Symphony of Secrets

In May of 1924, Fred demands to see Josephine’s work on Red. She hides some Fredless Pages under a floorboard in the bathroom before he comes to her room. Fred compliments her work. She asks why he is making so much more money than she is from the music and demands credit for her work. He argues again that people will not buy music written by a Black woman, but Josephine doesn’t believe him.

Fred demands more music, and she argues that she can do whatever she wants with her music. When Fred breaks a lamp, Josephine recalls that the person living beneath her has moved out. There is no one on her floor or the floor beneath hers. No one will come to help her. Fred continues to demand that she give him all her music, and she refuses. Fred throws the table and finds the pages of the Compendium that Josephine hid there, as well as the pages she hid under the couch. He tears through the rest of her apartment and finds about half of the pages she has hidden. She “vow[s] that he [will] never find the rest” (453).

Bern’s experience with the police hired by the Foundation causes him to question the idea that he can overcome all obstacles with hard work. His “lower middle class family” taught him this (454), but now, he is humiliated by having to walk through the police station in nothing but shorts. He tries to cope by humming, but he cannot hum Delaney’s music or enjoy it as he used to, now that he knows that Delaney took credit for Josephine’s work. While he is being processed, Bern wishes that he had never become a “DF Kid.”

Several hours later, Detective Kirdahi and an officer come into the interrogation room, where Bern is handcuffed. Bern asks to call his lawyer, but Kirdahi claims that he doesn’t need one. After Bern answers basic questions about his name and address, they give him an orange jumpsuit to wear. The detective insists that taking the Foundation’s laptop off the premises is theft. Bern continues to ask for a lawyer. Four officers assault him, and Bern is put in a cell with the jumpsuit. Several hours later, they release him and tell him to leave the jumpsuit. As a result, he must walk for several blocks in his shorts in the January cold. He is now more determined than ever to expose the Foundation’s corruption.

On a Thursday in May, Josephine goes to Miles Turpin’s office and offers to sell him some music. He makes a racist remark that her music won’t sell. She plays a song called “When It Was Evergreen” on his piano and gives him the sheet music for it. Josephine has never told Fred that she is able to write standard musical notation. Miles says that the song sounds familiar but is good. She offers to sell it with her name on the byline for $12. Miles says that the song will be popular with his white audiences and agrees to buy it the next day.

However, Josephine has booked a train to North Carolina later that evening. She put her trunks in Penn Station before coming to see Miles. He says that he needs her to fill out paperwork the next day. She plays him four more songs and offers all five of them to him for $60. He is interested in buying all of them in the morning. Josephine decides to change her train ticket and pretend that nothing has changed when she sees Fred that night.

In a Bronx sublet, Eboni reads Bern’s letter of resignation. She tells him that he shouldn’t have been so nice. While Bern feels like he is not himself with different clothes and burner phones, Eboni has pulled herself together. They talk to a lawyer about the NDA and learn that there is a chance that it will not hold up in court. After Bern shares his feelings about being held in the jail cell, Eboni hugs him. They kiss and go to bed together.

After having sex and napping, Eboni brings two laptops into bed. They research the board members’ various shady activities. When Eboni hacks into servers and follows the money trail, they discover Kurt is involved with the “Good Tidings Company” (478). They are disgusted when they learn about it.

When Fred becomes famous, he starts losing his hair and having trouble sleeping. He is on the phone with the San Francisco Players talking about an adaptation of his musical theater production, The Wanderers, when Miles comes to see him. After Fred gets off the phone, Miles sends Fred a message through his receptionist, which states, “Someone is stealing your songs” (481). Miles tells Fred about Josephine’s offer to sell him several songs. He asserts that Fred wrote the songs because the songs sound like Fred’s existing body of work. Miles also makes racist comments about why Josephine could never have written the songs herself.

Miles shows Fred the songs, and Fred learns that Josephine can write in standard musical notation. Fred claims that he wrote the songs and makes racist remarks about Josephine. Miles tells Fred about his appointment with Josephine on the following day. Fred agrees to send some business to Miles’s publishing house and makes plans to have dinner with him that night.

Bern starts having issues with his memory after quitting his position at the Foundation and being assaulted by the police. He does not trust anyone except Eboni and their relationship develops into love. They hide out in an apartment in Queens, but one day, Bern needs to go to the store for toilet paper and coffee. He leaves a note for Eboni and heads to a bodega. Once on the street, Bern feels like he is being followed, so he goes into a smoke shop and lets the group of men he saw pass by him. When he leaves the shop, he encounters the same men on a side street. Bern tries to run, but the men catch up to him. They demand that he give them “the stuff” and assault him.

Bern sees an empty bottle on the ground and uses it as a weapon. He cuts one man deep in the thigh and claims that the injury will kill him if his friends don’t take him to the hospital immediately. The injured man demands that his friends take him to the hospital. After they leave, Bern calls Eboni and tells her that there are at least four men who know their address. They upload their important files to Eboni’s online server and destroy their laptops while driving away in an Uber. They take the Uber to the subway and ride to Coney Island.

In a Russian neighborhood, they see a sign for a room for rent and call the number. The woman is interested in renting to them over the phone, but when she sees them in person, she changes her mind. They offer more money than she is asking to rent the room. She makes some racist comments but agrees to let them stay for a week when they offer to pay her double the rent.

Fred and Miles have a steak dinner with wine. Miles gets very drunk and says that Fred is the only person he talked to about Josephine’s music. They leave the restaurant and walk toward the Hudson River. Fred leads Miles down a deserted alley and convinces him to urinate there. When Miles unbuttons his fly, Fred hits him on the head, then shoots him in the back of the head with a revolver and takes his wallet. He takes a cab back to his building to confront Josephine.

This chapter consists of a letter from Bern and Eboni to the board of the Delaney Foundation. They reveal what they have discovered in their research. First, they write about Kurt’s involvement in a “money-laundering scheme” and his activities with male sex workers (509). They state that another board member, Thomas Alexander, has committed tax fraud and hired undocumented workers. Bern and Eboni threaten to go to the press and to legal entities with this information, as well as information about Delaney’s theft of Josephine’s music and the Foundation’s decision to pay people to assault Bern. They also threaten to post all the information online. If the board wants to keep them from releasing the information, they must meet on March 1 at the Pierre Hotel. Bern and Eboni also assert that a friend of theirs will post the information if they should go missing.

After she changes her train ticket, Josephine hides in her room. She cleans up the mess that Fred made and looks at the jeweler's screwdriver that she used to hide the score for Red. She plans to retrieve the music after meeting with Miles; then she will go to the train station. Josephine longs to leave New York and go to North Carolina. When Fred gets home, he asks why she tried to sell songs to Miles. Josephine asserts that the music belongs to her because she wrote it. He grabs her, and she smells the revolver. Fred pulls out the gun and says that Josephine’s betrayal made him kill Miles. Josephine argues that Fred betrayed her by never giving her credit for her music; he also didn’t give her even half the profits from the sales.

Fred claims that she is ungrateful, but she asserts that he couldn’t have written the music without her. Fred calls her “a crazy scrap-bag lady [...] living like a dog” on the street before he helped her (522). Josephine continues to assert that she owns the music she wrote. Fred squeezes her face and then her neck, crying as he strangles her to death. In her last moments, she listens to the music of the city.

The board members and their lawyers attend Bern and Eboni’s meeting in the Pierre Hotel’s ballroom. Bern starts to take them through a PowerPoint presentation, but before he can get to the second slide, Whitman—the lawyer—interrupts with a comment about violating his NDA. Bern and Eboni’s lawyer, Lauren Weber, explains that the court case over the NDA could drag on for months. Eboni subtly insults Mallory’s outfit. Bern continues with the presentation, asserting that Josephine wrote Red. Kurt refuses to work with them. Lauren goes over documents that detail how to credit both Josephine and Delaney for the works that they can prove Josephine wrote. Lauren and Eboni explain that the board must give Josephine’s family the royalties from her songs. Bern argues that the Foundation should be helping people.

Next, Lauren points out the expected compensation for Eboni and Bern, and board members are stunned by the amount. Bern explains that much of it is meant as recompense for the damages he suffered when the police assaulted him. The board doesn’t know that the Foundation hired the officers, and Kurt tells everyone to leave. However, the board members insist on staying. They turn against Kurt. Bern continues the presentation by revealing that Delaney was a murderer.

This chapter details the information that Bern presents about Delaney committing murder. Bern and Eboni relate that they sifted through the boxes of documents from Ditmars & Ross. Then, they hired a forensic detective to go over the documents. These documents include evidence that Miles had dinner with Delaney on the same night that he was murdered. One of Delaney’s guns, displayed in the Foundation’s museum, is the same kind that killed Miles. Bern found Miles’s grandson, who had the five songs that Josephine sold to Miles, with her name on the standard musical notation. Miles’s grandson also found a contract for the songs dated “the day after Miles Turpin died” (535).

Kurt argues that the evidence they have gathered is not convincing. Bern counters that the information will destroy the reputation of the Foundation regardless, causing them to lose all their funding. Kurt makes some racist comments and threatens Bern and Eboni. Other board members tell Kurt to stop talking, and Bern feels like justice is finally happening.

Fred wraps Josephine’s corpse in her coat and takes her down in the elevator. Her clothes stick to the elevator’s filigree. Once downstairs, Fred drags her corpse several blocks and tosses it onto the train tracks. He hears a metallic noise as the corpse falls and wonders what it is. When he gets back to his building, Fred feels lonely and is in denial about his homicides. He cannot believe that he has stopped Josephine from writing more music. Then, Fred realizes that he cannot completely translate her unique musical notation. He looks for Red but can’t find it and realizes that the trunks holding her Compendium are also gone.

Fred retrieves the trunks from Penn Station, but none of them contain Red. He tears up the building looking for Red but never finds it. He does find some early drafts of melodies and uses them to try to recreate the opera. The trunks provide Fred with many songs that he can translate to regular musical notation, and he decides to change his name to Frederic when he publishes them. Eventually, he runs out of Josephine’s music and is left with her transcriptions of sounds and music by other people.

The critics give Delaney poor reviews, and he is haunted by Josephine. He talks to her and pours a glass of champagne for her before every performance. Fred is unable to work with other composers due to his fear that they will discover the fact that he is a fraud. After the loss of Josephine’s Red, Delaney’s name becomes synonymous with a huge mistake. Along with recreating Red, he creates the Delaney Foundation to cope with his guilt over killing Josephine. He believes that he has done “enough penance” and hopes that audiences will like his version of Red.

However, the audience does not enjoy the premiere of Red. By the end of Act 2, audience members start to leave the theater, and many don’t return after the intermission. Only a few people stay until the end, and they offer minimal applause. Fred stays in the theater until everyone else leaves. He looks at the glass of champagne that he left out for Josephine. He takes out a picture of her, writes his confession to her murder on the back of it, and then tears it into little pieces. As he leaves the theater, he realizes that he will never find Josephine’s music for Red.

Mallory agrees to give Bern and Eboni access to the original office of Delaney Music Publishing. As she keeps them waiting outside the building, Bern thinks about how he and Eboni have started experimenting with cooking their own pizza. Mallory arrives and gives them information about Delaney tearing up the building in 1924. He never discovered Josephine’s final hiding place: the “tarnished art deco brass filigree that lined the interior” of the elevator (560). This is where Mallory found the manuscript of Red that she hired Bern to decode, and it is now empty.

The premiere of Red is held in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Eboni devised a lottery system that assigns seats to people randomly. Bern observes that the crowd is very diverse. He takes the stage and introduces the opera. He thanks Eboni, and the spotlight points her out in the audience. As he gives Josephine credit as the composer, he directs the spotlight on Earlene and her family. Bern shows a picture of Josephine to the audience and explains that Delaney stole her music. The book ends as the opera begins.