Longing (29 page)

Clara was in her room practicing Chopin's E-flat Rondo when there was somewhere in the house beneath her a commotion so resonant that her playing was interrupted and her curiosity overwhelmed. She rushed from her room, nearly stepping upon her cats where they stretched out in the usual place and positions they occupied when she was at the piano. Then she ran down the stairs to the ground floor, all the while over the sound of her own breath hearing a kind of multivoiced fugue of accusation, recrimination, explanation, outrage, and woe.

She came upon a large gathering just inside the front door, which was open to the street, on which there was a carriage with its door held wide by the coachman, who appeared nearly bug-eyed at the extravagant words that gushed from this otherwise decorous, even solemn house.

“But I
am
a virgin!” Ernestine proclaimed, her head tilted back so it was impossible for Clara to tell to whom she was addressing this ridiculous falsehood.

“All the more reason for me to take you home,” said her father, the baron.

“Do you mean if she were not a virgin, you would allow her to remain?” asked Robert ingenuously.

“Not a virgin!” Clara's father uttered these words with an incredulousness so sudden and profound that Clara felt compromised in her own sad innocence.

“If she were not a virgin, I would cut her off,” the baron pronounced.

“Cut her off?” Robert shook his head as if to deny the very possibility, even as he wondered exactly what the baron meant: cut her off from her fortune, or, as he pictured it, dissever her from this very earth to have her float away forever.

“Cut her off.” The baron chopped the air with his hand. “And, yes, I would leave her here, for I should certainly not allow her back into my home.”

Ernestine reached out and grasped Robert's sleeve. “You see, Robert, he will leave me here if—”

“The only leaving,” Robert hurriedly interrupted her, “is your father's leaving you no choice but to go with him.”

Again tilting her head back, Ernestine cried out, “But I am not—”

“A virgin.” Now it was Henriette Voigt who interrupted the poor girl's apparent willingness to sacrifice her fortune for her love, addressing herself to the baron. “A virgin,” she repeated, “is the only sort of young woman I will allow into my home. And, as you know, Baron, your daughter and Herr Schumann have spent many happy and innocent hours chaperoned by none other than myself in my home, listening to me play the piano, the poor things, and educating themselves about art through a continuous viewing of my husband's fine collection of paintings and
objets
.”

“And in my believing this, you are not making of me myself an
objet de risée
?” the baron asked her.

“Do you observe me laughing at you, kind sir?” Henriette asked him.

“Not all laughter issues from the mouth,” observed the baron.

“I see you are a philosopher as well as a father who cares for nothing so much as the good reputation of his daughter.” Henriette did not accompany such ambiguous flattery with her usual laughter, which had not been much in evidence, Clara had noticed, since she had begun to spend so much of her time with Robert's friend Ludwig, whom even now she kept by her side through the clutching of his hand and the continual observation of his gaunt but comely face. It was like some kind of hopeless love, in the face of both death and marriage, and brought to Clara an admiration of Henriette she had not felt before, to say nothing of the fact that it left her no longer jealous of Henriette for the passion she had so clearly inspired in Robert.

Ludwig Schunke had taken Henriette away. Now Baron von Fricken was taking Ernestine away. Clara didn't care that the whole world might be emptied if that was what was necessary for her and Robert to be left standing together.

“You have convinced me, Madame,” said the baron to Henriette, “that my daughter is whole.” He held out his arm to Ernestine. “Come, my child. Let us go home. You will be safe there. And those who love you will know where to find you.”

The next moment, Ernestine was gone. Robert appeared lost. He stood in the open doorway watching the carriage disappear around the corner, holding his arms out before him, as if he had recently been carrying a huge bolt of fabric or a woman had been torn from his embrace.

Clara edged closer to him. Ludwig put a hand on his shoulder. Henriette held Ludwig's other arm with both her hands. Clara let her sleeve touch Robert's. Now they were like two couples, two ordinary couples, two tragic couples, standing at an open door in the late-summer sun, pondering the approach of evening, each with its secrets, nothing need be said, their love forbidden and all the more intense for that.

How nice it would be to walk out the door and stroll through town, deciding where to eat and what to drink. Or to stay at home, and talk, and she could sing to them the songs that Johann Miksch had taught her in Dresden, to which she now would not return, not ever, not with Ernestine away; for why else had her father exiled her if not to keep her from stealing Robert's heart, unless it was to keep Robert from stealing hers (so little did her father know that it had long ago left her sole possession)?

“Won't you stay for supper?” Clara asked Henriette and Ludwig. “I shall make soup and meat if we have any and Robert's favorite potatoes, with butter and pepper, and—”

“I can eat nothing,” said Robert.

“You may refuse to make love to a woman,” said Henriette. “But you must never refuse her cooking.”

“Do you imagine Ernestine is a good cook?” asked Robert.

“Oh, no,” said Clara.

“Oh, yes,” said Henriette.

“What about you?” Robert asked Ludwig.

“You know very well I can't cook,” said Ludwig.

Henriette laughed.

“That's not what I meant,” said Robert.

“Of course it's not.” Ludwig quite enjoyed his little joke and how it had restored the spirit of his ruthful lover. “But why do you inquire after her ability to cook? She is beautiful. She is rich. And if you marry her she will never cook a single meal for you as long as you live!”

“Thank goodness,” said Robert.

“Why do you say that?” asked Henriette, who in her matchmaking had learned that it was as important to recommend to men a woman's ability to cook as it was to recommend to women a man's ability to make love.

“Because she's a terrible cook,” answered Robert.

“Did she cook for you?” Clara asked before she could stop herself.

“Why did you ask if we thought she might be a good cook?” said Ludwig at the same time.

“I was hoping for evidence to the contrary of my own experience,” Robert answered him.

“She
did
cook for you!” Clara no longer cared if she showed her outrage.

“Fish,” said Robert.

Ludwig looked as if he might become even more ill.

“Judge no woman by her fish,” said Henriette authoritatively.

“I shall make fish for our supper,” said Clara, who had thus far limited her cooking for Robert to the soup she had promised him in the note with which she had accompanied the tie from Paris what seemed so many years ago when she had been a child.

“Oh, but we cannot stay,” said Henriette. “Ludwig and I are having supper at my home.”

“Where is your husband?” asked Clara.

“Karl is away at the Vatican,” said Henriette. “But a word of advice, my dear child: A woman may dine alone with a man, and dessert will remain merely dessert.”

“What could you possibly mean by that?” asked Clara, who knew the power innocence held over sophistication.

Wisely, Henriette declined to answer. She said her good-byes and gathered Ludwig unto her, a frail man whose footsteps had grown abbreviated against the weakness in his breath and whose spirit had grown more generous within the foreshortened confines of his life. He went with her because she loved him, and he knew enough to know that this would feed the only hunger he had left. Yet he looked back longingly at Robert and Clara, like someone who wishes he could be in two places at once and would willingly die to effect such fission.

Clara was amused to think she might have driven them away with the threat of her cooking. And she was overjoyed to be alone with Robert. It had been so long. All she could recall was their playing Chopin together and meeting over St. Nicholas's Church. But that had been in spirit only, satisfactory enough at the time but no substitute for the man himself, bedraggled as he was, sad in the eye over the departure of his love, bewildered and cautious and withdrawn, which rendered him all the more precious for being all the less stable. She would put him back together and hold him together. She would cook him fish for dinner and pancakes for breakfast. She would never again leave his side.

“Look,” he said.

Automatically, she closed her eyes, as she had done when she was a child and “look” meant “don't look,” for he'd be hiding something with which to surprise her and her little brothers.

“Which hand?” she said to show him she remembered.

“You know me too well”—and finally there was mirth in his voice.

She opened her eyes and saw in the open palm of his injured hand a ring, diamond solitaire with three stone shoulders bearing the weight of her world come crashing down. It was not for her. His eyes were not giving it to her, and such events did not happen in the world anyway.

“We have agreed to marry,” he said. “We have told no one.”

“Why?” Hearing herself say it, she thought it the coldest of words.

“Because I need a wife. Don't laugh at me, Clara—she was prescribed by Dr. Reuter.”

Clara did laugh, but not at Robert and his mad doctors. “I didn't mean why are you getting married. I meant why are you telling no one?”

“Because I haven't given her this ring, of course. Had I given her the ring, she would wear it, and then everyone would know.”

“And why haven't you given her the ring?”

“She knows nothing of the ring.”

“I don't think she need know of it to appreciate its sudden bestowal upon herself. I am told it is a surprise that does not make the hair of most young women stand on end.”

He took her hand with the one not holding the ring. “I promise to tell you, and you alone, if her hair does stand on end.”

“You will give it to her then?”

“I shall follow her to Asch.”

His hand closed around the ring. But Clara could still see it, slipped upon Ernestine's long and slender finger, a shining jewel that tore the finger from the hand.

*
These would immortalize the otherwise lamentable Baron von Fricken by providing Schumann the melody of the theme of his Symphonic Etudes.

Leipzig

DECEMBER 4, 1834

I would rather lose all my friends together than this one
.

Robert Schumann

With the approval of her husband, Karl, who had observed his wife rescued from the frivolity of her obsession with the coupling of other men and women (for which, in part, he blamed himself), Henriette Voigt moved Ludwig Schunke into their home. It was not so they might dally together, especially with so little left to Ludwig of what it is one dallies away: time. It was to provide Ludwig with a place to die.

He might have died in the room in which he lived one room away from Robert's room, or in that empty room between them upon the Turkish rug that had received the body of his best friend's father. But he did not want to die alone, and to die with Robert was to die alone, because Robert, who could attend life with the utmost dedication and a silent reserve that gave the impression of being of eternal comfort, could not abide death. He could not speak of it, address it, witness it, share its habitat, or clean up after it, and though he could think of it (indeed, could not avoid thinking of it), these thoughts made him want to flee not only the present field of death but the very mind that formed them.

Robert had been paying one of his periodic visits to his fiancée, Ernestine, in Asch, when Schunke had begun to hemorrhage. Fortunately, Henriette had been with him in his room on the Burgstrasse, as she was with him almost every day. She sent for Dr. Reuter while she held towels to the sides of Ludwig's face as he coughed the blood from his mouth. She felt it warm the towels and soak her hands and advance up the thin sleeves of her dress like the fingertips of some distracted paramour.

By the time Robert had returned to Leipzig, Ludwig had been moved to the room in the Voigt house in which Robert had lain half-undressed with Ernestine.

When Robert visited him there, he found Ludwig using the prayer rug as a blanket.

“Are you cold?” he asked, for the approach of winter had sucked the winds in from the mountains.

Ludwig shook his head and smiled. “Flying carpet,” he whispered in a voice that was slowly returning to the silence Robert both feared and envied. He had discovered that the more music he wrote, the less inclined he was to speak, unless he had been drinking, in which case he might prattle on interminably until the increasing volume of the music in his head drowned out the sound of his words and sent him scurrying off to write down the notes. He sometimes felt that music resented language and did everything possible to annihilate it. Given music's greater precision, beauty, and expressiveness, Robert thought it would be the other way around. But language paid its humble respects to music by struggling valiantly yet futilely to describe it, the equivalent of trying to sing about mathematics. Music, in the meantime, obliterated words, thoughts, meaning itself. It rolled through one's blood and brain with an ecstatic pitilessness.

Robert touched the rug, massaging with his fingertips a small, threadbare patch where someone's knees had worn away the color, or perhaps a chair had sat for years and shifted with the restless weight of time upon the body of a man who read himself to death.