Marrying Mozart (34 page)

“The wind bag, the moldy cheese.”

“She’s not quite that bad.”

But Mozart, raising his eyes to his future mother-in-law, thought, She’s worse.

Thorwart cleared his throat. “We are gathered here—”

Maria Caecilia put up her hand to silence him, inclined her head. “Herr Mozart,” she said. “My dear Herr Mozart, I believe I understand that you wish the hand of my daughter Constanze.”

“I wish to marry her, yes, hand and all. Both hands and all other limbs, dear Frau Weber.”

“You must understand certain things. We are not now quite as you found us some time ago in Mannheim, when my poor dear husband yet blessed us with his wisdom. I’m a widow now, with only two remaining daughters. You wish to marry my Maria Constanze, but how do we know you’ll do it? I am asking you as a mark of good faith to sign this contract that you will pay a certain sum of money if you haven’t married her within three years. You understand we are aware of the slowness between your words of love and your finalizing them in the blessed church, Herr Mozart. We should not wish a repetition of what occurred in my family between you and another.”

Thorwart nodded gravely. His jaw was so stiff with purpose that it looked as if it might shatter, loosing his teeth all over the carpet. Mozart took a deep breath. He raised his eyes, and there saw Sophie looking at him, deliberately cross-eyed, nose wiggling, looking all the world like a drunken rabbit. He felt his laughter rising, and then Leutgeb’s hand on his knee to restrain him.

“Your answer, Herr Mozart?”

“You know I’ve agreed. I’ll agree to anything to have her. Give me a pen; you’ll have my signature.” He put out his arms impulsively. “I’ll marry her within three months. Madame, if I could, it would be within three days. Where’s the ink and pen? Where’s the notary?”

“I am notary,” Thorwart said. “Maria Sophia is witness. Come.”

At once all in the room except Maria Caecilia stood and walked to the table. Outside they heard the kitchen maid screaming at someone, and a crash of crockery. Maria Caecilia ignored it, watching as the young composer signed, and then she stood up, sweating faintly.

Suddenly, Constanze pushed in among all of them and snatched the contract. “I need no contract from you,” she cried. “I believe your word. I believe it.” Turning to her mother, she cried, “Mama, it has nothing to do with you; it has only to do with Wolfgang and me.” The contract, now in many pieces, drifted down and settled under the clavier legs.

They escaped outside the house to the back of the church, where they held each other without speaking. Then Sophie came trotting toward them with a large umbrella. “It will rain, I think,” she said. Her eyes crossed, her nose wriggled, and there was the rabbit in spectacles again.

Later Constanze and Sophie locked themselves in the parlor while the boarders hurried up and down the stairs; outside the rain fell persistently over Vienna, over the linden walk and the opera houses and the imperial palace, streaming down the stone saints and angels of the churches, dampening organs and fortepianos, wetting the windows of the great shops of the marketplace with all their gorgeous apparel. The rain fell on the posters in front of the opera announcing the first performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s
Die Entführung aus dem Serail—The Abduction from the Seraglio.

O
ne week later, Josefa returned from Prague.

She dropped her canvas bag by the front door of the boardinghouse, and took the steps two at a time to the room she had shared with her sisters. No one was there. She gazed at the hats, dresses, stockings, and books scattered about, then stooped to pick up one of Sophie’s flat, worn shoes, and held it against her heart. Her face contorted, and she shut her eyes hard. She would not cry now, not until it was over, and then maybe never again.

Why weren’t Constanze and Sophie here? She had thought of them all the carriage ride to Vienna, of the games they had played as children. She had often been the hero; she had slain dragons, led her sisters from burning castles, removed evil spells with the wave of a crooked stick that seemed to glitter as it cut the air like a sword. Now she needed her sisters more than she ever had in her life, but of course she had not told them she was coming. No one knew at all.

Josefa pulled the pins out of her hair, which fell halfway down her back, and with the pins clutched in her fingers, she descended the steps, slowing as she approached the parlor. “Papa,” she whispered. She opened the door, leaning against the frame. Maybe he would be there ... maybe! But he was not. There was his clavier, the fall board open, the overcast light from the window playing on the discolored and worn ivory keys. Hanging above it on the wall was his portrait, his slightly crooked and sweet smile. Fridolin Weber, second tenor in the chapel, violinist, generous host, throwing open the door as his guests mounted the Mannheim stairs.
Come up, I long
to
embrace you!
Playing scales as she stood before him learning to sing.

“What, are you leaving so suddenly?” the bass Hofer had asked after her last performance in the Prague Opera when she had come into his dressing room to say good-bye. He stood, still in the robes of the king he had played in the opera that day. “I’ve been watching you since you’ve come, you know. You have a magnificent voice, but the feeling within you is what makes it so rare. People come to hear you. Why are you going away?”

“I have to go.”

He had crossed the room, and taken her hand; he was not a handsome man, but he listened to people, and she had always felt him listening to her.

She said, “You are very kind, Monsieur Hofer.”

“But you will return to Prague?”

It all began in a parlor much like this, she thought; it began with my father. He gave me music and love. He always protected me; I was his girl. She turned abruptly, and descended to the kitchen.

Maria Caecilia Weber was asleep in the old armchair they had brought in their travels from city to city, her hips spread out under her vast skirts, her head with its heavy chins drooped on her chest, which rose and fell with her breathing. Rain beat on the kitchen window, a little seeping under the casement, while the upper floors of the boardinghouse were still and quiet, the way they sometimes were in the morning. Josefa listened. Not even the cellist played; he must be at rehearsal or moved away. The kitchen table was full of cold chicken, which would later be smothered in warm sauce and piles of vegetables and onions.

She took a deep breath. “Mama,” she said sternly.

Maria Caecilia sighed and stirred. She seemed to start a little as her eyes opened and focused on her eldest daughter. For a moment something soft crossed the heavy face with its still youthful skin, and Josefa remembered years before when she had rushed into her mother’s capacious lap and her mother had said, “Whose little girl are you? And who loves you best?”

Her mother sat forward now, rearranging her expression, straightening her puckered white cap. “You stand there like a loose woman with your hair all down,” she said, her voice husky from sleep. “Well, Josefa, you might have sent word you were coming. Have you come trailing your lovers? What on earth do you want? Away for months and months and no letter to me, not a coin for me when I might need one. In and out of our lives, isn’t it?”

“Oh, how nicely you welcome me!” Josefa muttered.

But tears had formed in her mother’s wide, plain face, obscuring her eyes; she stood up, her hand bracing her back for a moment, and began to stir the soup that had been simmering over the fire. “Yes,” she said, her broad back to her daughter. “You come home likely boasting, after the reputation you left here from which we’ve just begun to recover. I suppose you know the news. Your sisters write, I’m told. Stanzi’s betrothed, though without a contract, foolish girl; he’ll leave her with her belly swelled, mark my word. Aloysia seems content with her portraitist when she could have done so much better. Now I suppose you come back to bring me shame. You could at least help with the dinner instead of being useless. Sophie’s off doing good works for the poor.”

“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”

“No, I don’t, but you’ll tell me anyway.”

“I left Prague a month ago. I’ve been traveling. I went to Zell, where you were born and where you met Papa.”

Maria Caecilia’s back stiffened slightly, and then she rubbed the small of it and resumed stirring the soup. Turning to the table, she began to cut the cooked chicken with a knife. She never raised her face. “You went to Zell? Why? You never showed much interest in my sisters, your aunts. Poor Gretchen, poor Elizabeth!”

Josefa watched the adept hands cutting up the chicken, deboning it, arranging it in neat piles. She said, “I wanted to find out what I could about you and Papa. Do you remember what you said in the carriage coming back from Papa’s funeral? I never forgot it. There were many people who remembered you quite well in Zell. Your family didn’t have very much money at all; I found that out. I badgered my aunts until they confessed. Your family was never wealthy; there was never much silver. None of it was true, ever.”

Her mother did not look up. “How long did you say you’d be staying with us, Josefa?” she said coldly.

“Not long! I have friends in this city; I can stay with them, but before I go, I want you to tell me who my real father is. I want to hear the truth from you.”

Maria Caecilia began to untie her apron, and then flung down her hands. “How dare you ask that question!” she cried. “What a ridiculous question! Because of a remark I made in my grief after burying my saintly Fridolin? How dare you question my respectability? Yes, you’d like to drag me down to the dirt, wouldn’t you?” Covering her face with her arm, she began to weep, her large bosom heaving.

Then, throwing her arm down, Maria Caecilia cried, “All I’ve struggled to maintain all these years, negotiating with bill collectors, managing the scorn of your father’s brother, and his whole family who thought I wasn’t good enough. Always making fun of me for my lack of education, because I didn’t understand music. ‘She can hardly read,’ they said, ‘much less understand music.’ How can you know what was between me and your father? How can you know what I suffered?” Her beautiful skin was now splotchy.

The kitchen door creaked open, and Thorwart came in, smelling of that familiar perfume he wore, which always preceded him into a room. “Why, what’s happening?” he said sternly. “I could hear your voices all the way down at the street door. I see the prodigal has returned, and at once begins to shout at her mother. Haven’t you had enough bad behavior from this young woman, Maria Caecilia? I would have the police send her away. She does no one any good here. Girl, why do you look at me?”

Josefa clutched the back of a chair. “It’s him, isn’t it, Mama? I found it out in Zell. Oh dear Lord, it’s him, this horrible man we have to call ‘uncle,’ the one we’re made to respect, who is my real father. He never could keep his hands to himself with all of us, though you wouldn’t believe us if we told you. He tried to catch me on the stair and rub himself against me, though I’m his own daughter.”

“What, what?” cried Thorwart; the kitchen was hot, and he had begun to sweat.

“I went to Zell! I spoke to your sisters, Mama. I spoke to lots of people. There was nothing respectable about you, Mama; you were wild. You hated your home; you wanted to escape. I know what happened. This disgusting man saw you coming across the courtyard at dark, and he came out and asked you to a tavern with his friends. It was two months before your marriage to Papa, who was working hard to earn money. You didn’t come home until dawn. You stayed with him that night.”

“How dare you!” cried Maria Caecilia. She tried to rush forward, but Thorwart grabbed her arm to restrain her.

“You went to your wedding with a baby inside of you, with me inside of you. It’s him, isn’t it? When I look at him I see my face; when I look into the mirror, I see his expressions. I think I would rather die than know this.”

Thorwart shook his head, releasing his hold on Maria Caecilia. He gazed coldly at Josefa’s wild hair and dirty traveling dress. “My dear girl,” he said, drawing out his handkerchief and wiping his forehead. “You have never known truth from fantasy, and as a child you made up such things no one knew what to think of you. The stage is where you belong, where you may live out your wild dreams. However, I am sorry to disillusion you about your paternity. I’m not your father. And I’m very glad I’m not, for you’re not meek and gentle the way a young woman should be, as any daughter of mine
would
be.”

He cleared his throat in the silent room, looked at her sternly, head to one side, and then, in a voice that touched the words only lightly, as if they were dirty, he said, “I never went to bed with your mother, though I was sorely tempted, as were my friends, for she was a flirt then. Oh yes, standing by the window in her chemise. She didn’t stay with us that night, but went off with someone else from the tavern. Excuse me for revealing it, Madame Weber, but I can’t have my name dirtied when I’m innocent. You came to me weeks later in tears because you were carrying a child. I beg you both, Madame Weber and Mademoiselle Josefa, do not impute me in this. All other allegations are spurious as well.” He raised his heavy chin defiantly and straightened his coat with a firm tug. “I am, and will always be, a gentleman.”

The sound of two boarders laughing in the hall reached them; Josefa still clutched the back of a chair as if she would keel over without it. “Then who
is
my father?” she cried. “Who did you go with that night, Mother?”

Maria Caecilia sank down into a chair, covering her face with her hands. When she looked up, she seemed to have aged several years. Looking over at the bowl of onions, she said bleakly, “I was just seventeen, and I knew nothing. You must understand this. Your father was a soldier in the service of the empire. It didn’t happen that night but a few nights following. I was not myself since the first time I saw him; he was so strong, so handsome with his mustache, like the stories my sister and I would tell one another. His coat buttons shone. Like you, he was tall.” She reached out for an onion and cradled it in her hands. “I gave myself to him, and I would have married him, but he was sent away with his regiment. My letters went unanswered; my heart broke. I returned to Fridolin Weber, who was a good man. He knew; I confessed it to him. He was more forgiving than you, my girl, more so than you have ever been.”