Chapter 10

Hance neither replied nor pulled his eyes away from Emmy. She wore no makeup. She couldn’t afford it, and she didn’t need it. Her full, oval face, with its lashless Da Vinci eyes, had the radiance of a woman replete with physical satisfaction.

He remembered how she had played with the children at Dario’s rectory and how she had composed herself during the lesson. The Virginal likeness had not been the stuff of casual preoccupation. She had been gestating an idea, impregnated by a source he could not understand.

“That’s noble of you,” he said, but he could not help crushing her delight. “Have you thought about the details? Where will the school be located? How big will it be? How much will it cost? Have you planned for teachers? Books? Funding? And what kind of professional and state certifications will the school need?”

As he expected, disappointment defaced her enthusiasm like fissures spreading from the point of impact on a mirror. He thought she would become lackluster Emmy all over again. He was wrong.

“See? That’s why I wanted to ask you to help me. You know about these things. I don’t.”

Was the girl flattering him?

“I’m sorry, I’m not an elementary school teacher. I think you’d best speak to Mother Evarista. She’s the expert. She’ll know what it takes to start and run a school.”

“She’ll think I’m silly.”

“Why? She’s an elementary school principal. I’m sure she’ll understand.”

“No, she won’t. She’ll wonder what’s wrong with me. I don’t have certification, I haven’t done any student teaching, and I won’t take any methods courses for another two years.”

“Then why do you think you can teach now, never mind build a school?”

“Because I know I can. And I want to.”

“Then let me see what I can do,” he said, knowing he wouldn’t.

She thanked him and left, leaving him staring at the cupcake, regretting he hadn’t asked her to keep it for herself. He pitied her. She was as certain about running a school as Dario was about building the homeless shelter.

Why? What was this insistence on doing great deeds?

Why could people not simply be and let others simply be? Why did they need to improve on what they had or what they were? Why did they aspire to own things they could never own and to be what they could never be?

The same, sad, moral suppuration had murdered Mary Guaire and would have murdered him too, if he had had his way.

Her ambition should have been enough to presage her future. She had come to him in New York, eager to join the troupe after years of singing Lenten oratorios in a girl’s academy in Rhode Island. In an age when most women cultivated families, her friends encouraged her to use her gifts to spread hope and joy as the nation emerged from the devastation and confusion of revolt. Hance sensed at once that she was the water of a new spring: pure, sweet, passing through the world unaware of the delight she gave and promised.

They claimed each other without the formality of marriage or the knowledge of their associates, meeting in secret. What they did to each other required silence, the will to withstand the pain of arousal, the ability to keep their heads while convulsed in completion. Hance wished now that Mary had made a noise. Better to remember the gasp of her pleasure than what he derided as the slop of her death.

“John!”

The tone suggested this was not the first time someone had spoken his name.

Celeste Warren was in the doorway. “Sounds like a full house tonight. Would you like your door closed?”

Only then did he notice the activity in the practice hall. Layers of passages on pianos, violins, woodwinds, gave Bach and Mozart the aural delirium of atonality.

He declined the offer with thanks. As his colleague went on her way, he wished he could tell her why he wanted the door to stay open: He needed to hear dreams in progress; to assure himself that people still believed they could shape their lives as they wished; to savor the prospect of their devastation when fate did not oblige.

Such was the legacy of Mary Guaire.

He wanted to speak to Celeste about Mary, though he knew he could never tell anyone. Mary’s memory belonged to him alone, just as every part, scent, texture and ripple of her flesh had belonged to him alone.

He returned to reading his students’ papers, but what he saw was the stuff of his own history: Marsden, arrogant with drink, revealing the desire to take Mary and make her like Hance, himself and all the others. Hance remembered fleeing with her to Paris, where they lived under different names until the Revolution forced them deeper into the Continent. He saw, too, how Marsden found them in Prague and declared that, if he couldn’t have Mary, nobody would have her. Hance saw himself dismissing the threat as the verbal foot-stamping of a petulant child, and Marsden sulking like a child and going away. Hance recalled believing Marsden would see reason once the drink had left him and was foolish enough to think that was what had happened when Marsden joined them during rehearsal for The Magic Flute later that night. Mary was singing the Queen of the Night’s aria. When Marsden arrived, he did not interrupt. He signaled Hance, who was at the harpsichord, to say nothing, and sauntered behind her. Hance saw a string of beads glittering from his hand. He was going to give her a necklace? A wedding gift, perhaps? How nice.

But the beads turned out to be a gilded spiked garrote. Hance watched, unable to stop Marsden from strangling Mary. Then he himself made it look as though Mary had died in a fire, reducing the woman he had revered for her purity into a heap of bony cinders.

Why? What perversion, depravity, defect of thought or feeling had inspired him to do such a thing? True, he knew he could never stop Marsden. Why did he not try? Mary would have expected him to try. He refused to imagine her agony when she realized he was doing nothing.

Now look where doing nothing had left them both. Mary was dead. And he?

Hance leafed through the papers, seeing “oratorio,” “cantata,” “Baroque” and “Bach” among pretentious mental grovelings that betrayed their creators’ inability to analyze complex material.

Fools, he thought. But they were supposed to be fools. Their ignorance was his to endure without end. He deserved no less. He knew. But why? For what he had done to Mary Guaire, or for what he was?

He would forever refer to Mary’s fate not as “Mary’s death” but “what I did to Mary Guaire.” He could never remember fleeing Prague that night, though he must have removed himself from the city with speed, and alone, without Marsden’s company.

Alone in his office, surrounded by the musical noise and his students’ essays, he felt anew the fit of self-disgust that drove him to become an itinerant tutor, giving lessons in music, languages, mathematics. It had helped that he was young and of a kindly, sorrowful disposition. Families treated him with compassion and often paid him with bread and hot meals. They never suspected the meals were for naught. He owed his life to the blood of the small animals he came across in the wild, and to the occasional dog and chicken left unattended in a farmyard. 

In time, he tired of himself, as he was now tiring of himself, and his existence. Troubled dreams of Mary Guaire as a pile of ash made him seek his own end. He had heard tales about different ways to kill creatures like him, but the methods were distasteful at best and humiliating at worst. He would no more submit to a stake through the heart––plus the simultaneous beheading––than announcing what he was in the newspapers. He determined a simple shot through the heart would be enough. On a raw winter’s night in an inn near Rome, he accused a wealthy man of supporting the French occupation. By dawn, smoke was curling from their pistols. Hance’s adversary and his second were riding away in a comfortable carriage. Hance who had no second, watched the blood creep through his waistcoat with the speed of ink through muslin. He was alive. No surprise there. He couldn’t save Mary Guaire. How fitting that he couldn’t manage his own death.

Succumbing to the memory, he closed the office door, sat at the harpsichord, and began playing Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of his Beloved Brother. He remembered how, after the duel, the salty fragrance of his blood had reminded him that he needed to drink, but he eyed the animals with the disgust that accompanies the notion of eating a pet. He reasoned that he had indeed found the method of his demise. He wouldn’t drink. He would walk until he dropped.

He had no idea where he was going. The blood that gave his coat and waistcoat the texture of thin, soggy bread had yet to pervade the heavier wool of his greatcoat. He suspected passersby would mistake him for a student or a well-to-do pilgrim walking along the side of the road, his head bowed in thought and his arms folded against the chill.

He stumbled into a wall and fell upon stones. There were gentle female cries, a soft scuffle, a mild argument. He was lifted up. “Lasciatemi,” he said as he was carried indoors. Let me be. But they would not let him be. Rough hands splashed through the swill on his chest. Somebody said he was dying.  A priest gave him Last Rites.

The scent of roses and frankincense came from the chalice as the cleric prepared to place the Host on his lips. Like a newborn animal finding its mother’s milk, he knew what he needed. He put his hands around the plain golden goblet and pulled it to his mouth, sipping what he could of the Precious Blood within.

He lay back to see another cleric bending over him. The man held a little leaden ball between thumb and forefinger. “The surgeon took this out of your heart, yet you still breathe. How is that possible?”

Another man might have feared he would be tried for heresy and executed for revealing a life like his. But Hance wanted an end. He revealed everything about himself, from his trysts with Mary Guaire to refusing to drink the little animals’ blood, even though drinking it would have preserved him.

“You cannot live as you’ve lived before today,” the man said when Hance had finished his tale.

“I don’t want to live.”

“You will live. There is no other way.”

“What do you mean?”

The man turned his back and vanished among the crowd in the room.

“Signor!” Hance called.

An elderly nun hushed him. He realized he was now in a bed; people were moving around him as if he had just been placed there.

He asked the nun where the man had gone.

“We’re all here, mio bambino. We won’t leave you alone.”

He understood he had blundered into the grip of the Church. He would learn too soon that he would not be allowed to leave.