the years to have supported her and bought her every pretty thing I could, and to be rewarded like this and find myself in poverty.”
Josefa walked back and forth before the simmering stew, arms crossed over her chest. “Mama, why are you always thinking of yourself? You never think of anything else; even when you thought of her, it was really only for you. All these months, it’s been, ‘Aloysia must have,’ ‘Aloysia must wear!’ Sew for your sister, do this and that for your sister; all of you, but Mother’s the worst. Aloysia’ll come back for her contract; she loves how people admire her when she sings.” Josefa stared at all of them, hands on the table near the blue beer pitcher. “I suppose you’ll expect me to support you all, even I, who was so condemned for my lover and may never have another, who will die a spinster, which would suit you for certain, Mama—keeping us all here with your dreams of finding men worthy of us.”
“Girl, be still or you’ll have a beating,” cried the mother.
Josefa rose to her full height; she had played a girl dressed as a soldier recently, and it had suited her. “And who’s to beat me, you weak, stupid, fat woman?” she cried. “Oh, I’m so very tired of all of you! You’ve always mocked me. You always favored her, all of you. Only Father understood me, and I thank God he has not lived to see this.” Fiercely, she seized the spoon and stirred the stew.
The presence of the boarders forced them to keep their voices down, but Josefa fled from the room, letting the door bang behind her. Constanze and Sophie slipped into the garden with vegetable peels for the compost heap; then, arms about each other, they fell exhausted to the bench. There Constanze raised her hands to her mouth and drew in her breath hard.
“But how can we have forgotten Mozart?” she said. “Oh Sophie, what will he say?”
On a table in their rooms in Salzburg, warm afternoon su shone on the music for a new wind sextet for oboes, horns, and bassoons, a divertimento to be played during the palace dinners. Near it Mozart had laid the letter that had come by post an hour before, the page with its few creases open before him. He picked it up, turned it over to where he had broken the seal, and then turned it back to read once more. The writing was not even hers, but Sophie’s; she wrote that Aloysia and Lange had returned to Vienna as man and wife, and were now living away from the family.
His father and sister found him sitting there.
“Let us at least eat,” said his father.
Slowly, after grace was given, the story came out. Mozart’s words were brief. He could almost not bear the compassionate looks of his sister, Nannerl, and his dry, spare father, and how their hands had reached out to hold his.
“Will you pass the pork? And the salt dish?”
“I’m afraid the radishes are very sharp, Father.”
“Nannerl, I’ll have them anyway.”
They ate in silence for a time.
“Those Webers,” Leopold Mozart said. “I’m not surprised. The father was a good man, but the girls run wild. A boardinghouse, a mother with pretensions. We must thank God on our knees that He didn’t let you become entrapped in that family.” He helped himself to bread, and did not look up from the buttering as he spoke. “I hope you now agree with me that you shouldn’t marry for a long time. Well, you were young, but you have been spared from a tragedy. Make your reputation; go slowly. I was nearly thirty when I married and knew more about the world than you, but then a woman like your good mother does not come along often. When the Archbishop takes you to Vienna next week on his state visit there, I hope you will not darken the door of those Webers. These radishes are sharp indeed.”
Much of the day’s journey to Vienna, Mozart sat with his fingers to his lips, staring from the coach window at the mountains and fields. The creaking conveyance that they had boarded before dawn was too full, and his fellow musicians pressed uncomfortably close, while someone’s leather bassoon case wobbled back and forth until it found a place leaning against his thigh.
In the midafternoon the horses stopped before St. Stephan’s Cathedral, called Stephansdom, and the nearby Palace of the Teutonic Knights, an old religious