Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  “Even when she called, ‘Anna,’ that last morning, my heart beat so fast from fear that I could not answer or go in to see her. I was afraid to look on suffering. I was afraid I would see death as it came, I was afraid of being sick and dying myself, I was afraid of everything. I could not bring myself to be near her.

  “Frau Mundlein stayed home from work the day Rosa’s fever went very high. She told me not to go to school and instead to fetch the doctor. I went gladly. He said, ‘I will come when I can. New York is full of sick people.’ I remember still, to my shame, that I walked very slowly away from his office. I looked in store windows. I sat on a bench in front of a cigar store and studied a painted wooden Indian with his raised arm, his fingers holding a tomahawk. I spent long minutes at the glass counter of the newspaper store on the corner deciding to buy a rope of licorice with the penny I had. I thought of visiting a friend who lived around the corner and then remembered she would be in school.

  “All this time my heart was pounding, my lips were dry, my tight fists were wet. I was mortally afraid. I did not want to go back home to see the dying and to be there when it came.

  “And so I wasn’t. When I got home Frau Mundlein was sitting in the parlor, holding a handkerchief. Her face was red and wet. ‘She is dead,’ she said and cried. And I? I am ashamed to say, I was flooded with relief that I had not seen it. Afterward, yes, I felt sorrow for my sister, my companion and friend. And pity for her, and terrible guilt at my cowardice.

  “The doctor came and wrote out a paper and gave it to Frau Mundlein. Again he waited. Frau Mundlein gave him two dollars. Two men came for Rosa with a stretcher. I stood in the doorway, watching them lift her from our bed. Before they covered her with a sheet, Frau Mundlein leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

  “It is the way I remember Rosa most clearly now: lying on the stretcher, her eyes closed, her small nose pinched in and blue, great black patches on her cheeks and her chin. And Frau Mundlein bending over to kiss her. I have never put the sight of it away, nor the guilty ache I was left with. The memory of me, huddled against the frame of the door, afraid, lingering at the store, always afraid.

  “In high school I took science subjects so I could go on to a nursing school. I would not be afraid again, I thought. I would learn what to do for the sick and acquire courage so that in all my life I would not run away at the prospect of suffering and pain. Even if I could not stop it, I would learn to stay with it, to help, to be with the sufferer, as I had not been able to be with my sister.”

  The work of the Foundation went along very well in the ten years that followed, as the press and the public who have been informed of these matters know. Mrs. Rhinelander conceived of the idea of the Maclaren Clubs, somewhat like the Mendelssohn Clubs, all over the country. I, and others in the Foundation, traveled to all parts of the nation helping to establish these clubs. The plan was this: once a month members of the club would come together for the performance of American music by American musicians, and the proceeds, after expenses and fees, would come to the Community’s scholarship and building funds.

  I traveled much in those years, accompanied always by Anna. On occasion I played some of Robert’s piano music, but more often I spoke to groups of interested men and women about his compositions and his life as a student, a conductor and composer. I became proficient in my omissions, after a while not even considering that I was promulgating an authorized version of his life in which only the surface detail bore any resemblance to reality. I was, however, entirely successful in my apostolate: articles and books, encyclopedia entries, and histories of music and musicians have accepted and made permanent, and still retain, my descriptions. Only here, now, when Robert’s name and music have fallen out of the public memory and are known only to a few dusty scholars, do I fill in the blanks I left in those speeches to raise money in his memory.

  The sums donated to our enterprise astounded me: one and one-half million dollars in the first three years, beginning with a most generous sum from Mr. Rogers, another from Dr. Butler and the members of the Columbia University department of music. All of Robert’s acquaintances, the doctors who treated him, musicians in the orchestras he had conducted, the publishers of his music, even dear Reverend Whitehall, who had become my good friend, all sent postal orders or checks. Young men and women who had studied his piano pieces when they were learning to play, as well as eminent persons all over the musical world: it was most gratifying. With those first years’ contributions we were able to secure the future of the Farm by paying the bank what was owed on the mortgage and to begin to build the six studios in the woods we had planned to house our young resident musicians.

  By the spring of 1911, I think it was, they were ready for occupancy. I wrote to persons I knew in the universities who taught music (not so frequent a thing as it is now) asking for the names of promising young persons who might want to work at the Maclaren Community, as it was formally titled in our chartered papers. One of these letters went to Churchill at Columbia. It was some time before I had an answer, and then it was not from Church but from the chairman of his department. I include the letter in this account for purposes of completeness:

  Dear Mrs. Maclaren:

  I took the perhaps unwarranted liberty of opening your letter to Professor Weeks because his widow, to whom it should rightfully have been forwarded, has returned to her home in Milwaukee, where she has again taken up abode. We are not in possession of her address there.

  The sad facts are these: Professor Weeks died last summer after a long illness. He had left the faculty during the spring semester before, suffering from a long series of afflictions, to the liver, to the skin, and finally, I must tell you, to his mental faculties. Regrettably, we were forced to ask for his resignation. Mrs. Weeks much resented our decision. She appeared before the department committee in June to protest, claiming with some heat that her husband was only temporarily ill and would be well in time for the opening of the fall semester. The doctors, she insisted, had assured them of this.

  It was our feeling, after observing Professor Weeks’s rapidly deteriorating condition during his last term of teaching, that this would be impossible. Indeed, this judgment was, sadly, borne out: he died during the summer that followed from a heart attack, Mrs. Weeks reported to us.

  I hope you will permit me and my colleagues to send our regrets to you, knowing of your late, esteemed husband’s long friendship with Professor Weeks. Finally, I wish to say I am sorry to have been the one to convey this news to you. Apparently, Mrs. Weeks, in her grief, must have neglected to do so, and you must not have seen the short but respectful obituary printed in The New York Times.

  I am yr. most obedient servant

  Lawrence Vandersee

  Chairman, Department of Music

  Columbia University

  I tried to find Catherine’s address in Milwaukee, without success. I wanted to send her condolences. Not finding her, I had no place to mail my note. I have never heard from her and do not know if she is still alive.

  Anna and I devised a routine for our six summer visitors to follow. They arrived in late May and remained, if they found the Community congenial, until early October. At first only male composers came to us. A few of them, oddly, found the life at the Community very hard. They were the gregarious fellows who could not withstand the long hours of enforced solitude. Our rules required that the days from early morning until evening must be reserved for creative work in the studios, alone. Some disliked the communal outhouse, which was cold at night and often inhabited by annoyances like spiders and mosquitoes. A few resented our communal approach to meals and other household chores. One man felt the lack of electric light in the studios was old-fashioned. We had hired a very good cook who came in midafternoon and stayed until dinner was prepared. So the clearing and washing after dinner was done by all of us together, to the dismay of a few of the young men whose talents had protected them thus far from close contact with domestic chores.

/>   Professor Vandersee had enclosed with his letter a list of three names, graduates in composition now living precariously in New York, whom he recommended highly to me. One of them, a former student of Churchill’s named Eric Anderson, was accepted for the first year.

  Anderson was to prove our most faithful applicant and returnee. He was older than the others, in his late twenties when he started his attendance at the Farm, and had studied abroad as well as at Columbia University. He proved pleasant, willing, and surprisingly without the usual difficult temperament. His quietness was always welcome in the evenings, a little landing of silence in the midst of the general turbulence, the vocal excesses of the other, sometimes very arrogant, young men at our supper table. Anna and I were always glad when he applied to return for a summer and when the admissions committee, made up of established critics and composers, accepted him. Sometimes he played for us all in the evenings. The influence upon him of Robert Maclaren’s music was evident: it was as though he had taken in from the air around him Robert’s love of incorporating natural sounds in his melodies, his fondness for program pieces, his modest tunes and thin, delicate orchestrations. By the time the Great War began in Europe, Eric had become an expected part of our summer household as no other Community member ever was.

  I can see him now, his six-foot-six frame bent over the piano keys, the lamp making his long blond hair, parted neatly in the center and reaching to his shoulders, even lighter, his huge hands wholly occupying the keyboard. He played Liszt with a kind of massive authority. He had his native country’s light blue eyes. There was only one blemish to his blond handsomeness: a red mark, thin and salamander-shaped, which lay over his light skin from his eye to the corner of his mouth. Often he would sit with his hand over the mark, leaning on his elbow as he ate or listened to music. When he played, however, the scar darkened, although he seemed at those times to have forgotten it. The younger men called him the Quiet Swede. They appeared to resent his unusual reticence in the midst of all their racket and boisterous talk.

  At the end of the summer of ’15 we knew the war was close to us. That fall we had fewer applications for the next year. Many of the possible candidates, I suppose, were expecting to be called away to the army. But in May ’16 Eric came with three others and we settled into a quiet summer before the inevitable turmoil of war.

  I never knew quite why—it may have been the remnants of Europe that still lingered in Anna’s speech and manners—but Eric found it possible to talk to Anna and to no one else. One night as she and I were in bed she told me he had said two periods of his life had been spent in sanatoria for the insane: once in Sweden when he was in gymnasium and again in New Haven, Connecticut, while he was studying music in New York. His illness was depression. When it came upon him he could not play or write or eat or move from his bed or his chair. The first time he had to be carried to the hospital and kept there for a year until gradually it wore away. “I am well now. It is six years since … I have been working very well since … that last time.”

  Only in Anna did he confide, as I have said. But even to her he would not say anything about his parents. “He is a solitary man,” Anna told me, “who can not bring himself to talk about himself. He lives alone because he has lost his confidence that anyone else would accept his history or trust his present and future.” But at the Farm his way of listening intently to the others made him accepted, especially, I had noticed, by Anna, who favored him when she served portions in the kitchen at supper. She always provided his lunch basket with extra fruit and the sweets he loved.

  During the first week of October we held our customary party to bid the young men good-bye. The visitors brought the wine and we provided sandwiches and cakes. We always preceded the feast with some hours of performance. Eric was more silent than usual, preferring, when his turn came, not to play. He sat beside Anna on the love seat and twice I saw him bend over to whisper something to her. He ate a great deal—our small sandwiches always seemed to disappear into his outsized hands—and he smiled steadily, receptively, but made no contributions to the general hilarity.

  The other young men were like children about to be given their vacation from school. They drank much wine, joked loudly with each other, and talked about how good it would be to return to New York for the beginning of the opera and concert season. They seemed glad to be finished with the long summer’s work and solitude: but not Eric. As always, he was regretful and sad.

  The party lasted until midnight. At half past ten I said my farewells. They were all to make their way to the village railway depot early the next morning before I expected to arise. Anna remained to close up behind the young men after they returned to their studios.

  I must have fallen asleep quickly and slept for some time. The sound of a door woke me. I looked at the clock that stands in the corner of our room. It was two o’clock. Anna was not there.

  I went to the landing, feeling panicked. She was coming up the stairs in the dark and seemed startled to see me awake. We went back to the bedroom together.

  “Where have you been?” I whispered, although why I do not know. There was no one any longer I might disturb.

  “Talking. Talking to Eric. He said he wanted—very much—to talk.” She undressed quickly, came into the bed and stretched out as though she were very tired. I sat up, now wide awake, waiting for her to speak. Suddenly there was missing the accustomed, loving easiness between us, the way we moved together at the start of sleep to lie close, often in each other’s arms, the sense of creature warmth and security we kindled between our two bodies as we touched, the wonderful way we were always able to converse about anything, everything. The room, the bed, my heart felt cold, a new twist of jealousy, the rattle of fear knocking on the panes of the heart.

  “Anna. Do you, do you—care for Eric? You must tell me at once if you do.” There was a silence. Anna pulled the quilt over her shoulders to her chin. I lay down a short space from her, barely able to see the dark outline of her head on the pillow. Only thin moonlight entered the room.

  “No, Carrie. I don’t care for him—that way. Not in the way I care for you. But he is a troubled, lonely man. He has no friends, he tells me. He needs someone to talk with, to hear about his fears and worries.”

  Immensely relieved, I reached across what had seemed a chasm in the bed between us and touched her hair. It curled tightly about her head. “Does he care for you, Anna?” She turned to me, and I realized the chasm had been of my imaginary making. Once more warmth returned to the bed.

  “I’m afraid, yes. He does, Carrie. He wanted to tell me that before he left tomorrow. He says he has no hope, but he wants me to know, to think about him.”

  “Will you?”

  “What?”

  “Think about him?”

  “Not in that way. I told him I would never leave you. But as a friend must think about another, of course I will. I said I would write to him in the winter. He is terribly afraid of the war, of America entering it, of being hurt or killed. …”

  Her voice drifted off. Almost at once I could hear her steady, deep breathing in sleep. But I remained awake, staring into the darkness, somehow afraid of what could possibly happen. I slept very little that night.

  That fall and winter, letters came regularly to Anna from Eric in New York. She read them all to me. They were frightened, depressed letters from a man alone in a studio on the Bowery in the bowels of New York (he called it that), trying to compose an opera on the theme of Oedipus, with no contacts with friends or fellow musicians. He had convinced himself, he wrote, that he must always stay indoors when it was light outside: “I must not be seen on the streets because my height, my strength, will call attention to me. I know the army has once said no to me because of my mental history, but I believe if they see me now on the street they will enlist me.” He wrote that he went out only at four in the morning, when the wholesale markets in his section of the city were opening. He bought food and then raced back to his hole: “Lite
rally, it is a hole,” he wrote, “a basement from which I can see only the feet and lower legs of passersby.”

  Anna replied to him, composing her letters on the table in the evenings after we had finished our games, our reading aloud, our conversation. She showed me what she had written: “Do not stay indoors so much. It is bad for your spirits.” She said she shared Eric’s horror of the war, being rendered somewhat ambivalent by the call on her sympathies of her German and German-American friends and relatives. “Do not worry. The war in Europe cannot go on too much longer, perhaps we will not have to enter it, and then you will be safe. Are you planning a return to the Community in May? There will be a place for you. I will speak of it to Mrs. Maclaren.”

  Her letters were full of motherly negative commands: “Try not to stay so much within yourself. … Never eat unwashed salad greens or fruit.” Reading her letters, I thought, Now that Robert is gone, Anna is nursing Eric. But I said nothing of this to her. Our relationship was so good, so open, that it admitted only of truth-telling between us. I was not tempted to disturb the tenor of our days. Our love sustained me and, I hoped, her. It was a source of psychic reassurance and, yes, physical pleasure as well. So that the presence of Eric among her letters did not disturb me. She was so loving a woman that there was, within her nutritive spirit, room for more refugees than me alone. Together with Anna, I, too, worried about Eric.

  That year, in April, the United States entered the war. Foundation members met to decide what to do about the Community and decided to open as usual in May despite the grave events. Anna and I volunteered to do our war work in addition to housekeeping for the Community. Evenings we worked in the public library. Miss Milly Martino was no longer there: by then she was retired because of the trouble in her hands and neck. The new librarian, a lady with the strange name of Mrs. Osnas Fitz, opened the reading room for war work in the evenings. Anna and I, with the other ladies from the village, rolled bandages for the Red Cross and knitted, and “finished off” for other knitters, scarves and caps and socks for our troops overseas. It was in this way that it came about that we were away, in the reading room of the library rolling bandages, when the fire started which destroyed the Farm.