Symphony of Secrets, page 7
“Oh, really? I love pizza. You’ll have to take me there sometime,” Mallory said. Even Bern could tell that she had no intention of ever going. And then to Bern, she said, “If this isn’t a good time to talk—”
“No, no, it’s on the calendar,” Bern said. “Eboni just stopped in to update me about—”
“Jar,” Eboni interrupted.
“Excuse me?” Mallory said.
“Jar,” Eboni repeated. “That Doodle page with jar on it? He tells me he’s been asking your people for the original for weeks.”
Mallory looked flabbergasted. “But he has the page. I authorized it myself.”
“The original,” Eboni said. “We’ve requested it on multiple occasions. To do a full and accurate analysis, I’m going to need to see the original.”
“Well, as I mentioned to Bern, all in good time. The paper’s very fragile, and we must make sure it’s properly preserved. That’s the top priority right now.”
“It’s been over a month,” Eboni said. “How long does it take to preserve one sheet of paper? Especially since you’ve assured Dr. Hendricks that having him review it is also a top priority. What am I missing?”
“These things have to be done carefully,” Mallory said. “We can’t just have anybody—” She hesitated, cleared her throat, changed direction. “We’ll let you know when it’s ready, I assure you.”
We can’t just have anybody. That phrase—he recognized it. He’d been hearing variations of it all his life. In grad school, undergrad, high school. I don’t think you should audition for this group. We can’t just have anybody playing the first horn part, or You don’t need to audition for district band. We don’t need anybody off the street coming in, thinking they can make the cut. Since he’d heard it all his life, he should have been used to hearing it now.
But not here. Not from her. Not from Frederic Delaney’s niece.
He wanted to speak, but the realization knocked him back.
Eboni was quicker. “Oh, okay. I get it,” she said. “What is it? The hair? The nails? The makeup? Oh wait, I know. It’s the fact that we’re too Black for you.”
Mallory pulled back, her lipsticked mouth in a thin line. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. My hugest apologies if you took it that way—I just meant that the paper is very delicate and we’re doing our best to make absolutely sure that it’s preserved in its best—”
“I’m sure that’s what you meant,” Eboni said cheerfully. “On paper, I look great. We both do.” She pointed at Bern. “In person, it’s a whole new ball game. We’re good enough to research and figure out everything that you people have going on up in here, but we can’t see a piece of paper I know he’s been asking you for since the day he walked in? Come on. What’s the holdup? You think he’s gonna steal it? You think he’s going to get fried-chicken grease on it?”
“I am so sorry—you must understand that I didn’t mean anything by that—if it came across that way, just know it wasn’t my intention—I am so—so sorry—” Mallory was stuttering. She had gone very white, but two red spheres had appeared on her cheeks, as if they’d been dipped in rouge.
“I’m sure you are,” Eboni told her, taking a step closer, looking Mallory up and down, absolutely cool. Bern could tell that Eboni was vibrating with fury. “And here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get us access to the original pages of the Delaney Doodles and the original score to RED. None of this scanned business. You’ve been jerking us around long enough. When will you be making it happen?”
“These are better than the originals,” Mallory said, still flustered. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Everything has been scanned and copied, and digitally enhanced.”
Eboni had been standing in Mallory’s personal space, bristling with fury and indignation. Now her face softened and she rocked back slightly. “As I’m sure you’re well aware, digitized scans can be extremely effective. Almost too effective. They can pick up details that a human eye can’t. As you are also probably aware, the original design of most scanners is modeled after a bird’s vision. Birds have many times more rods and cones than humans do. Computer scans produce an intimate, detailed rendering, but right now we don’t need that. We don’t want a bird’s-eye view with three times the detail. We need a human perspective. Are you going to grant us access to these pages, or are you going to keep stalling us and delaying the process?”
A pause. Bern waited, chest tight, for an explosion from Mallory, but Mallory said only, “Well then, we’ve all learned something new today. It’s been an absolute delight—and so educational—to meet you, Ms. Washington. I’m so very sorry for your misconstruing my meaning. I didn’t mean to offend you. Let me just check on the scans and see where they are in the process.”
“Certainly,” Bern said. “Thank you.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Washington,” Mallory repeated.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Eboni said. Her lips didn’t fit around all her large square teeth.
When Mallory had gone, Bern shout-whispered, “Holy shit! That’s the executive director of the Delaney Foundation! Are you trying to get me fired?” The back of his neck was damp with sweat. He imagined security coming in to escort Eboni out.
What would his life be like without the possibility of RED? How could he be so stupid to let things escalate so uncomfortably between the two women?
“She ain’t nobody,” Eboni told him. “You are so obsessed with Delaney that you can’t even see when somebody’s jerking you around? It ain’t got nothing to do with your degree or your experience and has everything to do with what you see in the mirror.”
“I—”
“Haven’t you figured out yet that they need us? Trust me. Ain’t nobody getting fired anytime soon, and certainly not a Black man.”
“I—” he started to say again, and then stopped. All his life he’d been navigating the dangerous waters of discrimination: white people discounting him and treating him like they couldn’t see him, fellow students assuming the only reason he’d gotten into Columbia was to fill a quota. He knew he’d always be the token Black professor in a sea of lily-white faces.
Now the Delaney Foundation had a Black man, a former DF Kid, spearheading the most important project they’d ever had, written by one of the world’s most beloved white composers. The optics would play well in the media. Especially since Delaney himself did so much to connect Black and white. Bern held more cards than he’d realized. Eboni had, as usual, known this all along. “Later for all that,” he said. “Just try to keep it cordial, okay?”
“What are you talking about? She started it! Besides, you should be kissing my Black ass for lighting a fire under her to get you them pages.”
The next day, he received an email from Mallory:
Hi, Bern, great news. The original is ready for you. Set up a time with Stephanie for a viewing. See you soon!
Eboni arrived two hours later, cutting short a scheduled meeting to see the page with her own human eyeballs. Moments after Eboni stalked into the office, Stephanie knocked and poked her head in. Her smile looked more and more like she was in pain or had gas. “Hi, you two. Ms. Roberts asked me to escort you over to A-11.” Wince.
“A-11?” Bern asked.
“Where we’re keeping the originals.” Wince.
As Stephanie led the way upstairs, Eboni said, “I swear if she fake-smiles one more time at me I’m gonna snatch those glasses off her face and make her eat ’em.” She kept her voice down. Bern cracked up.
Meanwhile Stephanie led them past the guard station and into the elevator, up a level to the main room of the archive, in subbasement one. Low lights gleamed overhead, blond tables were arranged around a central research desk with carrels lining the walls. Off to one side, and through another security checkpoint, Stephanie shuffled down the hall and into a small room far to the back. Two chairs flanked a desk. In the back corner, a closed-circuit TV camera glared down accusingly. Stephanie droned on about the importance of no skin-on-paper contact. Bern stopped counting the number of times Eboni rolled her eyes. Did the Foundation honestly think he was in kindergarten?
Bern and Eboni took their seats, and then Stephanie closed the door behind her and disappeared. Neither spoke. Bern wondered how many hidden microphones and cameras had been installed and who was watching them.
One of the archivists tapped on the glass door, opened it. She held a thin, slightly oversize envelope with a string tie. She set it before them, pulled out its contents: a single sheet of paper encased in glassine. They couldn’t touch the manuscript anyway. So why were Bern and Eboni wearing gloves? Bern shook his head.
The archivist left them alone, and they stared into the single sheet with its Doodles front and back. They peered first at the back of the sheet, where the right margin still remained unmarked, and then turned the sheet over very slowly.
It looked just the way it did on the scan. Now they could see the faint indentations of a pencil, actually marking the lines. Delaney’s pencil. Delaney’s fingerprints on the page. Bern wanted to take off the plastic and smell the paper. Would it smell like Frederic Delaney himself?
They stared at the page, eyes tracing the Doodles, for some time. Flipped to the other side, then back again. The marks stared back, uninterested.
Again he turned the page, spun it upside down, then right-side up again. He laid it on the desk, with the JaR side up in the middle of the surface.
“Well, guess this is a wild-goose chase,” Eboni said after a while, pulling it closer.
Bern didn’t hear her. At this slight angle, the page looked different.
He didn’t say anything, just gestured with his chin. He could actually feel Eboni stop breathing as she stood next to him. Her shoe tapped his leg, just once. Bern said, probably too loud, “Sure is nice to see this in person, though, you know? I need to rack ’em up.”
Rack ’em up. They hadn’t used that code in years, but of course she must have remembered: it was what all the graduate students said when they were doing something and didn’t want Jacques Simon to overhear. Like the time Julie spilled water on one of the Quintet’s first editions and Bern had called out, “Hey, we should rack up these books.” Eboni distracted Jacques while Bern ran for paper towels.
Until Bern figured out where he stood with the Foundation—especially in light of Mallory’s comment the day before—he wanted to keep all discoveries to just himself and Eboni for now.
They stared, unseeing, down at the page. The designs blurred and danced. Five more minutes crawled by.
Finally Bern stood, went to the door. The archivist, who’d been hovering inconspicuously outside, approached immediately. “I think that will do it,” Bern said. “Thank you.”
Stephanie awaited them in the main research area. She was on her phone, and Bern wondered if she was texting Mallory. In the elevator down to the subbasement, Eboni brushed his sleeve, caught his eye.
Back in Bern’s office, he pulled out a sticky notepad he found in the desk. He was suddenly worried that his office was bugged.
I need to tell them, he wrote.
She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.
They looked at each other and, as casually as possible, headed out of his office. They went through security, retrieved their phones, and went upstairs and out into a misty early November. Cars sizzled past on damp streets, and the wind stung his cheeks. They headed west, toward Central Park and the chaos of Midtown.
Finally, a block away, near Lincoln Center, he spoke. “How did they miss it?”
“No freakin’ idea.” She shook her head. “The same way we did, I guess.”
“You saw it, too, right?”
“Of course I did,” she said. “Probably before you did. Rods and cones, baby. Rods and cones. And maybe just the way the light hit it.”
The letters did not spell J-a-R as the scans had seemed to indicate: the a, lowercase, was not an a at all. It was an o, also lowercase, that had a squiggle or a shadow or a crease in the paper that made the letter—if you didn’t examine it closely—look like a lowercase a.
Everyone had been combing for the wrong letters all this time—looking for J-a-R, not J-o-R.
“I need to tell Mallory about this,” Bern said.
“Unbelievable,” she said, shaking her head. “Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and it can’t even distinguish an o from an a.”
“I don’t think anybody looked at the original after they scanned it in and enhanced it,” Bern said, ducking around a halal food stand. “It probably went into cryogenic freeze once the scan was done.”
“Yeah,” Eboni said, considering. “Maybe. Especially if they were in the process of preserving it. I mean, it is a hundred-year-old sheet of paper. Did you see how brown it was? And I wonder what the gray stuff was all over the corner.”
“They got careless,” Bern said. “That’s how they missed it. Probably because they’re in such a hurry. All the hands-off white-glove treatment. They must have the same mentality Mallory has—that a scan was all they needed. The only reason we saw it is because you’re so pushy.”
“You’re welcome,” she told him. They were almost to Central Park now, waiting to cross at the light. Taxis and cars flooded past. A woman biked uptown with a little girl strapped to a tiny carrier behind her.
“I don’t know about you,” Bern said, “but I had to look at it at least a dozen times to see that it was an o, not an a.” He paused, thinking. “But still. I don’t understand how their searches didn’t turn up anything for J-o-R.”
“Maybe they were looking for a single word,” Eboni said thoughtfully. “Maybe J-o-R is two words. Like a name.” They crossed the street, followed one of the paths into the park. “Maybe J and oR. Or Jo and R. Did your Foundation buddies search for those?”
“No clue,” Bern said. They walked on in silence, both thinking hard. “And there’s something else, too,” he said after a few moments. The burn of excitement rippled across his shoulders, into his chest as he thought more about those mysterious letters. “I’ll bet you a million bucks that that’s not Delaney’s handwriting. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it or how I missed it, but I’m sure of it now. He didn’t write that.”
“He didn’t write JoR?”
“No fucking way he did. I know his handwriting. I know it.”
“How come nobody else figured that out then? Doesn’t the Foundation have handwriting experts?”
“I’m sure they must. But I’m an expert, too, you know? Seven years of looking at his handwriting has got to make me an expert. He didn’t write it.”
“Well, who did?” Eboni asked.
Bern stared at a tree as if it held the answer. The tree stared back, impassive. “We’ve got to tell them all this. We need them to help figure it all out.”
“Wrong-a-rino,” Eboni told him. “We ain’t telling them shit. We’re holding the cards for once. I’m not saying that it will amount to anything, but who knows, it very well could and if it does, boom! You get your name in another one of those fancy research journals you like to read so much and maybe I get something out of it, too. My vote is that we don’t say anything until we know more.”
Did Bern really want to bite the hand that was feeding him? The white hand that had been oh-so-reluctant to feed his Black mouth to begin with? Mallory still hadn’t told him exactly where the original RED had been found. Why were they hiding this from him, too?
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s give it a few days and see if we can come up with something. You don’t have access to the full Delaney archive from your computer, do you?”
“They said that they gave me access when you brought me in to look for jar. Now I wonder if there’s stuff they’ve kept from me.” She thought a minute. “But your computer taps directly into their mainframe, so I can get through their firewalls. I can even hide the keystrokes so they can’t follow us.”
“So you want to go back?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But no talking in there, okay? I bet that place is bugged.”
“Really? You think they’d go that far?”
“Is it worth taking the chance?”
They stared at each other a moment, and then headed back to the Foundation.
Back in his office, she took her seat behind the desk and he stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. “Are you sure that—”
“Would you please chill? Jeez. I know what I’m doing.”
A blur of computer code poured across the monitor. He had no idea what he was looking for, or at. She did, though. She typed another string of letters and characters that meant nothing to him.
JoR. What could JoR mean?
Thumbnail images tiled across the screen. Eboni zeroed in on the top left one, expanded it. Bern leaned over her shoulder for a closer look. A 1963 invoice from Jonathan Reece Electrical Supply.
She shrunk it, expanded the next. James and Rollins Fine Upholsterers furnished several new armchairs for Mr. Delaney in 1935.
Julie Royce’s engagement party in 1934.
All these were too late: the original RED had been written, and lost, supposedly between 1924 and 1926.
And then: another image: A list. A passenger manifest.
Frederic Delaney’s first trip to Europe in 1920, on the Queen Mary. A roster of passengers.
Delaney Party
And then a series of eight names.
The final name: Josephine Reed.
Jo R, Bern mouthed. Jo Reed.
Who was Josephine Reed?
Could this be Delaney’s mysterious Dark Lady? And what was her name doing on a sheet of Delaney’s Doodles?
8
Delaney’s Dark Lady
Bern
A search for “Josephine Reed” in the Delaney archive pulled up eighteen hits. Most telling, she’d accompanied him on his first European tour, one of the retinue of employees on his payroll, who soon dropped off. No scholar had ever paid attention to her before. Researchers had always assumed she was a general servant.
