Being a chapter from the novel in progress The Rosebud Row.
Leonora Speyer stood at the third-floor window of her home at 22 Washington Square North, looking out over the park, her violin hanging at shoulder level from the crook between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. She imagined herself a nesting bird looking down on the cooly glowing tops of the Sycamore trees. Without thinking, she used the free fingers of her left hand to gently brush the open strings, confirming that they were in tune.
She was dressed much as John Singer Sargent had painted her twenty years previous. In the intervening years she had not lost a bit of her Edwardian vigor; her dark, luxurious hair, now enhanced with the occasional silver strand that made the upward sweep of her pompadour shimmer in the shifting light, served to elongate the line of her pale neck, with its rouge-like violin blemish. Her white silk evening gown had lavender and plum undertones to the fabric that made it appear to move in the changing light even when she stood still. It plunged gracefully at its neck, setting her bare skin against the rich wood of her violin when she played. Intentionally uncorseted to give her more freedom to move, her long arms were naturally left bare.
Her poetry had been awarded the Pulitzer prize only a month before. She was still digesting the news. It made her happier than winning first prize during her second year at the Brussels Conservatory had; it meant more (if any of these things “mean” anything) than soloing with the major orchestras before the war, if only because, as a violinist she had been an interpreter; as a poet, she was a creator. But neither meant a thing compared to the quiet pride she took in having raised her four daughters.
When her husband Edgar had gently teased, “Now you know what the first line of your obituary will be,” she had sensibly responded, “Do you really think so little of me?”
He had taken her hands in his and kissed them, begging her forgiveness, as he had when he was stripped of his British titles by the government in December 1921. A German Jew, he’d been a victim of hysteria and xenophobia, accused of being a spy—this, after he’d financed much of the London Underground and saved the Proms. The entire family had been stripped of citizenship and moved to New York.
That she had put the violin down was not only because of her hand injury and the war, but because, despite her achievements as a parent, she knew that only she could write her poetry, and that poetry, if it is a meaningful enough thing, lasts. Approaching writing as a musician, she reasoned that, while talent is a gift from God, the color and harmony of words must be practiced and mastered like a physical instrument. Her poetry collection, Fiddler’s Farewell, was not only a symbolic but a literal goodbye to the violin as she had reinvented herself.
With the unselfconscious fluidity of the professional soloist, she brought her violin up under her chin in three graceful beats: first, the slight pressure with the ball of her left hand on the neck to rotate the instrument, second an outward motion to align the violin under the jaw, and third, the head’s non-embrace of the instrument, like a lioness rubbing her whiskers on her cub. At the same time, the bow moved like a length of deep-sea kelp, first outward and then up, so that it was in position for its first stroke on the strings, the frog resting securely on her thumb, nestled protectively by the fingers of her right hand. The deep, primordial feelings that these motions provoke combine a lover’s embrace and a parent’s—all emotions required and welcome, everything in accord, never separate from the instrument, for it was older and wiser than she, and had endured and celebrated many hands over the years.
Before touching the string with her bow, Leonora noticed that the tension of the hair of her bow wasn’t exactly as she preferred it, so she kept her violin in place with a practiced shrug and used her left hand to hold the bow by the tip and rotated the little screw on the frog a bit while looking at Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, sitting open on the stand next to the window. These movements have always been the secret, intimate language of violinists, and are so private that they take one’s breath away.
While she loathed musical travelogues, Leonora did adore Ravel’s Gallic harmonic ambiguity in the first movement. Is it A minor or the parallel major? Well, it is A minor but he’s really probing the essential nature of the note that falls between C and C#. And the G with which he finishes the little purling gesture is recursive, nervous, like a nun working her beads. The music is ancient-sounding, but its Classical bi-modal friction and Gershwin’s modern blues-scale give it contemporary friction: it’s either a flat seventh, which means we’re in E major, or a flat three, which makes it jazz: E—G—E—G#, like the oscillating G#—B—G#—C# melody of Gershwin’s beautiful new Second Prelude, which she’d heard Abigail’s husband John play only the other evening and which had moved her to tears.
She moved her bow to her left hand and jotted a fingering in; this piece benefited from alternative fingerings. The colors must shift from nun to matron to coquette effortlessly like an electric current.
John and Abigail Shallot were marvelous neighbors. Leonora and Abby were like sisters. And Leonora’s girls all doted excessively on their son, Auric, who was clearly a musical prodigy, both as a composer and as a pianist—a boy of the sort both Abby and Leonora had grown up with at the Conservatoire. It was a foregone conclusion that he would be sent when the time came, and that his future was assured.
But both women missed their dear friend, concert pianist Beatrice Welles, whose tragic death only three years earlier they still mourned. Beatrice had been an agreeable chamber music partner, an activist, and a teacher, married to one of Edgar’s business associates—a beautiful debauchee named Richard Welles, a Midwesterner with a knack for inventing things and winning at cards. According to Edgar, even though Dick and Beatrice had called it quits years earlier, he had liquidated his assets, lived abroad in Peking, and had relegated his boy to the Todd Seminary out in Illinois a few months ago while he gave himself to alcohol.
Beatrice’s son, Orson, was an identical kind of wunderkind, growing up far away under the same shadow of relentless genius.
Abby, for her part, was an excellent cellist—a graduate of the Curtis Institute, where she had studied with Felix Salmond before marrying John. She remained proud of having studied Elgar’s concerto with Felix, who premiered it, and still teased Orly Cole about having beaten him out of the chance to play the piece with the Curtis Symphony.
Leonora made her way through the first movement of the Ravel, stopping occasionally to jot in a fingering, change a bowing, or stipulate a string. It would be fun to throw in alternate string choices at the last minute with Abby in performance; particularly tonight, as the Ravel required a good violinist to pull off, and a very good cellist. She chuckled and looked out the window. There, on the bluestone walk in front of the house, stood Auric, looking up at her. Who knew how long he had been watching her in the window?
She looked at him: a strange, queer child with that stark, unblinking intensity and closely-cropped hair. She smiled. Abby had told her that he had demanded to be permitted to wait on people at Caffè Reggio down the block. The poet in her resisted the urge to step out of the moment. She wondered what he was thinking. At that moment, he raised his hand, held it near his face, and then reached toward her, a look of such complete….
In an instant, she set her violin down and dashed down the stairs. Her shoes clattered against the parquet of the front hall. She threw open the doors, rushed down the steps, and fell to her knees before him, arms thrown wide. “What is it, little one? What is it?” she cried, weeping, as he threw his arms around her and she him.
The trolleys, you see, had been stilled because Charles Lindbergh was being given a hero’s welcome on Fifth Avenue. Like all the streetcars running below fourteenth street, the Broadway Line trolleys did not use overhead wires. Instead, they drew power from an underground slot conduit buried beneath the street. The boy’s parents, he had just been told by his auntie, Abby’s sister, were dead; mown down by an unseen tram returning to its station.
“Who will I play for, now?” asked Auric.
Leonora stood, smoothed her dress, and taking Auric’s hand, walked him the few paces to the Shallot house. The doors, atop steps that were identical to her own, hung wide open. Abby’s sister stood between them, staring blankly into the park, her hands clenched upon her hips. Leonora stopped at the bottom step, Auric leaning into her side, his small arms locked around her waist.
“They were dragged for an entire block under the tram,” the sister said.
The official story, compiled from the terse, overlapping testimonies of the only remaining witnesses—three transit switchmen who had been idling by the track geometry—blamed a silver-capped walking stick. John Shallot had apparently stepped into the groove of the track, his heavy malacca cane wedging deep into the narrow steel channel just as the rogue car rounded the dead angle from Fourteenth Street. In his frantic haste to dislodge it, his shoe had caught in the iron flanging. Abby had refused to let go of his arm.
There had been no onlookers on the sidewalks to scream a warning or wave down the driver; the entire neighborhood had migrated north to throw ticker-tape at Charles Lindbergh’s passing motorcade. The streetcar had struck them at full momentum, carrying their bodies beneath its iron skirt and down into the lightless underground vault where the electrical plows drew their live juice. The heavy, unshielded motors had simply kept grinding forward, oblivious to the biological friction underneath.
When the emergency crews finally hoisted the chassis with pneumatic jacks, identification by facial structure was impossible. John and Abby were recognized only by the shredded, grease-blackened remnants of their garments: the specific weave of his bespoke English tweed and the distinctive green silk of her concert dress, which still smelled faintly of pine rosin and lavender perfume beneath the stench of ozone.
Within an hour, the damaged tram was towed to the subterranean barns on Tenth Avenue for a high-pressure wash, clearing the tracks before the regular evening commute could be disrupted. The remains were gathered into two wicker baskets and transferred to the Bellevue morgue, leaving nothing on the asphalt but a dark, iridescent stain that looked remarkably like machine oil, reflecting the pale New York sky.
A formal coroner’s inquest was hastily convened the following Thursday. The magistrate sat beneath a stained-glass transom, listening to the dry, mechanical data of braking distances and weight distribution before ruling the deaths an unavoidable misadventure. The verdict entirely cleared the New York Railways Corporation of corporate liability or mechanical negligence, reducing a family’s sudden erasure to a minor statistical anomaly in the city’s transit logs.
Dick Welles and Edgar were John’s appointed executors. His will was crystal clear: the house would remain in Auric’s name until his eighteenth birthday, when it would be liquidated along with John and Abby’s fortune, the proceeds held in a restrictive trust for the boy’s use. Abby’s sister, provided she remained in the house on Washington Square and oversaw Auric’s affairs to the satisfaction of the executors, would be provided with a comfortable living until his age of consent; she would then receive a flat cash bequest and be free to go.
For Abby’s sister, the legal arrangement was merely a green light to establish a permanent emotional distance. She had never understood the family’s strange, pretentious musical obsessions, viewing her nephew’s unblinking intensity not as genius, but as an expensive psychological liability that needed to be managed. It was already clear to Leonora that the woman would execute her duties like a conductor managing a forced rest—doing only what was legally required—waiting for that precise chronological milestone to disappear entirely, erasing her own coordinates from the family ledger and leaving the boy with a fortune but no history.
By the first week of December, the Shallot house was completely silent, its high ceilings echoing with emptiness and its furniture cloaked in pale muslin drop cloths. Abby’s sister had already defaulted on the household routine and retreated to Europe; Edgar and Leonora had taken the boy into their own home to live with the girls until the beginning of the second term at the Todd Seminary, where he would join Dick’s son, Orson. They kept him close until the twentieth of the month, when, his small leather suitcases in hand, he departed for the journey to Woodstock, Illinois.
Tomorrow, Mr. Burkan—the formidable copyright solicitor who handled George Gershwin’s affairs and co-founded ASCAP—would come to dinner, place his heavy card upon the silver tray in the foyer, and explain the precise meaning of a cryptic codicil in John’s will. It was a clause regarding Auric’s future that his abrupt enrollment at the Todd Seminary seemed to predicate. Leonora had already come to loathe lawyers; their vocabulary felt too much like an incision.
Leonora stood by her third-floor window and lifted her hand to Auric. He was standing once more on the blue flagstones in front of number 22, wrapped in his grey woolen overcoat with a ridiculous orange scarf knotted around his neck, the two small leather suitcases resting at his feet. He was eleven years old, his entire world compressed into those twin leather handles, carrying nothing but a blank ledger and a single red graphite pencil. The snow—sluggish, thick, and heavy, like frozen moths—drifted straight down around him as he looked up at her glass.
After a few minutes, the girls bounded down the steps without their jackets, hugging him, kissing his cold cheeks, pushing travel sweets into his coat pockets, weeping, laughing, promising to write every week, and demanding his instant return. Leonora smiled sadly as the black taxi pulled up to the curb. The girls retreated indoors, stomping their shoes free of the snow in the parqueted foyer, leaving Leonora alone to watch the vehicle carry the boy away into the charcoal-streaked Manhattan slush.
She picked up her violin but did not bring it to her chin; the varnished wood felt cold, heavy, and unyielding against her palms. Instead, she looked back at the open Ravel score on the stand, seeing the black note-heads no longer as music, but as a rigid grid—a system of clinical coordinates designed to capture and format human grief. The city beneath her feet felt less like a collection of human homes and more like a massive, automated machine, drawing its power from a hidden, subterranean conduit, grinding down creators to make room for the operators.
The boy was gone, the people he had loved and played for, violently torn away by a mindless machine, leaving behind nothing but unresolved dissonance. He had been stripped of his origins, his internal music erased, leaving empty bars waiting to be filled at the beginning of a century that had no use for beauty. In the quiet, darkening room, the open strings of her violin seemed to vibrate in sympathy with a distant, shortwave hum, oscillating endlessly between the major and the minor, the classical flat seventh and the major-minor flat third of jazz, waiting for a trigger that had already been pulled.