CHAPTER FOUR

On Tuesday I started writing music.

You hear about religious freaks who speak in tongues or spontaneously write in ancient runes. I was once as smug about those weirdos as anyone.

It seems that Franz missed having a piano and did the next best thing. We could hear everything as we wrote it. This was our recording studio, a perfect rendering in a single take. It would have been wholly wonderful except for one thing: We were on page eight before I noticed I was writing anything.

The kitchen table was covered with laboriously hand-lined paper, and every pen in the place was either on the table or tossed on the floor as unworthy. I realized how easy it had become for me to lose time—to surrender—when I was alone. The phone, a visit from Fred, any human contact was enough to keep me alert and anchored. But without that outer influence, it was becoming frighteningly pleasant just to blend into Franz.

Mom called often, and her tone became increasingly anxious. When I mentioned my leave of absence from work, she had trouble sounding calm. What plans did I have? What about my career? And her favorite: What am I doing with my talent?

Loyal Mom. She knew about my “adjustment problems,” but believed I could handle them. She was ready for me to share my newfound brilliance with the world.

“Call a music agent. Join the symphony,” she suggested. “There’s plenty you can do with a talent like yours.”

“First of all, it’s not mine, Mom.” For the fiftieth time. “I don’t know where it came from or how long I’ll have it. I can’t even go to the office; how can I think about playing in public?”

Ah, but I had been thinking about it. Thinking about it a lot.

Franz wanted to play. To create more orchestral work and hear it performed. To rejoin the music world. He didn’t say these things in words, but I knew what he felt.

We communicated through feelings, and things made sense that way. When I tried to think with him in actual words, everything got complicated. In any case, I knew for sure that he wanted to make music again. But how could a freak like me go public? Not one of my closest friends or family wholly believed what was happening, so what would strangers make of me? Sure, I could impress the crowd at Carnegie Hall, but it’s not like they have an open-mike night there. Just making a start seemed monumental.

Sick of feeling powerless and ignorant, I decided to help myself by learning more about my famous guest. I went online, where I could easily scroll through Franz’s life and search for helpful info. He was clearly alarmed to see his likeness on the screen, but I was comforted by the words that gave solidity to his existence, and by the enduring admiration he’d earned.

Born in Vienna (like my grandfather!) in 1797, the twelfth of fourteen children and only the fourth to survive past infancy. He died thirty-one years later, probably of venereal disease. A contemporary of Liszt and Mendelssohn—and, get this, buried next to his good friend Beethoven. Antonio Salieri, a lethally jealous composer, according to the movie Amadeus, said that Schubert “must be taught by God himself.” (I blush at that. Franz takes a bow.)

Schubert showed talent from the start, but his family sent him to school to be a teacher because it was a more reliable profession than musician. Still, he composed hundreds of songs called lieder just for fun by the time he was seventeen. (Prolific—nineteenth-century pop tunes?) Then he met Franz von Schober, who had plenty of money and urged Schubert to quit work as a teacher and come live with him in comfort. This is the fun part—they had a bunch of friends who got together just to sing lieder and make music in gatherings called Schubertiads (Karaoke classicals). One of these was a famous singer named Johann Michael Vogl. Schubert played while Vogl sang (a great surge of joy as I visualize this—must be a favorite memory for Franz).

At one point, Schubert became the live-in music tutor for the beautiful daughters of a Hungarian count. I liked this, too: Franz composed a lot of four-handed piano pieces during that time, possibly so he’d have an excuse to share a piano bench and cross arms with his favorite young countlette.

By 1819, Franz was on his first concert tour with his old friend Vogl. They were a hit. Schubert was by then a master of orchestration as well as songwriting. He was highly productive and happy until late 1823, when he started feeling ill. Franz kept writing, but his music had a sadder, more reflective tone.

As for his famous “Unfinished Symphony,” his eighth, people still wonder about that. It starts with two movements and that’s all. There should be two more. Since he’d written that much by 1822, what became of the rest? Theories: He considered it complete after two movements and stopped writing. Or he finished the work but removed two movements and used them with another symphony. Or the last two movements were lost when he sent the manuscript to his friend Herr Hüttenbrenner for safekeeping. Franz focused on this name on the computer screen, and it felt important.

Schubert died without a wife or known heirs.

Franz Schubert became my full-time occupation. His presence permeated everything, and I got the impression he wasn’t leaving soon. Luckily, I had a little money to sustain this unexpected leave of absence from reality.

It was the gift of my grandma Helen. By the end of her long life, she’d accumulated a respectable pot of cash. Mom and Dad were financially blissful since they sold their five sporting-goods stores to a large corporation. My sister had married into barrels of money. I was just the overworked lawyer with no husband to take care of me, so Grandma left it all to me.

“I know you make a living,” she said to me at our last Thanksgiving together. “Use your salary to pay your bills and buy necessities, but promise you’ll use my money for something that makes you happy.”

“Maybe I’ll make it my vacation fund,” I told her. “I could toast you in Paris and Tahiti.”

“Yes, vacations are nice,” she said, not quite convincingly. “Maybe you’ll want it for something else, too. Something really important to you, something you don’t know about yet.”

“Surprises can be nice,” I said.

So here I was, surprised. This was certainly important and something I hadn’t known about before, but I still wouldn’t call it nice. The nonstop effort to make sense of things was grueling. Normalcy seemed like a luxury, and I easily lost track of time, decorum, and other minutiae as Franz barreled through the mundane details of living.

I was brooding about this when my apartment buzzer sounded and I opened my door without thinking. It was Fred. He immediately apologized for not calling first.

“No problem, Fred, I just wasn’t expecting you,” I explained. “I thought you were the pizza guy.”

“The pizza guy?”

“Yeah, I ordered from Picurro’s on Henry Street.”

My fine, strong friend looked about to cry.

“Liza, you’re naked.”

We were both in tears then. Fred offered to stay over that night and I let him. He went to sleep on the couch, but I may have cried out in the night. Fred was in my bed when I woke up, wrapped around me like a blanket.

He took the day off to babysit me, and I felt gratefully grounded with my old friend beside me. We walked the neighborhood bundled in winter layers, and bought food at my favorite market. I felt almost like the old me, but somehow enhanced.

The phone was ringing when we got back to my place. On such a good day, I thought I could be nice to a long-distance telemarketer. But I have my limits.

“Bonjour! We’re ba-ack, ma soeur.” Cassie sang her words, and threw in French with a stinko accent, to boot.

“Already? How was Paris? Leave any clothes in the stores for the next tourist?”

“Come on, Liza, I’m not that bad. Besides, you’re supposed to shop at Christmas.”

“Oh, I must’ve misunderstood. I thought the idea was to shop for other people at Christmas. Silly moi.”

“Who says I didn’t bring something nice for you? Come to the house this Saturday and see.”

My sister, the fashionista, can dole out pretty fantastic gifts when she wants. Besides, a trip to her house might be just what I needed.

I said I’d come if I could bring Fred. I heard Cassie’s eyes roll. To cheer her up, I said I might bring someone else, too.

“A date?”

“We’ll see.”

Fred was already laughing when I hung up. A trip to Cassie’s could be fun as long as Fred was there to offend her. Fred is the opposite of fashion-forward (even his shoes look wrinkled), and he’s not going to marry me. Cassie saw him as an impediment to any chance of me meeting “someone worthwhile,” no matter how remote that possibility.

Fred knew Sister Dearest quite well from hearing my completely objective stories about her, and from social gatherings I dragged him to through the years. He always accepted my invitations to her house—out of morbid curiosity, he said—but he had reservations this time.

“She’s not exactly good for your mental health.”

“Okay, she can be a black hole in the karmic universe,” I admitted. “But she’s my sister. And this time she has something I want.”

Don’t think for a minute that my sister Cassie has a whole lot that I want. However, we’ve always eyed each other’s assets with the deepest interest. She’s the tall, svelte redhead that skimpy black dresses were invented for. I’m the dark voluptuous one, the eternal icon of womanly glory, if history had stopped in 1962.

Cassie is a career princess. She was fussy and demanding from the start, a noisy annoyance to my young ears. While I demurely marched through school with high grades, she made a commotion cheerleading and being gorgeous. Even her hair was good. Especially her hair. Red, wavy stuff that permanently inspired my mother to dye her own to match.

And Cassie and I were sisters at heart, with strong loyalties and clear boundaries about certain things. Usually.

In my sophomore year at Cornell, I met Barry Whitman and did a long, luxurious free fall for him. He had classic good looks, was the wittiest person I ever knew, and had a great sense of adventure. On weekends we explored the wilds of upstate New York and got in scarier fixes than I ever encountered in the New York City subways. No mountain too high, no cave too dark.

Cassie started at Cornell the next year, and it was the nicest time of our lives together. With no parents there, we weren’t competing for attention or rewards. I liked showing her around, and she liked hanging with upperclassmen. It wasn’t long before she acquired Wilson, her own adventuring boyfriend. We were part of a crowd that saw leisure time as a swell opportunity to risk life and limb.

I was scheduled to spend spring semester of my junior year in Barcelona. Barry didn’t want me to go, but I was deep into feeling my independence as a woman and secure in my love. I wrote him nearly every day and phoned twice a month.

In early March, Barry called me in tears. Really, they never meant it to happen. Wilson had left Cornell, and there was this ice-camping trip and Barry and Cassie wound up sharing a tent—for warmth, that’s all. But things had changed, and I was away in Barcelona, and no one wanted to hurt me but blah, blah, blah. They got married the following year.

My parents bought the newlyweds dishes, towels, a Cuisinart, and a week in Saint Bart’s. Barry’s parents gave them a Remington.

Maybe people who have always been rich don’t think in practicalities. Cash is a tacky gift and everyone has housewares already, right? On the other hand, a zillion-dollar statue of a reared-up horse and rider is always in good taste. As it turned out, Cassie built her world around that Remington.

Barry would not come into family money until after graduate school at Columbia, so they started out in a tiny apartment above a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Cassie intended to continue school part-time. But she looked at the stately statue in their funky living room and decided it needed a more fitting setting. She got a full-time job working with a publicist in the garment center and made a bit of a name for herself. She was stolen away by Donna Karan, and they moved to digs that were better showplaces for the Remington.

When Barry finished his MBA, he started work at the family bank. After paying his dues for nearly six months, he was promoted from vice president to senior vice president. Family money passed hands. Life got easier. Cassie and Barry moved to Great Neck. She set aside a flowering career to have two perfect children. The family soon wound up in that bastion of old Anglo money, Upper Danville on Long Island. At last her Remington could feel at home among Persian rugs, signed Picasso lithographs, a Fabergé egg, and one Steinway grand piano.

Sie ist stark . . . She is strong, with supple limbs and long, long fingers. Every day she feels robust. She expects it.

In my last years, I was so sick and feeble. What might I have done with a body such as hers for a full, long life? What might I do?