CHAPTER 9

The dream I had lately, will be made true; ’twas that I was dead, and stood by my grave, covered with rags.…

Martin Luther

Edith Frederick lived on Beacon Street. Her house had been in her husband’s family since its construction by Blaikie and Blaikie in 1888. The façade was elaborate with wrought iron. A heavy stone bow front rose beside the sumptuous entry.

But the house was not a fortress. It had been broken into by a merciless thief, a burglar with no interest in snatching up the silver. Instead he had attacked Edith herself, he had battered her, yanked out handfuls of hair and flattened her breasts, knocked out her teeth and tugged loose the fresh skin of her face so that it sagged beneath her chin. The thief was still lurking in the house, in closets, in the pantry, in the cellar, reaching out to dim her sight, to drive knives into her ears and a sword down her throat.

Edith fought back as well as she could. This morning her weapon was a new wardrobe for the new year.

The proprietor of the dress shop on Newbury Street knew her tastes exactly. She trotted out the little boiled jackets that Edith loved, the angora turtlenecks, the pleated woolen skirts. Cleverly she had saved them for Mrs. Frederick from last year, guessing they were going out of style.

Edith was delighted. She chose six pretty jackets in wine, forest green, black, gray, navy and winter white.

“Edge-stitched,” said the proprietor softly, displaying a selection of pleated skirts.

“Oh, good,” said Edith, knowing how gaily the pleats would twinkle as she walked, how the panels of light and shadow would swish to left and right. She chose them in five colors to go with the jackets—gray, black, navy, Dress Gordon and Black Watch.

Edith wore the gray combination out of the shop. The new gray sweater of softest angora rose warmly above her coat collar, hiding the stringy skin of her neck. Walking quickly along Clarendon Street, she looked into the faces of the young people as they thrust past her, plump girls with masses of disordered hair and weedy-looking boys, their noses red with cold. Did they notice her? No, they gave her not a glance.

How old were they? They had been babies only a few years ago. It made Edith tremble, the way the young were forever rushing into life, surging into adulthood around her, each mini-generation thrusting her further into old age. To each new batch she must seem still more doddering and superannuated.

Edith stared at the boy veering toward her now across the sidewalk—surely he was less than fourteen. If she were to say to him, “I was born in 1915,” it would seem fantastically remote, as though she had started life during the Civil War. She gave him a challenging look, commanding him to see her, to recognize that a woman of stature was walking toward him, but the boy only turned his head to the street and spat. A ball of white foam fell toward the pavement, translucent in the morning light.

Edith recoiled and hurried past him—but the boy wasn’t spitting at Edith. He was spitting at his father, he was spitting at school.

At least in the Church of the Commonwealth she would find the esteem she deserved. Edith had been coming here since childhood. It was like another home. She had met Henry in the church when it had been part of a whole Back Bay neighborhood of familiar places, a community of friends and relations.

In Edith’s youth there had been a lovely shape to her life—Friday afternoons at the Symphony, dancing classes at the Somerset under the tyranny of Miss Blanding, rounds of parties, musicales and concerts. Edith smiled, remembering the morning after her coming-out party when all her best friends had refused to go home to bed. They had shocked the cook by making their own breakfasts in the basement kitchen, then scandalized her mother by running off to the Sunday morning service at the Church of the Commonwealth in ball gowns and tuxedoes.

Edith and Henry, Ginny and Abby and Nick and Richard and Edgar, they had been full of high spirits in those days, but their good manners were the result of gentle rearing in pleasant homes on Marlborough Street or Newbury or Beacon or Commonwealth Avenue, houses with sumptuous reception halls and monumental staircases. Their country places were more modest, big wooden houses where everyone took pride in living simply, with only a cook and a couple of maids and a gardener.

It was all gone now. The Great Depression had scattered her friends. Luckily Henry’s family had survived intact, its wealth secure, soundly invested in government bonds. The others had not been so fortunate. Their houses had been sold and broken up into flats.

And therefore it was all young professional couples now along Commonwealth Avenue, and dentists and doctors. Marlborough and Beacon were brimming with students from Boston University and Northeastern, careless young people with hideous styles of dress and frightening haircuts, totally ignorant of the history of the houses they occupied, unfamiliar with the fine old families who had lived in them once upon a time—Sturgises, Dwights, Welds, Wheelwrights, Osgoods, Brewsters, Coffins, Searses, Abbotts. The good old names meant nothing. The new ones were so outlandish! But of course it was a good thing, Edith could see that. Give me your tired, your poor, etc., you couldn’t argue with it.

Still, there was something sad about the change. No longer could she walk down the street to take tea with a family of cousins. No longer was she pillowed on a sturdy support system in the basement, where the laundress plunged red arms in hot water to scrub the shirts and soaked the collars in starch and pressed the sheets with a smoothing iron and billowed them over the beds and tucked them in. No longer did coal rattle down the chute into the bin, no longer did the grate clatter as it was shaken down, no longer were the ashes lugged up to the alley. Gone were the invitations on the hall table—gone, all gone away—along with the musicales and the dinner dances and the balls.

With tenderness Edith remembered her mother’s dressing table, with the hand mirror of heavy silver and the matching brush, comb, shoehorn and buttonhook. Flown to the winds of heaven were the lacy dresser scarf, the eiderdown puff and the fragrant spills of powder, gone with the other lovely things—gone too with dreadful forgotten wars, with doughboys marching too fast on the scratched film, lying swollen and dead on the barbed wire. Edith shuddered.

But the Church of the Commonwealth was still there, occupying the same corner as always. The church was a monument to the unity of Edith’s life, to lasting values in an era of terrifying change. On the first shopping day of the new year she stood on the cold grass of the narrow park running down the center of the avenue and looked up at the tower, feeling a strong sense of possession, as if the sixty-two courses of Roxbury pudding stone belonged to her, and the decorative stripes of Longmeadow freestone, and the medieval interior. The sanctuary was something to be especially proud of, Edith knew, because the stone vaults were the first in the United States.

The new organ of course was truly her own. The organ was the direct result of Henry’s investment in South African diamond cartels in the decade before his death. All the profits, every single dollar, had gone to form the new trust for the church, the Frederick Music Endowment.

Edith knew nothing about its source. The other day, listening to the voicing of the Spire Flute, she had not given a thought to the thousands of black laborers somewhere in South Africa, hacking at the soil with pickaxes. The pressurized air blown into the pipe from the windchest of the organ bore no relation to the gasping breath of a black man with tubercular lungs in a Kimberley diamond mine. If the blowing air whispered anything to the Spire Flute, it was the story of Henry’s cleverness and generosity, and that was all.

Here and now, on this second day of January, Edith waited for the green light, then walked across the street to the arched entry of the church, copied, she knew, from some medieval cathedral in southern France. As usual the aura of the building reached out to enclose her. It gave her a sense of expansion to enter the church, to feel herself part of so majestic a thing. Within these walls her timid life was founded on solid stone, uplifted by luminous panels of stained glass. Here for the moment it had weight and sublimity, it was not simply a succession of fragile pearls on a raveling string.

“Good morning, Loretta,” she said brightly, walking into the secretary’s office. “Is Mr. Kraeger in?”

“Martin? Oh, sure, he’s in.”

“Do you think he’d mind if I took a few minutes of his time?”

Loretta leaned forward and yelled “MARTIN,” then flopped her knitting over and started back on the next row.

Edith turned away in sorrow, remembering secretaries from the past—Millicent Marchbanks with her Remington typewriter, Amelia Parsons with her mimeograph machine, Nedda Mistletoe with her splendid new filing system, and even Dorothy Keene with her newfangled word processor. Loretta Fawcett was a pitiful comedown.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Martin, but Alan tells me the organ is sufficiently voiced so that it can be played regularly from now on.”

“Oh, yes, he told me. He’s finished half a dozen ranks. Doesn’t it sound great?”

Mrs. Frederick hastened to the business at hand. “I’m arranging with the music committee to audition candidates for the job of substitute while Jim Castle is away.”

“Good for you.” Kraeger waved at the sofa and moved aside a stuffed animal belonging to his daughter Pansy, and a crystal ball, the gift of a comedian in the congregation. Picking up a fallen pillow, he said, “Do sit down.”

The pillow was the one Edith had made for him herself. She pretended not to notice the grubby condition of her fine stitches, although it gave her a pang, remembering all the loving hours she had spent with the bright strands of wool. It distressed her that Kraeger made such a bear’s den of his fine mock-Tudor study. Disorder bothered Edith.

She talked about the substitute organist, the arrangements for tryouts, the importance of the temporary position, the salary, which would be the same as that paid to James Castle. “It’s such a prestigious appointment. It will be a great boost to someone’s career.”

“That’s very generous of you, Edith.” Kraeger admired the fragile woman sitting so upright on the monstrous sofa. Edith Frederick was stiff and prudish and often irritatingly old-fashioned and conventional, but she was also affectionate, vulnerable, easily wounded, and truly generous. Tin ear and all, she had devoted herself to the musical life of the church.

But she was old. How old? Kraeger didn’t know. Looking at the hollows in her cheeks, the withered dewlaps, the sad descending lines around her mouth, he thought of Holbein’s woodcuts of the Dance of Death—all those agile skeletons arm in arm with emperors and bishops, plucking the sleeves of nuns and stout German burghers with their bony fingers, summoning them without warning, dragging them away. Now, looking at Edith Frederick, he could almost see the jolly skeleton hovering beside her, its arms hooked tenderly around her little jacket, its empty eye sockets snapping at the joke, its grin widening in silent laughter. Well, the bony fingers would be reaching for all of them before long—just as they had reached for Mr. Plummer. Death had taken him without warning in the same way.

Kraeger winced and suffered.