CHAPTER 8

When natural music is heightened and polished by art … one man sings a simple tune … together with which three, four or five voices also sing … performing as it were a heavenly dance.

Martin Luther

Alan Starr sat at the keyboard of a small portable organ in Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street, feeling ridiculous in a green tam-o’-shanter and tunic. The tunic was itchy. In agony, Alan adjusted the gold rope around his waist and reached up a furtive thumb to scratch.

Christmas was a hectic season for organists, even for an organ builder and repairman like Alan, because he hired himself out to play here and there. His colleagues in the American Guild of Organists were busy too, even the ones without steady church jobs, like Pip Tower and Gilda Honeycutt and Jack Newcomb and Peggy Throstle.

At this festive time of year all the churches in the Back Bay vied with one another in pageantry. Only at the Church of the Commonwealth were the celebrations subdued, because the new organ wasn’t ready and James Castle was away on leave. Pip Tower was filling in for the two candlelight services and the one on Christmas day. Alan hurried through the voicing of four ranks of pipes, so that Pip would have something to work with. Only forty-six more to go. “You’ve got Bourdon sixteen on the Pedal,” he told Pip, “and Prestant eight, Octave four and Spitzfiute eight on the Great, and that’s all.”

Pip wasn’t satisfied. “What, no mixture? How can I turn on the congregation without a mixture? Where’s the ecstasy, where’s the rapture?”

Alan felt sorry for Pip. He was a good-looking guy with very white skin and thinning blond hair, getting on for thirty. Like Alan, he was a student of Castle’s, but although he was a fine performer he seemed unable to land a regular church job. For years now he had been cadging Sunday morning substitutions and taking anything else he could get. Of course the job market for organists was impossible. The only regular positions were in churches and temples, and openings were scarce. There was no other employment but the occasional wedding or funeral, and unfortunately nobody seemed to be getting married any more and the old folks were healthier all the time. “Well, okay,” said Alan, “I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise.”

But by working at odd hours he managed to finish the Mixture rank on the Great division, and Pip had his moment of rapture.

At Emmanuel Episcopal it was all rapture. They were doing a Bach cantata and a medieval miracle play. There were long-haired women in velvet gowns with lutes and men in tights with dulcimers. Christ our blessed Savior, sang the women, now in the manger lay. Alan couldn’t help thinking again about young Charley Hall. What sort of manger was poor Charley lying in right now? It had been two weeks since he had been carried off in the police cruiser, clutched to the hard blue bosom of Sergeant Steeple. Alan’s efforts to discover his whereabouts had been fruitless.

He had been tossed from one telephone extension to another. When at last he reached Mrs. Marilynne Barker, a mighty general in the Department of Social Services, she held him at arm’s length.

“Are you the child’s father? A relative? A friend of the family? No? Then what exactly is your interest in Charles Hall?”

“It’s just that I’m concerned about him. I was the one who found him on the street after his mother disappeared.”

“Is that all? You have no other connection with the child? Then I’m sorry, Mr. Starr, I can give you no information.”

Alan continued to feel a pang of anxiety. What would happen to the poor little kid if his mother never came back? And where in the hell was she?

Rosalind Hall’s disappearance was now common knowledge among the community of organists in Boston. The dramatic details of Alan’s rescue of her child, his entry into the open door of her apartment, his discovery of the blood on the floor—the whole story had been printed in the Boston Globe, along with Rosie’s picture.

Her friends were upset. “Where can she be?” said Barbara Inch, who had been closest to Rosie. “What could possibly have happened?”

Jack Newcomb didn’t hide his glee. “All the more opportunities for us,” he said ruthlessly. “Rosie always got the plums. She was everybody’s first choice. After Castle, of course. Now they’re both gone. Less competition, right?”

Peggy Throstle was shocked by Rosie’s disappearance. “How could she abandon her little boy? I think it’s terrible.”

Barbara was outraged. “How can you talk like that? She may have been badly hurt. She would never have left that baby if she’d been all right. Somebody should be trying to find her.”

Alan Starr agreed with Barbara. Were the police doing anything at all? He cut Rosie’s picture out of the paper and taped it over the sink in his room on Russell Street. The picture kept nudging him, it wouldn’t leave him alone.

But neither did the demands of the Christmas season. At this time of year there was a regimented jollification in all the churches of the Back Bay, a tinseled charm that somehow outbalanced the reality of the surrounding city of metal and cement, the bland grind of traffic on the streets, the flashing windshields, the multitudinous offices with their data-processing machines, their ten thousand printouts folding over and over.

In the sanctified spaces of the churches of Copley Square and Newbury Street and Commonwealth Avenue the gray truths of daily life were swagged with garlands of laurel and wreaths of balsam. The scent of the north woods filled lofty interiors rich with timbered ceilings and acres of stained glass. Chancels were crowded with chirping children, pews thronged with churchgoers drugged with holy revelry. There was an infectious aura about the week before Christmas that seemed for the moment something more than a Dickensian mass hallucination. For a few days the illusion of peace on earth prevailed in the Back Bay.

There was no peace for Alan Starr. He had agreed to help with too many special services. After the miracle play at Emmanuel he had barely time to tear off his itchy shirt, pull on his jacket and pants and race down Berkeley Street to the Church of the Annunciation, slipping and sliding on the icy sidewalk.

Annunciation was another high-church Episcopal establishment. In the late nineteenth century there had been a demand along the broad new avenues of the Back Bay for the liturgical splendor of Anglican services, a hunger for red brocade and flickering candles and images of saints. Pale Brahmin noses had twitched gratefully, inhaling the fragrance of swinging censers, weak eyes had blinked in the dim light of the Middle Ages, educated ears had taken pleasure in the sonorities of The Book of Common Prayer. It was all very British, and everything British was good.

Alan slipped onto the organ bench at Annunciation and played a brisk prelude while the choir waited to process down the center aisle. Processions were important in the Church of the Annunciation. It was the highest of the high churches in the Back Bay. It was as close to Catholic as a Protestant church could come without falling into the arms of the pope.

You wouldn’t want to get any closer. Catholicism had been the religion of the immigrants who had swarmed into the North End and South Boston, Irishmen who by the raw strength of their arms built the railroads in which the Yankees of the Back Bay invested. It was the religion of the men who laid the sleepers and pounded the spikes, who roamed the countryside looking for work, plowing for Yankee farmers, felling trees in Yankee woodlots, caring for Yankee beasts of burden. It was the faith of the Irish women who tended the deafening machines in Yankee textile factories, who lived in the attics of Yankee town houses and cooked in the basement and did the laundry.

There were no Catholic churches in the Back Bay. If the Irish servants wanted to attend Mass, let them walk to St. Cecilia’s across the tracks, and be back in time to serve dinner.

Now in the Episcopal Church of the Annunciation the processional advanced. Alan pulled out a couple more stops and launched into “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Pacing in front of the choir, Barbara Inch was close enough to wink at him. Normally Barbara was the organist at Annunciation as well as the choir director, but this week her duties were so taxing, she had called on Alan to help out. Hastily now he pulled out a mixture as the congregation rose to sing.

Joyful and triumphant. Alan glanced at Barbara, and saw her lean toward the verger marching beside her. She was saying something, and at once the verger stopped singing, convulsed with laughter. As the rector ascended the chancel steps in front of them he turned his head and glowered.

Alan grinned and added a couple of brilliant reeds as he swung into the last verse, Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning. There was only one trouble with Barbara, she was too funny for her own good.

“They’ve warned me,” she had told Alan. “I may lose my job.”

She had not turned over a new leaf.

“How is she?”

“She keeps drifting off. Her pulse, God, it’s so slow.”

“Has she said anything yet?”

“Just ‘Charley.’ She keeps mumbling ‘Charley.’”

“Oh, Jesus, her kid. Christ, it’s not my fault. I couldn’t take the kid too.”

“Forget it, Sonny. He’s okay. Social Services, they’ve got him, that’s what the paper said.”

“How’s Helen?”

“Helen? Oh, my God, Sonny, she won’t speak to me. She won’t speak to her own mother. She’s worse than ever. God! What about the other one?”

“The other one?”

“You know. You saw the X ray.”

“Oh, that one. Horrible outlook. Surgery next week. I keep track. Every now and then I—adjust things slightly.”

“You adjust things slightly! Oh, good for you, Sonny. Oh, that’s rich. My clever boy.”