Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  After all this time I no longer can remember how prepared I was for what happened. But I did wonder: Would the boy complain to his mother so that she would take him away from Robert’s lessons? Would Robert completely lose control of himself at the boy’s undeniable talent and send his pupil away?

  It was not to be either of these suppositions. In the spring of that year, and just after Robert had returned home exhausted from his tour, Paul arrived alone for his lesson. He had been caught in a sudden rainstorm. His eyes red, his nose running, he stood, coughing, on the landing. His coat dripped water, his thin face was apologetic, his shoes full of water. The boy seemed afraid to go to Robert in this state, and yet there was little I could do for him except to insist he remove his shoes. I gave him a pair of Robert’s old slippers, many sizes too large. Coughing and shuffling in the slippers, he knocked on the music room door and went in.

  I took the sodden shoes down to the kitchen to try to dry them. So I missed the explosion. Paul had been ill with a cold, he had apparently told Robert: “I did not practice yesterday. I hope you will understand that …”

  The ceiling above me shook. Something heavy had been—thrown? dropped?—to the floor. I heard a crash, and then a desperate, thin, child’s voice cry: “Stop!” I went up the stairs as quickly as I could, hiking up my skirts to facilitate the climb. The door was ajar. In a fury such as I had never thought him capable of, Robert, in his shirt sleeves, stood in the center of the room, holding the fire poker above his head. Paul was crouched on the window seat, his face drawn and white, his mouth open in a mad, terrorized grimace. All his small, even, sharp teeth showed. “Robert, what is it? What are you doing? Stop that. Put it down.” Commands and entreaties poured out of me in one long line of sound.

  Robert looked at me, dazed. Then he sat down, almost as if he had collapsed, onto the piano bench, dropping the poker at his feet. He put his head into his hands. I started over to him, but I was too slow. The boy had jumped toward Robert from his crouched position on the window seat, like a small spring released into the air. Before I could stop him he had crossed the room, stooped down, opened his mouth, and dug his teeth into the flesh of Robert’s upper arm.

  Robert sprang to his feet. “My God! Let go!”

  Paul Brewster appeared for a few seconds to hang by his teeth from Robert’s raised arm, the cloth of Robert’s shirt bunched into his mouth. Robert went on screaming, the high, thin sound flowing from his mouth like sickness. His other hand slapped at the boy, trying to make him let go. I held Paul’s mad head in my hands and tried to pry open his teeth, which were like small pointed stones. His mouth was lined with foam. I felt it wet my hands.

  Finally, it seemed an incredibly long time, but finally he let go when Robert’s blood filled his mouth. He coughed, gagged, turned his head away, and vomited into the cave of the piano. Robert sat down heavily on the sofa, holding his bloody wound. I knelt down beside him. Robert had stopped screaming. The only sound in the room was Paul, spitting and retching. “Don’t move, Robert. I’ll send the maid for the doctor. You must have a doctor.”

  Behind me I could hear Paul staggering toward the door. He mumbled something but I could not make out what it was. I had no desire to stop him, I wanted him out of the house. At that moment I never wanted to see the beastly little boy again.

  That day and night hang like bats in my memory, black and unmoving. Robert stretched out, inert on his sofa. The doctor I sent for came at once, inspected the wound, looked troubled. Robert’s whole upper arm was now a furious blue-black color, with red teeth marks outlining the edges of the gash.

  “May I have a look at the dog that did this?”

  “It was not a dog.”

  “Not a dog?”

  “No,” I said. “A boy.”

  “Good Lord!” The doctor examined the wound again. He gave Robert several white papers of powder to take with warm water at intervals through the next days, washed the area again with alcohol, and shook his head. “There may be infection. One never can know. We will watch it. Rest,” he said sternly to Robert. “I’ll be back in the early morning.”

  Rest! Robert was so shocked that I could not persuade him even to leave his sofa for his bed that evening. His eyes closed, his wounded arm resting on a pillow at his side, he lay without stirring, refusing dinner, refusing to move at all to another room. He had been assaulted in every corner of his being, I believe, his whole system was affected, the insult was to his spirit as well as to his arm. For he told me the next day that all of his body ached, his head, his back, his knees and ankles. He was very thirsty, he said, his tongue felt burned, his throat cut and raw, but swallowing cool water hurt. The second night he moved painfully to our bed. He would not allow me to lower the lamps or to close the shutters and drapes. He seemed to be afraid he might be attacked again in the dark. Did he think the mad boy still crouched in a corner of the room? And the wonder of it! He wanted me to sit beside him while he slept.

  His sleep was stony. He never moved, he breathed so lightly that once I bent over to see if he was still alive. By morning I was exhausted. Robert still slept his torpid, motionless sleep. I sent the maid to Elizabeth to ask her to come to relieve me, after the doctor had been there and assured me there was no fever and no infection: “It’s healing very well,” he said. “I’ll look in at him again this evening.” Because I did not wish to disturb Robert, I went to sleep in my sitting room, feeling somewhat of an exile, on my mother’s bentwood sofa, covered with the afghan I had just completed.

  The days that followed: Elizabeth and I and the doctor, together and separately watching over Robert, entreating him to return to his work if only for an hour or so a day, to see a pupil for a short lesson, to come to the dining room for dinner, to take a walk with the dog. And he, refusing, lying collapsed, white, as if wrapped in bonds of unforgivingness, hardly speaking, his sickness not of the wound (which healed quickly) but of the mind, the whole organism. He lost weight, his nightshirt hung upon him, his energy, almost his will to live, seemed gone.

  The doctor came every morning to dress the wound. At the end of a week he whispered to me that he was no longer needed, that I could do what he was doing for a few more days and then the bandage would no longer be necessary. “No reason for me to come again, unless there is a change, and then you can send for me.”

  I hoped the doctor’s permanent departure would persuade Robert of his recovery, but I remember that his invalidism went on long after that. He refused to leave his bed. I had his music room completely rearranged, the ceiling painted, the paper redone, and the piano taken apart on the premises, without moving it, and cleaned by two men from the Steinway plant. I kept him informed of each stage in the transformation and the cleaning, but it did no good. At last he confessed to me, it was not the room, but the boy, the boy. Whenever he thought of returning to the room he saw Master Brewster crouched there, waiting to spring at him. He could not bring himself to go back into that room. I realized then that we had to find other lodgings.

  Elizabeth and I visited agents in the area and spoke to them about a farmhouse to rent for the summer. I was given lists of houses to visit in New Hampshire, in northern Massachusetts, and in the upper part of New York State. We hired a touring car for the day and visited the places closest to us, without success. Some of the houses offered were in bad disrepair, others too expensive, and still others inaccessible for a couple without a motorcar. Only at the end of our search did we venture to New York.

  The day we found Highland Farm, as it was later to be called, is still vivid to me. Elizabeth and I set out in the early morning to take an omnibus to the train depot, Robert being cared for by our maid in the few days I planned to be away. A block from our lodgings we almost collided with Mrs. Brewster. She looked discomposed. In her poor English, which I barely understood, she explained that she had been on her way to call on Robert and me, to tell us how mortified she was at what had happened between her son and Maestro Maclaren. From her rando
m, rambling words, some of which were in Hungarian, I gathered that Paul had told her only that there had been a bad argument, so serious that he could not return for lessons. “Terrible. Terrible, I am so sorry for it. He too, he will not now touch the piano. He gives it up now, he tells me, never again to study. Can you believe?”

  Her eyes filled with tears; she clutched at my arm for understanding. I nodded, and at last brought myself to ask, “How is Paul? Has he recovered from his cold?”

  “His cold? Yes, from that, but from his other sickness, no. That will never go.”

  “His other sickness?”

  “The fits, the grand mal, the seizures. Since he was a small baby, and always now, the doctor says.”

  Shaken, I bade her good-bye and said I hoped she would find another teacher for her talented son. I mentioned that his shoes were still in my kitchen, but she did not seem to hear. On the train to Saratoga Springs I thought of the two musicians, the thin, epileptic boy and the weary, sick maestro who fought with each other, locked together in a mortal madness born of the passion and the weariness of making music.

  Part Two

  THE FARM

  THERE WAS no transition. From the first day, Robert loved the house I had leased. He settled into his quarters at one end of the rambling farmhouse and began at once to work. Some of his best music was to be written here. The house stood at the edge of a large farm property, seventy acres of lovely woods and meadows. The original fields, which had once been cultivated, now were almost returned to high weedy places where insects and bees lived and where new birches and maples were beginning a wild reclamation. Our privacy was absolute, the quiet, after Boston, so loud that at first we both had to grow used to it.

  Everywhere there were fine walks into our own woods. Yet we were not isolated, for the village of Saratoga Springs lay at the foot of our property. Often we would walk into it in the evenings, stopping at the fountain to sip the ugly-tasting, sulfurous, healthy waters. At the center of the village were two large, quite splendid hotels and many small shops which filled to overflowing with visitors in the summer. In August another wave of visitors occupied the great houses on the outskirts. Then the streets were filled with motorcars and horse-drawn carriages as these late arrivals, the fashionable families from Newport and New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, Charleston and Boston, visited and dined with each other, went to the races, gambled, took the baths, and drank the curative waters.

  We had moved to the Farm in May. Our first summer was a delight. We enjoyed the bustle and confusion in the streets after the silence of our Farm, the cosmopolitan air the little village took on instantly with the warm weather. Mingled with well-dressed and sporting persons were strange, black-suited, long-haired, ringleted Jews from the East Side of New York who lived for the summer in the boarding houses near the baths. They came, we were told, to drink the sulfur waters they regarded as a valuable diuretic for washing away the winter’s accumulated interior impurities.

  In August the racetrack became the center of the village. Everyone, except the Jews, whom I never saw near the track, traveled up Union Avenue for the afternoon sessions. From our veranda (we never went to the races) we could hear the roar of people in the stands as they cheered the takeoff of the horses. And afterward, the paths near us were crowded with persons on foot, on bicycles, on horses, in their new open motorcars, coming away from the race grounds, returning to their hotels, their rented houses, their elaborate homes. It was a colorful, exciting, and somehow open and free place to be after the formal confines of Frankfurt and then Boston.

  When the summer was over, we asked the agent to renew our lease for the next full year. In October, Robert wondered if we could afford to buy the property, if indeed it were available for purchase. I made inquiries and found to my delight that it was. “But all this property, Robert. How will we care for it?” I had been remembering the neglected state of our tiny backyard square of grass and shrubs on Mount Vernon Street.

  “More to the point,” he said, “how will we pay for it all?” His concern for money was theoretical, general. It was I who kept the bank records, the family accounts, saved what I could, recorded the payments for his compositions from orchestras and choral groups, paid the month’s bills. He was right to be concerned, however, because now, alas, there were no pupils whose fees might have helped the year’s income.

  I visited the Saratoga Springs Savings Bank and found its president eager to lend the well-known composer and his wife money to acquire property near his village. Everything we had saved went toward the purchase of Highland Farm. I resolved, as Robert and I signed the ownership deed, that I would find a way to buy the property outright for Robert’s protection and security, to pay off the huge mortgage somehow.

  After one long winter at the farm, I came to realize that I had romanticized the village from its summer pleasures. Its vitality and interest departed with the summer visitors. Most of the shops closed, and the park band, the bathers, racing enthusiasts, and solemn, pale Jews departed for the cities, taking the life of the village with them. The paths and roads were deserted. Highland Farm was engulfed in oppressive, almost ominous quiet. The silence of the red woods and the yellowing fields was extended into our own almost soundless house.

  I found myself alone, more alone, it seemed, than I had ever before been in my life, in a strange place, a large, quiet house, with Robert estranged from everyone by his music. He had resumed his usual schedule. Rarely did I see him before evening, except to take him his late-morning coffee and roll, and his tea in the afternoon. Then, as it had been in Boston, he sat with me at dinner still in the grip of the music he had written during the day, a silent audience to it, his head on one side in its customary listening position. He ate everything served to him, automatically, without seeing or tasting it, I think. Often I would chat desperately to fill the void. He listened politely but rarely responded. He was not rude, I would not wish anyone to think that, he was merely not present.

  Guests came from Boston, from New York, even from the Continent, to call upon Robert. I always invited them to stay to dinner, often to stay the night, for the trains to New York and Boston were hard to reach in the evenings. We still did not own a motorcar: Robert felt that we would spend too much time motoring guests if we acquired one. At company dinner, Robert would rally briefly, speak of the world of music as it filtered through to us in the papers, and of his own work. But always, near the end of the meal, his small store of goodwill exhausted, he would sink back into apathy.

  It was too late for me to regret the move to the Farm. We had the house and the large acreage. Robert seemed content. I resolved to try to build upon the long silences by going back to my own music. Fortunately, I thought, the house was large, I could practice at one end without disturbing him.

  I can now clearly recall the pure, heady pleasure of that return to serious study. An incentive presented itself, by accident. I discovered one day, when I stopped at the town library to borrow my week’s reading, that the librarian had, briefly, sung with an oratorio society in New York. “I am Miss Milly Martino,” she said, for that was how she always referred to herself. She learned I was Robert Maclaren’s wife, and then she said, “I know so well who your husband is.” She told me about her meager musical training, she apologized for it: “I studied voice with a lady in Glens Falls,” she said, “a lady who sang at one time in the chorus of La Scala Opera. I left there to go to New York for a while, and then came to work in Saratoga Springs. Since then I have worked alone, at the piano—I do not play very well—with whatever music I can find in the library collection. There is not much.”

  I see Miss Milly Martino as I write, although it is more than half a century since those winter evenings we played and sang together. She was a strangely shaped, buxom little person, made of two great balls of flesh, one upon the other, almost like the snowmen children used to love to erect in the front yards. Her warm, soft-fleshed, well-corseted form I was to see reincarnated, I imag
ined, many years later in the person of the great soprano Rosa Ponselle, whom I met only once. Miss Milly Martino was much like Ponselle in her rounded contours, her heavy arms and legs, her full red lips and black bright eyes, her shiny black hair. Often I think how close her voice might have come to Ponselle’s: ripe, controlled, supple, lovely. Her back, too, was so fleshy it made her look almost humped, a sadly prescient shape, for in later years she had to retire from her post as town librarian because of a disease she had which was later named for its discoverer, Parkinson.

  But not yet. I worked hard at the piano after I met Miss Milly. My fingers slowly began to regain their old dexterity, and my love of the piano as a sensual, satisfying instrument, soft and pliable to the touch, returned. Suddenly there seemed not enough time to accomplish all I wanted to do. I walked down into the village to tell Miss Milly Martino I thought we might try an evening together. “It must be at your house,” she said. “I unfortunately have no piano now.”

  “Of course. At our house. Tonight?”

  “Delightful. I shall be there at eight.”

  “A singer from town is coming here tonight. I will try to accompany her,” I told Robert at dinner. “Fine. Fine,” he said, absently. I don’t think he heard what I’d said, for his custom was always to respond to the announcement of a plan with words like that: “Good, good. Fine, fine.”

  We worked well together, Miss Milly Martino and I. Her soprano was expressive and superbly controlled. Pressed, it could achieve extraordinary power and heights. It seemed to grow, expand, and rise without losing the delicate grain and texture of her middle range. She said she loved above all else to sing Mozart, so that first evening we began with Così fan tutte, Dorabella’s recitative and aria. My confidence in being able to accompany her increased when I realized her grasp of the subtleties of the music, the firmness with which she attacked the little runs and slips of “Ah, scostati! paventa il tristo effetto.” Since moments during my final year with Mrs. Seton I do not remember feeling such delight at being able to achieve with my fingers what my mind told me should be done, at falling back, acknowledging by my diminuendo, by the quiet tones, her right to soar out and over them, as though her voice had triumphed over my accompaniment as well as its own origins and limitations.