CHAPTER 10

Take hold of time, while ’tis time, and now, while ’tis now.

Martin Luther

Alan spent the week after Christmas with his parents and his sister Betsy in Brunswick, Maine. During the day he did his best to be a cheerful son and brother, but at night he couldn’t sleep for thinking about Rosie Hall.

He sounded out Betsy. “What was she like, I mean, really?”

“Rosie?” Betsy frowned, trying to explain. “She was smart, that’s for sure. Let’s see—she bit her fingernails.”

“Well, where do you think she’s gone?”

“How should I know? But it’s terrible, really. The blood on the floor! And the baby being left behind like that. Ghastly, just incredibly ghastly.”

Alan made up his mind. When he got back to Boston he would hire somebody, like that professor-policeman who had looked into the fire at Commonwealth, Homer Kelly. Kelly would know how to look for a missing person.

And Alan could afford to pay him, at least for a while. His parents had given him money for Christmas. He was supposed to spend it on a better place to live.

“Alan, dear,” said his mother, “I want you to find a nicer apartment. You can’t entertain your friends in that squalid hole on Russell Street.”

Alan told her his friends lived in places just as bad if not worse, but that seemed to pain her even more. He went back to Boston with the check in his pocket and a guilty conscience. But when he walked into his rented room, it looked fine. There was nothing the matter with it. One of these days he’d hang up his clothes and put up some shelving. If he spent a weekend painting the place it would be almost respectable, even to his mother.

No time for that now. Alan lifted a bag of pipe-notching tools from a chair and sat down to call Homer Kelly.

“Mr. Kelly? My name’s Alan Starr. We met on the day after the fire in the Church of the Commonwealth. I was there to look at the organ. But I’m calling about something else. I wonder if you remember the disappearance a month ago of Rosalind Hall? It was in the news for a while. Her baby was left behind, remember?”

“Oh, yes, of course, the abandoned baby.”

“Well, I’m the one who found him and called the police.”

“That’s right, I remember your name. What can I do for you, Alan Starr?”

Alan explained. In his own ears his interest in the matter sounded feeble, just as it had seemed to Mrs. Barker in the Department of Social Services.

But Homer Kelly didn’t boggle. “I’ve got a tutorial this morning. I could meet you afterward, say around noon?”

“A tutorial? That’s right, you’re a professor. What do you teach, Professor Kelly?”

“Oh, one thing and another. Thoreau and Emerson. Do you know Christopher Cranch? Tell me, brother, what are we?/Spirits bathing in the sea/Of Deity! I don’t know if that sort of thing will come in handy. What do you think?”

There was a pause while Alan sorted it out. “Well, I guess it can’t do any harm. Could you meet me at 115 Commonwealth Avenue? It’s Rosie’s apartment, near Clarendon Street.”

Alan spent the morning at the Church of the Commonwealth, voicing the new organ. What should he work on next? More foundation stops on the Great? Or get started on the Choir?

Pip Tower was there to lend a hand, to sit at the console depressing one key after another while Alan worked among the pipes, notching a languid, shaping a lip.

For a concert organist like Pip it was a comedown, but as usual he had to take whatever work he could get. He was only one of many Boston Conservatory graduates eking out a living with part-time jobs. They were a minor population of opera singers, flutists, string players and pianists, scraping along by giving lessons, filling in as temporary secretaries, working as hospital orderlies, bartenders, waiters, hoping for the big concert opportunity, the opening in a church somewhere, a symphony orchestra, the music department of a university.

Pip was darkly comic on the subject. “We were fools to choose church music in the first place. Who cares about sacred music in the United States? It’s a crass vulgar country of atheists and unbelievers. I’m an atheist myself, so what the hell? Of course there are all those people on the religious right, but their music comes from Nashville.”

He sat at the console of the new organ in the balcony of the Church of the Commonwealth and listened while Alan explained from within the massed rows of pipes. “You just play one key at a time, while I work my way up the rank. Degrees of glory, that’s what you listen for. Jim Castle wants glory. Here, wait a minute.” Alan used his voicing spoon on the lower lip of a Spindle Flute to make the flue a little narrower.

Pip played low C on the Swell keyboard. “It’s still a little breathy.”

Alan made the opening still narrower. “Try it now. What do you think?”

“Glorious. Absolutely glorious.”

“Wait a sec. I’ll make it more so. How is it now?”

“Even more glorious. Divinely, gloriously glorious. What about that old biddy who paid for it? Do you have to please her too?”

“What? I can’t hear you very well.”

Pip spoke louder. “That old crone with the moneybags, Mrs. Frederick. Why doesn’t she subsidize good-looking young guys with talent? Maybe she needs a boyfriend. Only, God, imagine going to bed with an old hag like Edith Frederick.”

“Try the D-natural.”

They worked at it all morning, then called it quits. “I don’t suppose you could pay me right now?” said Pip, looking embarrassed.

“Oh, sure.” Alan counted out a bunch of bills and handed them over. Then he stopped in the office of the accountant, Jenny Franklin, hoping to be reimbursed.

Jenny tut-tutted. “Alan, you really ought to be more systematic. You should make out a request ahead of time, with the address and social security number, and then I’ll send a check.” But she reimbursed him. “Just this once.”

On his way out, Alan met Mrs. Frederick in the vestibule beside the table of church bulletins and pious pamphlets—Walter Wigglesworth and His Times, Stained Glass at Commonwealth, Our Ministry to Children and Youth, Sermons from a City Church.

She held out her hand to Alan. Her face was gray. “Alan, tell me, who was that young man?”

“What young man?”

“He just went out. Thin, with fair hair.”

Alan was in a hurry. He threw open the door and called back to Mrs. Frederick, “Tower, Philip Tower. Organist, old friend of mine.” In the side garden of the church he passed Donald Woody and a man in a heavy overcoat. They were staring up at the window high overhead.

Alan stopped and looked too. The Wise and Foolish Virgins were only dark shapes of glass.

“Have to take the whole thing out,” said the man in the overcoat. “Starts to buckle, you’ve got to reshape the whole outer edge. Building’s probably settled, changed the outlines. We’ll have to make a template.”

“Well, you’ll be putting something temporary in its place, right?” said Woody. “Something translucent? Most of the morning light comes in that east window.”

“Well, you’ve got several alternatives—”

Alan stopped listening and hurried away, while behind him, unnoticed, Edith Frederick slipped out of the church and started home, eager for the comfort of a cup of Hu Kwa tea beside the fire in her own bedroom, with its apricot walls and silk comforter and the portrait sketch over the fireplace, Great-Aunt Amelia by John Singer Sargent. As she walked along Commonwealth Avenue, pulling her scarf close around her throat, she committed the name to memory. Philip Tower.

Edith had been meeting with the other members of the Music Committee, but before the meeting she had spent a few moments in the sanctuary. Sitting under the balcony during the voicing of the Spindle Flute, she had heard every cruel word—old biddy, old crone, old hag. Bitterly she vowed never to forget. The name of the brutal young man was Philip Tower.

“Department of Social Services, Mrs. Barker speaking.”

“Oh, good, I’ve been trying to reach you. Your phone sure is busy. Mrs. Barker, my name is Arthur Victoria. I’m with the Boston Hygiene Inspectional Services Department.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Rodent control, vermin in public buildings, lead paint removal. We have a complaint about rats in one of your foster homes.”

“Rats? What did you say your name was?”

“Victoria, Arthur Victoria.”

Mrs. Barker wrote it down. “Rats, you say? Which foster home?”

“Well, that’s just it. We’ve lost the complaint form. All we remember is the child’s name, Charles Hall. Can you tell us where he is situated?”

Mrs. Barker sucked her pencil thoughtfully. A complaint about rats? She had an acute sense of smell, useful for sniffing out rats of an entirely different kind. Picking up the Boston phone book, she slammed it down on her desk and flipped the pages. “Wait a minute, let me find your department in the phone book, and I’ll call you right back. What was that again? Hygiene Inspectional Services?”

Arthur Victoria hung up.