Excerpt: The Need To Damage

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

Chapter 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was the girl flattering him?

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

“She’ll think I’m silly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? What was this insistence on doing great deeds?

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

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

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

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

“John!”

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

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

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

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

Such was the legacy of Mary Guaire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t want to live.”

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“Signor!” Hance called.

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

He asked the nun where the man had gone.

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

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

Chapter 9

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

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

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

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

“How did you do it?”

How did he do what?

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

Really? Try this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry, I just … wondered.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The nuns did,” she whispered.

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

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

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

“Promise you won’t think I’m silly?”

“Yes, of course.”

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

Was that all?

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

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

Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you.”

“You sound angry.”

“I assure you, I’m not.”

Another lie.

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

“I was thinking no such thing.”

“Then what do you think I was doing?”

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

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

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

“I’ve been working.”

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

“Here.”

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

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

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

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

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

He hoped she would say no.

She said yes.

Chapter 7

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

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

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

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

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

“How big was it?”

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

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

“At least.”

“How big will the shelter be?”

“There will never be enough room.”

“What are you starting at?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So far, everything’s donated.”

“Everything? Labor? Furnishings?”

“Everything.”

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

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

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

“There are plans for that, too.”

“Plans involving the residents?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

No. “My schedule might not allow it.”

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

No. “I can’t promise anything.”

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

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

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