Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  Herr Labor had left the door unlocked for her. His apartment was shabby and dim, with faded wallpaper and mismatched old furniture. It smelled of coffee and stale, used-up air. Alma wondered when his housekeeper had last opened the windows to give the rooms a good airing. But Herr Labor himself was tidy and dapper, with his wavy gray hair and fastidiously groomed moustache. He stood up to shake her hand before sinking back into his chair.

  With a nervous flutter in her stomach, Alma arranged her scores on his piano. Sweating in concentration, she played all eight of her completed songs and then held her breath while she awaited his verdict. Herr Labor couldn’t read her scores but could only listen to her work and critique it verbally.

  “A most respectable accomplishment,” he said. “For a girl.”

  A gall of bitter disappointment rose inside her gorge.

  “Herr Labor,” Alma said, after an awkward silence. “I would very much like to learn counterpoint.”

  Counterpoint, she reasoned, was part of the fundamental knowledge she needed to make any real progress.

  “My girl, you’re not ready for it,” Labor said. “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, you know.”

  She was grateful that her teacher couldn’t see her tears. Struggling to master herself, she pitched her voice low to sound calm. “But I’d rather be crushed under the weight of knowledge than go on living in ignorance.”

  Still, Labor demurred, albeit very politely, as though he sincerely believed he was acting in her best interest, cossetting what he dismissed as her slender talent.

  After the lesson, Alma sat on the streetcar and stared strickenly at her music scores. Perhaps she lacked seriousness and application. Apart from her music lessons, she’d had little in the way of formal schooling. Mama had educated her and Gretl when they were children, even taught them French. But from the age of thirteen onward, Alma had insisted on educating herself. On choosing her own books and forming her own opinions.

  Yet Alma was beginning to regret her haphazard education, which seemed to cast her in the role of the eternal dilettante. Women will never be emancipated, she thought, until they receive the same education as men. Where did this leave her?

  Perhaps if she, like her mother when she was young, had been forced by economic necessity to earn a living with her music, she might actually achieve something. If she never went to another party and chained herself to the piano night and day, would she succeed in proving to Labor how seriously she wanted to be a composer? Or should she give up the struggle, get married, and have children like every other woman. Her gut seized at the memory of Joseph Olbrich’s longing eyes—what if she had squandered her chances with a perfectly decent man for nothing?

  Alma arrived home to find Berta Zuckerkandl’s surprise invitation to join her at the Court Opera’s premiere of Tristan und Isolde the following night. It was Alma’s favorite, and she dressed with care, wearing a flowing silvery evening gown that reminded her of an archaic Greek maiden dancing in the moonlight.

  “My husband couldn’t come since he has some dreary function to attend,” Frau Zuckerkandl said, when Alma joined her in her coach. “Besides, it’s good for me to spend time with bright young people like you.”

  Alma smiled, warmed by the light of Frau Zuckerkandl’s goodwill. With her nimbus of thick black hair and her diamond collier, this lady was the epitome of elegance, as different from her own mother as a woman could be. How Alma yearned to permanently inhabit Berta Zuckerkandl’s rarefied world of salons, exhibitions, and operagoing.

  Such were the thoughts that buzzed through her head when they entered the neo-Renaissance foyer of the opera house and walked up the grand marble stairway to the Zuckerkandls’ private balcony. Nestling in the red velvet seat, Alma trusted that the sheer majesty of Tristan und Isolde would soon sweep away her woes. Even the sound of the orchestra tuning their instruments sent her shivering in anticipation.

  She glanced through the program. The strapping heldentenor Erik Schmedes was singing Tristan, which left Alma weak in the knees, ready to fall in love with him on stage. The celebrated soprano Anna von Mildenburg was playing Isolde. But Berta Zuckerkandl seemed more intrigued with the conductor Gustav Mahler, a man she counted as her friend.

  “Mark my words, he’s the one we must watch,” Frau Zuckerkandl said, viewing him through her opera glasses as he ascended the podium to rapturous applause. “Have you heard his Second Symphony?”

  Alma shook her head. Though she wasn’t familiar with Mahler as a composer, she held him in absolute awe for the way he had revolutionized the Court Opera since becoming its director two years ago. Unlike his predecessors, he staged the operas as though they were plays, demanding that his singers act instead of just reeling off their arias. He even used the electric lights for dramatic effect, all in homage to Wagner’s original intention of the opera being a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art on the grandest scale.

  “Did you know he asked Anna von Mildenburg to marry him?” Frau Zuckerkandl whispered. “And can you believe she turned him down because she didn’t want to give up her career?” She seemed equally astonished and admiring of the soprano’s decision.

  If Mama had been that committed to her opera singing, I would never have been born, Alma reflected, trying to imagine the glamourous and independent life her mother might have lived. She gazed through her opera glasses at Herr Direktor Mahler taking his bows. In his black suit and tails, he was whip thin and athletic in appearance, his dark hair unruly and wild. He radiated intensity, reminding her of an ascetic who lived in a mountain cave and survived on water and air.

  Sweeping round, he faced the orchestra. Lifting their instruments, the musicians began the prelude, the notes shimmering and turbulent in an incessant ebb and flow. Wielding his baton as if it were a sword, Mahler was calm one moment, frenetic the next. A luminous aura seemed to emanate from him, transporting him, his orchestra, and his entire audience to a realm of utter transcendence. Music was the new religion—that was what everyone in educated circles was saying.

  The swelling chords seized Alma, possessed her, washing her in their tides, saturating her in their pathos and bliss. She found herself in tears, shaking with the desire to write an opera even half as sublime as this. Oh, Wagner, you Dionysus, you god of eternal ecstasy.

  After the curtains parted and Anna von Mildenburg’s first aria soared falcon high, and even after Erik Schmedes strode the deck of the swaying ship rigged up on stage, his muscled arms and calves bared, Alma’s eyes kept returning to the conductor, the very epicenter of this hurricane of sound. If Wagner was a god, Gustav Mahler was his high priest.

  6

  “Of course, you shouldn’t marry for the mere sake of bourgeois convention,” Max Burckhard told Alma, as they bicycled side by side along Lake Hallstatt at the foot of the Dachstein Alps. “What an utter waste that would be. Remember this, my dear—you are a free soul.”

  Alma’s heart lifted as her legs pumped the pedals uphill past the onion-domed church and farmers scything hay. How she loved cycling. She wished she could just race on and on, becoming one with the wind sweeping down from the snowy mountain peaks.

  “In fact, you don’t have to marry at all,” Burckhard said, with a candor that put a wobble in her handlebars. “I never did. At least not yet.”

  As his moist gaze lingered on her, she flustered and glanced away, directing her vision to the fishing boats swaying on the ruffled blue lake. Fascinating conversationalist though he was, Max Burckhard didn’t interest her as a man—he was older than her mother, for God’s sake.

  That doesn’t mean you don’t interest him as a woman, Mama would have retorted, she who suspected every adult male who came within a barge pole’s length of Alma to have ulterior motives. But Mama was far away in Vienna, and Alma was most respectably chaperoned, with Gretl and Wilhelm cycling just behind her, and Wilhelm’s parents and Carl bringing up the rear. They were cycling toward Hallstatt on the southern end of the lake, where they
planned to share a meal before heading back to their rented summer house near Bad Goisern.

  Poor pregnant Mama had stayed behind in Vienna to have her baby while the rest of them vacationed in the mountains. At least Mama’s own mother was coming down from Hamburg to look after her and the baby when it arrived.

  Alma hoped and prayed that Mama would be all right, that the birth wouldn’t damage her health. Try as she might, she could still not get over her shock that her mother would be giving birth to a brand-new infant just as she and Gretl had reached the age to marry and have children of their own. She felt guilty about leaving her mother at such a vulnerable time, yet Mama had insisted she needed her peace and privacy. It was as though her grown daughters and even her husband had become an unwelcome presence as the unborn baby devoured her entire existence. It frightened Alma to think of Mama trapped within those walls, as if her pregnancy had transformed her into an unmovable piece of furniture.

  And so Alma directed her entire attention on Max Burckhard. Even with the bother of his unwelcome overtures, she found him fascinating. The former director of the Burgtheater, Burckhard had introduced Vienna to the plays of Henrik Ibsen. He was the first man since Alma’s late father to take an interest in her mind. For Christmas, he’d given her two huge laundry hampers full of books—all classics in the finest editions. It was he who had introduced her to the works of Nietzsche.

  Alma secretly regarded Burckhard as a Nietzschean superman. Possessed of enormous physical vitality, he cycled, hiked, and rowed with the vigor of a man half his age. He was utterly true to himself. While she and her family summered in a geranium-bedecked chalet along the Traun River like so many other tourists, Burckhard had acquired a mountain hut far above the valley where he lived in splendid isolation, with only deer and chamois for company. Though her family frequently set her nerves on edge, Alma shivered at the thought of such solitude. Of existing all by herself with no one but herself to answer to.

  As Burckhard fell silent, Alma overhead Gretl’s conversation with Wilhelm.

  “I want to have four children,” Gretl said. “Four is the perfect number. Two boys and two girls.” Her sister’s voice sounded unnaturally bright, as though she were a bad actress delivering her lines.

  Sometimes her sister seemed so opaque, as though she concealed an entire universe of secrets in the depths of her slender, recipe-copying self. What was she hiding from them all? Why did Gretl get all those headaches—was she merely constitutionally weaker than the rest of them, as their house doctor claimed? Gretl could ride her bicycle as well as anyone else. Alma felt a pang of regret that the two of them were not intimate confidantes like the sisters she read about in novels.

  “Death does not exist,” Burckhard said abruptly.

  What happened to my father then, Alma was about to ask him when all thought was swept aside at the sight of the cyclist coming toward them, sunlight glancing off his spectacles and black hair. Could it be, or did she deceive herself?

  “Herr Direktor Mahler!” she cried, interrupting Burckhard’s discourse on death midsentence.

  For it was indeed Gustav Mahler who hailed them and asked directions to Traunkirchen. Accompanying him were two women and a man Alma recognized as Arnold Rosé, first violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic.

  In a flurry of deference, everyone jumped off their bicycles. Carl dug out his map and pointed out the way while Alma stole glances at Mahler. She’d never seen him up close before. His high cheekbones, his intelligent brow—this was the face of an artist glowing with exertion and good health. For a man in his late thirties, he appeared almost boyish, with his open, expansive smile. But when he directed that smile at her, having caught her in the act of staring at him, the blood shot to her head. She wanted to creep away, but Carl was now introducing her.

  “Are you the Fräulein Schindler who sent me the postcard?” Mahler asked, sounding altogether too amused.

  She cringed to recall how before leaving Vienna she had sent him a card begging for his autograph. And here she stood, as sweaty and disheveled as a peasant harvesting potatoes, while her musical idol suavely proceeded to introduce her to his sister Justine and then to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a violist who performed professionally in an all-female string quartet. Both women seemed to regard Alma pityingly, as though she were the latest soppy, starstruck girl to throw herself in Gustav Mahler’s path.

  How utterly humiliating. If Alma had learned one thing from her debacle with Klimt, it was to worship her idols from a safe distance. Perhaps she should stick to venerating dead men like Wagner.

  Eight weeks later, when Alma returned home from the mountains, Mama welcomed her by thrusting a bald, wriggling infant into her arms.

  “Your new sister, Maria,” Mama said, smiling at the baby and then studying Alma intently, as if to gauge her feelings for her new sibling.

  Maternal sentiment is the measure of femininity, Alma told herself, as she gazed into those unfocused blue eyes. Women and girls were supposed to melt at the sight of a baby. I must be unnatural—the third sex! For instead of madonna-like adoration, Alma felt a frantic urge to hand the baby back to Mama before the tiny creature spit up on her. Alma was holding an unwelcome reminder that Carl had copulated with Mama—something too grotesque to even think about.

  “Alma!” Mama cried sharply. “Support her head!”

  Before Alma could even work out how she was to do this, her mother had snatched the infant from her.

  Gretl cooed worshipfully. “Let me hold her!”

  With the new baby dominating the household, Alma considered herself lucky that she was allowed to play piano—provided that Maria wasn’t sleeping, of course.

  Alma attempted to compose a sonata. At long last she had persuaded Herr Labor to teach her counterpoint, and she hoped that this, her most ambitious composition thus far, would prove to him that she did, in fact, have talent. She forced herself to concentrate with single-pointed focus, to ignore Maria bawling in the nursery while Gretl banged around the kitchen—her sister was taking cooking lessons from Cilli. Simply jotting down a few new bars felt like the labor of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up that never-ending mountain. If Alma could even have one day of peace and quiet, she might accomplish so much more.

  Sweat pooled under her armpits as Alma played her sonata for Herr Labor, who sat with his gnarled fingers enclosing his blind man’s cane of polished walnut. Now was the moment of judgment when he would decree if her hard-won lessons in counterpoint had been worth his while. Her nerves were stretched so thin that she kept striking the wrong notes, and she could feel his impatience as if it were an icy draft.

  “Enough!” he cried. “It’s stupid of me to teach you! You can’t be taken seriously. If that’s the best you can do, you better give up.”

  It was as though the ceiling had come crashing down on her. Alma stared through her tears at the first sonata she had ever dared to write. She imagined Labor ripping it in half and flinging it out the window.

  “If you must compose,” he said, “stick to your lieder.”

  A blackness engulfed her heart. Any shred of dignity or purpose she’d ever had was laid to waste.

  7

  A dreary autumn darkened into the coldest winter in three years, the streets treacherous with ice. Nevertheless, the Austrian mail arrived as punctually as ever. Alma’s heart gave a little leap to see a postcard from Joseph Maria Olbrich. Now that he was Darmstadt’s most celebrated young architect, his joy seemed to radiate from his very handwriting as he announced his engagement to a beautiful actress.

  I’m happy for him. I truly am, Alma tried to tell herself, though this felt like yet another blow. She tried not to reveal any emotion as Gretl read the postcard and cackled in what sounded like pure schadenfreude.

  “Well, you missed that train, Alma! Imagine, you could have been his fiancée picking out the furniture for his new house.”

  Not dignifying her sister with a reply, Alma retreated to the piano and played the over
ture of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Yes, she’d had her chance with Olbrich. Yes, he would have offered her a way out of these stifling walls, the dead end her life had become.

  After the last note of the overture, she reached for her own music. Despite Labor’s command to restrict herself to lieder, she began to compose a rhapsody, this being the one defiance left to her. Alma played and played until she had muscle cramps in both hands. Then she sprang up and yanked open the window. Leaning out into the frigid air, she willed the bitter wind to blast away her ennui and self-doubt.

  “Are you trying to kill the baby?” Mama came storming up behind her and slammed the window shut before charging back to the nursery, where Maria was howling.

  Mama’s patience with Alma seemed to dwindle by the day.

  Leaving Gretl to her cooking lessons and Mama to her squalling infant, Alma swathed herself in her warmest clothes and burst out the door. The cold stung her face. It hurt just to breathe. The street sweeper’s beard was frozen and rimed in frost. But at least the bite in the air made her feel alive. Trying her best to embody the confidence and sophistication of a modern, independent woman, Alma took the tram to the Musikverein, where she joined the crowd queuing up for the afternoon concert. Her stomach seized at the sight of Herr Labor ahead of her in line. But he was oblivious to her presence, and she decided not to call out to him.

  Still reeling from the shame of her last lesson back in November, Alma was debating whether or not to continue studying with him. It wasn’t as though she had formally quit her instruction as much as she lacked the courage to knock on his door and schedule a new lesson. Enduring his critiques felt like being whipped by a cat-o’-nine-tails, and yet abandoning her lessons altogether might sound the death knell of her ambitions. How do you think you would have coped at the conservatory if you can’t handle Labor’s criticism? By giving up, she would prove to all the world that she, Alma Maria Schindler, was only a pretentious bourgeois girl with no actual talent. She should stick to playing Schubert to amuse Carl’s dinner guests.