by Jane Langton
“Well, there was that providential slipup, and they cremated her by mistake.”
Mary looked at Homer wisely. “Accidental or intentional, that slipup?”
“Either way, it was a fortunate development for the sleazeball masterminding the whole thing.”
Mary began plucking leaves from the hem of her long skirt. “Not the best gardening attire, I’m afraid. Of course we may be wrong. Maybe that poor hooker is still in the morgue, not burned up at all. You know, waiting for somebody to claim her. If she’s still there, we’re back to square one.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
“By impersonating that young lieutenant detective from the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County? Oh, Homer, isn’t it a misdemeanor or a felony to impersonate a public official?”
Homer snickered. “You only get thirty years.” He sat down at the telephone and worked his way through the bureaucratic hierarchy at the Mallory Institute of Pathology. There were delays, accidental disconnections, recorded messages, transfers to the wrong department. At last the Chief Medical Examiner for Suffolk County returned his call.
“Oh, Dr. Smythe,” said Homer, “thank you for getting back to me. I’m looking into the death of Rosalind Hall, whose body was found in a burned car on the thirteenth of January in the town of Hudson. There’s something we’d like to inquire about, if we might.” Homer’s editorial we implied an entire department of stalwart police officers standing beside him at the salute. “We wonder if you can tell us what happened to the body of a young woman turned over to you from MGH at that time. According to our records she was unidentified. Do you still have her in—ah—storage? Or has someone come forward in the meantime to identify her and remove the body?”
“Just a minute, I’ve got my book right here. Let me see. November, December, January. Ah, here it is. No, Mr. Kelly, that particular body is no longer with us. It was removed on January sixteenth by—just a minute, the handwriting is hard to read—it looks like Kerliss, or perhaps it’s Kooliss? Tooliss? Funeral home in Woburn. The signature of the driver is—well, it’s totally illegible.”
“Tell me, Dr. Smythe, do you know that particular funeral home? Is it one you’re familiar with?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. We often transfer bodies to funeral homes we never hear from again. People seldom end up in the medical examiner’s office from nice suburbs like Woburn.”
“You don’t ask for accreditation from the driver? Proof that he belongs to a legitimate outfit, the Academy of Accredited Embalmers, or something like that?”
“Perhaps we should, but we don’t.”
“Well, thank you, Dr. Smythe. Oh, one thing more, what was the name by which the body was identified when it was taken away?”
“Let me look. Yes, here it is. Opal Downing Dew. That’s D-E-W, Opal Dew.”
“Opal Dew! Well, thank you, Dr. Smythe.”
Homer hung up, and went looking for his wife. He found her in the kitchen, turning pieces of chicken in a frying pan with a pair of tongs. “Opal Downing Dew, did you ever hear of a woman named Opal Dew?”
“Opal Downing Dew! It has a sort of familiar ring. One of those three-named women of days gone by, like Aimee Semple McPherson and Carrie Chapman Catt. Wait a minute, I’ll try the encyclopedia.” Mary wiped her hands on a towel and went to the kitchen bookcase, and groped on the bottom shelf for the D volume of the children’s encyclopedia she had used in grade school. It was full of patriotism, optimism, incorrect information and pictures of beaming little girls with pumpkins and Boy Scouts saluting the flag. “Homer, look, here she is, Opal Dew. Look at her, the pince-nez, the marcelled hair, the immense bosom. Formidable! They don’t make women like that any more. She died in 1955.”
“Well, what was she famous for? Why is she in the encyclopedia?”
Mary looked up from the book and laughed. “She was an organist. I remember now. She used to play in music halls, big thunder-and-lightning concerts to immense crowds. Opal Dew!”
“No kidding. That’s interesting. The body snatcher needed a name, and he came up with one that was lying around in his mind, a familiar one. An organist! The body snatcher was an organist! Who else would think of Opal Dew but another organist?”
CHAPTER 45
The last judgment draws nigh, and the angels prepare themselves for combat.
Martin Luther
As a reliable guard over the new organ in the balcony of the Church of the Commonwealth, Alan Starr was a failure. He couldn’t keep awake. At three in the morning he fell asleep in one of the balcony pews, and he didn’t wake up until Donald Woody shook him at dawn.
“My God,” said Woody dolefully, waving at the facade pipes, “look what happened.”
Alan jerked upright. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered. The entire rank of Trumpets en Chamade had been pulled down by a merciless hand. They drooped at crazy angles.
“They’re soft, right?” said Woody. “With a high lead content?”
Alan groaned and stood up, furious with himself. “No, they’re mostly copper, but they can be manhandled. Shit! Goddamn the son of a bitch!”
“You must have been invisible,” said Woody, “over here in this back pew in the dark. You didn’t hear anything?”
“No, goddamn it, I can sleep through anything.”
“Can’t they be fixed?” said Woody hopefully. “You know, sort of bent back into shape? Like in a body shop?”
“Oh, hell no. They’ll have to be taken apart and fixed with new metal and soldered back together.” Alan looked at Woody angrily “Do you know how much a single rank costs? Thousands of dollars, that’s what it costs.”
Woody whistled through his teeth.
Alan called Martin Kraeger and woke him with the bad news. Twenty minutes later Kraeger came bounding up the balcony stairs, his shirttail out, his necktie dangling around his collar. He looked at the bent pipes and swore.
“My stupid goddamned fault,” said Alan. “I was asleep at the switch.” He began taking down the bent pipes, removing them from their footholes.
Kraeger stuffed his shirt into his pants and asked a solemn question. “Where was Oates last night?”
Alan looked at him, and stopped removing the bent pipes. “I’ll find out. I’ll go next door and call that place on Kansas Street. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back for the eleven o’clock service.” He rapped one of the folded pipes with his knuckles, and it gave back a dull clunk. “I guess my Couperin prelude will have to get along without Trumpets en Chamade.” Hauling on his jacket, he ran down the balcony stairs, nearly colliding at the bottom with Dulcie Possett, the chairperson of the Flower Committee. Dulcie was carrying a big vase of spring flowers for the morning service.
“Whoops!” said Dulcie, swinging her vase out of harm’s way.
“Sorry,” said Alan. Dodging around Dulcie he went out into the spring morning. The air was earthy with the smell of softened ground, fragrant with the scent of the daphne Woody had planted beside the steps. Alan ran around the church and started up the alley, then stopped in surprise.
There was Oates, right there in the alley, sitting on Rosie’s garden wall. “Harold,” exclaimed Alan, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here is more like it, right?” said Oates insinuatingly, grinning down at him.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been inside?”
“Might have been.”
“But how? Where did you get the key?”
Oates gazed at the sky. “Behold the birds of heaven, we sow not, neither do we reap, but God provides all us birds with nice little brass keys.”
“Keys! You’ve got a key to Rosie Hall’s apartment?”
“No, you’ve got a key to her apartment. Or rather, you did have.” Oates pulled it out of his pocket and held it aloft. “You should take better care of your coat pockets. I left the Lifesavers.”
“Gee, thanks.” Alan recognized the key by the yellow tag. He kn
ew what it said, 115 Commonwealth, Rear. “Goddamn it, Harold.”
“Oh, it’s all right.” Oates tossed him the key. “You can have it back. I’ve got another one right here. Hardware store made a copy. Nice place you’ve got here. I thought I’d just bed down here once in a while. Perfect little home away from home. Belonged to your fried girlfriend, right? Place is in escrow, right? Month after fucking month those legal hacks think the thing over, and who’s to know I’m here? Charming little place, really cute. Cunning little harpsichord. Your fried girlfriend on the wall, sweet girl, really sweet. Pretty little potted plants, they need watering, right? I’ll be doing the executors a favor.” Oates jumped down into Rosie’s garden, trampling a bed of crocuses, and beamed at Alan over the wall, showing his brilliant teeth.
Alan reminded himself that Oates was the greatest organist in the world. “Why didn’t you steal the gate key too?” he said, opening the padlock and walking into the garden.
Oates opened the back door with his hardware store key and led the way inside. Throwing himself on the sofa, he lay down full-length with his muddy shoes on the yellow cushions and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.
At once Alan went to the back entry and groped in the trash can. He brought one of the ashtrays to Oates, dumped his feet on the floor, and pulled up a chair beside him. “Now look here, Harold, tell me the truth. Were you in the church last night messing around with the organ?”
Oates opened his eyes and blew smoke in Alan’s face. “Jesus,” he said, “what happened?”
“The horizontal trumpets, somebody bent them down, the whole rank.”
Oates sat up, shook a clenched fist at the ceiling and uttered a stream of obscenities.
Alan was convinced. “All right, it wasn’t you then. Tell me, I hear you’ve been sleeping in churches. Have you slept in Commonwealth? I assume you have a key?”
Oates sank back and closed his eyes again. “Well, naturally, I’m quite the chatelaine these days. The man of a thousand keys. I creep through walls into locked rooms, I open bank vaults with a whispered word. Which reminds me.” Oates sat up again. “Did you know there’s a safe in the bedroom?”
“A safe? No, where?”
“In the bedroom, behind an artsy-craftsy wall hanging. I looked for a key or a combination. No such luck.”
So Oates had been groping in Rosie’s drawers. Alan cringed, but it was no more than he had done himself. He went to the bedroom. Sure enough, under the handwoven Guatemalan fabric on the wall was a small metal door with a numbered dial. Alan dropped the hanging and returned to Harold Oates.
It was Oates’s turn to ask embarrassing questions. “Cozy retreat, this place. Woman’s dead, right?”
“Maybe,” said Alan gruffly. “And then again, maybe not.”
“Must cost you a couple thousand a month to live here?”
“Oh, God, Harold, I don’t live here. I just come in now and then.”
“You stole the key, is that it?” Oates gave him a hideous wink.
“Well, yes, I suppose I stole the key.”
Oates grinned. He got up and shambled across the room to the picture of Rosie and Charley on the wall. “Your fried girlfriend is adorable,” he said, leaning on the desk, “but altogether too sunnyside-up. I like ’em over easy myself.” He glanced around slyly. “Just your type, right?”
Alan couldn’t be responsible for the look on his face. He turned away, feeling too well understood. The man was too many kinds of a genius.
Oates wandered away from the picture and ran his finger along one of the bookshelves. “Christ, here’s an old friend, Chiapusso on the life of Bach. Good book. Your girlfriend seems to have read it carefully. Notes in the margin. Girl after my own heart, fried or not fried.”
“For God’s sake, Harold.”
Oates chuckled, then flipped the page and gave a loud guffaw. “Look at that, she underlined the cat cantata.”
“Bach wrote a cat cantata? I never heard of it.”
“No, no, it was somebody else’s nutty idea. You lined up a row of cats, pinched their tails, you got a cantata. Joke.” Oates yowled like a cat and flipped another page. “All the other crazy stuff too, she’s underlined the rest of it, the self-sounding bells, the echoes in different languages.” Oates threw his head back and put his hands beside his mouth, calling from one mountain to another, “Good m-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-n-i-i-i-i-ng!” Then he put one hand to an ear and sounded the echo in German: “Guten mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-g-e-n!”
“Echoes in different languages? Self-sounding bells? Does it say that?”
“Of course. Good old Chiapusso. Great book. All the stuff Bach grew up with, the things he read, his philosophical friends and beer-drinking buddies.”
Entranced, Alan reached into an inside pocket of his windbreaker and extracted Rosie’s notebook. His fingers were shaking. He felt on the verge of understanding something important. “But they’re here. She wrote them down, the very same things, the self-sounding bells and the echoes. She made a whole list of strange things. Listen to this, Boxes in which sounds can be locked up, a prison shaped like an ear, a domed chamber in which a whisper could be heard from one side to the other.” Alan read the entire list to Oates, finishing with Noah’s ark. “Well, of course some of it’s Bach himself, the mirror fugues, the puzzle canons. I understand some of it, but the rest’s so crazy. What’s Noah’s ark doing here?”
Oates took the notebook and looked at it, chuckling. “Clever girl, whether pan-broiled or lightly toasted.”
“Oh, shut up, Oates.”
“It all goes together, you see. Even Noah’s ark. It was remnants of old medieval superstitions, with a dab of Kepler and a smidgeon of Pythagoras. You know about the music of the spheres? The whole universe distributed according to notes sounded by the different lengths of a vibrating string? Mercury at middle C, Venus at G, Mars at the octave? That kind of thing is still around. Folk superstition, you can’t get rid of it. Bach was as much a prey to it as anybody else. And Noah’s ark fits right in. It’s in the Old Testament, the length, height and width of the ark, it’s a major chord. You know about Bach’s mirror fugues, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure. He’d turn a tune every which way to make a variation. Upside-down and backward.”
Oates hurled his lighted cigarette on the rug. Alan snatched it up. “And The Art of the Fugue, it’s so Germanic, the discipline, the thoroughness, writing canons and fugues in every damned key.” His wasted face alight, Oates groped in his pocket and lit another cigarette.
Alan was spellbound. Rosie’s cryptic list was no longer mysterious. He reached for the ashtray and parked it on Oates’s knee.
“You know what drove me to drink, don’t you?” said Oates. “It was the crap I had to listen to every Sunday morning. The only goddamn place you can play a pipe organ is in a fucking church. But I had to, I mean I had to play the organ. Ever since I was a kid, it was what I wanted to do. But Christ! The feeble old farts I’ve had to listen to, the hogwash, the horseshit.” Oates leaned forward and took Alan by the arms and shook him. “All those gaseous discharges from the pulpit, the whining hymns, the gutless hoity-toity feeble cries for morality and moderation. Listen, kid, moderation never got anybody anywhere. It’s overdoing it that counts, it’s going beyond. You’ve got to eat too god-damn much, drink too goddamn much, fornicate too goddamn much, I don’t give a shit what you do too much as long as you do something too goddamn much. You’ve got to go beyond, I tell you. Look at Bach, you think he was content with moderation? The man was a hearty trencherman. His belly was full of beer. Do you think some lily-livered sissypants wrote the B-Minor Mass? Was it a goddamned mild-mannered asshole who invented the St. Matthew Passion and those demented crowds howling for blood? Passion, my God, what’s passion but going beyond?”
Dazed, Alan made up his mind. Fate had him in its grip. Oates was a tidal force, you couldn’t hold him back. And anyway the man had his own key. There was no way to keep him out. “Liste
n, Harold, why don’t we both live here from now on? You can have the bedroom, I’ll camp out on the couch and do the cooking. Wait a minute, I hear Mrs. Garboyle. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Opening the back door of Rosie’s apartment, Alan found Mrs. Garboyle in the entry, depositing trash in one of the barrels. As usual she seemed delighted to see him.
“Oh, Mrs. Garboyle, I hope it’s all right with you if we move in for a while. We’re keeping an eye on things until the court decides what to do with the place. There’s been a lot of vandalism lately. Last night the church next door was broken into and somebody damaged the organ.”
“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Garboyle.
Alan introduced Oates, and as usual Mrs. Garboyle was a pushover. “Oh, I’m so grateful that you’re concerned. I know dear Rosalind would be pleased, if she were alive.”
“We’ll pay the full rent of course,” said Alan, throwing himself headlong into the practice of overdoing things. Mrs. Garboyle ran off to get a couple of front-door keys.
Thus did the great Harold Oates become a resident of 115 Commonwealth Avenue. And so did Alan Starr, to keep an eye on him.
CHAPTER 46
Whoso climbs high, is in danger to fall.
Martin Luther
The forked career of Harold Oates continued its double path. On the one hand his new concerts at Old South and Trinity won him rapturous acclaim. On the other, the destruction that followed the concerts brought more enraged suspicion down on his head.
At Old South all the stop knobs were disconnected and removed. At Trinity a bucket of paint was emptied over the keyboards. The sacrilege seemed worse at Trinity, under the gold walls and lofty prophets. The paint looked blasphemous, a grubby reminder of the pitiful corruption of the human race.
There were frantic calls for Alan’s repair services. He did what he could, but there was too much going on. There was hardly time around the edges to work up new preludes and postludes for Sunday services, and it was all he could do to snatch an hour or two once a week to see Charley. The heaviest pressure was the completion of the voicing of the Commonwealth organ for its dedication on Easter Sunday. The new Prestant rank hadn’t come yet, nor the giant Contra Bombardes for the Pedal division.