Oh, I love opera with all its gossip and scandals, its lovers and mistresses and promises and betrayals.
Aloysia hesitated, the letter unfinished in her lap.
Why didn’t he come? She wanted to go to masked balls and dance until the dawn, when the stars have left the sky and only the pale ghost of the moon remained, and she must, she should. She had been given a new role, and the audience had called her name: Aloysia, Aloysia.
“Dearest come quickly,” she ended the letter to him, but then forgot to mail it. Weeks later she found it under the garden bench, illegible from the spring rains.
Hot summer lingered through September; dust lay over all the streets of the city, and, roused by carriage wheels or feet or a rug beater, it even drifted through the windows onto the strings of the clavier, which stood in the parlor of the second story.
Constanze had sat there almost all day copying music; now she stretched her aching back, rubbed her neck, and looked about her. She had the room to dust. After putting away her ink, she was taking the dust rag from her apron pocket when she heard the door open below and someone running up the steps.
Sophie flew through the door, her light, flowery summer dress reaching to her ankles, and threw off her bonnet. Her face was streaked with tears. “She’s gone; she’s gone. She left a letter on the hall table addressed to you, Josefa, and me. She’s gone!”
“Who? What?”
Sophie waved the letter in the air as if to shake the words from it. “Aloysia has run away with Lange, the painter.”
“Dear God,” cried Constanze.
They almost fell over each other rushing up the stairs. Lange’s room was stripped bare. The quiet portraitist had left nothing but his sheets neatly stripped from the bed, the smell of linseed oil, and, on the floor, a little splat of deep red paint, like blood of seduced virgins. They stared at it, holding hands. “Dearest mice,” the letter said when they unfolded it and held it between them. “You might as well know because I can’t hide it anymore. He came into the garden, and we went into the little shed. I don’t know what came over me. Oh, my loves, he worships the ground I walk on. I can’t live without him; I hardly know myself. And now I’m five months’ gone with child, which I didn’t plan, but what can be done? Be virtuous. I love you all with all my heart.”
Five months with child. They had teased her that she was gaining weight. Only Josefa, they now recalled, had looked down at her flustered sister wryly, a slight smile on the corners of her lips. Too many dumplings, too much bread and butter, Aloysia. Then the young singer had demanded her own room, where she could struggle to lace her corset away from curious eyes. Now they understood.
The three sisters and their mother barricaded themselves in the kitchen under the hanging pots, sitting around the bowl of rising dough and the onion skins left from making the stew. “Oh Aloysia, Aloysia,” Maria Caecilia said, rocking back and forth. “My darling, my sweet. First Josefa throws away the good name of Weber, and then our precious Aloysia follows. The slut, the whore! What will we do? What reputation can our family have left? And what of us, what of us? She’ll lose her work and be laughed off the stage. How will I pay for this house? What can we do?”
Constanze said quietly, “Perhaps she could marry him.” She spread the letter out again and read the whole of it, moving her lips quietly. “Here on the second page at the very bottom she’s written that they’ll marry. There, you see, Mama! We needn’t grieve. It’s perfectly respectable for a married woman to be with child.”
Caecilia Weber swept the onion skins aside. “Marry a portrait painter? Is that what I hoped when she once had a chance to be a Swedish baroness? I never truly intended her for Mozart. Oh, you don’t know what I have hoped for all of you, but mostly for her: my beauty, my enchantress, my darling girl. She looks just like I did in my youth, but I was good, I was dutiful. Why did God send me such daughters? Yes, he’ll marry her; there’s no hope for it. He must marry her and give me a settlement as well for the loss of her income. All