the dear fool, calling in a loud voice for the best three remaining bottles of wine to be dusted off and brought at once. How could he think of wine at this moment?
With that the music stopped within her, and she knew herself to be only a sixteen-year-old girl in a stuffy parlor. Could she have so quickly lost the mystery of those moments and the happiness of the singer when she becomes the song and touches eternity? But family and guests were all pressing about them, candles tilted and dripping wax. “Mind the candle,” Josefa cried, receiving the wine bottles from her father.
Now she was being hugged by all, aware of how intensely a few of the men looked at her, even Thorwart, who was called uncle by the girls even though he wasn’t really a blood relative. There was the self-contained composer, his left hand still resting soundlessly on the keys, also looking steadily at her. If she embraced him, she would regain the moment. Slip away, her eyes said; slip away and come with me. Come with me, dear Wolfgang Mozart. Her heart was beating very fast.
She left the room as a string trio began, escaping to the unmade beds and scattered clothing of her shared bedroom, even closing the door a little, but not all, so that she might hear the composer’s footsteps following her down the hall. The door from the parlor creaked softly, and she opened hers. In the shadow she saw a man walking softly under the portraits of long-dead Weber ancestors posing in their horrible dull garments.
She lightly ran forward the few steps and felt her hands caught by another’s; they were not Mozart’s supple hands, but wider, meaty ones. It was Leutgeb who had followed her. “Do you know what happens to kisses not given?” he said softly, looming above her. “They become sorrow, like words never spoken. You are the most beautiful girl in the world, and your voice is like that of an angel.”
Lifting her face, she allowed him to kiss her mouth. And as he kissed her, she felt all the magnificence of the song return.
Some minutes later she straightened her dress and slipped back into the parlor, where the second movement of the string trio had just begun. She could see her father’s good head nodding as he played his violin.
Sometime after the song had been sung and acclaim was yet ringing about the parlor for Aloysia, Josefa Weber slipped from the room to hide on the cold hall steps. She had observed her sister’s departure, and shortly after it Leutgeb’s; now Josefa sat with her arms hugging her chest. Why had she made up with her before? Here in their very own parlor Aloysia had taken the prize of admiration, while Josefa’s own voice was larger and more passionate, able to make the very pictures on the wall tremble and the candle flames waver. She could have sung equally well at sight, but, not having been asked to enter the competition, she was vanquished. Oh, it was always this way, always since Aloysia’s birth.
Josefa remembered peering over the cradle at the very tiny fragile child who, anxious relatives muttered, hovered between life and death. For weeks following Aloysia’s birth Josefa had stumbled over kneeling aunts whispering over their rosary beads. The child lived, and, from shortly after that time, everything changed.
Josefa had been the darling of her parents for three and a half brief years of life as an only child. Later, even after it seemed Aloysia would live, it was Josefa who was the first to read, the first to have a music lesson, the first to sing to aunts and grand-mothers as she stood on a chair and was held steady by her adoring mother, and then, dressed in her childish best, the first to sing to her father’s musical friends on Thursdays. Suddenly, though, there was another songbird, a higher, lighter, purer voice, yanking at her dress as she sang, almost pulling her from the chair. At the age of seven Josefa had had enough; she pushed her sister down ten minutes before guests arrived, and had then been slapped for it. Friends who had first lifted Josefa into their arms now exclaimed playfully at her weight, and they lifted tiny Aloysia instead. The younger girl darted like a sparrow; she was more appealing. And yet Josefa loved her small sister as something finer and sweeter than she could ever be. Hadn’t there