Divine Inspiration

by Jane Langton

  Below them people turned to stare up at the balcony. In the front row Mrs. Frederick frowned, and whispered to Martin Kraeger. Barbara looked at Alan severely. “You’ll just have to take over.”

  “Oh, God,” said Alan, who had never even glanced at the organ accompaniment to the St. John Passion.

  “You’ve got to. It’s not difficult. Really, there’s nothing to it.”

  Alan groaned. But then the problem vanished. A familiar figure walked out onto the balcony, plump and beaming, his bald head glowing with sunburn.

  It was James Castle.

  It didn’t matter that he had left the Church of the Commonwealth in a state of precarious doubt. Nor did it matter that Homer Kelly suspected him of having something to do with the fire in the church, and with the disappearance of Rosalind Hall. All that mattered now was their immediate need.

  “Oh, Jim,” said Barbara, throwing her arms around him, “will you help us out?”

  “Of course,” said Castle.

  He sat down on the organ bench and pulled out a few stops—Stopped Diapason eight, Prestant four, and Div Insp—and nodded at Barbara.

  At once she raised her arms, the instrumentalists began to play, and the choristers drew breath to sing “Lord, Lord, Lord, Thou our Master.” From that moment they were possessed. Everything flowed out of them into the music, torrents of controlled feeling. For a little while on an April evening at the end of the twentieth century they existed together in the mind of the eighteenth-century composer. The bows of the string players went energetically up and down, the flutes and oboes tweedled contrapuntally, the organ gave harmonious support, and the voices rose and fell and cried out, resolving splendid dissonances in harmony and beginning the story again. Barbara stood at the front of the balcony, transported, while sixty-seven men and women obeyed every motion of her lifted hands, lamenting the anguish of the cross, bewailing their grievous sin, uttering their majestic wonder.

  And then it was all over. There was applause for the chorus and the musicians and the soloists, and Barbara was presented with a bouquet of flowers. Then the instrumentalists put away their fiddles and flutes and oboes, and everyone left the balcony but Barbara. She sat down on the organ bench, and depression washed over her.

  She didn’t need the applause, she didn’t want a bouquet of flowers. She wanted only one thing. But Martin Kraeger had not even shaken her hand in congratulation. He had come up to the balcony to welcome back James Castle, he had nodded at her and smiled, and he had gone out with Castle.

  She felt washed-out and hollow. What did life hold for her after this, after tomorrow, after Easter Sunday morning? Castle would take over his old position, and once more she would be out of a job.

  She heard a step on the stairs. Quickly Barbara stood up, and looked for her coat.

  “Barbara Inch?”

  She didn’t know the woman who stood staring at her and frowning as though it were a crime to be Barbara Inch. “Yes, I’m Barbara Inch.”

  “I just want you to know a few things about my ex-husband.”

  Barbara shook her head, bewildered. “Your ex-husband?”

  “A word to the wise. I’m here to warn you. Steer clear.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Barbara looked at the stairway, wondering if she could dodge past this insane person and get away.

  “He wasn’t married to me, he was married to the church. He did not attend my mother in her last illness. His parenting lacked discipline.”

  “You’re Mrs. Kraeger,” said Barbara, astonished.

  “Lately he has revealed his bestial instincts, but I should warn you that in bed he seldom achieved my personal needs. I am a very passionate woman.”

  It was grotesque. “But why are you telling this to me?”

  “I’ve heard rumors. I feel I owe it to you as a woman.” Kay Kraeger’s eyes narrowed. “I must say, you’re not what I expected in a femme fatale. Why don’t you do something about your hair?”

  Barbara burst out laughing. Did it mean, could it possibly mean—? No, of course it didn’t mean anything, but a crazy happiness welled up in her, and she couldn’t control her laughter.

  “Oh, you may well laugh.” Kay Kraeger turned and pushed through the folding chairs. “I’m only trying to help, woman to woman.”

  Barbara found her coat and followed Mrs. Kraeger down the stairs. There was no one in the vestibule but Donald Woody.

  “She came roaring in here and demanded to know where you were,” explained Woody. “She’s bonkers, if you ask me.” He waggled his finger in a circle beside his ear. “What did she want?”

  “You tell me,” said Barbara. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Martin Kraeger took James Castle for a drink in the Copley Plaza.

  “So it was you who was ill, not your mother? Why didn’t you let us know?”

  Castle looked down at his gin and tonic. “Pride, I guess.” My doctor didn’t hold out much hope, and I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me.”

  “But where have you been? Were you at Mass General all this time?”

  “No, no, Sloan-Kettering in New York. Then I went to Fort Lauderdale and strolled along the beach while my mother fed me up.”

  Martin remembered the woman who had turned her back on him, whose screams he had heard through the brick wall of Castle’s house on Mount Vernon Street. Hastily he revised his opinion. The woman couldn’t be so bad, after all.

  “How about another one of these?” said Castle. He beckoned to the waiter. “Two more of the same.”

  Martin looked at him uncertainly. “Are you sure you’re supposed to be drinking this stuff? After what your insides have been through?”

  Castle looked surprised, and fumbled with his paper napkin. “Oh, no, it’s fine. I mean this is a special occasion.”

  “Right you are. Here’s to the special occasion. Welcome back.”

  CHAPTER 65

  He has all divinity at his fingers’ ends.

  Martin Luther

  After the Good Friday concert, Alan went back to Rosie Hall’s apartment and let himself in by the front door. He expected to find Harold Oates collapsed on the bed in an alcoholic stupor, and dreaded his waking up to curse the whole world. What could Alan say to him? Nothing. The failure of his effort at rehabilitation was miserably disappointing, but it wouldn’t do any good to talk about it. The man was a hopeless case.

  But Oates was not there.

  Alan was in a queer mood. He was still under the spell of the music. After his rescue by James Castle, he had left the balcony and gone down to the front of the sanctuary to hear the concert from behind one of the piers separating aisle and nave. Listening to the scandalized narrative of the Evangelist, the solemn urgency of Pilate’s interrogation, the wild clamor of the chorus demanding crucifixion, he kept remembering what Oates had said, Passion, my God, what’s passion but going beyond?

  Now he moved restlessly around the apartment, touching things—the harpsichord, the bookcase, the rubber plant, the wall. What did he care about in the same way, what was there that would pitch him into some other state of being, some mad condition of creative power and exalted understanding? He had to go beyond some barrier, he had to climb a ladder without rungs and hurl himself aloft without wings. What did he care about so much that it didn’t matter whether it was true or false, right or wrong, worthy or unworthy?

  Only one thing. He wanted to find Rosie Hall. Oates called her his fried girlfriend, Homer Kelly said she was probably a ghastly girl. Alan didn’t care. She wasn’t fried, and he didn’t care what she was like. He had to find her. He sat down heavily on a chair and closed his eyes. Mentally he picked up Rosie’s missing notebook and opened it and turned the pages as though it held an important secret.

  There had been page after page about registration. And pages of addresses and phone numbers. He himself had filled in blank pages with news about Charley—and with his own stupid letters. And there
had been the page of acoustic oddities.

  Oates had explained the oddities, and at once they had lost their mystery—the music of the spheres, the echoes in different languages, Noah’s ark, the self-sounding bells, the box in which sounds could be locked up.

  The box in which sounds could be locked up. Alan rose and went to the mantelpiece and picked up the big conch shell. Here was a box with a sound locked inside it, the sound of the sea—or so people said. He put the shell to his ear, and sure enough, there was a whisper like the murmur of waves on a faraway shore. It was really only the exchange of vibrating air between the curled passages of the shell and those of his ear, but it was a pleasant notion. The tide breathed in Alan’s ear and fell back and breathed again, as though the shell were a natural recorder, trapping the sound of the sea.

  Well, for Christ’s sake, a tape recorder too was a box that trapped the sounds you put into it, and released them whenever you wanted to hear them again.

  Alan went to the shelf where dust was collecting on Rosie’s old-fashioned audiocassette recorders. One of them held a cassette. It was the copy of her own performance of “Wachet Auf.” Oates had played it. He had denounced her choice of stops.

  Alan began a conversation with the composer. “Listen, Johann Sebastian, it’s true, I can open this box and your own music will come out. You wrote it two hundred and fifty years ago, and Rosie played it last year, but it’s still in here. Listen to this, Herr Kappelmeister.”

  The music began, and Alan pictured Bach raising his eyebrows in astonishment. His great jowls would shake, his small eyes stare with envy. “Gott sei dank! Ah, if only vee had such a box!”

  “The trouble is, Herr Kappelmeister, this apparatus isn’t very good. You should hear it on something high-tech.”

  The music rollicked and bounded along, right hand and pedal notes teasing each other, and soon the left hand began the admonitory tune, Wake, awake, for night is coming. Then there were noises in the street and Alan had to turn up the volume.

  But the noises grew louder.

  That was strange. The noises must be on the tape. They weren’t happening now, they had happened during the copying. Damn all low-tech sleazy paraphernalia. If the two gadgets had been wired together like the cassette recorders that were part of his own CD player, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Then he understood. The interference with the music had been recorded on the day he found the baby and brought him home for the first time. The two machines had been turned on when he walked into the apartment. Rosie must have set them going herself. She had been copying her own music from one tape recorder to the other, and then—Alan gasped—there were voices in the room, two people shouting, the baby beginning to cry.

  Swiftly he rewound the tape and listened again, holding his breath.

  The music was too loud, too insistent. He couldn’t distinguish what the voices were saying. But one was a woman’s—surely Rosie’s—and the other a man’s. Whose voice was it? Who was beginning to shout at her? What was he saying?

  Alan crouched closer, but Charley’s cries grew louder, blotting out everything. And then, oh God, the voices of the man and woman suddenly stopped and the music came to a close and the baby went on crying.

  Alan listened, agonized, as Charley cried on and on. Then with a click the crying broke off. The tape had run out. There was only the low humming sound of the machine itself.

  It was clear what had happened. Rosie had been making a copy of her own performance of Bach’s organ prelude, “Wachet Auf,” and the blank tape had mindlessly recorded not only the music but whatever was going on in the apartment at the same time. There had been a wild argument, and the baby had cried, and then Charley had been left all alone. Rosie and the guy who had been shouting at her had vanished, leaving the doors wide open. Poor Charley had climbed out of his crib and crawled out of the house by himself.

  Alan rewound the tape, his hands trembling, and listened a third time. The voices were no clearer. He gave up and called Homer Kelly.

  “Oh, hello, Alan,” said Mary. “How was the concert? We’re going tomorrow night. Do you want to speak to Homer? He’s gone to bed.”

  Hurriedly, breathlessly, Alan told her about the noises on the tape.

  She was interested at once. “Listen, there are people who know how to disentangle those things. Acoustics experts, they can sort out the frequencies. I’ll bet they could erase most of the music and leave only the voices. Do you know anybody like that?”

  “No, but I’ll find someone. It will have to be on Monday. I’ve got to spend all day tomorrow finishing the voicing on those damned Contra Bombardes.”

  “You poor kid. Well, good luck. And don’t lose the tape.”

  Alan went back to the tape recorder and extracted the cassette. Mary Kelly was right. Nothing must happen to it. It would have to be hidden where Harold Oates couldn’t find it, no matter how much he poked and pried. Alan winced, remembering the way Oates had ripped all the tape from one of Rosie’s cassettes. Filthy shit, Castle playing Sowerby. Some philanthropist should buy up every Sowerby recording in the world, smash them all, destroy them, burn all the scores, obliterate the name of Sowerby from the face of the earth.

  Alan brought a chair into the kitchen, climbed on it, and laid the tape well back on the top of the cupboard.

  CHAPTER 66

  Mankind is nothing else but a sheep-shambles, where we are slain and slaughtered by the devil.

  Martin Luther

  Pip Tower climbed the stairs to the balcony, where Alan Starr was sounding one pedal note over and over. Again and again a great roar boomed from the thirty-two-foot F-sharp Contra Bombarde.

  Alan looked up and grinned and slid off the bench. “Thanks for coming. I’ve been dodging back and forth all morning, trying to get those tongues curved just right.”

  “No problem,” said Pip. “Sorry to be late.” He took his place at the bench, and Alan crawled back into the organ and picked up his burnishing knife. But then he had to come out again to say hello to James Castle.

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” said Castle, looking up eagerly at the immense height of the new Contra Bombardes. “I’ll just hang around. Don’t let me interfere.” He shook Pip’s hand. “It’s good to be back among old friends.”

  Pip mumbled something, and Alan remembered how anxiously Pip had wanted to take Castle’s place. Now there was no place for him to take. Poor old Pip.

  When Homer Kelly gasped his way up to the balcony, they were back at work. Again and again a single pipe in the rank of Contra Bombardes bellowed the same note. “My God,” said Homer, “it sounds like a war.”

  “A foghorn,” said James Castle from the back of the balcony. “That’s what I always think.” He stood up and introduced himself to Homer, and so did Pip Tower, and everybody shook hands.

  Homer went to the narrow door in the organ case, put his head in and said loudly, “What’s all this about noises on a tape?”

  For a moment Alan was hidden in the forest of pipes, but then he put his head above a rank of Spire Flutes and spoke up excitedly, waving his burnishing knife. “Oh, Homer, I’ve been so dumb. It’s been there all the time, the whole thing, and I never listened. It’s on the copy, the music that was on one of the tape recorders when I came into the apartment that first time. I never played it all the way through before. There are voices on it, Rosie and somebody else—a man—and the baby crying.”

  “Whose was it? Did you recognize it?”

  “No, it’s too muffled. But Mary says you can get the frequencies unscrambled.”

  “So she tells me. That’s good, it might be a breakthrough. For Christ’s sake, don’t lose the tape.”

  “Oh God, no. I hid it in the apartment where Oates won’t come across it. I’ll find a technician on Monday and then maybe we’ll know who this bastard is.”

  Homer was crouched double, and his spine was killing him. He began backing out of the narrow opening. “How’s the voicing coming? You’r
e almost done?”

  “Almost, but it’s got to be finished for the Easter service tomorrow. I’ll be at it all day. Well, I can’t work on it during the concert this evening, but I’ll keep at it all night. Hey, Pip, hit it again.”

  There was a pause. “Pip?” called Alan.

  Once again the deep braying note of the F-sharp Contra Bombarde bellowed out of the pipe.

  “My God,” said Homer.

  “You ain’t heard nothing yet. Hey, Pip, play the fifth. There, how do you like that? That’s a sixty-four-foot resultant.”

  BOOM, roared the organ. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

  “Hey, Jim,” yelled Alan, deep inside the case among the Spire Flutes, “how do you like that?”

  There was no answer. Homer turned his head, but no one was sitting at the back of the balcony. James Castle was gone.

  CHAPTER 67

  Cursed, damned, reviled, and destroyed be … everyone who strives against Thy will.

  Martin Luther

  It was all very well to talk about working all day long, but Alan couldn’t do it. First he lost his helping hand at the keyboard because Pip Tower had a doctor’s appointment, and then by midafternoon he didn’t trust his fingers. He had been up all night, and he was exhausted. If his knife slipped, it could ruin an entire thirty-two-foot pipe.

  He walked wearily back to Rosie’s apartment, picturing the comfortable sofa and its soft cushions, hoping to avoid a miserable scene with Harold Oates.

  But when he opened the door he was shocked to discover that the apartment had been ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out, their contents dumped. Half the books were on the floor. Rosie’s collection of cassettes had been scattered right and left.

  “Harold?” shouted Alan. There was no answer. Alan looked for him in the bedroom. He found only a bare mattress. The sheets and blankets were tumbled on the rug.

  The kitchen too was a mess. Everything in the cupboards had been jumbled right and left. With a sinking heart Alan climbed on the counter and looked at the top of the cupboard. But it was all right. The precious cassette was still there. Had Oates been looking for it? Was the shouting on the end of the tape the voice of Harold Oates?