The Baroness and Monk

Fourteen thousand American men in uniform and two hundred fifty-eight women sailed from Southhampton for New York harbor in 1944. In the Queen Mary's officers' lounge a Rothschild heir turned her head to peer over the wing back chair, crushed velvet, like bruised cabernet skin, and peeked at the pilot's copy of The Decameron. 

"You should read it in Italian." 

Pages slammed shut with place unmarked. The captain shoved the leather-covered volume into a brass-buckled canvas briefcase emblazoned with his squadron's mascot. The black-eyed, sharp-nosed joker wore a fool's tri-corner hat and a high ecclesiastical collar and looked over a fanned hand of four aces.

 "So are you Italian?" 

"No, I am French, my name is Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. I am a Jew. You can call me "Nica." 

"I am an American, my name is Jim. I think I am a Protestant, but my initials are JEW." 

Her crimson nail traced the stitches on his Army Air Corps patch. 

"Usually I fly to New York. Do you find the approach more challenging at La Guardia or Le Bourget?" 

"You must be doing well to fly Pam Am." 

"Mais, non; we fly ourselves." 

A fall of chestnut hair swung in the light as she rose and turned to leave. 

"Give to me your address. My husband is lost in Africa, a saboteur of Nazi dreams, a hopeless preservationist of empire. I am to meet him in Mexico City, if he lives…. A girl needs always three back up plans."

 **** 

In June 1947, he packed his bags to accept the job offer from Perry Merrill, protege of Gifford Pinchot, Teddie Roosevelt's partner in establishing American forestry.  Jim's Uncle Howard had introduced him to Pinchot at age 15 and so he'd joined the Society of American Foresters in 1933. 

Three days before departure for the mountains of Vermont, a postcard of the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge came to “JEW Wilkinson, Wenonah, NJ.” It had a half thumb-print of lipstick and a command: "Back me up at The Stanhope - - - Nica." 

On June 12, his hardtop Jeep packed with books, boots and a letter of bona fides buzzed out of the crepuscular light of Hackensack and pulled up to The Stanhope Hotel's brightly illuminated portico on 5th Avenue, just as the Baroness slid out from behind the wheel of a black Bentley. 

"Oh, mon Capitaine, you're just in time! Fly me to Minton's! Is that your truck? We'll take that; Allons-y!" 

At Minton's Playhouse, bebop was brewing. Dizzy, Clarke, Mingus and Monk took Ellington into shadowed alleys and round brilliant corners.   Stuttering melodies that hitched the art forward and created new imaginations. At three in the morning, after the  last encore, the bearded, beret-topped piano player shuffled to the front of the stage, growled "Nica" and held out his hand. 

"Capitaine Wilkinson - my friend, Thelonious Sphere Monk.”

The pianist bent down, rested his hand on the stage edge, swung down to the floor and pulled a chair to their table.

"Well, Wilkinson, what did you think of the music tonight?"

"I don't know that I could keep up with it; it is intriguing, though - certainly it's no Chattanooga Choo, Choo."

"Ha, Glen Miller and I are conducting our trains to disparate destinations."

"And I suppose that I'll be someplace else after listening to my sister's Nearer My God to Thee."

The Baroness interjected:  "If you listen and listen and listen to Epistrophy, you'll get to some place very sacred."

"Wilkinson, tell me about your sister's music."

"She plays pipe organ, mainly at church of course, though she got to play the Wanamaker giant once.  She studied at Oberlin."

"My folks mainly study in sharecropper fields, road houses and sometimes at Minton's.  Miles, though, he graduated from Julliard."

Monk remounted the stage, sat at the piano, closed his eyes, pointed his chin up and played a dirge-like Nearer My God to Thee, a steady yet laboring drag of tired feet.  In the second verse, the rhythm sped up with stuttering steps and dissonant strikes that sounded of what the "sun, moon, and stars forgot."    A final crashing cord, sustained by a quivering right foot on the pedal, faded into the clinks of glasses and ashtrays being cleared from Minton's tables.

"Come on, Nica, Nellie's waiting on us."

The Baroness took the steps up onto the stage, waved back, ducked through the curtain and was gone. 

As chairs were piled on tables and the floor swept, he left by the side door for the parking lot and found in the Jeep a box of 78s on the floor and a note on his windshield: "A demain, mon Capitaine...." 

SEPTEMBER 2023

I have 125 pages that takes this narrative a lot further.  In progress.