The Last of All Possible Worlds and The Temptation to Do Good: Two Novels by Peter F. Drucker by Peter F. Drucker

Author:Peter F. Drucker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction & Literature
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2016-05-25T14:00:00+00:00

The Perkaczes

Renata had been the last guest to leave the concert on her grandfather’s ninetieth anniversary. When she had finally gone, after hugging and kissing her grandmother and telling her over and over again how grateful she was and how much she adored her, only Mariandl stayed behind, as she always did, to oversee the cleaning up. The Baroness Rafaela Wald-Reifnitz then slowly made her way upstairs to her dead husband’s private apartment to sit there quietly for an hour or two, as she and Arthur had always done after each of their concerts and parties, and as she still did now that he no longer attended these functions. For in the apartment which she had furnished for him as office and working quarters when they had first, twenty-five years or more ago, bought the dilapidated “Palais” of a long-forgotten eighteenth-century nobleman and restored it for their own use, Arthur was still very much alive, still present, still with her. There was the square rosewood piano, totally out of style by now, of course, and made obsolete by the sonorities of the concert grand, but endowed with a mellowness and sweetness of tone which the modern monster could not equal. It was the same piano on which she had accompanied Arthur when he sang for them on his first visit to her parents’ house. And it was the same piano on which he, later that evening, had in turn accompanied her when she sang for him, and when they both suddenly and at the same moment realized that they were deeply, totally in love with one another. Whenever he sang for her—and he never afterwards sang for anyone else—he had insisted on her accompanying him on the rosewood piano.

Next to the piano hung the only possession that was “his” rather than “theirs”: the engraving of the Duke of Wellington, which the Duke had autographed and sent when Arthur’s father had reported to him the birth of a son named after the old chief. And the way the Duke had spelled “Arthur” in the inscription was the reason that her husband, throughout his life, put a British “h” after the “t” in his name.

On the opposite wall, where the sun of the June evening was just reaching them with golden fingers, hung the two portraits of her, each chosen by Arthur. The first was her wedding present to him exactly sixty years ago—for they were married on his thirtieth birthday; the second her present to him on their golden wedding anniversary, his eightieth birthday, ten years ago today.

A few steps up—the music room of Arthur’s apartment had originally been a servants’ antechamber in the old Palais—there was the studio with its northern window cut into the mansard roof, Arthur’s drafting table running almost the entire length of the big room, with his rolltop desk in one corner for his papers, and an easel for her drawings and watercolors. Arthur had died in this room, seven years ago, falling asleep at the drafting table never to wake up.

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