Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  When I am able to practice regularly, then I really feel totally in my element; it is as though an entirely different mood comes over me, lighter, freer, and everything seems happier and more gratifying. Music is, after all, a goodly portion of my life, and when it is missing, it seems to me all my physical and spiritual elasticity is gone.

  —Clara, in her diary, 1853*

  We knew that in our mother woman and artist were indissolubly one, so that we could not say this belongs to one part of her and that to another. We would sometimes wonder whether our mother would miss us or music most if one of the two were taken away from her, and we could never decide.

  —Eugenie Schumann†

  21.

  SHE’S ARRANGED FOR THE coach to arrive before dawn, while the children are still sleeping. Better this way, Clara tells herself. Awake, they’ll only cry and cling. Beg her to stay.

  Like Johannes.

  But what good can there be in sitting home when she might be performing, earning money for them all? Here she’s no use to anyone, dissolving into tears at a word from a friend, at a letter from the doctor, at the sight of the Rhine. Better for her to get back on the road. Better for the children to be left in the care of stronger minds, less tremulous hands. And now that they’re settled in the new Düsseldorf apartment—Johannes established in his own rooms below, keeping a daily eye on them—she can set off without fear. The housekeeper will take charge of the four youngest children until Ludwig and Ferdinand can be sent to school. Felix has been weaned, the wet nurse dismissed. The cook has decided to stay, thank goodness, and the new maid, though young, shows promise. Julie, always sickly, will be sent to her grandmother in Berlin. Marie will return to her Leipzig boarding school, along with Elise—though Elise is turning out badly: obstinate, unpleasant, indifferent. Hard not to fear for her future, for what kind of life can be in store for such a girl? Not un-pretty but certainly no beauty.

  No particular talent.

  Then again, what kind of life can be in store for any of them, now that Robert’s madness has been announced in newspapers as far-flung as America? Perhaps, the younger ones will show signs of his genius, but the oldest have disappointed her, she has to admit that this is the case, despite Marie’s sharp, diligent ear; her discipline; her steadiness of character. How fortunate that Johannes doesn’t mind the children’s many shortcomings, listening to their chatter without the least sign of impatience or exhaustion. He’s practically a child himself, entertaining them all with gymnastics and riddles, terrorizing them with the same monster games Robert once played with herself and her brothers.

  Chasing them around the Piano-Fabrik.

  Popping out—buh!—from behind closed doors.

  How often she thinks now of that long-ago life with her father in which nothing was required of her beyond what she most wanted to do. Fresh sheets of music set before her like maps. Long walks for the sake of her constitution. New white dresses at the start of each concert tour. The surprise of new towns, unfamiliar performance halls, each piano like a human face, never to be forgotten.

  Now, as she waits in the early morning darkness, she feels herself growing younger. Stronger. At the sound of approaching horses, she opens the door, hurries down the steps, almost expecting to see her father—but, no. Her maid, waiting with the lantern, is waving the coachman inside to fetch the trunk. And here is Johannes, sleep-rumpled, bareheaded, lifting the heavy satchel of music. He presses something round and hard into her hands—an apple wrapped in his own handkerchief—and though she doesn’t want to accept it, doesn’t want to be burdened with anything more to carry, she finds a place for it in the already bulging pockets of her travel cloak, actually Robert’s greatcoat, oversize but warm.

  Johannes, her friend. Her dear, true friend. Perhaps he is falling in love with her, but what can be done about that? She is, after all, still married. And if he chooses to show his love for her—for Robert, too—by staying with the children, she is not in a position to refuse such a gift.

  “Kann ich denn nicht mit dir kommen?” he says, but she remembers too well how it used to be with Robert, who also begged to accompany her, only to sulk at the attention she received, nursing slights (real and imagined) until he worked himself into fever. No doubt Johannes will behave the same way. No doubt, at some point, she’ll be forced to choose between him and the work she most loves. Already he’s trying to convince her that performing is not important. He believes she should stay at home, live quietly. Compose.

  If only everything could always be exactly as it is between them!

  If only they could remain as they are—friends, best friends—forever.

  “Mein Johannes,” she says as he embraces her through the padded flesh of Robert’s greatcoat. He is telling her something about the children, does she have any message for them? No, there is not any message. The children have everything they’ll need. It is best that she leaves this way, in darkness. It is best that, by the time they wake to their bread and hot milk, she’ll be gone.

  “Und hast du nicht wenigstens ein liebes Wort für mich?” he asks, but she has no words for him, either. Her heart is with her husband. Her heart is like a stone.

  It is only after the carriage is far beyond Leipzig, after the maid has fallen asleep, as Clara herself drowses—lulled by the rattle and bump of the road—that she feels for him, and for the children, too, that tenderness of heart her father once feared, fought against fiercely, believing it would lead exactly to this: an unhappy marriage. Too many children. Small, dark rooms in which they’ve already awakened, knowing their mother is gone. If she opens her eyes, she’ll see them now, running bare-legged after the horses. If she listens, she’ll hear them sliding through the windows, slipping through chinks in the rattling doors. She’ll smell the crisp scent of the apple as they pass it between them hungrily, silently, hoping she won’t awaken, for if she does, won’t she only send them away, the way she usually does?

  Können wir denn nicht mit dir kommen?

  Can’t we come with you, too?

  She is reading their thoughts as if they are speaking. Why not? Isn’t this the privilege of a mother’s love? And it is love she feels, for the moment, for them all, now that it’s safe to do so. Now that they are only the children of dreams. She can love them completely—Johannes, too—with whatever is left of her heart.

  22.

  I AWAKENED TO FIND we were on a dirt road. Hart said, “Do you always sleep like that?”

  “Like what?” I was looking at a group of toy planes, life-size, scattered across a wide, mowed field. Each rested atilt, one wing on the ground, the other extending into the air.

  “Like a dead person. It is spooky.”

  “Sorry.”

  He was still shaking his head. “You should warn a man about such things.”

  We parked against a low wooden fence. A few hundred yards away, across a yellowing strip of close-cropped lawn, stood an octagon-shaped house with a wraparound porch overlooking a grassy airstrip. As we approached, I saw two Asian boys, teenagers in shorts and soft-brimmed hats, standing around a soda machine, gulping cans of Coke. A small, brightly colored plane, hardly any bigger than a sports car, peeled out of the sky and rattled to a stop directly in front of us all. The pilot—a middle-aged woman—hopped down, mopping at her face with a long, loose sleeve. As soon as she saw Hart, she greeted him by name. So did the teenagers.

  Hart responded in Japanese.

  Next to the house there was an in-ground swimming pool, landscaped with tall bursts of flowers, and as I followed Hart up onto the porch, butterflies rose in a single, fluttering cloud, distracting me so that I almost didn’t see what everyone else had turned to watch: a second plane moving smoothly down the airstrip, towing one of the toy-like planes on an impossibly slender rope.

  “Not a plane.” Hart corrected my thoughts. “A glider.”

  Already, the glider was lifting into the air, floating behind the towplane. Then the towplane was airborne, to
o.

  “That is Midori,” the tallest of the boys told Hart.

  “Have the rest of you soloed?”

  “Midori after eight hours only! I solo after fourteen.”

  “No more today,” said the second boy, who had his Coke pressed to the top of his head.

  “Tighten your harness next time,” Hart said, grinning at him, “and you won’t bump your head on the canopy.”

  “Thank you. Very helpful,” the boy said sarcastically, but Hart was already turning away, climbing the steps to the house. Which, it turned out, wasn’t air-conditioned, just cooled with noisy fans. There was a couch, a long conference table with chairs, a circular staircase leading up to a closed door. A man in his fifties bent over a computer screen, clicking on colorful maps. Another man rooted through the full-size fridge. There was a coffeepot, a sink filled with cups. There was a signed picture of Neil Armstrong in front of this very house. The pilot came in behind us, seated herself at a desk half hidden beside a display case crowded with hats, T-shirts, pilots’ logs, coffee mugs.

  “How is the lift today, Miriam?” Hart asked.

  “Booming, if you can find it. Hey, Chuck, see what the cat dragged in.”

  A deeply tanned man in a cowboy hat had appeared in the open back door.

  “Wie geht’s?” he said, and he shook Hart’s hand. “I see you brought a friend.”

  “Who isn’t flying,” I said quickly.

  Chuck grinned. “You want a lift out to the hangar?” he said, and Miriam said, “It’s too hot to be walking around,” but Hart waved both of them off, no-no, so we walked back outside alone, crossing the cropped grass in the beating-down sun toward an outdated mobile home. The towplane returned in a smooth, purposeful swoop, chattering past the house until it reached the far end of the airstrip. A man emerged from the cockpit, dropped to the ground. Hart watched, squinting against the light. “Miriam’s brother,” he said. “Both he and Miriam could fly before they could drive.”

  “What about Chuck?”

  “He started gliding when he married Miriam. The three of them have been running this place for, oh, fifteen years or so.”

  We’d reached the mobile home. A single air conditioner perched whimsically in one of the windows, buzzing, dripping. “They all live here?” I asked.

  “No, that’s just the pilot’s dorm,” Hart explained. “Ten dollars a night. It is actually quite homey. Three bedrooms, a pull-out couch, satellite TV. There is even a piano.”

  “You’ve stayed here?”

  “Last weekend, in fact. I got to practice my Japanese.”

  “These kids are living here?”

  “It is cheaper to get licensed in the States. Kids always pick it up quick. That Midori, though, she is something.” Hart whistled beneath his breath.

  “Why do these kids need licenses?”

  “You must have a license to fly.”

  “I mean, why do they need to fly?”

  Hart shot me a puzzled look. “Why do you need to write books?”

  On the other side of the mobile home stood a large metal hangar and, in front of it, a scattering of tethered gliders, each protected by a snug canvas cover. Beyond them, set on a concrete slab and sheltered by a wooden roof, were slim, rectangular trailers that, Hart explained, held disassembled gliders. His own, an ASW 27, was already assembled in the hangar; I was relieved to see it seated only one. Even a glance at the narrow cockpit made me feel short of breath.

  “Want to help?” Hart asked.

  “If I can do it from the ground.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I have flown over two hundred hours.”

  “Life’s too short,” I said, pleased to deliver Ellen’s smug line, “to get killed falling out of the sky.”

  Hart was not impressed. “People die all the time for many reasons. You would rather slip and fall in the bathtub?”

  “I would rather live a long and healthy life.”

  “You do not have that choice.”

  “Yes and no.”

  He shook his head. “A significant answer. Pick up the wing, do you mind?”

  He showed me how to hold it, and together we rolled the ship out of the hangar and pushed it across the sun-scorched grass. Fire-ant nests were scattered everywhere; I was glad I’d worn functional shoes. The end of the airstrip was a good quarter mile away, capped by a stand of pines, the ground rutted and scarred by wild pigs.

  “I can take you up later in the Blanik,” Hart said. “It seats two. They use it for training.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you right back down.”

  I sighed. “Which one is the Blanik?”

  He pointed with his chin. The glider we’d seen earlier was descending now, skimming just over the surface of the airstrip to land in a hiss on the grass. A Japanese girl climbed out of the front, looking all of twelve years old. “Midori!” Hart called and she waved to us both, beaming, so beautiful I could not look away. Together we watched as she circled the Blanik, still hopped up from her flight. Already, she was visualizing her next takeoff. Already, she was resenting the lost time on the ground.

  “I admire her passion,” Hart said. “I used to be such a person.”

  “About flying?”

  “About everything.” Chuck, still in his cowboy hat, had sped from the house on a golf cart, and now he and Midori rolled the Blanik to the side, making room for us to pivot the ASW into position. Hart pressed his car keys into my hand, his own hand surprising me, cool despite the heat. “Here. In case you want something to eat. Bottled water. You are welcome to whatever you find.”

  “I’ll probably grab my computer and write.”

  “Your book is going well?”

  The question took me by surprise. Perhaps this is why I answered it honestly. “Not really. No.”

  “What is the problem?” His face was close to mine.

  “The relationship was so contradictory. The facts just don’t add up. Not that I’m trying to write a nonfiction book, but when a novel is working, all of it becomes true somehow, whether it is or not. A really great novel gets at the truth the way nonfiction can’t.”

  He smelled, very lightly, of shampoo and sweat. Unabsorbed sunscreen clung to the stubble along his jaw. “Do not be offended,” he said. “But why are you so opposed to the idea that their relationship was sexual?”

  “It’s not that I’m opposed,” I replied, startled by his frankness. My heat-flushed face stared back at me, bugeyed, from the lenses of his sunglasses. “But we have so few documented examples of straightforward friendship between great men and great women.”

  “You love the idea of such a friendship, I see,” Hart said. “But perhaps your belief in such an idea says more about you than the people in your book.” He touched my cheekbone; I flinched, then felt silly when he showed me the eyelash stuck to his finger. “Of course, that could also be part of the story. I would be interested to read such a book.”

  Before I could reply, Chuck pulled up in the golf cart, Miriam riding shotgun. “Ready to go?” she said.

  I stood back to watch as she taxied the towplane into position. A long rope trailed behind it, which Chuck attached somewhere beneath the nose of the ASW. Hart was already in the cockpit, going through his preflight. At his signal, Chuck raised one of the wings, so both paralleled the ground. The rudder waggled from side to side, this time a signal to Miriam, and now both ships were in motion, gradually picking up speed. Chuck ran with the wing for five paces or so until the ASW was balanced, rising. The towplane, too, lifted into the air, the exacting distance between them an act of pure choreography. I watched until I couldn’t see them anymore, shielding my eyes against the heat and the light.

  Such an idea says more about you.

  I didn’t want to know what he meant. And yet I already knew.

  Chuck and Midori picked me up in the golf cart as I headed back toward the office. “Sweet takeoff,” Midori said, smi
ling. “You are pilot, too?”

  “Not me.”

  “You fly with Hart?”

  “Later. If I don’t chicken out.”

  “I’d be afraid to fly with him, too.” Chuck waved his hat at a persistent buzzing fly. “These big guys, they’re all the same. Risk takers. Buzz junkies.”

  “Hart’s a big guy?” I said.

  Chuck gave me a look of surprise. “Eye man. Surgeon. Figured out some kind of prosthetic eye. Damn thing works with the brain somehow, actually senses light.”

  “He developed idea in Japan,” Midori said with evident pride.

  “Company went public in the nineties,” Chuck said. He gave a little whistle. “Beaucoup bucks.”

  “I guess I don’t know much about him,” I said.

  “Tell you what,” Chuck said, settling his hat back onto his head. “You got a nail sticking out of one eye? That’s the guy you want to see out of the other.”

  Date: Saturday, May 27 12:16 AM

  To: LMJPROF@que.edu

  Dear L—,

  You know the one about the old man whose grandson is getting married? Just before the wedding, he calls the boy in for a chat. “My child,” he says, “I want you to know that all marriages go through phases. At first, you and you wife will make love all the time. But then, as the children come along, you will find that you are having sex less and less. And by the time they are grown and gone, you’ll be just like your grandmother and me. All you’ll ever have is oral sex. I just wanted you to know how things will go.”

  The boy looks at him, incredulous. “You and Grandma have oral sex?”

  “Every single night,” the old man says, “and it’s a perfectly natural thing. She goes into her bedroom and calls, ‘Fuck you!’ And I go into my bedroom and call back to her, ‘No, fuck you!’”

  You are wondering when I got cynical? I am wondering when you got so fucking serious.