Marrying Mozart (35 page)

Maria Caecilia began to peel away the first fragile onion skins, a tear running down her cheek. “Yes, he knew you weren’t his, Josefa, but he loved you the same as if you were, maybe more. And he married me anyway because he loved me so.”

Josefa closed her eyes. If she could have left the room she would have, but she knew she did not have the strength to go. Her mother’s voice came broken and accusing across the table that stood between them. “You girls!” Maria Caecilia said. “Do any of you know what it’s like to lose your beauty forever, to be fat and old and ridiculous, to go to sleep each night alone, to be no one’s love, no one’s little cabbage? To struggle to keep food on the table and yet be the butt of jokes to your daughters, to be nothing but stupid? I was once as young and beautiful as any of you. As beautiful as Aloysia or you—”

“I can’t bear it,” Josefa cried. For one brief moment, she had wanted to go to her mother and console her but was so horrified she fled. She ran stumbling, weeping, pushing past the astonished boarders who were talking in the hallway. Her hair streamed loose down her back as she rushed into the streets of Vienna. She ran past the shops and wagons, not knowing where she was going.

After some minutes she turned and hurried blindly to Petersplatz. Father Paul, just coming from confession, was taking off his stole. “Josefa Weber,” he said, smiling at her so that his beaked nose wrinkled. “We heard you were in Prague. Sophie tells me all about your letters. Has the opera season ended? Why have you come home? Why, you’ve been weeping! What on earth is the matter? You’re not in trouble are you, dear girl?”

“Where’s my sister?” “Sophie is working with some of the nuns in the orphanage two houses down. I’m so glad she returned; we don’t know what we would do without her! But what can be the trouble?”

Without answering, Josefa ran to the large building down the street, where she was met at once with the sound of infants and little children tumbling around in the hall. She ran into a room where she saw a few wet nurses feeding babies, then rushed up the steps to a schoolroom, where there was hanging a portrait of Christ and the children.

Sophie had been teaching the alphabet to a group of children sitting at one long table. At the sight of her sister, she stood up and almost fell over a chair to reach her, crying, “Oh darling, what are you doing here?”

“I need to speak with you.”

“When did you arrive? Why did you leave Prague? Oh, I’m so glad! Wait, I’ll send the little ones across the way to Sister Maria Elisa. There, pets ... my sister’s come!” The five children looked back curiously as Sophie shepherded them out. Then, closing the door, she hurried back to Josefa. They held each other amid the long low table of books containing the letters of the alphabet, small drawings of animals or flowers illustrating each one.

Then they sat down on two low chairs, knee to knee, hands clasped.

Sophie said, “You’re trembling and you’re crying.”

“I’ve had such words with Mother....” Josefa began to tell the story. She kept looking away, as if trying to find a way to escape the truth.

“Oh Josy, how terrible,” murmured Sophie. Her lips parted, and she grew so pale that her freckles seemed to darken. “Oh, my love.”

“It means that nothing is real anymore,” Josefa said hoarsely. “Nothing’s real. Whatever I did, right or wrong, I could return to that one thing: I was Papa’s girl. My father taught me singing, I tell people. My father always stood up for me, rode me on his shoulders; now he’s not my father at all. A stranger was my father. I can’t bear that loss; I can’t. I don’t know where in the world to go with a loss like this.”

Sophie began to kiss Josefa’s fingers one by one. “Come, don’t cry,” she whispered. “I’m crying, too, and I can’t even give you a handkerchief because I always lose mine. Wait, wait! I think I can make something of it. Now I’ll explain it to you. Yes, it’s clear to me.”

She wiped her nose on her apron and said in the clear voice in which she always made her proclamations, only now the words stumbled a little, “The soldier doesn’t matter at all.”

“How could he not matter? What are you saying?”

Sophie took several deep breaths. “He doesn’t matter one bit. You were Papa’s most precious girl; you were his own Josefa. He chose you; he could have put you in a basket and delivered you to an orphanage like a heap of old clothes, but he didn’t. Well, did he?”

“I can never forgive Mama.”

“Oh ... Mama!” Sophie took a few more breaths, and laid her hand flat on her knees to steady them. “Why she is the way she is ... this is part of it, of course, but there’s another bit. Remember when we first looked at that book of suitors in secret in Mannheim, and I noticed the first pages were cut away? I eventually found them under the paper lining in the drawer where Mama keeps her hose. Listen, I’m telling you to distract you.”

Sophie leapt up and began to rush about picking up fallen toys, stammering a little, glancing back at her sister. “Are you listening, Josy love? Mama bought the book when she was young and began to plan for her own sisters’ marriages. Someone fantastical, of course. Those pages were full of the names of pashas and princes and sons of the city fathers. Only poor Aunt Gretchen believed her and refused every other offer, and so she never married at all. Mama has always felt bad about that, but she couldn’t stop herself She had to keep planning fantastical lives for all of
us
to make up for it, and to make up for her own fall. She couldn’t see the happiness she had all along. She saw it only sometimes. And after Papa died, she knew.”

“She should have known before!” came Josefa’s savage cry.

“I think she did sometimes. Josy, people do just bumble along. We have to forgive one another. What else can we do? I tell you this now because it’s all part of the piece, you see, of understanding why Mama is the way she is.”

“I don’t want to understand her!” Josefa yelled, clenching her fists. “I don’t want to understand anything about her; I hope never to see her again! I will never, never get over this.” She wrapped her arms about her chest and rocked back and forth.

Sophie dropped to her knees before Josefa, the rag dolls she had just gathered up spilling back onto the floor, their little button eyes staring up at the two sisters. “But Papa loved you best! I was always a little jealous; we all were. You had a part of him that no one else did, not even Mama. And she misses him so.”

Josefa twisted her head away. “I hate it when I cry!” she gasped. “I’ve just been holding it in for so long.” After several minutes, she managed to calm down a little. “Well,” she said with a bit of grim laughter as she picked up one of the rag dolls, “perhaps with what I told Mama about Thorwart’s wandering hands he won’t be round anymore, and that’s a mercy! But Sophie,” she said, looking up at her sister, “I haven’t asked a word about you and your good works.”

“Heavens, what’s that compared to your news?”

“Tell me to distract me and keep me from crying again. I’ll buy you six crescent rolls and six coffees if you distract me.”

Sophie turned over her hands, a little chapped from washing, but they had always looked that way, even when she was a child. On the back of one was a deep scratch from a stray cat. “Nothing to tell.” She shrugged. “I’m teaching the little ones to keep myself from trouble. Oh, I’m also starting a shelter for homeless sick animals in an unused yard here. You could help me with it, particularly the larger dogs.”

“I might ... I will. Tell me more. No, not about Aloysia; she wrote me of her triumphs herself Tiresome girl! How’s our Stanzi? Is she really going to marry Mozart?”

“Yes, I hope quite soon. Don’t you want to talk about Papa now?”

“No, anything but that. Tell me of all of you.” Josefa tidied a doll’s dress, her face lowered so that her expression could not be read. “Mozart is a very good man, Sophie,” she said, “and you know that, and Stanzi knows that. I suppose when you marry that’s the most important thing to know. But I’ve thought a lot about it when I was away. The woman who marries him marries as well the part of him that creates such extraordinary music. It’s all part of him, and always will be.”

She laid the doll aside and, reaching inside her dress, drew out her silver locket. “I wrote and asked Aloysia to send it to me while I was in Prague,” she said, rubbing her thumb over the worn initials. “I wanted it with me for good luck. She never knew what was in it. I’d like to tell you. It’s strange how you keep secrets for a long time, and then they just spill out. Maybe tears bring them, but this is going to spill out also now. Are you ready, mouse? The strands of hair tucked inside my locket are mine and Mozart’s.”

Sophie sank down to the floor, pulling off her cap. “Mozart’s?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“But Josefa, what do you mean? Why on earth would you wear his hair in a locket? We thought your lover gave it to you, your first lover, and the hair was his.”

Josefa rose and walked to the window. Sophie began to rise as well. “Josy?” she whispered, staring at her sister’s tense shoulders. She could not see Josefa’s face, for it was turned to the window. “What is it? Tell me!”

“I’ve never had any lovers, mouse; I made it all up. I wanted you all to think someone loved me that much. I found the locket in a secondhand jewelry shop and bought it myself, and I took the hair from some he gave Aloysia.”

“Josy, are you serious? Not a single lover?”

“Not a single one.”

“You’re still a virgin?”

“I am.” Josefa hesitated, leaning her head on the window overlooking the busy Petersplatz with the bookstore and lemonade stand, and children walking home from school arm in arm. The voice was lonely now. “Are you disappointed?”

“No but ... but we were so certain that you ...” Sophie now managed to stand, thrusting her hands deep into her apron pockets and walking close to her sister. She rubbed her nose against Josefa’s shoulder, then reached for one of Josefa’s large, nail-bitten hands again. She glanced up at her sister’s stern profile, and moved her mouth a few times as if to find the right words.

She said, “Did you love Mozart, Josy? Did you?”

“I did,” Josefa replied. “I did with all my heart. I think I still do, though I’d never say it. You have all my secrets now, and you must swear as my sister never to tell them to anyone as long as I live. I wish Mozart and Constanze every good thing. Hug me ... how I’ve missed you! Did Papa truly love me? I’m going to cry again. I am unforgiving. I’ll try not to be. If he forgave her, why can’t I? Oh, Sophie, when will I find where I belong?”