Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Oh.” I could feel myself flush.

  “Besides,” he said, signaling the waiter, “men and women can never be friends.”

  This, then, was the end of our date. Hart paid the bill, waving my hand away, and then, as if released from chains, we stood up at exactly the same time. To my surprise, he gave me his business card, so I handed him mine.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t mind helping me,” I said, “if I get stuck on a translation.”

  “Sure, sure. We will talk on the phone. It’s the way these things go. Do you want to go flying with me some time?”

  “Flying?” I said, confused. “Like, in a plane?”

  “No-no-no, not a plane,” he said. “A glider.”

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I said, and then, as I was reading the name of his company (Viso-Tech) and his full name (Reinhardt Hempel), he asked how my marriage ended. Again, there was no transition between topics. When I didn’t answer, he answered the question for me.

  “I suppose he was unfaithful,” he said. “It is the usual thing.”

  “Calvin wasn’t cheating,” I said.

  “Then you,” Hart said, and now he was impatient. “Come on. It is always the same.”

  Abruptly I awakened from whatever was holding me here. This man was a stranger. I never had to see him again. I could drive home to the safety of my daughter, listen to the music of her breathing as she slept.

  “I wish I had cheated,” I told him. “I wish it with all my heart.”

  I left him beside the table. The entrepreneur. The rational person. The ax murderer. I did not look back. By now I was more than two hours late; it was my babysitter who would kill me. And indeed, she was waiting for me at the door: twenty-one years old, radiant, furious, her purse already slung over her shoulder.

  “Where were you?” she said, as if she were the mother and I the recalcitrant child. “Why didn’t you call?” And, like that child, I could offer no explanation. All I could do was tell her I was sorry for staying out too long.

  Clara Schumann at Thirty-five*

  Part II

  Virtue

  7.

  HEIDI WAS ASLEEP, TANGLED in blankets, some large and square, some rectangular, one no bigger than a handkerchief. Each had a cool, silky border she liked to scratch as she fell asleep. I rubbed the smallest one against her cheek; she sighed, curled her hand into mine. She’d inherited my wide palms as well as my good ear. Already she was finishing the first Suzuki Book; she could sight-read simple melodies, if she wanted. Lessons were battles, of course, at her age, but hadn’t my own been the same? Briefly, I lay down beside her, but I couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t find enough space for my adult limbs between her stuffed animals and decorative pillows, puffs of pink and white sheets. Something had unsettled me. Hart had unsettled me. The more I thought about the end of our conversation, the more it made me mad.

  Men and women can never be friends.

  Outside Heidi’s window, coconut palms rattled their thick, dry fronds. Beyond them, in the lake, frogs called to one another—you could hear everything through the glass—and now and then, there came another kind of cry, high pitched and sustained. Nothing close to wilderness is left in Palm Beach County, but this little man-made lake, at least, still offered a bit of peace. Tarpon churned the brackish water. Anhingas spread-eagled in the cypress trees. Great horned owls nested in the strip of woods that divided us from the highway.

  Once I would have said that Cal and I were friends. Would always be friends. No matter what.

  I slipped out of Heidi’s bed, paced through the kitchen and family room, circling twice through the pocket doors before heading down the hall toward my study. Marks from the furniture Calvin had taken with him—the dining room set, the antique chairs, the guest bed—were still embedded in the carpeting, like the fossilized prints from some prehistoric animal. Above my writing desk there’s a portrait of a skull, haloed in gold leaf, on a striking blue background. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and I bought it directly from the artist, believing I’d tuck it away to look at someday, a comfort, perhaps, as I lay dying. But shortly after Cal moved out, I hung the portrait over my desk. It helped—it still helps—looking up at that portrait. Assuming the old attitude of reverence. Remembering such loveliness exists, regardless of how empty I might feel.

  Robert, dying in the asylum, asked for a portrait of Brahms, and while some claim the request was rooted in jealousy, Jan Swafford’s biography suggests that Robert merely longed to look upon something beautiful. A suggestion that seems utterly believable to me, especially when you read Robert’s letter to Brahms on the subject: I received your picture through my wonderful wife, your likeness that I remember so well, and I know its place very well in my room, very well—under the mirror.* When you note that Robert welcomed Brahms as a visitor. And how carefully, tenderly, Brahms wrote to Clara of his impressions, putting a bright face on a darkening picture, expressing his affection for them both.

  “Do not heed those small and envious souls,” Clara wrote in the diary intended for her children, “who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship which they do not understand nor ever could.”†

  In August 1856, two weeks after Robert’s funeral, she and Brahms vacationed together in the Swiss town of Gersau. There they hiked the slopes of the Rigi, boated on Lake Lucerne. Free at last from Clara’s marriage, in that beautiful place far from home, something happened between them. Correspondence from that period has been destroyed, some of it at the urging of Brahms, some of it at the request of Clara’s oldest daughter, Marie. All we know for certain is that they returned to Düsseldorf separately and sadly. Brahms departed thereafter for Hamburg, while Clara embarked on yet another punishing concert tour. Still, they remained—by their own definition—“best friends” until Clara’s death in 1896, when Brahms would exclaim, “Apart from Frau Schumann, I am not attached to anybody with my whole heart.”*

  He died in 1897—jaundiced, obese, alone—eleven months after her passing.

  There is no evidence that marriage was ever discussed, either with each other or with mutual friends, to whom each wrote long and intimate letters, most of which have survived.

  There is no evidence of hanky-panky.

  I stared up at the portrait. The portrait stared down on me.

  What happened between them in Gersau? There was something I was missing. The same thing other writers—biographers, memoirists, contemporary novelists—had also struggled to see. Hart’s business card floated in my purse; I considered giving him a call. Our conversation didn’t seem finished somehow.

  But by now it was almost midnight. And it wasn’t Hart I wanted to talk to.

  Truth be told, I was longing to talk to Cal.

  8.

  WE WERE MARRIED FOR twelve years, Cal and I. His depression had always been part of our lives. First there were good years, with bad stretches. Then there were bad years, with good stretches. And then there were the years when it settled in for good, never talked of but always present, a phantom presiding over our table, slipping a cold hand into our bed. Cal ate compulsively, but without satisfaction. Evenings he drank, quietly and alone. These were the years he began changing jobs—from private schools to public to private again—looking for the right faculty, the right students, the right administration.

  He was restless. He was bored. Increasingly, he was angry.

  At first I thought the reenactment trips were a good thing. They gave him an outlet, a focus, a purpose. But each trip served only served to increase his dissatisfaction. Night after night, he’d stay up too late, e-mailing and blogging with people he’d met. I’d hear him on the phone, ranting against colleagues and coworkers, family members, friends. Everyone around him was holding him back. Everyone was secretly against him.

  These rants were never against me.

  Then, one day, they were against me.

  Still,
I defended him, protected him. I tried to conceal what was happening, even from the closest of our friends. I waited for the man I’d loved to resurface, the way—I am certain of this—Clara waited for Robert, year after year. And, like Robert, Cal always did reappear, as exhausted as a swimmer who has nearly drowned, though each time his return was less complete. The difference in him was so gradual that at first I didn’t understand the change. I thought it was just that we were aging, fading. I thought it was simply a trick of the light.

  I am a rational person, Cal liked to say, but there’s more to all this than reason. Had we behaved like rational people, there would have been no Heidi, who is the antithesis of reason: filled with emotion, bursting with light, passionate about everything, everything, everything from the fit of her socks to the stroke of a pen.

  It often worries me that I frequently inhibit Clara in her practicing, since she does not wish to disturb me while composing…she sometimes lacks time nowadays, and I am responsible for that and yet cannot change it. But Clara does recognize that I have to nurture a talent, and that I am full of the most beautiful energy right now and still do have to make use of my youth…we are really most fortunate to have each other, and understand each other, understand so well, and love each other with our whole heart.

  —Robert, in the marriage diary, 1842*

  Clara has written a series of smaller pieces, more delicate and richly musical in their invention than she’s ever achieved before. But having children and a husband who constantly improvises does not fit together with composing. She lacks the ongoing exercise, and that often bothers me, because many a heart-felt thought thus gets lost that she does not manage to execute. Clara herself knows her primary occupation to be a mother, however, so that I believe she is happy under these circumstances, which just simply cannot be changed.

  —Robert, in the marriage diary, 1843*

  Clara is now putting her Lieder and many piano compositions in order. She always wants to make progress, but on the right Marie hangs onto her dress, Elise also makes work, and the husband sits absorbed…

  —Robert, in the marriage diary, 1843†

  9.

  DESPITE THE URGINGS OF Joseph Joachim, Brahms hadn’t wanted to call on the Schumanns. He’d once sent Robert a packet of compositions, but these had been returned, unopened. That was enough for him. As for Frau Schumann, there was no discussion: she was a world-class pianist, a national treasure. Robert Schumann’s wife. But a woman, nonetheless, and therefore of little interest. Certainly no different from any other female walking the streets in her long, chaste gown, as if she believed she were fooling anybody. As if she weren’t, at heart, the same filth he paid for as easily, as comfortably, as a cool draft of beer on a warm summer’s night and forgot, just as easily, afterward.

  Sometimes there were those he didn’t have to pay, those who admired his beauty.

  These were the ones he did not forget.

  These were the ones he hated.

  It was 1854. He was nineteen years old. Schumann’s house might have been the house of anybody, a clerk, a teacher, a banker. Brahms rattled the knocker, then flushed, a letter of introduction clutched in his hand.

  Why should I have to come like a beggar? he thought as a little girl opened the door.

  His temper evaporated instantly beneath the flat, numb glaze of her stare. Why the plum circles beneath her eyes? Why the darkened parlor like a shroud about her narrow frame? No sign of a maid, a nurse. Something wasn’t right. He knew this without setting foot inside the house. Of course, he’d heard the rumors, like everyone else: Schumann mumbling to himself at rehearsals, Schumann catatonic at a dinner party, doctors advising rest and a change of air.

  “Johannes Brahms to see Herr Schumann,” he told the child, speaking with a gentleness that surprised them both, for she blinked as if he’d only just materialized. As if, until that moment, she’d been looking at empty air.

  “Papa and Mama are out walking,” she said. She had a pleasing voice—did she sing? “Come back tomorrow at ten.”

  The door closed in his face without ceremony. Now he’d have to spend an extra night at the cheap guesthouse he couldn’t afford in the first place. Enough. He’d pack up his rucksack immediately. He’d take the next train to Leipzig, where, alone, he’d present his compositions to publishers recommended by Joachim, by other powerful friends.

  Walking fast through the Düsseldorf streets, he turned his face from the passing glances of hollow-eyed women, from the hard, wet stares of certain men. The trick was to keep moving, to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze. Suck in his teeth and narrow his eyes. Knot the pale prettiness out of his skin. At fourteen, in the Animierlokale*—where his father first found work for him—prostitutes had tugged his hands from the piano keys, lifted him like an infant, passed him from lap to lap. The men urged them on, and there’d been those who’d press hard against him, yes, but that, somehow, had been less disturbing than the women: hags bending over him with painted faces and flickering tongues, choking on the sort of laughter which has little to do with pleasure.

  Which has nothing to do with joy.

  He arrived at the guesthouse in his darkest mood, and yet he did not pack up his rucksack. Perhaps he was simply too tired to continue on to Leipzig so late in the day. Or maybe he thought more of Schumann’s opinion that he’d ever admitted to anyone. He might have been thinking of the child at the door. He might have been thinking of nothing at all. Who can say why we make the choices that come to be seen as significant, ordained?

  The next day, he returned to the Schumanns’ house at exactly ten A.M. This time it was Robert who answered the door. It was Robert who shuffled, in slippers, to his own Graf piano, which he invited the young man to play. It was Robert who interrupted the C major Piano Sonata after listening for only a minute or two. His voice trembling with excitement. His eager eyes brightening with tears.

  “Excuse me,” he said, already rising, preparing to speak the words that would change everything for them both, “but I must call my wife.”

  Düsseldorf, November 5th, 1853

  Dear Sir!

  Your son Johannes has become very dear to us; his musical genius has provided us with happy hours. To ease his first steps into the world, I have spoken what I think of him in public…. and think that this will give a father’s heart a little pleasure.

  You may live with confidence towards the future of this beloved of the muses and always be assured of my deeply felt concern for his happiness.

  Sincerely

  yours, R. Schumann

  —Robert Schumann to Johann Jacob Brahms

  (father of Johannes Brahms) in Hamburg*

  I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arm around her and even—I don’t know, it seems to me so natural that she could not misunderstand.

  I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl—at least, I have quite forgotten about them. They but promise heaven while Clara shows it revealed to us.

  —Brahms, in a letter to Joseph Joachim, 1854*

  10.

  FOR THE FIRST WEEKS of 1854, Brahms and the Schumanns fell into happy routine. Mornings, they walked out together. Lunchtime was spent with the children. Afternoons were for the piano, for guests, for preparing Brahms’s scores for publication. For listening—often with averted eyes—to Robert’s latest efforts, which had been (so Robert claimed) dictated to him by friendly spirits. Brahms watched as Clara distracted anyone present with follow-up performances of Robert’s most ambitious works, pieces to which general audiences were still intractably resistant: his fine Carnaval, his Symphonic Études, his Kreisleriana. He saw how, in company, she intercepted any questions directed toward her husband, answering them exactly as Robert might have done, and he began to understand why Robert looked to her, leaned on her.

  He would not have believed a woman could be so capable, so strong.

  Did I not believe too, before I knew you, he would write to her in 1854, such h
uman beings and such a marriage could only exist in the imagination of the most beautiful minds?*

  She was not, by any means, a pretty woman, yet he found himself drawn to her side. He looked for little ways to be of help. He thought of clever, cheering things to say. He sat at the piano when she grew tired, played every request she made. Alone in the guesthouse, he stayed up too late: composing, drinking wine, considering her sweet, weary eyes. Sometimes he imagined her in Schumann’s bed—but no. He pushed the thought away. He was not, after all, attracted to her, an older woman, a mother, as plainspoken as she was plain-faced. And her affection for him was straightforward, clear. Blunt. Like her remarks on his manuscripts. Like her pieces of good advice.

  He bought a new coat to please her. He changed his fingerings.

  Still, he did not suspect her full powers.

  Then, one day, as they were finishing lunch, Robert began tapping the tabletop, and though Clara stood up and spoke his name, though baby Eugenie began to cry, though the cook appeared from the kitchen with anxious offers of soup, more soup, Möchte Herr Schumann ein bisschen mehr? he pounded away, beating hard time with the flat of his hand as Elise, Ludwig, and Ferdinand pounded, too; as Marie took Eugenie into her arms; as Julie rose coolly from her place and, with a beautiful woman’s look of disdain, slipped quietly from the room.

  “Do you hear? Do you hear the heavenly choir?” Robert shouted as Clara rounded the table, catching her skirt, spilling the water that remained in the pitcher as she stilled, at last, her husband’s hand with the wide, warm weight of her own. Silence as Robert lifted that hand to his mouth, kissed it, rubbed his sweating cheek against it, all the while looking into Clara’s face as if trying to recall her name. Brahms stared, helpless, along with the children. It was like watching a drowning man pulled from the water, the precarious moment when it seems both the man and his rescuer will tumble into the waves. Then, impossibly, through the sheer force of will, the balance shifts.