Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  But she heard her own sisters’ voices on the stair, the panting and complaining as they ascended. As she slipped the book under the clean sheets again, her memory flew back in time to twenty or more years earlier in Zell at the guild hall dance. There was her younger sister Gretchen, fresh as spring with yellow braids tumbling down her back and much sought after by the officers, and Elizabeth, as lovely as a Madonna, modest, tall, devout, dipping her knees to the music, turning to smile at Caecilia over the sound of the wind band. Then the three of them were going home laughing, arms linked. Now as she opened the door she saw only two ungainly, shapeless women straggling up the stairs in their crushed, lopsided hats, dragging several baskets from which dangled pairs of wool hose. A slipper tumbled out from one basket, and the neighboring boy who helped them muttered, “Jesus Christus!” as he fled to retrieve it. Maria Caecilia felt her smile stiffen on her lips. What had happened to them all? Youth must not be wasted; it must be made to last forever. Aloysia would be a Swedish baroness by the sea.

  She went forward with her arms out, tears in her eyes.

  Three weeks passed.

  The voices of the choirs singing masses had risen up as usual in the churches that Christmas, accompanied at home by the baking of cookies and pastry and the roasting of geese until golden brown. Then the worst of winter set in. Cold wind blew through the streets; there were no fresh vegetables or fruit to be had; gingerbread stands were closed; and fires, no matter how hearty, seldom warmed rooms sufficiently. The only sensible thing was to go to bed with a hot brick wrapped in flannel to keep one warm. Snow fell, and fewer travelers came through. Many people had departed before this time to winter in more lively cities. And now Maria Caecilia’s two sisters were also leaving to return to Zell.

  They passed Aloysia, who was sitting on the cold landing before the door. Bumping into her drawn-up knees, they cast morose glances toward the rooms they had just left and the sound of bitter shouting.

  Aunt Elizabeth stood upright to her full height, her crooked hat with the ancient bowed feather almost touching the ceiling. “I find it lacking in charity that your parents should argue so loudly, niece! Where are the consoling joys of man and wife?”

  Gretchen added in her stuttering, vague way, “I have my theories on such things. Darling Aly, have I mentioned them to you?” Her face, which was plain as lumpy pudding, looked hopeful.

  “I think so, Auntie,” replied Aloysia dully.

  Elizabeth sniffed. “Have you wrapped your feet well, Gretchen? It will be cold in the carriage.”

  Both aunts bent down and planted sticky kisses on Aloysia’s pale cheek. “Good-bye, dear Aloysia,” they said, blessing her. “Don’t sit here too long; we had a dear friend who died of sitting on cold stairs. There was nothing that could be done for her, though physicians came. She was laid out in the parlor with candles. We’ll return for your marriage. Your mother has hinted of fine things. You will wear the black petticoats we sewed for you girls? Black is a practical color—doesn’t show dirt, needs less washing.”

  “Oh yes, Auntie, of course. Good-bye, dear Aunties.”

  After the aunts had managed to get down the stairs, yelling all the while at the boy who helped them, Aloysia remained outside her family’s cluttered rooms, clasping her knees and shivering. It was the very spot to which Josefa had retreated two months before, but then that landing had always been the place of retreat when one of the four sisters wanted to be alone. Still written on the wall from years before in Josefa’s tiny, bold print was a list of ten things that would make life perfect. (A bed all to myself, never having to recite my French verbs, being loved best...) One had to bend down low to see it. It could only have been written by a lanky, grubby child stretched low on a creaking step. Tiresome! Josefa never could speak good French, though she read Rousseau.

  Your mother hinted of fine things; we will return for your marriage. Aloysia played with a lock of her hair. The Swedish Baron had departed for his own country; Uncle Thorwart had been apologetic. There were other fish in the sea, he had said. If the court moved to Munich, there would be more opportunities.

  Aloysia rubbed her hands, sticking them deep in her skirts to warm them. The name of the Baron had been angrily crossed out in the book. The enchanting handful of singing engagements in houses lit by hundreds of candles were over as well, and all the money the family had earned had been spent on entertainment and food. Yesterday Sophie had trudged to the pawn shop again with their mother’s jewelry.

  Even now Sophie slipped grimly out of the family’s rooms; her new, gold-framed spectacles made her look like some young university boy. She was followed by Constanze, who sank to the steps and began to sew.

  “How can you hold the needle? It’s so cold!” Aloysia murmured. “And how can you have the patience?”

  “I must do something.” The small face bent over her work.

  “I hope the neighbors don’t see us sitting here.”

  “Why? They’ve heard everything already. Mother has broken two plates and thrown a pile of music at Father. I saved the blue serving bowl and hid it in our wardrobe with the wineglasses.”

  “Don’t squint at the stitches, Stanzi; it will make you look older earlier.”

  “I’m older already,” Sophie said. “Troubles age one, but what can be done? We live in a fallen world. If we were still in the Garden of Eden, there would be no need for money. May I share Mama’s shawl, Aloysia? We’ll be here an hour or two, maybe more, and I’m freezing.”

  “Sit closer. There’s a little coal left in the parlor, but I can’t bear to be there. I thought you were good at making them stop quarreling, Sophie! Can’t you make them?”

  The youngest girl shook her head and wiped her nose. “You go,” she muttered. “Mama melts for you.”

  “I tried, but they didn’t pay any attention to me. I even cried. I won’t go in, though I’ll catch a wretched cold here and won’t be able to sing even if anyone asked me, which they haven’t since Christmas.”

  Sophie said, “It always gets worse in winter. Have you noticed it’s always this time of year it happens? We must just somehow hold out until spring comes and there’s more work. I suppose other people’s parents quarrel also.” She sighed, looking about her as if astounded to be able to see the world so clearly with her spectacles. “Uncle Thorwart doesn’t quarrel with his wife.”

  Aloysia answered sharply, “He doesn’t speak to his wife; he’s had a mistress for years. How can Mother and Father forgive him so easily about setting my hopes up for a Swedish marriage and then dashing them again? He should have known the Baron was already married. Don’t you dare laugh at me, any of you!”

  The shouts arose even louder from the depths of the rooms within, with their father’s defensive, breaking voice, followed by their mother’s accusations. Aloysia pressed her hands over her ears.

  At that moment Josefa came up the steps, her market basket swinging from one hand and an open book in the other. She was always reading, sprawled on the bed, hidden on the roof, finding a better world. Now she read so intensely that she bumped a little into one wall, then glanced at it in disgust. Her face filled with more disgust on seeing her three sisters huddled there and hearing the shouting from within. “Oh saints above,” she cried. “Everyone on the street will be talking about us now; I guess we’ll have no dinner. Why must she always berate Papa? He does the best he can.”

  Constanze clutched the sewing against her dress. “It makes Mama sad having always to make do. Still, I think that man and wife should never turn on each other, even in the worst of times. It’s providing for all of us that does it. If they married us off, they wouldn’t have to feed and clothe us.”

  Sophie stood up. Since Christmas her tiny chest had developed some roundness, but not enough to make her sisters hope she would ever have any real curves, not that she minded in the least. “I refuse to see us as merely mouths to feed,” she said. “We each have our own sacred purpose.”

  Josefa
closed her book with a snap. “Marriage? No, thank you, I’ve seen enough of marriage not to want it. This is how it ends up; you hear the quarrels down the street. Ugh! And Mama’s no saint; do open your eyes, Constanze Weber. Papa is what he is, and never promised more. If she wanted wealth, she shouldn’t have married him. But likely he’s the only one who asked her; that’s what Aunt Gretchen said.”

  “That’s not true! Dozens asked her!” Aloysia cried.

  “Again, the differences of story.”

  “Earth doesn’t promise happiness,” said Sophie. “I was reading Josefa’s Rousseau. ‘Mankind is crushed by a handful of oppressors, a famished crowd vanquished by sorrow and hunger, a multitude whose blood and tears the rich drink peacefully ...’ Oh, never mind. Josy, tell us what to do.”

  Josefa glanced toward their rooms. “I’ll do what I must, and God help me,” she said. “Constanze, take this food inside; Sophie, you tell them we’ve gone out. Aloysia and I are going to see Father’s brother, our Uncle Joseph. It’s time I brought out my plans.”

  Joseph Weber’s office was on the second floor of his large house in a more elegant neighborhood of Mannheim. It was filled with heavy antique German furniture, large portraits of severe strangers, and a few shelves of well-thumbed ledger books tucked near others of theology and law. On the mantel above the fire stood an engraved silver cup given years before by his merchants’ guild. Nothing has changed since the last time we were here, Josefa thought. Even the wine decanter and the plate of small pork pies.

  “The Frauleins Weber,” droned the servant as he closed the door behind them.

  “Good day, dear Uncle,” said the girls, making their curtseys.

  The man in the tasseled wool cap who had been working behind the desk looked up. He was Fridolin’s elder brother by some ten years, and he had Fridolin’s spryness, except that he was almost entirely bald. “Well, nieces!” he said abruptly. “You find me at a very busy time. You might have sent word. Are you here to inquire about my health? Unlikely. There’s so little commerce between my brother and myself since our quarrel, I can’t recall when he’s last come. He’s sent you perhaps. No? You’re well? Good. Have a pork pie. How much do you want to borrow today?”

  Josefa smiled, curtseying again deeply. “Dearest Uncle,” she said in her singer’s voice, which reverberated under her cloak. “You speak abruptly only because we’ve surprised you at your work, for which we are so very sorry. Still, you can’t conceal the goodness of your heart, for even now, every Sunday at dinner, our Papa tells us of how kind you were to him as a boy, and how much he admires and loves you. Surely you understand that all men are not equally fortunate in all areas of life’s endeavors. I recall you bought me a hat once. Unfortunately, it is long outgrown.”

  Once more she made the smallest curtsey. “Yes, I confess it,” she said, looking aside modestly. “We are in need of funds. Dearest Uncle, I would not ask you to part with any of your money unwisely. I would not dream of asking you for any if I could not offer sound collateral and a note of terms of repayment.”

  Assuming a queenly manner, she gazed at him.

  Her uncle stared at them. “Repayment?” he croaked when he found his voice. “Collateral? What can you offer me that any money put into your hand will ever see the inside of my cash box again, eh? Tell me.” Uncle Joseph put down his scratchy pen and narrowed his small eyes. “I could have timed your arrival by the season,” he said. “Was it not this time last year that the two of you appeared just as abruptly at my door? And, in the name of sweet Saint Elizabeth, what collateral?”

  Josefa faced him with chin upraised. “My work,” she said clearly. “I have been planning this for some time. I intend to open a music shop with Papa to advise us. We will sell printed music, clavier strings, violins, and violoncellos.”

  “And where will you find the money to begin this venture?”

  “From you, dear Uncle, with a little extra added on so that we can subsist until we succeed and Papa’s work increases. Now you can certainly see I am not asking for a mere loan, but capital for my shop. Here, if you will, look at this paper. The costs and profits are clear; I have been calculating them for weeks. The payments, interest added on, of course, will begin within a year. Our friends Heinemann and Alfonso will help us.”

  Joseph Weber rose a little, leaning on his desk. “What, what? How?” he stammered. “Does my brother know of this? What do you know of the world? From books, which I am told you buy incessantly with your little musical earnings? Blessed Savior, you’re cut from your family’s cloth! Of course my brother can’t sustain such a large family with their longings for books, French hats, chocolates, and wine! I told him two years ago to leave Mannheim to find more work elsewhere. Would he go? No. Will he do anything practical for you girls? Engage you as ladies’ companions? No. Apprentice you as seamstresses or milliners? Send you out into service with some good family? Never. He has mad, ambitious ideas for you and himself, none of which will ever come true, and now you have inherited them.”

  The clerk hid his scrawny face by busying himself with a pile of papers, while Uncle Joseph rose a little more, fixing his cold eyes upon them. “Music, music, music,” he cried. “And now, on my hope of salvation, more music! You all do nothing but starve on it, and still you persist. Loans last year, and the one before, and nothing repaid. Here I am selling cloth and have made a fine living, while he grows poorer and pretends it doesn’t matter. Will he join me in my work? No. Will he cease his ridiculous and expensive entertaining? No. He could have at least remained single; indeed, he should have joined the priesthood before he married that mother of yours.”

  Josefa had drawn herself up now so much she seemed twice her height. “You can say what you may against our mother, though it’s unjust, unjust, but you won’t speak of our darling papa,” she shouted. “Can’t you see I’m sincere? You don’t; you don’t believe me.”

  “Sincerity does not buy firewood; I certainly do not believe you.”

  “It’s futile to come to you; you have no heart. Papa’s a saint. We’ll get on without you. I’ll make my way in the world, I swear, and won’t turn my back on my family. Aloysia will become a great singer and make an advantageous marriage, as will my younger sisters. She will make one soon; see how beautiful she is!”

  Uncle Joseph smiled crookedly and sadly. “A great singer?” he murmured. “An advantageous marriage? You’ll starve on music as your father’s done, and where is the splendid suitor to climb all those flights of stairs to marry one of you? Men of good fortune want modest women; modest women don’t sing in public. Heinrich, pack the pork pies for them.”

  “Stuff the pies up your arse!”

  “Fine words, young woman! Get out! Good day to you.”

  Josefa rushed out of the house and down the street, with Aloysia running behind her. After some streets, she managed to pull her older sister to a stop. “I’m cold, so cold,” Aloysia panted. “My legs aren’t as long as yours; I can’t run so fast. Let’s have a coffee. It’s not real coffee, only roasted barley with syrup, but they also give you a crescent roll. Did you have breakfast? I didn’t. I have two kreuzers. It’s all I have left from the last time we sang.”

  Shivering, they drank their bowls of coffee in the wood shack while the old vendor spoke to some workmen who had also come in. Aloysia ate her roll slowly, pulling off fragments bit by bit. “We should have taken Uncle Joseph’s pork pies,” she said sadly.

  “Let him choke on them!”

  “Josefa, you scared him. You scared me.”

  “I hate him. It would have been a wonderful music shop. I was going to call it Weber and Daughters—Music, Instruments, and Sundries. I will call it that. I’ll find someone else to sponsor it. ”

  “Josy, we can’t go back there again to ask. You’re too horrible to have told our uncle to stuff the pork pies up his ...” She glanced at the workmen and ate the last crumb of her roll. “Que tu es horrible de dire à notre oncle de s‘enculer avec s
a tourte au porc! C’est terrible, c’est très impoli! It was very impolite.” Aloysia suddenly burst into giggles and then struggled for poise.

  “I’d die before going back. He’s a turd.”

  “Still, thank you for saying I’m beautiful.”

  “You are, you know,” said Josefa angrily, then she squeezed her sister’s arm warmly. “Though between you and Mother you’ll make something wretched out of it. Come on. We can’t go home to the others without some shred of good news. Let’s try to think something up.”

  The sisters linked arms and hurried on, their cloaks whipping out behind them, until they found themselves before the Christuskirche with its statue of the Archangel Michael blowing his horn to the heavens high above the dome. Their father had played violin there often for choral masses.

  Catching her breath, Josefa still nursed her anger. “How dare our uncle speak badly of Papa? He works so hard for us; he buys us hose when his are in tatters, he watches up for us all night when we’re sick and then goes to his work. No one understands how much he does, but I do. I’ve seen it as long as I can remember.”

  She folded her arms and stared up at the trumpeting archangel. Her eyes narrowed. “Still, Uncle’s right in one thing,” she muttered. “What chance do we have of making things better at home? Perhaps the music shop would cost too much. There’s not even much work singing in churches; the priests prefer the singing of the old castrati. Come, let’s go in. At least we’ll be out of the wind.”

  They pushed open the heavy doors and curtseyed slightly to a few elderly priests in narrow black cassocks. One of the wizened castrati, with his throat wrapped in an enormous gray scarf wound several times around, sniffed suspiciously at them, as if he had heard Josefa’s scathing words. Candles flickered before statues here and there, but the air was not still. Cold as it was, it reverberated from the sounds of the organ that someone was playing from the loft high above, with the great clunk clunk of the working bellows.