Chamber Music (5 page)

Her eyes strained into the distance of the hallway that led to her sewing room. She gestured with a sweep of her arm that took in the whole series of rooms. “I want none of this, to live or die among. I will acquire new objects of my own. Don't be concerned about that.”

Even though I heard what I took to be theatrical coloration in her sentences, it was a dreadful time for me. But Robert seemed unaffected. He said nothing more, considering the matter peaceably, satisfactorily, settled. He helped his mother find a flat on Neuleystrasse which was already furnished. He supervised all the packing of her personal belongings.

From all the furnishings she had brought with her from America, and the others she had gathered in Paris, in Stuttgart, in Frankfurt in the years she and Robert had lived together in those cities, she took with her only a small needlepoint-covered pouf on which she had rested her feet in the sewing room. Its area was the size of a lady's handkerchief, its pattern that of two mourning doves, their heads tucked into each other's breasts, their feet a pattern of entwined twiglike toes.

On the last day before our sailing, Robert took his mother's arm and guided her toward the door, carrying her coat and parasol, for the short walk to her new home. I could not bear to watch. It was like being present at a human sacrifice or forced to witness a hanging. She stopped, reaching to peck at my chin, because Robert said as she walked silently to the door, “Aren't you going to bid Caroline
bon voyage
?” Her kiss was as dry as dust, her lips too parched, I thought, to feel my burning skin. I was consumed with embarrassment and pity. I know she hardly saw me as she bade me farewell. I was not present when she said good-bye to her son.

We came home in June of '96. I can see us still, standing at the rail in the wind, watching the tugboats pull at the
Servia
, edging it with their great hawsers toward the pier. With one hand Robert held the high felt crown of his hat. With his other he worried at a sore on his lip, trying in his nervousness to work off the scab with his nail.

A cool wind cut across New York harbor. I remember thinking it was a new-world air, brasher and fresher than the ancient heavy air of Frankfurt we had just left. We watched the miniature waves of the Hudson River lap the white sides of the ship. Robert put his hands down on the rail and bent over to listen, I suspected, to the suspirations of the water. I knew he was listening for a pattern, a melody, even a refrain. I heard none, only the irregular gasps and smacks of tame harbor water.

The ship made its slow bend to the right, seeming to lean into the wind, nudged into its docking position by four insistent tugboats on its left side. The wind died as the maneuver cut the ship off from the river. Almost at once it became very warm, with the hot breath of the shore and the land.

I knew Robert was absorbed and nervous, not from the intricate motions of bringing a great ship to berth, but by the uncertainty of his future, by his already forming nostalgia for the securities of his life abroad. For him the present never existed, which was perhaps why I never seemed to exist for him. I watched him pat his hat again, saw that the work of his nail on his lip had produced a small trickle of blood. “Good Lord, Robert. Your lip is bleeding. You've been picking at it again.”

He licked his lip, smiling a little as though he were pleased at the taste. Perhaps he was making a small physical addition to the pain he was feeling, to the fear of coming home to America, to Boston, compounding dread with blood. “Will it take us long to come through customs, do you think, Robert?”

“I don't know. Burns took me through last time. Even so, it was two hours before I could start for the hotel.”

I tried to think how I could make the passage from the ship to the hotel easy for him, in place of his brother, whom we had not informed of our arrival. Robert was unable to manage such journeys, often following crowds in the direction they flowed, forgetful of his own. Sometimes I wondered if he thought everyone was going to his destination.

The gangplanks were lowered. They resembled three parallel tongues reaching toward the shore. We followed the crowd to one of them. Once down and on the pier, I felt the first assault of the depression that was to afflict me all that first year back in Boston. Robert had come home to promise, I to more of my married life as it had been lived in Germany: a maker of late suppers, a duster of piano keys and the lowered lid in the off hours when they were not in use, a solitary visitor to galleries and concert halls in the afternoons.

Still, the moment of stepping ashore at the foot of New York's towers was exciting. There was the chance that much might change now that Virginia and the conservatory were left behind. Robert might turn his eyes toward me,
see
me, might erase my sense of insufficiency with his love and notice. Now that we were home in our own land, he might open a little of his handsome European surface to my deep American love for him.

A few steps from the end of the gangplank we were met by a strange young man who seemed to have been waiting for us. He introduced himself to us as a reporter from the
Boston Transcript
, come to New York, he said, to interview the returning native son back from his European success. He wore a straw hat with a wide red-and-white band, and a white-and-blue-striped jacket that had suffered in the June heat of New York. There were semicircles of dampness under his arms. His forehead was wet. I saw Robert draw back from him a little.

“Have you lived in Germany very long?”

“For some years,” Robert said, in the clipped Germanic diction he had acquired abroad. He sounded precise and curt, as though the interview had already gone on too long.

“Study there, did you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Performed on the piana too, did you?”

Robert looked at me helplessly. The newfound patriotism of his return seemed to be slipping away in the presence of this reporter's callow American ignorance. I gestured toward the trunks and grips, now piled neatly under a cardboard sign that said
M
. “Perhaps we should get into our line for the customs inspector,” I said.

“Just a few more questions here, sir. Knew some of the greats, did you, over there in Paree?”

“I was in Paris only a year. Debussy was a fellow student there. We both studied under Savard.”

The reporter, I saw, wrote down
DEBOOSIE
carefully in his notebook and then asked, “Where did you go then? Vee-enna?”

“To Frankfurt, Germany, where I studied with Carl Heymann and Joachim Raff.”

I spoke up quickly to fill what threatened to be a long silence while the young man struggled with the proper names. “Mr. Maclaren's compositions were highly praised and encouraged by William Mason, a protégé of Franz Liszt,” I said, to prevent Robert's leaving rudely.

The straw-hatted young man wrote on his pad
LIST
and something else I could not read. “And now what are your plans, sir?”

“To compose and play, and perhaps to teach, in Boston.”

“Well, good luck to you, sir. And to you, ma'am. Excuse my dumbness. I'm—this is not my regular beat. Know nothing about music myself. City side of the desk is my place. Just happened to be in New York, so they asked me to come by.”

“Quite all right.” We walked away, toward the letter
M
and our luggage.

An astonishing metamorphosis of this conversation appeared in the
Transcript
, signed by what I took to be the young man's name, E. P. Duckworth. It was full of rhetoric and an invention of which I had not thought him capable after hearing him speak. The news report said that “the composer and his wife, Caroline, had lived abroad for some years, he studying and composing a great deal of music of which the composer Franz Liszt had been very admiring. A friend of Robert Maclaren's, interviewed in Frankfurt, said of the couple that ‘their union, perfect in sympathy and closeness of comradeship, was nothing short of ideal.'” He continued (I am quoting now from the newspaper account, which I still have in a scrapbook and which I will lay here in this account): “Their life in Frankfurt was characterized by an ideal serenity and detachment. It was a time of rich productiveness for Maclaren, who is now only twenty-four, and it is to be expected that his return to his homeland will be marked by further steps toward the great promise of his talent. His lodgings will be in Boston, where he and Mrs. Maclaren will reside on Mount Vernon Street. There he will accept private pupils. His
First Piano Suite
will be performed in November in Chickering Hall.”

A felicitous editor, I imagine, had turned Robert's bluntness, a reporter's ignorance, and Weeks's friendly blindness into tribute. I do not wish to seem critical or ungrateful when I say that this magical process, this kind of transmutation, was to occur again and again in Robert's biography. Admirers of his charm and his music created the myth of him that has remained to this day. The descriptive mode used for writing about him has always been euphemism—until the very end, and after his death, when critics, conductors, and students began to be critical of what they called his extreme romanticism. They were to comment upon the small scope of his work, the sentimental impressionism (I am using their terms, not mine) of his later compositions. But not yet: at this time about which I am writing, only panegyrics were written about him. The
Transcript's
article was the beginning.

The house we rented in Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill was narrow and three-storied. It looked out at back on a small, lovely shaded garden, and had a very large room suitable for a music room, two small sitting rooms, one for each of us, and two bedrooms. We reclaimed Paderewski from the friends who had boarded and overfed him in Robert's long absence. He had lost his lean look and become lazy and slow in his movements. He loved to lie in the garden and to be taken for short walks around the gardens on Commonwealth Avenue. Delighted to have him back, Robert took him out for airings every morning, and then returned him to his banishment in the garden when he went upstairs. Robert could not bear to work with any motion or breathing in the room. Paderewski disliked being put out, but he learned to be patient, to lie under the plane tree until Robert, finished with a long day of composing and lessons, would come for him again in the early evening. They walked together while I talked to our supper guests, if we had them, or supervised the food if we were to be alone. Only on weekends was the routine broken, when Robert went out to perform with the Symphony, or with the Kneissel Quartette, or to play at Chickering Hall in Boston.

Or, on Sunday evenings, we very often went to concerts, to hear Robert's work played, for it was beginning to have a vogue and could be heard quite often there and in other cities. I remember when
Lear and Cordelia
was played for the first time by the Symphony Orchestra. Artur Nikisch was to conduct it. He came by to call for us that evening. We took a hansom cab together to the Music Hall, it must have been, since I don't think the orchestra had as yet moved into its new Symphony Hall. Nikisch, Robert, and I had met in Leipzig; Robert and he had become good friends. This evening was the first time in a long time, almost since the farewell party, that I had seen Robert so animated. It was not because the Boston Symphony was going to play his work but because someone from the past—a friend from his beloved Germany—was there in his Beacon Hill sitting room.

I doubt if either Robert or Nikisch knew I was present. We entered the old Music Hall through the back door, I somewhat behind the two of them, and they in a transport of delight in being together again. Robert had his arm around Nikisch's shoulder. It was much like a reunion of fellow army officers who had once been stationed on the same foreign post, or college classmates come together after a long absence.

I went to my seat, and Robert joined me there. When Nikisch came to the podium I noticed how much alike he and Robert looked, with the similarity that seemed to characterize most men of their age and European training and class. Except for his beard (Robert never adopted the European habit), Nikisch had the same short, middle-parted hair, the same thick, curving mustache, the same absorbed look. They belonged to a close fraternity of artists—of men—which I had learned about in Frankfurt and from which, because I was a woman and a very minor musician, I felt eternally excluded. There
were
women musicians we had known in Europe—Teresa Carreño, who played Robert's
Second Piano Suite
in Wiesbaden, and a Miss Adele Margolis in London who performed two movements from his first suite. Robert wrote grateful notes to the two pianists, but he made no efforts to meet them: in the fraternity there was room only at a distance for women.

I had always thought that a
perfect union
(so the
Transcript
happily termed it) was the result of spiritual and intuitive harmonies, an intellectual fidelity, so to speak. If this were achieved, one could then enter into the highest harmony, which was physical love. In this day it is thought to be the other way around, but I have never believed that. Robert and I had almost no physical love, and never, it seemed to me, had it come at the culmination of the other unities, always as a sudden thought, a remembrance of conjugal duty. For neither of us do I think it was a great pleasure, certainly never for me. Indeed, I was not to know the joy of that pleasure of which so many speak and write until much later and in another way. …

Robert occasionally performed his duty as meticulously as he walked his dog, parted his hair, trimmed his mustache. But at the end of a long day, I knew his energy was very low, his interest elsewhere, his physical prowess used up. We lay in the great bed, which we had transported safely and crammed into an upper chamber of our thin New England town house. We rarely touched; he slept stretched out straight on his side, unwilling to lose his rest by contact, as solitary in his sleep as he was in his waking hours, a man who lived almost entirely within himself. Every month when I had my female visitor, as we used to call it, he would move to the couch in his studio, offended, I think, by the unmistakable odor, which the strips of rag I wore could not disguise. His nights and days were designed to shield himself and his art.