CHAPTER 65

He has all divinity at his fingers’ ends.

Martin Luther

After the Good Friday concert, Alan went back to Rosie Hall’s apartment and let himself in by the front door. He expected to find Harold Oates collapsed on the bed in an alcoholic stupor, and dreaded his waking up to curse the whole world. What could Alan say to him? Nothing. The failure of his effort at rehabilitation was miserably disappointing, but it wouldn’t do any good to talk about it. The man was a hopeless case.

But Oates was not there.

Alan was in a queer mood. He was still under the spell of the music. After his rescue by James Castle, he had left the balcony and gone down to the front of the sanctuary to hear the concert from behind one of the piers separating aisle and nave. Listening to the scandalized narrative of the Evangelist, the solemn urgency of Pilate’s interrogation, the wild clamor of the chorus demanding crucifixion, he kept remembering what Oates had said, Passion, my God, what’s passion but going beyond?

Now he moved restlessly around the apartment, touching things—the harpsichord, the bookcase, the rubber plant, the wall. What did he care about in the same way, what was there that would pitch him into some other state of being, some mad condition of creative power and exalted understanding? He had to go beyond some barrier, he had to climb a ladder without rungs and hurl himself aloft without wings. What did he care about so much that it didn’t matter whether it was true or false, right or wrong, worthy or unworthy?

Only one thing. He wanted to find Rosie Hall. Oates called her his fried girlfriend, Homer Kelly said she was probably a ghastly girl. Alan didn’t care. She wasn’t fried, and he didn’t care what she was like. He had to find her. He sat down heavily on a chair and closed his eyes. Mentally he picked up Rosie’s missing notebook and opened it and turned the pages as though it held an important secret.

There had been page after page about registration. And pages of addresses and phone numbers. He himself had filled in blank pages with news about Charley—and with his own stupid letters. And there had been the page of acoustic oddities.

Oates had explained the oddities, and at once they had lost their mystery—the music of the spheres, the echoes in different languages, Noah’s ark, the self-sounding bells, the box in which sounds could be locked up.

The box in which sounds could be locked up. Alan rose and went to the mantelpiece and picked up the big conch shell. Here was a box with a sound locked inside it, the sound of the sea—or so people said. He put the shell to his ear, and sure enough, there was a whisper like the murmur of waves on a faraway shore. It was really only the exchange of vibrating air between the curled passages of the shell and those of his ear, but it was a pleasant notion. The tide breathed in Alan’s ear and fell back and breathed again, as though the shell were a natural recorder, trapping the sound of the sea.

Well, for Christ’s sake, a tape recorder too was a box that trapped the sounds you put into it, and released them whenever you wanted to hear them again.

Alan went to the shelf where dust was collecting on Rosie’s old-fashioned audiocassette recorders. One of them held a cassette. It was the copy of her own performance of “Wachet Auf.” Oates had played it. He had denounced her choice of stops.

Alan began a conversation with the composer. “Listen, Johann Sebastian, it’s true, I can open this box and your own music will come out. You wrote it two hundred and fifty years ago, and Rosie played it last year, but it’s still in here. Listen to this, Herr Kappelmeister.”

The music began, and Alan pictured Bach raising his eyebrows in astonishment. His great jowls would shake, his small eyes stare with envy. “Gott sei dank! Ah, if only vee had such a box!”

“The trouble is, Herr Kappelmeister, this apparatus isn’t very good. You should hear it on something high-tech.”

The music rollicked and bounded along, right hand and pedal notes teasing each other, and soon the left hand began the admonitory tune, Wake, awake, for night is coming. Then there were noises in the street and Alan had to turn up the volume.

But the noises grew louder.

That was strange. The noises must be on the tape. They weren’t happening now, they had happened during the copying. Damn all low-tech sleazy paraphernalia. If the two gadgets had been wired together like the cassette recorders that were part of his own CD player, this wouldn’t have happened.

Then he understood. The interference with the music had been recorded on the day he found the baby and brought him home for the first time. The two machines had been turned on when he walked into the apartment. Rosie must have set them going herself. She had been copying her own music from one tape recorder to the other, and then—Alan gasped—there were voices in the room, two people shouting, the baby beginning to cry.

Swiftly he rewound the tape and listened again, holding his breath.

The music was too loud, too insistent. He couldn’t distinguish what the voices were saying. But one was a woman’s—surely Rosie’s—and the other a man’s. Whose voice was it? Who was beginning to shout at her? What was he saying?

Alan crouched closer, but Charley’s cries grew louder, blotting out everything. And then, oh God, the voices of the man and woman suddenly stopped and the music came to a close and the baby went on crying.

Alan listened, agonized, as Charley cried on and on. Then with a click the crying broke off. The tape had run out. There was only the low humming sound of the machine itself.

It was clear what had happened. Rosie had been making a copy of her own performance of Bach’s organ prelude, “Wachet Auf,” and the blank tape had mindlessly recorded not only the music but whatever was going on in the apartment at the same time. There had been a wild argument, and the baby had cried, and then Charley had been left all alone. Rosie and the guy who had been shouting at her had vanished, leaving the doors wide open. Poor Charley had climbed out of his crib and crawled out of the house by himself.

Alan rewound the tape, his hands trembling, and listened a third time. The voices were no clearer. He gave up and called Homer Kelly.

“Oh, hello, Alan,” said Mary. “How was the concert? We’re going tomorrow night. Do you want to speak to Homer? He’s gone to bed.”

Hurriedly, breathlessly, Alan told her about the noises on the tape.

She was interested at once. “Listen, there are people who know how to disentangle those things. Acoustics experts, they can sort out the frequencies. I’ll bet they could erase most of the music and leave only the voices. Do you know anybody like that?”

“No, but I’ll find someone. It will have to be on Monday. I’ve got to spend all day tomorrow finishing the voicing on those damned Contra Bombardes.”

“You poor kid. Well, good luck. And don’t lose the tape.”

Alan went back to the tape recorder and extracted the cassette. Mary Kelly was right. Nothing must happen to it. It would have to be hidden where Harold Oates couldn’t find it, no matter how much he poked and pried. Alan winced, remembering the way Oates had ripped all the tape from one of Rosie’s cassettes. Filthy shit, Castle playing Sowerby. Some philanthropist should buy up every Sowerby recording in the world, smash them all, destroy them, burn all the scores, obliterate the name of Sowerby from the face of the earth.

Alan brought a chair into the kitchen, climbed on it, and laid the tape well back on the top of the cupboard.