Chamber Music (14 page)

“You must, Mr. Maclaren. You must be seen. I am not certain of the new treatment for your—ailment. Keyes is a specialist, an expert. He is writing a book on—such matters. You must go to see him.”

Robert refused. Soon after, it must have been a month or so later, fortune came our way. Dr. Keyes, visiting friends in Saratoga Springs for the famous fall display of color in the leaves, called upon us. There had been no change in the condition of Robert's mouth and tongue. If anything, it had grown worse. The one view I had of them made my heart pound with fear. He could eat almost nothing, he said, everything stuck to his tongue and in his throat. Now it was impossible to keep his desperate state hidden any longer. “Look, Caroline.”

He opened his mouth. I looked. Clinging to the normal dark-red lining of the roof of his mouth were white mucous patches, ugly and dead-looking. His tongue was coated on all sides with thick, viscid saliva. Before he closed his mouth again quickly, sensing my horror at the hideous sight, I caught a foul, acrid odor and turned away without thinking, to escape the unpleasantness of it. I felt nauseated.

“Dear God, Robert. What
is
it?”

He shook his head. His eyes looked wild and terrified. Rarely in the days that followed did he speak, for his difficulty in moving his swollen, covered tongue and the pain in his cheeks and mouth made him avoid the slightest effort. Once again, on the evening before Dr. Keyes's arrival at the Farm (Dr. Holmes had sent word with the mail carrier of the imminent visit), I caught sight of the terrible thing he kept shut away in the diseased cavity of his mouth. At dinner, eating the warm milk toast I had prepared for him, he tried to cough and choked. I started to go to him, thinking to help him by pounding his back, but he gestured me away. Then (Lord, how clear that moment is still to me!) he thrust his fingers into his mouth and pulled out a rancid, ropy mass of thick, oily, copper-colored saliva. It clung to his fingers, he could not shake it off, he groaned helplessly. I rushed to him with my dinner napkin, wrapping his foul-smelling hand in it. It was the beginning of my witness to his long and terrible dying.

The next morning Dr. Keyes was with him in his bedroom for almost an hour. I waited downstairs at his request. When he came down he asked me to be seated. He took the settee at the side of the hearth.

“Mrs. Maclaren, I must be open with you. Your husband is gravely ill. There is treatment, of course. We can assuage his symptoms, we can make him more comfortable in this—affliction. But, I must be direct with you, we cannot cure him. It is, sadly, too late. He should have been treated when this first appeared, perhaps ten or more years ago. I do not know that exactly—he will not say. But even then we could not have been sure. We knew very little about the treatment then. Now our method works often, not always. At all events, it is too late to apply it to him now. It would do no good.”

“What is it, Doctor? What does he have? Does it have a name?”

I thought Dr. Keyes looked uneasily at me. “It has a number of names. Some have called it a blood disease, a disorder of the red corpuscles. Others see it as a disturbance of the nervous system, a brain disease. But whatever it is named, it starts and then recedes, appears and then rests a long while before it finally reappears with terrible virulence, as you now see it in Mr. Maclaren.”

“I understand. Can you tell me if other … what else will happen?”

“That, too, varies with the patient. The liver may be involved—there may be the jaundice that comes of that. His tongue may ulcerate, then harden, and finally become almost useless. That will cause a great deal of salivation, almost constant drooling which he will not be able to control. You must—uh, prepare in some way for that, with towels and large napkins, perhaps even a capacious bib of some kind. There may be bad swelling and splitting of the lips from all the water, but we can help that with mercurial ointment.”

“Yes. Is there more?”

“His gums are now spongy, almost like a soft cheese. There are large patches of fungus on them, what we call noma: they are very infected. So we may expect his teeth to—be lost quite soon. Even now there is much bleeding from the gums. The blood tends to be caught in that thick saliva you may have seen. His throat is similarly afflicted now, and it will be worse. It will swell and cause him much trouble swallowing. He may try constantly to cough, or to vomit, with no results. This condition we can lessen: we cannot stop it entirely.”

“Dear Lord! How can this be? How long …?”

“The worst part will be over in a few months, I think. After that there will be inevitable weakness in all the limbs—and, I must tell you, for most loved ones find this hardest to bear, diminution of the mental faculties. He will be bedridden, but must be helped into a chair each day for a short time to prevent liquid from forming in the lungs. He will require feeding and his bodily functions will have to be cared for, for he will lose control of them. Often he will be irritable and sometimes irrational in his demands and complaints. You must be patient.”

I stared at him, I'm sure, all the time he was reciting these terrible expectations. “Can nothing be done? Something, there must be something to do for this—nerve or blood disease, whatever it is. …”

“I do not believe so, Mrs. Maclaren. But of course there are other doctors you might wish to consult. There is a Dr. William Gottheil in Boston who has written impressively on this subject. You could—”

“No, no, that is not what I meant. I trust your experience, your knowledge, Dr. Keyes. But to know, so surely, that it is incurable …”

“I wish it were otherwise, with all my heart. But it is not. I can only say that …”

“Robert will die?”

“Well, yes.” He stood up. He turned a wry smile toward me, but I understood from what followed that it was directed more at himself: “A fatal termination, we say. But he will die, and soon. Yes.”

I find it hard to remember if I responded aloud to this frightful finality. I do recall the curious mixture of my feelings: profound pity for my poor sick husband who had still so much more suffering to endure, and pity for myself at the prospect of having to witness his torment. But grief? The stricken and furious grief of the wife about to be a widow? I felt none of that, for wife I was only in a sense, and woman I had not yet learned to be.

I saw him to the door. His chauffeur waited outside in his motorcar. Dr. Keyes turned to me and took my hand in his.

“My dear madam. This is a very hard thing for you to bear. I am keenly aware of that. But I will instruct Dr. Holmes, who is very capable, in all the procedures I am familiar with and he will be able to care for Mr. Maclaren well. Upstairs I have left on his table some prescriptions for treatment of the mouth—tincture of benzoin, another compound for his throat. Dr. Holmes will know what to do, whatever happens, you may be sure.”

“Thank you. I will call upon him, of course.”

“One final matter. If it is at all possible, I suggest you employ a nurse to assist you, very soon. It will be increasingly arduous for you to move him alone—you are a very slight lady. And you will need to be relieved from the constant care, especially—ah, at the termination, when you will need professional assistance in many ways.”

“Thank you. I will give serious consideration to that. Thank you again.”

So Anna Baehr came to Highland Farm. Dr. Holmes knew of her when I inquired a few weeks later. He told me this young woman had nursed a dying old lady in Fort Edward, very capably and kindly, he told me, and if I desired he would see if she was still unemployed after the lady's death.

It happened that she was. I prepared a room for her near the pantry and kitchen. She arrived on Christmas Eve in the afternoon. We had never met—Dr. Holmes had made all the necessary arrangements. So I was unprepared for her youth. Somehow, her name sounded so Germanic, I pictured her as impassive, strong, stolid, somehow. But the girl who arrived at the Farm was twenty-five, she told me (I would have guessed twenty), and had been in nursing service in New York, in Albany and in Fort Edward, a small village north of us.

During the long evenings we spent together that winter of Robert's dying, while he slept, she told me a little about her life. I learned it only very slowly, for she was not communicative about herself. But I put it down here, all together, as I came to hear it over the years.

Anna Baehr's voice was delicate, low, and charming; her diction had the formal awkwardness of someone whose first language had been German. She told me her father was a doctor who emigrated to this country with his wife and two daughters; Anna was eight and Rosa eleven when they settled in New York City. He died soon after, while caring for the sick of the East Side during an epidemic of smallpox. His widow, leaving her young daughters with a friend, a Berliner who had settled in New York's Yorkville section, took his body back to Germany and never returned.

Anna told me, “Rosa and I never understood it. She wrote to Frau Mundlein, she sent money, but she never came back to this country. We waited, thinking, any day, but she never came. Even when Rosa sickened with diphtheria and then died. My mother wrote to me. She sent money to Frau Mundlein to pay for masses to be said, for proper burial in a Catholic cemetery in Queens after a low requiem mass.

“But she did not come.

“Five years ago, after I had been graduated from nursing school, I went to see her. I sailed on a ship, earning my passage by acting as ship's nurse. I found her living in a house just off the Kurfürstendamm under another name. She had been married again and had been afraid to write to me about it. Her husband was in the government. It was strange indeed: she never told him she had two daughters in America. She was afraid he would not marry her if he knew. For everything it was the same: she was afraid.

“Even when I came to Berlin she told me to meet her outside the house in a café. She did not want me to come to her house for fear her husband would come home unexpectedly. So I never met him. But after she and I had two meetings in that strange way I sailed back on the return passage of the same ship I had come on. She continues to write to me, but I do not answer. She is not afraid of letters, but I do not wish to be related to a mother through the mails.”

The skin of Anna's face was tight and scrubbed, almost translucent. Her long hair, light and thin, shone with the luster of much washing. She wore it around her head in a pouf like a halo, the ends tucked away at the top of her head in a small bun. In the pictures I have of her that arrangement of hair now looks odd, but it was everywhere the fashion in those days.

The only strange thing about her looks was the color of her eyes. The irises were so pale they sometimes faded almost away into the white part. At other times, when she was distressed or ill or angry, they took on the color of slate. Her figure was full and ripe-looking, much like the young women I remembered seeing on the streets of Frankfurt who had full bosoms, slim waists, and then the opulence repeated in the hips. Next to her glowing youth, I felt old and withered. And so I was, in some ways. My body had never come to bloom. It was still pressed into the flat lines of my girlhood as though maturity, the rounded voluptuous flesh of a woman's fullness, was always to be denied to my sparrow's body.

By the New Year, Anna Baehr had settled in and assumed most of Robert's strenuous care. His sickness proceeded in all the terrible ways Dr. Keyes had predicted for it, as inexorable as a teacher following closely the syllabus for her subject. Anna had to make many trips by foot into the village to obtain the ointments and acids, the granules and powders for Robert's decaying mouth, the mercury in compound tincture of bark tonic for the lesions that had broken out at the edges of his eyes and at the back of his ears. She was always willing to take those long walks: she loved the out-of-doors and the exercise.

At her suggestion we had Edward dismantle the great bed, carry it piece by piece down the stairs, and reassemble it in the largest downstairs room, the drawing room. It became Robert's bedroom. Anna and I sat with him there or, when he slept, in the small morning room near the music room, which was now shut off to preserve the fireplace heat for Robert. She moved her bed into the breakfast room so that she could be close to him at night, and I slept on the sofa in my little sitting room on the other side of the drawing room.

All the old orderliness of the Farm, the musical calm and routines arranged to protect the composer's need for quiet and solitude, disappeared. Highland Farm had become a hospital with a single patient and four persons—Anna, Edward, Ida, the maid who came every day from the village, and I to care for him. All the rooms that had fires for heat were made into bedchambers. The whole downstairs became one vast dormitory.

There was no place to receive anyone, and no time. Callers hoping to see the noted American composer, as they put it, were turned away. Only Dr. Holmes stopped regularly at our house on his visits to his patients outside the village. Robert's extensive correspondence with persons all over the music world ceased entirely. The letter carrier rarely came now. We laid in stores against the expected heavy snows of February and March, the horse and sled being used for such trips to the village. Already the roads had become difficult, almost impassable. Edward brought ice, water, and wood to the house every morning and evening, and shoveled paths as best he could.

Most people now alive have never known the frightening isolation of those upstate New York winters. The snow piled against the ground-floor windows and the doors, and froze there, making caves of the rooms downstairs. I remember how delighted we were on those rare occasions when the warmth of the inside fires caused small spaces to melt outside the blocked windows. Then we could glimpse the dim, thin light of wintry February mornings. All day and in the evenings, fires were lit: even so, there were very cold pockets and corners in the house. We used the upstairs as little as possible. Lamps had to be lit in the early morning and they burned all day.