Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  I can recount what I saw that evening, for my memory of it is still very clear. The white suit, the white cap, yes, they were still there. But stuffed into them, straining every seam and thread, was a monstrously fat little woman. Her great girth made her seem abnormally short. Once onstage, she hesitated uncertainly, dazed by the bright light. Then she wandered toward the center of the stage, her small feet appearing too slight to bear all that gross weight. She smiled at the audience, a foolish, idiot-child smile with her red bowed lips minute in her huge powdered face, and patted the white button at the top of her cap as though to be sure it was still there. Then she waved to the musicians in the pit that she was ready to begin. That gesture, grand and silly, gave away her state: she was profoundly, completely drunk.

  After two false starts, during which either Della Fox or the little orchestra was out of step, she began to sing. Her voice was tiny. She sounded as though it were being squeezed out of her mammoth chest, issuing from between her bubble-like cheeks. She forgot the words, sang “la la de la de la” in their place, grimaced, fluttered her little fat fingers in the dim air in front of her, and then tottered over to the cabaret table at the right of the stage.

  Now the famous act, I thought. But it was not to be. Della Fox made a gallant effort to raise one great leg, packed tight into the trouser, over the corner of the table, but failed. Instead, still singing in her little high-pitched tuneless voice, a measure behind the pianist in the pit, she crossed her ankles and fumbled for the famous cigarette. The silver box gleamed in the spotlight. Trying gamely to open it, she dropped it and it struck the steps a distance from her. The little dance she did, half-bent from the waist, made it clear that she would not be able to pick it up.

  I glanced across at Catherine Weeks. For the first time all day she was smiling. Robert’s eyes were closed.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Churchill whispered, leaning across both of them. We walked up the aisle. I could hear the boos, the whistles, laughter, and shouts of insults from the gallery. People were already ahead of us in the aisle, on their way to the box office, I was sure, to have their admittance money returned to them.

  Robert stopped outside to look at the picture of Della Fox on the poster, at the tiny dimpled creature whose young innocent eyes sparkled even in the old, poor photograph. In her shining man’s suit, smoke curling about her piquant face, she was indeed, as she had been all those years in Robert’s memory, a lovely creature.

  “We should have known. I should have known,” said Robert. “How could it have been otherwise? All those years.”

  Churchill, looking as though he were responsible for the whole fiasco, felt he had to lighten Robert’s spirits. “Well, Rob, look at us. We’re not what we were, either, if you examine us closely.”

  Robert put his hand on Churchill’s still black hair and ruffled it a little. “Perhaps so,” he said in the absent way he had of talking of the past, “but I think you look very well, Church.” He hesitated, and I wondered if he might be thinking of his lapse of the morning. “I’m more like poor Della Fox. Old. Forgetful. Decayed. All too soon.” He paused. Then he took my arm in his accustomed way when he was tired, and said in a whisper that I’m certain only I heard, “Lost.”

  That was almost the last, perhaps even the last, of the good times, for him. In our few remaining days in New York we heard the Aeolian String Quartette at Carnegie Hall play one of Robert’s early quartets, the third, Opus 12, I think it must have been. We walked about in Central Park, we dined at Rumpelmayer’s with Adolph Burmeister and his wife. Adolph and Robert had been in Frankfurt together. Now Adolph played in the string section of the New York Symphony Society.

  From that dinner we came back early to the hotel because Robert complained of an odd unpleasantness: “I could not eat my dinner because it is hard to move my tongue,” he said. “It feels heavy, wooden.” I believed this to be an excuse for the dull silence he had maintained with the Burmeisters at dinner, but I said nothing. We left New York the next morning, two days before we had intended. It was Robert’s last visit to the city, his last trip any distance from the Farm, and, it turned out, the start of the last year of his life.

  The trip home in the railway car was longer and more tedious than the one down. Robert was very silent, persisting in his claim to a sore, cumbersome tongue. I read a little, sampled the chocolates from Maillard’s Candy Store that Churchill had given us upon our departure, and slept well in the berth above Robert. In the early morning I tried to distract him by reading to him from the Sun newspaper I had brought with me from the city. It was on the theatrical page of this newspaper that I learned that Della Fox had made no further appearances at the Lyceum after the one we had witnessed. She had been taken to Bellevue Hospital, the same night we saw her sorry performance, suffering from the delirium tremens of acute alcoholism. I did not convey this information to Robert, preferring to read the comments on a musical affair at Carnegie Hall on the same page. But nothing could take his mind away from his troubling, strange new affliction.

  “My tongue burns,” he insisted on that morning of our arrival at the Saratoga Springs depot. We came back at last to the Farm, tired out from travel, dusty and disheartened. I remember the heat of that summer, I remember the persons who called and were turned away because, I told them, Robert was working, or tired, or temporarily indisposed. I was able to visit with Sarah Watkins only occasionally when I could get away from the care of the house, the garden, and Robert.

  If now I will seem to dwell too much on the unpleasant details of that last year, you must forgive me: but they continue to live in my mind, vivid as fire. Now more than ever I see that they seem to be an integral part of the story I have determined to tell.

  I do not remember exactly when it was that I knew Robert and Dr. Holmes were not acquainting me with the nature of Robert’s illness. I confess to feminine foolishness or, perhaps, human blindness. But I think that, more than these, it was ignorance. For his increasingly horrifying symptoms meant nothing to me until the Christmas Anna Baehr came to help me nurse him, when his care had grown too heavy for me. She was to inform me; until then I knew only that strange and pitiable things were happening to him.

  In late September, Robert agreed at last to go into the village to see Dr. Holmes. The racing season was over, and the lines of vehicles: the touring cars and phaetons, omnibuses and barouches that had conveyed visitors back and forth from the hotels to the track and to the Club-house for gambling had all vanished, and with them the pickpockets and touts, the politicians from New York City, and the theater actors and actresses who played in Saratoga. I always enjoyed reading all the details of that high life in the local paper. The Saratoga Union reported that the village was almost back to its normal population; only a few of the fashionable and wealthy families lingered on for some weeks of the baths and for the cure of the waters.

  It was widely believed in those days that the hot dissipations of the summer, the “pace that kills,” as the Union put it, could be cleansed from the system by sufficient doses of the mineral waters of the Congress Spring. In the late mornings, well-dressed men and women walked in leisurely fashion from their hotels toward Congress Park to drink agate cups full of heavy, sulfurous water. Often the men were portly and red-faced: one knew that rich food and fine French wines from the United States Hotel and the Grand Union Hotel dining rooms, the late suppers at the Club-house, had been taken heavily into their distended stomachs five times each day. Even at the racing clubhouse they ate and drank as they watched the races. In those years their wives never accompanied them to the races or to the gambling casino—such attendance was thought risqué and fast—but still, the ladies, too, seemed to grow heavy in the season. They resorted to the same purgative treatment as their husbands in the Saratoga springs before they moved on to Wiesbaden or Vichy in the fall.

  The morning we drove to the village to see Dr. Holmes we were stopped by a little procession of strollers on their way to the Congress
waters to take the cure. Our hired motorcar waited for them to pass before turning into Broadway. But then I saw the carriage behind the walkers, driven by the famous woman.

  “Look, Robert. Do you know who that is?”

  “Who? Where?” he asked. Then he said, “No. Who is it?”

  The woman driving her carriage alone was what we used to call a spectacle. Almost larger than life, she was crossing the broad avenue slowly, a great peacock of a woman in a white carriage, a lavender parasol in one hand, the other holding white doeskin reins to her all-white horse. Her hips, ample and stately, completely occupied the whole seat of the carriage, as though it took that breadth to bear the broad, snow-white, almost fully displayed bosom above them. She was dressed (swathed was the word we used to hear for this) entirely in lavender. Her huge, large-brimmed silk hat was lavender, too, except for the brilliantly red roses on its brim, and she smiled from side to side of her carriage, the smile of a confident, famous, massive, but still lovely face.

  “That’s Lillian Russell, the actress, Robert. She’s grown fat, but isn’t she still beautiful, in her way? She looks—majestic.”

  Robert looked at her and did not reply. Perhaps he was thinking of Della Fox, wondering if obesity was the fate of all boyhood visions, of all great beauties. “Let’s move on,” he said to the driver.

  “We can’t pass. The driver can’t pass. Everyone ahead has stopped to see her.”

  Lillian Russell’s carriage was trimmed with solid silver. On her lap, erect and small, lean and haughty, sat her Japanese spaniel, his diamond collar, the Saratoga Union reported, having cost eighteen hundred dollars. It was altogether a wonderful sight to see. I have never forgotten it. The Union reporter wrote that Lillian Russell had grown grossly fat from gluttony. She was said to eat three whole chickens at dinner, to drink three bottles of French wine during an evening, and to finish with six cream desserts. But I forgot that as I looked at her, lordly and elegant, her enormous stays lifting her great bosom far into the space before her, shading the little dog in her lap. She passed the corner where we sat still waiting and came to the corner of the Grand Union piazza. Every man seated there, resting after the strenuous season, I suppose, rose to his feet as she passed, removing his hat, as though to acknowledge the progress of a queen or a goddess.

  She had passed the Grand Union Hotel and was driving up Broadway when our driver was able to move our vehicle. I was still full of the vision:

  “Robert, do you know, she refuses to stay at the Grand Union Hotel. I read that in the newspaper. Despite all its elegance.”

  “Why?” he asked thickly. His tongue was again troubling him, and I could tell he inquired only out of politeness.

  “I think it’s because of that sign.”

  On the registry desk of the Grand Union Hotel a notice read:

  “She has that spaniel she is so devoted to. So, of course she stays at the Crumb House instead.”

  Dr. Holmes examined Robert. Then he came into the waiting room with him. “I want him to be seen by a colleague of mine, a doctor in New York. Dr. Keyes, Edward Lawrence Keyes, at the Bellevue Hospital in New York.”

  “I will not go there,” said Robert to neither of us, into the air of the waiting room. “I will not go back to that city.”

  “You must, Mr. Maclaren. You must be seen. I am not certain of the new treatment for your—ailment. Keyes is a specialist, an expert. He is writing a book on—such matters. You must go to see him.”

  Robert refused. Soon after, it must have been a month or so later, fortune came our way. Dr. Keyes, visiting friends in Saratoga Springs for the famous fall display of color in the leaves, called upon us. There had been no change in the condition of Robert’s mouth and tongue. If anything, it had grown worse. The one view I had of them made my heart pound with fear. He could eat almost nothing, he said, everything stuck to his tongue and in his throat. Now it was impossible to keep his desperate state hidden any longer. “Look, Caroline.”

  He opened his mouth. I looked. Clinging to the normal dark-red lining of the roof of his mouth were white mucous patches, ugly and dead-looking. His tongue was coated on all sides with thick, viscid saliva. Before he closed his mouth again quickly, sensing my horror at the hideous sight, I caught a foul, acrid odor and turned away without thinking, to escape the unpleasantness of it. I felt nauseated.

  “Dear God, Robert. What is it?”

  He shook his head. His eyes looked wild and terrified. Rarely in the days that followed did he speak, for his difficulty in moving his swollen, covered tongue and the pain in his cheeks and mouth made him avoid the slightest effort. Once again, on the evening before Dr. Keyes’s arrival at the Farm (Dr. Holmes had sent word with the mail carrier of the imminent visit), I caught sight of the terrible thing he kept shut away in the diseased cavity of his mouth. At dinner, eating the warm milk toast I had prepared for him, he tried to cough and choked. I started to go to him, thinking to help him by pounding his back, but he gestured me away. Then (Lord, how clear that moment is still to me!) he thrust his fingers into his mouth and pulled out a rancid, ropy mass of thick, oily, copper-colored saliva. It clung to his fingers, he could not shake it off, he groaned helplessly. I rushed to him with my dinner napkin, wrapping his foul-smelling hand in it. It was the beginning of my witness to his long and terrible dying.

  The next morning Dr. Keyes was with him in his bedroom for almost an hour. I waited downstairs at his request. When he came down he asked me to be seated. He took the settee at the side of the hearth.

  “Mrs. Maclaren, I must be open with you. Your husband is gravely ill. There is treatment, of course. We can assuage his symptoms, we can make him more comfortable in this—affliction. But, I must be direct with you, we cannot cure him. It is, sadly, too late. He should have been treated when this first appeared, perhaps ten or more years ago. I do not know that exactly—he will not say. But even then we could not have been sure. We knew very little about the treatment then. Now our method works often, not always. At all events, it is too late to apply it to him now. It would do no good.”

  “What is it, Doctor? What does he have? Does it have a name?”

  I thought Dr. Keyes looked uneasily at me. “It has a number of names. Some have called it a blood disease, a disorder of the red corpuscles. Others see it as a disturbance of the nervous system, a brain disease. But whatever it is named, it starts and then recedes, appears and then rests a long while before it finally reappears with terrible virulence, as you now see it in Mr. Maclaren.”

  “I understand. Can you tell me if other … what else will happen?”

  “That, too, varies with the patient. The liver may be involved—there may be the jaundice that comes of that. His tongue may ulcerate, then harden, and finally become almost useless. That will cause a great deal of salivation, almost constant drooling which he will not be able to control. You must—uh, prepare in some way for that, with towels and large napkins, perhaps even a capacious bib of some kind. There may be bad swelling and splitting of the lips from all the water, but we can help that with mercurial ointment.”

  “Yes. Is there more?”

  “His gums are now spongy, almost like a soft cheese. There are large patches of fungus on them, what we call noma: they are very infected. So we may expect his teeth to—be lost quite soon. Even now there is much bleeding from the gums. The blood tends to be caught in that thick saliva you may have seen. His throat is similarly afflicted now, and it will be worse. It will swell and cause him much trouble swallowing. He may try constantly to cough, or to vomit, with no results. This condition we can lessen: we cannot stop it entirely.”

  “Dear Lord! How can this be? How long …?”

  “The worst part will be over in a few months, I think. After that there will be inevitable weakness in all the limbs—and, I must tell you, for most loved ones find this hardest to bear, diminution of the mental faculties. He will be bedridden, but must be helped into a chair each day for a short time to preven
t liquid from forming in the lungs. He will require feeding and his bodily functions will have to be cared for, for he will lose control of them. Often he will be irritable and sometimes irrational in his demands and complaints. You must be patient.”

  I stared at him, I’m sure, all the time he was reciting these terrible expectations. “Can nothing be done? Something, there must be something to do for this—nerve or blood disease, whatever it is. …”

  “I do not believe so, Mrs. Maclaren. But of course there are other doctors you might wish to consult. There is a Dr. William Gottheil in Boston who has written impressively on this subject. You could—”

  “No, no, that is not what I meant. I trust your experience, your knowledge, Dr. Keyes. But to know, so surely, that it is incurable …”

  “I wish it were otherwise, with all my heart. But it is not. I can only say that …”

  “Robert will die?”

  “Well, yes.” He stood up. He turned a wry smile toward me, but I understood from what followed that it was directed more at himself: “A fatal termination, we say. But he will die, and soon. Yes.”

  I find it hard to remember if I responded aloud to this frightful finality. I do recall the curious mixture of my feelings: profound pity for my poor sick husband who had still so much more suffering to endure, and pity for myself at the prospect of having to witness his torment. But grief? The stricken and furious grief of the wife about to be a widow? I felt none of that, for wife I was only in a sense, and woman I had not yet learned to be.

  I saw him to the door. His chauffeur waited outside in his motorcar. Dr. Keyes turned to me and took my hand in his.

  “My dear madam. This is a very hard thing for you to bear. I am keenly aware of that. But I will instruct Dr. Holmes, who is very capable, in all the procedures I am familiar with and he will be able to care for Mr. Maclaren well. Upstairs I have left on his table some prescriptions for treatment of the mouth—tincture of benzoin, another compound for his throat. Dr. Holmes will know what to do, whatever happens, you may be sure.”