At the song’s end Amy waved to the sustained applause, turned and walked back to us. She patted her face with the towel, took a long drink, asked, “Was that all right?”
“You’re doin’ fine, baby,” Jake told her. “Just fine.”
“Okay.” She set down her drink and said to no one in particular, “Time to turn up the heat.”
As she walked back out to the microphone Amy flipped up the collar of her jacket, not bothering to adjust her dishevelled hair. She pulled her sleeves up above her elbows, raising her arms above her head as she did so. She planted her feet to either side of the microphone stand, gave the crowd a double thumbs up. Jake showed brilliant teeth as he turned and gave Sameh the nod.
The next song, “You Turn Me” by Vickie Winans[10], was a hard-driving gutsy song, and once it was well under way Amy plucked out the mike and began her strut. Grins spread among the band, and the sound opened up. Two-thirds of the way through the song there was a duel of voices. Jake, Lothar and I sang against Karl, Hans, and Pipo, with Amy keeping score way up high above us all. Turn me, we cried over and over, turn me to grace. When we ended, the audience shouted back their approval.
Amy moved to the back of the stage, patted her face, and asked Jake, “That sounded all right, didn’t it?”
“Dynamite. Pure dynamite.”
“You sure?”
“Look at the crowd, baby. This place is packed with happy people.”
During the remainder of the set, Amy gave everything she had for each song, and afterward came back to Jake and begged to know if it was okay. Jake encouraged her the best he could; then she went back up front and sang her heart out all over again.
When the set ended, Amy gave the crowd a final bow and smile and promise to return soon. As we were walking down the backstage stairs the Reverend Hawkins came up followed by a stranger. He was a light-skinned older black man, very handsome in a hard-edged way. His hair was salt-and-pepper gray, his sharp-cornered face unlined. He stood very erect, very rigid, very straight and polished. He wore his clothes like a uniform; his shirt was sparkling white, his striped tie set with a tiny diamond stud, his shoes so shiny they reflected the overhead lights.
Jake walked forward with Amy a tiny half step behind him, both her hands intertwined with one of his. The man shook Jake’s hand briskly, gave Amy a brief nod. Amy was clearly willing to let her husband speak for her. Jake and the man exchanged a few words; then with a nod to them and the chaplain, the man pivoted around and walked off.
As soon as the chaplain had followed the man back down the hallway, Amy turned to Jake and said, “I’m going outside for a while.”
“Ain’t you gonna eat something? They’re fixin’ us a table back in the chaplain’s room.”
“I’m not hungry and I want some air. Can I have your Bible, please? Mine’s back somewhere in my things.”
Reluctantly Jake pulled the tattered volume from his back pocket. “Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“I’ll be all right. Can I have the keys to the van too, please?”
Jake watched her leave with a helpless look on his strong features. When she was gone he noticed me standing beside him. “Girl ain’t never had nothin’ but trouble with that man. The Lord’s got His work cut out for Him, helpin’ her carry that load.”
He turned and left for the chaplain’s room, too disturbed to notice the effect his words had on me. I hesitated, then followed Amy out into the night.
I found her seated behind the wheel of the van, the interior light shining on the Bible propped on the steering wheel. She rolled the window down when she saw me coming. “Did Jake tell you to come out here?”
“No.” Now that I was there, I was not sure why I had come. “I wanted to ask you something, but I can do it later.”
In reply Amy opened the door and slid over, careful to keep her place in the Book. I climbed in and shut the door. “What are you reading?”
“Oh, I did what I always do when life is pressing in on me. I said a little prayer, asked Him to guide me, and opened the Book. I saw it was Revelation and started to close it, thinking I had made a mistake. But the Lord knew what He was doing.”
She raised the Book and read, “ ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’
“This doesn’t mean now, Gianni. This is what’s going to happen after the Tribulation, when Christ comes to reign on earth. I must have read these words a hundred times, but they never had a meaning for me like they do now. All the things that trouble us, all our pains and angers and worries and doubts, they are all going to pass. Every one of them. All we have to do is keep our eyes on the Lord.”
She lowered the Bible to her lap, spread her hands out to cover the pages. “Until that time, we still have a friend who will never fail us in our times of need. We just need to learn how to turn whatever is bothering us over to Him.”
Amy looked out over the darkened parking lot. “When Jake said he wanted you to come live with us, I was really afraid. He said that it would be the only way you would ever understand what it meant to accept the Lord Jesus into your life, by seeing an example of a living faith in other people. I told him that was why I was so afraid. I mean, it’s one thing to have somebody come in for a performance, see us up on stage and go away feeling filled with the Spirit. It’s totally different, though, when somebody comes in and sees you when you’re tired, or down, or hurting. My faith isn’t perfect, Gianni. It’s a long way from it. I was afraid of making mistakes in front of you. Like now.”
“I don’t think you’ve made mistakes,” I replied.
She chose not to hear me. “All I ever wanted to do was sing. It was the only time I ever felt alive, whole, free from all the mess that we had at home. The rest of life was just something to try and put up with. When I was sixteen I got a job singing with a local band, and did some studio gigs and advertising jingles. It drove my father around the bend. I spent the next two years getting yelled at and being slapped around. He called my singing the devil’s work. Strange thing to hear from a man I never saw pray or go to church. He’d drop us off every week, come by and pick us up after it was over, but he never set foot inside the church himself. He didn’t have a thing against my singing, long as I was in the church choir. But soon as I started with that band, he wouldn’t leave it alone.”
She screwed up her face, lowered her voice, said to the front window, “ ‘No ’count white boys. Druggies and hippies and trash, that’s all they are. I won’t let no girl of mine be seen with no-good white trash, nossir. None of my girls’ll wind up a whore-lady with a road show.’ ”
Amy closed the Bible and cradled it to her chest. “What really bothered him wasn’t the music, though. It was what other folks’d think. He lived for the army. I used to wish my Pop’d love me just half as much as he loved his job.
“My father demanded perfection from us. All of us, Mama included. He had to have the best—the finest soldiers, the sharpest unit, the prettiest wife, the cleanest home. My sisters and I had to be the best students, the best dressers, show the world we were Pop’s little angels.
“I studied because I loved learning. I proved to myself that I was smart, that I could do just as well as anybody else. Then I’d go in and blow the tests. It was the only way I could get his attention, see, when he bawled me out. I was Pop’s big disappointment, and I got back at him every way I could, just looking for ways to hurt him and upset him. All the time, though, deep down I kept wishing he’d love me.”
She cleared her cheeks with two backhand swipes. “I finally decided I just had to get a little tougher. You know. Tough enough to take it, to live without my father’s love. I started going out with boys who were hurting as bad as I was, hiding behind masks of good looks and money. I was better than them, though. I knew it and I showed it. They had all of these things—the right car and the great pad and the good dope and the perfect clothes. But they were a
ll show. Just a big show.
“They looked at me like they looked at everything else, just what they could see on the outside. The nice legs, the nice body, that’s all they ever saw. But I knew there was something more, and I looked down on them because they never could reach it. I was the most condescending little snit you ever saw. I could cut a man up one side and down the other without flicking an eyebrow. They hated it, but they loved it too. It took me a long time to understand that. I finally saw that they kept after me because I was always a little unattainable.”
Amy turned to me with eyes as deep as wells. “You know what happened then.”
“Jake,” I said softly, hurting for her.
“After I met him I fought like mad. It still pains me to remember what a fool I was. I did everything I could think of to make that man hate me. I even brought one of those silly little playboys to a restaurant where I was supposed to be meeting Jake. The man didn’t even bat an eye. He told the guy about the rich man meeting Jesus on the road, asked if he wanted to pray with us. It blew the guy’s mind. Then Jake stood up and said he must have been mistaken, he thought he was going to be meeting a sister in the Lord for an evening of sharing in the Word. Can you imagine how I felt? An evening of sharing in the Word.
“It took me a while, but I finally came to realize that Jake was somebody who saw inside me. He saw the emptiness and the pain and the anger, and all he wanted was to show me how to fill that space with something better. He never talked about his own love. He never seemed the slightest bit interested in my beauty. That shocked me cold, I tell you. He never talked about loving me himself, never laid a hand on me. He only seemed interested in my heart. I wish there was some way I could describe how much that meant to me. He made all the games seem so silly, such dirty little lies. That’s why I was able to keep listening to him talk about the Lord, because he never talked to the outside Amy, the girl the rest of the world saw. He talked to my heart. He kept talking about the Lord and His love. A Lord that loved me for what I truly was, beyond all the lies and the barriers I had spent a lifetime putting together.”
Amy turned back toward the front windshield, let out a long sigh. “I made peace with my Pop, the best peace I could. And the Lord keeps pushing me a little further along every time He thinks I’m ready. This is the first time my father’s ever come to hear me sing, though. The very first time in my whole life.”
I thought back to that talk with Jake outside my little cottage, remembered the problems I had with my own father. We were quiet a long time, sitting side by side, staring out the front windshield at the silent parking lot, both lost in our own thoughts. I yearned for a way to tell her what I was thinking, but the words would not come.
Finally Amy said, “Thank you for letting me share all this with you, Gianni.”
“I learned a lot. Really.”
“That’s the power of sharing, I suppose. You can learn from the pain of others if you’re only willing to listen. It helps to know someone’s been down there too.”
“And made it back up again,” I added.
She looked deep into my eyes. “It’s so wonderful to see you open yourself up to Him, Gianni. His healing power is there for you, just as it is for me. Unconditional love. He’s just waiting to share it with you.”
The pressure in my heart was too intense for me to speak. I sat and searched her face and struggled with my conflicting inner voices.
Amy patted my hand, gave me her gentle smile. “Think maybe we ought to check in with the others? I imagine Daddy Jake’s just about borderline frantic.”
I returned to the hall feeling split in two. There were answers here to questions I did not even know I had. I could not grasp them, could not see how I could face up to it. I was afraid to listen too closely to the voices inside my mind.
I felt so utterly filled with doubt. What if they were wrong? What if all they were basing their lives on was nothing more than their own imaginations, seeking to fill the void in their lives with a myth? I was terrified of making a mistake, of being fooled, of being forced to confront the shadows in my mind and heart.
* * *
The dream was waiting for me when I went to sleep that night. I closed my eyes and drifted away, and the next instant all the veils were down, all the blinders torn away. I slept, and dreamed a dream as real as the world I had left behind.
I stood at the edge of a clearing made dark and gloomy by a misting rain. The limbs of the trees surrounding the clearing were bowed and motionless under the rain’s silent weight.
I watched as four cowled figures slowly entered the clearing. They droned in deep voices words I could not understand. Their robes slid across the ground, making them seem to float as they walked. They were carrying a casket. They began to lower the casket from their shoulders, and I saw that it had no lid, and that it was empty.
I peered at the figures, but their heavy cowls were drawn down so that I could not see their faces. The figures dropped the casket, and it floated down into a shallow grave that opened at their feet, landing with the sound of thunder.
One by one, three of the figures fell into the grave. They lay in haphazard confusion, their limbs intertwined, their cowls thrown back. I saw their faces at last. It was my mother, my grandfather, and my grandmother.
The remaining cowled figure started shoveling in dirt. I wanted to scream, but the earth was falling into my mouth as well as into the grave.
My mother opened her eyes and looked straight at me. I spat out dirt and tried to run to her, but the sod was falling faster now, piling up around me and holding me tight. It filled my mouth and made it hard to breathe.
The hooded figure kept shoveling in dirt until the grave was full. He brought up an enormous wooden stave, and shoved the sharply pointed end into the mound of earth. Then he began to grow taller and taller until he towered over me and the grave. He picked up a giant hammer and raised it high over his head.
A hand broke out of the ground. It reached toward me, pleading. I struggled to break out of the mountain of earth that held me fast, but I could not move. The hammer fell and struck the stave with the boom of a cannon. Again it fell. The third time, the cowl dropped back. It was my father.
I awoke with a cry and sat up rigid in bed, gasping for breath. My bedclothes were soaking wet. On trembling legs I got out of bed, undressed and dressed again. Then I began to pack.
It was impossible to forgive my father. How could I forgive someone whom I hated so much that I had spent a decade trying to forget his very name? Where had this search for God brought me except back to the point of confronting my hatred? I had not found God: I had only rediscovered an old pain. I closed my carry-bag, silently opened the bedroom door, picked up the case holding my classical guitar, reached for my bag and shoes, and padded across the wooden floor on bare feet. At the entrance to the apartment I hesitated long enough to make sure I had keys to the warehouse so that I could pick up my other guitars. I was not coming back.
PART THREE
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.
C. S. Lewis
Chapter 10
The train pulled into Como just after dark. I felt strangely empty. I shrugged it off as a change in climate, as Como was already well into springtime warmth. I caught a taxi directly to the restaurant. Now that I was back, I felt reluctant to go home to my cottage.
Alessandro was too tired to show me much enthusiasm. “You’re seven weeks too early,” he said in greeting.
I unloaded my bag and guitar cases from the taxi, and looked around. The tables and chairs were piled into a gigantic jumble against the far wall and covered with paint-spattered tarpaulins. Masonry equipment and stone-cutting machines were set up around the center of the restaurant. Wheelbarrows and portable concrete mixers and spades were backed up against the waiter’s station. Scaffolding grew up the side wall, surrounding a new metal girder which was still colored a raw red. At its base were dabs of gray paint where the workmen w
ere attempting to match the color of the wall. Dust was everywhere.
In the midst of this chaos was one table littered with papers. A sweat-streaked Alessandro was seated with two equally dirty men whom I did not know. A bottle and glasses were set in front of them.
Alessandro waved a weary hand toward the pile, said, “Fish yourself out a chair and join us, Maestro.”
“Thanks, I’ve been sitting in a train all day.”
He nodded. “These are the heads of the construction crew,” Alessandro said, and to them, “Giovanni di Alta is the star musician of our show.”
We exchanged greetings. Alessandro offered me his glass, apologized for not having the energy to go back to the kitchen for another one. I took a sip out of politeness, realized it was the first alcohol I had tasted in over two weeks, asked him how it was going.
“The fiend you see leaning against my wall here has been a mean one to deal with.” He leaned back on two legs, and the chair groaned dangerously. “You would not believe what that rogue has put us through.”
I gave the steel pillar another look, asked, “If it’s up why will it take so long to reopen?”
“Because the second one has to go inside too,” offered one of the construction men, draining his glass in one tired motion.
“The wall is leaning inward. The main support has to be on this side,” Alessandro explained. “I think maybe I’m gonna take a month’s vacation, let them put this one in without me.”
“It won’t be so bad,” the other man spoke up. He had a voice that spoke of grappa and late nights and thousands of unfiltered cigarettes. “We’ve learned how to do it now.”
Alessandro made a weary suggestion as to what the man could do with such nonsense, then said to me, “Antonio has been calling here from Milan two, three times a day looking for you. He asked me this morning if I knew of any detectives in Germany that spoke Italian.”
The Maestro Page 27
