Chamber Music (20 page)

“‘How can you be sure? Perhaps you haven't felt what love is yet.'

“‘Oh, yes, I know what it is. I have felt love.'

“‘For someone else? Another man?'”

She did not know what to say then, she told me. She hesitated, and then said, “‘No.'”

She turned back to her weeding. When she looked up again, Eric was standing a little way off, staring at her: “His face was red, Carrie. He looked—he looked unbelieving, as though he were suddenly remembering a dream—I don't know. He ran his hand through his hair and shook his head, again and again. Then he turned away and left.”

“Do you think he understood?”

“I'm sure.”

But Eric did not give up trying to be close to where Anna was. He held her chair, he always took the seat beside her at dinner, he followed her onto the back porch in the evenings when we all left the dining room and went out to witness the sunset. He sat beside her on the stone benches where we waited for the moon to rise and the stars to appear. His pursuit was sad and mute. Anna told me he did not again speak to her of love or require anything of her except that she not reject his presence close to her. He always asked her permission: “May I sit beside you? Do you mind if I walk with you?” His great size hovering over her must have been noticed by everyone, in the evenings, in the dining room, when we were all together.
I
noticed, and watched, feeling within me a little rough place like a ragged fingernail that irritated and troubled my mind. But of course I said nothing of this to Anna.

Our union had always been without descriptive words. We accepted without comment what we had discovered with each other by chance, the miracle of love. It may have been the irregularity to the outside world of our life together that kept us from talking about it to each other, even in private—I don't know—or it may be that there was no need for talk. A fitting vocabulary for such discussion did not then exist, or at least, if it did, Anna and I did not know any of its words.

Anna's kindnesses to Eric intensified because, she told me, “I feel so sorry for him. The least I can do is see that he eats and that his shirts have their buttons returned, and that Edward brings enough kindling to his studio against the early-morning chill.”

Late in August we had our traditional Sunday evening picnic. It had been a beautiful day, almost an early fall day, and promised to be a fine evening. Dorothy Griffith, Anna, and I prepared the food hampers, and the men carried them to the elevated grassy area near the graves. The four young musicians seemed in very good spirits, wine was consumed quickly, we ate sitting on shawls, and watched the sun set over the trees. So when it happened no one was prepared for the violence in Eric's voice. In the course of a small joke she was making, Dorothy had placed her hand over Eric's, apparently (I did not see it but Anna thought she had), and Eric was enraged by the comradely gesture.

“Don't touch me. I dislike being touched. Why are you always touching me?”

Dorothy blushed deeply, rose to her feet at once, and walked away from us, down the path to Weeks Studio. One of the men—I don't remember which—went after her. The rest of us, surprised, gathered up the picnic plates and packed the two hampers.

Eric remained seated on the shawl, making no move to help us. He stared down, tracing the motifs in the shawl with a long finger.

“Anna, say something to him,” I whispered to her as we packed. “Or shall I?”

“I think we should leave him be. He will be all right in a little while. It would embarrass him to be spoken to, I think.”

Between us, Anna and I carried one hamper, leaving the other to be brought back later by the men. We said good night to Eric, who remained as he was, seated like a stone on the shawl, and did not answer. Once we had to put the heavy hamper down to rest our arms. I looked back. He was still there, but he was watching us, Anna and me, his light blue eyes looking almost red in the evening light. His hand was over the red blemish on his face, and he looked tragic, a giant child, seated on the ground in the dusk.

Edward drove us to the village for our two hours of war work in the library. He waited for us, and at eleven we started back.

We were near the Farm road when Anna noticed smoke on the horizon. I remember how I started at the sight, for the evening in town, all the women working together, had been so peaceful. Then we had been riding together on the seat of the farm wagon, feeling (or I know I felt, and I think she did too) the power of closeness, thinking our own thoughts. I will never know hers, but I was remembering Eric on the ground, his hand to his face, a human island of desolation, looking despairingly after us. Knowing? Did he know? I will never have the answer to that.

“Look,” she said.

The sky was gray with smoke behind the house. Close to the horizon we could see flames. Edward thrashed at the old horse. By the time we pulled up to the front of the house, the hill behind it and the woods to each side where the studios were, were covered with smoke. We could see Dorothy Griffith and Jody running about with buckets.

“Get ours!” I screamed to Anna and Edward. “We can fill them at the garden pump.”

“No,” Anna shouted back, as though I were deaf. “It would be better if I go for help. To the Wrights …”

There was no telephone at the Farm—we had never wished to have one installed even when our neighbors had done so. But the neighbors to the north, Charles and Ellen Wright, had an instrument. Anna ran toward their place, disappearing at once into the night.

Her hair singed and smelling of smoke, Dorothy came up to me. Her hands were black.

“Are you burned, Dorothy?”

“No, no, but we cannot get to the other studios through the smoke. We don't know where Gerald is—or Eric.”

“They may be on the other side of the fire and cannot get through to us.”

Even had we wished to find them at once, we could not have. The smoke grew thicker as we stood helpless, watching it mount higher and spread farther to the side. Then I saw a small snake of flames moving along the ground. “The house, the house,” I remember screaming to no one in particular. The house was now in danger. Dorothy, Jody, and I began to splash water on the ground around it, on the walls and windows, everywhere. Our arms and legs grew weak from our repeated trips from the pump with heavy buckets.

The house was saved, not by our feeble efforts but because our neighbors, and then the fire wagons, arrived. The Wrights had telephoned at once: one engine and another equipped with a water pump came before the others could get to us on foot, while we were still wearily passing buckets to each other from the pump, now dousing the bushes and trees and grass near the house.

Anna returned with the Wrights, they took their places in the chain, and we were able to hold the little licks of flame away from the house until the firemen and their engines arrived. Their hoses were trained on the fire and the house itself. Little by little, the firemen moved forward into the woods, away from the house, their hoses creating massive yellow billows which rose above the charred trees.

Villagers, awakened by the smoke and by the fire bell calling for assistance, came to the farm and joined in the work. By the time the first light appeared in the sky I was too tired to do anything but watch—and pray.

Eric and one-legged Gerald Foster had not appeared. Anna was wild with apprehension. She ran from one fireman to another, pleading, “Find the others. For God's sake, there are two others back in there somewhere.”

We were all so weary. We sat on the wet black grass—Dorothy, Jody, and I—too tired to raise our arms, to stand any longer, straining to see through the dense smoke, still searching for signs of the others. We told ourselves they must have escaped to the back road, they were now watching the fire from the east side of the property, across the road, worrying about
our
safety.

But when we found them, they were dead, suffocated as they tried to escape the encircling fire, we surmised. They died alone, a few hundred yards from each other. Gerald might have been trying to reach Eric; he was found stretched out across the footpath to Eric's studio, face down in blackened underbrush, his wooden leg entangled in vines. Eric had never left his studio. He had died stretched in the ashes around him, his face calm, his eyes closed. Only the red mark on his face still looked alive and resentful. His body was charred, yet his head had miraculously escaped the fire.

The firemen and villagers worked all night and much of the next morning to put out the last little pockets of fire that kept breaking out in the woods and fields. All six of the studios, which we had so lovingly labored over and constructed with such attention to detail, were destroyed. Around each one the faint, sour smell of burned pianos lingered for a long time. Twenty acres of our woodland were reduced to a naked forest of black stubs and sooty grass underbrush. Our fire pond, from which the firemen had pumped almost all its contents, was now a shallow dark cavity full of floating fallen branches and the black remnants of evergreen needles.

But we had saved the house. Like a magic island in an infernal conflagration, it remained untouched except by the pervasive smell and discoloration of smoke. By noon of the second day, Anna and I were able to enter it, to climb to our acrid-smelling bedroom and fall exhausted into sleep. Dorothy lay down on the couch in the drawing room, Jody on Robert's old horsehair sofa in the music room. The bodies of Gerald Foster and Eric Anderson were carried away to the funeral parlor in Saratoga Springs. We, the survivors, slept profoundly for almost fourteen hours.

Early the next morning—it was still dark—Anna and I, weary and very stiff, made our way downstairs to the kitchen to make some tea. The odor from the corner near the rear door reminded us that we had never unpacked the hamper. Before we boiled the water we thought it best to dispose of the decaying picnic remains. There, on top of moldering cheese and bread and decaying potato salad, was a folded piece of paper, addressed to Anna Baehr, from Eric Anderson. As she did with almost everything, she saved that letter. It was in her drawer among her handkerchiefs when she died. I put it here in this account:

Anna, my dearest:

I watched as you and Mrs. Maclaren walked away to the village. I understand, truly I do. I am writing this in my studio which I need now to clean, by burning my score of
King Oedipus.
It is like my life: mediocre, and unlikely to amount to anything
.

Burning is cleansing. Perhaps the fire will spread to the studio and then to me. I was burned once before, by my mother in an accident. She was very young, fifteen, and unmarried when I was born. One night she carried me to my crib and dropped hot wax, by accident, from a candle she was carrying in the other hand, onto my face. I was six months old
.

Perhaps this fire I am planning will cleanse all that now seems vile to me: Dorothy's pursuit of me. The other men's childish silliness. You and Mrs. Maclaren. The whole idea of a memorial to her husband, the Community
.

I don't wish you to burn, only be cleansed of
—
what? Please forgive me
.

Eric

“He meant to burn us all—the whole Farm, the others, us, everything?” I cried.

Anna, still staring at the letter in her hand, said, “No, I don't think he meant that. He was discouraged about his opera. I know that. The rest is just—wild declaration. It doesn't mean he would do it. The fire spread out of his control from the fireplace while he slept on his cot. …”

We never knew. I will never be sure. Sometimes I wonder if the spectacle of our love and the burden of his own goaded Eric to burn
my
Farm. Or was he gripped by a religious fervor, a command to destroy Sodom, to repay me for keeping Anna from him? Whatever, mad prophetic gesture or miscalculated accident, the Farm lay outside our blackened windows, a burned-out ruin.

Gerald Foster's body was returned to his family in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I think it was. Eric was buried in our graveyard. His mother was dead, and there was no one else we knew about for him. Edward put a field stone at the grave's head and sank it into the ground. There is no name on it, but he is there, and I could identify the stone, if it has not sunk down entirely from view by now.

Three months later the terrible war he so feared was over. Anna and I spent Christmas at the Farm, the first one in many years, for ordinarily we would be traveling in winter, raising money for the Foundation.

What was there now to travel for? The desolation from the fire, even the remains of the studios in the woods, square flattened foundations, were now all mercifully buried by the snow, the idea of the Community, the memorial, buried with them. That Christmas, we were alone. We exchanged little presents. Together we cooked a simple supper on Christmas Eve. Anna prepared to go in the sled with Edward to the village for midnight Mass. I asked if I might join her.

Her face lighted. “Of course. It would be wonderful if you came.”

The altar of the church was vivid with red poinsettias (I thought at once of Dorothea Brooke's disease of the retina) and smelled of newly cut evergreens. The Mass was sung in Latin by young boys, their high, sweet untutored sopranos sounding like the Sunday-morning bells I had heard in Frankfurt. The church was dimly lit with candles and a little electricity, still a novelty and a pleasure, for we had not yet had the house wired for it.

I loved the Mass that Christmas Eve of 1918. I loved the bells, the organ, the sweetish smell of incense, the scrubbed little blond faces of white-robed choir and altar boys, the solemn elevated expressions of the two priests who, Anna whispered to me, were “the celebrants.” The procession of “the faithful” (the priest who delivered the sermon referred this way to the people in the pews, who had come long distances through the cold night and the snow) to the altar “to receive”: that was the way Anna described what she was doing up there. She would often say, “Today, I received.”