Longing (24 page)

“Good heavens!” said Dr. Reuter, whose customary expansiveness seemed to close in upon itself so that both he and Robert sat there shrinking further into their respective beings.

“There's nothing good about Heaven when it's the next stop on one's train.”

“But if you truly wanted to die, you would not be here talking to me.”

“I have raised a hand against my own life.”

“But you have not brought it down.” Dr. Reuter allowed himself the tiny smile of one who has recovered from the failure to match one metaphor by rallying to the next.

“Oh, but I have,” answered Robert. “I threw myself out the window.”

Thinking his patient was concocting yet another literary image, Dr. Reuter answered, “And look where you have landed—safely with me.”

“I landed in a tree.”

“In a tree?”

“The big tree in Riedel's Garden.”

“Is that not where you live?”

“No longer. I can't go back to my rooms. They're on the fourth floor. And I'm suddenly terrified of heights. I sometimes think were I to leap into the air, I'd die of fright before I came down. Not that I could get into my rooms even were I to go there—I have thrown away my key. The sight of any key now fills me with the most awful fear. It's as if the only entry I might make would be the entry into the house of death. But death is everywhere, is it not?”

Dr. Reuter allowed his hand to reach halfway across his desk toward Robert. “Look around you. Life is everywhere.”

Robert surprised the doctor by leaning forward and grasping his hand, which he could not now very well withdraw without offending his clearly anxious, confused young patient, who seemed to have absorbed the romantic eccentricities that had caused an entire generation of otherwise intelligent youth to replace reason with emotion, love with concupiscence, health with debauchery, respect for the past with lust for the present, answers with questions, and, in his case certainly, reason with madness.

“When I die,” said Robert, “my fear of death will be so great that I shall be unable to attend even my own funeral.”

Now Dr. Reuter began to fear for himself. He attempted to remove his hand, but his patient's proved too strong, notwithstanding the self-inflicted injury to one of them for which he had prescribed an animal dip some twenty months ago. He knew of course that Robert played the piano, but he had thought that all pianists had delicate hands, the beauty of music being so fragile. In the clutch of Herr Schumann's hands, he could hear only thunder and bedlam. Perhaps, he thought, one's hands can be read as the tangible image of one's mind, as some believe the nose forecasts the schwanz.

“You think I'm joking,” said Robert. “But you see, Moritz, I simply don't go to funerals. I had to bury my own father while my mother was off in Karlsbad, and when she returned, though she was positively consumed with grief, I envied her. It was done, you see. He was gone, but for her he'd disappeared into thin air. She didn't have to see him as I did when I found him, freshly dead, and to bury him as I did, coldly, stiffly, stinkingly, endlessly dead. She doesn't know, as I know, that death changed him. He—”

“How did it change him?” Dr. Reuter hoped his interruption would cause Herr Schumann to become irritated and no longer want to hold his hand.

“He no longer existed.”

It was Dr. Reuter who became irritated, sufficiently so, in fact, to cause him to be tempted to slap some sense into his incoherent young friend. While he resisted the temptation, he was able to regain possession of the hand with which he would have carried out this discipline had he not, as always, confronted impatience with restraint.

“Of course he no longer existed!” he shouted. “He was dead!”

Robert smiled in perfect agreement. “Then you will understand why I did not attend the funeral of my brother Julius, though he was my favorite brother, who died of consumption not three months ago, nor of my sister-in-law Rosalie, who died of malaria not one month ago, even though by so doing, or not doing, I incurred the wrath of her husband, my brother Carl, who has said he will never forgive me for not coming to say good-bye to her. Carl accused me of not loving Rosalie, when in fact I loved her so much that I cannot rid my mind of the image of taking her.”

Dr. Reuter seemed to have awakened from a brief sleep. “Taking her? Taking her where?”

“
Taking
her.”

Dr. Reuter not only removed his wire glasses but took the added precaution of closing his eyes. “You can't possibly mean…”

“Yes. I do. I was in love with her. I was in love with her even though I could never forgive her for replacing me.”

Dr. Reuter opened his eyes and squinted at Robert. “By marrying your brother, I assume you mean.”

“No. By having a baby and giving him my name and then killing him.”

“Your sister-in-law murdered your nephew!” As Dr. Reuter spoke, he pushed his chair back from his desk until, had he pushed any more, he might have fallen out the window of his office—which fortunately was on the ground floor, precisely the reason Robert had chosen to visit him in particular and not one of his other doctors whose offices might happen to be up a flight or two.

Robert nodded. “By making doubles of us.”

“Doubles! I've had enough of this romantic claptrap, Robert. You suffer from quite concrete symptoms but you seek reasons for them in the most phantasmal corridors of quackery. You would no doubt prefer me to prescribe a cure that was written on a tablet somewhere centuries ago by a wizard in a pointed cap. You have insomnia. You have no outlet for your sexual desires but an occasional whore and fantasies of incest. You live alone and keep alone and bang away at your music to the exclusion of any other activity and any other congress with a world that appears unable or unwilling to listen to the music you make. And if you are, as you claim, suicidal, it is because you have reduced the entire world to yourself and when you stop to look at yourself you realize, to employ your own words, that you no longer exist.” Dr. Reuter paused to take a breath and at the same time smiled ever so slightly and moved his chair back until his short legs were under his desk so that once more their inability to reach the floor was obscured. “Am I wrong about all this?” he asked rhetorically as he replaced his glasses on his huge nose.

“You are brilliant,” answered Robert. “I do no longer exist.”

“And are you ready to hear what you must do if you are to be cured?”

“I am ready.” Robert reached out his hand, but he was not fast enough, for Dr. Reuter moved both of his onto his lap beneath his desk.

Dr. Reuter looked past Robert to the small, dark painting of Frau Reuter that, far from the diplomas that seemed to swim around the doctor's head like so many ducks, graced the wall most distant from his desk. “You must get married.”

Robert laughed. “I would prefer to take some herbs.”

As Dr. Reuter rose from his chair and somewhat warily offered Robert his hand in a gesture of both reconciliation and dismissal, he ordered, “Take a wife.”

Part Two

Before the Wedding

Leipzig

MARCH 13, 1834

I will be irritated with her for the rest of my life
.

Friedrich Wieck

“I no longer want my kittens,” Clara said.

“Your kittens are no longer kittens.” Grimacing, her father watched the three of them—Mittens, Fluffy, and Agnes, thank goodness for the small favor that they were all of one gender—as they clawed at Clara's white nubby bedspread like fretful pianists lacerating chords.

Clementine bent forward to look at them more closely. “If they are not kittens, what are they? Dogs?”

“Cats,” said her husband with a patience he bestowed upon no one else.

“I no longer want them,” Clara repeated.

“What would you have me do with them? Drown them?”

“Oh, my,” said Clementine.

“Do you wish to drown them?” said Clara.

“What is the matter with you?” asked her father.

Clara smiled. “With me?”

She lay beneath her cotton flannel sheets and her thick woolen blanket and her white bedspread, still able to feel upon her thighs and tummy the rise and fall of the cats' paws, from which she took a pleasure that was no longer adequate.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” her father asked.

“What time is it?” she answered.

“How late do you plan to sleep?”

“How can I sleep if you suddenly appear in my room and talk to me?”

“How can
I
sleep if you persist in behaving this way?”

“Are you having trouble sleeping, my dear?” Clementine reached out to touch him, but he shook his head and caused her hand to retreat back to the knitting in her lap, a winter cap for him that was too late in the season and suspiciously the size and shape of the bald spot that was removing his hair with the precision and the indifference of a scalpel.

“What way?” Clara asked, fully aware, even if he was not, that she responded to every question of his with another question. She had discovered this was the best way both to avoid answering unpleasant questions and to vex the questioner.

“Must you force me to tell you?” he nearly bellowed.

“Why else would you have come here, if not to tell me?”

“We came here to get you out of bed. Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“What time is it then?”

He drew his timepiece out of his waistcoat pocket, making a great show of flicking its cover up with the nail of his thumb, which was the only nail a pianist allowed to grow long enough even for so modest a purpose, and staring at the face as if it had somehow stolen valuable hours from his life. “Well after nine o'clock,” he announced.

“In the morning?”

“My God, child!” He rose from the small upholstered (with the most idealized ballerinas and balloons, which Clara felt she had long ago outgrown and the cats had long ago punctured and pitted) chair so abruptly that it fell over backward, causing Clementine to miss a loop. Not pausing to right the chair, her father went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains, first one side and then the other. “Morning,” he announced gravely.

“Can it really be so early?” Clara sank farther beneath her bedclothes.

“So early!” He thumped back toward the center of her room and hesitated at his fallen chair and seemed to decide he would lose his (wholly illusory) upper hand should he stoop to place it upright. So he proceeded on with even greater forte in his feet until he stood pressed against the very footboard of her bed and took the kind of deep and pious breath she knew by now announced a tirade.

“You are an inconsiderate child, arrogant, domineering, contrary, negligent, stubborn, cantankerous, disobedient, rude, nasty, lazy, and, with not the slightest reason to be so, vain. What is to become of you, God only knows. You never get out of bed before nine o'clock. You never appear among the human race before ten-thirty, though what you've done with that time is invisible to any of us with the slightest good taste in clothing and hair styles. And then you spend the rest of what little is left of the morning receiving your visitors, most of whom want nothing from you but the glow of your fame, which I must warn you is barely visible any longer. But still you let one or another take you out to lunch. And when you finally get home from that you complain and complain when I ask you to play the piano because I am interrupting your thoughts about what theater you are going to go to after supper and what men are going to be there. And when I do force you to spend time at the piano, all you come away with are complaints about how hard my instruments are to play, with the result that you are ruining my business not only insofar as it concerns your hopeless career but also my selling my pianos in the first place. You are, in short, thoroughly impossible, and you make me thoroughly sick.”

“Oh, my,” said Clementine, whose instinctive sympathy for Clara as a female under attack was almost wholly eclipsed by her gratitude that she herself had not, at least as yet, been forced to suffer such a scolding as this from the man she loved and from the man who, she knew, loved his daughter more than he would ever love his wife.

“Now get out of bed and get dressed and go downstairs and play the piano as you did for all the years of your life until now.” He leaned forward and took Clara's bedspread in both his hands as if to pull it down.

Clara did the same with her hands, as if to keep it up.

“Are you refusing to leave this bed?”

“Are you unaware that I am naked beneath my covers?”

“Naked!” Clementine shrieked, so it was impossible to tell if Friedrich Wieck's hands flew off the bed in response to his daughter's words or his wife's whoop.

“Don't you sleep naked?” Clara addressed her first words to her stepmother.

“Not since—,” began Clementine, when her husband stopped her by saying, “For the love of God, no!”

“—I was your age,” Clementine could not help but continue, damn the consequences.

“Shall I get out of bed now?” asked Clara with a feigned innocence she found it absolutely delightful to assume.

As Clara lifted the top half of her body from the bed with the bedspread and blanket falling away and only the sheet locked tightly under the pits of both arms, her father finally retreated and barked, “Let's go!” to his wife, who seemed glued to her chair in anticipation of sharing at least this most superficial of intimacies with her stepdaughter.

“I promise to reform, Papa,” Clara called out as her bedroom door was closing. “Please tell Herr Banck to wait for me in Robert's old room.”

As soon as they had closed the door behind them, Clara sank back into bed and, laughing, kicked the kittens off.

Leipzig