In February 1909, Gustav’s appointment with the New York Philharmonic was officially announced. He had a committee of women to thank for the ease by which he could make this transition just as his relationship with the Metropolitan Opera had turned sour. Mrs. Minnie Untermyer and Mrs. Mary Seney Sheldon had raised more than $100,000 to fund a newly formed Philharmonic worthy of Gustav’s vision and genius.
These ladies invited Alma as their guest of honor to a gala luncheon at the New York Women’s Club, an immense structure designed in the style of an Italian palazzo with marble floors, arched loggias and balconies, high-beamed ceilings and massive chandeliers. There was even a ladies-only swimming pool and gymnasium in the annex. When Alma stepped into the grand entrance, Mrs. Seney Sheldon greeted her with air kisses and showed her to her seat at the head table. These women were so elegant, flawlessly coiffured as only rich American ladies could be, not a strand out of place. Alma felt positively shabby in her best tweed suit and crepe-de-chine blouse. Even her pearls felt drab compared to their diamonds and gold. While the waiter filled their crystal glasses with punch au kirsch, Alma endeavored to speak her best English while she answered the ladies’ questions about her husband. Of her own thwarted musical dreams she didn’t dare speak.
As kind and hospitable as these ladies were, Alma had to admit she was intimidated. What a debt Gustav owed them. What if he, with his quirks and stubborn egotism, managed to alienate them—who would come to their rescue then?
Alma’s halting attempt at small talk was interrupted when a latecomer galloped in with a ricochet of boot heels on the marble floor. A petite woman in an ill-fitting coat and a skirt that appeared the worse for wear.
“Howdy, ladies!” she called out. “Sorry I’m late. My dang bicycle had a flat tire.”
Had this transpired in Vienna, such a person would be most unceremoniously shown to the door or at the very least snubbed. But the rich society ladies rushed from their places to swarm around this woman, greeting her with much acclaim. Following their example, Alma went to shake her hand.
“Mrs. Alma Mahler, this is our other guest of honor,” Mrs. Untermyer said. “Miss Natalie Curtis. She’s an ethnomusicologist and lived for years with the Hopi Indians in Arizona. She’s written two books on Indian culture, and she’s also a composer.”
Alma felt a rush in her head halfway between envy and blinding awe. Meanwhile, Miss Curtis pumped Alma’s hand enthusiastically. She was, Alma noted, not even wearing gloves. Her mousy hair was windblown and scraped back in a careless bun.
“Frau Direktor Mahler, what a pleasure to meet you,” Miss Curtis said, in flawless German. “I’m a huge fan of your husband. I studied piano in Bayreuth with his great admirer, the late Anton Seidl. My Hopi name is Tawi-Mana, by the way. That means Song Maid.”
Alma’s mouth opened as wide as a fishbowl. How truly democratic America is! The wealthiest and most glittering ladies in New York bowed down in humble respect before Miss Curtis’s brilliance and originality.
“You lived with Indians?” Alma asked in English, out of consideration for the other ladies. “In Arizona?” She could scarcely imagine such a thing.
Mrs. Seney Sheldon laughed affectionately. “Not only did our dear Miss Curtis camp in the desert for six years, she brought an Apache chief to a party at President Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay. She and the chief cornered Mr. Roosevelt to discuss tribal land rights.”
Alma stared at Miss Curtis in abject wonder. In Austria there were New Women like the Conrat sisters who studied at the university and pursued a life in the arts, but never had Alma imagined that a woman could be this free, this intrepid, this bold. Only in America. Although Alma was officially here on Gustav’s behalf to sing his praises to his wealthy patrons, she found herself entranced by Miss Curtis’s every word. Four years older than Alma, Natalie Curtis came from an established New York family who were friends with the Roosevelts. She had studied at the National Conservatory of Music of America to become a concert pianist, but at the age of twenty-five, she visited Arizona and fell in love with the Hopi culture. And thus she had dedicated her career to helping preserve Hopi music, recording it on wax cylinders.
“Do you know that the Bureau of Indian Affairs forbade these people to speak their own language and sing their own songs?” Miss Curtis asked, her brown eyes flashing in righteous anger.
Alma shook her head. To be honest, she’d never given much thought to the world outside Europe and New York.
“So Miss Curtis browbeat Mr. Roosevelt into changing that law, too,” Mrs. Seney Sheldon said, in a tone of frank amazement.
“Now I’m studying black folk songs,” Miss Curtis said. “The music of former slaves. I want to see black people performing in Carnegie Hall. Just like your husband, Mrs. Mahler.”
Alma wondered how Gustav would react to that.
“Mrs. Untermyer told me you are also a composer,” she said, hoping Miss Curtis wouldn’t hear the plaintiveness in her voice.
“Why, yes, ma’am, I certainly am. Shall I play you something, Mrs. Mahler?”
Though they were in the midst of their luncheon with the white-gloved ladies delicately picking away at their quail on toast, Miss Curtis swept herself off to the piano to play a piece of haunting beauty. Alma had never heard anything like it anywhere—it sounded as radically innovative as anything Arnold Schoenberg had composed. Why wasn’t Natalie Curtis’s music being performed in Carnegie Hall? Perhaps, with these ladies’ intercession, it will be.
“It’s drawn from an Indian theme,” Miss Curtis said, when she returned to the table to polish off her quail, which she ate with her hands. “A Pueblo corn-grinding song.”
She was so confident, so assured, so absolutely convinced that her vocation could make a difference in the world. She doesn’t need to flirt with men at parties just to feel alive. Alma wished she could yank off her own skin and step inside Miss Curtis’s. This is what a woman might accomplish if she believes in herself. What I might have achieved had I only been brave enough to stand strong without a man.
“We white people have it all wrong,” Miss Curtis told Alma. “We spend half our lives acquiring things, then spend the other half taking care of those things. But what good are things if we don’t have a chance to truly live?”
Alma could only nod in agreement. The gulf between what she had and what she yearned for had never seemed greater. This August she would turn thirty. When, if ever, am I going to truly come alive?
“A chief once told me that white people’s faces are lined with the tracks of hunted animals,” Miss Curtis said, while mopping up her plate with her bread roll.
Alma shifted uncomfortably in her chair and thought of Gustav’s drawn and furious face when he had accused her of infidelity. Those furrows in his face that only deepened with each passing year of their marriage.
“Mrs. Mahler, are you feeling all right?” Miss Curtis’s eyebrows lifted in concern. “You’ve gone awfully pale.”
Alma felt a twinge in her belly, which she rested her hand on, the universal sign language of pregnancy—that mysterious and terrifying frontier into which the adventurous Miss Curtis had never set foot.
At half past four, Alma returned to the Savoy, where Gucki was drawing pictures and Miss Turner the Younger, as Gustav liked to call her, was knitting for the new baby. The sight of those little booties made Alma wrench away. The twinge in her womb had turned into cramps. She thought she would split in two.
Not even bothering to unpin her hat, Alma collapsed on her bed and lay on her side, hugging her knees to her belly. No, no, no. Surely this couldn’t be happening to her again. And yet she felt the gush between her legs that she knew to be blood. Would Gustav blame her for this, too? What’s wrong with me? It was as though her flesh had risen up in sullen defiance, rejecting her husband’s seed. I’m no longer capable of having babies. Only ghosts. Alma bit the corner of the pillow to keep herself from screaming while Maud Turner and poor frightened Gucki hovered in the doorway.
This time Dr. Fraenkel gave Alma laudanum, which she found far more amenable than strychnine. Leaving the broken vessel of her body behind, her spirit roved free over the red Arizona desert where Miss Curtis sat recording Pueblo women singing as they ground their maize. That sound faded, and Alma’s own music surged through her brain like a tidal wave. She was unmarried and free. She could do anything. Clad in a virginal white dress, she performed her lieder at Carnegie Hall while the ladies from the New York Women’s Club cheered her on. Except it wasn’t enough for her to be single like Miss Curtis. I want it all. My music, love, sex, and children. What I want doesn’t exist.
But after the laudanum had worn off, she reflected how Mrs. Seney Sheldon and Mrs. Untermyer were married with children and they were fiercely ambitious. They were giants, shaping the cultural landscape of America’s leading metropolis with their new Philharmonic. They held her husband’s professional future in their white-gloved hands. And they held up a mirror to her weakness. To how she had given away every last scrap of her power.
After a thorough and excruciating examination, Dr. Fraenkel proclaimed that there was nothing physically wrong with Alma that prevented her from carrying a pregnancy to term.
“I suspect the origins of your wife’s recurring spontaneous abortions lie in hysteria,” the doctor proclaimed to Gustav in the next room while Alma lay in bed and grimaced at the ceiling. She thought her shame would completely obliterate her.
In terms of physical health, Alma recovered soon enough. But she felt like an empty shell on two legs. Despair stuck to her like pitch. The utter hopelessness. No one had ever warned her that grief is cumulative. That loss after loss—first Putzi and then two miscarriages—would snowball into an impossible weight that would crush her. Smash her bones to splinters. Any little thing could set her off in floods of tears. The sight of a pregnant woman with that beautiful glow on her face. Or if Gustav smiled or spoke warmly to Maud, who was blameless of any indecency.
Unlike Putzi’s death, the miscarriages were invisible losses, which made them all the harder to bear. No funeral cortege or mourning garb marked her as bereaved so that others might be extra gentle with her. No, Gustav expected her to carry out her duties as before, attending his performances and guarding his precious privacy. Dashing outside to bribe some organ grinder to go away lest the noise disturb her husband. It had become too much. She could no longer keep up the façade of holding it all together. For just as he had refused to talk about Putzi’s death, he never spoke to her about her miscarriages. Yet his unspoken blame thickened the air between them. He seemed to think that these failures of hers—spontaneous abortions!—were something appalling that must be hidden away like her blood-soaked nightgown.
But Natalie Curtis was kindness itself, stopping by to visit every afternoon with cakes and cornbread she had baked herself. The blessed woman didn’t seem the least bit fazed by Alma’s despondency.
“Don’t blame yourself, Alma,” she said. “Half the married ladies I know have had at least one miscarriage. Probably your own mother, too.”
Her eyes filling, Alma nodded, remembering when Mama had confessed about losing a baby before becoming pregnant with Maria. Natalie’s solicitude was as fortifying as her golden cornbread spread with thick sweet butter and honey. At long last, Alma had a true friend in this country. A confidante like no other.
To distract Alma from her grief, Natalie played Hopi music and her own compositions on the piano. Then one day, when Gustav was out, Alma played four of her songs for Natalie. The two of them sang in harmony.
“Why did you stop composing? These are good enough to be performed at Carnegie Hall.”
“My husband required it,” Alma said under her breath, her voice barely louder than a whisper.
Natalie seemed absolutely livid. “If any man tried to take my music away from me, why I’d—” She glanced at Gucki watching them from the open doorway and stopped short. “I can’t say what I’d do in front of an impressionable child because it involves too many cuss words. But honestly, Alma, what’s stopping you? What can he do if you just compose anyway? Chop off your hands?”
Alma could only laugh drily and change the subject. What could a free spirit like Natalie understand of marital sacrifice? Of Gustav’s coldness?
After Natalie left, Alma went to Gustav’s desk to read his volume of Novalis’s poetry. I will find one perfect poem and set it to music. Just one song. Perhaps this would keep her from tipping off the edge of despair. Instead, she came across an unfinished letter written in her husband’s hand. She would have ignored it had she not seen her own name. It was addressed to her stepfather.
Alma is very well. About her present state she has doubtlessly written to you herself. She has been relieved of her burden. But this time she actually regrets it.
For a long moment, she couldn’t breathe. Black stars swam before her eyes. His words sank in slowly, as insidious as poison. How could he even think she had been glad to miscarry? How could he misread her and blame her so? To think he could be this heartless. Was he blind and deaf to her inner torment? Not even Natalie’s compassion could ease this pain.
Alma crumpled at her husband’s desk and began to write a letter. Mama, help me. I can’t go on.