Symphony of Secrets, page 38
With a calm that was altogether new to him and altogether welcoming and right, he now recognized that he would never know what happened to RED. He welcomed the word never, mouthed it to himself. Never.
Frederic Delaney shut the door behind him and trudged out into the night.
51
Brass Filigree
Bern
“Honestly, I don’t know why you’ve made such a big production about this,” Mallory Delaney Roberts told them when she arrived, tottering up on heels that seemed impractically high for the light March snow still dusting the sidewalk. “I would have taken you before without so much drama.” She spoke without rancor. That part of the story seemed done and behind them. Bern had to admire her for it.
“Yeah, well,” Eboni said, “you didn’t, did you?” She and Bern had been standing on the corner of West End Avenue and Sixty-Third Street for ten minutes, and she wasn’t happy to be kept waiting.
“It’s just a power play, you know?” she’d said before Mallory arrived. “Even now she can’t leave it alone.”
Bern had shoved his fingers deeper into his pockets, had leaned in and kissed her again. He was still so grateful she was with him. He breathed in the scent of her, held her in his lungs for a moment. “When this is over, we’re going to celebrate. With pizza,” he said.
She grinned. “You read my mind.”
But they weren’t going to a pizzeria. They’d sampled pizza all over the city, from the trendiest Brooklyn café to the grubbiest Bronx dive. They’d ventured to Staten Island, tried Costco’s and 7-Eleven’s plate-size slices. And finally—finally—with a cast-iron skillet and Eboni’s aunt’s crust recipe, they’d made their own. “There really ain’t nothing better than home cooking,” Eboni had told him.
“Home is wherever you are,” he’d said to her. Corny, but she didn’t seem to mind, and kissed him hard.
Now Bern asked her, “What kind of pizza you in the mood for?”
“As long as it’s not the Delaney Daily Special, I’m good,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m done eating that,” he said just as Mallory reached them. He didn’t say hello to her, just nodded in a way that he hoped would seem dismissive.
“Come on,” Mallory said, “it’s this way.” She led them down Sixty-Third Street to number 244, to the small nondescript brownstone they’d talked their way into months before, a stone’s throw from the Foundation offices. She could have taken him here at any time, but hadn’t. He still didn’t understand why. “These were the original offices of Delaney Music Publishing, as you may remember,” she said. “The Foundation bought the building in the fifties, and we used it as our main office until we acquired the land where we are now. We were thinking of turning this place into a museum but never did. We rented it out to musicians, some students. It was mostly for tax purposes.”
“Didn’t Delaney gut the place looking for RED?” Bern said. “I’d always thought so.”
Mallory led them up the walk, her key at the ready. “We’d always thought so, too. We have records showing a great deal of demolition in 1924. We’d always thought it was remodeling, since he said he didn’t lose RED until 1926.” The key turned in the lock; she pushed the door open into the narrow hallway that Bern remembered from months ago. The workmen didn’t seem to have made much progress. Ladders and tools lay stacked in the cold. She flicked a switch and several bare lightbulbs glowed.
“He must have been lying about 1926,” Bern said. “He must have lost it in 1924. She must have hidden it in 1924.”
“You may be right,” Mallory allowed. They followed her inside. “About eight months ago,” she said, “we decided to fix the place up. Its location is terrific, of course, and we thought we could use it for visiting board members or musicians performing at the Foundation. Really make it a five-star accommodation. Plus the charm of it having been the original Delaney offices.”
She led them past tool belts and sanders and saws, over to the elevator. She pulled out a key, inserted and turned it, and pressed the button. This time the doors opened.
“The elevator has been regularly in service since 1917,” she said. “We have the building inspection records. The motor’s been replaced several times, and there’ve been many service calls over the years—as you’d expect. But nobody actually replaced the elevator walls. Why would they?”
She leaned over the back panel, and they stood behind her, watching. A handful of tiny metal screws lay all but buried in the tarnished art deco brass filigree that lined the interior. Most screws had already been removed; only two remained. Mallory fished in her purse for a minuscule screwdriver, inserted it into the screwheads, and extracted them. “Workmen found this when we decided to refurbish the interior. Strip the brass, clean everything up. Of course, once we discovered what was inside, we decided to leave it intact.”
The brass mesh screen fell away, revealing a space about two feet wide, three feet high, and three inches deep. “RED was right here. All loose paper, just squashed at the bottom. It had been riding up and down the elevator for nearly a century.”
“That’s my girl,” Eboni said proudly.
Bern peered inside as if searching for some last sign from Josephine Reed, a final message to tell them what happened to her in 1924, why she hid the opera in its ultimate hiding place.
The space was empty.
52
Stepping into Tomorrow
The Red Ring of Olympia would be performed in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. With one of the largest auditoriums in the world, the Met could seat almost four thousand people. But it also felt right and just that here, in Lincoln Center, within spitting distance of where the score had spent the past century, it would finally sing out.
There were other considerations, too: LCD screens on the back of each audience seat to display subtitles; the Met’s ability to broadcast in HD worldwide; and of course, the stunning, world-class acoustics of the auditorium itself. The space was worthy of the music that would be played tonight.
For this very special inaugural performance, seats were not sold in the usual manner, with the expensive orchestra seats going to the socialites, the celebrities, the politicians. Instead, Eboni had devised a complicated lottery system where some seats were allotted to high-paying donors, some to the media, some to diplomats representing their countries, some to opera lovers, and some to DF Kids. Bern now recognized senators and concert pianists, movie stars and financiers. Tuxedos mingled with jeans; baseball caps with ball gowns. A well-known billionaire entrepreneur stood to let a tiny woman slide past him to her center seat: she was a schoolteacher from rural Arkansas who had taught half a dozen of the best trombone players in the country—all DF Kids.
Now, in that taut moment after the chandeliers had started to rise but before the lights dimmed and darkened altogether, Bern felt like he was actually looking at a cross section of not only America but the globe: a communion of music lovers, brought together for this one night, to listen and celebrate, to bond in that magical way that only music can provide.
The lights dimmed. The curtain rose. Bern stood alone onstage, a vast video screen blooming behind him.
“Welcome,” he said. “My name is Kevin Bernard Hendricks. I was a Delaney Foundation Kid, and I am the musical scholar who transcribed the music you’re about to hear.”
The applause roared up.
He waited, smiling, and then, “I want to thank so many people who made this possible: the Metropolitan Opera and the Delaney Foundation, to start.”
Applause again. He wondered if he’d ever get through his speech, however short it was. He listed several major donors and benefactors whom the Met had stipulated must be mentioned.
And then: “I want to also thank my partner in figuring out the mystery of this most extraordinary opera: Ms. Eboni Washington, whose company, Washington Visionaries, has been critical to this whole endeavor. Eboni single-handedly deciphered the code that baffled scholars for a century. Her work has allowed us to play the original, true version of RED you are about to hear.”
A spotlight on Eboni, in a box at stage right. She gave a thumbs-up. More applause rippled into the rafters.
“Now, I want to tell you a story. It’s a story that was lost for a century. A story that you, along with the rest of the world, will be learning tonight.”
On the screen behind Bern appeared the black-and-white photograph of a woman seated at a table: wide-eyed, beautiful, enigmatic, gazing distantly into the night.
“I’d like to introduce you to the person who made Frederic Delaney’s music possible. She was born in 1891 in Oxford, North Carolina. We don’t know a great deal about how she lived or how she died. What we do know is that her music changed everything we know about music today. The world is a better place because of her.
“The people sitting there”—he gestured to another box—“are her descendants, but they didn’t know of her contributions, either, or the critical role she had in creating all the music we are about to hear.” Spotlight on another box, stage left, where Earlene, Myrtis, Kay, Judy, Sandra, and Karl sat in new finery, smiling out over the audience and into the dozens of television cameras that clustered above the stage.
“We believe she had almost total recall of any musical phrase she heard. She was, most definitely, a genius.”
He clicked on a particularly gorgeous slide of Josephine’s notations: the pictographs and patterns shimmering and vibrating in the light. What would this moment have meant to her, with a worldwide audience gathered in tribute to her accomplishments? The entire world celebrating her music, broadcast live to every country, simultaneously translated into hundreds of languages and dialects?
It would have been overwhelming had he not fought so hard to make her story right. To right the terrible wrong that had been perpetuated for reasons he would probably never know. So it was not overwhelming; instead it felt just and right. He only wished he could have done more.
“Every so often, however, we discover another portion of the greater story, another section that was left out. We learn—not everything—but a little more. And because we learn more, the world is a little brighter. Our understanding is a little clearer. I’d like to think our capacity for empathy, for caring, is a little stronger, too.”
The slide returned to the first photograph: a woman seated at a table, the remains of a meal to one side, wineglasses glittering in the flash. What had she been listening to when the photographer snapped this image? What music had she been composing in her head, about to jot down onto a napkin or into a notebook?
“This woman wrote much of the music that Frederic Delaney passed off as his own,” Bern said. Was it just his imagination, or did she now seem to be smiling? “He wrote a different story for the world. He made it seem that the music was his. Written by him. Created by him. It wasn’t. It’s hers. That’s the hidden story I want you to know. It’s hers. All hers.”
He paused, looked out over the crowd—shadows, now, in the darkness. Then he gazed beyond the faces, beyond the lights.
“This opera is her masterpiece,” he said. “And her name is Josephine Reed.”
The video screen lifted away, and behind him another curtain rose, revealing the opening stage set of her opera as he introduced this extraordinary woman, and the music that she wrote, to the future.
Author’s Note
When my first novel, The Violin Conspiracy, was published in 2022, I was lucky enough to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t have encountered. Readers often told me either that they were surprised to learn that the kinds of things I discuss in The Violin Conspiracy still occur today, or that they found their own experiences reflected in the book.
One woman, who stopped playing the violin to raise her family, was inspired to pick up the instrument again. She even bought a violin from a pawnshop and brought it to a book signing to show me.
That particular experience made me think about all the other people whose voices, for whatever reason, have been silenced. Perhaps they never had an opportunity to be heard. Perhaps they didn’t have the courage to speak. Perhaps they were shut down before they could even begin.
I know that this is often how the world works, but it’s something I’ve been mulling over more and more.
In my junior year of college, I was invited to perform the Suite for Violin and Piano by William Grant Still. When my professor, Dr. Rachel Vetter Huang, asked me if I’d ever heard of the composer, I told her I hadn’t. I figured he was an obscure European or American. Then she told me he was an American composer who happened to be Black. I was dumbfounded. Sadly, I—a Black man myself—had never imagined that Black composers even existed. Why had I never heard of Still? It certainly isn’t because Still’s music is subpar; his compositions are full of passion and verve and deserve to be heard. But his music—and music by so many other musicians—is rarely played. Brilliant songs and extraordinary books or poems or paintings or speeches or—well, you name it—have been lost, thrown away, burned, or ignored. So many other artists (and their voices) were too intimidated, too shy, or too overwhelmed. Now they’re lost.
The stories are endless. A single mother living in an inner city wants to be a news broadcaster, but no one takes her seriously because of where she lives and how people view her. A singer who works in a processing plant never gets the chance to showcase his talent because he doesn’t fit the industry standard. And so on.
The situation can be even more precarious for people from historically marginalized communities. They often have to jump through even more hoops to get the recognition they deserve. Female composers like Fanny Mendelssohn had to pose as men to get their music played. While studying at an American academy, Mary Cassatt was not permitted to paint from live models only because she was a woman. Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to travel to space, was repeatedly discouraged from pursuing a career in STEM.
Sometimes it’s not just a question of vital voices failing to be heard. Sometimes people steal what others created. We often hear about lawsuits in which a musician lifted a melody from another musician’s song—but in the early twentieth century, the situation was much more egregious. Music publishers would pay a songwriter a few bucks for a song and then own it outright. The publisher would make millions, while the songwriter got a couple of dollars and maybe no credit. (That’s partly how the Copyright Act of 1909 came to be.)
I thought it would be fascinating to explore the time period of the early 1900s—when the people who were writing chart-topping songs would literally starve because the industry stole their music and their voice.
For me, Josephine Reed represents precisely that. But she also represents a great deal more. She’s a woman. She’s Black. And she’s neurodivergent. People with differing abilities are very dear to me. My nephew lives with autism, as does my best friend’s brother. I’ve been privileged to teach many students living with different types of neurological conditions and a wide range of learning disabilities. Two of my very best students live with autism.
As a Black man, I’ve often heard “You can’t do that.” It’s a phrase so many of us hear in our everyday lives. Women “can’t” run as fast, “can’t” conduct a major symphony, “can’t” become a CEO. Some neurodivergent people “can’t” hold down a regular job or fit into society.
We all know that people can, if they’re given the opportunity and the tools. I’m hoping this novel might be one of those tools.
All authors, like parents, have hopes for their books: that they’ll toddle off into the world, touching lives, changing perspectives. When I was writing Symphony of Secrets, I hoped, given the unique time period we’re living in, when the experiences of underrepresented communities are both celebrated and under attack (in September 2022, book banning has never been so prevalent—predominantly among books written by either LGBTQ+ people and/or people of color), this book could make a difference.
Of course, I want my book to be read, to touch lives, to change perspectives. I also hope that it encourages readers to go out and listen. Listen to the busker on the street; to the kindergartner unable to sit still; to the quiet woman tucked in a corner, doodling in her notebook. Listen to them. Really listen.
Who knows?—Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to hear a voice, a story, that would otherwise never have been heard.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, to the entire Anchor Books team: Thank you. I am extremely proud to be one of your authors.
Edward Kastenmeier, executive editor extraordinaire: Thank you for simply being incredible. Your thoughtful and sensitive suggestions truly expand my creativity. Every paragraph is better because of your insistence on excellence.
Suzanne Herz and Beth Lamb, the best publishers ever: Thank you both for believing in me. From the moment I met you, I knew I was in good hands. Thank you for all your support and for taking a chance.
J Funk (otherwise known as James Meader) and Julie Ertl, publicists beyond compare: I have no words. Thank you for your constant support and encouragement. And thank you for helping me with scheduling. You make it all look easy, and I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate all you do. Thank you.
Sophie Normil and Lauren Weber: Thank you for your overflowing creativity, your energy, your enthusiasm, and your support.
Brian Etling: Thank you for working overtime to make sure this book reached the public.
Kayla Overbey and Lisa Davis: Thank you for catching my mistakes and for making me look good.
Maddie Partner: Thank you for bringing the beautiful cover to the public.
