Swing was to be performed in the Pavilion of Japan, a thing of exquisite grace and beauty, patterned after an Asian feudal castle and containing, within that fortress, a baronial Samurai house.

I knew from the reading I’d done while first waiting in the “study hall” of Bob Culpepper’s interview room that a Japanese liner had been the first ship of serious tonnage to make its harbor at Treasure Island. Russ Hewett’s construction team had stopped their work as, fascinated and enlightened, they watched their Asian equivalents, garbed in blue-and-white kimonos and sandals, creating the entire pavilion without the use of a single nail, lashing together the beams with rope until each join could be dovetailed into the next. The final construction seemed to float above, rather than upon, the lagoon that surrounded it, the largest on the island, and when one sat in its inner garden for rice cakes and a cup of green tea, it placed the rest of the world an ocean apart.

I was waiting for Gail in the nearby Pacific House, as we’d previously agreed. I wasn’t sure if she would appear, or how I would feel when I saw her. But I knew she might need my help on many fronts.

Two hours earlier, Culpepper and I had driven back in silence to the Claremont.

I’d gone to the front desk of the Claremont and asked if a package had arrived from RC Copying. The clerk had handed me an oversized manila envelope that contained my full orchestral score and the Photostatic copy that Haffner had made for me.

I’d gone to my room and tossed the copy of the score (photographically reduced in size and a negative image with white notes on a black background) onto my bed. Then, remembering what had been done to my room the night before, I opened my top dresser drawer, lifted the sheet of white paper that lined its bottom, and placed the score underneath it.

I’d called Gail again at both the Berkeley Club and Hewett’s home and gotten no response.

I have seen people perform for the public on the same day someone close to them has died. I had no way of knowing if Gail would show up for the rehearsal. Professionally and personally, I owed her my presence. But the “personally” part was all balled up now.