The Vienna Melody (25 page)

He took the piece Mrs. Einried brought him, and she sat down opposite him while he ate it. The telephone rang. “I shall be going in about a quarter of an hour,” she said in reply to a question.

“Do you find that the lessons with my son are helpful?” she asked Hans.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. He had to cough and clear his throat, for he had swallowed a bit of cake the wrong way. “Excuse me,” he said apologetically.

“You're sweet,” she said. “Do you know that?”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, embarrassed.

“Has no one ever told you that?”

She took a cigarette from her ease. “Do you smoke?” she said, offering him one. “Of course you smoke,” she answered for him, and handed him a light. He swallowed the smoke and coughed again, much to his annoyance. Now she would believe it was his first cigarette! He inhaled, which was the most difficult thing to do, and he succeeded perfectly.

“Has no one really ever said that to you?” she asked with a laugh. “Here is an ashtray.”

Now he had knocked the ashes off on the cake! “I don't think so,” he stammered.

“Another little piece?”

“No, thank you very much, Mrs. Einried.”

“Do you like to go to the theater?”

“Very much.”

‘‘Too bad! Had I known that I should have got two tickets for this afternoon.”

“Oh, no, thank you so much.” Wrong again. He wanted to say he liked it this way better. How do you say things like that? They smoked.

“Have you a sweetheart?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don't make such a hypocritical face! Surely you are in love with someone. Does she love you too?”

She had come close to him and was stroking his hair the way she did her son's. She stood so near that her disconcerting perfume enveloped him. His heart pounded madly. Would he dare do what he had often dreamed of: take her hand, hold it for a second, and kiss her fingertips? He suddenly blushed deeply, for he feared she had guessed what was in his mind. She would box his ears, he thought. “Thanks for the cake. I must go now,” he decided to say.

“That's not true,” she told him. “If my son had been here you wouldn't have left for another hour.”

“But you're going out yourself. You just said so on the telephone, didn't you, Mrs. Einried?”

“Don't call me Mrs. Einried. Do you think I am as old as all that? How old do you think I am?”

“Thirty?” he ventured.

“You
are
sweet! A little older than that! In any case, I'm not going out.”

Her hand still rested on his head. Now she slipped the other over his cheek, held his face fast between them, leaned over, and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

His heart beat so that for a second he saw nothing.

“Did you like that?”

He nodded with bated breath. Looking up to her, he gathered courage. He took her hand and touched it with his lips.

She laughed. “How gallant we are!”

Now she's making fun of me, he suspected with horror.

But she had gently raised him from his seat. Her mouth was in front of his mouth, “Kiss me,” she said. She did say it. There was no mistake. Never in his life had he been so proud.

Except for his mother, he had never kissed a woman. When she discovers this she will laugh at me, he thought, swaying between ecstasy and fear.

He kissed her.

“We can be seen here,” she said, and went into the next room. The door was open.

Embarrassment overwhelmed him. He was to discover the secret towards which he had been impelled by an unspeakable curiosity, by an impulse growing more excited and restless with every day and every night, the more impenetrably it was guarded by grown-ups.

 

 

With eyes sharpened by disillusion Henriette saw instantly what had happened. In this regard too she and Franz had disagreed when she had told him it was madness to let a boy remain so innocent. But with persistent stubbornness, and apparently backed up by Otto Eberhard, he had maintained that in questions of education he would once and for all not allow himself to be influenced. It was bad enough that he had let her talk him into sending Hans to the liberal Francis Joseph Gymnasium instead of the Kalksburg Institute where little Hermann was; there at least boys were trained in strict Catholic and loyal monarchist traditions to be good Austrians and not the nervous, sophisticated weaklings of the Hegelgasse School. The fruits of a liberal upbringing were in raw enough evidence in her case! It had done no good for her to try to prove to him that she had been brought up not in the liberal way but much more in the grotesque secretiveness which had left her unequipped with any knowledge right up to her marriage and had almost cost her her life. But Franz's mind was no longer open to arguments. Since he had found out that she had betrayed him, all his confidence in her had been destroyed. Every other word was a hidden reproach. And every third was: “Don't think I am going to let you make a laughing stock of me any longer!” Nevertheless, he shied away from the idea of a divorce. The spirit of the house, she realized only too clearly, had triumphed over her own.

“Where have you been so long?” she asked her eldest child. She was in the same room where he was born. But since that time she had refurbished with Secession Era furniture, which had followed the Makart fashion and seemed more modern to her. But the mirror was the same, and she sat for hours before it, gazing into it and manipulating her heavy chestnut hair with two long-handled tortoiseshell brushes. Sophie had done the same years earlier down in her ground floor apartment, and even she was only following the example of Empress Elizabeth. Along Hentiette's parting there was a narrow streak of gray. She knew that it was becoming, yet, with her undiminished predilection for romantic expressions, she called it the beginning of the end. “You are fifteen minutes late!” she said to Hans.

She saw him in her mirror. The overgrown youth, who resembled her except for his father's long upper lip on which a fuzzy growth had begun to appear, smiled uncertainly. “We did a few algebra problems,” he explained. “We have mathematics on Monday.”

“Don't lie!” she said. “Why don't you come near me?”

She sensed the embarrassment with which he took a few steps towards her. Then she noticed the strange perfume. “You have been with a woman. Shame!”
Why do I say “Shame!”? she thought. I did not expect anything different. And I had promised myself that I would make it easy for him.

Hans looked at his mother. She was no older than Eugenie. Perhaps even younger. He flushed.

“Don't look at me like that! Who is she?”

“I was at Einried's, Mother.”

“Sit down. There's no sense in lying. Who was she? A woman from the street?

“No!” he denied, giving himself away so that there was no longer any retreat possible. “I can't tell you!” he added.

How strange that nothing helps even when you see it coming. When it comes it hurts just the same. “Very well, then don't tell me,” she said with an effort.

“Are you angry?” he asked.

She shook her head. It was hard to speak. If she had let herself go she would have said, “Yes! Angry! Until now you have belonged to me. You are the boy who for so long never said a word. You are the boy who for so long was fond of me.” You cannot count on your children, her father had said recently, although he was the last person to have any cause to make such remarks.
You cannot count on your children
, she repeated to herself.
After this person someone else will steal you, for an hour or for a night. And in three or four years someone will steal you for life. What shall I be to you then? To the thief you will say: Just a moment! I must rush over and say hello to my mother! And you really will do it in a rush, in five minutes in and out of the door, and your conscience will be as light as a feather afterwards! She brushed away violently. That is why one's hair gets white!

“No, I'm not angry,” she said. “I only want you to remain decent.” She broke off. What is the use? she thought. Children don't do what you tell them.

“Watch out that your father—I mean, it would be better if your father doesn't ask you any questions. He would not take it as easily is I do.” With a tired gesture she laid the brushes down. “Run along now,” she said.

He leaned over her hand to kiss it. “There's no one like you,” he said. He knew that even that was not expressed as it should be, hut he hoped that she would feel what he meant to say.

“Who knows?” she answered, snatching her hand away brusquely and pressing her fingertips to her temples.

Why is it wrong?
he thought.

“Herr Hoflieferant!” was the greeting of the senior master, Professor Miklau, to Franz, whom he had asked to come for a consultation. “I am afraid that your son Hans will not come to any very good end. There is no doubt
(non dubitandum quin)
that he has always been a poor scholar. But he is also an enemy of good morals, a fact which, as his final examinations draw near, opens up more serious prospects. From the very first day of school, when my colleague Herr Rusetter was obliged to reprimand him for being improperly clothed, your son has been an element of lack of discipline. He has tendencies to exaggerated outbursts of feelings, yes, and as soon as any opposition is shown him he flares up in the most headstrong way. Now, in addition to his unenviable school record, he has developed an almost more deplorable private way of life. Every step he takes is in violation of our code of discipline. He smokes; he frequents, according to positive evidence, various coffee houses. He reads ghastly books; one of them, an indecent piece of obscenity by a local writer, Schnitzler, which he was reading recently in class, I confiscated. His other private reading is equally unsatisfactory. He reads unsuitable plays by Ibsen, and the even coarser plays of a certain Strindberg. Nor is that all.
Quousque tandem abutere
,
Catilina
,
patientia nostra
! The young creature has a mistress! Here is the proof of that, which I found in the confiscated book, and, God knows, that is where it belongs! She must be some woman from the dregs of the people who is not ashamed to use such expressions, and to misspell them too!”

He handed Franz a blue note. It was signed with the letter E, smelled vaguely of lilies-of-the-valley, thanked him for some flowers, and fixed a rendezvous. She addressed him as, “My young squire!” The last line said, “I know it is madness to love you and you will make me suffer for it. But I do love you!”

Franz's rage, which flared instantly when the senior master began to speak, was now turned from the teacher to his son. First it was the teacher he found insufferable. Having been a poor scholar himself, he had never been able to abide the whole profession. Also he was annoyed at being given unsolicited advice. Had Hans been weak in Latin or mathematics he could have forgiven him. But that he was involved in obscenities roused his ire. “I'll settle the boy,” he said with decision. “May I keep the letter?” It was given to him.

As he did not want Henriette to find out anything about it—she only magnified things, and the boy got it from her anyway—he made an appointment for Hans to come to his private office in the Wiedner Hauptstrasse.

“You've got yourself in a pretty state!” he began as Hans stood before him.

Just as at the time of the Count Traun affair, Hans had the feeling that there was no difference between his father and Professor Miklau except that, in the meantime, he had learned to look at his father with other eyes. In the infinite number of occasions when he had witnessed differences of opinion between his parents he was always blindly partisan on his mother's side. His mother was the superior one; a hundred times cleverer than his father, a thousand times more interesting. To her, the children meant a great deal; to him, practically nothing. He had put Franziska and Hermann into boarding schools from which they came home at Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and the long vacation. Moreover, Franziska even spent most of her long summer vacation at Sacre Coeur. As for Martha Monica, the youngest of them, whom Hans absolutely adored, he seemed to hate her. To his own questions his father answered regularly, “You don't understand that yet.” The very mention of “progress” made him see red. Hans had never seen him read a book. When a Christian Socialist by the name of Bielohlawek called Tolstoy “an old nincompoop” in the Vienna Town Council, Papa had said, “He's absolutely right. It's all humanitarian slop.” He had no respect for anything under one hundred years old, and what he called “education” was training for extreme old age. Papa was no friend. He was a superior officer.

“What do you mean?” Hans asked. His very tone should have indicated to his father that he no longer had a boy with whom to deal.

But Franz had an application before him in which the C. Alt firm was requesting a patent from the Vienna Patent Office “for a new set of pedal keys applied to grand pianofortes for sounding certain bass notes with the feet.” The typewriter had left the middle bar in each letter ƒ unclear, so that it looked almost like a
t.
Confound these typewriters, anyway! How much more impressive, personal, and finer the old type of elaborate handwriting had been. The Emperor was quite right in requiring that all public papers were to be written as usual in longhand.

Having reinforced the middle bar in the ƒ's with his pen, Franz reread the sheet. It dealt with an invention of his own, no epoch-making one, to be sure, but one of solid worth and importance to the tradition of the firm and following on in their march of improvements. He had improved on an invention of Pierre Erard, as his grandfather had on one of Christofori.

“Don't beat about the bush,” he said, throwing down his pen. Opening his crocodile leather wallet, he drew out the blue note.