She shook her head and whispered, “No.” Mozart took up her hand and kissed her palm.
She gasped. The room was bright with sun. He leaned at the edge of the chaise, brushing her side. He reached across her lap and took her other hand and kissed that, too. Then he drew down her face and kissed her lips. Her unbound hair fell around them.
“See,” he said quietly, studying her with wide, anxious eyes. “That’s three already. Now you must do it, mademoiselle. I’ve given you a head start.”
But she refused. She could not. She could not even speak. After a moment he got to his feet, and she thought he would leave, and prepared herself to be alone again. But instead he went to the piano and played without pause for half an hour longer, until Stephen came home. He played as though she had given him all he desired. As well as she had ever heard—so well it was impossible to think of anything else. His fingers bestowed the kisses on the keys. Her hands lay in her lap, where he’d restored them, as though they had perished there.
Ether
Mesmer set up treatment for Anna in the music room. She was a private patient. The emperor had paid for everything. Mesmer brought with him a small replica of his baquet, a magnetized oaken tub with which he treated groups. The small one was about the size of a side table, circular, covered with a warmly finished lid and inlaid with Masonic symbols. The lid was rimmed with a number of hook-shaped cast-iron rods, like the legs of a spider. Mesmer explained to Anna that these rods were held in place, inside the tub, by glass bottles that stood upon a bed of crushed glass, sulfur, and iron filings. The tub was filled to the brim with magnetized water. It took two men to carry it. To one side of the baquet stood the doctor’s glass harmonica, a musical instrument made from circular glass tubes. These tubes, when turned upon a spit with a crank by his assistant and touched with dampened fingers or cloth, produced high, hollow, spinning tones. To this music Franz Mesmer conducted his cures.
He had requested that Anna wear a loose cotton smock and nothing beneath it, to ensure the efficient transference of magnetic energy. He arranged a series of Turkish screens in such a way that she might feel secure in her near-nakedness while he was treating her. Lidia and Anna’s mother sat outside the circle of screens.
Mesmer retired to put on his robes, and Anna stood barefoot in her airy smock waiting for the doctor to reappear. She was almost sure he was a fraud, and would not have agreed to see him but for the fact that Mozart knew Mesmer. Mesmer had put on Mozart’s first opera, Bastien and Bastienne, in his private theater, and he was friends with Mozart’s father, and a Freemason. Mozart had written to Anna to assure her that the doctor could work miracles. It was a week since he had played for her. Every night when she went to sleep she held the memory in her heart. But everything else, it seemed, remained the same.
Mesmer emerged wearing yellow slippers and a long purple robe. His wide-set eyes had deep frown lines between them, as though he had spent much energy imagining the pains and travails of others. It was a face wholly compassionate and open; a face to inspire faith, confession, and trust. He reminded Lidia and Mrs. Storace that they must be silent and respectful, lest they risk disturbing the transference of energy. If Anna needed assistance she was to ring a bell.
“Begin the music,” he said, and his assistant spun the glass tubes on the crank, drawing forth the clear, ethereal sound of the glass harmonica, a sound like a choir of miniature castrati singing in an overlapping cascade.
“Now,” Mesmer said gravely. He rested his hands on Anna’s shoulders. They felt like tender weights—so heavy and so filled with understanding, and she gasped in shock and nearly collapsed. He looked into her eyes. “I see,” he said. “My poor girl, what a state you are in.” And to her surprise—to her relief—he folded her in his arms. His thumbs rubbed into her back. Her face was in his shoulder, and he smelled of incense. “There,” he murmured, embracing her ever more tightly. “Do you feel that? That is our magnetic energy, mine and yours. That is the force that runs through everything, every animal and human. Yours is weak and thick, it does not flow, but mine is a torrent, I give it to you freely. Don’t you feel it?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Anna. One of her knees buckled. She would have stumbled to the floor had the doctor not held her fast.
“There,” he said softly, hoisting her up. “That’s one of your blockages gone. We must dislodge them all. You must help me channel the astral tides and release your ether in a clear beautiful stream.” He drew back and took her hands, rubbing the tops of them rhythmically with his thumbs. “You’ve gotten yourself all dammed shut. The pools of your life force are stagnant. How can one sing when inside one is a festering pool? One cannot! One grows weak and mute with putrid inner sores!”
The keening waterfall of the glass harmonica spread around them. “Where is your anguish?” Mesmer whispered.
Anna closed her eyes. She had not expected to be moved by this. At worst she had thought the treatment would leave her the same, and at best, that it would give her an hour’s diversion. But this doctor made her legs shake and her head feel light and empty, as though her mind were spreading thin as beaten gold. With an unsteady hand she touched her throat.
Mesmer nodded. His eyes half lidded in concentration, he felt along the sides of Anna’s neck with his open palms, and again the sensation was of a great and tender weight, hot and tingling, as the magnetic energy roused and churned between them.
“I feel the heat,” said Mesmer. “I feel the deadness—the void—yes, there, there.” His fingers massaged firmly and gently along her neck, turning her head with the movement as though sculpting clay. Then his hands fell down her collarbones to her arms and he guided her to a kneeling position in front of the baquet, crouching behind her with his robe flung around them. He said, in a fervent voice, “When I tell you, you will grasp a rod in either hand. You will feel a shock. But you must not let go. You must keep holding the rods. The shock will travel through your body and make you convulse. It is the only way you will be healed. Do not be afraid.”
She felt dizzy with his voice and the smell of incense. “I don’t want to,” she said in a faint voice.
His hands went under her arms, under her breasts. “You must,” he said.
As if in a dream she saw her hands reach toward the black iron, saw them grip the rods and convulse. In the next instant she was rocked by a surge of magnetic force that came through her neck and blossomed at the top of her head and shot down her spine to her belly, and even to the soles of her feet, and she cried out and shook from the feeling and sank back against Mesmer, who grasped her to him.
“Is she all right?” called Lidia anxiously.
“Perfectly, madam!” shouted Mesmer in a voice hoarse with effort and emotion. He held Anna close, warming her with his body, speaking softly into her ears, clearing away all the blockages and deadnesses and voids, massaging her, while she sobbed and shuddered. They put her to bed and she slept like death.
The Red Sash
Softly, as she did every morning, Lidia went into Anna’s room to draw the curtains and see if she needed anything. Lidia no longer stayed with Anna at night. Her mistress was not anymore that fluttering, needful sweetheart who had burned for Francesco Benucci’s secret kisses. Her cheek had grown hollow, her gaze turned thoughtful and inward. She had a waxen complexion, she who had been always flushing pinker and pinker. The doctors, Lidia feared, had bled her of every drop. She was grown so thin, she who had been so strong and plump. Lidia admonished her that there would be no more riding or dancing if she was not nourished, but Anna only sighed in her languid way and said it did not matter. She refused to see her mother.
Lidia had watched Anna go in to Mozart that afternoon; she had heard the music and the murmuring through the walls and seen Anna creep up to her room again afterward. That had all gone according to plan—a scheme of Stephen’s to draw his sister out. But Mozart, who had seemed shaken from the experience, said he did not know if it had done any good
. He had not come again. And yesterday had been the famous cure of Dr. Mesmer, but no one knew whether or not that had done any good, either. Everyone was always urging Lidia to use her influence, to get Anna to move and eat and laugh, but Lidia was at her wit’s end. Mrs. Storace, for her part, since her daughter would not see her and she had no wish, she said, to force herself upon her, had taken to spending long hours in study and prayer, like a nun or a penitent. She was not as harsh, Lidia noted, as she had been. But Lidia thought a little harshness might have been helpful now. If they could only douse Anna in ice water—if they could only force her to eat. That was what she needed, Lidia thought. Anything but the closed bedroom and the black ruminations with which she lay there, day after day.
As Lidia eased open the door on this morning she was surprised to find the room already light. The curtains had been drawn. The bed was empty and the coverlet feebly dragged across it, one end still trailing to the ground.
In the window seat sat Anna, quite upright, dressed in a white morning gown—the laces at the back undone—with a red satin sash about her waist. Her hands were clasped in her lap; her pretty feet were bare, resting on a velvet stool. The gaze she turned to Lidia was transparent and calm. “I’ve grown so thin,” she remarked quietly. “My dress doesn’t fit properly. I wonder if you could bring me some hot porridge with honey and dried currants and butter and cream? And a little pot of coffee with chocolate? Would you be so good, dear Lidia?”
And though she looked at Lidia with a clear, level expression, behind it lay a flicker of pride, as if she had pulled off a great trick. Lidia stood for half a moment with her mouth agape and then turned and bolted downstairs.
Anna had been up since daybreak. She had woken and felt a sudden desire to open the curtains before Lidia got there. So she had done it, one two three four five six, and had only got a bit out of breath. To anyone else this action would be as nothing. She watched the sky brighten and the people on the street begin their work and play. Then it had seemed necessary that she dress herself, although she was not used to dressing herself. She pried open the wardrobe and selected a likely looking gown, one of the loose modern ones that had light skirts and nothing rigid or heavy in the bodice. With painstaking care she changed into a clean chemise and pulled the dress over it. Since she could not do the laces she tied up the waist with a sash. Stockings were beyond her—she was afraid of ripping them. She kept laughing at her own weakness, how fumbling and timid she’d become. Even this act of dressing seemed so bold it made her afraid someone would find and scold her before she was ready. She combed out her hair and pinned it in a sort of bun and washed her face in the basin and was seated in the window, panting with exertion, by the time Lidia came to wake her. And the look on Lidia’s face was worth all the effort in the world.
Yesterday she had seen Mesmer. Everyone would think he had cured her. When she had woken this morning and decided to open the curtains she had been dreaming of music—a delicious, calming dream, the details of which had instantly escaped her, though for a moment, a remembered melody had brushed her thoughts and lingered there like a trail of smoke. She’d had a feeling of wonderment, unstained, without remorse, to think that her life could contain this music. And in that moment of remembering her dream she’d realized, as if seeing herself from afar, that what she was doing was not what she wanted.
It seemed she had never been so hungry. When Lidia came in with the porridge and the coffee she almost could have wept but she did not want Lidia to think she was sad. She set the bowl in her lap and the warmth spread through her legs and the porridgy steam wafted up into her face. The bowl was a white ceramic. Her hand quavered as she took the first spoonful, the porridge and the cream and the black currants and the thick golden strands of honey that had been made from sun and bees and flowers. And when she put it to her mouth it seemed there was nothing so beautiful and good as this, so sweet, so filling, and she felt her mind which had been clouded revive and thrill, and her throat glisten, and her stomach, in one motion, unknot and welcome. And the coffee—the coffee was the nectar of the gods, bitter and warm, and rang awake all the hunger for life that had been sleeping in her core.
“Could you help me with my dress?” she asked Lidia. “Is my brother home? Would he like to go driving with me in the country? I’d like some air. Perhaps we might be able to walk a bit if he would lend me his arm.”
And Lidia, who could hardly speak, lest she break the spell, said that all this would be done; and she went outside to report the news to everyone who was waiting in the hall.
The sky was a hazy blue, as though draped with gauze, and the tall magnificent trees backed with sunlight, their leaves bright and some of them in flower. She had not been outside in a long time. She kept turning her head to some flickering of light, or new smell, some breath of mossy air, some animal’s movement or call. Stephen beside her was at his very best, in his thoughtful, painterly aspect, pretending that all this was normal.
She’d suggested he bring his sketch paper and his watercolors. When they found a likely spot on the bank, they spread themselves out and he sketched the Danube, and then, against her protestations, Anna, leaning on one thin arm in her red sash, the spring light about her, her gaze on the great river, with its boats large and small, its people, its diving birds and nibbling fish, her straw hat thrown onto the ground beside her. She had not gotten Lidia to fix her hair. The bun listed to the side and threatened to unfurl; one or two curls fell down her neck.
“Stephen,” she asked him. She was still not used to speaking. Her voice was hesitant but it was still hers. “If I don’t sing again, will you hate me?”
He put down his brush to consider. “Yes,” he said. “I believe I shall. I’ll cast you off. You’ll be no sister of mine.”
She leaned toward him smiling. “Don’t!” she cried. “You must tell me. You must swear truthfully.”
He touched her arm. “Sweet Anna. I love you no matter what you do or don’t do.”
“Even though I ruined your opera?”
“You did not ruin my opera.”
“Say I did.”
He shook his head. “Never. You did nothing wrong.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed, a light, high sound that was itself almost singing, and lay back on the ground, to keep herself from weeping. “I don’t believe you. Look at the sky. Look at the leaves tossing.”
“You can’t lie down,” he said. “I’m not finished.”
“But I’m tired. And the sky, look at it,” she said, pointing. “That’s vastness. Nothing was ever so vast.”
“Sit up,” he laughed. “Look at the river again. I’m not finished.”
“Ah,” she said, propping herself up again. She wiped her cheeks and her hair fell down. “The river is also vast. And look how it runs and runs.”
A little later she asked, “Can I see?” and he showed her the picture. She studied it, tucking back her hair. “There I am,” she whispered. She drew a finger down the page. “How good you are. Just think, there might have been a baby with me.” When he did not reply she looked up with a sad smile. “I wish you could paint the baby in. Then I could keep it with me to remember her by. Did you ever see her? Before she died? I sometimes wonder if I imagined her. I never believed she was real, anyway. Perhaps she wasn’t. But then I don’t know why I’m so sad.”
“Don’t be sad anymore,” he said impulsively. “The baby is in Heaven. The baby wouldn’t want you to be sad.”
She smiled again, looking before her. “No,” she said. “I will be sad. I did everything wrong. Everything until now and even now I’m still sad, and afraid I’ll do wrong again. I never thought of her, Stephen. I tried very hard to believe she was not there and would never exist. And now I will think of her for as long as I live. How old she would have been, how she would have looked, whether she’d have liked me to teach her singing.” She paused for a long moment and then added, “I think she would have been a fine singer.”
“Yes,�
�� he said.
She smiled and looked down. “I don’t think Mama wanted her to live. I don’t think I did, either. In my heart. Deep in my secret heart. But then I should be happy now, and not sad.” She turned to him again, with her wan, thinned face, her cloud of dark hair. “Do you think we killed her? With wishing?”
“Never,” he said again. “I don’t believe you wished anything of the sort.”
She looked at the painting. “But of course you say that. You couldn’t very well say the other thing.”
“She’s in Heaven,” he said again, helplessly.
Anna shook her head. “A little baby all alone in Heaven? But who would take care of her?” She handed the picture back to him. “You don’t believe in Heaven any more than I do.”
“I suppose not,” he admitted, flustered.
She lay down again. “Nor in Hell.”
“No, I don’t suppose I do.”
“There’s a comfort.” She laughed. “I haven’t talked so much in months. Let me lie here quietly awhile and then we’ll go home.”
The Key of F
She told herself that it did not matter if she sang. The important thing was to live, as well as she could. But when she started to feel strong enough, she thought she might try. She had to play all sorts of tricks on her mind so that she would not get too anxious, or hope too much. It was best not to hope for anything at all.
She stood alone and imagined Rauzzini beside her. His gait, his voice, his flashing rings. She murmured to herself his familiar phrases and admonishments. She watched herself in the mirror with his eye, watched her head and torso and the intake of her breath. She remembered his breathing exercises as she remembered her name and yet it was as though she were performing them for the first time. For days she did nothing but breathe. Then she decided it was time to sing.
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