Marrying Mozart (6 page)

Mozart glanced at Josefa as he passed her the bread. Her eyes were warm in her long, thoughtful face, and she laughed as robustly as she ate. Her nails were bitten to the quick, and she had a space between her front teeth.

Between mouthfuls, she demanded curiously, “Do you play in such houses often, Herr Mozart? The sort with twenty or fifty servants all looking as if they had died and been stuffed and then sewn dead into their livery?”

“More than I can begin to count, Mademoiselle Weber. Unfortunately, they have paid me as I expected they would.” Wryly, he extracted a gold watch from the velvet bag and let it dangle back and forth with the movement of the carriage. Now he was smiling. “I felt the shape of it when they presented it and withheld my groans. Can it be gold ducats, I asked myself. Ah no, said I.”

Aloysia had chosen only sweets, and she was now taking cautious bites from a piece of chocolate almond cake. Her blue shoe was half off her heel, showing her white stocking, slightly discolored with blue dye. Mozart looked at her curiously; so this was the one who was driving his friend Leutgeb from his senses. How little she was! Rather like a porcelain doll he had seen once in an empty anteroom on one of his childhood tours, sitting all alone in a large velvet-covered chair, her legs stuck out before her, her head to one side. He wondered if, should he ever pass that way again, he would find it sitting there still.

Her voice was light. “Herr Mozart,” she said.

“Mademoiselle Weber.”

“You mentioned when we met a few weeks ago that you had been in London as a boy to play the clavier. (I also play excellently ; we all do but for our smallest sister, who wants to be a nun.) Father says you’ve traveled all about the world, to Vienna and Munich and Paris. But oh, Paris! Were you truly at Versailles?”

“I was indeed, mademoiselle.”

“Oh to see it! I think I should faint at even approaching such an exquisite court, the most civilized court in the world—walls trimmed with gold, porphyry, women in hair like sailing ships, or set with bird’s feathers, or with flowers! I’ve seen drawings in a book, and a dressmaker we know was once there. Is it true you played for the King himself?” Her lips were almost trembling. “And that, more, you’ve even seen Venice and the Grand Canal, the palazzo of the Doge? Does he truly walk under a golden umbrella? Can there be no streets but only water and bridges and gondolas gliding in the night?
Mon Dieu,
you have lived a wonderful life.”

“Some of it was wonderful, and some not,” he replied, his hand over the top of the wine bottle so it would not splash about. “I can’t be myself much of the time in such places, and most of the people I play to don’t listen or don’t understand my music. I’d rather make music with friends; if I didn’t have to earn a living, that’s all I’d do. I enjoyed playing at your house last month.”

“Sir, I thank you,” cried their father, his voice bright with wine.

Aloysia leaned forward, as if with the jolting she might fall toward him. She lowered her eyes as she spoke. “May I suggest, Herr Mozart, that you can afford to dismiss such things because you have them in abundance.”

“But sometimes these things are cold and unwelcoming, mademoiselle.”

“Do you think so? If you say so, it must be so, and certainly I wouldn’t know because, as a woman, I stay mostly at home. But even if we do, we’re highly educated in music. We’ve hardly ever been to school; we’ve lived just the four of us, with Mother and Father. Papa taught reading and writing at home, and of course we speak Italian and French, as any educated person does, but all this was secondary to music, wasn’t it, Papa?
Mon Dieu,
sometimes we have games to see who can play or sing the most difficult things at sight.” She wriggled the blue shoe so that it fell from her foot. Now she was laughing openly, joyfully. He could see her bare throat quiver under the opened cloak. It was unadorned: no pearl on a gold chain, nothing. “I always win.”

“You don’t always,” said Josefa.

But Aloysia’s thoughts returned to the previous subject. “I’m certain you’re mistaken, Herr Mozart! I’m certain I wouldn’t find living in such a beautiful palace as Versailles cold! I’d be lost at first in the thousands of rooms, but that would be for only a short time. Some kind nobleman would graciously show me the way. Imagine having servants to do everything for you, even dress you. Imagine having twenty dresses, and a personal chambermaid to wash your silk hose and brush your hair two hundred strokes every night.”

Josefa’s reply was sudden and severe. “Oh, there you go with your fantasies and great plans!” she said. “Tomorrow none of them will take down the family chamber pots and start the fire in the cold, but we will.” Her deep brown eyes darkened. She put one hand on her father’s arm, as if to comfort him, to say none of these wants were his fault. She sank back in the carriage shadows, drawing her cloak over her dress.

But Weber cried cheerfully, “There, there, who can say what tomorrow may bring? I repeat the maxim often; my daughters hear it daily, to their boredom! Here’s your street, Herr Mozart. Yes, tomorrow, we would much enjoy the pleasure of your company. May I expect you at seven? Very good, very good.”

The young composer climbed from the carriage and heard their voices as they drove away, “Good night, Mozart, good night, dear Mozart,” and then their laughter.

 

Clocks striking over the city, rich, sonorous, the echo drifting over the houses, the roofs, the church spires. The good priests turned over on thick linen sheets in their beds; the merchants pulled their sleeping caps down over their ears. Musicians were snoring lightly: singers and flautists embraced their feather pillows. Outside the modest provincial theater the hand-lettered posters announcing the new performances were slightly stained with wet snow. The street cobbles smelled of horse dung, the alleys of sewage and old cooking. Later, before dawn, the maids would rise and light the fires and prepare the strong coffee and hot chocolate, then run into the street for fresh, warm bread from the baker’s boy. But now it was late, and the clocks each struck at a slightly different time, so that midnight in one street arrived some minutes before midnight several streets away.

Mozart walked alone after the carriage had rolled away, a little tipsy, whistling to himself. He opened the door of the house and took off his shoes, mounted the creaking steps, unlocked the upper door, and passed into his ugly garret room, which served as parlor, dressing room, and bedchamber. There, waiting for him, was his narrow bed. The room was very cold, but at least he could feel the small fire from where his mother slept, paid for with money from home on the strength of what the flute commission and other work would bring. He took off his wig and set it on the table. He also took out the watch, grimacing slightly. He might sell it in another city, not here. Yes, he would sell it in a faraway city, where the prince’s valet would never come across it hanging in a jeweler’s window at a reduced price.

“Wolfgang, is that you?” came his mother’s sleepy voice from the other room; she coughed once or twice. “Why did you come so late?”

“They made me wait forever before they called me in to play. Are you better?” he asked, joining her in her room.

“My chest aches; the landlady brought me a mustard plaster and a hot stone wrapped in flannel for under my feet. The fire’s such a comfort. But you have a clavier lesson for Mademoiselle Cannabich in the morning. Oh, what a shame they made you wait so long. Did you have the opportunity of speaking to His Highness about composing a new opera for Mannheim?”

“There was no time; I’ll have to find another opportunity.”

“Your father wrote that your old friend Padre Martini from Italy sends you his love and prayers; he wishes you’d write and tell him how you’re getting on.”

Mozart listened somewhat anxiously to her coughing, and then heated some wine on her low fire and sat on her bed as she drank it, stroking her hand. A few more age spots had appeared there since last he had looked. After a time she fell asleep, and he kissed her cheek, then returned to his own room.

There he lay on his bed in only his shirt, his arm beneath his head, thinking of the rolling ride home in the carriage, and the two girls’ hair powder, which flecked onto their dark cloaks. He thought of Josefa’s bitten nails and how she had retreated to the shadows of the carriage quite suddenly, and of Aloysia’s eyes as she spoke of Venice.

Two of the clock. A song for soprano and keyboard had almost finished itself in his head. When dawn came into the room high above the houses, he would write it down from memory, and sign it W A. Mozart, with his usual flourish. It was yet many hours before seven in the evening when he was expected at the Webers.

T
he bottles of wine had arrived from the vintner by late Thursday afternoon; the scent of apple cake was rising from the kitchen; and the hour was just a little past six, which meant the guests would not climb the five flights of steep stairs for another hour. Aloysia Weber had shut herself in the narrow chamber that she shared with her three sisters, its two beds chastely hidden behind cheap white cotton hangings, its wardrobe, its dozens of hooks full of dresses, its scattered shoes, and its large jewelry box whose contents were mostly imitation. When Sophie was six years old, she had emptied the box to make it into a house for her pet white mice. (“They have feelings, too, you know. How would you like to live in a nasty hole in the wall?”) It had been restored, though it was never quite the same; it now always held a strange scent, and one corner of the dark velvet lining had been nibbled.

Aloysia had just finished unwinding the rags from her hair, and one never knew just how they would hang until that was done. Would the thick curls at the back of the neck be crooked? No, they were perfect, much better than last night. But she had been lovely enough then; her father and others had said it. “Such a delicious girl,” she could hear one of the men murmuring after she had concluded her aria at the palace. The way one or two of them looked at her! Not that they interested her very much, but they were, as her mother said, possibilities, their names to be added to a list in a little book, discussed over many hours of coffee. It was a leather-bound book tooled in flowers that her mother kept hidden in secret places (lastly behind the flour canister), which none of them had ever been allowed to look in or touch. Last night, however, Aloysia had been given permission for the first time to come to the kitchen and list a few men who had heard her sing. Most she could only describe; she did not exactly know their names. She also did not know if they were already married.

Some years ago, when Josefa had first started to have a shape beneath her chemise, her mother had gathered her two older daughters together and had begun to discuss the subject of marriage with them. To be an old maid was a terrible thing: no fate could be worse than that. To be unchosen was horrid! Was not even death preferable? They could not begin, their mother said, to think of their futures too soon. Now and then a girl trained to music could eke out a precarious existence. The occasional woman wrote for her bread, or was a clever dressmaker, but even with these things her true goal was to marry as well as she could. Aloysia remembered that evening in the kitchen, both girls sitting close to their mother, listening to her every word.

At first the names of suitors were modest prospects: printers, a furniture upholsterer with a small workshop, a schoolmaster. Then two years later Frau Caecilia Weber had looked at her newly blooming second child and, smacking her lips gently, observed, “An old school friend of mine has a daughter without dowry who has just married a Count, and she is not nearly as beautiful as you. Oh no, my sweet, not nearly as lovely. If such a blessing could occur, you could have all the pretty things you deserve, my Aloysia, my own little flea.” That was the day everything changed. It was a spring day, and she had run up the steps with her nose buried in sprigs of linden blossoms. She could hear her mother’s voice. “I know how you long for fine things, my Aloysia.”

Today on her way back from delivering a pile of copied music, she stood for a long time in front of a French dressmaker’s shop window, where she could make out, behind the small panes, a length of pale pink brocade. Pressing her forehead against the cold glass, Aloysia almost felt her soul leave her body and wind itself in the cloth. She so wanted first a dress from that cloth, and then another in milkmaid style made of the finest white muslin, with a wide, pale pink silk sash that would tie around her waist and bow so extravagantly at the small of her back that the ends would flutter down the skirt. She had seen a drawing of such a dress worn in the court of France.

“Aloysia, are you coming? Have you polished the candle sconces? It is Thursday, you know!”

Why must the world stop for Thursdays? Must they all be rallied weekly to this running about so, tidying the parlor, finding enough candles, always making sacrifices when no one in particular ever came, whereas last night at the Elector’s palace there had been the women with little dark beauty marks shaped like stars or moons. How could Josefa laugh at it? They had fought about it this morning while studying a new duet. And didn’t it matter to Josefa that she was nineteen and not yet betrothed? Just like the younger ones, who never gave it a thought.

“Aloysia!” called her sisters and mother.

At least she could wear her pink silk hose, embroidered at the ankle with small scarlet flowers, which her father had bought her the first time she sang in public. If by chance her skirt pulled up an inch or so above her shoes, Leutgeb would notice. The blustering horn player was in love with her, and, though his name had never been mentioned by her mother, she found that when he looked at her, her body grew warm all over.

But now, rummaging through boxes and under the bed, she could not find the embroidered hose. Dropping to her knees, she searched the bottom of the wardrobe, hurling things out. “Someone borrowed them, likely,” she muttered. “Will I ever have anything not borrowed, remade, or lent?”