Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  29

  Too soon they were back in Vienna, Gustav once more embroiled in the Court Opera’s increasingly contentious web of intrigues. Despite Alma’s every admonition to her husband about not overtaxing himself, he shrugged off her concerns.

  “Illness isn’t the result of overwork,” he informed her. “But of a lack of talent!”

  Alma could only bear witness to his endless battles with his own limitations. He punished his body mercilessly, rising early then staying up late to direct performance after performance. He would simply not allow his flesh to falter in its service to the creative spirit. However, one morning Alma came by his office and found him asleep at his desk, his head pillowed on a stack of paperwork.

  When Gustav wasn’t up to his neck at the opera, he was off on tour, directing his own music in Berlin, Munich, Breslau, and Brno. How much longer could his body cope with the strain? Though her husband swore that he hated traveling, he was compelled to tour these far-flung foreign cities to find an audience for his symphonies. The Viennese had precious little forbearance for his ambitions as a composer. But his frequent tours brought him into even deeper conflict with his employer. Prince Montenuovo, who bore ultimate administrative responsibility for the Court Opera, reprimanded Gustav for his absences and accused him of neglecting his duties.

  Alma took Mama to the Viennese premiere of Gustav’s Sixth Symphony in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. It was not the Vienna Philharmonic or the Court Opera Orchestra playing his work tonight—Gustav claimed that neither of these orchestras wanted much to do with him lately—but the much less prestigious Konzertverein Orchestra. That this concert was a local rather than a world premiere spoke for itself. Gustav knew very well what kind of reception he could expect from the Viennese.

  Still, this audience was meant to be friendly. Alma allowed herself a glimmer of hope as she picked out their well-wishers in the crowd. Arnold and Mathilde Schoenberg. Berta Zuckerkandl. The Conrat sisters and their parents. She tried not to stare too long at Alex and his new fiancée—the younger sister of his former love, Melanie Guttmann, who had immigrated to America. Their wedding date was set for June 21, Midsummer Day. If you had the foresight to wait for him, to trust in his love, he would be marrying you. What music might she have composed in these past five years if she had refused Gustav’s proposal and remained Alex’s beloved, his protégée? Alma fought to push away these thoughts, to unclench the tight muscles in her stomach and diaphragm. Be happy with what you have.

  Just as Gustav lifted his baton to begin the performance, a tumult blared from the uppermost balcony. Alma wrenched her head to see a row of pranksters blowing children’s toy trumpets in mockery of her poor husband. A ripple of uneasy laughter spread through the audience. Gustav regarded his hecklers with a thin, icy smile. Then his wiry frame seemed to seize up and freeze. He clutched at his chest, as though struggling to draw breath.

  “Oh, God!” Alma seized her mother’s hand.

  Blessedly, the moment passed. With stoic dignity worthy of an emperor, Gustav turned to his orchestra and the concert went on as though nothing had happened. But before her pulse could return to normal, Alma felt her mother’s hand go clammy in hers. Mama’s face had gone gray. Her lips were quivering and white.

  “Mama, what is it?”

  Alma helplessly watched her mother blink and swallow several times before she managed to reply. “Sometimes my chest goes tight and I see black stars.”

  Gustav was away again, directing his Third Symphony in Berlin, when Alma took her mother to see Dr. Kovacs, the renowned heart specialist.

  “What can a doctor do for me?” Mama fretted, while Alma guided her through the labyrinth of Vienna General Hospital. “Stick me full of needles and tell me I’m too fat, I reckon. Prescribe cold baths and calisthenics.”

  Alma felt as though she were dragging her reluctant mother down those stark, sterile corridors that reeked of ammonia and carbolic soap. She feared that if she loosened her grip on Mama’s arm she would turn tail and flee.

  “All he’s going to do is examine you. You owe it to little Maria to get this seen to.” Alma tried to keep her voice light and breezy to mask her deeper worries.

  Once they reached the waiting room, they sat together on a hard wooden bench that reminded Alma of a particularly uncomfortable church pew. In search of diversion, she handed Mama one of the newspapers hanging on a wooden holder. But when her mother opened the pages of Die Zeit, she cursed.

  Without another word, Mama showed Alma a satirical illustration entitled A Month with the Director of the Vienna Court Opera. The image was divided into four cartoons, each of Gustav coming up with an ingenuous new way to shirk his responsibilities at the opera. In the first he was rehearsing his new symphony with an unknown provincial orchestra. In the second he was hunting down a mythical instrument with hitherto unrealized sonorities. In the third he was reading proofs of his new magnum opus. In the fourth he needed time off to recover from his vacation.

  With a sigh of disgust, Alma hung Die Zeit back up on the rail and pulled down two more papers, one for Mama and one for her, only to discover more scathing commentary on her husband.

  With rabbitlike fecundity, Mahler spawns another larger-than-life symphony each year. His Sixth, performed at the Musik-verein on January 4, is marked by the most hopeless lack of ideas. Brass! Plenty of brass! An unprecedented amount of brass! Even more brass! Nothing but brass! And that was just the opening movement.

  But this was mild compared to the next article that leapt out to grab Alma by the throat.

  Not only has Direktor Mahler reaped universal scorn for his dictatorial management of his singers and musicians, treating them the way a lion tamer handles his beasts, but he is also to blame for the deplorable Judaization of our beloved Court Opera.

  As if to drive the point home, there followed a vicious caricature of Gustav as a scarecrow looming before the opera house. Mahler the Jew is driving away our best singers.

  Alma was so stung, she nearly dropped the paper. She knew that the anti-Semitic press had long opposed Gustav’s appointment as opera director. But why turn on him with such venom now, a decade after Emperor Franz Joseph had raised him to that lofty post?

  Oh, the hypocrisy of the Viennese, with their casual, homespun anti-Semitism that was almost gemütlich in its willingness to make exceptions for a visionary like Gustav Mahler. Hadn’t the mayor, Karl Lueger, declared, “I decide who’s a Jew.” Even Mama and Carl, who had absolutely opposed Alma courting Alex because he was a Jew, had warmly embraced Gustav. But it seemed Gustav’s personality clashes at the opera and his too-frequent absences had created such a backlash of resentment that he could no longer hide behind the veneer of his Christian conversion. And thus the Viennese press had decided that he was indeed a Jew. One whom they accused of abusing his position of opera director to advance himself, ignoring his duties in order to direct his own symphonies across Europe, as though he were some greedy, itinerant Jewish peddler.

  Mama wrested the papers from Alma’s hands. “They’re vultures, these journalists. Small-minded and ignorant. Pay them no mind.”

  Alma brushed away her tears. “But why do they hate him so?”

  For this was nothing less than a hate campaign aimed at her husband. If she read any more of this filth, she thought she would have a heart attack.

  Mama rested a consoling hand on her shoulder. “Why do they hate Klimt so? They despise anyone who tries to be true to himself. That’s what they can’t bear. That someone should try to be free.”

  A young assistant, pale and serious in his starched white uniform, appeared before them. “Frau Moll, Herr Doktor Kovacs is ready to see you.”

  Mama insisted that Alma accompany her into the examining room. So Alma looked on while the doctor performed his roster of diagnostic rituals on her mother, who appeared indignant at having to sit before a strange man in her underwear.

  “Frau Moll,” he said. “I’m pleased to say that not
hing is fundamentally wrong with your internal organs. But you must take this matter seriously or you could well develop a heart condition. You’re too adipose and must lose at least fifteen kilos.” Speaking sternly, as though scolding a child, he then proceeded to lecture Mama about the importance of exercise and a healthy diet. “Walk at least an hour a day, preferably up and down hills, and do deep-knee bends first thing each morning in front of an open window.”

  Mama narrowed her eyes at Alma, as if to say, I told you so.

  After seeing Mama home, Alma returned to her apartment to find Miss Turner awaiting her with the latest Abendzeitung in hand. “Frau Direktor, I thought you should see this.”

  Taking the newspaper, Alma blinked at the bold black typeface. Herr Direktor Mahler to Resign from Vienna Court Opera.

  “So now they’re stooping to libel!” Alma ripped the paper in half, hating herself for weeping in front of the nanny.

  “Yes, I know what those jackals are writing about me,” Gustav said, when he returned from Berlin.

  When Alma showed him the latest hatchet piece, he merely glanced over it carelessly, as though it were written about someone else.

  Mahler the symphonist has become the enemy of the Court Opera, which he has destroyed.

  The article went on to claim that the opera had lost 200,000 crowns due to his mismanagement.

  “Lies. All of it.” Gustav tossed the paper in his wastebasket. “Likely another one of their bookkeeping errors. They’re baying for blood because I’m a Jew. It was all right when the opera was turning a profit, but now that they claim to be losing money they want to pin the blame on me.”

  How could he sound so resigned? Alma thought. Where is his will to fight? She clenched her fists while he went back to sorting through the mail that had arrived while he was away. Another letter from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Heinrich Conried, the general manager, was trying to convince Gustav to become their new principal conductor. Alma’s throat closed around the presentiment that their days in Vienna were numbered. Her heart sank to imagine her family driven into exile because of a smear campaign.

  “Gustav, you need to do something,” she said. “Answer your critics!”

  He regarded her over the rims of his glasses. “Montenuovo has forbidden me to respond with words. He says I may offer my rebuttal only in deeds. So I’m directing Die Walküre this spring. They’ve loved all my Wagner productions. I hope that this will shut them up. Almschi, don’t look so tragic. I’m a public figure. When my suit gets splashed with manure, I brush it off.”

  She shook her head at him speechlessly. How much longer could he pretend that this was something he could just shrug away?

  Leaving her husband to his correspondence, she wandered disconsolately to the nursery, where Miss Turner was reading an English book of Mother Goose rhymes to Putzi and Gucki. Gustav had told her that they all should start learning English. Just in case.

  “The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow,” Miss Turner read, crisply enunciating each syllable. Seated on either side of her, Putzi and Gucki leaned in to peer over the picture book’s bright pages. “And what will the robin do then? Poor thing.”

  Alma leaned against the doorjamb and shivered.

  Even Gustav’s new production of Die Walküre failed to appease his enemies. “An orgy of darkness,” the critics sneered. They denounced it as too modern and even faulted petty details, such as Siegfried’s brown wig not making the hero appear suitably Germanic.

  Still, Gustav soldiered on, as though grimly determined to show only defiance in the face of his foes. Without asking leave from the opera, he traveled to Rome to direct three concerts. This time Alma accompanied him, eager to escape the toxic hothouse that Vienna had become.

  Their journey was beset with ill luck. The train engine broke down three times on the way, causing them to miss their connection. They lost their luggage, even the scores for the pieces Gustav would be conducting. He was obliged to hire a tuxedo for his performances, but they couldn’t find one his size. He looked like a boy in his father’s clothes, his ensemble held together with safety pins Alma had begged off hotel reception. The whole fiasco might have been comical had Gustav not been so tense and bad tempered, as though bracing himself for the inevitable backlash from the press awaiting them at home.

  When they arrived back in Vienna, the headlines assaulted them. The papers demanded her husband’s immediate resignation.

  Staggering up four flights of stairs with what remained of their luggage, Alma felt queasy and unwell. She might have worried that she was pregnant again except months had passed since they had last shared intimacies. With all the troubles grinding Gustav down, lovemaking seemed the very last thing on his mind.

  Before they could reach their apartment door, it sprang open. Out scampered Putzi. “Welcome home, Mama and Papa,” their four-year-old said in English, grinning at her own cleverness.

  Alma was struck by how beautiful their daughter was with her big blue eyes, lustrous dark hair, and plump healthy cheeks. What a striking woman she would one day be, a genius like her father. How Putzi glowed to see him again, her towering idol.

  “What a brilliant girl you are!” Gustav’s face brightened for the first time in days as he knelt to embrace her. “Do you want to help your papa open his letters?”

  Putzi nodded worshipfully.

  “Mind she doesn’t cut herself with the letter opener,” Alma called out after them, as father and daughter marched off hand in hand to his study, leaving her on the landing with all the luggage.

  Miss Turner then appeared, carrying Gucki on her hip. Before Alma could reach to take her youngest in her arms, the nanny stepped back. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Gravely, Miss Turner showed Alma Gucki’s left hand. Three of the tiny fingers were scalded. “She knocked over my teakettle. It’s my fault. I should have taken better care.” The nanny’s voice was tremulous, as though she feared Alma might fire her on the spot.

  Alma cupped her daughter’s round little face. More than burned fingers troubled the child. Her skin felt hot and clammy, as though she was running a temperature. Not wasting a second, Alma telephoned the doctor.

  “Scarlet fever,” Dr. Hammerschlag pronounced, lifting his stethoscope from Gucki’s tiny rib cage, now mottled with a bumpy red rash. He opened the child’s mouth to reveal the ulcers in her throat and her swollen red tongue. “A particularly virulent strain, I fear. You must send your other daughter away or she’ll catch it, too.”

  My sweet, precious Gucki. Her daughter’s wide blue eyes were fixed on the ceiling, as though seeing pictures invisible to everyone else. Alma gently turned the child’s face to look at her instead. “It’s all right, my darling. We’ll look after you until you’re better. You must be a brave girl for us. When you’re well, we’ll go to Maiernigg and play in the meadows. We’ll swim in the lake—”

  “What about Putzi?” Gustav asked, cutting her off. His face was creased, as if he could not comprehend how this horror could visit them on top of all their other woes.

  “We’ll send her to stay with Mama and Carl,” Alma said, swallowing back her anger that her husband seemed more concerned about their healthy daughter than the one who was deathly ill. My God, what if we lose Gucki? The girl wasn’t even three years old. If the scarlet fever didn’t kill her, it could leave her blind or deaf or both.

  “I’ll take Putzi away at once.” Gustav rushed out of the room.

  “Your husband is right to be so worried,” Dr. Hammerschlag said. “I’ve seen families with ten children wiped out in a week from the disease.”

  Because the risk of contagion was so great, Gustav elected to stay at the Hotel Imperial while Alma and Miss Turner cared for Gucki. Acting on the doctor’s orders, Alma reluctantly shaved off her daughter’s beautiful golden hair.

  “It will fall out anyway,” Miss Turner said bleakly. “That’s what the disease does.”

  Already a fussy feeder, Gucki struggled
to swallow with her ulcerated throat. They could only try to tempt her with smooth, soothing applesauce, buttermilk, barley water, and chicken broth. Morning and night, Alma treated the throat ulcers with a solution of nitrate of silver applied with a camel-hair paintbrush while Miss Turner held Gucki’s mouth open and pleaded with her not to gag. Alma sponged her daughter’s sore, infected skin and warmed her feet with a hot-water bottle. When the rash finally subsided, the child’s skin came off in scales. Even the skin on her tongue peeled off. Alma gave Gucki baths in Epsom salts and massaged her with cooling aloe. The disease was so infectious that all of Gucki’s clothing, toys, and bedding would have to be burned.

  “When you’re well again, we’ll buy you new clothes and toys. You’ll be better in time for your birthday.” Alma tried to speak with conviction, as though her words were a magical incantation that could save her little girl from the brink of death.

  Prisoner of the sickroom, Alma was plunged into such loneliness, she could find consolation only in her journal. The thought that she would have to burn these pages as well emboldened her to write the most soul-shaking confessions.

  Five years of marriage and I am no longer a person. I have lived my husband’s life. I’ve canceled my will and being. Like a tightrope walker, I’m only concerned with keeping my balance. But the scarlet fever has rendered my great sacrifice meaningless. I gave up my music. I put myself aside for husband and family in vain, for I could lose them all overnight.

  What grieved Alma most was how Gustav never seemed to acknowledge the surrender of her existence. What it had cost her. He was too utterly engrossed in his work, his self-denial, his struggle with the opera. In spite of her bearing him two children, he still seemed to regard her as a child. She copied his music for him and even in his absence studied the books he recommended to earn his approval. He praised her for reading Shakespeare in translation but most vehemently disapproved of her reading A Doll’s House by Ibsen.