The Complete Stories (85 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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Mahler went back to reading the Old Testament. He was thinking of
Das Lied von der Erde
though he had not yet written it.
Gropius stayed overnight and Alma drove him to his train to Berlin in the morning.
Gropius, holding his hat, said he was sorry for the trouble he had caused. Then he said, “When shall we meet again?”
“Never,” said Alma. “I am a happy woman. Please stay away from my life.”
“Never is
never
”
Gropius said none but the brave deserves the fair.
He got into the train and sent her a worshipful telegram from every station it stopped at.
Gustav, that night, collapsed outside Alma’s bedroom. The candle he was holding fell to the floor and the house almost went up in flames.
Alma got him to bed; she put Gropius out of her mind, where he remained until years later, long after Mahler’s death, when she felt she could no longer stand Oskar Kokoschka’s wild fantasies and burning desires.
 
 
Mahler, leaning out of his window at the Hotel Majestic above Central Park, in New York City, heard “boom” in the street below. The boom was for a dead fireman in a horse-drawn funeral cortege.
Mahler wrote the muffled drumbeat into his Tenth Symphony: BOOM!
 
 
“I know I am lost if I go any further with the present confusion in my life.”—Kokoschka
“May I see you?” he asked.
Alma loved men of genius.
He was worldly, sensuous. He needed love and money.
He came to visit and they went to bed. She woke him and said it was time to go home. When he left her he walked till dawn.
He signed her into his name: Alma Oskar Kokoschka.
“Read this letter in the evening.”
He bought the Paris newspapers to check on the weather when she was there.
“Alma, I passed your house at one o’clock and could have cried out in anger because you see the others and leave me in the dirty street.”
The women in his paintings resemble Alma.
Remembering Gustav and fearing that she was pregnant by Oskar, Alma worried about any Jew who might see her pregnant.
In view of the Jungfrau he painted her on a balcony.
Oskar’s mother railed against his obsession. “She is like a highsociety mistress, a whore without garters.”
“Shut your black mouth,” he told her.
Alma feared pregnancy. It was wrong to have had a child out of wedlock. Maria had died because Alma had become pregnant before her marriage to Mahler.
Oskar’s mother threatened to shoot her.
Kokoschka went to Alma’s house and found his mother walking around with a gun in her purse.
“Give it here.”
She crooked her finger and said, “Boom.”
“Those who sin will be punished,” Alma said one night to Mahler’s ghost.
Oskar: “I am not allowed to see you every day because you want to keep alive the memory of this Jew who is so foreign to me.”
“I must have you for my wife or else my talent will perish miserably.”
She said she would marry him only after he had created a masterwork.
“Alma, please don’t send me any money. I don’t want it.”
Die Windsbraut
is Oskar’s painting of Alma and him. She sleeps with her head on his shoulder. He gazes into the distance.
“I dreamed that Gustav was conducting. I was sitting near him and heard the music but it clearly displeased me.”
“How far behind me my life with Mahler seems.”
“I need my crazy mystique of the artist and from this I always manage to fill my head. The whole world is ultimately a dream that turns bad.”
In Kokoschka’s painting at Semmering, Alma ascends to heaven in fiery immolation. Oskar is in hell, surrounded by sexy fat serpents.
Alma was pregnant. “She will marry me now”: Kokoschka.
Gustav’s death mask arrived in the mail. Alma unpacked it and hung it on the wall. She entered the clinic for an abortion.
Austria declared war on Serbia. Alma wrote in her diary: “I imagine I have caused the whole upheaval.”
“I would like to break free from Oskar.”
“God punished me by sending this man into my life.”
“I would give up every man on earth for music.”
“Wagner means more to me than anyone. His time will come again.”
Mrs. Kokoschka picked up her clay pot and dropped it on the floor. She withdrew a blood-red string of beads she was holding for Kokoschka. Alma had given them to him as a memento of his love for her.
“Yesterday evening I ran away from Oskar.”
“What of the Jewish question
now
? They need help and direction —brains and feeling from those of us who are Christians.”
She wrote to Gropius.
“I will get him quickly. I feel this is, or will become, something important to me.”
Walter’s birthday fell on the day Mahler had died.
Alma went to see him. “Finally in the course of an hour he fell in love with me. We were where the wine and good food raised our spirits. I went to the train with him where love overpowered him so that he dragged me onto the moving train, and come what might I had no choice but to travel to Hanover with him.”
Walter had the manners of a husband. He was talented, handsome, an Aryan. He was crazily jealous of Kokoschka. Alma married him.
“So married, so free, and yet so bound.”
“I wanted to make my own music, or music about which I felt deeply, because Gustav’s was foreign to me.”
“Jews have given us spirit but have eaten our hearts.”
“My husband means nothing to me anymore. Walter has come too late.”
She had met Franz Werfel. “Werfel is a rather fat Jew with full lips and watery almond eyes. He says: ‘How can I be happy when there is someone who is suffering?’ which I have heard verbatim from another egocentric, Gustav Mahler.”
 
 
Alma married Werfel. He was a Jew who looked like a Jew, yet passable. She had had half a Jew in Mahler, and Werfel made the other half. They had a lot to learn, these Jews. They needed a Christian quality. Gropius was a true Aryan, a fine gentleman, passionate in his way, though she had never loved him. She had given him up for Werfel. She often thought of Kokoschka but hated him. “He wants to annihilate me.”
Werfel needed her. He lived in dirty rooms, his clothes uncared for, cigarette butts on the floor. He needed a wife. He already had fathered a son Gropius thought was his child. Walter guessed that out and departed. He had tried to keep their daughter, Manon, but Alma had
fought him for her. Gropius retreated like a gentleman. Manon died and was buried next to her half sister, Maria Mahler.
Alma lived with Franz Werfel through her best days. He wrote
Verdi
,
The Song of Bernadette
, and
The Star of the Unborn
. He made money and they spent it freely. The only really bad time was when they were trying to find their way out of Europe as the Nazis sought them in Spain. Then an American diplomat assisted them and they got out of Portugal on a Portuguese ship and afterwards lived in Beverly Hills, U.S.A. Alma was feeling happy again.
But there is no beating out illness and bad health. Werfel died in his sixties. Alma did not attend his funeral though the guests had assembled and were awaiting her. Bruno Walter thrice played a Schubert impromptu as they waited for Alma to appear, but she had had it with funerals of three husbands. She was drinking Benedictine and never got to Werfel’s funeral. She often felt that Kokoschka had been her best lover.
 
 
“Mahler had a long white face. He sat with his coat buttoned up to his ears. He looked like death masquerading as a monk. I told him this, hoping to exorcise my ghostly pangs of dread.”
“Why do I fancy I am free when my character contracts me like a prison?”: Mahler.
“Where is
my
truth?”: Alma.
“He was always stopping on a walk to feel his pulse. I had always known his heart was diseased.”
“The Jews are at once an unprecedented danger and the greatest good luck to humanity.”
“I see Hitler as a genuine German idealist, something that is unthinkable to Jews.”
“But fortunately he was stupid.”
“Oh, my God, my God, why do you so love evil?”
“Werfel believed in the world revolution through Bolshevism. I believed that Fascism would solve the problems of the world.”
Alma wore long necklaces with earrings and used dark lipstick. She drank Benedictine and ate little.
“Death is a contagious disease. That is the reason,” Alma wrote in her diary, “why I will not place a photograph of a living person next to someone who is dead.”
She thought she had met Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria on a mountaintop and he asked Alma to bear his child.
One night Mahler’s ghost appeared, momentarily freezing her fingers.
“Alma, aren’t you yet moved by my classically beautiful music? One can hear eternity in it.”
“How can one love Mahler if she best loves Wagner?”
“My time will come.”
Mahler diminished as he faded.
Alma felt he had handled her badly in her youth.
Yet there were moments she thought she still loved Mahler. She pictured him in a cemetery surrounded by his grave.
Alma favored cremation.
She was eighty-five when she died in 1964, older than King Lear.
 
 
Alma redeemed.
1984-85
 
THE NATURAL
 
THE ASSISTANT
 
THE MAGIC BARREL
 
A NEW LIFE
 
IDIOTS FIRST
 
THE FIXER
 
A MALAMUD READER
 
(
edited and introduced by Philip Rahv)
 
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
 
THE TENANTS
 
REMBRANDT’S HAT
 
DUBIN’S LIVES
 
GOD’S GRACE
 
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD
 
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
 
THE COMPLETE STORIES
IF
Idiots First,
Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963
MB
The Magic Barrel
, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958
MR
A Malamud Reader
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967
PF
Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969
PUS
The People and Uncollected Stories
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989
RH
Rembrandt’s Hat,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973
SBM
The Stories of Bernard Malamud
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983
TF
Two Fables
: “The Jewbird” and “Talking Horse,” limited edition, Banyan
Press, Bennington College, 1978
 
 
ALMA REDEEMED.
Commentary
, July 1984.
AN APOLOGY.
Commentary
, November 1957.
ANGEL LEVINE.
Commentary
, December 1955. MB, SBM.
ARMISTICE. Written in Washington, D.C., in 1940; first appearance in PUS.
BEHOLD THE KEY.
Commentary
, May 1958. MB.
BENEFIT PERFORMANCE.
Threshold,
February 1943. PUS.
THE BILL.
Commentary
, April 1951. MB, SBM.
BLACK IS MY FAVORITE COLOR.
The Reporter
, July 18, 1963. IF, MR, SBM.
A CHOICE OF PROFESSION.
Commentary
, September 1963. IF.
A CONFESSION OF MURDER. Written in 1952; opening chapter of abandoned novel,
The Man Nobody Could Lift.
PUS.
THE COST OF LIVING.
Harper’s Bazaar
, March 1950. IF, SBM.
THE DEATH OF ME.
World Review,
April 1951. IF, SBM.
THE ELEVATOR.
Paris Review
, Fall 1989. Written in Italy in 1957. PUS.
A EXORCISM.
Harper’s
, December 1968. Revised by the author for SBM but not included by author; in PUS.
THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS.
Partisan Review
, September-October 1950. MB, MR, SBM.
THE GERMAN REFUGEE.
Saturday Evening Post
, September 14, 1963. Title in the magazine was “The Refugee.” IF, MR, SBM.
THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS.
American Mercury
, January 1953. MB, SBM.
GLASS BLOWER OF VENICE. First published in PF, 1969.
GOD’S WRATH.
The Atlantic,
February 1972. SBM.
THE GROCERY STORE. Written in 1943, first published in PUS.
IDIOTS FIRST.
Commentary
, December 1961. IF, SBM, MR.
IN KEW GARDENS.
Partisan Review
, double (anniversary) issue, Fall 1984-Winter 1985. PUS.
IN RETIREMENT.
The Atlantic
, March 1973. RH, SBM.
THE JEWBIRD.
The Reporter
, April 11, 1963. IF, MR, SBM, TF.
THE LADY OF THE LAKE. First published in MB, 1958.
THE LAST MOHICAN.
Partisan Review
, Spring 1958. MB, MR, PF, SBM.
THE LETTER.
Esquire
, August 1972. RH, SBM.
LIFE IS BETTER THAN DEATH.
Esquire
, May 1963. IF, SBM.
THE LITERARY LIFE OF LABAN GOLDMAN.
Assembly
, November 1943. PUS.
THE LOAN.
Commentary
, July 1952. MB, SBM.
A LOST GRAVE.
Esquire,
May 1985. PUS.
THE magic BARREL.
Partisan Review
, November 1954. MB, MR, SBM.
THE MAID’S SHOES.
Partisan Review
, Winter 1959. IF, MR, SBM.
MAN IN THE DRAWER.
The Atlantic
, April 1968. RH, SBM.
THE MODEL.
The Atlantic
, August 1983. SBM.
THE MOURNERS.
Discovery
, January 1955. MB, MR, SBM.
MY SON THE MURDERER.
Esquire
, November 1968. RH, SBM.
NAKED NUDE.
Playboy
, August 1963. IF, PF.
NOTES FROM A LADY AT A DINNER PARTY.
Harper’s
, February 1975. RH.
PICTURES OF THE ARTIST.
The Atlantic,
December 1968. PF.
A PIMP’S REVENGE.
Playboy
, 1968. PF.
THE PLACE IS DIFFERENT NOW.
American Prefaces
, Spring 1943. PUS.
THE PRISON.
Commentary
, September 1950. MB.
REMBRANDT’S HAT.
The New Yorker,
March 17, 1973. RH, SBM.
RIDING PANTS. Written in 1953; first published in PUS.
THE SILVER CROWN,
Playboy,
December 1972. RH, SBM.
SPRING GRAIN. Written in 1942; first published in PUS.
STEADY CUSTOMER.
New Threshold
, August 1943. First book publication here.
STILL LIFE.
Partisan Review
, Winter 1962. IF, PF.
A SUMMER’S READING.
The New Yorker,
September 22, 1956. MB.
SUPPOSE A WEDDING.
New Statesman
, February 8, 1963. IF.
TAKE PITY.
America
, September 25, 1956. MB, MR, SBM.
TALKING HORSE.
The Atlantic
, August 1972. RH, SBM, TF.
A WIG.
The Atlantic,
January 1980. PUS.
ZORA’S NOISE.
GQ
(
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
), January 1985. PUS.

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