Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  I was seventeen that year. It must have been 1893, if indeed I am right in thinking I was seventeen. In the late summer Robert and I met again, walking in the Common. He tipped his hat to me and smiled. I felt an unaccustomed rush of pleasure in my face, in my breast. He said he enjoyed our meeting at Mrs. Seton’s tea and then he laughed. At the memory of the tea? I wondered, flooded by the charm of his shy smile, as the leash on which he held his huge collie circled my long skirt, pulling it tight to my legs.

  “What is his name?” I asked, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say, and untangling myself from the leash.

  “Paderewski, I call him. After the pianist I very much admire.”

  “Have you been at his performances?”

  “Once. In Stuttgart, when I was studying there.”

  “Piano?”

  “Yes, and composition. I’m returning to Europe in a month or so, this time to Frankfurt, to continue my studies with Carl Heymann and Joachim Raff.”

  He smiled a beguiling, gentle, self-deprecating smile as though to indicate the vast gulf between him and the great teachers at the Hoch Conservatory. I could say nothing to this impressive itinerary, I whose musical horizons were limited to the windowless room on Dartmouth Street, to the hatted Mrs. Seton’s mimic instruction. I remember staring at him: he seemed a paragon, almost supernatural, a man of the world with talent, free to travel, to study, to leave the little parks and tightly housed streets of Boston for the wide, ancient avenues and noble panoramas of Germany. I yearned for this conversation, full of revelations, to go on.

  He took my arm. “May I walk along with you?” he asked, already in step with me, the collie marching slowly ahead of us both, at the end of his taut leash.

  “Mr. Maclaren, do you ever think of conducting?”

  “I would be pleased if you would call me Robert, or better, Rob.”

  “Thank you. I’ll call you Robert.”

  “Thank you. I’d like to conduct, of course. I’d like to conduct my own work best of all.”

  “That seems to me the best one could hope to do, to compose music, and then to direct its performance.”

  “To me as well. Control, that is what one would achieve.”

  Our conversation on that occasion, as I recall, was formal and exploratory. He asked about my music and I told him, worrying as I did about the disparity between my small pianistic trials and errors and his great plans, that I hoped someday to accompany a singer, or perhaps to play duets, purely for my own enjoyment.

  “Of course. Does your family support your ambitions?”

  I told him about my dead father, and my mother whose life had closed too early, perhaps even as she sat, pregnant, enfolded in my father’s love, at the foot of the great vine at the Centennial Exposition, my mother whose time was now lived in the twilight of that year, a light diminished with each disappointed day. “I’m afraid I am her only interest,” I said. He smiled a concerned smile and shook his head. He said, “I recognize that condition. My own mother must resemble yours. She took me to Paris to study when I was fifteen, leaving my father and brothers behind in Boston. She told Professor Marmontel, when she had me play for him the first time, that she had recognized what she called my genius when I began to have lessons at eight. And so she has, you might say, invested herself in me ever since.”

  “Is she still in Europe? Waiting for you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “in Frankfurt.”

  We walked and talked together for more than an hour. It began to turn to dusk. I reminded him of my waiting mother, he said he would walk my way, we laughed together at Mrs. Seton’s idiosyncrasies, he told me she had worn a hat during his few early lessons with her. By the time we arrived at my house I thought I knew a great deal about him. I felt he liked me, and I knew, without a single doubt or hesitation, that I loved him.

  Three months later we sailed for Germany, leaving Paderewski with friends of Robert’s, for the time being. Our engagement had been brief and somewhat perfunctory, only long enough to calm my mother’s fears that I was rushing precipitously into the unknown, as she put it, when Robert asked her for permission to marry me before he returned to Germany.

  “I will take good care of her,” he said. “Some day I will have more money than I have now, I feel certain, and then Caroline will want for … very little.” I think he started to say “nothing” but corrected himself, feeling no doubt that it was presumptuous to prophesy too much for his talent.

  My mother agreed. She was willing to offer her aloneness to my success in marrying this charming and promising musician with an aura of foreign places clinging to his haircut and his unusual suit. She made no demands on us for the customary wedding. Indeed, she seemed too distracted and weary to plan and execute such an event. We were married before a city magistrate who was a friend of Robert’s father. His brothers, Logan and Burns, were his best men, Elizabeth Pettigrew accompanied me, and Robert’s father was a witness. But the titles were honorary, for the legal ceremony was very short. We took our guests to the Carlton for a late breakfast.

  It was curious: my mother did not attend. It seemed to me she did not wish to leave, even for an hour, her abiding conviction that her life was at an end, especially for the predictable optimism of a wedding ceremony, especially for mine. So I took on a new person, and a new name, out of her presence. Not having witnessed the event, she appeared not to believe, or not to wish to believe, in the fact. Her letters to me in Frankfurt were always addressed: “Miss Caroline Newby.” She spoke in her letters as though I were bearing the strangeness of a foreign country alone, warning me of the dangers in the streets at night for an unaccompanied young girl. She sent abroad small packages of Boston tea, and English biscuits in tins, even long leather gloves with buttons at the wrists against what she imagined to be the bitter cold of Germany’s black forests.

  My letters to her that year, I am sure, spoke of Robert, his hard work and long absences from home while he studied and practiced at the conservatory. I wrote to her about his great delight when he played his first concerto for William Mason, a favorite pupil of the great Franz Liszt, who praised him warmly and predicted a great success for him in the future.

  My mother’s replies to me, which came ever more infrequently in the first year abroad, gave no sign that she had received my news. She wrote of the terrible dampness of Boston that had begun to invade her bedroom. She was certain she detected mold in her shoes. If it grew there so easily it must certainly have fastened itself upon the lining of her lungs, which ached with every breath she took. She described the constant ringing in her left ear, which she believed had begun when a doctor had removed the wax from it and inserted in its place a tiny bell that rang whenever she moved her head.

  Robert was amused by the fancies in her letters. “Poor woman,” he said. “It comes of having too little to do in her life. Strange ideas take hold and grow in such emptiness.”

  I laughed with him, wishing at the same time that I had been able to fill her life more amply. Sixteen months after we sailed from the United States her letters ceased. I must confess I stopped writing to her. I felt no concern, thinking her silence a pique, or another aberration, like the mold, like the bell in her ear.

  But it was not so. She had succumbed completely to her imaginings. A wire arrived from the Massachusetts General Hospital addressed to “Miss Caroline Newby care of Robt. Maclaren,” informing me that my mother had died two weeks before, in hospital, of pneumonia. The details came later from Elizabeth: my mother had pulled her bed as far as it was possible to do into the closet, and gone to sleep with her head in what she hoped (I believe) would be a culture of mold. True or not, water had filled her lungs and killed her.

  The city authorities wrote to tell me she had been buried, decently, they said, in a public field in Belmont. Robert was appalled and wanted to send money to have her moved to his family’s plot. But somehow we never did it. There was not enough money at the time, and after a while it began
to seem natural that she should rest, finally, as she had lived, among the anonymous of the city.

  Elizabeth wrote to assure me that she had rescued some of my mother’s furniture from the public sale. She had put it in the attic of her family’s house. I was grateful that the bentwood sofa, particularly, had not gone to strangers.

  It was accepted as reasonable that Virginia Maclaren, Robert’s mother, would not be present at the wedding. After all, she was abroad, the trip back would have been, to the Scots mind of her family, a needless expense, even a foolish one for so short a ceremony, so meager a celebration.

  We met for the first time in Frankfurt in the rooms Robert and his mother had occupied in the Praunheimer Strasse before our marriage. Robert had wired her that he was bringing a wife. As we leaned against the ship’s rail, or walked the deck of the City of Paris in the morning sun, he told me a little of her life dedicated so entirely to his welfare, of her constant worries for his health, her concern that he keep his feet dry and his hands soft.

  I listened, watching the sea for whales or any sign of life in what seemed to me, at almost eighteen, a vast, anonymous, and ancient burial ground for armadas of ships. I had never crossed an ocean before. I had known of the Atlantic only from the Boston wharves where its grandeur was reduced to a series of brackish inways between piers, swirls of shallow water, full of the spill of ships.

  I was frightened by the hugeness we were traveling over and, when it stormed, into, so frightened and sick that I was excessive in my relief and joy at landing and finally reaching Frankfurt alive. I remember, and still burn with shame when I do, that I threw myself into Virginia Maclaren’s arms when we met, without waiting for evidence from her that she wished to engage in so intimate and enthusiastic a greeting. We parted almost at once: I felt a gentle but insistent pressure on my shoulder and withdrew my impulsive self from her arms. “What a surprise, Rob,” she said.

  “Why, Mama?” He accented the last syllable of that word in a way I had never heard in America. “I cabled. You knew I had married Caroline. The twelfth of November it was. You never answered the cable.”

  “Yes. I had the cable. That was the surprise, Rob. How long have you known … Caroline?”

  “A few months. What difference does that make?”

  While they talked, through, around, and over me, I stood between them and looked at my mother-in-law. She was a small, very tight woman with a solid, bosomless body, like a cork. Her bodice and skirt seemed pasted to her tubular trunk; her dress was wrinkle-free and taut. At the very top of her head her red-brown hair, the color of Robert’s, was coiled like a spring, making her seem a little taller than she was. Still she did not come to Robert’s chin. She had a way of directing her words into the far corner of a room, never looking at those to whom she spoke, not even her beloved son. This curious distance gave her statements, as well as her questions, the force of edicts. It did not matter that she spoke in English to German shopkeepers (she felt it unpatriotic, she once said, to learn a foreign language); they responded with alacrity to what they took to be her commands.

  From that first day I knew that she considered Robert guilty of desertion in marrying me. She had left her home, her children, her husband, her beloved Boston, afternoon teas, evening socials and concerts, to live in a barbarous country for the sake of his genius. Now, in his twenty-second year, a fully trained and maturing musician, he had deserted her. Her bitterness burned in the deep creases that crossed her forehead, kept perpetually red the lobes of her ears and the triangular tip of her small, furious nose. Only her eyes, which never lighted on any object, were gray and calm, like the horizon that they perpetually sought out, the color of haze or fog.

  Robert did not seem to be disturbed by his mother’s anger. “For a while, at least, until I can earn some money, Mama, we should like to stay with you.”

  His mother looked as if she had been asked to give lodging to the wife of Tom Thumb whom Barnum was at that time exhibiting in the capital cities of western Europe. “That is of course possible, if you wish, Rob,” she said, looking into the distance. Robert went to bring in our cases and the trunk. She ushered me into a small hallway.

  There is no other way to write of this. I must put it down directly. My mother-in-law pointed toward a huge room, almost the size of a Boston ballroom. Its ceiling was very high and beamed with what seemed to be half oak trees. At one end, mounted on a platform up three wide wooden steps, was a mammoth bed, as broad as four ordinary beds and covered with a yellowing lace spread. The canopy was of the same lace and draped down over the four posts, each one as thick and tall as a tree. I had never seen a bed of such proportions. It might have been a ship from a fairytale book—perhaps Timlin’s The Ship That Sailed to Mars. It was the size of my entire bedroom in Boston.

  I stared at it. “If you are staying here, this will be your room,” she said. “Your bed.”

  Stupidly awed, I said, “But this must be your room. I wouldn’t want to …”

  “It was,” she said, “mine and Robert’s. Now it will be yours.”

  That night, huddled in a corner of the cold field of coverlets and comforters, I erred again. Young and badly frightened, I needed refutation of the strange vista of their lives that his mother had opened to me. “Did you share this … room with your mother before I came?” I asked him. I was afraid to say “bed.”

  At first he did not answer. His silence told me I had made a mistake to question him. He moved farther away from me and lay still, his arms folded under his head, his russet eyes taking light from the dying fire at the other end of the room. He stared at the canopy.

  “Yes.” Then he closed his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep. I lay awake, filled with fear of the great expanse of blackness outside the four posts, and inexplicable terror for the future.

  So we three lived together. Mrs. Maclaren made the sewing room into a small bedroom. Robert left very early each morning for the conservatory and returned after seven in the evening for his supper. I spent my mornings trying to practice on the grand piano in the drawing room, feeling Virginia’s resentment across the distance from the sewing room where she preferred to sit in the morning, staring at the barren tree outside her window, sometimes sewing or doing her needlepoint.

  Often, in my cold misery (Germany in the winter is cold and dark and without hospitality even toward its native inhabitants, it seemed to me), I took walks along the formal, square blocks of the city, so different from the unpredictable curves of Boston. One could not get lost in Frankfurt. Its rectangles were too regular. After I had walked around one and come back to my starting point, I would have a hot chocolate and pastry in the Hotel du Nord, I think it was, and then walk around the rectangle in the other direction.

  In those two years my days were filled with music and silences, transplanted, I would often think, from Mrs. Seton and her music room. I stayed away from our flat as much as possible, walking the streets of the city, visiting its museums, going to afternoon concerts. I made no friends and missed Elizabeth and the few I had in Boston. In those years—I don’t know how it is now—Frankfurt had beautiful parks and I would walk there on pleasant days, wishing we had brought Paderewski with us to accompany me.

  Only once do I remember Robert walking with me. He was very quiet, his head bent slightly to one side as though he were listening to sounds pitched so that only he could catch them. He seemed happy, he seemed to be enjoying the absolute peace of those woods. Later in that year he wrote a pianoforte piece called From a German Forest. Then I knew something of what it was he had heard in the silence of the woods that day: the grave low sounds of the wind as it stirs leaves and twigs, moving around amid the Indian pipes and mosses at the foot of great trees, and its high, rhythmic whirrings in the top branches, interrupted at irregular intervals by the cries and pipings of birds.

  We were short of money, but I wanted very much to find rooms of our own. So Robert acquired two pupils, whom he preferred to instruct in the practice ro
oms of the conservatory. One wet afternoon (did it rain every afternoon in Germany or do I only remember it so?) I took the long walk to the school, thinking Robert and I might walk home together, at seven, his usual hour. The matron in a front room somewhat reluctantly directed me to the practice room on the second floor where he was giving a lesson. I went up. The door of the room I had been sent to was ajar, and I looked in. I saw Robert bent earnestly over a young woman seated at the piano, one of his hands lightly on her shoulder, the other poking at a place in the music before them both. She nodded and began to play. He stepped back, bending his head in his customary way, to listen.

  Then I saw, standing in the shadow in a corner of the room, a slight young man whose extraordinarily white face was luminous in the dark space. He seemed to be listening intently, but his eyes were on Robert, not on the young lady who was playing. He watched Robert so closely that his whole body seemed pointed toward him.

  I don’t remember why it so disturbed me to see Robert doing what he said he had to do so that we might be able to afford separate quarters, and the young man (another pupil?) watching him from the shadows. There was surely nothing improper in what I saw. But my discomfort kept me from staying there to wait for him that evening or from inquiring about the young man in the corner. Never again did I return to the conservatory except for the night of the farewell party for Robert. Now I took walks in other directions, resting on the aged wood benches in the parks, on the stone slabs in the art galleries. I learned a little cafe German so I could speak, hesitantly, to waiters and to the amiable guards in the rooms of the museums. I can hardly remember the pictures I studied day after day, but I remember well my loneliness, my sense of being held in the solitary confinement of stone buildings, surrounded by unpeopled forests and empty oceans, always, everywhere, alone.