She leaned forward. “But how to persuade her? Tell me!”
Thorwart blotted the table crumbs with his napkin as carefully as he might blot the damp ink of a contract. “Throw them together; make it occur. Young people are too foolish to see what is good for them. Make him feel as a young man does when an innocent girl crosses a dark yard to meet him. (I allude only to the feeling.) Throw them into each other’s arms.” His mouth was angry, and he compressed it. He folded the napkin carefully, and then, on second thought, dropped it with disdain to the tablecloth. He stood abruptly. “Good day, dear Maria Caecilia. I’ll do my best to see that Mozart has the opera, and can marry Sophie.”
Maria Caecilia almost felt her way home, touching the doors of buildings and the edges of lemonade stalls for support. She saw herself in the glass of a bookshop window and raised her fingers to her still soft cheeks. She was so languid with sensuality that she could hardly walk; she was caught between the memory of running across the dark yard so lithe and young, and the reality of her present heavy body. How did life change us and why? It was unfair. She could have walked to the park and sat there weeping, but what good did it do? She had her plans. Without plans life blew away, and Thorwart was right. There were still Constanze and Sophie.
She found Sophie at home reading a book at the kitchen table. Yes, her mother thought, suddenly unhappy again, the girl’s plain as bread. How on earth shall I make something of her? She’ll do nothing for herself; she doesn’t even notice if her dress is stained or if her hair is standing on end. Now likely she’s reading a book by some saint or peculiar French philosopher. Is this truly what I have to make my plans come true?
Sophie looked up dreamily, not a bit of rouge on her pale cheeks. “Come to me, my dearest,” Maria Caecilia said, opening her arms. She sat down in the one large chair by the fire, and when Sophie approached with her spectacles in her hand, her mother suddenly pulled her into her lap. “Tell me, precious child, do you truly want my happiness?”
“You’re squeezing me. I was reading a book; why are you squeezing me? Why wouldn’t I want your happiness?”
“Of course you do, more than the others.”
“Mama, let me up. I always try to make sure you are happy. You know it.” The girl’s eyes looked longingly at the book, whose place she had marked with her thumb.
“My love, today I drank coffee with your good uncle Thorwart, and with his auspicious guidance and heaven watching us, I understood how God has made a path for you and for me.”
Sophie had managed to stand and was looking with bewilderment at her mother. “Yes, of course, God makes paths. But what do you mean? I was wanting to go out soon, Mama. Father Paul is giving a talk at the church on science and enlightenment and I want to go.”
“Ah, what am I to do with you?” her mother cried, slamming her hands on her knees. “It’s always priests and philosophy with you, when you aren’t making plans to enter a convent. Don’t you want to marry and have children? You loved your sister’s poor infant more than she did. The answer’s clear. You’ll be happiest married, and I have just the man. You must marry Mozart.”
“What, what?” cried the girl. “But we’re friends, or at least we were friends before everything happened with Aloysia and he stopped speaking to me, and stopped telling me funny stories. Marrying has never entered my mind, you know that. I want only to be a nun. You won’t ruin my happiness the way you have—”
“What are you saying? Can you speak this way to me? Don’t play such an innocent! I have heard you laughing with the boarders.”
“It’s nothing more than laughter; why do you make more of it?” cried Sophie, staring nearsightedly at her mother. “I was having a nice afternoon. And how do you expect me to make him want such a thing when neither of us wants it?”
“How do you know he doesn’t want it? He obviously doesn’t know what he wants. And what of my happiness? What of my future? When my mother ordered me to marry, did I resist her? No, I had respect for