Chamber Music (16 page)

It grew later, the lamps burned low. It was almost ten o'clock. Anna countered my rolling literary sentences with her stepmother's wisdom about the best state in which to plant turnip seeds. “How?” I asked.

“You should be unclothed.”

“Unclothed? Why ever so?”

I thought she smiled, her brief, quickly erased, charming smile, but I could not be sure.

“It is quite sensible. If it is warm enough to be without any clothes it is then warm enough for the seed to be sown. I have heard it said that in one English county farmers sit naked upon the ground to plant their barley. This must be the same kind of test, don't you think?”

Naked
. It was a word I had seldom heard spoken aloud in those days, let alone acted upon. Even my own body I rarely saw without clothes, for I was accustomed to dropping my nightgown over my loosened stays and chemise before removing them, from habit, I suppose, because my mother had shown me how the act was properly performed.

But when my gentle friend Anna said
naked
, I had a startling, unaccustomed vision: of
her
, stripped of her gray shirtwaist dress, her pointed black leather high shoes, her gray stockings—everything. In a manner I do not believe I ever thought possible for one woman to want of another, I wanted to see her so,
naked
, to see her breasts I could only sense from their deceptively bound contours under her dress. For in those days women were beginning to bind themselves as flat as possible if they were especially full in that area. Immediately I suppressed this desire, put it away from me, telling myself my emotion was curiosity. It had been so long since I had been close to live flesh. Like a child, I thought, I miss being held, warmed, comforted, and touched by the softness of another. This need, for a woman, I could in no way comprehend. Yet it was there, in that curious moment.

But always, the living-dead existence of Robert ruled every hour of my life. I felt the weight of emptiness at the center of my being that nothing and no one had filled—since when? When had the small spark of passion left to me from my girlhood, the reaching out, which I suppose is what passion is, died in me who had hoped so ardently for so much in life? I had placed my emotional faith in music, in love, in the handsome young composer who walked with me in Boston Common. When did it all disappear? When had love died in my marriage and the long loneliness begun? In Virginia Maclaren's cold, dark-paneled rooms in Frankfurt? In that practice room in the Hoch Conservatory of Music? In my surreptitious reading of Churchill Weeks's love letters from Germany? Somewhere. Because it
was
dead, or absent, or dormant, until the moment Anna Baehr said
naked
one evening and stirred in my heart a vision, a strange, ineffable hope.

After Edward plowed the garden for her, Anna did her planting. It was all accomplished according to her eclectic learning. At one end of the plot was an old stone wall. Against it she planted fruit trees, which she said might be espaliered some day when they were larger. Around the base of each newly planted tree she wound strands of horsehair, obtained from the track stables down the road from us. She lectured to me: “Out of season is when one must obtain them. The hairs are in great demand by upholsterers for sofas and chairs.”

I was dubious about the efficacy of horsehair. My doubts met with Anna's usual, serious conviction: “Believe me. It will keep earwigs, slugs, and snails from the trees, because as they go up the stems from the ground they must pass over the points on the sharp hair. They will be mortally wounded.” I shuddered at the prospect of a border covered with sick and dying insects. Anna smiled. “You will not notice. Quickly their carcasses become part of the useful soil.”

In late April she waited, she said, for the waxing moon in order to plant the vegetable seeds. “Why?” I wanted to know. She was somewhat vague about her reasons but con vinced it had to be so, that in the periods of a new moon there is likely to be more rain. So, oddly enough, it happened. It rained every other day until the first sprouts appeared. She seemed pleased and smiled indulgently at my surprise.

One morning while we were changing Robert's great bed I noticed that the small bun she had always worn at the top of her head was gone, the ends of her long hair being held in place with large combs.

“Have you been cutting your hair?”

“Well, yes. I needed it. This week I will be planting beans.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. If you place human hair in the trench you have dug for the seeds it makes the bean stalks strong and tall.”

These were the natural oddities, the lore I came to accept as truth. I learned from Anna that ordinary refuse was to be cherished and used. She saved banana skins to be placed beneath the surface of the soil around our lilacs, which then, I must report, later flourished and bore flowers as never before in any year. Our tea leaves nourished the three climbing rose bushes at the side of the house. And stranger still: Robert's now unworn and outworn leather boots she would not allow me to put into the dustbin. I was permitted to throw away only the rubber soles and heels. “These you can have back. I will bury the uppers in the far end of the garden. When they rot they will enrich the soil.”

The garden flourished as Robert declined. By summer all the flesh was gone from his bones. Now he was inert and almost always asleep, and caring for him was somewhat easier. Except to remain beside him when occasionally he awakened, and the thrice-daily changing of his bed linen, there was little we could do for him. He could not eat. He lay still, like a stone, in the center of that great bed, a burden for Edward to lift so that Anna and I could roll clean sheets under him. Even his opened eyes seemed fixed, staring, paralyzed in their sockets. His scanty hair had turned completely white. “Only his heart,” said Dr. Holmes, who now came almost daily, “keeps him alive. It cannot be long now.”

On August 31, 1906, in the cool of the late afternoon, while Anna weeded in her garden and I dozed in my chair beside him, he died. He made no sound, there was no rattle of protest in his throat, no gesture of his hand seeking help. He died in his sleep, the newspaper reports said. But his sleep had been almost a year long: he had died long before. On that afternoon in August his heart stopped.

Anna discovered it when she came in from the garden, smelling of the tomato vines she had been tying up with scraps of our silk stockings. She woke me gently, pointing to the still form.

“He is—gone. You must send for Dr. Holmes. To certify.”

She knelt down at the side of the bed, crossed herself, and dropped her head in her hands. For the first time in my life I too knelt. I tried to pray for Robert, to say the childhood words to God that my mother had taught me:
hallowed be Thy name
…
Thy will be done
…
and forgive us
…
and lead us not into temptation
. … But nothing more than this rote would come, for (I feel I must now be honest) I could feel nothing as I looked at the still, white face of my poor husband but pity for his lost life, for his meager remains. And when I began to feel something, I realized it was pleasure at the closeness, the sun-warmed heat of Anna's soft skin, her arm against mine as we knelt together, the joy at being, for the first time in so long, adjacent to a glowing life.

I watched her as her lips moved. She had taken from her pocket a string of wooden beads. At that moment I wanted very much to be able to join in her worship, to find the proper words to say with her, to be united in her devotions. … It was impossible for me. The deep emotional freeze in which I had lived for so long, the ice age of my heart, would take a long time to melt, even beside the glowing flesh and warm heart of Anna Baehr.

From where I kneeled I could see, out of the long window of the drawing room, the edge of one of the climbing rose bushes. I thought irreverently, I remember, how efficacious the tea leaves had been. The bush was bursting with flowers which crowded each other against the panes of the french door.

The funeral was simple, but still rather grand because of the persons who came, so many eminent people from the world of music. Many walked up from the village, and others came long distances by motor and by train from New York, from Albany, and from as far away as Philadelphia and Washington. My old friend Elizabeth Pettigrew, now married, whom I hadn't seen in many years although we often corresponded with each other, traveled from Boston.

Robert was laid out in the music room, dressed in his old performance jacket with brown velvet lapels which he had not worn in a long time. The funeral service was conducted in our drawing room, now restored to its former appearance, by the Reverend Edmund Whitehall, an Episcopal minister from Saratoga Springs, who had not known my husband at all. Robert was strongly opposed to all churches, even refused commissions to write liturgical music, and would not have been happy with these high-church arrangements. But Father Whitehall had offered his services out of his long admiration, he claimed, for Robert's music, so I accepted his church's established service.

We had to send for dozens of camp chairs from the Grand Union Hotel to seat all the persons who came. The whole downstairs of the house was filled. Those at the greatest distance from the drawing room must have found it hard to hear the eulogy Father Whitehall delivered, but it was as well.

He had concocted it from newspaper clippings and a biographical article in the
Musical Courier
. I remember only a little of it—it went on very long—but I recall he reminded us of Rollo Walter Brown's phrase for Robert, “a listener to the winds.” He said that Robert had composed the greatest piano sonatas since Beethoven, that others had called him the equal to Grieg, and that, like Grieg, he was a miniaturist of great scope. He quoted to us Robert's remark: “I never listen to other people's music for fear of being influenced by it.” This the Reverend took to be a sign of Robert's great originality. He expanded upon it at some length.

Anna and I sat on chairs close to Robert's bier. We had been designated, together with Robert's brothers, Burns and Logan, the chief mourners. We both wore black dresses, and the brothers had wide black armbands sewn to their gray suits. What, who were they mourning? I wondered. They had not seen or communicated with Robert in years.

Everyone told me they admired the way I bore my grief. “My dear Mrs. Maclaren,” said the Reverend, “you are holding up so well.” I felt saddened, but it was buried. It was there, down beyond the display of tears. I mourned my wasted life in Robert's service, I grieved for his long absence from my conscious life, and mine, I think, from his. Only the curious unbidden thought of Miss Milly Martino at one point near the end of the service brought tears to my eyes. For what reason? I could not tell.

Perhaps thinking I was about to break down, Anna put her hand over mine. I grasped it tight and held it during the Reverend's long prayers, his last flights of fancy as he painted the dead composer in the image of a Parnassian god. I held her hand, thinking of the frightened, sick, troubled man in whose poisoned bloodstream spirochetes had raced like demented ants.

On foot we followed the casket, which was mounted, as Paderewski's had been, on the board of the farm wagon, to the spot Robert had designated. Anna had found his instructions for burial in his desk—have I written this already? Edward climbed down, stiff and sad-faced, self-important in his best clothes, and helped the three undertaker's men lower the casket into the grave. My mind was not in control that day. I was at the mercy of sudden irreverencies. At one moment, for no reason, I wondered if anyone had thought to line the grave with human hair in order to promote luxuriant immortality.

I took Anna's arm for protection against my fancies. We walked back down the road with Ida and Catherine Weeks, somewhat ahead of the others so we could see to the luncheon. It was all over: his short life, his long dying, the end of so much that began in promise, came to short fame, and ended in premature decay, long before death. As we entered the house, for the first time without Robert as its central inhabitant, I felt desolate, lost, in the way he must have meant when he said “Lost” to me, that time after Della Fox. Without him, the hub of my empty life, what would become of me? of the Farm?

First to leave were the relatives, and then Elizabeth, who had to return to her husband. As soon as the luncheon was over, the Maclaren brothers bowed stiffly, said a few polite words to me—after all, I could expect no more; we had not seen each other since my wedding—and took their leave. But the Weekses stayed on with us for a few days. Churchill was quite tired out by his long summer of teaching just concluded, by the trip to Saratoga Springs, and by his profound grief: he cried throughout the service, clinging to Catherine's arm. He touched Robert's hand just before the coffin was closed and murmured, “Good laddie.” For two days afterward he stayed in bed, Anna and Ida preparing him special invalid foods. I took him his meals on a tray while Catherine visited the baths. We were all still in practice for invalidism. It seemed quite natural to be caring for someone.

“There are wonderful, healthful baths there,” Catherine told us upon her return one late afternoon. “I think Churchill would benefit from them. The waters are warm and full of minerals—sulfur, I think, which the attendant at the Ladies' Bath says is beneficial for skin irritations.”

“Does Mr. Weeks suffer from a dermatitis?” Anna asked politely in her professional voice.

“My, yes. Just recently he has recovered from a very severe rash, everywhere, but mainly on his back. And the treatment was terrible, almost worse than the rash. But the doctor insisted on it.”

“Treatment?” I asked, finding myself listening to Catherine for the first time. Often in the past I was able only to make an effort to appear to be listening to her cheerless, ill-tempered conversation. Now she seemed to be taking pleasure in the details of Churchill's affliction.