Symphony of Secrets, page 8
That night Bern lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. 3:11 a.m. Delaney had never mentioned Josephine Reed. None of the journalists who’d covered him had written of her, either. The name felt utterly new to him, yet familiar.
He played the Quicksilver symphony again. The scherzo movement always put him in a good mood. He’d first heard it as a thirteen-year-old in All-County Orchestra: those perfect saxophone and French horn lines called out like sirens to a lost ship. The symphony was more properly titled Delaney’s Fourth Symphony—the conductor Herbert von Karajan had bestowed the Quicksilver name in the early thirties. Delaney and Bern both hated the reference because Karajan had ties to the Nazi Party.
Bern owned seven different recordings of the symphony. His favorite was the recording by the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. Slatkin’s interpretation was by far the cleanest and most energetic. Lying on his back, Bern started fingering the first French horn part, which mimicked both alto and tenor saxophone lines.
He was drifting into a restless, burning half slumber when a text pinged.
Eboni: You up? I know you are. What you listening to?
Bern: Delaney’s 4th. What’s up?
Eboni: What if she was his secret baby mama?
Bern: Now UR sounding crazy. No record of mixed child
Eboni: No record of Josephine Reed either smart azz. Go back to sleep. I think it might be real. I got a feeling
Bern: Night
It was comforting that she was awake, too. Knowing that she was just as obsessed made it possible for him to fall asleep, Quicksilver humming in his ears.
A few hours later, his phone chimed again, waking him from that half-asleep, half-dreaming state he’d fallen into after dropping off too late and then sleeping too deeply. He shot up in bed, heart pounding, grabbed the phone. Another text from her. He decided to ignore it and call.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you at the office?”
“Just about to head over,” he lied. “What’s up?” It was nine thirty—he was already very late.
“I don’t like to talk on the phone,” she said.
“Is talking that much worse than texting?”
A pause. “As long as they can’t overhear you.”
“They can’t, unless the apartment is bugged,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “So. We know that Delaney knew her. And possibly romantically.”
“Hold on. We don’t know that they were together.”
“They were together. I can feel it. No way this woman was everywhere he was and not with him.”
“Wait a minute. ‘Everywhere’? How do you know?”
“Because I ran a facial-recognition search last night. Found her in five photographs. Check it out.”
His phone pinged multiple times. He put her on speakerphone as he examined the screen.
The first photo showed a young Frederic Delaney, wineglass in hand, partially turned away from the camera, looking over his shoulder. Several Black people stood in the shot. Three men were gesturing. One held a saxophone. Behind him, at a round table, with the remains of drinks still littering it, a woman looked out from the frame. The caption read: F Delaney 1920, Alibi, with Eli Evans, Red Simmons, Joseph Reed?
Eboni’s search had picked up Joseph Reed, and she believed that this was actually a photograph of Josephine.
He tilted the phone to get a better glimpse. Shoulder-length hair framing a coffee complexion, high cheekbones, eyes enormous. She was looking off to the left of the photographer. Not arrestingly beautiful, but very pretty. Striking.
Eboni said, “You don’t bring your cleaning lady to a club.”
The other four photos weren’t captioned. Eboni’s facial-recognition software had picked them up. In each photo, at the back of a crowd or against a wall or half turned away, appeared a woman who looked very much like the woman in that first photo. In no photograph did Frederic Delaney acknowledge her or touch her, but Eboni was right. Would Delaney bring his cook to a jazz club or what looked like a private party?
“I want to come to the Foundation. Be sure that I’m searching their full archive. You want to send a car for me?”
“Get a cab,” he said. “The Foundation can reimburse you.”
By the time he showered and made it to the office, it was after ten a.m. He handed the security guard his phone. “ ’Bout time you showed,” the man said. “Ms. Washington’s been here for ten minutes waiting for you. I asked her to wait outside, but she said you wouldn’t mind. She said it couldn’t wait.”
“I don’t mind at all. Good looking out.”
“No sweat,” he said. “I got you, Doc.”
Bern headed down the corridor, scanned himself into his office.
Eboni looked up from his computer. “Dang, it’s about time you showed.”
He closed the door. “How’d you get here so fast?”
“Superpowers,” Eboni said. She passed him a sheet of paper that she must have brought with her. On it were the eighteen hits she’d found last night as well as info on the five photographs.
She pulled up a blank Word document on Bern’s computer, made sure it wouldn’t save to the server, typed: All references from 1919 to 1920. Photos 1920 to 1923. Nothing after 1923.
If the Foundation was listening in, they had to hear a conversation, Bern decided. So he asked, “Hey, what did Colleen think about the pizza?” and wrote: So she couldn’t have been his Dark Lady. He was in his prime till 1930+
Eboni: Maybe by 1930 DF had learned to hide her. Early on he made mistakes. Got caught with his pants down. She got photographed. Boom.
“She was super jealous,” Eboni said aloud. “And she said her boyfriend, Luis, had been there already. Typical.” They kept a verbal discussion about pizza going as they wrote down their real conversation.
Eboni: What was the name of his first music publisher? Didn’t FD work for someone till 1919? The Europe trip is 1920
Bern: Ditmars & Ross
Eboni searched, found a file in the Foundation archive for Ditmars & Ross. After a moment of searching, she shook her head.
Eboni: Nothing about JoR. Would DF have copied ALL the D&R archive? Or just stuff about FD?
Bern: No idea
Eboni: What happened to D&R archive? There’s not a lot in these files
Bern: Maybe the D&R papers are somewhere else? Maybe there’s stuff on JoR there?
Eboni: If we can find them online, I can tap in
They spent the next hour trying to figure out what happened to the company, but it didn’t seem that the Ditmars archive had been donated to any library or archival source. Ditmars & Ross had gone under during the Great Depression.
Eboni rechecked the first Ditmars documents in the Foundation archive. On an index scanned card at the end they found: From the collection of Samantha Bell, 1977.
“Okay,” Eboni said, “Give me a second.” In a few minutes the screen bloomed with names and images. Eboni typed: Samantha Bell is granddaughter. No record of death. But here’s address. An address and phone number in Yonkers. Go out and call her.
Eboni and Bern trooped outside.
Bern dialed the number. In a moment a woman’s thin voice answered.
“Hi, is this Ms. Bell?” Bern said. “My name is Dr. Bern Hendricks. I’m calling from the Delaney Foundation. I’m doing some research and I came across some papers that you donated to us several years ago. Is that correct?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, goodness. Goodness me. How nice to hear from you, Dr. Hendricks. I donated my grandfather’s papers a while ago. Back in the seventies or eighties, I think.”
“Do you remember anything more about what you sent us?”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “Not really. I’m sorry. Your people came asking for any documents about Mr. Delaney. Grandpa had a music publishing business for a while, quite successful, but he lost it all in the Depression.”
“Are there other documents?” Bern asked. “Documents that you didn’t give them?”
“Oh yes, there was quite a bit that they weren’t interested in. Materials from before Mr. Delaney worked there. And after, of course. There’s a lot about the bankruptcy.”
“Where are the files? Do you still have them?”
“Yes, yes, I think so. Last time I checked, but it’s been ages. There were several file boxes out in the garage. I always meant to donate them but I haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Are they still in your garage?” Bern asked. Eboni looked at him, grinned.
“They are,” she said.
“And you’re still in Yonkers?”
“I am,” she said. “Would you like to see them for yourself?”
“I would,” Bern said. “When would be convenient?”
“Oh, we could set something up for later this week, if you like?”
“Sure,” he said. “Or any sooner? What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Goodness,” she said, laughing. “I don’t have any plans. Come for tea.”
Rather than taking a Delaney town car that could be tracked, Bern and Eboni hailed a cab, which dropped them off in front of a modest detached home in Yonkers. The siding needed paint, but the lawn had been neatly trimmed and a gutter on the right side recently repaired. Bern knocked on the door. A few moments later a home nurse answered. Her name tag read Dahlia. They introduced themselves, and she led them into the living room, where an elderly woman wearing an orange and gray housecoat was working through a crossword puzzle.
They traded pleasantries for a few moments. Bern explained that they were trying to track down additional information about Frederic Delaney during his early employment at Ditmars.
“Several people have been through the boxes over the years,” Samantha Bell told them. Her thin, bluish hair barely covered her scalp, which was very pink. “I really should have donated the papers to a university.”
“Would you be interested in donating them to the Delaney Foundation?” Eboni asked smoothly. “We have state-of-the-art archival space, all climate controlled. Your grandfather’s papers would be beautifully preserved forever.”
Samantha Bell looked at her, considering. She was still very sharp, no question.
“And obviously the Delaney Foundation would compensate you for them,” Eboni went on. “We generally pay two thousand dollars per box, depending on the condition of the documents and amount of material in each box.”
“There are five or six boxes,” Samantha Bell said. She struggled up, grabbed her walker. “Do you want to see them?”
On the way to the garage Eboni hissed, “How much you got in your checking account?”
“I didn’t bring my checkbook.”
“We can get a cashier’s check. How much you got?”
“Enough to buy these, if I need to.”
“Good,” Eboni said. “Go figure out where your bank is. Because we’re gonna buy some files today.”
Two hours later an SUV cab left Yonkers with the entire Ditmars archive—six Bankers Boxes—packed in the rear.
9
Pros & Cons
Bern
An hour later they spread the contents of the Ditmars & Ross files across Eboni’s bright white conference table. The six cardboard boxes had spent years on a back shelf of Samantha Bell’s garage: mice had gnawed in and built nests in two of them; in another, a water leak had stained and cemented about half the files into a crumbling brown mass. Apart from dust and silverfish, the other three boxes seemed in good shape: faded cream-colored folders in no discernible order; pages of music; four oversize accounting ledgers; old electric bills; insurance forms; and dozens of other business records, mostly about the Ditmars bankruptcy.
They stacked up the folders around the room, quickly combed the files, looking for any mention of Josephine.
In the fifth box, they struck gold: Employees Misc., which apparently held information for temporary or part-time employees. Among the sheets, they found that Josephine Reed worked for Ditmars & Ross from July 21, 1918, to May 19, 1919. Her employment records were scarce, but they learned that she was paid eight dollars per week to sweep floors and perform “other cleaning and tidying services.”
She was born in Oxford, North Carolina. Her home address in New York was 143 West Seventy-Fourth Street, New York City.
“Search for 143 West Seventy-Fourth Street,” Bern told Eboni.
“In the Delaney archive?”
He nodded. He wished he’d brought his laptop, still in the Delaney offices. Since she wasn’t using the Delaney computers, it meant her tapping in on her own computer, which took about half an hour. It was easier, though, because she’d set up Bern’s computer in the Foundation offices as a conduit into the system.
In the meantime, Bern kept looking through the files. He was paging through insurance forms from 1910 to 1929, hunting for any mention of her, when Eboni said, “Fuck me sideways.” She leaned back in her chair, grinning at him.
“What? What is it?”
“That’s Delaney’s address. 143 West Seventy-Fourth Street, apartment 1G.”
“What was her apartment number?”
“It doesn’t have one listed,” Eboni said.
“But she lived in his building,” Bern said.
“She was his baby mama.”
“He didn’t have a baby.”
“Not that you know of. But wanna make a bet about what happened to her? Why she disappeared? She got pregnant. I’ll bet you.”
They looked at each other without speaking.
“This changes everything we know about Delaney,” Bern said. “Everything. No wonder he had such an affinity with the Black community. He had a secret Black mistress the whole time. No wonder he never got married. It was her, all along. Her.”
“Bet she didn’t tell him she was pregnant. She just up and left him. Or maybe he sent her away. A mulatto baby would have destroyed him. If people learned he was gettin’ down with the Black chicks—”
Bern was spinning along on his own track, not even hearing Eboni. “And of course he couldn’t sit in his box at the theater with her. Of course he couldn’t take her to shows. So he snuck her in and out of the theater and drank champagne with her secretly. That’s why there were always two glasses.”
“Maybe she gave up the kid. I wonder if there are orphanage records. Mixed-race kids must have been put up for adoption all the time.”
“There were two glasses at the Met on the night he died,” Bern said. “He never sent her away, and she never left him. She was around his whole life. Maybe she’s still alive?”
“How old would she be? There’s no age listed on the form,” Eboni said.
“Well, if she was a few years younger than Delaney, she’d still be well over a hundred.”
“But she could have lived a long time,” Eboni said. “There could be kids who remember her.”
For another ten or fifteen minutes they threw out conjecture and ideas, one wilder than the last. By then it was after two in the morning, and it had been a very long day. Reluctantly Bern grabbed a cab and went back to his apartment, his thoughts churning.
* * *
—
Next morning, Eboni’s text woke him up, summoning him to come back to her office. He emailed Mallory and told her that he’d be working off-site again today, then took the subway out to the Bronx.
Eboni was waiting for him in the glass-enclosed conference room, sitting at a table that, uncharacteristically for Eboni, looked like the Tasmanian devil had come through, leaving behind a whirlwind of legal pads, laptops, coffee mugs, and white deli bags. It was only nine o’clock; her three employees weren’t even in yet.
“You sure took your sweet-ass time,” she told him, looking refreshed and energized despite only a few hours of sleep.
“What’s going on?”
“I googled Oxford, North Carolina, to track down any relatives who still live there.”
“Wait. You dragged me all the way over here to tell me that? Girl, what’s wrong with you?”
“Settle down, slick,” she told him. She bit into a bagel that had been sitting on a deli napkin next to one of the laptops. “I called you all the way over here to tell you that Oxford, North Carolina, might not be New York City, but”—she glanced at her monitor—“the Granville County Library System is state-of-the-art. Most of the Granville County genealogical records are online.”
“It’s the South,” Bern said. “Ancestry is a big deal. You find anything?” He leaned over her monitor to get a better look.
“I just got started. There are a bunch of Reeds in Oxford. Thought you could put that PhD to work to show me what a good reader you are.” She nodded with her chin toward one of the other laptops. “I bought a couple more bagels. The everything with the scallion spread is good. You should try it.”
Bern had to get working on RED, he told himself, not spend his time hunting down this elusive Josephine Reed.
Instead, he sat down across from Eboni, pulled the everything bagel from the bag, and opened the laptop.
Over the next three hours, they pieced together that several Reed families had owned property just south of Oxford, North Carolina. One family had six children—five girls and one boy, Howard—and the middle child was Josephine. Howard, who’d died in 1983, had two children: Earlene and Alice, both of whom had married. They’d been the last of the Reeds.
A few minutes later Eboni unearthed Howard Reed’s last known address.
