Chamber Music (10 page)

“The Professor likes me to come to bed in my chemise. He plays endlessly with the ribbons, he rubs them and fondles them. He touches my … my … bosom through the cloth. Never underneath, isn't that odd? His hands are roughened now from all the woodworking he does. His nails are so long they curl over the edges of his fingers. I can feel them through the cloth.”

I would listen, wondering why she brought these details of the private bed into the sunny room, while I …

“The Professor likes to stroke me with his tongue. He uses it in the dark as we lie together, in all the chambers of my ears, and in other places which I cannot mention.”

I would wait, adding nothing, having nothing to add. Then, perhaps feeling that she had gone too far, revealed too much, she would change the subject and tell me about his hobby, which was carving birdhouses for the gardens and the lawn.

“I understand about the birdhouses with small openings for wrens and little cups for hummingbirds. And the roofed, gabled residences he makes for orioles and cardinals. And the special apartments which he says mourning doves and even owls prefer. But now I think he's gone quite queer: he's made an enormous wheel, the size of a wagon wheel. He made our gardener mount it flat on the roof, for storks. Storks!” she would scream in her light, charming voice. “‘Pelicans, too, and flamingos will be made to feel welcome there,' he tells me, ‘and anhingas.'

“He lectures me about birds. ‘Do you know,' he tells me, ‘that some birds migrate a thousand miles and others only a few hundred feet? So,' he says, ‘we must be prepared for the long-distance traveler, like the stork, as well as our friends from Watertown, Lake Champlain, and Bellview Street in Saratoga Springs.'”

All the trees around the Watkins' house, every gable and portico and porch, were hung with accommodations for birds. Professor Watkins, who taught classics before his retirement, had turned his entire attention to a concern for such housing. He told Sarah that often he lay awake thinking of the homeless bird, forced to sleep standing up on its fragile, twiglike legs for lack of a proper resting place. He mourned the apparent homelessness of the grouse: “Think of the grouse, with its heavy feathered feet. It must need a specially soft floor for its domicile.” And so he built an elegant, ground-level cabin, lined with plush to spare the grouse further pain.

Professor Watkins' hands had hardened and split at the finger tips. His palms were crossed with healed cuts and rubbed places. The same capable hands that provided for the hotelling of birds turned feeble and foolish when they approached the lightly clad body of Sarah in their conjugal bed.

I write of this not because of Sarah. What, after all, is Sarah (and her curious husband who gave his whole time to the happiness of birds) to the point of my narrative? I write of this because it was to gossip, to such confessional afternoons, that I turned to escape the soundlessness of Highland Farm. Intimately involved in this way with the curiosities of Sarah's life with her husband, I could, for the afternoon, with tea and little cakes on the table before us, escape the blank pages, the empty saga, of my own existence.

Sarah did not always chatter on so, indifferent to her listener. Many times, I am sure, she must have asked how Robert behaved toward me. She waited for admissions from me about my satisfactions, shall we say, the “transports of delight” as they were termed in the fiction of my day. But I could not bring myself to describe the void, the great bed in which Robert and I lay like strangers, his exhausted back to me, his skin seeming to shrink from any contact with me. My life touched his only through the food I prepared and we ate together in the evening, through the accounts and records I kept of his earnings and our expenses, in the hundreds of letters from his admirers and musical friends to which I responded at his direction.

It might be thought—indeed, I have seen it written somewhere—that the woman who is unawakened to the pleasures of the body, for which she has only uninstructed hopes, feels no physical need or lack. She is said to live in peace with her ignorance and her unfulfillment because she does not know what fulfillment is; nuns in convents are said to be endowed with such good fortune. I know this not to be so. Even Sarah's indelicate little disclosures to me about the Professor's small, feckless, ineffectual doings in their bed awakened warm rushes of feeling in me. There were regions in my body, bird-thin to the eye, arid and meager, that seemed to come alive when I heard about the Professor's fumbling with Sarah's ribbons. Just as, reading of the passionate embraces of men and women in the lending library's novels, of heroines' heaving bosoms as they felt the arms of their lovers around their shoulders, the touch of their fingers, I would respond hotly. My heart would pound. In my thighs, in my chest, at the small of my back there would be sensations I could not explain: warm, exciting, secretly wet.

Why do I write this foolishness? Why do I break now the reserve of three-quarters of a century, except perhaps to insert into the recounting of the history of that five-year span a few of the unspoken and unrecorded details of the heart and the spirit? It is hardly enough to know that a woman was born and lived and married and, in time, died. It seems somehow important to record, beyond the vital statistics, what she yearned for and was refused, what she imagined and did not realize.

And while I am writing of Sarah, and her one-sided confidences in those static, holding years: how many truths of the secret lives of women are lost to history in the still, social afternoon air that hovers between two women as they reveal the small singlenesses of their sex, the behavior of their husbands as lords, as lovers? Quickly said, revealed in a breath, in low tones, even whispers, such special truths are quickly buried and forgotten. And yet they hold more valuable human reality for the searcher after truth than the dates of history and the narratives of the lives and deaths of kings.

I may have told Sarah that I longed for children when she told me she did, but none had come. But I'm certain I never revealed that, since the time of his first serious illness in Saratoga, Robert had no capacity for the conjugal act. We had believed that illness to be a kind of pox, because of the terrible rash. When the scaly patches formed on his back and legs, I finally persuaded him to have the doctor inspect it.

Robert saw him alone in his offices: it was not the pox. The Saratoga Springs physician, Dr. Holmes, did not really know what it could be, Robert reported to me after the examination, but he prescribed a smoothed lump of sulfate of copper to be applied to the afflicted areas. I rubbed them carefully (painfully for poor Robert), but it did no good. Some of the areas became ulcerated and oozed a rank yellow pus. The doctor instructed me to apply a yeast poultice. On the worst places I placed, again at his instruction, a pack of crystals of acetate of soda. Robert would cry out in pain at these applications.

“What is it?” I asked the doctor on the one occasion I was in the examining room with Robert, who had grown weak and nervous under the ailment and could hardly walk alone.

I noticed he looked at Robert speculatively. Robert shut his eyes, and then the doctor said, “It is very hard to say.” But the strange rash receded, taking with it his old, occasional desire for me and some of his thick, dark-red hair, which came out on his pillow and his shoulders in broom-like segments. It seemed to me he showed more concern for his loss of hair than for his connubial failure.

None of this did I tell Sarah. Even to myself I have not rehearsed these elements of my marital life, until now. Because to the musical world Robert was a much beloved figure. But this public man, this famous man, was important also to me, who needed private love so much. His indifference and discontent with me seemed at the time of no great moment beside his fame. He was renowned, a talented musician, “a composer of genius,” many critics had already written. My contributory existence and auxiliary services, like my small, thin physique, were of no account in his light. History must be full of such alliances between famous men and their satellite, serving wives. Their true persons and their inner lives are rarely known or described in the painful and almost faithless detail I have given here.

And Sarah would go on and on with her logorrheic talk: “He spent this morning making special food for his warblers (although, he said, peregrines were said to be fond of it, too), roasting bread crumbs in the baking oven, and then mixing in the seeds of pumpkins. When I tried to enter the kitchen he told me I would confuse his recipe, so I left him alone. I'm sure he prefers his birds to me. I think he would like to live in a house under the eaves with them if only he could construct one large enough to hold them all.

“One died early this morning. Apparently its neck was broken as it flew head-on into the multiple apartment dwelling that hangs from the back roof. It lay on its side on the floor of the veranda. It was a finch, I think (I don't know the birds well, and I was afraid to ask Gordon). Its purple head was turned entirely backward as though (Gordon said) it had been examining its past in its last moments: a classical bird. Its beak was red with its own blood. The Professor wept and sat still on the veranda all morning looking at it and would not pick it up to dispose of it, and its blood sank into the wood. I sent the maid to him and he told her, politely, mournfully, to go away. I think he's quite mad.

“Did I tell you that last summer he discovered there were pigeons living in our attic above the maids' quarters? The maids said they would not stay if they were not removed. But the Professor lectured them, told them the pigeons had come there to find a shelter against the neglect and cruel treatment by the villagers, who find them dirty and offensive and try to poison them. Once I found him on the stairs climbing to the attic carrying a loaf of freshly baked bread and one of my down pillows. He said, ‘They are nesting.'

“They are still there, although in the winter they seem quieter. One maid left in August, saying birds over her head frightened her. The other two, I think, have grown used to the rush of wings and the scratchings of feet and beaks on the boards above their heads.

“Flight. That is all he now talks to me about.
Mad!
Only organisms capable of flight are entirely alive, he believes. Walking creatures, weighted to the earth, are half dead, their feet turned and moving one after the other down into the full, dry dirt of the grave. ‘Flight,' he says, ‘is life, the climate and reminder of eternity, of ascent, not deathly descent, of triumph over the Fall. Not until men fly,' he says, ‘will they be immortal. Some insects and birds are without mortal restraints. I have studied them, day and night. I know.'

“Nastily, I asked him about the dead finch, despising him and his madness and wanting, I suppose, to hurt him, to strike at his crazy creed.

“He never listens to me, he never hears me. He doesn't answer.”

I go on too long about Sarah. But her stories about the Professor (who died peacefully in his sleep, I remember, at the age of eighty-six, long after Sarah had drowned in Lake George, thrown from a boat during a storm, they said) occupied and entertained me in those years. She introduced me to the life of the town, and through her I made friends with a few wealthy summer residents who came for the races: Anne Rhinelander, Cecily Lorillard, the Leland sisters, Emily Chisolm. They were later to form the core of the Maclaren Foundation, from which the Community grew. I have always been grateful to poor Sarah for that, and pitied her for her ripe, charming middle age wasted upon an aging, obsessed husband. I have always held to the private belief that she drowned herself, went downward into the cold blue water of Lake George to escape the Professor, or to provide him with further proof of his aeronautical metaphysics. But of course I do not know.

On the thirtieth day of August, 1904, Paderewski died. I will never be able to eradicate the memory of that day.

He was twelve years old, but for him it was extreme old age. He seemed to have come to it long before his appointed canine span. His sight had almost gone under the weight of cataracts in both eyes, we were told. His last months were noisy. His body was subject to attacks of ague. During them his trunk would shake, and his tail, independently agitated, would thump hard against the bare floor where he always lay because he hated the heat and texture of our oriental rugs. Most of the day he slept, breathing heavily, each long, hard breath ending with a penetrating snort, often so loud that it could be heard in the rooms at the other side of the house.

His nights were sleepless. We were never able to discover what disease it was that aged him so early and drove him so inexorably into senility and sickness. Sometimes in his deep internal distress, he would hoist himself painfully onto his thin legs and withered paws and move about the dark house, walking almost blindly, stumbling into chiffoniers and chairs, sideboards, and piano legs.

What was he searching for in those black rooms among the lifeless dark furniture, down at the edges of the tasseled heavy drapes? Was it Robert, the young, brisk, charming man with loving hands and bright smile, the soft, cocked way of listening, the gentle, amorous voice? I do go on here unpardonably, but I, too, remember Robert in this way. He had long ago exiled the aged dog to my quarters because his heavy, long-haired pelt gave off an odor not unlike mold and was offensive to him. Paderewski's pounding tail and snores during the day were disturbing to his work.

I have said it was late August, a very hot summer noon. The air was heavy, oppressive, with the promise of rain. My rooms, so close to the eaves over the south end of the house, were warm; it was hard to breathe the thick, still air. I thought I would walk out into the woods that stretched behind the house. Deep within them were cool, pine-walled, and needle-carpeted pockets, almost small rooms, where I used to sit in the months of the heat to read.

Paderewski was asleep, as usual, on the stone floor before the hearth. I remember starting out, and then returning for a shawl to sit upon. I don't remember, but yes, I must have done so: I left the side door ajar. Robert was certain that I had. He told me I had become forgetful, and perhaps he was right. It was from being alone so much, I came to believe, and having no markers, no hitching posts, in the long silences for my memory to fasten upon. But I do remember I was gone two hours during the hottest part of the noon and after. When I returned to my room, Paderewski was not in his sleeping place.