Divine Inspiration

by Jane Langton

  Alan left the cassette where it was and spent the next hour putting the apartment to rights. Adrenaline coursed through his veins. He no longer needed a nap.

  CHAPTER 68

  These are knavish tricks and sophistical inventions.

  Martin Luther

  For the Saturday night performance of Bach’s St. John Passion in the Church of the Commonwealth, Mary Kelly wore a pair of pink harem pants over orange tights.

  “It’s strange,” said Homer, admiring the general effect, “in that outfit you ought to look ridiculous, but you don’t. I can’t understand it. You look like Queen Victoria opening Parliament.”

  The evening was balmy. People drifted into the Church of the Commonwealth from the street, where magnolia petals lay on the ground like fragments of smashed porcelain.

  The second performance was like the first. Once again Harold Oates failed to show up, but James Castle cheerfully took his place for a second time. He sat beaming at the organ console while Barbara swung her arms and guided her singers through one tricky transition after another and the instrumentalists fiddled and puffed.

  Alan watched grimly as Castle played the first measures in company with the wind instruments and the strings. Damn Oates anyway. He was out on a bender somewhere. All of Alan’s tender devotion to the reclamation of the great man was going straight to hell.

  When the concert was over, Homer and Mary Kelly strode down the aisle while everyone else was applauding, and plucked Alan out of the back row. “We want to hear that tape,” said Mary.

  “And I don’t suppose you have any beer in the fridge?” said Homer. “All this frenzied Christianity, it makes a person thirsty.”

  But as soon as Alan unlocked the door of Rosie’s apartment, it was apparent that something was wrong. Homer put his head in and sniffed. “That’s a funny smell.”

  Alan thrust past him into the living room. “Look,” he said, “the floor’s wet.”

  Mary walked around, avoiding the damp places. “It’s not wet all over, just here and there. It’s the way my mother used to sprinkle laundry.”

  They stood bewildered, then all of them jumped back as a little flame shot up from the floor.

  “Polka dots,” cried Homer. “The wet spots are like polka dots. Those other fires, they started from polka dots, that’s what the man said. It’s some incendiary chemical mixed with water. When the water evaporates, the other stuff ignites.”

  Alan picked up Rosie’s watering can and dumped it on the flame, which sizzled and went out. Mary ran to the kitchen and snatched up the kettle from the stove.

  Homer grabbed it from her and dumped it on one of the damp spots on the rug. “They have to stay wet. They only start burning when they dry out.”

  “Watch out, there’s another,” cried Alan, as another blaze erupted under the harpsichord. Two more flickered up in opposite corners of the room.

  Clumsily the three of them rushed back and forth, bumping into furniture and colliding with one another while new flames sprang up beside the sofa, the table, the bookcase. A blaze behind an armchair almost got away from them. For the next ten minutes they trampled small fires and soaked them with water.

  “God,” cried Alan, “the bedroom.” It was a mass of small flames.

  “Get those curtains,” cried Mary, snatching at the smoldering bedspread.

  There was no time to call for help. But when all the fires were out in kitchen and living room and bedroom and baby’s room and bathroom, in closets and back entry and front hall, Homer picked up the phone. “As soon as they dry out they’ll burn again. That chemical stuff, it’s got to be neutralized somehow.”

  They waited, exhausted, looking at each other. Their faces were sooty, their shoes soaked. The apartment was drenched and scorched. Automatically Alan tramped on a final spurt of flame behind the rubber plant. With a start he remembered the tape. He ran into the kitchen, slipping and sliding on the wet tiles, clambered up on the counter and fumbled on the top of the cupboard.

  The cassette was still there. Thankfully he put it in his pocket and climbed down again as the fire apparatus from Boylston Street came howling along Commonwealth Avenue.

  Homer took charge, hailing them in, shouting his explanations, heaving another pitcher of water at a new blaze. At once the place was full of big men in rubber coats.

  “The harpsichord,” said Alan. “The water will ruin it.”

  Together they lugged it outside, struggling through firefighters and snarled hoses and Mrs. Garboyle and a stream of excited teenagers from the rooms upstairs. Then Alan helped Mary and Homer wedge it into their station wagon.

  “Oates,” said Homer, slamming down the rear door, “where the hell do we look for Oates?”

  “Kansas Street,” suggested Alan. “He’s got a girlfriend there, and there’s a couple of other guys. Twenty-four Kansas Street. It’s a shelter for homeless people.”

  They squeezed into the car and Mary swerved recklessly away from the curb, while the harpsichord jiggled in the back, giving out plangent chords.

  But Oates wasn’t to be found at Kansas Street. “Gawd,” said Tom, “we ain’t seen him in a week.”

  “Where the fuck do you suppose he’s at?” said Dick.

  “That is a question the answer to which I would very much like to be informed of,” said Dora O’Doyle.

  Disappointed, they gave up on Oates. Mary and Homer drove Alan back to Rosie’s apartment. The fire apparatus was just pulling away.

  Homer and Mary followed Alan inside. Then, while Alan shuffled around dolefully among the wreckage of Rosie’s possessions, Homer called Lieutenant Detective Campbell and urged him to set up a serious search for the missing Oates. “Try the bars around Copley Square. And all the local shelters, the Pine Street Inn.”

  The Kellys went home. Alan locked up the apartment and ran down the street to the church.

  The Contra Bombardes were waiting. He had a long night’s work ahead of him.

  CHAPTER 69

  One day will come a thick black cloud out of which will issue three flashes of lightning, and a clap of thunder will be heard, and in a moment, heaven and earth will be covered with confusion.

  Martin Luther

  The pandemonium was colossal. Alan ran his feet up and down the pedals, laughing, while the building rocked around him. The massive voices of the Contra Bombarde were majestic pronouncements from on high, booming decrees declaring authority over man and beast, they were proclamations of universal justice. HEAR ME, roared the thirty-two-foot pipes, rumbling four octaves below middle C, vibrating on the fifth, the octave, the fourth above the octave. Alan coupled in the sixteen-foot Prestant and a couple of trumpets and DIV INSP, just for the hell of it. Finally he pulled out the Bärpfeiffe, which was like a bear dancing.

  The uproar was deafening. And it was all wrong. The unvoiced pipes were slow of speech and ragged. Alan shut off the extra stops and got to work, moving from organ bench to the forest of pipes and back, applying his tools to the tongues of the Contra Bombardes, hammering them delicately, stroking them with his burnishing knife.

  It was wonderfully still in the church. There wasn’t even a night watchman to look in and say hello, because the Ph.D. candidate was away on his Easter break. Alan was alone, working among the pipes in the light of a lamp hooked over a nail. The forty-watt bulb over the keyboards was a tiny glimmer in the cavernous darkness.

  It was four hours before he laid down his tools and rubbed his eyes and crawled out of the organ case and stood up straight and stretched, arching his tired back. Sleepily he thumped himself down on the bench, tried the last note and found it perfect.

  The Easter music lay on the rack, ready for the morning service. Alan chose a set of stops, including the newly voiced Contra Bombarde. Then he opened a folder and leafed through it, looking for Number Seventeen.

  Attracted by the clamor of the new pedal pipes, Harold Oates fumbled with his collection of keys until he found the one for the side door of
the church. Stepping silently into the hugeness of the dark chamber, he could see Starr on the balcony silhouetted against the feeble lamp above the music rack. The corners of the room were thickets of shadow.

  As Alan began to play, Oates recognized the music at once. It was a famous chorale prelude from Bach’s Little Organ Book, “In Thee Is Joy.” Energetically the measures bounded forward. Exuberant scales ran up and down in the left hand, and the pedals repeated a single mighty passage:

  Oates stood grinning in the dark, listening to the racing tumult of right and left hands, while the pedal repeated the same thunderous blessing again and again, In thee is joy, joy, joy.

  Joy was the right word. Joy was what it was. All the wild rancor in the soul of Harold Oates gave way to the only joy he had known in all his life, that of Diapason and Mixture, of Gemshorn and Regal and Rohrpipe. He moved forward and felt for the back of a pew and gripped it. The wood shivered in his fingers. The floor moved under his feet.

  Only then was he aware that someone else was listening. A human shape moved in the dark. It was very near, gazing upward at Starr as he piled on more ranks of pipes. The crazy kid was summoning all the strength and variety and power of the organ to magnify the tumbling merriment of his rushing fingers, while his feet romped on the pedals and the great Principals and Contra Bombardes bellowed the same mighty phrase.

  Joy, joy, and joy again. The speaking mouths of a thousand pipes whistled and wheezed and shouted and sang to Harold Oates, and he raised his hands in wonder. The building swayed. Instinctively he moved forward as the floor rolled beneath him. The other listener too raised his hand in a haunted gesture, a mystic tribute, reaching toward the source of the splendor.

  The floor moved again, shaken by the long waves rumbling within it. Again Oates stumbled forward until he was close enough to see that the reaching hand of the other man was not held up in awe. It was holding something, and now the other hand came up to grasp the thing in both fists.

  The music swarmed around them, the building shook, the spongy floor sagged and Oates shouted, “No,” and threw himself at the gun as it went off. The reeling shape turned, and in another blast of noise and fire the rejoicing of Harold Oates died away forever.

  At the organ Alan heard the shout and the shot and the crack as the projectile struck a pipe beside his head. The second shot was lost in the splitting noise of the timbers under the floor. The pilings under the east wall were crumbling into dust. The granite sills collapsed. Behind the pulpit the east wall crumpled and caved inward. A single block from the vault over the pulpit pitched down with a crash, and then the rest roared down together in an avalanche of stone.

  In the balcony Alan tottered to his feet and stumbled to the west wall, taking refuge in a brick archway beneath the window. With a wildly beating heart he watched the second bay of vaulting droop and fall, the cut stones thundering down, plummeting like rocks in an avalanche. For a breathless moment the third vault held, and then it too went down in a cannonade of falling voussoirs, ribs and keystones. The vast wooden roof fell too, cracking and twisting sideways, tumbling in a burst of snapped bolts like rifle fire, slamming down in a jungle of felled timber and a shattering cascade of slate shingles from the roof. The shingles rattled and bounced and lay still.

  The church was no longer in darkness. Looking up, Alan could see the limpid sky of morning. He shrank back against the wall and stared fearfully at the last remaining vault, which rose above his head in sexpartite perfection, poised on intersecting ribs. The architect of the Church of the Commonwealth had visited the continent in the year 1885, and he had come home enraptured by the stone vaulting of the Romanesque churches of southern France. Solidly, then, he had designed the four bays of his own vaulted ceiling, grandly he had buttressed and supported them like those of the ancient churches—but now only one of his massive vaults remained, clinging to the high walls south, west and north, trembling in empty air to the east, thrusting outward into nothingness its tons of arching stone.

  Alan closed his eyes and waited, but the noise was dying away. Opening his eyes, he looked up fearfully. The vault was holding. Somewhere over his head the tower was still standing calmly erect. Below him dust rose in billowing clouds from the wreckage, thinning and dissolving, floating higher and higher into the pale morning sky.

  The only sound was the heaving of the bellows. A single row of flue pipes whispered and sighed. Alan smiled. The lungs of the pipe organ were intact. In the midst of chaos and destruction it was still alive, and so was he.

  The stairway from the balcony to the vestibule was in perfect order. Alan stumbled downstairs, his legs caving beneath him, and found his way outdoors. To the east the sun rose over Boston Common and the Public Garden, over the Ritz Carlton Hotel and Arlington Street and the trees along the avenue.

  It was Easter morning.

  EASTER

  “Heut triumphiret Gottes Sohn”

  Chorale harmonized by J. S. Bach

  Crumbled to dust is Satan’s power,

  Vanished his passion to devour.

  Alleluia! Alleluia!

  By valor strong our champion brave

  Flingeth our Joe into his grave.

  Alleluia! Alleluia!

  CHAPTER 70

  When we read that Judas hanged himself, that his belly burst in pieces, and that his bowels fell out, we may take this as a sample how it will go with all Christ’s enemies.

  Martin Luther

  The phone call that woke Martin Kraeger was from Alan Starr. “What?” said Kraeger sleepily. “Oh, I see. Thank you.”

  For some reason the news of the collapse of the Church of the Commonwealth fitted right in with his apocalyptic dream, and it didn’t surprise him. Only when he got out of bed and stood up did understanding smite him. Thunderstruck, he hauled on his clothes and plunged out the door into the freshness of the morning on Dartmouth Street, and began running in the direction of the church. As he turned onto Clarendon he could hear distant cries and the spiralling whine of overlapping sirens. Someone shouted at him from a window, “What happened?”

  It was like the night of the fire. Kraeger had run toward the burning church with the same dread in his breast.

  “The phone’s ringing,” said Mary, sitting up in bed. She looked at her watch. It was only five o’clock.

  “Mmph,” said Homer.

  Mary got out of bed and went out into the hall. A moment later she was back, walking slowly.

  Something in her step alerted Homer. He lifted his head and stared at her white face.

  “That was Alan. He says the church has fallen down.”

  Donald Woody was already there. He nodded at Kraeger and went on talking calmly to a uniformed policeman about turning off the utilities. “It’s all okay downcellar.” Woody gestured at the office building, which was still intact. “I turned everything off—electricity, gas, oil burner.” He pointed at a fountain of water rising from the wreckage. “That geyser over there, they’ll have to turn it off in the street.”

  There was a traffic jam at the intersection of Clarendon and Commonwealth. Barriers had been thrown up, yellow sawhorses with blinking lights.

  Kraeger tried to get closer to the heap of shattered wood and stone that was his church, but he was only one of a crowd being shoved back onto Commonwealth Avenue. A couple of men in hard hats were throwing down more saw-horses, shutting off the westbound lane. An officer in an orange tunic stood in front of them, turning cars into the eastbound lane on the other side of the park, where two more cops blew shrill whistles and made huge pointing gestures, urging the traffic into two slow-moving streams.

  Someone gripped Kraeger’s arm. It was Alan Starr. His face was ashen. “Last night,” he said, “all those people in the building last night.”

  “I know,” said Kraeger. He was unable to say anything more. Together they looked at the heap of rock that could have fallen during the concert, crushing eight hundred lovers of sacred music, forty choir members, six sol
oists, a conductor, an organist, and twenty players of miscellaneous musical instruments. Kraeger found his voice. “You were here when it happened? Are you all right?”

  “I was up there.” Alan pointed to the balcony, which thrust out into the sunlight under the single remaining vault. “Listen, Martin, it was my fault. I turned on all the stops at once. All those thirty-two-foot pipes, they were all open at once, sending tremendous long sounds waves into the walls. I could feel everything shaking. All this”—he gestured at the wreckage—“it was all my fault.”

  Traffic was stalled, gridlocked. Frustrated drivers sounded furious horns. Martin had to shout. “No, no, it couldn’t have been the organ. Not just the organ.”

  A police officer yelled at them angrily, “Get back.” He bellowed at the crowd gathering in the blocked-off street, “Hey, you, all of you, move back. Come on, get back.”

  Alan and Martin had to retreat behind a barrier halfway down the block, along with a throng of inquisitive strangers who had come out of nowhere.

  Someone plucked Alan’s sleeve, an important-looking man in a business suit. “Mallory,” he said, introducing himself, “building inspector. You’re the one who was here, the witness? Was anybody else in the building? Like a janitor? Anybody?”

  “I told them already, there wasn’t anybody. I think I was all alone. I mean, I don’t know about anybody else. There wasn’t any night watchman, not last night.”

  “Good,” said Mallory, turning to go. “I just wanted to be sure.”

  “Except, wait.” Alan glanced at Kraeger. “Just before the roof fell in, I thought—”

  “What?” said Mallory impatiently. “What did you think?”