Vienna Nocturne (24 page)

As always, she could not judge accurately for herself whether she sounded well. The only way she could tell that she had sung sweetly was by the quality of the applause, like a thunder crack, sudden and loud, and the triumph on Stephen’s face. They took their bows and
beckoned the other singers back on stage, her colleagues who had sung earlier in the concert, and she was so happy, and so relieved, but then a gentleman in the upper balcony stood and shouted for everyone to hear, “She killed her baby! She killed her baby! Murderess!” until he was drowned out by boos and hurried from the building.

There was a reception after the concert, but Anna had disappeared. Benucci went down and knocked on the door of her dressing room.

She said, “Come,” and turned toward him with wet eyes and a hopeful smile, and he realized that she had been expecting someone else.

He shut the door. “Are you all right?”

She put a hand to her mouth. “I had to leave. I’m sorry. I couldn’t face them. They were being so good. We were all pretending so hard.”

“No one cares about a madman.”

She rose, clasping her fan loosely in her hands. “It’s horrible,” she said in a low voice. “I know what they think about me.” Her voice broke, slightly. There had been cruel speculation in pamphlets that Anna Storace had killed her baby, and lurid cartoons depicting her in sexual consort with the emperor and with women.

“I hate them, too,” she said. “If they knew what I feel—they are the torturers, they the murderers!” She hugged herself, staring before her. It was almost impossible to believe that half an hour before she had been glittering on a stage, a girl of sixteen, incomparably charming, commanding, poised. Anna Storace could light a hall with the way she held her hands. But of course it had been a mask. Benucci knew that better than anyone.

“Anna,” he said. “Is it true?”

She looked at him blindly. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, Francesco.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but there was a challenge in his voice. His voice was too loud for some rooms; it carried a challenge, sometimes, where none was meant.

She looked as if she did not know where to go. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not true, Francesco.”

He put his hand on the door. There was a long silence. She did not move, nor look away. She was a remarkable picture of stillness. He might have been leveling an arrow at her heart. “It was mine,” he said, “wasn’t it?”

She faltered and closed her eyes. The arrow struck, quivering, at the base of her throat. Her voice was not loud but perfectly placed, melodious, clear: “Yes,” she said.

He grasped the door and saw her marrying the Irishman, in her silk frock, saw her mother like a queen refusing to speak to him. He heard himself say, “And we’re still friends. That’s the main thing,” and saw her again and again turning her head and saying, “Yes.” He saw her more than a year ago in this same room, a plumper, sweeter, ardent young girl who clung to him and kissed him and wept from her love and he saw himself taking her in a vindictive passion, hurting her and not caring, caring only to silence and give her what she thought she’d wanted, caring only, too, for his pleasure, hating himself yet feeling the pleasure still. He saw her in her frock marrying the Irishman, again and again saw her turn from him and say, “Yes.” Saw her singing with him all year long, smiling,
slipping away, collapsed with her big belly behind the stage with her idiot brother squawking above her. He saw the Irishman hurting her, the rest of them pretending he was not.

“Oh, God,” he breathed. “How could you do it? How could you look me in the eye?” She went white and said nothing. He cast his eyes around the room desperately. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

“You didn’t love me,” she said. She swallowed. “You loved Aloysia.”

He stared at her. Then he said in a sharp voice, “Aloysia? Aloysia Lange? When did I give a fig for Aloysia Lange?”

“She said you did. She said you wrote her love letters.”

“When have I ever sent any woman love letters? When would Francesco Benucci have time for love letters?”

She listed forward as if he had struck her. “Oh,” she whispered. “Of course you didn’t.”

“Would you have let me dandle the child on my knee?” he said. “Would you have lied and lied? All that time, Anna, and you said nothing—”

“Don’t I know that?” she cried out wildly. “Haven’t I known it every minute?” She put her hands to her cheeks as if she was afraid she would break apart. “Oh, God! It was horrible! Oh, God!”

He stared at her and took a few steps back. “I never knew you,” he said. “I don’t know you now. We’re worse than strangers. You never told me. You never did. You married him and never told me.”

She let down her hands and stared vacantly before her, tears hesitating on her cheeks, as though waiting patiently for him to strike her down.

He gave a helpless groan and passed a hand over his forehead. “I’ve done you wrong,” he said suddenly. “Forgive me … please forgive me.” Then he turned and left the room.

Upstairs, in a mirrored hall with a checkered floor, the reception was still going on. “My gentle friends!” called someone in heavily
accented English. It was Mozart, red-faced, wigged, on the arm of his wife. “A most good evening to you.”

“Hello, Mozart,” said Stephen. “Practicing your English, are you?”

“If I do not practice,” said Mozart, delicately articulating each syllable, “I shall not advance.”

“Very good,” said Stephen, laughing. “And if you don’t advance you’ll never come to London. Good evening,” he said to Constanze in German.

She nodded to them both and said to Anna, “I’m so happy to see you well.”

“Thank you,” Anna answered, and felt a kind of panic rise inside her. Not the panic of stage fright—decidedly not that. She had returned to the party ten minutes after Benucci had gone. No one there mentioned her absence, nor her reddened eyes. They were all kindness. They avoided speaking of the madman, and the rumors.

Stephen had had a few drinks and was relaxed and amused. He had played well tonight. “I say, Mozart,” he continued, still in German, “awfully good of you to join us. Awfully bold. We missed you at our rehearsal for Anna’s cantata.”

“I was sick that day,” Mozart protested. “Feverish indigestion. Wasn’t I, my dear? I wrote Mademoiselle Storace and she absolved me.”

Saying this he pulled Anna toward him and whispered quickly in her ear, as if a caricature in a play, “I am an ass. Say nothing. You sang beautifully, beautifully—” but his grip on her arm was firm and his lips grazed her earlobe.

“Stop it, my love,” laughed Constanze, pulling him back. “You’ll muss her hair.” She looked around them composedly. “My husband has had too much wine.”

“I have not,” cried Mozart.

“He really was sick that day,” Constanze continued. “He hasn’t been that sick in ages. But he wouldn’t let me write you because he
insisted he’d be well enough. He kept saying, ‘I must be there, I must hear her,’ until I thought he’d have a fit, so finally he went, but by then it was too late and he came right home again. I thought it was a lot of fuss for nothing when he was so unwell.”

“It’s not true,” Mozart said. “I was not sick, I was fatigued. My wife is trying to defend me. Wasn’t sick at all.”

“You
were
sick,” said Constanze, frowning. “I was most anxious. I didn’t want you to go out. But you insisted.”

“You didn’t come all the way to our house, did you?” said Stephen. “Why the devil didn’t you say hello?”

Mozart looked at Anna and shrugged a little. “I was too late. I hadn’t realized, in my state, how late it was.”

“Well,” said Stephen. “I’m rather glad you weren’t there; I played your stuff abominably that day. I fared much better tonight.”

“You were so charming,” said Constanze. She smiled and patted Anna’s arm. “Both of you were so charming. Everyone is so happy.”

Mozart rode out on his horse lightly and easily, humming to himself, occasionally talking to the animal or patting its neck. There was a special grace in being a small man upon a fine horse. One could observe the world from height. One guided the animal and was carried by it. The ears swiveled, the hooves clopped, there was a bellows of breathing and low, conversational snorts. The balance was elegant and lively, always at the edge of thought, like when one hit a special place of concentration where the notes seemed to run of their own accord and one was afraid to eat or sleep or take a piss lest one topple down again into the slog of tedious labor and confusion like the poor fellows who walked.

It was good to have a horse. He hoped he wouldn’t have to sell it. Sell the horse and move to the outer city beyond the Prater, where the cheap rents were. With a horse one could see everything and get places quickly and independently, and look a certain way, tall, refined, powerful. He was not really any of those things, without his pretty horse, without his piano or some other instrument. On his
own he was small and bashful. Always saying some nonsense. He could never say quite what he meant. His own face made him laugh in the mirror, the jutting nose, the pitted skin, the eyes like a frog. When Aloysia Lange had broken his heart he had stared at his face for a long time. He did not do so anymore, he only laughed. His father, though, was stringently handsome. But Wolfgang resembled his mother. She had died with him in Paris, the worst days of his life. His father had blamed him. He would never go back to Paris. Not for all the horses in the world.

He would stop at his best friend Gottfried’s house for lunch, teach a lesson, meet with Da Ponte, pick up his new coat, the one with the white and gold, drop off a few easy piano pieces for a princess, and have an English lesson with Georg Kronauer, his brother Mason. Stephen Storace was rubbish for English lessons, and Anna—well, he couldn’t speak English with Anna, she made him tongue-tied in English—she pattered on in her lilting way and he gaped and stuttered and made a fool of his own foolishness until they were both constricted with laughter.

There was never enough money and never enough time. He thought of his death every day, not from morbidity or fear but to remind himself that it would come. He wasted so much time. Just this morning he had overslept and then had had to write a couple of letters and suddenly he was late for lunch at Gottfried’s and had not a line of music to show for himself. If he died today he would leave his family poor and his best work—he felt it there, dormant in his heart—unwritten. So it would be better not to die today, please God. Since becoming a Freemason he thought he had made his peace with death, which had used to frighten and anger him so much, but yet there were all these things waiting urgently in his heart to be written, waiting for money and time and peace and concentration. He could have written them today if he had not overslept. These piano pieces he was selling for the princess were drivel, rubbish, worse than any mincing, timid, derivative opus of his peers. But they had to be mincing or she could never play them and he
would never get his fee and would never pay the rent. Not that the fee would cover the rent. But he had to have the white-and-gold coat for performing in. He had to look richer than he was. A fine set of garments was as important as a fine horse—more so. When he wore a coat like that, then he was handsome. Striking, if not handsome. When everything fit just so and the fabric was heavy and rich and the buttons were like pearls and the collar was high and everything sharp and straight and fine and smooth. He was a peacock but he did love it. Then he could be easy with himself, then stand tall and play beautifully and banter with the duchesses and not be so nervous and shy. Most of the time one would not know he was nervous and shy. He had learned early and well to disguise his feelings with revelry.

Lovely, graceful, funny Anna. He felt he had always known her; he’d felt that from the first. And yet he’d never met anyone like her. This little English Italian soprano. Her waist fit neatly in his hands. Her hair was dark and soft; softer still were her lips and her cheek. How many hours he’d spent dreaming of her cheek, of it resting against his naked chest while he stroked her downy temple.