Vienna Nocturne

by Vivien Shotwell

  “You love your brother so much?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, unhesitating.

  “Can’t he come here himself to court my favors?”

  “He can’t leave England without a commission.” And suddenly she seemed close to tears. Perhaps the man was harsh with her, Joseph thought—her husband, the big Irishman. Why she’d married the fellow was impossible to say. She was a charming girl and bright.

  A knock at the door announced the emperor’s mid-morning cup of chocolate. He extricated himself from Anna to sit and drink it at his desk. There was only one cup on the tray, the attendant not having been told that the emperor had a guest. Joseph sipped the thick, bitter liquid and sighed with pleasure. “Would you like a taste?” he asked. “Rude of me to partake without you. Come here and have a drop.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” she murmured. But her face, he thought, held a kind of longing.

  “Think of it as an imperial decree,” he said with a poised smile, “to give me peace of mind as your host. You wouldn’t want to compromise my peace of mind.”

  With a blush of modesty she rose and came to stand before him, her swelling bosom level with his formidable Hapsburg nose. “Come sit,” he said.

  She might have drawn up another chair—might indeed have left the room—but with a simple acquiescent movement she knelt before him, her skirts spreading about her, one hand balanced lightly on the arm of his chair. Joseph, who under normal circumstances would have disliked sharing his chocolate with anyone, found himself moved to a most unusual degree by this new view and prospect. He took up the teacup with its precious cargo and offered it to her parted lips. She steadied and guided the cup with her hand. He did not let go. His finger, just below the rim of the vessel, touched her lip and chin.

  “Is it not exquisite?” he asked.

  “Heaven on earth,” she said. She did not move to recover from her supplicating posture, and he was glad of that. He had been lonely, truly, almost his entire life. Both his marriages—arranged, of course—had been deeply unhappy and blessedly short. His only child, a daughter, had perished before her eighth birthday. He was not the great breeder that his mother had been; not anything like her, in fact.

  He stirred the chocolate with the tiny spoon and sipped again. He could sense the touch of her lips on the fragile cup, reverberating there like the sympathetic vibrations of a stringed instrument.

  “Your brother may write an opera for my people,” he said. “Tell him to come in the spring. One does not want one’s prima buffa in a melancholy humor.”

  She smiled and dropped her eyes. “Thank you, Your Excellency. He will do you much honor, I swear it.”

  “Then let him not arrive too soon.”

  She waited a moment, as if expecting him to request something more of her, but he sent her away. He wished to finish his chocolate in peace, each taste a kiss, while the pleasant residual warmth of toying with her still sighed and faded in his belly. As for making Madame Fisher debase herself, even so slightly, to achieve her purpose—well, he wouldn’t have wanted her to think she had him at her beck and call, considering how much he paid her.

  Constanze’s Locket

  Mozart and his wife had returned from Salzburg shortly after Anna’s wedding, but she had not seen much of him since then. A few days after the meeting with the emperor, she wrote to ask if she could visit him. She said she wanted to sing her aria from The Disappointed Husband. A frail excuse: they had done the aria enough already. But she loved singing with Mozart—she felt, sometimes, it was the best part of her life. He propelled her along in the most natural way, while still listening and responding to her. He made her feel a better singer than she was.

  He wrote back immediately and asked her to come over that afternoon.

  After they had finished the aria he asked, “You’re well? In good health?”

  She bit her lip. Perhaps she looked unwell. It was true that she had slept poorly. The baby made her feel sick. But she was only three months gone, certainly not four; it did not show. “Quite well, though this dusty air, you know—gives me some low humors.”

  “My wife sometimes takes the air at Baden-Baden; perhaps you would like it. Perhaps it would be a respite from town. Refreshing.”

  “I couldn’t get away,” she exclaimed. “I’m positively trapped here with all these concerts and parties and obligations. When I was a little girl and very taken with myself, my mother—who is strict and always has been—used to spank me and remind me that the world didn’t revolve around my rear end. But now if I were to step out of it everything would fall apart—the operas, my husband—”

  Mozart fidgeted with his foot. “Perhaps you could give them a chance to try getting on without you. Husbands need very little when it comes down to it.”

  “I love my husband too much,” she said.

  With a grimace that was almost a smile he rubbed vigorously at the top of his keyboard. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  Her breath caught. “No?” she said. “What have you heard?”

  “That he’s a boor.”

  She stared at him a moment and then twirled away to coo at his pet starling, which he’d raised from a chick. It could sing like an angel. “What nonsense. I swear I’ve never been so happy in my life. Really I quite like boors. They show one off so well.”

  “For God’s sake!” he cried.

  She flinched, then schooled her expression into a kind of determined mildness. “My dear Herr Mozart,” she said, turning to him, “I believe you are jealous of my husband.”

  He shook his head in frustration. “You’re acting as though you’re on a stage.”

  “If I didn’t put on airs,” she said, in a light, high voice, “you wouldn’t like me.”

  “I liked you the moment I saw you,” he said. “Do not pretend, madame, to know what I do and do not like.”

  “You were half drunk. Remember?” She leaned playfully at the window and said in a blithe voice, “It’s true my husband has a temper, I mean with others, but he’s quite tame, really. He adores me as no one else.”

  “Why are you talking like this?” he asked. He frowned like a schoolboy being subjected to a great injustice. “Don’t you know I’m the only one here and I don’t care? Talk like yourself, for God’s sake—as you are, as you are. You’re talking in buckets of piss, is what you’re doing. My God, you’re the most adorable girl I ever laid eyes on. You’re the smartest, next to my sister. You’ve the world at your feet. You have my friendship and high esteem. We live in a civil society with rights and laws.”

  “Furthermore,” she said, “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “They say he treats you roughly.”

  “Then they’re vicious liars.” She stared at him, and then, still smiling, looked at her hands. She saw that her fingers were shaking, and pressed them together. It did not do to let one’s fingers shake in public. “Once,” she amended, “he slapped me—once in some silly argument. It was my fault as much as his. But after it happened he was wracked, you see. He could not forgive himself. So that’s all over now. Now we’re very dull. Really it’s extraordinary how these rumors blow up.”

  Mozart turned red. “I’d kill him.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” she exclaimed. “Please don’t. Then you’d have to kill yourself, too, and I’d have to drink some poison and collapse on both your bodies. Then what would become of your wife and child? Believe me. You must believe me. If you don’t, I shan’t be able to see you ever again, and wouldn’t that be sad?”

  She remembered that night, only a few weeks ago, before he’d left for Salzburg, when he had played variations on her aria. How he had upturned the pattern of his mind across the keys. She remembered how he had kissed her in the garden, as though her kiss had been all he desired. “If you had wanted to save me,” she continued, “you should have said so before. It’s quite too late now. The best thing is for us all to be as happy as we can.”

  Just then Con
stanze came into the room in a happy flurry. Her cheeks glowed. For a moment it seemed she did not see them there. “Oh dear! Are you not finished?”

  Mozart gave Anna a sober look. “Done just this instant, my dear,” he said. “This lady sings like an angel and is so obliging she won’t have me change a note.”

  “You can’t imagine, Madame Fisher,” declared Constanze, “what this man puts me through. It’s like living with a child! I don’t know how he managed before he met me.”

  “Grievously,” said Mozart, laughing. “On death’s door from the time I was a boy.”

  “What do you think?” Constanze asked Anna. “When I got out my key ring to open the safe box, to pay the chandler, what do you think I found?”

  She held the ring up for Anna to see. Five or six keys of varying weights and sizes hung from a chain around her neck. One was tied with a red ribbon. Constanze brandished it at her husband. “This key, ribboned thus, I have never seen in my life—I would have recognized it as a trespasser even if some stealthy elf-in-the-night hadn’t marked it with one of my own hair ribbons.”

  Mozart regarded his wife with amusement.

  “And then,” she said, “I go into the nursery and what do I find in the bassinet? A locked chest like a pirate’s treasure. But I haven’t opened it yet because I wanted my scoundrel of a husband to be with me.”

  “Haven’t opened it?” exclaimed Mozart. “My curious Constanze? As you like. It might not even fit the lock. It might be a key to something else entirely.”

  Constanze looked at him a second, her mouth open, then took up her skirts and darted out of the room. Mozart went after her. Anna, after collecting her belongings, followed some distance behind.

  A sweet domestic scene greeted her: Constanze on her knees by the bassinet; Mozart behind her, leaning down to see again the objects he had placed inside the trunk for her to find. They had lately welcomed into their family a baby boy, Karl, not a year after the sad death of their first infant. The wet nurse held Karl in a chair. Inside the box was a child’s rattle with tinkling bells and a large silver locket inscribed with some private love sentiment that made Constanze dissolve. “It contains locks of our hair,” she told Anna. “Mine and Wolfgang’s, and both the babies’.” She wiped her cheeks and looked at her husband. “You crazy boy,” she said. “Did you cut my hair while I was sleeping?”

  And Anna, thinking of her own poor baby, and her husband, and her life, wished in that moment to be anywhere else.

  A Corner of Her Heart

  One would not have thought, given the sweet prize Fisher had won, that he would have done anything to sabotage the situation, but it was common knowledge, by November 1784, that he beat his wife.

  Since their wedding he had almost ceased to concertize. When asked, he refused, considering either the venue or the fee beneath him. He practiced in fits and starts, going for days and weeks without playing, then shutting himself in his study for hours, playing music he already knew, with a kind of obsession. He struck Anna’s dogs with booted feet. He raised his voice. He wouldn’t speak to her for days. He called her coarse and fat, a whore. He forced himself on her in the middle of the night when she had been soundly asleep, and made motions, on a few occasions, of strangling her. She could never know when he might elect to hurt her, and that was part of the torture. Often it was when he had drunk too much—but not always. Sometimes it was when he had slept poorly—or too well—sometimes when he had eaten too much meat, or too little. In short he contradicted all logic.

  The servants quit their posts. New ones, more deaf to marital discord, had to be found. Fisher was calculating enough to spare his wife’s face and arms from welts or bruises, although one or two slipped past his guard to come under the notice of her colleagues at the Burgtheater, as did a new stiffness in her movements, always before so graceful and easy.

  By mid-November she was about five months pregnant and could not hide it longer. She decided to tell him. She would say it was three months. She would say she’d wanted to wait until she was sure.

  They had just had their supper and he was in a good mood. Anna had sung tonight and Mrs. Storace had eaten early, as was her habit, so Anna and Fisher had dined privately together in Anna’s large, gracious bedroom, where there was a small dining and sitting area. He smiled and let go a contented sigh. He told her she looked well and that she had been behaving better these days. He took frequent issue with her behavior. He believed she flirted and degraded herself. She told him a buffa soprano was required to flirt—it meant nothing—but he would not listen. He said he feared for her intellect, for the safety of her soul. She hated when he came to the opera because he would loom over her in her dressing room, not talking to any of the others, telling her she had sung better last night, or that the orchestra had played like rubbish.

  But tonight he was happy. He gave her soft looks. He touched her gently and said she was beautiful, that he could find nothing today, no matter how he looked, to reproach in her. And she, too, was almost content. The food had been good and she’d drunk a glass of wine. The baby was quiet and did not kick her. When John visited her bed it was always dark and she wore a loose shift and she was almost sure he could not tell. Really no one could tell, not for certain. She was still small and she dressed carefully. She only seemed plumper, that was all; it only made her more fetching. He looked pleasant in the candlelight. He was a handsome man when he was happy, and darkly lit.

  She would say she was three months gone. There might not be a better chance than now. She only had to find the courage to tell him. She poured them both more wine.

  “I love you,” he said, stroking the back of her neck.

  The touch repulsed her. She could not stop herself from turning away. She said, “Not me, John. You never loved me.”

  His eyes hardened and his hand grew heavy. The moment was gone. She held her neck steady and gave him a wide, mocking smile. “Not me!” she trilled again.

  He let her go and in the instant she was dancing away from him. She made it halfway across the room before he caught her. She should have told him before. Now it was too late. “I love you,” he cried. She laughed and said he did not.

  He encompassed her world. She was always thinking about him, always being touched or not touched by him, always hearing or not hearing his music. It moved her, almost, to hear the sound of his violin through the walls and know that he was shaping the tone with his mind and hands, because that indicated tenderness and understanding. His embraces still stunned and bewildered her, made her feel unhinged and abandoned, and yet she could not tell sometimes whether she desired or loathed them—or whether she was beyond even that, now, and had simply fallen into an attitude of submissiveness. But when the lights were still up, and she still clothed, armored with insignias of rank and success, her puffed coiffure, her stays and petticoats, her velvet choker with the single drop pearl, and while her ears were still hot with the music of the evening, the chaos of the applause—she became reckless, heedless, and thought her husband the most laughable fop in all the world.

  “Not me!” she sang, over and over. “You’ve never loved me! Nobody’s ever loved me!”

  She meant, or thought she meant, that the girl whom Fisher and everybody else purported to love was not her. The logic was clear and amusing, in the state she was in. Whoever she was, she couldn’t have said, but it wasn’t the girl everyone purported to love.

  She escaped him again, or he let her escape, she could not tell, and he started chasing her around the room, saying in French that he loved her—“Je t’aime, je t’aime”—until it became a chant in itself, a threat, a rhythm for the hunt, while she shrieked and giggled and ran away, feeling dizzy and heedless. A small corner of her heart, perhaps, was frightened, but she shut it down, slammed it away, was all sharpness and gaiety, teasing and fleeing him. He would wake her mother, who was sleeping downstairs with cotton in her ears.

  And then somehow he captured her, though she had thought this
time she would win free. It must have been the wine that confused her dancing, slippered feet and made her dizzy and slow and sick to her stomach. With a satisfied grunt he lifted her in his arms. Her hands went around his neck, her feet kicked the air. Breathing heavily he bent to kiss her mouth.

  “No!” she squealed, half laughing, batting at his face with her hand, conscious of speaking and behaving like a child, with a child’s voice and gestures. “Let me down,” she cried, pounding his shoulders and squirming this way and that. “You brute, you ugly brute, everyone hates you—let me down—let me out of this house—”

  She had slipped into Italian, the language of Dante and of her father. She kicked and twisted but Fisher only gripped her closer, so hard she felt he was gripping her bones. She turned her head and bit his shoulder; she scratched her nails down the back of his neck sobbing for him to let her go.

  He must have meant to do it. He walked up to the table, as she thrashed and struggled, and lifting her over it—lifting her as though over an altar—he tossed her up and let her fall. He might have put her down on the sofa or the bed, as he had done before. But something now must have inclined him to let her fall, as if from heaven, on the wastes of their meal: the little table with the half-eaten pheasant, the wineglasses and pitchers, forks and knives, fruit peelings, bread crusts, blood pudding, roast beef, potato remnants, syrup and pastry crumbs, milk jugs, coffee cups. Her scream was real, then. He had given no warning, except for that slight toss at the end. Glass broke under her. The copper pitcher bruised her back. Her head jerked over the lip of the table and struck the arm of the chair as she bumped to the floor, her gown of armor stained with wine and grease.

  So great was her shock that at first she didn’t move and barely made a sound. Fisher stood over her. “There,” he said. “There.”

  He sat in an armchair and rubbed his mouth, frowning. Anna put her palms on the floor and pressed herself into a seated position. She touched a hand to her head to see if it was bleeding. It was not. Then she remembered about her baby and began to cry. Surely he had killed it. She could feel it already dying inside her. The poor, sweet, good baby, which had stayed so quiet and small, that it might remain safe and be her own baby, to love and need her and bring her joy. She had done it to herself. If she had told him about the baby he would not have dropped her on the table. But she had not told him.