Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  “Oh, how nicely you welcome me!” Josefa muttered.

  But tears had formed in her mother’s wide, plain face, obscuring her eyes; she stood up, her hand bracing her back for a moment, and began to stir the soup that had been simmering over the fire. “Yes,” she said, her broad back to her daughter. “You come home likely boasting, after the reputation you left here from which we’ve just begun to recover. I suppose you know the news. Your sisters write, I’m told. Stanzi’s betrothed, though without a contract, foolish girl; he’ll leave her with her belly swelled, mark my word. Aloysia seems content with her portraitist when she could have done so much better. Now I suppose you come back to bring me shame. You could at least help with the dinner instead of being useless. Sophie’s off doing good works for the poor.”

  “Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”

  “No, I don’t, but you’ll tell me anyway.”

  “I left Prague a month ago. I’ve been traveling. I went to Zell, where you were born and where you met Papa.”

  Maria Caecilia’s back stiffened slightly, and then she rubbed the small of it and resumed stirring the soup. Turning to the table, she began to cut the cooked chicken with a knife. She never raised her face. “You went to Zell? Why? You never showed much interest in my sisters, your aunts. Poor Gretchen, poor Elizabeth!”

  Josefa watched the adept hands cutting up the chicken, deboning it, arranging it in neat piles. She said, “I wanted to find out what I could about you and Papa. Do you remember what you said in the carriage coming back from Papa’s funeral? I never forgot it. There were many people who remembered you quite well in Zell. Your family didn’t have very much money at all; I found that out. I badgered my aunts until they confessed. Your family was never wealthy; there was never much silver. None of it was true, ever.”

  Her mother did not look up. “How long did you say you’d be staying with us, Josefa?” she said coldly.

  “Not long! I have friends in this city; I can stay with them, but before I go, I want you to tell me who my real father is. I want to hear the truth from you.”

  Maria Caecilia began to untie her apron, and then flung down her hands. “How dare you ask that question!” she cried. “What a ridiculous question! Because of a remark I made in my grief after burying my saintly Fridolin? How dare you question my respectability? Yes, you’d like to drag me down to the dirt, wouldn’t you?” Covering her face with her arm, she began to weep, her large bosom heaving.

  Then, throwing her arm down, Maria Caecilia cried, “All I’ve struggled to maintain all these years, negotiating with bill collectors, managing the scorn of your father’s brother, and his whole family who thought I wasn’t good enough. Always making fun of me for my lack of education, because I didn’t understand music. ‘She can hardly read,’ they said, ‘much less understand music.’ How can you know what was between me and your father? How can you know what I suffered?” Her beautiful skin was now splotchy.

  The kitchen door creaked open, and Thorwart came in, smelling of that familiar perfume he wore, which always preceded him into a room. “Why, what’s happening?” he said sternly. “I could hear your voices all the way down at the street door. I see the prodigal has returned, and at once begins to shout at her mother. Haven’t you had enough bad behavior from this young woman, Maria Caecilia? I would have the police send her away. She does no one any good here. Girl, why do you look at me?”

  Josefa clutched the back of a chair. “It’s him, isn’t it, Mama? I found it out in Zell. Oh dear Lord, it’s him, this horrible man we have to call ‘uncle,’ the one we’re made to respect, who is my real father. He never could keep his hands to himself with all of us, though you wouldn’t believe us if we told you. He tried to catch me on the stair and rub himself against me, though I’m his own daughter.”

  “What, what?” cried Thorwart; the kitchen was hot, and he had begun to sweat.

  “I went to Zell! I spoke to your sisters, Mama. I spoke to lots of people. There was nothing respectable about you, Mama; you were wild. You hated your home; you wanted to escape. I know what happened. This disgusting man saw you coming across the courtyard at dark, and he came out and asked you to a tavern with his friends. It was two months before your marriage to Papa, who was working hard to earn money. You didn’t come home until dawn. You stayed with him that night.”

  “How dare you!” cried Maria Caecilia. She tried to rush forward, but Thorwart grabbed her arm to restrain her.

  “You went to your wedding with a baby inside of you, with me inside of you. It’s him, isn’t it? When I look at him I see my face; when I look into the mirror, I see his expressions. I think I would rather die than know this.”

  Thorwart shook his head, releasing his hold on Maria Caecilia. He gazed coldly at Josefa’s wild hair and dirty traveling dress. “My dear girl,” he said, drawing out his handkerchief and wiping his forehead. “You have never known truth from fantasy, and as a child you made up such things no one knew what to think of you. The stage is where you belong, where you may live out your wild dreams. However, I am sorry to disillusion you about your paternity. I’m not your father. And I’m very glad I’m not, for you’re not meek and gentle the way a young woman should be, as any daughter of mine would be.”

  He cleared his throat in the silent room, looked at her sternly, head to one side, and then, in a voice that touched the words only lightly, as if they were dirty, he said, “I never went to bed with your mother, though I was sorely tempted, as were my friends, for she was a flirt then. Oh yes, standing by the window in her chemise. She didn’t stay with us that night, but went off with someone else from the tavern. Excuse me for revealing it, Madame Weber, but I can’t have my name dirtied when I’m innocent. You came to me weeks later in tears because you were carrying a child. I beg you both, Madame Weber and Mademoiselle Josefa, do not impute me in this. All other allegations are spurious as well.” He raised his heavy chin defiantly and straightened his coat with a firm tug. “I am, and will always be, a gentleman.”

  The sound of two boarders laughing in the hall reached them; Josefa still clutched the back of a chair as if she would keel over without it. “Then who is my father?” she cried. “Who did you go with that night, Mother?”

  Maria Caecilia sank down into a chair, covering her face with her hands. When she looked up, she seemed to have aged several years. Looking over at the bowl of onions, she said bleakly, “I was just seventeen, and I knew nothing. You must understand this. Your father was a soldier in the service of the empire. It didn’t happen that night but a few nights following. I was not myself since the first time I saw him; he was so strong, so handsome with his mustache, like the stories my sister and I would tell one another. His coat buttons shone. Like you, he was tall.” She reached out for an onion and cradled it in her hands. “I gave myself to him, and I would have married him, but he was sent away with his regiment. My letters went unanswered; my heart broke. I returned to Fridolin Weber, who was a good man. He knew; I confessed it to him. He was more forgiving than you, my girl, more so than you have ever been.”

  Maria Caecilia began to peel away the first fragile onion skins, a tear running down her cheek. “Yes, he knew you weren’t his, Josefa, but he loved you the same as if you were, maybe more. And he married me anyway because he loved me so.”

  Josefa closed her eyes. If she could have left the room she would have, but she knew she did not have the strength to go. Her mother’s voice came broken and accusing across the table that stood between them. “You girls!” Maria Caecilia said. “Do any of you know what it’s like to lose your beauty forever, to be fat and old and ridiculous, to go to sleep each night alone, to be no one’s love, no one’s little cabbage? To struggle to keep food on the table and yet be the butt of jokes to your daughters, to be nothing but stupid? I was once as young and beautiful as any of you. As beautiful as Aloysia or you—”

  “I can’t bear it,” Josefa cried. For one brief moment, she had wanted to go to
her mother and console her but was so horrified she fled. She ran stumbling, weeping, pushing past the astonished boarders who were talking in the hallway. Her hair streamed loose down her back as she rushed into the streets of Vienna. She ran past the shops and wagons, not knowing where she was going.

  After some minutes she turned and hurried blindly to Petersplatz. Father Paul, just coming from confession, was taking off his stole. “Josefa Weber,” he said, smiling at her so that his beaked nose wrinkled. “We heard you were in Prague. Sophie tells me all about your letters. Has the opera season ended? Why have you come home? Why, you’ve been weeping! What on earth is the matter? You’re not in trouble are you, dear girl?”

  “Where’s my sister?” “Sophie is working with some of the nuns in the orphanage two houses down. I’m so glad she returned; we don’t know what we would do without her! But what can be the trouble?”

  Without answering, Josefa ran to the large building down the street, where she was met at once with the sound of infants and little children tumbling around in the hall. She ran into a room where she saw a few wet nurses feeding babies, then rushed up the steps to a schoolroom, where there was hanging a portrait of Christ and the children.

  Sophie had been teaching the alphabet to a group of children sitting at one long table. At the sight of her sister, she stood up and almost fell over a chair to reach her, crying, “Oh darling, what are you doing here?”

  “I need to speak with you.”

  “When did you arrive? Why did you leave Prague? Oh, I’m so glad! Wait, I’ll send the little ones across the way to Sister Maria Elisa. There, pets ... my sister’s come!” The five children looked back curiously as Sophie shepherded them out. Then, closing the door, she hurried back to Josefa. They held each other amid the long low table of books containing the letters of the alphabet, small drawings of animals or flowers illustrating each one.

  Then they sat down on two low chairs, knee to knee, hands clasped.

  Sophie said, “You’re trembling and you’re crying.”

  “I’ve had such words with Mother....” Josefa began to tell the story. She kept looking away, as if trying to find a way to escape the truth.

  “Oh Josy, how terrible,” murmured Sophie. Her lips parted, and she grew so pale that her freckles seemed to darken. “Oh, my love.”

  “It means that nothing is real anymore,” Josefa said hoarsely. “Nothing’s real. Whatever I did, right or wrong, I could return to that one thing: I was Papa’s girl. My father taught me singing, I tell people. My father always stood up for me, rode me on his shoulders; now he’s not my father at all. A stranger was my father. I can’t bear that loss; I can’t. I don’t know where in the world to go with a loss like this.”

  Sophie began to kiss Josefa’s fingers one by one. “Come, don’t cry,” she whispered. “I’m crying, too, and I can’t even give you a handkerchief because I always lose mine. Wait, wait! I think I can make something of it. Now I’ll explain it to you. Yes, it’s clear to me.”

  She wiped her nose on her apron and said in the clear voice in which she always made her proclamations, only now the words stumbled a little, “The soldier doesn’t matter at all.”

  “How could he not matter? What are you saying?”

  Sophie took several deep breaths. “He doesn’t matter one bit. You were Papa’s most precious girl; you were his own Josefa. He chose you; he could have put you in a basket and delivered you to an orphanage like a heap of old clothes, but he didn’t. Well, did he?”

  “I can never forgive Mama.”

  “Oh ... Mama!” Sophie took a few more breaths, and laid her hand flat on her knees to steady them. “Why she is the way she is ... this is part of it, of course, but there’s another bit. Remember when we first looked at that book of suitors in secret in Mannheim, and I noticed the first pages were cut away? I eventually found them under the paper lining in the drawer where Mama keeps her hose. Listen, I’m telling you to distract you.”

  Sophie leapt up and began to rush about picking up fallen toys, stammering a little, glancing back at her sister. “Are you listening, Josy love? Mama bought the book when she was young and began to plan for her own sisters’ marriages. Someone fantastical, of course. Those pages were full of the names of pashas and princes and sons of the city fathers. Only poor Aunt Gretchen believed her and refused every other offer, and so she never married at all. Mama has always felt bad about that, but she couldn’t stop herself She had to keep planning fantastical lives for all of us to make up for it, and to make up for her own fall. She couldn’t see the happiness she had all along. She saw it only sometimes. And after Papa died, she knew.”

  “She should have known before!” came Josefa’s savage cry.

  “I think she did sometimes. Josy, people do just bumble along. We have to forgive one another. What else can we do? I tell you this now because it’s all part of the piece, you see, of understanding why Mama is the way she is.”

  “I don’t want to understand her!” Josefa yelled, clenching her fists. “I don’t want to understand anything about her; I hope never to see her again! I will never, never get over this.” She wrapped her arms about her chest and rocked back and forth.

  Sophie dropped to her knees before Josefa, the rag dolls she had just gathered up spilling back onto the floor, their little button eyes staring up at the two sisters. “But Papa loved you best! I was always a little jealous; we all were. You had a part of him that no one else did, not even Mama. And she misses him so.”

  Josefa twisted her head away. “I hate it when I cry!” she gasped. “I’ve just been holding it in for so long.” After several minutes, she managed to calm down a little. “Well,” she said with a bit of grim laughter as she picked up one of the rag dolls, “perhaps with what I told Mama about Thorwart’s wandering hands he won’t be round anymore, and that’s a mercy! But Sophie,” she said, looking up at her sister, “I haven’t asked a word about you and your good works.”

  “Heavens, what’s that compared to your news?”

  “Tell me to distract me and keep me from crying again. I’ll buy you six crescent rolls and six coffees if you distract me.”

  Sophie turned over her hands, a little chapped from washing, but they had always looked that way, even when she was a child. On the back of one was a deep scratch from a stray cat. “Nothing to tell.” She shrugged. “I’m teaching the little ones to keep myself from trouble. Oh, I’m also starting a shelter for homeless sick animals in an unused yard here. You could help me with it, particularly the larger dogs.”

  “I might ... I will. Tell me more. No, not about Aloysia; she wrote me of her triumphs herself Tiresome girl! How’s our Stanzi? Is she really going to marry Mozart?”

  “Yes, I hope quite soon. Don’t you want to talk about Papa now?”

  “No, anything but that. Tell me of all of you.” Josefa tidied a doll’s dress, her face lowered so that her expression could not be read. “Mozart is a very good man, Sophie,” she said, “and you know that, and Stanzi knows that. I suppose when you marry that’s the most important thing to know. But I’ve thought a lot about it when I was away. The woman who marries him marries as well the part of him that creates such extraordinary music. It’s all part of him, and always will be.”

  She laid the doll aside and, reaching inside her dress, drew out her silver locket. “I wrote and asked Aloysia to send it to me while I was in Prague,” she said, rubbing her thumb over the worn initials. “I wanted it with me for good luck. She never knew what was in it. I’d like to tell you. It’s strange how you keep secrets for a long time, and then they just spill out. Maybe tears bring them, but this is going to spill out also now. Are you ready, mouse? The strands of hair tucked inside my locket are mine and Mozart’s.”

  Sophie sank down to the floor, pulling off her cap. “Mozart’s?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “But Josefa, what do you mean? Why on earth would you wear his hair in a locket? We thought your lover ga
ve it to you, your first lover, and the hair was his.”

  Josefa rose and walked to the window. Sophie began to rise as well. “Josy?” she whispered, staring at her sister’s tense shoulders. She could not see Josefa’s face, for it was turned to the window. “What is it? Tell me!”

  “I’ve never had any lovers, mouse; I made it all up. I wanted you all to think someone loved me that much. I found the locket in a secondhand jewelry shop and bought it myself, and I took the hair from some he gave Aloysia.”

  “Josy, are you serious? Not a single lover?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “You’re still a virgin?”

  “I am.” Josefa hesitated, leaning her head on the window overlooking the busy Petersplatz with the bookstore and lemonade stand, and children walking home from school arm in arm. The voice was lonely now. “Are you disappointed?”

  “No but ... but we were so certain that you ...” Sophie now managed to stand, thrusting her hands deep into her apron pockets and walking close to her sister. She rubbed her nose against Josefa’s shoulder, then reached for one of Josefa’s large, nail-bitten hands again. She glanced up at her sister’s stern profile, and moved her mouth a few times as if to find the right words.

  She said, “Did you love Mozart, Josy? Did you?”

  “I did,” Josefa replied. “I did with all my heart. I think I still do, though I’d never say it. You have all my secrets now, and you must swear as my sister never to tell them to anyone as long as I live. I wish Mozart and Constanze every good thing. Hug me ... how I’ve missed you! Did Papa truly love me? I’m going to cry again. I am unforgiving. I’ll try not to be. If he forgave her, why can’t I? Oh, Sophie, when will I find where I belong?”

  Sophie Weber, June 1842

  MONSIEUR NOVELLO LEANED FORWARD, THE BOOK IN which he had been writing held carefully on his knee.