Marrying Mozart (15 page)

“What do you mean?” Josefa whispered. “What are you saying?” she said, her voice rising in all its richness. Aloysia and Sophie put their hands over their ears, and Josefa suddenly leaned forward as if she would slap her mother, or close her large hands about her throat.

Constanze shouted, “Josy, don’t! And you, Mama, do you hear me, stop it! We’ve all got to stay together now, we have to!”

Their mother looked up, her face wet with tears, and reached out to touch her oldest daughter’s knee. “I didn’t mean that,” she croaked. Words failed her, and she broke down in harsh sobbing. “I don’t know what I’m saying. You don’t know all that was between him and me. He’d call me his little cabbage. Fat as I am, I was his little cabbage. He made me a better woman. His soul was golden; he was all the world. I was never, never worthy of him, and now he’s gone.”

T
he winter wind blew across Europe as it would, driving icy rivers before it, circling mountains, beckoning the frost. In the Munich parlor the dark leaves that were draped around the portrait of Fridolin Weber had dried in the few months since his death. Near it, one late afternoon, Sophie Weber was at the desk writing a letter to her mother’s sisters, bending close over the paper and biting her lip.

Sophie chewed on the pen’s edge for a moment to think straight ... those words:
I shall be honest.
What was honest anyway? Who told the utter truth, and, besides that, what was truth? She sat upright, recalling once more her mother’s words to Josefa as they all rode back from the funeral. It had taken months of soothing to lay those words to rest, apologies, late-night kitchen conversations, tears.

But now, to tell the truth to her aunts. Was not the reality too bitter to put into ink? Dare she write that their hearts and lives were in disarray, that they each struggled to discover the path that would lead them back to their former life, but they found that the way had been washed out, much like on that woodlands walk they had all taken years before. Though her father had remembered the way, and they had set out on their adventure, they soon found the bridge across the stream was gone. Such was now the truth of their lives.

Mother could do so little these days. And the others wouldn’t write, or endlessly put it off:

Sophie studied the last few sentences, then carefully inked them out (certain truths must be withheld for a time for prudency), blinked back her tears, and continued:

She put aside the paper then, because she was crying and didn’t want her tears to splotch her words, and because, to her horror, for the first time in her life she was not at all certain that God
would
help them through.

H
e came slowly down their Munich street that same blustery day, papers and dry leaves blowing about his feet, and began to climb their stairs, resting his heavy luggage full of music once, staring unseeingly at the grooves the bag handles had worn into his palm. Tentatively, he knocked on the wrong door, and a tipsy unshaven man grumbled at him and pointed upward to “where the ladies live.” His legs, under black breeches buckled at the knee, ached as he climbed the last flight, walking toward the paper sign posted on the door: THE MESDEMOISELLES WEBER: LESSONS IN CLAVIER AND SINGING AVAILABLE. PLEASE KNOCK.

The door was unlocked, and when he pushed it open, he saw Sophie at the table, looking thin and pale. The room was strange to him. It was not the one he had known in Mannheim, but here was the clavier, which he so admired, and the music, and the youngest of the Weber girls.

She turned. “Oh, Mozart,” she gasped, balling her handkerchief in her hands. “Oh, it’s you, it’s you!” She leapt up and then hesitated, holding on to the edge of the desk. But she could not restrain herself for long; she ran across the room and jumped into his arms.

“Sophie,” he said.

She clung to him, her too-large gray frock showing evidence that a moth had had its way. There was an ink spot on her nose where she had rubbed it. “But what are you doing here?” she said, wiping more ink on her face. “We thought you were in Paris. You didn’t send word you were coming. Let me call Aloysia. You’ll want to see her right away. How many days was the journey? Was it awful? You must be hungry and thirsty. Are you staying in Munich? She’ll be so glad. Why don’t you answer me? Do hug me. You make me miss Father, and that makes me cry. What are you doing here? Not that I’m not very glad.”

Because he could not trust his voice, he only held her close, looking over the wild loose bits of her hair to the doorway, through which he heard voices and then footsteps. With a blur of dark dresses, the other three sisters rushed into the room. They were all about him; he felt their warmth and sweetness.

And there was his Aloysia, his beautiful Aloysia.

They pressed against him, hands on his sleeves and coat, stroking his arm. It was Josefa who took over her late father’s role as host. Lowering her voice, she said, “Oh, Mozart, welcome! We’re so glad you’ve come. But you look very tired. The journey must have exhausted you; they say it’s ten days at least. I’m not certain we have wine, but I can make coffee. But dear saints, are you ill?”

He lifted his gaze from the recollected worn spot on the rug to the blur of their faces. “I’m not sick, no,” he said, “but I have news as dark as yours. My own beloved mother fell ill when we were in Paris; the physicians could do nothing, and she passed from the earth. My journey was long; I couldn’t wait to come here to those who care for me. I’ve lost her; I’ve lost her.”

He stared ahead, his shapely mouth fixed. He saw his mother lying in death, the nose now very sharp, the waxen long hands clasped about her rosary. He saw the emptiness of their rooms after his return from the graveyard, how the floor had creaked as he walked across it. She who had nursed him, and fretted for him, and waited for him to come home was gone; he would not see her again in this world. And what assurance had he been able to give her in her last hours that he would do better, he who was now left in life for better or worse; what assurance had he been able to provide of how deeply he had loved her?

The sisters drew closer, bringing him back to the present; they murmured, “Mozart, Mozart,” slipping their arms about him, but he did not move. Someone stroked his cheek, prickly with pale brown stubble. They were all one to him in that moment, but he couldn’t answer them. Words were impossible; only music might speak, and there was no music now.

He looked down and saw that Sophie’s fingers had moved within his. “They’re both in heaven,” she said, raising her pointed face to his. “Your mother and our father. They’re angels.”

“Yes,” echoed Constanze. “They’re angels.”

He burst out, looking from one to another of them, “Your good father! I couldn’t believe the letter when I received it; I can’t believe he’s not here. I still remember saying good-bye to him that cold morning last winter. ‘Soon we’ll drink wine again, Mozart!’ he said. He insisted I borrow his brown music portfolio. But your poor mother! How does she do?”

Constanze replied, “She stays in her room a great deal and weeps. Maybe she’ll come out for you.” The four sisters looked at one another, and then Sophie ran down the hall. After a time her bedchamber door opened, and they could hear shuffling. Frau Weber emerged, holding on to the wall. Mozart was weeping himself now, and he embraced her fiercely.

He looked over Frau Weber’s cap to Josefa, who stood stiffly, as if she were the sentinel of the house. Her face was pale and severe; her weight had dropped, her laced dress loose. She slipped from the room and returned shortly with a tray containing coffeepot, cups, cake plates, forks, and cake. There was already something of the spinster about her. Mozart remembered how when Aloysia had first sung his song the year before, Josefa had escaped to the hall and remained there a long time.

“Mozart, come have cake!”

They ate until the plates held only small crumbs, and their words fell away. Then, quietly, three of the sisters and their mother rose and retired from the room, bearing the coffeepot, the plates, and the forks, and letting fall the heavy curtains that pulled over the doors to keep drafts away, leaving Mozart and Aloysia alone.

The curtain had not yet fallen completely when he leapt at her, kissing her wrist, then up her woolen sleeve to her neck, her perfect ear, her slightly chapped lips. He drew her beside him on the red sofa, holding her so closely against him that he could feel her corset stiffening, and her breasts hidden beneath it. Her flesh smelled of apples and cinnamon.

“I thought of you always these months, Aloysia,” he murmured. “I reread every one of your letters ten, no, twelve times, and kissed them. A hundred times I wanted to throw the whole thing over and come back to you. Your letters ... I wish there had been more of you in them. I kept trying to find you in them. They seemed reserved, and I know you’re not reserved. I read between the lines to find you.” He kissed her face as he spoke, his mouth against her lips. “Sometimes, Christ help me, I couldn’t seem to touch you.”

She turned her face abruptly so that his lips missed her mouth. “What did you want me to write?” she said, wrinkling bits of her skirt in her hands and staring ahead of her at the desk, where Sophie’s pen was left to drip ink on her unfinished letter. “I told you about the music I was learning and about our days. If our days were dull, can you fault me for it? I have never been good at writing.”

Pulling her closer, he murmured, “But there was no passion in them. I know you’re passionate. Why don’t you kiss me? Didn’t you miss me, my love? Not at all? I was so alone.”

She brushed her lips across his, then jumped up to the desk, glancing at the letter. “I know, I know, and so were we alone, though we had one another. Still, Papa’s gone, and Mother has collapsed; for days she doesn’t come from her bed.” She turned from the desk to him, tears in her eyes, the letter now folded in her hand. Then, distractedly, she slipped it in the desk drawer. “Of course I missed you!” she said. “I have deep, deep feelings. I do love you.”

She began to walk up and down the room. “But you’re the one who went away,” she said. “You went away. Can you know what it is just to wait? I admit my letters were a little reserved after a time. Very well, I’ll tell you why. I suppose you ought to know.” She paused by the window. “Early on you wrote (do you remember?) ... you wrote that you could likely send for me to sing in Paris in the Concert Spirituel or the Concert des Amateurs, but then you wrote that it wasn’t possible. Do you know how disappointed I was?”

Her words stammered over one another, and then she ran from the window to sit beside him, her voice rising. “You said you’d help me. And then, and then. Then you wrote that you were offered the position of organist at Versailles. Oh, Mozart,
Versailles!
You could have sent for me.... We would have been married, and I would have sung there and curtseyed daily to Marie Antoinette, the most regal Queen, a true Viennese princess, the daughter of the late Emperor of Austria. Can you imagine what I felt, stuck here in my grief without Papa, without prospects, with my dreary sisters and my mother’s weeping, and knowing I might have a chance to live at Versailles itself, in Paris, the center of fashion and good taste. Yet instead I was to remain in provincial Munich, while my gifts and youth fade unseen, obscure, unwanted ... and you
refused the position.”

He stared at her, bewildered, not touching her, though she sat so close. “But don’t you understand, the very last thing I want is to be a French court organist?” he said. “And the salary wasn’t so great. I couldn’t afford to dress you as you like, and they’d have put me in livery. The household musicians are lucky to eat at table below the lackeys and before the cooks. That’s my father’s life; I grew up with it. Do you think I want that? Is it the life I’m meant to have? No Aloysia, dearest. I wanted an opera commission. You mustn’t want me to settle on something less than I could be. I would write great roles for you—just for you. That’s a much better life.”

“But now you have nothing.”

His voice rose to the garland of dry, fragile leaves around the portrait of her late father. “It’s true I have nothing now,” he cried, “but that won’t always be so. I need you to have faith in me. My father writes one angry letter after another. I’m not the darling little boy anymore, and I can’t be obsequious. Dearest, my composing deepened while there. I’ll show you the symphony I wrote in Paris, and the concerto for harp and flute.”

She clenched her hands on her knees. “But you could have had the protection of the Queen.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to be a household organist, so I came back to my own country. You idolize the French; I can’t and won’t. At the opera the Italian composer Cambini stood in my way, jealous. I waited weeks for appointments that brought promises which were not kept. Could you really expect me to stay?”