Marrying Mozart (19 page)

By that time Maria Caecilia had found her wooden spoon, but Josefa dodged her, knocking over the bowl of milk, which splashed down her father’s blue dressing gown, and ran from the kitchen. Their shouts and cries echoed through the rooms, and the girls could hear the voices of their neighbors leaning out the windows in the house next door, trying to discover what the noise was about. Sophie was now crying openly as she knelt to mop up the spilled milk. “It’s not true; it can’t be true,” she repeated again and again.

Josefa disappeared that afternoon, and they searched the city for her, running up stairs to ask friends, inquiring at the three bookstalls they knew she liked. The third seller, scratching his head, said he did recall an unusually tall young woman talking for a long time with a man, but he did not know their names. The man bought a great many books, he said. He had no idea if the young woman had been wearing a silver locket. He said he had seen the couple a few times since the summer.

It was the worst Christmas of their lives. For the first time no one baked the festive
weihnachtsgebäck
, the honey pastry made with ginger and spices, or the
springerle,
the rectangular hard cookies with dancing figures or holy pictures stamped on them. The goose burned, and everyone cried throughout the meal, at which Josefa did not even appear. She stayed away from the rooms for two days; when she returned, she refused to say a word. When they tried to follow her the next time, they lost sight of her. Constanze looked at her curiously and with some awe. Was there a difference? It was said that you could tell when a woman fell; you could know when a bride had come through her wedding night. But they could tell nothing. If this great truth was not so, then what was true? Still Josefa declared she would not go to Vienna.

By this time it was the new year, and Aloysia’s contract was to begin. They had either to send her on alone, or leave quickly with her, arranging for most of their things to be sent after. Still Josefa came and went as she pleased, with such hard, screaming words between her and their mother that the others were sick with fear. The night before they were to leave, she came home alone after midnight and dropped, fully dressed, across the bed. “Never ask me,” she murmured. “I’ll come,” and for an hour they heard her weeping in short, furious sobs. Slowly they moved closer to her.

Aloysia clung to her. “Please don’t be angry with me. You’ll find singing work as well, and look, sometimes I’ll pretend I’m sick and send you in my place. Promise me you’ll forget this horrid person. Life’s nothing to me if you don’t speak with me; I love you with all my heart.”

M
y dearest dear Aloysia,

I rejoice at your incredible news and good fortune to go to Vienna. Dearest love, you see I was right from the start about the value of your voice. The only thing that hurts me is that this move will take you still farther from me. It’s been too long since I’ve held you in my arms. God willing it will be soon that I can hold you in my arms forever.

My sister didn’t bake for Christmas either; she was too sad. I found her by the open flour bin with gingerroot on her lap, still mourning our mother.

I serve daily here with discouragement for the works I want to write, and the places I want to play are so far away from me. I’ve been inquiring about a good post elsewhere, but every time I hear of one, someone else has been given it first. Leutgeb has returned to Vienna and writes that the Emperor is promoting opera in German, which I could compose with joy, and also that they may be looking for a kapellmeister. I have written at once to a few old acquaintances who are in His Majesry’s circle, but with discretion, for if my Archbishop knew of it, he would throw me from his service. I swear faithfulness with one hand and hold the other behind my back.

Oh my love! They think because I am small and young there can’t be anything great and old within me. They shall, however, find out soon.

 

A thousand kisses; no, more ...

 

The four sisters and their mother packed a hamper of food for the coach journey, then rattled off toward Vienna with trunks of refurbished clothing and an opera contract, their household goods to follow shortly.

A
loysia’s debut at the Burgtheater came within a week of their arrival, but she knew her role already, for she had memorized it in Munich, even with all the difficulties within the family and the hasty packing and the sending of Christmas greetings to many relatives. The two maternal aunts sent a good piece of lace that they must have saved from their girlhood for Aloysia’s costumes, for she would have to supply her own. Their father’s brother predicted ruin in this new venture; the sisters tore up his letter.

Now in the center of the stage before a painted forest backdrop, Aloysia began her first aria, wearing a blue dress embroidered with silk butterflies and opened over an embroidered petticoat. At her feet were rows of shaded candles to light the scene. Some people talked through the whole aria, then quieted to listen to her improvised cadenza. The orchestra had ceased to play; the first violinist conducting from his seat waited as her highest notes mounted through the theater. Some members of the audience sat back, sighed. A few leaned forward.

After, in the winter air, with hundreds of carriages jostling to leave the premises, and the shadow of the churches and the magnificent stone houses with their sloped roofs and mansard windows all about them, Aloysia rushed into the arms of her sisters and mother. Constanze had brought her one pink silk rose. Alfonso took them all to an elegant supper café, where he predicted the rise of a great prima donna.

Returning home late, the sisters pulled on their white wool sleeping gowns in the large, empty, creaking old house they had rented, and shut themselves in the capacious bedroom on the fourth floor; they had slept together for so long they had not yet decided to sleep apart. Their mother took a room two floors below them. Aloysia lay among her sisters, her soft arm curled over her head, while the portrait of Saint Caecilia gazed down on them and the fantastical blue dress lay spread, as if resting, on the one large chair. She was so tired she fell asleep at once.

For the first few weeks they ran up and down the stairs, unable to believe the house was all theirs. It stood near St. Peter’s Church, Peterskirche, in the very center of the city, where a fair amount of Vienna’s citizens passed every day; you needed only to kneel by the window with your elbows on the sill to see the procession of nobility, priests, organ grinders, children with hoops. There in a corner of Petersplatz was the lemonade stall, now closed for the colder months, and there was also a bookshop with deep bins outside into which you could plunge your hand and come up with thick novels in English, and worn, gilded volumes of the great playwrights of France, Molière and Racine. Below the window was a procession of exquisite hats. Aloysia could tell the newest ones at a glance. She claimed she could distinguish on closer examination which ones had actually been made in Paris, and which copied here in the gorgeous shops in the Graben, where the most fashionable women bought their clothes. Most people spoke some French, the only truly civilized language.

Within a few weeks, all the sisters considered themselves Viennese. No one who lived here could ever wish to live any other place. It was an attitude that you could, in a brief stroll through the streets, touch everything worth having in the whole world, and see the Emperor riding in his carriage. You could speak with a shrug of all else in the country, farms through provincial towns, as if all those who lived there were simply too stupid or unworthy to be here. You could drop a spattering of French and Italian, and at once be understood by everyone.

There was only one problem: The house was not to be just their own.

All the girls were sitting around the kitchen table one morning, gossiping about neighbors and sharing news from their old city, when they became aware that their mother was stacking many new plates and cups in their capacious cupboard, among them an enormous white soup tureen.

Maria Caecilia turned to them, her hands clasped in a matronly way at her waist. “Oh my fleas,” she said tenderly, gazing from one to the next with the greatest satisfaction. “My treasures! I have asked myself since cousin Alfonso found us this house, what shall we do with all the rooms? And what shall I do about our income, for though, alas, Aloysia is earning nicely, more is always needed. I prayed to be lifted from the financial constraints under which we have so often suffered since your earliest days. My Fridolin, who is now an angel, is looking after me, for the answer came. I was at once so grateful I rose from bed and said a whole rosary on my knees. What do I like to do best? What is my greatest gift? Why to cook and bake! And so, with the many extra rooms, I have decided to make our fortune and take in boarders.”

Aloysia opened her eyes wide. “Boarders, Mama? Boarders?” Her lyrical voice rose. “This is how I’m to begin my life as a coveted soprano, living in a house of common boarders?”

“I have my reasons,” their mother replied serenely, wiping a spot off the soup tureen. “It will bring me a comfortable old age if, by any terrible chance, you all do not marry well.” But Aloysia repeated her words incredulously, then leapt up. She rushed into the larger parlor and began to play the clavier. Josefa and the younger girls followed at once, so close together they almost stepped on one anothers’ skirts.