He stood, still in the robes of the king he had played in the opera that day. “I’ve been watching you since you’ve come, you know. You have a magnificent voice, but the feeling within you is what makes it so rare. People come to hear you. Why are you going away?”
“I have to go.”
He had crossed the room, and taken her hand; he was not a handsome man, but he listened to people, and she had always felt him listening to her.
She said, “You are very kind, Monsieur Hofer.”
“But you will return to Prague?”
It all began in a parlor much like this, she thought; it began with my father. He gave me music and love. He always protected me; I was his girl. She turned abruptly, and descended to the kitchen.
Maria Caecilia Weber was asleep in the old armchair they had brought in their travels from city to city, her hips spread out under her vast skirts, her head with its heavy chins drooped on her chest, which rose and fell with her breathing. Rain beat on the kitchen window, a little seeping under the casement, while the upper floors of the boardinghouse were still and quiet, the way they sometimes were in the morning. Josefa listened. Not even the cellist played; he must be at rehearsal or moved away. The kitchen table was full of cold chicken, which would later be smothered in warm sauce and piles of vegetables and onions.
She took a deep breath. “Mama,” she said sternly.
Maria Caecilia sighed and stirred. She seemed to start a little as her eyes opened and focused on her eldest daughter. For a moment something soft crossed the heavy face with its still youthful skin, and Josefa remembered years before when she had rushed into her mother’s capacious lap and her mother had said, “Whose little girl are you? And who loves you best?”
Her mother sat forward now, rearranging her expression, straightening her puckered white cap. “You stand there like a loose woman with your hair all down,” she said, her voice husky from sleep. “Well, Josefa, you might have sent word you were coming. Have you come trailing your lovers? What on earth do you want? Away for months and months and no letter to me, not a coin for me when I might need one. In and out of our lives, isn’t it?”
“Oh, how nicely you welcome me!” Josefa muttered.
But tears had formed in her mother’s wide, plain face, obscuring her eyes; she stood up, her hand bracing her back for a moment, and began to stir the soup that had been simmering over the fire. “Yes,” she said, her broad back to her daughter. “You come home likely boasting, after the reputation you left here from which we’ve just begun to recover. I suppose you know the news. Your sisters write, I’m told. Stanzi’s betrothed, though without a contract, foolish girl; he’ll leave her with her belly swelled, mark my word. Aloysia seems content with her portraitist when she could have done so much better. Now I suppose you come back to bring me shame. You could at least help with the dinner instead of being useless. Sophie’s off doing good works for the poor.”
“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”
“No, I don’t, but you’ll tell me anyway.”
“I left Prague a month ago. I’ve been traveling. I went to Zell, where you were born and where you met Papa.”
Maria Caecilia’s back stiffened slightly, and then she rubbed the small of it and resumed stirring the soup. Turning to the table, she began to cut the cooked chicken with a knife. She never raised her face. “You went to Zell? Why? You never showed much interest in my sisters, your aunts. Poor Gretchen, poor Elizabeth!”
Josefa watched the adept hands cutting up the chicken, deboning it, arranging it in neat piles. She said, “I wanted to find out what I could about you and Papa. Do you remember what you said in the carriage coming back from Papa’s funeral? I never forgot it. There were many people who remembered you quite well in Zell. Your family didn’t have very much money at all; I found that out. I badgered my aunts until they confessed. Your family was never wealthy; there was never much silver. None of it was true, ever.”
Her mother did not look up. “How long did you say you’d be staying with us, Josefa?” she said coldly.