Chamber Music (15 page)

In those frozen days Anna and I were, as I have said, cave dwellers, the cold outside kept at a distance by our fires and our lamps, and by the ceaseless activity of caring for Robert. Our sense of enclosure and imprisonment was part of the very air of the house.

Without Anna I could not have managed, without her gentle, strong hands (the skin on them, as on her face, was pulled tight and shone with scrubbing) around Robert, putting him into his chair in the late mornings, changing his gowns, cleansing him many times a day with the prescribed powders obtained at the pharmacy: he could no longer bear water on his skin. The sores were everywhere, on his feet and hands, on the bridge of his nose so deep the bone was exposed, on his forehead and at the nape of his neck, on his palms and the red, diseased soles of his feet. Anna patiently applied the ointments everywhere, rubbing so gently that he did not flinch at the application of her fingers. Sometimes this procedure took almost an hour in the morning and again at night.

Anna sewed a thin, long shirt of gauze cloth for Robert to wear under his nightgown. This absorbed much of the odorous mercurial oxide and made the daily launderings of his bedclothes easier for Ida. And because the inunction had to be done to Robert's most private areas, Anna devised a flannel garment to serve as underwear, a large diaper-like structure. I see him still in those garments when I remember that winter: gaunt, weak, pale, his ulcerated head almost without hair, his gauze shirt hanging upon his bony shoulders, sitting in his armchair. He looked like a toothless, ancient Byzantine saint one sometimes sees in icons awaiting martyrdom. Edward and I would lift him a little from his chair, while Anna slipped the flannel diaper under him. Then she would start the arduous application to his furious sores—in his parts. He cried while this was being done and tried to push her away, but she held his hand and went on with her task. By noon his treatment was finished. Anna would renew his bed—with this I could be of help to her—and then we would call Edward and return him to it.

Anna and I had our luncheon, which Ida prepared, in the kitchen. At three, after I had rested and Anna had lain down to read, she said, in her New Testament or her herbals (for she had chosen the place on the Farm in which she planned to plant a garden when the spring came), the relentless process started over again: the mouth-cleaning and tongue-scraping, the cleaning up, the unctions.

I remember only a few breaks in the routine. Once I thought Robert's long tristful hours of staring ahead of him as he sat in his chair, or lay open-eyed in his bed without seeming to see, might be made more pleasant with music. I opened the door to my bed-sitting-room and began to play, I think it was a small section from Schumann's
Country Suite
, a gentle, quiet work I thought might ease his nerves.

I had just started when I heard a sound. I stopped and went into his room. His head was sunk on his chest and he was crying. “Is it the music? Don't you want to hear the music, Robert?”

He shook his head no. Another time I played, very quietly, a little from his own music, the piano transcription of the “Maiden's Song” from the
Indian Suite #2
. I have always loved the graceful, melodic curves of that piece, the way in which the tenderness of the squaw toward her dying brave is expressed in the long, slow, ascending tones, followed by the despairing fall, the descent of an octave in gradual degrees into the total grief of the low notes.

But the sound of the song unnerved him, made him cry again. Voices in other rooms had the same effect: his eyes filled with tears when he could hear them. Only silence soothed him. We took to wearing carpet slippers in the house, even Edward, to spare Robert the sounds of our footfalls.

So we existed through the months of that long winter, the heavy silence inside (except for the small, so-welcome pockets of easy talk between Anna and me), the covered-over and frozen spaces outside intensifying it. Robert's illness took its ugly, painful course, until the blessed time in the early spring when most of the terrible symptoms disappeared. But, like a country from which a plague has been lifted, he was left wasted, a shell. As his body cleared of its open sores and ulcerations, his eyes emptied and his body stiffened, becoming almost paralyzed, so that his bones seemed locked together, frozen stiff. His mouth was a black cavity, all his teeth having come out.

He no longer knew me, I am sure. He could not tell who it was, I or Anna, who fed and bathed and changed him. The vision of him as he was then is still with me: seated in his chair, his knees and shoulders covered with blankets, and on his lap the book he always wanted there, a large picture-book copy of
Mother Goose
. He would stare at the pictures for a long time, and then blink his eyelids rapidly or gesture with his fingers to let us know he wanted the page turned. Coming to the end, we would start turning the pages backward. The pages of the book became frayed and torn with our constant turning, but he never wanted another.

I saved that book. It must be downstairs someplace, perhaps in the drawing room where many of his books are still. I remember that the book often got wet, for the excessive salivation continued. Pints of saliva poured over his bottom lip, requiring constant wiping by one of us. Sometimes we were careless or too late, and Robert had drooled upon the book he so loved.

Postponed often by late freezes and icy March rains and snows, the full spring came finally to us. The windows were washed of their winter ice-grime and opened, ashes were taken from the fireplaces. Outside, bedding hung on lines to be aired of its sour winter odors in the spring sun. Everyone, Anna, Ida, Edward, and I, took heart at the warmth, at the sight of rich brown earth and the suggestion of buds on trees and bushes.

Everyone but Robert. He sat in his chair knowing nothing, suffering nothing of which we were aware (Dr. Holmes said he was experiencing no pain), unable to celebrate with us the end of the wearisome winter. For him the freeze went on: he was always cold, always shivering as he sat wrapped in shawls and blankets. Inert, silent, almost paralyzed, he became the still, inevitable hub of our household, the unmoving center of all activity, his welfare the point of or communal existence, like the statue of a deity, a Buddha.

But he was not there. The endless gowns and robes, blankets and shawls, shirts and towels that caught his excretions (by spring he could no longer contain his urine or his feces) and his saliva attested to his presence, but he was not there.

During the early spring evenings, Robert in bed in the next room, Anna and I alone in the little bed-sitting-room of mine, we played lotto. Anna taught me the game. When we tired of it, I taught her to play chess and dominoes and checkers. We usually played in silence. By that time in the evening we were both too weary for talk. I was occupied by the rules of the game and by the thought of Robert asleep in the next room. I didn't know what it was Anna was thinking, her almost colorless eyes fastened on the pieces and counters, until the evening she pushed the game away as we finished a round and said, “Where do you think, Mrs. Maclaren, he came into contact with it?”

So absorbed in the game had I been that I did not at once understand her.

“Contact with what, Anna?”

“His disease. This—luetic disease.”

What was this word,
luetic
? I assumed it came from her medical training, a technical adjective.

“I don't think anyone knows. How does one contract blood disease or diseases of the nerves like this? Dr. Keyes did not tell me anything about that.”

Anna's eyes, I noticed, seemed to darken as she turned them, now suddenly slate-colored and fierce, upon me. “Do you then not know what it is, how it comes?”

“No, except for what I have said, what I have been told, about the blood, the nerves. No. I don't know what else there is. What do you mean?”

Anna breathed deeply, and then with her expelled breath she said, “Syphilis. Syphilis is what I mean. Mr. Maclaren is dying of syphilis in its final, tertiary stage. Dr. Keyes is a very famous syphilologist. That is why Dr. Holmes sent him to see Mr. Maclaren. Surely you knew.”

I was aghast. Did I know? Did I suspect and refuse to let myself know? It is all so long ago now it is hard to separate what I knew or was later told, what I looked away from in my fear or was unaware of in my discreet, feminine ignorance. It has always been my way: did I closet the truth to delude myself or others? … But now I knew. Anna was incredulous of my innocence. She went on: “There is another thing I wish to say, now that I have said so much already. It is not only a terrible disease for him, but it can be communicated when two people—come together. Often it is—given to the other person.”

My heart pounded. My hands were wet with sudden terror. “Do you think—are you saying I might have caught—his syphilis?”

“Of course, I do not know. Only a doctor can tell you that. You must be tested, examined by a doctor to find out. Sometimes the first signs are so slight you do not notice them. A small, hard sore on the side of the lip or even—I knew a man in the hospital where I trained who had a little sore at the edge of his finger, almost under the nail. That was all, the only sign.”

I thought of Robert. How could he not have known earlier about himself? In time to be helped?

Anna and I had begun, unconsciously, I am sure, in those evenings and even in Robert's presence during the days, to use the masculine pronoun for him, not his name, and to refer to him in the past tense. He was the subject of all our sentences and the object of our silent, mutual concern. Our alliance began, it seems to me, not with us but with him, his needs, his past, his terrible present.

“He may have known and not said anything to anyone, not even to a doctor. You cannot tell. Or he may have requested his doctors not to speak of it.”

That was how it all came out, after a game of lotto. Now I knew. There were questions still in my mind: Where did he contract it? When? From whom? Why had he not sought treatment? Did he know? Anna told me of the two stages that preceded this final one which his shame or ignorance or secrecy must have disguised and ignored. The pox, I thought. …

I wanted to know so much. But there could be no questions from me, and no answers from him. He was no longer there. The talented son of ambitious Virginia Maclaren, the pride of Professor Raff, the beloved American composer, the respected conductor of symphonies, and the performer of great works as well as his own distinguished compositions, my husband: brought to this by bacteria, a spirochete (as Anna told me it was called), a minuscule germ of disease put into his blood by a sick person with whom he had—lain.

It was hard for me to believe: so much, brought at the last to so little. Paralyzed and demented, there he sat through the spring and summer, always smiling gently, his eyes fixed vacantly on the picture of a cow jumping over a moon.

Part Three

AFTERLIFE

A
NNA WAS
a devout Catholic. Many winter mornings it was impossible for her to get to Mass in the village. She accepted with equanimity what she must have regarded as a deprivation. But when the spring thaw arrived she started out at five every morning for the hour's walk to the church in the village. She bundled against the cold, wore heavy overshoes, and wrapped her head, peasant-like, in a woolen shawl. She always managed to return before Robert woke and I had barely awakened. Her cheeks glowing from the cold wind, her eyes bright, she told me, in that low, charming voice that always caught my attention, that the reception of the eucharist renewed her spirits. I remember smiling at her rhetoric and thinking, It is as much the walk, the wind, the out-of-doors that she so loves.

At once, after returning from her three hours outside, Anna bounded about her room, airing the bedding, and then made her bed, straightening everything in the small space allotted to her. By the time I was dressed and had come into the kitchen she had changed into her gray shirtwaist dress covered with a white bib apron, the “uniform,” she called it, which she always wore for work, and was breakfasting with Ida.

Sometimes I joined them, more often I ate alone in my sitting room, feeling the need to continue the foolish distance between me and those in my employ. But Anna's open, vital presence started every day for me: she was the one healthy, fresh thing in that wretched house of sickness. Her liveliness enlivened me and made bearable the relentless daily routines.

In the evenings, the arduous procedures for Robert being over, and he in his bed for the night, we sat in my little room, adjacent to his bed-drawing-room. When the games we played began to pall we often read. Now the fires were smaller. It was April and a little warmer in the house, so our evenings together lengthened appropriately: in the little room it might be described as being cozy.

Anna's reading was in the New Testament or Thomas à Kempis'
Imitation of Christ
, or sometimes in her
Gardener's Complete Herbal
. I recall I was reading
Middlemarch
. Now and again we would interrupt each other's companionable silences to read something aloud. I loved her apologetic insinuations into my attention, the sound of her soft voice with its light echoes of her beginnings in the formalities of the German tongue. I learned she was particularly fond of old wives' wisdom about the weather, about growing things. “In the Decay of the Moon,” she read aloud, “a Cloudy morning bodes a fair Afternoon.”

I always laughed at these ancient superstitions, but she was very firm, very serious about them. “You will see. Frau Mundlein who raised me taught me these things. When our garden flourishes in the summer, they will be proven. You will see.”

I in turn pursued the history of Dorothea Brooke, reading aloud to Anna the wonderful passage on her visit to Rome:

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaic above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina
.