety-year-old man dressing for his last friend’s funeral. Just atrophy, his muscles protesting after five days of immobility. He shrugged into his overcoat and pulled on his hat, wheezing and tottering to sit back down on the bed.

  “You really ought to rest, Mitch.”

  He shook his head. “If I lie in bed any longer, I’ll never get the use of my legs back. Help me up.”

  James took his arm and heaved him to his feet. He shuddered to the door, pinhead steps, and they shuffled down a long corridor till they came out to icy fresh air. He took in a lungful and gasped in pain.

  “Well, Mr Mahler paid for your private room so I guess we’re not really doing a runner.” James hailed a carriage and the driver at the head of the line of cabs nudged forward, seeing that he was walking an invalid out. James bundled Mitch into the carriage and called out, “Majestic Hotel, please.”

  Mitch settled into the plush velvet interior and winced with agony, waiting for a wave of pain to pass. The carriage rumbled up First Avenue and, gazing out to his left, he glimpsed the El train on Second Avenue at every block’s intersection, running parallel, hypnotic in its repetition.

  At 42nd street he looked up to the blank sky where the United Nations building would one day stand, an imposing black funeral slab. At 59th Street the Queensboro Bridge reached for the shore and fell short, only half bu
ilt. They had started in the middle of the Hudson and were working their way out to both banks.

  They trundled all the way up to 66th Street and turned left, going under the El trains at Second and Third Avenues. Otto Kahn’s townhouse mansion was two blocks up.

  “What day is it?” Mitch asked.

  “It’s Saturday,” said James. “February the fifteenth.”

  Otto Kahn might be out at his country mansion with his family. Would he even know anything about the kidnapping and the cover up, or had he helped in some way?

  The carriage came out to Fifth Avenue and rode straight into Central Park down the transverse. He’d come this way with Alma and Gustav, that first night they’d visited Otto. He’d drawn up that list of suspects and missed the one that was right under their noses, the blackmailer they’d left at home with the child.

  The carriage pulled up at the junction of the transverse and Central Park Avenue and the driver jumped down and opened the carriage door.

  “This is as far as I can go. The road is blocked ahead.”

  Music. A brass band. A procession of some kind.

  “It’s that funeral of the fireman that died last week. I can wait till it passes and then go round the back way.”

  “We’ll get out,” said Mitch. “I could do with the walk.”

  “Are you sure?” James protested.

  He heaved himself up, his insides spasming, and James eased him down the curb. They walked up the sidewalk that edged the park, pushing through the huge crowd, James reaching out before him to clear the way, saying, “Excuse me, please. This is a sick man coming through.”

  In the street a procession. A band playing a sombre funeral march, fat brass notes. Beethoven’s Leonora Prohaska. The sidewalk was jammed with a great throng. Every man had taken off his hat and it was strange to see so many bare heads.

  Mitch turned and looked back down the broad avenue. The throng seemed to jam the sidewalk all the way down to Columbus Circle. There were two thousand people or more. Behind the marching band crept a procession of horse-drawn carriages and at the rear, two electric trams draped in black crepe and full of funeral wreaths.

  “Here,” said James, “let’s go into the park.”

  They sidled into the bridle path. The band’s music echoed off the great buildings with a spectral air. Berlioz’s Symphonie Funebre now. Mitch felt cold sweat clammy in his suit and sucked in harsh air that burned his chest. But it was mild, warmer than it had been his entire stay; warmer than it had been in Washington.

  Inching along the bridle path, they caught up to the front of the procession. It halted right under the giant looming towers of the Hotel Majestic. The band fell silent. Someone was shouting, a muffled voice echoing. A speech. Someone was making a speech.

  Of course. This was the moment.

  The fireman’s funeral.

  He’d read about it so long ago. The single stroke of a drum that Mahler would hear and write into the final movement of his unfinished Tenth Symphony.

  Mitch pointed to the bench where he’d sat nine days ago, where Gustav had smoked and offered him the job of protecting Alma and investigating the blackmail attempt on them. They edged over to it and he slumped into it with a sigh, tugging at his shirt collar.

  Up there, the Mahlers would be watching. Faces at every window. He counted up to the eleventh floor, straining to see.

  There. Mahler at the window to his bedroom. And across from him, Alma with another woman he couldn’t recognise.

  The speech echoed on for a while, but he couldn’t make out the words. And then it too fell silent and there was a ghostly hush over everything.

  Death.

  A gunshot.

  He jumped.

  The single drum stroke echoed over the city, resonating like a cannon shot over the vast expanse of Central Park.

  Up there Gustav was watching, tears falling from his face. Mitch couldn’t see it but he had read it. Gustav Mahler wept for the fallen fireman and wrote that single drum stroke into the Tenth, with a scribbled a note to Alma in the score: You alone know what it means.

  Yes. This was the moment when the Tenth Symphony took seed in Mahler’s soul, and the Tenth was the song of Mahler’s love for Alma, and it was the song of Mitch’s love for Eleanor. The Tenth Symphony was Mitch’s touchstone.

  That’s why he’d come here. There was no other place or time on earth he could have gone.

  The seed of Mitch’s soul — his love for Eleanor — had met its twin in Mahler’s Tenth. When he’d fallen through time this was the only place he could have gone. This moment was his ground zero.

  He choked and found to his surprise that, just like Mahler up there, he was sobbing too.

  — 55 —

  THE CORTEGE WENT ON but the crowd that thronged the sidewalk dispersed. James pulled him to his feet and they walked out of the park.

  As the last electric tram passed, stuffed with every flower in the city, the two of them crossed the street to the Majestic, inching along the side to the entrance.

  “I shall take my leave of you here,” said James.

  “Oh, really?”

  “I think my dealings with the Mahlers are now at an end,” he said.

  They had surely shown him their thanks at the rescue of their child, perhaps even rewarded him, though he knew James Reese Europe would take no money from them. There was a chasm between his life and theirs, just as there was a chasm between his music and Mahler’s.

  “I shall do the same,” Mitch said. “But I have one more river to cross.”

  James smiled, nodded and shook his hand.

  “Goodbye, James. Thank you for all your help.”

  He wanted to tell him to be sure to dodge every bullet in the war that was to come, but he knew he would come through it unscathed. He wanted to tell him to go and write great jazz, and take the idea of a cabaret to Paris, and to form the Clef Club as an organisation to bring all the jazz musicians together. But he knew that James Reese Europe was going to do all those things without Mitch telling him.

  As he walked off through the dispersing crowd, he went to shout out And don’t lose that Buddy Bolden recording! but it caught in his throat. He would lose it. Somehow. The world would never hear it.

  Mitch shuffled into the Majestic and made his way across the lobby.

  Clarence opened the elevator door and beamed a great smile. “Mr Mitchell, sir. How fine to see you.”

  He shuffled in and leaned against the wall, wishing he had a walking stick. “Thank you for your help, Clarence. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “It was everything.”

  The elevator came to a stop with a bump and Clarence pulled the grille across and slid the door aside. Mitch reached out and shook his hand. Clarence looked down at their knot of fingers, surprised.

  Mitch inched along to the Mahlers’ suite and knocked the door.

  A man opened the door, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, the pathetic, wizened eyes of a mole. He pushed his spectacles on and there he was again, Gustav Mahler.

  “Mitchell,” he said. “Raheem. Come.”

  He followed him. Alma shrieked. She was on her knees on the rug, playing with Anna, her taffeta dress pooling around her. The little girl looked up, startled, abandoned as her mother shot up and reached for him.

  She guided him to the sofa and he crumpled into it with a sigh. This is where it began.

  “Mitchell, what are you doing? You’re alive, but you should be in your hospital bed.”

  Someone rushed to the door at the left, stood frozen in the door for a moment and went to the child.

  “Miss Turner,” said Gustav. “Take Anna next door for a little while.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Come on, Anna. Let’s do some drawing.”

  A new governess. English. About 40 and as cold as a fish. No hidden Italian passion in this one.

  Alma sat beside him, clasping his hand on the red velvet.
“What are you doing here? I mean, out of bed. You cannot be well enough to walk.”

  “I came to say goodbye.”

  “You cannot leave!” Alma cried. “Gustav, tell him.”

  “Almschi,” Gustav said. “Let go of his hand.”

  She took her hand away and rubbed it in her lap, like she’d burned it on the fire. His own fingers were still red raw, burnt with ice from the warehouse escape.

  Gustav sat in the armchair and crossed his legs, glaring. Mitch chuckled and coughed and a shard of bright pain shot through him. It was ridiculous. Gustav was jealous of a decrepit man practically dying in front of him.

  “How is the girl?”

  Alma and Gustav looked to each other, as if surprised at the question.

  “Does she know what happened? Is she traumatized by it in any way?”

  “She’s fine,” said Gustav. “She knows nothing of what happened. All is well now and so that is an end to it.”

  Alma looked at the floor. It was so simple to Gustav. He could reason himself out of emotion, and yet he would write a symphony of torment. Perhaps that was the only way he could process it all.

  “I’m glad everything is normal again,” Mitch said. “And that they didn’t win.”

  “I will resign from my post at the Met,” Gustav said.

  Mitch stared. He wanted to respond, but no words would come.

  Mahler shifted in his seat and filled the silence. “I have little time left to fight battles I have no interest in winning. Why fight to present the very best to an audience that cares nothing for it?”

  “But if you do, they’ve won.”

  “Mrs Seney Shelden has offered me the post of musical director at the Philharmonic. I shall educate America to the very best in symphonic music, and perhaps through this they will learn enough to raise their own Bach, their own Mozart. One day.”

  Mitch thought of James Reese Europe, making his way down Eighth Avenue to the Tenderloin district, and a boy in Washington who cared more about murder mysteries than music. Fate had a grim sense of irony. Gustav would appreciate the joke. One day.

  He patted his thigh and rose.

  “Gustav, you can’t let him go. He looks like death.”