Chamber Music (22 page)

The light was up when I climbed out of the bed, dressed, and walked to the village to tell Dr. Holmes (“It must be certified,” she had told me when Robert died) about Anna.

I felt nothing at first but the cold of desertion. There would be no second resurrection for me, no third chance at life. I knew that. One is granted one great love if one is fortunate—and after that? Death while one is still in life. Endurance, waiting, survival, the slow, inexorable growth of a sense of loss and cruel grief until it floods the mind and drowns what is left of the self.

So it ended. It is an irony of my life that I have lived on for more than forty-five years, as the world would measure it. But to me the living time of my life came to an end long ago. Until Anna came, I had waited, prepared to be born. Life came, with her: the feeling that reached in to the bone and warmed it, the hours that were filled instead of passed through, the days I remember still, that swim in my memory, glow in my mind like phosphorescent fish. With her death, life for me was ended, but I lived on, a dead-live, half-woman, once again resembling the one who had lived so long with Robert, restored to the lonely solitary I had been during all the years of my marriage.

So. I have put it all down. I look back at the years since Anna's death and find it hard to remember what has filled the void. What have I done? I've waited—a long, still, terrible wait—to die. I've gone on living at the Farm because there was no other place I wanted to be or had to go.

Now and then I used to walk to the village—now a city, I must remember to say—to the library. I've read books, played music, listened to recordings, cleaned this house and then cleaned it again before it had a chance to grow dirty, sewn and repaired and darned, tended my garden—Anna's garden, at first—which now my visiting nurse tells me is weeds and dandelions. I've written a thousand letters, I would guess. Each day even now, I answer letters that come to me from musicologists, biographers, and historians questioning me about my husband, and about his friends in Europe, some of whom became very well known. Most of them are now dead.

Every day, summer and winter, I used to climb the narrow corridor between the house and the high knoll, to the graves, Anna's grave where she is buried to the side and below the great headstone that will be mine soon. I put a small stone at her head, with a cross and
DUTY AND LOVE
on it, and her beloved name and her dates. I used to take two bunches of flowers each week, one for display to place on Robert's grave, so that it would be seen by visitors, creating the illusion of a loving wife who faithfully remembered her husband all these years.

The other was a smaller bunch, a few wild flowers I would find as I walked to the knoll: meadowsweet and black-eyed Susans, violets and Indian paint-brush. Unshowy flowers for a discreet love, for my unremarked love who lies cold and silent, waiting, I believe, for me.

A new group, inheritors of the original Foundation, has written to me. It seems that the government of the United States has a plan to endow the arts. One of the places they are looking at is our old Foundation, the long-since abandoned Maclaren Community. Of course, all the land is long gone. We could not rebuild here on the original site without dislocating thirty homeowners and the outbuildings of the City of Saratoga street-repairing department.

But Lester Lenox's grandson, Alexander, writes to me, from the Saratoga bank. I put his whole letter into this account:

We are asked to present the National Endowment for the Arts with a complete proposal. Part of that proposal
—
the bank's part
—
will consist of a statement of the present condition of the Robert Glencoe Maclaren trust, as administered by this bank in conjunction with you. Our assumption is that, if the proposal for the revival of the Community should be accepted, upon your death you would assign to the Foundation your rights to the estate
.

A second part of the proposal will consist of a history of the Community. Of course, no one is better able to tell that story than you, Mrs. Maclaren. Are you willing? The committee from Saratoga working on the proposal (for of course we feel it would much benefit the city if we could re establish it here) can provide you with a secretary who would come to the Farm if you would like to dictate the history, as you remember it. Here at the bank we have all the books and financial records. Should your memory of the facts fail at any point; we can check such matters as names, dates, and financial details for you
.

But I have already told this: I rejected the offer to dictate to a secretary, deciding I would celebrate my ninetieth year with a final effort to donate to paper my inner life together with the externals already known. I would put it down in my own hand as a way, I think, of signifying, attesting to the truth by the witness of my handwriting as well as the force of my own words.

And the facts? I read back over this lengthy statement and I find I have included too few facts. But then, what are facts but the catafalque upon which one hangs all the memories of an emotional life, the sticking points of one's memories out of which events have long since fallen, leaving only what seems real: disappointments, despairs, rare intense joys, and even rarer loves. And finally, for us all, the omnipresent aloneness of our lives.

We are all alone and lonely, wrote that novelist Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself. And so it was for me, Caroline Newby, raised by a lonely, heartbroken mother, taught to play the piano by the wordless Mrs. Seton, affianced to a prodigy who first loved his mother and then a man, once and fatally (I have now come to believe) before his marriage to me, a wife caught in a joyless, dutiful marriage, and freed from it at last by the deadly journey of infection through the rivers of her husband's blood. And then, after discovering love, unlikely and unsuspected, in a woman who dispelled her loneliness, left behind by her death, more alone than ever before, deserted by the single point of light, the one glowing coal, in a long, cold, dark life.

The Foundation will say: What you have managed to remember is perhaps only partial and personal, biased truth. You have not given us Robert's truth. Surely it would have differed from yours. I would reply: True. He never wrote about his life. Or Eric's truth, Churchill's. Even Della Fox's and Virginia Maclaren's and my mother's. The others. Anna's.

But, at the last, I think, the historian's view always superimposes itself upon history. Out of a vast amount of available facts from an infinite acreage he chooses what fits his limited and single vision and writes one story. In this case, the story is mine alone. It is all I am able to know.

At the last (I say this often, I notice, because at my age everything points to the end) I know this has been useful, not to the Foundation or to Washington, but to me. Writing it, I have freed myself. I have gathered in what I value and what I have hated. What is here, after all, but a few persons indistinguishable from their inevitable tragedies, a few hopes and visions, many fears, a long waiting, and a profound, extraordinary love that has lasted in memory far longer than most living passions.

Asked to write the history of a man and an institution, I have managed to produce merely a sketch of the chamber of one heart. Like Robert, I see, I am a miniaturist.

In ninety years I have made no significant journeys, traveled nowhere except into the interior of a single spirit, my own. Conceived in the age of the Centennial's bentwood sofa, I lived an almost empty life into an overcrowded and hectic century. Like Professor Watkins' migratory birds, I was the one who flew not a thousand miles but a few feet.

The wisteria Anna planted now blooms outside my bedroom window. Her memory for me has grown, reached up, covered, and supported the rest of my life. During the cold winter Saratoga nights when I lie alone and afraid in the great bed, I remember her way of protecting our trees from insects, her assurance that their brittle little skewered carcasses would enrich the roots. I still cannot believe in a higher purpose or a kindly Providence that will unite us. So I wait for the time when my remains will join hers to serve the useful soil.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chamber Music
is fiction, not biography. Its three major characters are based, vaguely, upon persons who once were alive, but most of the details of their lives are conjecture and invention.

Some real persons, musicians, teachers, and actresses of the early twentieth century, appear in these pages in somewhat changed chronology. The Maclaren Community is imaginary and bears no relation to places it may resemble.

Two such real places, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, gave me working time and space for this book. I thank them both.

About the Author

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including
Fifty Days of Solitude
,
Life in a Day
,
The Ladies
, and
Chamber Music
, has been literary editor of the
New Republic
, a nonfiction columnist for the
New York Times Book Review
, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1979 by Doris Grumbach

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7670-1

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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