by Jane Langton
CHAPTER 37
God has his measuring lines and his canons, called the Ten Commandments; they are written in our flesh and blood.
Martin Luther
“Okay, little guy, come to Daddy.” Charley stumbled across the rug and fell against Alan’s knees. His cheeks were sticky with strawberry jam. Some of it stuck to Alan’s trousers. “Hey, watch it there, kid. These are my best pants. Come on, little guy, time for your nap.”
While Charley was sleeping, Alan took Rosie’s notebook out of the drawer and started another page.
I bought Charley a toy xylophone, and he really whacks it. I play it too, and give him concerts. His favorite is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Rosie, where are you?
At once he erased the last sentence, but it had been ringing in his head. He put down the notebook and called Homer Kelly, struck with an idea.
“Homer’s not here,” said Mary. “He’s teaching today. Can I help?”
“It’s just that I’ve been wondering whether Rosie might have been calling the Department of Social Services to find out where Charley is. It’s something Mrs. Barker said, the social worker. She said he was strangely popular—that’s what she said. I wondered if they’ve been getting queries about him, and she’s stalled them off the way she did me.”
“I see. You’re assuming Rosie is a good mother and wants him back. But don’t forget, it’s possible she just went off and left him in the lurch, and then somebody faked her death in that car, and now she’s got a whole new life someplace else, and doesn’t give a damn about Charley.”
Alan was startled by the strength of his answer: “No, no!”
“Well, I don’t think so either, but perhaps you and I are just being sentimental. Tell you what, I’ll call that woman, what’s her name? Mrs. Barker, and ask her if anybody’s been inquiring after Charley’s whereabouts.”
“Good for you, that’s great. Call me back. I’m at Rosie’s apartment with Charley. Do you know the number?”
Mary wrote it down, then got to work at once.
Mrs. Barker’s voice on the line was brisk. “Department of Social Services, Marilynne Barker speaking.”
“Mrs. Barker, my name’s Mary Kelly. My husband and I are working with the police department on the case of Rosalind Hall, whose infant son is in foster care under the auspices of your department. We—”
“Oh, no, not another call about Charley Hall!”
“Oh, you’ve had other calls?”
Mrs. Barker fumed. “Yes, we’ve had other calls, and I’m getting sick and tired of it. Oh, your stories are very clever, I must say, but you will not worm his whereabouts out of me.”
Mary stared at the buzzing phone. She called Alan. “She hung up on me, but I gather she’s had a number of inquiries about Charley, somebody wanting to know where he is, telling different stories. She thought I was another one.”
“But that’s good. Why would anybody but his mother want to know where to find him?”
“Well, all right, but why doesn’t she just say she’s his mother? Why the vanishing and pretending to die in a burning car?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why in the hell.”
It was time to take Charley home. Alan raced him across the Public Garden and up Beacon Hill, and handed him over to Debbie Buffington. Afterward, slipping and sliding back to the Church of the Commonwealth, he was pleased to see a truck double-parked in the street, unloading the sixteen-foot pipes, which had come at last from Marblehead.
Harold Oates was taking charge. “The thirty-two-footers are still missing, damn them. They won’t get here until next month.”
“Next month? God, I’ve promised to have the organ completed by Easter Sunday, all tuned and voiced and ready for the Bach Passacaglia.”
“Hey, fella,” said the driver of the truck, “how about taking the other end?” Alan grasped one end of a pipe tray and backed up as the driver slid it off the end of the truck.
Oates looked on, grinning. He was sporting a suede coat with a fur collar. The price tag hung from one sleeve. “That low C in the Passacaglia, it’ll give those bloody Christians a thrill.”
Alan glanced at him, then almost dropped his end of the pipe tray. There were still ugly black gaps in Oates’s teeth.
“Hey, watch it,” said the truck driver.
“Oh, sorry.” Alan backed up the church steps. “Hey, Harold, what about your teeth? You were going to get your teeth fixed.”
Oates made a grotesque face. “Fucking teeth.” Then he cackled and made a joke about the old lady who had only two teeth in her head, but thank God they met.
“But what happened? We made an appointment with Dr. Slot. He was going to put in temporary substitutes while the new ones were being made.”
“Bunch of bullshit, you ask me,” muttered Oates, hunching his head down into his fur collar.
“Oh, God,” said Alan, holding the door of the church open with his shoulder. “Sometimes, Mr. Oates—” He backed his end of the pipe tray through the door and left the sentence hanging.
Oates came in too, grinning sheepishly, his mouth full of godawful holes.
To Alan’s surprise he found Pip Tower waiting for him in the balcony. “Oh, hi,” said Alan, embarrassed. He hadn’t talked to Pip since their painful telephone conversation after the auditions.
But Pip had come back to help with the voicing. Shamefacedly he admitted needing the money. “I’m sorry about what I said. I was pretty goddamn awful.”
“No, no, it’s okay. Oh, say, Pip, have you met Harold Oates? Harold, this is Philip Tower, another student of Jim Castle’s.”
“How do you do, Mr. Oates,” said Pip smoothly, shaking Oates’s hand.
Once again Oates displayed the holes in his yellow teeth in a hideous smile.
Next day Alan made a visit to the office of Dr. Roderick Slot. It was on the first floor of a handsome brick building on Dartmouth Street, adorned with patterned brick and jutting bays. In the waiting room Alan was confronted at once by the secretary-receptionist. She glowered at him. “Do you have an appointment?”
He recognized her at once as the dragon he had encountered so frequently in offices, libraries, schools and buses. Men or women, they were all the same dragon, with clawed bat wings and leathery scales. Her desk was a fortress between him and the dentist. Alan could see Dr. Slot in the next room, bent over a supine figure who had his hands clasped on his chest like a deceased person in a funeral parlor. “Can you tell me what happened to the appointment for Harold Oates? He was to have three crowns fitted last week.”
The dragon glared at him. Little streams of smoke leaked from her reptilian jaw. “We received no prepayment. The appointment was cancelled.”
“But the check was mailed to you. Mr. Kraeger told me he sent it. Reverend Kraeger from the Church of the Commonwealth, he sent you a check for nine hundred and fifty dollars.”
Sparks flashed from the hooded eyes. “Young man, do you doubt my word?”
“Why, no, but there must be some mistake. Never mind, we’ll just make another appointment.”
“Until we receive an advance payment that will be impossible.”
“But we could at least make the appointment. There’s been some silly mistake.”
The dragon reared up on her hind legs and flapped her wings. Flame shot from her forked tongue and seven rows of long sharp teeth. “Out,” she said, pointing at the door with one claw. “Out, out.”
The dentist looked up from his patient and met Alan’s eyes. No message passed between them. The dentist looked down again, and Alan left the office of Roderick Slot, Doctor of Dental Surgery, driven from the field of battle by Mrs. Eloise Drathmore, Dragon First Class.
In the Church of the Commonwealth Donald Woody was shutting up shop, taking a last look around before turning the building over to the night sexton.
In the vestibule some of the new pipes still lay in their boxes, ready to be carried up to the organ in the morning. He glan
ced into the sanctuary, where the evening light slanted through the Burning Bush window above the balcony and fell on the picture of Reverend Wigglesworth on the east wall. The picture was crooked.
Woody wandered down the aisle and shifted it so that it hung straight. Then he saw with dismay why it had tipped to one side. There was a crack running up the wall. There had been other cracks, and he had repaired them carefully, using patching plaster and taking a lot of trouble to match the paint exactly. This time he vowed to replaster the whole wall, perhaps the entire sanctuary.
Alan Starr would be pleased. He’d been calling for it, because the present coating of plaster was filled with nineteenth-century horsehair. “It’s terrible,” he said. “It sops up the sound. It’s like acoustic tile, the way it deadens the reverberation. They’ve got it in King’s Chapel too. Big mistake.”
The picture was again at a little angle from the vertical. Woody straightened it. Reverend Wigglesworth looked back at him vaguely, clutching his book. The gold letters of the title, Divine Inspiration, glimmered in the last rays of the afternoon sun.
CHAPTER 38
The church is more torn and tattered than a beggar’s cloak.
Martin Luther
Alan burst into Kraeger’s office. “It’s Oates. He still hasn’t had his teeth fixed.”
“He hasn’t?” Kraeger was sick of hearing about Harold Oates. “But I sent them a check.”
“That gruesome woman in the dentist’s office, she says they never got it. Maybe it was lost in the mail. Are you sure you sent it to Dr. Slot?”
Kraeger stared at Alan, then sagged in his chair. “No, I didn’t send it to Dr. Slot. I sent it to somebody called Dora O’Doyle on Kansas Street.” The miserable sequence replayed itself in his memory—the call from Slot’s office while Oates lay listening on the sofa, the sly exit of Oates, the call from Dora O’Doyle. “Oh, my God, it was Oates, he did it. He diddled me. He called this woman O’Doyle and had her call me back and say she was doing the billing for Dr. Slot. She must be his girlfriend. Oh, lord, I should have seen through it. What an asshole I am.” As a clergyman Kraeger had never used the word asshole before, but this was as dumb a thing as he had ever done, and it called for a new grasp on profanity.
Alan sank down on one of the huge chairs. “So Oates got the money, damn him. I notice he’s been buying himself a whole ghastly new wardrobe. And Dr. Slot still wants his nine hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I’ll pay it myself,” said Kraeger. “No point trying to explain it to Ken Possett. If he hears what happened, I’ll be out on my ear. They’d hire some certified public accountant to occupy the pulpit.”
“Look, I’ll chip in. But Christ, it’s only the first installment. There’ll be more to come.”
“Good Lord.” Kraeger thought about his dwindling savings account. The Church of the Commonwealth paid him a good salary, partly because it was a prosperous church with a large congregation, partly because propriety required his income to equal that of the director of music, so amply rewarded by the Frederick Music Endowment. But the shrewd divorce lawyer hired by his ex-wife had conned Martin Kraeger out of two-thirds of it, and his own rash charitable impulses often left him short. How would he pay for a new set of teeth for this musical shark, Harold Oates?
From the music room down the hall they could hear the choir beginning to work on the music for Good Friday. “That’s good, sopranos,” cried Barbara Inch, “but remember, don’t breathe except at the holds.”
“What if I faint?” gasped Betty Finch.
“No problem. Just lie down quietly and crawl out of sight. Now turn to page one-forty, We have no king but Caesar.”
CHAPTER 39
… as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom … before the creation of the world.
Goethe, on the music of Bach
Harold Oates’s temporary teeth were installed by a dental surgeon in Cambridge on a rush-rush basis just in time for his concert in the Church of the Commonwealth. They were only plastic, but they filled in the gaps while gold and porcelain were molded by a dental sculptor in Allston. Oates’s smile was dazzling, a flash of yellow and white.
Alan came to the concert early, and looked over the organ. It was as ready as he could make it. He turned it on, then stood back to wait for Oates, looking with pride at the manuals with their white and black keys, the panels of stop knobs, the curving arc of pedals, the facade pipes with their bronze patina. In the last week he had tuned and voiced the sixteen-foot Double Trumpet rank in the Great division. Only the sixteen-foot pedal Trombone remained in the Pedal division, and of course the thirty-two-foot Contra Bombarde, if it should ever arrive.
When Oates turned up, he was wearing a sharp new suit. That nine hundred and fifty dollars is going fast, thought Alan, resenting the rent he was paying for Oates’s room on Worthington Street. “Are you nervous?” he asked Oates.
Oates pretended to be insulted. “Me, nervous? Harold Oates nervous?” But he grinned at Alan and pulled out the DIV INSP stop knob. “No harm in calling on a higher power.”
“Look, the place is filling up,” murmured Alan, glancing over the balcony railing. “Look at your audience.”
“Screw the audience,” said Oates. He was polite to Barbara Inch and Martin Kraeger when they came up to wish him well, but he frowned at Edith Frederick. “I need,” he told her, “a moment of prayerful repose.”
“Oh, of course!” said Edith, and dithered down the stairs.
“Stupid old bitch,” muttered Oates, unwrapping a stick of gum.
Alan shuddered. “For Christ’s sake, Mr. Oates, don’t insult Mrs. Frederick. She’s the one who got all these people here. It’s the biggest audience I’ve ever seen.”
Oates sneered. “I have performed,” he said, “in St. Peter’s Basilica to crowds stretching as far as the eye could see.” Then putting the stick of gum in his mouth, he began to play.
It was Bach’s chorale prelude on Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress.” At once Alan forgot his resentment and forgave Oates all his sins. Out of the man’s profane heart poured strength and grandeur, power and might, filling the huge chamber with solemn beats of four, great columns towering to the vaults above, thundering in the floor below. All that was random and disordered in the life of Harold Oates was contradicted by these hammer blows of structure, tremendous undergirding pedal notes, THUS and THUS and THUS, while the scrambling rush of sixteenths thronged above them helter-skelter.
Alan flipped the pages for Oates and pulled out the stops, while through his head coursed the words of the hymn about the bulwark of God’s power against the prince of darkness. In Oates’s playing there was indeed something demonic, as though the devil himself were crouched on his back—a wildness, a recklessness, as if the music were about to destroy itself, only it didn’t.
Most of the people crowding the pews below the balcony were ill-informed about the organ literature of Johann Sebastian Bach, but they knew something extraordinary was happening, and they responded with loud applause. Oates took a bow, popping up at the balcony railing to bend from the waist, withdrawing, popping up again.
Alan stood back out of sight, looking on. Okay, Mr. Oates, don’t overdo it. But the applause continued. There were shouts of Bravo. Oates climbed up on the organ bench and capered.
He had cursed the audience, thought Alan cynically, but look at him now, he was pleased as punch.
CHAPTER 40
Though earth all full of devils were,
Wide roaring to devour us;
Yet have we no such grievous fear,
They shall not overpower us.
Hymn by Martin Luther
Homer Kelly ran into Alan Starr in the Boston Public Library. Alan was hunched over a table in the reading room. Books lay beside him, but he wasn’t taking notes. He was writing to Rosie Hall in her notebook, writing about music.
Have you ever read what Schweitzer says about the way Bach u
ses certain patterns to express specific emotions? One of the motifs I like best is the use of dissonance at the end of a piece, resolved in harmony, as in O Sacred Head:
Those dissonant notes send shivers up my spine, and then it’s so great when they smooth out in a major chord. It’s sort of like banging your head against a stone wall because it feels so good to stop.
Alan leaped in his chair when Homer Kelly touched his arm. Guiltily he slapped Rosie’s notebook shut and stood up, knocking over the chair. In the vast spaces of the reading room with its lofty barrel-vaulted ceiling, the crash echoed and re-echoed, and heads looked up from the other end of the room a quarter of a mile away.
Homer righted the chair and took Alan’s arm and led him away into the Delivery Room, where books could be requested and where they sometimes, hours later, arrived. Pale scholars leaned on the counter, worn down by years of waiting.
“Listen,” said Homer, “I’ve been thinking about pairs of things.”
The Delivery Room was resplendent with blood-red marble. Alan stared at the mural over the fireplace, a languid procession of Pre-Raphaelite noblewomen. Vaguely he remembered that they had something to do with the quest for the Holy Grail. “Pairs of things?”
“Two fires, the one at the church and the car fire, and two disappearances, Rosie’s and Castle’s.”
“Castle’s! But he didn’t disappear. His mother—”
“Is ill, or so he gave everyone to believe.” Homer looked at Alan gravely over his half-glasses, while ghostly scholars shuffled by, pursuing Holy Grails that were missing from the shelf or stolen by unscrupulous students or loaned to greedy professors with extended borrowing privileges.
“But it was overdue a month ago,” whimpered an untidy man, who looked as if he had been sleeping in the library and hadn’t eaten for a week. Homer gripped Alan’s arm again and urged him out into the golden ambience of the great stair hall.