as easy to love a rich man as a poor one,” she said. “Rich men are also worth loving.”
“Don’t you love Papa?”
“Impudence! Bad girl, Constanze Weber! Of course I do.”
Sophie pinched Constanze’s arm, gazing sadly at her mother’s wet eyelashes. “You could ask him on a Thursday, Mama; we could look him over.”
Aloysia slipped the butter away into the cupboard in the blue covered dish that had traveled from Mannhem with them, and then neatly shut the door. From the parlor came Josefa’s voice: “Let me know which evening he’s coming, and I’ll go to the lecture at the philosophical society.”
The plantation owner arrived the following Thursday with Frau Hoffman for the Webers’ evening, but he complained that music gave him a headache and left early. The girls laughed so hard they had to leave the room. Only Josefa did not have her customary fun with it, for she had seldom seen her father so profoundly tired; the next day, when she vowed to scold him about it, it seemed to have left him. And Sophie at last confided in Constanze what she had seen in the book of suitors when she had stolen it some months before: under Aloysia’s name were several new possibilities, all of them sons of wealthy fathers in good Munich society. Nowhere was Mozart’s name. The two younger sisters linked their little fingers, swearing secrecy, but they looked with some skepticism at their mother for a time after.
Autumn came, bringing no suitors worth mentioning, rather damp and rain. Fridolin Weber rushed from lesson to lesson under his enormous black umbrella. On his face was that wild, uncomfortable look he wore when they were not quite making ends meet, and again the girls heard quarrels from behind their parents’ bedchamber door. Then one morning their father came late from his rooms, his thin naked legs visible under his short nightshirt, one hand against the wall for support, and a cough shaking his body. “I’m not quite well,” he said. “Josefa, my love, you will kindly take my clavier lessons? Don’t shout at the young women if they’re stupid; they’ll go elsewhere.”
That Thursday evening the usual handful of guests arrived; they were shown into the bedchamber where Fridolin lay, a hot water bottle on his chest and his throat wrapped in flannel. “We’ll have our musicale here,” he said. The friends looked at one another, but obliged. Five or six musicians crowded in the room between wardrobe and table, squeezing chairs where they could. Heinemann’s bow caught on the bed hangings. Glasses of wine were set among the powders, pins, and health tonics cluttering Caecilia Weber’s dressing table.
“What does the doctor say?”
“He bled me and ordered me to rest.”
After the friends had left, Weber leaned back on his pillow, listening to the whispers of his girls, who were quietly returning the chairs and clearing away the cake plates and glasses. When he looked up, he saw Josefa standing in the doorway holding his beer, which she had heated for him, clutching it against her as if to shield its warmth. He called, “Come, sit on the bed’s edge, but first close the door a little.”
He took her hand in his once she was settled. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll be ready to go back to my work tomorrow, but tonight, dearest girl, while the andante was playing, I looked at all of you as if standing at a distance, and it was a strange thing. It was as if I wasn’t here anymore. I shouldn’t tell you this, perhaps, but I feel I must speak of it. You know there are certain things I can’t tell your mother; she worries so.”
Fridolin Weber leaned back on the flattened pillow, and Josefa thought, He looks older, like his own father now. Her heart skipped a beat.
“You work too hard,” she said sternly. “I don’t know why some people have to work so hard in life, while for others it’s easier. »
“I don’t mind it. I have all of you and your dear mother to keep.”
“Everyone wants too much of you; it’s not fair.”
“I didn’t want to speak about me, Josy, but you. I really didn’t mean to speak of me at all. We haven’t had our walks lately, those times just you and I walked together. I miss them very much. I sometimes look at you over the candles at supper. You’re my girl. It’s not easy being the eldest, and you’re not happy. I don’t know what