Katharine went into her bedroom, shutting the door more loudly than she meant to. It was a tiny chamber crowded with a bed, a chest of drawers, and a padded bench. She did not bother rotating the Bakelite switch to the On position but removed her dress in the dark, slid under the sheets, and stared at the ceiling.
Maybe I should get a job, she thought, not for the first time. They were hiring at Wanamaker’s. A meager salary but a regular paycheck. Maybe all her training was for naught. Perhaps the aspirations her father had instilled in her were mere vanity. After all, they had not served him too well, had they. She tossed in bed trying to quiet her mind. To sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
As Katharine sleeps, the memory of her beloved father, Sam, strolls into her dream, his features resembling the death mask he wore in his coffin a few years ago: chestnut hair, a gray-stubbled cropped beard, forehead lines smoothed in serenity. Although Sam Swift died abruptly at the age of forty-one, he had long before acquired an older man’s wisdom and weariness, which remained visible in his eyes even in death.
Wearing lace-up boots, knickerbocker pants, a pleated jacket with leather buttons and a fabric belt, he sits on the bed. “Things look different from here,” he tells his daughter as if gazing over the Hudson Valley from the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge.
“What do you see?” asks Katharine.
“The past. The future. Mountainous landscapes melted in a glassy uniformity. Men and women naked, shorn of the badges of consequence.” He crosses his legs.
“How I wish I could be with you, Papa.”
“You mustn’t think that way. Not until…” He glances down, pursing his lips.
“Until? Do you know when I’ll die? Do you know how?”
He lifts a flap of his jacket, removes a gold watch, and studies it. “The problem is that word, when. The hands move backward and forward and stand still all at once.”
“But if there’s no time,” says Katharine, “there can be no music. That must be unbearable.” She cannot conceive of a melody in which all the notes are played simultaneously, or not at all. Nor can she imagine her father dwelling in a world that has no operas.
“I didn’t say there’s no time.” He sets the watch on her night table. “There are all sorts of time, an infinite variety, all at once or never. It’s hard to express this in the language of the living.”
She sits up on her bed propping the pillow in her back. “Do you know how I’ll die?”
“You’ll die of heartache, as everyone does. It spreads through one’s days and years of stumbles, bruises, and scars and in the end one simply melts into the earth. But that’s not why I took the trouble of visiting with you.”
“You missed me.”
He strokes his chin. “I do miss you terribly but that’s not why I came, either. Do you remember the day you performed for my workers?”
She thinks back to that day ten years earlier, in 1907. “How could I not remember, Papa?”
And now she is a young girl in her father’s factory in New Haven, the one that his father bequeathed to him. The One-Lock Adjustable Reamer Company.
During the train ride to this place, Sam has explained the purpose of the performance. He yearns to prove to his workers that he is a different kind of owner. He wants to show respect for their intelligence and sensitivity. He wishes to share his passion for music. Katharine knows however that more than anything, what he desires is to offer his daughter her first public stage. She has performed Mozart sonatas for her classmates’ parents but this will be an opportunity to communicate across educational and social barriers. Even at ten, Katharine understands that although her father may possess no more money at month’s end than his workers, he moves in a different milieu. He is, after all, the respected opera critic of the New-York Tribune, a position that earns him little in pay but a great deal in honor. At least within a certain, admittedly small, social circle.
Having organized the transportation of a Baldwin upright to the factory floor, Sam allows the workers an extra hour of lunch break. They slouch in rusting chairs in five rows wearing smudged blue coveralls. Katharine enters in a new white dress, with bows in her hair, and curtsies.
Immersed in the stench of machine oil and men’s sweat she performs Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. A flawed rendition but a sincere one. When her fingers slip she glances at her father, who nods, keep going.
The workers listen respectfully, but little by little she loses control of the music. It develops a life of its own. Her hands cannot keep pace. Anxiety and panic seize her as she attempts to recapture and tame the notes.
Katharine hears the distant voice of her father’s ghost. “When I look back on scenes like this, I see…” he searches for the word. “Leitmotifs. Music made of light that connects people and events.”
Leitmotifs?
“Let me give you an example. Among the workers that day, in the fourth row of your audience, sits a man named Max Levant.” Katharine glances up from the keyboard and spots him. He smiles and winks at her. “He’s the uncle of a boy about your age, Oscar,” continues the voice of Sam Swift. “Your performance inspires Max, who in turn influences his nephew. Oscar grows up in Pittsburgh and becomes a brilliant pianist. Years later he enters your life, a friend of a friend who provides advice in a moment of confusion, when your life can veer one way or another. Neither of you knows that this moment flows from your performance at the One-Lock Adjustable Reamer factory. This is just one example. These leitmotifs, which connect distant people and events, they stretch everywhere, invisible to the living.”
As in opera, thinks Katharine. The ten-year-old version of herself rises and again curtsies. The workers applaud, remove their chairs, and return to their lathes, grinders, and drill presses.
“These leitmotifs, these waves of light,” says Sam. “The nodes they form where they meet.”
The nodes?
And again she is riding in the New Haven Local, returning home. Sam is not with her but she still hears his voice. “A node. Where small vibrations that emanate from remote times, places, and beings encounter each other and give birth to harmonies that reverberate through the universe. Not a terminus but a station in a network of stations.”
Katharine imagines piano strings vibrating simultaneously, creating overtones, chords stacked upon chords stretching all the way to heaven, some heard, many unheard.
“Sometimes, you’re riding in the train of your life,” says Sam, “and you come to a station.”
The train stops. She disembarks and wanders along the platform. Another train squeals to a halt releasing a final puff of smoke. Katharine looks at the schedule board but the letters are garbled.
“You’re not sure which one you’re supposed to take. All you can do is guess. What are the criteria? Perhaps you should slip into the most comfortable train? Or the one that’s departing soonest? Why not? You have to go somewhere. You see, you’ve lost your way, and it hardly matters what you do because until you remember your destination, if you ever do, you will remain lost.”
Sam Swift kisses her forehead and leaves her bedroom. She hears him shuffling to the piano in the other room, where he begins playing Chopin’s Nocturne, opus 9, number 1. The moonlight streaming through her window dims to blackness.
* * *
In the morning Katharine awoke feeling disoriented. At first she recalled only the tail end of her dream, wandering in a train station. But when she reached for her father’s pocket watch some of the earlier portions drifted back. She remembered playing the Baldwin upright at her father’s One-Lock Adjustable Reamer Company.
It had never actually taken place, that performance, had it? Although her father had indeed inherited the factory, tried his hand at running it, and failed.
That recital, though, was the kind of event he could almost have organized. Her dreaming mind may have hatched it but the egg of logic was all his: providing a stage for his daughter; dressing her for the occasion; trying to express himself to his em
ployees through music, the language of the men he revered.
Katharine rarely prayed. If God existed, He surely had more pressing business than the yearnings of an unsettled young woman on the Upper West Side. But this morning she knelt at her bedside, clasped her hands together, closed her eyes, and confided to any spirit who might be listening about her yearnings. She did not desire wealth. She merely wanted to reach her destination as an artist. This was the train in which she was meant to be riding. She had to find the right track. Was that too much to ask? And if it was, why had she been given this burning sense of destiny?
* * *
She and her friends Marie and Edith waltzed and scherzoed through the most gossiped-about circles, but they were not her circles. Music was the only power she possessed, but although the Edith Rubel Trio had acquired prestige on the salon circuit, it might never provide her a living income or independence.
Among the wealthy, some owned Victrolas but no one would use one to entertain. That would be deemed vulgar and disrespectful. The use of a music machine would preclude the vital interaction between musicians and listeners. It would be tantamount to stepping into a respectable restaurant and ordering homard à l’Armoricaine or coquilles Saint-Jacques from an automat.
Thus, opportunities for musicians abounded. Wherever people congregated they expected sounds, organized according to the harmonic and rhythmical grammar of their place of origin, to set a mood and reinforce a sense of kinship. The Irish enjoyed their jigs, bursting with panache and gaiety; the Italians their soaring arias; the Poles their triple-time mazurkas and polonaises; the Jews their half-impromptu, minor-key clarinet and violin colloquies. Those who were partial to the tastes and manners of the modernist French elite opted for the tonally ambiguous aural poetry of a Debussy or a Fauré.
Katharine, Edith, and Marie performed in the salons and gardens of politicians, actresses, and playwrights. In the sprawling Madison Avenue apartments of Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, well-heeled women congregated for a rally supporting their right to vote. Mrs. Vanderbilt Belmont, a stout lady with the nose and eyes of a Brueghel peasant, boasted of having shared exquisite moments with numerous gentlemen and more than one husband, most of them dim-witted. “Men are in no way superior,” she assured her guests, rolling her r’s. “And as much as they need our guidance in the boudoir”—an observation that elicited titters—“how much more so in matters of the economy and warfare.”
She introduced “the undisputed leader of our national movement,” Carrie Chapman Catt, who defended the women’s suffrage movement against the accusations of those who claimed it was pro-Negro. “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage,” Catt proclaimed.
Katharine had grown up in a pious Christian family. Grandma Gertie had composed hymns that were still sung in her church. Katharine’s father had played the organ there. And there she had learned the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Jonah and Leviathan, and of a Jesus who had suffered and died to atone for the sins of all humanity.
Of course women should have the right to vote. They were entirely equal to men. Why did people like Catt deny the rights of one group to buttress their credibility in supporting another? It came down to politics. Whatever Carrie Chapman Catt’s personal feelings about Negroes, she needed the support of white supremacists.
Politics. Katharine despised the idea that to promote justice, one had to appease thugs. Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that ran New York, offered citizens some of what they desired but in the end their diligence was self-serving. Politics divided the nation and stoked enmity. Politics made a mockery of democracy.
The answer to the division and rage that politics fostered, she felt sure, was shared culture. The memories of a people, pickled in melodies. On a nod from Edith, the trio dove into Katharine’s arrangement of the suffragist anthem, “Eliza Jane,” and the room hushed.
Another afternoon, a half hour up the Hudson River Valley by chauffeured motorcar, they performed Brahms’s Piano Trio no. 1 in the thirty-four-room Italianate mansion of Madam C. J. Walker. A colored woman who manufactured hair care products, Madam Walker had distinguished herself as the world’s first self-made female millionaire. Now that is something to be, thought Katharine.
No less husky of frame than Madam Vanderbilt Belmont, Madam Walker had invited her neighbors the Astors and the Rockefellers, but as she told Katharine with a laugh, “unfortunately they had more pressing engagements. They did send their wishes. Not that I care a hoot.” Several of her guests were more famous and venerated than any industrialist or real estate tycoon, including the man known as the greatest entertainer in the world, Al Jolson.
In an impeccably tailored suit, Jolson seemed to tower over everyone although he was of average height and build. Katharine sensed he was so in love with himself and his success that his face emitted some kind of invisible light. His booming voice, affected speech, outgoing manner, and hearty laugh stole his listeners’ attention. Everyone gathered to hear his stories of travel by luxury liner and private railcar to San Francisco and Berlin, and of his audiences’ fervor in those far-off venues. Her hands folded on the keyboard cover, Katharine participated in their collective dream of exotic realms, blinding limelight, and raucous applause.
But of all these soirées the most peculiar, to her mind, was a reception in the Lower East Side for a diminutive man with unruly raven hair, a goatee, and a flamboyant moustache, who hailed from Russia. The dignified woman who introduced him, Emma Goldman, told her poorly attired guests that “Leon Trotsky is terribly famous throughout Europe, where he is despised as well as adored as the irrepressible enfant terrible of the workers’ liberation movement as well as their most persuasive advocate.”
Trotsky climbed onto a crate. Frowning, he belted out one or two sentences at a time, waited for his translator, and resumed full-throttle about the servitude of the proletariat and their masters’ weakness. Rather than sweep his eyes through his audience, he stared at one member at a time. Like Katharine’s mother, but far more eloquent, he denounced the international bankers who sucked their lifeblood, mentioning among others the Rothschilds, the Schiffs, and the Warburgs, some of the very people who had recently hired Katharine, just a few hours’ ride from the Lower East Side but a world away. Although he thought of himself as utterly unlike Paul Warburg, Trotsky too vehemently opposed American intervention in the brutal European War, which seemed endless in the late summer of 1917.
Trotsky’s listeners, many of whom toiled in sweatshops for a dollar a week, spoke Yiddish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian better than English. Katharine realized they must have stretched their resources to pay for her incongruous engagement, desiring to honor their illustrious guest with an up-tempo performance of Borodin’s Piano Trio in D Major. A klezmer band would have been more appropriate, she thought. While Borodin’s earthy, passionate music held undeniable appeal, it was infected with Russian nationalism. But then, these men in their ill-fitting suits, these women in their patched Saturday best, who could not afford the garments they manufactured, heard klezmer at bar mitzvahs and other religious celebrations nearly every weekend. They wanted to mark the distinctiveness of the occasion and its secular European flavor.
Trotsky’s eyes alighted on hers. “But of all these injuries and illnesses,” he was saying, “the worst violation perpetrated in the name of capital is the robbing of men’s and women’s very lives. Reduced to despair, they have no choice but to sell their souls.”
His gaze roamed elsewhere but his words chilled her. She understood these people’s apocalyptic dreams. No one gets to choose the conditions of their birth. Some grow up in mansions and others in tenements. Rare and far-between are the impecunious souls upon whom society bestows opportunities. Therefore society itself must be the problem, or a big part of it.
She had shared enough champagne and banter with millionaires, though, to know that being born rich was not in itself necessarily a moral stain.
Perhaps John Rockefeller Jr., so often blamed for the Ludlow Mineworker Massacre, was indeed a scoundrel. But Jimmy Warburg seemed merely naïve.
Naïveté is not absolution, Trotsky would say, if he could hear her thoughts.
But as the image came back to her of Jimmy awkwardly clutching his whiskey, or chatting with a blonde admirer but gazing past her toward Katharine, she wondered whether Trotsky’s reasoning was sound. If the poor bore no inherited moral burden, why should the rich? Weren’t these revolutionary Socialists, rejecting the Bible in favor of Das Kapital, just substituting one form of original sin for another?
She smiled inwardly at the memory of Jimmy’s lopsided grin and the way he petted his calico cat. The silliness of his pretentions. Naval officer, indeed. She smiled at her own foolishness for devoting even a moment’s thought to him after all this time. How long had it been? More than two months, at least.
Following their brief encounter with Lower East Side socialist fervor, Katharine, Edith, and Marie walked to J. Ross Confectioners, where they topped off the evening with egg-cream sodas and schoolgirl titters. Their friendship required neither profundity nor wit. They had grown up together in the tight corridors and practice rooms of the Institute of Musical Art. When they performed, angels flitted between their hearts. During bursts of inspired musicality, they dwelled harmoniously in the estate of the composer whose work they were performing. He—always a man, always European—had built his domain with his own hands. They were his guests.
In real life, though, Katharine, Edith, and Marie had their differences. For one, Edith and Marie found little to admire in the crowd that cheered for Leon Trotsky.
“Those fools,” said Edith, sipping through a paper straw. “Don’t they see? The socialist revolution is just another power grab.”
“They don’t want equality,” said Marie. “They want revenge.”
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