Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  Mahler puffed away, remote as a cold moon. It seemed he wasn’t going to speak.

  Mitch rubbed his eyes, hoping that when he looked up, he would be home. But he was still in Central Park with Gustav Mahler. “What is it you want?”

  “I have been watching you from up there.” Mahler pointed up to the hotel window.

  Of course, he had watched Mitch walk across the street into Central Park and take his seat on this bench. Perhaps Alma had urged him to follow.

  “You seem like a man who doesn’t know his place in the world.” Mahler sighed, blowing out blue smoke, watching it coil in the air around him. He hummed something, distracted.

  A familiar tune. Mitch recognized it. From the Sixth Symphony. The second subject of the first movement. It surged out of the bleak militarism of the rest of that tragic symphony, ecstatic, like a flock of doves released from a battlefield. It was supposed to be his portrait of Alma.

  Surely, he had already written it and wasn’t coming up with the idea this moment?

  “I can’t stay. I don’t belong here.”

  Mahler looked up, as if Mitch had talked to him out of the blue. “Who is she?”

  Mitch gave him the locket. The old man peered at the two faces.

  Is he old? Mitch thought. He seemed so much older, but weren’t they the same age? Mahler had died aged fifty, or fifty-one, and that was some time soon, because the last photograph of him was on the boat from New York, sailing back to Vienna where he died soon after. Did he have a year to live? Two?

  Mahler handed back the locket.

  “I have to get back to her,” Mitch said.

  “Where is she?”

  “It’s not really a matter of where. It’s complicated.”

  “All females are.” Mahler tossed his cigarette onto the bridle path. “If it were up to me, I would leave you to find your beloved. But my wife sees you as the answer to her problem. She thinks we need you. And when she thinks she needs something, she is unshakeable. Besides, I have already dismissed her bodyguard.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Mitch. “I’m leaving right now.”

  “And yet here you stay.”

  “I’m having difficulty getting home. If I can just find the right way. It’s sort of your fault that I’ve been pulled off course.”

  Mahler patted Mitch’s knee and shrugged. “I apologize. Perhaps you are meant to do something here. Perhaps Fate has a plan for you that involves me.”

  Mahler thought it was rescuing Alma that had blown Mitch off course. No. It was Mahler’s music that had brought him here, like a siren song, leading him onto the rocks, leading him to shipwreck. Storm Eleanor had played a trick on him. It had shown him that he couldn’t reach Eleanor yet. It had brought him Mahler’s music and caught him up from the Earth in a whirlwind he couldn’t control, borne away on a tempest, and deposited in New York a century ago.

  Mahler stood up suddenly and reached inside his overcoat, pulling out a leather wallet. He pressed a wad of dollars into Mitch’s hand. “Please take this. A reward. My wife insists.”

  “I couldn’t possibly—”

  “I know, when I see it, a man with not a farthing in his pocket, not even an ounce of snuff. Take it.”

  Mitch wanted to hand the money back, but was aware of how far he might get with nothing. But wasn’t that the problem? These dead presidents would only anchor him to this time and place.

  “Your name is Raheem?” said Mahler. “You are Indian?”

  “On my mother’s side. Scottish on my father’s.”

  “You do not look Indian. I would never have guessed.”

  “No one ever does.”

  “But now I see a swarthiness in your demeanour. I took it for perhaps Italian.” Mahler turned and looked up at the Majestic, as if eager to be back there, or perhaps eager to stay a while. He put a finger to his lips, nodding. “Yes, Raheem and Mitchell. A curious constellation. Raheem means merciful, sympathetic. Mitchell is, of course, from Michael. The archangel Michael leads the forces of God against evil. You have certainly demonstrated mercy and compassion today.”

  Mahler held out his hand and Mitch shook it.

  “If you cannot find your way back to your beloved quite this moment, there is a position that is yours. But if you must be home, I wish you good speed.”

  Mahler tipped his hat and marched off with the jerking limp of a seasoned mountain walker who is too ill to climb the heights. He disappeared as he turned to find the exit, behind stark, bare trees, their patulous limbs frozen in the frigid air.

  Eleanor’s face stared back from the locket, as far away as she had ever been.

  Mitch couldn’t get back to her. Perhaps Mahler was right: he was here for a reason. Did he believe in Fate? Did he believe in anything anymore?

  Whatever his beliefs, he knew there was nothing to do but follow Gustav Mahler back into the Majestic Hotel.

  — 11 —

  WHEN HE WALKED INTO the lobby, he realized he couldn’t just take the elevator back up. He asked at reception and a concierge who looked like he was dressed for a royal wedding, told him it was impossible to phone the Mahler room and verify his status as Herr Mahler had cut off the phone.

  He sent a bellboy up. Again, the ‘boy’ was an old black man. Mitch sat on a plush green velvet sofa and pulled a New York Times off a pile. He didn’t open it, merely scanned the seven columns of dense text for two things: the inset box top left that bore the legend, All the News That’s Fit to Print, and the line under the paper’s banner.

  New York, Thursday, February 6, 1908.

  Earlier than he’d thought. The Mahlers must have been fresh to New York, and surely it was very soon after the death of Putzi. The death had been one of the three hammer blows: Putzi’s death to scarlet fever, Mahler diagnosed with a fatal heart condition, and his wife committing adultery. Was that the third blow, or was it that he’d been hounded out of Vienna by anti-Semites?

  Which of those three hammer blows had already struck Mahler, and which were yet to come?

  The bellboy returned and nodded to the concierge, who signalled that it was fine for Mister Mitchell to visit the esteemed conductor.

  The bellboy kept a dignified silence as the elevator rattled slowly up to the eleventh. Mitch stared, studying his craggy face and jaundiced eyes, wondering what horrors he had seen. Slavery had been abolished only forty-three years ago, and this man was clearly pushing sixty. If he himself hadn’t been born a slave, his parents certainly had.

  He wanted to ask him, but it felt unspeakably rude, so he said, “What’s your name, sir?”

  The bellboy looked around, as if someone else might be in the elevator with them, and Mitch realized that no one ever called this man ‘sir’, only ‘boy’.

  “My name is Clarence, sir.”

  “Well, thank you for your help, Clarence.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out the wad of notes Mahler had given him. “I didn’t tip your colleague earlier, because I had no money on me, but I have now. So please take this.”

  Clarence stared at the dollar bill as if Mitch had placed a scorpion in his white-gloved hand, and for a moment Mitch wondered if he’d insulted him by giving him too little.

  “Are you sure about this, sir?”

  “Oh yes, quite sure.”

  Clarence pocketed the dollar bill and slashed a pearly smile. “Thank you, sir.”

  Mitch had the feeling he’d given him something like a day’s pay.

  The elevator jolted to a stop, the bell chimed, and Clarence heaved open the concertina gate.

  Mitch tipped his hat and stepped out. “Thank you very much, you’ve been very helpful.”

  Clarence stepped out with him. “I have to show you to the door, sir.”

  “Oh yes. Of course.”

  Clarence walked him to the door, knocked and settled back on his heels to wait a while.

  But Alma swept the door open instantly and beamed brightly; a smile that was heavy with desperation. “Mister
Mitchell! You have returned. What great news.”

  She bundled him in and slammed the door in Clarence’s face.

  — 12 —

  MAHLER WAS SITTING at the great round walnut table in the corner of the room, on which sat a silver tea service. He looked up, nodded, but went back to his papers, lost in thought.

  A heavy pall of gloom about the room. Kahn and Dr Fraenkel had gone, leaving the Mahlers to their sombre solitude. It was a house of mourning.

  Mitch took in a deep breath and put up a wall of defence. The Mahlers were a whirlpool of grief. If he let them pull him in, he would be destroyed. Their feelings were a dangerous bacteria, a glass vial of bubonic plague. One slip and he would be infected.

  “Gustav!” Alma chided. She gave off a rapid stream of German. Something about home and situation.

  Mahler nodded, as if he’d forgotten an appointment, and waved Mitch over. “Come, my archangel Michael, and take some tea. We must talk.”

  Alma sat with them. The girl was singing next door, chanting a nursery rhyme of some sort, the voice of the governess cutting in sharply when she got it wrong.

  “We must talk of things that are most personal to us,” said Mahler. “But we now take you into our confidence because we believe that you might help us.”

  Alma clasped her palms together in prayer.

  Mitch nodded solemnly. “I understand, Herr Mahler.”

  “You may call me Gustav now. And if I may, I shall call you Raheem?”

  “Everybody calls me Mitch.”

  Gustav and Alma frowned.

  “Mitch is an awful name,” said Alma. “It is the name for a dog or a pet rabbit. I shall call you Mitchell.”

  “Then Mitchell, it is.”

  “Fine,” said Mahler. “Now, to business. I shall hire you as a chaperone cum bodyguard to my wife at a daily rate of two dollars, as of today. The fee you have already received shall not be included in that remuneration. You will accompany my wife at all hours of the day. This arrangement shall exist as long as this matter is of trouble to us, after which your services will cease. Is that clear?”

  “Which matter?”

  Mahler took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The man you fought today, when you saved my wife. He was... well, this is difficult...”

  “He was a blackmailer,” Alma said.

  Mahler snorted with annoyance and pulled his spectacles back on. “Some criminal claims to have a compromising letter that will bring shame on us. On me.”

  What he’d thought was a dance, they had been fighting over the letter. The man holding it out of her reach. Alma trying to snatch it from him.

  “Alma decided to meet this criminal in secret to ascertain that the letter was a forgery; a rather idiotic course of action for someone who is so sure of the falseness of the claim.”

  “Gustav!” Alma cried.

  “Almschi, why did you meet him if you were so sure of your innocence?”

  “Still, you do not trust me!”

  “I did not say that!”

  Alma thumped the table and stood up. “I went to protect your good name! To protect your position! They hounded you out of Vienna. I won’t see it happen again.”

  “Even a forgery can be damaging,” Mitch said in a low, soothing voice. “Look at the Dreyfus case.”

  It was the scandal of the age. An anti-Semitic lie that had brought down the French government.

  Mahler nodded and held his hands up. “Yes, of course. Terrible affair.”

  “The truth doesn’t matter to the press,” said Mitch, “only the story. And people will believe the story even when they know the truth.”

  Mahler reached out and took Alma’s hand. She sank back into her chair. “It’s all right, Almschi. I trust you. I know you did it for the best.”

  Alma snatched her hand away and took up the silver teapot. She poured a cup for Mitch and he sipped the bitter brew.

  “Alma,” said Mitch. “How were you told about this letter?”

  “There was a note, sent to the hotel.”

  “May I see it?”

  She looked to Gustav. He nodded.

  Alma went over to a Regency leather-topped drum table by the sofa and opened the drawer. She held the letter at arm’s length, as if it was infected.

  A practised scrawl on the envelope. A cultured pen. Inside, a short note.

  To the Wife of the Esteemed Maestro. Madame “Alma” Mahler.

  It has come to our attention that a scandal is abroad in the shape of a Letter — written by yourself—that most assuredly Compromises you. This letter shall be brought to the knowledge of the Public and the sponsors of the Metropolitan Opera so that this Scandal may come to light. That is, if you do not pay the sum of $1,000 for its return. Meet at 35, West 23rd Street at noon tomorrow, if you will.

  Yours, Rolando.

  “Do you know a Rolando?” Mitch asked.

  “A reference to La Battaglia de Legnano, no doubt,” said Mahler.

  They saw Mitch’s nonplussed face.

  “You don’t know this opera?” asked Alma.

  “Forgive me, I’m not a great follower of opera. I’m more of an aficionado of symphonies.”

  “Strange,” said Mahler. “In Verdi’s opera, the heroine, Lida, is married to Rolando, but discovers her former lover and Rolando’s best friend, Arrigo, who was thought to have died, is in fact alive. Lida’s letter to Arrigo is intercepted and Rolando accuses her of adultery. On the eve of the battle, the men fall out.”

  “But,” Alma added, “her virtue is confirmed at the end, as Rolando dies.”

  Mahler bit his fingernails. “Let us not forget that the battle is against the Germans, and that the opera is a proudly patriotic Italian opera.”

  “Why yes,” said Alma. “You suspect an Italian of this?”

  “It would suit Toscanini to have me gone, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “Toscanini?” Mitch said.

  Mahler sighed. “You may not care for opera, but you are aware of the famous Italian conductor, Toscanini?”

  “Of course. His name is widely known.”

  “When we arrived here before Christmas,” Alma said, “everyone was talking about him. His conducting of Aida had caused a sensation in New York. Everywhere, they were talking about Toscanini and Caruso, Toscanini and Caruso. He is a vile man.”

  “He is a brilliant conductor,” said Mahler, flatly. “Quite brilliant.”

  “Gustav! He despises you.”

  “Yes, he does. But he is a great conductor.”

  Mitch fished his moleskin notebook from his inside pocket and wrote Toscanini’s name on a new page. “And you suspect Toscanini of blackmailing you?”

  “No,” said Mahler. “He could not do that.”

  Alma thumped her fist on the table. “He would do anything to stop you, Gustav. He was the king of the New York Met until you arrived. He hates you for it.”

  “We have fallen out, it’s true.”

  “But could this rivalry really take the form of blackmail?” Mitch asked.

  “The Italians are always at war with the Germans!” Alma huffed.

  Mahler snorted a laugh. “They call me German everywhere I go. The irony is I’m not a German or Austrian. I’m a Bohemian.”

  “With them it makes no difference,” said Alma. “You’re the German conductor championing German operas. And you’re Jewish too. They hate that just as much.”

  Mahler nodded and looked at the table. “Well, there you state a case for far more than the Italians.”

  A silence fell between them as they considered the multitude of people who might hate Mahler simply for his race. Mitch heard the percussion of horses’ hooves along Central Park West and thought of Gustav and Alma being hounded out of Vienna. He’d held the most prestigious position in the world of opera and been an undisputed success there, but still the racists had kicked him out. It was unbelievable, in the twentieth century, he thought. Then he remembered the horrors that were t
o come. Mahler would die without seeing the rise of Hitler and the holocaust, he wouldn’t even see the First World War, but it was there in his music: the frenzied military marches, the dances of death, the torment, the suffering. His music would define the twentieth century, and he would witness almost none of it.

  “What other suspects might there be?” Mitch asked, as much to break the depressing silence. “There were several people here earlier. Who is Herr Kahn?”

  “That is dear Otto,” said Alma. “Otto Kahn is a patron of the opera.”

  “He’s a rich Jew,” said Mahler. “I think we can cross him off the list of suspects.”

  “So he is the head of the Opera?” Mitch asked.

  “No. Gatti-Cassaza is the head of the Metropolitan Opera,” said Alma. “He brought Toscanini with him from Italy. They are as thick as thieves.”

  “But this Gatti-Cassaza employed you too, Gustav?”

  “No, that was Heinrich Conried. He is the Met’s other director.”

  “A German?”

  “Yes, but he knows nothing of music.”

  “So there are two directors; one Italian, one German, and they’ve each appointed a conductor from their own country?”

  Mahler grinned. “You are beginning to understand the dirty politics of the opera world. Added to which, a director always suspects that a new conductor wants to replace him as director.”

  “You must come to dinner tonight!” Alma cried. “Otto is hosting a dinner party to celebrate Gustav’s Die Walküre which opens at the Met tomorrow. You must come with us.” She shot Gustav an entreating glance. “Mitchell is to accompany me everywhere, Gustav. You said so.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll send word to Otto.”

  The girl came running in from the other room, dressed in a coat and hat and scarf. Alma rushed to her and fussed over her with a stream of German. She said Gucki repeatedly, and Mitch recalled that was the pet name of the surviving daughter. Putzi had died, leaving Gucki. What was her real name? Anna, yes. Anna Mahler.

  The governess bustled in, also dressed for the cold.

  “Madame Mahler,” she said, in perfect English. “We are going for a walk through the park to see the crocodiles.”