The Prodigy: 2014 Edition - The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd - Number 4

by Noel Hynd

  “London was Rabinowitz’s adopted city,” Geiger mused.

  “Was it? Well, the old bastard is dead, so who cares? He’s easier to represent as an estate than as an individual.”

  “During the war. Before coming to the U.S.”

  “During the war, what?”

  “Rabinowitz lived in London during the war.”

  “Well, too bad the Huns missed him,” Greenstone said. “And that’s where you should debut the tour. You’ve got glamour, and you’ll draw a humongous crowd. So? Thoughts?”

  “Okay,” Geiger said. “You sold me. London. I’ll do London first.”

  In his home, Geiger sat down the phone. His agent could have been considered a world-class windbag were it not for the fact that he knew what he was talking about. If Brian Greenstone claimed a tour was going to be a success, he was invariably right.

  Geiger went downstairs and looked for Diana, then remembered that she always went to the health club on Monday mornings. Rolf discovered that he was apparently alone in the house. Mrs. Jamison had gone back out again. She put in forty hours a week, but sometimes—like now—Rolf couldn’t figure her schedule.

  But he knew he would survive the day even if she didn’t come back. He and Diana were to attend a preview that evening of the Renoir exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had received an invitation to the preview. The actual opening wasn’t until later in the week.

  He moved from his office down to his library. There was a stack of fan mail that he had left near the piano. He reread some of it. Then, beginning to feel ambitious and untroubled by Rabinowitz so far today, he moved to his bookcase.

  He started to select some scores. From his shelves, he pulled Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major #2. The work might be part of the program for Philadelphia if the Quaker City date worked out. Well, he reasoned. Why not? He might as well start looking at music.

  Several minutes later, he put his hands to the keyboard and began to play.

  Twenty-one

  Diana Stephenson walked through Central Park to Lincoln Center. There she continued on to the Theater and Performing Arts annex of the New York Public Library. She went to the third floor research gallery.

  There would be a wealth of material there, she knew, on Isador Rabinowitz, material not available from any on-line internet source. As a music scholar, she had her own working familiarity with the man. But she was looking for insights more than anything. She wanted to know what it was that had stayed within Rolf’s psyche. What invisible piece of the man had remained after his death?

  On the third floor of the library, Diana signed in with the librarian. He was a short, wiry man with closely cut gray hair. He assigned her a work space at a long flat table. She set down a notebook and a pair of new pens at her assigned place.

  Then she went to the massive old card catalogue of the theater and performing arts collection and found several listings for material on Isador Rabinowitz. Among them were several files of old clippings.

  She was aware of other researchers constantly coming and going. Diana paid little attention to their movement until she had written down the call-letters of the files she wanted. Done, she turned and her gaze traveled the room to find a man of about thirty-five sitting three long tables away from her.

  He was good-looking, with dark hair and a square jaw. He wore a blue pin-striped shirt and a tie. He was watching her intently. When she caught him, he lowered his eyes. Diana smiled to herself. She was both flattered and annoyed. She frequently caught men watching her. A couple of times a week, men tried to pick her up. In stores. In museums. Sometimes it was okay. Sometimes it was irritating. Never did she encourage it.

  “Well,” she told herself before getting on with her work, “at least he’s nice-looking.” This was better than drawing a creep.

  She filed her call-slips with the librarian, then went back to her desk table and waited.

  A few minutes passed. She was facing the man at the table who had been watching her. Twice he looked up to see her looking at him. The second time, he smiled. That caused her to turn away completely. Several minutes later, the librarian reappeared. He now had a name tag which identified him as Harold Milsap, Assistant Reference Librarian. Milsap cradled several aging folders in his arms.

  “Here we are,” he said as he arrived. The files she requested were contained in large envelopes, nine by twelve inches, each containing a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings. Milsap set four files upon the table in front of Diana. None had labels, other than Rabinowitz’s name, a reference code for storage, and a notation of how many clippings were in each file.

  Harold Milsap arranged the files in front of Diana so that she could see the titles on their spines. The librarian then spoke in an intense hushed voice.

  “You asked for five files. Subject matter, Rabinowitz, Isador. One file is still in use elsewhere here today.”

  “Someone else is researching him?” she asked.

  Mr. Milsap gave a nod to a research table toward the other end of the room. The dark-haired man in the blue pin-striped shirt, Diana’s newest fan, had the other file.

  She glanced at him. He was sitting quietly now, intently leaning forward, his gaze studiously on the material in front of him.

  “The gentleman right there,” Milsap said. “He’s doing some sort of research, also.”

  “Will he want these files eventually?”

  “I couldn’t say. I know he saw them yesterday. He might be finished with them.”

  “He’s been here before?”

  “Four days in a row,” the librarian said. “He’s reading everything we have on Isador Rabinowitz.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She turned slightly and took another look at the man. He was very good looking. He still didn’t look up.

  Milsap went back to his desk.

  Diana opened her first file. Carefully counting out fifteen clippings, she arranged them in front of her. The top file was the thinnest. It contained clippings form recitals by Rabinowitz in the 1950’s. They were reviews and personality profiles. Mostly journalistic wet kisses.

  Diana read through all of them. In keeping with the homogenized image that America wanted for itself in the fifties, each article had a similar spin: Rabinowitz, the genius, had suffered greatly in Europe before and during the war. Now he had brought his genius to the shores of North America and the nation was all the better for it.

  “Oh, brother,” Diana whispered to herself, thinking back on the stories that Rolf had told her. Three wives, countless mistresses, three legitimate children and two others who weren’t, all of whom would end up hating him. Law suits all over the place, physical confrontation with critics and other musicians. Lucifer of the Larghetto, Satan of the Scherzo.

  She reassembled the fifteen clippings and tucked them neatly back into the folder. She picked up the second file and waded through thirty-two more clippings. More of the same.

  She found a headline from a news story,

  MAESTRO RABINOWITZ

  BECOMES U.S. CITIZEN

  with a few paragraphs of text attached.

  The item was from Time magazine in 1953. The article, which pictured Rabinowitz with a bevy of beautiful, bosomy women at the Stork Club in New York, brought the public up to speed on the great man’s arrival in America. Time pointedly reminded its readers that Rabinowitz was a Russian-Viennese Jew, though he was now as American as a hot dog. “Or at least as American as the brilliant physicist, Albert Einstein, to whom he is frequently compared.”

  Rabinowitz? Einstein?

  Diana almost gagged on that one.

  The picture at the Stork Club, the one with all the babes, also featured J. Edgar Hoover, who had apparently helped accelerate Rabinowitz’s citizenship application. Hoover wore his usual sinister closet-creep grin.

  Presumably, thought Diana, the women are with Rabinowitz. Hoover would have had no use for them, other than as props.

  She checked with some notes on Ra
binowitz’s life that she had made before the library visit. The pianist had been married to his second wife at the time. He hadn’t divorced her till 1957. The women in the photo were leaning toward Rabinowitz, who was handsome as a man in his late thirties.

  Diana reassembled the thirty-two clippings and closed file number two. She was getting nowhere. She yawned for a moment and glanced around the research room. Idly, she wondered what it would be like to have a one-afternoon affair with a sexy stranger she met at the library. Other women she knew had done such things once or twice. So why not her?

  “Concentrate!” a voice told her.

  The subconscious command came into her mind so clearly that it bounced her out of her fatigue. These thoughts at the edge of her consciousness were irritating. They didn’t even feel like her own.

  She leaned back into her files.

  “A quick affair with a handsome anonymous stranger,” she mused further. “Never had one and probably never will.”

  Diana had never just hoped into the sack quickly with a would-be lover. All of the relationships in her life had been lengthy, involving a period of getting to know the man, developing a bond, and then making the decision to go to bed with him. Quick impersonal sex was not her style. Not her way of doing things.

  “But soon it will be, my fair goddess Diana,” the subconscious voice told her now.

  “What?” she answered. She looked up. She was now in an inane dialogue with herself.

  “Soon it will be.”

  “Soon it will be what?”

  No reply. She shook her head. One side of her subconscious was now in open revolt against the other. Good girl, bad girl? She yawned again. If she needed something good and stiff in the middle of this afternoon, it was a good stiff cup of coffee. A caffeine fix.

  She glanced at the man two tables away. She had lost his attention completely, now it appeared. She almost felt disappointed, in spite of her better sense. She went on to the third file.

  No big surprises here, either.

  Looking at another batch of kiss-facey positive write-ups, Diana developed a grudging respect for the publicity people who had sanitized Rabinowitz’s public image. She knew all about the private Rabinowitz from Rolf—the tyrannical nature, the physical abuse of his family and women, the vile language, the insistent, persistent bullying of students, peers, agendas, employees. The way he placed his hands menacingly on the backs of the necks of students, suggesting that choking them to death would be appropriate if their musicianship didn’t measure up. What a monster. Then she found something else, in reference to the old bastard.

  “…a personality and warmth as charming and incandescent as a waltz by Strauss…”

  wrote Look magazine in 1965.

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” she said.

  The “Dark Angel” stuff about the man didn’t surface until he was well into his seventies. By then he was so celebrated that everyone made excuses for him. And yet, Rabinowitz still eluded journalistic justice. Esquire had done an edgy piece on him in 2004. But even that one tended to explain him away in light of his artistic brilliance.

  Diana closed the third file and opened the fourth. It held nineteen clippings. She counted them out, arranged them neatly, and she stood up. She was getting tired. She left the clippings on the table and went downstairs and outside for a moment for a breath of air.

  “Renoir tonight at the Metropolitan Museum,” she thought. How she looked forward to it. Renoir had established himself as a genius without being a monster. So why had Rabinowitz needed to become one? She went back upstairs to the third floor. She sifted through the final assortment of clippings and found references to Rabinowitz’s “legal difficulties” in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Diana assumed the reference had to do with his wives or perhaps his entry into the United States. Heaven knew that Rabinowitz was not the type of man to bother with the letter of the law when he set out to do something.

  She had even found a quote in the Esquire Article that summarized his attitude:

  “Laws and morals, these are contemptible and thoroughly irrelevant ‘petit bourgeois’ concepts that shouldn’t inhibit those possessed by genius. I don’t put my fingers on the keys of a piano in the same way as mortal men. I don’t put my feet on the Earth in the same way, either…”

  The word, egomaniacal, came to mind. The term was too mild. For the first time she started to comprehend the ‘Dark Angel’ term that had been used for years within the classical music industry and behind Rabinowitz’s back. Writers had probably shied away from using the term in print out of fear of Rabinowitz’s influence through his recording label. A music professor at Berkley had once said of him, “If he hadn’t been a Jew, he would have been an excellent Nazi.”

  “My lasting beauty will be judged from my poetry at the keyboard, and…”

  –Rabinowitz had been quoted in another interview, this one upon the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday–

  “…not from any aspect of my personal behavior or demeanor.”

  After another quarter hour, Diana was filled with a growing revulsion for the subject of her inquiry. But she did feel that a clearer picture had emerged, though not the one she had come seeking. She wondered how Rolf had managed to tolerate being his student and chosen protégé for the seven torturous years he had been under Rabinowitz’s influence.

  Somehow, all of this refreshed her view of Rolf. It made her feel closer to him. And, looking at all this from one perspective, she was surprised the old man left as few emotional scars as he had. No wonder Rolf liked to weave themes from Chuck Berry—particularly Roll Over Beethoven and Brown Eyed Handsome Man—into passages of Ludwig van B. It was Rolf’s way—obviously one that he had developed under Rabinowitz’s tutelage—of retaining his own sanity. Plus, it was a nifty way of simultaneously clawing back at the old man and establishing his own independence. There were many ways to save one’s soul.

  Diana was finished. She assembled the final clippings, counted them carefully and—

  And?

  “What?” she asked herself. Something was wrong.

  Earlier she had counted out nineteen. Now there were twenty.

  She looked around. No one had set down any file on her table. No one was anywhere close to her. In fact, there was virtually no change in the room between the time she had gone downstairs and the five minutes later that she had returned.

  She counted the clippings again. There were twenty. Either she had miscounted the first two times—unlikely—or one had been added. She glanced through them again.

  She had read them all, it seemed. What hadn’t she noticed? What was…?

  Her hand froze as it settled on something that never touched upon Rabinowitz by name. She read the headline.

  SURVIVAL OF DEATH

  Unlike every other clipping in the folder, this one had no marking to indicate its origin. It was just there. She had carefully kept track of everything she had read, and she was certain that it hadn’t been there when she had gone downstairs.

  She started to read.

  OSLO, NORWAY. (AP) May 17

  Seven dozen European scientists and philosophers, meeting today in an extraordinary session at the Torkelsjohen Castle in Oslo, joined together to express a strong commitment to a modern spiritualistic reinterpretation of Christianity and Judaism. Central to the theme of the communiqué is the tenet that the soul, rather than passing on to the next world, remains at least for a short time within the physical confines of this world. Several case histories and experiments were cited that signaled significant evidence of contact with individuals who had been physically dead less than a year.

  Writer-philosopher and Nobel Laureate Fridtjof Nansen, who chaired the proceedings, stated that the soul…”

  Diana stopped reading as she felt a funny twinge.

  Where had this come from? And why was it nestled in with the other material on Rabinowitz? It was as if it had been placed there. Just for her.

  She tried to
ignore its implication: that the dead walk among us before they depart forever. She shivered uncontrollably. Then another strange feeling assailed her, one of being on view.

  She raised her eyes and her heart jumped. She stared at the waiting area around the elevators, where three people were standing. One of them, an older man, turned quickly away from her. But she recognized the tattered soiled coat and the rumpled trousers. She knew her East Seventy-Third Street watcher when she saw him.

  Suddenly the extra clipping made sense. “He had placed it there! Why”?

  She bolted to her feet and moved rapidly around a corner toward the bank of elevators. She left the research room at a dead run.

  One of the elevator doors opened and the three people waiting entered to descend.

  “Wait! Hold it!” Diana yelled.

  The metal doors slammed completely shut as she reached them. She punched the doors with her fist, then madly pressed the door “Up” and “Down” buttons. But the elevator had gone.

  Several seconds later, another set of doors opened for a different elevator car.

  Diana rushed in and pressed the button for the first floor. The car made one infuriating stop during which a fat woman ambled in. Then it continued. Diana ran out of the elevator, through a ground-floor reading room and around a corner toward the exit from the library.

  Far up ahead of her, going through the revolving door, she thought she saw the escaping watcher.

  She ran through the entrance area, through the security checkpoint, she was just seconds behind the man, and out the revolving door in pursuit. But outside, she stopped. She couldn’t find him. She looked in each direction. Somehow he had slipped away. Diana heaved a deep, angry sigh. How could he have disappeared so quickly?