The Brahms Deception (28 page)

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Authors: Louise Marley

BOOK: The Brahms Deception
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She tightened her hold around his neck, and buried her face against his shoulder. “I have been all of those things for so long! Why can I not change now?”
He didn't respond to her embrace, didn't pull her closer or lay his cheek against her hair as she had hoped he would. As he would have done a week ago. His voice rumbled in her ear, and it was full of doubt and confusion. “Your children,” he said. “Marie will be so glad to have you home again. And Julie, and Felix and the rest.”
Part of Frederica knew she should pull back, should try to regain her dignity, but anxiety drove her. And need. “I want to go with
you,
Hannes! I want to go to Hamburg! Just for a little longer—oh, please! Take me home with you!” She burst into noisy tears.
The tears seemed to make a difference. He dug in his pocket for an enormous white handkerchief, and made soothing noises. He smoothed her hair and dabbed at her wet cheeks. She made herself stop, fearful that tears would blotch her face and make her lips swell. Certainly in Frederica tears were ugly, distorting her features, reddening her eyelids and her nose. She didn't know what weeping might do to Clara's face.
When she had composed herself, Hannes got up from the bench and held out his hand to her. “Come to dinner, Clara. We will talk. You'll drink a glass of wine, and you'll feel more like yourself after you've eaten.”
Obediently, she rose. She smoothed the wings of her hair and resettled the combs. She followed him into the kitchen, where Nuncia was beginning to set out a lovely meal of mussels in red sauce and a salad of basil and tomato and mozzarella. She stood beside the table, gazing at the simmering pot, while Hannes found a bottle of wine and uncorked it. She accepted the glass he poured for her, and sipped it.
She said nothing more, for the moment, but she was not done. She would not return to Berlin and a pack of demanding children. She would not risk trying to maintain Clara's concert schedule, playing from memory reams of music she had never studied, encountering people she had never met but was supposed to recognize.
She would go to Hamburg with Hannes. He couldn't refuse her. And when he saw how much help she could be to him—how advanced her musical ideas, how quick her musical solutions—he would never want to part with her.
She would make it work. The strength of her mind was a match for anyone's. She would always get what she wanted, and no one could stand in her way.
Not even her beloved Hannes.
16
The time lag seemed the more pointless because he hadn't actually transferred. Kristian could not have made it to his room without Chiara. It seemed he blinked once, in the clinic, and when he blinked again they were at the top of the stairs. There was a low murmur from down the hall as Max let Braunstein into her room and settled her with the sedative Chiara had prescribed. Kristian turned in his own doorway to speak to Max, and then, it seemed, he was already in bed, in tee shirt and shorts, and Chiara was bringing him a capsule and a glass of water.
She had drawn the blinds against the rain-filtered afternoon light. The room was cool and pleasantly dim. Kristian lay back on his pillow after swallowing the pill. Chiara bent over him to smooth the blankets up to his shoulders, and he caught a whiff of some light scent. Her shampoo, perhaps, or skin lotion. He sniffed, and gave her a hazy grin. “You smell good, Doctor,” he said. “Like gardenias.”
“No,” she said softly, with a small smile. “Gardenias are too spicy. It is lavender.”
“Lavender. Delicious.” He turned on his side, and his eyelids began to droop. Without thinking, he caught her hand and held it. “I wish you could stay. The time lag—I'm losing track of what's real.”
“I am real,” she said. “And I will be here when you wake up.” She touched his forehead with her free hand, smoothing back his hair. “You should feel better then.”
He squeezed her fingers, and he thought perhaps she returned the pressure of his, just a little. “Chiara,” he said sleepily. “I should call Erika. Or did I already do that?”
“You will call her in the morning. Sleep now.”
“Did I—did we have lunch together?”
“We did.”
“Did I—” He yawned, and the chaos in his head seemed to swell, to overcome him. “Did I kiss you good-bye, Catherine?” he heard himself say, and then groaned, releasing her hand, covering his eyes. “No, not Catherine. Clara?”
“No, no,” she said, patting the coverlet. “I am Chiara, but it doesn't matter. It will all make sense tomorrow.”
He heard her leave, heard her small feet descend the staircase with their swift, determined rhythm. He rolled over again, and gave himself up to sleep.
The sensation of Chiara's cool, firm hand was still with him when he began to dream.
He dreamed of the day he first walked into the voice studio to accompany a new student, a soprano. She was late—he was to learn Catherine was always late—and he spent ten minutes chatting with the voice teacher before she finally burst through the studio door in a whirl of long dark hair, a display of stunning legs beneath a very short skirt, and a flash of dark almond eyes as she begged their forgiveness. She tossed a stack of music on the piano, and threw her backpack onto a chair. “I'm ready!” she declared breathlessly. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. The bus was late.”
“Strange, Miss Clark,” her voice teacher said. “Your buses are almost always late.”
Catherine flashed a wide white smile, saying, “It's the oddest thing, isn't it?” and laughing.
Kristian lost his heart in an instant. It was the essence of his dream, that rush of emotion that swallowed him whole, as if he had plunged into a lake of feeling he hadn't known was there. He was nearly to drown in it, but he didn't know that then.
Catherine dazzled him. She wasn't traditionally beautiful, with her wide cheekbones and mouth, her thick eyebrows and those tilted eyes. It was more that she was so sure of herself, sure of her path in life, and of her importance. She was the pampered daughter in a large family of sons. Her voice was glorious, a big, clear soprano. If she was a bit sloppy about her technique, she was still always vibrant in her interpretations. She claimed Octavia Voss as her role model, and when her teacher remonstrated with her that Madame Voss's technique was the very model of classical refinement, a worthy successor to Garcia and Lamperti, Catherine flashed her grin and shrugged. “She knows what the music
means,
” she insisted. “That's what's important.”
Catherine was as sure of herself in bed as she was in the studio or on the stage. He dreamed of that now, remembering how she liked to make love in the daylight, how she teased him to skip his classes, put off his practice, neglect his dissertation. Kristian dreamed of their lovemaking, and then he dreamed of their trip to Boston, when she sat at the bar at Angel's for hours, listening to him play, laughing with Rosie, perching on a stool beside the piano to sing.
All of these images jumbled together in his time-lagged dream, glowing, persuasive, as if to enhance the contrast with the darkness to come. When the dream shifted, it was sudden, a new scene, a different time. Even the light had changed, exaggerating the change of seasons within and without. Catherine was walking away from him across Columbus Avenue, her long hair fluttering, the silken strands lifting in the autumn breeze. He called her name, and this time, in his dream, she stopped and turned to face him. He ran across the street to her, but when he reached the other side it was Clara Schumann waiting on the sidewalk. Catherine's short skirts had lengthened into Clara's morning dress, sweeping the pavement with its heavy hem, crowding the parking meters with its wide crinolines. She was as pale as fog, her great dark eyes mournful, her lips white. She put out her hand, but even as he grasped her icy fingers they slipped away from him, and he couldn't hold her. She sank down, her body dissolving, re-forming. She came to rest in a wheelchair, and he realized it was not Clara after all, but Erika. Erika said in a worried voice, “What was that song, Kris? The song about the girl on a swing? Why can't we remember?”
He knelt beside her chair to put his arms around her, and then found it was Chiara Belfiore he was embracing. She pushed him away, saying, “No, Kris. It is only the time lag.”
He startled awake. His eyelids felt gluey and uncomfortable, and he rubbed at them. He sat up, letting the coverlet fall away, peering around for a clock to see how long he had slept. He couldn't find the clock in the darkness. He fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table, and his fingers encountered the battered paperback Brahms biography. He vaguely remembered tossing it there—when? Not yesterday, or the day before.
“God,” Kristian muttered. “What the hell day is it?” His fingers finally found the lamp, and he switched it on.
He took the book into his lap, pushing his hair back out of his eyes with his free hand. The cover held the familiar picture of Brahms with the flowing white beard and those haunted eyes, the image everyone seemed to have of him. Kristian ran his fingers over it, thinking of the handsome young man in Castagno, with his smooth chin and thick blond hair. There was a portrait of the youthful Brahms somewhere in this book, when the Master was not much older than he himself. About the age, in fact, he must have been in 1861.
Kristian flipped through the pages, looking for it. A section title caught his eye, and he stopped. He read the passage, then read it again. He had read it before, of course. He had read this entire book three times, expecting to transfer to observe Brahms, preparing to discover the meaning of
p dolce
and finish his dissertation. The book was full of his notes and bars of yellow highlighting dates and places and compositions. But this section, and its title, didn't feel right. He remembered it, but it felt out of place, as if it had fallen into the book from some other source—it felt a bit as he felt right now, not knowing the day or even the year.
The section was called “Mentors and Mysteries.” He read:
Robert and Clara Schumann referred to their protégé, Johannes Brahms, as “the young eagle.” They were devoted friends until the end of Robert's life. Brahms frequently visited Robert in the asylum when he was being cared for there, and during Robert's illness he assisted Robert's wife with her children and her domestic arrangements. After Robert's death, he often visited his widow and offered her support and comfort. The frequent correspondence between Brahms and Frau Schumann in those early years is preserved. It stops abruptly about five years after Robert's death. Clara Schumann had been an active concert artist all her life, beginning when she was only a child of nine years old, but in the summer of 1861 she abruptly disappeared from the public eye, canceling all her engagements, ceasing her efforts to edit and publish her husband's work. Rumors abounded that she had abandoned her family to move to Hamburg to be with Brahms. He never admitted it, and in fact refused ever to speak of Clara Schumann again after that time. Any letters which they may have exchanged are lost. All that is known for certain is that Clara Wieck Schumann died in obscurity and alone, abandoned by family and friends, at the age of about fifty. Conjecture holds that the Schumann family refused to allow her to be buried with her husband. The location of her grave site is lost to history.
Something about the paragraph made Kristian's heart ache. He couldn't think why. Surely he had known this for years, ever since he first fell in love with the ideal of Clara Schumann.
But why had he done that? Clara Schumann had cut her career short, abandoned her family in favor of a short-lived love affair, and died in disgrace. Why would he imagine himself to be in love with the memory of this woman?
He pressed his palms over his eyes, trying to think. He was having trouble knowing what was real and what was imagined. His dream had not helped, and he wished now he had refused Chiara's sleeping pill. He remembered Braunstein and the layering—surely that was real. He remembered Chiara holding his hand as he got into bed, or—had she gotten in with him, made love to him through a hot afternoon?
He groaned. Chiara. Was it Chiara he had dreamed of, or Catherine? Or—unaccountably—Clara Schumann, who turned her back on a blameless life, had ruined her reputation and abandoned her responsibilities, only to die in ignominy? God, his head ached.
It can't be right. Something has gone wrong.
He got up from the bed, and groped in his duffel for his cell phone. On unsteady legs, he staggered across to his bureau and the bottle of water there. He poured some, and sipped it thirstily while he waited for the phone to ring in Boston.
He steeled himself for the breezy message about the North Pole, but instead he heard “Hello?”
It was such a relief to hear her level, un-time-lagged voice that he could have shouted for joy. Or wept with exhaustion. He restrained himself. He still had no idea what time it was. “Rik!” he said hoarsely. “Thank God you're home!”
“Kris? What time is it there? Of course I'm home.”
“Rik, I'm sorry. I don't have any idea what time it is. I don't even know what day it is. Everything's so—” Words suddenly failed him, and he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think why he had called, what it was that was bothering him. Erika was the one he needed to talk to, he knew that, but—but why?
“Kris? Are you okay?”
He opened his eyes, and saw the Brahms biography with its broken spine, lying facedown in the jumble of his unmade bed. “Oh! Yes, yes, Rik, I'm okay. A bit time-lagged, but—”
“Time-lagged? Is that what you said?”
“It doesn't matter now. I'll be fine.” He reached for the book, and turned it over. “Rik, listen. Does this sound right to you?”
He read the paragraph. She said, “What's that from?” He told her, and she made him read it again. “I don't—something's wrong with that,” she said. “But I'm not sure what. It sounds familiar, as if I've always known this, but—”
“You once said I fell in love with Catherine because she looked like Clara Schumann,” Kristian said.
“I did, I guess.”
“But why would I—what would make me think about Clara Schumann that way?”
“Well, she wrote some very pretty music, didn't she? I seem to recall some songs—”
“Sure, her music. But why was she that important to me? Her career was so short. She's no more than a footnote in history, really. Robert Schumann's wife. Johannes Brahms's mistress. It makes no sense.”
“Kris, I don't understand what you're saying. I hardly know anything about her—nobody does, do they? Why are you asking?”
“I know it sounds strange. Sorry, Rik, I just—” He tossed the book aside, and crossed to the bureau to stare at himself in the round mirror above it. His face seemed unfamiliar to him, as if it had changed as he slept. What was it? His own face couldn't change!
Time lag. Nasty.
He gave his head a shake, and turned away from his reflection. “Never mind, Rik. Sorry to bother you.”
“Are you coming home soon?”
“I'll call you later, let you know my plans.”
“Kris—honey, you're sure you're okay?”
“I'm sure. Don't worry.”
She snorted a laugh, and he laughed, too. For a moment, he felt a bit better. Once they had said good-bye, though, and he clicked off his cell, his unease returned. He looked at his phone, and saw that the time was just after midnight. Erika must have just gotten home, and probably understood perfectly that he should be in bed. Asleep. He should try to sleep some more, he knew that, but he was pretty sure that was hopeless.

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