Unfortunately, there was a double-decker ferry at the landing all ready to take her away from me. We agreed to meet the next day at the house where her mother lived, because Gail felt it would be more pleasant working on the piano there than in one of U.C. Berkeley’s windowless practice rooms. I jotted down her mother’s address and Gail gave me directions via a combination of bus and trolley. We said good-bye and I watched her skip up the metal gangway.

I’d look very foolish, I thought, if I just stood there watching the boat pull away, so I started back to where I’d parked Larry’s car.

An earsplitting whistle stopped me dead. I turned and saw Gail already on the ferry’s upper tier, leaning over its aft rail. “Hey, what gives?” she yelled. “You weren’t going to see me off?” She shook her head in dismay. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, Ray!”

A little boy asked his mother why the lady was yelling at me.

I called out to Gail, “Sorry! I didn’t want to look stupid!”

“Perish the thought, Mr. Sherwood!” she called back with a grin. A loud horn sounded as the ferry slid away from the dock. Over its second blast, she bellowed, “Promise you’ll write me every day?”

I nodded in the affirmative. Gail said something to a man next to her, and he handed her his white display handkerchief. She held one end of it and waved it at me, as if she were sailing to Kathmandu.

As the ferry picked up speed, she returned the handkerchief to the man, who gave her a wary glance before stepping away. She stood with both her hands planted on the rail, regarding me with a comfortable smile. I watched until I could no longer discern the features in her face. It said a lot about my life that this had been the best afternoon I’d had in over a decade. It also said a lot about Gail.

Chapter 13

13

Swing Time

The swing craze got its start in Oakland, at a dance hall run by a U.C. Berkeley professor of agriculture named William Sweet. The dance hall was originally called McFadden’s, but everyone knew it as Sweet’s Ballroom. And the reason swing took hold here was because the sun sets three hours later in Oakland than it does in New York.

When I’d first started playing professionally, still in my teens, Paul Whiteman had billed himself as the King of Jazz. But of course his music wasn’t real jazz, not the reborn blast of Dixieland that had blown into New York from Chicago. Whiteman’s sound was rinkytink dance music, with a few real jazz soloists like Bix Beiderbecke and Joe Venuti riddling the blandness like chopped walnuts in a cream-cheese sandwich.