Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  When shall we two be together again, my beloved friend? For the old talk, the old making of music together, four hands at the same keyboard, four hands and two mouths and our whole beings engaged in the same loving act.

  These words, as I have here put them down, were etched into my memory and are still there. Often now I do not remember what day it is, or what dinner was served to me last night, but the words of Churchill’s letter I have never forgotten. Other parts of the letters were sprinkled with Scots phrases, for Weeks claimed his ancestry was like Robert’s and seemed to affect the Scots language as part of his own. He called Robert an auld farran, he blamed himself for being a bluntie, sometimes a blunker. He felt alone and melancholy—leefulane and ourie—he sent his lock o’ loo to his fellow pingler. Some I did not know and had to look up in the large Webster; I had never heard Robert, the proud descendant of Scots, use one of them. It must have been their private language of love, kept for those burning letters.

  I returned the letters to the place I had found them, feeling deep guilt for having allowed myself to be driven to such an act. Of course I know nothing of Robert’s answers to those cris du coeur; were they, too, sprinkled with loving dialect? But Robert wrote, I know. Once I saw a letter, addressed to Weeks, before Robert carried it himself to the postbox on the corner during one of his walks with Paderewski. In the late evenings I would see him writing, I seated across the room knitting or reading (never writing: to whom would I have written? surely not to my mother-in-law, who would not have responded, I felt sure), Robert holding his writing desk on his lap.

  As he wrote he would rub his lower lip thoughtfully. The sore I had first noticed tended to heal and then to appear again because, I always thought, in his nervousness and unease, he would rub his lip, returning the little eruption to life.

  What was I to do with this discovery, except to recognize what I thought at the time might be one explanation: there was a deep, unfathomable alliance among men of talent which involved them wholly, making it impossible for women to enter their consciousness except in a curiously negative way. Remove our services, our presence as helpmeets, and our absence is remarked upon. Our physical support restored, we sink back to the outer limits of their awareness.

  But admission to the alliance? I have never seen it granted, except as a chivalric courtesy uttered for the moment—Shall we join the ladies?—after ample brandy and smoking and the serious talk was exhausted. The next half hour would be spared us for polite small talk, women’s subjects.

  Perhaps, I tried to tell myself, the letters were an extension of all this, with the added exaggerations and emotional excess natural to creative persons who thought and wrote in the romantic tradition. In one of Weeks’s letters there were quotations from Heine and Goethe. My imagination supplied mottoes from Tennyson and Victor Hugo in the replies Robert must have sent to his friend. Once I came upon Robert standing with his foot on the grill in front of the fireplace, his face reddened by the flames, reading Tennyson’s poems, saying a line or two aloud, to himself.

  Our life went along evenly. The only change was Robert’s increasing success and recognition. Those were good years to be in Boston, to be a young American composer. We began to read, in the musical columns of the newspapers and in the journals, praise for Robert’s compositions, which were played with increasing frequency by pianists in New York, in Philadelphia, in San Francisco. The Symphony Orchestra in Boston, now under a new conductor named Emil Paur, played his work often. Poor Nikisch had gone back to Hungary after three years in Boston, a disappointed man who told us one evening at dinner that he had tried without success to come to terms with the men of the orchestra. But they had resented his demands for rehearsals over and above the ones they felt reasonable. Nikisch had invited Robert often as a soloist; Paur did, too, even increasing the number of appearances he offered him in a year.

  Robert traveled to other cities on the invitation of conductors, one of whom, Anton Seidl, I think it was, told the Evening Post that he considered Maclaren the first great American composer. Robert returned from that trip glowing at the phrase, almost a prophet in his own time and country, he quoted Seidl as having said, with his tight shy smile to Elizabeth Pettigrew, who had been visiting with me while he was gone those weeks. Later, Philip Hale was to say almost the same thing in the magazine Music.

  Elizabeth congratulated him. She had always admired him. Now, from the distance of her spinsterhood, I was able to tell, she regarded him with awe. She had a way of rising whenever he entered the sitting room, as though he were of a priestly caste. I think she found it very difficult to sit in his presence. But I don’t think he noticed, or noticed her at all, thinking of her, I felt sure, as an occupant of my spare time who did not, fortunately, impinge upon his.

  The unaccustomed glow in his face after that tour turned into a fever almost immediately upon his return. At first he denied its presence. Finally he was too sick to insist upon its absence and took to his bed, lying inert and hot, refusing to allow me to call a physician. “It’s the body’s way,” he said. For three days he slept, long and feverishly. I brought him meals and sat on the edge of the great bed while he tried and failed to eat. He said his throat was too sore.

  “Shall I read to you, Robert?”

  “I think not, Caroline. I don’t mind the silence. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to hear nothing but what comes into my head from the temperature, can you believe it?”

  I tried to be playful. “Would you care to hear some early Maclaren, like Petits Morceaux pour Piano?” In the dressing room off the bedroom was an upright piano on which I used to play a little now and then, quietly, so as not to disturb Robert.

  “Thank you, but I think not.”

  “Some Liszt, perhaps?”

  “No, no, thank you. It will sound odd, but I think I have begun to avoid listening to music, except my own when I must, so that I won’t be in danger of using it when I begin to write.”

  I remember his weakness during that time but, more, his new, acquiescent agreeableness. We seemed close to each other, because illness brings the nurse and the patient into an anxious union and because, as it does many men, his illness frightened him. He seemed willing to be nursed and tended to. But not doctored. The rash that covered his body worried me—could it be scarlet fever? But after a while it receded. I was converted to his view that home care and bed rest were adequate doctors. In two weeks the fever and the rash disappeared. Even the little red shiny herpes on his lower lip healed finally and never returned.

  Our closeness in that September: I cannot forget it. Robert would allow no visitors, wanted to hear no music. We talked together, as always, very little. But I felt pleasure in being able to spend my days in his company, crocheting, I recall, the large afghan for the couch in his music room, stopping now and then to fetch tea or soup for him, or watching his face as he slept. I slept on the little couch in the guest room so that I would not disturb his nights. When the afghan was half finished he recovered enough to walk about the room, and into the dressing room, where he would play small pieces, sometimes only fragments, on the piano, first humming gently, and then following the sound of his voice with music on the piano from the store in his head he had apparently collected during the fever.

  At the end of the third week he dressed slowly and went downstairs. I could hear the fresh snap of long sheets of staff paper as he turned them impatiently, the runs of trial notes on the piano. For a few days he allowed Paderewski to lie in the room with him during the morning as he worked, an admittance that delighted the loving old dog, who worshiped him in somewhat the same way Elizabeth did. But the slap of his tail and his occasional strolls about the room between naps began to irritate Robert. He was expelled to the garden and never again, in the time of his life that remained, was he granted that privilege.

  I took heart from that interlude. It made me hopeful that we could find paths to each other that might wipe out my loneliness. The year that followed was near the en
d of our time in Boston. One day in October—a beautiful fall full of cool sunlight and the little gusts of air that made life on the old Hill and along the paths of the Public Gardens so pleasant—Churchill Weeks knocked on our door at teatime.

  Settled in the sitting room, munching on cookies and drinking cup after cup of tea, he told us of his plans. He had come home to begin his American career as Robert had done before him. You will remember that in those days European training was thought to be essential for an American musician. He said he was on his way to Milwaukee, where his parents lived. We spent the time of dinner and the early evening hearing tales of life at the Hoch Conservatory, of the students Robert and he had taught, of their teachers, some now dead, others about to retire.

  I was content to sit on the edge of those hours of talk that night, providing the coffee and schnapps they both liked, listening to the talk that moved so easily between the two old friends. I was content because I had realized at their first moment of meeting that time and distance had transformed Weeks’s feelings: the strength and passion of his professed love for Robert, in the letters, had weakened or died out entirely. They sat at a distance from each other, having seemed to choose chairs to effect this, and their voices were loud and forced, as though they were giving instructions to a class or lecturing to a club.

  Weeks was attentive to me, ascertaining my comfort in the small chair I had chosen, twice offering to surrender his upholstered armchair to me. I began to like him, to forget about the anguish his person, even at a distance of three thousand miles, had caused me. I asked him if he would care to stay the night and he accepted gracefully, with no hesitation. “It is very good of you to think of it.”

  “Not at all. You’re an old friend. We’re both pleased to see you again.”

  But Robert said nothing. He seemed nervous, rubbing on his lower lip in his old way. After his illness of September his energies were low in the evenings. He excused himself to go early to bed. Weeks seemed disappointed but showed no surprise at his departure. “He looks very tired. It must have been a severe illness.”

  “It was. And as usual he refused to have anything done for him, anything professional, that is. He waited it out, as he likes to say. But he’s much recovered now.”

  “I see, yes. And you’re looking very well.”

  “Thank you. And you.” It was true. His pale skin had been colored by his ocean voyage, he looked sturdy, healthy, and, somehow, American. The Berlin cut of his coat could not disguise his country look.

  “I am about to be married,” he said. “I wanted to tell you both, but Robert went up before I was able to.”

  I took a deep breath and relaxed in my hard chair, almost unable to say anything to this news. “You can tell him in the morning. I’m so pleased for you. To someone from the conservatory?”

  “No. The daughter of my mother’s close friend. The three of them visited me in Germany last year. We’ve been in correspondence ever since. The wedding is to be at Christmas in Milwaukee. Do you think you and Robert could come?”

  “Surely,” I said, very quickly, and then checked myself. “That is, yes, of course we would both love to, but I must consult Robert about his schedule.”

  “I’ll send you an invitation in plenty of time to arrange for it.”

  I showed Weeks his room. On my way to ours I felt light-headed, almost giddy, uplifted by his news. Now I believed it all to be a sick fancy. The letters did not exist or they were merely literary exercises, romantic jokes exchanged by the two men. Robert was asleep when I came to bed. I lay awake for some time thinking of how time, by means of its simple accumulation, had wiped out the apprehensiveness that had lasted so long. Weeks left the next morning before Robert was awake.

  Robert worked very hard in the next month, to catch up, he said. Because money was still a problem for us, he took on a third pupil, a boy of eleven named Paul Brewster whose self-taught prowess was almost miraculous, said Robert. Now three pupils occupied his afternoons, always the best hours of his day. He kept his mornings, in which he was usually very slow to start, for composition, and in those hours he worked with such concentration that he abandoned his walk with the collie, taking him out only in the late afternoon. Paderewski had grown very old since our return from Europe; his still stately gait was now very slow and deliberate. This satisfied Robert, who was weary from working for nine hours before the walk. I would sometimes come upon the two old companions ambling along the paths of the park, Robert dazed and self-absorbed, Paderewski looking back at him every now and then.

  We made our plans to take a Pullman room on the Twentieth Century train to Chicago and then on to Milwaukee for Churchill Weeks’s wedding. I had persuaded Robert he ought to go. But in the end we did not do so. In early December Robert had a letter from his mother. It was a stiff, formal, strange letter:

  I wish to tell you, Rob, that I feel very close to the end of my days. I am now almost always bedridden with what my physician has called a disease of the heart. My feet and ankles swell badly at times so that I am unable to walk at all. I would not concern you with this but my physician has issued a warning to me, advising me to communicate with my relations in America so that I will not be alone in a last illness which, he says, may well be imminent. I am not writing as he suggested, for I wish no company now, having had none in the last years. But it seems wise to convey to you the warning he has given me so that you will have had notice.

  Your mother, Virginia Maclaren

  Much disturbed, Robert booked passage for himself on the first ship sailing to Wilhelmshaven, the Kaiser Wilhelmder Grosse, I think it was. We were not in a position to afford two passages, he said. I agreed: Virginia Maclaren needed Robert unaccompanied by his wife. Two days before he was to sail, a cable came for Robert from the coroner of the city of Frankfurt informing him of his mother’s death. Sometime later a long letter arrived from an attorney-at-law describing the contents of Virginia Maclaren’s will. Her husband having predeceased her, she left her small estate from him to her sons Burns and Logan. To her youngest son, Robert, and wife, Caroline, were to be given her personal effects and her clothing. To the Hoch Conservatory, with her gratitude for the fine training it had given to her son, the composer Robert Glencoe Maclaren, she gave all her books and the manuscripts in her possession of his early works, including the one most dear to her, Opus 3, Barcarolle pour pianoforte, dedicated A ma chère maman.

  Boston was growing too much for Robert. He talked often of finding a quiet place in the country in which to live and work. I still loved the city, having renewed acquaintance with some of my school friends, visiting the Museum of Fine Arts with them and with Elizabeth, lunching often in the downtown shops. I went each week to the Boston Public Library, where there were afternoon lectures on the most recent books. Sunday mornings Elizabeth and I went to the Unitarian church together.

  But Robert was restless because of the demands upon his time. He became increasingly short with his pupils, especially with young Paul Brewster, who was advancing so fast that it seemed to me to be in direct disproportion to Robert’s patience with him. Robert always referred to him as Master Brewster, suggesting by the designation that he was far too young for opinions, of an age only to listen and then do as he was told.

  I must tell you more about him. Paul had been coming to Robert for some months when we decided to find a place in the country. Working as hard as he did, Robert had lost weight. In the first three months of that year he had gone on tour, performing, lecturing, conducting his work and the music of his admired European masters, Liszt, Mozart, Beethoven. He came home exhausted from these trips. On lesson days he would lie on his couch through most of the morning, write almost nothing, storing up his meager supply of energy against the arrival of the precocious Master Brewster.

  Paul Brewster at eleven still dressed as a young boy, in dark knickers, a silk shirt, a black silk tie. Twice each week, accompanied by his mother, he came to our door. When I opened the door to their rin
g, his mother would dip into a small curtsy, as I had not seen it done since the peasant women in Germany, greet me in a language I did not understand, and then disappear.

  Robert told me she was Hungarian. Paul was her only child. In her eyes she and her son were sentenced to exile, living in the United States until the time came for Mr. Brewster’s firm to send him back to Budapest, where they had met and where Paul was born. To her, Boston was a tomb, a cell, a cage, she had told Robert, who understood enough Hungarian for those words. Having arranged for Paul’s lessons, and unburdening herself of these few details of autobiography, she made no other explanations. Her sole function became the delivery of the small genius, her son, to our house, and his retrieval an hour later.

  In that year, because of Paul’s avidity and skill, Robert sometimes instructed him far longer than his allotted hour. The boy seemed to consume the music he was given. His small, thin, tense, accomplished fingers were capable of performing extraordinary feats for one so young, his memory was perfect, his understanding of what he was doing almost that of a mature musician. I worried, not about him, for I hardly encountered him at all and knew all this only through Robert’s weary reports of him at our late suppers, but about Robert, whose fatigue grew with the boy’s virtuosity. No longer did he stand to give his lessons but had moved a wicker chair from another room into the music room, a chair that reminded me, when first I saw it there, of Mrs. Seton’s.

  Many afternoons, through the closed door of the music room, I heard Robert’s sharp, angry voice, reproaching Paul for a mistake, I surmised, since I was not able to hear the words. His voice would maintain the same tone after the repetition of the long passage, which to my ear was played brilliantly. Robert would find some small matter to carp about, the boy would play the music again with verve, with greater accuracy, although, not having discerned the initial error, I cannot be sure of this. Again Robert’s voice would cut across the last notes. Often I went downstairs and out into the garden so that I did not have to listen to Paul replaying the same passage, the same rejected perfection followed by the same unreasonable anger.