Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  At nine o’clock Miss Milly gathered together the music we had been doing. “I must start back before it gets too late. It is quite some distance from here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On Phila Street. You go down the hill, and then two squares over from Union Avenue. I board with the Seeleys.”

  “You have a beautiful voice. I so much enjoyed what we did tonight.”

  “And I. You play very well.”

  I walked with her to the door, urging on Paderewski, who had reluctantly agreed to come along, with my knee. The ailing old dog hated to be told to leave the house or the hearth. His trips to the outdoors to perform his bodily needs were always at my prompting. Indeed, at times I remember lifting him over the sill of the front door to help him out.

  Miss Milly Martino admired the dog. She asked how old he was, and I told her not so old, really, but he seemed to have gone into middle age when Robert left him behind to return to Europe, and then moved into premature senility upon his return. She thanked me for allowing her to borrow the Mozart score. We arranged to have another time together on Wednesday of the next week. I waited at the open door, watching her start off down the Farm road, the road the town was later to name and register as Maclaren Road, and then I pulled Paderewski back into the house. I held his thick hair at his neck; he was so big, I so small, that my arm almost rested on his back. I was happy, with a new music-filled happiness, and the feeling of pleasure at having found a congenial, talented friend to share it with.

  I remember another thought on that evening in November in the year that marked the start of a new century: it was possible to commune with the slow-breathing, warm, soft-haired body of an animal like Paderewski, even to feel his response to one’s own contentment. I have had dogs since but none who so perfectly accepted my state of mind as compatible to his, perhaps because his age had made him patient and slow. I wanted the pleasure of that evening to remain, to dally in my head as he lay beside me. I was still able to feel the physical thrill that always rises in me as I listen to the perfect placement of a soprano voice.

  When I closed the door behind me, I found Robert in his velvet house coat standing in the hallway, his fists clenched at his sides, his usually pale face red with fury.

  “Never again, do you hear?”

  “What is it, Robert?”

  “The noise. That … that screeching. I could not think. I could hardly hear my own playing. There is to be no more of that in this house, Caroline.”

  He seemed overwrought, on the verge of tears. I took his hand. “Come to bed, Robert. It’s late. I had no idea we were so—loud. Next time we’ll be quieter. I thought you had finished your work long since.”

  The next Wednesday was cold and rainy. The fall had turned abruptly to winter, the ground was white and treacherous with the first freezing rain. Much of that day I worried that Miss Milly Martino would not make it across her two squares to Union Avenue and then up the hill to our road.

  But she came, the score under her arm wrapped in a piece of oilskin and with it another score from the library, so that we would each be able to read, she said. Her broad felt hat and her coat dripped with rain, her men’s overshoes were buckled tightly to her heavy feet. She seemed to be delighted to be back at the Farm. As she took off her wet clothing she told me she had practiced all week and thought she “had” the scene we had started “by heart.”

  On our way through the house to my sitting room I said, “Tonight we must try to keep our sounds low. Sometimes my husband works late and he is easily disturbed by any sound when he is composing.”

  “Of course, of course.” I remember that her high sweet voice almost squeaked with awe. “I’ve never met him or even seen him. But once I played some of the short pieces of the Woodland Songs. Everyone in the village thinks it is a great honor to have him living near by.”

  We settled ourselves. I began to play the first bars of the aria “Smanie implacabili” … softly. Miss Millie started her “che m’agitate entro quest’ anima” in a light, subdued tone. Then, apparently transported by the aria she loved, by the lovely absurdity of Dorabella planning to go mad for the rest of her life, she struck the high G flat, showing the Eumenides how to scream with all the force of her absorption with the music. My admonition was forgotten. Accurately, elevated, she carried the aria along in that intensity, the music demanding another G flat and then a third. She was note-perfect: her flights between were triumphant, she sang with her whole voice, gaining in power and lyricism, showing me by the movement of her sparkling black eyes how much she had learned during her week of practice.

  Robert flung open my door so hard it hit the sideboard with a crackling sound and swung back almost into his face. He waved it away. His voice was shrill.

  “Out. Out. Get out. No more of that … noise. Out.” His finger pointed at Miss Milly Martino’s shoulder, then prodded it as she tried to move across the room out of his way to where her overshoes stood. I was afraid he was going to strike her, but still I could not move. I sat frozen on the bench. Never do I remember feeling so angry and so impotent. I wanted to shield her from this undeserved indignity, to assure the uncertain, frightened woman who was stumbling into her damp india-rubber galoshes and now struggling to put on her coat, that her voice was beautiful, her high notes pure joy to listen to as well as her effortless movement from one phrase to the next. But I could say nothing. Her mouth was clamped tight with terror. She scurried about the room, frantically gathering up her things. Immobilized by embarrassment, I could not intervene for her with Robert.

  He stood to the side to let her out of the door. She pushed past him, saying nothing. Seated still, I felt as though I were leaving with her, accompanying the heavy, rubbery, clumping sounds as she padded the long length of the halls to the front door, fumbling with the lock—I don’t think there was any light in the front hall in those days. Then the snap, the sharp clasp of the door closing behind her, the little click of the lock: I heard it all from the piano bench.

  Robert had gone when I returned from my motionless trip to the door with Miss Milly Martino. He had turned down the gas lamp over the piano. I listened again, now to his slippered feet crossing the hall to the stairs that went to our room. I remember I sat for some time by that darkened piano, crying from frustration and chagrin. I closed the cover to the keys, thinking how stern and rigid those ivory keys appeared which in my girlhood had seemed soft, endearing, pliable.

  The expulsion of Miss Milly Martino was never spoken of by me or by Robert. Of course she never returned: I believe she was badly hurt by Robert’s treatment. I wanted to invite her to come again while he was away on tour, but somehow I never did. Sometimes I would encounter her behind the oak counter at the library when I called for my week’s reading matter. But we never referred to that evening, not even on the afternoon two weeks later when I gathered my courage to return the library copy of Così fan tutte she had left behind. Both of us, I suspect, were embarrassed by our memories of that terrible evening and preferred to stay safely on the subject of the weather, the latest indignities to library copies by schoolchildren, and summer visitors, whom she always called riffraff.

  A few years later I saw that she tried to disguise the growing palsy of her hand by holding her right wrist with her left hand as she stamped the date on a library card. But often she could not manage to insert the card into its tight little pocket at the back of the book. The townspeople, who had grown fond of the quiet, cheerful, fat little woman, would reach out quickly to perform the task for her. The library’s withdrawal records became illegible. Dates were stamped at perilous slants one on top of the other. Friends of the library took up a collection to help Miss Milly retire. I recall that I requested the Maclaren Foundation to send a contribution.

  But I never heard Miss Milly sing again, and after her retirement I never saw her. In a few years, she went to stay at a boardinghouse for the sick where, a friend, Sarah Watkins, reported to me, she was a sensible,
cheerful patient. Even after her faltering head had to be held at the chin by a broad scarf attached to the uprights of the chair in which she always sat, she could be heard, on occasion, singing snatches of what my informant said she took to be opera.

  The first five years of this century: I must tell you about them in summary, because I confess the details have amalgamated in my memory into one continuous year. Robert wrote much, and well, in those years. He was awarded honorary degrees, his music was praised in the columns of Music, the Courier, in the English Musical Times, and in the large city newspapers. He was away often in the spring and the fall, playing and conducting his work with orchestras in New York, in Boston, in Charleston, and as far west as Cleveland. He would return tired out by the long railway trips between cities, for he was unable to sleep in the Pullman cars. Twice he went abroad, but I did not accompany him: the fees offered him for concerts were not sufficient to allow both of us to travel.

  But during the long, hard New York State winters at the Farm we were alone together, except for the dog and the groundsman, Edward Collins, who kept our paths and roads clear, and the maid from the village, Ida, who came to do the household chores. Robert followed his usual routine rigorously, seven days a week. I “kept” the house, as we used to say, and prepared a lunch (Robert ate no breakfast and made his own cup of chocolate at six in the morning when he started his work), which I left at his closed study door. After my own lunch I rested and then walked into the village, to the greengrocer’s or the butcher shop, which remained open in the winter, and sometimes to the bake shop if Ida had not made enough sweet rolls and cakes to satisfy Robert’s passion for such things.

  Yes, the days I was able to fill. I made a friend, by chance, the wife of a retired Hamilton College professor. She was about thirty, I think, fashionable, alert, and charming to look at. She loved to talk. I must confess I had grown hungry for talk. In our long conversations in her house in the afternoons over tea, I felt a comfortable connection to the trivial, friendly world I had thought I had lost during my life with Robert. I enjoyed listening to Sarah Watkins, for that was the name of the second wife of Professor Gordon Lyman Watkins. I felt ill at ease only when I became aware of my own lack of contribution to the talk.

  Sarah would rattle on in her light-headed way, often humorous and sometimes wry and regretful, about her days—and her nights—with the Professor, as she usually referred to him. My days and nights, indeed, years, were composed of solitude and stillness. I had little I could add to her absorbing narratives. Awake, Robert and I lived at opposite ends of a large house, so that the sounds of my housekeeping, my “puttering,” as Robert called it, would not carry into his study. He could not bear to hear talk before he began his day of composing. He said it sent him off in the wrong direction, colliding with and dispelling the usable silence of the early morning. In that silence, he said, he found the beginnings of melodies.

  Sarah’s confidences were about her husband’s habits and practices, his failings and wrongs to her. She had no discretion; she never seemed to feel she owed him any loyalty, and perhaps I was wrong in so openly relishing her revelations about him. But I was lonely. I needed her chatter and her friendship, so I listened, feeling that her strange stories filled the void of my life.

  As I came to think of him (seldom was he present in the afternoon room when I was there; usually he was in the shed at his woodworking bench), he was a fool, a figure of fun who, I imagined, fumblingly tried to love his younger wife and to live with her peacefully despite his elderly habits. He hoped to content her with mild caresses, with the bristling, wet brush of his heavy gray mustache on her cheek. Holding her teacup in one hand, she would lean across to me, making circles in the air with her slender fingers:

  “The Professor likes me to come to bed in my chemise. He plays endlessly with the ribbons, he rubs them and fondles them. He touches my … my … bosom through the cloth. Never underneath, isn’t that odd? His hands are roughened now from all the woodworking he does. His nails are so long they curl over the edges of his fingers. I can feel them through the cloth.”

  I would listen, wondering why she brought these details of the private bed into the sunny room, while I …

  “The Professor likes to stroke me with his tongue. He uses it in the dark as we lie together, in all the chambers of my ears, and in other places which I cannot mention.”

  I would wait, adding nothing, having nothing to add. Then, perhaps feeling that she had gone too far, revealed too much, she would change the subject and tell me about his hobby, which was carving birdhouses for the gardens and the lawn.

  “I understand about the birdhouses with small openings for wrens and little cups for hummingbirds. And the roofed, gabled residences he makes for orioles and cardinals. And the special apartments which he says mourning doves and even owls prefer. But now I think he’s gone quite queer: he’s made an enormous wheel, the size of a wagon wheel. He made our gardener mount it flat on the roof, for storks. Storks!” she would scream in her light, charming voice. “‘Pelicans, too, and flamingos will be made to feel welcome there,’ he tells me, ‘and anhingas.’

  “He lectures me about birds. ‘Do you know,’ he tells me, ‘that some birds migrate a thousand miles and others only a few hundred feet? So,’ he says, ‘we must be prepared for the long-distance traveler, like the stork, as well as our friends from Watertown, Lake Champlain, and Bellview Street in Saratoga Springs.’”

  All the trees around the Watkins’ house, every gable and portico and porch, were hung with accommodations for birds. Professor Watkins, who taught classics before his retirement, had turned his entire attention to a concern for such housing. He told Sarah that often he lay awake thinking of the homeless bird, forced to sleep standing up on its fragile, twiglike legs for lack of a proper resting place. He mourned the apparent homelessness of the grouse: “Think of the grouse, with its heavy feathered feet. It must need a specially soft floor for its domicile.” And so he built an elegant, ground-level cabin, lined with plush to spare the grouse further pain.

  Professor Watkins’ hands had hardened and split at the finger tips. His palms were crossed with healed cuts and rubbed places. The same capable hands that provided for the hotelling of birds turned feeble and foolish when they approached the lightly clad body of Sarah in their conjugal bed.

  I write of this not because of Sarah. What, after all, is Sarah (and her curious husband who gave his whole time to the happiness of birds) to the point of my narrative? I write of this because it was to gossip, to such confessional afternoons, that I turned to escape the soundlessness of Highland Farm. Intimately involved in this way with the curiosities of Sarah’s life with her husband, I could, for the afternoon, with tea and little cakes on the table before us, escape the blank pages, the empty saga, of my own existence.

  Sarah did not always chatter on so, indifferent to her listener. Many times, I am sure, she must have asked how Robert behaved toward me. She waited for admissions from me about my satisfactions, shall we say, the “transports of delight” as they were termed in the fiction of my day. But I could not bring myself to describe the void, the great bed in which Robert and I lay like strangers, his exhausted back to me, his skin seeming to shrink from any contact with me. My life touched his only through the food I prepared and we ate together in the evening, through the accounts and records I kept of his earnings and our expenses, in the hundreds of letters from his admirers and musical friends to which I responded at his direction.

  It might be thought—indeed, I have seen it written somewhere—that the woman who is unawakened to the pleasures of the body, for which she has only uninstructed hopes, feels no physical need or lack. She is said to live in peace with her ignorance and her unfulfillment because she does not know what fulfillment is; nuns in convents are said to be endowed with such good fortune. I know this not to be so. Even Sarah’s indelicate little disclosures to me about the Professor’s small, feckless, ineffectual doings in their bed a
wakened warm rushes of feeling in me. There were regions in my body, bird-thin to the eye, arid and meager, that seemed to come alive when I heard about the Professor’s fumbling with Sarah’s ribbons. Just as, reading of the passionate embraces of men and women in the lending library’s novels, of heroines’ heaving bosoms as they felt the arms of their lovers around their shoulders, the touch of their fingers, I would respond hotly. My heart would pound. In my thighs, in my chest, at the small of my back there would be sensations I could not explain: warm, exciting, secretly wet.

  Why do I write this foolishness? Why do I break now the reserve of three-quarters of a century, except perhaps to insert into the recounting of the history of that five-year span a few of the unspoken and unrecorded details of the heart and the spirit? It is hardly enough to know that a woman was born and lived and married and, in time, died. It seems somehow important to record, beyond the vital statistics, what she yearned for and was refused, what she imagined and did not realize.

  And while I am writing of Sarah, and her one-sided confidences in those static, holding years: how many truths of the secret lives of women are lost to history in the still, social afternoon air that hovers between two women as they reveal the small singlenesses of their sex, the behavior of their husbands as lords, as lovers? Quickly said, revealed in a breath, in low tones, even whispers, such special truths are quickly buried and forgotten. And yet they hold more valuable human reality for the searcher after truth than the dates of history and the narratives of the lives and deaths of kings.