“Reconnoi—”
“Yes, take the temperature of Prague,” he said. And if it happened that Prague was, in fact, running a fever, he said, then she and Josef could prepare for a more orderly departure. She could again make application to the Foundation through one of its European offices—one that hadn’t been shuttered in the past few months due to the situation, as Mr. Crabtree referred to it—and in no time at all Lilly and Josef would be walking arm in arm in Central Park. When that happened, and Mr. Crabtree believed it would, the first order of business would be to find them a more respectable neighborhood. Because she couldn’t live where she was living. It just wasn’t possible.
Except that it was. She had proven it. But what she didn’t know was whether it was possible to live in Prague.
Not for the first time she wished that war—a recognizable, guns-and-tanks-and-aerial-bombardment war—had broken out, and that return was impossible. Then the man with the office full of eagle feathers and buffalo heads and beaded belts and tomahawks would understand, and levers would be pulled and ears bent and chips cashed to keep Lilly in New York and to extract Josef from Prague. But this half-lit war, this agreement not to call it what it was for fear that the name would force some necessary action, required Lilly to participate in a lie that Mr. Crabtree was eager to spread: that things would be different at home, but only by degrees.
FIFTY-SECOND STREET
ELSTON HOOPER HELD THE last note and wouldn’t let it drop. When the sound from the golden bell of his trumpet ceased, the song would end—and no one wanted that to happen. This was the last rehearsal before their one and only gig and the eight men on the bandstand wanted to savor every note. They had been meeting once a week for the past three months and after the second session it was clear that they didn’t need to rehearse: they were all pros, and any pro worth his salt could motor through a wedding repertoire on four hours of sleep, half a hangover, and nothing but the opening key to guide him. They had taken a few weeks to rev up these tunes, to add more verve than your typical wedding band could muster, but the set list had been settled by the end of March, and the band that Martin had assembled turned its attention to music built for nightclubs and ballrooms. Every rehearsal began with a warm-up, a play-through of two or three songs for the reception, each one set to simmer. But it never took long for one of those wedding songs to metamorphose into something wondrous. Teddy Gaines on the drums would pick up the pace, demand a solo, and take this locomotive made of shining brass and polished wood down a different, more thrilling line. Or Hooper, on the trumpet, would turn a quick flourish into a fanfare. The band responded every time. They knew the rules of the game. We’ll see how long we can go with that wedding-party music but sooner or later—and please, Lord, let it be sooner—someone is going to ring that bell.
So it was a game, but it wasn’t a joke. How could it be, when Martin treated each session like the second coming of Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall?
The others in the band saw how much it meant to the little guy, and if they thought he was crazy to take it all so seriously, they kept it to themselves and played along. At first they figured he was trying to make nice with his wife and score points with his in-laws, Bronx big shots who had the juice to make life’s bitter pills go down that much easier. But that was hardly enough to make each man pour his heart and soul into a three-hour set for a clutch of half-drunk Irish squares who wouldn’t know Lester Young from Coleman Hawkins and who would probably use the same hateful name for them both. No, they showed up on time and rolled up their shirtsleeves in the afternoon heat at the Dime, a shoe-box club on Tenth Avenue—the western frontier of night-town—and played with everything they had because they knew this band could swing. Martin had assembled the group from the hottest spots in the city: these were men who regularly played the Roseland and the Famous Door, Café Society and the Hickory House. He had ventured as far as Minton’s, the Harlem hothouse where cutting contests sorted the wheat from the chaff. These all-night jam sessions let him see what these men could do when they were playing under their own steam rather than the baton of a bandleader, and after weeks of praising, cajoling, and pleading he had assembled the best band that his small budget could buy. It was one advantage of the hard times and the skinflint wages paid by most bandleaders: horn players were always looking for something on the side.
Once he had the crew lined up, Martin went to work shaping the set list. His charts—the written arrangements that brought together, page by page, the parts that each musician would play—looked like the scrapbook of a mental patient. They were scribbled on cocktail napkins and butcher paper, on the backs of receipts and in the margins of the New York Post. Only in the past two weeks had he transcribed onto neatly lined pages his hurried quarter notes for the saxophones, the mirrored notes of the trumpets, and the low, insistent halves of the bass. He had thought of this as his chance, for one afternoon, to play these songs the way he heard them in his head, but what came out in these noontime rehearsals was better than he had ever imagined.
While Martin had thought he would be leading the way—isn’t that what the bandleader did?—he quickly learned that he was playing catch-up. Men who could hold their own at Minton’s were already taking jazz music to places it hadn’t yet been. Still, he was the one who had brought this group together. Hadn’t he seen plenty of bands full of talented players that somehow never clicked, whereas this group found its groove in a matter of weeks? He must have had something to do with that. Even if he lacked the angel’s kiss that elevated Duke and Basie to the jazzman’s Olympus, he could still set the direction and let the players take it from there.