Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  His office was spacious enough to contain a grand piano and a massive mahogany desk. The walls were covered with framed and signed photographs of opera singers, many of them beautiful divas—Anna von Mildenburg, Selma Kurz, and Marie Gutheil-Schoder, to name a few. Their portraits seemed to glow with sophistication and success, holding up a mirror to Alma’s self-doubt. What have I accomplished in my twenty-two years?

  Not knowing what else to do with herself, she stood beside Mahler’s piano and turned the pages of the sheet music she found there—a half-finished score by Mahler himself. She recalled how his First Symphony had flummoxed both her and Alex, leaving her lover defeated, his head in his hands. I’m here for Alex, she reminded herself. To champion his career. Only she felt so tongue-tied. It was rude of her not to join the conversation, but she couldn’t think of what to say that wouldn’t sound like the gushing of an overawed girl. So many contradictory thoughts and emotions churned inside her. Before Mahler, she felt so small, so insignificant. And those rumors of Mahler seducing his sopranos—how many other young women had he lured to his office? In the corner beside the tiled heating oven was a loveseat. Her hands started shaking.

  “Fräulein Schindler,” he called out, cutting through her tangled thoughts. “How did you sleep last night?”

  She could only laugh in confusion. What a question! “Perfectly, Herr Direktor,” she lied, hoping to sound lighthearted. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He stared straight into her eyes. “I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  Alma raked her brain for some breezy comeback only to find herself gaping at him like a fish.

  “Come, Alma, dear.” Berta Zuckerkandl took her arm as they walked down together for the rehearsal.

  A full dress rehearsal of Les contes d’Hoffmann just for the three of them! Alma and her companions sat in the middle of the front row. Madame Clemenceau passed around a small box of candied violets, but Alma shook her head. Eating here seemed too great a sacrilege. The Court Opera was the holiest of cathedrals, and Mahler was the greatest producer she had ever seen. His senses were so acute—he seemed to hear and see every little thing at once. If a singer was out of tune or made an awkward gesture. If the electric lighting was wrong. And his energy! Moving at an allegro furioso, he vaulted tirelessly from his conductor’s podium, through the orchestra pit, and up onto the stage before leaping back down again. Under his direction, the orchestra was intoxicatingly lush. Alma perched forward in her seat as the fantastical opera unfolded. The second act was poignant, with the hero falling in love with an automaton. Not until the very end of this vignette did he realize he was enamored of a wind-up doll.

  But in the third act, when Marie Gutheil-Schoder appeared as the courtesan Giulietta, the spell was broken. The soprano’s skirts were slashed open on the sides all the way up to her waist, affording her tiny audience a shocking glimpse of her sheer pink stockings and silken undergarments. Alma had never seen anything so risqué.

  “Ooh, how naughty,” Berta Zuckerkandl whispered to her sister, who tittered behind her hand.

  Mahler’s voice split the air like a thunderclap. “How dare you? This is an abomination! A gross indecency!”

  Alma slammed back in her seat and the orchestra came to a crashing halt as Mahler railed at his soprano, his arms whipping in fury. He ordered the stammering lady offstage to get her seams sewn back together. Even after she vanished, he continued shouting over the heads of his orchestra, decrying Gutheil-Schoder’s shamelessness. If he was a brilliant director, he was also a stern taskmaster, Alma observed. His singers must admire and fear him in equal measure.

  Yet he came to the rail after the dress rehearsal and escorted Alma and her companions to the door again, every bit as kind and solicitous as before. When they said their farewells, he shook Alma’s hand with such warmth.

  “Remember, Fräulein Schindler, you said you would send me your music. I shall hold you to your word.”

  What if she sent Mahler her lieder and he hated them, she wondered fitfully. Would she ever dare compose again?

  “What was the outcome of your talk with Mahler?” Alma asked Alex the following afternoon while they played a duet on the piano.

  “He said he would consider staging another one of my operas.” Alex’s calf rubbed up against hers as he worked the pedals. “But not my ballet.”

  “Still, that’s a victory,” Alma said, hoping to console him. “I put in a good word for you, didn’t I? Just as I promised.”

  As if to mask his disappointment, Alex changed the subject. With a furtive glance at the open doorway where Mama was wont to hover and eavesdrop, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Come by my apartment Wednesday afternoon. It’s so hard to get you alone here.”

  Mama had become increasingly vigilant regarding Alex’s visits.

  “I’m forbidden,” Alma whispered back. “She says I’ve stretched her tolerance as far as it will go.”

  “Surely you could find some excuse to take the tram into the city.” Reaching across the keyboard, he touched her hand, causing her to falter and strike a false note while he carried on playing flawlessly. “Say you need to buy a new hat. But come to my place instead. What makes you hesitate? Is it prudery?”

  Alma avoided his gaze because she didn’t know what to say. In truth, she had begun to think that she and Alex had gone too far too soon. The depths of her own desire frightened her. Each time she plunged into that dark abyss, she thought she would never reach the bottom of it. What if she drowned there? Even now, sitting beside her lover at the piano, she wanted to kiss him, taste him, lie with him. Yet his pestering to get her alone in his apartment was beginning to wear her down. She wished he would leave off that hectoring tone when she had already risked so much for their intimacy. What if they both lost control and she ended up pregnant and disgraced? They should leave some final mystery for their wedding night—whenever that might be. The way they had been carrying on, she worried they would burn out their passions long before Alex could afford to marry her. Meanwhile, Mama had grown so suspicious, she seemed loath to even leave Alma alone in the house if she could help it.

  “Alma!” Mama marched in brandishing a letter. “This just arrived—without a return address!” Her mother’s voice rang with accusation, as though this piece of anonymous mail was the latest effrontery her daughter had forced upon her long-suffering parent.

  Alma shot a desperate glance at Alex, but his confusion seemed to indicate that the missive had nothing to do with him.

  After her lesson and before Mama’s watchful eyes, Alma opened the envelope to find an unsigned poem written in black ink on thick cream-colored stock with gilded edges. No other message accompanied the verses.

  It happened overnight.

  I never thought

  That counterpoint and harmony

  Would so move my heart again.

  Before Alma could fully comprehend the words on the page, Mama snatched it from her.

  “Who sent this?” Mama asked, in a voice like lead. “It doesn’t look like Herr Zemlinsky’s handwriting.”

  Mama seemed especially apprehensive after learning that Klimt had attended Berta Zuckerkandl’s party, but Klimt was hardly the sort to write a poem about counterpoint and harmony.

  “It could only be from Mahler.” Alma took the poem from her mother’s hand and read it once more.

  I still hear it, the poem concluded in its final stanza. A man, his word! / It echoes inside me—a canon of some sort. / I watch the door and wait. That look he had given her when he said, I’ll hold you to your word.

  Mama burst out laughing. “Oh, Alma, don’t flatter yourself. A man like Mahler would hardly write poetry to a girl like you. Someone’s playing a prank.”

  Mumbling an excuse to her mother, Alma grabbed her coat and set off for a walk up and down the steep streets of the Hohe Warte. The spiky outer shells of chestnuts, fallen from the golden-leafed trees, pricked her through her soles. Below, the city glistened in the splendor of mel
low autumn light. But Alma could hardly take it in.

  Mama could say what she would, but certainty gripped Alma with an unshakable force—the poem was Mahler’s. His verses left her as confounded as his First Symphony. I don’t understand this. What does it mean? Though she could hardly claim to feel for him what she felt for Alex, she could think of nothing and no one else apart from Gustav Mahler. I will pluck out this poisonous weed and make my heart the exclusive sanctuary for my true love, my Alex. If only Alex had written that poem.

  16

  Two weeks passed. The trees shook off their remaining leaves, and the first snow drifted down in fat, feathery flakes. The squares of Vienna smelled of roasting almonds. Alex was so busy conducting, he canceled their next lesson, and Alma was too cowardly to visit him at his home. Instead, she struggled to compose while little Maria shrieked and danced around the room.

  “You’re so pale, Alma,” Mama said. “What’s possessing you? All you do is play your piano and weep. I hate to see you like this.”

  Mama took her to see Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Mahler was not conducting and it showed—never had Alma been so bored at the Court Opera. Her eyes kept darting up to the director’s box where Mahler sat watching the performance.

  What’s possessing you? Alma searched her soul for an answer. Mahler has cast a spell on me. She stared at him in his lofty perch while he went on watching the opera as though oblivious to her existence. He was a giant filled with insurmountable power. She strove to put him out of her mind and concentrate on Alex. If only Mama and Carl weren’t so dead set against Alex, forbidding an open courtship, everything could be so different. If they approved of him, if Carl was willing to pull strings and help him as he’d done for Gretl’s Wilhelm, Alma and Alex would be engaged by now, Alma busy planning their wedding. But as things stood, her future with Alex was beginning to seem impossible. They were star-crossed lovers, all the forces of society and nature set against them. And then Mahler had swept into her life, bringing a sea change in his wake. Did this prove she was fickle? Inconstant?

  Just as Alma’s self-doubt seemed enough to throttle her, Mahler turned in his seat and finally took note of her, returning her open-mouthed stare. His eyes shone with something that looked like adulation. She blinked back tears as a sense of wonder coursed through her. Alma kept gazing up at him while he smiled down at her, his face appearing wide open and vulnerable, as though he were a boy of her own twenty-two years, not a forty-one-year-old man.

  During the intermission, when Alma and her mother wandered out into the foyer, Mahler materialized before them as though conjured out of the marble floor.

  “Fräulein Schindler, how enchanting to see you again! Is this your mother?”

  Alma had never seen Mama more impressed—she actually blushed when the famous conductor shook her hand. Meanwhile, a throng of inquisitive onlookers began to gawk and murmur.

  “Shall we go somewhere a bit more peaceful, Fräulein Schindler, Frau Moll?” Mahler asked. “I shall serve you tea in my office.”

  Mama squeezed Alma’s hand and gave her a giddy smile as Mahler escorted them upstairs. A golden cloud filled Alma’s head.

  In Mahler’s office, Alma sat at the piano and gently turned the pages of his sheet music while he and her mother conversed, Mama laughing and animated and Mahler most charming. A former opera singer, Mama seemed enraptured to have this audience with him.

  “You’re from Hamburg, Frau Moll?” Mahler asked, before launching into reminiscences of his stint as chief conductor at the Hamburg Stadttheater, where he had conducted Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the very first time.

  Alma swung around to hear the name of her most beloved opera.

  “You live in the Hohe Warte,” Mahler said, glancing from Alma to her mother. “Why, that’s my favorite walk.”

  “Then you must come and call on us, Herr Direktor,” said Mama.

  Alma was stunned. So her mother was encouraging him. Giving him her blessing.

  “I certainly shall,” said Mahler. “But when? Soon, I hope.”

  It was his eagerness that overwhelmed Alma and rendered her speechless.

  “You name the date, Herr Direktor,” said Mama.

  Alma swallowed back her breath to see him consult a leather-bound engagement calendar as thick as a Russian novel.

  “How about next Saturday,” he said, peering at Alma over his spectacle rims.

  Her heart banged in her chest. “Herr Direktor, I have a counterpoint lesson that day. With Herr Zemlinsky.”

  A pained look crossed her mother’s face. “Surely that can be rescheduled, dear.”

  Alma froze to see both Mama and Mahler looking at her, awaiting her response. Now was the time she could take a stand and prove once and for all that her fealty belonged to Alex. But what if she turned away as great a man as Mahler only for Alex to cancel their lesson at the last moment, as he was so prone to do? A man, his word!

  “Saturday it is,” Alma said, her ears ringing.

  His smile left her floating several feet above the ground. “I shall look forward to calling on you, Fräulein Schindler. I hope you will finally show me your songs.”

  “You can play your songs for the Herr Direktor,” Mama said.

  The joy on Mahler’s face brought the blood to Alma’s cheeks. To see him looking at her like that, anything seemed within the realm of possibility, as though something great and beautiful had entered her life and would remain there forever.

  “Herr Direktor,” Alma blurted. “One day I would love to try my hand at conducting an orchestra.” She immediately wanted to kick herself for making such an outlandish request.

  But Mahler appeared to take her seriously. “There’s certainly no harm in your coming to a rehearsal and giving it a try. In fact, it would give me great pleasure to see you at the podium.”

  Alma thought she would swoon as the glory of it all descended on her. A woman conducting the Vienna Philharmonic!

  “I hope you would give me your honest verdict,” she said earnestly, hoping to sound professional.

  His dark eyes seemed bottomless, the skin around them etched with lines of sorrow and joy. “No verdict is ever impartial, Fräulein Schindler.”

  Mama, seated on the loveseat, seemed to smile to herself.

  “How could you do such a thing?” Carl demanded, glaring at Mama over his plate of Tafelspitz. “Taking an innocent girl, your own daughter, into a private room with a roué like Mahler? Have you gone mad?”

  They sat in the decorous surroundings of Restaurant Hartmann, where Alma and her mother had joined Carl and Max Burckhard for dinner after the opera. Alma winced to see her stepfather making such a scene. He looked positively apoplectic, his face the same color as the red wine in his glass.

  Mama sighed. “Really, Carl. The Herr Direktor is a perfect gentleman. He’s calling on us next Saturday. Just imagine—Gustav Mahler in our house!”

  “You’re as naïve and starstruck as your daughter!” Carl threw down his knife and fork with an ugly clatter that caused the waiter to purse his lips in disdain.

  Alma opened her mouth to change the subject when Burckhard butted in.

  “Mahler’s in love with your stepdaughter.” Burckhard’s disapproval hung in the air like the smell of burned meat. “He’s been besotted with her since Berta Zuckerkandl’s party. Do you know I walked home with him that night?” Burckhard turned to Alma. “He told me that at first he wanted to dismiss you as a pretty doll, but then he discovered that you had brains and spirit, and he hasn’t been able to get you out of his head.”

  The air rushed through Alma’s lungs. To think that one dinner party could change everything.

  “What are you going to do if he proposes?” Burckhard asked, while Mama and Carl looked on in silence.

  Propose? That seemed farfetched. But what did she feel for Mahler? Everything was happening so fast, how was she to know her own mind? It happened overnight, Mahler’s poem proclaimed. And Alma was possessed,
transfixed like Leda when Zeus had descended upon her in the form of a swan, enveloping her in his great white wings.

  “What would you say if I accepted him?” she asked defiantly, watching Carl squirm.

  “Alma!” Max Burckhard cried, causing the diners at the nearby tables to turn their heads. “Remember who you are!”

  Burckhard, her friend who had gifted her with The Collected Works of Nietzsche and had stuck his tongue in her mouth on a mountaintop several months ago, reached across the table to seize her hand. He looked at her gravely, as though he were a physician fighting to save her from the grip of a life-threatening fever. “It would be a sin for you to marry him. A fine girl like you, of good blood, chaining yourself to an elderly degenerate.”

  “Herr Mahler is several years younger than you, Herr Burckhard,” Mama pointed out.

  “Mahler’s a Jew,” Burckhard said, ignoring Mama. “Think of your children, Alma. It would be a crime.”

  Alma yanked her hand free before turning to her mother. Would Mama now turn on Mahler and shun him the way she and Carl shunned Alex? Because he was a Jew?

  But Mama lifted her chin and spoke sternly to Burckhard. “Gustav Mahler is a brilliant and eminent man. How dare you speak of him so crudely? Alma’s a grown woman. She can decide for herself whether to accept the Herr Direktor as her suitor.”

  Alma thought trumpeting angels would swoop down from the restaurant ceiling to hear her mother speak so freely, as though she were as broad-minded as Berta Zuckerkandl. Even more astonishingly, Mama spoke as though Mahler’s courtship of her was a fait accompli.

  Alex was more understanding than Alma had dared hope when she wrote him a letter to reschedule their lesson without telling him why. He arranged to come two days earlier, on Thursday instead of Saturday, as if he could no longer bear to keep himself away from her. But as Alma sat at her piano and attempted to work out the figured basses under her lover’s watchful eyes, she was a twitching bundle of nerves. She could hardly look at Alex without feeling an inner stab of remorse even though she hadn’t actually done anything to betray him. The few pleasantries she had exchanged with Mahler were hardly a crime.