Chapter 2

The girl left without asking Hance if he or someone else would be her voice teacher, or if her lessons would be at that same time every week.  Her lack of curiosity signified she expected rejection yet invited him to assure her otherwise. He would not oblige. He let her go on her way, offering neither consolation nor encouragement. Never again could he suffer a female’s yearning for something she pretended she did not want. Not after Mary Guaire.

He left the music open on the harpsichord, locked his office and hastened across the common, heedless of the rain that stained the tired brick facades of the surrounding academic halls. The fleck of pain behind his eyes had returned. Within the hour the fleck would bloat, an ontological insect drilling out the matter deep within his head, removing his thoughts, memories, knowledge and awareness, and filling the space with an agony as arduous to ease as to endure.

It couldn’t happen at night, in the privacy of his rooms. That would be too easy. His suffering had to begin in public, in the midst of the most mundane events. Either he put an end to it as quickly as he could, or it surpassed the point where another man would die or go out of his mind. He suffered or he yielded, and the yielding—the way he was compelled to end the torment––was suffering in itself.

He coughed on the fragrance of wet clothes and canvas bookpacks. Not them, he thought as he sensed the clump of students. Young voices shouted a greeting. A stronger, more mature voice called his name. “John!”

Hance, who had been looking at the ground through dripping long hair, pulled up before he collided with Father Dario, who was already holding him by the arm, full of joy and enthusiasm. “We’re bringing food and clothing to the camp the homeless have set up in the woods. Why not come with us?”

Hance backed away from his colleague, courteous but too involved with his predicament to entertain notions of charity. “Alas, social justice doesn’t agree with my schedule.”

“You’re a department chair! You can do whatever you like with your schedule.”

Hance refused to speak in front of the students. Stepping lively, he signaled Dario to follow. “If the department chair goes running off on a whim,” he said in a low voice, “would that not signal to his peers that they too can do as they pleased?”

“It’s not a question of doing what pleases us, though the service of others should always please us. The entire staff should go out there. Can you imagine the message such an action would send to the town?”

“Yes, it would say we have no sense of responsibility to the people who pay us to educate their children—or themselves. The poor will always be with us,” Hance concluded as Dario started a cheery dispute. “I’ll have plenty of other chances to go with you.”

Dario gave up and returned to the students, who had taken shelter in the foyer of little Aquinas Hall, the science building.

Pain and the peculiar faintness of profound hunger brought Hance to the rim of sight and reason. He felt his face had gone the same bleached-wheat color as his hair. He was certain people would stare, as they always stared, wondering what was wrong with him. He relied on his sense of smell and the feel of his surroundings to guide him to the nearest building with a chapel.

The college was run by a centuries-old teaching order of nuns and was originally for women only. Though the college had long been co-educational, the dormitories were still segregated. Hance made his way to the male dorm, where he signed in to indicate the chapel was in use. He told the concierge and the young men making plans over their cell phones that Mass would start in a few minutes, if they wanted to participate. Some of them refused with guilty smiles. A student probably new to the school kept asking, “Mass? Who’s saying Mass?” Hance rarely wore his clerical collar on campus. He felt the symbol of his vocation made some students uncomfortable.

Feeling too ill to be bothered with participants or servers, he proceeded to the chapel, so reeling with nausea he could have been mistaken for a drunkard. He couldn’t be bothered with vestments, either; he would say Mass as he was––in sodden blazer and twills. The unsanctified wine and host were more important. As expected, both were ready for use in the service.

Hance decried the notion that a Roman Catholic priest celebrates Mass. For Hance, Mass was torture, not an occasion of joy. He could think of nothing more blasphemous than a man of his kind leading people in the worship of an un-nameable, unknowable essence whose form and function for ages had been the stuff of scholarly debate among great thinkers, the cause of madness among weaker minds, and the excuse for wars among peoples who could think of no other reason for murdering each other.

Yet he must say Mass day after day, until the end of time, sealed within a pact that no saint, pope, philosopher or Doctor of the Church had had the imagination to include among the torments of Hell. He could never grow accustomed to officiating in English. It was the Latin Mass he remembered; he could say it without the books, the servers, the satin ribbons that marked the appropriate readings. He would have liked to have incense, though­­––incense from a censer swung by a morally unblemished youth whose blood leached the purity of baby roses into his sweat.

The yearning was a momentary delusion. He had reached the Consecration, that part of the Mass where the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. As every priest had done countless of times for more than a thousand years, Hance raised the host and proclaimed, in Latin, “This is my body.” He then raised the chalice, saying, “This is the chalice of my blood of the new and eternal covenant: the mystery of faith which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

With no participants or servers to partake of the Eucharist, Hance had to confront the Communion of the Priest sooner than he preferred:

“Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi?” How shall I repay the Lord for all he has done for me?

“Calicem salutaris accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo. Laudans invocabo Dominum, et ab inimicis meis salvus ero.” I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord. In praise, I will call upon the Lord and be saved from my enemies.

“Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam.” May the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve my soul to life everlasting.

This was what he lived for, what would end his craving for the next twenty-four hours. Not the blood of that poor girl who had auditioned for him. Not the blood of the youthful group who had surrounded Dario on the soggy grounds of the common. This, the Precious Blood, the Blood of the Lamb. The Lamb that he reviled and that reviled him. The Lamb that had let him die not into eternal life with the Lord but into eternal damnation with The Lord.

The Order of Mass called for the priest to drink the Precious Blood with reverence. Hance knew that God knew reverence was the farthest thing from his heart. He managed to get the Blood down, but it always came back on a discreet gag; he had no choice but to silence himself and swallow again.

In the beginning, he had reasoned the wine had disagreed with him because it was an inferior vintage that had become vinegar, but he quickly understood the wine was truly the Blood of the Savior, saving him so he could drink it as punishment per omnia saecula saeculorum­­––forever and ever, world without end.

As soon as he accepted it into himself, the pain in his head gave way to a light that burst with the gut-shuddering violence he likened to the violence of losing himself in a woman––or the sinking of his teeth into the source of innocent blood. There was the same relief, too.

It never lasted though. Nothing good was meant to last, in this world or the next.

Chapter 1

Whenever a frightened young singer opened her mouth to him for the first time, Hance remembered Mary Guaire.

She had made the same noises as Marsden tightened the sparkling beads around her throat, turning the Queen of the Night’s aria into a mess of bubbling squeals as the bejeweled garrote severed the route between breath and life.

The lamentable business had occurred long ago, when people played fortepianos and electricity was an experiment with lightning. But every time Hance had cause to envision Mary Guaire, he could never entirely dispel the impulse to flee, and he could never quite accept that there was no need to throw a candelabrum on a body, meaning to hide the deed amid the carnage of fire.

That morning, as a late summer rain slapped the window, he sat back from the harpsichord and waited as the girl cowering at the music stand in the center of the room whimpered to a halt. She knew she lacked talent. He could tell. She bore the stigmata of humiliation: the wound-red cheeks. The crinkled flesh in the brow. The runny eyes. And yes, the voice of a dying Mary Guaire.

He wanted someone to put him out of her misery, though he sensed that sort of self-interest was unbecoming to a college professor. The girl was looking at him in fear and to him for guidance. He considered Mary Guaire for one last instant and beheld the girl with what he perceived as the kindness he felt when encountering small fluffy mammals. "It's not an audition for a major opera house. This is your first semester here. You’ve declared voice as your minor instrument. Would you like to start with something else, something simpler?"

The girl’s eyes glittered. “Um, I thought Arianna’s Lament was simple. I mean, it’s not like I want to study opera. I’m not an opera singer. I want to study your kind of music.”

“My kind of music?”

“Early music. Baroque music. Monteverdi. Schutz. Purcell.”

Clearly, she had listened to performances that made “his” kind of music sound easy. She lacked the skill and self-assuredness to convey the same effect.

He wanted to tell her the truth about herself. To dislodge her from her delusions. To spare her from becoming the farce of the department when her peers heard her practicing. To stop her parents from indulging their child’s fantasy by paying for her lessons. Telling her the truth about her abilities would probably hurt her more than breaking up with her boyfriend—if she had managed to entice a boyfriend. But not telling her would be like leaving a baby on a highway. “Do you like to sing?”

“Oh, yes.”

Her admission betrayed no joy. Hance noticed she had acquired the scent of salted apples. Stop it, he thought before the fragrance went to his head. “What do you like to sing?”

She looked at the book opened before her on the music stand. Hance thought she would leaf through to another song. She did nothing. Hance surmised she couldn’t bring herself to repeat, “Your kind of music.”

He would shove that music down her throat—so to speak. He would more than show her his kind of music. He would make her feel it. He sat up, turned an introductory chord into an arpeggio, and sang Possente spirto, from l’Orfeo, the opera composed by Claudio Monteverdi in 1607.

Whether the girl knew the story of the mythical shepherd, Orfeo, who retrieved his dead wife from Hell was of no concern. All that mattered to Hance was the sound he sent out. He had a bright tenor unsullied by vibrato and other affectations of modern operatic style. As he delivered phrase after breathless phrase, inserting the rapidly repeated notes called trilli and other complex motifs of the period, the girl’s eyelids receded, showing the white around her dim gray irises. Her own breath came quickly, deeply, as if the flimsy icon of an incipient woman was preparing her pallid, unsuspecting form to receive him in a way he would no longer give himself to a woman. 

The way Mary Guaire had once boasted of preparing herself to receive him.

He stopped before the girl dared to sing along, perhaps emitting the remnants of Mary Guaire’s last gasps.

“So you see it’s not all that simple.” Did he appear as unflustered as he intended? “There’s a lot going on. Think of yourself as a piano. Your anatomy” (he refused to say “body) “is a sounding board. Your voice is the string. Your breath is the hammer that strikes the string. At the same time, you’ve got to use your throat and facial muscles to form the word, place the tone, and regulate the pitch.”

The song’s sudden end had doused the girl’s desires. She was back to her ordinary, helpless self.

“But you make it all sound so—“

“Easy?”

“Yes.”

He almost said “I know.” “It’s work. Music is called a fine art, but the performance of music is really a fine sport. It takes training and devotion.”

“Do you think I can do it?”

“It’s not what I think that’s of consequence. It’s never what I think.”

He didn’t mean to taunt the girl.

He taunted himself.