Pannonica THE JAZZ BARONESS

When wandering half-lost around the lakes of upstate New York in my familiar reverie, I imagine structures of thought that incontrovertibly, for the moment, explain the way in which Pannonica’s motivation and devotion form no part of the reasons that found her crossing the Atlantic for New York City and her confirmation with Thelonius Monk. Shucking Rothschild, boarding the lifeboat, the caravansary wended through Bohemia and Persia, she sat alone at a table near the stage in the Raffles bar.
The lakes are long, and narrow, and very deep, similar to the shape of that group of souls who adore Proust. Shore roads dip into ravines and bend around vineyards and woodlots and fields of corn and hay, but taken on the whole length, are long and straight. Taverns situate themselves along the routes, attracting those persons with a couple of hours to spend, smoking and drinking and regarding the grapefields sloping down almost to the water. Many people who work in cities almost never have a day in which they may so idle.
It would not have been called courage.
I would never have quite expected that a small expatriate community of louche hedonists, deeply bored, would have found themselves over a matter of years coming together in a decommissioned 19th century resort hotel in Rose Hill, New York, Onondaga County, similar to tuberculosis sanitaria in Lake Placid, Saranac, or elsewhere in the Adirondacks. I had been by there a few times over the years, and was impressed by the stillness of the buildings on the hilltop road: tennis courts abandoned, bandstand gray. On a summer day they would gather a few of their number and drive the couple of miles to an inn overlooking Skaneateles Lake, to spend the long hours of the warm afternoon occupying a table or two at the corner of the patio deck that had the least view of the blue lake below. There they would drink wine and cocktails to cloud the edges of the cocaine and opiate derivatives that were their chief means of conveyance. I could not see that they ever very much extended their conversations past half-observations and notions and wry, satirical remarks. They were there in the off-season as well, within, quite near the fireplace; in different combinations, dressed in their slovens, having, I could only imagine, the same epically obtuse conversations, in shadows and in fogs, year after year.
For I had repeated my visits there, over many years. In the late 1980s it was on my bicycle. Later I drove a friend’s borrowed Alfa. Alone, as I was all but a few times, I would sit at the bar on the other side of the eight-foot length of extravagantly polished bowling lane, and extract bits of information from the owner, the host, who seemed indifferent to my presence there – though there were two canvas-sling high stools there, presumably for that purpose – about the group at the obscured table or near the fireplace. Over the times I would take a nod from one or two of them, meeting in the men’s room or at the bar, but no more. They were mostly from Canada, the expansive highway of literary critics and satirists; one or two were from France, or perhaps Denmark. Something had collected them. One fellow was barefoot, brownskinned, and his clothes, only lightly different from the scruffs worn by them all, was made entirely of deerskin: he was a disaffected Mohawk. He read Marx.
The cell was extremely thick and tightly closed. For a few years, I had learned from Sam, they had developed a whole-foods cooperative, and had distributed flours and ciders to small groups all around the lakes. They apparently had not foreseen or noticed that it was becoming an enterprise, but when that evidence was unmistakable, they had closed the business, and had cleared out the stock and staples.
Eight miles up the lake from this isolated, hilltop inn, Skaneateles village lay clean. It is a town of some wealth, with grand, well-tended houses; photographers, jewelers, musicians, restaurants. The town had welcomed a social-religious commune in 1843, and erected a school for fugitive slaves. But something of a vogue was started there, too, after the Second World War; matriarchs and patricians would rent or lend an attic apartment or room to writers and scholars, musicians and artists who were off-tune, oblique, or afflicted with languid impermanence. There these souls would knit and unknit equations, or trill their autisms of a phrase that would not coalesce into a sonata. They would stroll around the town streets or by the lake, whither they might gather in single pairs. They might take a job, briefly, before their practical incompetence washed over them and hied them back to their room.
But what did the tribal, static vagrants in Rose Hill unfurl with the hours of their lives? Certainly they slept and made meals; there were expansive porch discussions with coffee and toast; there was reading until dawn in single rooms. They perfected indolence; they were practitioners of this facility with a fabulous virtuosity. Had they ever sought to name the thing, they might have said the making of nothing was the very purest form of peace.
Among the musicians there was ceaseless chatter, good-natured or sharp, and Manhattan was a warren of lives and souls and isles of shoals, rooms that sealed out moonlight. Her cats were intoxicated with catnip, and her veterinarian bills were mountainous. Among them all she showed her smile of surpassing authenticity, but in the way that only those who have lost freedom know the way in which it fills the heart and lungs, only those without courage know the fits and starts of blood that does not smoothly flow. Abjuring the whole continent of Rothschild, Pannonica’s moral aspiration was freed to inhabit a fine world, where originality was one’s own, by having found the right place to be: near the perfect, and present at the creation.