by Jane Langton
“What do you mean,” said Alan, “gave everyone to believe? Why would Castle lie about his mother being ill?”
“Well, it’s interesting that his departure nearly coincided with Rosie’s. And we don’t know where he is, any more than we know where she is.”
Alan looked at the stone lions resting halfway down the stairs. They were gazing sleepily into nothingness, remote and disinterested in all human concerns, like those gods that created the world and abandoned it to its fate. “Well, you know, I’ve thought about that. I wish I knew more about Jim Castle. Martin Kraeger told me something sort of weird about him. He dropped in on him last Thanksgiving, and it was really embarrassing because he walked in on a screaming session. Castle’s mother—you know, the mother who’s supposed to be so sick—was there and she was really yelling, and there was this sick sister on the couch, and a bunch of other embarrassed relatives standing around. Martin left right away, and he never did find out what it was all about.”
“Strange, the ways of families,” said Homer. “You’d think a fine musician like Castle would come from a really supportive household.”
“Like Bach’s family,” agreed Alan. “You know, the whole family all singing and playing instruments together.”
“But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the family is a barrel of snakes, and the poor little genius has to escape and make his own way.” Homer looked at Alan and added softly, “Could Castle have been in love with Rosie? You know, a teacher in love with his student? It’s happened plenty of times before.”
“God, I don’t know. I guess I thought he was more interested in men than in women. Most male organists are gay. It’s just a fact. I don’t know why the hell it’s true, but it is.”
“Do you have any reason for thinking he wasn’t heterosexual?”
“Oh, I guess I thought he liked me. He was very kind to me, and once—well, once he put his arm around me kind of, you know, lovingly, after I played something for him. I was too surprised to respond. Anyway, I didn’t, and that was all there was to it.”
Homer sat down on the marble balustrade and folded his arms. “Well, suppose he was heterosexual after all, and in love with Rosie? Do you think he might have carried her off by force, leaving her child behind and a pool of blood on the floor?”
Alan smiled and shook his head, telling himself once again that the idea was ridiculous. “I certainly don’t think so.” Then he remembered something he had forgotten. “Two fires, you said. Listen, he was in a fire before.”
“Castle was in a fire?”
“He told me about it. His hand was bandaged afterward. He couldn’t play for a week or two. His whole house burned down. It’s one of those town houses near Louisburg Square, and the fire shot up the staircase in the middle of the night, so he was lucky to get out alive.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, a couple of years ago.”
“He owned the house?”
“Right. He collected a lot of insurance, but not until he hired some expensive lawyer to sue the Paul Revere Insurance Company.”
“Three fires then, but possibly unrelated. Of course I’ve heard a rumor that Castle had a motive for setting fire to the balcony of the Church of the Commonwealth.”
“You mean, to burn up the old organ on purpose? That’s absurd. He’d never do a thing like that.”
“Tell me, was Castle a smoker? Was he smoking along with Kraeger on the night of the fire?”
“He might have been, I don’t know. He used to smoke, I remember that. But I’m pretty sure he gave it up.”
Homer clapped Alan on the arm and said goodbye, then walked down the marble stairs and out into Copley Square. Before heading for the subway he paused to admire the bronze figures of Art and Science, graceful maidens in classical draperies seated on either side of the library steps.
It occurred to him as he boarded the Green Line that the city was full of allegorical women. It had been a fixation with painters and sculptors at the turn of the century. Jammed into the crowded subway car, grasping a pole, hurtling through the dark in the direction of Park Street, Homer wondered about Alan’s idealized allegorical woman, Rosie Hall. It was true, her picture looked noble enough, but maybe she wasn’t the goddess Alan thought her. Maybe she was nothing but a selfish young woman who had left her poor child in the lurch.
And maybe she wasn’t anything at all, because perhaps—indeed probably—Rosalind Hall was dead.
Homer shuffled out of the car at Park Street in a thick mass of students and commuters. He was reminded of the snakes he had been talking about with Alan, the seething mass from which a talented person could sometimes escape. Where in the whole sprawling universe was James Castle? And where was the family of snakes, slimily crawling over each other?
“Oh-ho, Miss High and Mighty, now you’re not going to speak to me either! I see, it’s a conspiracy. You and Sonny, taking sides against me!”
“Oh, God, Mother, will you let her alone?”
“All I’m doing is following doctor’s orders. Can’t you see she needs a sedative?”
“Oh, no, oh, please, please, no!”
“Helen, you’ll do as I say! You need a sedative and I need a rest. Come on, open your mouth!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, can’t you see she doesn’t want it?”
“Helen, hold still!”
CHAPTER 41
Buckle to! Though you don’t want to, you must!
Martin Luther
The Kellys’ driveway was at its worst. In the month of March it was sometimes a skating rink and sometimes a rutted track. The car wallowed off the road and Homer had to gun the engine through a thicket of fern and blueberry to find his way back.
Was it worth it, living here at the end of a mile-long dirt road? No, by God, it wasn’t. Paradise it might be, but one day he would plunge out of control down the embankment beside the house and crash through the ice on the Sudbury River and the car would fill up with freezing water and his drowned body would be hauled out with a boat hook. Serve him right.
He left the car at the top of the steep incline above the house and slid down the hill on the seat of his pants, his briefcase skidding ahead of him, landing in a snowbank.
Mary met him at the door. “Yes, it is too worth it,” she said before he could complain, handing him a drink.
“No it isn’t.” Homer hauled off his heavy parka and collapsed into a chair with his whiskey. “Oh, God, I’m tired.”
Mary sat down too, and leaned forward eagerly. “Homer, I’ve been thinking.”
“Always a mistake.” Homer sat up and looked at his wife appreciatively. Today she was wearing a monkish garment with a rope around the middle. “Your outfit,” he said, “it’s charming. You’d never see Mrs. Frederick walking around in a thing like that.”
“Oh, thank you, Homer. Now listen, it’s about the burned body in the car. If it wasn’t Rosalind Hall, who was it? It had to be somebody. Somebody with a name, somebody who was missing afterward.”
“Oh, God,” said Homer, taking a swig of whiskey, “I don’t want to think about women being burned alive in cars. Not now.”
“But maybe the body was already dead. The question is, suppose you wanted to get hold of a dead body, so you could burn it up in somebody else’s car, what would you do?”
“Well, you could practice self-reliance,” said Homer sourly, “and kill somebody yourself.”
“Or you could steal one that was lying around. The point is, there must be a record somewhere of all the people who died around the thirteenth of January.”
“So we should be finding out about missing cadavers? Hmmm, a funeral parlor, perhaps, from which a stiff has been purloined.” Homer groaned and tried to change the subject. “Look, this is deeply distressing to a man of my sensitivity and taste. Let’s talk about noble ladies with poppies in their hair—Pulchritude! Youth! Sacrifice! Glory! Victory!—not gruesome repulsive swollen blackened bodies in somebody’s bur
ned-up car.”
“Homer, what are you talking about? Look, we should be finding out whether a body turned up missing about that time. Because it certainly wouldn’t go unnoticed, if it disappeared. Deceased people have relatives with strong feelings about their nearest and dearest. They want coffins and cemetery plots and tombstones.”
Homer was feeling better. The whiskey had gone straight to his head. “That’s true. The family mortician doesn’t just flap his hands and say, ‘Whoops, I’m terribly worry, but Aunt Dolly seems to have flown the coop. We were trundling stiffs here and there yesterday and somehow we lost track.’ No, that wouldn’t do at all.”
“But suppose the person didn’t have any relatives? So that nobody missed her? What about that?”
Homer set his glass down with a bang. “Okay, suppose it was a prostitute. Dangerous life, especially for the ones who are in business for themselves, so to speak.”
“So what happens then? The anonymous body goes to a funeral home and somebody just helps himself to it?”
“It wouldn’t be a funeral home, it would be a morgue. That’s where they end up, the derelicts, in a morgue.” Homer stood up to pour himself another drink. “The trouble is, they’ve got a system. You can’t just walk off with a corpse. They keep track of every decomposing bit of protoplasm that comes their way. Tell you what, I’ll talk to a pathologist in Boston. Dead derelicts would probably turn up in Boston. I’ll try Mass General tomorrow.”
Massachusetts General Hospital was one of the great medical institutions of the Western world, but it was a pain to get to. All the parking lots were full. The automobile civilization, decided Homer, had reached its peak and was now on the decline, and a moment was approaching when all the cars in the United States would collide in a giant smashup causing earthquakes throughout the world and a mountain of wrecked cars as high as the moon. Well, at least Boozer Brown would be happy.
He left his car in a doubtful spot and found his way to the office of the Chief of Pathology.
The pathologist didn’t look the way Homer had expected. He didn’t have long narrow fingers reeking of formaldehyde and a pale ivory complexion. He was tanned and healthy, as if he had just been on vacation in the Caribbean. Sweat pants showed beneath his green pajama top, and his feet were encased in huge athletic shoes.
“Absolutely not,” he said, shaking his head. “We couldn’t possibly lose track of a body. No way. You want a list? The names of all the cadavers that have come through here in the last six months? To whom they were assigned?”
“Oh, yes, thank you. But what about unidentified bodies? Derelicts, people like that? Anonymous people, nobody knows who they are? They haven’t got any identification and nobody comes looking for them?”
“Boston City Hospital. We pass them along to Boston City. That’s where the medical examiner’s office is. He keeps them until they’re identified.”
“How long?”
The pathologist shrugged. “A year. Two years.”
“In their—uh—deep freeze? Suppose nobody ever comes to identify them? Do they just stay there forever?”
The pathologist shook his head and moved to the door, eager to get back to extracting organs from some expired person—brain, liver, heart, stomach, spleen, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, adrenal glands, testicles and bladder, and then go out to a jolly lunch with fellow pathologists and gnaw on barbecued pork ribs, his fingers dripping with sticky sauce. Nodding at Homer, he dodged out of the room.
Homer jumped up and followed him as he swung down the foul-smelling corridor. “Well, suppose somebody came along and said, ‘Hey, wait, that’s my sister Madeline.’ Could he take her away?”
“It would have to be an undertaker with a release form, everything signed out. If the cause of death was violent or uncertain, there’d be an autopsy and all the records would be available.” The pathologist swung left into an open elevator. As the doors began to close he was still talking about microscope slides and fragments of tissue. The last words Homer heard through the crack were faint and far away, “Boston City Hospital, Mallory Institute of Pathology.” Then the doors came together softly and the healthy young man was gone.
Homer went back to the parking lot, to find an outraged motorist backing and filling as he struggled to squeeze past his car. “You’re damned lucky I didn’t just sideswipe your goddamned automobile, you goddamned bastard,” hollered the driver.
“You’re absolutely right,” said Homer humbly. “I agree with you completely. I’m all apology.” Fuming, the man drove away, and Homer set off to find Boston City Hospital.
It was easier said than done. He spent the next half hour getting lost, cursing at the traffic, waiting at red lights, getting lost again, then coming upon the hospital at last by a miraculous accident.
The Mallory Institute of Pathology had a building to itself. It had once been grander than it was now. There were gold sphinxes in the lobby, but the place exuded an air of seediness and melancholy, as though every kind of human sorrow and degradation came here to a bitter end. Homer wandered without direction. One floor was sickening with the same smell that wafted gruesomely up and down the corridor of the Pathology Department at MGH. There were swinging doors with a sign, THESE DOORS MUST REMAIN CLOSED. Another floor was neat and well lit, lined with offices and a handsome library.
Homer poked his head into one of the offices, and a young black woman looked up inquiringly. “May I speak to a pathologist?” said Homer. “I’m from the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County.” As usual he neglected to say how long he had been trading on this defunct connection.
But the Boston City pathologist was just as discouraging as the man at MGH. “Impossible,” he said. “Utterly impossible. The system is absolutely airtight.”
Homer gave up and went home and complained to his wife. “They were so firm about it. It always puts my back up. Somebody says no way, and I always think there must be a chink somewhere. The human mind will think of something. The snake will crawl over the wall until it finds a hole, then slither through.”
“It’s that inquisitiveness of yours, Homer. You’ve got the longest nose in Massachusetts.”
“I do?” Homer felt his nose. “It’s not the longest, maybe, just the biggest.”
Mary gave it a kiss. “Well, anyway, it’s a splendid example of the human proboscis on a monumental scale.”
CHAPTER 42
If you think rightly of the gospel, do not imagine its cause can be accomplished without tumult, scandal, and sedition.
Martin Luther
Harold Oates brought home to his room from the Church of the Commonwealth one of the four-foot Gemshorn pipes, because that dumb kid Alan Starr hadn’t got it right, and now you couldn’t do a damn thing about it without a blowtorch.
He put the pipe down on his bed and looked at the propane torch he had picked up in a hardware store. How did the fucking thing turn on? Oates fiddled with the knob. At once a blast of blue fire squirted out of the nozzle and ignited the window curtain.
Martin Kraeger was sacrificing his Tuesday afternoon to promoting the welfare of Harold Oates. He usually devoted the afternoon to putting together rough notes for a sermon. During the rest of the week a rash would break out in his mind and some of the notes would develop growths and warts, which would effloresce and expand over half a dozen sheets of paper.
But it was the only time available for obeying Edith Frederick’s demand that he talk all his fellow clergymen into arranging concerts for Harold Oates.
“And be sure to inquire about practice time,” Edith had said. “Alan told me their pipe organs must be made available ahead of time. And keys! He’ll need keys to every single church.”
So Martin put aside his infant sermon and called the music directors at Emmanuel and Trinity, the rectors at Advent and St. John the Evangelist, the ministers at Old South, Arlington Street, King’s Chapel, First Baptist and the Church of the Covenant, the presiding priest at the Cathedral of th
e Holy Cross, and the First Reader at the Mother Church of Christian Science.
He was almost totally successful. Nearly all of them were willing to fit a concert by Harold Oates into their schedules of spring activities. Even the cleaning woman at the Church of the Annunciation was enthusiastic. “I’ll tell Mr. Baxter,” she said. “I was there the other day, at that concert in your church. That Harold Oates, he’s just fabulous.”
But the consequences of Kraeger’s success in arranging concerts were not entirely happy. Within a few weeks there were querulous complaints.
“He was practicing when the wedding party arrived,” reported the music director at Trinity. “He refused to leave. We had to pick him up bodily and deposit him on the sidewalk.”
“He’s sleeping in the pews,” said Ronald Baxter, the rector at Annunciation. “We can’t have that.”
“I caught him smoking in the Lady Chapel,” said the assistant rector at Advent, “leaning against the bust of Bishop Grafton. His shirtsleeve was on fire.”
“He invaded the chancel during Communion,” reported the rector at Emmanuel. “We thought he was taking the wafer, like everybody else, but instead he snatched the cup from the celebrant and drank it down. I was horrified, I can tell you. The man must be mad.”
“He drank the wine?” said Martin Kraeger. “That’s bad news. He’s supposed to be on the wagon.”
Kraeger decided to speak to Oates when he next appeared at Commonwealth to rehearse the St. John Passion with Barbara Inch’s choir. On the next Saturday morning he sat in a pew, waiting, while Oates played a continuo accompaniment and the choir took all the blame for the crucifixion upon themselves:
My own misdeeds were far more
Than grains upon the seashore,
Than multitudes of sand.
’Twas my misdeeds that maimed Thee
With agonies that shamed me,