Vienna Nocturne (15 page)

And Anna, thinking of her own poor baby, and her husband, and her life, wished in that moment to be anywhere else.

One would not have thought, given the sweet prize Fisher had won, that he would have done anything to sabotage the situation, but it was common knowledge, by November 1784, that he beat his wife.

Since their wedding he had almost ceased to concertize. When asked, he refused, considering either the venue or the fee beneath him. He practiced in fits and starts, going for days and weeks without playing, then shutting himself in his study for hours, playing music he already knew, with a kind of obsession. He struck Anna’s dogs with booted feet. He raised his voice. He wouldn’t speak to her for days. He called her coarse and fat, a whore. He forced himself on her in the middle of the night when she had been soundly asleep, and made motions, on a few occasions, of strangling her. She could never know when he might elect to hurt her, and that was part of the torture. Often it was when he had drunk too much—but not always. Sometimes it was when he had slept poorly—or too
well—sometimes when he had eaten too much meat, or too little. In short he contradicted all logic.

The servants quit their posts. New ones, more deaf to marital discord, had to be found. Fisher was calculating enough to spare his wife’s face and arms from welts or bruises, although one or two slipped past his guard to come under the notice of her colleagues at the Burgtheater, as did a new stiffness in her movements, always before so graceful and easy.

By mid-November she was about five months pregnant and could not hide it longer. She decided to tell him. She would say it was three months. She would say she’d wanted to wait until she was sure.

They had just had their supper and he was in a good mood. Anna had sung tonight and Mrs. Storace had eaten early, as was her habit, so Anna and Fisher had dined privately together in Anna’s large, gracious bedroom, where there was a small dining and sitting area. He smiled and let go a contented sigh. He told her she looked well and that she had been behaving better these days. He took frequent issue with her behavior. He believed she flirted and degraded herself. She told him a buffa soprano was required to flirt—it meant nothing—but he would not listen. He said he feared for her intellect, for the safety of her soul. She hated when he came to the opera because he would loom over her in her dressing room, not talking to any of the others, telling her she had sung better last night, or that the orchestra had played like rubbish.

But tonight he was happy. He gave her soft looks. He touched her gently and said she was beautiful, that he could find nothing today, no matter how he looked, to reproach in her. And she, too, was almost content. The food had been good and she’d drunk a glass of wine. The baby was quiet and did not kick her. When John visited her bed it was always dark and she wore a loose shift and she was almost sure he could not tell. Really no one could tell, not for certain. She was still small and she dressed carefully. She only seemed plumper, that was all; it only made her more fetching. He looked
pleasant in the candlelight. He was a handsome man when he was happy, and darkly lit.

She would say she was three months gone. There might not be a better chance than now. She only had to find the courage to tell him. She poured them both more wine.

“I love you,” he said, stroking the back of her neck.

The touch repulsed her. She could not stop herself from turning away. She said, “Not
me
, John. You never loved
me
.”

His eyes hardened and his hand grew heavy. The moment was gone. She held her neck steady and gave him a wide, mocking smile. “Not
me
!” she trilled again.

He let her go and in the instant she was dancing away from him. She made it halfway across the room before he caught her. She should have told him before. Now it was too late. “I love you,” he cried. She laughed and said he did not.

He encompassed her world. She was always thinking about him, always being touched or not touched by him, always hearing or not hearing his music. It moved her, almost, to hear the sound of his violin through the walls and know that he was shaping the tone with his mind and hands, because that indicated tenderness and understanding. His embraces still stunned and bewildered her, made her feel unhinged and abandoned, and yet she could not tell sometimes whether she desired or loathed them—or whether she was beyond even that, now, and had simply fallen into an attitude of submissiveness. But when the lights were still up, and she still clothed, armored with insignias of rank and success, her puffed coiffure, her stays and petticoats, her velvet choker with the single drop pearl, and while her ears were still hot with the music of the evening, the chaos of the applause—she became reckless, heedless, and thought her husband the most laughable fop in all the world.

“Not me!” she sang, over and over. “You’ve never loved me! Nobody’s ever loved
me
!”

She meant, or thought she meant, that the girl whom Fisher and everybody else purported to love was not her. The logic was clear
and amusing, in the state she was in. Whoever she was, she couldn’t have said, but it wasn’t the girl everyone purported to love.

She escaped him again, or he let her escape, she could not tell, and he started chasing her around the room, saying in French that he loved her—“
Je t’aime, je t’aime
”—until it became a chant in itself, a threat, a rhythm for the hunt, while she shrieked and giggled and ran away, feeling dizzy and heedless. A small corner of her heart, perhaps, was frightened, but she shut it down, slammed it away, was all sharpness and gaiety, teasing and fleeing him. He would wake her mother, who was sleeping downstairs with cotton in her ears.

And then somehow he captured her, though she had thought this time she would win free. It must have been the wine that confused her dancing, slippered feet and made her dizzy and slow and sick to her stomach. With a satisfied grunt he lifted her in his arms. Her hands went around his neck, her feet kicked the air. Breathing heavily he bent to kiss her mouth.

“No!” she squealed, half laughing, batting at his face with her hand, conscious of speaking and behaving like a child, with a child’s voice and gestures. “Let me down,” she cried, pounding his shoulders and squirming this way and that. “You
brute
, you ugly brute, everyone hates you—let me down—let me out of this house—”

She had slipped into Italian, the language of Dante and of her father. She kicked and twisted but Fisher only gripped her closer, so hard she felt he was gripping her bones. She turned her head and bit his shoulder; she scratched her nails down the back of his neck sobbing for him to let her go.

He must have meant to do it. He walked up to the table, as she thrashed and struggled, and lifting her over it—lifting her as though over an altar—he tossed her up and let her fall. He might have put her down on the sofa or the bed, as he had done before. But something now must have inclined him to let her fall, as if from heaven, on the wastes of their meal: the little table with the
half-eaten pheasant, the wineglasses and pitchers, forks and knives, fruit peelings, bread crusts, blood pudding, roast beef, potato remnants, syrup and pastry crumbs, milk jugs, coffee cups. Her scream was real, then. He had given no warning, except for that slight toss at the end. Glass broke under her. The copper pitcher bruised her back. Her head jerked over the lip of the table and struck the arm of the chair as she bumped to the floor, her gown of armor stained with wine and grease.

So great was her shock that at first she didn’t move and barely made a sound. Fisher stood over her. “There,” he said. “There.”

He sat in an armchair and rubbed his mouth, frowning. Anna put her palms on the floor and pressed herself into a seated position. She touched a hand to her head to see if it was bleeding. It was not. Then she remembered about her baby and began to cry. Surely he had killed it. She could feel it already dying inside her. The poor, sweet, good baby, which had stayed so quiet and small, that it might remain safe and be her own baby, to love and need her and bring her joy. She had done it to herself. If she had told him about the baby he would not have dropped her on the table. But she had not told him.

The door opened and there stood Mrs. Storace in her nightcap and dressing gown. Her face went white and she rushed to Anna and told Fisher to call a doctor.

“I’m all right, Mama,” said Anna. “No doctor, no, no.” A doctor would tell Fisher it was five months and not three. “I’m all right, we were arguing and I fell. See? I’m perfectly all right. Just surprised.” Slowly and deliberately she got to her feet, to show how well she was. “But my poor gown! You had better send for the maid to undress me and then I think I’ll go to bed.” She tried to undo the velvet choker at her neck but her fingers were weak and she could not do it, and yet she had to keep trying so that they would believe she was well and not send for a doctor. She fumbled at the clasp. “Knocked myself over, so silly, I don’t know what happened, the
poor table! It’s a wonder it didn’t break.” It was hard to fumble at the clasp and not to cry. “Mama, won’t you help me with my necklace? I can’t do it. It’s pulling on my neck, I’ve gotten fatter again.”

Mrs. Storace unfastened the clasp in one motion. The color had returned to her face. She glanced at Fisher coolly. “Forgive me, my dear,” she said to her daughter. “I worry for you. In your condition.”

“What condition?” asked Fisher.

Mrs. Storace pursed her lips. “Why, Mr. Fisher, I thought you had perceived. My daughter is carrying your child. It’s the usual course of events. You should be more careful. There must be no more arguments of this nature or the baby will be put at risk.”

“I didn’t know,” gasped Fisher. “My good woman, I swear I did not know.”

“Three months, if I’m not mistaken,” Mrs. Storace said, watching her daughter. “She did not wish to tell you until it was sure. Foolish girl. You must be more careful, Anna. You must not be so clumsy over dinner tables.”

Anna sank into a chair, holding a hand to her head to make it stop hurting. So in the end it had not been up to her to say it. She had not had to lie. And here was John Fisher embracing her, pulling her onto his lap, kissing frantically at her cheeks and hair, and calling her his little dove, his sweet dove. Her back ached and so did her head and the baby was probably dying but she was tired, and had no strength of will, and so she melted against his body as if strength might come from him, as if he could give her his power, rather than leaching hers away. “My darling,” he murmured, his lips and hands upon her. “My dove, my little fool, why didn’t you tell me?”

But the baby did not die. It kicked and bothered her and made it impossible to sleep. She started walking in the early morning, in humble clothes, like a servant. When she walked, the baby quieted and she felt better. She crept out. Sometimes someone recognized her, and turned to stare. It wasn’t proper for a lady to be out alone.
In spite of this she felt less hunted, in the hectic streets of Vienna, with the snow and horses and pigs and running children. It was one of the largest cities in the world. She could disappear. If people looked at her curiously it was not with the probing, pitying concern that filled the eyes of her friends and made her feel as though she could not speak with them about anything, lest she be questioned and judged. Never could she be alone, unassailed. She felt her thoughts run riot and could not stop the panic. She built screens around her face. One could hardly see, through the slats, the roils of panic. Every attempt she made to free herself entangled her more.

She didn’t know anymore which part she was playing, or for whom. She didn’t know which face and character would please John Fisher and let her abide with him in peace. Sometimes when she was most short and angry with him he would swing her around the room and cover her with kisses and beg her not to frown anymore, and when he did that, she could almost not keep herself from liking him, from imagining what a fine father he would be and how the baby would make him happy and how happy they would be then. She actually laughed. Sometimes when she shrank into herself and cried like a little girl he would cradle her and say he was a brute, it was his Irish blood, his passion, and then she would stop crying and nearly forgive him. Sometimes when she was happy and laughing he was likewise. But for all these moments there were equally those when he would strike and slap her and push her down and yank her about. As an audience, a critic, he was unreliable. What pleased him once could not be guaranteed to please again. Everything had turned—it was impossible to say who she was and had been and would be, and what any of it mattered.

Though her performances grew progressively more uneven they also provided the only times she felt secure in herself. She got to the theater earlier than she needed to. She told no one about her condition and concealed it well with her clothes. If they suspected they said nothing.

“Are you quite in health?” asked Michael one day. He had come
to accompany her to a luncheon at the Mozarts’. Michael and Mozart liked to play billiards together. He peered at her as though reading a coded manuscript. “Not ill again, I hope?”