“Yes, of course! I was concerned for a moment that my man didn’t mend your father’s old clavier satisfactorily. I’m afraid he confided in me that it’s seen its time.” And he smiled at her. “I’ll look for the music, mademoiselle,” he said, and went through a door into a small room where she could hear him humming and vigorously moving boxes. Even though he left the room, she could feel his presence.
Johann Schantz’s dark, muscular arms under his rolled sleeves were dusted with hair; his chest was broad, his voice deep. He smelled of the insides of fortepianos and claviers, that hidden woody smell of her childhood. He reminded her of a painting she had once seen of a gypsy. For some months now she had been making excuses to see him, spending the day before thinking of what she could say, and the days following wishing that her words had been more clever or that something about her had been more noticeable.
Aloysia always said you could define affection, relegating it to either flirtation or deep feeling, but that was so reductionary, that was so unsubtle. When Constanze was twelve there had been the schoolboy who had lived downstairs in their Mannheim house and had left her short notes slipped under a crack in one of the steps. When she was not quite fourteen there had been the lawyer’s clerk. He had died young, and for months she had grieved for him.
And now she was seventeen, living in the ever-changing world of transient boarders, circumventing her mother’s explosions, one of which some months ago had sent a mild boarder she had favored, a bespectacled student of ancient Eastern languages, rushing from the door, leaving behind books of very strange writing. A duller man had taken his room, and once more she had turned her back on the lot of them. They were merely meals to serve, shaving water to heat, beds to change—Aloysia’s abandoned fiancé among them. They would mean nothing to her, and she would allow them to see nothing of her true self.
Constanze had decided many years before that the best way to slip through her chaotic world was to be as quiet as possible, and to let no one know what she was feeling. When in the old days quarrels became too much between her mother and father, she had hidden on the steps, blocking her ears with her hands; then she and Sophie would quietly pick up the bits of broken plates. Yet under her full breasts, which she was always trying to lace down to obscurity, her heart was very soft. She cried for dead birds, she mourned for lonely old people—and she kept it all inside of herself. It would emerge in bursts of temper or grief, if she let it emerge at all. There was no room for her in the house, not in the early days. There were her brilliant older sisters, and her utterly charming and devout younger one, for whom she would give her life: they were gregarious and individualistic and, in the case of Aloysia, extraordinarily beautiful. There had never been any place for Constanze but in the corners, so in the corners she made her world.
Now she stood in the fortepiano shop in the midst of the instruments; she stood stiffly, for this place to which she was so drawn was a place of danger. Music opened her entirely. To some people it was pleasant; to others it brought the hope of happiness and peace; but to her it was reckless and deep. Once she had stumbled into a church when the boy’s choir was rehearsing a Bach chorale; alone, huddled in the farthest pew, she had found herself sobbing with emotion. And the truth was she had wanted to sing. She had wanted to sing deeply, richly, fully, but she had not dared. She was not as good as her sisters; she had never been as good as them, so she had chosen silence. Now she could not find her way through it.
She ran her hand over the fall board of one of the instruments; still hearing the sound of boxes being moved, she sat down on the bench and softly played a scale. From the other room came Johann Schantz’s jovial voice, “I do advise your family, Mademoiselle Weber, to consider buying a fortepiano. I would give it to you under generous terms. You see how much superior it is even