Vienna Nocturne (20 page)

“I’m having a notion,” he said to the countess. He sipped his wine and ate one of her bonbons. “I’m having a notion that it may be time to call Dr. Mesmer back to Vienna.”

“Really, Your Excellency?” asked the countess. “How thrilling that would be for all of us—all who have these concerns, these weaknesses, about which the regular doctors are at a loss.”

“Not
my
doctors,” the emperor amended with a smile. The countess bowed her head and murmured something sorrowful. “But even they,” the emperor continued, “have not the smallest notion how to make Mademoiselle Storace sing again. The poor girl has been bled nearly of her last drop, and doused in ice water, and seawater, and made to take all manner of powders, and been stood on her head and worked like a bellows, and all for what? Mesmer could be here in a few weeks. He might be just the thing for the Storace girl. He’s good with nervous young ladies.”

“Oh, yes,” said the countess. “She has always seemed one to me who possesses more than the usual degree of the ether, as Dr. Mesmer calls it, which flows through all our breath and veins. I have felt a remarkable attraction to her on every occasion I’ve seen her—a pull almost physical in its strength. I grieve to know she’s ill.”

“Indeed,” the emperor mused. “She does exert a certain pull, as you say.”

“As do all great artists,” said the countess with a smile. “They have that which I do not! How I envy them, Your Excellency. I do
believe this is why I hold these salons, that I might see the great ones at close hand and absorb some of their radiance—their magnetism.” She paused and let her gaze rest upon a guttering candelabra. “Yet it cannot be but that the force of the glow, the radiance—the white brilliance of that ether in them, so much thicker and hotter than our own—is also more subject to knots and blockages and clogging. Their risk is greater—they toy with all the passions and the profoundest beauties of the world, unbalance their humors, leave themselves raw to stoppages and despair. Do not you think so? And poor Madame Storace has had more to provoke her than even the calmest citizen could tolerate.”

“Perhaps, madam. But it’s just as well it died, before she could get sentimental. A single woman in my court is better off without such encumbrances. Far better off. She should be glad.”

“Oh, but sir,” interjected the countess with all her sweet modesty, “we women are weaker willed than you give us credit. All infants and children melt our hearts, and those—why, those we’ve carried
under
our hearts, of our own flesh—Your Excellency, the animal magnetism in such a case could not be felt more strongly. Oh, no, she felt the child’s death. I am sure she felt it. I am sure she feels it now. It is little wonder she is ill-disposed for singing.”

The birds outside her windows reminded Anna of Tuscan songbirds. They had the same quality of rejoicing, of bathing in the April sky, recalling the gaiety of her former life. She would have liked to see more clearly what sorts of birds they were, but the windows were soldered shut and the glass obscured with dust.

One could not think of heavier matters than these. One must shut everything out. Still, the tears would squeeze from her eyes, songbirds being more dangerous than they first appeared—more dangerous even than music. Songbirds recalled love, and children, and cheer, and of all these was Anna bereft.

Broad afternoon and still she lay in bed. The new doctor had come in the morning and bled her and told her to eat more, go walking in the Prater. She did wish to go walking in the Prater—it took her breath away for wishing. She had been like this for a month. All her limbs and muscles cried out for use. But even to go outside, to bathe and dress and step into the harsh and foreign air, meant an impossible and terrifying exertion. Sometimes it seemed
difficult even to lift her arm. She could lie on her left side for hours, wishing to turn to the right, but not doing so because it seemed too hard.

She leaked tears without warning or volition, as she’d once leaked milk. But mostly she was dry as bone, imprisoned inside herself. She felt her heart battering against the stony ribs. The first doctor had said there was black bile there, strangling her heart. When she remembered the girl she had once been, the girl who shimmered and danced like poplar leaves in the morning, whose only business had been to cheer others, and who now could barely speak or wish to move, how she pitied herself; how she became mired in this pity. There had never been anyone so sorrowful or weak or pitiable as she. “I did everything right,” she whispered to herself. She could speak now. But the voice was not hers. She renounced it.

She had done everything right. She had been cheerful and good. Misfortune had never upset her, never so completely as this. Even with John she had still been able to sing.

Stephen blamed himself for writing the aria that had torn her throat, an aria like a booby trap into which he’d poured all his hopes and somehow left buried Sleeping Beauty’s spindle. They both remembered how Stephen had carried on that night, as if his opera were more important than she was, and he said he would never forgive himself.

For the first weeks she had communicated with a notebook and a pencil hung about her neck. She had not realized until then how much she had been used to talk. And since no one much cared to converse in that way, to a scribbling mute, and since she did not feel easy with others, she had simply stopped trying. And the more she stayed in bed the harder it was to conceive of leaving it. Lidia begged her to. She pleaded, ordered, and prayed. She took away the pencil and the paper, once it was clear that Anna could speak without harming herself. But still Anna said as little as possible, and only in the feeblest whisper. She still felt a pain. It was a distinct
little pain. Just there. Her voice was a stained glass window and someone had thrown a stone through it. Rough air whistled around the shards.

If she could not sing she could not live. Like the poor baby had not lived. She had wished to hold it, after it had been born, but she had not been able to lift her arms, somehow, and then they had taken it away and Anna had turned her head and done nothing. And she could never tell Benucci now. The quail’s egg had burst, poisoned her throat, filled her lungs with slime and broken shells.

Better not to think of all that. She needn’t live if she couldn’t sing. Without singing she was nothing, had nothing, no personhood, no purpose, no knowledge, no mastery, nothing with which to make anyone happy. She was without use. And the longer she was without use, the longer she did nothing, the more pitiable she became. One took these things for granted, voices, babies, then they burst and vanished. A knife at her throat and slime dripping from her ribs and the poor heart battering itself to death inside. The poor, poor baby. For two weeks they hadn’t told her. For two weeks she had thought it living, imagined its smile, its black eyes and soft cheeks and waving hands. And all that time it had been already dead.

She was lying on her side, staring at the wall, as was her custom, when she heard some music coming from downstairs. She turned her head and frowned. Stephen, playing the piano, trying to draw her out. Well, she wouldn’t be drawn. Music was only painful to her now and he knew it. Of course he had to play for his composition and to keep his fingers limber, but somehow she knew on this day that he was doing it to draw her out. Every now and then he went through periods of trying to revive and cheer her, bringing little gifts or stories, coming in on tiptoe. Unspoken between them was the old truth that her life and art were more important than his own, that she provided income for all of them, that the entire population of Vienna awaited with impatience the news of her recovery or fall. She had become, in her distress, something of a legend. It
was said she was in danger of killing herself. There were rumors she had murdered her baby.

She was indeed transformed. Stripped of all that had located her in the world, exposed to her essence, an essence which turned out to be very little at all, she had nothing left to hold on to.

Still frowning slightly, she turned onto her back and closed her eyes. But she could not help hearing the music that drifted so sweetly from downstairs. It was impossible to ignore. There were no other sounds and she had nothing to read or write or do. So she listened. If she smiled, it was only at her brother’s folly, to think he could succeed in drawing her out. If she breathed more deeply, it was not from pleasure, however diverting the melody and countermelody—however long, it seemed, since she’d heard its like.

Then somehow she found she had climbed out of bed, by way of a footstool, and put on her peacock dressing gown and slippers. Her hair hung down her back. She saw the mirror and pinched her cheeks to brighten them. But no matter. She could look like this, or worse than this, forever, because she did not have to go on stage anymore, not for all her life. The music downstairs was blowing wide the curtains, letting in a smell of jasmine. One could not help but move toward it. Her legs were unsteady but somehow the knife in her heart had stopped its twisting—had gone quite still. If she moved with exquisite care, she could hardly feel it at all.

Grasping the railing like a drunken sailor she picked her way down the staircase. Apart from the piano, the house was wholly silent. Her mother must have been somewhere with her sewing or correspondence, and Lidia and the rest of the staff wrapped in their naps and domesticities. They had grown accustomed to keeping their own councils, during Anna’s long illness.

As she emerged into the narrow hallway, the music became immediately louder and clearer and she knew then that it was not her brother. Stephen could not play like this. Not ever. Not for all the striving and study in the world.

Mozart, of course.

The door was open. It was the parlor and music room, filled with sun. She had never seen so much sun, never in Vienna. It came through the windows and sparked the dust on the ceramic shepherdesses on the mantelpiece. Even the big, heavy flowers in their vases seem to strain again for sun and belie their state of sustained dying. She caught herself at the doorway, remembering her thinness, her ashen skin, her mussed hair, the peacocks. She could not recall when last she had washed. The room billowed with music and sunlight. She could almost lean against it.

Mozart glanced at her with a calm smile, as if she were a rare nocturnal animal he had coaxed to the edge of a meadow. He seemed as if in a meditation, as one deeply caught up, in this music which he did not write down, or read from, but tossed into the air like unstrung beads.

She stood in the doorway. It was as much as she could bear to stand there. But after five minutes, perhaps more, she was too tired to stand, and too enraptured to leave. She went to the chaise-longue and carefully laid herself upon it, while he continued to play without interruption.

When at last he paused, though with the appearance—his hands still on the keys—as if he would go on, Anna stirred and asked softly where was her brother.

Mozart said that he had come to give Stephen a composition lesson, but Stephen had been called away, and had invited Mozart, while he was gone, to try out the beautiful piano. Mozart was sorry to have disturbed her. He hadn’t known anyone was at home.

This could not have been true. He must have known she was home, and practically bedridden. But she indicated, with a shake of her head, a hand on her heart, how profoundly undisturbed she had been.

In her absorption with her misery she had nearly forgotten him. His brightness, his inquisitiveness, his art. She pleaded with him
softly to play something more. He gave a slight smile, shyly, and said there was nothing he loved better than playing for her. And for another several minutes, she did not know how long, he obliged her.

She lay back with her eyes closed. If a few tears escaped from beneath her eyelids they were not the thick, remorseless tears of her imprisonment but soft, sweet tears. Tears bewildered by the peace, the gentleness, the clarity in which she now lay and which in her inconsolable suffering she had so perplexingly forgotten. Then he stopped. He said, hesitantly, that he missed her singing and could not rest or compose. He missed everything about her. He begged her to come back to them. But she shook her head and said she could not sing, she feared she was dying.

“Sing for me,” he said, “and I’ll kiss your hands a thousand times.”

She gave him a dazed look. So this was why he was here. Not to play for her but to get her to sing. She felt again the slime, the heaviness. He wasn’t a singer. He couldn’t know. If his piano was out of tune, if a string on his violin snapped in two, he could call a craftsman, fix the damaged part himself, or commission a new instrument. Even if he were to lose the functioning of his hands, the ailment would be visible, the cause readily apprehended by a good physician. Not so with the broken singer. As easy to diagnose in her a tumor that had been planted but not grown. She could not. She protested it feebly and firmly. Her will had left her with her song. It would be unbearable to have him hear her voice laboring and wobbling like a beggar’s cart of rags and tins. She would not subject him to it—not humiliate herself before his ears.