Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “That’s what everyone is saying. I’m sure it will be in the news tomorrow morning. Canal Street. Some mirror and picture-frame factory. Fireman burned to death. Poor soul.”

  — 42 —

  GUSTAV PUT HIS FIST to his forehead and rocked to and fro. Alma clutched her throat and threw her head back, moaning, “Nein, nein, nein!”

  Mitch was struck by the fakeness of their grief. They were playacting like a pair of hammy Broadway actors. But their tears were real. Their grief was genuine. It struck him that this was the only way they knew to express grief — by using the second-hand gestures of the opera stars and stage performers they had seen. He wondered if it was any different in his own time. Did people there express their primal emotions using gestures borrowed from movies, and soap stars?

  He slumped into the sofa, a wide space between him and Alma, and knocked back brandy, wishing it was a good single malt instead. Gustav and Alma whimpered on and on for a while and Mitch waited till they ceased their Achs and Mein Gotts and said, “It’s only a matter of time before it emerges that we’re involved in this.”

  “How can you think of that?” said Gustav. “A poor soul has died because of us. Because of me. I burned that place down and murdered that man! I killed him with my own hand.”

  “Yes, and most likely they will come and arrest you for it. But it won’t be murder. Manslaughter at the worst.”

  “Manslaughter! Slaughtering a man! I have never known why that is regarded as lighter than murder.”

  “But how can they know we are connected?” said Alma.

  “Someone in this city wants to connect you with scandal. They want you removed from your post at the Met, and this is the perfect opportunity to make it happen.”

  “But who could have seen us there?” said Gustav. “Not those criminals. They surely would not go to the police and confirm the warehouse burned to the ground because they kidnapped us?”

  “That’s right,” said Alma. “No one can connect us to that place.”

  “Gilhooly,” said Mitch. “He was there. He saw us leave the building.”

  Alma and Gustav stared dumbfounded.

  “All he has to do is come forward and say he saw you fleeing the scene. It would be enough.”

  “A bitter ex-employee who was sacked only days ago?” said Gustav. “Would anyone believe him?”

  “Perhaps not. But... oh God... do you remember the photographer?”

  Gustav cast his mind back and slapped his forehead.

  “What? What photographer?” Alma cried.

  “As we arrived on Canal Street this morning,” said Mitch. “A man took Gustav’s photograph. It seemed strange to me that a photographer should be there right then and recognize you.”

  “I joked that no one would believe it was me, walking in that place.”

  “And weren’t we walking right past that place when he took the picture?”

  “Mein Gott, do you think he is part of this whole thing — this blackmail and kidnapping — this attempt to drag my name into the gutter?”

  “We were led there. To Mock Duck and to the Eastman Gang’s lair. They led us there and had a photographer take the evidence. To connect you to the shadiest people in the city.”

  As he said it, it didn’t make sense. If the Eastman Gang had kidnapped Alma, why hire a photographer to take evidence of that and so connect the great composer with them? It was Selig Silverstein who’d been told to visit Mock Duck — that was why they’d gone there. That would make sense: the blackmailer trying to connect the Mahlers to a Jewish anarchist and a Chinese crime lord. But the Eastman Gang were only involved because Mitch had gone right up to them and poked them in the eye.

  Could it be that Zelig’s kidnap attempt was nothing to do with the blackmail?

  He pondered the different handwriting of the two notes.

  And what was Gilhooly’s role in this? Following them to Mann Fang, being seen outside the Eastman Gang’s lair, laughing as they escaped.

  Alma was moaning operatically again. “We are doomed. We were hounded out of the old world, and now we’re to be hounded out of the new world also. Is there no place on this Earth for us?”

  “Don’t be silly, Almschi.”

  She thumped the arm of the sofa and spat, “Don’t call me that! I’m not your little girl, Gustav!”

  This was real, not stage anger. This was scarlet, spitting rage.

  “No,” Gustav snapped. “My little girl is dead.”

  He rose, scooped up his Don Giovanni score and flounced to the next room, slamming the door.

  Alma gasped, clutching her chest, like he’d shot her in the heart, tears rolling down her cheeks, fighting for breath between fat sobs of grief.

  Mitch reached over and took her hand. She gripped his tender fingers, a vicious sting. He gritted his teeth and took it till she calmed and softened her grip.

  “He is a monster,” she said. “Such an inhuman beast.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

  “He uses my dead child, my poor Putzi, as a weapon. A knife to drive into my heart. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

  She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and wept into it, her body racked with sobs.

  The barrier between Mitch and Alma’s grief was so thin. He felt it — a hurricane battering at the shutters — and hammered more planks of wood across the windows of his heart. If he allowed even a little gap, her grief would consume him. His dream of shipwreck last night. Alma the ship’s figurehead on the Flatiron’s ocean liner, sailing through an ocean of grief. Her own grief, he realized now. It would drown him if he let even a single drop through.

  “These past few months have been a Hell on Earth,” she said. “This first Christmas in New York. Putzi had just died and Gucki was back in Vienna, so we were here alone. Gustav wouldn’t talk about it and forbade any mention of her name. There was to be no Christmas for us, no children. I was here alone in a mausoleum where mourning was forbidden.”

  He reached across the sofa and stroked her hand.

  “I was expecting another child,” she said, “but I lost it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “I lost two children. No one knows that. He’s a beast. He doesn’t understand at all. Two children, Mitchell.”

  She leaned towards him and he hutched across so her head met his shoulder.

  “I tried to talk to him about it but he got angry and accused me of making it all about me! Don’t you think I feel it too! I feel the loss just as much as you! What kind of man says that to a woman who has lost her child? What kind of heartless man is that? He has no feeling for anything in the world.”

  “And yet he writes symphonies that feel the entire world’s pain.”

  “And what good is that: a man who feels the suffering of the universe but feels nothing for his dead child and his broken-hearted wife? You see how he hides in his work whenever he has to confront real feelings?”

  She leaned away from him, reached for her brandy and gulped it back in a tight, bitter gasp, leaning back against his shoulder, snuggling closer, the glass of gold on his lap.

  They sat staring down at it, hypnotized by its iridescent glow.

  “He doesn’t understand me,” she said. “No one understands me. Only you.”

  “Alma, that’s not true.”

  “I know you see into my soul. I knew it from the start; from that very first moment you looked into my eyes, when you rescued me. I saw that you saw inside me, that you knew all my secrets, that you felt what I feel.”

  “Alma, no.”

  “You try to hide it and ignore it. I see your struggle to deny it, to shut yourself off from me, but it is there all the time.”

  She nudged herself away from his chest, to look up at him. Her mouth lunged for his.

  Her sweet lips on his.

  Honey fig soft melting swoon.

  His hand moved across his thigh and found her hand, wrap
ped around the glass.

  Her tongue gently soft on his, slickly flicking, low moan vibrating in his mouth.

  His hand slid up her arm to her shoulder, pulled her closer, and slid down the contour of her body, feeling hard bone corset, down to the curve of her waist, pulling her to him.

  Her hand to his face, fingertips stroking his hair. She pulled him to her as she sank back.

  Falling towards her.

  Her head slumped back on a cushion and he sank onto her, their legs entwining. The ecstasy of sweet union. His body pressed against hers. Sinking into her. Drowning.

  “Oh, Mitchell,” she whisper groaned. “Give me another child.”

  Death.

  He pulled away from her cloying lips.

  “Alma, no.”

  “Give me what he can’t.”

  Piercing blade of light through his eyeball. He gasped and flinched away.

  “We can’t do this. He’s right next door.”

  “I don’t love him anymore,” she whispered. “He is dead to me, dead to my love.”

  He pushed her hands off him, pleading hands dragging him into the deep, and staggered back, dizzy, the room lurching. “I can’t.”

  She fell back, tears on her face, silent crying, the crystal glass toppled, a stain blooming on the red velvet.

  Gustav standing in the door.

  Just as he had that first morning, when Mitch looked up from the sofa to see him, the great composer looking down on him. Had he watched the whole thing?

  “I’ve failed,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry. I’ll take my leave of you in the morning.”

  He walked out and down the corridor, wondering if he would last till the morning. Wondering if he would wake in another place, another time, far away from all of this.

  — 43 —

  HE WOKE TO BLACKNESS, choking, throat raw, an ache behind his eyes, a shipwrecked sailor gasping on the beach.

  Still the servant’s room on the eleventh floor of the Majestic. A plain, square billet. The heat cranking through the pipes.

  He staggered to his feet. He’d slept in his clothes, collapsing on the bed last night. He found his hat and scanned the room. Nothing else. Nothing to leave behind. Only his own suit and two of Gustav’s, and the things Alma had given him.

  Walking up the corridor to the Mahlers’ suite, he knocked the door and then thought with panic, what if he’d woken in the same place but another time? To find the door opened by a startled flapper or John Lennon. Hadn’t he lived here, after they’d changed it to an apartment block? No, that was a different building, They would tear this one down, build another in its place and call it the Majestic Apartments. This corridor was the same as yesterday.

  The door opened and Gustav blinked at him through his spectacles, hair flyblown, standing in striped pyjamas. He nodded and turned and Mitch followed him through the right lounge and on to the bedroom, wondering if he would find Alma there.

  Gustav crawled into bed, the pages of Don Giovanni laid out all over the eiderdown. Alma must have slept in the governess’s bed.

  The furtive fumbling of last night came to him with a sharp pang of desire for her followed by a flush of shame. He wiped his cheek, as if her kisses were still imprinted on his face, and wondered if his empathic nature made him so easy to seduce.

  “I said I would take my leave of you,” he said.

  Gustav scanned the score and made a note in pencil, as if Mitch were a ghost, unseen, unheard.

  “I’m sorry,” Mitch said.

  “You are not to blame,” Gustav said. “How could I blame you for falling under her spell? I watched every man in Vienna do the same, and it is no different here in New York.” He smirked, looking Mitch up and down. Such a fool to think Mahler didn’t see everything.

  “Of course,” said Mitch. “You pushed me into her arms.”

  “I paid you to be my wife’s bodyguard.”

  “You paid me to be her companion. So you could have more time for your work. I wonder if you thought the same with Gilhooly.”

  “Ach. That ape.”

  “Don’t you know just how much she’s hurting?”

  Gustav slammed his pencil down. A petulant slap on the page. “You think I don’t see my own wife’s suffering?”

  “She’s an alcoholic.”

  Gustav shrugged and squinted, as if the word were foreign to him.

  “She’s drowning while you...”

  He faltered. He was going to say he was conducting the orchestra while the Titanic went down, but that didn’t mean anything. Not yet. Not now.

  The poor fool didn’t see it. Their child’s death had driven Alma to drink, and this was why she would meet Walter Gropius in a sanatorium. Next summer, maybe. She was there to recover from her alcoholism. Perhaps Gropius was too. Drink and depression would drive them into each other’s arms and it would devastate Gustav, even though he pushed her away all the time.

  But he would write the Tenth Symphony because of it.

  He was a selfish monster, a bully and a liar, but he was composing the greatest symphonies of the century.

  “You just don’t see it,” Mitch said.

  “You think I don’t see her grief?” said Gustav. “My First Symphony was a protest against the world’s indifference to the death of children. It’s there in all my work.”

  Mitch shook his head at the pages scattered over the bed. “You’ve lost touch with your wife.”

  Mahler nodded grimly. “I have lost touch with the world.”

  And again, there it was. It was all about the great Mahler, his work and his torment. He wouldn’t see it till his wife was walking out of the door. Only then would he realize it wasn’t all about him.

  “I’m sorry, Gustav,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry I failed.”

  He bowed and walked out and took the elevator down to the lobby. The newspaper front pages blared news of the tragic death of a fireman. The police would come calling. Perhaps later today. Maybe tomorrow.

  Mitch strode out into the light, a blast of cold air hitting his face. Not as bitter as yesterday. Fresh. A low, winter sun, blinding, rising from the park.

  He stood, not knowing which way to go.

  He thought of all the things he usually thought of to get home: his Birmingham flat, the antiques shop in Moseley he’d sold, the cottage in Wales.

  Eleanor.

  But she was gone forever. He’d never get back to her.

  The cold seeped through his boots. He was still here in New York on Monday the 10th of February, 1908.

  Then an idea formed in his mind and he smiled.

  He strode up to the line of carriages and called out to the driver at the front. “Grand Central Station, please.”

  — 44 —

  THEY WERE STILL BUILDING it. There was a giant trench to one side of the grand building he knew, a hundred men swarming all over it, attacking it with picks and shovels.

  All around the station, a chaotic hubbub of carriages, trams and motor cars fighting for space.

  Mitch leapt off and fought his way through a river of human traffic, pushing through to the grand hall and its vault of space. He walked through to a ticket booth.

  “I’d like a ticket to Washington, please.” He considered it. Weighed up the wad of money in his pocket and smiled. “First class.”

  The ticket puncher didn’t seem impressed one way or another. “Return?”

  “No. One-way.”

  He wasn’t coming back to New York. Just this one thing to do in Washington and then find a way to get back home.

  Through clouds of platform steam, he found his train and took a seat in a plush carriage, settling in for the four-hour ride to Washington. He would be there by midday.

  Everyone on the train seemed to be white. Only the porters and dining car staff were black. Perhaps the black passengers were restricted to a car in the rear of the train. Did they have their own dining car? He felt a pang of shame for not knowing.

  After half an hour, hi
s belly grumbled and a violent hunger took him. He waded through to the dining car and ordered breakfast. A cool glass of fresh orange juice. Then four strips of crisp bacon with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes — a strange touch, and a little out of place for an Englishman — followed by toast and jelly, and a pot of freshly made coffee.

  He sat back at ease with the world and dabbed his mouth with a cotton napkin.

  A newspaper left on the seat. He picked it up and tried to make sense of the acres of text without any pictures.

  Tensions between Germany and Italy. Temperance campaigners shut down saloons in New York state. Tragic death of heroic fireman in New York blaze.

  Would it be Inspector Becker who strode through the lobby of the Majestic and rapped on the Mahlers’ door? Perhaps it would be Mitch he wanted, not Gustav. Though any Jew would do for him. Mitch had a nagging thought that he was abandoning the Mahlers; skipping town to dodge the consequences.

  But he wasn’t skipping town. He was skipping time.

  He didn’t belong here with them. And it was Gustav who’d burned the place down, arming himself with an oil lamp.

  The oil lamp that had saved them. Or Zelig’s bullet would have ended it all.

  The oil lamp that had killed a fireman.

  Mitch wasn’t part of that. He wasn’t responsible. He had helped them as much as he could.

  His hand moved to the locket under his shirt.

  There was just this one thing he had to do before he went home.

  Monday, February the 10th, 1908.

  Gustav would premiere Don Giovanni at the Met, and Mrs Astor would take up her weekly spot, a visiting queen, for some of it. Half the audience would be more interested in her than Mozart or Mahler. And when she flounced out on the stroke of nine, the final act would be drowned out by the sound of swishing skirts as all of New York’s princesses followed her.

  What had brought him here? Mitch wondered.

  He’d heard the music on the radio, but why had the music brought him here — New York in 1908, February — was there something special about this moment?