CHAPTER 6

The world is full of such works of wonder, but we are blind, and cannot see them.

Martin Luther

When Martin Kraeger left his apartment on Dartmouth Street and walked up Commonwealth to the church, he found the traffic on Clarendon backed up behind an obstruction. A barrier had been erected by a crew from the Water and Sewer Commission. A blue truck was parked on the sidewalk. Two lanes of cars were edging into one, sounding resentful horns.

Kraeger had to jump across a river of water running along the gutter. He leaned over and looked into the manhole. “Hello, down there, good morning. May I ask what you’re doing?”

A couple of men in hard hats looked up. “New construction,” said one of them. “They got to drain the site.”

“Oh, I see. You mean for the new hotel.”

“Right. Buried sump pump, water comes up this pipe here, we connect it to the sewer line. All done now.” The two men climbed out of the manhole, and the talkative one gestured at the excavation. “Sump pump, see, it’s to keep the hole dry, right?”

“I see.” Kraeger turned and stared down into the pit. It was deep. Concrete pilings lay in a heap at one side. A crane stood idle. He watched one of the men from the Water and Sewer Commission bang the manhole cover down again over the hole. “I wonder how long the construction will take?” he said, thinking with dread of the noise of the pile driver, the din of machine-driven tools.

“Jeez, I don’t know. They say there’s money problems. I don’t know what the hell.” The two men removed the barriers and the truck pulled away. As the traffic surged forward in two lanes, Kraeger ducked back across the street, walked around the corner and climbed the church steps.

There was fresh paint on the door frame, and the great Longmeadow stones above the heavy arch of the entry were rosy and clean, their scorched surfaces sandblasted away. At last Kraeger could walk into the building without a stab of anguish. He was grateful to Ken Possett’s friend, that tall odd-looking man called Homer Kelly, who had found no reason to suspect arson. Kelly had persuaded the arson squad that the fire was an accident, and the arson squad had informed the insurance company, and the company had paid up. The organ had not been insured, unfortunately, but the financial settlement had rebuilt the balcony and replaced the cracked glass in the Moses window. Once again the burning bush blazed fiery red and Moses held up his pink hands in wonder.

“You can be grateful,” said Ken Possett, “that the sexton didn’t have a bunch of aggrieved relatives to sue us for ten million dollars.”

This heartless remark had caused Martin Kraeger a good deal of suffering. In the middle of the night he turned uneasily in his bed, while out of the dark rose the image of the charred body of Mr. Plummer, his lips open in a silent scream, his fingers hooked in agony.

But Kraeger’s Lutheran upbringing stood him in good stead. Since childhood he had grown away from strict Lutheran conformity, no longer believing human nature to be corrupt, no longer concerning himself with the remission of sins by grace, the hope of eternal bliss. To him Luther’s devil was a metaphor for human weakness. But he kept alive his respect for Luther the man, for his pungent and violent wit, his powerful resolution, the forcefulness and courage with which he had tossed aside every obstacle. Most of all he admired Luther’s faith, his total submission to the will of God.

Daily Kraeger hurled himself into whatever task lay before him, but he did so serenely, accepting his fate. He took to his heart his own guilt in the death of Mr. Plummer, and bowed down before it. But he went forward, hiding the scar that would never heal.

In the vestibule of the church he was confronted at once by his new building manager, Donald Woody. “Hey, Martin, we’ve got a problem with one of the windows. I think we’ve got to get those stained-glass people over here again to take a look.”

“Which window is it, the Three Kings?”

“No, it’s the one in the east wall. All those ladies with yellow hair.”

“The Wise and Foolish Virgins.” Kraeger smiled. “Amazing the way they ran to blondes in Biblical times.” He followed Woody into the sanctuary and they stood below the window and looked up at it.

It was one of La Farge’s miracles of light and dark. The lamps of the wise virgins glowed with a feverish brightness around the dazzling bridegroom, while the foolish virgins hovered in the darkness, their lamps extinguished.

“See there, on the left?” said Woody. “Those windows weigh sixty pounds a square foot. If they get out of line, they’ll fall.”

“Good Lord, it’s buckled there at the bottom. Good for you, Woody. Of course, call them right away.”

“I just thought I’d ask you first. I know you’re concerned about the budget and all.”

“When is a church not concerned about the budget?” Kraeger gave Woody a grim smile. “But we have to do what we have to do. This is obviously an emergency.”

“You’ll be getting some income pretty soon from that daycare center. I finally got those ground floor rooms in the basement cleared out. That woman Ruth Raymond, she’s been calling me every day, wanting to know if it’ll be ready in January. She’s got half the kids in Boston signed up.”

“That’s wonderful, Woody. I’m so glad you saw the usefulness of those basement rooms. A daycare center! It’s a superb idea.”

“Oh, and say, Martin, I found an old picture downcellar when I was clearing out, a portrait of somebody named Wigglesworth, that’s what the label says.”

“Wigglesworth! The Reverend Walter Ephraim Wigglesworth? But that’s wonderful! Walter Wigglesworth was the presiding minister for this congregation, way back when they were meeting on Tremont Street. A tremendously inspiring preacher, that’s what everybody said.”

“No kidding. Well, that explains the book he’s holding. It’s got a title painted on the front in gold leaf, Divine Inspiration. I’ll bring it up this afternoon.”

Kraeger watched Woody walk purposefully away down the aisle, and congratulated himself on finding so perfect a new sexton. Donald Woody had come on the job last August during Kraeger’s vacation, to replace the late Mr. Plummer. Martin had come back to the church to find the once-seedy sanctuary with its blackened balcony and ruined organ cleared of charred timbers and scorched pipes. The repairs to the balcony were half done, the pews had been refinished, the stained glass professionally cleaned, the floor tiles washed and waxed. Everything was running smoothly.

Since then Woody had solved all the small housekeeping problems in the kitchen, the parish hall, the church school, the basement club room, the meeting rooms, the offices; he had identified major difficulties with the plumbing, the oil-fired furnaces, the steam radiators, the security system. He had worked out a schedule for annual repairs. In October he had planted a thousand spring bulbs in the garden with his own hands.

“We’ve certainly got a winner in that Donald Woody,” said Kraeger to Loretta Fawcett, his executive secretary, walking through her small room on the way to his office.

“We certainly do,” agreed Loretta, taking half the credit, because she had welcomed Woody on his first day on the job, while her boss was camping in the Adirondacks with his little daughter Pansy.

But the truth was altogether different. On Woody’s first day Loretta had made a serious mistake. She had failed to pass along to the new sexton Martin Kraeger’s seven-page list of directions. Kraeger had written it by hand on the last day of July. Loretta was to type it up and deliver it to Donald Woody as soon as he arrived.

“It’s very important,” he told her, “especially the beginning.”

“Well, of course,” said Loretta.

But she hadn’t done it. Loretta Fawcett was a kindly and cheerful woman with a passion for knitting, crocheting and needlework, but she was an abominable secretary. Kraeger had long since discovered that he must type up his letters and sermons himself rather than depend on Loretta, because she was always deep in some vast project—an entire crocheted bedspread, a giant needlepoint tapestry. When he handed her the list for the new sexton she had been knitting a colossal pair of orange overalls.

“You won’t forget? He’s got to understand this first part as soon as he arrives.” Kraeger pointed it out to Loretta, the first paragraphs, over which he had taken special care:

First and foremost, you must know that this building and all the other buildings in the Back Bay, including Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, rest on pilings. This area was once subject to the tidal flow of the Charles River. The river was dammed up and the Back Bay filled with gravel and sand in the nineteenth century. Most of the pilings are made of wood, just as they are in Venice. As long as they remain water-soaked, they are extremely strong. But if they are allowed to dry out by a lowering of the water table, they will rot and turn to powder. Cautionary example: part of the Boston Public Library caved in, back in 1930.

Therefore your first duty is to REMEMBER THE PILINGS. You will find among the gear in your office a weighted tape measure. It is to be periodically lowered through the holes in the basement floor. If the space between floor and water exceeds four feet, water must be artificially supplied. These observation wells are to be found in the following places: in the northeast corner of your office, in the southeast corner of the boiler room, on the west side of the big storeroom.

Unfortunately Loretta promptly lost the sheaf of directions for Donald Woody. Well, she didn’t exactly lose it. She rolled it into a ball in her workbasket with the orange overalls, and there it lay for six weeks while she ran up a sweater for her niece’s new baby in coral pink (everybody was so pleased! A girl at last, after all those boys!).

When Donald Woody arrived on the job, he came to Kraeger’s office at once, looking for orders.

“He’s on vacation,” explained Loretta, staring at her knitting, her fingers flying. (The baby was due any minute.)

“Oh. Well, I wonder if somebody could show me what I’m supposed to do around here.”

“Well, I don’t know. You could talk to Mr. Hyde, he’s the substitute for August, but he doesn’t know anything about anything.”

“I see.” Donald Woody was nonplussed. “Well, maybe there’s some directions down in my office, like taped to the wall or something.”

“Oh, wait a sec.” Loretta suddenly remembered the notes she hadn’t yet typed up, and she pulled open a drawer, knowing full well that it contained only a couple of knitting magazines. “Well, never mind. I’ll bet there’s directions down there in the basement, like you said.”

But when Woody found his way to his basement office, he found no directions taped to the wall, and none on his desk. It didn’t matter. Donald Woody was a take-charge kind of guy. Before long he had the place running smoothly. After all, he had already worked in a big urban church in Topeka. He made a schedule of daily, weekly and monthly tasks, he wrote up a budget, he ordered supplies for the next half year. He interviewed applicants for the job of night watchman, and hired a kid from Boston University. He was a superb manager. His job was a creative challenge every day. Never had the complex of buildings been so clean and shining. Never had the mechanical systems run so smoothly.

But no one ever pointed out to Woody the small metal lids in the basement floor, bolted flush with the concrete. No one ever told him what they were for.

And Martin Kraeger never mentioned the pilings when he came home from his vacation. It never occurred to him to repeat his written directions verbally, since his new employee had everything under such perfect control.

Loretta came across the directions one day in November, after the baby shower for her niece, after everyone had oohed and aahed over the tiny pink sweater, after she opened her workbasket again and took out the warmup suit she was making for her nephew Scott. When she unrolled the huge wad of orange yarn, the seven closely written sheets of directions for Donald Woody fell out on the floor.

Loretta picked them up. “Oh, well,” she said to herself, “there’s no point typing them up now. He knows all about everything anyway.” And she tossed them in the wastebasket.

So Donald Woody never learned that the metal lids in the floor of his basement office were bolted over two-inch pipes leading down to the water table. He never understood the purpose of the weighted tape measure coiled in his desk drawer. Woody carried on his multitudinous tasks with superb efficiency, tramping over the metal disks a hundred times a day, while the water table under the church fell slowly, drawn down by a hundred sump pumps in the buildings left and right, and now by the new pump in the excavation across the street. Slowly, very slowly, the water surrounding the three thousand buried pilings sank a fraction of an inch every day.

Unfortunately the last decade had been one of the driest in years. Snow had not accumulated on the Berkshire hills, to melt and cascade down in little waterfalls and gush into mountain streams that plunged into bigger streams and emptied into the Connecticut River, the Merrimack, the Sudbury, the Mystic, the Charles, and filled ponds and lakes and potholes and puddles, and seeped into the ground everywhere to recharge the water table.

In the Back Bay there were underground rivers moving mysteriously through the filled land, through the fine sand and gravel brought from Needham on railway cars. Slowly they sank from a level of five and a half feet above Boston City Base to four, although there were strange hills of water here and there, and mysterious hollows where it lay lower than anywhere else.

Even the occasional rain pelting down on the vast roof of Trinity Church in Copley Square failed to recharge the soil around the building. The water sank below the tops of the four thousand pilings supporting the vast tower of red granite that loomed over the square.

But Trinity was in no danger. When the water fell to a certain significant point a buzzer sounded. At once the alert building manager began pumping Boston water to recharge the basin beneath the building and supply the loss. The water bill of Trinity Church rose astronomically, and the members of the vestry were dismayed.

The building manager was called in to explain the problem. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what else can we do? Surely you don’t want the pilings to dry out?”

“No, indeed,” said the rector, looking around the table and raising a mollifying hand. “May I make a motion of confidence in our manager’s decision to continue drawing water at the present rate? All in favor say aye.”

Other building managers and superintendents and janitors throughout the Back Bay were similarly alarmed. They acted at once, summoning from the water mains of the city of Boston enough to supply their needs. The churches were quick to do the same—Emmanuel, Advent, Annunciation, Old South, First Baptist, First Lutheran, the Church of the Covenant, First and Second Unitarian-Universalist. The hotels too called for more—the Copley Plaza and the Ritz.

Sixty miles away the Quabbin Reservoir sank an inch or two, as millions of gallons of water poured through the tunnel every day, running downhill through dirt and rock, under field, farm and forest, all the way to Boston.

Only the filled land under the Church of the Commonwealth went unsupplied with fresh gushes of underground water. Below the parish office building and below the four great piers of the tower, the water table shared the moisture of the buildings west of it, but under the sanctuary it sloped steeply downward to the east. The throbbing pump in the excavation across the street drew down the water further.

The pump had been forgotten. Lawsuits were holding up construction. One day a car pulled up beside the excavation. A court hack jumped out, skidded down the slope and handed the job engineer an order to cease and desist. The engineer looked at the piece of paper, threw up his hands, bellowed at the crane operator and the guy working the power shovel to get the hell home, leaped into his car and careened away from the curb and the excavation and the whole job of building a five-story hotel with Georgian exterior and luxury interior fittings, raced home and burst in on his wife, fuming and steaming, to find her in flagrante with his best friend, and in the succeeding uproar and confusion the little matter of the necessity of turning off the sump pump under the excavation at the corner of Commonwealth and Clarendon utterly vanished from his mind.

The neglected pump had long since sucked the excavation dry. Now it was pumping groundwater, relentlessly draining the saturated soil at level four, sending the water pulsing into a pipe to be carried by way of the West Side Interceptor to a pumping station and a treatment plant and eventual discharge into Boston Harbor. It was gone for good.