Longing (47 page)

“I was under the impression that you were her only piano teacher,” said Pastor Fischer.

“I am referring to my ex-wife, for God's sake, not to my daughter!”

“It is not your ex-wife, Herr Wieck, who has brought this case against you. Confine your remarks to your daughter. And I warn you, sir, do not bring forth such accusations without proof. I have never heard a man speak in such fashion of his own daughter. It would seem to be to bring shame to the entire family, himself included. If these are the kind of statements that continue in this declaration of yours, I must forbid you from reading from it. Proof, sir. Proof.”

Wieck slammed his declaration down on the table before him and picked up from it his leather satchel, into which he thrust his hand. “If it is proof you are after, I have documents. And I shall have witnesses as well. Behold.”

He removed the letters one by one and placed them on the table before him, until they made quite a stack. This was a much more dramatic approach to the presentation of his evidence than if he had simply dumped the letters out together. The court was completely silent while he did this, all eyes on the letters as they accumulated. He could feel the desire in the room to know what was written on these pieces of paper. He had counted on that desire. What, after all, could be more enticing than the prospect of becoming privy to an intimate correspondence that was intended to be irretrievably private?

“What have we here?” asked Pastor Fischer, as if it were not obvious.

“Letters.”

“From whom to whom?”

Wieck pointed over at the table where Schumann and Clara sat with their lawyer. “Him to her.”

He thought she had known. He thought she must have recognized them. But, to judge from the paleness that seized her face like a winter fog, she was only now becoming aware of the trouble to which he was willing to go to save her. Not for a moment taking her eyes off the letters, she whispered something to Robert and their lawyer. Even her lips were pale.

“And how do these letters relate to the case?” inquired Pastor Fischer.

“These letters, sir, are so full of intimate revelations that they cause a father the most profound shame over the behavior of his daughter.”

“The shame, Herr Wieck, is yours!”

Where, suddenly, had Einert found so deep a voice?

“You are out of order, Herr Einert,” warned Pastor Fischer.

“Will the court ask Herr Wieck where he found these letters.”

“The court will not. But you may.”

Without waiting to be asked, Wieck said, “Where do you think I found these letters? Where do most people keep letters? In her desk!”

“And was that desk locked?” asked Einert.

“Of course it was locked. Do you have any idea what these letters say? What they mean? One would have to be even more immodest than my daughter is proved by these letters to be to leave them lying about unsecured.”

“So you admit to unlocking Fräulein Wieck's desk without her knowledge or permission and stealing these letters.”

“Stealing?
Stealing
! Does a thief come into court and produce from a pouch what he has stolen? What kind of lawyer are you, Herr Einert, if you cannot distinguish between stolen property and evidence? As for whether I unlocked my daughter's desk, how else would you have me gather my evidence? It is a father's right to have access to his child's property. Are you telling me I cannot read her letters? Her diary? What is a parent for if not to know his child? And still, I will admit, I didn't know her well enough. And I didn't find these letters soon enough. But if they prove to leave any doubt after I have read them to the court that my daughter was seduced—
willingly seduced
, I might add—by that man who sits there so forlornly and inexpressively at her side, then
this
letter will clear up that doubt for all eternity.”

“And what letter might that be?” asked Pastor Fischer unnecessarily, for Wieck had it out of the satchel and was unfolding it before his eyes.

“Allow me,” he said. “This letter was sent to me from Dresden when news was made public of the present conflict between my daughter and myself. ‘Dear Herr Wieck. Having become aware of the painful and completely unjustified lawsuit brought against your good person by your profligate daughter and her insane magazine-editor suitor who even were he not insane would be too old for her, I feel it is my sad duty to inform you of a fact that, as shocking as it will be for you to hear, will allow you to triumph against your persecutors and prevent forever a marriage that would destroy your daughter's life. Approximately three and a half years ago, when your daughter was only sixteen years old and under your protection in my own city of Dresden, you were called away from Dresden on urgent business. No sooner were you gone than your daughter made known your absence to Herr Robert Schumann, the magazine editor in question, who arrived in Dresden posthaste and proceeded to relieve your daughter of her virtue. Allow me to repeat that: to relieve her of her virtue! Far from finding this loss to be shameful, your daughter, it nearly shames
me
to have to say, so reveled in such concupiscence that she repeated such act with Herr Schumann until such time as all four wheels of your coach had crossed the border of the Altstadt upon your return to Dresden. I trust this news will, even if it breaks your heart, secure your victory in the battle you fight for fathers everywhere. Yours in sad sincerity.'”

As if reading this letter for the first time, Wieck, under the burden of its terrible news, sank slowly into his chair. Once seated, he crushed the letter violently in his hand and then brought that hand even more violently down upon the table, once, twice—over and over until Pastor Fischer interrupted this display of grief and justifiable anger.

“Who is the author of this letter, Herr Wieck?”

Wieck unfolded the letter and smoothed it out upon the table and gazed down upon it. “Anonymous,” he said.

“Anonymous!” uttered Pastor Fischer and Herr Einert in harmony so synchronous as to appear suspiciously rehearsed.

“Of course Anonymous!” said Wieck. “If you wrote such a letter to a father such as I, would you put
your
name on it? What if you feared the messenger might be killed? What if you feared that you yourself would be called into this very court and be forced to utter such blasphemies aloud, before the world? Merely to
report
such behavior is enough to destroy the reputation of an honorable man. Look what it has done to those whose behavior it actually was.”

As once more he crushed the letter in his hand, he turned an accusing eye toward Clara and Schumann and their lawyer. But they were huddled together over another piece of paper, paying no attention to him whatever.

Finally, Einert looked up and said, “May I see that letter, please.”

“It is addressed to me.”

“Once you have introduced it to the court, it belongs to the court,” Pastor Fischer directed. “And consider, sir, that we are not even breaching the privacy of your locked desk in order to obtain it. Show him the letter.”

Wieck threw the crumpled letter through the air. It did not reach the table and fell at the feet of Einert, who bent down to retrieve it. This did not entail much of a journey.

Einert smoothed out the letter on the table and placed it next to the piece of paper at which he and his clients had been looking. Now they appraised both papers together, eyes moving from one to the other. Then they nodded in a suspicious common rhythm and looked up at him, the two men smiling, Clara still blank-faced.

Einert rose, addressing the court. “I have in my hand, in addition to the letter that Herr Wieck has attempted to obliterate into unidentifiability, another letter. This is signed by a Herr Lehmann and is addressed to Fräulein Wieck. I will not try the patience of the court or the sensibilities of my clients by reading it aloud. Suffice it to say that this letter is nothing more nor less than a villainous and wholly unjustified attack upon Herr Schumann. It describes him in the most scurrilous terms and warns Fräulein Wieck that her association with him will lead to her destruction. And I would like to ask Herr Wieck, what sort of man would write such a letter?”

“A wise man.”

“What sort of man would write such a letter to his own daughter?”

“Do you mean to tell me that this Lehmann also has a daughter who has betrayed and humiliated him? And with this selfsame Schumann?”

“I mean to tell you, sir, that your anonymous correspondent and Herr Lehmann are the same person.”

“Extraordinary! The poor man!”

“They are
you
!”

“I?”

“You.”

“Impossible! It is one thing for you to ask the court to believe that a man might be two men at once, namely Anonymous and Lehmann. But for you to think any man, let alone a man as busy as I with his teaching and his selling of pianos and the guidance of the career of she who would be the greatest pianist in Europe if only she will give up the idea that she should marry…for you to think that any man might be three men, and one of them Friedrich Wieck, is preposterous. I don't even have time to write my
own
letters, aside from those required by my present wife when I am away in distant cities with my daughter, attempting—unsuccessfully, I am sadly informed by both Anonymous and this Lehmann of yours—to keep her from being seduced. On what basis could you possibly accuse me of being the author of these letters?”

“Handwriting,” answered Einert.

“But those letters are not written in the same hand.”

“And how would you know that, Herr Wieck? You have not been shown the Lehmann letter.”

“I know that because it is one thing for you to accuse me of being the author of both those letters, but it is another for you to accuse me of being stupid enough to have written both letters in the same hand. Therefore, if I am the author of both letters, they cannot be written in the same hand. And if they are not written in the same hand, then neither I nor anyone else can be the author of both letters. Ergo, it is established that I am not the author of both letters.”

Wieck sat down but was immediately called upon by Pastor Fischer to stand up. “Bring me your declaration, Herr Wieck. It is, is it not, written in your own hand?”

“It is, your worship. But it is, as I trust you realize by now, a document most intensely and intimately private. I cannot allow any eyes but mine to gaze upon it.”

Pastor Fischer rested his face in his hands. “These eyes have seen things even more pitiable than autobiographical ravings and more contemptible than forgery.” Now Pastor Fischer let loose his face, those very same eyes inflamed with what Wieck could not distinguish between compassion and scorn. “Bring me your declaration, Herr Wieck. And you, Herr Einert, bring me the two letters that you claim are written not only by the same man but by the same man who wrote the declaration to whose profane accusations this court has lately been subjected. I shall compare the handwriting.”

As Einert, with tiny, soundless steps, went to Pastor Fischer and, bowing, handed him the two letters, Wieck gathered up the many pages of his declaration much as a man would fallen leaves when he had no garden implements, stuffing the papers into his arms, compressing them within his hands, squeezing them between his fingers, from which their edges and corners nonetheless extended into the courtroom with accusatory perceivability. When, finally, they were crushed beyond what he hoped was recognizability, he opened his satchel with his teeth and tried to drop the papers in. Some of them did find their mark; others fell to the table and to the floor.

“What are you doing?”

How could it not be apparent to Pastor Fischer what he was doing?

“Handwriting!” he screamed at the same time he walked from behind the table and trod upon those fallen pages of his declaration.

When he was halfway toward the much larger and more imposing table at which sat the magistrates, he stopped and turned to face neither his judges nor his accusers but rather some indeterminate being who might be hanging by his neck from the gilt-metal and cut-glass thirteen-light chandelier that added a touch of frivolous dissipation to the solemnity of injustice. Stamping his foot as he once again roared, “Handwriting!” he discovered he could make it tinkle.

“You want to judge my handwriting when sitting over there with my daughter is the man with the worst handwriting in all of Germany. Have you troubled yourself, Your Worship, to look at the way Herr Schumann writes? If it is true that the eyes are the windows to the soul—and Herr Schumann is a squinter, as is clear for all in this courtroom to observe—then the fingers are surely the signposts of the conscience. With which part of the body, after all, is more intimacy achieved than with the fingers? And Schumann's fingers can barely write a legible word. Small wonder—he crippled his own hand and by so doing destroyed the one career at which he might have been able to earn a sufficient living to begin to support the woman whose own career he would now cripple by marrying her. Nor are his lips much good for anything but such acts as would be unmentionable had he not insisted on my bringing them to the attention of this court. He has withdrawn from society in direct proportion to his pursuit of my daughter. And when he does converse, he mumbles, he whispers, sometimes he even whistles as if he thinks the rest of us are dogs. He is mystical and dreamy. He lives in his own world, this man, and that is where he belongs. He even drinks alone. He drinks so much that he is sometimes carried home by strangers. He drinks so much that he will be of no use to my daughter as she tours the world and he will be expected to accompany her and to converse with kings and queens. She was made Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa to her Imperial Highness Empress of Austria and handed fifty gold ducats by the empress herself, fifty ducats that I shall be happy to produce in this court as evidence. Can you imagine if Herr Schumann had been there to receive these ducats. He would have spent them immediately on drink. He would have mumbled to the empress, ‘Why no ducats for
me
, the composer?' Have you heard his music, your worship? Probably not, for it is nearly impossible to perform. I have been its greatest champion, and even I am more perplexed by it than I am by the behavior of those who shake their heads and cover their ears when they hear it. A husband must support a wife, even if the wife is more famous than he. How will he support her with this music of his? Where is his
Freischütz?
Where is his
Don Giovanni?
And how will she, in turn, run their household? A wife must run the household, even if she is more famous than her husband. But my daughter is an artist. She was raised to be an artist. She cannot make the same bed that she is capable of lying in all day long. She cannot bake a fish. She cannot dust a keyboard except by scales. Perhaps if her mother had not abandoned us in shame…But she would still remain an artist, and artists are not meant to keep a house, satisfy a husband's whims, or tie around her waist some apron of children who cause her knees to swell and her precious fingers to go numb with worry. An artist is a flower. An artist needs a gardener who will nourish her, not a husband who will block the sun and finally cut her down. Can you be so blind, Your Worship, that you cannot see that to allow this marriage will be to commit a crime against art, against society, against me, and even against these two impatient consummators, one still a child, the other a seducer of that child?”