The People

by Bernard Malamud

  The story had astounded him. Yet whenever he thought of telling it to someone he knew, or had just met, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  1984

  In Kew Gardens

  ONCE, as they walked in the gardens, Virginia felt her knickers come loose and slip down her ankles. She grabbed at her maidenhair as the garment eluded her frantic grasp and formed a puddle of cloth at her feet. Swooping up her underpants, with a cry of dismay she plunged into the bushes, shrilly singing “The Last Rose of Summer.” As she stood up, the elastic knot she had tied snapped, and the knickers again lay limp at her feet.

  “Christ, goddamn!”

  Vanessa listened at the bushes.

  “Don’t be hysterical. No one will see through your dress.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “No one would want to.”

  She shrieked slowly.

  “Forgive me, dear goat,” Vanessa told her. “I meant no harm.”

  “Oh, never, no, never.”

  Insofar as I was ever in love I loved Vanessa.

  George Duckworth, affectionate stepbrother, carried his tormented amours from the parlor to the night nursery. He nuzzled, he fondled, he fiddled with his finger. To his sisters he was obscenity incarnate. He touched without looking.

  “I meant no harm. I meant to comfort you.”

  Virginia lost her underpants and wondered where she had been.

  Her erotic life rarely interested her. It seemed unimportant compared with what went on in the world.

  I was born in 1882 with rosy cheeks and green eyes. Not enough was made of my coloring.

  When her mother died she tore the pillow with her teeth. She spat bleeding feathers.

  Her father cried and raged. He beat his chest and groaned aloud, “I am ruined.”

  The mother had said, “Everyone needed me but he needed me most.”

  “Unquenchable seems to me such presence”: H. James.

  The father moaned, “Why won’t my whiskers grow?”

  As Virginia lay mourning her mother, dreadful voices cried in the night. They whispered, they clucked, they howled. She suffered piercing occipital headaches.

  King Edward cursed her foully in the azalea garden. He called her filthy names, reading aloud dreadful reviews of books she had yet to write.

  The king sang of madness, rage, incest.

  Years later she agreed to marry Mr. Leonard Woolf, who had offered to be her Jewish mother.

  “I am mad,” she confessed to him.

  “I am marrying a penniless Jew,” Virginia wrote Violet Dickinson. She wondered who had possessed her.

  “He thinks my writing the best part of me.”

  “His Jewishness is qualified.”

  His mother disgusted her.

  She grew darkly enraged.

  In fact, I dislike the quality of masculinity. I always have.

  Lytton said he had no use for it whatever. “Semen?” he asked when he saw a stain on Vanessa’s dress.

  Vanessa loved a man who found it difficult to love a woman.

  She loved Duncan Grant until he loved her.

  She had loved Clive Bell, who loved Virginia, who would not love him. Virginia loved Leonard, who loved her. She swore she loved him.

  When Julia, the mother, died, the goat threw herself out of a first-story window and lay on the ground with Warren Septimus Smith. “He did not want to die till the very last minute.” Neither had she.

  The old king emerged from the wood, strumming a lyre. A silver bird flew over his head, screeching in Greek.

  A dead woman stalked her.

  Janet Case, her teacher of Greek, loved her. She loved her teacher of Greek.

  She loved Violet Dickinson.

  She loved Vita Nicolson.

  Leonard and she had no children. They lay in bed and had no children. She would have liked a little girl.

  “Possibly my great age makes it less a catastrophe but certainly I find the climax greatly exaggerated.”

  Vanessa wrote Clive: “Apparently she gets no pleasure from the act, which I think is curious. She and Leonard were anxious to know when I had had an orgasm. I couldn’t remember, do you?”

  “Yet I dare say we are the happiest couple in England. Aren’t we, Leonard?”

  “My dear.”

  Leonard and Virginia set up the Hogarth Press but they would not print Mr. James Joyce’s Ulysses. “He is impudent and coarse.”

  Mrs. Dalloway loved Warren Septimus Smith though she never met him.

  “He had committed an appalling crime and had been condemned by human nature.”

  “The whole world was clamoring, Kill yourself, kill yourself for our sakes.”

  (He sat on the windowsill.)

  He jumped. Virginia fell from the window.

  As for To the Lighthouse, I have no idea what it means, if it has a meaning. That’s no business of mine.

  “[Lily Briscoe] could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write …’

  “ … She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

  All I need is a room of my own.

  “I hate to see so many women’s lives wasted simply because they have not been trained well enough to take an independent interest in any study or to be able to work efficiently in any profession”: Leslie Stephen to Julia Duckworth.

  “There has fallen a splendid tear/From the passion-flower at the gate.”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  “There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people singing such things under their breath that I burst out laughing.”

  The Waves.

  The Years. The bloody years.

  The acts among Between the Acts.

  No one she knew inspired her to more than momentary erotic excitement throughout her life. She loved Shakespeare’s sister.

  Leonard gave up that ghost.

  “They also serve.”

  She felt a daily numbness, nervous tension. “What a born melancholic I am.”

  They had called her the goat in the nursery, against which she tore at their faces with her tiny nails.

  They had never found Thoby her dead brother’s lost portrait. Vanessa had painted and forever lost it.

  Her mother died.

  My father is not my mother. Leonard is my mother. We shall never conceive a living child.

  “I shall never grow my whiskers again.”

  She heard voices, or words to that effect.

  “Maiden, there’s turd in your blood,” King Edward chanted in ancient Greece.

  Her scream blew the bird off its one-legged perch and it flapped into the burning wood.

  An old king strode among the orange azaleas.

  For years she simply went mad.

  She spoke in soft shrieks.

  She wrote twenty-one books whose reviews frightened her.

  “That was not my doing,” said Leonard Woolf.

  “Nor mine,” sobbed her Greek tutor.

  Perhaps it was mine, Vita Nicolson said. “She was so frail a creature. One had to be most careful not to shock her.”

  I loved Vita. She loved Orlando.

  Virginia wrote a biography of Roger Fry. She did not want to write a biography of Roger Fry.

  Leonard served her a single soft-boiled egg when she was ill. “N
ow, Virginia, open your mouth and swallow your egg. Only if you eat will you regain the strength to write your novels and essays.”

  She sucked the tip of his spoon.

  “Though you give much I give so little.”

  “The little you give is a king’s domain.”

  At that time the writing went well and she artfully completed Between the Acts, yet felt no joy.

  Virginia relapsed into depression and denied herself food.

  “Virginia, you must eat to sustain yourself.”

  “My reviews are dreadful,” Virginia said.

  “I am afraid of this war,” Virginia said.

  “I hear clamorous noises in my head,” Virginia said.

  One morning, to escape the noises of war, she dragged herself to the river Ouse, there removed shoes, stockings, underpants, and waded slowly into the muddy water. The large rock she had forced into her coat pocket pulled her down till she could see the earth in her green eyes.

  “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

  1984

  Alma Redeemed

  GUSTAV MAHLER’S ghost.

  Bruno Walter had seen it as Mahler conducted one of his last concerts. It waxed in music as the conductor waned. The ghost appeared, more or less, to Alma Mahler one or two years after her husband was dead. Alma did not believe in ghosts, but this one troubled her. It had got into her bedsheets but hadn’t stayed long.

  Can Jews haunt people?

  Gustav was a rationalist nonbeliever. “In that clear mind I never detected any trace of superstition,” Bruno Walter said. He spoke of Mahler—as Alma clearly remembered—as a “God-struck man,” whose religious self flowered in his music, viz., “Veni, creator spiritus,” as it flashed in eternity in the Eighth Symphony. Alma felt that Mahler was too subtle a man to have believed simply in God, but that wouldn’t mean he might not attempt to disturb her, although she was aware that some of her thoughts of Mahler had caused her more than ordinary fright. Might the fright have produced the ghost? Such things are possible.

  In my mind, more than once I betrayed him.

  Yet Mahler was a kind man, although an egotist who defined his egotism as a necessity of his genius.

  “Gott, how he loved his genius!”

  Now, all of Alma’s husbands, a collection of a long lifetime including Mahler, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel—and Oskar Kokoschka, the painter, made it a fourth if you counted in the man she hadn’t married, whom Alma conceived to be her most astonishing (if most difficult) lover—they were all artists of unusual merit and accomplishment; yet Alma seemed to favor Mahler, even if she had trouble during her lifetime caring deeply for his music.

  When she met Gustav Mahler, Alma stood five feet three inches tall and weighed 144 pounds. She loved her figure. Her deep blue eyes were her best feature. She drew men with half a glance. Alma never wore underpants and thought she knew who might know she wasn’t wearing them. When she met him she felt that Mahler didn’t know though he may have wanted to.

  Alma, a lovely, much-sought-after young woman, one of the prettiest in Vienna in those days, felt Mahler was magnetic, but she wasn’t sure she ought to marry him. “He is frightening, nervous, and bounds across the room like an animal. I fear his energy.”

  She wrote in her diary in purple ink: “At the opera he loves to conduct Faust.”

  She wanted Gustav. She felt she had snared him in her unconscious.

  Yet his demands frightened her. “Is it too late, my dearest Alm-chi, to ask you to make my music yours? Play as you please but don’t attempt to compose. Composition is for heroes.”

  “How can I make his music mine if I have loved Wagner throughout my life? What passion can I possibly feel for Mahler’s music or even for Mahler?” These thoughts concerned her.

  “You must understand, my tender girl, that my harmony and polyphony, for all their vivid modernity, which seems to distress you, remain in the realm of pure tonality. Someday your dear ears will open to the glories of my sound.”

  “Yes, Gustav,” said Alma.

  “Let us be lovers in a true marriage. I am the composer and you are, in truth, my beloved bride.”

  Mahler urged her to consult her stepfather and mother. “You must lay to rest your doubts, whatever they are. The matter must be settled before we can contemplate a union for life.”

  “Say nothing,” Carl Moll, her stepfather, advised Alma. “Best get rid of the Jew.”

  “Perhaps get rid of him,” said her mother. “I never trusted his conversion to Catholicism though he pleads sincerity. He became Catholic because Cosima Wagner insisted that no Jew be allowed to replace Richard Wagner at the Vienna Opera.”

  But Alma said she had thought about it and decided she loved Mahler.

  She did not say she was already pregnant by him.

  Mahler walked in his floppy galoshes to the church on their wedding day.

  At breakfast the guests were spirited, although in memoirs she wrote many years later Alma wasn’t sure of that. She had trouble defining her mood.

  She was twenty-two, Mahler was forty-one.

  “If only I could find my own inner balance.”

  Mahler whispered into her good ear that he loved her more than he had loved anyone except his dear mother, who had died insane.

  “You must give yourself to me unconditionally and desire nothing except my love.”

  He sounded more like a teacher than a lover.

  “Yes, Gustav.”

  “He is continually talking about preserving his art but that is not allowed to me.”

  Nothing has come to fruition for me, Alma thought. Neither my beauty, nor my spirit, nor my talent.

  Does his genius, by definition, submerge my talent? My ship is in the harbor but has sprung a leak.

  He did not lie in bed and make love to her. He preferred to mount her when she was deeply asleep.

  His odor was repulsive. “Probably from your cigars,” she had informed Mahler. He was a stranger to her, she wrote in her diary, “and much about him will remain strange forever.”

  She tripped over a paraffin lamp and set the carpet afire.

  Mahler dreamed Alma was wearing her hair as she used to in her girlhood. He did not like her to pile her tresses on the top of her head. Gustav said her hairdo was Semitic-looking and he wished to avoid that impression. He assured his friends he was not a practicing Jew. Alma wore her hair long most of the time.

  When their daughter, Maria, caught diphtheria and died, Mahler could not stand being alone. Memories of his daughter seared his life. He went from person to person with a new message: “Alma has sacrificed her youth for me. With absolute selflessness she has subordinated her life to my work.”

  Alma let Ossip Gabrilowitsch hold her hand in a dark room.

  “To gain a spiritual center, my Alma, that’s the important thing. Then everything takes on another aspect.”

  Alma found his impersonal preaching repellent and frightening.

  Since her youth she had been nervous among strangers and very sensitive about her impaired hearing.

  Mahler became frightened at the thought of losing his wife.

  Mahler and Freud met in Leiden and walked for four hours along the tree-lined canals. Freud told him a good deal about the life of the psyche and Mahler was astonished though he had guessed much that Freud had told him.

  “My darling, my lyre,” he wrote his wife, “come exorcise the ghosts of darkness. They claw me, they throw me to the ground. I ask in silence whether I am damned. Rescue me, my dearest.”

  Mahler suspected that he loved Alma more than she loved him.

  He was as strict now about her going back to her music as he had been nine years ago in insisting she give up composing.

  One night she woke up and saw him standing by her bed like a ghost.

  He dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her.

  He feared his Ninth.

  “Ah, how lovely it is to love, my dearest Almscher
l. And it is only now that I know what love is. Believe me, Tristan sings the truth.”

  “Alma blossoms, on a splendid diet, and she has given up tippling Benedictine. She looks younger day by day.”

  One day she had a cold; Mahler invited the doctor who had examined Alma to look him over too.

  “Well, you have no cause to be proud of that heart,” the doctor said after listening for a minute.

  The bacterial tests sealed his doom. Mahler insisted he be told the truth, and he said he wanted to die in Vienna.

  He talked to Alma about his grave and tombstone. She listened gravely. He did not want to be cremated. He wanted to be there if people came to the graveyard to see him.

  “Mozart,” said Mahler, before he died during a thunderstorm.

  “Boom!”

  Alma met the man who later became her second husband in a sanitarium, in Tobelbad when, exhausted by Gustav’s pace and striving, she was advised by a country doctor to take the cure.

  Gustav displayed an unyielding energy she couldn’t keep up with. She was the young one but he made her feel old. That’s the trick, she thought. He wants me to match him in age.

  At Tobelbad she met a handsome architect, Walter Gropius, age twenty-seven, who lived down the hall and stared at her in astonishment as she walked by. He gazed at Alma with architectural eyes and she was aware she had form.

  They began to go for long walks. Gustav usually gave her short lectures in philosophy as they walked together, but this one talked on about nature and architectural masses; he seemed surprised that she did not throw herself into his arms.

  Gustav, promoting his conducting career, hurried from city to city, writing to her from where he happened to be, one opera house or philharmonic society after another; but she was in no mood to respond. In his letters to his tender Almscherl he wrote, “I could not bear this depleting routine if it did not end with delicious thoughts of you. Regain your health, my precious dear girl, so that we may again renew our affectionate embraces.”

  In his letters Mahler tickled her chin and ladled out bits of gossip laced with pious observations. His pace was again frantic; yet wherever he went, he worried about her, though for reasons of scheduling, etc., he found it difficult to visit her at Tobelbad, yet surely she knew the direction of his heart?