Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  “It’s fine. I have to go home now.”

  “There’s a lady waiting for him,” said Gustav. “Isn’t there, Mr Mitchell?”

  Mitch’s hand went to the locket at his chest. “Yes, there is,” — somewhere in time — “I have to get back to her.”

  He saw the disappointment on Alma’s face, and the sharp sense of triumph and glee in Gustav’s.

  He shook his hand.

  He had three years left. Three symphonies. It seemed an eternity suddenly, and Mitch realized this was because he himself didn’t have three hours left.

  Here he was, the great composer, living on the eleventh floor, because of the Curse of the Ninth. He was about to write his Ninth Symphony, but fearing it would be his last, he would call it The Song of the Earth instead. Having tricked the gods of Fate, he would then happily go on and write Symphony no 9. But the curse would get him in the end. Having completed that Ninth Symphony, he would die before he’d finished Symphony no. 10.

  Fate would not be cheated.

  But perhaps he’d won. He would die with eleven symphonies written, not nine.

  Mitch bowed to Alma, tipped his hat and walked out.

  She followed him out to the corridor, her crepe dress whispering.

  “Mitchell, you can’t go,” she said, her hand on his arm.

  “I have to, Alma. I don’t belong here.”

  She nodded and looked at the floor, her fist to her mouth, holding back tears. The melodramatic dance that passed for emotion. He stroked her cheek and she closed her eyes at his touch.

  He didn’t need to stay to see how it went with this couple. He’d listened to it a hundred times or more at the end of Mahler’s Tenth. It was the most beautiful declaration of love ever written in music, but a forlorn love.

  An unfinished sympathy.

  “Alma, do one thing for me.”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Leave him. Have an affair. A man only appreciates his wife when other men desire her. Or when she desires other men.”

  Her eyes widened with shock, but she considered his words and was already putting them into action. She would have her affair with Walter Gropius, sometime soon, and perhaps there would be others between then and now. Gropius would write his letter. Mahler would write the Tenth Symphony in response. But the seed had already been planted in him, with that single bang of a drum that had boomed over Central Park.

  The elevator arrived with a bump and chimed.

  Mitch kissed Alma Mahler full on the lips and left her startled as he stepped inside and was gone from her forever.

  — 56 —

  AS HE WALKED OUT OF the lobby, he checked the money in his pocket. A few dollars left. Not much. Hunger growled in his belly and he wondered if he should go back in to the restaurant and order breakfast, as Gustav had before they’d set out to rescue Alma. An army marches on its stomach.

  He walked out into the bright winter noon and stepped into a waiting carriage.

  “Where to, sir?”

  Back to the cottage in Fishguard, or to some other place, to Eleanor, somewhere in time.

  “The Flatiron, please. I mean the Fuller building.”

  The carriage eased off and they were rattling down Central Park West. It made sense to head for the spot where he’d come through, as if that place were the portal, when he knew it was anything but. He could go right now if he wanted to, sitting in this carriage as it moved through Manhattan. A startled cab driver arriving at his destination and puzzling over how his passenger had disappeared. He could leave a mystery in New York. But it felt right to go back to that ground zero. There was a pleasing sense of circularity about it.

  The carriage rounded Columbus Circle and headed down Broadway, passing the sights they’d seen that night with Natalie. As they sped past 53rd Street, he peeked out and craned to catch sight of Marshall’s. They thundered through Times Square, the crossroads of the world, and he wondered at how some people still called it Longacre and thought about the woman in the tam-o-shanter hat who’d smiled so brazenly at him. Random love. It could happen on any street corner on the earth, at any moment in history.

  Down through theatre land and the great white way, its gaudy signs not yet lit up. In a few hours it would be that canyon of bright light again. They passed 42nd Street with the Casino and the Empire. At 40th street, there was the grand Metropolitan Opera House, which would soon be conducted solely by Toscanini. The sidewalks crammed with the Saturday afternoon crowds going in and out of shows. The Globe, the Cohan, the Gaiety, the Criterion. And there, the giant woman’s face smiling down at the street, just a tangle of wire now, no winking eye.

  The cab turned towards Fifth Avenue and he saw the Metropolitan Life Tower rising above Madison Square Park. Then they turned sharply and he caught it dead ahead for a moment — an ocean liner cruising up Fifth Avenue — till the cab edged the park and pulled to a halt along the west side of the Flatiron.

  The driver jumped down and held the door open. Mitch fumbled with his roll of money and gave him a dollar, saying, “Keep the change.” He was striding into the Flatiron lobby before the cabbie could thank him.

  The concierge nodded, recognized him and waved him over to the elevator.

  “Eighteenth, please,” he said.

  The bellboy pressed a button and the elevator juddered into life. Mitch scanned the brass plate listing the building’s occupants, remembered Izzy’s improvised song and smiled.

  The Equitable Life Assurance Society. Imperial Russian Consulate. Frank A. Munsey publishing. Sercombe press. Daniel Langton, landscaping. Bromonio Company. Roebling Construction. Bohemian Guides. Fuller Co. on the nineteenth.

  The elevator jolted on the eighteenth and he stepped out. Down the long corridor, office doors on either side, tunes spilling out of each one. The door at the end, the prow. The Saratoga Trunk Company.

  He looked behind to check the corridor was clear, reached up and slid his finger along the lip of the transom. The key fell. He tried to catch it, but it struck the ground, tolling on the marble floor like a bell. He picked it up, put it in the lock and was inside in a moment. The cramped office. The wind howling against the window looking right up Fifth Avenue.

  He was ready to find Eleanor now.

  He placed the key on Max’s desk. He would wonder how he’d forgotten to lock up after himself, puzzle over it, dismiss it and be more careful in future. He would also wonder why he’d left the window open.

  Mitch pushed the sash up and the wind roared in. The permanent storm that raged around the Flatiron.

  He reached up and gripped the sash, stepping up and out onto the narrow stone ledge that ran around the building, his coat flapping. His hat flew off and he knew if he let go, he would follow it through the air. That would be all it took.

  In Mitch’s dream, Gustav had conducted the crash of waves from this prow, a sorcerer’s apprentice, blindfold, waving his arms at the maelstrom of souls drowning beneath him. He’d slipped and fallen into the abyss with a great scream of horns.

  This was the only way to guarantee it, Mitch told himself. Imminent death would force a body to flit to another time.

  Glancing down, the river of traffic swirled around the prow: carriages, cars and trams. Humans like so much sea froth. Directly below, the cowcatcher, the cigar store. He would fall right through it, unless the wind took him to the side. Or be impaled on the Stars and Stripes. Or one of those ridiculous giant cigars.

  But none of that would happen. He wouldn’t hit the ground.

  It had happened to Pete Wethers when he’d been shot at on the rooftops above Birmingham’s Council House Square. He had fallen, but never landed.

  That was the theory anyway.

  And if the theory proved false, he would simply die. Perhaps it was a good day to die. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to return to Eleanor. Perhaps he had done everything he needed to do and this really was the end.

  He fumbled at his shirt and pulled out the locket, his fingers n
umb with cold.

  “Eleanor,” he called, in the hope it might take him to her.

  He let go of the sash, stepped forward into the void and felt the rush of cold air.

  — Coda —

  A TRUMPET NOTE HELD for an eternity. A primal scream. Like the death of a god. Yes, a trumpet, at high C. That was the right sound. It would take a great player to perform this. A lung-bursting feat of endurance.

  Gustav coughed and clutched his nightgown at his heart, a spasm of pain knifing his chest.

  Where had he heard that call before? A single trumpet note held high over a busy backdrop. It brought a distant memory, just out of reach, like a dream fading in the morning light. He heard it as if through the crackle and fuzz of a cylinder recording. It brought a sharp sense of anger, hurt, and guilt all mixed together. He couldn’t place it.

  No matter. This was the right note, floating over the rest. Like a herald. Like a horn announcing something great, and foretelling death. That too.

  So much music crowding his mind, a restless, whirling polyphony.

  Soon every dark secret I’ll know, I’ll know, I’ll know... but slowly, slowly, slowly...

  That nagging tune. What was it? Se vuol ballare. Beethoven. Yes. The variations he dedicated to his beloved Eleanore. Variations on The Marriage of Figaro. From Mozart. Yes, sweet little Mozart melodies.

  “Mozartl. Mozartl.”

  Ending on those two bass piano chords. Finality. Drifting into the hereafter. Into nothingness. The void.

  I must march unto death, with no snuff nor a farthing in my pocket

  An oppressive swathe of heat through the open windows. The blur of garden outside. Birdsong.

  He tasted salt on his lips and croaked. The sore throat that had plagued him since Christmas. Coughing bitter gouts of phlegm, reaching hard for breath.

  Fever, so tired.

  Was that Alma by his side? A blur of white. Nurses.

  If only they might bring him his score for the Tenth, he might scribble that note, make a start on orchestrating the rest of it.

  Like in New York, sitting up in bed on those cold winter mornings in the Majestic, scribbling on a score. So many scores, always someone else’s. Rarely his own.

  His Tenth, which would really be his eleventh, because he had cheated the Curse of the Ninth.

  Unbearable headache. Such heat.

  The long journey across the ocean, and on to Paris, and finally to Vienna. To be buried here with Putzi. My little child in her cold grave. I will keep you warm, little one. I am coming, my little girl.

  The garden through the French windows. Days of bright sun. Vivid heat. Through the flames. The stink of flowers piled up in the room and out in the echoing corridor. Already they had bedecked his coffin.

  Give me another month, just one more summer, to finish the Tenth, orchestrate it fully. Let it stand.

  You will not let me do that, brutal God I no longer believe in. I cheated Fate and you will let me cheat no longer.

  His pulse throbbed in his temple, a stuttering beat. As in the opening of the Ninth Symphony. He had written his own faltering heartbeat into the score. Now a pale echo of that pulse.

  He felt nothing now but a morphine fog.

  The end of the Tenth. Violas in F-sharp major. Yes. The key that paints a sigh of relief when the struggle is over. A soul that has come through the flames.

  Look, Almschi! We have come through.

  And they had. They had come through the worst of it.

  He had almost lost her, and now he had written that bitter grief into this, his Tenth, which was really his eleventh.

  Nearly there, so nearly finished.

  He had poured the secrets of his heart onto the page. Everything he felt for Alma. The loss of her, his love for her.

  “My Almschi!”

  So much of it had reminded him of that terrible winter in New York, three years ago. Putzi had died and the world was a dark nightmare. Alma and the squalid blackmail letter, the kidnapping of little Anna, the fireman who’d died. That drum booming out over the vast expanse and the silent cortege below. Heartbreaking. He had written it all into this stack of pages, scribbling messages to Alma above the lines of music, unable to stop himself from writing out those cries to her, as if the music might not be enough, as if he might not finish it and these were his last breathless instructions.

  He had thought of Mitchell too.

  The curious constellation of his name. Raheem meant merciful, sympathetic. Mitchell from Michael, the archangel who led the forces of God against evil.

  Mitchell had found little Anna, somehow, little Gucki, walking through the streets like a god, or a devil, sensing the secrets of every dark heart in that screaming metropolis. That was what Dr Fraenkel had said, as if he suspected him of being a god amongst men.

  And Mitchell had walked out that morning. Yes, that morning of the fireman’s funeral — that single stroke of a drum, like death — he had walked out and was never seen or heard of again. The police inspector had come looking for him, but could not trace him. He had flown by their nets and escaped into the firmament.

  And the pain, the pain of knowing that Alma had desired him. A dagger to his heart. Though Mitchell had pushed her away. It had been a dress rehearsal for the Gropius affair and the torment of it. The third great hammer blow that had felled him.

  His own fault. He had written that tragedy into his Sixth, when he was happy and everything was going well. The gods had given him the tragedy he’d desired. He had killed Putzi, and Alma’s love... and himself.

  Tired. So tired. That was all. If God gave him another month, would he walk out of those doors and spend precious time with Alma and little Anna while he still could? Or sit in this stinking bed and finish his final symphony? It was written out, and nearly half-orchestrated. He had cheated the curse. The Ninth would not be his final symphony. He’d gone beyond and looked into the abyss and seen what other composers had not.

  Thunder boomed over the city. Someone rushed to shut the French windows. A colossal storm raged, hail rattling on the window.

  It is now. It is time.

  Deep longing ached in his throat. I am yours, all yours. A woman’s face through clouds. Radiant. A look that kissed. Exquisite yearning.

  My love awakens the songs. The songs awaken my love.

  A beautiful woman turned to him on a grey boulevard, smiling from under a picture hat.

  Almschi.

  That day I first saw her on shady Maximilian Strasse.

  She turned to him and smiled from under a black veil.

  Beckoning him.

  Come to me. I am waiting. Come to me through oceans of time.

  Rain crackled on the windows. How can the walls withstand such a fierce storm? It seemed to shake the stone walls in waves, booming on the roof with the incessant roar of a tsunami, a howling tempest, battering at every door and window, looking for a way in. A vengeful ghost.

  This was Death come to take him.

  Where the dark sentiments reign. At the gate which leads into another world. The world in which things do not fall apart by time and place.

  The world ended on a bass chord. Cellos. Peaceful cadence. Open dominant fifths, twice over the tonic chord.

  Sweet relief.

  It is over.

  Soon every dark secret I’ll know.

  But slowly, slowly, slowly...

  And he knew, as he slipped into blackness, that he was not going to God at all. That he was God. That God had been in everyone around him, in every living thing, there all the time, world without end, that this was the end of God and the beginning.

  I am lost to the world... I live alone in my love, in my song.

  He drifted into the hereafter, into nothingness, the void, and there was nothing but music.

  Next in the Touchstone saga

  Haunted Town

  [Touchstone Origins]

  (Released: September 22nd, 2019)

  Drawn to a portrait of 194
0s screen star, Eleanor Gale, teenager Mitch finds himself pursuing a romance across oceans of time, and foiling a Nazi plot to invade Britain.

  Make sure you’re the first in line to read it.

  Join the mailing list at andyconway.net

  Thank you...

  ... FOR BUYING AND READING Unfinished Sympathy.

  If you enjoyed it, please do spend a minute to give it a review on Amazon or Goodreads. You won’t be seeing adverts for Touchstone books on TV or station platforms, but a simple review is like a billboard ad for an independent author like me.

  Acknowledgements

  MY DILIGENT EDITOR, David Wake, and my amazing launch team — Paul Gray, Lee Sharp, Audrey Finta and Helena George — contributed greatly to the shape of the book and made sure it was free of errors. Any remaining errors are all my own doing.

  SEVERAL HISTORICAL sources have been invaluable in building a picture of the Mahlers’ first few months in New York, 1908.

  La Grange, Henry-Louis de (2008). Gustav Mahler Volume 4: A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. [cited as DLG in the Historical Notes below]

  Mahler, A. and Mitchell, D. (1968). Gustav Mahler. London: Murray.

  Burrows, Edwin G. & Wallace, Mike (1999), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, New York: Oxford University Press.

  Alexiou, Alice Sparberg (1951). The Flatiron: the New York landmark and the incomparable city that arose with it. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.

  Swift, Ike (1906). Sketches of Gotham. New York: Richard K. Fox.

  Singer, Ben. “Manhattan Nickelodeons — New data on audiences and exhibitors’. The Silent Cinema Reader. edited by Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer.

  SEVERAL FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES on Mahler provided inspiration in the writing of this book:

  Boehm, S. (Director). (2012). Mahlermania [DVD]. Germany: Deutsche Oper Berlin in cooperation with Nico and the Navigators.