Vienna Nocturne (13 page)

And she, smiling up at him and accepting his pressing kisses, thought of herself as one of the flat, pieced-together cargo barges that floated headlong down the deep, swift Danube to the waiting towns below, but that would never have the strength, or the means, or the will, to return.

Stephen wrote:

Benucci frowned and looked confused. “But why such haste?”

Anna laughed gaily. “Yes, it’s rather racing, isn’t it, but it’s what we want. He’s a good man and shall make me happy, and everyone is always telling me I should marry.”

He was silent for what seemed a long time, and in spite of everything some part of her began wildly to hope.
Please
, she thought, smiling at him.
Please, Francesco
. But then he gave a small start, as if returning to his senses, and beamed at her and kissed her cheek. “Forgive me. I’m only surprised. Let me congratulate you. This is happy news. You’d make any man the luckiest in the world.”

“Well,” she said, renewing her smile. “Not
any
man.”

He squeezed her shoulder, as if she’d said nothing. “And we’re still friends. That’s the main thing.”

She turned from him and said, “Yes.”

They were married in the Dutch Embassy. Anna wore her best silk and looked, her mother said, the loveliest of her life. Mrs. Storace, in a high, white wig, did not say much to anyone, but it was clear she relished in this kind of ceremony, with its rule and straightness and sanctity. She was more than satisfied with John Fisher. He had a strong carriage and a Christian heart; a steadiness and a sense that would regulate her daughter. Much good, she observed, could come even of misfortune.

They were married in the morning, a Friday. Light touched their shoulders. Anna’s friends were there and some of her patrons. Benucci sat on the left, a dark-haired figure at the edge of her vision.

Fisher’s face was schooled and stern, as if feeling the weight of history upon him. They said their vows and signed in the book and everyone prayed. There was music from a wind quintet, friends of Anna’s from the orchestra, and then some small refreshments. Her mother would not speak to Benucci. Anna, too, could hardly speak
to him. He muttered a low congratulation and moved away. He had brought Lidia, who hugged Anna tightly and whispered, “Courage, courage, he is a good man, all will be well,” because there was nothing else now that could be said.

What a terrible thing to go to bed with a stranger. A bedroom was meant to be a place of comfort and repose, a place for love and rest and the vulnerability of sleep, where even the darkness of night was yet safe and enveloping. To welcome this man, accept his demands and his professions of tenderness, and try to fall asleep in his heavy arms, indeed took all the courage Anna possessed. She thought of the future, of “forever,” and it seemed a horror beyond imagination or dream. She could not bring herself to wish for his death, not even if it meant her release. But he would grow old, someday he would surely grow old, and with age would come blessed neglect. She laughed to think that this was the best she could hope for, she who had been used to having every favor in the world. And now more than ever, when it was too late, did she wish she had told Benucci, and asked him to save her. Her pride, wrapped in the heavy arms of John Abraham Fisher, crumbled to nothing.

“Now you’re mine,” he said, as if that were all he had ever wanted in life. How small her hand was in his. There were calluses on his fingers from pressing the strings of his violin, just as there had been on her father’s fingers, and her brother’s, and a red mark on the left side of his neck, almost like a blister, red and rough, where the violin rubbed against him. When he said, “You’re mine,” Anna touched the red spot with her finger. Fisher pressed her hand away. In the morning he made love to her again. She had slept restlessly and felt unwell, but she tried to be docile. Good, she thought, that she hated him, that she was disgusted and tightly wound: it would make him think she was a virgin. He did not know her secret and never would. The baby stayed quiet and small.

Sometime mid-morning Fichout and Bonbon, her pet dogs, came whining and scratching at the door, and she got up to let them in. This for some reason put Fisher into such a repressed fury that
he stormed out in his nightshirt and bare legs to dress himself in his own room, where he called for coffee and breakfast. After some time he told her it was because she had let the dogs in without first asking for his permission.

The next morning she did ask for permission, and he told her to let them be. She lay in bed listening to them whimper and then rose and put on her dressing gown and slippers. “What are you doing?” Fisher asked from behind the heavy canopy.

“I’m going,” she said, a little petulantly, “to tell them they can’t come in. They don’t understand.”

“Because they are senseless animals, my love.” But he lay back in bed and didn’t stop her.

Fisher liked to keep hold of her when they walked. He clasped her hand on his arm, or else touched her back or waist or shoulder, never losing contact, with an insistence, it seemed, born out of his love, his joy at their finally being consecrated together and at his future being secured. It was not lost on Anna, nor had it ever been, that John Fisher had been almost penniless when he first came to them—not being the sort of stooping ingratiating idiot, he said, who for his bread gave lessons to children or played in chamber orchestras. Now, with Anna’s income, so large she herself didn’t know what to do with it, he would want for nothing, would never be asked to stoop. No very great wonder he wanted to keep a hand on her always. She was in this respect like his violin, an instrument of his prestige and livelihood.

He hated to see her sing, being a jealous sort of husband, exactly the sort Aloysia Lange had recommended so long ago at Café Hugelmann. Could he not tell the difference between truth and a play? she asked him. He answered that he could not. Not since he’d met her.

His hand upon her came to feel like a mark—not native to her but imposed, applied, until it became part of her by attrition. It was his left hand, most often—the hand that made the melody. “If it were a play,” she’d once said to Mozart, the night he’d kissed her on
the terrace, “you could have marked me for life.” But kisses did not mark, she knew that now. Kisses left no trace. Hands marked. And it was no play. The story was done, or it had never been. The first time Fisher hurt her was in bed. He had wanted to punish her, he said, for making eyes at Benucci that evening in the opera. He seemed to take much pleasure in it. He was different, in that moment, than he often appeared during the day, when he could be exceedingly polite. He was the youngest of five children, he said, and had grown up with excesses of punishment.

Anna went down to her mother the next morning and told her she could not go on living with John Fisher. But her mother did not understand. She said that Anna must endeavor to make herself more pleasing and modest and good, and not be so fussy and delicate. If she turned Fisher out now, she said, it would be as much of a scandal as if she’d given birth to a bastard.

She listened to her mother. She tried to be pleasing. And the baby remained, stuck like a root, tenacious, quiet. If she had told Fisher about the baby, perhaps he would have been more gentle, but she could not tell him yet or he would know it was not his, because not enough time had passed. And then he might kill her. Every night she closed her eyes and prayed for the baby to stay small for as long as it could.

She tried to keep some lightness in her life and that was in music and singing. She attended parties and salons. She pretended she was the Anna of before, of Milan and Venice, La Storace, L’inglesina. She sought out moments of peace, treasured them more for how they had become so rare. She loved her dogs with all her heart. She went up to a tree by the main square and touched its trunk with her hands. Once she actually leaned her forehead upon it. The tree did not care about husbands and babies and scandals. It was just a tree. It stayed in the ground and did not care. The leaves played in the sky. The tree did not mind that she leaned her forehead upon its cool, solid trunk and pretended that it loved her. And when she was on stage, with the orchestra beneath her like a great ocean, her
voice still her voice, her breath stretching every corner of her lungs, the poor baby safe and snug inside her, she could forget everything else, and only be where she was, relaxed and alive. And though she was not quite herself, though she sometimes made mistakes, still the audiences laughed, still they clapped, because they expected her to sing well and could hardly tell the difference. And though, outside, with John, there must still be the “forever,” the oppression, and the terrible absurdity, here, in her music, in her life’s refuge, she had everything that was beautiful.

Benucci worried for her. She felt him watching her with a brooding frown. But she tried to tell him, with her actions and smiles, that she had taken courage, and he should not fear for her unhappiness. It would not do, she told herself firmly, to impose her griefs on him. She had not been raised to complain.

Joseph II assented with interest to Anna Fisher’s request for an audience. He had not spoken to her since before her wedding, and he congratulated her, upon her entrance into his study, on the happy occasion.

She seemed to have grown softer in the face since last he had seen her, and her eyes were darkened, as if with preoccupation. She had come to speak of her brother, a composer now living in England who wished to write an opera for her in Vienna. She seemed uncharacteristically nervous. Joseph leaned back on the rigid sofa—he preferred furniture of a certain hardness, to keep him awake during affairs of state—and crossed his long legs at the ankles. “It might look odd,” he told her, “to order an opera from a man I’ve not met and whose music I’ve never heard in my life.”

“I have an aria here,” said Anna gently. “I can play it for you.”

She crossed to the harpsichord. Concentrating too much, perhaps, on appearing composed, she swallowed to clear her throat. Her arms were soft, her head tilted slightly to one side, as if overbalanced
by the weight of her piled hair. He watched her breast expand and contract as she sang. An expression of pleasure, or repose, settled over her features, as though the act of singing were a comfort and relief to her. The voice was still lovely, but betrayed an edge of roughness or tiredness he had not often heard from her. He may only have noticed it because of her proximity. He found himself reflecting that this new catch or burr in the sound gave her voice somewhat more pathos.

He rose in an impulsive movement to turn the pages for her, and standing then beside her could not suppress the impulse, as if in a dream, to let his long, heavily ringed hand drift lightly down to rest on the top of her back. His index finger lay along the soft skin above her neckline, while his thumb curved up to touch the inclining nape of her neck. She stiffened, almost imperceptibly, and then he felt her relax again; seeming, as she did so, to press back against his palm. Letting go his breath he leaned over her to turn the next page, catching a whiff of her perfume—a Spanish sort of scent—and remaining close enough, ostensibly to examine the music, that her arm as it ranged the keyboard brushed once or twice against the pearly front of his trousers.

“Pretty,” he said when she was done, and leaned over her again to flip back through the pages. “Your brother writes well for you.”

“I’m not in good voice today,” she said. “I apologize.”

“May I?”

The girl made room and he sat beside her. He spread the manuscript before him, peering at its neatly lettered notation. “Yes, very pretty.” He hummed a few bars to his own accompaniment. “Skillfully done. Very tasteful. One can hardly detect his Britishness.”