Symphony of Secrets, page 19
He tried again. “Yep, that was a great set tonight. Bobby’s new tune was just swell, don’t you think?”
Josephine nodded, fingers roving the keyboard.
“Man, oh man, those torrents were white-hot tonight, huh?”
“Yes. You played like a torrent. The best torrent.”
His chest expanded under her praise, and he was about to say Aw, shucks, thanks or something self-deprecating, but Josephine went on, “It was shameful that Bobby didn’t bring in the swirling tabs.”
He knew better than to try to figure out what Josephine meant, but he was glowing from her appreciation and wanted it to continue. “I’m guessing you didn’t like Bobby’s new tune? I thought it was swell.”
“It was fine. It missed the swirling tabs, but otherwise, it was fine.”
“What do you mean by ‘swirling tabs’?”
Josephine motioned for Freddy to sit next to her. She played Bobby’s tune exactly. “This is what Bobby did,” she said. “He missed all the swirling tabs. Here’s where he should have let go.”
“Hold on, hold on. Now, I know Bobby ain’t the greatest composer in the world, but I think he put together a swell tune. I felt like I was in Brazil.” The piece utilized habanera rhythms and a repeated six-bar melody. The bass line, combined with the percussion and the light, skipping piano riffs, brought the melody to life.
“I did like it,” she said. “I loved listening to you. You played like the white torrent and you didn’t fight the knobs.”
That was all he needed to hear. “Thanks,” he said. “When the melody came in again, I doubled it in octaves, did you notice? Beefed it up. Bobby never saw it coming! I thought about extending the tune by another six bars. Really catchy. But I wasn’t sure if the fellas could keep up with me. C-sharp minor isn’t an easy key for Red to play in. Way too many sharps.”
Freddy’s voice trailed off, because Josephine’s hands had shifted into something different—she’d started with Bobby’s tune but then she’d inverted the melody, leaving only the first two notes intact. Her left hand danced into a virtuoso rhythm, something that felt reminiscent of Beethoven but still had a habanera feel: a pulsing exotic thrum that immediately set his foot tapping.
“The tabs begin to swirl here in this section. Can you feel their pull?”
“How are you doing this?” he asked.
She shrugged, the music building under her fingertips.
“Did you write any of this down? On your sheets?”
She shrugged again.
“Did you?”
“Yes, of course. He could have used his swirling tab if he had done this.” She extended the melody and inverted it, synthesized it, utterly transformed it. Because he knew what he was listening for, Freddy could still hear echoes of Bobby’s original tune, but he suspected that nobody else—including Bobby—would be able to. Her fingers ran ferociously across the keys.
“I’ve never heard anything like this. It’s—it’s—I don’t know what it is. It’s incredible. Did you write this one down, too?” He didn’t wait for an answer, shuffling through the pile of papers that Josephine had set near her bedroll. “This one. Is it this one?” He pulled a sheet out randomly.
“No, of course not. That was the subway ride yesterday morning.” Josephine stopped playing, opened her handbag, flipped through her pages, and handed one to him. The ever-present JoR stood out stark in the corner. “It’s this one. It has the tab that should have been swirling.”
This page, like the others, was a bewildering design of curved and straight lines, geometric shapes, dots, and dashes.
“Play it again, will you?” he said, staring at the paper as if he were hoping it would light up and explain itself.
She played the song again.
“This is an amazing thing you’ve done. I can’t believe you did this from hearing it once. This is a brand-new song, you know that? Another brand-new song, like ‘Bring Back the Moon.’ ”
Josephine yawned, got up from the piano bench, gathered her toiletries.
“You have more of these?” he asked her.
“More of what?”
“More new songs. Not just the ones you hear. New songs.”
“The songs I want to hear, you mean.”
“Yes,” he said. “The songs you want to hear.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You do? How many do you have? New songs? Just these here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “You know that I don’t like numbers.” One hand was on the doorknob, the other clutched toothbrush and toothpaste.
“Wait! How many more like this do you have?” He brandished the paper.
She looked back at him, blank-faced. “Probably a thousand. Or two hundred. Or maybe a dozen.”
“You have a thousand new songs?”
She shrugged. “Or a dozen. I don’t really count. I’m going to the bathroom, okay?” She peered out. Apparently no one was in sight so she crept out, down the hall.
While she was gone, he paced the studio. Then, too impatient to wait, he unearthed the papers from beneath and behind her bedroll, pawing through the sheets as if one would suddenly be illuminated and comprehensible.
Which is where she found him when she returned.
“What are you doing?” she said from the doorway, lunging toward him.
He stood up, clutching a handful of papers as if to ward her off. “Josephine,” he said steadily, “how many new songs do you think you have right here?”
“At least twenty,” she said. “Maybe forty. I don’t really count.”
In some places the drift of pages was easily an inch or more thick. She had thousands of pages—wrinkled, creased, folded, flattened—piled and wedged into every conceivable space imaginable.
“Oh my gosh,” he said. “You have all this? There must be hundreds of— Is this all of them?” Freddy flipped through the pages.
“Yes,” Josephine said, “besides the ones in my trunk.”
He stopped, stared up at her, mouth open. “Your trunk? What trunk? What are you—”
“The one I left in the Pennsylvania Station,” she told him patiently. “I didn’t have the money to get it out. And then after Howard left I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you ever mention it before?”
“You never asked.”
“Wha—what was I going to ask? If you had random luggage stuffed with your scribbles hidden around the city?”
She shrugged.
“Could we get your trunk? Could I see those sheets? The ones in the trunk?”
“It’s probably not open now,” she said. “And we have to be at Ditmars in a few hours.”
Still he sat on his knees, staring down at her pages. “We can pick your trunk up from Penn Station after work. You should’ve told me about it. I would’ve gotten it for you.”
She leaned down, kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You were wonderful tonight,” she said. He looked up and his eyes met hers. The electricity jumped between them. She’d never kissed him before.
He was eight years younger than she was. Would that matter? Probably not. Definitely not. He got to his feet, looked away. “You know something? You’re pretty swell yourself.” He backed away from her papers and her bedroll, busied himself getting his own toiletries for the bathroom.
When he returned, Josephine was already curled on her pallet, hair barely visible under the blankets, facing away from him.
He crept into his own bed, turned out the bedside lamp.
But sleep eluded him. How many songs—new songs, like “Bring Back the Moon”—were encoded in the pages that Josephine slept on, like a dragon on its treasure trove? And how many more were in this trunk? How big was the trunk? How many pages could a trunk hold? Ten thousand? A million?
And then there was that song she’d played tonight. Bobby’s song. No, not Bobby’s song—it was Josephine’s now. She’d transformed it, made it her own. He would need her to play it again to transcribe it properly. Would Bobby want credit? Would Bobby even recognize his own song? Of course, if Freddy wrote great lyrics to accompany the song, then really it was more Freddy’s song than Bobby’s or Josephine’s.
Plus there were all those songs in that trunk.
* * *
—
“Boss! I’ve done it!” A week later, Freddy bounded past Eunice’s desk and up the stairs. He took them two at a time, waving the sheets of foolscap at Ditmars, who glowered at him from under heavy eyebrows. “You gotta hear these,” Freddy said. “I wrote you four new songs. Four! They’re all winners!”
“All four of them?” Ditmars turned back to the ledger open in front of him. “Get outta here. We’ve done this dance already. Come get your assignments.”
“Boss, I’m telling ya, these are hits. I know you weren’t too keen last time, but—”
Ditmars cut him off, even taking the cigar out of his mouth as if to be absolutely clear. “Delaney, get to work. Quit wasting everyone’s time. Go pick up your assignments and get going.”
Freddy stood in the hall, dazed. A couple of other fellows snickered, and Calvin Broadwell elbowed him in the ribs as he slipped past to get his assignment. Miles Turpin and Josh Roberts headed into practice rooms. Freddy couldn’t believe that Ditmars had blown him off. These new songs were great.
Last Friday, he and Josephine had picked up the trunk from Penn Station. It had been an ordeal, utterly buried in the very back of the left-luggage office. The clerk—a scrawny, pockmarked young man who barely spoke English—had told them originally that it wasn’t there, but Freddy wouldn’t take no for an answer and made the clerk check again—and again. Finally he returned with a large beat-up steamer trunk in tow. Stripes of thick dust marked its surface.
“That’s it,” Josephine said, and the trunk slid beneath the counter and into Freddy’s outstretched hands.
“Do you have a key?” he asked Josephine as he wrestled it out of the baggage room. It was very heavy. Josephine searched in her reticule, handed him a small golden key. He opened the lock, lifted the lid. It was filled to the very top with paper: napkins, envelopes, notepads, and anything else that would be suitable to hold Josephine’s characteristic blur of ciphers. He closed the lid quickly, as if worried that someone else would rush in and grab a crumpled handful.
Back at the apartment—to take them uptown he’d had to hire another cab and pay another day’s worth of wages—he dived into the trunk, handing Josephine one sheet after another.
“What’s this?” he’d say, and she’d tell him it was the sound of cows back in North Carolina, or her siblings arguing, or her mother complaining, or the choir concert she’d heard when she was fifteen, or her sisters practicing piano. But every once in a while—maybe every dozen pages or so—there’d be a melody, something she “wished she heard,” and he’d put that sheet into a different pile. After several hours they’d made only a small dent in the sea of paper but had forty-odd pages set aside. Plus, of course, there was all the paper underneath her bed, which Freddy had only begun culling through. His head swam.
He’d had Josephine play each of the forty-three new melodies to determine which felt the most vibrant and exciting. As a song plugger, his job was to tap into popular taste, to anticipate what kind of music his patrons wanted to hear, so this skill now stood him in good stead. All the songs were terrific, but he chose four that he thought were particularly compelling to transcribe and overlay with lyrics.
Now, at Ditmars & Ross, he marched into an empty practice room, sat down at the piano, and started off with “Walk a Mile for Your Smile.” It was a bouncy, effervescent tune that should have been a rag but wasn’t, should have been jazz but wasn’t; it had an irrepressible beat and a melody that got stuck in your head the first time you heard it. Freddy played the whole song through, then played it through again.
You got it too
Always you
I’m headin up that aisle
I’d walk a mile
For your smile
Song pluggers, composers, and music publishers were nosy by nature, attuned to listening, always on the alert for something fresh. New songs popped out daily from music publishers, but all the songs had a commonality: ragtime songs sounded similar; the ballads all had a kinship; you knew one coon song because it resembled the one you’d played for two weeks at Altman’s, three months ago. So when a new song—one that actually felt new—floated into the air, Freddy’s colleagues paid attention.
First it was Josh Roberts, poking his head in, coming inside, standing over Freddy as he played. Then Chuck Keats slipped in, leaned against the wall. Miles Turpin appeared a few minutes later, joined Chuck and, after a minute, leaned into the hall. “Hey,” he called, “Calvin, get in here.” One by one, Freddy’s coworkers peeked in, and stayed, and listened.
“Gee, that’s a swell tune. What is it?”
“Whatcha playin’ there, Freddy?”
He played “Walk a Mile for Your Smile” four times running, singing his heart out, and then, without missing a beat, switched it out for “Carnation Celebration,” another upbeat song that had echoes of a John Philip Sousa march, but this tune combined a Texas two-step feel with the legato melody soaring above the strict rhythm. After a few rounds he started in on the lyrical “Let the Rain Come”:
The wind blows from the West
And she has left me here
With one final request
Let the rain come, let the rain come, let it come
He was watching the doorway as he sang, so immediately caught sight of Ditmars behind Chuck Keats. Freddy switched into the final tune, the mid-tempo “Careful What You Give Away,” which was an amalgamation of Latin rhythms mixed with a sultry soulful work song. The combination was imaginative and seemed unlikely, but worked like a dream—a clear, original take on all these disparate music styles. He reached the last note, and the little room echoed with applause. Applause wasn’t really something that happened in the halls of a music publisher, but these songs were so infectious, so full of life, so absolutely fresh and charming, what else was there to do? His colleagues patted him on the back and shoulders. Miles Turpin shook his hand, saying, “You have gold there, pal.” He bent down to whisper, “Don’t give it away.”
Freddy met his eye, nodded. He had no intention of giving anything away.
In the meantime, Ditmars was yelling, “All right, break it up. Eunice has the uptown assignments. The rest are on my desk. Let’s get to work, fellas. These songs ain’t gonna sell themselves.”
Freddy joined the exodus.
“Delaney, where are you going?” Ditmars asked him.
“Just going to get my assignments for today. From Eunice.”
“Hold on a minute. Those were some swell tunes you played there.”
“Oh? You liked ’em, after all?”
“Who wrote ’em?”
He hesitated. Should he tell Ditmars about Josephine’s involvement? If he did, wouldn’t Ditmars be less enthusiastic? Of course he would. Coloreds weren’t like regular people. And Freddy’d still pay Josephine, of course. He was looking out for her. This was better for all of them. “Those are all mine. Remember? I tried to show them to you, but you thought it was all baloney.”
“Yeah, yeah, well, I’ll give you fifty bucks. There’s four, right?” Ditmars shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth.
Freddy Delaney wasn’t going to be your average song plugger anymore. He was going places. Freddy Delaney had four songs in his hand and another thirty-nine back in his apartment, and another who-knew-how-many-more still waiting patiently for the sunlight and the piano to bring them to life.
“Why don’t we discuss this over coffee?” Freddy said, and then yelled down the stairs, “Eunice? Could you bring us two cups of coffee? One for me and one for Mr. Ditmars.”
The cigar almost fell out of Ditmars’s mouth.
Freddy led the way to Ditmars’s office, made a production of sitting in one of the guest chairs. “How much are you offering?” he asked as Ditmars made his own way around the desk. “Let’s make it a real offer, waddya say?”
“Twelve dollars and fifty cents each. Fifty bucks total,” Ditmars said. “That’s more than I paid you for ‘Take Back the Moon.’ Take it or leave it.”
“I was thinking more like forty bucks each. Plus royalties. A dollar for each sheet. And it’s ‘Bring Back the Moon.’ Not Take.”
Ditmars rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, then pulled it out, stared at it like it offended him, stuck it in the ashtray. “You want what? Forty dollars per song? And royalties?”
“How much did you make on ‘Bring Back the Moon’?”
“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind? It’s a little early to be hittin’ the sauce, don’t you think? I’d never pay forty bucks for a song. Never.”
Freddy swallowed. “These are hits, every one of ’em. You paid Miles twenty bucks for ‘You’re My Lovey Mine’ and that wasn’t a tenth of how good these are. Forty bucks each is fair. We both know you’re going to make loads more off them. This is actually a great opportunity for you, you know that?” Freddy was surprised at himself for keeping his calm and meeting Ditmars’s eyes.
“You got lucky. You’re not a songwriter. I’m not sure how you pulled these tunes outta yer ass. Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll offer you fifteen dollars for each song. Each one. That’s sixty bucks. That’s a lot more than you normally make. A lot.”
Eunice knocked, entered with two cups of coffee. She didn’t look at Freddy, but he could tell by the way she set the coffee down in front of him that she was rooting for him. He met her gaze as she left.
“Thirty dollars apiece,” Freddy said. “Plus royalties. That’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”
