She blessed the empty rooms, and hurried down to the street.
And then within weeks it was as if they had never lived anyplace else but beautiful Munich. Their new rooms, on a floor one story lower than their Mannheim residence, made it slightly easier to bring up firewood and bring down chamber pots. They were also fairly close to the great church, the Frauenkirche, with its two tall round towers rising over other buildings against the bright sky. They settled in their old careless way, everything scattered about, musicians coming on Thursdays to play and often on other nights dropping by for supper, wine, or talk. For the first time in their lives, they had almost enough money to live on, and the two older sisters began to sing here and there to some success.
Letters came regularly from their friends in Mannheim, and every week or more, a thick one from France, which Aloysia took away to the girls’ communal bedroom, giving orders that no one was allowed to enter for some time. From behind the closed door they could just hear the scratch of her pen as she wrote her reply; when finished, she walked directly to Father’s desk, sealing her response with white melted wax and his crest of a lyre. Do not come near, do not ask, her pursed mouth seemed to say.
In spite of the move, the family members shortly became themselves again: their quarrels, their secrets, their gregarious love of company, their father’s weariness, their mother’s desires to have her girls well settled. The book with the tooled-leather cover and the list of potential suitors written carefully within had indeed moved with them; it was hidden now in some new spot, which no one could find, though Sophie had looked for an hour, until her skirt was dusty. Their mother had been quiet concerning it for some months after the move, and for a time they all thought she might have forgotten about it.
She had not. In the heat of summer, as they sat about the new parlor (which looked just like the old one except the floor slanted a little and they had to stuff a wad of paper under one of the clavier legs to stabilize it), the Weber sisters heard their mother huffing slowly up the stairs. “Girls,” she said, reaching up to unpin her hat, for she never went down to the street, even to buy matches or cooked fish, without it. “My girls, my little fleas, I have plans.”
“Ah, not plans,” murmured Josefa. She had an intense look in her eyes; she had been reading Hamlet in German for the fourth time, and had just come again to the appearance of the ghost.
“And what good mother doesn’t have them? Listen!” Maria Caecilia laid her hat carefully down on the table. “I met Elisa Hoffman in the thread shop; you’ll recall, my doves, she went to school with me. She asked if you were all betrothed or married yet, and I said no, indeed, though my eldest is already twenty.” Maria Caecilia sighed and continued, “Then my kind former schoolmate replied, ‘Dear Maria Caecilia, don’t be concerned! I have a prospect. I know a man here but briefly who has plantations in the West Indies, a widower of thirty with two children.’ ”
Maria Caecilia sat down, breathless and triumphant, and fanned herself with a thin news journal that she had brought for her husband.
“Which one of us will be bid for?” Josefa said, shifting on the sofa as she prepared to return to her book. “When does the auction begin, or do we each share as we always do, getting a quarter apiece of the young man? Is that by polygamy or dissection? Please count me out. The West Indies are hot and too far. Thirty’s old. Money doesn’t make one happy.”
“That’s true, Mama,” Sophie cried. “The saintliest people are poor.” She blinked behind her spectacles. “We can’t dissect him, or we’ll be hanged for murder to the beat of a soldier’s drum, and we can’t share him whole. Some savages have ten wives, and Arabian pashas have sixty, but we wouldn’t like that. Constanze wants to marry for love, and I’m only twelve years old and want a life of good works. Aloysia is pledged to Mozart, and Josefa is going to join the gypsies or run off with a theater troupe if she can’t be an entrepreneur and have her music shop. She told us. So the idea is utterly impractical.”
“What I want,” said Constanze, “is to keep us all together. So if he’s not willing to have us all working in his fields, perhaps he could live here and help bring down the chamber pots.”
“Ah, what am I to do with you all?” their mother cried, sailing into the kitchen while the three younger girls followed. From her basket, Maria Caecilia pulled forth a great lettuce, the dirt still clinging to the drooping green leaves. “What do you know of life, with what words can I tell you?” She peeled back the wrapping from a large, yellow, creamy slab of butter, biting her full lip. “It’s as easy to love a rich man as a poor one,” she said. “Rich men are also worth loving.”
“Don’t you love Papa?”
“Impudence! Bad girl, Constanze Weber! Of course I do.”
Sophie pinched Constanze’s arm, gazing sadly at her mother’s wet eyelashes. “You could ask him on a Thursday, Mama; we could look him over.”
Aloysia slipped the butter away into the cupboard in the blue covered dish that had traveled from Mannhem with them, and then neatly shut the door. From the parlor came Josefa’s voice: “Let me know which evening he’s coming, and I’ll go to the lecture at the philosophical society.”
The plantation owner arrived the following Thursday with Frau Hoffman for the Webers’ evening, but he complained that music gave him a headache and left early. The girls laughed so hard they had to leave the room. Only Josefa did not have her customary fun with it, for she had seldom seen her father so profoundly tired; the next day, when she vowed to scold him about it, it seemed to have left him. And Sophie at last confided in Constanze what she had seen in the book of suitors when she had stolen it some months before: under Aloysia’s name were several new possibilities, all of them sons of wealthy fathers in good Munich society. Nowhere was Mozart’s name. The two younger sisters linked their little fingers, swearing secrecy, but they looked with some skepticism at their mother for a time after.
Autumn came, bringing no suitors worth mentioning, rather damp and rain. Fridolin Weber rushed from lesson to lesson under his enormous black umbrella. On his face was that wild, uncomfortable look he wore when they were not quite making ends meet, and again the girls heard quarrels from behind their parents’ bedchamber door. Then one morning their father came late from his rooms, his thin naked legs visible under his short nightshirt, one hand against the wall for support, and a cough shaking his body. “I’m not quite well,” he said. “Josefa, my love, you will kindly take my clavier lessons? Don’t shout at the young women if they’re stupid; they’ll go elsewhere.”
That Thursday evening the usual handful of guests arrived; they were shown into the bedchamber where Fridolin lay, a hot water bottle on his chest and his throat wrapped in flannel. “We’ll have our musicale here,” he said. The friends looked at one another, but obliged. Five or six musicians crowded in the room between wardrobe and table, squeezing chairs where they could. Heinemann’s bow caught on the bed hangings. Glasses of wine were set among the powders, pins, and health tonics cluttering Caecilia Weber’s dressing table.
“What does the doctor say?”
“He bled me and ordered me to rest.”
After the friends had left, Weber leaned back on his pillow, listening to the whispers of his girls, who were quietly returning the chairs and clearing away the cake plates and glasses. When he looked up, he saw Josefa standing in the doorway holding his beer, which she had heated for him, clutching it against her as if to shield its warmth. He called, “Come, sit on the bed’s edge, but first close the door a little.”
He took her hand in his once she was settled. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll be ready to go back to my work tomorrow, but tonight, dearest girl, while the andante was playing, I looked at all of you as if standing at a distance, and it was a strange thing. It was as if I wasn’t here anymore. I shouldn’t tell you this, perhaps, but I feel I must speak of it. You know there are certain things I can’t tell your mother; she worries so.”
Fridolin Weber leaned
back on the flattened pillow, and Josefa thought, He looks older, like his own father now. Her heart skipped a beat.
“You work too hard,” she said sternly. “I don’t know why some people have to work so hard in life, while for others it’s easier. »
“I don’t mind it. I have all of you and your dear mother to keep.”
“Everyone wants too much of you; it’s not fair.”
“I didn’t want to speak about me, Josy, but you. I really didn’t mean to speak of me at all. We haven’t had our walks lately, those times just you and I walked together. I miss them very much. I sometimes look at you over the candles at supper. You’re my girl. It’s not easy being the eldest, and you’re not happy. I don’t know what to do to make you happy, Josy. I wish it could be done with something bought, like a hat or chocolates. That I could manage. I’ve had a lot of time to think today. You want things you don’t know you want. Do you know any of them? Josy, with your huge and gorgeous voice, my true musician. Yes, you are a true musician. What will happen with your voice? Will it bring you happiness?”
“I’m not loved, Papa, that’s it.” She sat leaning forward, one hand on his foot, feeling his sharp toenails even through the covers. “The others are loved so easily. I have no patience with stupidity. I shouted at your pupil today, and I think her mother won’t have us teaching her anymore. I want to be loved so much, but I don’t know how to go about it. Sometimes I wish it were a long time ago when the others weren’t born and there was just us.” She looked up mournfully, reddening. “I’m so sorry about your pupil.”
He patted her hand. “I’ll go tomorrow and placate her.”
In the morning they heard him dressing to go out, whistling a little. Some hours later he returned to wait for another pupil in the parlor.
Josefa, in the kitchen by the simmering soup, was engrossed in the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth when she heard something fall. She jumped up and rushed toward the parlor. Her father lay on the floor by the clavier. “Oh, my darling,” she cried, dropping to her knees beside him. He looked at her as if puzzled to find himself there. Then his breath stopped, and the light went from his eyes.
She held his hand, her fingers caressing the hairs above his knuckles and then feeling down to the supple, hardened fingertips. A sob shook her chest. “Wake up, Papa,” she whispered.
She bent down to whisper into his ear. His soft graying hair stirred. She crouched on the floor, trying to keep her growing sobs inside her, hoping no one else would come. But where is the music? she thought. Where has the music gone? And where has he gone, lying here, almost as if asleep from some great weariness, and not yet fifty years old? When would he stir, and rise up, and rush through the room, scattering music, saying, “The pupil’s coming!” Perhaps you had only so much of yourself to give, and when you had given it all, it was over. He had given of himself for his four girls, to buy them dresses and warm sheets, firewood and veal. Yes, he had spent himself.
He’s mine, she thought. I’m his. The rest of them don’t matter, never did, not even Mama, who drove him on so. I was his first girl; I was here first. He said it last night; he almost said it. Oh Papa, you’re so handsome, not dull like your brother. Inside there’s music, music. It’s still there. It’s not all come out; it’s here in your chest. We haven’t had many walks here. The others took them away, the others who have never really loved you properly. Neither of us has ever been loved the right way; we both know it. You taught me to sing, and I don’t sing, not much, but one day I will, and then each note will be for you.
The tears fell down her cheeks, and she sat back on her heels. Breathing deeply several times, she found the low center of her voice. Then tremulously she began to sing. The rich voice staggered from note to note, and as she breathed more deeply, her voice steadied and flowed forth. She sang part of a mass for the dead, for which he had played first violin so many times in Mannheim churches. “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.” Her voice rose and rose, until it filled every corner of the room and made the windows tremble. Perhaps it would enter his body and fill it, too.
She hardly knew when the others came in and began to cry aloud, hardly felt it when her mother shook her by the shoulders and shrieked, “Stop singing, stop singing, you stupid girl; why are you singing? Christ have mercy, Christ have mercy!” But she heard her mother’s heavy knees fall to the floor, and then Josefa’s song ended.
There were mourners, of course, climbing the many flights of stairs. Everyone came. She played his favorite music on the clavier hour after hour, her mouth compressed, her eyes vague and watery from weeping. Tears would stop and start; then her face became hard and determined. She stared at the grief expressed by her sisters and mother as if it were something she could not quite understand. First was the requiem, and then the procession, following the coffin as it rocked in the black carriage, to the graveyard.
Wake up, Papa, Josefa thought. It will soon be Thursday again.
They rode back from the graveyard in a hired carriage because they did not have the strength to walk. Maria Caecilia could not stop weeping. “How could you sing when you found him? How could you, Josefa Weber?” she repeated again and again. “You have no heart. Tell me.”
Sophie said, “She was right to sing; what else could she do? He gave us music; she gave it back. He was her papa, and she loved him.”
Maria Caecilia leaned forward, her face a cross between tenderness and fury. “She hasn’t got a right to mourn like this; he’s not her papa,” she cried over the sound of the carriage wheels. “He never was.” Then she sat back with her hand covering her mouth and her eyes closed. Josefa stared at her. She had gone so pale that Sophie thought she would fall off the seat in a faint.
“What do you mean?” Josefa whispered. “What are you saying?” she said, her voice rising in all its richness. Aloysia and Sophie put their hands over their ears, and Josefa suddenly leaned forward as if she would slap her mother, or close her large hands about her throat.
Constanze shouted, “Josy, don’t! And you, Mama, do you hear me, stop it! We’ve all got to stay together now, we have to!”
Their mother looked up, her face wet with tears, and reached out to touch her oldest daughter’s knee. “I didn’t mean that,” she croaked. Words failed her, and she broke down in harsh sobbing. “I don’t know what I’m saying. You don’t know all that was between him and me. He’d call me his little cabbage. Fat as I am, I was his little cabbage. He made me a better woman. His soul was golden; he was all the world. I was never, never worthy of him, and now he’s gone.”
The winter wind blew across Europe as it would, driving icy rivers before it, circling mountains, beckoning the frost. In the Munich parlor the dark leaves that were draped around the portrait of Fridolin Weber had dried in the few months since his death. Near it, one late afternoon, Sophie Weber was at the desk writing a letter to her mother’s sisters, bending close over the paper and biting her lip.
Dearest Aunts Elizabeth and Gretchen,
I pray God that this finds you well and happy. It seems a very long year since my last birthday when you sent me new slippers and my family was in Mannheim.
Mother has asked me to write to say how we are doing. As she would not wish me to conceal the difficulties of our circumstances to you, I shall be honest.
Sophie chewed on the pen’s edge for a moment to think straight ... those words: I shall be honest. What was honest anyway? Who told the utter truth, and, besides that, what was truth? She sat upright, recalling once more her mother’s words to Josefa as they all rode back from the funeral. It had taken months of soothing to lay those words to rest, apologies, late-night kitchen conversations, tears.
But now, to tell the truth to her aunts. Was not the reality too bitter to put into ink? Dare she write that their hearts and lives were in disarray, that they each struggled to discover the path that would lead them back to their former life, but they found that the way had been washed out, much like on that
woodlands walk they had all taken years before. Though her father had remembered the way, and they had set out on their adventure, they soon found the bridge across the stream was gone. Such was now the truth of their lives.
Mother could do so little these days. And the others wouldn’t write, or endlessly put it off:
Father did not leave money, and his brother sent some, which has gone for firewood and food. Constanze is copying music, and Aloysia and Josefa are singing in churches and private concerts, wherever they can. Our uncle Thorwart, who has moved to Vienna, is trying to procure a small pension for Mother from the court because of Papa’s service for so many years as musician under Elector Carl Theodor. By law we women must have a male guardian, and Thorwart has been appointed, though he interferes rather a lot. I can’t like him as much as I did, though I must pretend it. Constanze says he brushes against her breasts all the time, and then says, “Pardon, pardon!” We have not yet told Mother.
Sophie studied the last few sentences, then carefully inked them out (certain truths must be withheld for a time for prudency), blinked back her tears, and continued:
We go bravely forward as Papa would have wished. I am certain that God will see us through.
She put aside the paper then, because she was crying and didn’t want her tears to splotch her words, and because, to her horror, for the first time in her life she was not at all certain that God would help them through.
He came slowly down their Munich street that same blustery day, papers and dry leaves blowing about his feet, and began to climb their stairs, resting his heavy luggage full of music once, staring unseeingly at the grooves the bag handles had worn into his palm. Tentatively, he knocked on the wrong door, and a tipsy unshaven man grumbled at him and pointed upward to “where the ladies live.” His legs, under black breeches buckled at the knee, ached as he climbed the last flight, walking toward the paper sign posted on the door: THE MESDEMOISELLES WEBER: LESSONS IN CLAVIER AND SINGING AVAILABLE. PLEASE KNOCK.
Marrying Mozart Page 11