“Not an uncommon upbringing for children of that class, in that place and time,” Hart said. “Once again, you are finding significance”—he squeezed my foot—“where there is none. I am thinking this longing for significance is a serious flaw of character.”
“Which would, in itself, become significant over time. Think of all the decisions such a longing would influence. Think of all the ways it might alter, significantly, the direction of my life.”
“Ah, Jeanette.”
“Ah, yourself. You don’t think it’s significant that Clara concealed Julie’s death so that she could go ahead with a scheduled concert? That she only visited Ludwig once during the many years he lived in the mental institution? That Marie, not Clara, attended Felix as he lay dying?”
“Distinctive, perhaps. But significant?” His hand was on my ankle now. The back of my knee. “In a thousand years, what can such a word mean?”
“I don’t plan to live a thousand years. Do you know how Clara informed her two oldest children of Robert’s death? In a letter. Do you know how often she saw Ferdinand during the year before his death? Not once. Marie went to visit him in the hospital. Marie, for that matter, arranged his funeral. Meanwhile, Clara’s writing in her diary, Work is always the best diversion from pain.”*
“Sex is also effective,” Hart said, shifting his weight. Manuscript pages fell to the floor; somehow he’d pinned my arms. “Is your daughter a good sleeper?”
“No. And then I read something…can’t think where…”
“Might we lock that?” He was eyeing the open door.
“…about Clara traveling to perform in some major German city and encountering on the street, completely by accident, one of her daughters who went to boarding school there. A daughter she hadn’t seen in months. The two of them spent a most delightful afternoon before it was time for Clara to return to her hotel.”
Hart sighed, rested his head on my chest. “You are thinking it is cold, even heartless, that Clara wouldn’t have made plans to see this girl.”
“Yes and no.”
“I am tired of the yes and no.”
“I just mean that I understand how she felt. You think I don’t miss the uninterrupted intellectual life I had before Heidi was born? But I wouldn’t put her in a boarding school, even a good one, for the sake of that work.”
“No, you’d just put her to bed at your parents’ house. You’d hire a babysitter. And don’t tell me you are not happy to have her father take her for two weeks so that you are free to travel—”
He was right, and it cut me to the quick.
“At least I wouldn’t miss her birthdays! I wouldn’t skip her graduations! I certainly wouldn’t leave her to die alone in a hospital or mental institution because it interfered with my writing. There’s a balance to all this, and I’m not saying I’ve got it right—I know I don’t have it right—and I also know, by the way, men do this sort of thing all the time—”
“Men like me, is what you are thinking.”
“Which is why you’ve been successful at the things you’ve pursued. Maybe I’m just jealous she was able to do it, too. I suppose I believe, in the back of my mind, that if I were a true artist, a real artist, I could.”
His weight deepened against me, the way a child’s weight deepens with sleep. “You are a strong person, Jeanette. You would have visited your husband in the madhouse, I have no doubt of this. You would have sat at the bedside of each and every one of your dying children. But not all people are strong in this way, particularly when there’s a child concerned.”
“Does it take so much strength to let your lonely little daughter know you’ll be in town for a day?” I was speaking against the side of his neck; he could not see my face. But he knew—he must have known—what I was thinking.
Or visit your daughter more than once in six years?
His breathing matched my own.
“The first weeks, the first months, after you are leaving a child?” he said. “It is a difficult thing. Not knowing how much she is changing. Having no connection to her daily life. Nothing to talk about.”
He was too heavy now, but I didn’t want to shift his weight, didn’t want to risk distracting him, interrupting whatever it was that, at last, he was going to say.
“Eventually you start feeling better. You hope it goes the same way for the child. You don’t want to stir it all up again, for either of you, so you stay away. You send the checks. You make sure she wants for nothing. Do you understand what I’m saying? I fought for my daughter in court, and you know what they gave me in the end? One weekend each month. One supervised weekend. And me living overseas.”
I wriggled a bit, I couldn’t help it, and he said, “I am crushing you, I think.”
“No,” I said, but he pushed himself away from me, the excuse he was looking for, and then we were sitting in our separate corners, as far from each other as, just moments earlier, we’d been close. He touched his wineglass, tapped the base of the lamp. He picked up the plastic hair band that had fallen out of my hair and fiddled with it, twisted it, until it broke.
“Sorry,” he said. Then he broke it again. I got up and locked the door. When I turned, he was behind me, he was kissing me too hard, as if he were testing me to see what I could bear. At that moment I was terrified. All I wanted was to return to the relationship we’d had before. Because one can write anything about a dead man.
One has no obligation to a stone.
33.
I WAS LATE GETTING up in the morning, rushing to wake Heidi and help her dress, fix breakfast, get her lunch packed for school. She sat at the counter, picking at her toast, and I noticed her face looked flushed. “Do you feel okay?” I asked, placing my hand on her cool forehead.
She shook her head. “I had a bad dream.”
I was relieved; she could still go to school. “What about?” I said, reaching for half of her toast. “Come on, I’ll eat this piece. You eat the other.”
“A man took you away.”
“Honey,” I said. She was staring at her plate. I pulled the other counter stool close and sat down. “It was just a dream, okay?” I told her. “Everyone has dreams. What did he look like?”
“Little.” She held up her thumb and index finger. “Like this.”
“Tell you what,” I said, trying to make her smile. “If I see him, I’ll step on him. I’ll smack him with a rolled-up newspaper.”
As if released from the spell of her dream, Heidi picked up her toast and bit it. “It won’t make any difference, Mom. There’s nothing you can do.”
Suddenly I felt disoriented, as if I were the one in a dream. For the voice I heard, though Heidi’s, was the voice of someone older. The girl she was becoming. The woman she would become.
Everyone has a devil. My Heidi would be no different. When he came for her, she, too, would recognize him. She’d open that screen door.
Date: Wednesday, July 5 10:32 PM
To: [email protected]
Dear L—
Sorry for the silence. I wasn’t offended, just busy. And thinking, too, about what you said. About history repeating itself. About everything. So you really think I have a beautiful mind? I’ve always liked yours, too.
I’d love to meet you for a drink—I’m connecting through JFK—but I have to tell you I find myself really involved with this man I told you about. Everything you wrote to me makes sense, and yet I don’t want to back away from what I feel. The way I would have done in the past, as you of all people should know. Perhaps this is why you’re the one person I really want to talk to now. If that’s unfair, or unkind, you will tell me. You will always give me an honest answer, even when I don’t want to hear.
xx,
Jeanie
Date: Wednesday, July 5 10:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Hi Jeanie,
I am always happy to see you. That’s my honest answer, though it’s incomplete. Shoot me an email with your flight information. Can�
�t wait to catch up—
L—
Part VI
Good Things I Wish You
Romance is a peculiar thing. I am renewing old considerations. It changes people so much, often to their disadvantage. When they…believe that this is the main thing, and why the world actually exists, then I just can’t take it…
—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1854*
Passions don’t naturally belong to human beings. They are always exceptions or extremes…. The beautiful and true human being is calm during happiness and calm in times of pain and hurt. Passions must pass soon or one must banish them.
—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1857†
34.
THE HOUSE ON INGELSTRASSE was set close to the street, with an arched entryway—sized for a carriage—leading into a central courtyard. There Hart sat waiting for me on a small green bench. As soon as he saw me, he jumped to his feet, pulled me into his arms. The look on his face was open, even joyful. The courtyard functioned as the school’s playground, and children raced around us in packs, darting from the sandbox to the jungle gym, from the jungle gym to the swings. There we stood in the midst of it all, staring at each other like two people who had fallen in love.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” Hart said. “You weren’t answering your phone. Did you find the apartment okay?”
“I overslept. Are we late?”
“Not quite.”
He led me back toward the archway, where we followed the curved stone stairway to the second-floor rooms occupied by Clara and Robert during the early years of their marriage. Now these rooms held scores and letters, portraits, antique instruments, pieces of furniture pushed out of the way to make room for a dozen rows of folding chairs facing a modern grand piano. A woman was already speaking to the audience, thanking sponsors, mentioning upcoming events, and then Hart lifted his chin as a tall, dark-eyed girl, violin in hand, emerged from behind a curtain.
She wore combat boots beneath a short leather skirt. White sleeveless blouse. A clutter of rings. Short blond hair streaked with chartreuse. Interrupting the crescendo of applause, she planted her feet and attacked the Ciaccona from Bach’s Partita No. 2, silencing us, seducing us, working the bright acoustics of the hardwood floors, the plaster walls, to create a sound almost electronic in its overtones. Hart leaned forward in his seat, hands clasped, as if in prayer. Here, then, lived all his lost passion, reverberating around us. Reborn, reinterpreted. Timeless as gold.
At the end of the piece, Friederike bowed perfunctorily, tuned through the applause, and then launched into Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro without seeming to care that her newly arrived accompanist wasn’t quite settled, that the audience was still recovering from the Bach, clearing throats of emotion, shuffling and shifting stiff limbs. No matter. By the third selection, we did not expect her to wait for us, to look at us, to acknowledge us in any way beyond that quick bob of a bow. Only after she’d completed her last number did she glance at the feet of those in the first row, run a ringed hand through her colorful hair, and offer—more to herself than the rest of us—a small, pleased smile. There’d be no encores once she left the makeshift stage, despite hopeful applause that sustained itself for at least three minutes in that small, echoing room.
Already, she’d forgotten us, her violin safely tucked away in its case.
She was back behind the curtain, waiting for the last of the footsteps to retreat down the curved marble stairs. Waiting for the scrape and slap of the folding chairs: picked up, collapsed, put away. Waiting for the accompanist—a local boy, about her age—to enter his number into her cell before leaving with his father who, too, must shake her hand.
Anything we can do for you, they said.
Of course, she said.
But she wasn’t really paying attention. She was watching the gap in the curtain. She was freshening her lipstick from a slender tube, running her hands over the creases in her skirt.
Listening for a single set of footsteps.
Thousands of miles away, Heidi had just finished eating Cal’s special pancakes for lunch, and now she was sitting on his lap, teasing him, tickling him, begging him for ice cream. He’d take her for three scoops—not Mommy’s prescriptive one—and after that, a swim in the lake, without making her sit out the old wives’ cautionary hour. That night, he’d keep her up too late, watching movies with her older cousins, roughhousing with her, riling her up, encouraging her wildest exuberance as only a father can.
No, no, she didn’t want to go with Daddy. And then when she was with Daddy, she wanted only to stay.
“Are you ready to meet my daughter?” Hart said, taking my hand as if I were the one in need of consolation.
“We’re the lucky ones,” L—had said as we waited in line at the Starbucks outside the security gate. He looked older than when I’d last seen him, heavier along the jawline, gray hair poking through his shirt collar. Then again, he was older. Five years. I was older, too. “No matter what happens in our personal lives, we can always turn to our work.”
“But what if that work starts attaching itself to someone outside the work? Or something,” I added quickly. “Psychologically, I mean. Let’s say I’m inspired by mountains, but I’m forced to move to the Great Plains. Without those mountains—”
“Or without that particular person—?”
“Without that external inspiration, the passion for the work just drains away.”
“But isn’t inspiration just another word for infatuation?” L—shrugged. “It comes and then it goes. It can’t be sustained. You see this all the time with student writing, don’t you?”
We placed our coffee orders, joined the other addicts in the close, noisy space beside the pickup counter. The security line was growing. It was only half an hour until my connecting flight would start to board, and I felt that I had so much to say, too much to say that I could say to no one else. “But what is the difference, really,” I blurted, “between infatuation and love? I’ll be forty-three in another two months. I think I still don’t know.”
“You’re asking me?” L—shook his head. “The guy with the second marriage that lasted, oh, what time is it again?”
He pantomimed looking at a watch.
“Stop it,” I said, laughing. “Besides, shouldn’t that make you the expert?”
“Point taken,” he said, and then he looked at me with such unabashed affection I came to him like a child. “Jeanie, don’t you know?” he said. “Infatuation is the inciting incident. Maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it doesn’t, but you can’t have a story without it. Love is the story itself, the thing we carry with us after the mountains are gone.”
I thought about how easy it would be to stay here, in the arms of this good, kind man, who would take care of me, always. But another twelve hours, and I’d arrive in Leipzig. Another sixteen hours, and Hart would rise from a small green bench in a courtyard, kiss me at the entrance to a room where, after her marriage, Clara wrote with such joy: We love each other more every day and live only for each other.*
View from the Train, 2006
35.
IT’S BEEN OVER A year since their last vacation. It’s been two weeks since Robert’s death. This time they are traveling to Gersau, unofficially chaperoned by Johannes’s sister, Elise, accompanied by Ludwig and Ferdinand, assisted by Clara’s maid. They make several stops along the way, including Bonn, where they visit Robert’s grave. Clara collects flowers and leaves as Johannes waits for her, openly weeping. When he bends to press his forehead—lightly, sweetly—against her own, it seems to her that she, too, must die: out of sorrow, out of joy, she cannot tell which. For two years, they’ve been living with the same shared grief, like a lock on a door that cannot be picked. Now there is relief in Robert’s death. Both of them feel it. It can’t be helped.
Back on the train, continuing south, Clara watches Johannes as he stares out the window, half listening—as she herself half listens—to Elise, who warbles on and on
, like a bird. There are times when his beauty catches in her throat like one of his best melodies. There are times when the very thought of his goodness—to her, to the children, to poor Robert—moves her to tears. But then moods strike, like the one which grips him now, and he pulls away from her, avoids her gaze, holds himself aloof. Ever since they crossed the border into Switzerland, he’s acted as if she’s done something to displease him, though she cannot think what that would be. Or perhaps one of the children said something? For his ill-tempered silence has spilled over onto Ludwig and Ferdinand, who have chosen to sit in second class with the maid, instead of clamoring, as they usually do, to cuddle on the lap of Herr Brahms.
Yet he loves the children, she knows this. Loves them as he loves her. Wants to be a part of them.
A part of her.
Claimed.
So why, then, this terrible coldness? Why does he sit like a stone? All it would take is a word of explanation, but when she ventures to touch his sleeve, he flinches, as if he has never looked upon her with such hunger it took her breath. His mouth open, urgent, against her closed lips. His teeth at her neck, her throat. Month after month, she has turned him away, as she must.
As both of them knew that she must.
Now there’s no need to wait any longer. Now the locked door between them is gone. She thinks ahead to Gersau: bathing in the lake, wandering the foothills, playing on the piano at the inn, where they’ll live as a family, happy and complete. She is no child. He has proved himself a man. It is only a matter of time until they marry. The next time he comes to her, she won’t disappoint him. The next time he kisses her, she won’t turn him away.
Good Things I Wish You: A Novel Page 11