The Brahms Deception Page 13

“No. No, it’s okay, Chiara. Although,” he added with a smile, “that seems like a good reason to be a doctor. Did your father object to that?”

  “No, no. My mother is also a doctor, and my older brother. It was expected.”

  “Do you like it?”

  She laughed. “Sometimes I like it very much. Sometimes I do not. Like most other professions, I think.”

  “You’ll be a wonderful doctor.”

  She squeezed his arm, and released it. “Kris, you do not know me. You can’t know if I will be good or bad.”

  “Yes, I can,” he said. “I watched you with the Bannisters, and with Frederica. It comes naturally to you, I think.”

  Her voice was warm but tinged with that air of being older than her years as she said, “Perhaps. I am not sure I know yet myself.”

  They reached the parking lot of the clinic. Everything was quiet on the outside, as if there were no drama, no heartache, inside the plain building. As they stepped up on the porch, Kristian said, “I thought I had won the transfer to observe Brahms.”

  “Yes, I know about this.”

  “When I learned that the Foundation gave it to someone else—I didn’t take it very well.”

  “Of course not! A terrible disappointment—your dream lost, no?”

  “That’s a good way to put it.” He leaned against one of the pillars. The guard, for the moment, was absent, probably making one of his hourly circuits around the building. Chiara stood gazing out into the night. He watched her profile, thinking how familiar she already was, as if he had known her for years instead of days. “Everything fell apart after that,” he said quietly. “My girlfriend left.”

  “Because you lost the transfer?” She turned to look up at him. “That seems very selfish.”

  “Well,” he said, and managed a short laugh. “It was not just that. She’s a very ambitious girl. A singer—good singer, actually. She—well, we argued. We said a lot of things.”

  Chiara said without hesitation, “You were not right for each other.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” He closed his eyes a moment, wishing he could forget those dark weeks. “It was all a train wreck—everything piling up until I couldn’t stop it. First the transfer, then Catherine, and then the school. Took me weeks to calm down.”

  He had been lucky, he knew, to get his old job back at Angel’s. Rosie had spoken up for him. For months he had pounded out his frustration on the piano, until Angel complained over the cost of having it tuned so often. It had helped, though, blasting Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov through the bar in the late hours.

  He straightened, remembering where he was. He looked down at Chiara, and spread his hands. “Sorry. It’s still a bit fresh.”

  “Poverino,” she said softly. “Your heart was broken.”

  “Well—yes, you could say my heart was broken. Perhaps I broke it myself. I made a mess of everything, and now I have a steep tuition bill to pay and no doctorate to show for it.”

  “You must be very angry with Dr. Braunstein.”

  He didn’t think it was wise to answer that. He said instead, wryly, “At least it got me back into Angel’s.”

  “Angels?”

  “Angel’s, the possessive. Angel’s Bar. It’s not like a bar here in Italy, but a nightclub. I play piano there five nights a week. A real career highlight.”

  She put her hand on the door. “I would like to hear you play,” she said. “There is a piano in the reception room, at the other side of the building, beneath the stairs.”

  He grinned at her, and his heart lightened a bit. “We’ll see,” he said. “You might not like my kind of music!”

  They found the Bannisters and Elliott and Max huddled around the desk in the transfer room, and they each pulled a chair close to join them. Frederica still slumbered on her cot, brown hair straggling from beneath the transfer cap. Frederick Bannister had combed his sparse hair and changed his shirt. Bronwyn Bannister looked as if she was so weary she could barely stand, but she leaned forward, listening to Lillian Braunstein.

  The speaker on the phone made Braunstein’s voice sound even more brittle than usual. “You’ll have to use the EMP,” she said.

  “I don’t like it,” Max said. His freckled cheeks looked drawn, and Kristian wondered when he had slept last. “We don’t know enough about how it will work.”

  “What is it?” Bannister said.

  Elliott pushed a thin stack of paper toward him. “It’s an electromagnetic pulse. The idea is to stimulate Frederica’s brain.”

  “It’s supposed to jar the subject out of the transfer,” Max said with none of his usual cheer. “It gives a pretty strong kick.”

  “Is it safe?” Bronwyn quavered.

  Braunstein’s voice rattled through the speaker. “We think it’s perfectly safe.”

  “But you don’t know?” Bronwyn’s voice shook.

  Elliott said, “It probably is.” Max’s lips twisted, and he rubbed his brush of hair.

  Chiara said to the phone, “Dr. Braunstein, you know that the pulse can have side effects. Are we confident Frederica has never had trouble with her heart?”

  “Her heart?” Bronwyn’s waxen face turned even paler.

  Braunstein managed to sound angry even over the great distance between Castagno and Chicago. “It should be fine.”

  Kristian said with asperity, “Should be? That’s comforting.” Max and Chiara both flashed him a look. He lifted his chin and stared at the opposite wall, his jaw clenched. What will it do to Clara?

  Bronwyn said shakily, “Frederick tells me you saw Frederica, but that she disappeared. I just don’t understand, Mr. North. Could you have made a mistake?”

  Kristian’s arms were folded so tightly they ached. It would be so easy—easier—to blurt it all out, take the responsibility off his own shoulders and place it where it belonged. In fact, it would be satisfying to tell these people that their daughter, who had stolen his place, had done something unspeakable. They might not believe him, but at least he would be telling the truth.

  But he couldn’t. For one thing, it felt too much like spite, and he couldn’t see how it would help. The real reason was Clara herself. It didn’t matter that she had been dead for a century. In 1861, she was alive, and she had a right to her own life.

  He tried to speak evenly. “No, Mrs. Bannister. I didn’t make a mistake.” He didn’t want to speak the lie again. He had said enough already.

  Braunstein’s voice took on the tone of command. “Use the pulse,” she said. “If it doesn’t work, we have another researcher ready to come to Castagno.”

  Kristian shoved himself to his feet. His chair teetered, and he caught it just before it fell. Chiara jumped up as Kristian took a step back, away from the desk.

  “What does Gregson say?” he demanded. His voice was loud and harsh in the quiet room.

  Braunstein hesitated, and the moment of silence as she chose her words seemed louder than the scrape of Kristian’s chair on the tiled floor. She said, “Dr. Gregson always errs on the side of caution.”

  “If it’s not safe . . .” Bronwyn’s voice faltered.

  Her husband said, “We have to try it, dear.”

  “We have to try it?” Bronwyn cried. Her voice rose. “That’s what you said before, Frederick! You said, we have to let her try it!” She stood up, tottering on unsteady feet. “It shouldn’t even be Frederica lying there!”

  Bannister came to his feet, too, seizing his wife’s arm. “Bronwyn! Don’t—”

  “Don’t? Don’t? How dare you! You’re the one that could never say no to her, and now—look at your daughter!” She cast a look of hatred on her husband. “You said it would be safe, that it wouldn’t—”

  “Bronwyn! Be quiet!”

  Bronwyn shook off his hand. Everyone was staring at her, openmouthed. She said, with a gesture to include everyone, “It shouldn’t be my daughter lying there! You all know that, don’t you?” Her voice rose until it was nearly a shr
iek. “It shouldn’t be Frederica at all. It should be him!” She raised her arm and pointed a long, scarlet-tipped forefinger directly at Kristian.

  9

  Clara Wieck, six years old, loved playing the piano. She even liked practicing. What she didn’t like were her lessons with her father.

  Friedrich had designated her at her birth to be the realization of his ambitions, and when he took her away from her mother and brought Clara back to his home in Leipzig he began his work on her in earnest. He was known as a strict taskmaster with his other pupils. With his daughter he was a despot. He shouted at her, he cursed her mother for spoiling her, he demanded she learn the most difficult pieces, he ordered her to practice for hours on end.

  She was a strong little girl, and she met every one of her father’s demands. But she was only a child, and when Friedrich sent Johanna away, the second maternal figure to be torn from Clara, she rebelled. She began to hide herself when it was time for her lesson.

  She had lots of hiding places. There was a closet under the stairs where the housekeeper stored brooms and dustpans and spare candles. There was a wardrobe of winter clothes that stank of camphor. There was a cupboard in the kitchen, used for baskets of potatoes and sacks of flour. Her nurse discovered all of these eventually, one after the other, and would haul her out by her pantalettes and deliver her over to her father. Desperate to find some new place to conceal herself, one morning after breakfast she climbed into a trunk of sheets and blankets folded around sachets of lavender. She burrowed deep beneath them so that even if her father opened the lid, he wouldn’t see tiny Clara huddling at the bottom. She stayed there for what seemed like hours, until she could scarcely breathe the close air and had to concede that an hour of being bullied into playing scales and arpeggios was better than another moment buried under a pile of linens.

  Now, in the darkest moment of her life—darker even than those following her beloved Robert’s death—Clara felt like that little girl again, suffocating under a blanket. She understood now she was not dead, or dying. It was, perhaps, even worse. She was oppressed. Subjugated.

  Surely she had spent most of her life fighting this feeling! Her father, her children, and even dearest Robert had wanted to control her, to bend her to their own needs and wishes and ambitions. Only Hannes, in all truth, had loved her for herself alone and not for what she could do for him. Hannes did not require her to salve his ego, to manage his home, to promote his work. He encouraged her to go on with her own compositions, to pursue her concert career, even to have a little free time from the pressures of children and publishers and agents.

  Clara heard them, Hannes and this—this possessor. She heard the quick breathing, the gasps of ecstasy, the sighs of release. She felt the warmth of their coupling, the urgency of it, though it was remote, separated from her, denied to her. Hannes, Hannes! But he didn’t know he was being unfaithful. He couldn’t know. This deep pleasure, to which she had finally succumbed after years of resistance, had been stolen from her. This other, whoever or whatever it was, had stepped into her place.

  Of course, it was not rightfully her place. She should not have been here in Castagno at all. Perhaps this was her punishment.

  She had tried not to give in to temptation. When Robert was so ill, Hannes stayed faithfully at her side, protecting her from the curiosity of the public, interceding on her behalf with the doctors and the sanitarium. There had been only Robert in her heart. She had always loved Hannes, of course. They both had. He had come to them like a young eagle, tall and fair and brilliant. He worshiped Robert, and Robert believed passionately in Hannes’s music. When Robert pressured her to limit her public appearances, Hannes remonstrated with him. When Robert was ill for so long, Hannes helped to care for the children, advised her in financial matters, helped her to manage Robert’s publishers and correspondence. The three of them had been so close that when Robert was no longer there the two survivors grew even closer.

  It had all come about in the most natural way. She, of course, was a middle-aged woman, a mother, a professional. Her life was not her own. But Hannes was young, and hot-blooded. The first day she put off her mourning clothes, he spoke to her.

  She had been at the piano, playing through Robert’s manuscript for the E-flat Variations one more time before sending it to his publisher. The housekeeper showed Hannes into the music room, and he stood in the doorway, smiling to see Clara dressed in a wine-colored dress instead of the black she had worn for so long. The dress was severely plain, lacking either lace or ruffle, and the underskirt was a modest printed cotton, but he exclaimed as if it were a silk concert gown.

  “Clara! How beautiful you look!”

  She pushed away the manuscript, and got up from the piano. “Hannes, you must not flatter me. I know I look as wan as any other widow. I certainly feel it.”

  He crossed to her, his long legs lean and muscular in rather tight trousers, his excellent figure shown to advantage in his high-collared coat and brocade waistcoat. How could she not notice how handsome he looked? How full and ruddy his cheeks? Robert had been so wasted at the end. He knew no one, could hardly remember his own name. By contrast, Hannes glowed with health and energy and intelligence.

  Hannes bent to kiss her cheek with lips that were firm and tender at the same time. Even then, just a year after Robert’s death, Clara had felt a flutter of something under her breastbone, something she thought had died with her husband. The temptation to rest her cheek against Hannes’s lapels, for just an instant, was so intense as to be all but irresistible.

  She did resist, but he was not so constrained. He caught her hands, and brought them to his lips. “Clara, it has been long enough. Robert would not want you to be sad all of your life.”

  She should have pulled away then. She should have snatched back her hands, insisted that Hannes behave toward her as he always had. That was her real moment of weakness.

  She was so weary of being sad and alone. She was exhausted with the weight of worrying over money and her children’s welfare and her husband’s health. She was only thirty-seven that year, and facing years ahead without her husband. Though she thought of herself as middle-aged, her mirror told her she was still young. The flicker of desire in her body was like that of youth, though she had meant to lay it to rest with her husband.

  On that day, she had been strong. She had smiled up into Hannes’s wonderful eyes and said, “Come now, Hannes. Help me with this manuscript. I think there are one or two errors to be corrected before I send it off.”

  He squeezed her hands, and followed her to the piano. They bent their heads together over Robert’s music, and the warmth and strength of Hannes’s shoulder so close to hers caused the flicker of desire to grow into a flame.

  He looked down at her, his eyes kindling at their nearness. He knew, even then. He knew her feelings, recognized her longing. It made it all the harder in the months to come to keep her distance, to maintain the dignity and solitude of her widowhood.

  She had immersed herself in her concert schedule, in her children’s schooling, in the running of her household. But still, as she lay alone in her bed at night, her dreams of Hannes betrayed her memories of Robert. When she drank her solitary coffee very early in the morning, before anyone was about, she meant to think of Robert, to hold him in her thoughts, but Hannes’s clear features intruded.

  And when she sat at the piano—when she tried to apply herself to editing Robert’s last works, as he had requested—it was Hannes’s music that haunted her. She sometimes felt like a girl again, infatuated, beguiled by romantic love. It was neither wise nor seemly, but it was undeniable.

  She had no intention, then, of giving in to temptation. But the years stretched ahead of her, long, lonely years of work and yet more work, of sacrifice and fatigue and longings unanswered.

  She should have accepted it. She should never have thought she could escape, even for a brief time. She had made a terrible mistake, she saw that now, and this was her punishm
ent. She tried to cry out to Hannes, but he could not hear her. She cried out to God for help, but He turned a deaf ear to her pleas. Her possessor was merciless, cruel. A demon, surely, allowed by God to torment her. And she was helpless before its greater strength.

  Frederica had mastered much of Brahms’s piano music by the time she was seventeen, and won early entrance to Oberlin. There she also played the Lieder, accompanying voice students in their lessons and recitals and master classes. She knew her future didn’t lie in performance. She was not a great sight reader, nor even a truly fine pianist. She understood musicology would be a better application for her talents, but still she worked hard at the piano, laboring over fingerings and rhythms and accidentals until they were second nature.

  All of this served her now. When she followed Brahms’s tall figure down the staircase on her second morning in 1861, he went straight to the fortepiano to place a fresh sheaf of foolscap pages on the music stand. He pushed back the bench for her to sit down, doing it with the air of habit, as if this was the way they spent every day here in Casa Agosto. Feeling a bit sticky and uncomfortable, she lifted the heavy skirts and slid onto the brocade bench.

  She had managed to put on all the clothes again, though they felt confining and hot. There had been a bit of trouble with the corset, but he had helped her. She would have liked a shower, but of course there was nothing like that here. She had to be satisfied with a splash of water from the ewer on the washstand. She looked up at the music he had placed before her with a touch of trepidation.

  Clara Schumann had been a brilliant sight reader, though she was one of the first pianists to perform exclusively from memory. Frederica had no doubt Clara could play even newly handwritten manuscripts with ease. She could not hope to match her.

  Brahms sat beside her, and reached up to arrange the sheets of manuscript.

  Excitement and relief ran through Frederica. The excitement was purely that of a musicologist looking at an early version of the A-Major Quartet. She had seen the manuscript once, but it was not the same. This one was still rough, with notes crossed out and accidentals spilling across the staves. Frederica, smiling, began to pick out the notes, slowly at first, careful to play as if she had not seen them before. The relief she felt was because she already knew this piece thoroughly. She had performed it in graduate school and refreshed her memory of it when she knew she had won the transfer.