Chamber Music (3 page)

My mother's replies to me, which came ever more infrequently in the first year abroad, gave no sign that she had received my news. She wrote of the terrible dampness of Boston that had begun to invade her bedroom. She was certain she detected mold in her shoes. If it grew there so easily it must certainly have fastened itself upon the lining of her lungs, which ached with every breath she took. She described the constant ringing in her left ear, which she believed had begun when a doctor had removed the wax from it and inserted in its place a tiny bell that rang whenever she moved her head.

Robert was amused by the fancies in her letters. “Poor woman,” he said. “It comes of having too little to do in her life. Strange ideas take hold and grow in such emptiness.”

I laughed with him, wishing at the same time that I had been able to fill her life more amply. Sixteen months after we sailed from the United States her letters ceased. I must confess I stopped writing to her. I felt no concern, thinking her silence a pique, or another aberration, like the mold, like the bell in her ear.

But it was not so. She had succumbed completely to her imaginings. A wire arrived from the Massachusetts General Hospital addressed to “Miss Caroline Newby care of Robt. Maclaren,” informing me that my mother had died two weeks before, in hospital, of pneumonia. The details came later from Elizabeth: my mother had pulled her bed as far as it was possible to do into the closet, and gone to sleep with her head in what she hoped (I believe) would be a culture of mold. True or not, water had filled her lungs and killed her.

The city authorities wrote to tell me she had been buried, decently, they said, in a public field in Belmont. Robert was appalled and wanted to send money to have her moved to his family's plot. But somehow we never did it. There was not enough money at the time, and after a while it began to seem natural that she should rest, finally, as she had lived, among the anonymous of the city.

Elizabeth wrote to assure me that she had rescued some of my mother's furniture from the public sale. She had put it in the attic of her family's house. I was grateful that the bentwood sofa, particularly, had not gone to strangers.

It was accepted as reasonable that Virginia Maclaren, Robert's mother, would not be present at the wedding. After all, she was abroad, the trip back would have been, to the Scots mind of her family, a needless expense, even a foolish one for so short a ceremony, so meager a celebration.

We met for the first time in Frankfurt in the rooms Robert and his mother had occupied in the Praunheimer Strasse before our marriage. Robert had wired her that he was bringing a wife. As we leaned against the ship's rail, or walked the deck of the
City of Paris
in the morning sun, he told me a little of her life dedicated so entirely to his welfare, of her constant worries for his health, her concern that he keep his feet dry and his hands soft.

I listened, watching the sea for whales or any sign of life in what seemed to me, at almost eighteen, a vast, anonymous, and ancient burial ground for armadas of ships. I had never crossed an ocean before. I had known of the Atlantic only from the Boston wharves where its grandeur was reduced to a series of brackish inways between piers, swirls of shallow water, full of the spill of ships.

I was frightened by the hugeness we were traveling over and, when it stormed,
into
, so frightened and sick that I was excessive in my relief and joy at landing and finally reaching Frankfurt alive. I remember, and still burn with shame when I do, that I threw myself into Virginia Maclaren's arms when we met, without waiting for evidence from her that she wished to engage in so intimate and enthusiastic a greeting. We parted almost at once: I felt a gentle but insistent pressure on my shoulder and withdrew my impulsive self from her arms. “What a surprise, Rob,” she said.

“Why, Mama?” He accented the last syllable of that word in a way I had never heard in America. “I cabled. You knew I had married Caroline. The twelfth of November it was. You never answered the cable.”

“Yes. I had the cable.
That
was the surprise, Rob. How long have you known … Caroline?”

“A few months. What difference does that make?”

While they talked, through, around, and over me, I stood between them and looked at my mother-in-law. She was a small, very tight woman with a solid, bosomless body, like a cork. Her bodice and skirt seemed pasted to her tubular trunk; her dress was wrinkle-free and taut. At the very top of her head her red-brown hair, the color of Robert's, was coiled like a spring, making her seem a little taller than she was. Still she did not come to Robert's chin. She had a way of directing her words into the far corner of a room, never looking at those to whom she spoke, not even her beloved son. This curious distance gave her statements, as well as her questions, the force of edicts. It did not matter that she spoke in English to German shopkeepers (she felt it unpatriotic, she once said, to learn a foreign language); they responded with alacrity to what they took to be her commands.

From that first day I knew that she considered Robert guilty of desertion in marrying me. She had left her home, her children, her husband, her beloved Boston, afternoon teas, evening socials and concerts, to live in a barbarous country for the sake of his genius. Now, in his twenty-second year, a fully trained and maturing musician, he had deserted her. Her bitterness burned in the deep creases that crossed her forehead, kept perpetually red the lobes of her ears and the triangular tip of her small, furious nose. Only her eyes, which never lighted on any object, were gray and calm, like the horizon that they perpetually sought out, the color of haze or fog.

Robert did not seem to be disturbed by his mother's anger. “For a while, at least, until I can earn some money, Mama, we should like to stay with you.”

His mother looked as if she had been asked to give lodging to the wife of Tom Thumb whom Barnum was at that time exhibiting in the capital cities of western Europe. “That is of course possible, if you wish, Rob,” she said, looking into the distance. Robert went to bring in our cases and the trunk. She ushered me into a small hallway.

There is no other way to write of this. I must put it down directly. My mother-in-law pointed toward a huge room, almost the size of a Boston ballroom. Its ceiling was very high and beamed with what seemed to be half oak trees. At one end, mounted on a platform up three wide wooden steps, was a mammoth bed, as broad as four ordinary beds and covered with a yellowing lace spread. The canopy was of the same lace and draped down over the four posts, each one as thick and tall as a tree. I had never seen a bed of such proportions. It might have been a ship from a fairytale book—perhaps Timlin's
The Ship That Sailed to Mars
. It was the size of my entire bedroom in Boston.

I stared at it. “If you are staying here, this will be your room,” she said. “Your bed.”

Stupidly awed, I said, “But this must be your room. I wouldn't want to …”

“It was,” she said, “mine and Robert's. Now it will be yours.”

That night, huddled in a corner of the cold field of coverlets and comforters, I erred again. Young and badly frightened, I needed refutation of the strange vista of their lives that his mother had opened to me. “Did you share this … room with your mother before I came?” I asked him. I was afraid to say “bed.”

At first he did not answer. His silence told me I had made a mistake to question him. He moved farther away from me and lay still, his arms folded under his head, his russet eyes taking light from the dying fire at the other end of the room. He stared at the canopy.

“Yes.” Then he closed his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep. I lay awake, filled with fear of the great expanse of blackness outside the four posts, and inexplicable terror for the future.

So we three lived together. Mrs. Maclaren made the sewing room into a small bedroom. Robert left very early each morning for the conservatory and returned after seven in the evening for his supper. I spent my mornings trying to practice on the grand piano in the drawing room, feeling Virginia's resentment across the distance from the sewing room where she preferred to sit in the morning, staring at the barren tree outside her window, sometimes sewing or doing her needlepoint.

Often, in my cold misery (Germany in the winter is cold and dark and without hospitality even toward its native inhabitants, it seemed to me), I took walks along the formal, square blocks of the city, so different from the unpredictable curves of Boston. One could not get lost in Frankfurt. Its rectangles were too regular. After I had walked around one and come back to my starting point, I would have a hot chocolate and pastry in the Hotel du Nord, I think it was, and then walk around the rectangle in the other direction.

In those two years my days were filled with music and silences, transplanted, I would often think, from Mrs. Seton and her music room. I stayed away from our flat as much as possible, walking the streets of the city, visiting its museums, going to afternoon concerts. I made no friends and missed Elizabeth and the few I had in Boston. In those years—I don't know how it is now—Frankfurt had beautiful parks and I would walk there on pleasant days, wishing we had brought Paderewski with us to accompany me.

Only once do I remember Robert walking with me. He was very quiet, his head bent slightly to one side as though he were listening to sounds pitched so that only he could catch them. He seemed happy, he seemed to be enjoying the absolute peace of those woods. Later in that year he wrote a pianoforte piece called
From a German Forest
. Then I knew something of what it was he had heard in the silence of the woods that day: the grave low sounds of the wind as it stirs leaves and twigs, moving around amid the Indian pipes and mosses at the foot of great trees, and its high, rhythmic whirrings in the top branches, interrupted at irregular intervals by the cries and pipings of birds.

We were short of money, but I wanted very much to find rooms of our own. So Robert acquired two pupils, whom he preferred to instruct in the practice rooms of the conservatory. One wet afternoon (did it rain every afternoon in Germany or do I only remember it so?) I took the long walk to the school, thinking Robert and I might walk home together, at seven, his usual hour. The matron in a front room somewhat reluctantly directed me to the practice room on the second floor where he was giving a lesson. I went up. The door of the room I had been sent to was ajar, and I looked in. I saw Robert bent earnestly over a young woman seated at the piano, one of his hands lightly on her shoulder, the other poking at a place in the music before them both. She nodded and began to play. He stepped back, bending his head in his customary way, to listen.

Then I saw, standing in the shadow in a corner of the room, a slight young man whose extraordinarily white face was luminous in the dark space. He seemed to be listening intently, but his eyes were on Robert, not on the young lady who was playing. He watched Robert so closely that his whole body seemed pointed toward him.

I don't remember why it so disturbed me to see Robert doing what he said he had to do so that we might be able to afford separate quarters, and the young man (another pupil?) watching him from the shadows. There was surely nothing improper in what I saw. But my discomfort kept me from staying there to wait for him that evening or from inquiring about the young man in the corner. Never again did I return to the conservatory except for the night of the farewell party for Robert. Now I took walks in other directions, resting on the aged wood benches in the parks, on the stone slabs in the art galleries. I learned a little cafe German so I could speak, hesitantly, to waiters and to the amiable guards in the rooms of the museums. I can hardly remember the pictures I studied day after day, but I remember well my loneliness, my sense of being held in the solitary confinement of stone buildings, surrounded by unpeopled forests and empty oceans, always, everywhere, alone.

Robert would take his mother and me out to dine on Saturday evenings, every Saturday evening. I remember the heavy dinners in the restaurant we frequented in the Jahnstrasse, the blood-thick brown gravies over slabs of brown meat, the heavy, dark beer, the weightlessness of the fine strudel held onto the plate by full-bodied apples. I would leave the restaurant almost anchored to the sidewalk by the food. Robert would suggest we “walk it off,” and we would: he two or three steps ahead, walking lightly and fast, my mother-in-law and I following a little behind, all three of us silent and shielded from each other by our resentments and the leaden sediment of the long dinner.

Sometimes now, in wakeful moments in the long nights of my ninetieth year, I go back to read in a small black leather notebook I kept during our time in Frankfurt. There was no one for me to converse with so I occupied myself with putting down my thoughts, what I heard talked about, what I noticed:

October 18

Yesterday the rain slanted so oddly that, as it entered the gutters, it made no splash, merely met and joined the waters already there
—
is this called confluence
?—
as though flowing downward from another, higher stream
.

November 2

Robert says that the piano's wondrous limitations ought to impel the composer to write for full orchestra. In those effects, the strings of the piano have been plucked out and mounted on panels to be bowed. The hammers have been amplified into percussion. Only the winds are not derived from the eviscerated innards of the pianoforte
.

November 9

Robert is a handsome man. His thick red hair is parted carefully in the center, making him look freshly barbared, mother-tended, neat. He has all the graces of a young, confident, and talented man. His quiet humor is always turned first upon himself. The red of his irises seems a ruddy reflection of a glowing mind, stirred not by persons but by determination to know more. Why, then, does he not seem loving
?