Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach

This time I carried it at once to the music room. Robert took it, smiled his quick, charming smile, thanked me, and turned away to read it. I remember thinking how his smile had shrunk, from the wide grin I first noticed at our meeting in the park until now: it had become abbreviated, a token, a quick gesture like a handshake, the remains of a smile. Then it was gone and one was left, I was left, that is, frozen rather than warmed by it.
    That afternoon Robert went to a rehearsal. I watched him from an upper window as he turned the corner into the avenue and then I went quickly into the music room. With me I took a duster as pretense. The room was meticulously neat—Robert could not work unless it was—but the surfaces were somewhat dusty and I began to stir the dust about. Under a pile of music paper near the back of the piano I saw a light blue color. And while only Paderewski watched my shameful act, I read Weeks’s letters.
    What shall I say of them? They were written in an agony of love such as I had never in my life been witness to. Weeks told Robert of the pain his departure had caused him, of the illness he had suffered for two months afterward, of his slow recovery during which his only thought was to see Robert again, to hold his beloved head in his hands once again, to take strength from his strength. Was it at all possible that Robert was planning a summer return to the Continent, since he, Weeks, would not be free to come to Boston? In a cribbed, uneven script that seemed visible evidence of his distraught state, he asked:
    When shall we two be together again, my beloved friend? For the old talk, the old making of music together, four hands at the same keyboard, four hands and two mouths and our whole beings engaged in the same loving act .
    These words, as I have here put them down, were etched into my memory and are still there. Often now I do not remember what day it is, or what dinner was served to me last night, but the words of Churchill’s letter I have never forgotten. Other parts of the letters were sprinkled with Scots phrases, for Weeks claimed his ancestry was like Robert’s and seemed to affect the Scots language as part of his own. He called Robert an auld farran , he blamed himself for being a bluntie , sometimes a blunker . He felt alone and melancholy— leefulane and ourie —he sent his lock o’ loo to his fellow pingler . Some I did not know and had to look up in the large Webster; I had never heard Robert, the proud descendant of Scots, use one of them. It must have been their private language of love, kept for those burning letters.
    I returned the letters to the place I had found them, feeling deep guilt for having allowed myself to be driven to such an act. Of course I know nothing of Robert’s answers to those cris du coeur ; were they, too, sprinkled with loving dialect? But Robert wrote, I know. Once I saw a letter, addressed to Weeks, before Robert carried it himself to the postbox on the corner during one of his walks with Paderewski. In the late evenings I would see him writing, I seated across the room knitting or reading (never writing: to whom would I have written? surely not to my mother-in-law, who would not have responded, I felt sure), Robert holding his writing desk on his lap.
    As he wrote he would rub his lower lip thoughtfully. The sore I had first noticed tended to heal and then to appear again because, I always thought, in his nervousness and unease, he would rub his lip, returning the little eruption to life.
    What was I to do with this discovery, except to recognize what I thought at the time might be one explanation: there was a deep, unfathomable alliance among men of talent which involved them wholly, making it impossible for women to enter their consciousness except in a curiously negative way. Remove our services, our presence as helpmeets, and our absence is remarked upon. Our physical support restored, we sink back to the outer