The Brahms Deception

by Louise Marley

“But it wasn’t because of the transfer process. I thought that was safe. Frederick told me it was, and I believed him. I guess I shouldn’t have, but—” Her voice shook suddenly, and she swallowed. She was so still, not moving a single unnecessary muscle. It wasn’t natural, and Kristian wondered how she did it. It made him twitchy. She went on, “It was because of her obsession with Brahms.”

  “She was obsessed with Brahms?”

  Bronwyn blinked slowly. Her eyelashes were almost invisible without the layers of mascara she had been wearing when she arrived. “Since she was a teenager. Instead of liking bands, or actors—it was Brahms. She wouldn’t go to dances or parties. She put Brahms’s picture up in her room, posters and album covers and so forth, the way other kids do with popular musicians.” She paused, and blinked again. Half to herself, she said, “He was so handsome, really. There are some wonderful photographs. When he was young, that is. Not the old ones, with that long beard and those awful eyebrows.”

  Kristian couldn’t think of a reply, even an inane one.

  “She had pictures of him in her room, and she played all his music. She read everything she could find on him, and when she wanted to do her doctorate on p dolce it was natural. But this. I thought she’d go crazy when it turned out that you had won the transfer, and—”

  She suddenly turned even paler than before. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. This must be painful for you, too.”

  Kristian leaned forward over his half-empty coffee cup. “Mrs. Bannister, what happened? You were going to say Frederica went crazy when I won the transfer?”

  She nodded, a gingerly motion, as if her thin neck might break. “Gregson called, and said you had been awarded the transfer. She was hysterical. She wouldn’t stop crying, and she shut herself in her room for hours and hours. She wouldn’t come out, not for me, not for Frederick—it was awful.”

  Kristian looked away to hide the expression in his eyes. It was exactly as Erika had thought. “So what happened?” he asked tightly. “Mr. Bannister did something, I gather.”

  “Well, you have to understand. We were afraid she might—might harm herself.”

  “So your husband bought the transfer for her.”

  “Well, not exactly. He—” Kristian set his jaw as he turned back to face her. She flinched at the look in his face, but she held her ground. She said in a rush, “He handles a lot of donations, you know. Research funding. His boards are—That is, there’s never enough, of course, and so many worthy—” She made the slightest, vaguest motion with the fingers of one hand, then clasped the coffee cup again, clung to it as if she didn’t dare let go. “He promised Lillian . . .” Her voice trailed off into silence.

  Kristian couldn’t look at her anymore. He got up, and carried his cup to the sink. He stood staring at the row of spoons and spatulas hanging on the wall, thinking of his unpaid tuition at Juilliard. Of Catherine, walking away from him across Columbus Avenue. Of Erika, barely fitting her wheelchair through the too-narrow doors of their apartment. He wanted to hurl the coffee cup across the kitchen.

  “I’m very sorry, Kris,” Bronwyn said stiffly. “It was not fair to you, I know that. I objected to the whole thing, but—I’m afraid it’s been a very long time since either my daughter or my husband listened to me.”

  “Well,” he managed to say, speaking to the wall of utensils, his neck aching with the effort to control his temper. “It’s done now.”

  “Do you think she’ll ever come back?”

  The helpless pain in her voice touched him despite himself. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. A tiny moan, so soft he couldn’t be sure he really heard it, escaped her, and he turned. “I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything I can to help her, Mrs. Bannister.”

  “That’s very kind,” she said in a thin voice.

  He was saved from replying by the opening of the kitchen door. Max came in, saw the coffeepot, and exclaimed, “Hey, Kris! Great. I’m dying for some caffeine.” He stopped when he saw Bronwyn. “Mrs. Bannister.”

  “Good morning, Mr. McDonald,” she said. Kristian wanted to dislike her. He wanted to resent all three of them, but he couldn’t find it in himself. By her own standards, Bronwyn Bannister was bearing up. Keeping up appearances. Being courteous. He couldn’t help but wish her daughter had half as much integrity.

  12

  They had been so clever, Clara thought, she and Hannes. He had told no one of the lovely little town he had discovered. Castagno was the hideaway of Italian nobility, a hilltop resort where the wealthiest aristocrats fled. The process of Italian unification was sapping their power, taxing their wealth, changing their way of life. In Castagno they found that time moved more slowly, and the inexorable change in Italian life was delayed. Hannes liked that, liked the idea that it was a place of escape.

  Clara told Marie, her dearest, most capable eldest daughter, that she was taking a private vacation, and that no one was to know. She could trust Marie. She gave her the address of an intermediary, and nothing else. There was no one she dared confide in—except Hannes himself.

  They had not even met each other on the train. Hannes had departed from Hamburg, taking the train to Firenze and then hiring a carriage to convey him to Castagno. She had left from her home in Berlin, taking only a portmanteau and a small valise for her personal things. She was careful to carry nothing more than she could manage alone on the train. With neither maid nor chaperone nor escort, she traveled first to Milano and then to Pistoia, only a few miles from Castagno.

  It was a daring thing for a widow to do, and she took care not to call attention to herself. She wore her mourning dress, black bombazine with a moderate crinoline beneath it, and only narrow strips of black lace to decorate the severe bodice. She never emerged from her sleeping compartment without her black bonnet, the veil pulled down to hide her face, and she locked the compartment carefully to guard what little she had brought with her.

  There was something essential in her valise. It was something she had not discussed with Hannes, but she knew, though it embarrassed her, that she could not come without it. It had not been easy to acquire. It had cost her a brooch an admirer had given her after a concert in Paris, but she parted with the jewelry without hesitation, bestowing it on her maid to purchase her silence.

  Clara dared not go to the chemist’s herself. She sent the maid, with specific instructions but without explanations. The girl came back with the brown paper parcel tied up with string. Clara handed over the brooch, a pretty thing of tiny rubies, and accepted the parcel. Not until she was alone did she open it, laying it on her bed, untying the string, folding back the paper with a little shudder of reluctance. It was all there, the gutta-percha syringe, the little basin, and the small brown glass vial of powder. Sulphate of zinc. She touched everything, telling herself it was necessary, though it was distasteful. She tied up the string again, folded it into one of her chemises, and stowed it on the bottom of her valise, beneath her spare corset.

  She would never have admitted to anyone she knew that she had it. The purchase of it, the careful planning and deception that went into its acquisition, shocked even herself, but she had to have it. It would be a disaster to conceive again now, widowed, alone, living as she did in the public eye.

  Clara had never planned on having so many children, but she had never been able to deny her dear Robert. In the early days of her marriage, the two of them could hardly bear to be apart. They held hands, even at meals, and they embraced at every opportunity. Their first little home had been a haven of the purest happiness she had ever known. She had been free of her father’s constant demands. She and Robert had won the legal right to marry, despite Friedrich’s objection. They made music every day, talked of music every evening, lived and breathed for music. That first year had been blissful.

  When the children began to come along, it had all begun to change. Clara tried to be happy over each successive pregnancy, but it was hard. Though Robert would not say so in so many words, she understood his wish tha
t she cease concertizing. She suspected he had been in favor of her pregnancies, hoping with each one that she would finally give up touring and stay at home. It was disloyal of her to think it, and she would hardly admit it even to herself, but it was not for the children that Robert wanted her close to him; it was because he craved the comfort of her presence and depended utterly on her emotional support. In the early days he rejoiced in her composing, but in the latter ones he had lost interest.

  Perhaps it had been selfish of her to press on with her career, but giving up her music was not possible for her. She felt she could not live without her concerts. Her art was all she had that was hers alone. Only when she was touring, when audiences applauded her, praised her without reservation, when people treated her with respect and admiration and even some measure of reverence—only then did she feel she was the woman she was meant to be. Despite her love for Robert, her devotion to the children, this was a sacrifice she could not make.

  Her compositions, in the same way, were the expression of her innermost self, that private Clara not even Robert could ever know. Or perhaps, she thought with a touch of rebellion, would even want to know. She understood that her modest efforts were not so glorious as his, not so complex, nor so sophisticated, but her ideas craved expression, just the same. She gave him her little songs as gifts, slipping them between the leaves of books for him to find, presenting them at Christmas or on his birthday. He praised her work, of course, but with increasing restraint over the years. She understood now, looking back, that he was already showing the beginnings of that melancholy that would overtake him, that would overpower him, and eventually destroy his life.

  Well, it did not bear thinking of now. It was all in the past.

  She certainly did not have to ask Hannes to know he would not want children. There were enough children in their lives!

  When she climbed down from the train in Pistoia, veiled and cloaked, lugging her portmanteau and her valise, a grizzled Italian man stepped forward to greet her. “Signora Schumann?”

  “Sì?” she said tentatively. Her Italian was not fluent, unlike her English and French. Mostly it came from studying Italian opera. “Sì. Son io.”

  He grinned, and bobbed his head, touching his flat wool cap with his fingers. “Mi chiamo Claudio,” he told her, picking up her portmanteau and her valise with a purple-veined hand. “Benvenuta, signora! Ha avuto un buon viaggio?” He led the way through the crowd of people without waiting for an answer. She followed, concentrating on not losing sight of him. The train station was crowded with noisy people shouting at one another, at their servants, and at the dozens of children clinging to their skirts or their coattails. Wheeled luggage carts rolled past, catching at her dress. Claudio ducked and dodged through the crowd, and Clara, clutching at her bonnet with one hand, struggled to follow him.

  The conveyance Claudio presented to her was not precisely a carriage of the sort she was expecting. It was more of a cart, pulled by a very pretty but not very large donkey. Claudio handed her up into the back of it, and she arranged her skirts as best she could while she settled on the wooden bench that served as a seat. There was no roof. The sides rose to her shoulders, panels of wood generously and rather primitively painted with scenes from the countryside—fields of grapes, brown cattle grazing beside streams of vivid blue, frolicking children, smiling peasants. Bemused, she folded back her veil to examine these and then to look around her at the city of Pistoia. It reminded her a bit of Prague, with its old stone walls and the wide avenue circling a grassy park. There were people strolling through the park in the May sunshine. Everywhere she looked there was a profusion of flowers, so many varieties she didn’t know all their names.

  Claudio clucked to his donkey, and the little creature willingly clopped away up the cobbled street. Clara, dropping her shawl, tried to take everything in as they rattled out of the city. Everything she saw charmed her, the terra-cotta houses, the tall garden trellises, the river they passed over on an arching stone bridge. It all seemed so new, so full of possibilities. She felt even that she herself could be new here, or at least renewed. She could explore a part of herself too long repressed. Despite her pressing need for a bath to wash the cinders of the train from her hair, and to change out of the grim black dress with its dusting of ash on the hem, her heart felt so light she thought she would need both hands to keep it restrained inside her chest.

  That swell of good cheer, as the carriage rattled away from Pistoia to bear her to Castagno, became a wave of joy when she saw Hannes. He was pacing behind the stone garden wall, the sun gleaming on his golden hair, his forget-me-not eyes vivid in the generous light. He looked unbearably sweet to her, stepping over the wall with his long legs the moment he spotted the carriage. Disregarding Claudio’s presence, Hannes swept her into an embrace, burying his face in that intimate angle between her cheek and her neck, and murmuring, “Clara, mein Engel! Dank sei Gott, you’re here at last!”

  She would never, no matter what joys or sorrows awaited her as the years wore on, forget the sheer, trembling delight of that first day they spent alone together. There was a cook in the house, a dark, whiskery woman of middle age called Nuncia. She had already filled a bath for the signora, set up behind a rickety wooden screen at the far end of the kitchen. When Clara, wrapped in a dressing gown, came downstairs and walked timidly into the kitchen, Nuncia took up a kettle of water steaming on the big woodstove. She emptied it into the claw-footed tub, then withdrew, smiling and nodding. Clara shed her dressing gown and stepped carefully over the high edge of the tub and down into the delicious warmth of the water.

  The little house called Casa Agosto was peaceful above her and around her. No children demanded attention. No husband required tending. No staff needed orders; no post from publishers urgently demanded her response. It was as if the world had stopped for a time, and she had no wish to start it spinning again.

  She lay back in the tub, luxuriating in the quiet. Gentle sunshine slanted through the small windows. She smiled up at the high ceiling, where years of cooking smoke had stained the whitewash. A rack of well-used pots and pans stretched across the inner wall, and an enormous stone sink filled the space beneath the windows. Clara admired the rustic simplicity of all of this as she allowed the water to soak out the tension and fatigue of her journey. When she feared the water was beginning to cool, she washed her hair and her face and scrubbed her hands, then dried herself. She put on the dressing gown again and slipped up the stairs in her bare feet. Nuncia had unpacked her things and hung them in the wardrobe. She donned her simplest morning dress of dove gray, with a charcoal underskirt. It was a relief to slip her feet into soft-soled slippers instead of her heavy traveling boots. She tied a scarf around her damp hair. She was tucking a lace scarf into her bodice when she heard the soft notes of the fortepiano trickle up the stairs. With an eager smile, she hurried from the bedroom and down the narrow staircase.

  Hannes jumped up from the bench of the fortepiano and came to seize her hands. She said diffidently, with a hand to her hair, “My hair will not dry for a long time, I’m afraid, but it was full of cinders.”

  He drew her out through tall French windows, into the sunshine of the garden. “It will dry out here, as long as you’re not cold.” They sat side by side on the stone wall, with the midafternoon sun at their backs. She undid the scarf, and let her hair drop in its damp masses down her back. Hannes fluffed it with his fingers, spreading it across her shoulders. He put an arm around her waist, gathering her close, and she allowed her cheek to rest against him. She closed her eyes, and was able to believe, for a little while, that there was nothing untoward in what they were doing, nothing shameful, nothing a thousand couples were not doing across Europe on a sunny May afternoon.

  Soon the savory smells of frying garlic and stewing tomatoes wafted from the little house to mingle with the scent of the roses that climbed in tangles over the stone wall. The few people who had passed by on their errands, and the children chasi
ng one another in the street, vanished into the other eleven houses. A breeze sprang up, but Clara’s hair was nearly dry, and with the lowering sun at her back she felt no chill. Hannes asked her about Berlin, about the children, about her concert schedule. Just as Nuncia came to the door to call them to supper, he said, “And your songs? Have you resumed composing?”

  She shook her head, and her hair caught on the wool of his coat. “No.”

  “You should, Clara. It has been five years since you wrote anything! You could compose more songs, perhaps. You have written so few, and they’re beautiful.”

  “I’m just not sure—not so sure anyone wants them.”

  He hugged her to him. “I do,” he said firmly.

  She smiled up at him. “Well, I do have an idea, though it’s a slight one. There’s a little poem I knew when I was a girl, and I’ve been thinking about it. It’s very simple, a nursery rhyme, really. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll try to work it out on paper.”

  Nuncia, gray haired and plump and full of smiles over having young lovers in the house, called, “Signori! La cena!”

  Hannes stood, and helped Clara up. “Do write the song, mein Engel. I long to hear it.”

  It was almost more happiness than she could bear. She went into the house, and was led back to the kitchen, where it was clear they would have their meals. Nuncia nodded her to a chair, and she sat at the plain wooden table while Hannes uncorked a bottle of local wine. The most marvelous meal was set before her, some sort of ridged noodle she had not seen before, tossed with olive oil and garlic and lightly cooked tomatoes, with a sprinkle of chopped basil on top. There was a sort of flat bread, and two perfectly grilled veal chops to follow. She indulged in two glasses of wine, something she rarely did. She and Hannes ate and talked and laughed. He touched her hand across the table, and a thrill ran from her fingertips to her belly.

  And then the dinner was over. Nuncia went home, closing the garden gate behind her. Hannes drew the curtains, and stirred up the fire in the little salon. They were alone. Hannes took out his pipe and began to tamp it, sitting back in the wing chair, his long legs crossed at the knee. Clara went to the fortepiano, and let her fingers trail over the keys, trying the sound, testing the pedals.