Still hazy, jetlagged, I listened to Danny’s proposal, made somewhat dramatically, that we should all go have brunch next morning at Wijnand Fockink. I wasn’t sure what I heard, but didn’t bother, Dutch was mostly unintelligible in his mouth, despite much practice. Things became clear enough the next day.
Having overslept, after only a coffee for breakfast, the brunch looked a bit daunting. Coarse dark bread and a rough Algerian wine accompanied a cheese palette, arranged from mild through hard and egregiously aged to sweet at the end. Softly played French songs, rather sentimental, Edith Piaf old favorites, Mireille Mathieu young but not so different, filled the background. As we moved slowly through this spectrum of cheeses, the tastes rendered distinct with the wine’s help, I found life looking rosier and rosier. Stepping outside the illusion remained intact, the streets shone, the trees blossomed just for me, there were stars sparkling in the water.
Those were the days early in our acquaintance (we had started our first ‘real’ jobs together) when Danny would spend each summer in Amsterdam. In New Haven he had made himself just as quickly at home as anywhere; sometimes I hung on his coat tails going to a party or play.
When some years later I was talking with Danny in Montreal, I reminded him of the musical French background to that brunch in Amsterdam. His friend Bram, who had been sitting next to me at the time, had commented on Piaf. “Chagrins, plaisirs … not to regret at all? What of the chagrin des plaisirs, so much more difficult to overcome?” Since then Dannyhad begun to spend his summers in Montreal. He had resolutely turned his back on Amsterdam summers, not to mention Dutch pronunciation, and was practicing French.
I had come prepared, and offered him some Edith Piaf lyrics, for practice – thinking that he could simultaneously listen to her easily obtainable records. The Parisian R is too ambitious, I told him, maybe you can mimic it with the Dutch G or the Scottish CH? Are you calling the kettle black? he asked me, and I hung my head in shame. Since he was about to give a philosophy talk at UQAM, he was practicing Bertrand Russell’s examples in French. “Le roi de France est chauve” he liked especially, being bald himself, which he attributed to his having once, in an emergency, washed his hair with laundry detergent. That evening after wine and cheese for supper, Danny took me to a jazz club. Everyone there knew him.
Though Danny and his father were irredeemably mid-western, Danny’s sister, living in New York, had become native there. Since I was living nearby Danny would call me when he came to visit her, and we would go listen to jazz. Once he called to ask me along to the Village Vanguard where he said Dorothy Donegan was playing the piano. Then he added, can you come by car this time? Then we can pick her up at her hotel and give her a ride to the village. I hadn’t heard about her, what …? Oh, he said, she isn’t so young any more, let’s make it comfortable.
She was a bit late. In the lobby we talked with the pianist, who was writing a self-help book for people addicted to coffee. When she entered Dorothy Donegan did not look, at first sight, like she needed comforting, rather like someone I’d turn to for comfort. Then when she grinned at me, mischievously, I thought perhaps she would not be so comforting after all. 
At the Vanguard she started slowly, a sort of jazz lullaby, but that was a truly deceptive beginning. By the end it felt like we had come through a storm, she had turned wild, at one point climbing on the piano stool, I swear I saw her kicking the keys with her foot.
Different friends bring different styles in music – so with Ernie, who lived in the Village, there was Marshall Chapman at the Lone Star, a rather complicated series of things with Phoebe Legere and her pick-up band The Female Troubles, and the so appositely named Helen Wheels at CB/GB. But on my own I would return to the jazz bars, alone unless Danny was visiting. There were fewer such occasions as time went by. In Montreal Danny met ZhenHua, a very straight talking engineering student from China. Instead of returning there, she married Danny. Though rapidly assimilating, there were links to her time as a Red Guard. Not only a photo brandishing a Kalashnikoff but, more tellingly in the long run, a certain absoluteness in moral judgment. Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, where the guilty live contentedly ever after, left her outraged.
I saw much less of Danny after the eighties. Early in 2013 we spoke on the telephone, Danny, it seemed, wanted to reminisce, to talk about our days in New York. I seemed to remember more than he, or at least, was less confused; some of our discussion left me puzzled. Then some months later ZhenHua called me, and in her straightforward way said, “Bas, Danny is dead. He found out he had Parkinsons.”
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Notes. Later, in 1991, the New Yorker Magazine ran a piece about Dorothy Donegan. It was called “Wonder Woman” and began with “At the age of sixty-eight, Dorothy Donegan is on the verge. She is a virtuoso pianist, an electric performer, and a transcendent clown, and she has been doing what she does for fifty years without – until the past year or so – much effect.” She died In 1998.
Phoebe Legere was at that time unknown outside the Lower East Side, willing to play at parties. Punk legend Helen Wheels, whom Ernie tried to hire for another party, died in 2015. The photo with the Kalashnikoff is on the cover of ZhenHua’s book Red Flower of China.
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 