“Who is John Hammond?”
“He’s a top producer for Columbia Records, one of the biggest. He’s put some of the jazz greats on the map. Listen, I’m sure he would flip out if he heard you sing. We’ll call him from the hotel tonight. You can audition for him over the phone.”
“You are crazy . .
“Crazy serious. I promise you, one song and he’ll offer you a contract.”
“No, no. I couldn’t. . - not over the phone. Long-distance like that.”
“Jenny, stranger things have happened. America’s a funny place.”
“Do you miss it?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I guess I do,” he said. “ I think maybe I’ll have to go home for a while. I’ve been gone a very long time.” Then a moment later: “You’ll love New York.”
She sat up suddenly. “What?”
“I said you’ll love New York. We’ll go there on our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon?”
“Marry me, Jen. I adore you. I will devote my life to making you safe and happy.”
She seemed troubled and did not respond immediately. “I want to marry you, Kee. And I thank you for asking me. I don’t know...”
“Jenny, in one night you’ll hear every great jazz artist alive. We’ll do the Apollo and the 1-larlem Opera House, the Savoy, Cotton Club
“I don’t think I’m ready to give up on Germany.”
Keegan barely missed a beat. “Okay, we’ll stay over here. You’ll be my wife, that makes you an American citizen. They can’t touch you.”
“Oh Kee, for such a worldly man you are so naïve. Don’t you see, they can and will do anything they want to. Would you give up your citizenship and become a German? Stay here not knowing whether you can ever go home? Would you do that, Francis?”
He didn’t answer.
“The difference between us is that you know you can go home anytime you want to. If I went to America I could never come back. Kee, my father fought for this country just as you fought for yours. He died in 1916 fighting for the Kaiser. I cannot walk away from Germany thinking I did nothing to try to make it better. Did you give up on America because things went badly? Did you do that? Is that why you live in Germany now?”
“No,” Keegan answered. “That’s not why I left.”
“Tell me, I want to know all about you,” she said softly. “Maybe it will help me.”
For all his adult life, Keegan had prided himself on never looking back. The past was the past, too late to change, so forget it. But in the last few months he had been forced into introspection, by Vanessa, by Vierhaus and now by Jenny. It all seemed far too complex to explain and even Keegan did not fully understand why he had left America to become a nomad in Europe. He had never discussed his past with anyone before, not even Bert. He didn’t answer her immediately and when he finally started talking it came out like a flood is he tried to put it all in context. His mind drifted back to the terrible summer of 1932, to Washington, and a night that had changed his life forever.
“I was in Washington,” he began. “I don’t even remember why. A hot summer night. I ran into n acquaintance of mine named Brattle from Boston and he invited me to dinner on his yacht. It was moored in the Potomac River, at the edge of the city.”
The night began with shock, shock at the sight of Bonus City, which they passed on the way to the dock. For three months, army veterans and their families, calling themselves the Bonus Army, had been camped in Washington, demanding a five- hundred-dollar bonus that had been voted them in 1924. Although it wasn’t due until 1945, they desperately needed it now.
Keegan was unprepared for the awesome spectacle of twenty thousand ex-soldiers and their families living in squalor around the Capitol and White House. For while this was the year of the Washington Bonus March, it was also the year the twenty- month-old son of America’s greatest living hero, Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped and murdered. A shy and reclusive man, the “Lone Eagle,” as he was known by everyone in America, had conquered the Atlantic Ocean alone in his single-engine plane. Lindbergh, his wife Anne and their new baby were as close to royalty as one could get in America and so the tragedy dominated the news from the night the child was stolen from his New Jersey home until his body was discovered seventy-two days later and then onward as the murder investigation intensified and became a national obsession.
Other news had also overshadowed the march. In France, President Charles Doumer was assassinated in a Paris bookstore. The relatively unknown governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was challenging Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller had become an instant movie star grunting “Me Tarzan, you Jane” and five other lines of dialogue in Tarzan the Ape Man. A machinist named George Blaisdell invented a cigarette lighter which he called a Zippo.
Author Erskine Caldwell had shocked the country with Tobacco Road, his novel about life among sharecroppers in the Deep South and there had been threats of book banning in Boston and in the South. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World stunned everyone with its dismal science fiction view of life in the future while, on the radio, Buck Rogers was introduced, presenting a completely different vision of the future.
In Oklahoma, where years of poor farming practice had depleted the land a devastating drought finished the process, adding hundreds of thousands of farmers to the country’s 13 million unemployed. There were two thousand hunger marchers in London; New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from office in the midst of a juicy scandal; young John Wayne was fighting for his life every Saturday afternoon in a matinee serial called The Hurricane Express; Herbert Hoover announced Prohibition a failure and encouraged state liquor laws; and Flo Ziegfeld, who had redefined the meaning of the term showgirl when he created “The Ziegfeld Girl,” died in Hollywood with his wife Billie Burke at his side. Walter Winchell, radio’s dark prince of gossip, commented in the Stork Club one night, “This. is one helluva year,” and there was no arguing the point.
Little wonder these stories and others had crowded the veterans’ march off the front page and finally out of the newspapers and off the radio altogether. Washington had become an enormous “Hooverville,” a name synonymous with the temporary, ragtag villages all over the country that housed the millions of nomadic, dispossessed, jobless people wandering the land in search of lost dreams. As the weeks dragged into months, the plight of the veterans became just another footnote in this, the worst year of the Depression so far.
The Bonus Camps were a ragtag collection of lean-tos, tents, cardboard shacks and crates, sweltering in one of the hottest summers in Washington history. Here and there, makeshift gardens struggled in the heat to produce stunted tomatoes and hard-eared corn. Women bathed their children in tubs with water from the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. The crowd was neither unruly nor threatening.
As they drove past the miserable campsites, Keegan realized how easily he might have been one of them. Jocko Nayles, who had driven him down to Washington in the Pierce Arrow, had commented, “Jesus, Frankie, these are our guys. We fought with them. Things bad as they are, why don’t they pay ‘em?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Keegan had replied. “Hoover says the Depression’s over. He wants them to go home and starve to death so he doesn’t have to look at them.”
The trouble was, most of them had no homes or jobs to go to. In this, the most dreadful summer in the nation’s history, there were thirteen million people unemployed. The suicide rate was three times normal. And the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, continued to preach what was by then a warped and illogical litany, that the economic recovery of America was in full swing, that the greatest danger was from “Prohibition gangsters who’ve turned our streets into battlegrounds” and that the family would be the resurrection of America. Hoover, of course, wasn’t talking about the families who had lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity in a desperate and failed economy wrought by arrogant millionaires. He was talking about the “decent families” who still had jobs, who earned a living wage, sat by their Atwater Kent radios at night listening to Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy and Li’l Orphan Annie, and who drove to church each Sunday in their Fords and Chevrolets.