Longing (37 page)

“I fell asleep.”

“Yes.”

“I won't have you sneaking off as usual before…”

“Yes?”

“Before I show you out.”

She stood and picked up the lamp from the table next to her chair and walked him to the stairs. He went down before her on the narrow stairway and when he reached the bottom looked back up at her. She seemed to be floating down to him on the light from her lamp, slowly as he waited until the light reached him and climbed down his body, causing him to open his arms to receive it and to receive her into them.

He held her for a moment as she stood on the last stair, his cheek against her neck and half his face hidden in her hair, before he lifted her down and put his mouth to hers and felt her lips open as he had never been able to imagine they would. Her hand not holding the lamp came around behind him and, in a fist, pressed into his spine, pulled him against her, as his own hands touched her neck, her shoulders, grasped the halves of her taut and slender back, which rose and fell with the same quick breaths he felt escape into his mouth.

When finally he drew his lips away from hers and looked into her face, her eyes were closed. He could feel her trembling, almost violently, and was afraid she might fall, and so he held her against him until her body ceased to move at all.

There they stood, silent and inseparable, until, without either of them knowing how, he found himself at home sitting at his piano writing the word innig on a sheet of music paper with one hand while the other sounded out the music itself, and she found herself with her father beside her in the carriage on the way to Zwickau.
*

*
The baton had first been used by Danile Türk, who became so excited over his innovative implement of command that he often inadvertently accompanied the music with a shattering of glass in the chandelier that hung without sufficient clearance above his head in the concert hall in Halle. In 1798, Joseph Haydn had used a baton when conducting
The Creation
, and Ludwig Spohr, who turned Clara's pages in Kassel in 1832, had tried unsuccessfully to popularize the baton in 1825. But it was Mendelssohn who succeeded in placing the baton in the hand of virtually every conductor once he had revealed it to his Gewandhaus musicians and their audiences. He and Hector Berlioz exchanged batons, Berlioz's accompanied by a letter so heavily influenced by his enthusiastic reading of
The Last of the Mohicans
that he addressed Mendelssohn as Great Chief, referred to their batons as tomahawks, and denigrated squaws and palefaces for their love of more ornate weapons than Mendelssohn's sleek whalebone rod and Berlioz's own oak stick.

*
Three years later he replaced this finale with a Rondo in 2/4. He dedicated the piece to Henriette Voigt, who had recently died at the age of twenty-eight of the same disease, consumption, that had claimed the life of her great love, Ludwig Schunke, exactly two weeks shy of his twenty-fourth birthday.

*
Innig
was a notation Schumann would often thereafter put on his music. It means both
inward
and
intimate
. It was while attaching it to this second of his
Davidbündlertänze
that he had what he described to Clara as “marriage thoughts,” which he went on to say “originated in the most joyous excitement I can ever recall. If I was ever happy at the piano, it was while composing these.”

Dresden

FEBRUARY 7, 1836

Union
.

Robert Schumann

When Robert learned from his brother Eduard on February 4 that their mother had died in Zwickau, at the age of seventy, he locked himself in his room. He would speak to no one, not even Wilhelm Ulex, who, while he could not imagine the reason for his friend's withdrawal, accepted it as further evidence that Robert's genius isolated him from the world and that without such isolation his art would suffer. Why else would Robert make his best friend suffer the humiliation of living with a veritable ghost, unseen and untouched?—if not unheard, for there continued the sound of the piano, interrupted only by the sound of weeping.

It was not until another letter arrived on February 6 that Wilhelm was able to engage Robert in the flesh.

“There's a letter for you,” he yelled through Robert's door and, he hoped, over the sound of the piano.

No response.

“It's a letter from Fräulein Wieck.”

The piano ceased. The door opened. Robert stood before him with his hand outstretched. He looked, as he often did when he was composing, haggard and almost maniacally distracted. But there seemed, as well, a weight atop him, crushing him in upon himself, whereas his music customarily seemed to shred him into a dozen weightless strips of airy, vulnerable being.

Wilhelm gave him the letter, which Robert placed flat in one hand while with a tip of the index finger of the other he tested the seal.

“Intact,” he pronounced. Then he made that same hand into a fist and brought it down with such force that the seal shattered.

“Outtact,” he announced.

He read the letter to himself as Wilhelm stood there, witnessing what appeared to be an instantaneous and nearly total transformation of Robert's physical being. The weight was lifted. The red eyes turned blue again. Even his clothes seemed to rearrange themselves into an at least casual presentability.

Robert reached out and pulled Wilhelm into his arms. Wilhelm realized that the letter, whatever its other magical powers, had not succeeded in providing Robert with either a shave or a bath.

“We're off to Dresden,” said Robert, which pleased Wilhelm, for Robert, as eager as he appeared to have Wilhelm live with him, had never taken him anywhere beyond the homes and taverns of Leipzig.

But Wilhelm's pleasure was short-lived. Once they reached Dresden, it was into Clara's arms that Robert disappeared and Wilhelm realized he had been, as the term was used to indicate a decoy lover, a beard.

It was not that Robert didn't trust Clara. It was her father whom he doubted. Her letter—her wonderful, liberating, quite possibly life-saving letter—said that her father was leaving Dresden on business the next day. Her unspoken meaning was clear:
Come to me
.

Wieck had taken her to Dresden the moment he became convinced that Robert would not marry Ernestine von Fricken. Once again, Dresden had become his place of her imprisonment. But this time her father was determined to guard her himself. And this is exactly what he had done, without a word passing between his daughter and Schumann, so that when he was called away on business, the lure of increased income overcame the diminishing fear that, should he not be there, Robert Schumann might magically appear and continue to distract his daughter from her music and from a better life than a dissolute lunatic like Schumann could ever provide.

“Now I understand,” said Wilhelm as they rode together in the coach toward Dresden. “I had never seen you so distraught. Imagine, to find that your beloved, if that indeed is what she is, has been cruelly torn from—”

“My mother died,” Robert interrupted his friend.

“Your dear, sweet mother!” Wilhelm was instantly crestfallen. While he had never been invited to Zwickau to meet Frau Schumann, he was aware of Robert's love for her and hers for him, as evidenced by the money she sent him so he could have his laundry done (not to mention the laundry she did for him when he visited her) and buy good beer. “When?”

“Four days ago.”

“Four days? Are you not—”

“No.”

“—going to the funeral?”

“No. How could you even ask? Clearly, you don't know me as well as Ludwig did. He would never even imagine I would go to my mother's funeral.”

“Your own mother…?”

Robert put his hand on Wilhelm's arm. “That's all right. I wouldn't go to your mother's funeral either.”

Nor, he had the kindness not to add, to your own.

He and Wilhelm took a shared room in Dresden, where, before he had unpacked or bathed, Robert wrote a note to Clara and had the hotel deliver it to her at the home of the Reissigers, friends with whom she and her father were staying. He asked that the deliverer wait for a response.

Since he did not trust that Wieck had indeed departed, he felt the need to write in code, should his note be intercepted:

Dear Fräulein Wieck:

A package has arrived for you at the Hotel David. As in the last days of Pompeii, it is ready to erupt. Please be so kind as to attend to its retrieval.

Yours forever,

Herr Einsamkeit
*

Too nervous to do anything else as he waited for a reply, Robert finally took a bath, keeping Wilhelm next to him so he might have someone to talk to in his nervousness, though usually he liked to bathe unaccompanied, because he preferred silence to talk and because he was always hearing music in his head; and what better place to hear it and try to remember it than the bath and thus to overcome his humiliating need to be at the piano while composing?

Robert was still bathing when he heard a knocking on a door down the hall.

“That must be the hotel boy with her response,” he said to Wilhelm. “Hurry. But if he's gone and has slipped it under the door, be sure to bring it here immediately.”

Wilhelm returned empty-handed, shaking his head. Robert looked at him forlornly. “I should have known—her father is still in Dresden. He must have intercepted my note. I should never have made reference to the Bulwer-Lytton. She
told
me he thought it was a most inappropriate gift. He even told her that it was evidence that I understood nothing whatsoever about her. He—”

“It was the hotel
girl,”
interrupted Wilhelm.

“What hotel girl?”

“The girl who's come to see you at your hotel.”

“Girl?”

“It's Clara herself,” Wilhelm finally confessed, at once delighted over his little tease and saddened over his inevitable displacement.

“Well, don't let her stand out in the hallway,” said Robert, rising naked and still soap-streaked out of the dirty water. “Take her into the room. And then, if you don't mind, gather your things and go down to the hotel desk to book yourself your own room.”

“You are done with me?”

Robert nodded gravely.

“I have served my purpose?”

“Not entirely.”

“Shall I seduce her for you, then?” said Wilhelm bitterly.

“A towel, please,” answered Robert, stepping out of the bathtub.

When Robert went to Clara, she was sitting at the desk in his room, a pen in her hand and paper before her.

“I trust I did not take so long dressing that you are writing me a note of farewell that had I found it here would have broken my heart.”

She did not turn around. She merely went on writing, her back to him, so that he could see her shoulders work against the fabric of her dress. He was reminded of when he had come upon her sharpening knives at her return from Paris nearly four years ago. But then, he remembered, he had felt she was like a stranger. And now, she seemed to belong exactly where she was.

When she had finished her writing with the flourish of a signature, she turned to him, a great smile upon her pretty, joyous face, and said, “Here,” holding out to him the sheet of paper.

Dear Herr Einsamkeit:

In answer to your kind and welcome letter, I offer myself as antidote to your loneliness. Please be so kind as to accept this gift with your customary kindness and passion.

Yours beyond forever,

Fräulein Verloren und Verlobt
*

He did not yet dare take her in his arms. He had done so several times after their kiss on the stairway, but only for a moment, for another kiss or two, and never with the depth or meaning of their first kiss, as if they knew that no stolen kiss could be as passionate as the first.

“I can't believe I'm here,” she said.

“Here? Dresden? My hotel? My room in my hotel? Or here on Earth?”

“Speaking of your hotel,” she said, “I had to follow the boy who brought me Herr Einsamkeit's message. I knew there was no Hotel David, but I knew that David was you and that I would find you wherever you would expect to have my response to your little letter. But I didn't know what hotel that would be.”

“Why didn't you simply ask the boy where he worked? Or better yet, accompany him back?”

“Because then he would know I was here with you. And I want no one to know I'm here with you.”

“Wilhelm knows.”

“Will he betray us?”

“To your father, you mean?”

“Papa does not want us to be together at all.”

“He will.”

“Betray us?”

“No one will betray us. I meant your father will want us to be together.”

“When?”

“When he knows how I feel about you.”

“And how is that?”

“Shall I show you?”

She rose from the chair and came to stand near him. “It took me so long to learn to talk that I perhaps value words overmuch. So rather than—”

“Are you saying you would prefer me to tell you than show you how I feel about you?”

“For the moment, yes.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “So?” she prompted.

“I don't know what to say.”

“You might start by telling me that you adore me.”

“Oh, I do.”

“There,” she said, so encouragingly as to give him the impression he had actually said it first.

“And that you have always adored me.”

“Always,” he emphasized.

“And that you always will adore me.”

“Forever.”

“And that you like the way I look.”

“Of course I do.”

“And how do I look?”

“How?”

“Yes, how do I look to you?”

“I think you are the most beautiful creature on earth.”

“Creature?”