TWO

NOVEMBER 1982

I sit in one of the pews of the Church of the Good Shepherd, an Episcopal church in Jacksonville, Florida, where I grew up. Blue velvet kneelers are propped up in front of each wooden pew. So many times I knelt here as a child, not praying but somehow enjoying the meaningless ritual—stand up, sit down, kneel, sit down, kneel, sit, stand. Religion was cloaked in secrets and mysteries. When you know the ritual, you’re in. I liked being a member of that secretive club.

But I am no longer a child. I am twenty-six years old. I have been a heroin addict and a recent resident of the Florida Correctional Institution for women. I have even more recently graduated from college with high honors. I have a teaching job at a community college and am thinking about going to graduate school. It feels right to return to the fold this Sunday evening to be present at a performance of my mother’s requiem—her masterwork. I am not here out of love for sacred choral music. I am here out of gratitude to the woman who stood by me and waited while I explored the realms of degradation and despair and then who helped me get back on my feet.

I gaze around at the stained glass pictures. It’s evening now so the light does not shine through them, and their brilliant colors are muted and dull. Small square and triangular stones make up the floor of the aisles. These floors always fascinated me with their odd hieroglyphs. I inhale the stone smell, old with a fusty sort of holiness. It has been a long time since I’ve been to my mother’s church.

I stopped going regularly when I was about twelve. Before that I had to go because my mother was the organist and the choir director, and I couldn’t stay at home alone. Besides, I liked being in that Gothic castle with its secret passageways, dungeons, and sequestered rooms full of pipes for the organ. The choir was my extended family. My godmother was a soprano in the choir. My godfather a baritone. The rest of them were like assorted aunts and uncles. I even adopted the church secretary as my grandmother.

Then I became a teenager, and figured I didn’t need all that family anymore and damn sure didn’t need to have some stupid God preached at me every Sunday. Of course, as Episcopalians we weren’t exactly fire and brimstone, but the liturgy entailed telling God how worthless we were and how thankful we were that his Son died for our sins. And none of it made any sense to me. I was too young to have committed any sins anyway.

But in the ensuing years life has done me the favor of kicking me around a bit, and though I still don’t get the dying-for-mysins bit, I have now committed some grievous sins of my own, and I have come to believe that something larger than me exists, something ineffable. I’m not sure, however, that it lurks in this big stone building with its stained glass depictions of ecstatic saints and doubting disciples. Or maybe it is here. Maybe it’s everywhere, like they say.

My brother John (or Jo as we call him in the family), wearing tails and looking magisterial, comes down the aisle, bearing the conductor’s baton. An orchestra awaits him. My mother is seated at the console of the big organ with its four keyboards and its row of foot pedals. The choir is robed and ready. The concert begins.

My mother has always composed. At Yale she studied with the famous composer Paul Hindemith; he told the dean that she was his most promising student. In her professional life, she’d written original arrangements for her various choirs to sing and a couple of commissioned musicals, and she’d even rescored the music for The Lost Colony, an outdoor drama in Manteo, North Carolina.

Marriage to my father, however, had kept her early ambitions in check. My brothers said that he threw her compositions in the fireplace when she was younger. She told me that the most crushing thing he ever did to her spirit happened one time when he came into the music room of our house and found her working on a composition. Overhearing the work, he sneered and said, “That’s facile, isn’t it?” He did much worse things, but his snide comment about her work stung the most.

Tonight is her vindication. She’s written a piece from her heart, a requiem for two young men. The men (both in their early twenties) died in separate accidents within a couple of weeks of each other. They were sons of close friends of hers. As a woman with sons of her own, as a friend, as a human being, she was deeply affected by this sudden, inexplicable loss of promise. “Why do people die so young?” she wondered. “Why am I still alive?” Not being a particularly religious person, she couldn’t fall back on that old standby: God’s will.

I’m sitting in the crowded church, listening to this strange, sometimes atonal piece. It doesn’t sound like traditional church music; the voices are haunting. The saints in their stained glass prisons hold their breaths and listen. Do the dead gather to hear the music written in their honor? The list on the program includes more than just the two who inspired it. There are about thirty names of various church members who have died within the past year. I know a few of them.

And am I thinking about the dead I have known? Two of my cohorts from the bad old days died from drug overdoses. Other acquaintances died in drunk driving accidents, and others might as well be dead, locked away for years. No, I am not acknowledging them or any of the others. I am only looking forward. I have stepped out of my dark past, but I haven’t really found my place in the world, and I have no idea that resurrecting this piece of music will become my mission more than a quarter of a century later.