SALUTARIS

Excerpt: The Need To Damage

2011-06-07T06:14:00.001-07:00

In this later chapter, Hance and Marsden come to terms:

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.

Salutaris Teaser Trailer

2010-04-02T03:04:00.001-07:00

Chapter 11

2010-03-09T13:19:00.001-08:00

Many of the students in the practice rooms were boarders who would go to their dorms for the evening. But some lived nearby and would return to their homes and families once their day was done, as would colleagues who were not members of religious orders.

As Hance played the Bach, he remembered coming home from school when he was a boy and playing the same piece on the harpsichord. For the moment, his office and the practice hall did not exist. Fresh pies cooled on the sideboard, which had been moved into the parlor so the dining room could be freshly wallpapered. The warm, sugary fragrance challenged the scent of the glue. Any moment now his father would come home and hang his coat and hat near the door. His brother was outside kicking through piles of autumn leaves. … How easy to believe it all was happening now, yet how hard to believe he once had enjoyed a life that many people would consider boring and of no consequence.

Why did he never suspect that that life could end, or that his life would no longer be his to spend as he pleased? What had been wrong with him, to think his life in his future would be as good as or better than what he knew as a boy? What had been wrong with him, to believe he was guaranteed that segment of time called a future?

Hance knew the students in the practice rooms thought they had their own future. They waited, as he once had waited, for the time when they would be what they worked so hard to become.

How silly.

How ingenuous.

How utterly ignorant about the true properties of life. Life does not go from one fulfillment to the next, like promised stops on a well-crafted tour. Life is a succession of heartaches garnished by the attempt to relieve the agony.

He almost ended the Capriccio with a petulant smash of a chord. No. Some nosy individual was bound to see who was having the hissy fit. He went for a walk.

Walking was the only way he could try to escape himself. Two hundred years ago, he’d have hired a horse and gone for a ride. He couldn’t let his mind wander while riding. He had to be aware of his surroundings; to watch the road or path ahead for anything that could spook or lame the horse. Besides, the horse always knew when he became lost in thought. He no longer moved with the horse. He let the reins go slack when he should have tightened them or tightened the reins when they should have hung loose. The horse would become confused and either roam where it wished or stiffen and back up, preparing to rear.

He hadn’t enjoyed a good ride in ages. He could drive a car, instead, but the consequences of becoming lost in thought behind the wheel were much graver than the results of falling mentally asleep in the saddle. He could possibly kill someone. A horse at least had sense enough not to walk into something. A horse always stopped for a human, if there was time enough to stop.

Dusk had long matured into a night rich with the scent of wet earth and dead leaves, an aroma that swelled in the unseasonably warm air. A small footbridge crossed the stream between the arts building and the library. Students hurried to or from the parking lot hidden behind the dense stand of trees. Hance leaned on the railing of the bridge and listened to the water. It had the sound of purity: silvery, unsullied by silt, unhindered by rocks. Sometimes, when all was quiet, a deer or two would saunter to the edge and drink. They never walked into the water to drink. It was almost as if they understood the difference between clean and filthy water. One day he almost coaxed a doe to take a leaf from his hand. She stepped close enough for him to see the curtain of lashes over her great eyes, but a student late for class raced over the bridge, making a clatter that frightened the animal into bolting through the trees. Hance thought of her whenever he passed that way. He hoped to see her again, but began to sense he never would.

He had been at the college for nearly seven years already and would be assigned to a new school before the next fall term. He never stayed anywhere more than seven years. It was the most reasonable amount of time. A man didn’t change that much within seven years. After ten years, though, he’d be expected to show signs of aging. Hance, however, would never change. He couldn’t. So far as students and faculty ever knew, he could be thirty or forty, never more, never less.

The aging was inside. He was exhausted: from performing. From coaching the same inadequate singers day after day, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

From an existence he never could have chosen for himself.

When students asked Hance what religious order he belonged to, his reply was quick and casual: “None.” He was a diocesan priest, not associated with any monastic rule or “order” like the Benedictines (Order of Benedict), the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor) and the Dominicans (Order of Preachers). He lived in the world, not in a monastery, and though he didn’t take vows like those associated with monastic orders, like his monastic counterparts, he was bound to canon law.

Answering questions about why he became a priest was equally straightforward: “I was called.”

Straightforward, but not as truthful as listeners presumed. “Bound and shackled” was more like it.

The nun in Rome had not lied when she said Hance wouldn’t be left alone. He was watched over day and night, sometimes in silence, sometimes to the drone of Latin prayers as a monk or a nun muttered Hours or a rosary. He never joined the devotions, nor was he invited to do so. Prayer had no place in his life. Though he had sung his own share of oratorios when opera houses shut down during Lent, he had been created to reject and refute, not to embrace and believe. To him, prayer was nothing. He dismissed the recitations as he ignored the sound of shutters rattling in the wind. The noise was there; it would go away.

But God would not be ignored. The lack of blood meals induced the headaches Hance would come to know and fear so well. In the beginning, he attributed the pain to the unpleasantness of his captivity; it would go away if he were patient and concentrated on escape. But the pain did not go away. It grew. He imagined not avenues of escape, but of his head exploding and a porridge of brains dripping down the wall. His body, not his mind, drove him out of his room and toward the chapel. “Ho bisogno … ho bisogno,” I need, was all he could say to the friar who escorted him, astute as a parent letting a toddler take its first rickety dash down a hallway.

The priest was giving Communion when Hance dropped to his knees at the railing and seized the chalice as he had seized it that first day among the clerics. He thought the priest would pull it away, but the friar behind him said something that made the priest back off. Or perhaps it was the way Hance gagged on the substance that made the man recoil. At the same time, the pain in Hance’s head broke and moisture flooded his face. He felt cloth patting the stuff away. When he opened his eyes, he saw a portrait drawn in blood on the sleeve of the celebrant priest’s white vestment. All that the image wanted was a crown of thorns and a beard, and the good friars could claim they had the long-lost Veronica’s veil in their possession. Hance almost laughed, but nobody else was laughing. Nobody else was making a sound. All the friars were looking at him and the picture his blood had rendered.

That night he was brought to a location near the Vatican. A Cardinal fluent in English carried an order from the Pope: become a priest and dedicate yourself to the Eucharist.

“Why?”

“You cannot die and go to Hell, so we must provide you with Hell here on earth. Your kind might live forever, but you are damned to eternal suffering, not to eternal life.”

Hance rebelled against his imprisonment by not rising in the morning when wakened and by not joining his keepers at mealtimes.

He was never ordered to be taken from his room. The Cardinal knew his agony would drive him to the blood that now kept him alive in order to suffer his punishment. If he couldn’t walk out of his room, he would crawl out, drawn by scent and any creature’s natural yearning for survival.

In time, Hance tired of the fighting. He found less agony by doing as he was told. He understood he had indeed succeeded in doing away with himself. Never again would he sing or play harpsichord or fortepiano as he pleased. Never again would he direct an opera. His voice and his music belonged to another John Hance in another life. But in the day when Gregorian chant was still a major part of the daily office and priests still sang parts of the Mass in Latin, it was impossible for him not to sing, and it was impossible for others not to notice his voice. In time, he was ordained Padre Gian Nicolo del Preziosissimo Sangue: Father John Nicholas of the Most Precious Blood. Instead of keeping their vampire in a monastery, beyond communion with ordinary humans, the Vatican made him suffer more by sentencing him to do what he no longer wished to do: make music. He would do so as a teacher within the confines of the Church, dealing with less talented students in schools not known as nests of musical geniuses.

He’d been working with dullards for nearly two centuries. Not a vast amount of time, considering the scope of eternity. But such was life in Hell. There would be no end. That was the point. All he could aspire to was to be among the beauty of nature every now and then. Never could nature be taken away. The sun rose and set; trees changed with the seasons; birds sang. Deer pranced and drank at pure, lovely springs.

Homeless men and woman pitched ramshackle camps in the woods behind churches.

A talentless girl wanted to teach their offspring.

Nature wasn’t beyond the fist of Hell, after all …

Chapter 10

2010-03-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

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. He remembered her lying with her head thrown back, her breasts atop her loosened stays, her petticoats mounded around her waist. Incited by the segments of nakedness, he would push back those breasts, nipping the tips raw, enticing her to cry out. She wouldn’t. 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. He wished now she 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.

Chapter 9

2010-02-25T12:01:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Chapter 2

2010-01-31T04:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-27T03:32:00.000-08:00

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.