Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

“I shall have a quiet summer,” Mama said, hugging her back. “While you and Gretl go to the mountains, I shall stay behind in Vienna and rest.”

  “What’s all this?” Carl’s booming voice made Alma grit her teeth. “Is that girl in hysterics again? Let your poor mother breathe.”

  Shaking in anger, Alma couldn’t even look him in the eye.

  “I was telling Alma about the baby,” Mama said brightly, taking her husband’s arm.

  Gretl rolled her eyes. “Alma with her head in the clouds. Always the last to know.”

  3

  Back home once more, Alma played piano. Steeped in concentration, she gave herself wholly to the prelude and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde while her music teacher, Adele Radnitzky-Mandlick, looked on. Alma had been studying with her since the age of twelve. They had become so close, she called her Frau Adele. How Alma reveled in this deep immersion in music, her consolation and refuge. The one still point amid her turmoil as she struggled to forget Klimt and reconcile herself to the changes in her family. Mama had commandeered Alma’s bedroom for the new nursery, thus obliging Alma to move into Gretl’s room. It would be only a temporary inconvenience, Mama had argued, seeing as Gretl would be married next September. Still, this meant that Alma and her sister would be cooped up together for more than a year as their home seemed to shrink around them.

  “Absolutely sublime,” Frau Adele said, when Alma had finished. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more nuanced interpretation.”

  Frau Adele, her guardian angel. Her teacher was an elegant woman in her thirties who earned her living as a musical mentor of promising young women. Her recitals showcasing her protégées were famous. Some months ago, Alma had performed in the neo-Renaissance concert hall in the Palais Ehrbar and received resounding applause and praise. The Neue Freie Presse had declared her brilliant, a rare talent.

  “I’m both sad and delighted to inform you that I have nothing left to teach you.” Frau Adele’s smile indicated that this was the greatest honor any of her students could bestow on her. “You have reached the point where you’re ready to take it a step further.”

  Alma leaned forward, her heart trilling in hope.

  “You’re now ready to study with my teacher,” Frau Adele said. “Dr. Julius Epstein at the Vienna Conservatory.”

  Alma leapt off the piano bench and breathlessly hugged her teacher.

  “Go get your parents, my dear,” Frau Adele said. “We must talk it through with them.”

  Her head swimming with euphoria, Alma dashed off to find Mama. Her shoes clattered on the polished wooden floor. Mama would scold her for making scuff marks. Their family had lived in this house for four years, but it still didn’t feel like home to Alma—it seemed too sterile and new, built by Julius Mayreder to Carl’s specifications and decorated to Carl’s tastes. His Japanese and Chinese porcelain cluttered the cabinets designed by Koloman Moser. All so curated and self-conscious, Alma thought. The residence of an aspiring patrician.

  Alma found her mother in the sewing room, the one place besides Alma and Gretl’s room that remained free from her stepfather’s aesthetics.

  “Mama!” She pulled her mother up from her wicker chair so abruptly that her knitting tumbled from her hands. “Frau Adele says I’m ready for the conservatory!” Alma had every expectation of her mother’s blessing. Mama herself had studied voice there. “Come, she wants to speak to you.”

  Grabbing Mama’s hand, Alma tried to rush her back to the parlor, but pregnancy made her mother’s progress cumbersome and slow.

  “I’ll go talk to her,” Mama said, pulling her hand free. “You fetch Carl.”

  Alma felt her stomach drop. “Why?” Why did her stepfather have to butt his head into everything, even her dream of becoming a great composer?

  “You know very well why,” Mama said. “He controls the purse strings.”

  With a sigh, Alma stalked off down the stairs, out the back door, and down the gravel path to her stepfather’s studio in the back garden. Its huge windows ran nearly the entire length and breadth of the walls. Alma’s resentment bubbled like witch’s brew. Gretl and I must share a room because he impregnated our mother. But he gets an entire freestanding building to himself. His studio was as big as a laborer’s cottage. And there he worked on his canvases, pretending to be a great painter while, in fact, he earned most of his money dealing in other people’s art. The vice president of the Secession.

  Try as she might, Alma couldn’t take him seriously as a father figure. He was four years younger than Mama. Only eighteen years older than Alma was. But she arranged her face in an expression of stepdaughterly affection as she knocked on his studio door and stepped inside. Smiling as sweetly as she could, she took his arm and coaxed him away from his unfinished still life.

  Cilli, the maid, served coffee and apricot streusel while Frau Adele stated her case to Mama and Carl. Alma perched on her chair, her sweating hands clasped in hope.

  “Alma’s nineteen, the perfect age to begin a serious course of study,” her teacher said. “As it stands, she’s a very talented amateur. But she has the potential to become a professional. With her virtuosity, she belongs in the concert hall.”

  I’ll study with Dr. Epstein! I’ll write symphonies and operas! Alma saw her future beckon like a glimmering castle on the horizon.

  “I’m sorry to say our finances are tight at the moment.” Carl lifted his palms in apology. “You must understand, Frau Radnitzky, we have another child on the way and Gretl’s wedding to pay for. It’s not as though Alma will have to support herself with her music. A girl as pretty as my stepdaughter will be married in a few years.”

  A white-hot rage climbed up Alma’s throat. Ignoring Carl, she appealed to Mama. “You went to the conservatory!”

  “I received a stipendium,” Mama said quietly. “And in those days, I did have to earn my living at the opera. Life is so much easier for you, my dear, thanks to Carl looking after us all.”

  Alma reeled from her mother’s betrayal.

  “Besides,” Mama said. “You told me you didn’t like performing on stage and being on display.”

  “But to not even have a chance,” Alma said, trying her best not to cry. “What about Ilse Conrat? She’s studying sculpture in Brussels. Her parents—”

  “Are rich,” Mama said. “We, alas, need to think about economy.” She reached forward to pat Alma’s arm. “Of course, you’ll still continue your composition lessons with Josef Labor. There’s nothing wrong with being a talented amateur, Alma. We’re so proud of your accomplishments, aren’t we, Carl?”

  Alma blinked back her tears and looked at Frau Adele. Her teacher appeared disappointed but resigned, as though this was not the first such exchange she had witnessed.

  “Keep on playing like a virtuosa,” Frau Adele said when Alma saw her to the door. “And do keep up your lessons with Herr Labor. You owe it to yourself, Alma Maria Schindler. You have a gift.”

  Alma shook her teacher’s hand and kissed her cheek. After saying good-bye and closing the door, she thundered up the stairs in a flood of tears. In truth, she had expected no better of Carl, but how could her own mother so abruptly dismiss her dreams of being anything more than a dilettante?

  Mama planted herself at the top of the stairs. When Alma tried to dash past her, her mother took her arms and tried to hug her. “I’m so sorry, dear. But you don’t want to be like those Conrat girls. You know what people say about them.” Not only was Ilse an aspiring sculptor, but her younger sister, Erica, intended to study at the university. “Bluestockings aren’t taken seriously as women—they’re too mannish.” Mama dropped her voice and reddened. “The third sex.”

  Pulling away from her mother, Alma ran into her and Gretl’s room—blessedly, her sister was out. She hurled herself on her bed. As hard as she tried to banish her mother’s words, the curse of becoming one of the third sex terrified her. Alma had to admit she was both fascinated and intimidated by the Con
rat sisters. They put their femininity to the side to pursue years of lonely, dusty striving, yet they’d be lucky to receive even a portion of the regard heaped on men who walked the same path. And so they would doom themselves, Mama seemed to imply. Despised as the monstrous third sex, they would exile themselves from the comforts other women enjoyed. Namely love, marriage, and motherhood. And yet the thought of having to marry a man like Carl made Alma want to claw off her own skin.

  Where on this earth do I belong? Mama was right in one thing, Alma was forced to admit—she didn’t enjoy performing in public. She hated the savage competitiveness among Frau Adele’s other students, and she would not be content with a career of merely interpreting other people’s music. No, music for Alma was something deeply intimate. Her essence. Her soul. More than anything, she dreamed of transforming her innermost emotions into cathedrals of sound.

  I won’t be bullied away from my music or my dreams. I shall persevere. If one door was now closed to her, another remained open. Alma would devote her entire being to writing her own music.

  The very next day Alma set to work composing a fantasia arranged around the leitmotif that kept surfacing in her diary: Loneliness is my destiny, for I feed off my own thoughts.

  Meanwhile, Gretl, with an obsession bordering on mania, sat in the corner copying recipes into a book. Only a year ago her sister would have filled that selfsame book with her sketches. Was this what it meant to be a grown woman—abandoning any pretense of making anything of yourself just so you could serve your husband the perfect plate of Tafelspitz? But at least Gretl was moving forward in life instead of being left behind like Alma. Now that Mama and Carl are starting a new family, it’s time for us to move on, Gretl had said smartly—Gretl, who seemed only to look to her future when she would be married.

  Not for the first time Alma wished she were a young man who could take his share of the family money and go his own way. The problem was there wasn’t much in the way of family money. Emil Schindler’s only fault was that he’d had no head for finance. He hadn’t even managed to write a will. After he died, everything had gone to Mama, and now everything of Mama’s belonged to Carl. Gretl and I are reduced to living off of Carl Moll’s charity, with nothing to call our own.

  “Alma, those chords are so strident.” Gretl looked up from her recipes. Dark circles shadowed her sister’s eyes. “You’re giving me a headache. Can you play something more cheerful? Mozart would be nice.”

  Exasperated, Alma rose from the piano. The parlor’s claustrophobic walls closed in as if to smother her.

  4

  Sometimes Alma felt as though she had two separate selves. On the evening of Berta Zuckerkandl’s party, when she glided into her hostess’s salon in her white crepe-de-chine gown, Alma became another person. The lonely, cerebral girl brimming with self-doubt was left behind and a vibrant young lady took her place. This Alma sparkled in her confidence that she could win every heart in that room.

  Men danced around her, moths drawn to her flame, and she breathed in their attention as if it were oxygen. Koloman Moser hailed her. The architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, who had designed the brand-new Secession Museum, enveloped her in a flurry of pleasantries. The Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff kissed her cheeks, and the smolderingly handsome diplomat Alfred Rappaport kissed her hand. If only Klimt was here to witness her triumph.

  Each man was like a different door she might open, through which she might enter into a whole new world. What future life would be most enchanting—to follow Khnopff back to Brussels or go against Carl’s wishes and marry Rappaport, a Jew, and be a diplomat’s wife whose home was the great world itself?

  Alma turned to Joseph Maria Olbrich, that dear earnest fellow, who had just accepted a lucrative new post in Darmstadt, Germany. “Of course, I shall miss all my friends in Vienna,” he said, taking her hand. “But more than anything, I shall miss you, Alma.”

  He gazed at her with such devotion. Unlike Klimt, this was a man she could trust, as solid and honest as an oak tree. Mama’s voice seemed to trumpet in her head. All he needs is a little nudge and he’ll ask you to marry him! Don’t miss your chance. But did she really want to live in Darmstadt, in the most industrial region in Germany, with its countless factories spewing smoke into the air?

  Her thoughts were diverted when Fernand Khnopff appeared at her elbow and trotted out a poem in his native French about Viviane, the enchantress in the Forest of Brocéliande. He asked her to set it to music for him.

  “The Viviane in the poem is actually you, Fräulein,” Khnopff said. “For you are the most bewitching flirt I ever met.”

  “Nonsense!” she cried. “If I so much as smile at a man, he has the nerve to call me a coquette.” Alma pretended to be offended when, in fact, she was exulting. How delicious to be the one they all wanted. But while she claimed center stage, she couldn’t help noticing how Gretl and Wilhelm seemed happy to just sit together, hardly leaving each other’s side.

  “Come play for us, my dear.” Berta Zuckerkandl drew Alma to the grand piano.

  Electricity shot through Alma as soon as her fingers touched the ivory. At moments like these, her two selves were united at last—Alma, who dreamed of being a composer, and Alma, the belle of the ball. Suddenly, she was whole.

  She played Wagner’s “Liebestod.” When Alma finished to euphoric applause, Berta Zuckerkandl took her hand and raised her to her feet. Frau Zuckerkandl looked every inch the New Woman in her reform dress—a flowing uncorseted gown of cherry-red Japanese silk covered in floral embroideries over which she wore a trailing open kimono. The effect was at once exotic and breathtakingly modern. She wasn’t just a society lady, after all, but a professional journalist and art critic—you were nobody in Viennese artistic circles until Berta Zuckerkandl noticed you. Her intelligent gray eyes were riveted on Alma.

  “Let’s raise our glasses to Alma Maria Schindler,” Frau Zuckerkandl said, “who has turned the rest of us poor women emerald with envy. Not only is she the most beautiful girl in Vienna, and that’s quite bad enough, she’s also a brilliant pianist. That’s infuriating. But on top of it all, she composes! That makes you sick.” Her eyes full of warmth and good humor, Frau Zuckerkandl kissed Alma’s cheek and handed her a glass of champagne.

  A hired pianist took over and the dancing began. Olbrich was the first to claim Alma, his eyes so soft and tender, and she trembled in the certainty that this evening would end with his proposal. Even though Mama and Carl would consider him a prize catch, she had to admit she felt no passion for him, nothing to set her pulse racing. Just a quiet affection. Was that enough? Perhaps she misunderstood what love was meant to be. Looking over at Gretl and Wilhelm, she witnessed their contentment, their enviable peace. But no fireworks, no frisson.

  Alma took a break from the dancing to listen to one of Berta Zuckerkandl’s delectable gossipy tales.

  “Only last week Auguste Rodin visited Vienna on his way back from Prague,” she began. Frau Zuckerkandl was intimately familiar with the Parisian art world. Her sister was married to Paul Clemenceau, the younger brother of the great French statesman Georges Clemenceau. “And who should show Monsieur Rodin the sights but our own Gustav Klimt?”

  The mere mention of Klimt’s name was enough to make Alma drop her eyes to contemplate the parquet floor. As for Rodin, she understood he was notorious for his sculpture of nude lovers sharing a kiss—she had seen a photograph of this piece in Ver Sacrum. It’s not just about a kiss, she had overheard Klimt telling Carl. It’s about sex itself. The thought was enough to make her tremble, bringing back the memory of how close she had come to succumbing to Klimt in Venice.

  “It being a fine day,” Frau Zuckerkandl continued, “Klimt took Rodin to a café in the Prater Garden. Accompanying the two gentlemen were two of Klimt’s models—slim red-haired vamps, whom Rodin found most enthralling.”

  So Mama was right after all—Klimt is a womanizer. Frau Zuckerkandl’s story almost made him sound lik
e a pimp. Alma felt a sickening lurch.

  “Utterly enchanted by it all, Rodin leaned forward, and said to Klimt, ‘I’ve never before experienced such an ambience—your unforgettable templelike Secession Museum filled with startling modern art, and now this garden, these women, this music. What’s the reason for it all?’” With a complicit smile, Frau Zuckerkandl paused to look around at her circle of listeners before continuing. “Klimt answered with only one word. ‘Austria.’”

  At that, everyone lifted their glasses with a rousing cheer, washing Alma of all her gloom. Austria, she thought. Not the stolid and regimented homeland she loathed, so far behind the rest of the world. Not the rigidly conservative empire that had opened its universities to women only four years ago. Not Austria, but the new Vienna rising from this fountain of modern art, music, and writing.

  No, she wasn’t tempted to follow Olbrich to Darmstadt. Instead, she danced with one man after the next. For one night, let her live, surrendering to the elation, the laughter, and the champagne. Of just being present in this room where, apart from Klimt, the finest artists and minds of Vienna were gathered, and she was a part of the sheer effervescence of it all. Here she belonged. She was nineteen and beautiful. She still had time.

  5

  Alma alighted from the streetcar and marched through the crowded narrow streets of the old city center inside the Ringstrasse. Under her arm, she carried her leather folder of compositions. After weeks of practice and preparation, her next lesson with her composition teacher, Josef Labor, had finally arrived.

  Squaring her shoulders, Alma entered the ornate arched doorway on Rosengasse and climbed the stairs to Herr Labor’s apartment. It would have been absolutely taboo for her to visit any other man without a chaperone. But Labor was blind and Mama trusted him implicitly—it was she who had chosen him as Alma’s teacher. Alma suspected that her mother had selected him for his very blindness. His appraisal of Alma’s work was based on its merit alone, not swayed by her looks.