Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tomorrow morning at eight.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s her range?”

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

“Why would she do that?”

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

"Perhaps. I'll find out."

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

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s new to the department.”

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

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

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

“Yes, if your car was brought here.”

“Oh. All right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?” 

“Melissa. My friend.”

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

“Didn’t you tell her who I am?”

“No.”

“Why?”

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

“I do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What else do they pay you for?”

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

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

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

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

“Can’t afford an Internet café.”

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

“Can’t afford those, either.”

“How do you stay in touch with everybody?”

“We write notes.”

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

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

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

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

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

"So you've been living here?"

"Sometimes."

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

She said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't have anything."

"Nothing? What about your textbooks?"

"They're back at the camp."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2

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

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.