by Jane Langton
Unfortunately Loretta promptly lost the sheaf of directions for Donald Woody. Well, she didn’t exactly lose it. She rolled it into a ball in her workbasket with the orange overalls, and there it lay for six weeks while she ran up a sweater for her niece’s new baby in coral pink (everybody was so pleased! A girl at last, after all those boys!).
When Donald Woody arrived on the job, he came to Kraeger’s office at once, looking for orders.
“He’s on vacation,” explained Loretta, staring at her knitting, her fingers flying. (The baby was due any minute.)
“Oh. Well, I wonder if somebody could show me what I’m supposed to do around here.”
“Well, I don’t know. You could talk to Mr. Hyde, he’s the substitute for August, but he doesn’t know anything about anything.”
“I see.” Donald Woody was nonplussed. “Well, maybe there’s some directions down in my office, like taped to the wall or something.”
“Oh, wait a sec.” Loretta suddenly remembered the notes she hadn’t yet typed up, and she pulled open a drawer, knowing full well that it contained only a couple of knitting magazines. “Well, never mind. I’ll bet there’s directions down there in the basement, like you said.”
But when Woody found his way to his basement office, he found no directions taped to the wall, and none on his desk. It didn’t matter. Donald Woody was a take-charge kind of guy. Before long he had the place running smoothly. After all, he had already worked in a big urban church in Topeka. He made a schedule of daily, weekly and monthly tasks, he wrote up a budget, he ordered supplies for the next half year. He interviewed applicants for the job of night watchman, and hired a kid from Boston University. He was a superb manager. His job was a creative challenge every day. Never had the complex of buildings been so clean and shining. Never had the mechanical systems run so smoothly.
But no one ever pointed out to Woody the small metal lids in the basement floor, bolted flush with the concrete. No one ever told him what they were for.
And Martin Kraeger never mentioned the pilings when he came home from his vacation. It never occurred to him to repeat his written directions verbally, since his new employee had everything under such perfect control.
Loretta came across the directions one day in November, after the baby shower for her niece, after everyone had oohed and aahed over the tiny pink sweater, after she opened her workbasket again and took out the warmup suit she was making for her nephew Scott. When she unrolled the huge wad of orange yarn, the seven closely written sheets of directions for Donald Woody fell out on the floor.
Loretta picked them up. “Oh, well,” she said to herself, “there’s no point typing them up now. He knows all about everything anyway.” And she tossed them in the wastebasket.
So Donald Woody never learned that the metal lids in the floor of his basement office were bolted over two-inch pipes leading down to the water table. He never understood the purpose of the weighted tape measure coiled in his desk drawer. Woody carried on his multitudinous tasks with superb efficiency, tramping over the metal disks a hundred times a day, while the water table under the church fell slowly, drawn down by a hundred sump pumps in the buildings left and right, and now by the new pump in the excavation across the street. Slowly, very slowly, the water surrounding the three thousand buried pilings sank a fraction of an inch every day.
Unfortunately the last decade had been one of the driest in years. Snow had not accumulated on the Berkshire hills, to melt and cascade down in little waterfalls and gush into mountain streams that plunged into bigger streams and emptied into the Connecticut River, the Merrimack, the Sudbury, the Mystic, the Charles, and filled ponds and lakes and potholes and puddles, and seeped into the ground everywhere to recharge the water table.
In the Back Bay there were underground rivers moving mysteriously through the filled land, through the fine sand and gravel brought from Needham on railway cars. Slowly they sank from a level of five and a half feet above Boston City Base to four, although there were strange hills of water here and there, and mysterious hollows where it lay lower than anywhere else.
Even the occasional rain pelting down on the vast roof of Trinity Church in Copley Square failed to recharge the soil around the building. The water sank below the tops of the four thousand pilings supporting the vast tower of red granite that loomed over the square.
But Trinity was in no danger. When the water fell to a certain significant point a buzzer sounded. At once the alert building manager began pumping Boston water to recharge the basin beneath the building and supply the loss. The water bill of Trinity Church rose astronomically, and the members of the vestry were dismayed.
The building manager was called in to explain the problem. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what else can we do? Surely you don’t want the pilings to dry out?”
“No, indeed,” said the rector, looking around the table and raising a mollifying hand. “May I make a motion of confidence in our manager’s decision to continue drawing water at the present rate? All in favor say aye.”
Other building managers and superintendents and janitors throughout the Back Bay were similarly alarmed. They acted at once, summoning from the water mains of the city of Boston enough to supply their needs. The churches were quick to do the same—Emmanuel, Advent, Annunciation, Old South, First Baptist, First Lutheran, the Church of the Covenant, First and Second Unitarian-Universalist. The hotels too called for more—the Copley Plaza and the Ritz.
Sixty miles away the Quabbin Reservoir sank an inch or two, as millions of gallons of water poured through the tunnel every day, running downhill through dirt and rock, under field, farm and forest, all the way to Boston.
Only the filled land under the Church of the Commonwealth went unsupplied with fresh gushes of underground water. Below the parish office building and below the four great piers of the tower, the water table shared the moisture of the buildings west of it, but under the sanctuary it sloped steeply downward to the east. The throbbing pump in the excavation across the street drew down the water further.
The pump had been forgotten. Lawsuits were holding up construction. One day a car pulled up beside the excavation. A court hack jumped out, skidded down the slope and handed the job engineer an order to cease and desist. The engineer looked at the piece of paper, threw up his hands, bellowed at the crane operator and the guy working the power shovel to get the hell home, leaped into his car and careened away from the curb and the excavation and the whole job of building a five-story hotel with Georgian exterior and luxury interior fittings, raced home and burst in on his wife, fuming and steaming, to find her in flagrante with his best friend, and in the succeeding uproar and confusion the little matter of the necessity of turning off the sump pump under the excavation at the corner of Commonwealth and Clarendon utterly vanished from his mind.
The neglected pump had long since sucked the excavation dry. Now it was pumping groundwater, relentlessly draining the saturated soil at level four, sending the water pulsing into a pipe to be carried by way of the West Side Interceptor to a pumping station and a treatment plant and eventual discharge into Boston Harbor. It was gone for good.
CHAPTER 7
How many sorts of deaths are in our bodies? Nothing is therein but death.
Martin Luther
James Castle was saying goodbye to one thing after another. He walked around the music room and looked for the last time at the pictures on the wall, the photographs of former choir directors and organists. His own teacher, the celebrated Harold Oates, had performed only once in the Church of the Commonwealth (once had been enough), but Castle had hung his picture on the wall with the others. It was a surprisingly respectable side view. The savage glitter of the eyes was not visible. The muttered obscenities had not been recorded.
Goodbye, Oates. Goodbye, all the rest of you. Castle walked out into the hall. At once he encountered Edith Frederick.
She was not someone to be dismissed with a passing nod. Edith was responsib
le for the new organ, for the paid soloists in his choir, for the fact that his income as director of church music was the largest east of the Rocky Mountains.
Her ignorance was the cross he had to bear. Edith’s late husband had been the great appreciator, the lover of sacred music, but unfortunately he was dead and gone. He had left to his wife the distribution of the largesse from the Frederick Music Endowment. Edith was generous and open-handed. She was also tone-deaf and musically illiterate.
Today, as always, he bent the knee. “Good morning, Edith. You look like a rose this morning.” It was a fawning remark, and Castle cursed his habit of speaking in this way to Mrs. Frederick. The truth was, the woman seemed particularly hollow-cheeked and old today, in spite of her smart pink jacket with its silver buttons.
Edith Frederick dismissed the compliment. She knew the cruel effect of the sunshine raking down on her wrinkled face from the skylight overhead. She was always intensely conscious of the direction of the light. Thank you, dear hostess, but I won’t sit on the sofa beside the lamp. I’d prefer this straight-backed chair facing the window.
She looked at Castle reproachfully. “Oh, Jim, is it true you’re taking a holiday? You’re going off at once without warning, at a time like this? What about all the Christmas services we’ve planned?”
Feebly Castle flapped his hands. “I’m sorry, Edith. It isn’t a holiday. My mother’s ill. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it.” Edith’s sorrow was not the sympathetic kind but the disappointed-in-you kind.
“I wish I could help you find some interim people. There are plenty of good ones—some of my students, Alan Starr, Barbara Inch, Pip Tower. It’s too bad Rosie Hall has disappeared. She was the best of all. But I can recommend all the rest. I leave it up to you.” Castle pressed Edith’s hand and hurried away down the hall to say goodbye to Martin Kraeger.
Edith’s smile faded. It had once been famous for its charm—I’m smiling because nothing terrible has ever happened to me, and I’m rich and I’m young and I’ve just bought a Jacobean table. Now it was a muscular act of will—I smile, although my husband died choking on a chicken bone and I suffer from angina pectoris and my old friends are disappearing one by one.
Looking up at the skylight, Edith put her hands to her ravaged cheeks.
Martin Kraeger’s study was a handsome chamber, adorned by the church architect of 1887 with oak panelling, an elaborate marble fireplace and a niche carved with a scallop shell. The niche had once contained a bust of Christ with his eyes rolled skyward. Now a computer was wedged into it, a lump of gray plastic below the shining cherry of the fluted shell. There had been no other place to put it because the massive furniture in Kraeger’s study took such a lot of room—the immense sofa and six sanctimonious chairs crowned with ogee arches and finials. They had once graced the Tremont Street study of the blessed Wigglesworth, who was said to have arisen from naps on the sofa in a state of rapturous grace.
As a chamber for the present pastor of the Church of the Commonwealth, the room was certainly dignified enough. It would have been still more exalted if Loretta Fawcett had not dumped a lot of ecclesiastical desiderata here and there, boxes of sermons and orders of service she ought to have filed away long ago.
And there were gifts from grateful parishioners—a pale watercolor by one of the deacons, said to represent the Church of the Commonwealth, and a wall-hanging made of string, weeds, and puffs of rabbit fur created by Joyce Pinwick, the director of the church school. Often the rabbit fur floated free and got up Kraeger’s nose. The sofa was piled with homemade pillows, mostly the work of Loretta Fawcett, but one was a needlepoint masterpiece by Edith Frederick.
Another was an anomaly, a pink satin sacred heart, the work of an elderly confused parishioner who misunderstood the differences in the sacred articles of faith among the various orders of the Catholic Church and the doctrines of a multitude of Protestant denominations.
Perhaps the Church of the Commonwealth was confused in the same way. Newcomers would often inquire, “What kind of church is this anyway?” and then the old hands would say, “Well, it’s sort of this and that.” Before long the new people got used to it, and soon they too were saying to puzzled visitors, “It’s this and that. It’s kind of this and that.”
Officially the church was nondenominational. Kraeger himself picked and chose from a broad spectrum, faithful to no single orthodoxy. He believed in a historical Jesus rather than a divine one. Even so, some of the more liberal members of his congregation were dissatisfied with his reverence for the moral genius of the man, and they were uncomfortable with the intensity of his feeling about the tragedy of the crucifixion. Whenever he brought it up, they nudged each other in their pews and whispered, “There he goes again.”
Kraeger’s personal view of humankind was dark. For him the crucifixion was not a single event but a paradigm of the fate forever awaiting the good and the brave. Perhaps there was something to be said after all for the doctrine of human depravity.
But his aspect was cheerful. In choosing one path over another, day after day, one moment to the next, he felt free of doubt. His faith permitted him to be careless and easy in all he said and did. His pessimism about humanity was not evident in his public person, which was loud, confident, hearty, affectionate and ironical. His pain over his part in the death of the sexton he now kept to himself, making a private penance by turning over a portion of his income to a shelter for homeless people on Kansas Street.
“There’s no evidence it was your fault,” Homer Kelly had said. It was true that Homer wasn’t an official member of any police force; he wasn’t even a private investigator. He was a professor of American Literature at Harvard. But he had once been a lieutenant detective in the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Somehow he had awed the arson squad—with his colorful reputation and his extravagant way of speaking—into accepting his whimsical judgment. Not your fault, he had said. Kraeger did not feel absolved. The weight on his soul was permanent, one more proof of the failure of his personal life.
Kraeger’s marriage had been his principal mistake. He had married impulsively, attaching himself to a foolish woman who sued him for divorce shortly after the birth of their daughter Pansy, who was now four years old. His confidence in his power to attract a woman more suitable than Kay Kraeger was zero.
In person Martin Kraeger was heavyset and homely, with jowls and small piglike eyes. But ugliness liberates. He could be friendly with women without causing hearts to beat, without arousing that flutter of feminine devotion so typical of congregations circulating around a single dominant male. He seldom went so far as to embrace members of his congregation in that ceremony of hugging that was now correct pastoral etiquette, and yet the intensity of his engulfing interest often gave his parishioners the sense of being wrapped in a mighty bearlike clasp, eaten up and swallowed whole.
When James Castle walked into Kraeger’s study, he found him on his knees, going through the cardboard boxes on the floor of his closet. Somewhere in this swarm of shifting papers were the documents divorcing Martin Kraeger from his ex-wife. He had to find them because Kay was making silly demands that were surely not part of their legal agreement.
He sprang to his feet and shook Castle’s hand. “Jim, I never thanked you for sticking up for me about the fire.”
“I was just saying what I thought. Your cigarettes didn’t have anything to do with it. When we left the church that night there wasn’t any smoldering cigarette on the floor or anywhere else.”
“The trouble is, I can’t remember what I did with the stubs. Did I grind them out on the floor? I don’t think I would have done that. I probably rubbed them out on the sole of my shoe, but I’m not absolutely positive. Filthy habit. Thank God I’ve given it up.”
“Look, it’s all over now. I just came in to say goodbye. I’m leaving this afternoon. My mother’s condition keeps getting worse. Actually this is a good ti
me for me to be gone, while Alan voices the pipes. It takes months.”
“Do you mean the organ can’t be used for months?”
“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. Whenever he finishes one rank of pipes, it will be available. You’ll have to hire a substitute for Sunday services. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” Castle took a step forward, and put his hand on Kraeger’s arm. His voice was constricted. “It’s been a great thing in my life, Martin, making music to go with those good words of yours.”
“For me too. You know that. And there’s plenty more to come. Hurry back.” Kraeger watched with surprise as Castie walked out, blowing his nose. Why was the man so worked up? Well, his mother was at death’s door, why shouldn’t he be worked up? Then Kraeger found himself thinking uncharitably that if Castle’s mother was his own mother, he wouldn’t be sorry she was ill, he’d be intensely relieved. On the one occasion when they had met, the woman had not impressed him favorably, to put it mildly.
It was just last fall. He had made the mistake of dropping in on Castle the day after Thanksgiving without warning. Castle lived at a classy address on Beacon Hill. Martin found it, and pressed the bell. At once he wished he hadn’t. There were wild screams within. They stopped, and after a moment Castle opened the door, his face pale, his pinkish-gray hair standing up around his freckled bald head. Angry faces filled the background. Mumbling with embarrassment, Castle introduced his relatives—a brother, a couple of uncles, a mother, and a feeble-looking younger sister lying on a sofa under a blanket. They all stared blankly at Martin, and muttered something as he nodded amiably at each of them in turn. All except the mother, whose response to his extended hand was to turn around rudely and show her back.