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The weather is perfect for outdoor concerts in the evening, just a touch of breeze to cool the air. August always brings such gorgeous night skies, with stars like silver jewels on dark blue velvet. The usual staff picnics are out of the question because of the humidity, but I plan to go for long walks every evening.
I miss you. I wonder sometimes if we were fated to meet as we did, and to like each other so much. At other times I think God is surely playing a cruel joke. I am bereft, thinking of all that Cissy is missing—Rosemarie’s mania for chocolate cookies and bread dough and her dear little sleepy face when she first wakes up in the morning.
I understand more clearly what my sister must have felt when she ran away with you to Smoke River. Practicing Mozart and Brahms must not have seemed important when weighed against not seeing you again.
Tomorrow I must begin to work on the Schubert piano quintet for the second park concert; it has a beastly final movement, full of racing arpeggios and spread-out chords.
Professor Beher, the bassoon player, is stopping in for tea tomorrow afternoon; I will bake chocolate cookies and think of Rosemarie.
And you.
Winifred
August 12th
Dear Winifred,
Your letter reached me at the end of a long afternoon of hospital rounds, during which I thanked whatever God there is that we have no new cholera patients. The last one, Mrs. Madsen, was released this morning.
But about your letter. I read it avidly while Samuel tried to gain my attention; finally he snatched it away and complained, “Well, for heaven’s sake, man, if you’d just marry the girl you wouldn’t have to write letters!”
Those are his exact words.
I wanted to punch him.
Yan Li and Rosemarie went for a “walk” this morning, mostly to gain some relief for that poor beleaguered cat of Sam’s. “Kitty” is now Rose’s favorite word. That and “’infred.” By the time you return at Christmas she will be able to pronounce your name properly; then she can start on “Nathaniel.”
“Daddy” is too easy for a child as intrigued with words as she is. My middle name is Austen; perhaps she might prefer only two syllables.
I admit to being jealous of Professor Bassoon’s having tea with you. More than a little jealous, to be honest. I want no other man to share even a teapot with you, or win your admiration, or touch you. Forgive me for this, but I think it characteristic of the male of our species to be possessive.
Of late I find I cannot read poems by Milton, or Tennyson, or Wordsworth, or even the awful doggerel that appears in the Smoke River Sentinel every Saturday, written by women who have never been in love.
There is no point in denying how much I miss you. You know I want you in my life, and in my bed. And I know as surely as the sun rises each morning that I will never want anyone else but you.
Rosemarie now sits on my lap as I write this; those sticky chocolate fingerprints on the paper are hers. Well, maybe one very little one is mine.
Come back to us, my darling.
Zane
August 17th
Dear Zane,
Our second concert in the park was a huge success. The string quartet played brilliantly, the audience shouted bravos and applauded until their hands must have ached and afterward the president of the conservatory personally congratulated me on a “very fine example of musicianship.”
All I wanted to do was return home, take a cool bath and forget about next Sunday’s concert. It isn’t the weather that is oppressive; it is the strain of getting the violinist and the cellist to sit down together on the bandstand without hissing obscenities at each other! I pray that the trumpet and oboe players will be better mannered.
What is it that makes people go mad in the summertime?
I am starting to teach a few new piano students, but my heart is not in it. These are youngsters, girls mostly, who failed the entrance exam for conservatory admission and are attempting to challenge the ruling against them. I feel sorry for them, really. But had they worked harder, they would not be scrambling now.
Cissy would say—well, she did say, and quite often—that there was more to life than practicing the piano. In some ways I feel I am looking back at myself when I was that age, wondering about the choices I have made in my life.
I am not weary of music, or of playing the piano, or teaching, or of performing on the concert stage. But I am dreadfully tired of the politics of my conservatory and the petty concerns of some prima donnas on the staff.
My friend Millicent is not one of them. I pray that I myself will not turn into one of these.
My spirits are low tonight, as you can no doubt tell. The end of summer is drawing near and with it comes the ennui I always experience before the new term starts. This year there is a great restlessness in me as well. Perhaps I am just growing older. Or perhaps something is shifting within me.
