Lovely War(15)

“Athena’s more my style,” Apollo explains. “Fierce, fair, fantastic. War, wisdom, and craft. We’d be perfect. Artsy and hip. Bohemian but grounded. Think of the little godlings we could make.”

“Forget about it,” says Aphrodite. “Athena’s not falling for you or anyone. Believe me.”

“I’ll win her over yet,” says Apollo. “But, to your question, what’s the attraction of War?”

Hephaestus raps his gavel. “Overruled. Don’t care.”

Apollo strokes his chin. “There’s plague. During the last war, my so-called Spanish influenza was a triumph. Reaped twice as many souls as your ‘Great’ War, Ares.”

“You’re proud of that?” demands Hephaestus.

“It’s not the body count, Volcano God,” says Apollo. “It’s the terrible beauty of a massively destructive force. When Poseidon shakes the earth and tsunamis wipe out the coastline, it’s something to see. You loved Mount Vesuvius. Admit it. You took pride in Pompeii.”

Hephaestus tries to look modest. “They’re still talking about it, two thousand years later.”

Apollo shrugs. “We’re artists.” He conjures a platter of grapes, figs, and cheeses, digs in, then addresses Ares. “Don’t tell me you didn’t glory in the Battle of the Somme. Or Verdun. You were drunk on blood.” He offers him the platter. “Snack?”

“You’re a fool,” says the god of war.

“All I’m saying”—Apollo is still chewing—“is that my little flu virus, in its own microscopic, contagious way, was a thing of beauty.” He smacks his lips. “Annihilation has its own je ne sais quoi. We’re all guilty of it. So spare me the sermons.”

“I’m not guilty of it,” says Aphrodite. “Destruction has nothing to do with me.”

The male gods stare, then explode laughing. Aphrodite turns her back on them all.

“Then there’s the poetry,” says Apollo. “Another reason to love war. Why, in the Great War . . . Not since the Trojan War has a conflict inspired such verse. Here, let me recite for you—”

“No!” Three divine voices sound together, for once in perfect accord.

Apollo looks genuinely surprised. “You don’t want me to?” He plucks a ukulele out of the air. “Well, I’ll be darned. Anyway,” he says, “there was the music. The Great War lit a musical fire that engulfed the world.”

“We were just talking about that,” says Aphrodite.

Ares frowns. “No, we weren’t.”

“We were about to,” the goddess says. “Apollo, I summoned you here to tell your part of a particular story.”

“Which story?” Aphrodite looks intently at him, and he nods. “Oh. That story.”





APOLLO


     Carnegie Hall—May 2, 1912





COME WITH ME to Carnegie Hall.

It’s May 2, 1912. The Great War is still two summers away.

James Reese Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra is about to perform, to a sellout crowd, a “Concert of Negro Music.” The audience is packed in like well-dressed sardines.

For the first time ever in America, black musicians will perform black music at a major concert hall. An orchestra of over a hundred performers will play brass, winds and strings, banjos and mandolins. The Clef Club Chorus, 150 voices, packs in, as does the Coleridge-Taylor 40 voice choir. Ringing the back of the stage are ten upright grand pianos. Ten.

The audience, black and white, waits for the show to begin. They’re about to hear a sound so new, so energetic and rhythmic and harmonic, so syncopated, so alive, that music will never be the same. This sound will reverberate around the world—following, though nobody knows it yet, the drums of war.

The ten pianos must be a joke, some people think. What could the Clef Club Orchestra possibly want with ten pianos?

They’re no joke to fifteen-year-old Aubrey Edwards, seated behind the third piano from the left. I’d had my eye on him since he was still sucking his thumb. One of the youngest musicians on the stage, Aubrey’s got the confidence of ten pianists. Give him enough fingers, and he play all ten of those instruments at once. There’s nothing about harmonies Aubrey doesn’t understand.

The fathomless darkness of Carnegie Hall gapes at him like a gigantic mouth, waiting to devour him, piano and all. The footlights, lower teeth. The wooden stage, a tongue. Each balcony, another row of fangs.

He hopes his parents and his sister, Kate, are out there somewhere. No telling if they got tickets. When Aubrey arrived, lines were already wrapping around the block. Young as he was, and not carrying an instrument, he had to work to persuade the door guard he was in the band.

The other pianists take their benches. The orchestra’s so keyed up with excitement, you can smell it. The air is heavy with cologne and the wood-and-brass-and-oily-velvet smell of instruments.

The conductor, James Reese Europe, takes the stage. A giant of a man in a glittering white tuxedo. The audience bursts with pent-up applause, like a tidal wave rolling through the auditorium and rippling up its balconies. Silence falls. The time is now.

Even Aubrey’s confidence falters for a moment, then. How does “The Clef Club March” begin? When do they modulate? His fingers freeze. He’s going to ruin everything. Jim Europe’s going to kill him. Uncle Ames, who taught him to play, will kill him twice. He’ll never play in Harlem again. He wipes the sweat on his palms off onto his gray trouser legs.