Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  After a sleepless night, Alma rose from her chilly bed. Wrapping herself in her dressing gown, she padded in slippered feet to the door of the suite, unlocked it, then wandered down the hall until she came to the communal stairwell with its long leaded windows facing east. Sitting on one of the steps, she hugged her knees to her chest and stared out at the night sky starred with electric lights. Here she would wait for dawn, her ears pricked for any human noise welling up from below to puncture her ghastly bubble of loneliness and isolation.

  It was February and they had been in New York for two months. For all its glamor, the city still felt alien and strange. Winter here was harsher and colder than anything Alma had experienced in Austria. The blizzards terrified her with their winds that seemed strong enough to blast out the window glass. And now a further complication presented itself. Tentatively, she laid a palm on her belly. It’s time to tell Gustav. Don’t delay it any longer. It’s not going to go away. She hadn’t had her period since late November and was feeling faint in the mornings, though not as violently sick as during her previous pregnancies.

  She would tell Gustav this morning before he left for rehearsal. Why was she so afraid? He loved children. He loves them more than he loves you. Dissolving into tears, she held her hands to her face. How could they possibly fit an infant into this new life of theirs, straddling two continents, when they hadn’t even managed to make room to include Gucki? Alma worried that he would be angry at her for ruining his carefully laid plans, just as he had managed to salvage his career from the ashes. Would this baby prove the death blow to their marriage, obliging Alma to stay behind in Vienna with Mama and Gucki while Gustav spent next year alone in New York, living like a monk? Or worse, not living like a monk and falling in love with one of his beautiful sopranos? The most forbidden thought pulsed inside Alma: Do I even want this child?

  If only she had a friend to talk to. But even Frau Baumfeld, as kind as she was, was not the sort of intimate confidante to whom Alma could pour out her anguish.

  The first light of day, red with promise, bathed Alma’s face. Go tell him! Be brave! Grabbing hold of the bannister, she pulled herself to her feet and swayed as the blood rushed to her head. Gustav would be awake. She would have to call down to order his breakfast. Before he left for the Met she would tell him.

  Key in hand, she let herself back into the suite to find her husband already dressed and on his way out the door.

  “Gustav,” she said, laying both her hands on his shoulders. Absentminded though he was, he must have noticed something wasn’t right. Surely he would ask her why she had been wandering around the hallway in her dressing gown. “Gustav, I must speak to you.”

  “Later,” he said, kissing her distractedly. “I have an early meeting with Conried. If I can’t convince him to let me ship over Roller’s stage backdrops from Vienna, I swear I’ll tear out my hair. They brought me over here, so they should at least allow me to stage an opera properly!”

  Left alone once again, Alma played piano until she thought her fingers would turn to stone. One more day passed and then another, and still she didn’t tell him. She felt too raw, too vulnerable, and the moment was never right. There was always some more important matter pressing him. Another reception to attend where she was obliged to play the charming wife of the great man, hiding her loneliness and desperation behind a big smile and a flutter of her painted fan.

  One morning she awakened to cramps. A bright rush of clumpy blood stained her sheets. The contractions ripping through her felt exactly like childbirth except this was no birth. Just another death. You can’t even keep a child alive inside your own body.

  A noise ripped out of her, an animal wail, too tortured for even Gustav to ignore. He came running to find her doubled over on the floor, her blood pooling beneath her. While she gazed up at him through her tears, he looked at her as though she were a sphinx. Some creature he couldn’t understand at all.

  “You didn’t even tell me you were expecting, Alma. Why hide it from me? Didn’t you want the baby?”

  Was he accusing her of deliberately aborting their child? Alma felt her heart go completely black.

  Gustav telephoned Dr. Fraenkel, yet another Viennese émigré. While the doctor worked to still her hemorrhage, Alma squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to disappear from the earth. Afterward, Dr. Fraenkel dosed her with strychnine. She lay alone in her room, her hands clasped rigidly over her emptied womb. The drug stiffened her to the tips of her toes. She saw Putzi cradling the dead unborn baby. Why did you let him die, Mama?

  “I can’t understand why she kept it hidden from me,” she heard Gustav telling the doctor in the next room. “Had I only known, I wouldn’t have expected her to stay out so late at the opera. What am I going to tell her mother?”

  “Herr Direktor,” said Fraenkel, “your wife is nervenkrank. She’s suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown. I order four weeks of bedrest.”

  Nervenkrank. Sick in her nerves. Just like Gretl, who had wanted to shoot herself the summer before she married Wilhelm. It runs in our family. Alma imagined Gustav writing this in a letter to Mama and Carl. She felt as though she were one of Dr. Freud’s innumerable female patients, destroyed by hysteria, the particular curse of her sex. This the sum of all her loss. At least now she had an excuse, an explanation for all this inner turmoil. She could simply surrender. Collapse into the bottomless well of grief.

  34

  “I love Gustav very much, so don’t take this the wrong way,” Mama said. “But if you are indeed nervenkrank, he made you that way. You weren’t like this before you married him. Just look at you, Alma, all skin and bones!”

  Mother and daughter swayed in the carriage as it trundled up the rutted road. Though it was May and the sun blazed in the South Tyrolean sky, the High Puster Valley lay swathed in snow. Lifting her eyes to the jagged Dolomite peaks, Alma contemplated her mother’s words. She hugged Gucki, who snuggled in her lap. How her little girl had grown! Next month Gucki would turn four.

  “Gucki will come with us to New York next season,” Alma said, stroking her daughter’s golden curls. “Otherwise, I won’t go.”

  “That’s the spirit, my dear,” Mama said. “Of course, you’re his wife and you must be loyal. But you also need to look after yourself. Besides, you must be strong for Gustav. He needs you. Without you, he’d fall apart.”

  Mama’s words brought to mind their journey back from New York to Cuxhaven, where they had arrived in Germany on May 2. By then, Alma had recovered sufficiently from her miscarriage to take charge of their luggage as they went through customs. Gustav had wanted to help, but his hectic season in New York and his guest productions in Boston had left him utterly depleted. He looked so old and feeble that the customs agent had intervened. Your father needn’t trouble himself, Fräulein. You can settle everything with me. Unfortunately, Gustav had heard him.

  “You’re not just his wife,” Mama said. “You’re his everything.”

  Not that I feel like that, Alma thought. But it was true that Gustav seemed unable to navigate life’s practicalities without her. Here she was in this remote alpine valley, in search of another summerhouse so Gustav could have the peace and privacy to compose again and heal his shattered nerves. Returning to Maiernigg, where Putzi had died, was unthinkable, so they had sold their lakeside villa and now urgently needed to find a new retreat. The more remote, the better as far as Gustav was concerned. While Alma went house hunting, he was conducting in Prague.

  I greatly enjoyed the graham bread that Justine gave me for the journey, he had written in his most recent letter. It seems to have the desired effect on my digestion. Please order me another loaf for Sunday evening. I should be back in Vienna by half past seven. I wonder what we’ll manage to find for the summer? I leave it entirely up to you, Almscherl.

  The steaming horses labored uphill until the farmhouse came into view. Trenkerhof, as it was called, appeared significantly more rustic than the villa in Maierni
gg. A massive old farmhouse with snow mantling the carved wooden eaves. Nestled high on the mountainside, it commanded sweeping views of the valley. What spoke most strongly in its favor was that it was isolated enough from the surrounding farmsteads to give Gustav the solitude and silence he so craved.

  Käthe Trenker met them at the gate, her face chapped and ruddy from the mountain wind. Speaking in her heavy dialect, she gave Alma, Mama, and Gucki a tour of the rambling old house with its steep staircases, timber beams, and thick walls. It was primitive to be sure. No electricity. Just tiled ovens for warmth and plenty of candle sconces and paraffin lamps for light.

  “I can cook for you, meine Herrschaften,” Käthe said. She and her brother, who ran the farm, lived in a separate wing of the house. “All summer we have fresh milk, butter, farmer’s cheese, and eggs. In autumn, apples and pears from the orchards. And you, little Fräulein,” she said, beaming down at Gucki, “will have barn cats and kittens to play with!”

  “I would like to rent this for the summer,” Alma said, warming to Käthe’s earthy pragmatism. “June through the end of September. Only I must ask if you can hire a carpenter to build a hut at some distance from the main house and barns. My husband requires a composing hut. Of course, we’ll pay you for this.”

  Käthe raised her eyebrows as if she had never heard such an eccentric request in all her life. But then she nodded and said it would be done as soon as the snow had melted.

  “Mameli, come!” Seizing her hand, Gucki tugged Alma up the wooden stairs to a cozy little chamber with flowers painted on the tile oven. “My room!”

  The child leapt on the bed built into a niche in the pine-paneled wall.

  On June 10 the Mahlers moved into Trenkerhof. Käthe Trenker’s eyes threatened to fall out of her head at the sight of the three pianos they brought with them—one for Gustav’s newly built composing hut and two for the main house. After taking a tour of the eleven rooms, Gustav chose the two largest and lightest ones for himself with an air of good cheer, as though completely unaware of his own egotism. Not wasting a moment, he plunged into working on Das Lied von der Erde, The Song of the Earth, symphonic settings of eighth-century Chinese lyric poetry by Qian Qi and several other Tang dynasty poets. His first new composition in two years.

  Alma hoped that this burst of creativity might signal the return to their happy family summers before they lost Putzi. That the pure mountain air would restore Gustav’s serenity and cure him of the hypochondria that had plagued him in New York. Alas, the gorgeous alpine setting seemed to only make it worse. Awakening every morning to the sight of those towering mountains the doctor had forbidden him to climb was torture for Gustav. How was a man who so loved hiking to make his peace with a sedentary existence?

  “I feel like an addict deprived of my morphine,” he told Alma over a spartan lunch of graham bread, apples, dried fruit, and decaffeinated Kaffee HAG. He stared wistfully at those gleaming peaks.

  Her husband’s dietary regime was a cause of considerable contention between him and Käthe. He was appalled when Käthe served him farm-fresh butter instead of his favorite butter in the familiar factory wrap. Even more disturbing for Gustav was her semolina pudding made with fresh milk from her cows. Käthe, in turn, was exasperated by his insistence on eating apples out of season. Alma had to order them from Australia. Alma often found herself caught in the middle of Gustav and Käthe’s disputes.

  “You’re always taking her side,” he fumed. “I suppose you want me to address her as the Honorable Fräulein Käthe now.”

  “Maybe the esteemed Herr Direktor should find another doctor,” Käthe told Alma when they were alone. “One who tells him to calm down, shut his mouth, and go for a quiet stroll.”

  Before they lost Putzi, their summers in the mountains had been their reprieve, their blessed refuge, but this summer, demons seemed to chase Gustav. Continually anxious about his heart, he carried a pedometer in his pocket to count his steps. He obsessively measured his pulse. No excursion or distraction seemed to lift his gloom. Even the solace of his composing was weighted with foreboding. Though Das Lied von der Erde was, technically speaking, his ninth symphony, he had a terror of calling it that.

  “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was his last and then he died,” he told Alma.

  It seemed the only person who could truly make him happy that summer was Gucki. How he delighted in their daughter’s drawings. Her portrait of stout Käthe at the stove stirring her semolina pudding sent Gustav into gales of laughter until he had to wipe the tears from his eyes.

  “One day our Gucki’s work will hang in a gallery, Almscherl.”

  The steady stream of guests and old friends who had missed Alma while she was in New York provided a welcome diversion. Mama and Carl came with little Maria. Then Gretl and Wilhelm and their son.

  One afternoon in August, much to her surprise, Alma opened the door to find Alex’s sister, Mathilde Schoenberg, on the doorstep. Even in this remote valley, Alma had heard the news that Mathilde had abandoned her husband and two children to run off with the artist Richard Gerstl, a thing that Alma found both shocking and, if she was truly honest with herself, exciting. To be so bold and brave and careless, like a heroine in an opera. Why was it always painters that discontented wives fell in love with, Alma began to wonder.

  But Mathilde’s face was blanched, and her eyes swollen and red as though she hadn’t slept in days. The two of them went to sit in the meadow behind the barn, where Gustav couldn’t hear them, and Mathilde poured out her confession there.

  “I’m going back to Arnold,” she said, weeping into her hands. “If he takes me back. Richard’s threatened to kill himself if I leave, but how can I live without my children?”

  “Arnold adores you,” Alma said, her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “Of course, he’ll take you back. Your children need their mother. As for Richard, he’s a grown man.”

  How hypocritical she sounded, dispensing this advice as though she herself had never been tempted to go astray. Alma quivered to recall the euphoria that had exploded inside her when Ossip Gabrilowitsch had almost kissed her in Paris. But Mathilde’s dilemma brought home the harsh consequences of adultery, particularly for the straying wife. What if Arnold didn’t take Mathilde back? What if he wouldn’t let her see her own children? Mathilde would be left homeless, trapped in a failing affair with an overwrought lover who was threatening to blow out his brains. Men like Klimt could have affairs as a badge of bohemian freedom, but there was no way Mathilde could come out of this without an awful stain that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  “At least you and Gustav are happy together,” Mathilde said, drying her eyes. “He worships you.”

  Alma tried to smile. It’s the other way around, she wished she were brave enough to say. I worship him. Despite everything, she lived in awe of Gustav. For if she didn’t, she’d be forced to confront her most forbidden emotions, the awful fear that she had made the wrong choice. That she would have been far happier with Alex.

  In September Gustav took the train to Prague to begin rehearsals of the world premiere of his Seventh Symphony, which would be performed at the International Exhibition held in honor of Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventy-eighth birthday. Alma stayed behind and saw to the packing and the removal of their belongings back to Vienna before they set off again for New York in November.

  At Gustav’s insistence, Alma joined him in Prague to attend the final rehearsal. Her train was delayed, so she arrived during the final movement. For Alma’s benefit, Gustav asked his musicians to play through the entire twenty-minute rondo finale one more time.

  The orchestra was rehearsing in a pavilion hall where waiters scurried from table to table with napkins and silverware in preparation for the gala dinner that evening. Gustav had the temerity to ask them to set up a table for her in the middle of the central aisle. Why was Gustav making such a show of her, placing her right in front of the stage? Instead of a gesture of respect, it felt h
umiliating. The waiters rolled their eyes at her behind her husband’s back.

  The rehearsal had evidently gone at least an hour over time. Disheveled from the train, Alma felt as worn out as Gustav’s musicians, her nerves stretched to their breaking point, her concentration shot. For now she had to prepare for their journey back to New York and find a suitable nanny to replace Lizzie Turner, who had returned to England. A governess equally fluent in German and English would be ideal.

  Instead of focusing on the music, Alma’s mind kept roving back to Vienna, where Gucki was, staying with Mama once again. The little girl had a sore throat. Mama had assured her it was a trifling thing, not a serious illness, but Alma couldn’t keep herself from worrying. How swiftly Putzi had succumbed when she and her mother thought there was no danger.

  After the finale had finished, Gustav joined her at the table. He was so worried that this birthday celebration for the emperor was the worst possible venue to premiere such a long and challenging symphony. He was petrified the critics would tear apart his Seventh the way they had done with his Sixth.

  “Almschi, look at these tables and linen napkins! All they want to do is stuff themselves with schnitzel and listen to Strauss waltzes!”

  This time Alma simply couldn’t find the right words or reassurances. She was hungry and tired, and her mask slipped. Not the adoring wife and helpmeet who worshipped him but a twenty-nine-year-old woman who felt the tatters of her youth slipping away all too quickly. Lilith roiled inside her, seething with resentment for her husband who either ignored her, patronized her, or positioned her on some lofty pedestal not of her choosing. All depending on his mood. His level of neediness. His fixation with death and solitude and his career above all else had worn her to the quick. If only she were still that twenty-two-year-old girl he had married, that young woman overflowing with emotional intensity. Where had it all gone? She felt her eyes glaze over just to hear his torrent of words—all about himself. I can’t go on like this. What does he want from me? Why couldn’t he be this earnest and attentive when she needed him?