Chamber Music (18 page)

It was enough, it was more than enough to compel us to our room upstairs, to the bed to which we climbed each night. Dousing the fire, we went upstairs. It was odd: for one of us to remove her dress, as Anna had done, was enough for us both. A single act represented two. The sensual pleasure we shared resulted, I have often thought, from the guesses we had made about ourselves and the answers we found in each other. Now I knew another like myself. My suppositions were confirmed.

I had discovered a strange thing about our love: when I held my breasts, thin and unsubstantial as they were, I was reminded of Anna's. I was touching her, re-creating the pleasures of contact with her on myself. To my inadequate self I assumed her lovely flesh. It was the very opposite of narcissism—it was metamorphosis.

I remember another time: in the early spring we were planting together, at the sunny side of the house, a place Anna had decided would be right for a wisteria vine. “It will grow over the edge of the porch in time and make a cool place to sit.” The roots of the little plant were tangled. On our knees we both reached into the shallow hole to disengage them. Our fingers came together around the stem. We looked up and smiled at each other, holding hands in the fragrant soil surrounding the young roots of the wisteria vine. In such silent but telling ways Anna spoke to me. She used gestures, sudden affectionate motions that were both symbolic and at the same time concretely warm: these came easily to her.

To me, the world we had discovered together at first seemed strangely unreal. My long education in connubial behavior before Anna had been so different. Between us there was no flirtatiousness, as there is so often in the world of men and women. We had no struggle for dominance, we experienced no submissiveness. We were each dominant and each submissive when we needed to be. Sometimes I took her in my arms, sensing her need for comfort. At other times I wished to be held, helped, comforted.

One wet fall day, I remember, I was taken by a very bad attack of lumbago, as it was then called, while kneeling on the damp ground to plant bulbs. The pain struck so quickly that I could not stand erect. Anna helped me into the house. I hurt so badly, I was a child again. How long it had been since anyone handled my body so carefully, so tenderly. She rubbed ointment into my spine, her gentle, capable hands full of remedy and assurance. I lay in bed, still sore and very tired. She sat beside me on the bed. “You are a born nurse,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said. “I was not born a nurse. It happened, my decision to be a nurse, after my sister got ill, a long time ago. My mother was gone then, and we were living with Frau Mundlein. She was very kind, kinder to us than I can remember my mother to have been. Sometimes I think she might have been … somewhat closer to us, but she was afraid, she once told me. Our mother might return and take us away and then she would feel a deprivation. She never kissed me or took me into her arms, and she kissed Rosa only once that I remember.

“Every day Rosa and I watched the post for word from our mother in Germany. One person on our street had a telephone, but Frau Mundlein did not. So we were able to tell ourselves that our mother called us often from across the waters but without an instrument there was no way for receiving her calls. We did not understand she was too far away to use such an instrument. Letters came frequently to Frau Mundlein containing money for our support. Frau Mundlein always read to us the sentence: ‘Tell the girls I shall see them soon.'

“Rosa was very small for her age, very thin and pale. She was often sick and she recovered very slowly. I was in perfect health and never missed a day of school. Poor Rosa went to school very seldom. Frau Mundlein worked six days every week sewing shirtwaists in a factory near the East River. Often Rosa was alone in the house during the day, nursing her sore throat and the aches in her legs.

“Because of that I did not realize how sick she was when the diphtheria was in the city. Rosa was feverish and said her throat hurt her. She stayed in bed. When Frau Mundlein came home she made soup and milk toast for Rosa. That was all Rosa was able to swallow. I would get up in the night when she stirred in the bed beside me to get her water. She was always thirsty.

“But when she got very sick Frau Mundlein sent me to ask the doctor to come. We waited for him. It was two days before he climbed the stairs to our flat. He told Frau Mundlein angrily, ‘There are sick people all over Yorkville.' He could not see them all when they wanted him.

“The doctor examined Rosa for a short time (I thought) and then came out of our room and told Frau Mundlein that Rosa had diphtheria. He gave her some white papers of medicine and said, ‘Give her orange juice and weak tea.' He waited. Frau Mundlein said she would pay him next time. ‘I'll come again tomorrow,' he said, but he didn't come, not until it was too late and Rosa was dead.

“People were dying of the disease, I knew, and from the time I heard that was what poor Rosa had, I was frightened. It was shameful, I still feel a hot shame, for I was frightened, not for her, but for me. I was afraid to go into our room. I did not want to catch the sickness. So I slept on the sofa in the parlor. I put my head under the blanket when I heard her call in the night. Frau Mundlein got up to get Rosa water.

“Even when she called, ‘Anna,' that last morning, my heart beat so fast from fear that I could not answer or go in to see her. I was afraid to look on suffering. I was afraid I would see death as it came, I was afraid of being sick and dying myself, I was afraid of everything. I could not bring myself to be near her.

“Frau Mundlein stayed home from work the day Rosa's fever went very high. She told me not to go to school and instead to fetch the doctor. I went gladly. He said, ‘I will come when I can. New York is full of sick people.' I remember still, to my shame, that I walked very slowly away from his office. I looked in store windows. I sat on a bench in front of a cigar store and studied a painted wooden Indian with his raised arm, his fingers holding a tomahawk. I spent long minutes at the glass counter of the newspaper store on the corner deciding to buy a rope of licorice with the penny I had. I thought of visiting a friend who lived around the corner and then remembered she would be in school.

“All this time my heart was pounding, my lips were dry, my tight fists were wet. I was mortally afraid. I did not want to go back home to see the dying and to be there when it came.

“And so I wasn't. When I got home Frau Mundlein was sitting in the parlor, holding a handkerchief. Her face was red and wet. ‘She is dead,' she said and cried. And I? I am ashamed to say, I was flooded with relief that I had not seen it. Afterward, yes, I felt sorrow for my sister, my companion and friend. And pity for her, and terrible guilt at my cowardice.

“The doctor came and wrote out a paper and gave it to Frau Mundlein. Again he waited. Frau Mundlein gave him two dollars. Two men came for Rosa with a stretcher. I stood in the doorway, watching them lift her from our bed. Before they covered her with a sheet, Frau Mundlein leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

“It is the way I remember Rosa most clearly now: lying on the stretcher, her eyes closed, her small nose pinched in and blue, great black patches on her cheeks and her chin. And Frau Mundlein bending over to kiss her. I have never put the sight of it away, nor the guilty ache I was left with. The memory of me, huddled against the frame of the door, afraid, lingering at the store, always afraid.

“In high school I took science subjects so I could go on to a nursing school. I would not be afraid again, I thought. I would learn what to do for the sick and acquire courage so that in all my life I would not run away at the prospect of suffering and pain. Even if I could not stop it, I would learn to stay with it, to help, to be with the sufferer, as I had not been able to be with my sister.”

The work of the Foundation went along very well in the ten years that followed, as the press and the public who have been informed of these matters know. Mrs. Rhinelander conceived of the idea of the Maclaren Clubs, somewhat like the Mendelssohn Clubs, all over the country. I, and others in the Foundation, traveled to all parts of the nation helping to establish these clubs. The plan was this: once a month members of the club would come together for the performance of American music by American musicians, and the proceeds, after expenses and fees, would come to the Community's scholarship and building funds.

I traveled much in those years, accompanied always by Anna. On occasion I played some of Robert's piano music, but more often I spoke to groups of interested men and women about his compositions and his life as a student, a conductor and composer. I became proficient in my omissions, after a while not even considering that I was promulgating an authorized version of his life in which only the surface detail bore any resemblance to reality. I was, however, entirely successful in my apostolate: articles and books, encyclopedia entries, and histories of music and musicians have accepted and made permanent, and still retain, my descriptions. Only here, now, when Robert's name and music have fallen out of the public memory and are known only to a few dusty scholars, do I fill in the blanks I left in those speeches to raise money in his memory.

The sums donated to our enterprise astounded me: one and one-half million dollars in the first three years, beginning with a most generous sum from Mr. Rogers, another from Dr. Butler and the members of the Columbia University department of music. All of Robert's acquaintances, the doctors who treated him, musicians in the orchestras he had conducted, the publishers of his music, even dear Reverend Whitehall, who had become my good friend, all sent postal orders or checks. Young men and women who had studied his piano pieces when they were learning to play, as well as eminent persons all over the musical world: it was most gratifying. With those first years' contributions we were able to secure the future of the Farm by paying the bank what was owed on the mortgage and to begin to build the six studios in the woods we had planned to house our young resident musicians.

By the spring of 1911, I think it was, they were ready for occupancy. I wrote to persons I knew in the universities who taught music (not so frequent a thing as it is now) asking for the names of promising young persons who might want to work at the Maclaren Community, as it was formally titled in our chartered papers. One of these letters went to Churchill at Columbia. It was some time before I had an answer, and then it was not from Church but from the chairman of his department. I include the letter in this account for purposes of completeness:

Dear Mrs. Maclaren:

I took the perhaps unwarranted liberty of opening your letter to Professor Weeks because his widow, to whom it should rightfully have been forwarded, has returned to her home in Milwaukee, where she has again taken up abode. We are not in possession of her address there
.

The sad facts are these: Professor Weeks died last summer after a long illness. He had left the faculty during the spring semester before, suffering from a long series of afflictions, to the liver, to the skin, and finally, I must tell you, to his mental faculties. Regrettably, we were forced to ask for his resignation. Mrs. Weeks much resented our decision. She appeared before the department committee in June to protest, claiming with some heat that her husband was only temporarily ill and would be well in time for the opening of the fall semester. The doctors, she insisted, had assured them of this
.

It was our feeling, after observing Professor Weeks's rapidly deteriorating condition during his last term of teaching, that this would be impossible. Indeed, this judgment was, sadly, borne out: he died during the summer that followed from a heart attack, Mrs. Weeks reported to us
.

I hope you will permit me and my colleagues to send our regrets to you, knowing of your late, esteemed husband's long friendship with Professor Weeks. Finally, I wish to say I am sorry to have been the one to convey this news to you. Apparently, Mrs. Weeks, in her grief, must have neglected to do so, and you must not have seen the short but respectful obituary printed in
The New York Times.

I am yr. most obedient servant

Lawrence Vandersee

Chairman, Department of Music

Columbia University

I tried to find Catherine's address in Milwaukee, without success. I wanted to send her condolences. Not finding her, I had no place to mail my note. I have never heard from her and do not know if she is still alive.

Anna and I devised a routine for our six summer visitors to follow. They arrived in late May and remained, if they found the Community congenial, until early October. At first only male composers came to us. A few of them, oddly, found the life at the Community very hard. They were the gregarious fellows who could not withstand the long hours of enforced solitude. Our rules required that the days from early morning until evening must be reserved for creative work in the studios, alone. Some disliked the communal outhouse, which was cold at night and often inhabited by annoyances like spiders and mosquitoes. A few resented our communal approach to meals and other household chores. One man felt the lack of electric light in the studios was old-fashioned. We had hired a very good cook who came in midafternoon and stayed until dinner was prepared. So the clearing and washing after dinner was done by all of us together, to the dismay of a few of the young men whose talents had protected them thus far from close contact with domestic chores.

Professor Vandersee had enclosed with his letter a list of three names, graduates in composition now living precariously in New York, whom he recommended highly to me. One of them, a former student of Churchill's named Eric Anderson, was accepted for the first year.

Anderson was to prove our most faithful applicant and returnee. He was older than the others, in his late twenties when he started his attendance at the Farm, and had studied abroad as well as at Columbia University. He proved pleasant, willing, and surprisingly without the usual difficult temperament. His quietness was always welcome in the evenings, a little landing of silence in the midst of the general turbulence, the vocal excesses of the other, sometimes very arrogant, young men at our supper table. Anna and I were always glad when he applied to return for a summer and when the admissions committee, made up of established critics and composers, accepted him. Sometimes he played for us all in the evenings. The influence upon him of Robert Maclaren's music was evident: it was as though he had taken in from the air around him Robert's love of incorporating natural sounds in his melodies, his fondness for program pieces, his modest tunes and thin, delicate orchestrations. By the time the Great War began in Europe, Eric had become an expected part of our summer household as no other Community member ever was.