The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [79]
“I couldn’t believe it, either,” said Eduard, in a harsh whisper that Lucien had never heard, while staring through him with a dejected anger that seemed improbably close to the surface, given that the building had been completed several years earlier. Eduard briefly shook his head as if to drive the vision away before he smiled at Lucien and continued in a more placid, resigned tone. “Honestly, there’s no accounting for taste—or bad taste, as the case may be. They wanted angels and cherubs, and I—or we—insisted that color and pattern were more than enough.”
“Sometimes I really do envy my father,” Lucien noted as he again looked up. “At least his work is measured in numbers and results. Even if it takes a long time—and I know from him that it usually does—eventually either you cure a disease or you don’t.” Since moving to Vienna, Lucien regularly received updates from Guillaume, who in his son’s absence continued to work as feverishly as ever, both in his own lab and at the university, on the same projects that had occupied him for as long as Lucien could remember. Although Guillaume frequently emphasized that a cure for any of his diseases—this was how he often referred to them, as if they were his charges—remained on the distant horizon, he seemed satisfied with his progress. Or maybe, Lucien sometimes considered, his father didn’t really care about finding a cure for cholera—much less aging—so long as he was engaged in the work, which because it was driven by a love for his dead wife, brought him closer to her. But it was a solitary endeavor, and Guillaume—and in this respect he was very much a scientist, at least as Lucien understood him—showed no sign of suffering from the kind of artistic angst to which Eduard had just alluded.
Eduard nodded. “What’s also good about science is that it’s constantly expanding—adding new knowledge on top of the old, or replacing it—which is something a lot of art critics—the same ones constantly bemoaning the slightest change because it offends a nostalgia they hold for some lost period of their youth—would be well served to understand.” He smiled wryly at Lucien. “Look at what happened to Wagner.”
“Don’t remind me.” Lucien rolled his eyes. “But how do you know if it’s good—if it’s really original and not just contrived—when you’re doing it? Nobody sets out to make something limp and derivative, right?”
“In my experience, you never really do,” Eduard mused, and Lucien could not help but note a certain melancholy that seemed to hover over him as he spoke, as if the obvious success of the result had been tainted by the ordeal of getting there. “You just have to trust a gut feeling—an intuition—and hope.”
THAT NIGHT AT dinner with Eduard, as they reflected on the previous three years, Lucien playfully tested the hypothesis that he had changed—and for the better—since coming to Vienna.
“You think?” Eduard replied. “How so?”
“I’m more mature,” Lucien ventured. “Don’t you remember how, when we met, you were always saying how young I was?”
Eduard laughed. “That’s because you were always in tears.”
“Yes, I suppose I was.” Lucien sighed, and smiled as he thought of himself breaking down at the door of Eduard’s Paris hotel, then again when Eduard took him to Beethoven’s apartment for the first time, and then when he first saw the green copper dome of the Karlskirche, built to honor the victims of a devastating plague in 1713, which had annihilated half the city’s population.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of—it was endearing,” Eduard said more reflectively. “You know, I also cried when you left for Paris the first time—”
“No you didn’t!”
“Of course I did,” Eduard said. “It may not have been an epic tantrum, but I can still feel the back of my hand as I held it up to wave to you, and how it felt as the tears evaporated in the wind.”
“I was on the train,” Lucien replied. “You never told me—you were always so stoic.”
“Well, one of us had to be.” Eduard grinned as he picked up his fork.
As Heinrich cleared their plates from the table, it occurred to Lucien that—as with the city