Chapter 9

Emmy twirled her hair around her finger but otherwise did and said nothing as Hance drove back to the college. The look on her face as she stood at the music stand in the center of the room could have been that of the Madonna suckling the infant Christ in a Reni painting—flushed, contented, intent on the pleasure of her duty as the Ultimate Mother. Hance perceived none of the embarrassment that had scourged her audition or last week’s lesson. She still sounded like a remnant of Mary Guaire, but she was at peace, either resigned to her lack of talent or accustomed to it the way a needy person grows accustomed to the horrid quality of the clothes she can afford to wear.

Hance would not intimidate her, as he had done the week before. He listened, he coached her, and he listened some more as she failed to do as instructed. Unlike Emmy, he was not at peace with what she heard or perhaps thought of herself.  He could not reconcile why a student who said she liked to sing would refuse to learn how. She convinced him of his inability to form her into an artist yet defied him to form her. He glimpsed himself as a charred tree––upright but carbonized, never to thrive in the sun or burst forth blossoms in the spring. He wanted to seize her and glut himself with the substance that welled from deep within her, engorging her breasts and belly, waiting to be tapped.

Emmy scratched through the pages of her songbook. “What you’re playing? I don’t see that written here? Is that some kind of interlude? Is there another verse after it?”

He had gone from the accompaniment to Che farò senza Euridice into the melancholy air from the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, both from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. A silly aberration.  Now Emmy would have to suspect something odd about him. He devised an explanation. “The two sections sound alike. It was easy to go from one to the other. The classic accompanist’s mistake. Excuse me.”

“How did you do it?”

How did he do what?

“Get that tone. It reminded me of a sunny day in winter. Bright but frigid. It made me think the only way Orfeo could face life without Euridice was to no longer care about everyone and everything that ever mattered to him. They all meant nothing to him. His own life meant nothing to him. It gave me the shivers.”

Really? Try this.

He leaned into the keyboard, producing a tone that he knew would move her as if she had accepted a man into her and held him there, absorbing what he spilled with the serenity of parched earth in a soft rain. He held the final notes until the sound weakened and was heard no more.

“Did the composer want the music to sound like that?”

He looked up. Emmy was hugging herself­––chilled, not impassioned. Hadn’t she felt what he projected? He heard himself say, “There aren’t any directions in the score,” with no trace of the confusion and disappointment that scraped his confidence.

“So if you were conducting that opera, you would want that part to leave your audience feeling cold and heartless?”

Heartless as if they were gutted by events too terrible to bear, or heartless as implied by the words cynical, jaded and uncaring?

He leafed through the book for Heidenröslein, The Hedge Rose, an innocuous little Schubert song. “I’m not conducting that opera, Emmy, but I do know I’m not sure what I would do at that point.”

“Sorry, I just … wondered.”

Ignoring the semblance of contrition, Hance continued the lesson, and she continued to sing and not follow his suggestions. He stopped trying to teach her and let her sing as she would, hoping none of his peers noted his apparent inability to correct her unique deviation from accepted performance standards. At the end of the lesson, he assigned her some easy songs from the Elizabethan period and said he would see her the following week at her regular lesson time. He wondered if she could tell how much it hurt him to be polite to her. She left, crushing the paper on which he had written her assignment.

Like concrete slopped into an architectural hole, Emmy’s rebellion hardened into a mass that formed the foundation of all Hance thought for the rest of the day. Through all the classes, through all the lessons, through all the rehearsals, he didn’t know which rattled him more, her arrogance or his willingness to believe she could make him doubt his talent. The letters after his name and his position at the college confirmed his worth. He didn’t need the students’ approval; they needed his. If Emmy persisted in taunting him, he would indulge in the power of his position and give her a failing grade if she didn’t improve by the end of the semester. If she failed other classes, she would be compelled to leave the college, but if her grade point average was good enough for her to survive the semester. he could always refuse to take her as a student next semester. Either way, he wouldn’t have to deal with her any more.

He was in his office marking papers when she appeared at the door, which he always kept open. It was after dark. She must have been on her way to class after dinner, for she balanced a small cupcake on the palm of her hand.

“I forgot to say thank you for driving me back here and giving me that lesson. You didn’t have to.”

The way the words rushed out of her and the speed with which she plopped the cupcake on his desk inferred she would escape the building awash in tears. But all she did was step back, her cheeks a bright, frost-nip pink.

Hance eyed the gooey gift. The tilt and clumpy frosting suggested it had originated in somebody’s kitchen, not a commercial bakery. “Did you bake this?”

“The nuns did,” she whispered.

He listened, willing himself not to bother with the suspicions and rationalizations that suddenly destroy whatever ill we think of someone and make us doubt ourselves as much as we had doubted that person.

“I know I messed up my lesson,” Emmy was saying, bending low over the desk so he could hear her. “I was thinking of something. Something I really need to talk about with somebody.”

So the lost lamb needs a Father Confessor. Lay professors could always brush off a student with personal troubles by advising psychological counseling. For Hance, listening to woes came with the collar and vestments. He had no choice. “What’s the matter?”

“Promise you won’t think I’m silly?”

“Yes, of course.”

It had to be awful. She looked over her shoulder, as if signaling for Hance to suggest closing the door. Afraid she would say something for a confessor’s ears only, he pushed back his chair and would have closed the door himself when she said, “Those children in the woods behind Father Dario’s church … I want to teach them.”

Was that all?

He wasn’t surprised. The girl was an education major. “That’s an excellent idea. I suppose they could use a tutor.”

“I mean … I want to start a school for them. Could you help me?”

Chapter 8

He released her at once. He had sense enough not to touch a student. What would Dario think?

Dario seemed not to have noticed. He was rolling up the architect’s plans, aligning the layers with care.

Emmy ran through the rooms on tiptoe, her path defined by breathless giggles. Hance found her at the kitchen table reading aloud from a picture book of children’s Gospel stories. A little girl was on her lap; the boy she had chased clung to her arm.

Though the children’s faces had the shine of a recent scrubbing, Hance sensed little else clean about them. They had to have come from the settlement in the woods.

Seeing him, Emmy stopped reading long enough to pour him a cup of coffee from a white ceramic carafe on the table nearby. There was something about the way she held it out to him that forbade him from refusing. The scent suggested more than coffee; the taste, dark chocolate sprinkled with shavings from roasted coffee beans. It was delicious. Pleasantly hot, too. He leaned against the counter, sipping the beverage, listening to Emmy reading the miracle of the loaves and fishes. She had no likeness to herself as a singer. This girl believed the content she sent into the world. She had the ability to make others believe it, too. Why would she be so conscious of herself while singing, yet so willing to give of herself through a book?

At the end of the story, Emmy took the children by the hand and walked them back to their mothers in the woods. Hance went with her, lest she not return and he lost her again. “The nuns were worried about you,” he said as they stepped among the tents and campfires. That’s a lie. I myself was worried about you. “You didn’t call or leave any kind of message that you wouldn’t be in for your lesson, either.”

“Sometimes it’s easier that way. I don’t like to argue with people. If I called, somebody would have tried to talk me into taking the lesson.”

“That’s not arguing, that’s making you see the reality of the situation. The lessons are paid for at the beginning of the semester. Why waste that money by not showing up?”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you.”

“You sound angry.”

“I assure you, I’m not.”

Another lie.

“You shouldn’t be. I wasn’t skipping out, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking no such thing.”

“Then what do you think I was doing?”

“I have no idea. I’ve been looking for you because––”

“You were worried about me. You, not the nuns.”

She knows. How? Is it so noticeable? Hance would not refute her claim. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been working.”

Ripped jeans and that faded violet jacket were hardly the stuff of office attire. Hance wanted to blurt, In that condition? He settled for a polite “Where?”

“Here.”

Had Dario not told him the truth about the shelter? Was some funding already in place? “How much is Father Dario paying you?” Surely, not enough to live on.

“Oh, it’s not that kind of work. It’s the kind of work that Jesus did. Our Father’s work. ”

Nobody, clergy or lay, had ever spoken to Hance about doing “Our Father’s work.” They all had degrees of devotion and belief, but those degrees were modest; their expression, subdued. Emmy was speaking like a mystic. If she was indeed on that level, she might know more of him than he preferred to reveal.

But if she were not on that level, why would she let him take her arm and greet him with a glance that signaled she had been waiting for him? Hance felt his flesh shrink. There was one way to find out.

“Would you have time to take that lesson now?”

He hoped she would say no.

She said yes.

Chapter 7

Poor Dario. He knows so much but sees so little, like all those silly, self-important scholars who once upon a time caroused around the dungy gutters in the shadow of the Sorbonne.

Hance said nothing as his friend spoke a dissertation about the Church’s obligation to protect the poor, and how the ancient concept of sanctuary forbade the town from evicting the homeless from church property. The two had gone into Dario’s office, which overlooked the yard and the improvised dwelling place in the woods. Hance could not help waiting for one of the “residents,” as Dario had begun calling them, to swing from the branches, shouting “Asile! Asile!” like Hugo’s hunchback in Nôtre Dame de Paris.

“We’re building them a shelter,” Dario was saying. “So far, we’ve got the architectural plans and the contractors. All we need is the town’s permission.”

Hance almost suggested it would be less expensive and more practical to let everyone live in the rectory. He tried to figure out how many acres were involved but saw no end or border to the bare mass of trees that shivered in a sudden gust. “How did the diocese come to own so much vacant land?” He could never grow accustomed to the notion of the Church as an investor of real estate.

“A monastery once stood there. Burned to the ground in the early 1960s. The order had planned to build a seminary in its place, but the diocese, acting on the tenets of the Second Vatican Council, moved the seminary to the inner city, where the students could better serve the poor. What the architects call the footprint of the site remains. You can’t see it from here because the woods grew over it.”

“How big was it?”

“The monastery itself had four wings around a courtyard with a formal garden. The roof was terracotta, and the chapel had a bell tower. Very Romanesque.”

“How extensive was the site, about the size of a city block?”

“At least.”

“How big will the shelter be?”

“There will never be enough room.”

“What are you starting at?”

“Something similar to the monastery, with four wings around a courtyard.”

“A courtyard with a formal garden and a few marble birdbaths?”

“Yes. Half a wing would be devoted to a retreat house. We need an inspirational environment to remind the homeless of their dignity as children of God.”

No, it's not the homeless you need to inspire. You need to give the faithful a good reason to attend a retreat in a homeless shelter.

Hance had mentioned the formal garden in the spirit of cynicism. He was not surprised that his veiled malice was lost on Dario, who spoke of the retreat house as if fearing to drop a fragile teacup––or to incite Hance’s disapproval.

Hance did not disapprove of Dario’s grand scheme. What disturbed him was Dario’s ignorance. The homeless were not persons. They were the scarification of humanity, inflicted by the failure to achieve what society demanded of its participants. A shelter set upon pretty acreage owned by a church would never cut away the disfigurement. The mutilation was per omnia saecula saeculorum, for ever and ever, maintained by the greed and arrogance that formed society’s mandates.

Dario was just another one of those people fired by the commandment to love one another and deluded by the premise that love alone could relieve suffering. Nothing could relieve suffering. Suffering, not the rood to which Christ was nailed, was the One True Cross. Without suffering we could not hunger for joy, and hungering for joy, knowing we could never earn or keep that joy, led to suffering that could have no end.

Hance despised Dario for his ignorance, and knowing he willfully despised Dario made him despise himself. He was supposed to despise no one. But he could love no one. He refused to love anyone, not even himself, and surely, not God. He could not love the agent of his torment. He would endure. It was the only way he could fight back.

“You’re too quiet, John. Maybe this will change your mind.”

Hance had no interest in the rolls of blue architectural paper Dario unfurled atop the desk. The designs meant nothing to him. The children had continued running around the rectory as if they were in their own private playground, chased by a giggling Emmy Kydd. He needed to speak to her. He did not know what he would do if she vanished again. Still with his attention on the ruckus, he asked Dario how much the project would cost.

“So far, everything’s donated.”

“Everything? Labor? Furnishings?”

“Everything.”

“Monthly maintenance? Who’s going do the laundry and clean the toilets?”

“Some social workers have proposed assigning chores to the residents.”

“Your residents will be individuals who have demonstrated that they can’t see to themselves. How can they be expected to look after others?” Was that too harsh? “And what about utilities? How will utilities be funded?”

“There are plans for that, too.”

“Plans involving the residents?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve thought of everything. There’s nothing I can possibly do to help you.”

Dario followed Hance to the study door. “There’s not ‘nothing,’ John. We were hoping you could help raise funds.”

Don’t. He resisted spluttering in contempt. “How?”

“How else? Benefit concerts with musicians from the college.”

No. “My schedule might not allow it.”

“It doesn’t have to be this semester. The town hasn’t approved the plans yet—though it would be nice to proceed as though it had and pursue all manner of funding sooner than later.”

No. “I can’t promise anything.”

“Can you at least promise me you’ll think about it?”

Foolish man. We have no control over our own lives, never mind the lives of others. “I’ll speak to you later.”

A little boy scampered by, pursued by Emmy Kydd. Hance reached out and caught her by the arm. Another girl might have screamed. The look on Emmy's face made him think she had been waiting for him.

Chapter 6

How students indulged their time was of no interest to Hance. He could teach them history, theory and performance, but he could not teach them the results of their actions. If they had no desire to learn, if they were in college because it was the only place to go after high school, they would flunk out or be pulled out by parents unwilling to let their darlings use the semester as a vacation away from home with all expenses paid.

Most unsuccessful students presaged their fate by failing tests or skipping class. Some simply could not grasp the material. Still others disliked the school atmosphere, which one disenchanted soul said had the appeal of a mummy on a catwalk. Hance, who had overheard the remark, reasoned the student simply did not appreciate the school’s history: many of the small, ivy-covered buildings had been designed by architects active in New York and Providence in the middle of the 19th century, and the campus was on the National Register of Historic Sites. But Hance could not deny the premises had enough pointed dormers, tall, skinny windows and overwrought stained glass to make the House of Usher look like the happiest place on earth.

So what was Emmy Kydd’s reason for avoiding class? Why had she not gone to Aquinas Hall last week? Why was she not here now?

She was twenty minutes late. No, twenty-one. He watched the second hand on his watch trip over noon. The minute hand skipped into place.

He loathed lateness. He never knew what to do with himself while waiting for someone because he never knew how much time he had. Despite the proliferation of cell phones, students never called or texted to let him know when they expected to arrive. Their attitude was, “I’ll be there when I get there.” He was sorry Emmy took that approach. He had expected better of her.

A radiator the size of an easy chair clanked in the corner. Soon the steam would hiss, kissing a vague warmth around the room.

He played the introduction to Gute Nacht, from Schubert’s Die Winterreise, The Winter’s Journey. The plodding, minor-moded chords expressed the tedium of his wait as well as the agitation of his impatience to start the lesson.

No, not his impatience to start the lesson. The chords gave voice to the agitation of his impatience to see Emmy again.

Listening for her footsteps in the hallway, he sang so softly as to almost mouth the words. “Fremd bin ich eingezogen,  Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus …” A stranger I came, a stranger I leave …

“Der Mai war mir gewogen, mit manchem Blumenstrauss.” May awoke me with its blossoming flowers …

There were footsteps. Not her footsteps. A door down the hall closed.

“Nun ist die Welt so trübe, der Weg gehüllt im Schnee …” Now the world is dismal; the road, covered in snow … He repeated the line, continued the accompaniment without singing. Where was she? Why did she not call or have somebody else leave a message?

He did tell her he would see her today, didn’t he? Did she not hear him? Did she forget? Did she confuse this day with another?

Remembering the last time he saw her, he also remembered her lesson in the church, and how he had yelled at her and struck his fist on the railing of the choir loft. Was she afraid of him? Could he blame her if she was?

He stopped playing; folded his hands in his lap. He had also berated a fellow priest. The thought that he had apologized and been forgiven, albeit lightly, was no consolation. He appalled himself. What was wrong with him? What must that priest think of him?

What must Emmy Kydd think of him?

The hour for her lesson was up. Voices made friendly commotion in the hallway as classrooms emptied. Hance hoped Emmy would appear with apologies, saying she had forgotten or had slept in. He waited ten minutes before realizing he needed to act, not wait.

He might have waited too long. The nuns had seen her only a few times during the last week. She had not dropped any classes, though, and she was still registered at the school.

He drove around town, praying to see her. The box in the alleyway near the liquor store was gone; its residents had left behind no sign of habitation.

Perhaps she’d taken up with friends or returned among the homeless?

He went to the camp site, which was still cordoned off with yellow police tape. A lone patrol car idled in a clearing near the side of the road, watching for trespassers. Hance wondered if the officer inside thought he was driving by to cause trouble. He almost stopped to ask the officer where the homeless had gone. He was tempted to explain he was a clergyman, but he was in a blazer and flannels, not his collar; the man might not believe him.

By noon, visions of Emmy sleeping under a highway overpass and sucking filthy water from the gutter had replaced his ability to reason. Hoping his head ached from hunger but fearing he had little time to return to his rooms if the other business was upon him, he drove to Dario’s rectory on the grounds of the Church of the Ascension.

Dario called the craggy brownstone church his cathedral for the way the church and rectory were connected, as they were with many cathedrals. The buildings were in a rustic part of town, set in from the street and backed by woods that belonged to the township.

As Hance parked in front of Dario’s garage in the back, he smelled chimney fire coming from behind the garage, in the direction of the woods. At first he thought landscapers were burning underbrush. But he saw no landscapers’ vehicles.

Edging between the back of the garage and an overgrowth of vines and hedges, he saw fluffy pillars of smoke rising from the woodland floor, like columns of steam he had once seen dancing from the ground around the base of Mount Vesuvius. People bloated by every piece of clothing they owned crouched near the fires or in tents formed by tarps and sheets stretched between trees. They spoke among themselves in whispers, and hunched over, as if determined not to be discovered. The amount of clothing the squatters wore and their secretive manner suggested to Hance that these were the homeless people who had evaded the police at the other camp. He could not believe the stupidity of the group: Making fires was not the way to elude notice. He quit the scene as quietly as he could.

The door to the rectory was unlocked—a good thing, because with so many children running around in an uproar, nobody would have heard the bell. Dario was perusing a list with the secretary, whose desk was in the front parlor. He straightened as Hance opened the door. “John, either wipe that look off your face and pitch in or go back to whence you came.”

The severity of the greeting knocked Hance into silence. He had no idea what his face looked like. He did know he suspected Dario was harboring these people without the approval of the Diocese, and he himself did not approve. He almost walked out. Then a red-haired girl in a short violet coat caught a rampaging toddler by the waist and lifted him high in the air going, “Wheeeeeee!”

He had found Emmy Kydd, and if he had not seen for himself, he would not have believed her capable of joy.

He closed the door. “All right, Dar. What do you want me to do?”

Chapter 5

Hance would have sung an Ave Maria and burned candles among roses if he thought it would put Emmy Kydd at ease. But the slouching, lowered-eye figure at the music stand was a human ooze of misery that defied a cure. He played the introduction to Voi che sapete, “You who know the ways of love,” from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, waiting for her to sing.

Such an exquisite sense of shame, he thought, admiring how unmoved she was by the pretty, playful introduction. How did she earn that sense of shame? What has she done? What has been done to her?

A noise broke his daydream. The same noise that had come from Emmy during her audition weeks before. The voice of the dying Mary Guaire.

He went back to the beginning of the piece. “Again, Emmy.”

Again, the sound of Mary Guaire.

“Right. Let’s try it again …”

Again, Mary Guaire.

“Again.”

Mary Guaire, once more.

Hance returned to the introduction. Which did he want to do, help his student or indulge in the memory of Mary Guaire?

He noticed Emmy look toward the door. Hance had heard the laughter, too. He doubted the students in the hallway had paid attention to the lesson and were making sport of her, but the look on her face suggested he would not be able to convince her.

He told her to take her things and follow him.

Silent, expressing no surprise or curiosity, she did as he said. He found it a bit disconcerting that she would walk behind him. Any of her peers would have been right up there with him, full of questions, perhaps chatting without end. At odds with her diffidence, he stopped in the middle of the commons and waited for her to come level with him. He directed her along a slim, stony path to the little fat-domed church between the campus and the girls’ academy.

The church was more of a chapel, with room for no more than 300 people at a time. Its design had been inspired by the Italian Renaissance architect Palladio. There were columns between the pews and statuary in slender niches. The complex surfaces, the stone floor and that domed ceiling provided plenty of area for sound to bounce off, making for splendid acoustics. Hance had Emmy stand at end of the center aisle at the foot of the sanctuary and went into the choir loft above the floor at the entrance. She still had her messenger bag over her shoulder. Her thin, violet-colored jacket was an incongruous companion for her reddish hair.

“Sing to me.” He refused to shout across the distance. He spoke to her as if she were up in the loft with him.

“Sing what?”

He could barely hear her. “Whatever you like. The first thing that comes to mind.”

He saw her mouth move. A rusty whisper. Did he really hear “Lasciatemi morire,” Let me die, otherwise known as the Lamento d’Arianna? She had the gall to attempt the same aria that had humiliated her during her audition with him? He considered the lyrics:

Lasciatemi morire.

E che volete

Che mi conforte

In cosi dura sorte,

In cosi gran martire?

Let me die. Who do you think can comfort me in such a horrid state, amid such great suffering?

She had the gall to sing it to him. Why? Had she been sent to mock him, to remind him of the one thing he most wanted but could never have? Was she part of the punishment?

If she meant to mock him––if she were indeed in league with the punishment, then he owed her no respect. He would kill whatever courage she had to sing that song. He would hurt her. He hardened his voice. “I can’t hear you.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-te-mi-“

“I can’t hear you.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-te-mi-“

“I still can’t hear you.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-“

“There’s nobody here, Emmy! Don’t be afraid of what you sound like. Open your mouth.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-“

“NO.” Hance pounded his fist on the railing. “You’re singing to yourself. You should be singing to me. I’m not sitting in front of you. I’m up here.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-“

“NO!”

“LA-SCIAAAA-“

“Don’t shout! There’s no need to shout. Stand straight. Place the tone atop your breath and let it ride out to me.”

“Lasciaaaaaaa-“

“No! You’re not thinking about what I told you to do. Think before you do it.”

“La-SCIAAAA-“

“No! No, no, no, no, no!”

A door in the apse behind the altar opened. Out dashed a priest, the skirts of his chasuble flapping about his trouser legs. “What’s going on here? First Friday Mass is about to start—“

Hance gestured to the priest but addressed Emmy. “He’s doing it, too!”

The priest charged down the aisle, looking up into the darkness. “What am I doing?”

“Shouting. Needlessly.”

The priest braked in recognition. “For crying all night, John, I wish you’d let me know when you want to usurp the premises. Mother Evarista’s on her way with the first graders. They’ll be here any minute.”

Hance descended the winding staircase from the choir loft, sorry his colleague had caught him in such a mood. Perhaps that was part of the punishment, too. “Mea culpa, Frank.”

The priest, who was heading back to the door behind the apse, waved without turning around, joking “I forgive you, my child” as he returned to the room behind the altar.

Walking back to the college campus, Hance made light of the eviction. Emmy said nothing. They stepped aside to let Mother Evarista, the convent abbess who was also the grammar school principal, marshal a line of silent, stumbling children toward the church.

“Good morning, Mother.”

“Good morning, Father.”

Hance enjoyed the absurdity of their respectful exchange. If none of the first graders had been there, the greeting would have had a different script:

“’Morning, Ev.”

“Hey, John! How’s it going?”

He was pleased to see Emmy give the nun a shy smile. Perhaps now was a good time to ask how she was managing at the convent.

“It’s nice.”

Excellent. The response was two syllables, instead of one or worse—silence.

“Were you able to retrieve your things from the camp?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There was yellow tape all around the place, and cops in cars waiting to arrest anyone who tried to get in.”

“Didn’t you tell them your possessions were there?”

“Sister Katharine did.”

“Why didn’t you speak to them yourself?”

“Sister Katharine drove me there. They told her to talk to the police chief.”

“Did she?”

“He wasn’t available.”

“Did nobody tell you when he would be?”

“No. We couldn’t wait, anyway. Sister Katharine had a class at four.”

“Didn’t you go back?”

“No. They’re only things,” Emmy insisted as Hance said, “You’ve been wearing the same clothes all this time?” “Stupid things. Probably all moldy from being on the ground.”

“Clothing isn’t stupid. It has a purpose.”

“I know. M’Liss gave me some of her sweaters.”

The news did not bode well. “You went back to the street?”

“I had to see how M’liss was doing. I brought her food.”

“Food from where? The student center? The convent? Food that you needed for yourself?”

“Nobody’s watching out for her.”

“She should be watching out for herself.”

“But aren’t we supposed to watch out for each other? Aren’t we supposed to feed the hungry and clothe the … people who don’t have any clothes?”

Hance noted her reluctance to say the “naked” part of “clothe the naked.” “She shouldn’t be on the street,” he said. “Nobody should be on the street.”

“But she likes it there. She’s on her own.”

They had reached the music building.

“Can I go now, Father Hance? I’ve got a class in Aquinas Hall.”

“I’ll see you next week, then.”

She left without expressing any kind of leave-taking. Hance was not surprised to see her pass Aquinas Hall and scoot through the Gothic iron gates that separated the campus from the town.

Chapter 4

The nuns of the teaching order that ran the college took the girl in, promising to help her retrieve her things from the camp. This resolution of the girl’s situation, however temporary, struck Hance as something that would have happened two hundred years ago, before the invention of public agencies to succor the indigent. People of the 21st century never sheltered strangers in their homes. To shelter a stranger was to risk thievery, assault, murder. But homeowners risked the same possibilities two hundred years ago, didn’t they? Hance wished the nuns well with their guest and prayed the girl was as harmless as she was helpless. It would gut him to think their charity was a symptom of gullibility.

For a little while after that night, Hance attended to classes, rehearsals and ordinary department business with little concern about the girl. He expected to see her in the hallways, or to hear her mewling through a voice lesson with Celeste Warren, the retired opera coach who always ended up with the less talented voice minors. He imagined she would find him at his office and tell him how nice it was to live on campus; to have hot meals every day; to have a soft bed, with clean linens; to have clean laundry; to not worry where she would sleep the next night. Yet on the other hand, he also expected one of the nuns to tell him the girl had run away, taking blankets, plates or other useful objects along the way. He felt he had made a mistake. He could not say why.

A vision after a particularly trying Communion showed him. It came as the excavation in his head diminished, and he feared the server, a yawning frat rat, might discern the reddish sheen of his face owed itself not to the warmth of the chapel, but to the blood in his sweat. In the vision, he was driving the girl back to the campus, determined to be rid of her, just as he had done the night he had discovered where she lived.

This time, discreetly leeching the blood that maintained him on this earth, he knew without thinking in words that he had not helped the girl; he had abandoned her. She was the icon of the irrevocable, irremediable selfishness that had marked so many mendicants he had known on the Continent. In those days it was fashionable for God-fearing people to befriend mendicants––men and women, not affiliated with religious orders, who had renounced all worldly concerns and traveled among the shrines of Europe and the Holy Land, living like hermits without a cave. Contrary to the popular notion, mendicants were not beggars. They never begged. They trusted God would send them helpers. He had befriended a young mendicant in Rome and enjoyed hours debating Aquinas and Augustine with him. The man refused the food Hance brought him and eventually, inevitably, starved to death.

Despite his desire to know about the girl’s progress, he refused to ask about her. He sensed he should wait. She would come to him. Perturbed souls always came to him, whether he wanted them or not.

By the first week of November, the college’s small choir was rehearsing for the Christmas concert, an annual affair that attracted newspaper stories by reporters who always asked Hance the same question: How do you reconcile being a priest with a career as a conductor? It never mattered that he was a college professor, like the unknown number of teaching priests before him, or that the first great universities of Europe were staffed by clerics. Some people simply could not grasp the notion of priests doing something of value in the world unless they, like Dario, dabbled in obtaining social justice for the oppressed.

The choir, which consisted of 16 singers, was preparing the Mozart Mass in C Minor. It was the kind of rehearsal that was so good it should have been the actual performance; it could never be repeated.  Some parts of the Mass are scored for two choirs. One of the parts is the Gloria. Hance, who was conducting from the piano, had the choristers stand around the piano randomly, not with their particular choir or section. A soprano from the first choir was likely to stand between a tenor from the second choir and a baritone from her own choir. The idea was to force everyone to listen to his or her part, and to understand how that part fit in with all the rest. “Listen to yourselves, listen to each other,” he repeated as contrapuntal lines chased each other and overlapped in voluptuous harmonies.

Hance felt the singers pick up the tempo, like a horse rebelling against the snaffles. With a nod, a glance, a word, he collected them into a restrained but energetic whole that made him feel he was indeed on horseback, cantering over unknown ground. The Gloria dwindled to its gentle conclusion, the students smiling. Hance knew they felt they had discovered something rare. They had yet to discover the rigors of trying to emulate success.

He told them to take a well-deserved break and greeted Celeste Warren, who had been waiting in the doorway. “I’ve got a favor to ask, John,” she said as she approached the piano. “I’d like you to approve a change of secondary instrument for one of my students, from voice to anything other than voice.”

Hance suspected the wording of the request. “What’s the matter? Has she lost interest? Would she prefer another instrument?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Professor Warren intoned before Hance finished speaking “It grieves me to say this, John, but the child is horrendous. She’s a music education major, and her primary instrument is piano, which I understand she’s got to learn for teaching purposes. I’ve been subtly suggesting she switch to organ or a wind instrument, but she insists she wants to continue with attempting to learn to use her voice in something that suggests a musical manner.”

Hance regarded his colleague, a woman who had the grace not to color her white hair or spread artificial color across her creamy but delicately crinkled cheeks. “Am I to understand, Celeste, that you would prefer not to have her as your student any longer?”

“She just failed her mid-term exam with me, and I believe she’ll fail for the semester. I don’t want to flunk her, but I can’t help her any more.”

“Why do you think I can teach her better than you?”

“I’m the grandmother of six. You’re young and you’ve got hair. You’ll command her attention.”

Hance blushed at the inferences behind the knowing, deadpan delivery. Girls––and women––had been nursing infatuations with priests for as long as he could remember. Why? What was there about lusting for the unattainable and the unavailable? He reached for a notepad. “When is her next lesson?”

“Tomorrow morning at eight.”

Hance winced. “Is that her usual time? You’ve been asking her to sing first thing in the morning, without having had time to warm up?”

“We’ve all sung first thing in the morning. We’ve got to, on occasion.”

“True, but it’s torture for the least experienced among us.”

“With all respect, John, listening to her is torture for me.”

Hance almost laughed. “Tell you what. Leave her a message asking her to come here at that time. She’ll have her lessons with me. What’s her name?”

“Emmy Kydd.” Celeste spelled the name as Hance wrote.

“What’s her range?”

“Hard to tell. She swallows her voice instead of projecting it.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Some students are shy and afraid of making mistakes, but she says she likes to sing. Perhaps she just dislikes singing in front of people.”

"Perhaps. I'll find out."

"I shouldn't sound so optimistic if I were you."

The student's voice was the least of Hance's concerns.

He now knew the girl's name. She was coming to him.

Chapter 3

The rain had stopped. Though classes were in session and the buildings formed a brightly lighted barricade against the dripping night, the campus felt like a small, humid room where dense drapes and carpeting digested all sound and incubated the air into the likeness of dusty mold. Damp, and hush'd, and close as a sick man's room when he taketh repose an hour before death, Hance thought as he crossed the common.

He had become a reluctant participant in the detritus of events that should not have concerned him and that he would have warned against had he been thinking clearly. As he trampled mushrooms into velvety goo and heard the bloated splats of raindrops fallen from wherever they had lost their grip, he could do no more than reflect upon humanity’s unending inability to see that all those old sayings about times changing, people staying the same, and season following season were falsehoods, caused most likely by unrelenting unrequited hope.

In Hance’s sphere, people really did change, and though season followed season, no summer, winter, spring and autumn was like the one the year before. Each had its own ambience and an event to distinguish it from all the others. There was the spring he discovered Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, and the spring his mother died; the autumn he learned about Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Agincourt Carol, and the autumn he first read Tennyson, whose assessment of the season's deathroom atmosphere always impressed him as the most accurate.

Autumn this year would be marked by the deliverance of Father Dario and two dozen students from the hands of the authorities. The woods where the homeless had pitched their camp belonged to the town, which that day had decided to arrest the squatters on charges of trespassing. From what Dario had told him, Hance gathered that as the police approached, the homeless receded into the woods, apparently as smooth and silent as a hump of ink hugging the corner of the paper absorbing it from the surface of a valuable desk. Dario and the students stayed. They had no reason to run away. They were there to help the homeless. The police apprehended them on charges of aiding the trespassers and hindering arrests.

The police had allowed everyone they arrested one telephone call, and the students phoned the lawyer who had offered to come to their aid. With the lawyer on the way, Dario called a fellow priest––Hance. He said his car, as well as the students’ cars, had been towed from the campsite to the municipal pound. He needed a lift to the facility, which was too far to reach on foot. If Hance could bring him and a couple of students to their cars, they would go back for everyone else.

Sacerdotes tui induantur justitiam, Hance thought as he started up his car, a non-descript compact from the last century. May thy priests be clothed in justice. May they also be clothed in common sense and the ability to consider the consequences of their actions, especially if the justice they fight for is unpalatable in some circles.

Dario and the students were waiting for him outside the police station, an incongruous but cozy Tudor-style building behind mountainous rhododendron bushes. They all were talking about their experience as if jail were the best stop on a house tour.

Nobody apologized for dragging him out on a rainy night. Nobody complained about the possibility that they were arrested without cause, either. They were leaving that business up to the lawyer, who remained behind, still bailing out youthful offenders.

As Hance opened the doors for Dario and the other passengers, he noticed a girl standing on the flagstone path to the station’s entrance. The light over the door rimmed the outline of her head, casting her face in shadow. But her dejected stance and lack of concern for what could happen to her was enough to identify the girl who had auditioned for him earlier in the day.

Hance heard his passengers telling others they would return for them. Nobody directed a promise to the girl. “She was at the camp?” he asked Dario before pulling away from the curb.

Dario followed his stare. “A student of yours?”

“She’s new to the department.”

“Ah,” Dario said, and resumed marveling at how easily the homeless people had avoided capture.

Hance would have preferred to go home after depositing his passengers at the pound. But when Dario invited him to help out with “just one more car load,” he thought refusal to participate would appear selfish and rather afoul of his calling.

He was not aware the girl who had auditioned for him was in his car until the three other students had left him with gleeful thanks and she remained alone in the back seat. She sat as if waiting for the others to return. “We’re supposed to get out here?”

“Yes, if your car was brought here.”

“Oh. All right.”

She slid out of the car and closed the door without giving thanks.

She stood at the gate to the pound. While others joked with the officer on duty, she stood, looking around, her hands at her sides, with an aloofness that struck Hance as willful isolation.

Convinced the girl was yet another one of countless creatures that proved both God’s sense of humor and the range of his imagination, Hance put the car in gear and almost drove away, leaving her to the mercy of her peers. But she continued to stand with her hands at her sides. It was then that Hance really noticed what she was doing with her hands:  nothing. Unlike the other students, who were pulling out keys from pockets and handbags, she alone was still. She had no keys. She had no handbag. The pockets of her tight-fitting jeans were flat and empty.

She must not have a car, Hance reasoned. Either she trusted someone would give her a lift, or she did not care if nobody helped her. Nobody seemed to notice her. Her peers filtered through the gate into the pound, which was nothing more than a gated parking lot.

Hance imagined the girl being ignored and made to walk home. He sensed resignation had already dulled her further. He got out and opened the passenger door for her. “Here, I’ll give you a ride back.”

She got into the car readily enough but restricted conversation to directions: “Please turn left here. … Please make a right. … A left at that light. … Go straight until you reach the fourth building, the one next to the deli. That’s it.”

They were on a street where neglected houses were separated from the road only by sidewalks and from each other by passages large enough to hide smelly garbage cans. The girl had pointed to a dwelling whose facade of pale green aluminum siding was depressed toward the corner of the lower floor as if a great beast had scratched its backside against it. Half a flight of steep yellow brick steps stopped on a concrete landing before a glass door fronted by an aluminum grille.

The girl left the car with neither thanks nor goodbye, dashed up the steps and facing away from the door, burrowed through her pockets, as if digging for keys. Hance, who suspected the neighborhood was as rough in character as it was in appearance, preferred to wait to see her go safely inside, but the longer she excavated, the less comfortable he felt about sitting there. An unenlightened neighbor might think he was stalking her.

He pulled away, glancing in the rearview mirror to make certain she got into the house. Though the streetlight was on the corner half a block away, he had no doubt the blur he saw speeding into the passage between the house and the deli was the girl, who was now no longer on the step.

He drove around the corner in the direction she had fled, parked across the street and pretended he was going to the liquor store, which he calculated was alongside the end of the passage the girl had taken. The sound of giggles and sneakers slapping the pavement enticed him to look into the passage.

A large cardboard box filled the passage about twelve feet in from the sidewalk. The side of the box against the liquor store had buckled, slanting the roof.

From where he stood, Hance perceived a sleeping bag, a swath of material that could have been a blanket or a towel, and open, empty fast-food containers. The dwelling of rodents, not a human. He could not see through the other end of the box. But the girl was there. He sensed her desire to be seen but unseen.

Hance would not allow himself to go farther. She would run. Perhaps a passerby would summon the police. He was certain he would be able to explain himself, but he could not subject the girl to that sort of attention. She might run to a place where he would never find her. He took a step back. He wanted to say her name, but realized she had never told him her name; nor had he asked. He had no choice but to say, “Hello.” He spoke softly, with a gentleness that he hoped conveyed concern and an admonishment against running away.

“Hello, it’s—" What to call himself? Father Hance? Professor Hance? Which would make him sound less like a predator? He waited for a man to leave the liquor store before saying, “It’s John Hance.”

The box quivered, making the sound of dried swamp grass rustling in the breeze. The girl was there. He caught the same scent of salted apples she had emanated during her audition earlier in the day. Hance wondered if she would flee. No. She stayed. “I just want to make sure you’re not living in conditions that could hurt your voice," he said.

The box shuddered. The girl appeared, speaking through the hair that swung over her face as she bent double, compressed by the height of the box. “Sorry about M’lissa. She thinks you’re from the department of family services or something.”

“Who?” 

“Melissa. My friend.”

There was another girl? More than one? How many lived in that box?

“Didn’t you tell her who I am?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know it was you. You look different in the dark.”

“I do?”

She eyed his hands. “Did I leave something in the car? Is that why you came after me?”

“I came after you because I didn’t see you go into the house. Don’t you live there?”

“I can go where I want. I’m eighteen.”

He felt she looked at him as if seeing a naked man for the first time. “You must live somewhere. You don’t wear the same things to class every day. You keep clothes somewhere. Laundered clothes.” Her hair was clean, too. And her nails were trimmed and polished.

“I use the laundry room at the student center.”

“Where do you get the money to use the laundry room?”

“I do laundry for classmates. They pay me enough to do mine, too.”

“What else do they pay you for?”

“Little things. Cleaning their rooms. Doing their dishes, if they’re in an apartment and they can cook.”

Hance thought of a practice that had accompanied him into modernity. “Do you do research for them, too?”

“I hardly have time to do my own assignments.”

He believed her. “You do your work in the library, I take it.”

“Can’t afford an Internet café.”

“Do you have a cell phone or a laptop?”

“Can’t afford those, either.”

“How do you stay in touch with everybody?”

“We write notes.”

“Of course. The same technique that’s been behind the progress of civilization for thousands of years.”

“I’m not backwards if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking you’re resourceful. You’ve got to be resourceful, if you can survive on limited means.”

"I do what's got to be done, that's all. I don't want to live ..."

Hance thought the mumble was a euphemism for "in a shelter."

"So you've been living here?"

"Sometimes."

"Where are you when you aren't here? With a relative, a family friend?"

She said nothing.

"Are your parents alive?" Somebody was paying her tuition.

"Like I said, I'm eighteen. I can live where I want. I don't need parents."

Her parents had to be alive, for her to speak with such vehemence against them.

Hance again regarded the box and its fragments of an attempt at a normal life.

"This really isn't the place for a singer. The stress and the weather could ruin your voice. Gather your things. I'll bring you back to the college. The nuns have guest rooms at the convent and in some of the dorms. I'm certain they can make you comfortable until we sort out something better for you."

"These aren't my things. They're M'lissa's."

"Where are your things, then?" Back at that house? Had he made a mistake in coming after her? Was she really well off?

"I don't have anything."

"Nothing? What about your textbooks?"

"They're back at the camp."

"In the woods? Why did you bring them to the woods?

"I couldn't leave them here. Somebody would take them and sell them."

"Am I to understand you lived at the camp?"

"You won't tell anybody?" She shoved tears off her cheek with the back of her hand, stirring the scent of salt. "Promise me you won't tell anybody!"

"I can't promise you that. I'll need to tell the nuns the truth about you. They'll want to know the truth. Without the truth, I can't help you. Nobody can." He could never tell the truth about himself. Nobody would believe him. Nobody would help him. Who was he to believe he could help this girl?

She agreed to return to the campus with him. He ached for her, in his heart and elsewhere. He resolved to place her in the care of the nuns and be rid of her.