Hance recognized the street where Marsden lived as a street where houses built in the faux-Tudor style of the mid-twentieth century were smothered in ivy and general neglect. Here couples divorced instead of trying to live together. Children ran in gangs and stole from local stores. Nobody cleaned up after dogs. Bloated bags of trash sat alongside overflowing bins like aromatic growths. In brief, it was a street where discontent was the norm, and defeat was cultivated as another name for victory.
Though no children skittered behind the dormers, Marsden’s house was no different from the rest, in spirit and appearance. Marsden poured glasses of brandy and made a fire in the small fireplace. “It’s almost like the old days, before electric lights,” he said as the flames writhed high. He turned off the lights and invited Hance to sit on the couch, the only chair in the cold, uncarpeted room.
Hance would not sit. Sitting would invite something else. He switched the lamp back on.
Marsden was already beside him, his manner redolent of dusk upon a lawn in high summer—soft and comforting, yet concealing slimy things that creep on their bellies and roll in the mud. “You ran from me that night in Prague. Why?”
Hance was tired of explaining himself to himself for the past two centuries. He had no desire to explain himself to Marsden, who had put his arm around Hance’s shoulders. Hance looked at the fire. Was the heat on his face from the flames or awareness of Marsden’s stare?
“You wanted to die,” Marsden was saying. “I know. In fact, there’s nothing about you that I don’t know. I was there when you pursued that pitiable life as an itinerant music master. I was there when you talked your way into that stupid duel. I killed small animals and I scattered them in front of you along the way, hoping you’d surrender to the scent of wild blood. You didn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.” Hance tried to shrug him off.
Marsden held on. “Then believe this: I was there when you fled with Mary Guaire to Paris. I was there when you took her to the provinces. I was there when you settled in Prague. I watched you pleasure her night and day. She begged you to give her a child, and when you didn’t …” Though there was nobody else in the house, Marsden whispered the most intimate endeavors between Hance and Mary as though the details ought not be uttered aloud.
Too late, Hance realized Marsden had no intention of freeing him after all. He tried to break away. Marsden grabbed him by the hair at the back of his head.
“Did your keepers never tell you why God gave animals fur and made them walk on four legs? It was so humans wouldn’t watch them copulate and imagine themselves doing the same thing with each other. It didn’t work. Despite all the clothes, despite all the fashion, no matter what the year, the style, the mores, every creature that walks the earth is an animal, and what they do in the field, or in the barnyard, or in the bedroom, is what they live for. It’s what we live for.”
Hance said nothing, did nothing, wished to remember nothing as Marsden fell upon him in the rage he had always expected for himself and the lust he suspected Marsden had long reserved for Mary. Why fight back or beg for mercy? Marsden would always do what he wished, and this was just another day in Hell. There was no point in railing against what could never be changed.
Hance was put out of the house before daybreak, a bruised and bleeding effigy of abuse. The places that Mary alone had been allowed to enjoy cried out with the sensation peculiar to private flesh that has been violated.
He was too dazed to feel the cold or to hope that nobody would see him. He was mindful of his attire, though. All the buttons on his shirt were gone, ripped off when Marsden tore it open straight down the placket. He closed the shirt by knotting his tie low and keeping his blazer buttoned. Instead of buttoning his trench coat, he wrapped it around him and knotted the belt, thinking it would add a deeper layer between the world and his dishevelment.
Not until he reached the sanctuary of the woods between the town and the college did he allow himself to acknowledge the brutality of the night. Two hundred years ago he had fled the scene of a heinous deed willing to die. Now he fled the scene of a heinous deed willing to descend into nothing. He heard in his mind the final line of Spem in alium: “Respice humilitatem nostrum.” Some translated the words as “Remember us in our humble state.” Hance preferred, “Remember our humiliation.” It better described the awfulness that dictated the gross disregard for life, the flagrant need of one person to damage another.
“Respice,” he muttered, “respice …”
It might have been the hollow creaking of a crow. It might have been the chatter of a disturbed squirrel. Whatever the cause, Hance looked up through the lattice of naked branches to see pink and coral streaks lying like a child’s handprint on the early-morning sky.
“The rosy fingers of dawn,” he thought, recalling the cliché so loved by the ancient Greek poets. He just as quickly thought, “The rosy fingers of God.”
With the impunity of an all-knowing God, Marsden had followed him all his life. Was Marsden following him now?
Was God?
Hance listened. There was no riffle of foliage that would betray an animal; no crush of snow that would denote the presence of a person. The woods were still. So still, not even the branches creaked beneath the kiss of a breeze.
Yet, to Hance, the silence was the pause of someone waiting patiently for a reply which the person trusted would come. Though he saw no one, heard no one, suspected no one, Hance sank to his knees and spoke softly, reluctant to be overheard and aware that he would appear to be speaking to nobody, but determined to speak all the same.
“I don’t deny I’ve never felt your presence. I don’t deny I’ve never loved you. I don’t deny I have no desire to serve you. But I’ve never railed against you. I’ve never begged to be released. You know what I am and what I have done. At least I trust you do, because I can’t begin to express myself …”
No, he could express himself: in images, not in words. He saw all that he had done to Mary as vividly as he still felt what Marsden had done to him. He was remorseful, aghast, incredulous. Yet the confusion of emotions could hardly convey the grief, horror, agony, and self-hatred that for two hundred years had curdled within him, unspent and more profound than the thwarted sexual ecstasy that Marsden had wrenched from him in that heartless house on that spiritually squalid street.
“I can’t go on like this. I won’t.”
He lay down in the snow and waited for the confusion and sleepiness that would denote the cold was killing him. The rosy fingerprints faded against a field of brightening turquoise. In about two hours classes would begin. Hance wouldn’t be there. His classes would be cancelled for the day. And when he failed to appear tomorrow, the classes would be cancelled tomorrow. And when he failed to appear the day after … Perhaps someone would go looking for him. Perhaps his remains wouldn’t be found until the spring. Somebody else would have to conduct the spring concert. Somebody undaunted by that Tallis. He thought of his singers’ performance of Spem in Alium … Five choirs, forty voices, echoing, repeating, and then coming together at bar 40 … bar 67 …. Bar 125…For that start of that final sentence, Respice in humilitatem nostrum. He was training the singers correctly, one choir at a time. Soon he would put the choirs together in groups of two, then in four groups of two, then two groups of four.
He would put the choirs together, not his successor?
Ah, his mind was roaming. Winter’s embrace was squeezing him to sleep. He closed his eyes but started under the feeling that he was about to be stepped on.
A man and a woman were paces away. Each wore layers of sweaters and a denim jacket atop their faded jeans. Black trash bags were tied around their feet, no doubt to protect their sneakers from the snow. The man had a bulging backpack strapped between his shoulders and carried a smaller one in his hand. The woman carried a young child in a blanket. Day laborers? Originally from somewhere south of the border, most likely. They had the thick black hair and black, almost almond shaped eyes of indigenes, some of the oldest peoples of the Americas. They didn’t appear surprised to find someone else in the woods at that hour.
The man greeted Hance in Spanish.
Hance shook his head, signaled he didn’t understand. Why didn’t they go away? Couldn’t they see he wanted to be left alone?
The man knelt beside him and pulled a silver thermos from the mesh pocket on the side of the backpack. When Hance hesitated to take the thermos, the man removed the lid.
The opening exhaled fragrant steam. Hot chocolate.
Hance took the thermos but felt it rude to drink by himself. He extended the thermos first to then the man, who shook his head, and to the woman, who refused, smiling. At last, he gestured to the baby. The woman laughed, “No, no,” patted the baby’s backside area and made a sound that struck Hance as funny despite its rudeness. Of course. one did not load hot chocolate into a baby.
As Hance drank, the man spoke. The only words Hance understood were “Padre Dario.”
They were looking for the camp behind Dario’s church?
Hance couldn’t possibly give them directions. He didn’t speak Spanish, and they didn’t speak English.
“Padre Dario, Padre Dario,” they kept saying, as if uncertain Hance understood.
Perhaps it was the warming effect of the drink. Perhaps it was the couple’s kindness. All at once, Hance’s plight seemed less hopeless. Yes, he should go to Dario’s with the couple. They could make themselves comfortable among the tents, and perhaps Dario or one of the other priests would give him a lift home. Hance stood, nodded, and motioned for them to follow.
Lights in the upper floor of the rectory assured Hance that Dario’s day had begun. He went up the steps, surprised to find them covered in a thin layer of fluffy snow. (It had snowed? When?) “Sorry to bother you,” he said as Dario opened the door. “These people were looking for Padre Dario.”
Hance turned, thinking to signal the couple to come to the door. At the same time, he understood the look on Dario’s face.
The family was gone.
Hance started down the steps, his eyes sweeping the yard for a sign of the couple.
Dario followed. “I looked out the window when I heard the bell. All I saw was you ”
“They must have gone into the camp.”
Dario took his arm, pointed to the walkway that led to the steps. “Look.”
Hance saw only one set of footprints. His.
“They were with me. They gave me hot chocolate.”
“A couple so poor that they’re homeless gave you their food?”
“They must be day laborers. Or maybe they work in a restaurant. He had a backpack.”
“Come inside and tell me. It’s too cold.”
“There was a baby.”
“Inside, John.”
Dario was holding open the door. Hance stepped into the foyer, certain that his colleague sensed something was wrong.
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