Divine Inspiration

by Jane Langton

  But it was worse than that. Rosie wasn’t just a name on a list, she wasn’t simply a student of Castle’s. She was someone who was always being shoved down Alan’s throat. She was a widow, and her friends were trying to marry her off. People were always telling him, “Oh, you’ve got to meet Rosie Hall.” His sister Betsy was the worst. She had been to boarding school with Rosie, she was always talking about her. Once she had even arranged a date for the two of them, but at the last minute Rosie had called Betsy to say she was sick, and Alan had told Betsy the hell with it, and that had been that. He was sick of hearing the woman’s name.

  A siren sounded from the street. The high whine spiralled down and stopped. The police cruiser was pulling up outside.

  Swiftly, his curiosity still unsatisfied, Alan opened the desk drawer and groped inside it. His fingers closed on a key. It had a tag, #115 Rear. Pulling the drawer farther open, he found a small notebook, and flipped the pages. It was full of musical scribblings.

  The doorbell rang. Without thinking, Alan pocketed the key and deposited the notebook in one of the zippered compartments of his down jacket.

  Then he went to the door and flung it open.

  CHAPTER 5

  When two goats meet upon a narrow bridge over deep water, how do they behave?

  Martin Luther

  There were two of them, a man and a woman, both in uniform.

  “Mr. Starr?” said the man. “My name’s McCormack. This is Sergeant Steeple.”

  Alan glanced at McCormack’s identification and stood back to let them in. They looked at him curiously and followed him into Rosie Hall’s living room, their eyes roving left and right, taking in the harpsichord, the playpen, the sleeping baby.

  McCormack looked tired. He plopped himself down on the sofa. “You say the door was open? Give me that again.”

  Alan explained again in more detail. McCormack’s face was mobile. His eyebrows went up and down, he smiled, he frowned, he scribbled in a pocket notebook. Sergeant Steeple stood solemnly at one side, refusing to sit. Her face was expressionless, her jaw large, her bosom massive.

  McCormack put away his notebook. His eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t the church next door the one where they had that fire last year?”

  “Oh, that’s right. That’s why I’m here. I’m installing the new organ. I was on my way in, and there was this baby on the church steps.”

  Sergeant Steeple walked heavily to the playpen and looked down at Charley. “This is the child?”

  Well, naturally it’s the child. Who did you think it was? Alan watched as she bent over stiffly and picked up Charley. For the first time it dawned on him that this formidable woman would be in charge of the baby from now on. He felt a pang of dismay. “Hey,” he said impulsively, taking a step toward her, “wait a minute.”

  Sergeant Steeple straightened up with a creak of her corset and looked at him sternly, holding Charley at arm’s length like a sack of flour. Charley woke up and burst into loud sobs. “Well?” said Sergeant Steeple, glaring at Alan.

  He reached for the baby. “Let me take him.”

  Charley howled. Sergeant Steeple shouted above the racket, “What’s it to you? I thought you were a stranger, right?”

  “Well, sure, but maybe I can calm him down.”

  Reluctantly she dumped Charley into Alan’s arms. The baby quieted at once, and began sucking his thumb. Sergeant Steeple looked resentful. “Where’s all the kid’s things?”

  Alan led the way into the baby’s room, feeling heartsick. Poor little Charley, what was going to happen to him now?

  He left the policewoman to gather Charley’s clothes, and went into the kitchen with the baby in his arms to find McCormack on his knees, using a pipette to get a blood sample from the floor. McCormack got to his feet with a wheeze. Alan watched as he emptied the sample into a small jar, screwed the cap on tightly and enclosed jar and pipette in a plastic bag.

  “Will you be able to identify whose blood it is?” said Alan.

  “Well, of course we can figure out the blood type. Then we’ll try to get the mother’s medical records. Maybe the baby was born in a local hospital.” McCormack wagged his head wisely. “But even if it’s the same type, it wouldn’t prove it was hers.”

  Sergeant Steeple appeared, carrying a plastic bag bulging with Charley’s possessions.

  “Sergeant,” said Alan, appealing to her, “what happens to the baby from now on?”

  She glowered at him. “Relatives, we look for relatives. If he’s got no relatives, he goes into foster care.”

  “You mean some stranger might be taking care of him?” Suddenly it seemed terrible to Alan that this marvelous child should be sent out into the bureaucratic world of Boston’s social welfare system all by himself. “Hey, why don’t you let me take care of him?”

  The policewoman narrowed her eyes. “Who are you anyway, the father? Lotsa times it’s the father kidnaps the child. How come you’re so interested in this kid? Here, let me have him.”

  Alan held Charley tighter, and backed away. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m not his father. I told you, his father’s dead. I never saw this baby before in my life. I never saw his mother. I’ve never been in this house before. I found the baby on the steps of the church, like I told you, and I only figured he came from here because the door was open.”

  “Well, okay,” said Sergeant Steeple, “but I can’t give this baby to nobody without they go through the Department of Social Services.” Reaching for Charley, she tried to tug him away. Alan hung on. For a moment there was a tussle, with Charley whimpering in the middle.

  Alan gave up. There was no point in arguing. “Well, look. Can I find out where he’s going to be, so I can visit him?”

  Primly the woman gathered Charley to her stiff bosom. At once he began to cry. She shouted above his sobs, “Social Services. You got to ask them.”

  “Jesus,” said McCormack, holding his ears. “I get enough of this at home.”

  “What are you going to do about Rosie?” shouted Alan. They looked at him blankly. “His mother, Rosalind Hall. She’s missing, remember?”

  McCormack reached up and plucked something from the kitchen wall. It was a key, dangling from a board. “We’ll send over a detective. Missing persons, we’ve got a department, they’ve got a system.” He tried the key in the front door. It worked. Then McCormack wandered around the apartment, giving it a cursory examination.

  Alan watched him try the bureau drawers in Rosie’s bedroom and open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and shuffle the papers on her desk. Pulling something out of the pile he held it up, a money clip of twenty-dollar bills. “No burglary, apparently. Okay, we’re through for now. Come on, we’ll turn out the lights and lock the place up.”

  Alan followed them out of the apartment to the sidewalk. Charley was still crying in Sergeant Steeple’s embrace. Alan watched as they got into the cruiser. His heart ached for Charley, who was reaching out his arms over the sergeant’s thick blue shoulder.

  “Bye-bye, Charley,” he said, trying to smile, waving his hand. He stood helplessly on the sidewalk as the cruiser drove away, Charley’s screams fading as the car moved in the direction of Dartmouth Street.

  Three hours earlier Alan had not known of the existence of young Charley Hall. How could such a short acquaintance with this little blob of human flesh leave him so bereft? His peace of mind was fractured. Turning away from Rosalind Hall’s apartment, he walked to the church, climbed the steps and tried the door. It was locked. He fumbled in his pocket for the key.

  Inside the vestibule there were only glimmers of light from the street lamps outside, superimposing the shadows of bare branches over the geometric patterns of the William Morris tiles on the floor. The sanctuary too was dark and silent. Castle had gone home.

  Only the stained-glass windows were dimly visible—the Wise and Foolish Virgins over the pulpit to the east, the Three Kings to the south, Daniel in the Lions’ Den to the north, and Moses and the
Burning Bush at the west end of the balcony, in a forest of new organ pipes. The symbolism connecting the four windows was a mystery, but they were famous creations from the workshop of John La Farge.

  Alan looked up at the Three Kings. The sky behind the three majestic figures was made of light-refracting blue glass knobs the size of Ping-Pong balls. In the kings’ hands as they knelt before the child in the manger were pale objects of yellow glass, chalices gleaming like gold.

  Charley Hall too was a baby, but nobody was bringing him presents of gold and frankincense and myrrh. In his case it was all misery, loneliness and abandonment—that was what the chalices of the Department of Social Services would be offering to Charley Hall.

  CHAPTER 6

  The world is full of such works of wonder, but we are blind, and cannot see them.

  Martin Luther

  When Martin Kraeger left his apartment on Dartmouth Street and walked up Commonwealth to the church, he found the traffic on Clarendon backed up behind an obstruction. A barrier had been erected by a crew from the Water and Sewer Commission. A blue truck was parked on the sidewalk. Two lanes of cars were edging into one, sounding resentful horns.

  Kraeger had to jump across a river of water running along the gutter. He leaned over and looked into the manhole. “Hello, down there, good morning. May I ask what you’re doing?”

  A couple of men in hard hats looked up. “New construction,” said one of them. “They got to drain the site.”

  “Oh, I see. You mean for the new hotel.”

  “Right. Buried sump pump, water comes up this pipe here, we connect it to the sewer line. All done now.” The two men climbed out of the manhole, and the talkative one gestured at the excavation. “Sump pump, see, it’s to keep the hole dry, right?”

  “I see.” Kraeger turned and stared down into the pit. It was deep. Concrete pilings lay in a heap at one side. A crane stood idle. He watched one of the men from the Water and Sewer Commission bang the manhole cover down again over the hole. “I wonder how long the construction will take?” he said, thinking with dread of the noise of the pile driver, the din of machine-driven tools.

  “Jeez, I don’t know. They say there’s money problems. I don’t know what the hell.” The two men removed the barriers and the truck pulled away. As the traffic surged forward in two lanes, Kraeger ducked back across the street, walked around the corner and climbed the church steps.

  There was fresh paint on the door frame, and the great Longmeadow stones above the heavy arch of the entry were rosy and clean, their scorched surfaces sandblasted away. At last Kraeger could walk into the building without a stab of anguish. He was grateful to Ken Possett’s friend, that tall odd-looking man called Homer Kelly, who had found no reason to suspect arson. Kelly had persuaded the arson squad that the fire was an accident, and the arson squad had informed the insurance company, and the company had paid up. The organ had not been insured, unfortunately, but the financial settlement had rebuilt the balcony and replaced the cracked glass in the Moses window. Once again the burning bush blazed fiery red and Moses held up his pink hands in wonder.

  “You can be grateful,” said Ken Possett, “that the sexton didn’t have a bunch of aggrieved relatives to sue us for ten million dollars.”

  This heartless remark had caused Martin Kraeger a good deal of suffering. In the middle of the night he turned uneasily in his bed, while out of the dark rose the image of the charred body of Mr. Plummer, his lips open in a silent scream, his fingers hooked in agony.

  But Kraeger’s Lutheran upbringing stood him in good stead. Since childhood he had grown away from strict Lutheran conformity, no longer believing human nature to be corrupt, no longer concerning himself with the remission of sins by grace, the hope of eternal bliss. To him Luther’s devil was a metaphor for human weakness. But he kept alive his respect for Luther the man, for his pungent and violent wit, his powerful resolution, the forcefulness and courage with which he had tossed aside every obstacle. Most of all he admired Luther’s faith, his total submission to the will of God.

  Daily Kraeger hurled himself into whatever task lay before him, but he did so serenely, accepting his fate. He took to his heart his own guilt in the death of Mr. Plummer, and bowed down before it. But he went forward, hiding the scar that would never heal.

  In the vestibule of the church he was confronted at once by his new building manager, Donald Woody. “Hey, Martin, we’ve got a problem with one of the windows. I think we’ve got to get those stained-glass people over here again to take a look.”

  “Which window is it, the Three Kings?”

  “No, it’s the one in the east wall. All those ladies with yellow hair.”

  “The Wise and Foolish Virgins.” Kraeger smiled. “Amazing the way they ran to blondes in Biblical times.” He followed Woody into the sanctuary and they stood below the window and looked up at it.

  It was one of La Farge’s miracles of light and dark. The lamps of the wise virgins glowed with a feverish brightness around the dazzling bridegroom, while the foolish virgins hovered in the darkness, their lamps extinguished.

  “See there, on the left?” said Woody. “Those windows weigh sixty pounds a square foot. If they get out of line, they’ll fall.”

  “Good Lord, it’s buckled there at the bottom. Good for you, Woody. Of course, call them right away.”

  “I just thought I’d ask you first. I know you’re concerned about the budget and all.”

  “When is a church not concerned about the budget?” Kraeger gave Woody a grim smile. “But we have to do what we have to do. This is obviously an emergency.”

  “You’ll be getting some income pretty soon from that daycare center. I finally got those ground floor rooms in the basement cleared out. That woman Ruth Raymond, she’s been calling me every day, wanting to know if it’ll be ready in January. She’s got half the kids in Boston signed up.”

  “That’s wonderful, Woody. I’m so glad you saw the usefulness of those basement rooms. A daycare center! It’s a superb idea.”

  “Oh, and say, Martin, I found an old picture downcellar when I was clearing out, a portrait of somebody named Wigglesworth, that’s what the label says.”

  “Wigglesworth! The Reverend Walter Ephraim Wigglesworth? But that’s wonderful! Walter Wigglesworth was the presiding minister for this congregation, way back when they were meeting on Tremont Street. A tremendously inspiring preacher, that’s what everybody said.”

  “No kidding. Well, that explains the book he’s holding. It’s got a title painted on the front in gold leaf, Divine Inspiration. I’ll bring it up this afternoon.”

  Kraeger watched Woody walk purposefully away down the aisle, and congratulated himself on finding so perfect a new sexton. Donald Woody had come on the job last August during Kraeger’s vacation, to replace the late Mr. Plummer. Martin had come back to the church to find the once-seedy sanctuary with its blackened balcony and ruined organ cleared of charred timbers and scorched pipes. The repairs to the balcony were half done, the pews had been refinished, the stained glass professionally cleaned, the floor tiles washed and waxed. Everything was running smoothly.

  Since then Woody had solved all the small housekeeping problems in the kitchen, the parish hall, the church school, the basement club room, the meeting rooms, the offices; he had identified major difficulties with the plumbing, the oil-fired furnaces, the steam radiators, the security system. He had worked out a schedule for annual repairs. In October he had planted a thousand spring bulbs in the garden with his own hands.

  “We’ve certainly got a winner in that Donald Woody,” said Kraeger to Loretta Fawcett, his executive secretary, walking through her small room on the way to his office.

  “We certainly do,” agreed Loretta, taking half the credit, because she had welcomed Woody on his first day on the job, while her boss was camping in the Adirondacks with his little daughter Pansy.

  But the truth was altogether different. On Woody’s first day Loretta had made
a serious mistake. She had failed to pass along to the new sexton Martin Kraeger’s seven-page list of directions. Kraeger had written it by hand on the last day of July. Loretta was to type it up and deliver it to Donald Woody as soon as he arrived.

  “It’s very important,” he told her, “especially the beginning.”

  “Well, of course,” said Loretta.

  But she hadn’t done it. Loretta Fawcett was a kindly and cheerful woman with a passion for knitting, crocheting and needlework, but she was an abominable secretary. Kraeger had long since discovered that he must type up his letters and sermons himself rather than depend on Loretta, because she was always deep in some vast project—an entire crocheted bedspread, a giant needlepoint tapestry. When he handed her the list for the new sexton she had been knitting a colossal pair of orange overalls.

  “You won’t forget? He’s got to understand this first part as soon as he arrives.” Kraeger pointed it out to Loretta, the first paragraphs, over which he had taken special care:

  First and foremost, you must know that this building and all the other buildings in the Back Bay, including Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, rest on pilings. This area was once subject to the tidal flow of the Charles River. The river was dammed up and the Back Bay filled with gravel and sand in the nineteenth century. Most of the pilings are made of wood, just as they are in Venice. As long as they remain water-soaked, they are extremely strong. But if they are allowed to dry out by a lowering of the water table, they will rot and turn to powder. Cautionary example: part of the Boston Public Library caved in, back in 1930.

  Therefore your first duty is to REMEMBER THE PILINGS. You will find among the gear in your office a weighted tape measure. It is to be periodically lowered through the holes in the basement floor. If the space between floor and water exceeds four feet, water must be artificially supplied. These observation wells are to be found in the following places: in the northeast corner of your office, in the southeast corner of the boiler room, on the west side of the big storeroom.