Falling in Flight

by Marylee MacDonald

A year after she had buried her husband, Neva Roth sat in a Viennese rehearsal hall listening to the piece she had dedicated to his memory. A mixed chorus of men and women, packed tight on risers erected in a semi-circle behind the orchestra, sang a modern version of a Gregorian, plainsong chant. The choir could handle her kind of avant-garde music. They sang Schoenberg, for heaven’s sake. But in the orchestra, the percussion section sounded like waiters dropping trays of crockery. A bassoon belched out low groans. Piccolos scratched glass. There was no unity and no beauty, and it was because of the conductor, carving mountains with his baton. She put down her copy of the score.

     “Hold on a minute,” she said.

     Herr Lautner, wings of wild hair above his ears, glanced back. “Yes?”

     Neva approached the podium, expecting to be given a hand up.

     “Sit down, Frau Roth!” Lautner said.

     “You’re not reading the score the way I meant it to sound.” She turned to the orchestra and made a fist. “I want from the heart.” Then to Lautner, sotto voce, she said, “They’re playing mechanically. Why don’t you try directing without the baton?” Hands up like a ballerina, she traced a heart.

     “Madam, in all my years of conducting, I have never had a composer tell me how to do my job.”

     “But you seemed stuck in the middle,” Neva said.

     “I am not stuck, Madam. This is my method.”

     “But spontaneity…”

     “Please, Madam! Enough!” His baton clattered to the floor.

     No one took a breath, not the musicians, waiting tensely to go on, nor the chorus. As a gesture of conciliation, she picked it up and returned to her seat.

     He tapped the podium and raised his arms. Sweat yellowed his armpits. The rehearsal space was not air conditioned. Give him the benefit of the doubt, she thought. Some conductors preferred to work alone. Maybe he’d been forced to invite her to rehearsal. Seventy-two, a respected composer, she was known in New York, a stranger here. Tomorrow was the debut of “Falling in Flight,” a tone poem based on the legend of Icarus. Happy Icarus, soaring on his wax wings toward the sun, and terrified Icarus when his wings melted. She desperately needed Lautner to get onboard.

* * *

For months she’d tried to create new work, but Martin’s death had disrupted the twilight sleep from which her music sprang. She was having trouble contacting her heart, the breath and flesh and voice that went into her compositions withered by that last glimpse of Martin’s face, powdered and peach-colored. Something within her had shrunk — her daring, her boldness, her belief that in the face of life’s great events, music mattered. But, of course, it mattered. Otherwise, why had she decided not to have children? Why had she thought the sacrifice worth it?

     Wrung out by the humidity, Lautner’s refusal to accept an apology, and the u-bahn’s rush hour crowds, she rode the elevator up to street level. A bad rehearsal would not matter if the concert went well. She wanted the piece played exactly as she heard it in her head.

     Pension Aclon, on tiny Dorotheergasse, occupied the top floor of an old apartment building. From the dusty foyer, a marble staircase spiraled up and around the open shaft of a bird-cage elevator. Neva’s schilling in the coin box brought the motor to life. She got in, and the elevator glided up, pulleys shrieking, to the sixth level, where it jerked to a halt inches below the landing. As Neva opened the door and stepped up, the cage swayed, and the light shaft below narrowed to a handkerchief of black. Vertigo spun through her, and she caught the elevator door.

     Her key turned in the lock. Almost home.

     The concierge, a woman with features elongated by a severe bun, greeted her in the hall. “A Herr Hoffmann left a number for you to call.”

     “I don’t know anyone by that name.” Neva took the hastily scribbled message, crumpled it, and stuffed it in her pocket. Probably some flunky of the conductor’s.

     In a room where lace curtains covered the open windows, she unpacked her suitcase into the walnut schrank and thought how proud she’d been to receive the commission. Martin’s family came from Vienna, and she’d been dying to see it for years. Now Lautner was putting his autocratic stamp on her work. But what could she do? Nothing. On the far side of the bed, she spread out Martin’s red nightshirt, arms akimbo. The nightshirt had the well-loved appearance of Martin himself, bear-like in girth. Forget dinner. She threw back the duvet. If she could just sleep.

     The phone jangled. The concierge. A Herr Hoffmann awaited her in the breakfast room. Neva slammed down the receiver. The conductor refused to speak with her in person, and now sent his minion to tell her what? That her work was atonal? Too difficult to play?

     In the breakfast room a crystal chandelier hung above eight round tables set with gold-rimmed china. A man sat reading, the pages of the Wiener Tagblatt hiding his face. His long legs were crossed, he wore thin-soled, Italian shoes. His foot kicked as evenly as a metronome.

     “You woke me,” she said.

     The man folded his paper, slipped his reading glasses into a breast pocket, and stood in one smooth motion. Before she could withdraw it, he kissed her hand. His hair, feathered in layers of white and gray, touched the collar of his khaki suit. When he straightened, she saw that his face was tan and weather-cracked, his eyes merry. He was handsome.

     “Gnadige Frau. I see you do not have the slightest idea who I am.”

     “Should I?”

     “We met in Salzburg,” he said.

     “Didn’t the conductor send you here?”

     “No, no. We met in a beer garden.”

     Now she remembered. Half a dozen Austrians had taken seats at a nearby outdoor table, and over beer and pretzels, she had told them about her commission.

     “Were you one of the music aficionados from Vienna?”

     “Exact!” he said. “When I saw the poster advertising the Schoenberg concert, I remembered you.”

     “Oh, the concert!” she groaned. “I committed a faux pas and practically got myself booted out of rehearsal.”

     “Do you not remember me inviting you to accept my hospitality in Vienna?”

     “In America that kind of comment is never sincere,” she said.

     “No? But many Americans say to look them up if I ever return to the States.”

     “You’d better not,” Neva laughed. “They’d be surprised.”

     “But I meant it.” He handed her a business card.

     She ran her thumb across the raised engraving. With her rusty, High German, she translated the words. “Offices, renovations, restorations. What are you, an architect?”

     “Architect and urban planner.” He clicked his heels and bowed. “With a degree from NYU.”

     “How did you find me?”

     “A friend in the choir told me where you were staying, so I tracked you down.”

     “Well, then.”

     “The concert is sold out,” he said. “Sometimes a loose ticket is floating about in the director’s pocket. Perhaps you could ask.”

     “I wouldn’t dare,” she said.

     “I apologize,” he said. “At this late date, you and Herr Lautner must have VIPs to think about.”

     “Herr Lautner doesn’t confide in me.”

     “Oh? A bit of trouble with the Maestro?”

     “He doesn’t seem to have a feel for the piece. It’s torture watching him rehearse.”

     “Herr Lautner has a reputation for being… shall we say, methodical. I’m sorry for you.”

     With the newspaper crushed under an arm, he looked like a schoolboy waiting to be dismissed.

     “I have an extra ticket,” she said. The one they had sent for Martin.

     “Then you must allow me to reciprocate and show you Wien. Will you?”

     “Of course, Herr Hoffmann.”

     “Please call me Otto.”

     His move toward familiarity caught her off guard.

     “All right — Otto.”

     There was a post-concert reception. Realizing it might be awkward to abandon him, she invited him to come, and he accepted enthusiastically.

* * *

Neva slept through the morning rehearsal. Not jet lag. She wished it were. Even in New York she often overslept, made appointments and then forgot. She called the choir’s secretary and lied about a migraine. Seeing Otto’s card on the night stand, she dialed his number.

     “Did we arrange a meeting place for tonight?”

     “Not yet,” he said. “Why don’t you meet me for lunch, and we can fixe une rendezvous?”

     His easy transition to French was delightful, something she and Martin used to do, eat dinner in French, read Rilke auf Deutsch, sing Portuguese ballads like love-struck, Bohemian poets. She dressed hurriedly and ran downstairs to a cafe at the corner of Stephensplatz. Ten minutes later Otto came toward her. He was taller than she remembered and carried a cardboard tube beneath his arm. Wind blew loose a red place mat. He snagged it from the air and then sat. While he studied the menu, she saw that his nose canted to one side, giving his face a pleasing asymmetry.

     “You mentioned you’d visited the States,” she said.

     “After the War I worked as a draftsman in New York.”

     “A draftsman! Do they have those anymore?”

     “No. The whole profession has changed.”

     “When was this?”

     “I went in ‘53 and came home in ‘58, then lived like a pauper on my wife’s teaching salary. It was ten years until I received a commission.” His eyes skipped across the parapets of buildings. “Vienna was rattling with pensioners and amputees. Now, it is a young person’s city, and I am ready to retire.”

     “You look young,” she said.

     “I hike every weekend.”

     “I like to hike.”

     “Where?”

     “The Adirondacks.”

     “Ah, the Adirondacks,” he said.

     “Why did you come back?”

     He turned toward the plaza. “To repair the rubble.”

     “But the city looks perfectly preserved.”

     “The facades are the same, but we architects made new everything within the historic shell of the past.”

     The shell of the past. Her skin tingled. She knew about that.

     “So shall I pick you up at your hotel?” Otto said.

     She pulled a ticket from her purse. “No, I’ll meet you there.”

* * *

Coughs ricocheted through the hall. The orchestra shimmered in the bright rectangle of the stage. Neva came down the aisle to the front row. Otto had arrived early. As the choir filed in, the risers creaked. Herr Lautner strode across the stage, tuxedo tails flapping, hair slicked back with pomade. Stepping onto the podium, he raised his baton.

     The choral piece, “Falling in Flight,” began with the brass establishing a theme of rising fourths and fifths, speaking directly to the musical subconscious. One by one, the woodwinds, strings, and voices joined, a happy cocktail party of sound with a single, underlying conversation. She had written the score without measures and marked each musician’s sheet music “count to ten” or “count to five.” Her music went to the very core of the musicians’ art, natural breathing and a sense of phrasing. A professional, especially a Viennese, was more than an instrument with a foot tapping out 4/4 time. As she watched the conductor, she felt an intense longing to direct her own piece, to wade hip deep in the ocean, making herself vulnerable to the next big wave of sound. She wanted to be knocked flat.

     When the harmonics changed, the tenors, altos and sopranos assembled in the layered oohming of Tibetan monks. Wow, wow, wow vibrated through the Grand Saal. Bringing both arms down in a violent thrash, the conductor halted all sound. In the silence, the walls rang with a tinny, whispered vibration. So far, so good, she thought, nearly euphoric that the tricky middle had gone well. Settling against the seat, she slid her elbow back on the armrest and felt Otto’s shoulder. She pulled away.

     In the final third the strings and voices traded chants, calling across a chasm. To her horror, Herr Lautner’s arms jerked up and down. The freewheeling tumble stopped. The orchestra marched to his tempo.

     The end stunk. There was applause, appreciative but not a roar.

     Otto clapped heartily. “Sehr gut! Wunderbar! Herrlich!”

     “Danke,” she said, acknowledging the false praise.

     The disappointing end took her back to Martin’s funeral, the dim yellow light filtered through the shades, the flowers shedding seeds across her desk. While her mother and sister fielded phone calls from friends and colleagues, Neva sat at her desk with yellowed shades pulled against the heat and the score of “Figaro” propped against the wall.

     The composition was flawed. She had feared it. Now she knew, and she must face the final humiliation: congratulating the conductor.

     At the reception, the prongs of Otto’s fingers steered her through women in evening dress, beaded bags clutched to their bosoms, chorus members clothed in satin robes, and tuxedoed instrumentalists sipping champagne. This happy clamor was the effect she’d wanted. As she approached the conductor, he looked her up and down, practiced insincerity curling his bottom lip.

     “Frau Roth, delighted you could join us.” Herr Lautner nodded at a ring of men. “I believe you know everyone?”

     The head of the Music School, Herr Dr. Witz, whose mustache style had been lifted from the era of Franz Josef, offered his congratulations. He gave a sideways glance at the conductor. “Very challenging piece.”

     “The idea came from Puccini,” she said.

     “Yes?” said Witz. “I would have thought Britten or your famous Eastern influence.”

     “No gamelans,” she said. “No ten tone scale.”

     She looked around for the Schoenberg’s Music Director, an ally, but he had disappeared into the cliques of mostly gray-haired men. By God, was she going to have to justify her composition? Yes, she was, and she would.

     “The balance between abandon and control…”

     “Ah yes, the converso of Puccini,” Otto said. “One cannot praise him too much.” He pinched her arm and locked his hand around her elbow.

     She shook free. “As I was saying before you interrupted me, the switchbacks need the proper balance between abandon and control.”

     Herr Lautner accepted a glass of champagne. “Perhaps you place too much responsibility on the musicians.”

     “Not at all. The musicians can feel the descant build.” She made a fist and beat three times against her chest. “Music must come from the core.”

* * *

Afterwards, she refused to take Otto’s arm. Fog from the Danube had settled over the city. Mist glazed the cobblestones and muffled the clip-clop of carriage horses.

     “Why did you pinch me?”

     “You were angry,” he said.

     “So?”

     Otto laughed. “I have known well one other hot-headed woman, and I find it wunderbar that you do not disguise your feelings. With such a woman, one always knows where one stands.” He took her hand and tucked it under his elbow. “But in the end, was it not better to flare at me than at Lautner?”

     Street lamps sculpted the squared planes of his broad forehead and high cheeks. Was there something hidden and rigid about him, too?

     “So, tell me about your wife.”

     “My wife is no more.”

     A German idiom for death. Ist nicht mehr.

     “When did you lose her?”

     “Four years ago.” He pulled his chin. “No. Four and a half.”

     “My husband has been dead a year,” she said.

     “Ach so?”

     “His parents came from Vienna.”

     “What did he do?”

     “He was a math professor at Columbia.”

     “Were you happy?”

     “Very.”

     He nodded solemnly. “Then you have a long way to go.”

     Restaurant awnings had been rolled up. Barrel-backed chairs faced each other across empty tables. Shutters on the upper floors had been closed against the dampness.

     “Did you find it hard to get on with your own life?”

     “Certainly,” he said, “but I told myself it was the same after the war. Time passes, and one becomes accustomed to the new normal.”

     “And you’re all right?”

     “Life is for the living.”

     “My husband is the only person on earth who truly understood me.”

     “You must have some fun.” He placed a hand her shoulder. “Let me show you the city.”

     “Promise I don’t have to be in a good mood?”

     “Not for me. I have my bad days too.”

* * *

The next day he informed her that their first stop was the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

     “My husband’s parents always talked about that.” Art history professors, they had emigrated two years before the Anschluss. His dear, dear parents. Gone, too.

     And here she was, dazed by jet lag and worry, standing in a room of Flemish miniatures. The museum was famous for its collection. Farmlands. Windmills. Dark skies.

     Hands clasped behind his back, Otto leaned past the stanchions and rope that kept visitors from getting too close. An alarm sounded. She pulled him back. A guard hurried toward them.

     Otto held up his hands.

     After issuing a warning, the guard returned to an adjoining room.

     “Did that make you nervous?” Otto said.

     “I don’t want you arrested.”

     “I only look. Never touch. Let me show you the benefit of standing close.”

     He beckoned her toward the portrait of a cow, and when she stood as close as he wanted her to, details leapt out — wet nostrils; individual eyelashes; dolorous eyes.

     “It’s the portrait of a soul,” she said.

     “Genau!”

     She had passed the test.

     “What’s on the agenda for the rest of the day?”

     After the museum and lunch, he proposed a concert at the cathedral. Tickets already purchased, so there was no sense her begging off for a nap. She had to admit organ concerts were her favorite. How had he known?

     “Your every wish is my desire,” he said.

     She smiled. “My every wish is your command. That’s the way we say it.”

     “I don’t like to command. I would rather persuade.”

* * *

The crowd surged through the giant wooden doors of St. Stephen’s. Inside, a breeze swept through the nave and out the clerestory windows. A bird slapped the wooden beams. The cathedral, where Papa Haydn had served as Kapellemeister, was chock-a-block with heavy, carved wood. She felt small and insignificant, her music, and even her recent inability to compose, diminished by his great genius.

     When she slid into a pew, her leg pressed Otto’s thigh. He glanced down, then placed an arm around her shoulder. She shivered with pleasure.

     A thousand voices gabbled. She took a blank staff book from her purse.

     “How do you write music?” he said.

     “I start by thinking of the piece as a table — square, round, oval-shaped, with leaves or without.”

     “Such a domestic image!”

     “In most ways I am a very traditional woman.”

     His thumb dug into a knot on her neck.

     Relax, she told herself.

     “That feels good.”

     He placed a hand on her knee. “And about the music?”

     What had he asked? Oh, yes, about how she composed.

     “Let’s say I get a commission for a piece 45-minutes long. I imagine an oval-shaped table with no leaves. In the beginning the table is covered with a lace tablecloth. I can see the dark color of the wood underneath, but nothing of the grain. I have only a sense of the size and shape of the composition. Then, if the patron tells me what feeling the piece should have, I search for the same feeling in myself.”

     “What do you do once you know the feeling?”

     “I make little rips in the tablecloth, here and here and here.” With her fingernails, she opened imaginary holes. “To expose bits of wood grain. I begin to see a pattern. I connect the larger holes. Finally, I have a composition.”

     “This delights me,” he said. “Our creative process is very similar.”

     “Oh?”

     From an inside pocket, he took out a mechanical pencil. “May I borrow your notebook?”

     “Just until the concert starts.”

     He glanced at the nearby oratory, an elevated crow’s nest reached by a winding stair. His pencil drew a vine around the edge of the page. He turned the line into a banister. Frogs with inward turning toes squatted on the rail.

     She looked from the drawing the banister.

     “I didn’t see the froggies until you drew them,” she said.

     “As with music, details suggest the whole.”

     She felt moved that he had grasped so quickly the thing that meant the most to her in life.

     A murmur traveled through the crowd. Heads craned, looking toward the organist, whose keyboard at the side of the cathedral sparkled with a pinpoint of light. The first, heavy chords of the Baroque organ rang out. Bach’s powerful B-minor Toccata resembled a medieval tapestry, notes in high registers weaving, like whites and yellows, through the mighty purple bass. She allowed the music to squeeze her heart. Tears flowed freely. Otto dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.

     Then it was over. The audience burst into applause.

     “I hope it wasn’t too much,” he said.

     “Oh, no!” she said. “It emptied me out.”

     Otto blew his nose. “The B-minor Toccata was my wife’s favorite.”

     Near the exit he pulled her out of the shuffling crowd. “Wait. Look here.”

     Display cases on the transept wall held old newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs. The nave of St. Stephen’s opened to the sky. There were blocks of rubble. Crushed pews. Shattered glass.

     He put his finger on the single, standing arch. “This was all we had to work with. This nothing.”

     She looked up at the high vaults. “How one earth did you put it all back?”

     “Stone by stone. The same way I rebuilt my life.”

     “I wish I could believe that were possible. Since my husband’s death I have had no musical ideas. I don’t know if I’ll ever write again.”

     “I hope you will.” He took her arm and led her toward the door.

     Across from the eastern portal of the cathedral, a pyramid of glass bombarded the plaza with brassy light. Neva shielded her eyes.

     He stepped between her and the glare. “Earlier, I had an idea.”

     “What kind of idea?”

     “Would you consider writing a commissioned piece for a women’s choral group here in Vienna?”

     “Not the Schoenberg Choir?”

     “The Frauengesang Verein.”

     “Is it for some occasion?”

     “An anniversary,” he said. “I am on the Board.”

     “Who is the client really? Is there a Music Director, or will I have to please the whole Board, an impossible task, I might add. I’ve tried before.”

     “I am the client,” said Otto. “You have only me to please.”

     “You can’t be serious.”

     “Indeed, I am.”

     The sun fell behind the roofs. The heavy cloak of gloom lifted.

     “Tell me more about the group,” she said.

     “It’s a women’s choir of mature voices.”

     “An experienced choral group, then?”

     “Why don’t you judge for yourself? These people are my dearest friends, and tonight we meet for dinner in Grinzing. Besides,” he added, giving her a wink, “they might join in sponsoring the commission.”

     “Oh, good. I can raise my fee.”

     “So you will do it?”

     “Let’s see how things go.”

     If she was going to meet these people, she needed to take a shower and change.

     In the elevator’s iron cage, they floated up. Their elbows touched and touched again.

     “How were you able to get on with your life?” she said.

     “I had no choice.”

     “Do you date?”

     “I think of it more as developing friendships.” He pushed open the filigreed door. “My wife always arranged our free time. If I made no effort, I would find myself sitting home every night. Is it not pleasant to enjoy the company of the opposite sex?”

     She made herself exhale.

     Just as she was about to insert the key, he took her hand and drew it to his lips. “Did you bring the red scarf you wore in Salzburg?”

     A shawl, not a scarf. “You remember what I wore?”

     “You had on slim black pants.”

     “Shouldn’t I wear something more formal?”

     “Not at all. Be yourself.”

     He would wait in the breakfast room.

     In her room she saw that the maid had folded Martin’s nightshirt and placed it on a pillow. She pressed it against her cheek and consigned it to her suitcase. Just in case.

     She showered and put on pants and heels. Surely, they’d done enough walking for the day. The tassels of her shawl swung as she trotted down the hall.

     “Beautiful,” Otto said. “A work of art.” Rather than a cab, he suggested the Strassenbahn.

     How comfortable he seemed with his life as presently constituted. If only she could move on.

* * *

The tracks quivered and sang.

     “What is this Grinzing place?” she said.

     “So to explain to you, Grinzing is where Beethoven composed his ‘Pastorale.’ Mahler is buried in the graveyard.”

     “Should I have brought a bouquet?”

     “We can let the graveyard alone.”

     She laughed. “Yes, I have had quite enough of graveyards.”

     The connection with Beethoven and Mahler had Neva expecting a grand Schloss. But, no. Grinzing was a modest village of stucco farmhouses, vineyards spreading beyond the edge of town.

     The streetcar halted. He helped her down.

     “Despite its distance from the city, quite a lot of tourists come here.”

     “To look at Mahler’s grave?”

     “For the heuriger wine.”

     “I don’t know that word.”

     “It is wine from the new harvest.” He pinched his thumb and index finger. “A bit sour, some say.”

     “I hate sweet wine.”

     “Mogan David?”

     “That especially.”

     “Reserve your verdict.” Saying something about wreaths and landmarks, Otto set off.

     Cobblestones caught her heels.

     “Wait up!” she called. “I’ve got on heels.”

     He halted immediately. “I was trying to recall where Beethoven lived.”

     “What am I, your Japanese wife?”

     He walked back and offered his arm. “Without a woman’s civilizing influence, we men forget out manners.”

     She walked on the balls of her feet. “I wish I’d worn tennis shoes!”

     He slipped an arm around her waist. “If you stumble I will catch you.”

     He made a handsome escort. For two blocks, passing a dozen wineries, she let herself be carried, and she began to wish that something, as yet unnamed, could develop from smiles and touches.

     Finally, he steered her through an arch wide enough for a wagon. A courtyard opened before her — two dozen picnic tables.

     “Here we are!” Otto said.

     Austrian men in business suits and women in flowered dresses hoisted empty pitchers at passing waiters. A stocky man in a green felt jacket stood and waved. Missing a step, Neva tripped.

     “Oopsola!” Otto caught her under the arms.

     At the table women froze.

     Neva straightened herself.

     “Meine Damen und Herrn,” Otto said, “it is my honor to present to you the famous American composer Neva Roth.”

     Neva’s shawl slipped from her shoulders. She busied herself retying the knot so that she did not have to look up. In her black tank-top and stretch pants, she’d already seen that she was a hundred pounds lighter and ten years younger than anyone else. A waiter brought glasses and two pitchers of wine.

     The men’s drunken fellowship put her on alert.

     Otto seated her next to a Frau Schmidt. After a sidelong glance, Frau Schmidt spoke in a guttural, Austrian dialect to a woman with hair like dollops of whipped cream. If Neva was to have any standing with these people, she would have to jump into the conversation.

     “I understand you and Herr Hoffmann are old friends.”

     Frau Schmidt turned, drawing her elbows in. “Do you speak German?”

     “Yes,” Neva said.

     Frau Schmidt switched to Hoch Deutsch. “Then we can’t say bad things about you, can we?”

     The other women laughed.

     Neva was in no mood to be the butt of their jokes. “Do you sing with the Frauengesang Verein?”

     “Once I did.” Frau Schmidt refilled her wine glass. “But my voice is now too sharp.”

     “Could you tell me how large the group is?”

     “Eighty, plus or minus.”

     “Are the singers trained?”

     “Since we were children, we all sang together.” Frau Schmidt drew a circle in the air. “This group here.”

     She pointed out who sang which parts in the chorus, when they had joined and when retired. The quality of Frau Schmidt’s voice, sharp even in speech, and the gossipy manner in which she raked over each singer’s flaws, reminded Neva how much she disliked catty women.

     The man in the green coat stood.

     Otto removed his tie and stuffed it in his pocket. He squeezed Neva’s thigh. “Don’t disappear.”

     When he left, Frau Schmidt said in a stage whisper, “Don’t pay any attention to Otto. He’s just lonely.”

     “We didn’t realize you really were a composer,” said the woman with the pile of curls.

     A woman in a lilac pantsuit scooted closer. “We thought you were another one of Otto’s women.”

     “Otto’s women?” Neva said.

     “I don’t blame him,” said Frau Schmidt.

     “Blame him for what?” Neva asked.

     “For taking companions,” said the woman in lilac, frowning.

     The need for companionship Neva knew well, and she did not blame Otto for beginning to date. Four years was a long time.

     “We went to school with Hildi,” said the woman with curls.

     “Yes,” said Frau Schmidt, “and she does not recognize any of us.”

     “You mean did, do you not?”

     Frau Schmidt’s heavy eyebrows drew together. “She’s still alive. In body.”

     Neva looked from one to the other. Smiles dropped from their faces.

     “Does she have…Is she in a…”

     “Home for Alzheimer’s?” Frau Schmidt said. “Yes, and for a time when we visited, we could get her to remember our school days. But now? Nothing at all.”

     “She sits in a wheelchair and whimpers,” said the woman with curls, “and at night she screams.”

     “Otto can hardly stand to visit,” Frau Schmidt said.

     “And you remain his friends?”

     Frau Schmidt shrugged. “We have many widows in our circle, and they say he is never disloyal to his wife.”

     “Understand?” asked the woman in lilac.

     She understood all right. Look, but don’t touch. He didn’t have sex.

     Through an open door she saw him in a line of men, arms crossed, shoulder blades blousing his shirt. His wife was alive. He could sit with her, touch her hand, talk to her. Even if she did not talk back, she was alive, poor woman.

     And here was Neva in her bare shoulders and red scarf, happy to play Carmen, or worse, Jezebel.

     Carrying two plates, Otto returned. A plate slid into view — thick slabs of bacon. Knockerl, a local delicacy. Two scoops of potato salad.

     No wonder the women were fat. The breeze shifted, and a barnyard smell blanketed the patio.

     Frau Schmidt said, “What reeks?”

     Tell it like it is, Sister, Neva thought.

     Otto placed a hand on her shoulder. Mr. Touchy-Feely.

     “You must eat,” he said.

     “I can’t eat this.”

     “Why not?”

     “I’m vegetarian. Plus, Jews don’t eat pork as you undoubtedly know without me telling you.”

     She cupped her hands around her face. Please don’t cry, she thought. Whatever you do, don’t make a scene.

     His face appeared through the curtain of her hair, and the questions he was about to ask made her throw a leg over the bench. He grabbed her arm, but she twisted away and bolted through the arch and out to the street, wobbling downhill toward the streetcar stop. Otto caught up just as the streetcar, its bell ringing, opened its doors.

     She took a window seat and pulled the shawl over her head.

     Otto sat next to her.

     She shrank away.

     The streetcar felt stuffy. She threw off the shawl. The window stuck. She beat the glass with her fists.

     “Calm down.” Otto stood and forced the latch.

     Wind whipped her hair. No man would ever be able to stand her again, and she would be alone the rest of her life. She crushed the scarf to her eyes and hunched over, elbows on her knees.

     Half an hour until they reached the city proper. She would ignore the barricade of his crossed arms. She could endure it. This was minor, compared to the other things she had endured.

     Half an hour later the streetcar stopped.

     Otto stood. “Our stop is the next.”

     “It’s not our stop. It’s my stop.” If he tried to touch her, she would sock him.

     But he did not.

     At the pension he took out a schilling for the elevator.

     She started for the spiral stairs.

     “As you wish, Gnadige Frau, but I take the elevator.”

     She took off her shoes. “I need the exercise.”

     The elevator rose alongside her. Otto stood in the cubicle as she circled the shaft. On the third floor, she stopped to catch her breath.

     The platform lifted his feet above her head, and he called down, “We did not have time to discuss the commission.”

     “Oh, that.”

     “Yes, that,” he said.

     The elevator’s light cast moving shadows along the wall. The elevator clanged to a halt.

     Winded, she arrived on the sixth floor.

     Otto moved from the shadows. “We must talk.”

     “I’m not doing the music, Herr Hoffmann. I can’t.” She tried to slip past him. Get her key in the lock. The day had done her in.

     He flicked on the light. “Please,” he said. “This anniversary will come only once.”

     “Find the Frauen whatever another composer.”

     “You misunderstand,” he said. “It is not for them.”

     “Isn’t it for their anniversary?”

     “It is for mine,” he said. “The fiftieth of my wedding. The golden one.”

     The hall light clicked off, plunging her into darkness, and the gears of the ancient elevator engaged. Standing very near the stairs, she found herself dizzied by the downward suck of air and the clank and hiss of a cable lowering the elevator to the lobby below.

     She reached for Otto’s hand. He caught her wrists and pressed her palms together, his breathing that of a man laboring under a heavy load. He wore pine cologne, and it was that, as much as anything, that made her slip her hands around his waist. Hugging him was like hugging a tree: straight, solid, and resinous. Cheek against his chest, she heard the thump and hush of his heart. How much time did he have? How much time did she?

     He stroked her hair.

     She let him.

     “I thought we both were widowed,” she said.

     “The wife I knew is dead, and I would throw myself at your feet if I thought it would convince you to undertake my commission. I want a memorial to show how marriage makes a common history. I had hoped to give you some idea of what my wife was like before the disease. Her friends have memories I do not.”

     “But I ran out.”

     “It was not because you are Jewish.”

     Neva drew back. His face blurred in the dark.

     “I ran because you were not free.”

     A spasm passed down his body.

     “But you are free.”

     He stepped back, one relationship between them called off, the other, as client and patron, still possible.

     “I hope you can make my idea a reality.”

     “I’m sorry, Herr Hoffmann. I truly can’t.”

     “Well, then.” He clicked his heels and bowed. Clutching the iron rail, he started downstairs.

     She listened to the diminuendo of his steps.

     A long night lay ahead. Too much going on in her mind.

     Back in the room her notebook lay where she had tossed it on the bed. Like an illuminated manuscript, Otto’s drawing curled like a vine. Notes filled the staffs. She had no memory of writing them, that afternoon’s concert already a lifetime ago.

     She kicked off her heels, pulled a chair to the desk, and turned on the lamp. What was this she had heard? Not Bach, exactly, but an undercurrent. Organ music was great for that. She opened a drawer and found a pen. Around and through Otto’s drawing, she parted the lace. The sound of “wedding” sprang from the page, the beginning of love and its end. She heard voices singing.

Marylee MacDonald is the author of Montpelier Tomorrow, Bonds of Love & Blood, and The Rug Bazaar. A former carpenter and mother of five, she has won the Barry Hannah Prize, the ALR Fiction Award, the Jeanne M. Leiby Chapbook Award, a Gold Medal for Drama, and more. She’s currently finishing a short story collection, Body Language, and a novel, The Vermillion Sea. She splits her time between Santa Rosa, CA, and Tempe, AZ, and in both places she likes to sleep outdoors and gaze up at the stars.