The cacophony of sounds pouring out of the windows of the dozens of practice rooms in the music hall that evening flowed together for Steve into a glorious symphony.
Leaning back into the bench, Steve reasoned, I think I’ll just read this book for a few minutes here before it gets too dark.
He opened the book and gazed off into the distance. Little matter that what he was holding was a dictionary. Littler matter still that it was upside down!
XVIII
Truly Cecilia Endsrud was both a lyric poem and a full symphony. Every little thing she did possessed a soft lyrical quality to it, and yet the total effect of it all was as impelling as a grand symphony. The folks in her hometown, Meadowville, Minnesota, all knew her because she was the pastor’s daughter, and they adored her. She was one of those special people who are always welcome and never out of place no matter where they go, but whose arrival always seems to come as a delightful surprise. Such were her unaffected ways that even if she had walked unannounced into the saloon on the edge of town, I am sure its patrons would have been curious about what had brought her there but glad to see her. Folks had got used to seeing her almost anywhere. She seemed to have a sixth sense when you had a special need, and she would unobtrusively slip in and out of your life, leaving something behind just for you.
Of course she was markedly different from her classmates in high school. But it was not a difference that created a cleavage between her and them. I am told that a full score of them considered her their best friend. She had a way of striking a responsive chord in almost everyone. Especially kids who were unsure of themselves, or who were relegated to the fringe for whatever reason, gravitated to her because in her eyes they were somebody, and they knew it. Yet, paradoxically, everyone knew she could spend hours out in the fields and the woods walking all alone and talking softly to herself, and no one who knew her found it the least bit odd. Spotting her in the distance strolling along slowly, her hands crossed behind her back, they might remark, “Oh, it’s just Cecilia,” and all would be explained.
“Just Cecilia.” Anyone else would have set the town gossips buzzing time and again. But it was “just Cecilia”: Cecilia, whose organ preludes these past five years had brought most people to church early so they wouldn’t miss them, not as showpieces but as the ideal medium for preparing the heart for worship; Cecilia, who might be expected to carry flowers in the same hour to the ailing mayor in his sprawling mansion and to frail Mrs. Wilson recovering in her hovel from bearing their eleventh child; Cecilia, who always had a glow about her whether she was with people or off by herself. There was a connection, folks seemed to know intuitively, between the warmth she shared so spontaneously when she was with people and the warmth she absorbed from God in her frequent times alone with Him, often out under the open sky. No one really begrudged her that time alone. Naturally, a few considered her “uppity,” but they had to keep their opinion to themselves. If they expressed it, every one jumped to her defense. “It wouldn’t do any of us any harm to do a little more thinking and praying ourselves,” they might say.
Her father and mother had named her Cecilia after the patron saint of music. Both of them possessed an enthusiastic love of good music. Both, in fact, were responsive to harmony and grace wherever they found them. But in Cecilia this family characteristic took on a different form. She had little tendency either toward her mother’s musical ecstasies or toward her father’s joyous raptures. In her, music was more like a steady current flowing through her soul, absorbing into itself all the joy and beauty, the grief and sorrow she encountered along life’s way. That is why I refer to her as both a lyric poem and a grand symphony, tenderly responsive to the smallest trifle and weaving all the trifles together into a whole. A person experienced something inescapably musical just by being near her.
She had always been a thoughtful and sensitive child. But when she was fourteen she had an experience that, among other things, made her even more thoughtful and aware of the people around her. She had been given a small New Testament for her Confirmation but had accorded it scant use over the next several months. Then one day she said to herself, “I think I’ll just sit down and read the whole Gospel of Luke because it’s the one that begins with the beautiful Christmas story. It’s true that I get to hear a passage from one of the Gospels every Sunday in church, but wouldn’t it be grand to find out how they all fit together?”
So she took her New Testament out into the meadow with her on that warm summer day, made herself comfortable on the grass under an old oak tree, and opened it to Luke. She told me later that she had to stop often in sheer awe of what she was reading, and to let it sink in. When she was done, she couldn’t move for maybe half an hour. Then she rolled over onto her knees, happy tears running down her cheeks, and prayed, “Jesus, take all of me. I’m yours.”
I am quite certain that from that moment until the day she died, she never knew what it was like not to belong to Jesus.
At this point I am sorely tempted to digress for a page or two and comment on the metamorphosis of my cousin from a playful little girl in pigtails to a young woman you couldn’t take your eyes off. We saw each other only once a year due to the distance between the town in northwestern Wisconsin where I grew up and Meadowville in central Minnesota. The only realistic way of making that trip in those days was by train, requiring two transfers. But we made that pilgrimage every year solely for the joy of spending a week with the Endsruds. Uncle Irv was my mother’s brother, the pride and joy of her childhood. And Aunt Ellie was one of the most gracious women I have ever known. The year she nearly died giving birth to Cecilia, my mother took off immediately to be with her, leaving me in the care of my grandmother for several weeks. That created a bond that was renewed every summer about the time of the second haying. Dad would turn his general store over to Mimi, his assistant, and we would all set off for Meadowville to help Uncle Irv on the parish farm which he worked.
As it happened, we could not make our annual trip during the summer of 1916 because Dad had fallen off a ladder and broken himself up pretty badly. But the following summer he had recovered enough to resume our yearly visits.
It is strange how you tend to assume time has stood still when you haven’t seen friends for a while. I myself had grown at least a foot since our last visit, but I still pictured Cecilia as the scrawny kid I had known two years before. Was I in for a shock!
It took me two full days before I could start treating that queenly woman as my cousin again. Gone were the days when, in youthful innocence, we “played house” or rolled around in the grass, tussling and tickling each other to the point of exhaustion. Neither of us had a sibling, so we made the most of our week together each year.
And that part didn’t change once we’d got used to the new reality that she was a girl and I was a boy. We’d never noticed that before. So although it took more than two minutes of hide-and-seek to reconnect this time, in the long evening walks we took to our old haunts all over the countryside we bonded again, and Jesus was a big part of it for both of us.
I grew to cherish certain things that I noticed about her now for the first time. She had just a hint of the hereditary idiosyncrasies that marked her as an Endsrud. Her nose turned up ever so slightly, her cheekbones were just slightly higher than usual, her chin had a very slight slope inward. Somehow these little touches set off her delicate features from anyone else’s and gave her overall loveliness a unique quality. She was the only person in our whole extended family with silky blond hair, but she shared with all of us the ability to tan well in the sun. And since she loved the sunny meadows and being out-of-doors, her face and arms were always a healthy hazelnut brown. To look at her made you love life!
To look at her! Those sparkling brown eyes made especially for that angel face! When she was happy, joy danced in them. When she was sad, they were deep wells. They were the unshuttered windows of her soul. She did not know what it meant to be secretive. She had never had any reason to
be. She had always been loved just as she was.
This is the Cecilia I remember so well—sitting beside me on the barnyard fence talking together quietly, but often also in silence; ambling along beside the woods across the meadow, her head lowered in meditation; fondling a tiny lamb or feeding a nervous chipmunk; trouncing on the hay in the overloaded wagon on the way back to the barn; picking up a dirty little kid on a street corner and planting a kiss on his forehead; gliding nimble fingers lightly over the piano keys and singing softly; or just smiling at me through those bright brown eyes of hers for some reason now long forgotten. I have to admit that more than once, I regretted the fact that we were first cousins.
She was now a freshman at Christiania. The congregation had raised a hundred and fifty dollars so she could go and “study up on music.” She must be sure to come back at Christmas time and play the organ for the Christmas pageant and let them listen to the new preludes she was going to learn at Christiania.
Of course she would be back at Christmas time, she assured them. She loved her God, her family, her friends, and her music.
Of course she’d be back.
XIX
The next three weeks were by all odds the strangest weeks Steve had experienced in his twenty years of life. His motives, impulses, and feelings were tumbling all over each other. He did the most unusual things! Nothing he said really fit into the context of what was going on around him. And nothing he said came out crisp and clear. As he walked along every evening on his chosen path, the ground receded from beneath his feet.
It is amazing how many things a fellow can find out about a girl in the space of three weeks without ever asking anyone. For example, he can stumble over the fact that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she eats lunch at 11:30, whereas on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays she does not eat until 12:15, meaning that she must have an 11:20 class on those days. He can even discover that on Mondays and Fridays, she passes him on the staircase between the second and the third storeys of Old Main, provided he is “detained” after math class for a moment or two; that during chapel she nearly always sits on the right-hand side of the nave near the front except on Wednesdays when she arrives late and quietly slips into the balcony to avoid disturbing anyone; that every evening between 7:00 and 7:30 she walks from the women’s dorm to the music hall, often detouring briefly into the woods near the door; that she then proceeds up to the fifth floor where the practice pipe organs are located and for an hour sends a torrent of music out through one of the windows up there; and that she begins almost every day by getting up at the crack of dawn and striking out across the fields behind the dorm on a hike that can take her as far as Mill Creek and back before breakfast. The singular thing about these data is that they all came to him, apparently out of nowhere, with no particular effort on his part.
In this way each day was furnished with its own high points. When one of them occasionally failed to happen (for example, not passing her on the staircase when he should have), his heart sank. Was she sick? Had she dropped that class? Was she detained by that handsome fellow she sat next to in class? Well, as long as she was happy…. Sometimes a lump formed in his throat at the thought. Once he actually said, “Oh phooey!” loud enough to attract a puzzled look from the people around him.
Phooey it indeed! That’s what he told himself times without number when he thought about how hopeless it was to think that a fellow like him could ever attract the attention of a woman like her. He tried to console himself with the thought that women were just trouble. He had seen what a woman could do to a man. He’d been warned that the first sign of love is the last sign of wisdom. You had to really be on your guard. He remembered all the nagging his father had to take from his mother. There wasn’t a woman in the world who would shut up when you were tired of her and spruce up when you wanted her. They just tied a man down for the rest of his life. Who wanted that?
But none of this applied to his Cecilia! How defenseless this left his heart! She was for him the crown of creation, the fusion of all that is good and alluring in womanhood with that extra something from Above which his Spectre Maiden had possessed. He couldn’t think about her without being swamped by that warm ache in the midsection and that feeling of helplessness all over his body so familiar to anyone in love.
This, of course, led him back to the one huge incongruous fact that glared at him: he was worried about warding off a creature as lovely as Cecilia!?! What was there about his mousy face to warrant even a glance from her? If she knew he was worried about her dominating him, she’d just laugh and think he was crazy. Poor Cecilia! She had no idea she was causing him so much anxiety. Her only guilt was her innocence; her only blight was her grace.
But for the moment a few very simple joys sufficed to make his days bright, brighter than they’d ever been before. Just to sit facing her from halfway across the cafeteria was all it took to warm his heart. Just knowing she was there, that’s all. With the studied regularity of an old man set in his ways, he sought out the hardwood bench near the music hall every evening at 7:00, there to “study” in the sharp crispness of the autumnal air, just to be there when she walked past. Of course, he took great pains “for her sake” to avoid drawing any attention to himself. But surely it did no harm to imagine that she was really sitting there next to him on the bench. They might even be holding hands! It must be wondrous to feel her beside you, to have her hand voluntarily enclosed in yours…….
“Get over it, man,” a little voice inside him chided. “It’s never going to happen. Who do you think you are?”
Day by day he was winding himself up tighter and tighter, growing ever more addicted to his bitter-sweet narcotic. He knew very well that this was all going to go nowhere, but he was powerless to stop it. Why would you ever want to put a stop to the one thing that is injecting into your life something altogether new to you, and totally wondrous—a compelling reason to get up in the morning?
XX
About this time something happened that jolted Steve out of his routine and hurled him back into the throes of chaos.
“What do you know about that blond chick, Cecilia Endsrud?” Tom asked casually as he swept up the four discards in a game of pinochle. The four men were sitting around a table in the dormitory lounge at the end of the hall.
“Never heard of her,” Lute responded quickly, sizing up his chances of making three-seventy this hand.
“Me neither,” drawled Ted. “How come?”
“Oh, just curious. How ‘bout you, partner?” he inquired of Steve across the table.
“Seems nice,” Steve managed to choke out, recovering his breath.
“‘Nice,’ the man says! Would you listen to him? He calls her ‘nice’!”
“Well, what do you call her?” demanded Lute.
“Une merveille!” Tom lingered on each syllable, enunciating even the mute e’s.
“All right, Johnny boy. So you were in France. Now say that in plain English.”
“A miracle! A wonder!” Tom translated unperturbed.
“Well then, how come I haven’t seen her?”
“You’re too busy eyeing the broads to notice her. This one’s got class.”
“Now that you’re an old man of twenty-four who’s played the field and is ready to settle down and domesticate, you’re looking for class, eh?”
“No. Now listen, seriously. She’s about five foot six or seven. She’s got wavy golden hair like you’ve never seen before and smooth tan skin that makes you drool. She’s got soft brown eyes that make you wilt, pretty crescent lips, and a neat slender body with just the right amount of curves. That’s my idea of a real woman!”
“Listen to the poet!” cried Lute.
“Yeah,” chimed in Ted, closing his eyes to get a better picture of this woman.
“And he,” exclaimed Tom pointing at Steve, “he calls her ‘nice’!”
“Well, what did you expect from Pearson? Some sort of dreamy rhapsody like yours?” Lute demanded.
“Of course not. But ‘nice’ doesn’t cut it. Not in any way.”
“So what do you plan to do about her, a big handsome brute like you?” Ted teased.
“That’s just what I’ve been wondering. This place is dying a slow death. And there she is, and here I am. It doesn’t make sense not to do something about that. Another thing—I’ll bet a fellow would have to be kind of careful. They say she’s a preacher’s daughter.”
“So that’s the one you mean, is it?” The light suddenly dawned on Lute. “I’ll admit she’s got a real pretty face, but that’s about all she’s got.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter for a change, would you?” Tom was visibly annoyed. “You don’t have to be a cow to be a woman.”
“Well, I didn’t know you went in for that type, that’s all. Another thing you’d have to watch out for”—Lute lowered his voice—”she’s Mork’s cousin. Haven’t you noticed them hanging out together a lot?”
“Now don’t you say nothing against Paul,” Tom declared defiantly. “He checks over my French assignments, you know. I’ll bet he’d be glad to see me dating his cousin.”
“All right! All right! No offense intended, big fellow. But a word to the wise…,” he concluded guardedly.
“Don’t worry about me…. Well, Steve buddy, looks like we got them that time. They’ll never make three-seventy now.”
Nobody had noticed that Steve’s face had gone feverish and that he was struggling to control the tremors in his hands.
“Yeah. Looks like we got ‘em,” Steve concurred.
Five minutes later all the fellows except Steve had sauntered back to their rooms. It was 11:00 p.m. Steve slouched down low in the davenport. His eyes were vacant, glazed, staring a hole through the wall in front of him.
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