by Jane Langton
Only the lamp of Truth still flared up now and then, flickering brightly enough to fill the pews on Sunday mornings and brim the collection plates with dollar bills. The preaching, of course, had changed. The mild and respectable Protestant faith that had established the parish as a denomination unto itself in the middle of the nineteenth century had drifted farther from orthodoxy every year. The present pastor, Martin Kraeger, had started his ministerial life as a Lutheran, but he had grown farther and farther away from his background. Now what was he? A lapsed Lutheran, an occasional Transcendentalist, a moderate Unitarian, an unsilent Quaker and a wry Existentialist, with a few molecules of contemplative Buddhism thrown in. His congregation accepted the intellectual jumble. They seldom examined their pastor’s tissue of beliefs, or attempted to unravel one piece of patchwork from another.
Alan walked up the center aisle, holding the baby, inhaling the scent of extinguished candles, the leathery smell of the old Bible on the pulpit, the stuffing in the pew cushions, the lingering fragrance of perfumed sopranos and clean-shaven tenors. There was still a hint of scorching in the air, a sharp recollection of the fire that had burned the balcony and destroyed the old organ and taken the life of the sexton, old Mr. Plummer.
Alan winced as he caught the acrid scent, remembering the anguished look on the face of Martin Kraeger the morning after the fire. Alan had been called in at once, to assess the damage to the organ. He had examined it in the presence of Kraeger, James Castle and Edith Frederick, church treasurer Kenneth Possett, and the chief from the local fire station on Boylston Street.
Kraeger’s ugly face had been a study in wretchedness. He kept saying, “It was my fault.” He had been smoking carelessly, he said, up there in the balcony, talking to Castle. And there had been lighted candles all over the place for the evening wedding. Had old Mr. Plummer extinguished them all? Were some of them still burning under the balcony when Kraeger left at midnight with Castle? Only a few hours later it had gone up in flames.
Kraeger had already confessed his fault to the firefighters as they dragged their hoses around the burning building. He had confessed it to the people watching the fire as they stood gaping behind a rope barrier. He had told the reporter from the Globe and the kids with the video camera from Channel 4. All New England had seen him the next morning on the local news. There he was in person, weeping over the burned body of Mr. Plummer. It was a gruesome and pitiful picture. “Entirely unfit for children,” complained a committee of mothers in a letter of protest.
Alan had seen the episode on the morning news while he hauled on his clothes to go to the church. He had raced up Beacon Hill and down again from his room on Russell Street, and gasped his way across the Public Garden and arrived at the Church of the Commonwealth out of breath. Inside the sanctuary he found the others standing around the organ in the half-ruined balcony. As an organ student of James Castle’s, Alan already knew Reverend Kraeger and Mrs. Frederick. Church treasurer Kenneth Possett was new to him, and the chief of the local fire department, and another stranger who came puffing up the balcony stairs, stumbling over the charred remains of chairs recently occupied by the choir.
It was a tall man in a rumpled shirt. “My God,” said the man, “what a disaster. It’s hard to believe a careless cigarette could have done all this.”
“Oh, there you are, Homer.” Kenneth Possett introduced Homer Kelly to Martin Kraeger, Mrs. Frederick, James Castle, the fire chief, and Alan Starr. “Homer’s an old friend of mine. Right now he’s teaching at that ancient institution of higher learning across the river, but he used to be a policeman. I thought he might be able to help us figure out what happened.”
“It’s not just a question of cigarettes,” said the chief, turning to Homer. “It was candles too. That wedding, they had candles all over the place last night. It’s a wonder there’s any churchgoers left in the world, the way they go out of their way to burn themselves up with candles. Electricity, Jesus! You’d think Thomas Alva Edison never got born.”
“It was all my fault,” murmured Martin Kraeger. His exhausted face was still black with smoke. His hands were wrapped in bandages.
The fire chief looked at him grimly and said nothing, remembering the insane way Kraeger had rushed into the building at the height of the blaze to look for the missing sexton, endangering the lives of the firefighters who had to drag him out again—as if they didn’t have enough to do, saving the rest of the building, watering down the blowing embers, watching the roofs of the neighboring town houses. The man was a maniac.
Ken Possett turned to Castle. “The point is, what are we going to do about the organ? Can anything be salvaged? Is it a total loss?”
And then Castle turned to Alan, the visiting expert. Alan had already made up his mind. He had glanced at the scorched façade pipes and opened the narrow door to the chamber where the others were massed in their thousands upon thousands. Everyone else looked at him too, and he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s totaled, I’m afraid. Oh, you might salvage a few of the smallest metal flue pipes, but most of them are a dead loss. The wooden flues are wrecked, the solid-state control board is a mess, and the console”—Alan gestured helplessly at the blistered keyboards, the scorched rows of stop knobs—“well, you can see for yourselves, there’s nothing left.”
“All those pipes,” whimpered Ken Possett, “fourteen thousand pipes, you’re telling us they’re all gone?”
“Well, say, thirteen thousand nine hundred of them. I’m sorry.”
And then Mrs. Frederick stepped gallantly forward. “My mind is made up. The Church of the Commonwealth must have a magnificent pipe organ. Jim, I want you to pick the best in the world. It will be my gift to the church, in memory of Henry.”
Afterward Alan tried to picture Jim’s face—had there been a sly look of triumph? He couldn’t remember. He had been too interested himself in the idea of the new organ. He had wanted to nudge Castle and say, “Marblehead, right?”
But Castle did not need to be told. Next day Alan accompanied him to Marblehead and showed him the organ that had been ordered and cancelled by a failing church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And then it had taken the people in Marblehead only a few months to adjust it to Castle’s specifications.
And here it was, ready for tuning and voicing, Mrs. Frederick’s magnificent new tracker organ, with casework of cherry and three thousand five hundred seventy new pipes rising in tiers beside the stained-glass window of Moses and the Burning Bush. For the next few months its destiny was up to Alan Starr.
The baby was beginning to squirm. Alan jiggled it up and down, and walked along the center aisle until he could look back up at the balcony and see Castle at the organ console. There he was, high above the rows of pews, his back to the pulpit, the pipes rising around him.
The fugue came to an end. Castle lifted his hands from the keyboard and held up one finger. Alan was silent, listening. The baby listened too. “Four seconds,” said Alan.
Castle turned on the bench and looked down at him gleefully. “Four, right. Four seconds of reverberation. Pretty good. If we took out all the pew cushions we’d probably get five. Hey, what have you got there? Is that yours?”
“No.” Alan bounced the baby in his arms. “I found it outside on the steps.” He looked around. “I thought its mother might be in here someplace.”
“The baby was on the steps? You mean all by itself?” Castle got up and leaned over the railing to take a look. “Babies shouldn’t be left alone. Good Lord.”
“I think it’s going to sleep. Wait a minute. I’ll be right up.” Reaching into a pew he tumbled the cushion to the floor, then lowered the baby onto it and latched the pew door. “How’s that?”
“Looks okay to me, but what do I know about babies? Hey, did you bring the extra stop knob?”
“Sure.” Alan galloped up the steps to the balcony and took the blank stop knob out of his pocket. “What do you want it for?”
“Divine inspiration.” Castle took
the stop knob and tried it in the empty space above Spitzflute and Octave on the panel for the Great organ. “Put it right here.”
“What do you mean, put it there? You want to add another rank? Good grief, you don’t start with a stop knob, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, no, I don’t want it connected to anything in particular. Just directly to God, that’s all. It’s for divine inspiration. I want you to paint DIV INSP on it. So I can give it a yank whenever I lose touch with whatever the hell’s going on in the service. You know, whenever Kraeger mumbles in his beard or my page turner drops the music.”
“Oh, right, good idea. Every organ should have a knob like that.”
They got to work. Castle went through the ranks for the Great division, and went on to the Choir, the Positive, the Swell, the Pedal. Alan took notes.
“When are the thirty-two-footers coming?” said Castle, using both feet to send a deep Bourdon fifth shuddering through the building.
“Soon, I hope. Hey, what’s that squeal?”
“God, it must be a cipher.” Castle turned around on the bench. “Oh, no, it’s not. It’s your little friend. The baby’s awake.”
Alan raced down the balcony stairs and picked up the baby just as it flung one leg over the arm of the pew. In another moment it would have fallen into the aisle. At once it stopped crying and smiled at him.
“Cute little critter,” said Castle, looking down from above. “Maybe it lives around here. Did you try the house next door?”
“No. Good idea.” Alan bounced the baby gently. “Look, the job should take me three or four months, if the thirty-two-foot pipes get here soon. But I’ll have the Great division done by the end of January. Mrs. Frederick wants to have a celebration. Can you find something to play on a single manual? Something really—what was the word—glorious?”
Castle turned away and shuffled his music. “Oh, that’s right, the end of January. Yes, yes, she told me. Oh, sure, there’ll be no problem finding the music. But I won’t be here. It will have to be somebody else. I’m going away for a while.”
“You won’t be here?”
“My mother’s ill. Very ill. I haven’t seen much of her in the last few years, and it’s high time I tried to be a dutiful son. Look, why don’t you take over the performance for the celebration? You’re the best student I ever had—next to Rosie, of course.”
“Rosie? Oh, of course, Rosie. I keep hearing about the magnificent Rosie.”
“You never met Rosie?” Castle laughed. “You sound envious. Well, you should be. She’s damned good.”
“Look, I’m sorry about your mother. Couldn’t you come back just for a day or two, to play the concert yourself?”
Castle picked up his music and stood up. “I think not.”
“Too bad. People aren’t going to be happy when I show up instead of you.” Alan shouldered the baby and began walking down the aisle.
“Oh, Alan,” said Castle softly, looking down over the balcony railing. “Goodbye. I probably won’t see you again. Before I go, I mean.”
“Oh, well, have a good trip. I hope your mother’s better soon. So long.”
Outdoors the December night was chill. Alan carried the baby past the church, and past the church office building next door. The next edifice in the block-long row of town houses was a five-story brownstone.
He stopped and stared at it in surprise. The front door was wide open.
CHAPTER 3
Our Lord God is like a printer, who sets the letters backwards.
Martin Luther
The door was at street level. There were no steps. Alan put his head into the entry, then walked in, carrying the baby.
There was an inner door, but it too was open, and then a large hall with another open door and a staircase. A small blanket lay in the doorway.
It was like a moment in a dream—the open doors, the silence, the blanket glowing in the light from the street lamp outside.
Boldly Alan walked into the apartment, calling, “Is anyone here?”
There was no response, only a slight humming noise. Light streamed from an inner room. Shifting the baby in his arms, Alan shut the door behind him and walked into the living room. At once he found the source of the humming, a pair of old-fashioned audiocassette recorders lying on a shelf.
He switched them off. The humming stopped. Someone must have been recording from one to the other.
Turning, he looked around the room. “How about it?” he said to the baby. “Is this where you live?”
The baby looked at him solemnly. But it was surely the right place. There was a playpen in the middle of the spacious room, and when Alan went exploring he found a crib in a small bedroom at one side.
The baby’s parents must have mysteriously gone away, leaving all the doors open. The baby had crawled out of the house to seek its fortune in the wide world.
It was squirming again and whimpering. What did it want? Babies had two famous physical needs. You put milk in at one end and changed a diaper at the other. Bravely he took on the diaper problem. In the baby’s room he found a table covered with a flannel blanket. On the floor lay a big package of paper diapers.
Alan lowered the baby to the table and laid it on its back. It began to howl. For the next five minutes he wrestled with the task of disrobing, cleaning and diapering a small heaving animal. Fortunately the shape of the diaper corresponded more or less to the shape of the child, which was, he was interested to observe, a boy.
Next? Wash the boy’s face. Alan took him to the bathroom and mopped at his grubby cheeks with a washcloth. The baby submitted to this indignity with hiccuping sighs, emerging clean and pink. Alan looked at him proudly. Now that he had an investment in this infant’s care, he felt a sense of possessiveness. Bonding, it was called.
He felt possessive too about the empty apartment. For the moment it was Alan Starr’s own pleasant Back Bay residence. It was many degrees finer than his own small place on the wrong side of Beacon Hill. There were dark high walls, a ceiling with a molded pattern in the plaster, and large windows looking out on a small brick-walled garden.
The furnishings too were handsomer than his own homely collection of castoffs from his mother’s house in Brunswick, Maine. A harpsichord with a painted sounding board stood beside the playpen. There were bookcases all over one wall, a shining table with Hitchcock chairs, a desk piled high with papers, a yellow sofa beside the fireplace. On the mantel lay an enormous conch shell.
As a desirable dwelling Alan could imagine nothing better. The baby was lucky. His parents must be rich. Apartments on Commonwealth Avenue did not come cheap.
The baby was jiggling restlessly in Alan’s arms, driving down its fat legs, making small unhappy noises. He felt a rush of concern. The poor thing was probably hungry.
“All right, little guy.” He carried the baby into the kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door with a proprietary flourish. On the top shelf he found a baby bottle full of milk, ready to his hand. He had known it would be there. It was almost as if he had put it there himself. He took out the bottle and started for the living room, intending to settle down on the sofa with baby and bottle and decide what to do next.
Only then did he see the stain on the kitchen floor. It was a long streak, as though something had been dragged across the white quarry tiles, leaking a reddish-brown fluid.
Holding the baby carefully, Alan bent down to look. Most of the stain had dried, but there was a puddled place that was still wet, and it was a bright purplish red.
It was blood, decided Alan with dismay. The streak was somebody’s life blood.
“For Christ’s sake, didn’t you hear me kick the door? Where the hell have you been?”
“Asleep! I was asleep! Oh, my God, what’s the matter with her? Here, put her down, put her down. Is she dead? My God, Sonny, what happened?”
“Christ, I don’t know what happened. She fell. Quick, take her feet. Wait till I turn her on her side.”
�
��Oh, my God, her head! We’ve got to call an ambulance!”
“You can’t call a fucking ambulance. You’ve got to do something. It’s up to you. Shock, right? She’s in shock?”
“Oh, Sonny, I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s been years. Oh, my God, she looks bad.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Certain quotations are taken from the board game Monopoly® and are used with permission from Parker Brothers. Monopoly® is a registered trademark of Tonka Corporation. © 1991 Parker Brothers, a division of Tonka Corporation.
copyright © 1992 by Jane Langton