And in truth, it was hard to know whose quarrel it was. You had some highly principled Jewish boys duking it out with some other highly principled Jewish boys over the right of ersatz Nazis to speak hatefully about Jews. You had varying shades of fascists on the grandstand watching the boys fight. Most of the crowd, repelled by the speeches, had started to drift out of the park, though a few pro-Nazis were still locked in their sieg heil salute. Some police officers made the rounds of the refreshment stands, telling the vendors the picnic was over. I was pretty sure I saw Bob Culpepper trying to separate some of the college boys, and I began to wonder if the lieutenant was solely assigned to scenes of violence to which I was a witness or participant. It was all very confusing.

But despite its nasty ending, the event had, in fact, been very effective for the person who had viewed the picnic as an unintended means to an ill-intended end, and whose simple mission had been achieved smoothly and without mishap.

And in my masterful ignorance, I’d done nothing to stop it. In point of fact, I’d helped out a bunch.

Chapter 32

32

Opus 38

Jack Donovan’s orchestra didn’t play Sunday nights, which meant I could put in a full evening on Swing. I worked alongside Gail in the comfortable knowledge that Russ and Martha, our chaperones, were just down the hall, listening to Jack Benny.

It was pleasant to be accepted as one of the family. Martha whipped up a light supper while Gail and I made it our goal to reach the last bar of her composition by that end of that night.

Russ was very upset with what had happened in Dimond Park and spent most of the evening drafting a letter to the editor of the Oakland Tribune. He then retired to his bed, but Martha stayed up, probably to make sure I didn’t retire to Gail’s. It gave me the creeps that she might think me capable of such a thing. I guess her perception of jazz musicians’ morals was shaped by the licentious behavior of certain members of my profession back in the days just before Prohibition.

Gail was totally occupied with proofing her composition, poring over the score in what was as hard a musical task as I could imagine. Gail’s piece did not follow any traditional rules of harmony, and a miswritten note would not be something you could “hear” by spotting a missing accidental. I’d been peeling away the glued joining paper from each fold of the original piano score so that I could give her back each page of her composition as I finished orchestrating it, to compare what I’d just scored to what she’d first written. She caught a few errors, but overall it seemed I’d done a very accurate job.