Chamber Music (19 page)

I can see him now, his six-foot-six frame bent over the piano keys, the lamp making his long blond hair, parted neatly in the center and reaching to his shoulders, even lighter, his huge hands wholly occupying the keyboard. He played Liszt with a kind of massive authority. He had his native country's light blue eyes. There was only one blemish to his blond handsomeness: a red mark, thin and salamander-shaped, which lay over his light skin from his eye to the corner of his mouth. Often he would sit with his hand over the mark, leaning on his elbow as he ate or listened to music. When he played, however, the scar darkened, although he seemed at those times to have forgotten it. The younger men called him the Quiet Swede. They appeared to resent his unusual reticence in the midst of all their racket and boisterous talk.

At the end of the summer of '15 we knew the war was close to us. That fall we had fewer applications for the next year. Many of the possible candidates, I suppose, were expecting to be called away to the army. But in May '16 Eric came with three others and we settled into a quiet summer before the inevitable turmoil of war.

I never knew quite why—it may have been the remnants of Europe that still lingered in Anna's speech and manners—but Eric found it possible to talk to Anna and to no one else. One night as she and I were in bed she told me he had said two periods of his life had been spent in sanatoria for the insane: once in Sweden when he was in
gymnasium
and again in New Haven, Connecticut, while he was studying music in New York. His illness was depression. When it came upon him he could not play or write or eat or move from his bed or his chair. The first time he had to be carried to the hospital and kept there for a year until gradually it wore away. “I am well now. It is six years since … I have been working very well since … that last time.”

Only in Anna did he confide, as I have said. But even to her he would not say anything about his parents. “He is a solitary man,” Anna told me, “who can not bring himself to talk about himself. He lives alone because he has lost his confidence that anyone else would accept his history or trust his present and future.” But at the Farm his way of listening intently to the others made him accepted, especially, I had noticed, by Anna, who favored him when she served portions in the kitchen at supper. She always provided his lunch basket with extra fruit and the sweets he loved.

During the first week of October we held our customary party to bid the young men good-bye. The visitors brought the wine and we provided sandwiches and cakes. We always preceded the feast with some hours of performance. Eric was more silent than usual, preferring, when his turn came, not to play. He sat beside Anna on the love seat and twice I saw him bend over to whisper something to her. He ate a great deal—our small sandwiches always seemed to disappear into his outsized hands—and he smiled steadily, receptively, but made no contributions to the general hilarity.

The other young men were like children about to be given their vacation from school. They drank much wine, joked loudly with each other, and talked about how good it would be to return to New York for the beginning of the opera and concert season. They seemed glad to be finished with the long summer's work and solitude: but not Eric. As always, he was regretful and sad.

The party lasted until midnight. At half past ten I said my farewells. They were all to make their way to the village railway depot early the next morning before I expected to arise. Anna remained to close up behind the young men after they returned to their studios.

I must have fallen asleep quickly and slept for some time. The sound of a door woke me. I looked at the clock that stands in the corner of our room. It was two o'clock. Anna was not there.

I went to the landing, feeling panicked. She was coming up the stairs in the dark and seemed startled to see me awake. We went back to the bedroom together.

“Where have you been?” I whispered, although why I do not know. There was no one any longer I might disturb.

“Talking. Talking to Eric. He said he wanted—very much—to talk.” She undressed quickly, came into the bed and stretched out as though she were very tired. I sat up, now wide awake, waiting for her to speak. Suddenly there was missing the accustomed, loving easiness between us, the way we moved together at the start of sleep to lie close, often in each other's arms, the sense of creature warmth and security we kindled between our two bodies as we touched, the wonderful way we were always able to converse about anything, everything. The room, the bed, my heart felt cold, a new twist of jealousy, the rattle of fear knocking on the panes of the heart.

“Anna. Do you, do you—care for Eric? You must tell me at once if you do.” There was a silence. Anna pulled the quilt over her shoulders to her chin. I lay down a short space from her, barely able to see the dark outline of her head on the pillow. Only thin moonlight entered the room.

“No, Carrie. I don't care for him—that way. Not in the way I care for you. But he is a troubled, lonely man. He has no friends, he tells me. He needs someone to talk with, to hear about his fears and worries.”

Immensely relieved, I reached across what had seemed a chasm in the bed between us and touched her hair. It curled tightly about her head. “Does he care for you, Anna?” She turned to me, and I realized the chasm had been of my imaginary making. Once more warmth returned to the bed.

“I'm afraid, yes. He does, Carrie. He wanted to tell me that before he left tomorrow. He says he has no hope, but he wants me to know, to think about him.”

“Will you?”

“What?”

“Think about him?”

“Not in that way. I told him I would never leave you. But as a friend must think about another, of course I will. I said I would write to him in the winter. He is terribly afraid of the war, of America entering it, of being hurt or killed. …”

Her voice drifted off. Almost at once I could hear her steady, deep breathing in sleep. But I remained awake, staring into the darkness, somehow afraid of what could possibly happen. I slept very little that night.

That fall and winter, letters came regularly to Anna from Eric in New York. She read them all to me. They were frightened, depressed letters from a man alone in a studio on the Bowery in the bowels of New York (he called it that), trying to compose an opera on the theme of Oedipus, with no contacts with friends or fellow musicians. He had convinced himself, he wrote, that he must always stay indoors when it was light outside: “I must not be seen on the streets because my height, my strength, will call attention to me. I know the army has once said no to me because of my mental history, but I believe if they see me now on the street they will enlist me.” He wrote that he went out only at four in the morning, when the wholesale markets in his section of the city were opening. He bought food and then raced back to his hole: “Literally, it is a hole,” he wrote, “a basement from which I can see only the feet and lower legs of passersby.”

Anna replied to him, composing her letters on the table in the evenings after we had finished our games, our reading aloud, our conversation. She showed me what she had written: “Do not stay indoors so much. It is bad for your spirits.” She said she shared Eric's horror of the war, being rendered somewhat ambivalent by the call on her sympathies of her German and German-American friends and relatives. “Do not worry. The war in Europe cannot go on too much longer, perhaps we will not have to enter it, and then you will be safe. Are you planning a return to the Community in May? There will be a place for you. I will speak of it to Mrs. Maclaren.”

Her letters were full of motherly negative commands: “Try not to stay so much within yourself. … Never eat unwashed salad greens or fruit.” Reading her letters, I thought, Now that Robert is gone, Anna is nursing Eric. But I said nothing of this to her. Our relationship was so good, so open, that it admitted only of truth-telling between us. I was not tempted to disturb the tenor of our days. Our love sustained me and, I hoped, her. It was a source of psychic reassurance and, yes, physical pleasure as well. So that the presence of Eric among her letters did not disturb me. She was so loving a woman that there was, within her nutritive spirit, room for more refugees than me alone. Together with Anna, I, too, worried about Eric.

That year, in April, the United States entered the war. Foundation members met to decide what to do about the Community and decided to open as usual in May despite the grave events. Anna and I volunteered to do our war work in addition to housekeeping for the Community. Evenings we worked in the public library. Miss Milly Martino was no longer there: by then she was retired because of the trouble in her hands and neck. The new librarian, a lady with the strange name of Mrs. Osnas Fitz, opened the reading room for war work in the evenings. Anna and I, with the other ladies from the village, rolled bandages for the Red Cross and knitted, and “finished off” for other knitters, scarves and caps and socks for our troops overseas. It was in this way that it came about that we were away, in the reading room of the library rolling bandages, when the fire started which destroyed the Farm.

But to go back a little. The last summer of the war, we had four musicians in residence, not our customary six. For the first time one of them was a woman, a most competent young flutist and composer named Dorothy Griffith who had come to the Farm to work on a sonata for her instrument. We assigned her the studio (Weeks, it had recently been named) nearest the house so that she would not have the long, dark walks home in the evening that some of the other studios required of their occupants.

Eric had returned, and two other young men were with us. One, from Massachusetts, Gerald Foster, had lost a leg in childhood, and the other, St. John Sterne (we called him Jody), was weak in one eye and so was not called to the army. All four, for a wonder—usually we lost at least one the first week from restlessness or loneliness—found the Farm congenial to their work. They all got on well with each other, I thought, and with us when we saw them at dinner and during the evening musicales and gatherings.

The musicales were occasions of great pleasure to me. Sometimes, after the students had finished, I would play. Since the afternoon I went back to it, a year after Robert's death, I had regained my delight with the piano. The thick and oppressive quiet that filled our house during Robert's illness and, before that, my careful quiet so that he could compose undisturbed were ended, after what I had considered a decent interval of mourning.

Anna smiled at my “decent interval.” I began to play
Lieder
, some pieces I had not looked at since my time with Mrs. Seton. To my great joy I discovered that Anna could follow the music and sing in a low, fine contralto. We began to study a song from Schubert's
Winterreise
.

There grows between accompanist and singer an unspoken bond. They signal to each other their readiness, and the accompanist plays the first note at the same moment as the singer begins. Between us there developed such a bond. I would hold my hands just above the keys. Anna, standing behind me, would place her hands lightly on my shoulders. At the moment I felt her touch I began, and so did she. Our understanding at these moments was complete.

Some notes were too high for her voice. But she managed the long ascent from “Manche Trän' aus meinen Augen” to the “Durstig ein das heisse Weh” with ease, only the final note giving her a little trouble. She would press my shoulder as she abandoned the attempt, and I would shrug and laugh. Then she would go on, to the long, slow, melodic descent to the end of that lovely song. I would applaud and she would blush. We were together in our amusement at our successes and our failures.

Always before, music had created a distance between Robert and me, a separation I served by my silence in deference to his greater accomplishments. With Anna it became collaboration, albeit an amateur one, and “in that union,” as the Chinese sage who wrote the
Li Chi
said, “we loved one another.”

That summer Eric found it hard, it seemed to me, to stay away from our house during the day. He would come to the kitchen at noon when Anna was preparing our luncheon and linger on one pretext or other. While I practiced in the afternoon I would see him from my window walking the road from his studio, cutting across the meadow to where Anna worked in the garden.

She always told me about his visits. Her openness to me about every thought she had was consoling at moments when I had twinges of the old fear. A day in July came when she told me Eric had asked her if she would consider him as a suitor. He said to her: “I want very much to marry. I think I might conquer my sickness, my fears, if I were not so alone all the time. If I marry it can be no one but you, Anna. My thoughts are full of you, winter and summer. Can it be that you feel nothing for me?”

Anna said she told him she could not leave the Farm.

“‘Why not? You are merely a companion, a paid person. She could find another.'

“He took my hand—it was very dirty, covered with soil, and held it very tight. ‘Let me go,' I said. ‘It is more than that.'

“‘What do you mean, more than that? Security? I can make a home for you. I am publishing and being paid for my work now. True, not much right away, but once the war is over, orchestras will begin to play American compositions as never before, I am told. I love you, Anna. I have never loved a woman before, except my mother, who died when I was ten, in a fire. Her room, only
her
room, in our summer house on Long Island was struck by lightning. No one in the house but my mother died in that storm. She burned up alone, in her bed, while my brothers and I slept, and my father was in the city working. … And since then, no one. I've felt nothing for anyone, until now, for you.'

“‘I am sorry.'

“‘You feel nothing for me?'

“‘I feel affection and friendship. But love, no. I don't love you, Eric.'