Good Things I Wish You

by A. Manette Ansay

  Back on the train, continuing south, Clara watches Johannes as he stares out the window, half listening—as she herself half listens—to Elise, who warbles on and on, like a bird. There are times when his beauty catches in her throat like one of his best melodies. There are times when the very thought of his goodness—to her, to the children, to poor Robert—moves her to tears. But then moods strike, like the one which grips him now, and he pulls away from her, avoids her gaze, holds himself aloof. Ever since they crossed the border into Switzerland, he’s acted as if she’s done something to displease him, though she cannot think what that would be. Or perhaps one of the children said something? For his ill-tempered silence has spilled over onto Ludwig and Ferdinand, who have chosen to sit in second class with the maid, instead of clamoring, as they usually do, to cuddle on the lap of Herr Brahms.

  Yet he loves the children, she knows this. Loves them as he loves her. Wants to be a part of them.

  A part of her.

  Claimed.

  So why, then, this terrible coldness? Why does he sit like a stone? All it would take is a word of explanation, but when she ventures to touch his sleeve, he flinches, as if he has never looked upon her with such hunger it took her breath. His mouth open, urgent, against her closed lips. His teeth at her neck, her throat. Month after month, she has turned him away, as she must.

  As both of them knew that she must.

  Now there’s no need to wait any longer. Now the locked door between them is gone. She thinks ahead to Gersau: bathing in the lake, wandering the foothills, playing on the piano at the inn, where they’ll live as a family, happy and complete. She is no child. He has proved himself a man. It is only a matter of time until they marry. The next time he comes to her, she won’t disappoint him. The next time he kisses her, she won’t turn him away.

  It was inevitable that he should recognize that the destiny which he had to fulfill was irreconcilable with single-minded devotion to a friendship. To recognize this and immediately seek a way out was the natural outcome of his virile nature. That he broke away ruthlessly was perhaps also an inevitable consequence when one takes his inherent qualities and the nature of the situation into account. But without a doubt he had had a struggle with himself before he steered his craft in a fresh direction, and he never got over the self-reproach of having wounded my mother’s feelings at the time, and felt that this could never be undone.

  —Eugenie Schumann*

  36.

  IN THE MORNING, WHILE Friederike practiced, Hart took me to see the house of Mendelssohn, the new Gewandhaus, and, finally, the church in Leipzig where Clara and Robert were married. This was a surprise Friederike had arranged. The caretaker—it turned out—was the father of last night’s accompanist, so I was permitted to play the organ, to wander the church as I pleased, while Hart slipped out into the garden, cell phone pressed to his ear. I concentrated on the caretaker’s German: a single bronze bell, he explained, still hung in the tower from before the war. Originally there had been three, so when the church was reconstructed, the two stolen bells were replaced. In the end, however, they were taken down, having been forged of iron.

  “The sound,” he said sadly, “wouldn’t mix.”

  At noon, we met Friederike at her hotel. She embraced Hart and then, to my surprise, gave me a quick hug as well. Had we enjoyed ourselves? she asked as we walked up the street for lunch. Was I able to see what I’d wanted to see?

  To me, she spoke in English with a soft French accent.

  To Hart, she spoke German or French.

  I’d thought she’d be hard-edged, indifferent, but off-stage, her shyness was palpable, despite the studded jeans and ripped tank top, hair spiked into a fierce crown of thorns. After the concert, at the first sight of her father, she’d taken three bounding steps into his arms but then, at the last moment, twisted away so I’d found myself grasping her outstretched hand. Hart caught her around the shoulders and neck, the three of us connected in an awkward tableau as, at the same moment, the lights went out. The building was closing for the night.

  “Attendez!” Friederike called.

  “Pst, vielleicht können wir hier schlafen!”

  And Friederike, not knowing if I’d understood, said, “Papa thinks we should spend the night. What a marvelous thing for your book!”

  In the end, we flew, hollering, down the stairs, surprising the old docent with his ring of keys. Hart held Friederike’s violin aloft. He was bright-eyed, reckless. “Catch!” he said, pretending to toss it, after we’d made it outside.

  “Papa, you are crazy.”

  “Here it comes!”

  Now Friederike told me that her violin was insured for one million euros. “Papa bought it for me two Christmases ago,” she said, glancing out the window at the street, where Hart had gone to address another round of calls from Lauren. Meanwhile, we lingered over coffee and dessert, the first time we’d been alone.

  “You’re lucky,” I said, trying to align a gift of this magnitude with so many years of silence. “Few people understand how important it is to have a really good instrument.”

  “He set it up to look as if it came from a group of donors, but Maman’s attorney looked into things and figured out that Papa was—relating to it?”

  “Behind it.”

  “Oui. At first Maman wouldn’t let me accept, but really, what could she do? Since then, she is always checking up on me, worrying, opening my mail. Of course she is angry about things, still. But he’s told you everything, I am sure. And it happened so long ago.”

  “He has told me,” I said, choosing each word with care, “that both he and your mother wanted very much to raise you.”

  “But does anyone ask what I want?” She said something in French that I couldn’t understand. “I want to go to New York City, to study at the Juilliard. Maman is getting married again. She will not be alone.” She nodded so I’d know Hart was on his way back to the table. “Perhaps you and Papa will marry as well. He tells me of your little daughter, too. A wonderful pianist, very clever.”

  What I thought: Whom he met only once.

  What I said: “Very clever, when she practices.”

  “What have you been talking about to please our Friederike so?” Hart said, sliding into his seat beside me, covering my hand with his own.

  Our Friederike.

  How it thrilled me, how it frightened me, to belong once again to this tableau: the mother, the father, the beautiful child. People smiling to us as they passed.

  We rented a car, drove to Zwickau. We spent several hours at the Robert Schumann House, then had supper at a small, ghastly inn where at one point, for no discernible reason, an enormous painting fell from the wall in an explosion of glass and dust. Moments earlier, Hart had been mocking it; now, he and Friederike could not stop laughing. When they saw me hunched beneath the tabletop, they laughed even harder, Friederike wiping mascara from the corners of her eyes.

  “Pourquoi est-ce qu’elle se cache comme ça?”

  “She is American,” Hart said as waiters rushed in, exclaiming over the mess, “and all of these crazy Americans, you see, are carrying guns wherever they go. You hear a sound like that in Miami? Everybody ducks.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I protested. “And we do not all carry guns.”

  “You want to fuck wit’ me?” Hart said, doing his best Scarface, which wasn’t quite as good as he thought. “You want to fuck wit’ me?”

  “Papa!”

  Even before we were asked to leave, Hart was throwing euros on the table, and we stumbled out into the cobblestone streets, drunk on wine and bad behavior. Our epic quest: another inn. We wound up driving through the countryside. Hours later, in a little town balanced at the far edge of the earth, I pointed out what appeared to be a very nice resort. Friederike was trying to tell me something, but Hart pulled into the long, circular driveway, beautifully manicured with sculpted trees, suggesting I see about rooms. I got out, tried the arched front door. Locked. A wom
an dressed in white passed through the well-lit halls. I banged on the door to get her attention. She stopped, froze, looked at me, then sternly shook her head.

  “Bitte?” I called through the glass. “Hotel?”

  It was at this point that I heard Hart laughing.

  “Papa, you are terrible!” Friederike said.

  I was standing in front of a mental institution.

  This, then, is the story I’ll take with me. Not the museums in Leipzig. Not the carefully collected curios of Zwickau. Not the Endenich asylum, the elaborate grave in Bonn, the house in Düsseldorf with its circuitous route to the Rhine.

  Finding, at last, a place to sleep. Friederike’s shower running in the room next door. Hart watching me from the narrow bed. Making love well beyond the point of exhaustion when, still, there is somehow more to be given, more to be received.

  If only I could tell you, now, all the good things I wish you. Long out of sight of the mountains, what I still carry with me.

  This.

  I suffer indescribably at being separated from Johannes…And yet is it not most natural that I should love and esteem Johannes so much, after such a long and intimate relationship with him, during which time I learned to know fully the riches of his heart and mind?

  —Clara, in a letter to Joseph Joachim, 1857*

  37.

  WE WERE SETTLED IN our Zurich hotel by the time my cell phone rang. Friederike’s music camp had started just that morning; I was writing at the marble-topped kitchen counter while Hart made phone calls from the desk in our bedroom, switching from English to French and back, speaking with his American attorney, his French attorney, Lauren. I dug the phone out of my purse without looking, eager, expecting Heidi’s clear voice. “Sweetie, how are you?” I trilled.

  “You sound awfully cheery.”

  “Ellen?” I said, disoriented.

  “Getting lots of research done?”

  I looked around the beautiful suite: curved couches and monogrammed robes, a small grand piano, balcony doors opening onto a wide view. “Yes and no.”

  “Well, I’ve been hard at work. Would you like to hear what I’ve found out about your German doctor?”

  Something deep in my chest gave way; I took the phone into the bathroom. “Okay,” I said, sitting on the edge of the oversize whirlpool tub.

  “He got his medical degree in East Berlin, but afterward he stayed on to do research. After the wall came down in ’89, he left his university and formed Viso-Tech.”

  Our connection was poor; I struggled to hear over the crackles. “He told me all this—” I began.

  “—ever Google this guy? He was one of those corporate cowboys everybody loved in the nineties. Profiles in Forbes, CEO, People. He came up with this implant that goes into the brain, helps it process signals from the eye.”

  “Someone was telling me about it.”

  “Anyway, he gets only good press until August of 2000, when he’s arrested at Disneyland.”

  “Where? I’m having trouble hearing—”

  “Disneyland. For kidnapping his daughter.”

  “What?”

  “Six years ago, he went to France, picked her up for the weekend, then never took her back to her mother.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t exaggerated? You know how these accusations get tossed around during a bad divorce.” But was I thinking about Hart’s limited visitation, about Lauren’s reaction to the gift of the violin.

  “Hello? You’re cutting out.”

  “It’s just—we’ve been with Friederike all week, and she’s made it pretty clear she wants to live with her dad—”

  “If Cal disappeared with Heidi, would you be making excuses like this?”

  Fat chance. I sighed. “Anything else?”

  “He’s still on the Viso-Tech board of directors, but his involvement is minimal these days. He’s listed on staff at Bascomb Palmer. He does a little teaching, a little public speaking.”

  “So, in other words, he’s basically who he says he is.”

  “Aside from the kidnapping charges, yes.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing. A few years ago, he was hospitalized in Santa Fe. Another little bubble of publicity. Since then, there isn’t much written about him. He’s published a few papers. Lectured at a few conferences.”

  “What was he hospitalized for?”

  “Maybe you should ask him.”

  “Or maybe it’s none of my business.”

  “You’re angry at me.”

  “You’re angry at him. I’m trying to figure out why.”

  She must have moved because suddenly the connection was perfectly clear. “He tells you not to get attached to him, but he introduces you to his daughter as if you’re someone special. He says there’s no chemistry between you, but, let me guess, you’re in bed all the time. And I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking he’s something special, this tragic, troubled man. You’re thinking that, at some point, he’ll recognize everything you are to him and love you in return. Let me tell you from experience: both of you can’t be in love with him. A man like that cares about no one but himself.”

  38.

  ON THE TRAIN TO Lucerne. Late afternoon. Hart sat beside me in the window seat, staring out at the dark, textured surfaces of the mountains, at the sky which was still the bright blue of morning. Tomorrow, after our night in Gersau, we would visit the glider club in St. Gallen. Everywhere we went, he watched the scatterings of clouds, assessing conditions. Would there be lift? I knew exactly what he was thinking, and yet I felt no closer to knowing this man than when we’d met three months ago. The ax murderer. The kidnapper. Three marriages.

  You mustn’t get attached.

  Suddenly I was missing Heidi terribly. I checked my cell, but there was still no message, no text, no photo. What would I do if I returned from Europe to learn Cal had taken her out of the country? Started a new life with her in Vancouver, Panama City, Tibet?

  “Who were you speaking to this morning?” Hart said.

  “A friend of mine from the States.”

  He was watching me with the same expression with which he’d been studying the sky. “Whatever he said upset you, I think.”

  “She.”

  “Ah.”

  “She ran a background check on you.”

  “At your request?”

  “Her own initiative, actually.”

  “An enterprising woman.”

  “More like a concerned friend.”

  “And what, in particular, concerns her?”

  What I thought: What doesn’t?

  What I said: “You tell me.”

  Behind his shoulder, the countryside flashed by: open fields populated by cattle and goats; steep vineyards; exposed rock; scattered outcroppings of slope-shouldered pine. Beautiful countryside. Beautiful land. I wanted to scoop it up by the bucketful, drink it down in gulps, wash away my suburban South Florida life of billboards and strip malls, asphalt and road trash, terrible traffic and the sort of heat that begins to feel something like rage. Even here, it clung to me still, like burned and blistered skin. I wanted this place to be the one I called home, even as I struggled to speak its language, even as I knew that, in another week, I’d be back in the world where, no doubt, I’d come to belong. Neither vibrant city nor lyrical country but the undefined space in between. Staring out my window at the artificial lake. Walking the beach with my face turned toward the water, away from the condos, the shops and parking lots.

  “What is there to tell?” Hart said. “I should not have taken her out of France. I should not have kept her so long.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “La Scala. The London Philharmonic. Tanglewood.” He cocked his head. “What, you were expecting a dungeon?”

  “I wasn’t expecting Disneyland.”

  “It was where she wanted to go. Our last stop.”

  “Your last stop before what?”


  “Before it was time to take her back home.”

  “You were going to take her back to France?”

  “I’d sent Lauren our itinerary. She turned it over to the French authorities, who turned it over to the Americans. That is how I came to be arrested in front of—what is that ride? The one with the planets? Space station?”

  “Space Mountain?”

  “Yes, it is just this otherworldly. They put me into handcuffs. You can imagine the mess. I lost interest in my research, I still cannot explain. I took a leave of absence. I traveled out west for a year.”

  “Where you ended up in the hospital.”

  “Your concerned friend, I’m sure, has told you about that, too.”

  “Not really,” I said, but he was getting to his feet.

  “Quick, before I kidnap you. We are coming to our stop.”

  The last ferry was about to leave; we bought our tickets, stepped aboard. Minutes later, we were sliding through the green waters of Lake Lucerne. Mount Pilatus behind us. The Rigi like a muscular shadow ahead. Upstairs in the dining room, Hart surprised me by ordering champagne.

  “Now, for happier topics,” he said as the waitress put out our glasses. “Friederike attends the Juilliard this fall. It is settled to everyone’s satisfaction. So it’s doubtful, I think, that Swiss guards shall arrive—tonight, at least—to carry me away.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, it is a wonderful thing. I will relocate to New York, buy an apartment, pay a housekeeper to greet her after school and care for her when I travel. Of course I will cover Friederike’s tuition and expenses. Meanwhile, should Lauren feel the emotional loss of her daughter too intensely, I shall continue paying child support as a means of cushioning such strong, maternal grief. Should her soon-to-be husband benefit from such considerations, well, such an effect must be considered incidental.”