by Jane Langton
Alan unlocked Rosie’s back door and dragged the stroller into her apartment. At once he picked up Charley and carried him to the picture on the wall. Charley’s education began at once. “Look, Charley, there’s your mama. See Mama? That’s Mama, Mama, Mama!”
The truth was, Alan felt a parental sense of competition with little Wanda, who had walked and talked when she was only twelve months old. By God, he’d teach Rosie’s infant son to talk.
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.”
EPIPHANY
“In Dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr”
Chorale harmonized by J. S. Bach
Thy splendor fills the blackest hour of night,
The solemn dark is all alight.
O set our feet upon Thy way!
That we may see
Eternally
Thy star forever bright as day.
CHAPTER 15
It is said: “Preach thou, I will give strength.”
Martin Luther
It was the day called Epiphany, the sixth of January, the feast honoring the journey of the Wise Men to Bethlehem. This year it happened to fall on a Sunday. Thus the annual special service celebrating the window of the Three Kings in the south wall of the Church of the Commonwealth was better attended than usual.
The congregation was a mixed lot, as always. They sat elbow to elbow in their heavy winter coats, glancing up at the window now and then. It was a cloudy day. The colored glass was muddy, the chalices dim, the naked infant indistinct.
Looking down at the crowded pews from the balcony, Alan studied the occupants—male and female, old and young—and wondered why they were all there. Some had come for friendship, some sought metaphysical enlightenment from Martin Kraeger, some were sturdy regulars from way back, some were James Castle groupies—disappointed this morning to find a string quartet fiddling in the balcony. A few were elderly Brahmins like Edith Frederick who had lived in the Back Bay all their lives. The surrounding universities were responsible for the students and professors, the hospital complex for doctors, nurses and health administrators. There were couples from the suburbs who had paid fifteen dollars to park their cars, and homeless people grateful for the steaming radiators under the sanctuary floor and the five-thousand-gallon oil tank in the basement.
Martin Kraeger preached to them all. He did not need a microphone. His voice was strong, almost a bellow. In the pulpit he often quoted a remark of Martin Luther’s, I cannot pray without at the same time cursing, because all his sermons contained this paradox. On the one hand the nation was in decline and the planet was going to hell, but on the other, his own wit and his huge laugh and the strength of the good will that flowed from his combative spirit urged his congregation to plunge into the fight.
They emerged from one of his services mauled but refreshed. A sermon by Martin Kraeger wasn’t a twisting of the arm, it was a wrenching, a powerful shove. They went out from the glowing darkness of the sanctuary into the daylight, feeling dazed, discovering that the trees along the divided street had taken other shapes, the cars were not the sort they remembered, the traffic lights were different shades of red and green.
This morning Kraeger’s sermon was not a moral harangue, it was a psychological study of three sorts of journeys—those that tracked unmistakable stars, others following erratic and wandering lights, and a third sort probing for secret smoldering fires underground. It was a good sermon as sermons went, poetic and full of meaning of some sort or other, although perhaps there had been too many metaphors.
After the service Alan took four envelopes out of his pocket and paid the string quartet, handing over the checks he had requisitioned from Jenny Franklin.
On Sunday afternoon he took Charley for another ride in the stroller. It was a warm and blustery day. The winter streets were dry, the sidewalks still negotiable for the little wheels of the stroller. Alan gave Charley a giddy flight of wild bumps and bounds down Mount Vernon Street, and the baby screeched with delight. In the Public Garden they flew over the bridge across the Duck Pond and rushed in the direction of Arlington Street. There they had to stop because three men were blocking the sidewalk.
They loomed over the baby, three derelicts with ruined faces. The tallest had a red nose and dirty denim trousers. “Gawd,” he said, bending down, breathing gin into Charley’s face, “he sure is cute.”
“What’s his name?” said the man in the green Day-Glo jacket.
“Charley.”
“Mine’s Tom,” said the tall man, beaming proudly at Alan. “This here’s Dick.” He clapped the shoulder of the man in the green jacket.
They were harmless, Alan could see that. They only wanted to put their old faces close to Charley’s, as one might smell a flower. “I suppose you must be Harry,” said Alan, smiling at the third man, who was kneeling in front of the buggy.
The man looked up at him with small red eyes and grinned evilly, exposing three missing teeth. “Harry it is. I was christened sixty-four years ago by a Christadelphian Baptist.”
The words came hissing out through the vacant teeth, but his accent was not like Tom’s or Dick’s. It was a soft whiskey baritone with cultured vowels.
“Hey,” said Tom, “tell you what. I got something for the baby. Gawd, he’s cute.” He pulled down the zipper of his jacket and extracted a limp stuffed animal of no particular species.
Charley took it, turned it upside-down and hugged it to his breast.
“Well, thank you,” said Alan, wondering how to get away.
“Jeez,” said Dick, “I got something too.” He rummaged in a sagging pocket and pulled out a lollipop to which a good deal of lint was stuck.
Alan felt a parental twinge of doubt, but he made no protest as Charley took the lollipop, perceived at once what it was for, and stuck it in his mouth.
Harry had a gift too. Getting to his feet with difficulty, he groped in his coat and produced a shiny silver object. He put it to his lips, and a clear sweet note threaded its way down the street. Charley let go of the lollipop stick and held up his hand. “Wait a minute, kid.” Removing the lollipop from Charley’s mouth, Harry inserted the whistle. “Now blow.”
My God, the germs, thought Alan. He watched anxiously as Charley sucked on the pipe, then blew a tentative breathy note.
“Smart kid,” said Harry. “Maybe he’ll be a flutist.”
It was the first time Charley’s intelligence had been praised by the outside world, and Alan felt a surge of pride. You hear that, Wanda?
Tom poked Charley’s stomach with a dirty finger, Dick patted his woolly cap, Harry winked at Alan, and they shambled away into the Public Garden.
“The three kings in person,” murmured Alan to the winter air.
Charley sucked in his breath and blew a tremendous blast.
At the main off
ice of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services on Causeway Street, Mrs. Marilynne Barker was harassed by another phone call about the infant Charley Hall.
“Mrs. Barker? This is Diana Weatherby calling. I am an attorney. How are you today?”
There was a pause while Mrs. Barker controlled her temper. An inquiry about her health by a total stranger meant a dumb phone call. “I’m just fine. Why do you want to speak to me?”
“Well, we have a court order, you see, requesting information about a foster child named Charles Hall. We need to know where he is residing.”
The smell of rat was very strong. “Tell me, Ms. Weatherby, when did you pass the bar?”
“When did I—? Oh, last year, I mean the year before that.”
“Okay, what’s the second amendment to the Constitution?”
There was a gasp at the other end.
Mrs. Barker snickered and hung up, congratulating herself on preventing another criminal interference with her system of foster care. Why on earth were these phony people so inquisitive about young Charles Hall? Was there a disgruntled father hiding in the wings somewhere? No, there wasn’t any father. The father was dead. Could it be some infertile couple desperate to steal a child? But why this particular child?
Mrs. Barker got back to work, but she couldn’t get young Charley off her mind. The truth was, his foster home was extremely marginal. Probably she never should have accepted that dreary young woman Deborah Buffington as a foster mother. It might be a good idea to drop in on her one day with a surprise inspection.
Not today, of course, or tomorrow. For the moment Mrs. Barker was overwhelmed. As an administrator she shouldn’t have had a case load of her own at all, but Social Services had been drastically cut back. They were trying to do twice as much work with half the former staff. It was impossible.
