Sisi, page 14
“Yes, then, in that case…” She knit her hands together in front of her waist. “It’s already been decided; I plan to leave with Valerie immediately. Besides, I can’t stand to be in this court a minute longer—the only person I care about is Valerie anyway.”
She thought she saw him wince. That there was, at last, a flicker of emotion in his dark, silky eyes. A fleeting glimmer of his true feelings. But he recovered his composure before she could be sure he had even lost it, and he nodded, the perfect bureaucrat once more, and a complete stranger.
“Over the hedge! Run! You have the fox in your sights!” Sisi called out to her daughter Valerie, who was darting across an expanse of green grass before a cluster of cypress trees. Valerie, having declared her wish that she might be just like her mamma, was pretending to race atop a horse. Her mother looked on from the patch of shaded grass where she sat lazily thumbing her way through her book of Heinrich Heine poetry.
“I got the fox, Mamma! I caught him!” The little girl came running up to her mother, her cheeks rosy, her breath uneven from giggles.
“Did you, my darling? Bravo!” Sisi leaned forward and covered her daughter in kisses. “Soon we’ll have you doing more than make-believe, my love. Soon we’ll have you atop a true Hungarian thoroughbred.”
That clear spring day found Sisi in the southern spa town of Merano. She and Valerie had both recovered from their coughs months earlier, yet Sisi had resisted the gentle hints and frequent requests from her husband that she return to court. Here her days were her own to enjoy with Valerie and Marie and Ida, to read her poetry and ride her horses and take in the clean mountain air. No, the thought of returning to court filled her with such anxiety that her ladies warned her she threatened to make herself sick all over again. She would stay away as long as she possibly could, ignoring her mother’s entreaties and the vicious newspaper reports that tallied her days away. Even Franz seemed to have accepted it.
Or so Sisi had supposed. Until she received his telegram bearing a message to his wife that was not so much a request as a summons:
HER MAJESTY THE ARCHDUCHESS SOPHIE IN INCREASINGLY POOR HEALTH STOP PHYSICIANS AGREED: NOT MUCH TIME LEFT STOP ENTIRE IMPERIAL FAMILY CALLED TO HER BEDSIDE TO BID FAREWELL AND RECEIVE FINAL BLESSING STOP PLEASE RETURN AT ONCE FULL STOP.
Spring had bloomed across Vienna, with curtains fluttering in open windows and boxes of bright flowers enlivening the stately white façades of the Ringstrasse, but inside the Hofburg, a somber mood hovered like a dark, wintry fog. The courtiers haunted the long halls, covered in black, whispering in hushed voices as Sisi swept by, clutching Valerie’s hand in her own as the little girl struggled to keep apace with her mother.
The antechamber adjoining Sophie’s private rooms was packed with long-faced ambassadors, courtiers, ministers, and relatives, all dressed in black and clutching prayer books and rosary beads. Dozens of eyes fell upon Sisi as she entered, setting off a wave of bows and curtsies.
“Empress Elisabeth.”
“Your Majesty.”
“God bless and keep Your Grace.”
Sisi swept the room with her eyes. She nodded toward Count Bellegarde, then Colonel Latour. Half a dozen priests and cardinals stood together in the corner.
“Empress.” Andrássy strode forward, extending his hand but then remembering himself and withdrawing it, offering nothing more than a formal bow.
“Andrássy,” Sisi answered, leaning close to him, turning her back on the narrowed eyes of Bellegarde.
“Thank goodness you have arrived in time. The emperor is anxious to have you beside him.” Andrássy guided Sisi toward the door to the old woman’s bedchamber. “You are to enter, right this way.”
A liveried footman pulled the bedroom door open, and Sisi reeled as she walked through it, her mind awhirl at the fact that Andrássy, her mother-in-law’s sworn rival, was keeping vigil outside the archduchess’s door. At the fact that she was now ushered into this room so swiftly—this room that had been barred to her all of those years when her little babies were kept in the nursery off of their grandmother’s suite. How she’d haunted this doorway, aching to be let in but so often finding a guard or minister to turn her away, telling her that the archduchess and the children were napping or that she had not made an appointment and had missed her opportunity to visit the babies.
“Keep Valerie,” Sisi said, ignoring the little girl’s protests as Miss Throckmorton took the child’s hand. “You three,” Sisi said, looking at Ida, Marie, and Miss Throckmorton, “stay out here. I don’t want Valerie to be scared or put at any risk of illness.” The little girl began to cry as her mother left her behind, but Sisi, for perhaps the first time in her life, did not grant the little girl her wish.
Inside the large, elegant bedroom, a small, sad assembly sat in shadow. The scarlet curtains were drawn so that the whole room appeared to be steeped in gloom, filled only with the sounds of faint whispers. Several priests and nurses darted about, dispatching various orders pertaining to the sick woman’s body and soul, pausing only to offer a cursory bow at the empress’s entrance. The family members knelt and huddled around the oversized bed where Sophie’s frame lay, inanimate and unresponsive.
Sisi saw her son first, noticing that he had barely grown during her months-long absence. “Rudy, my dear.” He looked only slightly thicker than a young boy even though he was an adolescent. Perhaps it was his face that made him appear so young, Sisi thought—his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, his cheeks raw from wiping away tears.
“Mother,” he said, bowing toward Sisi but otherwise keeping to his post beside his grandmother’s bed. Perhaps he was hurt that she had left him once more, Sisi considered. Or perhaps he felt that the woman who lay dying on the bed had been more of a mother to him than this latecomer ever would be.
“Gisela.” Sisi greeted her daughter next. If Rudy still looked like a boy, Gisela had become a woman, plumper and rounder than she, Sisi, had been when she herself had married. And then Sisi remembered: her daughter was engaged. Sisi had found out about it from a letter, but had yet to see her daughter since it had happened. Oh, she should utter some words of congratulation to her daughter, and how she wished they were meeting under different circumstances!
“Mother, welcome home.” Gisela shuffled closer to Rudy, putting her arms around her brother rather than greeting her mother with any particular show of affection, or even familiarity.
“Hello, Elisabeth.” Franz Joseph stood from his place at his mother’s bedside, and Sisi crossed the room toward him.
“Franz,” Sisi said, placing her hands on his arms. “Oh, Franz, I’m so sorry. How does she do?” Sisi looked down now. She could barely conceal her alarm as she stared into Sophie’s pale, waxy face. The woman looked like a wraith, a withered, vestigial shell of her former self. Her hair, once so dark and thick, flew away from her face like errant wisps of a spiderweb. Her eyes, closed in sleep, were ringed by a webbing of fine purple veins, and her lips were spread apart, so she appeared as though she were trying, and failing, to speak.
“She hasn’t awoken in several hours.” Franz’s voice was low and hoarse, and he seemed to swallow his words in an effort to choke down the threat of tears that accompanied them. “We hope this sleep is a restful one. And that she will wake at least one more time so that we may all…” Now he brought a gloved hand to his face, hiding the emotion—the anguish—that would not heel to his imperial will.
Sisi put a hand to his shoulder and stared back down at the motionless figure of her aunt. Her mother-in-law. Her most ruthless rival at court. And in that moment, Sisi wondered how it was possible to hold such powerful feelings of both love and hate in her one heart.
This was, after all, the woman who had haunted Sisi since her earliest days as a bride, exercising complete dominion over her choices, her husband, her household, her children. This was the woman whom Sisi had fled, traveling to other countries and continents but never entirely escaping her meddling or influence.
And yet, this was the woman who had welcomed Sisi to Vienna as a young girl, who had been the constant in her life, more present as a daily companion, perhaps, than even her distracted and overburdened husband. The woman who had given her Franz. The woman who had loved Sisi’s children and nursed her through her pregnancies and held her hands through her painful deliveries.
As Sisi looked now at the aged woman, silent at last, she wondered: how had this woman had the power to terrify her as she had? Sophie looked so feeble as she lay there, her features expressionless, her skin as white as parchment. Incapable of hurting anyone, especially a strong and robust young woman like Sisi. Had she been unfair to the older woman? Sisi wondered. Had she let the early tension between them color every action and word from the woman since? Hadn’t Sophie simply done the best she could for the son she adored—the son who had been forced to shoulder so many burdens, to fill a role where more-than-humanness was expected of him? Wouldn’t she, Sisi, do the same for Valerie, now that she understood what it was to be enamored with, to be utterly devoted to one’s child?
And Sisi was struck by the Heine quote she had circled that morning, on her trip back to Vienna: Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.
Sisi turned away from the bed, pacing the large, shadowed chamber. Her eyes fell on the opposite wall, where the large oil painting of Maria Theresa looked down over the room, the face plump and proud. Maria Theresa—the most beloved Habsburg ruler to ever occupy this palace. The strong, prolific, infallible empress. Devoted wife. Model mother. Pious Christian. Formidable and just ruler of her people. Maria Theresa was the Habsburg ruler against whom every Habsburg had measured him- or herself since. She was the woman upon whose face Sophie had chosen to look every single day. The woman on whom Sophie had tried to model her every behavior, both personal and public. Had she succeeded? Sisi crossed her arms, holding herself. Yes, she conceded, Sophie had succeeded. She had earned for herself a spot in the brightest constellation of Habsburg stars. “The Only Man at Court,” that had been Sophie’s nickname. She had been the strongest figure at a court where strength was the highest virtue and most necessary trait.
Sisi turned away from Maria Theresa’s stern, all-knowing gaze and crossed to the other side of the room. Sophie’s desk was scattered with papers and a hastily discarded pen, as if the old woman had been busy at work when death had finally come to claim her. Sisi brushed her finger against the surface of the woman’s rosewood desk; not a speck of dust. She startled, ever so slightly, when she realized that on top of the desk rested two small framed portraits. Sisi reached forward and picked them up. She stared into a pair of youthful, smiling faces. Herself and Franz Joseph. The portraits they had sat for just before their wedding. How bright and carefree and hopeful those two individuals looked—the faces of children, really. They were the only portraits that occupied the space of Sophie’s desk, the place where the woman had sat and worked every single day. Fingers trembling, Sisi replaced the pictures where they had been these past twenty years.
Just below the portraits sat a leather book, its pages left open. So Sophie had been in the middle of work when she had taken ill. But this was her diary, Sisi realized, recognizing the old woman’s familiar, elegant handwriting. Her throat dry, Sisi read just the last few words the woman had scrawled: “Liberalism will triumph, I fear. God help us all. If only my son could—” That was Sophie, indeed. The woman had worried about her son and her empire with her very last bit of strength.
Sisi glanced over her shoulder and saw where the rest of her family remained huddled and focused on the inanimate figure in bed. She turned back and leaned over the diary. Her heart racing now, she picked it up and began riffling through the pages. They fell naturally to a section far earlier in the thick book. Clearly a section that the woman herself had visited often, for the writing was faded, and the pages were worn. Sisi narrowed her eyes and read the words, the book shaking in her hands: “Some are now predicting that my son might choose the younger one, Sisi, rather than the elder one. What an idea! As if he would look twice at that little imp!”
Farther down the page: “When I tried to praise Helene, to extol her virtue, her intellect, her slim figure, he would not listen. Instead he said to me: ‘No, but see how sweet Sisi is! She is as fresh as a budding almond, and what a splendid crown of hair frames her face, she is a vision. How can anyone help loving her, with her tender eyes and her lips as sweet as strawberries?’ But what my bewitched son doesn’t see—Sisi is just a child!”
Sisi stifled the gasp that tried now to burst from her throat. She threw a glance toward Franz, who didn’t look toward her, and then flipped farther through the pages. She came next to a passage in which her mother-in-law described the morning after their wedding night: “I found the young pair at breakfast, my son radiant, a picture of happiness (God be thanked). Sisi was as timid and frightened as a little bird. I wanted to leave them alone but my son stopped me from going with a heartwarming summons to join them.”
A page later, Sophie—always watching, always observing, always judging—described Sisi’s behavior at a church service: “The young couple looked perfect, inspiring, uplifting. The empress’s demeanor was enchanting; devout, quite wrapt in humble meditation.” And then, Sisi realized, came a passage from during her first pregnancy: “I feel that Sisi should not spend too much time with her parrots. If a woman is always looking at animals in the first months, the children are inclined to resemble animals. Far better that she should look at herself in the mirror, or at my son. That would have my entire approval.”
Sisi’s heart constricted with each word she read, and yet, she could not stop. Several pages later came a description of Franz’s journey to the wars in Italy. Sisi’s earliest devastation as a young bride. She still recalled how she had begged Franz to take her with him to the Italian campaign rather than leave her alone at the frightening, hostile court. He had refused, and his mother had had this to say on the matter: “Poor Sisi’s scenes and tears only serve to make life even harder for my unfortunate son.” But then, just after that, came more praise from the woman: “Sisi at a Christmas party for her twenty-second birthday, looking as delicious as a sugar bonbon, in a strawberry-pink dress of watered silk.”
It kept going—page after page of the woman’s most intimate and honest thoughts. So much ink spent on her constant concerns for the court, her care for her soul, and above all her love and devotion to her son. Second only to the attention spent on her son were the writings on her son’s wife, and the older woman’s seesawing opinions on whether Sisi was performing her role appropriately beside him. “Poor Sisi, gone, and for how long? We know not. Leaving her poor husband behind, as well as her children. I was shattered to see her go.” Sisi’s stomach seized. She looked at the date: October 1860. Right after her departure from court. Her first time fleeing Vienna, shortly after she had become ill. Just after she had heard the rumors of Franz’s infidelity. The first real rupture in her marriage—and one that had proven insurmountable. She remembered how sick she had felt, how frantic she had been to escape, not only from Franz, but from his mother, as well. “I was shattered to see her go.” Sophie’s own take on the departure. It was too much, reliving these moments through Sophie’s eyes and her own memories, and Sisi pressed the book shut, replacing it on her mother-in-law’s desk.
She turned back, her mind spinning, her eyes filling with tears. She looked on the inanimate frame of Sophie once more, surrounded by the family members who loved her. In that moment, Sisi realized that she had not said a nice thing to or about this woman in over a decade. She had avoided her and rebuffed her and presumed every word and gesture from this woman to be malicious and hostile. Perhaps Sophie, in all her attempts to be with Sisi these past few years, had longed to apologize. To begin again in a new relationship. Or, at least, to allow both of them the opportunity to right the wrongs of the past before it was too late…for surely Sophie, ever the pragmatist, had known that her end approached. Perhaps she, Sisi, had been the more antagonistic of the two, had prevented either of them from seeking any absolution for the troubles they had created for each other. And now, perhaps, it was too late. The immense weight of all of this suddenly overwhelmed Sisi, and she flew to the bedside where she fell to her knees, clutching her hands together. Leaning up against her mother-in-law’s bed, she gasped, “Oh, Aunt Sophie, forgive me!” And with that, unsure of whether the tears rose up out of a pool of grief, or guilt, or both, Sisi wept.
She had carried her anger toward this woman like a heavy stone for so long; she had spent so much time and energy avoiding the very sight of her, so many words expressing the injustice she’d suffered at Sophie’s hands. And now, in spite of that—or perhaps because of that—Sophie was the only person who could relieve Sisi of the burden of her hatred.
—
Later that night, after Gisela and Rudy had been urged by their father to take several hours of rest, Sisi and Franz remained in the bedroom, keeping their silent, watchful vigil beside Sophie. The archduchess’s waking came as a quiet and unexpected occurrence, one that they might easily have missed but for their inability to sleep and their orders that the candles around the bed remain lit. Franz noticed first. “Mother, are you awake?” Sophie stirred at the sound of her son’s whisper.
“Aunt Sophie!” Both Sisi and Franz rose, their bodies hovering on either side of the bed like sentries.
Sophie took in her surroundings. “Sisi?” Seeing her niece’s face through the shadows, the old woman gasped. “Sisi, is it you?”
“Yes, Aunt Sophie.”
“You came.” The woman’s voice, as weak as it was, carried the tinge of surprise.
“Of course I came.”
“Oh, my little niece. Thank you for being here for Franzi.” The woman reached for Sisi’s hand, and Sisi returned the grip, noticing how fragile the bones felt beneath the old woman’s cold, papery flesh. “Sisi, my girl.”
