Vienna Nocturne

by Vivien Shotwell

  With John

  The first time Anna saw John Fisher perform, at a private concert, he sought her out with his eyes at every pause or interval. He was as fine a violinist as any she’d heard, next to her brother and poor drowned Thomas Linley. His face in meditative concentration became softer, younger, and more open, and his arrogance, his slight tendency to swagger, became, in performance, natural and called for. His hands as they worked the burnished instrument were graceful and gentle and light. Had they been otherwise they would have elicited no music.

  By Lidia’s calculations Anna was two months gone with the baby, but it stayed quiet and small, as if it was aware that it must not be known.

  John Fisher was a well-spoken gentleman and a fine musician. He had been friends with Anna’s father in their youth. Her mother had always wished for Anna to marry a man from the British Isles and it would not perhaps be surprising to others that Anna was obedient in this wish.

  She saw Lidia when she could, in parks or cafés. Lidia wanted Anna to run away but Anna said it was impossible. Lidia blamed herself for the pregnancy.

  Anna and Fisher read plays and made music together, and went to concerts and had picnics. In mid-August Mrs. Storace had tea with Fisher and told him that her daughter was willing and there must be no delay, lest her honor be compromised. He, although somewhat surprised, admitted that a brief engagement would be agreeable to himself as well.

  “Miss Storace,” he said abruptly one afternoon shortly thereafter while they were strolling in the Prater. “I think you the sweetest lady I’ve ever set eyes on.” He drew to a halt and clasped Anna’s hands.

  She did not like him. She wished she were anywhere else. His cheeks were fat and his eyes so sharp and blue. He spoke quickly, as if afraid she would flee before he had finished. The sun in his face gave him an unattractive scowl. His hands, from either nervousness or heat, were bathed in sweat. She held them as lightly as she could and hardly took breath.

  “You enchant me,” he said. “I have remembered you, all these years. I loved your father.” His eyes flooded with tears, and she thought distantly that he was more emotional a man than had first appeared. “I know I’m almost a stranger to you,” he continued. “I know you could have any man you liked. By God, I know.” This was hardly the case—no true gentleman would ever wed a girl who went on the stage. “But I love you,” Fisher went on. “I would do anything, anything, dear Miss Storace, to have you.” His damp hands squeezed her own. He scowled into the sun. “But why don’t you speak?” he cried. “Miss Storace, why do you turn such a look of blandness on my heart? Won’t you consent? Won’t you make me the happiest of men and be my bride?”

  The blood had drained from her face. She waited a moment for someone to rescue her. But there was no one.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, Mr. Fisher, I will.”

  “My darling,” he said, seizing her tightly. “John. You must call me John. My darling!”

  And she, smiling up at him and accepting his pressing kisses, thought of herself as one of the flat, pieced-together cargo barges that floated headlong down the deep, swift Danube to the waiting towns below, but that would never have the strength, or the means, or the will, to return.

  Stephen wrote:

  I confess I’m surprised. But though I have never met the gentleman, I trust in the judgment of my mother and yourself, and wish you, dearest sister, incomparable, darling Anna, all the happiness and joy the heavens and this gentleman Mr. Fisher can offer you. Tell him, for me, that he takes possession of one of the most precious female creatures in my life. Let him treat her like a goddess and a queen.

  Benucci frowned and looked confused. “But why such haste?”

  Anna laughed gaily. “Yes, it’s rather racing, isn’t it, but it’s what we want. He’s a good man and shall make me happy, and everyone is always telling me I should marry.”

  He was silent for what seemed a long time, and in spite of everything some part of her began wildly to hope. Please, she thought, smiling at him. Please, Francesco. But then he gave a small start, as if returning to his senses, and beamed at her and kissed her cheek. “Forgive me. I’m only surprised. Let me congratulate you. This is happy news. You’d make any man the luckiest in the world.”

  “Well,” she said, renewing her smile. “Not any man.”

  He squeezed her shoulder, as if she’d said nothing. “And we’re still friends. That’s the main thing.”

  She turned from him and said, “Yes.”

  Courage

  They were married in the Dutch Embassy. Anna wore her best silk and looked, her mother said, the loveliest of her life. Mrs. Storace, in a high, white wig, did not say much to anyone, but it was clear she relished in this kind of ceremony, with its rule and straightness and sanctity. She was more than satisfied with John Fisher. He had a strong carriage and a Christian heart; a steadiness and a sense that would regulate her daughter. Much good, she observed, could come even of misfortune.

  They were married in the morning, a Friday. Light touched their shoulders. Anna’s friends were there and some of her patrons. Benucci sat on the left, a dark-haired figure at the edge of her vision.

  Fisher’s face was schooled and stern, as if feeling the weight of history upon him. They said their vows and signed in the book and everyone prayed. There was music from a wind quintet, friends of Anna’s from the orchestra, and then some small refreshments. Her mother would not speak to Benucci. Anna, too, could hardly speak to him. He muttered a low congratulation and moved away. He had brought Lidia, who hugged Anna tightly and whispered, “Courage, courage, he is a good man, all will be well,” because there was nothing else now that could be said.

  What a terrible thing to go to bed with a stranger. A bedroom was meant to be a place of comfort and repose, a place for love and rest and the vulnerability of sleep, where even the darkness of night was yet safe and enveloping. To welcome this man, accept his demands and his professions of tenderness, and try to fall asleep in his heavy arms, indeed took all the courage Anna possessed. She thought of the future, of “forever,” and it seemed a horror beyond imagination or dream. She could not bring herself to wish for his death, not even if it meant her release. But he would grow old, someday he would surely grow old, and with age would come blessed neglect. She laughed to think that this was the best she could hope for, she who had been used to having every favor in the world. And now more than ever, when it was too late, did she wish she had told Benucci, and asked him to save her. Her pride, wrapped in the heavy arms of John Abraham Fisher, crumbled to nothing.

  “Now you’re mine,” he said, as if that were all he had ever wanted in life. How small her hand was in his. There were calluses on his fingers from pressing the strings of his violin, just as there had been on her father’s fingers, and her brother’s, and a red mark on the left side of his neck, almost like a blister, red and rough, where the violin rubbed against him. When he said, “You’re mine,” Anna touched the red spot with her finger. Fisher pressed her hand away. In the morning he made love to her again. She had slept restlessly and felt unwell, but she tried to be docile. Good, she thought, that she hated him, that she was disgusted and tightly wound: it would make him think she was a virgin. He did not know her secret and never would. The baby stayed quiet and small.

  Sometime mid-morning Fichout and Bonbon, her pet dogs, came whining and scratching at the door, and she got up to let them in. This for some reason put Fisher into such a repressed fury that he stormed out in his nightshirt and bare legs to dress himself in his own room, where he called for coffee and breakfast. After some time he told her it was because she had let the dogs in without first asking for his permission.

  The next morning she did ask for permission, and he told her to let them be. She lay in bed listening to them whimper and then rose and put on her dressing gown and slippers. “What are you doing?” Fisher asked from behind the heavy canopy.

  “I’m going,” she said, a little petulantly
, “to tell them they can’t come in. They don’t understand.”

  “Because they are senseless animals, my love.” But he lay back in bed and didn’t stop her.

  Fisher liked to keep hold of her when they walked. He clasped her hand on his arm, or else touched her back or waist or shoulder, never losing contact, with an insistence, it seemed, born out of his love, his joy at their finally being consecrated together and at his future being secured. It was not lost on Anna, nor had it ever been, that John Fisher had been almost penniless when he first came to them—not being the sort of stooping ingratiating idiot, he said, who for his bread gave lessons to children or played in chamber orchestras. Now, with Anna’s income, so large she herself didn’t know what to do with it, he would want for nothing, would never be asked to stoop. No very great wonder he wanted to keep a hand on her always. She was in this respect like his violin, an instrument of his prestige and livelihood.

  He hated to see her sing, being a jealous sort of husband, exactly the sort Aloysia Lange had recommended so long ago at Café Hugelmann. Could he not tell the difference between truth and a play? she asked him. He answered that he could not. Not since he’d met her.

  His hand upon her came to feel like a mark—not native to her but imposed, applied, until it became part of her by attrition. It was his left hand, most often—the hand that made the melody. “If it were a play,” she’d once said to Mozart, the night he’d kissed her on the terrace, “you could have marked me for life.” But kisses did not mark, she knew that now. Kisses left no trace. Hands marked. And it was no play. The story was done, or it had never been. The first time Fisher hurt her was in bed. He had wanted to punish her, he said, for making eyes at Benucci that evening in the opera. He seemed to take much pleasure in it. He was different, in that moment, than he often appeared during the day, when he could be exceedingly polite. He was the youngest of five children, he said, and had grown up with excesses of punishment.

  Anna went down to her mother the next morning and told her she could not go on living with John Fisher. But her mother did not understand. She said that Anna must endeavor to make herself more pleasing and modest and good, and not be so fussy and delicate. If she turned Fisher out now, she said, it would be as much of a scandal as if she’d given birth to a bastard.

  She listened to her mother. She tried to be pleasing. And the baby remained, stuck like a root, tenacious, quiet. If she had told Fisher about the baby, perhaps he would have been more gentle, but she could not tell him yet or he would know it was not his, because not enough time had passed. And then he might kill her. Every night she closed her eyes and prayed for the baby to stay small for as long as it could.

  She tried to keep some lightness in her life and that was in music and singing. She attended parties and salons. She pretended she was the Anna of before, of Milan and Venice, La Storace, L’inglesina. She sought out moments of peace, treasured them more for how they had become so rare. She loved her dogs with all her heart. She went up to a tree by the main square and touched its trunk with her hands. Once she actually leaned her forehead upon it. The tree did not care about husbands and babies and scandals. It was just a tree. It stayed in the ground and did not care. The leaves played in the sky. The tree did not mind that she leaned her forehead upon its cool, solid trunk and pretended that it loved her. And when she was on stage, with the orchestra beneath her like a great ocean, her voice still her voice, her breath stretching every corner of her lungs, the poor baby safe and snug inside her, she could forget everything else, and only be where she was, relaxed and alive. And though she was not quite herself, though she sometimes made mistakes, still the audiences laughed, still they clapped, because they expected her to sing well and could hardly tell the difference. And though, outside, with John, there must still be the “forever,” the oppression, and the terrible absurdity, here, in her music, in her life’s refuge, she had everything that was beautiful.

  Benucci worried for her. She felt him watching her with a brooding frown. But she tried to tell him, with her actions and smiles, that she had taken courage, and he should not fear for her unhappiness. It would not do, she told herself firmly, to impose her griefs on him. She had not been raised to complain.

  Each Taste a Kiss

  Joseph II assented with interest to Anna Fisher’s request for an audience. He had not spoken to her since before her wedding, and he congratulated her, upon her entrance into his study, on the happy occasion.

  She seemed to have grown softer in the face since last he had seen her, and her eyes were darkened, as if with preoccupation. She had come to speak of her brother, a composer now living in England who wished to write an opera for her in Vienna. She seemed uncharacteristically nervous. Joseph leaned back on the rigid sofa—he preferred furniture of a certain hardness, to keep him awake during affairs of state—and crossed his long legs at the ankles. “It might look odd,” he told her, “to order an opera from a man I’ve not met and whose music I’ve never heard in my life.”

  “I have an aria here,” said Anna gently. “I can play it for you.”

  She crossed to the harpsichord. Concentrating too much, perhaps, on appearing composed, she swallowed to clear her throat. Her arms were soft, her head tilted slightly to one side, as if overbalanced by the weight of her piled hair. He watched her breast expand and contract as she sang. An expression of pleasure, or repose, settled over her features, as though the act of singing were a comfort and relief to her. The voice was still lovely, but betrayed an edge of roughness or tiredness he had not often heard from her. He may only have noticed it because of her proximity. He found himself reflecting that this new catch or burr in the sound gave her voice somewhat more pathos.

  He rose in an impulsive movement to turn the pages for her, and standing then beside her could not suppress the impulse, as if in a dream, to let his long, heavily ringed hand drift lightly down to rest on the top of her back. His index finger lay along the soft skin above her neckline, while his thumb curved up to touch the inclining nape of her neck. She stiffened, almost imperceptibly, and then he felt her relax again; seeming, as she did so, to press back against his palm. Letting go his breath he leaned over her to turn the next page, catching a whiff of her perfume—a Spanish sort of scent—and remaining close enough, ostensibly to examine the music, that her arm as it ranged the keyboard brushed once or twice against the pearly front of his trousers.

  “Pretty,” he said when she was done, and leaned over her again to flip back through the pages. “Your brother writes well for you.”

  “I’m not in good voice today,” she said. “I apologize.”

  “May I?”

  The girl made room and he sat beside her. He spread the manuscript before him, peering at its neatly lettered notation. “Yes, very pretty.” He hummed a few bars to his own accompaniment. “Skillfully done. Very tasteful. One can hardly detect his Britishness.”

  It was not a wide bench, more like a broad stool. The fullness of her skirt overbounded it and puffed into his lap. They sat shoulder to shoulder. Now and then his roving foot, as he played, brushed against her own. She made no move to stand—seemed, indeed, unusually still. She was a girl who was always turning and shimmering and sashaying. But her expression now held the same bland emptiness that was so often presented to him by his courtiers and servants.

  He had spent many hours now observing Anna in the opera theater; allowing her performances, as it were, to seduce and conquer him from the stage. No wonder a certain portion of that feeling might carry into this room. His foot found hers once more, slid against it, and this time she did not move away. So simple a change and yet what a stirring it gave him, what a feeling of anticipation, of suspension in time.

  He lifted his hands from the keys and dropped them into his lap. The rings—a signet for his office, a ruby from his mother, a few others whose provenance he could not recall—felt heavy and languishing on his fingers. Her skirts, overflowing, caught beneath his hands in his lap an
d he pretended not to notice. Her small foot remained flush and coconspiring with his own. The sensation of touch traveled in small pleasant shocks up his leg and into his gut and brain. The fabric of her dress was pleasing, a green satin, like forest leaves, and he smoothed it absently against his thigh.

  “You are happy with your husband?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  She stirred and turned her head; her foot did not move. “You flatter me too much, Your Excellency, to worry about my happiness.”

  “I’ve heard he has a temper.”

  “He is Irish, Your Excellency. And I have a temper of my own.”

  “Do you?” Joseph countered with amusement, twisting a little to face her—a movement that increased, rather than diminished, the seeking pressure of his foot. “Then I’ve never seen it. You have always seemed the picture of tractability.”

  “I would not dare to show my temper before the emperor.”

  “Dear God!” Joseph exclaimed. “And do I not try to make everyone treat me just as any other man?”

  “That would succeed only if you were like any other man.”

  Joseph frowned. “I am, I swear to you—more than you realize.”

  She gazed long at him. “My brother would do your court much honor, sir.”

  Joseph sniffed and turned back to the music with a feeling of irritation. “I have too many composers wanting my attention already. There are only so many operas one can sponsor in a year.”

  “As a favor to me,” she said.

  Her hands had been folded in her lap. Now, as if of its own accord, one of them moved to rest on his knee, his knee that was covered by her own skirts.

  “A favor?” he laughed. “I see marriage has made you grow bold, Madam Fisher. What have I done to owe you a favor?”

  She retrieved her hand, still with the same steady smile. “Nothing, sir. It would be a personal favor, a kindness I could never repay, greater than anything I could hope for.”