The Brahms Deception Page 34

  Christmas lights, as garish as the still-flickering neon sign outside Angel’s, hung in uneven loops across the mirror above the bar. A dilapidated aluminum tree with red and green ornaments stood in one corner. The only improvement Angel had made—under orders, Kristian thought, from Rosie—was that the piano had been tuned. It wouldn’t hold, not in that environment, but it was nice, and by the time the low registers were no longer in agreement with the upper ones he’d be back at the university.

  He played Christmas tunes, jazzing up some, turning others into blues. “White Christmas,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and “Blue Christmas,” until he couldn’t take the saccharine sweetness anymore. Then he played “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rudolph,” as patrons called out requests. When he took a break, he sat at the bar chatting with Rosie.

  “It’s nice to hear you again,” she said.

  “Thanks. Nothing’s changed here, I see.”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, nothing changes at Angel’s. We’re frozen in time.”

  He finished his bottle of mineral water, then stood up to go back to the piano. “Any requests, Rosie?”

  “I’m just waiting to hear the good stuff, Kris. Like you used to play.”

  “You think maybe it’s too early for that?”

  She looked around at her customers. “Nope. It’s perfect.”

  “You got it.” He turned back toward the piano.

  He began the introduction to “E lucevan le stelle.” Rosie always liked Puccini. She had loved listening to Catherine sing Lauretta. Catherine wouldn’t have sung Cavaradossi, of course, but he had heard a young tenor at the university working on it in the studio near his office. The nostalgic text had stayed in Kristian’s mind:

  How the stars used to shine there,

  How sweet the earth smelled,

  The orchard gate would creak,

  And a footstep would lightly crease the sand.

  She’d come in, fragrant as a flower,

  And she’d fall into my arms.

  He was twelve bars into it when he glanced up and saw the young Clara Schumann standing in the doorway. Flickering neon light from the sign outside played over her dark hair, and her eyes glistened in the muted light from the bar. She gave him a wide smile, an expression of merriment he had never before seen on her face. His fingers faltered, and he lifted his hands from the keyboard, his mouth open in astonishment. He was afraid to blink.

  She took a step toward him, into the muted light of the bar. He exhaled a big breath of surprise and relief. It wasn’t Clara at all. It was Chiara Belfiore. Erika and Zachary were behind her, all of them smiling, making their way around the scattered tables toward the piano.

  Kristian, grinning back at them, crashed on through the aria, playing the melody in parallel octaves, treating its mournful nobility as if it were all a great joke. Puccini wouldn’t have liked it, but Erika was laughing as she crossed the room, one hand on her cane, the other tucked under Zachary’s arm.

  Oh! sweet kisses, oh! lingering caresses,

  Trembling, I’d slowly uncover her dazzling beauty.

  Now, my dream of love has vanished forever.

  My last hour has flown, and I die, hopeless!

  And never have I loved life more!

  He finished with a flourish, a pounded chord, then jumped up from the piano. “Chiara! What on earth—”

  Erika said, “She’s spending Christmas with us, Kris. We’ve planned this as a surprise.”

  Chiara twinkled up at him, and he suddenly didn’t know why he had thought she was Clara. Everything about her was different, the pert nose, the curling hair falling every which way. She wore a turtleneck sweater and jeans, just as she had in Castagno. And her smile surely lighted every room she entered. She said, “I hope it is a happy surprise, Kristian.”

  “It’s perfect!” She put out her hand to him, but on an impulse he swept her into his arms and hugged her, hard. “It’s just perfect!”

  She hugged him back. She was small and firm and warm against him. And very much alive. As he released her, she looked up into his face. “You look very well, Kristian.”

  Something sweet and familiar flickered in his heart. He held her hand in both of his, and wondered how he could have forgotten. He told her, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.”

  “And you are Dr. North now, Erika has told me.”

  “Yeah. Finally.”

  “And so.” She tilted her head and looked up at him, appraising him. He had forgotten, too, how she managed to look young and old at the same time, wise beyond her years. “And so, you are free.”

  Softly, with a feeling that she had said something important, he agreed. “Yeah, I am. Exactly. And I’m damned glad to see you, Chiara.” She laughed, and he turned her toward the bar. “Come on. I want to introduce you to someone. I think Rosie will approve.”

  23

  Clara was nearly overcome by gratitude when Hannes accepted her invitation to celebrate her first Christmas in Frankfurt. It had seemed, in the past few years, that the losses never ceased—her mother, her daughter Julie, her father—and as she took up her post at the Hoch Conservatory she felt every one of her fifty-nine years, in her hands, in her knees, and most of all in her heart. When she opened the door to find Hannes on the step, looking so strong, still youthful, his blue eyes bright against the backdrop of snow and ice, she nearly threw herself into his arms.

  She did not, of course. Marie came into the foyer right behind her, and greeted Hannes with enthusiasm, helping him with his snow-dusted overcoat, his hat and scarf, offering him hot cider to take the chill from his bones. Laughing, he accepted, and Marie bustled off to give orders in the kitchen. Clara contented herself with taking his arm to guide him into the parlor. She was glad to feel solid muscle beneath the fabric of his coat, to see the flush of health in his cheeks. He had begun letting his beard grow. She regretted that, but she supposed, as he was now a man of fortyfive, that it was appropriate. As they settled into two delicate brocade chairs opposite her piano, he looked around with obvious pleasure.

  “It’s beautiful, Clara,” he said. His voice was deeper than it had been, roughened by his cigars and his pipe, no doubt. He was not the boy she had been so much in love with, though when she looked into his eyes she still saw that youth of twenty-eight who had tempted her off to a secret Italian holiday.

  “It is nice, isn’t it, Hannes?” She followed his glance around her comfortable home. “It’s convenient to the Conservatory.”

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his long legs. She wriggled back into her own chair, smoothing her dark skirts over her knees. It was good to have a man in the house. She no longer yearned for Hannes at night, alone in her bed, but it felt right to have him here with her and the children. “How is the teaching?” he asked. “You have good students?”

  She chuckled. “No! I have bad students, and I am hard put to make them better.”

  “Clara, mein Engel, I’m sure you terrify them all!”

  “I hope so. It’s good for them.” She pretended to look stern, but he only laughed and reached into his pocket for a cigar. She jumped up in a swish of crinoline to fetch the matchbox from the mantelpiece. She struck the match herself, and held it for him as he drew. When she sat down again, she said, “Oh, Hannes, I’m so glad you’re here. Since the jubilee, I feel beset on every side!”

  He frowned a little, the cigar clenched between his teeth. “Why is that?”

  “They want me to finish editing Robert’s collected works, but I have no confidence. There are so many things that need to be corrected—I am just not sure of his wishes.”

  He took the cigar from his mouth, and leaned forward to take her hand. She closed her eyes at the comfort and warmth of it. That old, dangerous weakness swept through her heart. She forced herself to open her eyes again, to gently withdraw her hand.

  Hannes understood, she thought. He always understood her thoughts and her needs. That was part of the danger.


  She watched him as he sat back, arranging his long frame in the ridiculously small chair, and she smiled. “I must buy a bigger chair for your visits.”

  “Please.” He smiled in return, and put the cigar back in his mouth, but she saw the way his eyelids fell, hiding his expression from her. She said, “Hannes?”

  Abruptly he thrust the cigar into the tray beside his elbow and jumped to his feet. He strode to the window, turning his back to it, his hands clasped behind him. “Clara, you know I still . . . if you would reconsider—”

  “Oh, Hannes, dearest,” she began, but her words were cut off by Marie returning with a tray of steaming cups and a plate of macaroons.

  They all sat down, and chatted lightly about an upcoming concert, about Marie’s work with her father’s publishers, about Julie’s children, Elise’s new husband. Clara and Hannes weren’t alone again until far into the evening, when the rest of the family had repaired upstairs to their beds and the two of them sat on a divan before the fire, listening to the slight, comforting noises above their heads, the sounds of a family preparing for the night. Clara had covered her legs with a quilt. She sometimes felt inexplicably cold, especially in winter. A sign, she feared, of increasing age.

  “I love being here with all of you,” he said.

  “I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve looked forward to this for so long, Hannes.”

  He watched the twisting dance of the flames, his clear profile illumined in gold and rust, and her heart nearly betrayed her. When he turned his head, he caught her glance and reached for her hand. “Clara. Won’t you consider—”

  She held his hand, but she shook her head, looking into his dear face. “Don’t, Hannes,” she whispered. “It was almost the end of me.”

  “Not because we were—No! It wasn’t a judgment, Clara! It was something else, something wicked and cruel, but not a judgment!”

  She looked away, even as she savored the feeling of her cold fingers secure in his long, warm ones. “I can’t bear to speak of it,” she said quietly, brokenly. “I can hardly bear even to think of it, although sometimes . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Sometimes what?” he said, very low, as if he were afraid of interrupting her thought.

  “Sometimes I see someone,” she said. “I think I see the—the one who saved me.”

  “How can that be?”

  “How could any of it have happened, dearest?” It was Clara’s turn to stare into the fire, to try to hold her courage about her like the quilt warming her feet. “How could a demon have possessed me, and then an angel set me free? None of it can be real, and yet—you were part of it. You felt it. And so you know.”

  “But what is it you see that makes you think it is the one who saved you?”

  “I can’t explain, even to myself. It’s a—I suppose it’s an intuition. It’s like knowing, in some secret part of you, how to make music out of notes on a page. Something in me responds to him.”

  “Him?”

  She shivered a little, and drew the quilt closer. “I have seen a young man, Hannes. Fair, like you—even fairer, really, very light hair—with blue eyes and a sweet face.”

  “Clara—are you imagining things? Perhaps . . .” He paused, and said delicately, “Perhaps the change of life, meine Schatz?”

  “Oh, no. No, it’s not that. I have seen him very clearly. Three times.”

  “Where? How?”

  “I have no way to explain how. As to where, it has been different places. I am usually falling asleep, or just waking. I have this feeling that I must look up, or look across the room, that I am drawn somehow . . . and there he is.”

  Hannes scowled. “Like seeing a ghost.”

  “Yes. Like seeing a ghost.”

  “I don’t see why you think this is your—your angel. Your savior.”

  “I feel it,” she said simply.

  “It all happened so long ago,” he said. “Can you not put it aside? Put it out of your mind?”

  “I would like to do that, but it’s as if—as if sometimes he needs me, instead of the other way around. I would like to say good-bye, to have it all be over, but until he—” She shook her head in a gesture of helplessness. “I can’t make sense of it, dearest.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t see him anymore.”

  “I do, too. Only because I want to forget that terrible time.” She caught a breath, and said, “Oh, Hannes—not all of that time. Being there with you—until it happened—that was one of the sweetest times of my life.”

  He moved closer to her, brought her hand to his lips. “Mein Engel. It has been seventeen years, but nothing has changed. I still love only you.”

  “Hannes, I am too old. That part of my life is done.”

  “I care nothing for that,” he said stoutly.

  She wanted to weep. Instead, she composed her face to turn to him as a friend might. “You are famous, Hannes,” she said lightly. “You write magnificent music, and you allow me to play it. Your legacy will be perhaps the finest of the age.”

  He chuckled, and kissed her fingers again. “You exaggerate.”

  “No. I do not.” She allowed herself to lean toward him, to kiss his cheek. “You should not be distracted by an old woman like me.”

  “You are not old!”

  She drew back, and turned her gaze back to the fire. It seemed sad, somehow, small and brave, striving against the darkness, but collapsing onto itself bit by bit. By midnight there would be nothing but embers and the faint, reminiscent glow of what had once been.

  “I am almost old,” she mused. “It’s very strange, to think of myself as old, but it’s time I accept it.”

  “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” Hannes said stoutly.

  She smiled into the fire. “Flatterer. I know it’s not true.”

  He pressed her fingers. “No one has ever taken your place in my heart. No one ever could.”

  “Sometimes I admit I’m glad of that,” she murmured. “But in my stronger moments, I wish you would find someone to share your life.”

  “You share my life, Clara.”

  She tilted her head to cast him a sidelong look. Even now she felt the tie between them, pulling them together. But it wasn’t right. Though she wished she didn’t have to, she resisted it, tucking her feet beneath her, wriggling a little farther away from him. “I do, Hannes. I do share your life. But you need more than I can give you.”

  He smiled, and reached across to fold her quilt more tightly around her. When he had enclosed her in it, binding her arms so she could not resist, he kissed her mouth, once, twice, three times, until she was breathless and laughing at the tickle of his newly growing beard. “I am content, my Clara,” he said. He drew her into his arms and held her close, like a swaddled baby. “I am content just to be here with you.”

  CODA

  Late that same night, Clara woke abruptly and lay staring at the brass chandelier above her bed. Moonlight shining off the fresh snowfall filled her bedroom with its silvery reflection. She sat up, and pushed back a lock of hair that had escaped her nightcap. She saw everything as easily as in daylight, the bulk of her wardrobe, the pitcher and ewer on the washstand. Mementoes of her jubilee celebration still hung around the oval mirror above her dressing table.

  She felt the tug that had become familiar over the years. The first time it had happened she had been still young. She hadn’t expected, then, that it would happen again. The visions seemed to come when she least expected them, and she thought that was because they were not about her. Her story had already unfolded, while his—whoever he was—was still developing.

  She got out of bed. At the foot she had laid a knitted shawl, and she wrapped this around her shoulders before she crossed the cold floor to the window. He wasn’t here yet, but he would be. She knew this feeling, this sense that she was being called. It had been years since she had felt it, but time did not seem to lessen its insistence.

  She looked out the window to see the
snowy streets, the pristinely blanketed gardens, the spires of the churches rising in the distance, glittering faintly in the moonlight. It felt good, she thought, to be looking forward to Christmas, to have her children about her, to have Hannes in the house. She was getting old, but that was not what mattered. Her family mattered, and her work. Her reputation mattered, and Robert’s memory. Robert’s legacy. At this moment, in the depth of winter, she was content.

  She shivered against the chill seeping in through the glass. As she drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders, she turned her back to the window.

  He was standing just inside the door of her bedroom. He wore his customary smooth, shiny coat, made of some material she didn’t recognize. It was short, and he wore it open over a shirt with the collar undone. His trousers were made of some rough fabric, with slanted, stitched pockets and bits of what looked like hardware here and there. Like Hannes, he was young, and strong, and handsome.

  And this time he wasn’t alone.

  Oddly, the young woman at his side wore the same rough trousers, but she wore a thick sort of shirt over them, with a high collar that folded just under her pointed chin. She was small and very pretty, with curling, disarrayed hair and a short, straight nose. He had his arm around her, and they were both laughing, leaning together, walking. Clara smiled to see them, though an ache of nostalgia for her own youth made her press her hands to her heart.

  The girl seemed not to see her, but he—he turned his head, and his eyes widened. They looked at each other, Clara and the boy, for a long, tender moment. He kept walking, but his eyes followed her, keeping her in sight until he was looking over his shoulder. It was illusion, of course, but it seemed he and the girl walked across her bedroom and vanished through the wall behind the wardrobe.

  Clara knew, at that instant, that she would not see him again. The era in her life that had begun in Castagno in 1861 had come to a close.