by Colm Toibin
“Why don’t you stop by your father’s office anymore?” his mother asked. “He has mentioned it several times.”
“I will go there tomorrow,” Thomas said.
On the way home from school, however, he thought of the ease he would feel in his own house, finding a place away from everyone, reading his book or just dreaming. He decided that he would go to his father’s office later in the week.
Thomas had a memory of a day in that house in Lübeck with his mother at the piano and himself at the violin, when Heinrich appeared in the doorway without warning and stood watching them. As Thomas continued playing, he was alert to Heinrich’s presence. They had shared a room for some years, but did not do so anymore.
Heinrich, four years older than he, fairer in complexion, had become a handsome man. That was what Thomas noticed.
Heinrich, who was eighteen then, clearly saw that he was being studied by his younger brother. For one or two seconds, he must also have spotted that the gaze included an element of uneasy desire. The music, Thomas remembered, was slow and undemanding to play, one of Schubert’s early pieces for piano and violin, or perhaps even a transcription of a song. His mother’s attention was on the sheet music so that she did not take in the way in which her two sons looked at each other. Thomas was not sure that she even knew Heinrich was there. Slowly, as he blushed in embarrassment at what his brother had seen in him, Thomas looked away.
When his brother had gone, Thomas desperately tried to play the violin in time with his mother as though nothing had occurred. Finally, however, they had to stop; he was making too many mistakes for them to carry on.
Nothing like this ever happened again. Heinrich had needed to let him know that he saw into his spirit. That was all. But the memory remained: the room, the light from the long window, his mother at the piano, his own solitude as he stood close to her trying to play, and the music, the soft sounds they made. And then the sudden eye contact. And the return to normality, or something that might have resembled normality were an outsider to have come into the room.
Heinrich was happy to leave school and take up employment in a bookshop in Dresden. In his absence Thomas grew even dreamier. He simply could not apply himself to study or to listen much to teachers. In the background, like some thundering noise, was the ominous idea that he would turn out, once the time came for him to behave like a grown-up, to be no use to anyone.
Instead, he would embody decline. Decline would be in the very sound of the notes he played when he practiced the violin, in the very words when he read a book.
He knew that he was being observed, not just in the family circle, but at school, at church. He loved listening to his mother playing the piano and following her when she went to her boudoir. But he also liked being pointed out on the street, respected as an upright son of the senator. He had soaked up his father’s self-importance, but he also had elements of his mother’s artistic nature, her whimsicality.
Some in Lübeck took the view that the brothers were, in fact, not merely examples of a decline in their own household but presentiments of a new weakness in the world itself, especially in a northern Germany that had once been proud of its manliness.
Much then depended on their younger brother, Viktor, born when Heinrich was nineteen and Thomas almost fifteen.
“Since the first two boys have grown so attached to poetry,” Aunt Elisabeth said, “we can only hope that this new one prefers ledgers and account books.”
* * *
In the summer, once the family arrived at Travemünde for their four weeks’ holiday by the sea, all thought of school and teachers, grammar and ratios and the dreaded gymnastics was banished.
In the beachside hotel, a Swiss-style lodge, Thomas, who was fifteen, woke in a tidy little room with old-fashioned furniture to the sound of the gardener raking the gravel under the bright white sky of a summer morning on the Baltic.
With his mother and Ida Buchwald, her female companion, he had breakfast on the balcony of the dining room or under the tall chestnut tree outside. Beyond them was the short grass, giving way to the taller shore vegetation and then the sandy beach.
His father seemed to take pleasure in the hotel’s minor shortcomings. He believed the tablecloths to be too hastily laundered and the tissue-paper napkins to be vulgar; the strange bread and the metal eggcups were not to be tolerated. And then, having listened to him complain, Julia would calmly shrug.
“Everything will be perfect when we go home.”
When Lula asked her mother why their father seldom came to the beach with them, she smiled.
“He enjoys being in the hotel, and he doesn’t want to come to the beach. So why should we make him?”
Thomas and his siblings would go with his mother and Ida to the beach and curl up on the chairs put in place by the hotel staff. The hum of conversation between the two women would stop only when anyone new appeared and they would both sit up to see who it was. And then, curiosity satisfied, they would start up again in a kind of languid whisper. And soon, at their urging, in his bathing suit, Thomas would approach the waves, edging himself in, afraid first of the cold, jumping as each gentle wave came, and then letting the water embrace him.
In the interminable late afternoons, there were hours by the bandstand, or times when Ida read to him under the trees behind the hotel before they would go to sit at the end of the rampart in the twilight and wave a handkerchief at the ships going by. And then it would be time for supper, and later he would often go to his mother’s room to watch her prepare for her descent to the dining room on the hotel’s glassed-in veranda to have dinner with her husband, surrounded by families not only from Hamburg but from England and even Russia, as he himself got ready for sleep.
On the days when it rained, when the west wind blew the sea back, he would spend time at the upright piano in the lobby. It had been battered by all the waltz music played on it, and he could not get the same rich tones and undertones that the grand piano at home yielded, but it had a funny, muted, gurgling tone of its own that he knew he would miss once the holiday was over.
His father, that last summer, returned to Lübeck after a few days, under the pretext that he had urgent work to do. But when he appeared again, he did not join them for breakfast and, no matter how fine the day was, remained reading in the drawing room with a rug around him as though he were an invalid. Since he did not accompany them on any of their outings, they carried on as if he were still away.
It was only when Thomas went looking for his mother one evening, finally finding her in his father’s room, that he was forced to notice his father, who was lying in bed staring at the ceiling with his mouth open.
“Poor dear,” his mother said, “work has tired him out so much. This holiday will do him good.”
The next day, his mother and Ida followed their normal routine, without any mention that they had left the senator in bed in his room. When Thomas asked his mother if his father was sick, she reminded him that the senator had had a minor bladder operation some months earlier.
“He is still recovering,” his mother said. “Soon he will be running into the water.”
What was strange, Thomas thought, was how little he could remember of his father ever swimming or lying on the beach during earlier summer holidays. Instead, he recalled him reading the newspaper in a deck chair on the veranda, his supply of Russian cigarettes on the table beside him, or waiting outside his mother’s room as Julia drifted dreamily inside in the time before dinner.
One day as they walked back from the beach, his mother asked him to visit his father in his room, perhaps even read to him should his father ask. When Thomas demurred, letting her know that he wanted to hear the band play, she insisted, saying that his father was expecting him.
In the room, his father was sitting up in bed, with a crisp white sheet around his neck, while the hotel barber shaved him. He nodded to Thomas and indicated that he should sit on the chair nearest the window. Thomas found a book th
at was open with its pages facing downwards and began to flick through it. It was the sort of book that Heinrich might read, he thought. He hoped his father did not want him to read from this.
He became absorbed in the slow, intricate way the barber was shaving his father, following broad sweeps of the open razor with tiny movements. When the barber had done one half of the face, he stood back to examine his work and then set about cutting away tiny hairs near the nose and on the upper lips with a small scissors. His father stared straight ahead.
Then the barber got to work again, taking off the rest of the lather. When he had finished, he produced a bottle of cologne and, as his father winced, he applied it liberally and then clapped his hands in satisfaction.
“This will put the barbers of Lübeck to shame,” he said, taking off the white sheet and folding it. “And people will flock to Travemünde for the best shave.”
Thomas’s father lay on the bed. His striped pajamas were perfectly ironed. Thomas saw that his father’s toenails were cut with care, except for the little toe on the left foot where the nail seemed to have curled around the toe. He wished he had scissors so that he could try to cut it properly. And then he realized what an absurd idea this was. His father would hardly let him cut his toenails.
He was still holding the book. If he did not put it aside quickly, his father might see it and call on him to read from it, or he might ask him something about it.
His father soon closed his eyes and appeared to be asleep, but presently he opened them again and gazed blankly at the wall opposite. Thomas wondered if this would be an opportune moment to ask his father about ships, which ones were due in port and which were due to depart. And maybe, if his father became loquacious, inquire about fluctuations in the price of grain. Or mention Prussia so that his father could complain about the unpleasant manners and uncouth eating habits of Prussian officials, even men who claimed to come from good families.
He glanced at his father again and saw that he was fast asleep. Within a short time, he was snoring. Thomas thought that he might now put the book on the bedside table. He stood up and went closer to the bed. The shaving had made his father’s face look pale as well as smooth.
He wasn’t sure how long he was expected to stay. He wished someone from the hotel would come with fresh water or fresh towels, but he supposed all of that was already in place. He did not expect his mother to come. He knew that she had sent him to the room so that she could relax in the hotel gardens or go back to the beach with Ida and his sisters or with Viktor and the maid. If he set foot outside this room, he believed, his mother would surely hear about it.
He walked around, touching the newly laundered sheets, but, worried that he might disturb his father, he stepped away.
When his father let out a cry, the sound was so strange that he believed for an instant that someone else was in the room. But then his father began to shout out words and it was a familiar voice that Thomas heard, even though the words made no sense. His father was sitting up in bed, holding his stomach. After some effort, he managed to stand out on the floor only to fall back weakly onto the bed.
Thomas’s first response was to move away from him in fright, but as his father lay back moaning with his eyes closed, his hands still holding his stomach, Thomas approached him and asked if he should go and look for his mother.
“Nothing,” his father said.
“What? Should I not get my mother?”
“Nothing,” his father repeated. He opened his eyes and looked at Thomas, his expression a kind of grimace.
“You know nothing,” his father said.
Thomas darted from the room. On the stairs, having found that he had descended one floor too many, he ran up to the lobby and found the concierge, who called the manager. As he was explaining to both what had happened, his mother and Ida appeared.
He followed all of them to the room, only to find that his father was peacefully asleep on the bed.
His mother sighed and quietly apologized for the fuss. Thomas knew that it would be futile to try to explain to her what he had witnessed.
* * *
His father continued to weaken when they returned to Lübeck, but he lived until October.
He heard his aunt Elisabeth complain that as the senator lay on his deathbed he interrupted the sacred words of the clergyman with a brisk “Amen.”
“He was never good at listening,” she said, “but I would have thought that he would listen to the clergyman.”
In the last days of their father’s life, Heinrich seemed to know how to be with his mother, but Thomas could not think what to say to her. When she hugged him, she pulled him too close; he believed that he offended her by his strenuous efforts to release himself.
When he heard Aunt Elisabeth whispering to a cousin about his father’s will, he moved nonchalantly away and then sneaked in close, enough to hear her say that Julia could not be given too much responsibility.
“And the boys!” she said. “Those two boys! The family is over now. I suppose people will laugh at me in the street, the very people who would always bow.”
As she continued, the cousin noticed Thomas listening and nudged her.
“Thomas, go and make sure your sisters are properly dressed,” Aunt Elisabeth said. “I saw Carla wearing the most unsuitable shoes.”
At the funeral, Julia Mann smiled wanly at those who offered her sympathy but did not encourage them to say anything more to her. She retreated into her own world, keeping her daughters close, allowing her sons to represent the family, should that be necessary, by speaking to those who came to console them.
“Can you keep these people away from me?” she asked. “If they ask if there is anything they can do, could you implore them not to look at me in that sorrowful way?”
Thomas had never seen her as so elaborately foreign and mysterious.
A day after the funeral, with her five children in the drawing room, Julia observed that her sister-in-law Elisabeth, with the help of Heinrich, was moving the sofa and one of the armchairs.
“Elisabeth, don’t touch the furniture,” she said. “Heinrich, put the sofa back where it was.”
“Julia, I think the sofa needs to be against the wall. There are too many tables around it where it is. You always have too much furniture. My mother always said—”
“Don’t touch the furniture!” Julia interrupted.
Elisabeth moved proudly towards the fireplace and stood there dramatically, like a woman in a play who has been wounded.
* * *
When Thomas observed Heinrich getting ready to accompany his mother to the court where the will was to be read, he wondered why he had not been included. His mother was so preoccupied, however, that he decided not to complain.
“I have always hated being on display here. How barbaric that they will read the will in public! All Lübeck will know our business. And, Heinrich, if you could keep your aunt Elisabeth from trying to link my arm as we leave the court, that would be very kind of you. And if they wish to burn me in the public square after the reading, tell them I will be free at three o’clock.”
Thomas wondered who would run the business now. He imagined that his father would have named some prominent men to oversee one or two of the clerks who would look after things until the family decided what to do. At the funeral, he had felt that he was being watched and pointed out as the second son upon whose shoulders a weight of responsibility would now land. He went into his mother’s room and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. If he stood sternly, he could easily see himself arriving at his office in the morning, giving instructions to his subordinates. But when he heard the voice of one of his sisters calling him from downstairs, he stepped away from the mirror and felt instantly diminished.
He listened from the top of the stairs when Heinrich and his mother came back.
“He remade that will, to let the world know what he thought of us,” Julia said. “And there they all were, the good people of Lübe
ck. Since they can’t burn witches anymore, they take the widows out and humiliate them.”
Thomas came down to the hall; he saw that Heinrich was pale. When he caught his brother’s eye, he realized that something bad and unexpected had happened.
“Take Tommy into the drawing room and close the door,” Julia said, “and tell him what has befallen us. I would play the piano now except that our neighbors would gossip about me. I will go to my room instead. I don’t want the details of this will ever mentioned again in my presence. If your aunt Elisabeth has the nerve to call, tell her I am suddenly stricken with grief.”
* * *
Having shut the door behind them, Heinrich and Thomas started to read the copy of the will that Heinrich had taken from the court.
It was dated, Thomas saw, three months earlier. It began by assigning a guardian to direct the future of the Mann children. Below that, the senator made clear his low opinion of them all.
“As far as possible,” he had written, “one should oppose my eldest son’s literary inclinations. In my opinion, he lacks the requisite education and knowledge. The basis for his inclination is fantasy and lack of discipline and his inattention to other people, possibly resulting from thoughtlessness.”
Heinrich read it out twice, laughing loudly.
“And listen to this,” he went on. “This is about you: ‘My second son has a good disposition and will adjust to a practical occupation. I can expect that he will be a support for his mother.’ So it will be you and your mother. And you will adjust! And who ever thought you had a good disposition? That is another of your disguises.”
Heinrich read to him his father’s warning against Lula’s passionate nature and his suggestion that Carla would be, next to Thomas, a calming element within the family. Of the baby Viktor, the senator wrote: “Often children who are born late develop particularly well. The child has good eyes.”