“No noises from outer space?”
“Nor from inner.”
He said that was a good sign.
“What do you think we ought to do?” she asked.
“Concerning what?”
“About the house. About our lives. If I go on hearing noises when I get back.”
He said after a minute, “Zora, I would like to help you extricate yourself from this misery. I speak with love.”
“Don’t make me feel like a crippled pigeon,” she said. “I know I hear a real enough noise when I am in that house.”
“I warn you, I love this house,” he said.
On the night after her return from her trip alone, Dworkin, awakened by a burst of cello music in the sky, stood in yellow pajamas and woolen navy robe on the deck, staring at the clustered stars.
Spanning the knotted strings of glowing small fires across the night sky, he beheld, after its slow coming into sight, like a lighted ship out of fog, his personal constellation: the Cellist. Dworkin had observed it in childhood, and often since then, a seated figure playing his cello—somewhere between Cassiopeia and Lyra. Tonight he beheld Casals sitting in a chair constructed of six jeweled stars, playing gorgeously as he hoarsely sang. Dworkin watched engrossed, trying to identify the music; like Bach but not Bach. He was not able to. Casals was playing a prelude lamenting his fate. Apparently he had—for him—died young. It was hours past midnight and Zora slumbered heavily, exhausted by her lonely journey. After the stars had dimmed and the celestial cellist and his music all but vanished, Dworkin drew on a pair of knee socks under his pajamas, and in tennis shoes he went quietly downstairs to the music room, where he lifted the dark cello out of its hand-carved casket and for a moment held it in his arms.
He dug the end pin into the pockmarked floor—he would not use a puck, he had informed both his wives. Dworkin wanted the floor to move if the cello caused it to. Embracing the instrument between his knees, the delicate curved shell against his breast, he drew his bow across the bridge, his left fingers fluttering as though they were singing. Dworkin felt the vibrations of the cello rise in his flesh to his head. He tried to clear his throat. Despite the time of night and the live pain in his shoulder, he played from the andante of Schubert’s B-flat major trio, imagining the music of the piano and violin. Schubert breaks the heart and calls it un poco mosso. That is the art of it. The longing heart forever breaks yet is gravely contained. The cello Dworkin passionately played played him.
He played for the space and solidity and shape of his house, the way it fitted together. He played for the long years of music here, and for the room in which he had practiced and composed for a quarter of a century, often looking up from his score to glance at the elms through the window of the arched wall. Here were his scores, records, books. Above his head hung portraits of Piatigorsky and Boccherini, who seemed to watch him when he entered the room.
Dworkin played for his gabled dark-gray, blue-shuttered house, built early in the century, where he had lived with both of his wives. Ella had a warm singing voice excellently placed and supported. Had she been braver she would have been a professional singer. “Ah,” she said, “if I were a brave person.” “Try,” Dworkin urged. “But I’m not,” said Ella. She had never dared. In the house she sang wherever she happened to be. She was the one who had thought of putting in the stained-glass windows of beasts and flowers. Dworkin played the allegro, and once more the andante of the heart-laden Schubert. He sang to Ella. In her house.
As he played, Zora, in a black nightgown, stood at the closed door of the music room.
After listening a moment she returned quickly to the bedroom. When he left the music room, Dworkin detected his wife’s perfume and knew she had been standing at the door.
He searched his heart and thought he understood what she had expected to hear.
As he went along the hallway, he caught a glimpse of a fleeting figure.
“Zora,” he called.
She paused, but it was not Zora.
“Ella,” Dworkin sobbed. “My dearest wife, I have loved you always.”
She was not there to assent or ask why.
When Dworkin got back to bed, Zora was awake. “Why should I diet? It’s an unnatural act.”
“Have you been lying there thinking of dieting?”
“I’ve been listening to myself.”
“You hear something again, after being absolved in your travels?”
“I believe I am slowly going deaf,” Zora said.
“Are you still hearing the whine or wail?”
“Oho, do I hear it.”
“Is it like the sound of someone singing?”
“I would call it the sound of my utter misery.”
Dworkin then told her he was ready to move.
“I guess we ought to sell the house.”
“Why ought we?”
“It comes to me at this late date that it’s never been yours.”
“Better late than later.” Zora laughed. “It is true, I have never loved this house.”
“Because it was Ella’s?”
“Because I never loved it.”
“Is that what caused your noises, do you think?”
“The noises cause the noises,” Zora said.
Dworkin, the next day, telephoned the real estate agents, who came that night, a man and his amiable wife in their sixties.
They inspected the house from basement to attic. The man offered to buy a child’s fiddle he had seen in the attic, but Dworkin wouldn’t sell.
“You’ll get a good price for this place,” the woman said to Zora. “It’s been kept in first-rate shape.”
When they were moving out in the early spring, Dworkin said he had always loved this house, and Zora said she had never really cared for it.
1984
In Kew Gardens
Once, as they walked in the gardens, Virginia felt her knickers come loose and slip down her ankles. She grabbed at her maidenhair as the garment eluded her frantic grasp and formed a puddle of cloth at her feet. Swooping up her underpants, with a cry of dismay she plunged into the bushes, shrilly singing “The Last Rose of Summer.” As she stood up, the elastic knot she had tied snapped, and the knickers again lay limp at her feet.
“Christ, goddamn!”
Vanessa listened at the bushes.
“Don’t be hysterical. No one will see through your dress.”
“How can you be certain?”
“No one would want to.”
She shrieked slowly.
“Forgive me, dear goat,” Vanessa told her. “I meant no harm.”
“Oh, never, no, never.”
Insofar as I was ever in love I loved Vanessa.
George Duckworth, affectionate stepbrother, carried his tormented amours from the parlor to the night nursery. He nuzzled, he fondled, he fiddled with his finger. To his sisters he was obscenity incarnate. He touched without looking.
“I meant no harm. I meant to comfort you.”
Virginia lost her underpants and wondered where she had been.
Her erotic life rarely interested her. It seemed unimportant compared with what went on in the world.
I was born in 1882 with rosy cheeks and green eyes. Not enough was made of my coloring.
When her mother died she tore the pillow with her teeth. She spat bleeding feathers.
Her father cried and raged. He beat his chest and groaned aloud, “I am ruined.”
The mother had said, “Everyone needed me but he needed me most.”
“Unquenchable seems to me such presence”: H. James.
The father moaned, “Why won’t my whiskers grow?”
As Virginia lay mourning her mother, dreadful voices cried in the night. They whispered, they clucked, they howled. She suffered piercing occipital headaches.
King Edward cursed her foully in the azalea garden. He called her filthy names, reading aloud dreadful reviews of books she had yet to write.
The king s
ang of madness, rage, incest.
Years later she agreed to marry Mr. Leonard Woolf, who had offered to be her Jewish mother.
“I am mad,” she confessed to him.
“I am marrying a penniless Jew,” Virginia wrote Violet Dickinson. She wondered who had possessed her.
“He thinks my writing the best part of me.”
“His Jewishness is qualified.”
His mother disgusted her.
She grew darkly enraged.
In fact, I dislike the quality of masculinity. I always have.
Lytton said he had no use for it whatever. “Semen?” he asked when he saw a stain on Vanessa’s dress.
Vanessa loved a man who found it difficult to love a woman.
She loved Duncan Grant until he loved her.
She had loved Clive Bell, who loved Virginia, who would not love him. Virginia loved Leonard, who loved her. She swore she loved him.
When Julia, the mother, died, the goat threw herself out of a first-story window and lay on the ground with Warren Septimus Smith. “He did not want to die till the very last minute.” Neither had she.
The old king emerged from the wood, strumming a lyre. A silver bird flew over his head, screeching in Greek.
A dead woman stalked her.
Janet Case, her teacher of Greek, loved her. She loved her teacher of Greek.
She loved Violet Dickinson.
She loved Vita Nicolson.
Leonard and she had no children. They lay in bed and had no children. She would have liked a little girl.
“Possibly my great age makes it less a catastrophe but certainly I find the climax greatly exaggerated.”
Vanessa wrote Clive: “Apparently she gets no pleasure from the act, which I think is curious. She and Leonard were anxious to know when I had had an orgasm. I couldn’t remember, do you?”
“Yet I dare say we are the happiest couple in England. Aren’t we, Leonard?”
“My dear.”
Leonard and Virginia set up the Hogarth Press but they would not print Mr. James Joyce’s Ulysses. “He is impudent and coarse.”
Mrs. Dalloway loved Warren Septimus Smith though she never met him.
“He had committed an appalling crime and had been condemned by human nature.”
“The whole world was clamoring, Kill yourself, kill yourself for our sakes.”
(He sat on the windowsill.)
He jumped. Virginia fell from the window.
As for To the Lighthouse, I have no idea what it means, if it has a meaning. That’s no business of mine.
“[Lily Briscoe] could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ’Women can’t paint, women can’t write …
“ … She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
All I need is a room of my own.
“I hate to see so many women’s lives wasted simply because they have not been trained well enough to take an independent interest in any study or to be able to work efficiently in any profession”: Leslie Stephen to Julia Duckworth.
“There has fallen a splendid tear/From the passion-flower at the gate.”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people singing such things under their breath that I burst out laughing.”
The Waves.
The Years. The bloody years.
The acts among Between the Acts.
No one she knew inspired her to more than momentary erotic excitement throughout her life. She loved Shakespeare’s sister.
Leonard gave up that ghost.
“They also serve.”
She felt a daily numbness, nervous tension. “What a born melancholic I am.”
They had called her the goat in the nursery, against which she tore at their faces with her tiny nails.
They had never found Thoby her dead brother’s lost portrait. Vanessa had painted and forever lost it.
Her mother died.
My father is not my mother. Leonard is my mother. We shall never conceive a living child.
“I shall never grow my whiskers again.”
She heard voices, or words to that effect.
“Maiden, there’s turd in your blood,” King Edward chanted in ancient Greece.
Her scream blew the bird off its one-legged perch and it flapped into the burning wood.
An old king strode among the orange azaleas.
For years she simply went mad.
She spoke in soft shrieks.
She wrote twenty-one books whose reviews frightened her.
“That was not my doing,” said Leonard Woolf.
“Nor mine,” sobbed her Greek tutor.
Perhaps it was mine, Vita Nicolson said. “She was so frail a creature. One had to be most careful not to shock her.”
I loved Vita. She loved Orlando.
Virginia wrote a biography of Roger Fry. She did not want to write a biography of Roger Fry.
Leonard served her a single soft-boiled egg when she was ill. “Now, Virginia, open your mouth and swallow your egg. Only if you eat will you regain the strength to write your novels and essays.”
She sucked the tip of his spoon.
“Though you give much I give so little.”
“The little you give is a king’s domain.”
At that time the writing went well and she artfully completed Between the Acts, yet felt no joy.
Virginia relapsed into depression and denied herself food.
“Virginia, you must eat to sustain yourself.”
“My reviews are dreadful,” Virginia said.
“I am afraid of this war,” Virginia said.
“I hear clamorous noises in my head,” Virginia said.
One morning, to escape the noises of war, she dragged herself to the river Ouse, there removed shoes, stockings, underpants, and waded slowly into the muddy water. The large rock she had forced into her coat pocket pulled her down till she could see the earth in her green eyes.
“I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
1984
Alma Redeemed
Gustav Mahler’s ghost.
Bruno Walter had seen it as Mahler conducted one of his last concerts. It waxed in music as the conductor waned. The ghost appeared, more or less, to Alma Mahler one or two years after her husband was dead. Alma did not believe in ghosts, but this one troubled her. It had got into her bedsheets but hadn’t stayed long.
Can Jews haunt people?
Gustav was a rationalist nonbeliever. “In that clear mind I never detected any trace of superstition,” Bruno Walter said. He spoke of Mahler—as Alma clearly remembered—as a “God-struck man,” whose religious self flowered in his music, viz., “Veni, creator spiritus,” as it flashed in eternity in the Eighth Symphony. Alma felt that Mahler was too subtle a man to have believed simply in God, but that wouldn’t mean he might not attempt to disturb her, although she was aware that some of her thoughts of Mahler had caused her more than ordinary fright. Might the fright have produced the ghost? Such things are possible.
In my mind, more than once I betrayed him.
Yet Mahler was a kind man, although an egotist who defined his egotism as a necessity of his genius.
“Gott, how he loved his genius!”
Now, all of Alma’s husbands, a collection of a lon
g lifetime including Mahler, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel—and Oskar Kokoschka, the painter, made it a fourth if you counted in the man she hadn’t married, whom Alma conceived to be her most astonishing (if most difficult) lover—they were all artists of unusual merit and accomplishment; yet Alma seemed to favor Mahler, even if she had trouble during her lifetime caring deeply for his music.
When she met Gustav Mahler, Alma stood five feet three inches tall and weighed 144 pounds. She loved her figure. Her deep blue eyes were her best feature. She drew men with half a glance. Alma never wore underpants and thought she knew who might know she wasn’t wearing them. When she met him she felt that Mahler didn’t know though he may have wanted to.
Alma, a lovely, much-sought-after young woman, one of the prettiest in Vienna in those days, felt Mahler was magnetic, but she wasn’t sure she ought to marry him. “He is frightening, nervous, and bounds across the room like an animal. I fear his energy.”
She wrote in her diary in purple ink: “At the opera he loves to conduct Faust.”
She wanted Gustav. She felt she had snared him in her unconscious.
Yet his demands frightened her. “Is it too late, my dearest Almchi, to ask you to make my music yours? Play as you please but don’t attempt to compose. Composition is for heroes.”
“How can I make his music mine if I have loved Wagner throughout my life? What passion can I possibly feel for Mahler’s music or even for Mahler?” These thoughts concerned her.
“You must understand, my tender girl, that my harmony and polyphony, for all their vivid modernity, which seems to distress you, remain in the realm of pure tonality. Someday your dear ears will open to the glories of my sound.”
“Yes, Gustav,” said Alma.
“Let us be lovers in a true marriage. I am the composer and you are, in truth, my beloved bride.”
Mahler urged her to consult her stepfather and mother. “You must lay to rest your doubts, whatever they are. The matter must be settled before we can contemplate a union for life.”
“Say nothing,” Carl Moll, her stepfather, advised Alma. “Best get rid of the Jew.”
The Complete Stories Page 75