Chamber Music (17 page)

“Yes, he went daily for almost a month to the doctor's office. Often I came with him and waited while he had his treatment. Once I went in with him. I watched while he sat bare to the waist astride a special chair, his breast pressed against its back. An attendant squeezed a blue ointment from a large capsule onto his back and rubbed hard with his two hands, for almost half an hour. So hard that at times the pustules would break and spew out a yellow pus all over his hands. Church was not permitted to wash the terrible ointment off. He put over it a gauze shirt to wear under his clothes. Next morning he had to return to have a mercurial bath in a tin-lined tub, and then a hard alcohol rubbing, and then the treatment all over again.

“It was a terrible ordeal for him. It went on for weeks, every day, even Saturday and Sunday. Now of course he is somewhat better, so I am wondering if these baths might not benefit him. I should ask Dr. Keyes.”

“They would not,” said Anna curtly. “He should not go to the baths here. He may communicate his illness to others. I knew of a patient who abandoned such treatment because it was so unpleasant in order to travel to the Hot Springs in Arkansas, but it did him no good. It was very wrong of him to interrupt the treatment.”

Catherine seemed impatient at Anna's interruption of her triumphant (or so it seemed to me) recital of Churchill's symptoms and treatment. She told us no more, and next day they departed. Church seemed very quiet and depressed, by Robert's death, I supposed. His two days in bed had left him weak and shaky on his feet. He said he dreaded the prospect of another difficult year of teaching.

The house was quiet, almost eerily calm that evening as Anna and I sat in the drawing room, once again restored to its old appearance. We played lotto for the first time in many weeks. My mind, however, was not on the game, being full of questions: “What do you think, Anna, about …”

“About Mr. Weeks's rash?”

“Yes.”

“Only a doctor would know properly.” She was short, not wanting to talk, I thought, perhaps because she liked to win at these games and was distracted by my interruptions. “I cannot really say.”

“But, the mercury … I remember some years ago, a similar rash that Robert … Could it be?”

“It could be another thing. One can never tell from a story.”

“But Dr. Keyes. You said he was a physician only for …”

“Well, yes. Dr. Keyes. That, of course, is something.”

Alone in my room, on the following evening, I wrote a letter. I did not sit with Anna, as usual, because I was writing to her and because of the disturbing nature of what I had decided to ask her:

My dearest Anna:

When you took my hand during the service for Robert, I knew. I do not understand how I knew, or what it is I now want. I think it is this: to combine what remains of my life with yours, if you are willing, to spend our time together in the understanding, the peace, the easy conversation, the companionship we have already shared to some extent. My feelings for you are confusing to me. I do not understand what it is I am feeling, or even what it is precisely that I desire. I had thought my life would be almost over when Robert died. Now I see it was over long before, in one sense. For suddenly I have had a vision of an afterlife for me, for us, where we will nourish and sustain and, yes, love each other, in a new way. We are bound together now in sympathy for each other. Will you stay with me
?

Thine, Carrie

I never gave her this letter. I kept it among my papers, and I put it here, in this record, to allow it to speak for itself. Immediately afterward I wrote a second one:

Dear Anna:

This is a large house, and there is much to do in it. You have made such a fine garden, you have been so good to Robert and me, that I have thought to ask you now: would you be willing to stay on, not as nurse or housekeeper, but as companion and friend to me
?

Caroline Maclaren

Anna stayed. She didn't respond to me in words but simply went on with her constant helping, her activity in the house and in the garden, her gentle listening, and her comfortable talk. Her lissome, fine-boned, full-fleshed body hidden under the heavy dress and apron, she spent much time in the kitchen preserving the excess from the abundant garden harvest.

The time came to clear away the dead garden matter and to cover the area with leaves and bracken. In October Anna prepared the bushes for the onslaught of winter ice by wrapping them in coverlets of hemp cordage. Early each evening she would leave the house carrying two heavy watering pots: “It is necessary to spray cold water on the perennials and the bushes when there is a chance of frost. So that heat will be created by evaporation. This prevents frost-freezing.”

My days and evenings were spent responding to the hundreds of letters of sympathy sent to me. Among the first letters to arrive was one from Henry Huddleston Rogers on stationery that informed me he was vice-president of the Standard Oil Company. He had been in touch with Robert ever since the accident with Paderewski. He wrote now that he wished to do something in Robert's memory: “What would you suggest?” Many other letters came that posed the same question.

I began to give serious thought to some kind of memorial for Robert. There was very little I could do alone, the taxes and the mortgage remaining on the Farm being almost more than I could pay at the moment out of my meager widow's money in the bank. Late that fall, I asked my faithful friend Lester Lenox of the bank in Saratoga who had helped us when we wished to buy the Farm to come for afternoon tea. I also invited a lawyer I knew in the village, Alfred de Wolfe, my longtime acquaintance Anne Rhinelander (who was good enough to come up from New York for the occasion) and Emily Chisolm, who traveled with her from New York, and of course my old friend Sarah Watkins.

I had written to Churchill, thinking that he, too, would wish to be part of the decision about a memorial. In return I had a short note from Catherine: “Churchill is ailing again. He is confined to his bed, has a high fever, and is at times incoherent. Tomorrow there is to be a consultation among our doctors to determine the treatment.” She could not tell me the exact nature of his illness, as yet, but she had been informed by one physician that it was a variety of blood disorder, severe but curable.

We six, and Anna, met in the drawing room. I showed them the letters I had just finished responding to, pointing out how many had expressed a desire to do something. “What do you think should be done?” I asked.

Many possibilities were suggested: the award of a medal in Robert's name each year to a composer of great promise, a national competition for a scholarship to a European conservatory, the endowment of a chair of music at a university. It was Lester, as I recall, who first offered the idea of a foundation to establish a summer community for musicians and composers.

“I have given this idea much thought,” he said. “It would be fitting, very fitting indeed, to honor his memory in this way. Also, while we are raising the funds to prepare accommodations for the young composers who would come to the Farm, it may be possible, at the same time, to find funds to pay off the remaining mortgage on the Farm. So Mrs. Maclaren's security, too, would be assured. And the memorial will be established for the young and promising. Of course, the village of Saratoga Springs will benefit from it as well.”

Mr. de Wolfe was enthusiastic: “By all means. I am so tired of our town being spoken of always as a gambling place or a racing center—or worse. A community for musicians on the outskirts would be a great improvement.”

There was general agreement about the advisability of the plan. So it came to be. Those present became officers and members of the Maclaren Foundation, to be so listed in the charter. All but Anna, who said she would help in any ways she could, but she did not wish to be “listed.” Entirely fearless in the presence of slugs, snails, spiders, earwigs, and aphids, and in her encounters with snows and rough winds, she had no self-assurance or courage in a gathering such as this. I think Mr. de Wolfe and some of the others may have been relieved at her retiring nature, not knowing quite what to make of her presence, of my insistence that she be part of the plan. To them she was a nurse, a companion, now inexplicably raised to equality with her mistress and employer. But not to me.

This is the time to place in this account an explanation of what Anna Baehr was to me. If it is distasteful to the Foundation officers who will read this, it can always be deleted. Nowadays a relationship such as Anna and I had may be openly declared. Women who love as we loved are called freely by the name of the isle inhabited by the Greek poetess. They walk hand in hand, I am told, in daylight through the streets of the city and proclaim their sexual preferences in public.

In my time—that is to say, in my middle years, in the afterlife I was fortunate enough to be granted by a compassionate and broad-minded Deity—such choices were hidden under the discretion of conventional appearances. We made no public announcement of what was, after all, a private intention. Nor was there any need for ostentation. The world would not have sanctioned it nor, or that matter, believed it of me.

Nor would an open admission have made one whit of difference to what
was
. We were two women of disparate class, living together in a farmhouse on the outskirts of a small village. We were disguised by my condition: marriage and widowhood, and by what came to be regarded as my mission, my work, assisted by Anna, on behalf of the memory of my husband and her patient, Robert Glencoe Maclaren.

If there was irony in this it was not seen by anyone but me. It must never have occurred to anyone that my intense determination to establish a memorial to him was in inverse proportion to the love that had been lost between us. Often I puzzled over this. Then I came to see that I had devoted myself to his public image, his music, not to his person as I knew it. I came to understand my activity.

But this strays from what I wanted to say about my profound love for Anna Baehr. During that first winter we were alone together in the house. Ida had to be let go because I could not afford to keep her, and Edward came only irregularly to do the outside chores. Anna and I did everything together. I wooed her quietly (yes,
wooed
is the word, there is no other accurate one), hoping to find in her something of the passion I felt, not knowing if I might frighten her, as indeed I myself was frightened, by my advances.

Our compatibility was very great; we talked often and of everything, together. But I soon knew that was not enough for me. I must be frank in this, and it is difficult. My fantasy, my vision of Anna and me together ended in the great bed. I wanted to sleep with Anna in my arms, to be held in her arms in Virginia Maclaren's bed, the bed in which Virginia Maclaren had slept with her son, the bed of her son's long death, the one I now so insufficiently occupied alone. I wanted to renew those old, soft linen sheets—with what? I was not sure what I would do, what we could do. I wished only for Anna's closeness, her warmth, her womanly presence and fullness, the touch of her soft skin against my small, thin, cold bones, in the center of my enormous bed.

My suit went no further than the tenderness of my first tentative steps: my fingers on the nape of her neck when she came in from her tiring physical labor in the garden and complained of a little stiffness. The gratifying feeling of her muscles relaxing, her shy smile of gratitude when I had finished. My kiss on her cheek as we said good night and went to our rooms. And after a while, her return of my kiss, her warm lips on mine.

Then all at once, I needed to go no further, there were to be no other trials. One night as we kissed good night she moved close to me, reached to my bony shoulders with her strong hands, and pressed me to her. I felt no surprise, no awkwardness. There was no spoken prelude to that night, and no verbal aftermath. It was understood: we no longer went to our separate beds.

To tell you what we had together that night, and during all the nights and the days that filled the next twelve years: how difficult it is to find words to hold it all, to capture the quality of close, understanding comradeship, to place inexpressible love into public phrases. I find I think most readily in images. But then I realize how one-sided are these images of mine. I could not tell at the time, do not still know, if Anna would have used the same ones, or any at all. She was not given to figurative language.

I think of the first, soft spring rain: she was moisture to my dried roots. I think of the way a certain configuration of notes played on the flute, alone, above the muted sounds of a symphony orchestra, can bring tears to one's eyes. Anna was those things for me. I had known “life” before that night, known what it was to be alive and to be aware of the horrors, too often, happening around me. I knew that life had substance without possessing any of it myself. I realized my own body not as a subject but as an object. Because of Anna I began to know it intimately, because she had touched me, given me knowledge of myself, with her loving hands.

Anna was a quiet woman. Words, especially abstract words like
love
and
happiness
, came hard to her. She never explained her feelings, rarely even mentioned them. Only her hands betrayed the humanity that burned in her. I knew what she felt when she touched me in places of my body to which I had always been indifferent, had known about only theoretically.

I remember one very cold night when we sat as close as possible to the fireplace. The fire burned high and hard, but it still did not seem to warm the rest of the sitting room. Anna said it might be better on the floor. So we gathered our skirts about our legs and lowered ourselves to the hearth, making cushions under us of our petticoats and skirts.

Suddenly I was very warm. I felt the heat invading my neck, my ears and armpits, almost piercing my skin. Anna must have felt as warm as I. She reached behind her neck and opened the little buttons that formed a long line down her back. I watched, marveling at her dexterity: usually we did each other's buttons. I wondered how she would manage those at the broad place of her back. She did. Then she reached to her shoulders and pulled her dress and the chemise beneath it to her waist, baring her full breasts, pale as snow. I wanted to touch them, to feel their extraordinary softness and warmth, but I waited. Her hands lifted her breasts toward me, I bent toward her and put my face down into their center. She took my head and held it there. I breathed the sweet warm odor of her skin, her glowing smoky flesh heated by the proximity of the fire.