CHAPTER 57

The Lord drags me, and not unwillingly do I follow.

Martin Luther

Alan’s bank account was shrivelling. He was paying two separate monthly rents, one for his room on Russell Street, the other for Rosie Hall’s apartment. The fact that Harold Oates was sharing the apartment didn’t seem to give him any qualms of conscience about helping with the expense, even though his concerts were bringing in substantial sums of money. Well, the hell with it. Grudgingly Alan told himself that the greatest organist in the world had a right to float on his greatness.

Mrs. Garboyle took Alan’s rent checks graciously and set them aside. She promised to turn the money over to the executors whenever the house made its way through probate—to the executors or to anybody else who was concerned with the matter out there in the dry stretches of barren desert where courts convened and judges ruled and estate attorneys earned large fees.

Oates was completely at home in Rosie’s apartment. He deposited cigarette ashes everywhere, complained about Alan’s cooking, splashed in the bathtub and played the harpsichord. Alan was bewitched by his harpsichord technique. His fingers were as precise and delicate on the plucked notes of the keyboard as they were powerful on the keys of the tracker organ, where two coupled manuals called for strength of hand and arm.

Alan listened with pleasure, but at night he insisted on sleeping on the sofa, while Oates took the bedroom. It wasn’t generosity, it was harpsichord protection.

But there was no way to protect Rosie’s drawers and closets from the inquisitiveness of Harold Oates. He pried and poked, examining prescription medicines, fingering her underwear, reading letters, uncovering a bedside book on female hygiene. Alan couldn’t blame him, because he himself had examined everything in the house, but he was infuriated just the same. And what about Rosie’s notebook? How could he protect it from the meddling fingers of Harold Oates?

Alan wandered around the house looking for a hiding place, then slipped it among the cookbooks in the kitchen. Oates was no cook. He wouldn’t be consulting Julia Child or studying One Hundred Ways to Cook Zucchini.

On Palm Sunday Alan came home from an exhausting service at the Church of the Commonwealth to find Oates rewinding a tape on one of Rosie’s old-fashioned tape recorders. He was fuming. “Horrible low-tech. A recording of a recording. Wrong registration. And the repeat is a mess. Background noise. Disgusting.”

Alan felt resentful for Rosie’s sake. “What’s that, ‘Wachet Auf’? I thought she played it very well.”

“Who, your fried girlfriend? Oh, her technique’s okay, but, shit, the registration. She should have come on strong with a gutsy reed in the cantus firmus.” He looked at Alan and jerked his head toward the bedroom door. “Hey, somebody opened the safe while you were gone.”

“What?” Alan ran into the bedroom and stared at the wall where the little woven fabric from Guatemala had covered the small safe. Now it was hanging cockeyed. The door of the safe was open.

“Empty,” said Oates, trailing after him. “I thought they might have left a stray thousand-dollar bill. No such luck.”

Alan turned on him. “Where were you while this was happening?”

Oates plopped down on the unmade bed and closed his eyes. “Visiting old pals on Kansas Street. Where do you think?”

And Dora O’Doyle, no doubt. Alan didn’t care. He went to the kitchen and phoned Homer. “It had to be Rosie,” he said eagerly. “Who else would know the combination?”

“Good,” said Homer. “Is anything else missing?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look around and call you back.”

At once Alan turned to the shelf of cookbooks. He ran his fingers over the books, and pulled out the zucchini book and The Joy of Cooking. Surely he had put Rosie’s notebook between them? It wasn’t there.

The notebook was gone, and so were a number of other things. Alan made a list and reported it to Homer. “Charley’s blanket, his spoon, his ball, his vitamins, his xylophone. Whoever took him from Debbie Buffington’s place must have come here, opened the safe, and taken stuff for the baby. It had to be Rosie.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Homer.

Alan went back to the church and spent the afternoon voicing the eight-foot Octave. Only the thirty-two-foot Contra Bombarde remained in the Marblehead shop.

Returning to the apartment late in the afternoon he found himself alone. Oates was somewhere else. Once again Alan ransacked the cookbook shelf. The notebook was nowhere to be found. Perhaps Rosie was flipping through its pages right now, reading his notes on Charley’s progress and the letters he had written to her in his sentimental folly. Alan winced as he thought of the dumb things he had said. He tried to picture her walking away down Commonwealth Avenue carrying a bag of Charley’s things and turning over the pages of the notebook.

The picture refused to materialize. Rosie was absent. Until now she had been a presence lurking just around the corner somewhere, if he could only find the right corner. Now she seemed remote, removed to the farthest star, as though she did not exist in Boston at all, or in New York City, or Pittsburgh, or Santa Fe, or Milwaukee, or San Francisco, or Detroit.

She was more gone than she had ever been before.

“They’re gone? Oh, thank the Lord!”

“I dropped them at Lufthansa in plenty of time. Helen, for Christ’s sake, don’t cry. You know they had to go.”

“Here, Sonny, your coffee’s hot. Pay no attention to Helen. Her mind’s going. I’ve noticed it a lot lately. Yesterday she forgot to take her medicine, didn’t you, Helen? Oh, God, stop that whining!”

“Christ, Mother, will you kindly shut up?”

“Oh, that’s right, Sonny, blame me, when I’m only telling the truth. Oh, Sonny, look out, you broke the cup! Oh, God, Sonny, what happened?”

“Nothing. For Christ’s sake, let me alone. Nothing happened.”

“But you dropped the cup! Your hands are shaking! Sonny, Sonny, tell Mother, are you all right? Oh, Helen, shut up! Do you hear me? Just shut up!”