of himself and his sister; his legs dangled from the clavier bench. He was very young, very charming with his silky wig. On the windowsill, best placed to catch the sun, were his mother’s plants. The edges of some of the leaves had turned brown. He drew in his breath hard.
“God bless you, my son—a safe journey?”
“Nothing unexpected; we did not overturn.”
His father groaned, “My God, your mother—even after this time I hope it is not true, that surely she must come up the steps after you. I have had masses said.”
Mozart looked about uncomfortably, then murmured, “Father, father.”
For a moment Leopold Mozart covered his face with his hands.
Mozart said, “Lord give us patience, Father, to bow to His will; she’s in His hands now, having gone to her just reward. But Father, you’re well? God grant it you are well, and my darling sister?”
“As well as can be expected.”
Mozart put down his bags. On a shelf were the very same six porcelain plates with pictures in blue of milkmaids frolicking in some field; one showed a crack where it had been carefully mended. His father had pushed it off the table in a fit of anger years before ... or had it been himself? He could never recall for certain which one had done it, perhaps both; then he saw his mother’s reproachful shoulders as she knelt to gather the pieces and he heard his sister’s weeping. Nannerl wept easily. They were careful not to make her cry. Where was she this day?
“Ah, my son, here’s the letter from your great uncle. Here, where it says, ‘Your wife’s among the angels,’ etc., etc. He sends his love to you. He asked if you were eighteen yet. He forgets things. He loved your dear mother, the angel. And another one here of condolence from your old friend Padre Martini from Bologna, that great musician and man of God, who taught you when you were fourteen.”
The delicate, almost translucent, slightly wrinkled hands sifted through the papers until Mozart thought him like an old monk. Well, now he would sleep in a celibate bed.
“I wanted to show you—”
“But there’s time for that, Father.”
“... the letter announcing—”
“But there’s time, there’s time!”
The apartment door opened, and Mozart’s older sister, Nannerl, rushed toward him with her market basket on her arm, crying, “Oh, Amadé!”
He murmured, “I’m so sorry, my love. What can I bring you but myself?”
She clung to him for some moments, and then broke away, wiping her face. “I’ll put away the cheese,” she said.
He heard her in the kitchen. When he thought of Nannerl, as he did almost daily wherever he was, he recalled both the patient, tender older sister of their childhood tours, waiting with clasped hands until he had finished playing his music, as if content to stand there always, and the woman she was now, sitting by the window copying music. It was not that she had no beauty, but that she had no light. She would take care of their father, of course; but without her mother she felt utterly weakened. She had written that to him. She’s put aside her youth entirely now, he thought as he heard her opening the kitchen cupboards. She’s put it away as something too extravagant for her own use, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper and laid it away. And that was Mother’s old gray-flocked dress she was wearing, the one Mother always wore to church.
They ate the familiar dishes at supper, and, when the sweets appeared at the end, Leopold leaned forward and spoke the words he had been keeping back throughout the whole meal. “Wolfgang.”
“Father.”
“Are you listening?”
“I am, yes.”
“I’ve smoothed the path for your reconciliation with the Archbishop; he expects you tomorrow.”
“I’ll go speak with him.”
“I trust you have left your affections for Mademoiselle Weber in Munich.”
“Indeed not, Father; I intend to marry her.”
The next day he dressed in his best coat and walked over the bridge to Getreidegasse, the street where he had been born, then with the river Salzach on his left, turned up Goldgasse until it opened to the Domplatz and the Archbishop’s stately Residenz. Mozart’s father had been a church musician in Salzburg for some thirty-five years, serving the late kindly Archbishop and, more recently, this one. Mozart thought suddenly, My father knows many aspects of music: the toil, the diligence, the exactitude. But the ecstatic love of it eludes him; he does not trust it. And what is it to trust music and the