Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  As if she could sleep while he was cutting open her daughter on the kitchen table! What if the chloroform wore off and Putzi felt the scalpel cutting away at her flesh? Alma staggered out the door and vomited into the flowerbed.

  It was nine in the evening. Up at the top of the house, light shone in Gustav’s study. She even saw his profile in the window, bent over some book. Which one of his weighty tomes of philosophy would he open for solace? Did he notice her below in the gathering shadows, peering up at him like a ghost?

  Nature itself turned infernal, the dense air crackling with thunder, the twilit sky a lurid red. Across the lake, a jagged bolt of lightning cleaved a tree. Rain pelted down, saturating her hair, pasting her clothes to her quivering flesh, filling her shoes.

  Tearing off down the lakeshore, Alma shrieked and keened. She cursed God and Gustav—had they become one and the same? The cruel lyrics of his Kindertotenlieder swelled inside her brain. In this weather, in this storm, how could I have sent the children out? Racing around like a demented thing, she screamed and wailed and ripped her skirt in half, but the storm was louder and no one could hear. This was her own private hell.

  At five in the morning, Alma slumped beside the cold, unlit tile oven in the parlor. She had changed into dry clothing and wrapped herself in a quilt, but her hair remained damp and disheveled. She bit her lip until she tasted her blood. She wondered if Gustav was sleeping. Before coming back inside the house, she had seen that his light was out. She sucked in her breath to hear the knock on the parlor door. In stepped Miss Turner, who had evidently taken the trouble to put on a fresh apron and shirtwaist so Alma wouldn’t see the bloodstains.

  “We’ve finished. You may see her now.”

  Like a sleepwalker, Alma lurched into the kitchen to see her beautiful daughter with her wide-open blue eyes. Her precious baby with a hole slashed in her throat, into which a metal tube had been inserted to help her breathe. And still she gasped for air. Alma gripped the edge of the table as hard as she could to keep herself from foundering.

  “Can she be safely moved to my room?” she asked the doctor. “It’s obscene to keep her on the kitchen table.”

  Alma tucked her daughter into her own bed and sang softly to her while Putzi sucked in air through the tube, struggling for each breath. Was any noise Alma had ever heard more terrifying than that tortured wheeze? Putzi’s throat was so swollen from both the diphtheria and the operation that it resembled a bull’s neck. Her face was pallid, her little hands waxy and white. Outside the bedroom door, Gustav sobbed and paced, just as he’d done when Alma had labored to bring their daughter into the world four and a half years ago.

  Alma ran to wrench the door open. “Gustav, come and take her hand. Let her see her papa—” She broke down and swallowed back the words she couldn’t bring herself to say. Before she goes. Tell her how much you love her before she goes.

  Gustav stood in the doorway. He reeled on the threshold, his face crumpling at the sight of their gasping daughter. His hands covered his ears, as though he couldn’t bear to hear Putzi’s death rattle.

  Alma telegraphed Mama, who came at once, weeping in remorse that she had arrived too late to say good-bye to her granddaughter.

  Her arm around her mother’s heaving shoulders, Alma showed Mama into her room, where Putzi lay atop the eiderdown. Alma and Miss Turner had washed the body and clothed her in her best white Sunday dress. The hateful tube was gone, and Putzi’s slashed throat was mercifully hidden by Alma’s lace scarf.

  One hand cupped to her mouth, Mama stared at her granddaughter who hadn’t lived to see even her fifth birthday. “Oh, Alma, what if Gustav’s right and this is my fault?”

  Alma held her mother as grief racked both their bodies.

  Carl, who remained at home with Maria, arranged for the funeral and burial at Grinzing Cemetery, a short distance from the Hohe Warte. Miss Turner ordered the coffin to be delivered from Klagenfurt.

  Alma could hardly eat, drink, or get dressed in the morning. She, Gucki, Gustav, and Mama all slept in her husband’s room. Alma was terrified of letting any of them out of her sight for fear that they, too, would be snatched from her. They were like birds in a storm, huddled together so the gale wouldn’t blow them apart. How could little Gucki, just three years old, comprehend the loss of her sister? Alma slept with Gucki in her arms so she could constantly reassure herself with Gucki’s every breath and heartbeat that this daughter was alive.

  And through it all, Mama went on blaming herself for Putzi’s death while Gustav, despite their shared anguish and close proximity, seemed to go on blaming Alma and her mother. As much as Alma tried to cling to him for comfort, a wall of alienation grew between them. He wouldn’t accuse her to her face, but his silent reproach hung in the air like smoke.

  On the third morning of their encampment in his room, Gustav decided they all needed some fresh air and suggested they walk down to the lakeshore at the bottom of the garden. That much Alma thought she might manage. With Gucki in her arms, she descended the staircase, then stepped out to feel the sunlight and soft breeze on her face. It didn’t cheer her in the least, only reminded her that Putzi would never again run and play under that shining sun or show off her pictures of this beautiful landscape. When they reached the lakeshore, Alma felt so unsteady on her feet, she had to set Gucki down. Though Gustav was only feet away, Alma hugged a tree to keep herself upright.

  When she heard the noise of people approaching their house, she stiffened, her back to their voices. Let no strangers, however well-meaning, see her this undone. But Mama turned and looked toward the intruders. What she saw made her face constrict. Paralyzed with fear, Alma watched her mother’s face turn deathly white. And then she collapsed.

  “Mama!” Alma cried, falling at her side. Mama was out cold. In a panic, she looked up at Gustav. “Call the doctor! Get Elise and Miss Turner.”

  But her husband’s eyes were frozen on whatever had caused Mama’s sudden seizure. Alma followed his gaze. The men from the carpenter’s workshop were delivering the tiny coffin. How could that pathetic wooden box ever contain their beautiful child?

  “Gustav, I feel faint,” she said. “And something’s seriously the matter with Mama.”

  Even now he wouldn’t look at her, only at their daughter’s casket. Alma felt so abandoned that it was almost a joy to fall unconscious.

  Dr. Blumenthal came to examine Alma and her mother. Mama, he grimly informed them, had suffered a heart attack. They gathered in Mama’s room to discuss the doctor’s verdict.

  “If you’re a patient of Dr. Kovacs, you should see him immediately on your return to Vienna, Frau Moll,” he said to Mama, as she lay in bed. “As should you, Frau Direktor,” he added, turning to Alma.

  The physician looked so haggard, as though he, for all his professional detachment, had witnessed more tragedy than he could countenance from one family in the space of two and a half weeks.

  “You, Frau Direktor,” he went on, “are suffering from extreme exhaustion and heart palpitations. I order a complete rest. After the funeral, I suggest you spend a few weeks in a sanatorium. You could take your daughter and nanny with you.”

  Alma nodded, too worn down to protest that she was only twenty-seven—far too young to languish in some rest home with the elderly and consumptive. After losing Putzi, she felt older than Gustav, older than Mama. She felt ancient, ready to fall in a heap of dusty bare bones.

  Gustav, looking on from the doorway, offered no words of solace. But with an attitude of forced jocularity, he said, “Come on, doc, wouldn’t you like to examine me, too, as long as you’re here?” He spoke as though attempting to lighten the atmosphere and distract them all from their gloom.

  Alma held Mama’s hand while Gustav unbuttoned his shirt and lay down on the sofa. At first, the doctor seemed to go about his business dismissively, as if he was doing this only to humor her husband. But while he listened to Gustav’s heart, his expression turned grave.

 
“Your heartbeat is arrhythmic, Herr Direktor, probably due to some minor valvular malformation you were born with. Did you not say that heart problems run in your family? I recommend you consult Dr. Kovacs as soon as possible. In the meantime, avoid strenuous exercise.”

  Alma watched Gustav blink rapidly as he sat up and began to button his shirt, as though trying to wrap his thoughts around what the doctor had just told him. Her temples pounded. She felt as though the entire house were collapsing around them. This diagnosis changed everything. Not only had their young daughter suffered the most gruesome death. Not only had Gustav been harassed into resigning from the Vienna Court Opera. But now it seemed that his very life was in jeopardy. Their life together.

  Now we are truly cast adrift. Cut off at the roots.

  Suite 4

  The Lonely One In Autumn

  31

  On a bitter December morning, they left Vienna, the city where Gustav had no future. Alma followed her husband up the ornate portal steps of the Westbahnhof with its arches and pillars, which looked more like an ancient temple than a railway station. Here they would board the train to Paris, the first stage of their journey to New York.

  Walking between Gretl and Mama, who carried Gucki, Alma did her best to hold her head up, to play the part of a great man’s wife about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Could she truly start all over again at the age of twenty-eight? Reinvent herself as everyone in America was said to do? Perhaps the defeated, beaten-down Alma could die and a newer, better self be born.

  Whatever you do, don’t cry. Don’t make a fool of yourself in public. It had been hard enough to keep herself from breaking down at their farewell party the night before. Her head throbbed from too much champagne. After her months in the mountain sanatorium at Semmering, sentenced to a strict diet, she had lost so much weight that she could no longer hold her drink. The doctors assured her that her heart was much improved, not that it felt like it. Her heart dragged like an anchor, as if to keep her here in the world she knew.

  When they reached the platform, Alma almost reared back at the sight of some two hundred people loitering about, men in their top hats and bowlers, women in their furs. Her spirits lifted at the sight of familiar faces—dear Alex, Erica and Ilse, Arnold and Mathilde, Bertha Zuckerkandl. But her view of her friends was obscured when a wave of people she scarcely recognized thronged around her and Gustav, and shoved bouquets into their arms.

  “Frau Direktor Mahler!” A weeping woman glued herself to Alma. “Such a tragedy! Vienna will never be the same without our beloved Herr Direktor. It breaks my heart to see you go.”

  Alma glanced sideways at Gustav, who was likewise ambushed by lachrymose strangers. Leave him alone, she wanted to shout. He hates crowds.

  The mawkish horde made such a din, Alma found it impossible to hear her real friends say their good-byes. Klimt had to peel the woman off of Alma before he could take her hands.

  “It’s over, Alma,” he said, his eyes brimming. “A golden age has ended today. The philistines have won.”

  In his Beethoven Frieze, Klimt had depicted Gustav as a knight in gold armor, the artist as savior of humanity. But those hopes and dreams had withered to dust. When Klimt gave Alma his chaste parting kiss, she wished he would instead kiss her with the full fire of his passion, as he had done nine years ago in Venice. Oh, let him kiss her right here in the middle of this multitude, shocking everyone! At least it would make her feel alive again. Force her husband to notice she was still a woman, not just some ungainly piece of luggage he was dragging halfway around the world. She had become resigned to Gustav’s cold shoulder. Back in August, he had forgotten her birthday. She hadn’t even received a card from him.

  Though Alma sought to cling to Klimt for comfort, the crowd soon drove them apart. But Mama and Gretl rescued her, Mama’s stout form forcing a path through the mob, thus allowing Alma and Gustav to board their sleeper carriage. Alma shook in relief, thinking that this would be the end of it.

  But no! The seats, table, washbasin, and even the floor were festooned in floral offerings. That overpowering hothouse stink, which reminded Alma only of a high-class funeral, sent bile surging up her gorge. Not content to merely massacre Gustav in the press, the Viennese were now laying both her and her husband to rest in the most ostentatious way possible. How she fumed at the two-faced hypocrisy of the Viennese! No wonder Dr. Freud had become so famous cataloguing myriad complexes and neuroses—look at all the raw material he had in this wretched city! The throng pressed against the windows and open doorway, gawking at her as though in anticipation of seeing her crumple and fall to her knees. Alma steeled herself, not willing to show any sentiment except a glacial smile. But when Gretl hugged her, Alma’s tears began to flow. Unstoppable.

  “It’s so unfair,” her sister whispered. “Wilhelm and I are finally back in Vienna and you have to go away. We’ll lose each other again.”

  Gretl and Wilhelm were now living on the Hohe Warte, close to Mama and Carl, in a villa also designed by Josef Hoffmann.

  When Mama pressed little Gucki into Alma’s arms, she truly fell to pieces, afraid she’d break her poor daughter from hugging her too hard.

  “Be a good girl for your Oma.” Alma kissed Gucki, dampening her daughter’s cheeks with her tears. “Mama loves you. Papa, too. We’ll send you picture postcards. In summer, we’ll come back. We’ll all be together again and go to the mountains, my darling.”

  Owing to Alma’s fragile constitution, Gustav, Mama, Carl, and Dr. Hammerschlag had deemed it best for little Gucki to stay behind at the Hohe Warte with her grandparents. Living on the eleventh floor of a foreign hotel with no other children to play with, Mama had said. That’s no life for a three-year-old. How was such a young child to make sense of the enormity of the journey before them, that stormy Atlantic crossing in the dark depths of midwinter?

  Privately, Alma wondered if Gustav, having blamed her for Putzi’s death, didn’t trust her to keep Gucki alive in New York. After all, she hadn’t been able to save Putzi—what gave her the right to believe that Gucki would be any happier or better off in her care? What if her endless grief and misfortune poisoned Gucki? Let Mama take her. Let Mama keep her safe.

  “Good-bye, my sweet treasure.” Alma drank in the blue heaven of Gucki’s eyes before handing her to Mama, who gave Alma one last kiss before stepping off the train.

  Flinging thorny yellow roses off the leather seat, Alma sat down opposite her husband. They both faced the window to wave at their supposed well-wishers until the train jerked into motion. As soon as they left their onlookers behind, Gustav slumped against the backrest. He looked every bit as exhausted and emptied out as Alma felt. At the age of forty-seven, his face was more deeply etched with lines than ever before, and she saw the first gray hair at his temples. How this ordeal had aged them both. These hateful people have wrung us dry. Neither she nor Gustav spoke. After too many endings, too many partings, neither of them seemed to have any words left for each other.

  Twenty-four hours later Alma and Gustav arrived in Paris, where they had arranged to stay two nights at the Hotel Bellevue on the Avenue de l’Opéra in the First Arrondissement, only a short stroll from the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées. This elegant suite with its own piano would have been paradise if they had been visiting under happier circumstances.

  They went to the opera to see Tristan und Isolde, but Gustav complained of a migraine and they left during the interval, sparing Alma the “Liebestod” scene, which would have forced her to remember the dreams of her youth that now lay in ruins. Dying for love, dying into love. That flaming rebirth through the transfiguration of love.

  The following morning, Gustav, ever restless, set off on a long walk through the December rain while Alma remained behind. She could simply not force herself to march along beside him through that downpour of needle-sharp rain that was worse than snow, the way it penetrated one’s very bones.

  Instead, Alma perched on the sofa and watched
the carriages rattling up and down the boulevard. A motor car, with its blaring horn, spooked a team of horses. New York, she thought, will be packed with motor cars, with their smell and noise. Gazing out the seventh-story window, she tried to pretend she was already in her new home looking down at the world with detachment. Stay aloof so nothing can hurt you anymore. But her heart came crashing to earth at the sight of a couple walking arm in arm. The young man pulled his sweetheart under an awning and kissed her as though he’d never stop. Alma’s eyes misted.

  Marital happiness is a thing as delicate and fragile as a newborn infant, Mama had told her. It must be carefully looked after. One of Mama’s reasons for insisting that Gucki remain behind with her was to give Alma and Gustav a chance to rekindle their love. Mama had told her that this year in New York was an opportunity for the two of them to start over again, like newlyweds on their honeymoon, unencumbered by children. On their actual honeymoon, Alma had been pregnant and too sick to enjoy much in the way of uninhibited passion. Now we have been given a second chance. Yet here she sat by herself in a beautiful hotel suite while Gustav wandered alone in the rain.

  As twitchy as a caged panther, Alma wandered to the piano and attempted to cheer herself up by playing “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” from Die Walküre. She began to sing the hopelessly romantic libretto when a knock at the door sent her hands flying off the keys.

  Who could it be? Pausing in front of the mirror, she smoothed her hair before opening the door. A young man with a sensitive face and thick dark wavy locks bowed and held out a slim package wrapped in mauve and silver gift paper.

  “Good afternoon, Frau Direktor,” he said in Russian-inflected German. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I discovered by some happy accident that I’m staying in the same hotel as you and the Herr Direktor, and I wanted to pay my respects to you both before you sail to America.”