A cool wind cut across New York harbor. I remember thinking it was a new-world air, brasher and fresher than the ancient heavy air of Frankfurt we had just left. We watched the miniature waves of the Hudson River lap the white sides of the ship. Robert put his hands down on the rail and bent over to listen, I suspected, to the suspirations of the water. I knew he was listening for a pattern, a melody, even a refrain. I heard none, only the irregular gasps and smacks of tame harbor water.
The ship made its slow bend to the right, seeming to lean into the wind, nudged into its docking position by four insistent tugboats on its left side. The wind died as the maneuver cut the ship off from the river. Almost at once it became very warm, with the hot breath of the shore and the land.
I knew Robert was absorbed and nervous, not from the intricate motions of bringing a great ship to berth, but by the uncertainty of his future, by his already forming nostalgia for the securities of his life abroad. For him the present never existed, which was perhaps why I never seemed to exist for him. I watched him pat his hat again, saw that the work of his nail on his lip had produced a small trickle of blood. “Good Lord, Robert. Your lip is bleeding. You’ve been picking at it again.”
He licked his lip, smiling a little as though he were pleased at the taste. Perhaps he was making a small physical addition to the pain he was feeling, to the fear of coming home to America, to Boston, compounding dread with blood. “Will it take us long to come through customs, do you think, Robert?”
“I don’t know. Burns took me through last time. Even so, it was two hours before I could start for the hotel.”
I tried to think how I could make the passage from the ship to the hotel easy for him, in place of his brother, whom we had not informed of our arrival. Robert was unable to manage such journeys, often following crowds in the direction they flowed, forgetful of his own. Sometimes I wondered if he thought everyone was going to his destination.
The gangplanks were lowered. They resembled three parallel tongues reaching toward the shore. We followed the crowd to one of them. Once down and on the pier, I felt the first assault of the depression that was to afflict me all that first year back in Boston. Robert had come home to promise, I to more of my married life as it had been lived in Germany: a maker of late suppers, a duster of piano keys and the lowered lid in the off hours when they were not in use, a solitary visitor to galleries and concert halls in the afternoons.
Still, the moment of stepping ashore at the foot of New York’s towers was exciting. There was the chance that much might change now that Virginia and the conservatory were left behind. Robert might turn his eyes toward me, see me, might erase my sense of insufficiency with his love and notice. Now that we were home in our own land, he might open a little of his handsome European surface to my deep American love for him.
A few steps from the end of the gangplank we were met by a strange young man who seemed to have been waiting for us. He introduced himself to us as a reporter from the Boston Transcript, come to New York, he said, to interview the returning native son back from his European success. He wore a straw hat with a wide red-and-white band, and a white-and-blue-striped jacket that had suffered in the June heat of New York. There were semicircles of dampness under his arms. His forehead was wet. I saw Robert draw back from him a little.
“Have you lived in Germany very long?”
“For some years,” Robert said, in the clipped Germanic diction he had acquired abroad. He sounded precise and curt, as though the interview had already gone on too long.
“Study there, did you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Performed on the piana too, did you?”
Robert looked at me helplessly. The newfound patriotism of his return seemed to be slipping away in the presence of this reporter’s callow American ignorance. I gestured toward the trunks and grips, now piled neatly under a cardboard sign that said M. “Perhaps we should get into our line for the customs inspector,” I said.
“Just a few more questions here, sir. Knew some of the greats, did you, over there in Paree?”
“I was in Paris only a year. Debussy was a fellow student there. We both studied under Savard.”
The reporter, I saw, wrote down DEBOOSIE carefully in his notebook and then asked, “Where did you go then? Vee-enna?”
“To Frankfurt, Germany, where I studied with Carl Heymann and Joachim Raff.”
I spoke up quickly to fill what threatened to be a long silence while the young man struggled with the proper names. “Mr. Maclaren’s compositions were highly praised and encouraged by William Mason, a protégé of Franz Liszt,” I said, to prevent Robert’s leaving rudely.
The straw-hatted young man wrote on his pad LIST and something else I could not read. “And now what are your plans, sir?”
“To compose and play, and perhaps to teach, in Boston.”
“Well, good luck to you, sir. And to you, ma’am. Excuse my dumbness. I’m—this is not my regular beat. Know nothing about music myself. City side of the desk is my place. Just happened to be in New York, so they asked me to come by.”
“Quite all right.” We walked away, toward the letter M and our luggage.
An astonishing metamorphosis of this conversation appeared in the Transcript, signed by what I took to be the young man’s name, E. P. Duckworth. It was full of rhetoric and an invention of which I had not thought him capable after hearing him speak. The news report said that “the composer and his wife, Caroline, had lived abroad for some years, he studying and composing a great deal of music of which the composer Franz Liszt had been very admiring. A friend of Robert Maclaren’s, interviewed in Frankfurt, said of the couple that ‘their union, perfect in sympathy and closeness of comradeship, was nothing short of ideal.’” He continued (I am quoting now from the newspaper account, which I still have in a scrapbook and which I will lay here in this account): “Their life in Frankfurt was characterized by an ideal serenity and detachment. It was a time of rich productiveness for Maclaren, who is now only twenty-four, and it is to be expected that his return to his homeland will be marked by further steps toward the great promise of his talent. His lodgings will be in Boston, where he and Mrs. Maclaren will reside on Mount Vernon Street. There he will accept private pupils. His First Piano Suite will be performed in November in Chickering Hall.”
A felicitous editor, I imagine, had turned Robert’s bluntness, a reporter’s ignorance, and Weeks’s friendly blindness into tribute. I do not wish to seem critical or ungrateful when I say that this magical process, this kind of transmutation, was to occur again and again in Robert’s biography. Admirers of his charm and his music created the myth of him that has remained to this day. The descriptive mode used for writing about him has always been euphemism—until the very end, and after his death, when critics, conductors, and students began to be critical of what they called his extreme romanticism. They were to comment upon the small scope of his work, the sentimental impressionism (I am using their terms, not mine) of his later compositions. But not yet: at this time about which I am writing, only panegyrics were written about him. The Transcript’s article was the beginning.
The house we rented in Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill was narrow and three-storied. It looked out at back on a small, lovely shaded garden, and had a very large room suitable for a music room, two small sitting rooms, one for each of us, and two bedrooms. We reclaimed Paderewski from the friends who had boarded and overfed him in Robert’s long absence. He had lost his lean look and become lazy and slow in his movements. He loved to lie in the garden and to be taken for short walks around the gardens on Commonwealth Avenue. Delighted to have him back, Robert took him out for airings every morning, and then returned him to his banishment in the garden when he went upstairs. Robert could not bear to work with any motion or breathing in the room. Paderewski disliked being put out, but he learned to be patient, to lie under the plane tree until Robert, finished with a long day of composing and lessons, would com
e for him again in the early evening. They walked together while I talked to our supper guests, if we had them, or supervised the food if we were to be alone. Only on weekends was the routine broken, when Robert went out to perform with the Symphony, or with the Kneissel Quartette, or to play at Chickering Hall in Boston.
Or, on Sunday evenings, we very often went to concerts, to hear Robert’s work played, for it was beginning to have a vogue and could be heard quite often there and in other cities. I remember when Lear and Cordelia was played for the first time by the Symphony Orchestra. Artur Nikisch was to conduct it. He came by to call for us that evening. We took a hansom cab together to the Music Hall, it must have been, since I don’t think the orchestra had as yet moved into its new Symphony Hall. Nikisch, Robert, and I had met in Leipzig; Robert and he had become good friends. This evening was the first time in a long time, almost since the farewell party, that I had seen Robert so animated. It was not because the Boston Symphony was going to play his work but because someone from the past—a friend from his beloved Germany—was there in his Beacon Hill sitting room.
I doubt if either Robert or Nikisch knew I was present. We entered the old Music Hall through the back door, I somewhat behind the two of them, and they in a transport of delight in being together again. Robert had his arm around Nikisch’s shoulder. It was much like a reunion of fellow army officers who had once been stationed on the same foreign post, or college classmates come together after a long absence.
I went to my seat, and Robert joined me there. When Nikisch came to the podium I noticed how much alike he and Robert looked, with the similarity that seemed to characterize most men of their age and European training and class. Except for his beard (Robert never adopted the European habit), Nikisch had the same short, middle-parted hair, the same thick, curving mustache, the same absorbed look. They belonged to a close fraternity of artists—of men—which I had learned about in Frankfurt and from which, because I was a woman and a very minor musician, I felt eternally excluded. There were women musicians we had known in Europe—Teresa Carreño, who played Robert’s Second Piano Suite in Wiesbaden, and a Miss Adele Margolis in London who performed two movements from his first suite. Robert wrote grateful notes to the two pianists, but he made no efforts to meet them: in the fraternity there was room only at a distance for women.
I had always thought that a perfect union (so the Transcript happily termed it) was the result of spiritual and intuitive harmonies, an intellectual fidelity, so to speak. If this were achieved, one could then enter into the highest harmony, which was physical love. In this day it is thought to be the other way around, but I have never believed that. Robert and I had almost no physical love, and never, it seemed to me, had it come at the culmination of the other unities, always as a sudden thought, a remembrance of conjugal duty. For neither of us do I think it was a great pleasure, certainly never for me. Indeed, I was not to know the joy of that pleasure of which so many speak and write until much later and in another way. …
Robert occasionally performed his duty as meticulously as he walked his dog, parted his hair, trimmed his mustache. But at the end of a long day, I knew his energy was very low, his interest elsewhere, his physical prowess used up. We lay in the great bed, which we had transported safely and crammed into an upper chamber of our thin New England town house. We rarely touched; he slept stretched out straight on his side, unwilling to lose his rest by contact, as solitary in his sleep as he was in his waking hours, a man who lived almost entirely within himself. Every month when I had my female visitor, as we used to call it, he would move to the couch in his studio, offended, I think, by the unmistakable odor, which the strips of rag I wore could not disguise. His nights and days were designed to shield himself and his art.
Or so I then thought.
I have mentioned the farewell party given Robert by his fellow students and his pupils before he left the Hoch Conservatory, two evenings before, as I recall. None of the women students came, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour. It was at nine o’clock. I was the only lady among twelve or thirteen solemnly suited men standing about the room, wineglasses in their hands, talking together, Robert in the center, laughing often. I was introduced to a number of persons I had not met before. Professor Heymann came over to speak to me when I seemed to be pushed to the very edge of the animated groups. He took my arm and moved me over to speak to a pale-faced young man who was also standing alone. I remembered him at once as the young man I had seen in the shadows of Robert’s lesson that day. “Mrs. Maclaren, may I present Churchill Weeks,” the professor said. “A very good pianist. This is Robert’s wife, Caroline.”
Churchill Weeks stared at me. His brows were so heavy over his deep-set eyes it was difficult to see them clearly. His face seemed almost sickly in that studio light. He took my hand, raised it a little, and bent stiffly over it, in the German way, without kissing it. “I am honored, Frau Maclaren. Your husband is my very dear friend. I shall miss him very much.”
I was astonished: tears streamed down his face. I was startled, for I had not seen his eyes, I did not know he was crying. That was all he said for a long moment, and then he went on, “You must pardon my display of feeling. I am an American—my home is in Milwaukee—and it is hard to stay on here—alone.” He turned and left the room.
Walking back toward the Praunheimer Strasse, I asked Robert about Churchill Weeks. “Is he always—so emotional?” Robert seemed reluctant to talk about him. “He’s—a musician, a composer. Very sensitive.”
“Have you been friends long?”
“We have known each other since we came to Frankfurt at almost the same time.”
“More than two years, then?”
“Yes, it must have been. Somehow it does not seem that long.”
“Why did I never meet him before? Why did you never bring him home?”
Robert made no reply. We walked for some time in silence, the usual climate of our walks. Silence was more characteristic of him when we were together than the sound of his voice, low and pleasant as I remember it being to friends. After a while he said, “I enjoyed the party. It was good of them all to have it for me. They’re very kind friends.”
I managed to bury the memory of Churchill Weeks’s pale, wet face until the letters began to arrive, not long after we had settled into Mount Vernon Street. One morning the postman handed me three thin letters in blue envelopes as I walked out to do the day’s shopping. Robert was cloistered in his studio upstairs where he had breakfasted alone in order to begin work early. All the letters were from abroad, and in the left-hand corners read: Weeks/Jahnstrasse 76/Frankfurt/Deutschland. I went back into the house and climbed the stairs to deliver the letters. I first knocked on Robert’s door and then went in. He was standing beside the piano, his head bent over a manuscript page of music, both hands resting on the lid. He had not heard me enter.
I did not want to interrupt, knowing how intently he was listening to the sounds in his head as he often did, even in company, and always when he was alone with me. I went out, closing the door quietly behind me, and left the letters for him on the reception table near the downstairs entry. On the way to his walk later, with Paderewski, he will find them, I thought.
That night we were to sup late. Robert was still in his studio, engrossed in his new Woodland Songs, which he had told me he hoped Carl Faelton would play in his recital in New York next season. Robert came to supper and ate in silence, wiped his mustache carefully with his napkin, folded it, and then for the first time turned his eyes on me, with that weary look he always had at the end of a long day of work, close to the end of his patience with himself and with me, for some unknown reason. “I found my mail very late this afternoon. Does it not usually come earlier?”
“Yes, about nine-thirty, usually.”
“Why didn’t you bring it up to me?”
“I did, Robert. You were working. I didn’t wish to disturb you.”
“You might have offered me a choic
e,” he said in a small, angry voice.
I was aghast. No household crisis or sudden personal disability, nothing, had ever before been sufficient cause for Robert to be interrupted. But Weeks’s letters …
I must now write frankly, perhaps more frankly than I am sure the Foundation wishes me to. For the fact was, those letters from Churchill Weeks were love letters. I must be pardoned for the venial sin I committed: I read them. It happened this way. A few days later another thin blue envelope from Germany arrived. This time I carried it at once to the music room. Robert took it, smiled his quick, charming smile, thanked me, and turned away to read it. I remember thinking how his smile had shrunk, from the wide grin I first noticed at our meeting in the park until now: it had become abbreviated, a token, a quick gesture like a handshake, the remains of a smile. Then it was gone and one was left, I was left, that is, frozen rather than warmed by it.
That afternoon Robert went to a rehearsal. I watched him from an upper window as he turned the corner into the avenue and then I went quickly into the music room. With me I took a duster as pretense. The room was meticulously neat—Robert could not work unless it was—but the surfaces were somewhat dusty and I began to stir the dust about. Under a pile of music paper near the back of the piano I saw a light blue color. And while only Paderewski watched my shameful act, I read Weeks’s letters.
What shall I say of them? They were written in an agony of love such as I had never in my life been witness to. Weeks told Robert of the pain his departure had caused him, of the illness he had suffered for two months afterward, of his slow recovery during which his only thought was to see Robert again, to hold his beloved head in his hands once again, to take strength from his strength. Was it at all possible that Robert was planning a summer return to the Continent, since he, Weeks, would not be free to come to Boston? In a cribbed, uneven script that seemed visible evidence of his distraught state, he asked:
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