“What a wretched thing to do.”
I returned his grin. “You have no idea how vicious I can be.”
That night I dreamed of Harry going off to war at the age of thirteen, wearing a uniform sized for a grown man, the pant legs and sleeves rolled up, the helmet pressing down over his ears. It ought to have been a funny fantasy, but it had no amusement value. He was making his way through a dark wood filled with the rattle of machine guns and the screams of dying men. I tried to pull him behind the cover of a tree, but I recoiled when I realized he was covered in blood.Save yourself,he said, and he whidded away through darkness relieved only by the brief flashes of grenades and mortar fire.
A month later, on Friday, December 7, the family and staff were decorating Christmas trees in five rooms. Gertie and I were assigned to the library, provided with cartons of ornaments, and threatened with a dinner of just a soda cracker and a stick of celery if we didn’t dress the tree to the highest standard by five o’clock.
Among a family of lively talkers, Gertie was perhaps the most loquacious. By the time we’d hung only half the ornaments and none of the garlands or tinsel, we’d discussed at least a dozen subjects and had come to Isadora. “I’m worried about my sister. Oh, not you, Addie. My other sister. You’re as put together as a Pierce-Arrow. Not that you’re a machine. You’re not a machine. If you were a machine, however, you’d be as put together as a Pierce-Arrow. When I’m old enough to drive, I don’t want to drive anything but a Silver Arrow fastback coupe. That carjumps. The thing is, our Isadora is old enough to drive, but she doesn’t care at all about that. What she cares about is getting out there anddoing what she knows she was born to do, which is not play Mozart in a concert hall.”
Inserting wire hangers in a dozen red ornaments, I said, “She wants to be a jazz pianist, swing style, a big band behind her.”
“Yeah, that’s part of it. She wants to burn up the keyboard, kick the audience into high gear, but not just that. Maybe not even mainly that. You need to talk to her. I could tell her how to get past what she’s dealing with, but I’m the little sister, don’t you know. When it comes to something this serious, big sisters don’t think little sisters know what the hell they’re talking about. Of course, in spite of being younger than Izzy, I’ve often been the big sister in this relationship. I’ve got my weird hand, and those of us with weird hands tend to grow up faster, but she doesn’t understand that. It’s all about chronological age with her. I love the crazy old bitch, but I can’t help her. You can. Help her, Addie. Help her before she develops a bleeding ulcer and one night vomits blood all over the dinner table. That’ll traumatize Chef Lattuada, and the dear man doesn’t deserve to be traumatized.”
So two days later, on Monday morning, I followed the last notes of a Beethoven sonata to the music room, where Izzy was practicing alone. In a brief silence during which she most likely rolled her head to stretch her neck and flexed her long-fingered hands, I came to the end of the hallway, where the door was ajar. As I stepped into the room, she went from Beethoven to Chopin as if she had been possessed by the spirit of Ludwig and now by Frédéric François. She played the B-flat Minor Sonata with such grace and nuance that, if you didn’t know better, you might have thought she had composed it. I stood out of the way, enchanted by the music. When Izzy saw me, she terminated the sonata with seven inappropriate notes that most people would translate into the wordsshave and a haircut, two bits.
When she called my name and patted the piano bench, I sat beside her. “Chopin would want to break your fingers for that joke.”
“Not at all. He was a darling little man with a sense of humor. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin—who was the Baroness Dudevant before her divorce and called herself George Sand after it—was his lover for ten years. She wore men’s common clothing with a contrasting top hat. She smoked foul cigars. She cheated on him with several other men. In spite of all that, she could make him laugh, and he loved to laugh.” Izzy sighed. Her gaze traveled the length of the keyboard as if she were playing an imaginary series of broken chords in one long arpeggio. “I doubt that I myself will ever have a lover.”
“Of course you will,” I declared. “You’ll sweep some man off his feet, and he’ll sweep you off yours, and I’ll cry my eyes out with happiness at your wedding.”
She shook her head. “Men aren’t attracted to depressives. They want lighthearted girls, frolicsome and coltish, vivacious, sunny.”
“You’re all those good things, Izzy. For sure, you’re never a moaning depressive.”
“Not yet, I suppose. But I will be. How else could I end up now that I’ve set my heart on being something I can never be? Most big bands coming up, they don’t even have pianos. Trumpets, trombones, saxes, a clarinet, a bass. If thereisa piano, it’s usually the instrument of the bandleader. Otherwise, the closest thing you’ll find to a piano is a xylophone, and I’m not going there. Besides, jazz bands are entirely men except for a girl vocalist. And if the vocalist matters at all, if she’s not just decoration, then she’s got to be as good as the musicians, which is very damn good.”
“There are a few all-girl bands,” I reminded her.
Isadora covered her face with her hands and spoke through her fingers. “None is half as good as all-guy bands. It’s embarrassing. Why don’t they try harder? They could knock it out of the park. Why settle for selling glamour at small venues, for smaller audiences?”
I shrugged. “They figure it’s stacked against them. You could be the first, Izzy. You’ve got the talent and the drive.”
“Harmony would be devastated. She’s spent so much time with me. She thinks I have what it takes to do what she couldn’t, what was taken away from her.”
“You’ve got Harmony wrong. She just wants you to be the very best you can be. She wants to see you shine. Deep down, she doesn’t care if that’s classical music in a concert hall or big band swing in a hotel ballroom.”
“Yeah? You think so? What about this? She saw Rachmaninoff is going to be in town. She was so excited she told my parents. Daddy and Mother have a lot of contacts, people who owe them, people who don’t owe them but just like them—and some know Rachmaninoff. So now they’re trying to figure out how to get him to the Bram to hear me. That’s totally coconuts! Sergei Rachmaninoff! I might as well throw myself off the roof right now. If I play as well as I can and he thinks I have a little something, even the littlest something, then I won’t be able to get off the track to Carnegie Hall whether I’ll ever be good enough to belong there or not. But if I don’t play my best, if I fudge it—that’s a form of lying. My parents will know that I embarrassed myself—and them!—on purpose.”
We shared the piano bench in silence for a minute or two. Izzy hunched over the keyboard in a state of misery while I searched the library in my memory to consider how a few of my favorite novelists might have handled this. I drew a blank.
“So what if,” I said, “you can’t get past the prejudice against women musicians in the big bands? What if you’re every bit as good as anybody, but the guys-only tradition doesn’t change? As you said, not every swing band has a piano in the first place. What if you could have been in Carnegie Hall but instead you’re not anywhere?”
She made fists and appeared about to pound the keyboard in frustration, but then she opened her hands and sat looking at her palms as if reading her future in them. “I love the piano, Addie. But I love this new, special music even more. I love swing, the culture that comes with it, the electricity of it, theliftit gives me. If I can’t be a part of it with a piano, there’s another way.”
“What way?”
“Sometimes you’ve heard me sing while I played.”
“You’re a very good singer.”
“I’m better than you think. Better than very good. That sounds conceited, but I’ve earned it. I haven’t just been singing at the piano. Whenever I’m sure no one’s going to use the screening room, sometimes after midnight, then I go in there to work on my voice. It’s soundproofed. No one can hear me unless they’re right outside in the hall. I don’t have the piano, but I can hear the music in my head. I sing a cappella, never miss a note. I work on my technique. I’m developing my own style. I can do it, Addie. Maybe the singer only gets up and takes the microphone every fifth number. But even when she’s not front and center, she’s sitting on a chair right there with the band. Right there with the music.”
“You really want this, don’t you, Izzy?”
“I really do. And I’m getting close. My voice will be ready by the time I’m seventeen. It might be ready now. That’s the problem.”
“Which is?”
