FDR accepted Jimmy’s terms, no money and no title, but insisted he relocate to Washington. He phoned Kay at George’s flat to relay the news. “Why, that’s marvelous,” she told him. “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“I just don’t know,” said Jimmy.
“How can you think twice?”
“I’m married. I have children.”
“Washington?” scoffed Kay. “A stone’s throw.”
They hung up without resolving the matter.
* * *
Three weeks later, Jimmy informed her by mail that he had taken up residence at the Carlton Hotel in Washington. He huddled daily in the Oval Office with FDR and his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau.
What he did not discuss in the letter was his love life. But Kay knew he would not remain alone for long. She played a major-dominant-seventh chord on the piano, followed by a tonic chord, signifying finality, perhaps the conclusion of the second movement of a sonata. “Well, that’s that,” she told George.
Standing behind her, George massaged the base of her neck.
“Mmm,” she said, closing her eyes.
She flattened the middle note of the tonic chord, implying a key change. Perhaps there was a third movement to come, after all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SUMMER 1934
George was digging clams with DuBose Heyward on an island near Charleston in South Carolina and attending Sunday morning services in little churches. He wrote to Kay about the spirited hymns, the hand-clapped rhythms, and his fascination with the Gullah people. He had also uncovered a gift for building sand castles. “You should see them,” he wrote. “The towers, the tunnels, the spiral stairs. If they had a Pulitzer for sand castles, I’d have a shot at it. Of course while I’m pushing mud around I’m wrestling with Porgy in my head. Then a big wave sweeps in and flattens it, which makes it all the more precious.”
George maintained that mental precomposition was always beneficial. Like the wave washing away the sand castle, leaving behind a memory of its shape, the mind rinsed away the inessential. All one remembered of the precomposed piece was its essence, which was the best place to start. Thus, he had worked out the Rhapsody in Blue on a train from Boston to New York, and many songs while lying in bed.
At the Russian Tea Room in New York, Kay met for drinks with the ballet producer Lincoln Kirstein, the choreographer George Balanchine, and the young Harvard graduate who, Kirstein announced, was not only financing the project but writing the story: Eddie Warburg.
Eddie was Jimmy’s cousin, a literature major just out of Harvard. Kay glanced at him. Eddie looked boyish, scrubbed, and eager, in a bow tie and a tight-waisted wool jacket. She realized Kirstein had used her name to acquire funding, just as he had used Balanchine’s name in his effort to acquire Gershwin. Her world was starting to seem claustrophobic and incestuous—George Gershwin working with George Kaufman; Jimmy, George, and Kay all venting their misgivings and fantasies to the same psychoanalyst; and now, Jimmy’s cousin financing and writing the book for her ballet.
I hope Eddie understands this opportunity, she thought. What we’re talking about is the possibility of creating a new style of ballet. American ballet. What Sherwood Anderson and Scott Fitzgerald had accomplished for the novel, what Gershwin was achieving for the concerto and opera, Eddie and Kay might realize for dance.
The Ballets Russes début of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had marked a cultural inflection in Paris. That performance, in which a sacrificial virgin pirouetted and cabrioled herself to death, signaled the end of an age, the era of European dominance. That girl, expiring in splendor and exhaustion, was nineteenth-century, colonial Europe itself.
She wondered whether Eddie was up to the task. He possessed little experience writing for the stage, let alone for a ballet. But he was young, and supreme self-confidence is the privilege of those who have not yet learned better—as well as those, like George Gershwin, who are congenitally incapable of learning better. Eddie’s easy smile conveyed enthusiasm; his banter, intelligence. Perhaps he possessed more depth than he cared to put on display.
George Balanchine, born Giorgi Balanchivadze, commanded attention. Tall, blonde, tailored, he balanced a cigarette holder at the ends of his delicate fingers, exhaling round puffs. His Ballets Russes were all the rage in Paris and though Russian by birth, he spoke English with a cultivated French accent. In America, he longed to direct a ballet that would be deemed quintessentially American. “Otherwise, what is the purpose? Why cross the ocean, to repeat what I have done?”
He visualized movement in fluid, orchestrated motions and sought the simplest story that could be told. “Let us begin with an image,” he suggested. “Something no one would think of when they think of ballet.” The original conception of The Rite of Spring, he recalled, began with the image of a primitive ritual—failing to mention that he had not yet become involved with the Ballets Russes at that time.
Eddie, Lincoln, and Kay brainstormed. They talked of vehicles—automobiles, trains, airplanes. But how to write a ballet about airplanes? They thought of the crowds on Fifth Avenue and Times Square. Kay suggested department store shoppers at Lord & Taylor or Saks Fifth Avenue. Balanchine appreciated this idea. They could construct a multilevel set, with moving stairs that would provide gasp-worthy opportunities for leaps and pirouettes.
“The only problem,” observed Balanchine, “but it is a serious problem, I am afraid: we have such stores in Paris. Les Galeries Lafayette, La Samaritaine, le Bon Marché… No, no, this will not do. This is not enough uniquely American.”
Eddy hit upon the idea of the Yale-Harvard football game. “Lots of movement,” he said. “Not random but fluid and orchestrated, like you said. And a major event in American culture. One that everyone pays attention to. An absurdity, but an important absurdity. As American as mashed cranberries.”
Everyone pays attention to the Yale-Harvard game? reflected Kay. Maybe in your world, kid. Nevertheless the idea of a football ballet was refreshingly counterintuitive, humorous in a way. An opportunity to poke fun at elite self-absorption.
Balanchine leaned over the table. “Please, tell me more about this.”
Kay was already composing in her head. A resolutely modern score. A footballer leaping for the pigskin in slow motion and twisting to snatch it out of the air to the accompaniment of harps and celeste. A victory parade, the raucous, dissonant squawks and thumps of competing bands. She thought of interlacing college songs from Yale and Harvard into the score the way George had inserted American anthems into Of Thee I Sing.
“Kay?” she heard Kirstein repeat.
“Oh—yes.”
“Can you work with this material?”
“I think so.”
Returning to her apartment, she threw off her heels and ran to the piano barefoot. Alma Mater would not resonate with sadness and history like Porgy. But musically Kay would stretch far beyond Fine and Dandy. With George Balanchine at the helm one could expect originality and spectacle. Absurdly, the mere fact that she would be partnering with him placed her in a small, elite circle that included Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. In their fondest dreams, neither she nor her father had envisaged such a possibility.
Of course, Doctor Zilboorg had instructed her not to confuse her father’s dreams with her own. Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it, Kay told herself.
* * *
George was still in South Carolina when the package from Lincoln Kirstein reached Kay. Eddie Warburg had finished the story for Alma Mater. She sank into a leather armchair in her salon and read it. Eddie described a series of athletic and social scenes involving the Yale team, the Harvard team, their champion athletes, those athletes’ girlfriends, and their rivalries, casting the Harvard quarterback as the hero and the Yale football star as the villain. The culture of Harvard was portrayed as all-American, strong, and conscientious, while Yale was populated with pampered, spoiled dolts. It was as tongue-in-cheek as it was s
ophomoric. Since they had decided the ballet would open in Hartford, halfway between the two colleges, Kay feared a backlash from music critics who were Yale graduates.
Balanchine’s role ensured the project would receive attention. Splendid music and superlative dancing would offset any narrative affront. Lacking dialogue, ballet remained the ideal medium for a composer eager to demonstrate her prowess.
In short, she told herself, despite its potential shortcomings Alma Mater represented a breakout opportunity, the spring storm that would germinate the seed of the rest of her life. Kay would provide a dazzling score, entertaining, original, and quirky.
Yet she could not escape the nagging fear that the occasion might be squandered. Something did not feel quite right. She wondered whether she was not living out that recurring dream: given the occasion to display her musical brilliance and allowing the music to guide her, she might see the opportunity ignite and explode. She doubled down on her work, interrupting it only for piano lessons with her children, an occasional stroll in the park, or a Broadway show.
* * *
At the end of George’s five-week adventure in South Carolina she met him under the clock at Grand Central Station. He looked ridiculous in white cotton trousers cut off above the knees, an untucked short-sleeve shirt, sandals, and a straw hat.
“No bags?”
“Paul threw everything in the Studebaker.”
She hugged him.
“Zowie, that was another planet,” he raved as they walked toward the exit hand in hand. “The cabins on the beach, the spiritual hymns, the people who’d rather give you the food off their plate than let you miss the fun. I fell hard for ’em, Kay. And of course they fell for me, too.”
“Well, now you’re back,” she told him, lighting a cigarette. “And we’d better get you showered and into decent clothes or people will take you for a vagabond.”
“If vagabond means wanderer, they’d be right!” They walked out to East Forty-Second Street. “Let’s grab a New York Sundae.”
“You’re not a wanderer, George,” said Kay as they proceeded down the sidewalk. “Sure, you’ve spent time in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Charleston. But you always come home, don’t you.”
“Speaking of Los Angeles,” said George, “another offer came in. Two more movies. Fred and Ginger, can you believe it?”
She stopped, exhaled a puff of smoke, and looked at him. “You’ve already done that,” said Kay. “You already got your DC-2 thrills, didn’t you?”
He looked past her at a tin can blowing in the gutter. “This isn’t a pair of wings, Kay. This is a tin can rolling down the road.”
She shook her head sadly. “Whatever you say, George.” She threw her cigarette to the ground and snuffed it with her heel.
“Anyway,” George offered in a conciliatory tone, “it won’t be tomorrow, if it happens. Maybe a year. Maybe two. Maybe never. Let’s not think about it.”
“Deal,” said Kay.
He opened the door of Molly’s Sweets & Sundries. Kay went in, anticipating a moment of sweetness and laughter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
DECEMBER 1934
A Christmas tree now stood in Doctor Zilboorg’s office, and in the spirit of the holiday he offered Kay an eggnog. “Rum, brandy, or bourbon,” he asked.
“Brandy,” said Kay with a laugh. She was surprised that a psychoanalyst would stock such libations, and said so.
“Libations?” he chuckled. “On the contrary, it is of utmost importance that you shed your inhibitions, your defense mechanisms. If alcohol helps, well…” He completed his sentence with a whirl of his hand. His mood seemed buoyant, perhaps an effect of the season. After handing her the drink he sank back into his easy chair, sipping. “Let’s start where we left off, shall we?” He looked over his notes. “The important thing is to dissociate yourself, at least in this room, from both George and Jimmy.”
“But I love George.”
“There is nothing wrong with love. But let us try to dismantle whatever is weak in the scaffolding of your emotions. We are seeking the solid underlying foundation. You must avoid a repeat of your failed marriage. You will agree with that, I hope.”
She tasted her eggnog, which was stronger than expected, with a bitter aftertaste. “That all sounds perfectly reasonable, Doctor Zilboorg, in theory. And every piece of music looks beautiful on paper. It’s when the fingers hit the keys that the trouble starts.”
He sipped his own drink, nodding. “No one claimed this work was easy. One has to tease apart the role of the libido, driven by the id, and the desire for self-aggrandizement, driven by the ego.”
At his instigation they rowed their canoe toward the deepest part of the psychodynamic lake, where she peered into the water beyond her reflection. The forms that writhed in the depths aroused and frightened her. Nor was Doctor Zilboorg interested only in the “oneiric” portion of this activity—by which he meant, the dreamlike images that filtered through her consciousness. He asked which fantasies stimulated her most. “Feel free to close your eyes… Even to caress your thighs, if necessary, while visualizing.”
To relax her defenses, he plied her with more eggnog. Kay hesitated, confused. Her mind raced as she tried to understand. The drink was causing her head to spin. What kind of brandy did this fellow use? A part of her felt flattered that Zilboorg was growing more relaxed with her. In addition to the patient-doctor relationship, perhaps a friendship was cracking out of the psychic egg. After all, Zilboorg knew her more intimately than almost anyone.
Even so, another part of her felt uneasy. She sipped again, listening to him drone on about the id and the ego. “These are the two dominant forces that power the emotion we call love.”
Kay viewed herself as a modern woman, free of her ancestors’ squeamishness. She questioned her discomfort. Zilboorg was trying to help. True, the idea of discussing her sexual fantasies with a slovenly, mustachioed Ukrainian in a tweed jacket and yellow shirt did not hold much appeal. But this specialist’s reputation was sterling. She drained her glass and he refilled it.
She had never devoted much thought to her sexual fantasies. Nor had she broached the subject with anyone. She had hidden them even from herself. Now she confronted those secrets. Mysteries that had tainted her feelings about Jimmy since their first encounter, and earlier. What she had mistaken for a jigsaw of libertinism, jealousy, revenge, half-hearted reconciliation, and resignation revealed itself to be more complex and nuanced. She entertained the possibility that Jimmy’s infidelities had not stemmed from a blend of egotism and sensuality but had been an unconscious response to something he had perceived in her, or a reaction to the emotional satisfaction that had eluded them. She had always thought him handsome and clever but despite his wooing and her best intentions, she had never truly desired him. Somehow he knew. Paradoxically her sexual distance, however much she had tried to compensate, kept her interesting and desirable to him, a perpetual conquest-to-be-achieved, an unerfüllter Wunsch as Freud might put it, rather than an acquired possession, ein Besitz.
For the first time in years she pitied her husband. Not usually given to tears, she broke down weeping in Doctor Zilboorg’s office.
* * *
Kay learned that her libido, which should fly unfettered, had been trapped like an insect in amber. Doctor Zilboorg asked her to participate in an exercise that would liberate it. After her imagination and sensuality were freed, if she was still attracted to George Gershwin, she would discover that her love was purer and larger than she had suspected.
“Exercise?”
He smiled. “You need to set aside your defenses now. For this next step to be effective, you must trust me entirely. Your therapy has proved helpful so far, has it not? And yet, we have traveled only a short distance together.”
He stood, pulled off his jacket, threw his tie over a chair, and unbuttoned his shirt. She watched him, confused. He is accredited. Acclaimed. He has written books and addressed the American Soc
iety of Psychoanalysts. Other patients, including Jimmy and George, sing his praises. “Any residue of Puritanism is pernicious,” he explained, “and must be eliminated.”
Distressed, she averted her eyes from his belly and the black curlicues on his chest and groin as he stepped closer. He forcefully guided her to the divan. She tried to squirm out of his hold. He pinned her on the sofa and lifted her dress. This cannot be happening. She heard a cry, the shriek of an injured bird. It burst out from a deep inner place and flew from her mouth. He shoved and grunted. She had lost control of her arms and legs. She lay in his hands like a rag doll, passive and numb.
Then something broke inside her. She pushed away his torso, slapped his adipose shoulder once, twice, three times, and somehow recovered her voice. She screamed. He jumped off. She pulled up her panties, pulled down her skirt, grabbed her handbag and heels, and buzzed out low like a soiled, greasy horsefly burdened with fecal repast.
“Wait,” Zilboorg called after her. “Let us talk this through.”
Not a chance. Kay winged home barefoot and disheveled, bumping into passersby, dashing between cars. A honk here, an angry “lady, watch out!” there. Buildings around her seemed to waver, bow, and undulate. That damned eggnog! She had never before felt so disoriented, so vulnerable. Nor had she ever reacted to alcohol this way. And God knew she had imbibed quite a few exotic concoctions at wild parties.
Finally she turned the corner to her street. Did her building just move? Whatever had happened, now she was inside. She ran upstairs two steps at a time.
She plunged into a hot bath. She scrubbed her arms, her breasts, her belly, her face, everything Zilboorg had touched. When the water cooled she stepped out and sprayed perfume all over herself but she could still smell him. She still felt his grasping hands. She closed her eyes and sat on the edge of the tub to exhale.
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