Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  “Don’t you like it, Almschi?”

  “Of course, I like it,” she said, aware of the orchestra members and music journalists hovering around them. Gawking and eavesdropping. She felt like a zoo animal on display. “You’re a genius.” She feared her words sounded as wooden as the planks beneath her aching feet.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Alma noticed one young journalist studying her with an expression of undisguised contempt. She could almost read his thoughts. She’s a monster, a philistine! She doesn’t even understand his music.

  35

  Snow drifted down, crystaline and perfect, outside the windows of the Savoy Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. In their ninth-floor suite, Alma and Gustav hosted their New Year’s Eve soiree with none other than the world’s greatest tenor, Enrico Caruso, who lived on the tenth floor.

  Caruso, thirty-six and achingly handsome, put a record on the gramophone and led Alma in a tango, teaching her the steps of the exotic Argentinian dance that was all the rage. She felt so passionate and alive, her new evening gown of scarlet silk appliqued with serpentine embroideries in metallic thread flickering like flames in the candlelight. Though she supposed that both her gown and this dance were far too flamboyant for an expectant mother—she was three months gone and not yet showing—she surrendered to the extravagant moves, almost swooning in the tenor’s arms when he dipped her low enough for her coiffure to graze the floor before he swung her back up again. Laughing in pleasure, she kicked her heels high while her guests looked on. The venerable Polish coloratura soprano Marcella Sembrich. The renowned sinologist Friedrich Hirth. And Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was also staying at the Savoy.

  Ossip’s eyes burned into Alma, raising the blood to her cheeks. It was almost too thrilling—dancing the tango with a dashing Italian while being ogled by a smoldering young Russian. She wondered if Gustav even noticed. At least her husband knew she was pregnant this time around.

  Then, at the very climax of their tango, four-and-a-half-year-old Gucki, who was supposed to be in bed, upstaged Caruso when she jumped out from her hiding place, a stack of opera scores that rose higher than her head. In her white flannel nightgown, the little girl whirled and twirled across the parquet floor, mimicking the tango’s moves while everyone laughed.

  “Brava!” Caruso cried, lifting her up and planting a kiss on her cheek before passing her to Alma. “Isadora Duncan herself couldn’t be more graceful.”

  “She loves to be the center of attention,” Gustav said drily. “Just like her mother.”

  Alma smarted and carried her daughter back to bed. She had given their new nanny, Lizzie Turner’s younger sister, Maud, the night off. Twenty-two-year-old Maud was undoubtedly off celebrating with the other young nannies and governesses residing in the Savoy.

  After Alma had finally succeeded in coaxing Gucki to sleep, cuddled up under the quilts with her stuffed rabbit, she rejoined the party. There was a swirling mélange of conversation in German and Italian. Though she and Gustav lived half the year in New York, they moved in circles that were as solidly European as the world they had left behind.

  Gustav’s second season at the Met had been fraught with conflict. The new director, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, had brought over his own star conductor, Arturo Toscanini, who had insisted on directing this season’s premiere of Tristan und Isolde, stealing the limelight from Gustav, who had spent months painstakingly staging and rehearsing the opera. Though Gustav was contractually bound to finish this season at the Met, he did not intend to return the following year. Instead, he’d signed a contract with the New York Philharmonic. Three weeks ago he had conducted the North American premiere of his Second Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Though poorly publicized and attended, it had been rapturously received. The orchestra had given Gustav a standing ovation.

  “To your success, my friend!” Caruso lifted his glass to Gustav. “I much prefer you to that Milanese peacock! Why, Toscanini is so vain, he puts all the female divas to shame.” Caruso playfully kissed Marcella Sembrich’s hand.

  Much to Alma’s relief, Gustav seemed more confident about his health lately. He took Gucki for walks through snowy Central Park and sometimes walked to work.

  “Let Gatti-Casazza do his worst,” Gustav said. “Meanwhile, I’ll take all the money the Met pays me so I can spend the summer composing in peace.”

  He will be in the mountains composing, Alma thought. While I’ll be at Mama’s, having the baby. The child was due in June. They had given up their Vienna apartment in the Auenbruggergasse, and their furniture was in storage. She was already dreading the eight-day Atlantic crossing and hoped it wouldn’t be too rough.

  “To your music, Herr Direktor!” Ossip raised his glass.

  They gathered around the grand piano to hear Gustav play from his newly completed Das Lied von der Erde while Sembrich sang. Alma, despite her many uncertainties, thought her heart would break from her love of Gustav and his artistry. These Chinese poems he had set to music were true songs of the earth, as opposed to his early symphonies of heavenly transcendence. The lyrics were a bittersweet ode to the transience of mortal existence coupled with the sensual ecstasy of being alive. The second movement, “Der Einsame im Herbst,” The Lonely One in Autumn, gave particular voice to her deepest yearning.

  “I’ve never heard anything so beautiful and sad,” Alma said, when the music had ended. “You can’t separate its sadness from its beauty.”

  “Just like life itself,” Gustav said. “When I was young, I used to romanticize death. But now, when I can taste my own mortality, I’ve never been less certain of any kind of afterlife. What if this is all there is?”

  Alma stared at him, her throat thick with emotion to hear him speak so frankly of his deepest fears. How she wished they were alone together. She would wrap her arms around him and hold him. His openhearted tenderness would be heaven enough for her. But she stepped into the background once more while Friedrich Hirth proceeded to unroll a Chinese scroll painting on the dining table.

  “Herr Direktor, I brought this as an homage to your Das Lied von der Erde,” Hirth said. “A visual tableau of the poetry of impermanence.”

  Alma leaned close to examine this exquisite artwork. A silver river wound like a liquid dragon through green hills. The river rolled past peasants toiling in their rice paddies. Past fishermen mending their nets. Past artisans firing their pots. Past wandering monks with their begging bowls and merchants returning from their expeditions. Past a teahouse high on a bluff where mandarins were taking their refreshments while a courtesan played music on some exotic instrument. Human beings, from the lowliest to the most exalted, lived out their short, measured lives while that river flowed into eternity.

  The image filled Alma with an unspeakable melancholy, a sense of emptiness devouring her from within. How vain and foolish our little lives are. Ossip looked up from the scroll, his eyes soft. She lowered her head so no one could see her blush. Ossip had hardly said a word to her all night, but his every glance spoke volumes. He’s still in love with me. The memory of their encounter in Paris sent her pulse tripping.

  Hirth rolled up his priceless scroll just as the clock chimed midnight.

  “Happy 1909!” Alma called out to her guests. “May it be filled with happiness!”

  “The Year of the Rooster!” Hirth cried.

  They ran to the windows to see the sky explode with fireworks and then exchanged New Year’s kisses. Caruso kissed Alma a bit longer and more greedily than he should have—he was Neapolitan, after all. But it was Ossip’s much more bashful kiss that sent an electric charge through her. She had to laugh and push him away lest she betray her deep hunger and need.

  His face bright red, Ossip sat at the piano. “I dedicate this to our beautiful hostess.”

  He played Brahms’s Intermezzo in A Minor, one of her favorites. Alma closed her eyes, allowing the music to carry her away to a place beyond sadness.

  Afterward, her guests said their good-byes. Gus
tav excused himself and went to bed. But Ossip lingered. Left alone together, he and Alma sat on the window seat and watched the falling snow.

  “They say there will be a blizzard tomorrow,” Ossip said.

  Alma shivered. “American weather terrifies me. Blizzards and tornadoes and hurricanes! Vienna was never so extreme. But you’re Russian. You’re not afraid of winter storms.”

  His eyes moved over her face. “I think it’s more than the weather that frightens you, Alma. I thought you were going to start crying when you looked at that Chinese painting. The only time you came alive tonight was when you were dancing with Caruso.” Ossip sounded palpably jealous, which made her smile in spite of herself.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I was very, very happy when you played Brahms for me.”

  “I’m so glad. I just wish I had the power to make you happy for longer than the duration of one piano movement.”

  She swallowed, floundering.

  “I think we must be brave enough,” he said, “to seize whatever chance of joy life brings us.” He stared into her eyes with unmasked love.

  Alma quivered. The best thing would be to cut him off now before he said too much. Before either of them transgressed the bounds of propriety. She rose shakily to her feet while he remained seated, gazing up at her.

  “Alma, I tried to forget you. It’s not right what I feel for you. I idolize your husband, but I . . .”

  It seemed he couldn’t go on speaking. Instead, he kissed her hand. And then the inside of her wrist. Alma’s knees went weak.

  “If I respected your husband any less, I would elope with you.” His young face was incandescent.

  Had Gustav ever looked at her like that? I married the wrong man. Ossip would support my composing. She imagined the two of them clasping hands and leaping out the ninth-story window. Instead of falling to their deaths, they would float through the snowy sky above this enchanted city with its constellations of electric lights. But the reality that she was three months pregnant brought her crashing back to earth.

  “No.” Alma drew away, crossing her arms in front of herself. “I could never do that to my husband.”

  Ossip rose from the window seat. “May I at least offer you my love from afar? My fealty? You the lady in the tower and I your knight errant?” His eyes shone.

  She breathed in his smell of tobacco and sandalwood. With his intelligence and intensity, his sheer devotion, this man was irresistible. Her thoughts roved back to the Chinese painting and her own constrained and truncated life. What if this is all there is? She couldn’t say for certain if she moved toward Ossip or he toward her. But their kiss engulfed her, that slow-burning consummation of their almost kiss in Paris. Never had Alma thought that a kiss could be as powerfully erotic as lovemaking itself, inflaming every part of her body, saturating her in bliss. She thought she would fall gasping over the edge of ecstasy. Finally, she tore herself away.

  “Goodnight, Ossip,” she said, breathing as hard as if she had raced up nine flights of stairs.

  “I love you, Alma Maria.”

  Alma walked him to the door. After one last breathless kiss, he wrenched himself away and stole out. Alma locked the door behind him, then leaned against the solid oak and swayed, savoring the aftermath of their kisses still burning on her mouth. The taste of him on her tongue. She tiptoed to her room. All night I shall dream I’m sleeping in Ossip’s arms.

  She stifled a shriek to see Gustav sitting on her bed, his face haggard. “Do you care to explain your infidelity?”

  He seemed to regard her as though she were Jezebel incarnate, quaking before him in her scarlet dress.

  “I wasn’t unfaithful,” she said, shocking herself with the force of her anger that rose stronger than shame. If you hadn’t left me feeling so lonely and unloved, this never would have happened.

  “I overheard your entire conversation. Do you think I’m stupid? He wanted to run away with you.”

  “But I told him no!” Her voice rose and cracked. “I told him my place is with you.”

  “You kissed him! I can see it on your face. That glow like you had when you were a girl.”

  When Gustav was angry, he frightened her. Those throbbing zigzag veins like lightning bolts on his temples. He had become the wrathful Zeus.

  She covered her face and wept. “Of course, I kissed him. It’s New Year’s Eve! Would you deprive me of his friendship?”

  “If you call that friendship, you’re as big a child as Gucki.” With that parting remark, Gustav walked out of the room.

  Alma couldn’t sleep that night, could only huddle at the window and watch the falling snow blanket the expanse of Central Park. So white and pure. Unsullied. Unlike the passions inside her fractured heart.

  36

  In February 1909, Gustav’s appointment with the New York Philharmonic was officially announced. He had a committee of women to thank for the ease by which he could make this transition just as his relationship with the Metropolitan Opera had turned sour. Mrs. Minnie Untermyer and Mrs. Mary Seney Sheldon had raised more than $100,000 to fund a newly formed Philharmonic worthy of Gustav’s vision and genius.

  These ladies invited Alma as their guest of honor to a gala luncheon at the New York Women’s Club, an immense structure designed in the style of an Italian palazzo with marble floors, arched loggias and balconies, high-beamed ceilings and massive chandeliers. There was even a ladies-only swimming pool and gymnasium in the annex. When Alma stepped into the grand entrance, Mrs. Seney Sheldon greeted her with air kisses and showed her to her seat at the head table. These women were so elegant, flawlessly coiffured as only rich American ladies could be, not a strand out of place. Alma felt positively shabby in her best tweed suit and crepe-de-chine blouse. Even her pearls felt drab compared to their diamonds and gold. While the waiter filled their crystal glasses with punch au kirsch, Alma endeavored to speak her best English while she answered the ladies’ questions about her husband. Of her own thwarted musical dreams she didn’t dare speak.

  As kind and hospitable as these ladies were, Alma had to admit she was intimidated. What a debt Gustav owed them. What if he, with his quirks and stubborn egotism, managed to alienate them—who would come to their rescue then?

  Alma’s halting attempt at small talk was interrupted when a latecomer galloped in with a ricochet of boot heels on the marble floor. A petite woman in an ill-fitting coat and a skirt that appeared the worse for wear.

  “Howdy, ladies!” she called out. “Sorry I’m late. My dang bicycle had a flat tire.”

  Had this transpired in Vienna, such a person would be most unceremoniously shown to the door or at the very least snubbed. But the rich society ladies rushed from their places to swarm around this woman, greeting her with much acclaim. Following their example, Alma went to shake her hand.

  “Mrs. Alma Mahler, this is our other guest of honor,” Mrs. Untermyer said. “Miss Natalie Curtis. She’s an ethnomusicologist and lived for years with the Hopi Indians in Arizona. She’s written two books on Indian culture, and she’s also a composer.”

  Alma felt a rush in her head halfway between envy and blinding awe. Meanwhile, Miss Curtis pumped Alma’s hand enthusiastically. She was, Alma noted, not even wearing gloves. Her mousy hair was windblown and scraped back in a careless bun.

  “Frau Direktor Mahler, what a pleasure to meet you,” Miss Curtis said, in flawless German. “I’m a huge fan of your husband. I studied piano in Bayreuth with his great admirer, the late Anton Seidl. My Hopi name is Tawi-Mana, by the way. That means Song Maid.”

  Alma’s mouth opened as wide as a fishbowl. How truly democratic America is! The wealthiest and most glittering ladies in New York bowed down in humble respect before Miss Curtis’s brilliance and originality.

  “You lived with Indians?” Alma asked in English, out of consideration for the other ladies. “In Arizona?” She could scarcely imagine such a thing.

  Mrs. Seney Sheldon laughed affectionately. “Not only did
our dear Miss Curtis camp in the desert for six years, she brought an Apache chief to a party at President Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay. She and the chief cornered Mr. Roosevelt to discuss tribal land rights.”

  Alma stared at Miss Curtis in abject wonder. In Austria there were New Women like the Conrat sisters who studied at the university and pursued a life in the arts, but never had Alma imagined that a woman could be this free, this intrepid, this bold. Only in America. Although Alma was officially here on Gustav’s behalf to sing his praises to his wealthy patrons, she found herself entranced by Miss Curtis’s every word. Four years older than Alma, Natalie Curtis came from an established New York family who were friends with the Roosevelts. She had studied at the National Conservatory of Music of America to become a concert pianist, but at the age of twenty-five, she visited Arizona and fell in love with the Hopi culture. And thus she had dedicated her career to helping preserve Hopi music, recording it on wax cylinders.

  “Do you know that the Bureau of Indian Affairs forbade these people to speak their own language and sing their own songs?” Miss Curtis asked, her brown eyes flashing in righteous anger.

  Alma shook her head. To be honest, she’d never given much thought to the world outside Europe and New York.

  “So Miss Curtis browbeat Mr. Roosevelt into changing that law, too,” Mrs. Seney Sheldon said, in a tone of frank amazement.