Gustav grew exasperated, his face etched in sagging lines. “I’m beginning to doubt whether you love me.”
Alma swallowed back a string of unspoken curses. Yet even as she raged inwardly, she was shaken by the conviction that she had never felt so inextricably bound up with another human being. Even his disapproval gave her something solid to cling to. His gaze defined her. His solicitude as he softened and embraced her once more, forgiving her for her betrayal.
He took her out in the rowboat, far out into the vast lake so that she could lose herself in the gentle rocking and swaying that was almost like lovemaking. He spoke to her of Nature and God, of immanence and transcendence, of mysticism and the transmigration of souls. Her otherworldly husband who wanted to raise her to his level, and how she coveted this ascension. To look out at the world from his lordly heights.
If only I could find my inner balance, Alma wrote in her diary, despairing over how much she distressed both Gustav and herself with her doubts, her aching loneliness. From this moment onward, she resolved not to tell him of her inner battles. Instead, she would pave his way with peace, pleasure, and equanimity. Since she couldn’t find her way back to her old self, she would allow Gustav to shape her into a better self.
Alma elected to devote her hours to making a fair copy of Gustav’s evolving Fifth Symphony. As the rush of new ideas flooded him, he fell into the habit of neglecting to write out the instrumental parts beyond the first few bars. Over the weeks, Alma pored over the score and heard it rise inside her. She copied it out, filling in the instrumental parts, becoming more and more of a real help to Gustav.
Rapt with concentration, Alma sat on the stone terrace and transcribed Gustav’s most recent draft onto the master score. She had become so proficient at deciphering his frantic, often messy notes that she was now writing in the new parts as fast as Gustav could compose them. What a delight it was to be working in tandem with him—to think she was part of this vast symphony. No one can say I’m not his colleague. His amanuensis.
Dipping her fountain pen into the inkpot, Alma was about to fill in a new bar when a cacophony of barking caused her to splatter ink all over the page. Cursing, she realized she would have to copy this sheet over again. Her jaw set in annoyance, she glanced up to see none other than Anna von Mildenburg, her husband’s actual colleague and former lover. Dressed impeccably in ivory linen and lace, the soprano was as slender as Alma was bloated with pregnancy. The diva was leading a mastiff on a velvet leash.
Not waiting for an invitation, Mildenburg traipsed up to the terrace, where her mutt proceeded to jump on Alma. Shoving the dog away, Alma tucked Gustav’s score away in its folder for safekeeping, away from Mildenburg’s eagle-sharp eyes.
“What brings you here?” Alma asked, unable to hide her irritation. How dare Mildenburg barge into her and Gustav’s summer retreat?
“Not exactly the warmest welcome.” Mildenburg tapped her immaculate gloved fingers on the table, as if to mark the contrast to Alma’s ink-stained hands. “My dear, I have the most thrilling news! I’ve purchased the villa next door. We shall be seeing a lot of each other. Gustl will be so delighted.”
The skin on Alma’s nape bristled. “You mustn’t disturb him! I hope you’ll keep that dog quiet.”
Why couldn’t the cursed woman leave them alone? It was bad enough the way Gustav’s former paramour fawned over him at the opera.
“So heartless, Alma! I bought this poor creature off a penniless beggar. At least Gustav loves animals. If you don’t even have the manners to offer me a cup of coffee, why then I shall have to return in the evening when he’s here to receive me. Gustav won’t turn me away.” But instead of beating a retreat, Mildenburg fixed Alma with a sickly sweet gaze. “I think you and I should have a heart-to-heart about his collaboration with Alfred Roller, which is all down to you and your stepfather. So much expense just for set design! What if this bankrupts the opera? But our Gustav was never good with finances, was he?”
Our Gustav? Alma contemplated hurling a potted geranium at Mildenburg’s smug face.
“You owe your career to my husband,” Alma said coldly. “Don’t you dare involve me in your intrigues.”
When Gustav emerged from his composing hut several hours later, Alma couldn’t bring herself to mention Mildenburg’s visit. Let her husband remain in blissful ignorance of the diva next door for as long as possible. With any luck, Mildenburg would grow bored with quiet country living and hop on the next train to Salzburg.
That evening, when Alma and Gustav dined al fresco, the serene murmur of the lapping lake gave her cause to hope. The two of them shared their simple supper while animatedly discussing the final choral movement Gustav had in mind for his symphony.
Meanwhile, a fly began buzzing around his head. Distracted, Gustav kept trying to wave it away, but the creature was so persistent that he finally chanced to swat it so hard that it plummeted to the ground, where it lay twitching and dying. Springing up from his chair, Gustav raised his foot to squash it and put the thing out of its misery. But then his leg froze in midair, as though he were in the throes of a deep moral dilemma.
“There, there, don’t despair, my brother,” he said, gazing down dolefully. “You, too, possess an immortal soul.”
Finally, he managed to put his foot down and crush the insect before sinking back into his chair with a mien of utter dejection, as though tormented by his collusion in the creature’s demise.
“Gustav, it was only a fly,” Alma pointed out.
“Only a fly?” With sorrowful eyes, her husband shook his head. “Alm-schi, it was a sentient being!”
So his great compassion for animals, which Mildenburg had so pointedly brought up, extended to insects. Alma wondered how he would react if they ever had an ant infestation.
As if on cue, Mildenburg emerged out of the twilight, trailed by her slavering, barking familiar. “Gustl, how good to see you!” she cried, her voice dripping in glee.
Gustav looked from Alma to Mildenburg in bewilderment while Mildenburg mounted their terrace with all the aplomb of a star soprano taking center stage.
“Did your wife not tell you that we’re neighbors now, dear Gustl? You must meet Wotan, my new companion. Go on, shake his paw.”
With a howl worthy of a Wagnerian baritone, the mastiff leapt up, its huge paws braced in Gustav’s lap. Alma looked on in horror as the wretched mutt began to hump her husband’s leg. So great was Gustav’s revulsion that he knocked over his chair in his escape.
“Augh!” he cried. “Get that beast away from me!”
At least it was reassuring to see that her husband’s reverence for the soul of all nature knew some bounds after all. Brandishing a rolled-up copy of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Alma rushed to Gustav’s defense while a red-faced Mildenburg ineffectually shrieked, “Down, Wotan! Naughty boy!”
Elise charged out with a broom, the sight of which sent Wotan cowering behind his mistress.
“Frau von Mildenburg,” Alma said. “You must keep that animal off our property at all times. And perhaps it would be more courteous to wait for an invitation before calling on us again.”
“I shall be forced to walk home alone then,” the soprano said tragically. “In the dark.”
“I shall escort you,” Gustav said, conquering his aversion of the dog to be a gallant defender of womanhood. He did, however, address Mildenburg with the formal, distancing Sie, rebuffing Mildenburg’s familiar Du.
Careful to keep the leashed dog on the far side of her, Mildenburg took Gustav’s arm and threw Alma a smile. So that had been Mildenburg’s design all along, to get Gustav to walk her home, just the two of them beside the moonlit lake.
“Herr Direktor, please finish your meal,” Elise interjected. “I shall walk the gracious Frau von Mildenburg home. Do I have the honor, madam?”
With effusive heartiness, Elise took a firm grip of Mildenburg’s arm before marching her and her mutt away. Alma nearly laughed aloud to see the indign
ation on Mildenburg’s face.
Gustav pushed away his half-finished plate as though his encounter with Mildenburg’s dog had robbed him of his appetite. Reaching across the table, he took Alma’s hand.
“Almschi, come inside. I think I’ll take a look at Siegfried.”
Alma looked at him in dismay, fearing that if they sat down to play the opera it would only summon Mildenburg out of the darkness again and she would insist on staying past midnight to sing every aria. But Gustav, it seemed, was determined, and Alma could only follow as he led her to the piano. Pulling her to sit beside him on the bench, he opened the massive bound score of Siegfried. Between the title page and the first page, he extracted a score of his own that he had apparently concealed there as a surprise for her. With a flourish, he placed it in her hands. A song drawn from Friedrich Rückert’s poem “Liebst du um Schönheit.”
“Something very intimate, just for you,” Gustav said, caressing her hair.
“A love song.” Alma’s eyes filled with tears, all the longing and doubt choked up inside her. She was familiar with Clara Schumann’s musical setting of this poem, composed more than sixty years ago when Clara had been twenty-two, the same age Alma was now.
“I hid it here five days ago and was waiting for you to find it, Almschi, but it took you too long!”
“Because I’ve been so busy copying out your symphony,” she said.
“Listen.” With great tenderness, he began to play and sing.
If you love for beauty, or youth, or riches, don’t love me, the poem declared. But if you love for love’s sake, love me now and always, and I will love you forevermore. The plaintive beauty of the lyrics sent a rush up Alma’s spine.
Then they played and sang the song together, over and over, their four hands on the piano keys, their voices twining in harmony, their love echoing out the open French doors into the gathering night.
Alma was in thrall of her husband, staggered by his genius. Compared with his endless riches, how insignificant I appear.
Her pregnancy, it was true, was becoming more and more of a hindrance, especially on their walks together, but her new vocation to write out his scores was profoundly rewarding. Gustav had come to rely on her as indispensable to his creative process. When he finished a new movement or was stymied by a creative block, he fetched her up to his composing hut to ask her advice.
“That choral movement is just too much,” she told him. “It’s boring, like a hymnal, and the rest of your work is filled with such beauty and energy.”
“But Bruckner,” he said, crestfallen. “I keep thinking of his chorales.”
“Bruckner, but not you,” she said gently.
And so he agreed to strip that movement away.
In September, just as they were beginning to make plans to return to Vienna, Gustav’s Fifth Symphony was completed. With great solemnity, they climbed arm in arm up the steep path to his hut, where he played all five movements on the piano for her. Alma followed along on the score, her inner ear listening to how the piece would sound with a full orchestra.
The first movement opened with a trumpet solo using the same rhythmic motif as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but Gustav’s rendition was far darker. He had titled this movement “Funeral March.” Oh, why is my husband so obsessed with death, Alma wondered fitfully, one hand on her swelling belly.
The stormy vehemence of the second movement then gave way to contemplation with a brief burst of glory before that, too, faded into shadows like the ending of a tragic opera. The third movement was, by contrast, the ebullient scherzo she had critiqued before their marriage. With its alternating waltz and Ländler rhythms, it was filled with exhilarating optimism, as if Gustav’s lust for life had vanquished his dread of death.
But it was the fourth movement, the adagietto set for strings and harp, so tender and slow, that moved Alma to tears. For this was a love song even more poignant and yearning than “Liebst du um Schönheit.” Gustav borrowed a motif from her beloved Tristan und Isolde. Most moving of all, he had penciled in lyrics beneath the violin line, a declaration of his love. How I love you. You, my sun. I cannot tell you with words. I can only pour out my longing to you. And my love, my joy!
Through her tears, she smiled at him. For a moment, their eyes locked before he continued to play. The adagietto opened seamlessly into the finale, saturated in pastoral bliss, which took the adagietto’s main theme and transformed it into an exuberant, happy-ever-after dance. After Gustav played the last note, Alma rushed to embrace him. His arms reached wide enough to hold her and their unborn child.
“It’s magnificent!” she cried. “Magnificent!”
They flew outside to dance their own improvised Ländler. Circling round and round, Alma caught glimpses through the pines of the deep blue sky.
23
The halcyon weather broke with thunderheads rolling down from the mountains, signaling that it was time to pack up and return to Vienna.
Huddled beside her husband on the clattering train, Alma was by now so huge with child that she felt almost ashamed to show herself in public. There was something so undignified, so primitive, about the way her flesh swelled and protruded like overripe fruit fit to burst, all of it beyond her will and control.
At the opera, Gustav began rehearsals for Mozart’s little-known work Zaide. His life slotted into its old rhythms, everything back to the way it had been before their summer idyll. But for Alma, this could never be—her back throbbed in pain and she was plagued with heartburn. She couldn’t even sleep properly, her belly was so enormous, and when she did chance to drift off, nightmares haunted her.
A monstrous green snake thrust itself inside her body through her most intimate parts and took residence inside her. Trying to rip the cursed thing out, Alma tugged at its tail and screamed for Elise, who came running. Grappling and yanking at it violently, Elise finally succeeded in pulling the beast out of her. But then the serpent uncoiled before Alma and taunted her. In its maw, it held all her internal organs. Alma collapsed, hollow and eviscerated.
Trying to shake off the terror of her dreams, Alma prepared the nursery with freshly painted walls and bright curtains, a crib and changing table, a pile of fresh diapers, and tiny clothes and booties. But the baby wouldn’t come. Alma was nearly two weeks overdue. Every morning she awakened with a dry mouth and covered in cold sweat, convinced she would be pregnant forever.
At Mama’s and Gustav’s insistence, she submitted to examination after examination by Dr. Hammerschlag, whose ice-cold fingers poked and prodded her. Hell, Alma imagined, was full of gynecologists.
“The baby has displaced itself in the womb,” the doctor pronounced, with a grim, purse-lipped stare as though Alma were a feckless young girl who had brought this upon herself just to inconvenience him. “On account of your overexerting yourself without any thought to your condition.”
Mama shook her head despairingly. “Why did you let Gustav drag you up all those mountains, dear? I thought you had more sense.”
Mama and the doctor laid the sole blame on her as a matter of course. No one faulted Gustav. He was stainless, eternally absolved.
On the third of November, the contractions came like earthquakes cleaving the ground beneath Alma. As hard as she struggled to claw her way back up, she only tumbled back down into the rent earth. Why had no one warned her that childbirth was a descent into the underworld? Gustav had promised to raise her up to his level, but she sank into the bowels of hell instead.
It was a tearing breech birth so awful that Mama was in tears, holding Alma’s hand, begging her not to give up. Even Dr. Hammerschlag had gone pale, as though he feared the worst. As Alma pushed and groaned, she heard Gustav’s panicked pacing in the next room. Childbirth was not a thing he could command or direct. It wouldn’t adhere to the dictates of his clockwork schedule. She heard him calling to her through the closed door, his voice breaking, but the doctor wouldn’t let him in the room. The next contraction split her in two. She t
hought her screams would shatter the window glass.
And then it was over. Mama smiled at Alma with such pride and affection as she hadn’t in a very long while. “Alma, my beautiful girl, now you’re a mama, too.”
Alma gazed at the tiny wriggling thing that had lived all those months inside her. Those unfocused eyes, as blue as cornflowers. That tiny needy mouth opening for her first wail. The baby overawed her. Little one, how will I ever be good enough to be your mother? Alma clutched her newborn daughter to her pounding heart.
Gustav burst in, his eyes full of tears. “Oh, my love, how can any man bear the responsibility of such suffering and keep on begetting children?”
Mama and the doctor withdrew to give them their privacy.
“I was terrified, Almschi,” Gustav said, kissing her brow. “What if I had lost you both?”
“It was a breech birth,” she said.
He laughed ruefully as he took their baby in his arms. The infant nestled sweetly in his embrace. Just looking at his face, Alma thought that he was born to be a father. He was helplessly in love with their daughter already.
“That’s my child,” he said, gazing down at her. “Coming out bottom first. Showing the world straight off the part it deserves.” He choked up, overcome with emotion, then returned the baby to Alma.
“Maria Anna,” Alma whispered to their daughter, named after both their mothers. “Gustav, now we’re a family.”
Alma’s torn, bleeding perineum was full of stitches, necessitating fifteen days of bed rest. Mama, meanwhile, hired the best nanny she could find, a calm and efficient Englishwoman named Lizzie Turner, who cared for the infant while Alma was too weak to do anything but hold her baby and breastfeed, and even that seemed to drain her last strength. She was plagued by excruciating abdominal pain, which Dr. Hammerschlag diagnosed as gallstones. He then put her on a diet even more severe than Gustav’s.
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