Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  Robert would take his mother and me out to dine on Saturday evenings, every Saturday evening. I remember the heavy dinners in the restaurant we frequented in the Jahnstrasse, the blood-thick brown gravies over slabs of brown meat, the heavy, dark beer, the weightlessness of the fine strudel held onto the plate by full-bodied apples. I would leave the restaurant almost anchored to the sidewalk by the food. Robert would suggest we “walk it off,” and we would: he two or three steps ahead, walking lightly and fast, my mother-in-law and I following a little behind, all three of us silent and shielded from each other by our resentments and the leaden sediment of the long dinner.

  Sometimes now, in wakeful moments in the long nights of my ninetieth year, I go back to read in a small black leather notebook I kept during our time in Frankfurt. There was no one for me to converse with so I occupied myself with putting down my thoughts, what I heard talked about, what I noticed:

  October 18

  Yesterday the rain slanted so oddly that, as it entered the gutters, it made no splash, merely met and joined the waters already there—is this called confluence?—as though flowing downward from another, higher stream.

  November 2

  Robert says that the piano’s wondrous limitations ought to impel the composer to write for full orchestra. In those effects, the strings of the piano have been plucked out and mounted on panels to be bowed. The hammers have been amplified into percussion. Only the winds are not derived from the eviscerated innards of the pianoforte.

  November 9

  Robert is a handsome man. His thick red hair is parted carefully in the center, making him look freshly barbared, mother-tended, neat. He has all the graces of a young, confident, and talented man. His quiet humor is always turned first upon himself. The red of his irises seems a ruddy reflection of a glowing mind, stirred not by persons but by determination to know more. Why, then, does he not seem loving?

  December 7

  VMcl—hers is a maternity which freezes from love and burns with hate, which consumes what it hungers for, not food but the nearby spirits of family and other persons, which dies slowly when deprived of the bed of its son.

  December 18

  Europe seems elderly to me, covered with hoar, learned, sly, selfish, an octogenarian who resents the sight of his American great-grandson who is youthful, vigorous, vital, and full of boundless hope.

  January 9

  Where is natural music, the real music of the world, to be found? In woods, among low banks of ferns, at the spindly tops of birches, in reeds at the edge of ponds, under the lift of ocean waves, and around the edges of its spume. Below one’s feet passing on ancient bricks laid for roads. Between the folds of organdy curtains blowing into sun-rooms in a light wind. Under the eaves of an old house during a storm which dispossesses the swallows.

  January 14

  A story Robert told last evening: in Paris in the conservatory in 1887 there was a pupil named Claude Debussy. His elderly professor, Antoine Marmontel, was stiff and severe, rigid and Prussian. He preferred the smooth, effortless playing of Robert to Claude’s abrupt and choppy performances. Claude was somewhat younger than his fellow pupil. He breathed raucously when he played difficult passages so that his nasal noises intertwined themselves with the harmonies. He panted loudly in order to emphasize strong beats. When he performed at the conservatory he resembled a snorting steam engine, so everyone, including Professor Marmontel, despaired of him, predicting a dim platform future for the clangorous young pianist.

  February 5

  Robert recalls the time when his teacher, Carl Heymann, returned from a successful tournée of Paris, London, Copenhagen. He seemed to his students no longer a teacher now but a performer, an elevated personage, an example of the polish and assurance such a journey and such acclaim give to a man. He seemed mysteriously now to be capable of anything. Robert said he played the classics as though they had been written by men with blood in their veins.

  March 9

  Robert’s red mustache has grown. It droops at its corners. Gravity is pulling it down, it fills the whole area of his face between his nose and lower lip, burying his upper lip, crossing his face with color. Now he brushes his hair upward in the imperial German fashion. But his pink and white skin is of the American type. Professor Joachim Raff calls him “the handsome American.”

  April 1

  The Maclarens are proud of their Scots ancestry. They talk of it as though they had never made the oceanic migration to New England. They still salt their American speech with dialect from Scotland; their true patriotism is to the older country.

  May 14

  The death of Raff, the death of Liszt a few years ago. Robert wonders why he stays in Europe any longer. He has discovered there are no appointments for an American in Europe. Würzburg has turned him down, the conservatory here considers him too young for Heymann’s post. That redoubtable old man has begun to lose his mind and is to be made to retire. Poor Heymann—often he plays the same piece again and again and again, sometimes for an entire day, and always the theme from Spontini’s Olympia Overture. A few days ago he sat seemingly fastened to the piano and the piano bench. He has to be lifted up and led away to his bed each evening.

  I reflect now on what I wrote in those long-distant German years, my interior dialogue, my rehearsal of what I heard Robert say, of what I thought. Sometimes I wrote in an effort to understand Virginia Maclaren’s quiet decline, or to record my desperate, lonely reflections, my talk to myself alone.

  Virginia Maclaren began to grow visibly thinner. The solid cork of her body lost its firmness, her neck, a peg that had held her block-like head erect on her rigid shoulders, became ragged, bent forward, her chin often almost resting upon her chest as she sat in a chair in the evening working at her embroidery hoop. A strange weakness of her spine was diagnosed by doctors in Berlin. I never believed she was physically ill. I thought she wanted her eyes to sink down from the distances they once sought, to the floor. The strength in her neck and in her spirit began to weaken from the day I came to live in Europe. Everything gave way in her: the almost youthful, well-corseted stocky body, the sure posture of her head, her will to stay alive to witness her son’s success.

  Once, coming home early on a rain-drenched afternoon—I had been caught in the sudden downpour and was wet through my cape to my dress so that it clung unbecomingly to my legs—I stopped in the entranceway to remove my sodden shoes and cape, trying to make no noise, as my mother-in-law often rested in the afternoon hours. For some reason I remember my hat that afternoon: the black feathers, dyed egret, I think, that covered it like birds in flight, smelled dank, like crows submerged in a cistern. There was no sound of life anywhere in the long string of rooms in which we lived. I went to my room to change, passing the closed door of the sewing room.

  The door to our room, too, was shut. Odd, I thought, because my New Englander’s concern for the proper airing of bedchambers during the day always compelled me to leave it open. Opening it, I saw my mother-in-law stretched out on the bed, her face buried in Robert’s pillow, her shoulders shaking although no sound could be heard. One of her hands seemed to be under her lower body, which moved convulsively, up and down, up and down over the hand. Her thin, violet-colored morning dress showed me the outline of her moving back, her legs, her shoulders, her knees dug into the softness of the bed. She looked as I imagined Christ might have looked from the back of the cross, still alive and moving, a woman in an agony of grief and sexual passion, crucified upon a coverlet.

  I tried to back away. She heard me, sat up, saw me, and brushed her wet eyes with her sleeve. “And now you spy upon me,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “Oh, no, I did not know you were here.”

  “I know, I know. There is no place left for me. You heartless Caroline Newby. You have taken it all.” She climbed down from the bed’s great height, down the steps to the floor, looking like a toy, a dwarf beside the treelike posts. Her eyes blank and unseeing, she went past me
into the hall. I wanted to follow her, to take her head in my hands and kiss her suffering face and tell her that I had taken nothing, that her son gave almost nothing to me and surely seemed to desire nothing from me. I wanted to tell her what I had learned, that he belonged only to the secret music in his head, or perhaps to his young lady pupils or to his watching friend, but not to me. In the enormous bed in the great bedchamber she had had as much of him as I, or more than I because she had had him at the beginning and, I still believe, had taught him the arts of maternal love and mature passion, had loved him as only a mother, hardly ever a wife or a mistress, can love, with the hands that caressed his infancy, the lips and tongue that tasted the sweat and new odors of his puberty, the avid eyes that knew his contours from their first appearance, watched the curl about the ear turn to sideburns and reach down to become beard.

  I wanted to tell her how deeply I envied the love between her and her son, how I had never learned to love my recently deceased mother in this way, how my mother had never loved me, my mother who, like Virginia Maclaren, had not come to our wedding, to whom, too, I had always been Caroline Newby.

  But the long hall lay between her room and mine. Her heavy door was shut, the words she had spoken still hung like smoke in the air. Her beloved son, who was also my husband: all that stood in the way. I stayed where I was in the bedroom and closed the door. We never spoke directly to each other again.

  How do I put down on this paper my feeling of inadequacy, so profound that it began early in my marriage to Robert and lasted until his death downstairs? I felt there was no way to charm a man so charming himself, or to interest a genius who heard only the higher treble notations of significance, while I stumbled about on the low notes of the bass clef. Or to console his mother, a woman bereft of her lover.

  The night Robert and I first made love (of this subject I do not enjoy writing, yet I have set out to be open, so I must put down what I have felt, or not felt, not alone what I have seen and overheard) in the berth of a stateroom aboard the City of Paris, the act, which I had virginally dreaded, was over quickly. Robert was listless and tired, he told me what he was about to do to me as though he were a physician calming the fears of a child with a description of surgical procedures. I felt nothing under his demonstration but sharp pain and hot blood on my inner thighs. He fell asleep heavily while I tried to dry the blood from myself and the sheets of the berth without waking him. A week later—we made love again. This time it was my suggestion that we do so. I was curious to know if I had healed. I wanted to feel the rush of pleasure I had been led to believe (from the occasional confessions of my Boston friends) was customary.

  I did not. This time, and in the growingly infrequent sexual encounters Robert and I had in the next two years, I felt nothing except mild satisfaction in serving what I considered to be his need. Never did I think of my lack of ardor as a failure in him. Always it was I who seemed deficient and inadequate, without beauty and charm, ignorant of the subtle guiles that awaken and sustain masculine desire. And then, after those two unsatisfying years, we rarely made love again.

  I have often speculated: Why did Robert look upon me so kindly in the Commons that day and decide to marry me, I who looked mouselike, murine, perhaps even birdlike? “You are such a little girl,” my mother had said hopelessly, in that age of proudly buxom women equally endowed in the bustle area. “You remind me of a starved heron,” my friend Elizabeth once said, meaning it to be a purely descriptive phrase, not cruel, I am sure. My hair was, as it is still, without definable color, as though it had very early begun to rehearse for its inevitable whiteness: a thin, weak-brown shade. True, my hands and feet were small, and that was fashionable and called, often, aristocratic, but my reach at the piano keys suffered from this. Robert once said that my hands were not practical.

  Why, then, did he choose to turn Miss Caroline Newby into Mrs. Robert Glencoe Maclaren? Because it was suitable, practical, for a young composer to have a wife? A man who hoped some day to have a chair of music at a university or a post as principal of a conservatory: should he not have a wife?

  Or, I wondered, could it be that Robert was seeking to unlock the maternal prison? With a wife beside him he would be free at last, and yet hardly, at it turned out, tied to me. Once Robert’s natal bonds were cut, he floated free, wary, careful not to form another emotional attachment as exhausting and lengthy. We two were bound to each other by law. But beyond that, we were bound by air, we lived in the common ozone of his indifference, his eternal politeness and charm, his passion to write music, perform it, listen to it, and, as it was to be later in Boston, to walk companion-ably in the parks in the evening with me on his arm and Paderewski, now growing heavy, walking beside him on a slack leash.

  Inadequate as I felt to his needs and to the larger realization that he needed far less of me than I of him, still, often, he wanted me present. I may have served his desire to establish himself as a family man, trustworthy and solid, in the world’s eyes. I suited his arm, I occupied a chair in his sitting room. I learned from his mother to keep an orderly, clean, and attractive house. I had, he often said, a way with servants. I knew food and was rapidly learning about wine. I took up very little room, being birdlike. The Steinway grand, newly arrived from Hamburg, was a larger, more decorative and significant addition to the display of his life than I.

  We had been living in Germany for more than two years when Robert decided it was time to return to America. His musical future was there, he now felt. He said his education was over, smiling as he spoke, saying he hardly felt educated, in his self-deprecating way—and still, think of what the favorite pupil of Liszt had said of him! It was time to leave the world of student trials for the proof, to move beyond his tutors and masters in order to carry out their instructions.

  We made our plans to depart, booked three passages on the Servia and arranged for the shipping of our household and the careful crating of the new piano and the great bed. In the first flush of optimism about his future, Robert thought of buying another piano to be sent to America but was restrained by the cost and by the reminder that William Steinway now had offices and showrooms for his instruments in New York.

  But at the very last, Virginia Maclaren would not come with us. She would not leave Germany. Robert tried to reason with her. I said, “You are so far from people, from your family.” She shrugged, saying they did not need her. “My husband is dead, my sons are grown.” I spoke of her friends. “I have friends no longer,” she said, “here or there.”

  “Robert,” I said, playing what I thought to be the strongest card. To that she said nothing, searching the floor with her eyes, looking up at Robert only briefly. He seemed to have grown taller as she shrank. “You would not wish to live so far from us, would you, Mama?” he asked. I remember clearly the strange tense he used: indefinite, conditional.

  Again she raised her eyes from the floor to look into the distance. “Yes, I do. As far as it is possible to be. I no longer wish to live near anyone. Not even you, my beloved Rob. I wish to be alone, to live alone, without reminders of the past.”

  “But the shipping. The packing. We’ve arranged to have all this furniture sent back.”

  Her eyes strained into the distance of the hallway that led to her sewing room. She gestured with a sweep of her arm that took in the whole series of rooms. “I want none of this, to live or die among. I will acquire new objects of my own. Don’t be concerned about that.”

  Even though I heard what I took to be theatrical coloration in her sentences, it was a dreadful time for me. But Robert seemed unaffected. He said nothing more, considering the matter peaceably, satisfactorily, settled. He helped his mother find a flat on Neuleystrasse which was already furnished. He supervised all the packing of her personal belongings.

  From all the furnishings she had brought with her from America, and the others she had gathered in Paris, in Stuttgart, in Frankfurt in the years she and Robert had lived together in those cities, she took wit
h her only a small needlepoint-covered pouf on which she had rested her feet in the sewing room. Its area was the size of a lady’s handkerchief, its pattern that of two mourning doves, their heads tucked into each other’s breasts, their feet a pattern of entwined twiglike toes.

  On the last day before our sailing, Robert took his mother’s arm and guided her toward the door, carrying her coat and parasol, for the short walk to her new home. I could not bear to watch. It was like being present at a human sacrifice or forced to witness a hanging. She stopped, reaching to peck at my chin, because Robert said as she walked silently to the door, “Aren’t you going to bid Caroline bon voyage?” Her kiss was as dry as dust, her lips too parched, I thought, to feel my burning skin. I was consumed with embarrassment and pity. I know she hardly saw me as she bade me farewell. I was not present when she said good-bye to her son.

  We came home in June of ’96. I can see us still, standing at the rail in the wind, watching the tugboats pull at the Servia, edging it with their great hawsers toward the pier. With one hand Robert held the high felt crown of his hat. With his other he worried at a sore on his lip, trying in his nervousness to work off the scab with his nail.