“Of course, you shouldn’t marry for the mere sake of bourgeois convention,” Max Burckhard told Alma, as they bicycled side by side along Lake Hallstatt at the foot of the Dachstein Alps. “What an utter waste that would be. Remember this, my dear—you are a free soul.”
Alma’s heart lifted as her legs pumped the pedals uphill past the onion-domed church and farmers scything hay. How she loved cycling. She wished she could just race on and on, becoming one with the wind sweeping down from the snowy mountain peaks.
“In fact, you don’t have to marry at all,” Burckhard said, with a candor that put a wobble in her handlebars. “I never did. At least not yet.”
As his moist gaze lingered on her, she flustered and glanced away, directing her vision to the fishing boats swaying on the ruffled blue lake. Fascinating conversationalist though he was, Max Burckhard didn’t interest her as a man—he was older than her mother, for God’s sake.
That doesn’t mean you don’t interest him as a woman, Mama would have retorted, she who suspected every adult male who came within a barge pole’s length of Alma to have ulterior motives. But Mama was far away in Vienna, and Alma was most respectably chaperoned, with Gretl and Wilhelm cycling just behind her, and Wilhelm’s parents and Carl bringing up the rear. They were cycling toward Hallstatt on the southern end of the lake, where they planned to share a meal before heading back to their rented summer house near Bad Goisern.
Poor pregnant Mama had stayed behind in Vienna to have her baby while the rest of them vacationed in the mountains. At least Mama’s own mother was coming down from Hamburg to look after her and the baby when it arrived.
Alma hoped and prayed that Mama would be all right, that the birth wouldn’t damage her health. Try as she might, she could still not get over her shock that her mother would be giving birth to a brand-new infant just as she and Gretl had reached the age to marry and have children of their own. She felt guilty about leaving her mother at such a vulnerable time, yet Mama had insisted she needed her peace and privacy. It was as though her grown daughters and even her husband had become an unwelcome presence as the unborn baby devoured her entire existence. It frightened Alma to think of Mama trapped within those walls, as if her pregnancy had transformed her into an unmovable piece of furniture.
And so Alma directed her entire attention on Max Burckhard. Even with the bother of his unwelcome overtures, she found him fascinating. The former director of the Burgtheater, Burckhard had introduced Vienna to the plays of Henrik Ibsen. He was the first man since Alma’s late father to take an interest in her mind. For Christmas, he’d given her two huge laundry hampers full of books—all classics in the finest editions. It was he who had introduced her to the works of Nietzsche.
Alma secretly regarded Burckhard as a Nietzschean superman. Possessed of enormous physical vitality, he cycled, hiked, and rowed with the vigor of a man half his age. He was utterly true to himself. While she and her family summered in a geranium-bedecked chalet along the Traun River like so many other tourists, Burckhard had acquired a mountain hut far above the valley where he lived in splendid isolation, with only deer and chamois for company. Though her family frequently set her nerves on edge, Alma shivered at the thought of such solitude. Of existing all by herself with no one but herself to answer to.
As Burckhard fell silent, Alma overhead Gretl’s conversation with Wilhelm.
“I want to have four children,” Gretl said. “Four is the perfect number. Two boys and two girls.” Her sister’s voice sounded unnaturally bright, as though she were a bad actress delivering her lines.
Sometimes her sister seemed so opaque, as though she concealed an entire universe of secrets in the depths of her slender, recipe-copying self. What was she hiding from them all? Why did Gretl get all those headaches—was she merely constitutionally weaker than the rest of them, as their house doctor claimed? Gretl could ride her bicycle as well as anyone else. Alma felt a pang of regret that the two of them were not intimate confidantes like the sisters she read about in novels.
“Death does not exist,” Burckhard said abruptly.
What happened to my father then, Alma was about to ask him when all thought was swept aside at the sight of the cyclist coming toward them, sunlight glancing off his spectacles and black hair. Could it be, or did she deceive herself?
“Herr Direktor Mahler!” she cried, interrupting Burckhard’s discourse on death midsentence.
For it was indeed Gustav Mahler who hailed them and asked directions to Traunkirchen. Accompanying him were two women and a man Alma recognized as Arnold Rosé, first violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic.
In a flurry of deference, everyone jumped off their bicycles. Carl dug out his map and pointed out the way while Alma stole glances at Mahler. She’d never seen him up close before. His high cheekbones, his intelligent brow—this was the face of an artist glowing with exertion and good health. For a man in his late thirties, he appeared almost boyish, with his open, expansive smile. But when he directed that smile at her, having caught her in the act of staring at him, the blood shot to her head. She wanted to creep away, but Carl was now introducing her.
“Are you the Fräulein Schindler who sent me the postcard?” Mahler asked, sounding altogether too amused.
She cringed to recall how before leaving Vienna she had sent him a card begging for his autograph. And here she stood, as sweaty and disheveled as a peasant harvesting potatoes, while her musical idol suavely proceeded to introduce her to his sister Justine and then to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a violist who performed professionally in an all-female string quartet. Both women seemed to regard Alma pityingly, as though she were the latest soppy, starstruck girl to throw herself in Gustav Mahler’s path.
How utterly humiliating. If Alma had learned one thing from her debacle with Klimt, it was to worship her idols from a safe distance. Perhaps she should stick to venerating dead men like Wagner.
Eight weeks later, when Alma returned home from the mountains, Mama welcomed her by thrusting a bald, wriggling infant into her arms.
“Your new sister, Maria,” Mama said, smiling at the baby and then studying Alma intently, as if to gauge her feelings for her new sibling.
Maternal sentiment is the measure of femininity, Alma told herself, as she gazed into those unfocused blue eyes. Women and girls were supposed to melt at the sight of a baby. I must be unnatural—the third sex! For instead of madonna-like adoration, Alma felt a frantic urge to hand the baby back to Mama before the tiny creature spit up on her. Alma was holding an unwelcome reminder that Carl had copulated with Mama—something too grotesque to even think about.
“Alma!” Mama cried sharply. “Support her head!”
Before Alma could even work out how she was to do this, her mother had snatched the infant from her.
Gretl cooed worshipfully. “Let me hold her!”
With the new baby dominating the household, Alma considered herself lucky that she was allowed to play piano—provided that Maria wasn’t sleeping, of course.
Alma attempted to compose a sonata. At long last she had persuaded Herr Labor to teach her counterpoint, and she hoped that this, her most ambitious composition thus far, would prove to him that she did, in fact, have talent. She forced herself to concentrate with single-pointed focus, to ignore Maria bawling in the nursery while Gretl banged around the kitchen—her sister was taking cooking lessons from Cilli. Simply jotting down a few new bars felt like the labor of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up that never-ending mountain. If Alma could even have one day of peace and quiet, she might accomplish so much more.
Sweat pooled under her armpits as Alma played her sonata for Herr Labor, who sat with his gnarled fingers enclosing his blind man’s cane of polished walnut. Now was the moment of judgment when he would decree if her hard-won lessons in counterpoint had been worth his while. Her nerves were stretched so thin that she kept striking the wrong notes, and she could feel his impatience as if it were an icy draft.
“Enough!” he cried. “It’s stupid of me to teach you! You can’t be taken seriously. If that’s the best you can do, you better give up.”
It was as though the ceiling had come crashing down on her. Alma stared through her tears at the first sonata she had ever dared to write. She imagined Labor ripping it in half and flinging it out the window.
“If you must compose,” he said, “stick to your lieder.”
A blackness engulfed her heart. Any shred of dignity or purpose she’d ever had was laid to waste.