Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  The beer was poured, a few drops making their way down the outside of the glass. “What, do you think I took it without asking?” Aloysia said. “I did borrow your slippers, Sophie, I admit that. I’ll return them soon, I promise. As for the locket, Josefa said I could have it. Last month when I came for my things she thrust it at me, saying, ‘I don’t want it anymore.’ She’s more and more odd, you know. Her deportment’s dreadful, even onstage. Never mind. I guess she’s done with her mourning for her lover in Munich.”

  Aloysia sat up a little, and looked around the room as if momentarily surprised to find herself here. “Mon Dieu,” she murmured. “How we are all turning out differently than we thought ... but enough of that. Come see my new dresses. I’m singing in private houses as well as the opera, and it does pay very nicely.”

  In the bedroom she spread out a new pink dress, a dark green one, and a petticoat that would be displayed through the front dress panels, layers and layers of white eyelet embroidered with little pink flowers. Aloysia looked carefully at her sisters. She kissed Sophie, and said, “I can’t believe you’re fifteen. Your birthday was months ago, and I’m sorry I missed it. I’ll buy you a present; you know I always do, though it’s often late. But look at you both—before we know it, you’ll both be in love and married as well. By that time Josefa might actually be less abrasive and find someone to marry her. I’ll be the most famous singer in Europe by then, and we’ll visit one another and be civil. Yes, it will happen; I know it.”

  Sophie stood with her toes turned in a little, rubbing the bridge of her nose to ease the place where the spectacles rested. “I’m not going to marry,” she said. “I want to be a nun and dedicate myself to charitable works.”

  “Oh, that again, you tiresome child. All girls want that for a time—the perpetuation of virginity, the dedication to the sorrowful mysteries, and all those things we were taught when Papa took us to church. But tell me ...” Her fingers caressed the eyelet of the petticoat, and she blinked a little faster. “How is ... Mother?”

  Constanze sighed. “Mama’s much the same. Her back aches; her legs ache; the boarders tire her. I do what I can. Speaking of marriage, she has plans again. I heard her talking with Uncle Thorwart the other day from behind closed doors, something about the cousin of a count who has a small estate. She doesn’t give up; she doesn’t understand. When I marry it will be for love.” She raised her face, and, in that moment, there was an unusual radiance in her heart-shaped face.

  She flung herself down on the bed, pushing aside the dresses. “The last time Mama tried was in the autumn, and he was old enough to be my grandfather. He had to help himself up from the chair with his cane, though Mama said he owned four houses.” Through her now loosening hair, Constanze gazed at her younger sister, beginning to laugh all over again. “And we laughed so hard, Sophie and I, we had to excuse ourselves. We collapsed on the stairs outside the sewing room, laughing. I know he heard us, but we couldn’t help it! Sophie said, ‘If he can’t stand by himself, what will he do in bed?’ and that made me laugh so hard I nearly fell over. It’s true; the child did say it. Don’t deny it, Sophie! Oh, heavens—”

  “Oh, how ridiculous,” Aloysia cried. “Sophie, how do you know such things? What use will they be in a convent? What a waste! Darlings, poor mice! Move over; don’t squash my dresses.”

  The three sisters tumbled over one another on the bed, lying on their sides amid the pillows, hearing Joseph Lange’s humming as he painted in the next room. Aloysia said, “You know, our Josefa never comes to see me, or at least hasn’t in this last month. She can’t make up her mind if she loves me or resents me. But she does have a lover. I know people who sing with her. It’s one of the tenors, the one from Prague. The city’s small; you can’t blow your nose without someone noticing it, and gossip’s the very bread and butter of life. Some people say two lovers. She’s doing it to get back at Mother, to show others she can, to show me.”

  Lying on her side, Aloysia hesitated, her face taking on an unusual severity. “And if she doesn’t watch it, she’ll find herself where I was, with a bun in the oven, and she’ll have to marry. Not that I didn’t want to; I wouldn’t trade Lange for the world. But there I was, so swollen with child, so distorted I hardly knew myself, and I kept saying, really, is this creature me?” Now she was laughing again, flinging back her hair. “Can you imagine our proud Josefa in that state? Children are lovely, but with the bickering and quarreling Mother and Father engaged in over us, and their concerns about how to cut the slices of meat small enough to go around. Oh mice, do you remember the hours and hours we hid on the stairs while they raged and shouted? With all that, should we be hasty to get ourselves with child?” Her voice trailed off, and she caressed the bodice of the pink dress.

  Sophie lay silent in thought. Josefa did not come home often. She was singing in another opera house, where her rich voice with its deep low notes fascinated some even though her roles were small. She had made close friends with two women who lived together, one a rather mannish portraitist and the other a young composer; she was often at their house, and stayed away for days without explanation. Their mother looked at her angrily with a furrowed brow, daring to challenge her only in short barbs, then looking away, gnawing her lip, afraid of losing her. But could Aloysia’s words be true? Two lovers? What did a woman do with two lovers? I am losing her; I am losing her, Sophie thought. Josefa will go just like Aly, and leave us.

  Vaguely Aloysia’s words floated over her, and Sophie turned to look at the young singer who now leaned back dreamily, pillow in her arms. “She’ll come back, Sophie,” she murmured. Aloysia knelt for a moment and touched the younger girl’s freckled cheek as she had years before when Sophie was ill and she had sung her lullabies. Then she said, with slow tenderness, “Oh mice, do you ever wonder what life is for? In the end what it’s really for, what’s the reason for it, and how are we to behave?”

  Aloysia opened her hands palms up and then reached for an ostrich feather that lay on the table near the bed. “Never mind, I’ll make myself melancholy talking like that. Look, this feather’s going on my blue hat ... everyone in Paris wears them! No, wait, this is important! Tell me about you, Stanzi. There’s something different about you. What is it? Do you have a secret? Are you in love? Yes, you are, look how you blush. Now I’m going to tickle your belly until you tell me.”

  They fell together into a heap, Constanze laughing, her dress pulling up over her dark hose as she tried to get away from her sister’s tickling fingers. “Oh stop, stop, Aloysia; there’s no one, I swear.”

  Holding her down, Aloysia whispered into her ear, “I know something about you that you don’t. You could be a great flirt if you let yourself, Constanze Weber, and you could, too, Sophie, with all your talk of nunneries. You silly girls, when will you learn? Flirting’s delicious, it’s delicious; you have so much power. Oh, it’s one of the most delicious things.”

  A knock sounded at the door, discreet, then sounded once more. “Beloved,” came Lange’s low and reasonable voice, “you have a rehearsal with the musicians in an hour. The clock just struck, and you ought to have a little food before you go.”

  Aloysia sat up suddenly. She stood frowning, glancing severely toward her few more common dresses, wondering which one she should wear. The two younger sisters slipped down from the bed, straightening their own dresses and refastening their hair with the pins that had come loose.

  “My darling,” came the call again.

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming.” Aloysia flung off the dressing gown and stood in her smock; she sat down on the chair to pull on her hose and fasten them to her garter. From the other room came the sound of things being moved. Smoothing her hose, Aloysia said offhandedly, “And how’s Mama’s boarder, Herr Mozart? I hear he writes and gives lessons and some concerts, yet still can barely make enough to feed himself. A pity. Some people say he’s brilliant, and others that he’s just too proud, that he wants life just as he wants it and won’t
have it any other way.”

  Sophie nodded, the corners of her mouth drawn down. “He never speaks to us except when he must,” she said uncomfortably. “I wish we were still good friends! Do you ever sing the songs he wrote for you?”

  “Yes, I do; they’re beautiful songs. The whole tour he planned! He has a kind heart but little sense. Sophie Weber, are you going to ask me if I regret what I did? Never, not for a moment. Joseph and I are much in love, and we may travel to other countries. Perhaps to Paris for my singing, and he could paint there. His work’s in demand. Did you see the lovely one he’s making of me in the role of Zémire, with the feathers in my hair? Oh girls, did you see it? It’s against the wall.”

  She was dressed now, slipping the last of the ivory pins into her hair. They followed her into the small sunny room where her clavier stood and watched as she gathered up her music, trying a scale or two. Her beautiful little voice rang out to the china figurines on the windowsill. When she turned, both younger sisters sensed that she had now entirely left them, that the laughter and tickling might have occurred years ago and not just a few minutes before.

  “Don’t let Mama spoil your lives,” she said severely. Then she kissed them on their cheeks, for a moment letting her little hand linger on their arms. “Good-bye, my very dears,” she murmured. “I miss Papa, don’t you? Sometimes I miss him so much I can’t bear it.”

  The shop sign dripped water down its painted wood over the words JOHANN AND WENZEL SCHANTZ, MAKERS OF FORTEPIANOS AND CLAVIERS, PURVEYORS OF MUSIC FROM FRANCE, AUSTRIA, AND ITALY. Peering through the rainy windows, Constanze gazed past the instruments to the blurred, well-built man in his leather apron. Then she opened the shop door to the tinkle of the bell, and went inside, shaking off her cloak as best she could.

  His voice resonated warm and deep. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Weber.”

  She made the smallest curtsey. “Bonjour, Herr Schantz.”

  “You come in the rain! I hope all’s well with your family.”

  “Oh, all quite well! I’ve come to find the music for the song we spoke of.”

  “Yes, of course! I was concerned for a moment that my man didn’t mend your father’s old clavier satisfactorily. I’m afraid he confided in me that it’s seen its time.” And he smiled at her. “I’ll look for the music, mademoiselle,” he said, and went through a door into a small room where she could hear him humming and vigorously moving boxes. Even though he left the room, she could feel his presence.

  Johann Schantz’s dark, muscular arms under his rolled sleeves were dusted with hair; his chest was broad, his voice deep. He smelled of the insides of fortepianos and claviers, that hidden woody smell of her childhood. He reminded her of a painting she had once seen of a gypsy. For some months now she had been making excuses to see him, spending the day before thinking of what she could say, and the days following wishing that her words had been more clever or that something about her had been more noticeable.

  Aloysia always said you could define affection, relegating it to either flirtation or deep feeling, but that was so reductionary, that was so unsubtle. When Constanze was twelve there had been the schoolboy who had lived downstairs in their Mannheim house and had left her short notes slipped under a crack in one of the steps. When she was not quite fourteen there had been the lawyer’s clerk. He had died young, and for months she had grieved for him.

  And now she was seventeen, living in the ever-changing world of transient boarders, circumventing her mother’s explosions, one of which some months ago had sent a mild boarder she had favored, a bespectacled student of ancient Eastern languages, rushing from the door, leaving behind books of very strange writing. A duller man had taken his room, and once more she had turned her back on the lot of them. They were merely meals to serve, shaving water to heat, beds to change—Aloysia’s abandoned fiancé among them. They would mean nothing to her, and she would allow them to see nothing of her true self.

  Constanze had decided many years before that the best way to slip through her chaotic world was to be as quiet as possible, and to let no one know what she was feeling. When in the old days quarrels became too much between her mother and father, she had hidden on the steps, blocking her ears with her hands; then she and Sophie would quietly pick up the bits of broken plates. Yet under her full breasts, which she was always trying to lace down to obscurity, her heart was very soft. She cried for dead birds, she mourned for lonely old people—and she kept it all inside of herself. It would emerge in bursts of temper or grief, if she let it emerge at all. There was no room for her in the house, not in the early days. There were her brilliant older sisters, and her utterly charming and devout younger one, for whom she would give her life: they were gregarious and individualistic and, in the case of Aloysia, extraordinarily beautiful. There had never been any place for Constanze but in the corners, so in the corners she made her world.

  Now she stood in the fortepiano shop in the midst of the instruments; she stood stiffly, for this place to which she was so drawn was a place of danger. Music opened her entirely. To some people it was pleasant; to others it brought the hope of happiness and peace; but to her it was reckless and deep. Once she had stumbled into a church when the boy’s choir was rehearsing a Bach chorale; alone, huddled in the farthest pew, she had found herself sobbing with emotion. And the truth was she had wanted to sing. She had wanted to sing deeply, richly, fully, but she had not dared. She was not as good as her sisters; she had never been as good as them, so she had chosen silence. Now she could not find her way through it.

  She ran her hand over the fall board of one of the instruments; still hearing the sound of boxes being moved, she sat down on the bench and softly played a scale. From the other room came Johann Schantz’s jovial voice, “I do advise your family, Mademoiselle Weber, to consider buying a fortepiano. I would give it to you under generous terms. You see how much superior it is even to the harpsichord, in which the level of the tone can’t vary.” Then he was closer; he had come from the room. He stood just behind her. “Play something and you’ll see,” he said. “Play something.”

  The first chords filled her, and tears pricked at her eyes. She withdrew her hands after playing only a page of a piece from memory, and clasped them tightly in her lap among the folds of her gray skirt.

  “Come!” he said, seating himself beside her and beginning to play. His large hands were slightly hairy, and here and there were small cuts from his work. “Now you see what the pedal can do,” he said. “Is it not a remarkable instrument? But perhaps not today for you.”

  The shop bell tinkled, and another customer came in, shaking out his umbrella. Constanze stood up at once and walked to the window, where piles of music lay; she began to look through them. Trios; music for wind band, clavier, and fortepiano music. Outside the window, the rain streaked down, and people hurrying past were blurred. Some time passed.

  Then he was at her side. “Here’s the music, mademoiselle; I found it for you. You lost your copy when moving? Keep this one safe.”

  Johann Schantz touched her arm, but she did not turn. She knew at that moment there was another young woman inside her, and if she allowed her to burst free, then who would she be, what would she do, where would she belong? Who was she if not the dutiful daughter, her hands clasped over her apron; the one who picked up broken plates and brought scraps out for the refuse man? She knew who she was: good, sweet, obscure Constanze, who had not quite been able to keep her family together.

  Then his youngest child ran into the shop and leapt into his father’s arms. She walked a few streets in the rain, protecting the music under her cloak. The fortepiano maker was a married man. How could she dream of him? What would her own beloved father have said?

  Still, during the next days, she reviewed every moment that had passed between them since she had first seen Johann Schantz, of the times she had visited his shop to purchase music or to present another difficulty with the aging clavier. She thought of how when he himself had come
to their house to mend the clavier, she could not go into the parlor when she heard his voice.

  Two days after her visit to the shop she was standing by the table just inside the boardinghouse door, looking through the post, which contained its customary weekly letter from her maternal aunts, when she saw the letter addressed to the Weber sisters. At once her heart began to pound, and she took the letters with her to the kitchen.

  “What do you have there?” Sophie asked as she rolled out dough. “I know. One of Mama’s schemes has worked out, and the Count’s Russian cousin has asked to marry you. You’re moving to Moscow.”

  “No, it’s an invitation to a supper and dance with the Schantz family, in their rooms above the music shop. Alfonso’s going as well, and he can chaperone us.”

  Sophie looked about for the bowl of preserved fruit to spread on the dough. “What are you hiding from me, Stanzi?” she said ruefully. “Never mind. You’ll tell me when I’m on my deathbed, dying of curiosity. Let me see. Josefa won’t go with us; she never does anymore. I suppose Mama will say we can go if cousin Alfonso’s there.”

  They arrived late to the party after helping to serve supper at home. The upper room was quite full already, with more than a few dozen people, mostly musicians, some of whom the girls had known half their lives. A sideboard groaned with dark bottles of wine from Johann and Wenzel Schantz’s country vineyard, for the brothers’ family made fine Viennese wines in addition to fortepianos. There were also cheeses, sliced sausages, and bread.

  Constanze kept her eyes on the floor or the table. She could sense the presence of the fortepiano maker, and hear his resonant, rich bass voice. This night she knew that his eyes followed her; she could feel them.

  Sophie hurried off to speak to an old friend of their father’s, and Constanze found Alfonso and his handsome Italian peasant wife sitting on chairs in one of the bedrooms, which had been cleared as much as possible for the party. She could estimate by Alfonso’s ebullient voice and his flushed face how many glasses of wine he had already consumed. By his side, rocking back and forth shyly in his chair, was a young man. “My prodigy,” Alfonso cried expansively. “I found him work in the orchestra at Stephansdom playing in the masses when he’d just come from France, and I think I may be able to find him a place with the musicians of Prince Esterházy when they travel here this winter. My dear friend, my dear Henri, I have known Constanze and her sisters since they could barely totter across the room. Their father was a good soul and my closest friend.”