Divine Inspiration

by Jane Langton

  But this morning she had foiled an intruder. She had done one good deed this day. For once her occupation seemed more like the humane and compassionate calling she had expected it to be in the beginning.

  CHAPTER 16

  The world remains the world it was thousands of years ago; that is, the spouse of the devil.

  Martin Luther

  Homer studied the blue pages in the Boston telephone book, then dialed a number.

  “’Vestigative Services,” said a bored voice on the line.

  “Department of Missing Persons?”

  “Jussamin’.”

  It took Homer three tries, two transfers to other departments, one disconnected line, one wrong number, and four long pauses while he was batted around from one reluctant departmental employee to another, until at last a certain Lieutenant Middleton accepted the responsibility for knowing something about the disappearance of Rosalind Hall.

  “You a relative?” said Lieutenant Middleton.

  “No, but I’m looking into the case. My name’s Homer Kelly.”

  “Homer Kelly?” Lieutenant Middleton sounded interested at once. “Oh, sure, I heard of you. What can I do for you, Mr. Kelly?”

  “Well, I just wondered if you’ve made any progress in finding Rosalind’s whereabouts?”

  “I’ll be honest with you. We’ve been so busy with the Cheese case, we haven’t had much time for anything else.”

  “The cheese case? You’ve got a runaway cheese?”

  “You know, Roberta Cheese, her case.”

  “Roberta Cheese?”

  “The movie star. You mean you never heard of Roberta Cheese? Christ, where you been? Didn’t you see the story on TV last week? She disappeared from Boston Common. They were shooting on Boston Common, this big Hollywood director, and all of a sudden their big star turns up missing.”

  “So you’ve been working on that, instead of on the disappearance of Rosalind Hall?”

  “Well, Christ, the mayor’s on our back. If we don’t find her, the whole city looks bad on the national news. Everybody in the country, they’re all following the case. God, Roberta Cheese disappears and it lands in our laps!”

  “Mmmm, yes, I see. But Rosalind—”

  “She wasn’t kidnapped anyway. She probably left voluntarily. Ninety-eight percent of missing persons turn up someplace, they left on their own hook, they aren’t missing at all.”

  “But what about the blood? It was her blood, right? That’s what they found out. And some of her hair was in it, so she must have suffered a head wound.”

  “Oh, sure, but she probably slipped and fell, then got up and walked out. She packed a suitcase, right? Because there isn’t any luggage in her closet, although that old lady in the house claims she had some, and she told us some of the clothes are gone. I don’t know why we should spend our time looking for a woman who walked out on her own baby.”

  “What about her friends? Did you talk to any of her friends?”

  “Oh, sure. Well, I mean, we talked to the old lady in the building. I told you, with this big Hollywood case—”

  “The Big Cheese case. I see. Well, thank you, Lieutenant Middleton.”

  Homer put down the phone and looked out the window at the frozen surface of Fair Haven Bay. There had been perfect skating on black ice ever since Christmas, as the cold continued and the snow held off. Yesterday he had skated upriver with Mary all the way to Framingham. Now he went looking for his wife, depressed by the exigencies of political life in the city of Boston.

  “Well, of course I’ve heard of Roberta Cheese,” said Mary. “Homer, where have you been? She ran off with her publicist last week, everybody knows that.”

  “She ran off with her—? You mean she didn’t just disappear?”

  “Well, her publicist disappeared at the same time, and his wife is hopping mad. It’s common knowledge.”

  “Then why is Missing Persons so wrought up? Oh, well, never mind. Listen, those people didn’t even bother to talk to anybody who knew Rosie Hall. So I’ve got to do it. Alan gave me a list. I’ve got an appointment with Barbara Inch. Want to come along?”

  Barbara Inch waited for Homer in her apartment on Marlborough Street. It was a small apartment, dark and bleak, giving on the alley at the rear of the house. Even so, Barbara could not have afforded it without a roommate to share the expenses. Roommates were transitory and various, and sometimes infuriating, but there was no help for it. Barbara put up with them, doing her share of the housekeeping without complaint.

  She had been on her own for years. Her parents had paid for her education at the Conservatory and then they had quietly died, leaving her to fend for herself. For a while Barbara had worked as a nurse’s aide, and then she had found a part-time job teaching music in a private school. Last year her troubles had seemed to be over when she was hired as organist and choir director at the Church of the Annunciation.

  But she had just been fired. When the phone rang, Barbara tried to get her voice under control before murmuring a choked hello.

  It was Alan Starr. “Am I calling at a bad time? You sound as if you’ve been crying.”

  “Me, crying? The Inch family never cries.”

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  “It’s okay. The truth is, I’ve lost my job at Annunciation.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. What happened?”

  “Incorrigible behavior.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Barbara, what did you do this time?”

  “Failed to show respect for the assistant rector, not to mention to Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Mr. Binnacle turned around and caught me genuflecting when he was genuflecting.”

  “Good grief, during a service?”

  “No, no, it was just a rehearsal for the first Sunday after Epiphany, but it was in front of the whole choir, accompanied by various titterings, gigglings, chucklings and other misdemeanors. I admit it was disrespectful, but he’s such a pompous ass.”

  “Well, look, don’t worry. They’re having auditions for Castle’s job. They need a substitute while he’s away.”

  “No kidding? Well, I’ll try, but Pip Tower will get it. He’s better than I am.”

  “Well, try anyway. Oh, Barbara—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sort of interested in trying to find out what happened to Rosalind Hall. You knew her, right? Could you tell me about her? I mean—like, I never met her. People kept telling me I ought to, but I never did.”

  “She knew about you.”

  “Well, that’s because we were supposed to have had a date once. My sister arranged it—you know my sister Betsy—but Rosie got sick, or at least that’s what she said, so I told Betsy to forget it.”

  Barbara’s voice grew animated. “You know, that’s just like Henry James. He wrote a story, ‘The Friends of the Friends.’ This man and woman are always being told they should meet each other, and their friends make arrangements but they never work out, and then she dies, only she comes back after death to get a good look at him. It’s one of his ghost stories.”

  Alan shivered. “That’s a very sad story.”

  “Oh, there’s the doorbell. I have to go.”

  Alan had wanted to ask more questions about Rosie, but now he was glad to hang up. The ghost story had chilled him to the bone. “Well, thanks. So long.”

  Barbara slammed a door on her roommate’s unmade bed, hurried out into the hall and looked over the railing, half expecting to find a private eye from the movies climbing the stairs, a short thickset character in a fedora with a cigarette dangling from his lips. She was surprised to see instead a very tall man and woman ascending the last flight of steps. They had middle-aged faces and scholarly-looking spectacles.

  The man was out of breath. “Ms. Inch?—Homer Kelly here—I’ve brought along—my wife Mary.”

  Barbara sat them down on her two butterfly chairs and pulled up a folding chair for herself. She hoped her eyes didn’t show she had been crying. “What can I tell you about Rosie? I r
eally want to help.”

  Homer folded one long leg over the other. “Your friend Alan Starr gave us your name. He said you knew more about Rosalind than anyone else.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve just been talking to Alan. You people are working together?”

  Homer tried to organize his arms and legs in the butterfly chair. “That’s right,” he said, rocking back dangerously. The chair tipped sideways. Mary lunged, the chair tipped back again, and Homer continued with dignified aplomb, “All we know is that she was an organist, a widow with a young child. She rented rooms to students in a house she inherited from her parents, next to the Church of the Commonwealth. Anything else you can tell us about Rosie would be helpful.”

  Barbara looked down at her clasped hands. “I feel awfully guilty about her. She was one of my closest friends, but I confess I hadn’t seen her for several months before she disappeared. Not since the fire, in fact. I can’t remember anything after that. Oh, I should have gone to see her. She was housebound with the baby. I was busy with my job, but I should have made time somehow.”

  “The fire? You saw her at the fire in the church last spring?”

  “Oh, yes, I did. Well, everybody in the neighborhood was there. We heard the sirens, my roommate and I, and we saw the red sky to the south, so we got dressed and ran over there.” Barbara shook her head in sickened recollection of the noise, the confusion, the blocked street, the police barriers, the crowds, the fire trucks, the hoses lying everywhere, the firefighters silhouetted against the flames. “Have you ever seen a big fire? Well, it seemed thrilling at first, all those really brave firemen going into the burning building to make sure nobody was inside. But poor Martin Kraeger, they had to hold him back. He kept trying to go in too. His face, you could see it so clearly in the light of the fire.” Barbara closed her eyes, remembering the anguish on Kraeger’s face. “And then, oh God, they brought out the sexton.”

  “He was dead?” said Mary Kelly.

  “Oh, he was dead, all right, a blackened body on a stretcher. They covered him with a rubber tarp right away, but we’d all seen it. It’s something I wish I could forget. That’s when I noticed Rosie. She was standing in front of her house with the baby in her arms, wearing a coat over her nightgown. Her face was—well, it was terrible, just like Kraeger’s. I saw her try to get closer, holding the baby, but they wouldn’t let her through. There were all these people crowding in, wanting to see, and the fire chief yelled at them and the ambulance pulled up, and I tried to get to Rosie, but the police barriers were in the way and I couldn’t reach her.” Barbara’s voice shook. “I should have called her next day, but I didn’t. I was busy, preparing for a concert. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Who else was there?” murmured Homer. “What about James Castle? He should have been as upset as Reverend Kraeger. It was Kraeger’s church that was going up in flames, but it was Castle’s organ.”

  Barbara smiled bitterly. “Jim Castle? You don’t understand. He got a brand new one out of the fire, that wonderful new tracker organ from Marblehead. He should have been dancing with glee. But he wasn’t there. At least I didn’t see him. I didn’t recognize anybody but Rosie and Mr. Kraeger.”

  Mary Kelly sat back quietly while Homer asked question after question. She was interested in the look of Barbara Inch, the long brown hair hooked behind the ears, the owlish glasses, the long lank shape under the loose dress, the refusal to prettify. There were things one could do with the woman—one could cut her hair, try different sorts of clothes and throw away those big flat sandals.

  But why interfere? She was all right as she was, with a keen edge like a well-sharpened tool. Let her alone.

  CHAPTER 17

  The word of God … meets the children of Ephraim like a bear in the way and a lioness in the woods.

  Martin Luther

  It was Alan Starr’s turn to play the midday Friday concert at Trinity Church in Copley Square.

  The electropneumatic organ was not to his taste, although it was an enormous one with seven thousand pipes. The console had a place of honor at one side of the broad chancel, below Henry Hobson Richardson’s golden walls and arching golden heavens. Beyond the chancel rose the massive piers supporting the giant tower. The decoration of the church was a combination of Byzantine mosaic and painted stencilling and sumptuous frescoes and brilliant stained glass, with a superimposed touch of Art Deco. Alan could never make up his mind whether it was a magnificent masterpiece or just plain awful. Its reputation was too august to question, its effect on the beholder too intimidating. BLESSING AND HONOUR AND GLORY AND POWER, thundered a legend high on the wall.

  Now, sitting on the organ bench, Alan felt giddy, poised all alone in shimmering air. Beyond the railing he could see the entire audience, a slim scattering in a forest of oaken pews. In the last decade of the twentieth century few people attended organ concerts but other organists. All Alan’s friends were there—Pip Tower, Barbara Inch, Peggy Throstle, Martha Moore and Jack Newcomb—and some of the older professionals—Arthur Washington, Melanie Chick, Gilda Honeycutt.

  And as always in the wintertime, a few street people had come in out of the cold. Alan was amused to see the three dingy derelicts he had met the other day in the company of little Charley—Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom was asleep, Dick was crouched over a comic book, Harry sat with bowed head.

  Alan played Buxtehude and Franck. The thick, muffled quality of the organ was fine for the Franck, less fine for the Buxtehude, but the audience applauded politely as he finished the concert and came forward to the chancel rail to bow.

  Then his friends walked up the chancel steps and clustered around the organ to praise his performance. “How’s the job search coming?” said Alan, making polite conversation with Pip Tower. “Are you still working at that hospital?”

  Pip looked grave. “Oh, sure. I’m a lowly hospital orderly. I deliver X rays, I wash mattresses upon which people have gone to a better world, I bathe dead bodies. Super. And I just started working in a copy center at night.” He brightened. “I heard about the interim job at Commonwealth. I understand there’ll be auditions.”

  “That’s right,” said Barbara Inch. “I’m going to try out too, but you’re a shoo-in. The rest of us haven’t got a chance.”

  Pip looked at Alan anxiously. “What do you know about the committee?”

  “Well, I suppose Mrs. Frederick’s in charge.”

  “Oh, Jesus, she doesn’t know a fucking thing about music. What about you? Are you going to audition?”

  “Me?” Alan laughed. “And compete with you? Heck, no. I’d have to be out of my mind.”

  Barbara and Pip drifted away. Everyone else had vanished too. The vast acreage of pews was empty. Alan gathered up his music, but as he slid off the bench and stood up, he was surprised to find the man who called himself Harry slouching against the wall behind him.

  He looked worse than ever. He had pulled off his knitted cap, and his thin hair stood straight up on end. His eyes were bleary and cunning. “You can do better than that,” he said. “The registration on the Buxtehude, it was pure shit.”

  He lunged forward and switched on the organ. Alan looked on, flabbergasted, as Harry sat down and fumbled with the stops. He played a chord, and a threadlike Dulciana spiraled out of the organ and floated in a delicate veil over the dark spaces of the church.

  Stunned, Alan listened as the gray man with the ruined face ran through the Buxtehude, then launched into a Bach fugue. His feet raced over the pedals in a monumental walking bass, and then with a surging combination of reed stops, his hands gave chase.

  His touch was faultless. Without the evidence of his eyes Alan would have thought he was listening to James Castle’s perfection of pace and sparkling clarity. But here there was something more, something unleashed, something transfigured, something free and wild.

  The last measures crashed out of the pipes and ricocheted from the golden walls and the mosaics of prophets and the glassy surfaces of the w
indows and the lofty curvatures of the barrel vaults, and died away at last after seven long seconds.

  Awestruck, Alan leaned toward Harry and whispered, “What did you say your name was?”

  Harry turned off the organ. The pneumatic wind died down. His small red eyes glanced at Alan, then darted away. “Oates,” muttered Harry. “Harold Oates. You might have heard of me.”

  Alan gasped. “Oates, Harold Oates? But I thought you were—?”

  “Dead?” Oates laughed. “Well, you’re right. I died a long time ago. What you see before you is a stinking corpse.” Sliding off the bench, he stood up.

  Tom and Dick appeared from nowhere. “Don’t he play good?” said Dick.

  “Gawd!” said Tom.

  “AA, that’s what done it,” said Dick. “You should’ve seen him, last year when he first come. Welfare sent him. Tanked.” Dick waved his hand. “Tanked up to here. Really stewed. Tom, he brought him in.” Dick clapped Tom on the back. “Of course Tom’s mostly half-pissed himself.”

  “Right,” said Tom. “Gawd!”

  “But where have you been?” said Alan. “It must be twenty years since—you know, since you were giving regular concerts.”

  “Dead,” said Oates again. “I told you.” He turned away and moved down the chancel steps with Dick and Tom.

  Alan leaned over the railing. “How can I get in touch with you? Where do you live?”

  “Among the lilies,” snarled Oates.

  CHAPTER 18

  I hold the gnashing of teeth of the damned to be … despair, when men see themselves abandoned by God.

  Martin Luther

  H is mother confronted him at the door. You’d think she couldn’t always manage to be right there at the door when he came in, but she always was. Behind her at the end of the hall his sister huddled in her wheelchair, her eyes closed.

  His mother began complaining at once. “Sonny, you’ve got to take over. I’ve got to get out of here, just for an hour.”