A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  He thought for a moment. “That would be terrible.”

  It was. Michou’s death had been violent, horrifying. Those last few hours with Justin had been bitter, like dead ashes.

  He had not been well enough to travel for a long time. He suffered so many afflictions, most the result of Auschwitz. He, who had never smoked, had a form of emphysema. His liver did not function properly. His heart was apt to race into tachycardia. Mostly he bore his illness with patience and humor. But he was old long before his time.

  The night before Katherine was to leave, they had listened to a broadcast which featured Thomas Forrester’s work and concluded with the Second Kermesse Suite. This music, which had in it the power of consolation for the rest of the world, would always tear them apart. They went to bed, silently, and lay there, holding each other, still silent.

  In the morning, while they were having breakfast, Justin spoke. His voice seemed heavier than the lowering skies outside. ‘Your father was a better composer than I am.’

  Their breakfast table was in front of the windows in their bedroom, which on a pleasant day would be sunny and warm. Now it was chilly, drab. ‘That’s nonsense,’ Katherine had said. ‘You can’t make comparisons. You’re totally different.’

  ‘Comparisons will be made. They always are. Composing was your father’s primary need. For me it was secondary. I would never have started composing if I could have gone on playing.’

  “But you have composed, and you’ve been … you are … very successful.’

  He waved his hand over the breakfast table, nearly upsetting the pitcher of hot milk. ‘Success is ephemeral. My music is not going to be remembered, and your father’s is.’

  ‘Justin, you cannot make a judgment like that. What is going to last and what is not is nothing any composer can know during his lifetime.’

  ‘Perhaps not somebody who is only a composer. But I am as much critic as composer.’

  ‘Not of your own work.’

  ‘Most certainly of my own work. I am a pleasant person—most of the time. I have an excellent sense of humor. But my music does not. It is too heavy. When I die, it will drop of its own weight.’

  ‘Justin, you are not well, or you wouldn’t be talking like this. I don’t want to go on this tour. I’ll tell Jean Paul to cancel.’

  ‘You will go on this tour. Music is the one language that cuts across politics and party lines. And I don’t want you here. You will just add to my depression.’

  ‘Justin.’ For a moment, all she could do was say his name. She knew that her very presence exacerbated his pain. She knew, too, agonizingly, that beyond a point she could not contradict him. Her father went further in his music than Justin did.

  ‘I wish I could call Wolfi,’ she said. ‘He could always talk sense into you even when I couldn’t.’

  ‘Go!’ Justin had finally shouted at her. ‘Go, and leave me to work things out in my own way. Wolfi is dead. Nobody can do it for me. Just get out.’

  She had left reluctantly, not with any prevision that he was going to die while she was away. It was bitter enough to know that she had not been able to help him. He had still been angry when Jean Paul had come for her in the car, angry at himself, at her.

  And she had failed him.

  We fail each other, over and over.

  She left him, and while she was in Warsaw his heart gave out.

  13

  She realized that the car was already moving up Amsterdam and that Llew was glancing at her. “Sorry,” she said. “I tend to lapse into memories. The important thing to learn is that there is nothing we cannot live with, we artists. I’m not sure I’d have made it without music.”

  “Yes,” he said, and again, a block later, “Yes.”

  They were silent until they reached the Cathedral. She liked the fact that she could be with the young organist and not feel the need to talk. He helped her out of the car, up the steps. As they went into the nave she said, “I’m really very annoyed at the piano being moved. Can you give me any hints?”

  “The nave is long, and you have to account for the time it takes the sound to move from one end of the building to the other. You’ll probably want to play at a considerably slower tempo than usual.”

  “Logical. Yes. I may have to alter my program slightly.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he apologized.

  “It’s a benefit, and there’s no point in a benefit if you don’t make as much money as possible.”

  Slowly they walked down the dim reaches of the nave. “I saw to it that the piano was moved this morning,” Llew said. “Not easy. You can’t roll it beyond a certain point, because there’s no way to avoid steps entirely. I’ve also called the tuner.”

  “Thanks. It’s ready.” She thought she saw a shadow flit around one of the great columns. “You know the Gomez children?”

  “How can one avoid them? They’re always hanging around.”

  “Has Topaze ever—”

  Llew gave a twisted grin. “Tried to sell me information? Sure.”

  “Have you ever—”

  He looked vaguely embarrassed. “A couple of times, when I thought the kid needed a hot dog from the vendor on the corner. It’s all gobbledygook. He can’t ever come out with anything straight. Vague allusions—” He stopped abruptly. “I didn’t take it seriously, but—”

  “What?”

  “I gave him a quarter a few days ago to get him out from underfoot, and he said somebody didn’t want you to give the benefit. Of course, he made it all up.”

  “Of course,” Katherine said, and hoped her voice did not sound as heavy as it felt. “Thanks for bringing me, Llew. I’m seeing Felix at four-thirty, so I should be ready to go home a little past five.”

  “Where are you meeting the bishop?”

  “In St. Martin’s chapel.”

  A Change of Program

  1

  In the front row of chairs facing the steps to the choir and the high altar sat Emily Davidson. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind if I listen? As a sort of lesson?”

  “Listen if you like,” Katherine said, “but don’t mind if I ignore you.”

  “I won’t mind a bit. Sometimes being ignored is the one thing in the world you want.”

  The acoustics were immediately and noticeably different from the chapel. Katherine played through the program, slowing down as Llew suggested. The Scarlatti toccata, she thought, did not work; the repetition of the notes which had been clear and separate in the chapel were blurred in the vast spaces of the nave.

  After a while she felt a presence, and Emily was standing beside her. “Madame Vigneras?”

  “What is it, child?”

  “You know that Mozart sonatina you’ve given me to memorize?”

  Katherine held back her irritation. “What about it?”

  “Please—I don’t mean to be a bother—but if you’ll sit where I was sitting, or even a little farther back, I’ll play it for you, at the tempo it says it should be played at.”

  Katherine began to understand what Emily was trying to tell her. “All right.” She pushed up from the piano bench, and went down the steps to the nave, moving back several rows.

  Emily played the sonatina through once, and then again, at approximately half the tempo.

  Katherine stood, nodding, and then went back to the choir. “I thought I’d slowed down, but I can see now that it wasn’t nearly enough. Some of the music I’ve chosen won’t take being retarded so radically. Thanks.”

  “You’re not mad at me—”

  “Of course not. I’m grateful.”

  “It seems disrespectful, but you aren’t used to the Cathedral acoustics.”

  “Emily, you’ve shown me just what I needed to be shown. Thank you.”

  “May I stay and listen for a while longer?”

  “I’d be grateful if you will. Sit back a bit, and let me know if I start accelerating.”

  She worked for nearly an hour before she felt Emily’s p
resence again. “That last piece—it’s fuzzy.”

  Katherine rested her hands on the keyboard. “Yes. And it doesn’t take being played any more meditatively than I’ve just played it. I’ll have to substitute something else.”

  “But the Beethoven,” Emily said, “it works.”

  “I’m glad. I would hate to have had to drop that.”

  “Madame Vigneras—”

  “Yes?”

  “What Dorcas said yesterday, about my accident maybe not being an accident—don’t pay any attention to her. Ballet dancers have an oversized sense of drama. Of course it was an accident.” The light blue eyes in the copper-toned face blazed at her.

  Katherine said quietly, “When Dorcas brought it up, you didn’t seem that positive.”

  “She took me by surprise. Of course it was an accident. Mom and Dad know it was. So please don’t say anything to them, because it would just upset them.”

  “If they know that it was an accident, why would it upset them?” Why do children insist on protecting their parents? Julie had been protective with Katherine about Eric’s infidelities. She, herself, would have gone to any lengths to protect her own mother. Why, when protecting is the last thing that parents want? It is to exclude—

  “It was an accident, it was,” Emily repeated, and Katherine drew back at the fear in the child’s face.

  Before she could say anything, Emily raised one hand and turned to the sacristy; the dean was walking toward them.

  “Oh, dear—” Emily whispered, and stopped as her father neared them.

  “There you are, Emily,” he said, not sounding pleased. “When I heard that Madame Vigneras was here, I thought this was where I might find you. First of all, I don’t want you bothering Madame,” and, before Katherine could intervene, he continued, “and secondly, you did not check in when you got home from school.”

  “Oh, but I did, Daddy,” Emily protested. “You were in conference and Señora Castillo wouldn’t even let me check in by telephone, but she promised to tell you I was home, and coming over to the Cathedral, just as soon as you were free.”

  For a moment he pondered this, then nodded. “Señora Castillo went home with a headache. She gets occasional migraines, so that’s probably why she forgot. All right, Em, get along home. I want to speak to Madame Vigneras.”

  The child’s dark, rebellious face for a moment mirrored her father’s. Katherine finally intervened. “Emily, I was concentrating so on the music, and so grateful for your help, that I never even mentioned your memorizing the sonatina so quickly. You must have worked very hard.”

  “I like work. That kind of work.”

  “Stay with the first sonatina till your next lesson. Don’t rush on to the second.”

  Emily glanced at her. “How did you know that I was going to?”

  “I haven’t forgotten myself at your age. Keep on with the first sonatina. Memorizing it is only the beginning. Listen to it. Try to hear what it wants you to do with it. Find out where it wants you to accelerate and be merry, and where it wants to whisper something lonely. Look at the Italian, and if you don’t agree with it when it says fortissimo, find out why. Spend the rest of this week discovering this one piece of music.”

  Emily’s mouth was slightly open as she listened. “It’s like ballet, then. My old piano teacher never talked about music like this. Now I understand why I shouldn’t gallop ahead. Thank you.”

  “Go home and work,” Katherine said.

  “I will. This minute. Thanks, Madame Vigneras, ’bye. ’Bye, Daddy.”

  2

  Katherine came down the marble steps of the choir to where the dean was standing. “Your child has been enormously helpful to me this afternoon. I didn’t realize quite how staggering the difference in acoustics is going to be.”

  He nodded, half listening, not apologizing for the change. “You know Mimi came to see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is never an easy time to be dean of a great cathedral. There are always problems most of the world, even the church-going world, could never dream of. There was crisis after crisis during the sixties—”

  “And in all decades,” she reminded him. “Each one in my life has had its own traumas I could never have guessed at or prepared for.”

  “Such as this present unpleasantness?” He led her to the first row of chairs. They sat together, silently. The afternoon light slanted down the long nave, touching the columns with soft color, lifting their heaviness to soaring beauty. There was a pervasive odor of limestone, of city grime, a faint residue of incense. Nothing sharp or unpleasant, no turgid smell of pot. The city sounds, too, were muted, so that a passing siren sounded far away.

  “A church or a synagogue used to be safe, a place of refuge,” the dean said. “When I sang in choir, a cathedral was still a holy place, and untouchable. All the ambulatory chapels were unlocked, with people going in to pray, not to steal. The silver candlesticks and crucifixes were safe. Now even St. Martin’s chapel, where we keep the Reserved Sacrament, and which is always open for prayer, has only valueless candlesticks, and a crucifix a thief couldn’t sell. Bishop Juxon used to spend several hours a week outside St. Martin’s so that people who wanted to pray or weep or just sit someplace small and private, less overwhelming than the nave, would not be disturbed. But, not long ago, and despite a reasonably good lock, someone stole the Reserved Sacrament for anything but a reverent purpose.”

  “A black mass?”

  The dean bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment. “Black masses have been going on since—oh, very early in Christendom, I suppose. They are, it strikes me, an indictment of the Church, a witness to our lack of love. Throughout the centuries we’ve imposed, arbitrarily, Christian standards on people who had longstanding ways of worship, forcing whatever was our version of Christianity down their throats, instead of simply letting our light so shine that people would want to know what lovely light of love illumined us.”

  Wolfi, she thought, no matter what his human weaknesses, had been lit from within. The dean, too, had that light, but now it was flickering, faint, dimmed by his confusion at whatever powers of hate were touching his beloved Cathedral.

  “Suzy and I discuss our work with each other,” he continued. “I undoubtedly know more about the physical aspects of the human heart than most clergymen, and she—somehow I don’t want her to know how far things have gone, how unsafe things are. And you’ve walked right into this hornet’s nest, because of Mimi, because of Felix. If you’d returned to New York and just started going to church on Sunday, you’d be aware of none of this.”

  Trying to lighten things, she said, “If I’d returned to New York and not seen Mimi or Felix, I wouldn’t have gone to church, and I’d have been a great deal lonelier than I am.”

  “Yet here you are, who should be safely outside the dark side of things, plunged right into the midst of shadows which hold hate, and for which I cannot find the source. Mimi should have come to me when she traced that call to Cathedral House. I am more sorry than I can say about it all—the phone calls, and most especially about the vandalizing of your apartment and the portrait. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am angry. At first I was frightened, but now I am angry.”

  “Do you have any place you could go for a while? Don’t you have a house in Connecticut?”

  “It’s rented. Anyhow—no, Dave, I am not running away. That is evidently what they—whoever they are—want me to do, and I will not give them the satisfaction of driving me out of my home. Also, I have just started to give Emily piano lessons, and that is no small investment for me to have made in your child.”

  “We are eternally grateful to you. But that should not keep you in New York if—”

  “Is Emily in some way connected with this?”

  His voice was rough. “Why should she be?”

  “I have no idea.” She did not press him, but changed the subject. “About the vandalizing of my apartment�
�Mimi told you that she does not think this nastiness is directed at me?”

  “Yes, but—Felix? I could understand it better if it were at me. During my lifetime I’ve inevitably made a few enemies.”

  “So has Felix.”

  “But not now. He’s been retired for so long, and he’s such a gentle person, everyone loves him.”

  At random, Katherine said, “He still hears confessions. Perhaps he knows too much.”

  The dean turned sharply, but spoke in a controlled voice. “Our training as priests is rigorous. We are taught to listen, to hear, and then, after the penitent has left, to forget.”

  “Are you able to do that?” Katherine asked.

  “It becomes easier with experience. And it is a self-defense mechanism, a safety precaution. Allie tells of a time when he was first priested, and a bishop came to his church for a confirmation. While they were waiting for him in the sacristy, the rector was talking about how important the bishop was to him, and how he had made his confession to him many years ago, right after he—the bishop—was ordained. It had been, in fact, the first confession the bishop had ever heard. Well, the bishop finally arrived and they got on with the service, and during the sermon the bishop talked about the value of confession, and just happened to mention that the first confession he had ever heard was that of a murderer.”

  Katherine made a murmur of shock.

  “Allie said that this made an indelible impression on him. It was a terrible slip of the tongue on the bishop’s part, though Allie said the poor man had no idea what he’d done. But it made Allie realize that nothing heard in confession must ever be mentioned, that it must, in fact, be forgotten.” He sighed, deeply. “Are you through practicing, Madame Vigneras? Is somebody driving you home?”

  Katherine looked at her watch. “Llew is picking me up a little after five. Felix is meeting me here at four-thirty.”

  “Yes, I suppose you have to tell him.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost time for him to come. You’ll be all right if I leave you alone for a few minutes?”

  “Of course.” But suddenly the shadows seemed to stretch out into the nave, to deepen in the bays, to huddle at the bases of columns. Absurd. If she let her imagination play tricks on her, she would be delighting whoever it was who was full of hate.