Finding Kindred Souls

You could say that David Gurewitsch inherited Wanda Landowska from his mother. A pioneer of rehabilitative medicine, Dr. Maria Gurewitsch treated Wanda for more than a decade. The problem was that Wanda never paid her bills. Weary of making collection calls, Maria Gurewitsch picked up the phone and struck a bargain:

“If I can come and listen to you practice, you don’t have to pay your bills.”

Wanda agreed but added a caveat. “You may come and listen to me practice, but I won’t tell you ahead of time. I will call you and you must be able to drop everything come at that very moment.”

One more proviso and the deal was made: “Very well, then,” Gurewitsch said. “I shall come when you call, but I would like for my son David to have the same privilege.”
It was the younger Dr. Gurewitsch, a physician who reveled in metaphor, who on May 31, 1946, took an X-ray of Wanda Landowska’s hands. He had no medical purpose in mind but was hoping to see what her bones showed: Could a skeleton reveal what it took to make a fugue transcendent? The implicit playful question was whether a look inside her might explain how she played that way.

I learned about Wanda's practice-as-payment plans from Mrs. Edna P. Gurewitsch, the widow of David. Reading the caption on the plaque beneath the X-ray led me to research the physician and right away I learned that Wanda wasn't the only female historical figure with whom David Gurewitsch had a connection.

From 1948 to 1962, Gurewitsch served as the personal physician to Eleanor Roosevelt. The two shared a passionate mutual attachment that might best be described as a chaste affair. Mrs. Roosevelt confessed to David Gurewitsch that she had fallen in love with him. The romantic feelings were unrequited but the friendship continued and flourished. In fact, Mrs. Roosevelt spent most of the last decade of her life living with Dr. Gurewitsch and his wife, Edna. The latter recounted at length her husband’s special relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt in a memoir titled Kindred Souls. Edna P. Gurewitsch briefly recounted her husband's friendship (and her mother-in-law’s friendship) with Wanda Landowska in a brief series of phone conversations and letters with me in 2008.

For anyone interested in a moving, personal narrative about Mrs. Roosevelt, Kindred Souls is a terrific read.

X-RAYS OF WANDA LANDOWSKA'S HANDS

The light box is white, slightly crooked, and has two tiny cracks on its face, which you only notice if you make yourself stop looking at her hands. Wanda Landowska’s fingers are splayed. She wears no rings, although there’s an odd fragment of line at her wrist that suggests the edge of a bracelet or wristwatch. The bones are neither stark white nor smoky gray nor steely blue, but all three, and then none of those colors, and then another color that doesn’t even have a name.
Somehow their position looks both modest and bold, although both seem like strange words to apply to a skeleton. In the upper right corner, the date is burned into the X-ray, with a short, straight vertical line posing as a comma between the day and year: MAY 31 | 1946.

There’s a smudgy plaque beneath the light box, which has a caption in all caps:

X-RAYS OF WANDA LANDOWSKA’S HANDS
PRESENTED IN MEMORY OF A. DAVID GUREWITSCH
1902-1974
PROFESSOR OF REHABILITATION MEDICINE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
1974

I am studying this when an announcement comes over the speakers, and the voice of a live woman is bouncing off the tiles.

“May I have your attention please? May I have your attention please? Cancel fox code for the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers. Cancel fox code for the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers.”

I have no idea what a “fox code” is but I feel relieved that it’s canceled, considering that I’m standing on the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers. The building is better known to Birminghamians as the Spain Rehabilitation Center, and to the physicians, patients and staffers who populate it simply as Spain. I’m not here for rehabilitation, however, at least not as a patient. I am here to look at art, particularly an X-ray hung as art, of the hands of a great pianist and the harpsichord’s first great 20th century champion. The patient, the subject, was dead before this hospital ever opened its doors; she may have never even set foot in the state of Alabama. But here are her hands, hung up as art, the light box humming alongside humdrum watercolors. The X-ray was taken 50 years ago by a doctor remembered as a pioneer of rehabilitation and brought to Birmingham by another physician who had his own ideas about what her bones showed.