Symphony of Secrets, page 20
“You’re making a huge mistake. You should take what you can get. You’re no big-time wheelin’ and dealin’ agent. You’re a mediocre song plugger who got lucky. Take the deal.”
The blood was pumping in Freddy’s ears, almost deafening him. He swallowed again and did his best to make his lips curve up into a smile. Then he met Ditmars’s gaze and gathered his sheet music, which he’d tossed onto the desk. “Okay, boss. I guess I’d better get to work. Those songs aren’t going to sell themselves, right?”
“So that’s it?” Ditmars said. “You aren’t selling? You might want to think twice about this.”
“I’m not selling for less than thirty,” Freddy said. “I’m going to stick to what I’m halfway good at. I’ll get my assignments from Eunice. Thanks.”
He marched out of the room, headed down the stairs. He wasn’t just a mediocre song plugger. He was great. Everyone thought so. “Bring Back the Moon” was making tons of dough, wasn’t it? A great tune and even greater lyrics. That melody would have been nothing without those lyrics. The nerve of Ditmars to call him mediocre. With each stair tread he got angrier and more self-righteous. Thirty dollars a song was a steal! If Ditmars couldn’t see that, he’d find someone else who could. There were music publishers up and down the block, and more up by Times Square. Maybe he’d just get a new song-plugging job somewhere else.
He was halfway down the stairwell when Ditmars’s voice came booming after him. “Delaney! Get back in here.”
“What for?” he called back. Lanier Publishing. He’d start with Lanier. They were a class A outfit. Not like this two-bit joint.
“Get back in here,” Ditmars roared again. “I’m sure we can make this work.”
Freddy paused, looked up. Ditmars was out of sight, presumably still at his desk, but it were as if Freddy could see him still sitting there, soggy cigar melting in the ashtray. Freddy called up, “If you’re not going to give me thirty, there’s no point.”
“Will you get up here and not shout out private business where everyone can hear? Get up here.”
Freddy trudged back up, stood in the doorway. “Are you giving me the thirty bucks a song?”
“I’ll do seventy-five cents royalty. No more,” Ditmars said.
“Thirty bucks a song and seventy-five cents royalty,” Freddy repeated.
Ditmars sighed dramatically. “And not a penny more, you hear me?”
“Including mechanicals?” Mechanical royalties meant he’d get paid whenever someone bought the song to play on the phonograph, a machine that was becoming popular around town. Freddy suspected that phonographs would be the way of the future, especially since he’d heard that the technology was improving daily.
“Mechanicals too?” Ditmars said. “You trying to make me go broke?”
Freddy waited in the doorway.
Ditmars sighed. “Fine. Mechanicals too. Fifty cents. Not a penny more.”
Freddy leaned in, shook Ditmars’s hand. “You got a deal, boss.” He handed Ditmars the sheet music. Ditmars took them, turned them around, peered down at the notations as if trying to discover something magical on each page. “One more thing,” Freddy said. “I want the credit line to read ‘Fred Delaney,’ okay? Not Freddy. I’m gonna be Fred from now on. There are a lot more songs where this one came from.”
That evening, out of sight of the music publisher, Freddy and Josephine shared a cab uptown. Because they could afford it. Josephine didn’t understand about money, but Freddy assured her that they each made sixty dollars that day, which was as much as Josephine usually made in three months. He told her that the songs would be published under Fred Delaney, since he’d written the lyrics and it would be just too confusing if people knew the songs came from a colored woman. Otherwise people would think these were coon songs, or minstrel songs, or maybe jazz or the blues. Plus the songs wouldn’t be worth as much, being written by a colored woman instead of a white man.
Josephine nodded as if she understood, but Freddy wasn’t sure that he’d gotten through to her. No matter, he could explain it again to her if he had to.
He didn’t tell her about the royalties he’d negotiated from Ditmars. He meant to, but—honestly—it had slipped his mind. He’d tell her one of these days, for sure.
* * *
—
They headed uptown again by cab, which in itself was unusual since they always economized and took the subway. Freddy could get used to this life.
“Not tonight,” Freddy told her. “We’re cabbing it. And wear your new dress.”
Last week he’d dragged her up to Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, the so-called Boulevard of Dreams, to pick out a new dress and shoes. Negroes, of course, couldn’t shop where everyone else did, down in Midtown—they had their own shops up in Harlem, so that’s where Freddy took her.
They went to three shops before he found what he wanted: what the shopgirl, eyeing Freddy, said was called a “day dress”: a sleek maroon gown with a wide golden-yellow collar. “It’ll match your handbag,” Freddy told her. “Put it on.”
Josephine had trooped obediently to the dressing room, tried it on, made her way back out, arms slightly spread, to where Freddy waited. “Ah, you look like a million bucks,” he said. She did indeed look nice: the fabric hugged her form, flared out below her hips. No way anybody would think that a few months ago she’d been homeless, sleeping in public parks or down by the river. Freddy’s heart expanded. He’d really been generous, taking her in and finding her a job and letting her sleep on his floor. Sure, he was getting something out of it, too—his musicianship had improved immensely, and now income from her songs were lining his pockets—but that didn’t stop the basic facts of how much he’d helped her. He loved this feeling, loved the gratitude and complete trust she had in him, spinning for him and the salesgirl. He’d gotten her a maroon velvet hat, too, to match.
Now Josephine smoothed the still-new maroon fabric—Freddy wouldn’t let her wear it till tonight—over her knees as she perched on the edge of the cab’s seat. He wouldn’t tell her where they were going but of course she recognized the place when the cab pulled up: the Shortstack. This black-and-tan club was getting a great deal of buzz from all over—colored and white. The house band wasn’t an ordinary four- or five-piece band; the Shortstack’s claim to fame was that they housed a genuine twenty-two-piece swing band, like the ones in St. Louis. And Freddy could tell how much Josephine loved the full-on musical immersion.
When the cab came to a halt and she moved to open the door, Freddy said, “Wait.” He got out of his side, ran around, and opened her door. He held out his hand like a butler or a footman to help her out.
She stared up at him, eyes wide, not understanding.
“Come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. “This is your night. This is how all the swells do it.”
She laid one hand lightly in his and stood, so trusting; and he vowed, again, to take care of her.
He held her hand as they made their way inside, down a short flight of stairs, where the doors opened up into a huge subterranean room. Tables and chairs lay scattered about, and between and among and on top of them, people were dancing: white and colored, the music gyrating over them. He caught the maître d’s eye and the man led them to a table, front and center, with a large Reserved for Private Party sign tented on top.
Freddy checked his watch. When the house band started their next number, he knew they’d arrived right on time.
The band played three notes.
She stiffened, expression even blanker than usual, and he could tell she recognized the tune. He grinned at her.
“Bring Back the Moon” was pouring from the big band like water through a sieve. It was all around her. No longer in her head. He figured that she’d heard the song played, of course, but never with this many instruments, never on so large a scale. Never so full of life. Earlier that week Freddy had offered the house band the exclusive opportunity to play the new music he and Josephine had been working on, if the band would play the songs for an hour straight.
The band started with “Bring Back the Moon.” Then “Walk a Mile for Your Smile” and the other tunes Ditmars had purchased. The singer was a big-voiced alto whose lips curled lovingly around each word, as if she were tasting it. Then the band played a few other popular instrumental songs—“The Last Night in Your Arms,” “The Third Time Charm,” “Little Green Eyes”—that Josephine had composed. She hadn’t sat down at the table and now edged closer and closer to the stage, unmistakable in her new maroon dress. She wasn’t scrawling madly on her paper; she just stood there, illuminated in the beam of her music, absorbing every note.
The crowd of dancing patrons had grown larger with each song. Soon everyone but Freddy, it seemed, was dancing. He leaned back in his chair, arms sprawled across the backs of the chairs next to him, and just watched. They were all so happy. He’d brought enjoyment and delight to all these people, and to Josephine Reed most of all. He, Freddy Delaney, had done this. Even the band seemed to play with more and more enthusiasm as the night went on.
He’d never seen Josephine glow like this before—yes, there was no word other than glow. He’d heard women described as “glowing” but had never actually seen it for himself. In her beautiful new dress with her matching shoes (he’d insisted on those, too), he could see her only in three-quarter profile: she was devouring the music coming from the dais, but her eyes were shining and her face was alight. Her smile was worth all the hours Freddy had spent plugging.
The band played the last chord of “Novelty Days” and started the opening chords to “Sublime Summer,” an upbeat, danceable song that sounded like the house band was born to play. Freddy slipped through the crowd and extended his hand to Josephine. “C’mon! Dance with me!”
Josephine looked up at him, confused. For a moment her smile faded. “What?”
“C’mon, kiddo,” he repeated. “Let’s you and me dance to our song! Waddya say?” He inched his hand closer to Josephine’s.
A glance back at the band, then down at his hand, then up to his face. Then she focused on his hand as she reached out and allowed his hand to clasp hers.
She danced effortlessly. He didn’t know why that surprised him, but it did. He’d never seen her dance; off the dance floor there was something slightly uncoordinated and disengaged about her movements. Who had taught her? How had she learned? He made a note to find out. But right now her maroon dress flared as he spun her, her feet tapping in elegant rhythm. How had she even learned these steps? Arms flailing, feet kicking high, she spun and shimmied. He realized, after the third or fourth dance, that his cheeks were aching—he was smiling so much. Not just because of Josephine’s happiness but from his own, too. He had done all this for her, and she was loving it.
They danced until the final note of the night. When the band finished, the applause was deafening. The band packed up their instruments and Josephine, who must have been exhausted, now sat at the edge of her seat, biting her lip slightly as if trying to remember everything.
They were the last patrons at the Short Stack. The manager had come up and shaken their hands and patted Freddy on the back, telling him what a brilliant composer he was, and Freddy had just stood there, smiling tightly, not looking at Josephine.
As the lights crashed out and the vast dance floor reduced to shadows, Freddy thought about the Alibi Club and his first late-night encounter with Josephine. How far they’d come!
At last he led her up and out into the early-morning quiet. No vehicles passed. He worried about catching a cab, but after a few moments, headlights rounded a corner and approached.
“Freddy?” Josephine said next to him.
“Yes? Everything okay?”
“Why did you do this?” she asked.
He’d been looking at the cab, holding out one arm, but now he turned to her. “Because you deserve to be happy. And I thought that would make you happy.”
She was looking at the ground. Typical.
“I’ll do everything I can to make you happy,” he said. “I promise.”
A beat, and as the cab approached, swerving toward them, she hugged him. Even though she didn’t like to be touched. Even though she never reached out to anyone.
But now she reached out to him. “Thank you,” he heard her whisper into his chest. “Thank you, Freddy.”
24
BOOM!
Bern
“I got something,” Eboni announced three days later, when Bern showed up at her office that night, after spending the day working on RED. “It connects with ‘When It Was Evergreen.’ ”
“What’ve you got?” He, of course, remembered the song: lush strings and a slightly saccharine melody that too easily stuck in your head.
I wish I could see you now
You brought me more joy than I was allowed
We thought it was evergreen
We thought our love was evergreen
Can we walk in a circle
Can we turn it around
The melody didn’t make the song memorable for Bern, but the Doodles did. On the original manuscript, written in Delaney’s distinctive spikey handwriting, a series of thirteen pictograms twirled down the right margin. Many of the symbols didn’t seem to repeat on other Delaney manuscripts. He and Eboni had examined the sheet several times already.
“Look at this.” Eboni zoomed in on the adjacent screen of one of Earlene’s pages. She highlighted a section about a third of the way down.
And there they were. The same thirteen pictograms, in the same order: a tiny half circle with four lines slashing the right edge; a vertical line with two left-slanted slashes top and bottom and tiny circle below; a square balancing on its point with another square overlaid and several of the resulting pointed triangles colored in; something that looked a little like a cloud; and nine hieroglyphs more, all identical to the Delaney manuscript.
Bern said, comparing them, “They’re exactly the same.”
“No shit. I think this might be ‘Evergreen.’ ”
He compared the two: the original Delaney manuscript of “Evergreen” with the page in Earlene’s trunk. Could this Doodle page be the melody of “Evergreen”? The circle with the four slashes represented the descending G minor arpeggio over the course of four beats, of We thought our love. Then the vertical line with the slashes and the circle was a dotted combination eighth-sixteenth note—in this case, a G, which served as the root for the arpeggio and for the lyric was evergreen.
“He wrote the music in code,” Bern said, realization sliding over him. Of course. “That’s what all this is. It’s not just notations on how to play the music—this is the music. And it’s not just the notes; it’s how to play them, all in one. Bring up the crossed triangles,” he said. This symbol appeared fairly frequently in the margin notations: a triangle balancing on its point, with two lines intersecting. “Find the manuscript with the most uses of it.”
The song “Swingin’ with My Hat and Cane” popped up, and then several others. She zoomed in on the first, and now it made sense. The triangle represented an obbligato bass line in the key of D; and when one of the lines was left out, it modulated to E-flat major. Eboni found it in several more songs.
He couldn’t help it: he hugged her. She folded into him as if she’d been wanting the same thing.
He pulled away, but they held hands an instant longer than was strictly necessary.
They’d cracked the code. And the Delaney Foundation had no clue; they didn’t know the code, and didn’t know that Josephine had written it—or at least written some of it.
Because they had to be writing it together: Why else would every page sport a JoR on a corner? Every page, without fail. Bern speculated that there were—or had been—other pages in other trunks with FBD on them, that Delaney had written. But Bern and Eboni had found Josephine’s trunk, not Delaney’s.
The next week, Bern put in eighteen-hour days. He spent five or six hours transcribing and annotating RED, to show the Foundation he was still hard at work; and then he and Eboni spent twelve or more hours afterward comparing every Doodle from Earlene’s trunk with every Doodle in Delaney’s manuscripts.
Now that they knew the Doodles were the music, the pictograms slowly opened up. Sometimes, although rarely, the symbols referred to a specific note—a square with a corner blacked out was an A—but in most cases the pictogram referred not just to the note, but also to how the note was to be played: whether ascending or descending; how to modulate the key and articulate the notes; what the tempo should be; and, incredibly, the dynamic structure—how loud or how soft the notes should be played. All packed into one little symbol.
One late night while they were trying to translate page fifty-six of Earlene’s Doodles—which they’d linked to Delaney’s “Ice Candles in the Desert,” an aria that had been briefly performed in 1923 but otherwise got little play today—Bern rubbed his eyes and looked up. “There’s no question about it,” he said. “Whoever wrote this—and we can assume by the JoR that it was Josephine—was also a brilliant composer.”
“She probably wrote it for the baby,” Eboni said.
Bern ignored her. “It would explain so much. This was how Delaney wrote so much music.” One of the issues that had always stymied music historians about Frederic Delaney was how he could hear a piece only once and immediately be able to synthesize it and utilize it years later. But if two people had that skill—had perfect pitch and perfect recall—it was so much more possible.
A thought kept bubbling up that he tried to tamp down: What if it were all Josephine?
This was a rabbit hole that Bern really, really didn’t want to fall into; but he kept picking at the scab, rubbernecking the car wreck. What if Josephine Reed had written all the music, not Delaney? What if she was the genius? Scholars had noted that Delaney seemed to have been an average student, an average musician, back in Bloomington; and even when he’d arrived in New York, he wasn’t immediately setting the music scene on fire with his compositions. He’d been in the city for several years before it worked its magic on him and he’d started creating all those wonderful melodies.
