by Dennis Must
“He’s my brother,” I whispered conspiratorially.
“Oh, I didn’t know he had one.”
I refrained from agreeing.
“Perhaps you would like to talk in person?” she said. “I live close to the parish house. Why don’t you stop by?”
“Now?”
“Yes, of course.”
She was standing in her open doorway when I approached the clotted-cream Victorian’s ample porch.
I was struck by her austere yet youthful presence, having expected a much older woman. Lithe in frame and attired in a plain white smock, the Turneresque silk scarf that tied her russet hair in a tight bun was her only concession to adornment. Her radiant mien and penetrating gaze caught me off guard.
Extending her hand, she appeared momentarily confused, looking through me almost.
“Ethan Mueller,” I said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Yes,” she answered, as if as an afterthought, and turned into the living room, which felt overwhelmed by a Steinway grand. We sat in facing Queen Anne chairs upholstered in coral peonies. The light from the late afternoon was diffused ochre because of the cloth blinds pulled halfway down the windowpanes. It bled stream-like across the massive lid of the mahogany piano.
She answered my gazing at the instrument. “This is my teaching room,” she said. “I have students most every afternoon, a few of whom are exceptional . . . causing that lovely instrument and me to be very accommodating.”
“He sat there on certain afternoons, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” She grinned, eyeing me as if she expected me to say something more. “It’s why I invited you in . . .” There was a moment of expectant silence. “Ethan.”
Another being expressed a longing for him that touched mine.
Sensing my difficulty, she shook her head and confirmed again, “I honestly don’t know where he is.”
We sat mutely in the embracing warmth of that room as unassuming as she. I could almost hear the afternoon lessons being played out each half hour of every weekday afternoon—a rare few inspiring.
I gave her an attenuated version of my story: how Father Daugherty was my brother yet I’d never met him, let alone known that he even existed.
And as the minutes turned into nearly an hour—it was a Saturday afternoon—it became apparent to me that Westley had sat in this very room sharing his story, for nothing appeared to surprise her regarding mine.
Elizabeth had this habit of bending her head in thought while clasping her hands together and turning her fingers over each other, a continual caressing of sorts. When conversation ceased, either hers or mine, she would look up and glance straight into my eyes.
Was she seeking my brother?
It was clear that the intensity of the conversation, particularly the way I expressed myself, had begun to take its emotional toll on her. I’d not spoken to anyone so openly as I had to her, not even to my father.
Somewhat ashamed of myself, I stood and said I had to be going.
Elizabeth reached up and motioned for me to sit back down. “For a moment,” she pleaded.
As we sat facing each other again, it felt as if she were trying to awaken a memory in me. Or was I fearing that? After a moment, she stood and, from a small stack of piano books on the Steinway, lifted one with a yellow cover, handing it to me.
“Your brother’s.”
It was the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, piano compositions.
“Each Wednesday at three o’clock, he sat here. That was his lesson book.”
“And he played?”
“Quite beautifully,” she replied.
She had given me yet another piece of him. There had been no musical instrument in our house. Leafing through the compositions for “young players,” I checked the margins for jottings, possibly his. A sixteen-bar exercise, “Aria,” listed its due date in red pencil: Feb. 2nd.
“Your brother loved the Minuet in G Major,” she said, and began playing. The piece was unfamiliar to me but exceedingly lovely. I envisioned Westley performing it as a child with her at his side. She turned to me, smiling wistfully, and I began to hum the melody as if it were as familiar to me as my face.
At its last note, the hush in Elizabeth Andrews’s music room lingered. A shard of late-afternoon light illuminated her hands at rest on the ivory keys. Her eyes closed in private reverie.
For reasons unknown to me, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of anguish. I cannot explain it in any other manner except to say that at that moment, I could not help believing that I had once sat beside this comely woman in this very same room, and the longing to reawaken that suppressed memory haunted me terribly. Or was I merely yearning to have been beside this russet-haired beauty of deep intelligence and restraint as Father Daugherty once had? Was I reading her longing for his presence and willing it to mine? Had they once been intimate?
While self-consciously murmuring about having to leave, I stood and walked to the door before looking back. She was standing at the Steinway.
“Tell him I miss him, Ethan,” she said softly.
“If I find him,” I replied.
“Oh, you will.”
And as I pulled open the door, she called out:
“You asked if there had been a woman.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat startled.
“I believed he yearned for one deeply. When I described how he choreographed the mass?”
“Yes?”
“I always felt that it wasn’t Christ so much that he wished to embrace but someone more palpably real . . . one whose warm breath might grace his touch as he elevated the silver cup high into the nave.”
Then I knew.
“Do you think he understood that?” I asked.
Elizabeth hesitated before responding, turning her fingers over each other. “No. One day he surely would.”
A chaste and unrequited star-crossed longing had sought expression through the Anna Magdalena Bach exercises each Wednesday afternoon at three.
When I pulled Elizabeth’s door behind me that day, the time with her augured an unhappy end to my quest.
Maybe it’s wiser to go on about my way, I mused.
It was apparent to me by now that the price one had to pay to become closer to him might be higher than I could afford. My green-lights-in-jelly-jars moment had brought me to the lowest point in my life; I didn’t ever want to go back there, but I worried that I might have to as the stipulation to embrace my brother.
When I arrived back at my room that evening, I returned Westley’s stories to the fiberboard box in which they had been mailed.
I wanted time away from him . . . from myself.
In the morning I’d decide how I was to move forward.
But at some point in the night, I awakened with a start . . . or that’s how I mentally recorded it at that time. Sitting up in bed, I observed how the traffic outside my window seemed unusually heavy at that hour. In fact, it felt as if cars were passing by at considerable speed—numbers of them. I lifted the window blind and discovered that I was standing on the shoulder of a highway. Ahead rose a gigantic trestle bridge, one with red lights on its highest girders to alert low-flying aircraft.
I turned back to return to my bed, but nothing was there except a steep precipice adjacent to the roadway. I began walking toward the bridge as the vehicles continued to zoom by, and it was then that I spotted the acid-green jelly-jar lights. They illuminated the bridge railings every several feet.
Curiously, I found myself comforted by them even though I have always had a deathly fear of heights and panic always set in when crossing a bridge, whether by car or by foot. Yet in this instance the lights seemed familiar to me. As if I had been here before. I know this place, I thought. There is nothing to be afraid of. I began to move to the center of the bridge. The sound of the river below now began to drown out the sound of the heavy traffic . . . nearly as if it no longer existed.
I looked back once again to confirm
that I was alone. Were my bed, my window, the house no longer there for certain? And that’s when I spotted my car parked on the roadside. Its headlights were still on. But it was the Mercury sedan I’d owned while attending seminary.
Then it came to me: yes, I’d been here. It was the night of my spiritual crisis.
The night I had turned my back on God and all that I had ever believed in. It was the night that I’d realized how terribly alone I was. The night I’d felt as if I had been abandoned by my very own soul, and I was nothing more than an empty vessel driving my car to nowhere. I’d stopped on this bridge.
Recalling that, I began to chortle.
First it was God who evaporated.
And now I was uncertain whether I was in fact real and not the ephemeral substance of my own dream.
For there seemed to be no beginning or end. There was nothing to return to. Where did this road lead?
I started cracking up when I heard him speak in a measured voice to the operator. “This is an emergency, lady. My number is 7-6208, Sharon exchange. Charge it to me.” I could hear him mutter, “My boy’s in some kind of distress.” She kept repeating, Five cents, please, deposit another five cents. “Christ, can’t you hear me, lady? Santa Muerte, festooned with green lights, is winging my kid across the dark Allegheny—and they’re about to merge with the fucking Ohio! It’ll be in all the papers in the morning if you don’t let us continue this conversation.”
Then nothing.
All we could hear was each other taking air. And for what seemed a whole minute, surely a dime’s worth, we breathed heavy, sucked wind, scrambling away from Mr. Taps.
’Cause that’s who’d jumped into the passenger’s side. Couldn’t I see his Alice-blue shoes? The filter tip snuffed out in the puddle of piss on the floorboards? The once-unblemished Mercury I’d coveted for its pock-free chromium bumpers and forest-green paint job, fantasizing an aging matron had motored to the Big Orange, a swain at the wheel singing “Let’s Get Lost.”
Jesus, she loved that car. Loved that man.
A trumpet bird whose siren song had lured me over the parapets of the skeletal bridge.
Then I heard my father ask me if I was still there.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Christ, yes I’m still here.”
“Always keep a pocket full of nickels. Promise me, boy?”
“Time’s not up,” I said.
“Where are you calling from?” he asked.
“Pittsburgh. One of its many bridges.”
I could hear him rustling, perhaps turning on the light to check the time.
“Why, Ethan?”
“Because nothing’s changed.”
Why was I phoning him at this late hour? I wondered. What was the implacable need to hear his voice? Was it the child in me wanting him to watch me high-dive? So he could huzzah? Marvel at my form? Yet there are no lights on the rivers this night, the mighty Allegheny or the Monongahela as they merge to coitus in the grand Ohio.
Perhaps that was why I called you, dear Father.
Perhaps you could be waiting for me at the confluence, and then together we will stroke through the night out to sea.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “Let me hear you speak, son. What are you thinking?”
“Thinking? Oh, I’ve stopped doing that. I keep returning to this place.”
“Cold out there tonight? Are you dressed warmly? It rained here all day today. And what about the traffic? Many cars on the road, son?”
“Mine with the parking lights on several feet away and the motor running.”
“Radio on?”
“What?”
“What’s playing, Ethan?”
“‘’Round Midnight.’”
He laughed. I did too.
“I have some news for you. A bit of serendipity that you phoned . . .”
I didn’t respond.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother called.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Ethan?”
“I’m here.”
“Had very little to say. When I answered the phone, it seemed as if nobody was on the line, except I could hear breathing. At first I thought it was you and kept calling your name. Finally he spoke. It was a terse ‘Westley. It’s Westley.’
“‘Where are you?’ I asked.
“No response.
“I told him I missed him.
“‘Could we meet somewhere?’ I asked.
“Silence.
“‘You know your mother passed away, right?’
“‘I do,’ he said.
“Please come home, son.”
“Are you speaking to me?” I said.
“Of course. Of course I am speaking to you.”
“I’m sorry to have awakened you, Papa.”
“’Round midnight,” he jested.
“’Round midnight,” I echoed, placing the receiver back in its cradle.
At that moment I no longer could hear the sounds of the river nor the cars rushing by. In fact, I found myself standing at my window with the blind never having been raised. I returned to bed and, in an effort to understand what had just transpired, realized that the time I’d spent earlier with Elizabeth Andrews had had a much stronger effect on me than I’d thought.
Yet the moments on the bridge and the conversation with my father seemed so real that I couldn’t convince myself that it had all been a dream. Could I have phoned him from here? I wondered.
The receiver felt cold to the touch.
Almost as if he had taken its trembling orb into his calloused hands, held it up to his lips, and murmured ’round midnight over and over as if those words meant something. But what did the heart care except to be held and spoken to?
Within a month of my visit with Elizabeth Andrews, I had a teaching position in an inner-city high school where most of the students were African American. Virtually all of us who taught there, including the administrators, were white.
Listening to my students’ stories, I reflected on the egregious amount of effort and time I’d expended on my own stories; as each week passed, the bridge incident’s pernicious hold on me was diminishing. Westley and his whereabouts no longer occupied my every waking hour either. I rested in the conviction that he would approve of my self-control and the need to sort out all that I’d learned.
It was during that first summer recess, sometime in mid-July, that I received an envelope with Elizabeth’s return address. Inside was a handwritten note appended to a postcard.
Dear Ethan,
It had fully slipped my memory when we shared that lovely afternoon together becoming acquainted. And it wasn’t until I was cleaning out my very messy desk last week that I came upon the enclosed. It was, as you will see, addressed to me with no greeting or salutation therein. The date, barely legible, looks like it was posted about four years or so after Father Mueller left St. Vitus parish.
My deepest apologies for not recalling it sooner.
With affection,
Elizabeth
The postcard was a washed-out black-and-white photograph of a cowl-attired monk herding sheep on a hillside meadow. Dark clouds threatened rain. I could tell the address was in his handwriting because of the sparse notes he had appended to several of his stories.
The inscription below the photograph: Holy Cross Abbey, Berryville, Virginia.
Of course she hadn’t forgotten receiving it. She’d withheld the postcard from me because of his having won her promise to honor his desire for total privacy. I suspect no one even knew of his taking lessons from her. I pictured him entering through the alleyway that abutted her back porch, he in street clothes, no less, incognito. He was an “actor,” after all. Their moments together—maternal, platonic, of course, but shot through with untrammeled openness and revelations. Elizabeth was affording me an attenuated look inside what she certainly knew and understood about Westley. It is no wonder the mass had be
come a theatrical piece, a pas seul, when he presided.
But over the months following our meeting, it had obviously anguished her to receive a clue as to his possible whereabouts. And at the risk of betraying him, she forwarded it to me, I suspect in the hope that she knew him well enough, expressed through the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach lessons, to be sure that he would forgive her.
Perhaps she didn’t want me to abandon my quest, to write the story that he, Westley, hadn’t yet composed.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER NINE
THE MIDWAY AND THE MONASTERY
MONKS
“Don’t be fooled by what you see,” he cautioned. “Like anyplace else, there are a lot of pricks here.”
Formerly a landscape architect in Boston (now his eighteenth year in the order), Brother Paul had a stuttering problem. So severe that he’d steadfastly grab onto something solid—a leg of a table, say—while he agonizingly spoke. And perchance out of a sense of the diabolical, he would lock you into his gaze, daring you to turn away, when these seizures occurred.
“P-P-P-P-Pricks,” he spat.
I assumed one had committed him to the odious detail of guest master. You might have thought someone welcomed it. The guesthouse was heated and had hot and cold running water, a real kitchen, and soft chairs. The only remnants of the barren monastic life in this house were his straw bed—disguised with a fitted sheet—a dark cowl, and the cross he bore to entertain pilgrims like myself.
In the monk’s barnlike domicile there was only cold water, piped to a communal bathing stall. Several showerheads hung inside what looked like a milk house with its concrete floor and cinder-block walls. Each day shortly after 3:00 a.m., the monks would rise in their unheated four-by-eight stalls that were separated by six-foot-high walls and appointed with a mat of straw on a wooden platform, one blanket, a straight-backed chair, and a clothes hook; the openings to these stalls had no coverings.
