Vienna Nocturne (16 page)

She kissed him. “Just a little peaky—slept poorly. There was too much in my head, too much music.”

“I’ve got three tunes in my head at the moment,” Michael said. “At the same time. Isn’t your husband coming?”

She hesitated, then gave him a rueful look. “He’s in a bad mood today. He said he doesn’t like Mozart. I don’t know what got into him.”

“Doesn’t like Mozart?” Michael raised his brows. “Well, then. Each to his own. I’m glad to have you to myself.”

“Let’s walk,” Anna declared. “I want to be in the sunshine.”

He drew back. “In this frost?”

She shook her head. “I need to breathe, Michael.”

“If you say so,” he said doubtfully. “Got your muff? I’ll just send my carriage on its way, then. You’re sure you’re not going to freeze yourself into a faint?”

“Don’t be so motherly,” she said. “I never walk anymore—doesn’t that seem unnatural? We used to walk everywhere in Italy.”

“Only poor people walk. With no shoes on.”

“I don’t move,” she exclaimed, flinging out her arms. “I want to breathe cold air and walk for hours.”

His face darkened. He was going to say something about Fisher. If he came out with it directly she was not sure how she would answer. At last he asked, “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem wan, Anna.”

Her answer came without thinking, like her smile. It was the truth. “Mozart will cheer me. Come.”

She finished fastening her boots and they went out. There was snow on the street and some sun shone weakly through the clouds. She strode along as if there was some marvelous treasure around the corner—she made herself imagine there was—with the air harsh in her throat and her eyes stinging from the vigorous chill.
Michael Kelly, used to taking an easy pace in everything he did, found himself having to hurry to keep up with her. At the Mozarts’ everyone was in high spirits, loud and raucous, a kind of madness in the air. Some of his instrumentalist friends were there, a flautist and a bassoonist, and they played something, and everyone sang bawdy songs, and there was dancing, and Mozart beat Michael at billiards. Then he recited some nonsense verse and Anna laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes. Then there was another game of billiards and she browsed the books in his library—Ovid, Molière.

“Do you like to read?” asked Constanze. “My husband carries a book in his pocket wherever he goes.”

“I used to,” said Anna. She touched a hand nervously to her face. She was sure Constanze could tell that she was pregnant. “I’m so busy now.”

“So am I,” Constanze said. She smiled.

Then there was shouting from the billiards room and they rejoined the rest of the gathering. Anna could almost imagine that this was all there was—that she lived here, too, in this jovial house, with these warm, boisterous friends.

She found other pockets of respite and they kept her in sound mind, and reminded her that all was not lost, although sometimes it seemed so. On nights she wasn’t singing, she watched the theater troupe perform Shakespeare in German, sometimes with Fisher but more often alone. She liked the comedies because they did not require anything of her. She could remain calm through even the most fraught of narratives, knowing it would end well. She understood, more and more, why people loved her opera buffa—why they found reassurance there, in that she always played the same stock role; in that the plots, the music, were all the same.

One needed sameness. One needed a feeling of order and reliability—of knowing that what was prophesied would come to pass, that those who were meant to love would love, that evil and good would be accounted for. There was reassurance in repetition, in familiar sounds and faces, as there had been from infancy. It was
like walking slowly with her mother in the Stephansplatz, a large square in the center of the city, to the same rhythm of the same music in her head, past people and shops she had seen every day, knowing that the sky would not buckle, the earth not heave up its contents, the young soldier on his horse not give her a bruised knee or a bloody nose because she had moved in a way that seemed to him wanton.

As she was walking one morning—too early; she had hardly slept—Anna saw a tall, familiar figure stooping over some vegetables on display in an alley.

“Lidia,” she said.

The other girl turned in surprise. “Oh, my dear one.” She embraced Anna with all her strength.

They had not seen each other in some time. Anna had always been too engaged. “I thought I’d buy some bread,” she explained now to Lidia.

Lidia looked her up and down. “Don’t you have someone to do that for you? Why are you alone? In your condition?”

“Oh, yes, but sometimes they get the wrong kind, and I do like the fresh air. The walking is good for me.”

Lidia observed that the air was not so fresh in town as in the country and it was not proper for her to be out alone. “You must have been up late singing last night,” she added. “You should be in bed.”

“I don’t need as much sleep as I used to,” Anna said. “Since my marriage. I’m entirely different now. It’s extraordinary. You must try it, Lidia. You must marry.”

“Only a widower with ten children would want me.”

“Don’t say that,” Anna said. “I swear you are lovelier than when I met you.” She pressed her arms together. “I’m only up early this morning because of some uneasiness in my humors.”

“I never knew you to have uneasy humors,” Lidia said.

“That I did not, because I had my dear Lidia with me.”

Lidia looked at the ground, as though shrouding some pain. And there, in that flicker of pain, Anna saw the concern, the reproof, the solicitude that was every day in the eyes of her friends, and it came to her that Lidia knew. Someone had told her, or she had overheard some rumor. Madame Fisher’s wicked husband was beating her.

“Tell me,” Lidia said. “Would you like me to come back to you? To be your companion again?”

“Oh,” Anna laughed, a laugh like a glaze, smoothing her entire aspect, “and face the wrath of my mother?”

“I don’t think she would have anything to object to now that you’re wed. I doubt she’d even notice me. I’d be quiet as a mouse.”

Anna swayed on her feet. Last night after she’d sung, someone had given her a small silver watch. She wore the watch now around her neck. Beneath her cloak and scarf it was warm against her skin, where first it had been icy cold. She could feel the high tick of its heartbeat against her own, dividing the day into time, measuring out her breaths. It must be nearly eight. The sky, twilight-blue when she’d left the house, was bright and clear. How many sunrises she had missed. Last night while she’d slept the watch had ticked in its smooth purse on the table where a few weeks ago her husband had dropped her.

“I would have to ask John if you could come back,” she said.

Lidia cocked her head. “Does he bother with your servants?”

Anna touched the base of her throat. “Please don’t pity me. In truth I am fortunate. When I think of my life, of all I’ve done, all
I’ve loved, it amazes me. Look, it makes me cry. I’ve always been so weak and softhearted.”

“
Open
hearted, my dear one,” Lidia exclaimed.

“And you mustn’t—you must simply ignore John. Don’t argue with him or he won’t have you. He’s very moody. He loves me in mountains and chasms. It’s because of his genius—all geniuses are moody. And love isn’t worth anything without storms and tempests, you know! But when he loves me best in the world it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever known or felt and you mustn’t get in the way of that, Lidia, only be as you are and just for me so that I might feel your calm, dear loving presence again when I’m lonely. I do get lonely, even now that I’m married and so fearfully busy. You were my only friend. My only true friend. Sometimes when I’m alone in the morning in bed and there’s no Lidia to draw the curtains and wake me, the emptiness—the silence in my head, you see—I get so frightened! You can’t believe what it’s like!”

They walked on together, Anna leaning on the other girl’s arm and talking as if all this could make up for their time apart, could disperse the isolation she felt, even here, with dear Lidia once again obediently listening and murmuring at her side, and all the words she could spill not doing anything to vanquish the silence, the reproach, the loneliness, of those horrifying mornings.

It occurred to Anna early one morning, John sleeping beside her, that her husband might as well have been miles away, farther away than Stephen, dead like her father, or unborn like her child, for all that she was in any degree close to him. She sat up and looked at his square face and the thought came to her that this was no less true of anyone else she loved or knew; that it wasn’t just because John was her husband or because he mistreated her. If he had not been her husband, if he had been kind, she would have been alone in the world all the same.

Rising from the bed she went to the window and looked outside. The glass was thick and dirty. She could see nothing but a few shadowy figures who might have been ghosts. She felt as though she were regarding her own death.

“What are you doing?” John asked from the bed.

She turned. “I was thinking how alone I am.”

His face in the dim light was unreadable. “You’re not alone. I’m
right here. I may be an old man but I’m certainly here. Come to bed. You have to sing later.”

With a rustle of bedclothes he was asleep again. He spoke like that now and then—as if he cared for her. Anna looked at him for a few minutes. Then quietly she put on her dressing gown, the one with the peacocks and the French lace, and bound back her hair in a loose braid. She went to her writing desk and triggered the secret panel that contained her letters and treasures. In the gray light of morning she read Rauzzini’s letter again. The part about how he believed in her, how she was remarkable. She took out the phoenix pin and turned it in her hands and pressed it to her cheek, as she had done a hundred times. John Fisher stirred and kept sleeping. The room brightened with morning. Anna took out some paper and her inkwell and wrote a letter to the emperor and had Lidia send it before her husband arose.

It was wonderful to have Lidia home. She was not afraid of Fisher and she gave Anna courage.

Joseph II received petitioners and meted out petty justice every morning at ten. Each appointment took between three and five minutes and was also attended by a number of secretaries and ministers. There was no music at these proceedings, although it might have made them pleasanter.

John Fisher entered the audience room in his finest clothes, with his violin tucked under his arm and the swaybacked bow dangling from his hand as if in lieu of a sword. It had snowed this morning and his boots were wet. There was something tender and melancholy about seeing him with the instrument under his arm, an instrument built so finely that it was as if the wood had been melted and suspended into shape.