Chamber Music

by Doris Grumbach

  I loved the Mass that Christmas Eve of 1918. I loved the bells, the organ, the sweetish smell of incense, the scrubbed little blond faces of white-robed choir and altar boys, the solemn elevated expressions of the two priests who, Anna whispered to me, were “the celebrants.” The procession of “the faithful” (the priest who delivered the sermon referred this way to the people in the pews, who had come long distances through the cold night and the snow) to the altar “to receive”: that was the way Anna described what she was doing up there. She would often say, “Today, I received.”

  My Unitarian sensibilities, restrained and intellectual, had not prepared me for what was going on among “the faithful” as they kneeled in their pews or at the altar rail. I understood not one word, except for the sermon and the reading from the Gospel. The heavily symbolic nature of the events escaped me entirely.

  But Anna was there beside me, her lovely scrubbed countenance (a sister to the altar boys, I thought) never turning from the sedate pageant on the altar, her shining eyes fixed on something she must have been witnessing up there: I could not tell what. Outside, the wind rattled the stained-glass windows and rough snow puffs hurled themselves against the walls and the doors, but inside there were those serious, confident worshipers like Anna, glowing in the presence of their God, the extraordinary concentration, under the instruction of bells, of “the faithful.”

  Seated beside Anna while everyone else kneeled, I tried to pray. I managed only to think, The destroyed Farm, what shall I do with it? Shall I start all over again? Will the Foundation want to help to restore it all? Is Robert’s music still important enough to music lovers (who must have new favorites by now) to appeal to them again in his name? I floundered among questions vaguely directed to the Lord, but no supernatural answers presented themselves to me in that first hour of Christmas morning.

  How do you pray? Do you command the Lord: “Grant me the time and the strength in which to rebuild, the Farm, my own life.” Or question Him: “What do I do now?” Or petition: “Please, dear God, do not let me lose what little I have—the house, my friend, my love. …”

  The Foundation members met in early April, as soon as it was possible for those scattered persons to negotiate the roads. Anna had been called away that day by old Dr. Holmes. An unusual number of persons in the village were ill with influenza, the result of the hard winter and the change of weather, he said. He needed Anna’s help with a family in which four of the young children and their pregnant mother were very ill. So she was gone when the members arrived. They knew of the fire, the damage—the newspapers had carried accounts of it, reporting that nothing was known of the cause.

  Mrs. Rhinelander was curious: “Have you ever found out what happened?”

  “No,” I lied, “we never have. We came home from the village to find the whole woods ablaze. The chief of firemen guessed it might have been sparks from an unbanked late-night fire in one of the studios. But we cannot know for sure because all the studios burned to the ground.”

  Lester Lenox gave us a dismal financial report: “There would have been enough to operate the Community for some time to come, under ordinary conditions. But not enough, by any means, to rebuild and refurnish. Prices are very high since the war. It could never be done on what is in the bank and what is invested.”

  We took everything into consideration on that long afternoon. There was no way. I heard in their voices a lack of enthusiasm for rebuilding, I sensed their feeling that Robert Maclaren’s day had passed, and mine, and the best that could happen was that I might salvage enough to live on.

  So it came to that. I did what they thought I should. I agreed to sell most of the property, all the burned acres, holding back only the land surrounding the house and corridor behind it which led to the hill and the knoll where the graves were. It was quickly sold: the township of Saratoga Springs was anxious to have land on the outskirts on which to build its storage sheds and to house its road-building equipment. Later, years later, the land was sold again, and subdivided. At present, I understand, although I have not been out to see it in some years, it has been much built upon. Roads have been cut through, there are power and telephone lines overhead going to the small houses which have, thrusting out from their roofs, television antennas as high as trees. There is no sign, I am told, of what once was there, the studios hidden away from each other in beautiful woods, “an idyll,” the brochure used to say, “for the exclusive use of gifted persons.” Now even the graves seem to have sunk, like the gardens of Persia, below the much trampled ground of the subdivision.

  There was still enough money, I learned, for me (and so Anna) to live on in the house. We would need to be frugal, but hadn’t we always been? With Anna’s garden and our preserving, and doing so much of the necessary work about the house ourselves, we would make out well. I felt no longer young when that meeting was held. I knew the members were right. I needed to rest, not to travel so much. Yet the thought of discontinuing Robert’s memorial, abandoning the summer Community of young musicians, was disturbing to me. So I persuaded the members of the Foundation to continue its existence and their membership on it for a while, to keep the idea alive until we saw what the future held: “It might be that the day will come when it will be possible to start again,” I said to them.

  They left the Farm, relieved, I thought, to be rid of the heavy burdens of administering the funds of the Community and glad of my willingness to let it all go for a while. Lenox, the Reverend Whitehall, and de Wolfe all urged me to come into the village more often: “Interesting things going on there now. Wednesday book club, church fairs and suppers. A ladies’ garden society, that kind of thing,” said de Wolfe, and I said I would try. I remember thinking, No more spectacle. Lillian Russell. The baths closed down for repairs. Are the waters still drunk by colorful figures from New York, I wonder?

  When Anna came back from her nursing stint the next day, I told her what had transpired. All she said was, “It is as well. Without Eric it would not be the same this year.” Her irises were almost white with fatigue. I remember she went to bed at noon, having had no sleep during her long night with the sick children. No more was said about it.

  Losing the Community made a difference to my life, to my pretense, you might wish to say, knowing now what you do of me, to my pretense of devotion, to the apparent duty of those years. True, to everyone I was Mrs. Robert Maclaren, in the histories of music (if indeed I did appear at all), in Who’s Who under Robert’s long listing. But since his death I had begun to be Caroline Maclaren, the woman who raised quite large funds for the Community by playing Robert Maclaren’s music and lecturing about him at fund-raising gatherings all over the country, the administrator of the Community who headed the table in the dining room during the summer sessions. In a small way, I had become a person with a little authority.

  With the Community gone, no, suspended, as I had insisted, the township of Saratoga Springs removed what it had called “the musicians’ haven” from its travel brochure in the summer of ’19. The war over, the town had begun to look for the return of the old flood of summer residents and tourists. Reading that brochure, foolishly now it seems, I was flooded with regret, almost, I must confess, so depressed by the loss, by the end of my life’s work, no matter how insignificant, that I hardly noticed Anna coming and going from the village at odd hours of the day and night, hardly heard her reports of the increasing number of persons stricken by the influenza. My depression closed my eyes to the signs, which must have been there, of her weariness.

  The village had become an extended, crowded hospital. Never before in anyone’s memory had an affliction spread so quickly and so lethally as the influenza of that year. It was no longer thought that the fierce winter was responsible, as Dr. Holmes had believed. Instead the theory now held was that the disease had been brought back from the front by young men who had survived the horrors of the trenches only to succumb in their beds, at home, having first communicated the germ, was it? spiroch
ete? or what? to their families.

  Anna insisted I stay away from the village. She carried whatever we needed to eat from the shops that lay along her path in her walk home up the hill. We ate hastily and at odd times. There were very few of our old long, comfortable, and companionable evenings together. For the sick in town needed her. And she did so well: she seemed to thrive under the hard new discipline—she had been away from it for a long time. The sense of service brought the shine back to her cheeks and the glow to her eyes.

  There are persons whose vitality lies in the performance of their duty, in their service to others, which, I take it, is what duty really means. There are many more such persons than traditional history takes note of. We have been well educated, we have read chronicles and biographies, plays and novels, about rebels and revolutionaries, leaders of nations and battalions, kings and great criminals, theatrical stars and escape artists. But what do we know of those whose pleasure in life is service? The waiting classes, the pram pushers, the burden bearers up the sides of great mountains, the launderers of the sheets of others, the seamstresses of our cloaks?

  More than all those, there are the ones whose hands distract the sick from their distress, who hold the frightened child they are paid to care for against their breasts, who comfort the dying while often the family waits safely outside the sickroom, who cool the distress of last moments. Anna was such a person. She made Robert’s last days bearable to him, and to me. In the village she nursed the family of six, single-handed, until the mother and two of the children succumbed and until the two other children and their father recovered slowly and could leave their beds, and until—it was almost inevitable—she contracted the terrible illness, struggled weakly in her weariness against it, crying out and rambling incoherently, blind and deaf to me and to everything but the ancient, mad, frightened world she rehearsed in her head, and then died.

  She was my friend, my companion, my beloved, she listened to me as no one, not my mother or my teachers or friends and surely never my husband, ever listened. She talked to me, not often about herself but about me, about us, and about others she loved. She filled the silences of a lifetime for me. Even at the end, as she lay in the middle of the great bed, bathed in the rank sweat of mortal sickness, red-eyed with fever, she talked to me, even when Dr. Holmes was there and she of course could not know that, was not aware that we were not alone: “Travel together. Should go to Germany. My mother. Alive still? Don’t know. Afraid, always afraid. Must introduce you. So she knows about us, about me. Sees there is nothing to be afraid of in love. That I am her daughter. Even to her new husband. As I am your daughter. Your mother. Your husband. Your love.”

  I said in a low voice, “Shhh, Anna. Rest now, dear. Sleep for a while.”

  “Give her this powder when she is able to drink a little, Mrs. Maclaren.” He put his silver tools away in his black bag and snapped the ends together. His face was very white. His reddened eyes looked strained and alarmed. He seemed eager to be gone. I wondered if he too was overtired, on the brink of the sickness himself.

  “The Community dinners. When he talked and looked so long at me. To help him. To hold him close. Like a child. A son, a lover he wanted to be. Like Carrie. But hard to reach and frightened. Afraid like my mother. Wounded in the face. In the heart. Left alone. To the fire. We helped him not at all. How, Carrie? How could we help? I a nurse and not nursing. Died and was buried without the priest, without unction, without comfort. Burned again. Lying near the dog. Near the great man. He a boy and a man, without friends. I did nothing. Unspeakable crime.”

  She screamed. I held her, wiping the wet from her red, shiny face, kissing her damp forehead, paying no heed to Dr. Holmes. Was he still there?—I do not know—when Anna talked, raved, when I pleaded with her to stay with me, not to leave me in the dark, the loneliness from which she had rescued me.

  I whispered to her, “I’m not afraid, Anna. Not of being alone. But of being without you. Stay with me.”

  But she didn’t hear. She was out of her head, incoherent, almost out of time, on the point of leaving the bursting healthy life I had so loved in her. She had forgotten what she knew for certain, and in her delirium remembered only her doubts, her fears: “Know so much. The Foundation people. And Carrie. The great ones. The great man. How can I be with them?”

  I said into her ear, holding her beloved head, smoothing her wet hair, “Love, you were with them all. Above them all. Out of all the world, my choice. I wanted you, I want you. Stay with me, love. There is no one else. Terrible loneliness without you, no one else. Not for me.”

  She could not hear me: “The long horsehairs. Long as you can find. They spawn eels. Good for the soil. Needed. In the garden. Long, long horsehairs.”

  But you know the truth already. At three in the morning—I remember that a full moon had just disappeared over the bend of the hill and the light in our bedroom disappeared—she woke and called, “Carrie?”

  I moved from my chair, where I had dozed, to the bed.

  “I’m cold.”

  “Anna, I’m here. I’ll warm you.” I went to the cupboard for another blanket, a quilt, anything I could pull out quickly.

  When I came back to the bed she said, “Carrie. Where is God?”

  “God? What do you mean? The priest, do you mean the priest? Do you want me to call the priest?”

  “Cold,” she said. “God. Carrie.”

  And she died.

  That was almost fifty years ago. (Can it be? Sometimes I lose count.) That early morning, in the darkened bedroom, Anna died. I have never found a comforting euphemism for it. She did not pass away, or leave this life, or go to her maker. I cannot accept “She is with God,” which is what the priest who came the next morning said. None of those things. She died. She lay there, forever still. She turned cold and began to stiffen. There in the great Maclaren bed at three o’clock in the morning. My love became a thing, a motionless person-less strip of lifeless white matter.

  I remember: I got into bed with her, lay beside her, touched every part of her body, as a student of sculpture would touch a classical statue to memorize its lines, to remember its curves and suggested softness. As long as I am able to remember (forever for me), her body will be alive in my mind, my eyes, under my finger tips.

  The light was up when I climbed out of the bed, dressed, and walked to the village to tell Dr. Holmes (“It must be certified,” she had told me when Robert died) about Anna.

  I felt nothing at first but the cold of desertion. There would be no second resurrection for me, no third chance at life. I knew that. One is granted one great love if one is fortunate—and after that? Death while one is still in life. Endurance, waiting, survival, the slow, inexorable growth of a sense of loss and cruel grief until it floods the mind and drowns what is left of the self.

  So it ended. It is an irony of my life that I have lived on for more than forty-five years, as the world would measure it. But to me the living time of my life came to an end long ago. Until Anna came, I had waited, prepared to be born. Life came, with her: the feeling that reached in to the bone and warmed it, the hours that were filled instead of passed through, the days I remember still, that swim in my memory, glow in my mind like phosphorescent fish. With her death, life for me was ended, but I lived on, a dead-live, half-woman, once again resembling the one who had lived so long with Robert, restored to the lonely solitary I had been during all the years of my marriage.

  So. I have put it all down. I look back at the years since Anna’s death and find it hard to remember what has filled the void. What have I done? I’ve waited—a long, still, terrible wait—to die. I’ve gone on living at the Farm because there was no other place I wanted to be or had to go.

  Now and then I used to walk to the village—now a city, I must remember to say—to the library. I’ve read books, played music, listened to recordings, cleaned this house and then cleaned it again before it had a chance to grow dirty, sewn and repaired and darned, tended my ga
rden—Anna’s garden, at first—which now my visiting nurse tells me is weeds and dandelions. I’ve written a thousand letters, I would guess. Each day even now, I answer letters that come to me from musicologists, biographers, and historians questioning me about my husband, and about his friends in Europe, some of whom became very well known. Most of them are now dead.

  Every day, summer and winter, I used to climb the narrow corridor between the house and the high knoll, to the graves, Anna’s grave where she is buried to the side and below the great headstone that will be mine soon. I put a small stone at her head, with a cross and DUTY AND LOVE on it, and her beloved name and her dates. I used to take two bunches of flowers each week, one for display to place on Robert’s grave, so that it would be seen by visitors, creating the illusion of a loving wife who faithfully remembered her husband all these years.

  The other was a smaller bunch, a few wild flowers I would find as I walked to the knoll: meadowsweet and black-eyed Susans, violets and Indian paint-brush. Unshowy flowers for a discreet love, for my unremarked love who lies cold and silent, waiting, I believe, for me.

  A new group, inheritors of the original Foundation, has written to me. It seems that the government of the United States has a plan to endow the arts. One of the places they are looking at is our old Foundation, the long-since abandoned Maclaren Community. Of course, all the land is long gone. We could not rebuild here on the original site without dislocating thirty homeowners and the outbuildings of the City of Saratoga street-repairing department.

  But Lester Lenox’s grandson, Alexander, writes to me, from the Saratoga bank. I put his whole letter into this account:

  We are asked to present the National Endowment for the Arts with a complete proposal. Part of that proposal—the bank’s part—will consist of a statement of the present condition of the Robert Glencoe Maclaren trust, as administered by this bank in conjunction with you. Our assumption is that, if the proposal for the revival of the Community should be accepted, upon your death you would assign to the Foundation your rights to the estate.