Chamber Music Read Online Free Page A

commands.
    From that first day I knew that she considered Robert guilty of desertion in marrying me. She had left her home, her children, her husband, her beloved Boston, afternoon teas, evening socials and concerts, to live in a barbarous country for the sake of his genius. Now, in his twenty-second year, a fully trained and maturing musician, he had deserted her. Her bitterness burned in the deep creases that crossed her forehead, kept perpetually red the lobes of her ears and the triangular tip of her small, furious nose. Only her eyes, which never lighted on any object, were gray and calm, like the horizon that they perpetually sought out, the color of haze or fog.
    Robert did not seem to be disturbed by his mother’s anger. “For a while, at least, until I can earn some money, Mama, we should like to stay with you.”
    His mother looked as if she had been asked to give lodging to the wife of Tom Thumb whom Barnum was at that time exhibiting in the capital cities of western Europe. “That is of course possible, if you wish, Rob,” she said, looking into the distance. Robert went to bring in our cases and the trunk. She ushered me into a small hallway.
    There is no other way to write of this. I must put it down directly. My mother-in-law pointed toward a huge room, almost the size of a Boston ballroom. Its ceiling was very high and beamed with what seemed to be half oak trees. At one end, mounted on a platform up three wide wooden steps, was a mammoth bed, as broad as four ordinary beds and covered with a yellowing lace spread. The canopy was of the same lace and draped down over the four posts, each one as thick and tall as a tree. I had never seen a bed of such proportions. It might have been a ship from a fairytale book—perhaps Timlin’s The Ship That Sailed to Mars . It was the size of my entire bedroom in Boston.
    I stared at it. “If you are staying here, this will be your room,” she said. “Your bed.”
    Stupidly awed, I said, “But this must be your room. I wouldn’t want to …”
    â€œIt was,” she said, “mine and Robert’s. Now it will be yours.”
    That night, huddled in a corner of the cold field of coverlets and comforters, I erred again. Young and badly frightened, I needed refutation of the strange vista of their lives that his mother had opened to me. “Did you share this … room with your mother before I came?” I asked him. I was afraid to say “bed.”
    At first he did not answer. His silence told me I had made a mistake to question him. He moved farther away from me and lay still, his arms folded under his head, his russet eyes taking light from the dying fire at the other end of the room. He stared at the canopy.
    â€œYes.” Then he closed his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep. I lay awake, filled with fear of the great expanse of blackness outside the four posts, and inexplicable terror for the future.
    So we three lived together. Mrs. Maclaren made the sewing room into a small bedroom. Robert left very early each morning for the conservatory and returned after seven in the evening for his supper. I spent my mornings trying to practice on the grand piano in the drawing room, feeling Virginia’s resentment across the distance from the sewing room where she preferred to sit in the morning, staring at the barren tree outside her window, sometimes sewing or doing her needlepoint.
    Often, in my cold misery (Germany in the winter is cold and dark and without hospitality even toward its native inhabitants, it seemed to me), I took walks along the formal, square blocks of the city, so different from the unpredictable curves of Boston. One could not get lost in Frankfurt. Its rectangles were too regular. After I had walked around one and come back to my starting point, I would have a hot chocolate and pastry in the Hotel du Nord, I think it was, and then walk around the rectangle in the other direction.
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