Chris continued to pursue his music and didn’t look back, traveling the world playing the trumpet. On the rare occasion he stopped home in between gigs and practiced in his old room, Elinor stood by the door, listening to him play and getting choked up.

Once the children moved out, Elinor and Frederick kept up their routine. Frederick had become a vice president at Pepperidge Farm, where during his time overseeing the experimental bakery, the famous Pepperidge Farm apple pie tart was created.30 However, the company couldn’t confirm if Frederick personally developed the recipe, which was similar to the dessert he used to make for Elinor when he was a POW.

Frederick had long since patched up his relationship with his mother, traveling to Europe over the years to visit. After Karl Albert died in 1964, Margarete took several trips of her own, including one to Village Creek, and developed a far more congenial disposition in her later years. She and Elinor were cordial to each other, although never close, and that was the extent of their relationship until Margarete’s death in 1991.31

Elinor continued to garden, have friends over in the afternoon, cook dinner for Frederick, and listen to Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington in the evenings in the living room with Frederick. That part of their lives would never change. There was always great music playing in the Albert house—the two of them with jazz in the backdrop, just as it had been from the start.

“They loved each other deeply until the day they died,” said Chris.

Postscript

Postscript

IN 1981, CHRIS ALBERT JOINED THE COUNT BASIE Band, and by 1999, he was a trumpet player in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, though neither Frederick nor Elinor would ever see him perform on that level. Frederick, like his father, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and died in June 2001, at age seventy-five. Elinor, who had been in poor health for a while, died four years later from a cancerous growth in her chest, at age eighty-four.

Chris came to accept that there were parts of Frederick and Elinor’s lives that he would never fully know.

“I think there’s a certain amount of programming that goes on in family and long-term relationships,” he said. “You know what to expect and for instance, now that I’m a middle-aged person, and even years before, I said, ‘Well, why didn’t I ever ask him about Hitler? And why didn’t I ever ask him about the whole Nazi movement?”1

Stephen Albert, in a rare moment of talking about his parents, agreed. “When I think back on it, they didn’t volunteer a lot, let’s put it that way. And I don’t think I particularly asked a lot either. It’s not like they were hiding anything, but they just didn’t bring it up.”2