as you do. Many people go about the world without hearts as we know them, and we never realize until too late. She has a different sort of heart, which, of course, we love her for. Grandmother understood her, but grandmother’s gone to heaven with Papa. Of course she’s beautiful. Angels are beautiful and filled with love, though it must be a different sort of beauty; but then you wouldn’t fall in love with an angel, would you, since they’re not corporeal? And do we have the sense and wisdom of angels? Can we, while in this mortal place ...” She went on and on in one of her long speeches, her words not entirely comprehensible. He stared at her.
A wind band some distance from them burst out with popular tunes.
She said, “I’m praying to God to give you courage. I swear, I know, that your life will be happy. No one’s life here is always happy, but you will have some. I am sure you have read The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe. Josefa knows it by heart, as did our father. Lost love. But what can we expect? It’s a fallen world.” Then she took off her spectacles, rubbed them with her sleeve, and said, “At least come pray and then have a lemonade. It’s October, and they won’t keep the stands open much longer.”
His eyes filled with tears, and he waited a while until he was able to control himself. Then he followed her back toward Stephansdom, where they entered the great ornate Gothic edifice, which was one of the musical centers of the city as well as the repository of some remains from hundreds of years of Habsburg emperors. They genuflected, then knelt and prayed together as he had done when in thanksgiving for a composition well received. Opening his eyes, he saw her beside him with her hands clasped.
Then she said, “Come on,” and they went out into the square in the still warm autumn day to the lemonade stand, and each had two glassfuls. After that Sophie went home, and Mozart walked across the square once more to the Palace of the Teutonic Knights, which was flying the Archbishop’s flag to signal his residence. Climbing to his bleak room, he brushed off his coat for the Archbishop’s concert that night, which was to be held at the house of Prince Galitzen. That he had missed the rehearsal was remarked upon by a few colleagues.
Carnival time came to Vienna just before Lent, as it did each year, with its glittery masks, wild costumes, extravagant feasts, the parading whores, who revealed as much of their bodies as they dared to by law, the banging of drums, the playing of horns, and much dancing until dawn—all to frighten winter away. It was an old custom that he recalled from Venice and Rome as well; the city flaunted gaiety before the austerities that would come.
Mozart had dragged himself through Christmas, and the cold months which followed, seeing his lost love in every petite woman, feeling that the whole thing must have been a mistake and that any day Aloysia would appear at his door, eyes cast down, modestly dressed. He saw her dressed like his mother, in a gray-flocked gown as plain as a nun’s. He saw how he would take her to his bed, losing at last his wretched and unwanted sexual innocence. He went to sleep in the room he shared with the cellist thinking of it, and woke to find it was not so. Here he was in Vienna, where Haydn had sung as a chorister, where Gluck had the performance of his radiant Orfeo and Euridice, where the Emperor walked daily in the parks, but he made little of the music he wished to make and seldom performed where he wished to perform.
He saw none of the Webers. Sophie had sent him a handkerchief that had been her father’s, with the initials FFW embroidered on it. He looked at it from time to time with distant tenderness, but he had no desire to see her, even to thank her for her kindness. He was too ashamed, and he was in no mood for Carnival.
One day as he was drinking coffee and reading the news journal at a coffee and pastry house, Leutgeb, with his round, youthful face, slipped into the empty chair beside him. “We never see you,” he said. “My wife hardly believes you exist; my baby is sure you do not.”