Symphony of Secrets

Bern worries about Eboni and is unable to work. He is sure that the police at her office were hired by the Foundation. That evening, she texts him from a burner phone. He buys one as well, then buys a second one at her request. On this phone, Eboni texts that she has hidden Josephine’s papers, but they took everything else. She and Bern plan to meet in Queens in one hour. Eboni gives Bern the address of a women’s clothing store. She is in the back waiting for him. They hug.

Eboni states that police with a warrant for the breached NDA came to her office. She doesn’t tell Bern where she hid Josephine’s things. Eboni backed up the pages of symbols on a new, secure server and wiped the files that the police took. Bern is impressed with her calm in the face of danger. Eboni declares that the Foundation cannot be trusted and that she knows someone who can help take them down. She suggests that Bern go back to work as if nothing happened. He agrees to stash burner phones in the public library so that she can contact him. As he walks back to his apartment, Bern feels like he is being followed.

After Delaney locks her in her room, Josephine listens to records and transcribes. Fred returns and asks for the song. She plays him the “trees falling upward” (367), which is not a singable melody. Fred calls it noise, and she plays different variations of the same thing. Fred gets angry and states that she will not have a home if she doesn’t write the song. He explains that their new publishing house will fail; without her talent, they will have no money for a place to live. Then Josephine listens to people walking on stairs and closing doors in the building and tells Fred that these sounds are what she transcribed.

Fred thinks she is joking. When he realizes she isn’t, he grabs her shoulder and chin roughly and gets teary-eyed. He says they will be ruined if she doesn’t write new music. Josephine tells him never to lock her in. She wants to go out to the clubs and have dinner with him like they used to. However, Fred will never go back to his old job, and he is no longer interested in playing at the Alibi Club. Josephine asks him to go to the Cantina with her. He says she can go, but he can’t, if she writes the new song.

Then, Josephine plays a piece that he loves. He hugs her. Fred promises to spend more time with her, and they have dinner together. She goes out on her own, and he is at home when she gets back. That night, in bed, Josephine thinks about how Fred has changed.

After stashing the burner phones, Bern goes to the Foundation. Almost immediately, he is summoned to Mallory’s office. The videoconference link shows the same people from the earlier meeting. Kurt Delaney tells Bern that they have discovered that Eboni deleted the Foundation’s files. He demands that Bern turn over all the documents. Bern tells them that he doesn’t know where the documents are, nor does he know where Eboni is. Kurt reminds Bern that the NDA is a legal contract that stipulates all his work related to Red belongs to the Foundation. When Bern refuses to reveal where the documents are, Kurt makes some racist comments and threatens Bern.

The lawyer, Whitman, offers to reimburse Bern for the cost of the documents that he purchased from Earlene. Kurt gives Bern 36 hours to bring in the documents and promises to ruin Bern if he talks to the press. Bern has some private doubts, but he doesn’t reveal anything about Eboni. After the meeting, Bern goes to the library and texts Eboni. He admits that she was right—the Foundation is corrupt. Bern declares war on the Foundation and promises to get in touch with someone who can help them.

Over the summer, Josephine walks around the city during the mornings and transcribes. Fred has lunch with her, and in the afternoons they work on the Compendium. Fred slowly learns to read her notational system. Her symbols are more complex than standard musical notation. She cooks dinner for them, and sometimes, Fred goes out with her to a club in the evenings. Josephine starts hiding her favorite melodies in the Compendium from Fred, calling these parts the “Fredless Pages.”

In the autumn, Fred starts spending less time with Josephine. He promises to spend more time with her after he gets into a groove with running the publishing house. Fred decks out the office with furniture and interior design, including an elevator. Josephine must quickly remove some of her Compendium from the furniture that Fred replaces. He also hires staff. By the winter, Fred learns to read more of her notational system and spends only an hour each afternoon going over the Compendium with her. During the day, Josephine writes ballets and theatrical scores. During the night, she visits the clubs that admit Black people, listening to live music.

One night, she sees Fred going into a “whites-only” club with a woman in a flapper dress and expensive jewelry. When he gets home, she confronts him because he claimed to be going to a business meeting. He claims that the meeting was at the club. Josephine wants him to spend time with her and admits that she doesn’t like the fact that he was out with another woman. Fred tells her they will go to Europe in the spring. She is unsure if she will like traveling through Europe. Fred explains that there aren’t any whites-only clubs in Europe. Josephine is enthralled with the idea that she can go to all the clubs and hear all the music.

Bern and Eboni meet at a pizza place in Brooklyn. On the way there, Bern is paranoid about being followed and changes trains six times. The pizza is excellent, and Bern’s contact, a reporter named Mona Keltner, joins them. They tell her that Josephine drew all the Delaney Doodles and probably wrote all of Delaney’s music. They tell Mona that there were five trunks full of pages of her symbols at Pennsylvania Station, but they have only recovered one. They show her a picture of it.

Josephine and Fred take a ship to England. In London, they spend the afternoons together. Fred gets her tickets for many musical acts he can, but he doesn’t go out with her. In the evenings, they go through the five trunks of the Compendium to find new music. Fred’s entourage grows, but the new members don’t talk to Josephine. They also encourage Fred to stay at different places than her, but he insists that she stay in the same hotels that he does. She overhears them comparing her to a stray dog.

In Paris, Fred spends very little time with Josephine. He works with her on new songs in the Compendium for about an hour each day but is absent otherwise. She doesn’t speak French, so she spends all of her time transcribing in her hotel room. A week into their stay, Fred demands that she give him some music they worked on a few days’ prior. When she tells him that she doesn’t know where the melody in question is, he grabs her shoulders and shakes her, smacking her head against the wall. He demands that she give him the music, and she argues that it belongs to her. Prior to this, Josephine never liked the idea of owning music. However, she now realizes that her songs bring in all the money. She tells him to leave her alone, thinks about going back to the States, and realizes that Fred only cares about her music, not her. He apologizes and promises not to grab her without her consent again. Josephine claims that the music he wants is under the bed. While he looks under there, she gets the music out from its hiding place with other Fredless Pages and slips it into a visible pile. Fred is happy when he finds it and leaves. She is shaken by his actions and transcribes all night.

In the morning, he apologizes again and explains that the music is for a duke’s birthday party and that royalty will hear it. He takes her out to breakfast and shows her around the city that day. A few days later, he hires a woman named Clarice to accompany Josephine around the city and translate languages for her. She is never “turned away for the color of her skin” in Europe (413). They travel around various countries, and Josephine hears a wide variety of music. In Antwerp, Fred takes Josephine to the Olympic Games, where she sees the flag with the different colored rings. That evening, she tells Fred that she wants to write music about the rings. She plays some of her ideas for him, and he suggests that she make the rings into five operas.

The reporter, Mona, has not contacted Bern by the time Mallory calls him into her office again. A smaller group is present on the videoconference. Kurt asks about the trunk and the documents. Bern remains silent for a while, then mentions the optics of an “all-white board firing a Black man” (420). Mallory says they are not firing him. Bern goes back to his office to work on Red. That week, Eboni tries to restore her business by working remotely and keeping a low profile.

As Bern works on Red, he becomes more impressed with it. He notices that there are more symbols in the later portions of the manuscript and fewer symbols in the first 150 pages. This causes Bern to hypothesize that the beginning of the opera is more developed than the later acts. He wants to see the original to test his theory. Mallory doesn’t answer his request to see it. Bern tries to contact Mona on his burner phone. When she does finally call, she tells Bern that her editor is not interested in running the piece on the Foundation because of the NDA. She also did not find any records of Josephine in the archives of the New York Times.

That night, Eboni and Bern meet in a mall in Flushing. Eboni is furious at Mona for dropping the story and suggests going public on social media. Bern worries that this strategy will ruin his academic reputation and asks if Eboni has any other ideas. She does.

When Josephine and Fred get back to New York, he moves into a different room in the building, separating himself from Josephine. She puts the trunks that hold the Compendium in his old room. Each night, he comes and asks for the music that she has written that day. He still makes mistakes in reading her symbols, but he is getting better at decoding them. Her operas for the Olympic rings inspire him to spend more time working with her. As the years go by, Josephine writes the Blue, Yellow, and Black operas. Then, she starts working on the Green opera.

In 1923, Josephine comes home after seeing a New Orleans jazz band to find Fred in her room. He tells her that he wants to talk about honesty and cooperation. As she thinks about the Green opera, he asks if she is keeping pages from him. Distracted, Josephine glances at one of her hiding places. (Fred has already taken out the pages that she hid there.) He demands that she give him everything that she writes and forbids her from hiding her music again. Josephine has many hiding places, so Fred only finds a small portion of what she is hiding, but she worries that he will find the others.