In the ballroom of Villa Undine came light, happy music. The klavier was producing a song by Robert Schumann. Instead of the classical perfection of Bach’s, Mozart’s, or Haydn’s music, this music was played with a stirring looseness, interpreted with an inexpressible wildness. Then a different scene of childhood began to sound. A sadness, a wistfulness, the wholehearted feeling a child can be overwhelmed with.
Wilhelmina Wang, her Cathayan firefox wrapped around her shoulders, pushed open the wooden carved door to the ballroom, and gingerly stepped in. Unobserved by Clara Schumann at the piano, there was another audience in the ballroom already, in the shadows of the corner. Janosch A. Prufrock, his dark thin hair parted severely over his high white brow, his thin arms ill at ease, crossed over his chest, his morning coat buttoned firmly to the chin, was listening with an expression of appreciation, of longing, of regret, of what-could-have-been.
Clara Schumann looked up at Wilhelmina, and smiled warmly. Her soft large eyes lit up with friendliness. Her hands paused over the keys, and she said apologetically, “When I play in the mornings, Robert in the next room cannot focus on his composing, so at home I cannot use the most beautiful hours of the morning for studying. I hope I have not disturbed your work here as well. Robert’s spirit is so great, I don’t know how to hold him. And he has gotten so little acknowledgement on this trip, that it hurts him to see me received everywhere while he, with his injured right hand, had to give up the prospect of a performing career.”
Surprised at herself for having spoken so much and so candidly to this Cathayan girl with her curious red, gold, and black animal, Clara Schumann paused, and then said as if to explain, “I’m having such a hard time reconciling the artist with the housewife in me, and the thought of Robert needing to work for money is so painful to me, because it cannot make him happy, yet I cannot see a way out of it except for me to work, to earn money to create a life dedicated to his creating his art for him.”
Janosch A. Prufrock’s heart burned in pain and in care. He looked at this woman, still young, and thought of her daughters Marie and Elise being looked after by wet nurses in Leipzig while they are on tour, until he was jolted out of his thoughts by her next words.
“Robert’s love makes me infinitely happy. My biggest concern is his health.”
He looked at this woman, the care and concern on her face, the love written so plainly on it, and he could see the girl in her still. The girl he remembered, whose musik-master father had called her lazy, careless, disorderly, stubborn, disobedient, who tore up her sheet music before her eyes to dramatically punish her for playing badly, whose father owned her and shaped her as an extension of his own ego until her marriage and break from him. And Janosch A. Prufrock, cool in life-or-death situations under blade or spearpoint, restrained to the point of inscrutability, fought back the moistening of his far-away blue-green eyes.