As the triumphant notes swelled, Alma viewed Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze. The yearnings, depicted as sinuous young women, floated off on a quest for meaning and grace. But the hostile forces of madness, disease, and depravity stood in their way, taking the form of a giant ape with a serpent’s tale surrounded by lascivious nude women. Farther along, Beethoven appeared in golden armor, an avenging knight to battle the powers of darkness in order to redeem humanity. On closer inspection, Klimt’s Beethoven revealed itself to be a portrait of her husband, Alma realized with startled wonder. So this was the surprise Klimt had alluded to. She recognized Gustav’s angular profile, his dark hair and sculpted face, his slim body.
The yearnings, persevering on their pilgrimage, found their deliverance through poetry and music. Finally, they were subsumed in the rapture of the kiss of absolute union, depicted as a naked couple locked in an eternal embrace. Around them a choir of angels sang the “Ode to Joy” chorus that Gustav’s ensemble now played.
This divine alchemy of music and art swept Alma away. Gustav was the great magician, the most revered person in that room packed with artists and intelligentsia. He knew no borders, none. Everything merged in sublime beauty. Gustav Mahler, Beethoven’s true heir, the artist-savior and champion of modern art and music. He, the epicenter of this brave new order. And she, his bride, four months pregnant with his child. She with her clipped wings, her own music sacrificed to his.
Alma felt a hot wash of pain to see Ilse stand smiling beside her sculpture Wet Hair while a journalist photographed her. The life-size plaster-cast statue had won a gold medal in Munich the previous year. The female figure was bent forward, holding her long wet hair in one hand and reaching for a towel with the other. Though the figure was nude, there was none of the eroticism of Klimt’s or Rodin’s work—this was not an image intended to arouse male desire but an exquisitely crafted sculpture of a woman performing an everyday act, her eyes lost in contemplation. Alma was astounded by the technical brilliance. How had Ilse managed to make that wet hair look so lifelike? Ilse was receiving so many commissions, she could support herself with her art.
Erica, meanwhile, looked on in sisterly pride. She held hands with her adoring beau, Hans Tietze, her fellow university student. No one had pressured Ilse to marry. No one had forced Erica to choose between love and pursuing her dreams.
Mistress of a spacious apartment so close to the heart of Vienna, Alma thought she should have been the happiest woman alive. The music room windows were open to receive the sweet May air. Across the way, she could see Belvedere Castle and its manicured lawns.
Taking her seat at Gustav’s piano, Alma’s fingers caressed the keys, itching to play, to lose herself in music as she had always done. How marvelous it would be to compose, to even have regular lessons again. But she had made her pact with Gustav. Then again, he was away at the opera. He wouldn’t even know. The shiver of the forbidden rippled through her when she opened the heavy accordion-pleated folder where she kept her scores hidden away. Her lieder and sonatas. But when she tried to play her song “Bei dir ist es traut,” her fingers froze on the keys.
Gustav would know she had broken her promise. He would read it at once from the distraction on her face. He could tell when she was elsewhere, lost in reverie. Straying from her absolute dedication to him felt like a sin as grave as adultery. He was as demanding a taskmaster with her as he was with his musicians, accepting nothing less than her utmost effort.
In the hallway, the telephone rang, a shrill shattering of the stillness. Alma nearly twisted her ankle to pick it up on the fifth ring. Gustav’s assistant at the opera informed her that her husband was on his way home for the midday meal.
“Resi!” Alma shouted, rushing into the kitchen. “Hurry with the soup.”
As if to spite them both, the maid was still sullenly chopping celery.
“Meine Güte, all these cursed vegetables!” Resi grumbled, a look of martyrdom on her face, as they surveyed the cutting board of sliced carrots and onions. “You know, Fräulein Justine was so conscientious, she insisted on making the Herr Direktor’s vegetarian cuisine herself. She would trust no one else! What do I know of such things? I have to chop up an entire garden just to make soup!”
After years of serving Justine, Resi seemed especially resentful of having to take orders from Alma, the young usurper. Too exasperated to argue, Alma began flinging the vegetables the maid had already managed to chop into the simmering pot of vegetable stock. It was true that they would taste better if they were first browned in butter before going into the broth, but there was simply no time. It took Gustav less than fifteen minutes to march home from the opera. When he reached the street-level entrance of their building, he’d ring the bell downstairs to alert Alma that he had arrived. By the time he had climbed the four flights of stairs to their apartment, he expected to find his hot soup waiting for him on the table.
“Are there fresh rolls?” Alma asked Resi. “Butter? Honey and fruit?”
“Yes,” Resi sputtered. “I had to run to the market and drag my basket up all those stairs. My knees are murdering me. Why can’t we get our groceries delivered? Fräulein Justine used to let us get everything delivered.”
“You know we must economize, Resi.”
Alma wondered how she had been saddled with the most unbiddable maid in Vienna. Back at Mama and Carl’s house, Cilli managed to do both the cooking and shopping without complaint. Perhaps Alma’s rudest awakening after the wedding was discovering how badly Justine had managed her brother’s finances. Carl had been right—despite Gustav’s princely salary, he was deep in debt to the tune of 50,000 gold crowns. Alma reckoned it would take at least five years of austerity to pay it off. She was beginning to feel grateful for her husband’s spartan diet.
Before Alma could stop her, Resi threw what Alma judged to be far too much salt in the soup.
“Not even chicken broth or a ham hock to add flavor,” the maid lamented. “You won’t even let me add cream.”
“My husband detests creamy soups. You know that, Resi.”
“One day that man’s crazy diet will kill him,” the maid muttered darkly.
Her heart banging in urgency, Alma raced the clock to set the table and fill the water glasses. She folded the linen napkins and arranged the vase of lilacs just so. Her husband kept to a rigid schedule, rising early when she was still too racked with morning sickness to lift her head from the pillow. He worked on his music, hammering on the piano, before he sprinted off to the opera at nine. After the midday meal, he insisted on a long walk for the both of them owing to his conviction that exercise was imperative for healthy digestion. They hiked either four times around Belvedere Park or else once around the entire circuit of the Ringstrasse. Then they took their Jause, a light repast, at five before he returned to the opera. When he was conducting, he expected to see her in the director’s box. If he wasn’t directing, he still expected Alma to arrive at the opera on foot at the end of the evening and walk him home. After their late supper, they might have some precious time together to talk or play four-hand piano before they both collapsed exhausted into bed.
Gustav could tolerate no disruption in his routine even to accommodate her pregnancy or their newlywed status. There were to be no surprise guests, no parties, and no salongoing unless he scheduled it. As his wife, Alma now had to safeguard his peace and privacy just as Justine had in the past. In this vein, Alma had taken to sleeping in Justine’s old room so her bouts of nausea wouldn’t disturb his rest. Being pregnant was so all-consuming, she could barely manage living according to Gustav’s regime and could only wonder how much harder it would be once the baby was actually there, demanding all her attention.
She jumped to hear her husband ring the bell downstairs.
“Resi, be quick with that soup!” Alma shouted, before opening their apartment door, a thing Gustav insisted on, to save him the trouble of fumbling for his key.
No sooner than the maid had delivered the s
oup to the table, Gustav marched in like a conquering hero, a healthy color in his face. Banging doors open and shut, he sprinted to the washroom to clean his hands and face before returning to kiss Alma and take his seat at the table.
“Almschi, you look so pale,” he remarked. “You need to spend more time outdoors.”
Thanks to Resi’s sabotage, the soup was both undercooked and oversalted. Gustav shook his head in dismay.
“Almschi, perhaps you should study Justi’s cookbooks. I’m sure they have much to teach you.”
Alma smiled thinly. Her sister-in-law, as her final dig before departing her brother’s household to begin her new life as Arnold Rosé’s wife, had most pointedly left behind her cookbooks for Alma’s edification. Then again, not even Alma’s own mother would feel much sympathy for her plight. Hadn’t Mama warned her that one day Alma would come to regret her utter dearth of domestic skills? Gretl, after all, had done the proper thing and taken cooking lessons before marriage, studying recipes with the same zeal as Alma had once studied counterpoint. A sense of loss flooded Alma again, a grief she tried to swallow down like the god-awful soup. Now that she and Gustav were married, the wild romance of their courtship seemed well and truly over. He was no longer the ardent lover who had sworn he couldn’t live without her but a schoolmaster sternly shaping her into the wife he expected her to be.
“Please, Almschi, no white rolls next time. You know I eat only whole-grain bread.”
Not able to stomach the soup, Alma nibbled on a poppy-seed roll her husband wouldn’t touch. Gustav, meanwhile, spoke excitedly about their upcoming trip to Crefeld, Germany, where he had been invited to direct his Third Symphony.
“I know it’s only a provincial town, but just imagine, Almschi. My Third will be performed in its entirety for the very first time!”
When he looked at her like that, on fire with enthusiasm, so much love in his eyes, her resentment and misgiving melted away.
“What a triumph for you, Gustl.” Alma reached across the table to take his hand. “For us.”
Perhaps a change of scene was all it would take to make everything sweet again. Deliver me, o gods of music, from the hell of housekeeping. For a few blessed weeks, Alma would be spared from having to wrangle with Resi. There would be parties and receptions, and Alma could be her convivial old self, laughing and charming her way into the hearts of Gustav’s hosts. But what would she wear? By June, she would be six months pregnant. As for buying new clothes, finances were tight, but the thought of squeezing herself into last year’s summer apparel was a daunting one. She might have to swallow her pride and beg Mama to lend her some of her reform dresses that were loose enough to accommodate her swelling body.
Mama, is it normal to feel this lonely as a wife? The question Alma didn’t dare speak aloud clung to her tongue like the taste of bitter medicine. Perhaps she could confide in Gretl, but she had Gretl’s fragile nerves to consider. At least her sister seemed happier in her marriage these days. She had written Alma an exultant letter announcing that she, too, was pregnant with her first child. Mama was over the moon.
“This year I’ll be a grandmother twice over,” Mama said.
In the garden at the Hohe Warte, Alma and her mother sat in the grass with little Maria, who was nearly three years old. The pudgy, dark-haired child was busy building a fortress of painted wooden blocks. If her little half sister had been a boy, she and Mama would be joking that the child had a future as an architect. But, poor Maria, you’re just a girl. Even if you grow up among artists, you’ll only get married and have babies.
The men sat only yards away, but they were in a separate sphere, discussing the symbiosis of art and music. The painter Alfred Roller, Carl’s colleague from the Secession, was embarking on a collaboration with Gustav to design stage sets for the Court Opera’s production of Tristan und Isolde this coming winter. Alma watched with yearning as Herr Roller showed his sketches to her husband. How she longed to wriggle away from her little half sister to join the men’s discussion. Carl and Kolo Moser were also gathered there, all four men engaged in a spirited conversation. But now that Alma was an expectant mother, everyone, including Gustav and Mama, seemed to think it crucial that she at least make an appearance of doting on little Maria. Besides, even if Alma had brazenly elbowed her way to the table, there wasn’t a free chair for her to occupy. She could only observe as the men lionized her husband.
Both Mama and Carl had come to worship Gustav. During Alma’s visits to what had once been her home, she had come to feel like the odd one out, with her mother and stepfather falling over themselves to make Gustav welcome. Cilli loved to spoil him with special vegetarian dishes that made the food coming out of Alma’s kitchen taste like pig slop. From the open kitchen windows, Alma caught the aroma of vegetable strudel baking in the oven.
“I must go in to help Cilli,” Mama said. “You’ll watch Maria, won’t you, dear?” With a covert glance at the men, Mama lowered her voice. “Cilli’s copied some recipes for you. Poor Gustav looks like he’s lost weight since the wedding. You have to try harder in the kitchen, darling, even if it means firing that awful Resi and getting someone else. Your sister, for all her travails, still manages to serve her husband a decent meal.”
At that, Mama disappeared inside the French doors and left Alma in charge of Maria. With dogged insistence, the three-year-old stacked her castle walls higher and higher until the entire edifice collapsed around her. Alma tried to help the child rebuild, but Maria slapped at Alma’s hands in frustration.
“Mama!” Maria wailed, only then seeming to notice that she had been left alone with Alma.
Shrieking in alarm, the child charged in the direction of the open French doors only to trip over her own blocks before Alma could catch her. Falling headfirst, her half sister banged her head and began to scream in earnest. Alma took the child in her arms and frantically tried to soothe her. But Maria only howled inconsolably for her mother.
Mama stormed out, her hands on her hips. “Alma, can’t I leave you alone with your sister for one minute?”
Gustav, who prized his peace and quiet, came to gently take Maria from Alma’s arms. “Such a powerful set of lungs,” he said indulgently. “Maria Moll, I think you’ll be an opera diva one day.”
The child stopped screaming to gaze at him in astonishment as he crooned a lullaby, bouncing her in his arms until Maria was grinning. With a fit of giggles, she attempted to yank off his spectacles. Gustav seemed so natural with children. He’d had much more practice with his large family of younger siblings. After his parents’ deaths he had stood in as a father figure for them.
“Maria,” he said, in his Bohemian-accented German, not rolling the r. “If Almschi and I have a little girl, we shall also name her Maria. After my mother.”
Although Alma supposed that she should be grateful to Gustav for rescuing her from her half sister’s tantrum, she found she was furious beyond words that he had already named their unborn child without so much as asking her opinion.
Mama thanked Gustav profusely before shaking her head at Alma. “Thank goodness one of you is good with children.”
Alma smarted, aware that Carl, Alfred Roller, and Kolo Moser were staring at her in horror, as if her ineptitude with a toddler proved that she was a monstrosity. Now that her complete incompetence as a woman in all areas apart from the bedroom and the ballroom had been firmly established, she wanted to cover her face and hide. Read Nietzsche and pound out Götterdämmerung on what had once been her piano.
As if fearful that Alma might make matters even worse by saying something ungracious, Mama loudly summoned her to help give Maria her bath. “You should know how to bathe a child, seeing as you’re having one.”
Alma, her mother, and Maria passed through the parlor, where Carl’s latest paintings were on display. Since Alma had left home, her stepfather’s art had undergone a radical transformation. A large tender portrait showed Mama and Maria at the breakfast table, their every gestur
e radiating domestic bliss. Now that Alma had moved out, it seemed that their beautiful modern home was an oasis of tranquility. No wonder they couldn’t wait to see the last of me.
21
At the end of May, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Alma and Gustav made the long train journey to Crefeld, an industrial city of 100,000 souls on the banks of the Rhine just north of Düsseldorf. The city appeared as a dusty jumble of neoclassical buildings, textile factories, workers’ tenements, and brand-new villas where the factory owners resided. Since Crefeld possessed little in the way of inns, she and Gustav were invited to stay in one such industrialist’s oppressively overfurnished home. Their wealthy host offered up his own master bedroom to the famous guest conductor and his wife.
Crefeld struck Alma as backward and hopelessly provincial. She and Gustav could hardly step out of their host’s front gate to go for a walk without being trailed by a gang of loudmouthed youths heckling Alma for her reform dress, the only clothing she could bear in this miserable heat.
“Hey, lady, why are you wearing a flour sack?”
The pimply yokels also taunted Gustav on account of his eccentric gait, his nervously twitching leg, his habit of carrying his hat instead of wearing it. Even when they returned to their host’s home, the boys loitered outside, loudly mocking Gustav’s and Alma’s foreign accents.
Though Gustav was accustomed to drawing crowds of curious onlookers wherever he went, this puerile taunting seemed to wear him down. As a man who relied on his routine and privacy, he appeared completely out of his element. Alma managed to persuade him to give up their punishing walks in the heat and instead hire a carriage to take them into the countryside, where they might leave their tormentors behind and find some peace and a cooling breeze.
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