The Vienna Melody (6 page)

“You see, this is your new aunt,” he said, as he gave him the bonbon. The boy took the candy and put it immediately into his mouth; his new aunt did not interest him.

“Pierre!” the Frenchwoman said in a reminding tone. She herself had not been introduced.

Henriette asked Pierre his age in French and received the answer that he was
huit ans
.
 
She did not inquire whether he was already going to school and could read and write, because when she was a child she had hated such questions. As soon as the candy give signs of disappearing, Peter's mother exchanged looks with his governess, and after he had once more made the rounds, with “
Bonjour, mademoiselle
” to Henriette, and “
Bonjour, Papa; bonjour, Maman; bonjour, mon oncle
” to the others, he was led away.

“You speak beautiful French,” Elsa said, with a glance of recognition.

The lawyer inquired: “How is your distinguished father, Miss Henriette? I had the privilege of studying under him at one time. But he would scarcely remember me.”

At this Franz's patience wore thin. “Really, I can't stand this any longer! Miss Henriette! Your distinguished father! Give each other a kiss and begin using your first names!”

“You think every one is as free and easy as you are! How do you know she would like it?” asked Otto Eberhard, turning to his brother.

That he meant to imply that it was distasteful to him did not reach her at all. She was far too spoiled even to suspect that she might be unwelcome to them as a sister-in-law; in her eyes there was certainly no overwhelming social cleavage between the daughter of Professor Stein of the University and the grandson of Alt, a piano manufacturer.

“Why not? Of course,” was her answer to the Public Prosecutor's query.

Nevertheless, Elsa brought the conversation around to the impending unveiling of the Maria Theresa monument and the difficulty of obtaining tickets for the special stand. It was a problem they discussed at length, after which the engaged couple left.

“Well,” Franz said after they were out in the hall, “how did you like them?”

“Very much,” she replied. “He's good-looking.” She did not mention Otto Eberhard's wife.

“So much the better!” he said, somewhat amazed. “Now pull yourself together for Number 8!”

His elder sister Gretl, a faded, worn creature, opened the door for them herself. “My maid's out today,” she explained, and added, “Won't you sit down a moment? I'll go and call my husband. But, Franz, and you too, Miss Stein, don't tell him he doesn't look well! He's had another attack.”

When she had disappeared Henriette gave her fiancé a look which seemed to him so dejected that the rage he felt against his family rose violently, despite his laborious efforts to restrain it. In the first quarter of an hour they had succeeded in completely intimidating the girl!

The girl was not intimidated. It was something else. When Frau Paskiewicz had opened the door into the next room a terrifying odor of artificial oxygen had issued from it.

“My sister is a panicmonger,” Franz said in excusing her.

The terrifying odor was noticeable again when a man in the dress uniform of a colonel in the Dragoons came in on Gretl's arm.

“Infinitely delighted to make your acquaintance,” was his greeting to Henriette. He spoke with a soft Polish accent, catching his breath between every word and smiling with lips marked by death. His good looks were striking.

“Oh, but do sit down,” he begged. And again they were all seated according to custom, with the two ladies on the sofa and the two gentlemen in armchairs. “You have brought a ray of sunshine into our house, Franz!” said the colonel.

“You mustn't talk so much, Niki,” warned Frau Paskiewicz. “How do you think he looks, Franz?”

“Splendid!” was her brother's curt reply.

Henriette added impulsively, “The colonel looks very well.”

There was a spark in the sick man's look which gave life to his depressed features. His wife noticed it. She had always feared that expression more than anything else. Before this, when he was well, that was how it had started each time—with this flash in his eyes. Afterwards had come the lies, the waiting up at night, the quarrels, the humiliation, and the pitiful reconciliation. The faded woman turned against her future sister-in-law.

“My dear, you are sweet to an invalid! You are definitely to be congratulated, Franz, and the whole family too! They've been urgently in need of just such a glorious bit of springtime!”

“Thanks, Niki. But we shall not detain you any longer,” answered the prospective bridegroom, fuming at his sister who had not as yet said a single pleasant word to Henriette. The crazy, hysterical creature!

“Nothing of the sort,” objected the colonel. “First we must pledge each other in wine. Gretl, be good enough to give us some Tokay.”

“But you shouldn't drink anything, Niki,” his wife said imploringly.

Then, just as in the old days, she heard his threatening words, “Did you understand me?” It was said in the same old deadly tone. Turning to the others, he added, “She thinks it harms me. But that's a superstition. Good wine never harms, only bad.”

At this moment the door opened slowly and softly and a child came in. She was a tall, overgrown, pallid girl with the colonel's profile.

“Who called you?” asked Frau Paskiewicz.

“No one,” replied the child.

“Then you can go,” said her mother.

But the colonel said, “Come here, old lady.”

The child came over to the grown-ups. Her large dark eyes moved anxiously from one to the other.

“Can't you at least say how do you do?” asked her mother.

“How do you do?” said the child. She had come in because her parents' voices had caused her so much anxiety. When Mama had come in to fetch Papa she had heard her say to him, “At most just a moment, Niki! Will you promise? You know Dr. Herz does not like you to move about!”

And Papa had given his word to Mama, but the moment was long since past and her parents' voices were so disturbing. Everything she could ever remember was disturbing.

“Sit down, Christine,” Franz said to her. But he had no candy for her.

“Thank you,” the child replied, and sat down on the edge of a chair.

Meanwhile her mother had poured out wine for the guests, and in doing it her hand trembled so that she spilled some.

“Anyone can see that you are out of practice,” remarked her husband. “No glass for you?”

“You know I don't drink,” she replied softly.

Earlier in the day young Dr. Herz had told her that if the colonel's “asthma” (as he euphemistically called it) did not subside he would have to remain absolutely motionless, without saying a word. Any motion might do him harm. But Niki had insisted on getting up, shaving himself, putting on his dress uniform, and doing the honors to this preposterously bedecked little Jewess!

“You will pour some for yourself and clink glasses with us,” she heard him say.

The child stared at her with a pale face. She poured out the wine.

The colonel stood up. He held himself straight as a die, clicked the heels of his patent-leather boots, on which light silver spurs jingled, and said in his best cavalry manner: “I raise my glass to the new party of the newly-to-be-constructed fourth floor, to the charming young lady who is doing us the honor of joining our family.
Hoch soll sie leben
,
hoch soll sie leben
,
dreimal hoch
!” There he stood as in the old days, a full glass in his hand, and sang the last words.

“Thank you,” said Henriette.

“Thank you, Niki,” said Franz, who had also joined in the singing.

“You permit me?” asked the colonel, and walked four steps, erect and unassisted, over to Henriette. A trace of color passed over his cheeks. With easy grace he crooked his arm through hers and they drank together. Then he drew her to him and touched her lips. “Henriette,” he said, and she heard how hard he was breathing.

“Niki,” she replied.

“Well, and you ladies now?”

“We do it without ceremony,” Henriette put in quickly.

The faded wife touched her glass with her lips. “Your health, Henriette,” she whispered.

“Yours, Gretl,” said the bride-to-be.

The child, who up to this point had not moved, now smiled with relief.

“I envy you,” the colonel confided to Franz as he shook his hand when they were leaving.

While they climbed up to the second story, Henriette thought to herself that this man with the narrow, grizzled temples, whose veins stood out with every word he said, would lie there exactly as her mother had done. And his wife would reproach herself bitterly for not having been kinder to him, exactly as she had reproached herself bitterly for having opposed her mother in the last hour of her life. “You are a wicked girl,” her mother had said in that last hour.

They were standing now in the corridor of the second floor and Franz was searching his key ring for the key to the “party rooms.”

“Neither your sister nor your sister-in-law was really nice to me, were they?” she asked.

He was still looking for the key. “Most probably they're jealous of you.”

“Oh, nonsense! What for?”

“Because you're young. Because you're beautiful. Because you're—”

“Because I am…?” she asked with a sort of laugh, for it was funny to see him struggling with both keys and compliments.

“Besides, they were naturally jealous.”

“The Public Prosecutor's wife too? Isn't the Public Prosecutor altogether law-abiding?”

The key was found at last. He took her trough the conservatory, past the potted palms and laurels, and into the yellow drawing room, a six-sided chamber with faded yellow damask on the walls and furniture.

“This was where Mozart played,” he remarked, with a touch of pride. As she said nothing he went back to her earlier question: “In that way all men are alike. On this point the colonel, incidentally only a lieutenant.”

He had expected her to admire the yellow drawing room.

But all she said was: “I'm sorry for the colonel.”

“For him? He has more on his conscience than any priest can absolve!”

“But he'll die soon.”

“What of it? Are you sorry for every one who must die?”

“Yes!” Her reply came from the depths of her conviction.

He did not like that. In other women he would have called it fuss. In her he excused it by saying: “You have a kind heart.”

She did not tell him what it was, for she would have had to explain that ‘being sorry' was a disease like any other, and he would not have understood, yet with her this was a fact. She could be so painfully ‘sorry' for people that she would do the most foolish things. And the most foolish things made her ‘sorry.' An old woman sitting in the sun. People coming home on a Sunday evening from an excursion, with six hard days ahead of them. A child in the park begging his mother, “Buy me a pinwheel too!” A man studying the prices in a delicatessen shop window and then walking on. “He must be very poor,” she would insist.

“That anyone should sympathize with Niki Paskiewicz is something new to me!” Franz's tone was almost impatient. “You had better look at this. This is the family relic!”

He pointed to a low piano made of yellow pearwood. It had three legs, two of which were solidly connected by a handsomely carved crossbar. There were no pedals, nor any cover for the board with yellowed keys. “Christofori Piano­forte, Leipzig, 1726. Improved by Christopher Alt, Vienna,
1777” read the inscription inlaid in mother-of-pearl above the keys.

“This is the first instrument that my grandfather brought out under his own name,” he explained to her. “Do you see this hammer? Grandfather was the one to hit on the idea of percussion action. That is to say, improved percussion action. He made use of the hammer pivoted within this sheath here. He fixed it to the key in such a way that its head points towards the front of the instrument. See? Its butt he had introduced into this beak here, known as the ‘hammer butt,' for the purpose of engaging what was later called the ‘escapement.'”

As an expert, to whom all this was a matter of course, he could not imagine that anyone else could not take it in. She played the piano—very nicely too—and that was enough for him. He went on throwing technical expressions around and enjoyed showing himself off in his own field. She was spared no detail.

While he was busily talking and demonstrating, she thought:
I hope he won't ask me any questions afterwards. I haven't the vaguest notion about anything!
And it flashed through her head this man knew as little about herself as she did about “escapement.”

“You see what I mean?” he asked, concluding his lecture.

The tone of her “yes” passed unnoticed because, now that he had proved to her that he was no less capable than the other men in the house, he felt more sure of himself. They had titles and decorations, yes, but what would remain of their accomplishments? The product he made was world-famous. “Piano maker” was what his grandfather modestly called himself, not a manufacturer. His son and grandson took pride in following his example. Franz pointed out to her the oil portrait of old Christopher, smiling down on the pearwood instrument. It showed a serene, red-cheeked, clean-shaven gentleman with his white hair brushed forward from his temples, a high-standing black neckcloth, and one hand thrust between the buttons on his long double-breasted blue morning coat.

“Nice picture, isn't it?”

“Very.”

Once more they were standing by the chill, moldy-smelling staircase. ‘‘Shall I quickly show you where I live before we go down?” he suggested.

“Of course.”

Is it possible that one person can be so little aware of what is going on in another? He let her see his bachelor quarters, on which the taste of the Makart era had left its imprint. There were peacock fathers, blades of dried grass and palm leaves in tall vases; Moorish pages holding torches; bronze busts of Beethoven and Mozart on the tiled stoves; photograph albums with stiff covers; pictures in ornate frames, “Piazza San Marco,” “Leda and the Swan,” a girl with a rose between her lips, “Susanna in Her Bath,” a copy of the Adam portrait of Empress Elizabeth on horseback; plush, china, skin rugs.