Alma and Gustav lived in harmony. Walter’s secret letters had dwindled, and she was content to let it rest. Everything was as it should be. Her lover’s infatuation had run its course, and the affair itself had served to purge her of her demons, allowing her to love her husband with a wide-open heart.
Such happy winter days, walking with Gustav and Gucki through Central Park. Meeting Natalie Curtis at the Women’s Club for lunch and sharing her good news that Frances Alda would be singing one of her lieder. Miss Alda sent her piano accompanist to the Savoy to consult Alma’s artistic direction. He played her piece for her to make sure he had the tempi right. This is how it feels to be a professional composer! When she wasn’t working on her own music, Alma continued giving piano lessons to Gucki.
One morning in February, Gustav awakened with a fever and an inflamed throat. Though he didn’t seem to think it was anything serious, Alma took the precaution of telephoning Dr. Fraenkel. She looked on while the doctor took her husband’s pulse and temperature, and peered down his throat.
“Tonsillitis,” Dr. Fraenkel said solemnly. “I’d advise you to bow out of tomorrow evening’s concert.”
“I couldn’t possibly!” Gustav sounded offended by the very notion. “I’m conducting the world premiere of Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque.”
Gustav had come down with tonsillitis in the past and had always shaken it off. Apart from a septic throat just before Christmas, he had enjoyed excellent health this winter. Still, Alma was sobered to see how concerned Dr. Fraenkel was.
“Maybe you should do as he says,” she told Gustav, after the doctor had left. “Stay home until you feel better.”
Gustav shrugged. “I’ve conducted with a fever before. But I’ll rest in bed until it’s time for the performance if that makes you happy, Almschi.”
The following evening, Alma made sure her husband was warmly dressed. She bundled him in blankets for the cab ride to Carnegie Hall. Dr. Fraenkel came along and joined Alma in the director’s box, where they watched Gustav conduct with his usual vigor, his thin body whipping like that of a jockey on a racehorse. Alma breathed in relief to see that everything seemed to be going well.
During the intermission, she and Dr. Fraenkel rushed down to check on Gustav in his office backstage. The doctor had brought aspirin powders, and Alma carried a bottle of Gustav’s favorite seltzer water and a fresh lemon. They found him slumped in his chair, as though conducting the first half of the concert had drained the life from him. Alma’s throat tightened, but then Gustav looked up at her and smiled.
“I have a headache” was as much as he would admit.
However, he gratefully accepted the aspirin and seltzer water that Alma infused with fresh lemon juice. In his customary fashion, he appeared to pull himself together, as though his health was a matter of personal willpower.
Gustav conducted the second half with fiery brilliance, tilting between passion and vehemence. Half god and half demon. His forty-eighth concert in three months, and he was giving it his all, as though this performance would be his last. An ice-cold presentiment seized Alma. Dr. Fraenkel gripped her hand, as if exactly the same thought had occurred to him.
When all three of them returned to the Savoy, Dr. Fraenkel examined Gustav once more.
“The fever’s gone,” the doctor said in astonishment.
Alma’s heart leapt. So it was nothing, after all.
“I told you so,” Gustav said cheerfully. “I conducted myself back to health. So much angst over a sore throat!”
In a matter of days, Gustav’s throat inflammation was gone. He was giving Gucki piggyback rides through their suite. Not long afterward, his fever returned, but it was mild and gave him no cause for alarm. Then it worsened only to recede again before returning with a vengeance. At night the fever ebbed, then mounted again during the day. Gustav kept vacillating between illness and moments of respite when he swore he was on the mend. These ups and downs kept Alma on a knife-edge.
One morning he collapsed, as he had done at Trenkerhof last summer. Alma held his head in her lap and pressed cool, damp towels to his chest while Miss Turner phoned the doctor.
“Almschi, I’m not right, am I?”
Gustav’s face, deathly pale, glistened with cold sweat. His breathing was shallow and weak. His beautiful slender fingers had gone stiff, curling inward at the tips, as though some poison were paralyzing him. Alma kissed his fingertips, as if her love had the power to cure him.
“You’ll have to telephone Mrs. Seney Sheldon,” he told her. “She’ll need to find another conductor.”
Gustav’s resignation terrified Alma. She had never seen him this broken.
Dr. Fraenkel arranged for a specialist from Mount Sinai Hospital to come out.
Alma sat at Gustav’s bedside and held his hand while the specialist inserted the biggest needle and syringe she had ever seen into her husband’s arm. The doctor and his assistant needed to withdraw blood to prepare a diagnostic culture. She had to look away, but Gustav endured his ordeal with stoic fortitude. The procedure was so laborious that afterward the bed, bedroom floor, and bathroom were spattered with his blood.
“We’ll take these samples back to the laboratory,” the specialist said, when he was finished. “We should have the results in five days.” But his drawn countenance gave Alma little cause for hope.
“Almschi, look on the bright side,” Gustav said, when the specialist and his assistant had left. “My fever’s gone down. Maybe there’s actually something to that old technique of bleeding patients to make them well again.”
Even as he lay in the bed linens spattered with his own blood, he was trying to inject humor into their tragedy. If they didn’t laugh, they would never stop crying. The room looked like a murder scene.
Alma wrapped him in his dressing gown and helped him to the sofa in the sitting room while the hotel maid cleaned away the bloodstains and made up his bed with fresh sheets and blankets.
“You should eat something, Gustl,” Alma said. She ordered up an omelet and tea from the restaurant downstairs, and fed him as though he were her child, putting every little bite in his mouth.
“When I’m well again, we’ll have to go on like this,” he said. “You feeding me. It’s so nice.”
Little Gucki stared at them, her huge eyes spilling tears. Just seeing the frightened look on the child’s face made Alma fear that she, too, would begin to weep. How could that poor little girl make sense of what was happening to their family?
“Don’t cry, Guckerl.” Gustav kissed their daughter’s forehead. “Your mama’s looking after me.”
Miss Turner, who looked as though she were also trying her best not to cry, said she would take Gucki ice-skating.
“If she falls, catch her,” Gustav said. “I catch you every time you fall, don’t I, Gucki?”
How could I have ever betrayed this beautiful man? Alma asked herself.
After Miss Turner and Gucki had left, and the maid had departed, Alma read to Gustav from his beloved Dostoyevsky. But he still had enough strength to reach forward and take the book from her hand.
“Almschi, you’re still so young and beautiful. You’ll be in great demand when I’m gone.”
Her eyes filled. “Gustav, don’t.”
But in the same humorous voice as before, he began to list her potential suitors. “Max Burckhard has loved you since you were a girl. Klimt is still single. Alex never stopped loving you. And I daresay, Dr. Fraenkel’s quite infatuated with you, in case you haven’t noticed. Who shall it be?”
It seemed he made a point of deliberately excluding Walter Gropius from his list.
“No one.” Alma kissed him. “Don’t speak of it.”
“Burckhard is banal. Klimt is a rake. Alex, alas, is married. Fraenkel’s not artistic enough to suit you. It will be better if I do hold on and stay with you, after all.”
Alma had to laugh and cry at the same time. In the white winter light, she lay beside him on the sofa and embraced him. She held his hands to her breasts and loved him as fiercely, as tenderly, as his weakened body allowed.
“My madly beloved Almschi,” he said. “Breath of my life.”
What blooms between us is ecstasy. Together they had endured every storm. Our love, she thought, is nothing less than divine. A bliss without repose that blurred the edges of life and death.
“Viridans streptococci,” Dr. Fraenkel announced. He had come to personally deliver the results of the blood test.
Alma, seated at Gustav’s bedside, exchanged a blank look with her husband. It seemed he was as clueless as she as to what that diagnosis even meant. But it was impossible to ignore how devastated Dr. Fraenkel appeared.
“My friend, you have a serious bacterial infection,” Fraenkel told Gustav. “You were born with a heart valve defect, which is itself a cause for concern. The streptococci have now settled in the heart tissue. The result is a slowly progressing inflammation of the inner lining of the heart—endocarditis. Compromised heart function has led to poor circulation—hence the clubbing in your fingers.”
“What can be done?” Gustav asked, with clear-eyed practicality.
“You might try Collargol injections,” Fraenkel said. “But if you’re well enough to travel, I suggest you go to Paris to consult André Chantemesse. He’s one of the world’s leading bacteriologists.”
Black spots swam before Alma’s eyes. Her skin went clammy. No doctor in all America was qualified to treat her husband’s disease? She sensed there was an awful truth that Dr. Fraenkel was trying to hide.
When she saw him to the door and handed him his hat and coat, Fraenkel hovered over her in paternal concern—or was it more than that? Was there any substance to Gustav’s jest that their house doctor was in love with her? He gazed at her with a possessive air, as if the tragic inevitability of her husband’s illness would one day make her his own. The thought made her want to spew. Fraenkel already knew her most intimate parts from tending her after her miscarriages. She wanted to shriek in his face. Stop looking at me like that, as though my husband were already dead.
“Alma,” he said, clutching his hat to his heart. “You need to prepare for the worst.”
Alma looked after Gustav day and night, hardly leaving his side. Mama was on her way over to join them and they would all sail back together. Maybe the Parisian specialist could cure Gustav. As long as hope remained, Alma would clutch at it with her last strength.
Their friends, the Baumfelds, had thoughtfully sent over invalid’s food for Gustav, including a tureen of soup that Alma now warmed over a spirit stove. When she carried the soup into Gustav’s room, he looked up at her expectantly. “Isn’t your concert tonight?”
In the wake of his illness, she had nearly forgotten that Frances Alda would be singing “Laue Sommernacht” at Carnegie Hall. Miss Alda had sent her two tickets. This was the moment Alma had longed for her entire life, and yet it seemed obscene to leave Gustav alone.
“I insist you go,” he said. “Miss Turner and Gucki will keep me company. I only wish with all my heart that I could be with you and share your moment of glory, Almscherl.”
When Alma entered Carnegie Hall, she found Natalie Curtis awaiting her in the lobby. Messy hair, scuffed boots, and all.
“Do you think I’d miss this?” her friend asked, kissing Alma’s cheek.
They sat together in the gallery with a bird’s-eye view of the stage. Alma had wanted to hide in the back row, but Natalie drew her forward. Even her friend’s enthusiasm couldn’t quell Alma’s nerves. It seemed almost embarrassing to see her own name in the program. What would people say about her? Her song was such a little thing compared to Gustav’s massive body of work. He was the genius and she the half-formed dilettante. And what did her music even mean to her if she lost him? What if she was to blame for what might prove to be his fatal illness? You’re a whore. Your affair made him ill. He knew, knew all along. Knew what you got up to on the Orient Express night train to Paris.
“Alma, why on earth are you crying?” Natalie gave her arm a squeeze. “I know your husband’s not well, but wouldn’t he want you to be happy tonight? I think we need to toast your success.”
Natalie discreetly passed Alma her hip flask of Arizona firewater.
The curtain swept open. The crowd fell silent at the sight of Frances Alda, unbearably beautiful with her red hair and slanting green eyes, her creamy shoulders rising from her sea-green gown. Alma listened to the concert with her heart in her throat, her own song being performed last in the repertoire. Then the moment arrived. Alda’s exquisite soprano gave voice to “Laue Sommernacht.” Her soulful interpretation rendered the piece as worthy as any song written by anyone. Every note was incandescent with yearning. Alma was in tears, but they were no longer tears of shame. I did this. I am a composer. All that striving has come to fruition. Was this how Gustav felt when he directed his own work? Her heart broke for him. If only he could be here to hear Frances Alda sing.
Upon a mild summer night, beneath a starless sky
in the wide woods, we were searching in the dark
and we found each other.
Alma grabbed Natalie’s hand in disbelief when her song was encored. The sense of delirium that possessed her was unlike anything she had experienced since the day she went into labor with Gucki and thought she had an entire opera pouring out of her. The applause made her quake, especially when Frances Alda lifted her arm to direct the audience’s attention to Alma in the gallery. Her heart raced. She felt dizzy. It seemed impossible that all these people were cheering not for Gustav but for her.
Alma hurried back to the Savoy to find Gustav awaiting her return with the keenest suspense.
“Almschi, how did it go? Tell me everything.”
He held out his arms. She kicked off her shoes and nestled beside him on the bed.
“Gustl, they encored my song!”
He looked so joyful, the color returning to his face. “Thank God for that! Almschi, I swear I’ve never been in such a state of excitement for my own work. I’m so proud of you.”