by John Gardner
“‘Really, all the composers I know have mothers and fathers,’ yes. He was terrifying, but my three hours with him lasted for six hours, and I learned more than I would have done in a year with Toscanini. He taught me that the conductor was the servant of music and the servant of the score. By the age of seventeen, I was almost complete in my musical education. I also knew that, if I were to become a conductor, then my job was to illuminate.”
Herbie nodded, as though this did not surprise him. “Also by the time you were sixteen, Louis, the war that had engulfed Europe had also pulled the United States into its furnace.”
Passau shrugged. “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Uncle Sam needed me on every street corner so I went and offered my services. I recall that I had dreams of glory which always ended up with me conducting a fantastic concert with two military bands playing Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, with massed cannon and riflemen. I also thought there would be airplanes flying overhead. In the end, they would not have me.”
“Because you had German origins?”
“Because I had flat feet. Oh, indeed some completely German communities were faced with terrible attacks, windows broken, homes set on fire, beatings in the streets. Some were taken off and arrested as spies.”
“Including your six-hour teacher, Karl Muck.”
Passau’s face lit up. “Yes, it is ironic, Herb, that I should find myself in this position, when the man who gave me my first lesson in the art of directing an orchestra was thrown from America as a spy for the Kaiser.”
“Hilarious.” Herbie closed his eyes. “Tell me the next hundred pages of your history, Louis. I’m all ears.”
“Well, my father was prospering, and he was by now thought of as wholly American. Nobody bothered us, and when the Johnnies came marching home again I was almost eighteen years old, filled out, tall, the blue eyes. Hey, my curly hair drove the girls wild. But I was too cowardly to do anything about it. Aaron taught me, I still went around with Carlo, worked for my father and lived pretty well.”
At weekends Louis and Carlo continued to make trips to Harlem, and Louis learned more kinds of piano playing, including ragtime—bouncy, syncopated sound, played against a regular two-four, or four-four, beat.
“I think I knew, even then, that one day this kind of sound would emerge, in one form or another, and be enfolded into the classical repertoire. I even thought I could detect it in works written long ago. If you’ve read the books about me, then you’ll know I was to get great criticism in the fifties for my recordings of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Poppea. People said I had modernized them. I hadn’t, of course, it’s all there if you look.”
There were moments, Herbie Kruger thought, when he really disliked Passau. The man was a genius, everyone knew that, but a genius does not have to tell everybody how wonderful he has been. Big Herbie controlled his desire to inform Louis Passau, once and for all, that he was a pompous, overblown prick. Instead, he even actively encouraged him, because the kind of information he was getting from the old man was detail that had never surfaced, in interview, article or book. All of it was new so, being a spymaster with immense experience in all aspects of the trade, Herbie lusted after any item dropped by the Maestro.
These thoughts slid through his mind now, though he had no idea that, during this particular session, it would be lust, in the usual sense, that would play a predominant part.
“What I did, consciously, during the days working for my father, was to appear ham-fisted, with ten thumbs. I botched work with leather. I could never shape things exactly as my father wished. I became a numskull on the subject of shoemaking, though, alas, proved to be adept at dealing with the customers in the front of the shop. You see, Herb, I could never resist the chance, or the urge, to be charming. That in itself almost robbed music of a leading figure.”
Joseph cajoled, bullied and constantly railed at his son, who could not even cut a piece of expensive leather with any accuracy. Yet Joseph was a worried man, his business went well, he was making both money and a reputation, but Gerda was showing signs of failing health. In her late thirties and early forties she had the look of a woman well over sixty years of age. Her hair went prematurely gray and she had arthritis which, on some days, made walking impossible.
Aaron talked again to his pupil about the future, for he had made several further advances to the Packensteiners, pleading with them to give Louis the chance he deserved.
“I should not speak with you like this, Louis, but it might be that you will have to make some painful decision in the next year or so. You are either going to be tethered to your father’s business, like some scapegoat, or you will have to leave and meet your own destiny. That will, I know, cause great pain, huge anguish, particularly to your mother. But it is possible that it’s the only way you will do what you were born to do.”
Young Packensteiner nodded, miserable at the thought of bringing further heartbreak to his sick mother.
“Truly,” Hamovitch told him, “you have to gather up immense courage. When the time comes, you will have to leave, like a thief in the night. It’ll be of no benefit for you to stay and face it out with your parents, however much you love them. If you disclose your plans, they will only cling harder, and you will find it more difficult to escape.”
“Herbie, my friend,” for once Passau did not look smug. “Herbie, Aaron could not know how prophetic he was. Leave like a thief in the night, he said. I left like a thief. No doubt about that.”
In the autumn of 1919, Louis made up his mind. He would carry on for three years only. If his father had not changed his mind by 1922—when he was twenty-one years of age—he would leave. During that time he would find some way of getting money together, to fund his escape into the world outside his parents’ home and Joseph Packensteiner’s business. Three years, then it would be a rift, maybe for all time.
But, first, there was to be another parting of the ways. Carlo regularly joined Louis on Sundays for sprees in Harlem where Louis watched, with unashamed envy, as the rich folk came to visit the area, going slumming in their glad rags. He began to drink a little, became well-known in some of the clubs and night spots, even sitting in with bands for fun and a few bucks.
Around the middle of October, the young men set out, one evening, for their old haunts and, on the omnibus, Carlo broke the news. “This’ll be our last trip, Lou.”
“Our last trip?”
Carlo did not look at him. “I’m goin’ outta town, Lou. I gotta job away from New York. Lotsa money. A good life. My old man fixed me up with a buddy of his who’s a real bigshot in Chicago. Guy by the name of Big Jim Colosimo.”
For a couple of seconds, Louis was shocked. “Diamond Jim Colosimo?” Then the shock turned into envy. “He’s a gangster, Carlo. I read about him in the papers.”
“Sure, maybe he’s into a few rackets; but you shouldn’t believe all the newspapers say. Point is he’s rich, kid; and he runs the biggest place in Chicago. Everyone goes there. All the famous people, even opera stars. Everybody. So I’m goin’. Some day I’ll come back rich.”
That night, for old times’ sake, they went back to their favorite haunt, the first one they had ever visited. They were greeted by people who knew them as regulars in the area, men and women who had heard Louis play. The barman set up drinks for them and Carlo excused himself. He was away for a long time. In fact, Louis was not to see him until much later in the evening. As he sipped his beer at the bar, he became aware of a short, pretty black girl, who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old, standing next to him, smiling. He could smell the scent she was using, and she pressed the side of her body close to him.
He had seen her around the place before; even made remarks to Carlo, for she was a slinky, sensual girl who moved in a way which made any real man begin to walk with a slight stoop.
“Hi, Lou.” She came even closer to him, then whispered, “You wanna come upstairs?”
“What?”—“Herbie, I never had a
feeling like it, not even when the young girl squeezed my cock after I’d played piano with Jim Johnson. This one? She woulda made a stud mouse feel like a stallion.”
“I’m a present,” she said. “Carlo’s paid for me. We can take as long as we like, Lou. I’ll make it real nice for you.”
“Carlo’s paid?”
“Sure, he’s paid. Says it’s a farewell present. I’m young, clean and here just for you, Lou. Or, maybe you don’t like me.”
“Herbie, old friend.” The ageing Maestro’s eyes seemed glazed over. “They say you always remember the first time, and the first girl you ever had. Well, I’ll tell you they’re right. If I could still get it up, I’d fantasize about her.”
“I’m sure, Lou. Can we take it as read that you had a great time, eh?”
“Great! Great, you say? Herbie, for a young man I doubt if anyone on this planet had such a first time. …”
“It’s what we all think, Lou.” In spite of himself, Herbie recalled a dilapidated room in Berlin, just after the Russians had won the battle. He even saw, and smelled, the girl, maybe a couple of years older than himself. He remembered her name was Lotte, and she took his virginity from him with a longing, loving tenderness which made both of them forget their precarious situation. He thought often of Lotte, and wondered what had happened to her.
“Herbie, I tell you, this girl, her name was Melodie with an ‘ie’—leastways, that’s what she said it was, and it could have been right. She played it like an instrument, Herb. You ever had a woman like that? Like an instrument on which you play the most wonderful music? Melodie was like an entire orchestra. I still think of her when I conduct Sacre”—by which he meant Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “All those throbbing and pounding strings. She was amazing. She was my first for quite a long time. I went back to her, and we were lovers: which meant I didn’t pay her anything. But she was an inspiration, that little black Melodie.”
Herbie was surprised. Passau seemed genuinely moved. But, as ever, he spoiled it.
“I tell you, Herb, that girl coulda sucked the paint off a Rolls-Royce.”
“You have quite a reputation, Lou. With women, I mean.”
“They became necessary to me. Like a drug, and I could never be satisfied with just one. I think all my life, after Melodie, I needed women. After concerts, after I had poured out myself on the box with a great orchestra and a great performance, I always needed a woman. You know what the Italians say?”
“Apart from ‘Mama mia’?”
“They say that screwing is the poor man’s opera, though I think opera is the rich man’s aphrodisiac.”
“You could be right, Lou. What was the final outcome?”
“On that first time I had six outcomes, Herb, and I’m not boasting.”
“I believe you. There’s a story that you once fired your leading tenor—a very famous man—because he caught you with your prima donna.”
“Not me. That was Toscanini, but it’s told about any conductor who gets a reputation. They all get caught by the tenor when they’re with the diva, yes. And they all fire the tenor. It’s not true, of course, but that’s how they tell it.” He gave a thin smile, which was not a true smile in that it did not go near his eyes.
“So what happened next, Lou?”
Carlo Giarre left a Chicago address and telephone number with young Packensteiner. “Don’t forget, Lou,” he said at their parting. “Anything you need—a job even—just write, or arrive. I’ll be there, and I’ll keep in touch.”
He was as good as his word. The following year, when the newspapers were full of the story of Big Jim Colosimo’s gangland murder in his own famous Colosimo’s Cafe, Louis received a short note with a new address, telephone number and a scrawled message—You can get me here most of the time, or leave a number for me to call you back. Plenty of work here for a guy like you. Plenty of dough as well.
The address was still Chicago: a place called The Four Deuces.
By this time, the Volstead Act had become law, under the full title the National Prohibition Act. America was officially dry of liquor, and this spawned every evil in the book. New addresses and telephone numbers arrived from Carlo, and his notes begged young Packensteiner to join him. “Get rich the easy way,” one of them said. Another was scribbled from a bed in the Jackson Park Hospital: “Be out in about a week. They don’t use rock salt here.” It was inevitable that this strange strong mixture of friendship would survive. In the end one of them would come running for the other.
There were different letters, of course—from Isaak and Eisa. They now told a tale of success turned to fear. With the war over, the need for army boots had ceased to exist. Business dropped, and there was trouble everywhere. In Russia, with the revolution, in Austria, Romania and Hungary. Things did not look so good now but, even though Joseph wrote impassioned letters, his brother and sister-in-law could not be persuaded to come to America.
Louis also had more letters from his beloved cousins, who told the same tale, though the girls wrote of flirtations with officers—they were always officers—and a genuine love match between David and a local girl. He would be married within the year. Like his father, Louis tried to tempt them with stories of life and money in America. When they wrote back, not one of his cousins ever responded to the inducements.
“I constantly fumbled work with leather and shoes,” Passau sounded smug. “I drove my father to despair. But, in the spring of 1920, he managed to get the better of me.”
Joseph purchased a second set of premises, a new shop and workroom, in the very fashionable area near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was to be the showplace of what he saw as a whole chain of stores. By this time the boy, Sheldon Pamensky, had proved to be a natural craftsman. He also had a cousin, Benny Pamensky, who was already a shoemaker of some skill but little brain.
To begin with, Louis expected his father would take charge and move into the new shop. But, to his surprise, he found that Joseph had stolen a march on him.
“I’ve given up any idea of you ever being able to make shoes,” his father told him one morning. “The new place will open next Monday. Benny will be the shoemaker, I’ll visit once in a while, we’ll get another apprentice. You, my fine son, will be the manager. Up on Fifth Avenue, they expect to see some style in their stores. You have that kind of smartness, so you can run the place.”
The following Monday saw Louis, in a new black suit, take charge of Packensteiner & Son, Fifth Avenue. Benny had the workshop in the back, and a boy, Abe Schilling, with him.
By late in 1920, Louis had settled into the new position. He had also found a way of obtaining the cash he needed to squirrel away if he was ever going to escape from New York and his parents.
It was simple once he had organized it. What was more, because his father paid him a pittance, he had no conscience about stealing from the business—filching from the till, falsifying accounts. He even pocketed cash when someone came in to settle an account, which he, naturally, left in the ledger as still unpaid, taking care to see that no further bill was sent to the customer.
Towards the end of 1921, Joseph announced that the Fifth Avenue store was to have another employee, Benny’s young sister, Ruth, barely seventeen years of age, to assist in fitting the many ladies who came to the shop. She would also run the stockroom, so she worked under the lascivious eye of Louis, who—as the old man now put it—“Found that I had an erection every time I looked at her. I had saved just over one hundred dollars, by stealing from my father and to be truthful, Herbie, I would gladly have thrown this at the Pamensky girl, just to cop a feel.”
She was slim, dark-haired, and wore the usual long skirts of shopgirls, but somehow her skirt was tight, almost as tight as her blouse which looked as though it could never restrain her growing, swelling breasts.
“Herb, I lusted after her, and it was almost my complete downfall. It should have taught me a lesson. The lesson of that old proverb, ‘a standing cock knows no conscience.’ I l
usted. Oh boy, did I lust.”
It started on a Wednesday evening in early December. Joseph Packensteiner had taken to visiting the store every other day and he had made his visit earlier in the afternoon. Benny—and the boy, Abe—had gone home, as they usually did around six, leaving Louis to close the place up and settle the till.
Just after six o’clock he told Ruth that she could also leave while he cashed up. He was particularly interested in dealing with the cash that evening because, after his father had left, two large accounts had been settled in ready money. He planned to let one of them, a sum of over twenty-five dollars, remain on the books, while he would let the other—thirty dollars—show as being paid.
The day’s takings, minus the twenty-five he planned to pocket, could be handed over to his father with pride. Better for the girl to be out of the way when he cashed up and falsified the till ledger.
But Ruth had other ideas. She looked as though ice would not melt between her lips. “She had a smile I have never seen on a girl before or since,” Passau commented. “I never want to see a smile like it, either, it was tantalizing, as though her lips beckoned you, yet, somehow, it was the smile of a snow queen.”
“Frosty?” Big Herbie asked.
“No. A smile of sugar icing.” She was a girl of high intelligence, the kind who was determined to get to the top in any way she could. She was not going to be like her mother, who scrubbed and polished office floors from three in the morning until seven. The Packensteiner business was going places. One day it would be worth a lot of money. True, she nursed a secret desire for the blue-eyed, curly-haired Louis, but that simply made her long-term plan easier. She would have her share of the Packensteiner future, which she saw as the Packensteiner fortune.
On that particular evening she said there were still some shoes to be put away, and some to be made ready for delivery first thing in the morning. She had promised Benny that she would leave them, boxed and parceled, so that Abe could get them out first thing.