CHAPTER 14

Thus am I long since condemned to die, and yet I live.

Martin Luther

“C all them again, Mother. You’ve got to try them again.”

“For Christ’s sake, Helen, hold still! How can I
comb your hair if you don’t control yourself?”

“Oh, dear God, take me out of here. Oh God, please God, let me go.”

“Oh, wonderful, Helen, that’s just wonderful. That’s the thanks I get for sacrificing myself, when I might have been anything, anything! Helen, stop it! Hold still!”

“Please, God, let me go.”

Alan called Homer Kelly to tell him about finding Charley. A woman answered the phone. “I’m sorry, Mr. Starr, Homer’s not here. This is Mary Kelly. You’re the organist? Homer’s told me all about you. Oh, forgive me, perhaps he shouldn’t have.”

Homer’s wife had a rich warm voice. Alan found himself eager to confide in her, to tell her everything. “Tell Homer I found the baby.”

“The baby! Rosalind Hall’s baby? How wonderful.”

“I just happened to run into him. There he was, big as life on Mount Vernon Street. His foster mother was pushing him along the sidewalk in a little stroller, you know, one of those collapsible things on wheels. They live on Bowdoin Street. I don’t know if it’s a good arrangement or not. Her name’s Debbie Buffington. She let me take him out for a while, and I brought him home. You know, to his own place on Commonwealth Avenue. Did Homer tell you? I’ve got a key.”

“Yes, he told me. He’s been looking into the matter of Rosalind’s fingerprints.”

“He has? Did he find out why she was fingerprinted before?”

“No. They lost the files. It was a computer error. Somebody punched a wrong button and wiped out five years of statistical records.”

“My God.”

“It was probably some dumb thing she did,” said Mary soothingly. “She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who would have had a wild youth.”

“No way.”

Mary thanked him and promised to tell Homer the good news.

“Don’t tell anybody else though,” said Alan. “Debbie Buffington’s afraid she’ll get in trouble with the Department of Social Services. I gather they’ve got a really fierce woman in charge of foster care.”

“Well, naturally they’ve got to be careful with other people’s babies. You must be attached to the little boy, to want to see him again.”

“Oh, yes,” said Alan eagerly. “And it isn’t only that.” He was on the verge of telhing Mary Kelly about his obsession with the picture of Charley’s mother, but he checked himself in time. It was true that the picture haunted him, the tape recording of her playing enchanted him, and her handsome apartment seduced him, but what kind of a jerk would say anything like that out loud?

Extracting Charley from Debbie for another expedition to 115 Commonwealth Avenue was easier than the first time. Lazily Debbie said, “So long,” and slammed the door.

It was the middle of January, but the sidewalks were still clear. The sun shone, the sky was blue. In the alley behind the church Alan surprised a woman who was unloading her car behind the church, dumping things on the pavement, a stack of small plastic chairs, a tricycle.

“Want to sign up?” she called to Alan gaily as he squeezed the stroller past her car. “We’ve got an opening in our new daycare center. Somebody cancelled out at the last minute.”

“Oh, no thanks,” mumbled Alan.

“Cute little kid,” said the woman.

“Oh, right,” said Alan, pleased with the compliment in spite of himself.

With this second visit to the apartment Alan and Charley established a pattern. The talking lesson came first, Mama, Mama, Mama, in front of Rosie’s picture. Charley still didn’t say anything, but he looked at the picture solemnly. To Alan he was less like an uncomprehending child than a wise old person who listened and kept his own counsel. In spite of the rancid opinion of Debbie Buffington—”Jesus, I think he’s Mongoloid”—Alan knew the baby wasn’t stupid. His rubbery little face was expressive, his eyes gleamed with good humor. There was a real person somewhere inside that plump infant body, communing with himself. One day he’d throw his bottle on the floor and say, “Here I am.”

After the lesson it was time for a solid meal. Alan had seen the sort of food Debbie Buffington dished up for Wanda and Charley—macaroni, ice cream and potato chips. Surely the kid needed something healthier than that. Alan found little jars of spinach and apricots in a kitchen cupboard, and fed them to Charley with a tiny spoon. Charley smacked it all down.

After lunch it was naptime. Alan laid the baby down in the playpen, covered him with a blanket, then roamed around the apartment, looking in drawers and closets, wanting to know everything about Rosalind Hall. In her bedroom closet he looked at the clothes on the hangers, but they told him nothing. A thin nightgown hung on a hook, and it told him too much, not about Rosie but about himself. He lifted the transparent tissue and held it between his fingers and let it go again.

From the bedroom he went back to her collection of tape-recorded music. He took the two cassettes of “Wachet Auf” from the tape recorders, tucked them away in plastic boxes, and looked at the rest of her collection. It was a pity she didn’t have better equipment. If she ever came home again, he’d show off his high-tech apparatus. She’d find out what she was missing.

Then for the first time since he had stolen it from Rosie’s drawer, Alan remembered her notebook. He had stuffed it in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. Was it still there? It was. He pulled it out eagerly. Plumping himself down on the sofa he began leafing through it. The first pages were lists of organ registrations for pieces he recognized, chorale preludes from Bach’s Little Organ Book. Some were in Castle’s handwriting. Castle had made out similar lists for Alan.

What did Castle really think about Rosie? It was common knowledge she had been his favorite pupil. But everybody assumed he wasn’t really interested in women. Most of the male organists in Boston weren’t interested in the opposite sex. It was a fact of life.

But then it occurred to Alan with a rush of blood to his head that Rosie and Castle had disappeared at almost the same time. And Castle’s parting from the church had been mysterious. He had not said where he was going or when he’d be back. His mother was supposed to be ill, but he had not deigned to tell anyone the exact nature of her illness or where she was lying at death’s door. It was very strange. Alan had a vision of Rosie locked up in Castle’s basement, wherever that might be, pounding on the door, crying, Let me out!

It was an unpleasant picture. Ridiculous, anyway. Respectable men of fifty with impeccable reputations, freckled bald heads and exalted careers did not carry women away by force, especially if they weren’t attracted to women in the first place.

Once again Alan flipped the pages of the notebook. This time he found a list of addresses. They were all organists. To his surprise his own name was among them.

Turning the page, he found the strangest of Rosie’s lists. What the hell was it all about?

Self-sounding bells

Echoes in different languages

Boxes in which sounds can be locked up

Mirror fugues

Puzzle canons

A prison shaped like an ear, to carry the prisoner’s secrets to the
keeper

A domed chamber in which a whisper can be heard from one side
to the other

The Little Harmonic Labyrinth, BWV 591

The music of the spheres

The Well-Tempered Clavier

The last item on the list made him laugh—

Noah’s ark

What sort of fantasy was this? Most of it had to do with sounds—bells, whispers, echoes, music by Bach—BWV 591 was #591 in the Bach Werke-Verzeichnis. Puzzle canons and mirror fugues—the composer had been famous for playful inversions of melodies, musical themes turned backwards and upside-down. They were a sign of his teeming inventiveness, his frolicsome delight in tossing balls in the air, bouncing them on his head, catching them in his mouth, his hat, turning a somersault while the ball was in the air. But what was Noah’s ark doing on the list?

Charley whimpered. He was waking up. Alan looked at his watch. They had been away from Debbie Buffington for two hours. It was the darkest time of the year, and dusk was falling. When would she begin to worry?

He bent over the playpen and looked at Charley. If only the kid could talk. He must know what had happened to his mother. “Where’s Mama, Charley?” said Alan, reaching down to pick him up. “Where’s Mama?”

At once the baby did something clever. He turned his head and looked at the picture on the wall.

Alan swept him up and hugged him. What a smart little kid! Charley might not yet be talking, but his mind was there, all right, in spite of what his surly foster mother said. Hastily Alan carried him into his bedroom, changed his diaper, shoved him into his puffy outdoor clothes and plopped him into the stroller.

At the last minute, on impulse, Alan took Rosie’s notebook to the window, turned to an empty page and made an entry:

January 5: Charley understands the word “Mama.”