The Complete Stories (84 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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G
ustav Mahler’s ghost.
Bruno Walter had seen it as Mahler conducted one of his last concerts. It waxed in music as the conductor waned. The ghost appeared, more or less, to Alma Mahler one or two years after her husband was dead. Alma did not believe in ghosts, but this one troubled her. It had got into her bedsheets but hadn’t stayed long.
Can Jews haunt people?
Gustav was a rationalist nonbeliever. “In that clear mind I never detected any trace of superstition,” Bruno Walter said. He spoke of Mahler—as Alma clearly remembered—as a “God-struck man,” whose religious self flowered in his music, viz., “
Veni
,
creator spiritus
,” as it flashed in eternity in the Eighth Symphony. Alma felt that Mahler was too subtle a man to have believed simply in God, but that wouldn’t mean he might not attempt to disturb her, although she was aware that some of her thoughts of Mahler had caused her more than ordinary fright. Might the fright have produced the ghost? Such things are possible.
In my mind, more than once I betrayed him.
Yet Mahler was a kind man, although an egotist who defined his egotism as a necessity of his genius.
“Gott, how he loved his genius!”
Now, all of Alma’s husbands, a collection of a long lifetime including Mahler, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel—and Oskar Kokoschka, the painter, made it a fourth if you counted in the man she hadn’t married, whom Alma conceived to be her most astonishing (if
most difficult) lover—they were all artists of unusual merit and accomplishment; yet Alma seemed to favor Mahler, even if she had trouble during her lifetime caring deeply for his music.
When she met Gustav Mahler, Alma stood five feet three inches tall and weighed 144 pounds. She loved her figure. Her deep blue eyes were her best feature. She drew men with half a glance. Alma never wore underpants and thought she knew who might know she wasn’t wearing them. When she met him she felt that Mahler didn’t know though he may have wanted to.
Alma, a lovely, much-sought-after young woman, one of the prettiest in Vienna in those days, felt Mahler was magnetic, but she wasn’t sure she ought to marry him. “He is frightening, nervous, and bounds across the room like an animal. I fear his energy.”
She wrote in her diary in purple ink: “At the opera he loves to conduct
Faust
.”
She wanted Gustav. She felt she had snared him in her unconscious.
Yet his demands frightened her. “Is it too late, my dearest Almchi, to ask you to make my music yours? Play as you please but don’t attempt to compose. Composition is for heroes.”
“How can I make his music mine if I have loved Wagner throughout my life? What passion can I possibly feel for Mahler’s music or even for Mahler?” These thoughts concerned her.
“You must understand, my tender girl, that my harmony and polyphony, for all their vivid modernity, which seems to distress you, remain in the realm of pure tonality. Someday your dear ears will open to the glories of my sound.”
“Yes, Gustav,” said Alma.
“Let us be lovers in a true marriage. I am the composer and you are, in truth, my beloved bride.”
Mahler urged her to consult her stepfather and mother. “You must lay to rest your doubts, whatever they are. The matter must be settled before we can contemplate a union for life.”
“Say nothing,” Carl Moll, her stepfather, advised Alma. “Best get rid of the Jew.”
“Perhaps
get rid of him,” said her mother. “I never trusted his conversion to Catholicism though he pleads sincerity. He became Catholic because Cosima Wagner insisted that no Jew be allowed to replace Richard Wagner at the Vienna Opera.”
But Alma said she had thought about it and decided she loved Mahler.
She did not say she was already pregnant by him.
Mahler walked in his floppy galoshes to the church on their wedding day.
At breakfast the guests were spirited, although in memoirs she wrote many years later Alma wasn’t sure of that. She had trouble defining her mood.
She was twenty-two, Mahler was forty-one.
“If only I could find my own inner balance.”
Mahler whispered into her good ear that he loved her more than he had loved anyone except his dear mother, who had died insane.
Alma said she was glad he respected his mother.
“You must give yourself to me unconditionally and desire nothing except my love.”
He sounded more like a teacher than a lover.
“Yes, Gustav.”
“He is continually talking about preserving his art but that is not allowed to me.”
Nothing has come to fruition for me, Alma thought. Neither my beauty, nor my spirit, nor my talent.
Does his genius, by definition, submerge my talent? My ship is in the harbor but has sprung a leak.
He did not lie in bed and make love to her. He preferred to mount her when she was deeply asleep.
His odor was repulsive. “Probably from your cigars,” she had informed Mahler. He was a stranger to her, she wrote in her diary, “and much about him will remain strange forever.”
She tripped over a paraffin lamp and set the carpet afire.
Mahler dreamed Alma was wearing her hair as she used to in her girlhood. He did not like her to pile her tresses on the top of her head. Gustav said her hairdo was Semitic-looking and he wished to avoid that impression. He assured his friends he was not a practicing Jew. Alma wore her hair long most of the time.
When their daughter, Maria, caught diphtheria and died, Mahler could not stand being alone. Memories of his daughter seared his life. He went from person to person with a new message: “Alma has sacrificed her youth for me. With absolute selflessness she has subordinated her life to my work.”
Alma let Ossip Gabrilowitsch hold her hand in a dark room.
“To gain a spiritual center, my Alma, that’s the important thing. Then everything takes on another aspect.”
Alma found his impersonal preaching repellent and frightening.
Since her youth she had been nervous among strangers and very sensitive about her impaired hearing.
Mahler became frightened at the thought of losing his wife.
Mahler and Freud met in Leiden and walked for four hours along the tree-lined canals. Freud told him a good deal about the life of the psyche and Mahler was astonished though he had guessed much that Freud had told him.
“My darling, my lyre,” he wrote his wife, “come exorcise the ghosts of darkness. They claw me, they throw me to the ground. I ask in silence whether I am damned. Rescue me, my dearest.”
Mahler suspected that he loved Alma more than she loved him.
He was as strict now about her going back to her music as he had been nine years ago in insisting she give up composing.
One night she woke up and saw him standing by her bed like a ghost.
He dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her.
He feared his Ninth.
“Ah, how lovely it is to love, my dearest Almscherl. And it is only now that I know what love is. Believe me, Tristan sings the truth.”
“Alma blossoms, on a splendid diet, and she has given up tippling Benedictine. She looks younger day by day.”
One day she had a cold; Mahler invited the doctor who had examined Alma to look him over too.
“Well, you have no cause to be proud of that heart,” the doctor said after listening for a minute.
The bacterial tests sealed his doom. Mahler insisted he be told the truth, and he said he wanted to die in Vienna.
He talked to Alma about his grave and tombstone. She listened gravely. He did not want to be cremated. He wanted to be there if people came to the graveyard to see him.
“Mozart,” said Mahler, before he died during a thunderstorm.
“Boom!”
 
 
Alma met the man who later became her second husband in a sanitarium, in Tobelbad, when, exhausted by Gustav’s pace and striving, she was advised by a country doctor to take the cure.
Gustav displayed an unyielding energy she couldn’t keep up with. She was the young one but he made her feel old. That’s the trick, she thought. He wants me to match him in age.
At Tobelbad she met a handsome architect, Walter Gropius, age
twenty-seven, who lived down the hall and stared at her in astonishment as she walked by. He gazed at Alma with architectural eyes and she was aware she had form.
They began to go for long walks. Gustav usually gave her short lectures in philosophy as they walked together, but this one talked on about nature and architectural masses; he seemed surprised that she did not throw herself into his arms.
Gustav, promoting his conducting career, hurried from city to city, writing to her from where he happened to be, one opera house or philharmonic society after another; but she was in no mood to respond. In his letters to his tender Almscherl he wrote, “I could not bear this depleting routine if it did not end with delicious thoughts of you. Regain your health, my precious dear girl, so that we may again renew our affectionate embraces.”
In his letters Mahler tickled her chin and ladled out bits of gossip laced with pious observations. His pace was again frantic; yet wherever he went, he worried about her, though for reasons of scheduling, etc., he found it difficult to visit her at Tobelbad, yet surely she knew the direction of his heart?
He had asked his mother-in-law, Anna Moll, to write Alma a letter requesting news; and soon thereafter she paid her daughter a visit, but there was no news to speak of. “She is responding to her cure, not much more.” Gropius was invisible.
Alma had put him out of her mind and returned home. No one knew whether they had become or had been lovers.
“When shall we meet again?” the handsome Gropius had asked.
She wasn’t sure.
“Seriously, my dearest—”
“Please do not call me ‘my dearest,’ I am simply Alma.”
“Seriously, simply Alma.”
“I am a married person, Herr Gropius. Mahler is my legal husband.”
“A terrible answer,” Gropius replied.
“‘None but the brave deserves the fair.’” He quoted Dryden in English.
When he translated the line, Alma said nothing.
“Mahler met me at the Toblach station and was suddenly more in love with me than ever before.”
One night when Mahler and Alma were in Vienna, before returning to their farmhouse in Toblach, Mahler, looking around nervously, whispered, “Alma, I have the feeling that we are being followed.”
“Nonsense,” said Alma. “Don’t be so superstitious.” He laughed
but it did not sound like a laugh. He did not practice sufficiently, Alma thought.
Gropius then sent Mahler a letter asking his permission to marry his wife. Alma placed her husband’s mail on the piano and shivered at lunch as Mahler slowly read the letter, whose writing she had recognized. She had wanted to tear it up but was afraid to.
Mahler read the letter and let out a gasp, then a deep cry.
“Who is this crazy man who asks permission to marry my wife? Am I, then, your father?”
Alma laughed a little hysterically, yet managed to answer calmly.
“This is a foolish young man I met at the sanitarium. I do not love him.”
“Who said love?” Mahler shouted.
Alma eventually calmed him, but he felt as though he had been shipwrecked and didn’t know why.
That afternoon Alma saw Gropius from her car window as she drove past the village bridge. Gropius didn’t see her.
She returned from her errand feeling ill and breathlessly told Mahler whom she had seen walking near the bridge: “That was the young man who was interested in me in Tobelbad although I did nothing to encourage him.”
“We shall see.” Mahler took along a kerosene lamp and went out searching for Gropius. He found him not far from their farmhouse. “I am Mahler,” the composer said. “Perhaps you wish to speak to my wife?”
Gropius, scratching under his arm, confessed that intent. “I am Gropius.”
Mahler lit the lamp. It was dark.
He called up the stairs and Alma came down.
“I come,” she said.
“You two ought to talk,” said Mahler. He withdrew to his study, where he read to himself in the Old Testament.
When Alma, white-faced, came to him in the study, Mahler told her calmly that she was free to decide in whatever way she wanted. “You can do as you feel you must.” If he was conducting, no stick was visible.
“Thanks,” said Alma. “I want him to go. Please let him stay until morning and then he shall go. I have spoken to him and explained that I will not tolerate bad manners.”

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