Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  Leaving the cemetery, the three of them headed toward their waiting carriage.

  “Since we’ve hired the cab anyway, could we not take a spin through Prater Park?” Gretl asked Mama. “It’s so lovely today.”

  Only a stone’s throw from the graveyard walls, people sat at tables beneath the swaying chestnut trees and sipped coffee while reveling in the beauty and warmth of this June afternoon. A Gypsy played a wildly romantic folk song on his fiddle while elegantly dressed passersby showered coins into his upturned hat, the clement weather making them especially generous. Even the usually dour-faced women selling memorial bouquets at the cemetery gates were laughing and humming along to the Gypsy’s music. Yes, a drive through Prater Park would be glorious.

  Except Alma had something else in mind.

  “Before we go to the Prater,” she said, “could I just drop off my music scores at Herr Zemlinsky’s apartment in the Obere Weissgerberstrasse?”

  She patted the satchel containing her lieder.

  “You could have mailed them,” Mama pointed out. But since it was on their way to the Prater, she couldn’t gracefully refuse.

  Of course, I could have mailed them, Alma thought, as they set off, the carriage driver whistling a jaunty tune as his two dark bay horses trotted briskly over the cobblestones. But that would have defeated her true purpose, namely to see Zemlinsky one last time before she and her family departed for the mountains. They wouldn’t be back in Vienna until late September.

  Yet she reflected how uncomfortably morbid it was to come directly from Vienna Central Cemetery to the apartment where Zemlinsky’s father lay so ill. Though she prided herself on being utterly modern and free from superstition, she couldn’t help worrying that she might bring bad luck with her, along with the traces of graveyard dirt on her shoes. The elder Herr Zemlinsky, she had learned, suffered from kidney stones, an agonizing malady. He had been ailing for some time, which explained why young Zemlinsky was obliged to support his entire household. Perhaps it was in poor taste for her to visit at all, even to drop off her music.

  Alma’s heart squeezed into a frightened ball as she rang the Zemlinskys’ bell. Mama stood behind her like a sentinel while Gretl waited for them in the cab.

  A vaguely familiar-looking young woman answered the door and seemed to regard Alma warily. With a vicious stab in the belly, Alma recognized her as the girl who had turned to glare at her for giving Zemlinsky a standing ovation at the Musikverein concert back in January. Melanie Guttmann, Zemlinsky had said her name was. The girl he’d claimed was his “acquaintance” stood swathed in a huge apron, as though she were his wife, his perfect little hausfrau. For all Alma knew, she was his fiancée. Then again, why should that bother her? Zemlinsky is nothing more than a teacher. But that postcard he’d given her! To Fräulein Alma Maria Schindler, with all my affection. To think she’d given him her photograph.

  Alma sucked in her breath and took a step backward, accidently treading on her mother’s toe. “Good day to you, Fräulein.” She hated herself for feeling like a child as she clutched her music scores with her mother looming behind her. “I wished to deliver these lieder to Herr Zemlinsky.” She bit her lip. “The younger Herr Zemlinsky. I hope his father is recovering.”

  Too late she thought that she should have brought flowers for the sick man, but surely it would have been deeply disrespectful to come calling with a bouquet purchased at the graveyard.

  Melanie Guttmann’s lips trembled. “We sat up all night around his bed. He died today, may he rest in peace.”

  Alma’s heart tore. “I’m so, so sorry!”

  Helplessly, she looked at her mother, who offered her condolences, and back at Fräulein Guttmann.

  “My music scores,” Alma said lamely.

  “I’ll show you into his study.” Fräulein Guttmann spoke with quiet dignity. “You can leave them on Alex’s desk.”

  “He’s not home?” Alma swallowed back her disappointment.

  “No,” said Melanie Guttmann, looking Alma in the eye. “Alex has gone to fetch the rabbi.”

  Alma felt completely out of her depth, as though she were trapped in a dream where everything appeared unreal and yet hyperreal at the same time, the colors twice as bright and the shadows twice as dark as in the waking world. What a fool she was, imposing herself on this household deep in mourning, and all because she had longed to catch at least a glimpse of Zemlinsky before her family left for the summer.

  Of course, Alma had known from the beginning that Zemlinsky was Jewish. But like the Conrats, like Berta Zuckerkandl, and Melanie Guttmann herself, he was so assimilated that it had been easy for Alma to gloss over the fact. Until today when Fräulein Guttmann had pointedly spelled it out to her right in front of Mama, as if to say, Leave him alone. You have no business chasing him.

  While Mama stayed behind in the doorway, Alma followed Fräulein Guttmann down the hallway with its heavy oak furniture and family photographs; through the parlor, where the menorah took pride of place on the sideboard; and finally through a set of double doors into the music room with its piano and desk. The faded wallpaper was covered in paintings and sketches that looked like the work of friends and family rather than that of established artists. There was a drawing of Brahms, a photogravure of Wagner, and even a bust of Zemlinsky himself, possibly the work of his student, Arnold Schoenberg, an amateur artist as well as an aspiring composer. Alma thought to herself that this was the room of a true bohemian, radiating unbelievable poetry. But before she could take comfort in this, a young woman she hadn’t noticed until now shot up from an armchair. Was it Zemlinsky’s sister, Alma wondered. Without a word, the girl rushed out of the room as though not wanting a stranger to witness her anguish—hammering home the fact that Alma didn’t belong here.

  No, it’s Melanie Guttmann, not you, who sat up all night while Zemlinsky’s father lay dying. Melanie Guttmann who calls Zemlinsky by his first name and seems to be running the household, allowing his mother and sister to give themselves wholly over to their grief.

  Fräulein Guttmann took Alma’s scores from her, along with Alma’s cheery note of greeting that now made her want to cringe, and set them on Zemlinsky’s desk.

  Alma was about to murmur her thanks and shrink toward the door when she noticed her own photograph, framed in silver and placed at the very center of the desk beside Zemlinsky’s own stack of neatly penned sheet music.

  10

  In the Lutheran parish church in Bad Ischl, the emperor’s most beloved resort town, which was nestled at the foot of the Salzkammergut Mountains, Gretl marched down the aisle on Carl’s arm. Alma’s eyes misted with tears, for Gretl was more beautiful than she had ever seen her in her sweeping veil of Venetian lace, her brow crowned in a circlet of white roses and baby’s breath. Most captivating of all was the radiance on her sister’s face as she looked at her bridegroom.

  Following her sister’s gaze, Alma choked to see that it was not Wilhelm Legler awaiting Gretl at the altar but Gustav Klimt, his eyes blazing with desire. Blushing prettily, Gretl gave him her hand.

  Alma longed to bolt out of the church, but she was sandwiched between Mama and Aunt Mie, trapped in that narrow oaken pew. She tried to close her eyes, to look away to spare herself, but it was impossible. The unfolding scene was branded on her retinas, each nuance as vivid and sharply focused as cinematographic pictures. Klimt’s muscular embrace engulfed her slender sister in her virginal gown. With a savage insistence, he kissed her before the stuttering pastor could even make them say their vows. To Alma’s horror, Klimt was taking complete possession of Gretl, as he had once tried to do with Alma with that stolen kiss in Venice, that kiss Alma had thought would stretch into eternity.

  Before the scandalized wedding guests, Klimt began undressing Gretl, who surrendered to him with cooing sighs, throwing back her head so he could kiss her throat. Soon the wedding gown and her filmy white undergarments lay in a heap around her sister’s trembling ankles. Only the lacy bridal veil
was left to cover Gretl’s flushed and naked body as Klimt laid her gently on the floor, about to consummate their marriage then and there. Except now it was Alma who lay in his embrace, completely at his mercy, completely open to him, without shame, her pounding heart drowning out the church bells. A sweet dampness spread between her thighs.

  Alma gasped and floundered as Gretl shook her awake.

  “Really, Alma, you were moaning like someone was murdering you! I think you drank too much punch last night.”

  Still in thrall of her dream, Alma was too ashamed to look at her sister. Instead, she attempted to bring herself back to the waking world by focusing on the red gingham curtains and the ibex head staring down imperiously from the pine-paneled wall. This was their room in the rented summerhouse on the Traun River. The date on the calendar pinned beside her bed was September 1, 1900. Gretl’s wedding—to Wilhelm, not to Klimt!—was still five days away.

  Alma did indeed have a thumping hangover from her twenty-first birthday party the previous night. She had muddled recollections of some impassioned debate with Max Burckhard. Don’t commit yourself to any one person, the forty-six-year-old bachelor had admonished her. Every potential mate is a prison. Drawing on Nietzsche’s philosophy of the individual, Burckhard had been arguing, as always, in favor of free love. And she, having already imbibed too much rum-laced punch, had countered, Don’t you know that another person can also be a paradise? Had she really said that? Then that filthy dream about Klimt! As it so happened, she knew Klimt was summering only a short distance away, on Lake Attersee, in his sinful love nest with his sister-in-law, Emilie Flöge.

  Burying her head in the pillow, Alma willed herself to sink into the oblivion of dreamless sleep, but Gretl yanked the prickly feather quilt off her and attempted to hoist her out of bed. “You must get dressed, or we’ll be late for the pastor.”

  “Pastor?” Alma cupped her palm to her splitting forehead.

  “Our conversion ceremony!” As jumpy as a frightened rabbit, Gretl opened the wardrobe, garishly painted with folkloric motifs, and pulled out Alma’s most severe shirtwaist and a somber gray skirt. “You promised. Remember?”

  Lurching down the narrow pine stairs, Alma dragged herself into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee from the enamel pot Cilli had left on the woodstove. Sipping the bitter, scalding liquid, she glanced through the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, which reported that a record heat wave had sparked off an alarming number of suicides—and this in a city that already claimed the highest suicide rate on the globe. Perhaps the new nerve doctors like Sigmund Freud could explain what it was about Vienna that made people drown themselves in the Danube Canal or swallow poison or shoot themselves in the head. She wondered what the likes of Dr. Freud would make of her after her depraved dream.

  Out in the garden, Carl was sketching while Mama chased toddling little Maria, whose rapid growth reminded Alma all too starkly of the stasis in her own life. She was now twenty-one, not even engaged, and had nothing to show for herself but a handful of songs.

  “Goodness, Mädele, you slept so late, the morning mail’s already arrived,” Cilli groused in her thick dialect, as she bustled into the kitchen and handed Alma a letter from Zemlinsky.

  Just when she’d given up on hearing from him! In her excitement, Alma spilled coffee on her pristine blouse. Shutting her ears to Gretl’s pleas to hurry, Alma tore open the envelope, finding a card wishing her a happy birthday and a letter on black-bordered mourning stationery. This was the first communication she’d had with him since he canceled their last lesson back in May.

  When I received your lieder, he wrote, I was, as you can imagine, in a dreadful state. Then followed a most detailed critique of her two songs. Before Alma could finish reading, Gretl hauled her off, stained blouse and all, down the narrow lanes of villas and hotels past the farmwives in their dirndls selling bunches of alpine herbs to the summer tourists. Finally, they reached the little neo-Gothic Lutheran church, an anomaly in this deeply Catholic province where one could scarcely walk one hundred paces without passing a wayside chapel or a carved Madonna.

  The momentous event of Gretl and Alma’s conversion consisted of the two of them kneeling in the otherwise empty church while the pastor mumbled prayers with his back to them. Alma restrained herself out of fear of upsetting Gretl, whose nerves appeared to be stretched ever thinner as her wedding day approached. Was her sister having second thoughts about Wilhelm, Alma wondered. Or was she apprehensive about the physical side of marriage, of what would unfold on her wedding night? Alma’s dream about Klimt kept intruding on her thoughts, of Klimt making love to her on that cold marble floor only a few feet from where she and Gretl knelt.

  The only way to drive such indecency from her mind was by thinking of Zemlinsky. Then again, her thoughts had dwelled on Zemlinsky that entire summer, not only while attempting to compose a cycle of three songs based on Rilke poems but even as she tried to divert herself with the usual vacation pastimes. During alpine hikes, she couldn’t help but daydream about his holding her arm as she ventured up a particularly steep incline. Sadly, the fact remained that Zemlinsky was beyond her grasp, still deep in mourning for his father, whose death had left the full weight of responsibility for the family on his shoulders. He was surely destined to put off marriage for a good few years, and when he did marry, it would be to Melanie Guttmann. Any friendship he shared with Alma must be subordinated to this reality. Then why couldn’t she get him out of her mind?

  Later that afternoon, Wilhelm called by. Leaving him and Gretl on the terrace overlooking the Traun River, Alma shut herself up in the stuffy little parlor where she read and reread Alex’s letter. His analysis of her compositions was sweeter to her than the most ardent love poetry. The attention he gave her music made her feel so alive. Only he could discern the potential locked inside her that still needed guidance and mentorship before it could unfold. Don’t you know that another person can also be a paradise?

  Sitting at the battered upright piano, she threw herself into implementing the corrections he suggested. Then Gretl’s shrieking made Alma’s hands freeze on the keys.

  Dashing out to the terrace, she found Gretl and Wilhelm tearing into each other like two rabid dogs.

  “So we can only move back to Vienna when you’re established?” Gretl’s lips were drawn back from her teeth, as though she might literally snap at Wilhelm. Her eyes were glassy and hard. “Only have a family when you’re established? When the hell is that going to happen? Goddamn it all!”

  “Enough of your hysterics,” Wilhelm said. “You’re carrying on like a spoiled brat who always wants her own way.”

  “Me spoiled?” Gretl’s fury distorted her face. Her eyes squeezed into slits. “Fine words coming from a German-loving mama’s boy—”

  Before she could finish her tirade, Mama and Carl barged in and pulled the sparing couple apart.

  “It’s just wedding nerves, my boy,” Carl said to Wilhelm, with strained joviality as he escorted him out the garden gate. “Women, eh? Don’t take it to heart.”

  Mama yanked Gretl inside, out of view of the gawking tourists loitering in the lane. The whole scene left Alma dazed. Never had she seen Gretl like this, spewing such curses and so jarringly out of control. Mama and Gretl were in the parlor with the door closed, but their voices were raised to such a pitch that Alma heard every word.

  “I won’t marry him! It’s a mistake.”

  “Gretl, I’m ashamed of you. You’re ruining this for everyone. Tomorrow you’ll apologize to poor Wilhelm and pray that he forgives you.”

  Unable to endure another word, Alma retreated to the most secluded part of the garden, where she flung herself on the grass and listened to the rushing river and the distant chime of cowbells. How could Mama be so heartless, pressuring Gretl to go through with this marriage after Gretl had so brutally revealed her misgivings? Alma’s heart split in anguish for her sister. If this is marriage, I want no part of it.

  Later,
when Alma tiptoed up to their room, she found Gretl crying in bed.

  “Hush, sweetheart,” she whispered, taking Gretl in her arms. She wished she could simply hug the hurt out of her.

  “I’m losing everything.” Gretl clung to Alma as if she would never let her go. “My home, my country, you, my friends in Vienna.”

  “You’ll never lose me,” Alma said. Though, in truth, if her sister lived in Stuttgart, they probably couldn’t expect to see each other more than once or twice a year. “Don’t listen to Mama,” she told her sister fiercely. “If you don’t love him, don’t marry him. We’ll be spinsters together.”

  Gretl shook her head. “That’s all very well for you. You have your music. Without a husband, I’m nothing. There’ll be nothing left of me.”

  “That’s not true! Your sketching—”

  “A few girlish drawings? Oh, Alma, don’t patronize me. Besides,” she added with a trembling smile, “I want to have children.”

  How could her sister come so undone? Alma hardly dared to leave her side. They pushed their beds together and held hands while Gretl cried herself to sleep. Alma had notions of kidnapping her sister and spiriting her off to Paris where they would live like bohemians.

  But all proceeded according to Mama’s orders. Meek and docile once again, Gretl begged Wilhelm’s pardon. On September 5, she married him. After the wedding, the bridal couple and their guests strolled along the esplanade overlooking the Traun River, and then they all dined at Hotel Elisabeth, named in honor of the late empress. Alma was relieved to see that Wilhelm seemed gentler and more attentive to her sister than ever before, as if he was all too aware of her emotional frailty. Gretl, in turn, seemed to rally in the light of his kindness. She appeared sweet and calm, as if the raging, cursing woman on the terrace had been a different person.