Chamber Music (6 page)

Or so I then thought.

I have mentioned the farewell party given Robert by his fellow students and his pupils before he left the Hoch Conservatory, two evenings before, as I recall. None of the women students came, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour. It was at nine o'clock. I was the only lady among twelve or thirteen solemnly suited men standing about the room, wineglasses in their hands, talking together, Robert in the center, laughing often. I was introduced to a number of persons I had not met before. Professor Heymann came over to speak to me when I seemed to be pushed to the very edge of the animated groups. He took my arm and moved me over to speak to a pale-faced young man who was also standing alone. I remembered him at once as the young man I had seen in the shadows of Robert's lesson that day. “Mrs. Maclaren, may I present Churchill Weeks,” the professor said. “A very good pianist. This is Robert's wife, Caroline.”

Churchill Weeks stared at me. His brows were so heavy over his deep-set eyes it was difficult to see them clearly. His face seemed almost sickly in that studio light. He took my hand, raised it a little, and bent stiffly over it, in the German way, without kissing it. “I am honored, Frau Maclaren. Your husband is my very dear friend. I shall miss him very much.”

I was astonished: tears streamed down his face. I was startled, for I had not seen his eyes, I did not know he was crying. That was all he said for a long moment, and then he went on, “You must pardon my display of feeling. I am an American—my home is in Milwaukee—and it is hard to stay on here—alone.” He turned and left the room.

Walking back toward the Praunheimer Strasse, I asked Robert about Churchill Weeks. “Is he always—so emotional?” Robert seemed reluctant to talk about him. “He's—a musician, a composer. Very sensitive.”

“Have you been friends long?”

“We have known each other since we came to Frankfurt at almost the same time.”

“More than two years, then?”

“Yes, it must have been. Somehow it does not seem that long.”

“Why did I never meet him before? Why did you never bring him home?”

Robert made no reply. We walked for some time in silence, the usual climate of our walks. Silence was more characteristic of him when we were together than the sound of his voice, low and pleasant as I remember it being to friends. After a while he said, “I enjoyed the party. It was good of them all to have it for me. They're very kind friends.”

I managed to bury the memory of Churchill Weeks's pale, wet face until the letters began to arrive, not long after we had settled into Mount Vernon Street. One morning the postman handed me three thin letters in blue envelopes as I walked out to do the day's shopping. Robert was cloistered in his studio upstairs where he had breakfasted alone in order to begin work early. All the letters were from abroad, and in the left-hand corners read:
Weeks/Jahnstrasse 76/Frankfurt/Deutschland
. I went back into the house and climbed the stairs to deliver the letters. I first knocked on Robert's door and then went in. He was standing beside the piano, his head bent over a manuscript page of music, both hands resting on the lid. He had not heard me enter.

I did not want to interrupt, knowing how intently he was listening to the sounds in his head as he often did, even in company, and always when he was alone with me. I went out, closing the door quietly behind me, and left the letters for him on the reception table near the downstairs entry. On the way to his walk later, with Paderewski, he will find them, I thought.

That night we were to sup late. Robert was still in his studio, engrossed in his new
Woodland Songs
, which he had told me he hoped Carl Faelton would play in his recital in New York next season. Robert came to supper and ate in silence, wiped his mustache carefully with his napkin, folded it, and then for the first time turned his eyes on me, with that weary look he always had at the end of a long day of work, close to the end of his patience with himself and with me, for some unknown reason. “I found my mail very late this afternoon. Does it not usually come earlier?”

“Yes, about nine-thirty, usually.”

“Why didn't you bring it up to me?”

“I did, Robert. You were working. I didn't wish to disturb you.”

“You might have offered me a choice,” he said in a small, angry voice.

I was aghast. No household crisis or sudden personal disability, nothing, had ever before been sufficient cause for Robert to be interrupted. But Weeks's letters …

I must now write frankly, perhaps more frankly than I am sure the Foundation wishes me to. For the fact was, those letters from Churchill Weeks were love letters. I must be pardoned for the venial sin I committed: I read them. It happened this way. A few days later another thin blue envelope from Germany arrived. This time I carried it at once to the music room. Robert took it, smiled his quick, charming smile, thanked me, and turned away to read it. I remember thinking how his smile had shrunk, from the wide grin I first noticed at our meeting in the park until now: it had become abbreviated, a token, a quick gesture like a handshake, the remains of a smile. Then it was gone and one was left,
I
was left, that is, frozen rather than warmed by it.

That afternoon Robert went to a rehearsal. I watched him from an upper window as he turned the corner into the avenue and then I went quickly into the music room. With me I took a duster as pretense. The room was meticulously neat—Robert could not work unless it was—but the surfaces were somewhat dusty and I began to stir the dust about. Under a pile of music paper near the back of the piano I saw a light blue color. And while only Paderewski watched my shameful act, I read Weeks's letters.

What shall I say of them? They were written in an agony of love such as I had never in my life been witness to. Weeks told Robert of the pain his departure had caused him, of the illness he had suffered for two months afterward, of his slow recovery during which his only thought was to see Robert again, to hold his beloved head in his hands once again, to take strength from
his
strength. Was it at all possible that Robert was planning a summer return to the Continent, since he, Weeks, would not be free to come to Boston? In a cribbed, uneven script that seemed visible evidence of his distraught state, he asked:

When shall we two be together again, my beloved friend? For the old talk, the old making of music together, four hands at the same keyboard, four hands and two mouths and our whole beings engaged in the same loving act
.

These words, as I have here put them down, were etched into my memory and are still there. Often now I do not remember what day it is, or what dinner was served to me last night, but the words of Churchill's letter I have never forgotten. Other parts of the letters were sprinkled with Scots phrases, for Weeks claimed his ancestry was like Robert's and seemed to affect the Scots language as part of his own. He called Robert an
auld farran
, he blamed himself for being a
bluntie
, sometimes a
blunker
. He felt alone and melancholy—
leefulane
and
ourie
—he sent his
lock o' loo
to his fellow
pingler
. Some I did not know and had to look up in the large Webster; I had never heard Robert, the proud descendant of Scots, use one of them. It must have been their private language of love, kept for those burning letters.

I returned the letters to the place I had found them, feeling deep guilt for having allowed myself to be driven to such an act. Of course I know nothing of Robert's answers to those
cris du coeur
; were they, too, sprinkled with loving dialect? But Robert wrote, I know. Once I saw a letter, addressed to Weeks, before Robert carried it himself to the postbox on the corner during one of his walks with Paderewski. In the late evenings I would see him writing, I seated across the room knitting or reading (never writing: to whom would I have written? surely not to my mother-in-law, who would not have responded, I felt sure), Robert holding his writing desk on his lap.

As he wrote he would rub his lower lip thoughtfully. The sore I had first noticed tended to heal and then to appear again because, I always thought, in his nervousness and unease, he would rub his lip, returning the little eruption to life.

What was I to do with this discovery, except to recognize what I thought at the time might be one explanation: there was a deep, unfathomable alliance among men of talent which involved them wholly, making it impossible for women to enter their consciousness except in a curiously negative way. Remove our services, our presence as helpmeets, and our absence is remarked upon. Our physical support restored, we sink back to the outer limits of their awareness.

But admission to the alliance? I have never seen it granted, except as a chivalric courtesy uttered for the moment—Shall we join the ladies?—after ample brandy and smoking and the serious talk was exhausted. The next half hour would be spared us for polite small talk, women's subjects.

Perhaps, I tried to tell myself, the letters were an extension of all this, with the added exaggerations and emotional excess natural to creative persons who thought and wrote in the romantic tradition. In one of Weeks's letters there were quotations from Heine and Goethe. My imagination supplied mottoes from Tennyson and Victor Hugo in the replies Robert must have sent to his friend. Once I came upon Robert standing with his foot on the grill in front of the fireplace, his face reddened by the flames, reading Tennyson's poems, saying a line or two aloud, to himself.

Our life went along evenly. The only change was Robert's increasing success and recognition. Those were good years to be in Boston, to be a young American composer. We began to read, in the musical columns of the newspapers and in the journals, praise for Robert's compositions, which were played with increasing frequency by pianists in New York, in Philadelphia, in San Francisco. The Symphony Orchestra in Boston, now under a new conductor named Emil Paur, played his work often. Poor Nikisch had gone back to Hungary after three years in Boston, a disappointed man who told us one evening at dinner that he had tried without success to come to terms with the men of the orchestra. But they had resented his demands for rehearsals over and above the ones they felt reasonable. Nikisch had invited Robert often as a soloist; Paur did, too, even increasing the number of appearances he offered him in a year.

Robert traveled to other cities on the invitation of conductors, one of whom, Anton Seidl, I think it was, told the
Evening Post
that he considered Maclaren the first great American composer. Robert returned from that trip glowing at the phrase, almost a prophet in his own time and country, he quoted Seidl as having said, with his tight shy smile to Elizabeth Pettigrew, who had been visiting with me while he was gone those weeks. Later, Philip Hale was to say almost the same thing in the magazine
Music
.

Elizabeth congratulated him. She had always admired him. Now, from the distance of her spinsterhood, I was able to tell, she regarded him with awe. She had a way of rising whenever he entered the sitting room, as though he were of a priestly caste. I think she found it very difficult to sit in his presence. But I don't think he noticed, or noticed her at all, thinking of her, I felt sure, as an occupant of my spare time who did not, fortunately, impinge upon his.

The unaccustomed glow in his face after that tour turned into a fever almost immediately upon his return. At first he denied its presence. Finally he was too sick to insist upon its absence and took to his bed, lying inert and hot, refusing to allow me to call a physician. “It's the body's way,” he said. For three days he slept, long and feverishly. I brought him meals and sat on the edge of the great bed while he tried and failed to eat. He said his throat was too sore.

“Shall I read to you, Robert?”

“I think not, Caroline. I don't mind the silence. Sometimes it's a pleasure to hear nothing but what comes into my head from the temperature, can you believe it?”

I tried to be playful. “Would you care to hear some early Maclaren, like
Petits Morceaux pour Piano?
” In the dressing room off the bedroom was an upright piano on which I used to play a little now and then, quietly, so as not to disturb Robert.

“Thank you, but I think not.”

“Some Liszt, perhaps?”

“No, no, thank you. It will sound odd, but I think I have begun to avoid listening to music, except my own when I must, so that I won't be in danger of using it when I begin to write.”

I remember his weakness during that time but, more, his new, acquiescent agreeableness. We seemed close to each other, because illness brings the nurse and the patient into an anxious union and because, as it does many men, his illness frightened him. He seemed willing to be nursed and tended to. But not doctored. The rash that covered his body worried me—could it be scarlet fever? But after a while it receded. I was converted to his view that home care and bed rest were adequate doctors. In two weeks the fever and the rash disappeared. Even the little red shiny herpes on his lower lip healed finally and never returned.

Our closeness in that September: I cannot forget it. Robert would allow no visitors, wanted to hear no music. We talked together, as always, very little. But I felt pleasure in being able to spend my days in his company, crocheting, I recall, the large afghan for the couch in his music room, stopping now and then to fetch tea or soup for him, or watching his face as he slept. I slept on the little couch in the guest room so that I would not disturb his nights. When the afghan was half finished he recovered enough to walk about the room, and into the dressing room, where he would play small pieces, sometimes only fragments, on the piano, first humming gently, and then following the sound of his voice with music on the piano from the store in his head he had apparently collected during the fever.