Antiphony (19 page)

As he finishes the last bit of shortbread, he hears a sound, a low-pitched rumbling that lifts and builds to a high crescendo. At first it is hard to make out, then it registers—it is coming from the corridor to his right. He leaves the library and heads towards it; another turn down a hallway towards the center of the building, the walls lined with old-fashioned paintings of
former deacons and ministers of the church from the past hundred and fifty years, all of them dead and gone.

Here, the sound of voices lifted up. He goes through a set of double doors and enters from the narthex, stands at the back of the sanctuary and rests against one of the ancient wooden pews. The choir is perched in a set of pews situated behind the main altar, fifty feet away, two rows of men and women moving their mouths in time with a man who waves his arms in front of them, without even a piano for accompaniment. Theodore closes his eyes and lets the sound they emit wash over him. The voices are filled with joy—two sets of voices it seems, the lower register singing a brief phrase followed immediately by an answering phrase sung by the higher register. He can feel the sound welling up within him, the vibration bouncing off the walls and across the taut receptive surfaces of his body. The words are hard to make out, at first—the tempo is fast—but he listens carefully and hears the repetition, the echoing phrases calling back and forth to one another:

For the instruments are by their rhimes.

For the shawm rhimes are lawn fawn
moon boon and the like.

For the harp rhimes are sing ring
string and the like.

For the cymbal rhimes are bell well
toll soul and the like.

The first phrase calling out in baritone, the second phrase echoing and answering back in the higher voice of the women, with a staccato emphasis on the final three words which repeat.

For the flute rhimes are tooth youth
suite mute and the like.

For the bassoon rhimes are pass class and the like.

For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place
beat heat and the like.

For the clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.

With his eyes closed he can feel the sound move back and forth across him and through him, he feels it register its tottering delight in satisfying and shapely stronger confinement across him and through him he feels it looking as if it were the body eternal the member of which is lost to sense is leaching through as a stream of balm is reverberating through all manner of depth as shaking through his body.

For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound
soar more and the like.

For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are the instruments in HEAVEN.

For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous magnitude and melody.

With his eyes closed still he in a passion dreams he is a leaping roaring with anything that passes through plummets through sounds in a witching way two thousand threescore and seven through arising forms and bodies shapes plucked from nothingness by angels in his head.

For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace.

For this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.

With eyes closed this image's head is of fine gold this sound wrested within him a shout and whisper at his ear this heavy
armor of vibration infiltrates and helpless he receives it painted on the inside of his head where silent dreams imagine forms and pull them out to something pulled and plucked to stand without complaint.

Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from the hand of the artist inimitable,

and from the echo of the heavenly harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty.

With eyes closed he sees the sound he feels it turn upon itself and translate all light into what it always has been, always has been merely sound, he feels the light in sweetness vibrate in accordance with the trembling touch every thing, even the orange light that filters through his eyelids, has become a variating key of vibration, a clapping shuffling baffling variance of sound.

“Okay, stop.
Stop
.”

The eyes are open again, the sound is gone. The man who was waving his arms has commanded it to stop. The voices of the singers have been flailed with a disparaging drop of the arms into mute silence, and the singers are left to stand and contemplate what it is they might have done to displease their master. Theodore cannot imagine what it could be. To him, this sound which still reverberates across the wood and plaster rafters of this tall and echoing space has seemed to be the very voice of wonderment, the type of sound he would imagine traversing the vast distances between the planets and their stars whenever he heard the archaic phrase: music of the spheres. He wishes it would never stop. But as the man stands there, stock still, staring at his charges, the last shred of their voices floats towards the rafters high above and dies away.

They wait with some patience to hear the indictments he will level at them, the description of their shortcoming, the instructions for what to do better next time. Perhaps the conductor is gathering his own thoughts, or letting them consider what they must know they have done wrong. The men of the lower register stand hunched together on the bottom two rows of pews—the women on the top two, a few men and women mingled together on the second row. And there in the middle of the top row, he sees the woman he knows, the one he met the other day—can it really be only yesterday?—at the coffee shop. She catches his eye, sees that he is staring at her, and smiles.

Theodore hopes the conductor, the choirmaster, doesn't see her smile and look back at him too. He wants to remain wholly anonymous, a pure transistor of these sounds and sensations, an unobstructed conduit through which they can flow.

The conductor does not turn his balding head around. He remonstrates them with the detached, resigned voice a parent would use to indicate that he is tired of having to tell his indolent children the same things over and over again.

“The timing is all off, people. Britten intended this piece to be call and
response
, modulating back and forth, and then coming together as one.” One of his feet stamps down on the flag-stones, just barely, a little tap, indicating his impatience. “This is an anthem, a song of praise and joy. So let's
hear
it—the sopranos are too
tight,
too tense. You're not blending. I want you to sound out, but I also want you to blend. You must sing your part and also come together—like this.” And then the thin, balding, impatient man raises his arms in the air with his hands cupped, making two C's facing each other, like mouths emitting
two competing voices, and he slowly brings the two hands together into one oval above his head and shakes it for emphasis.

“Now,
blend
.”

In the moment before they begin again, Theodore looks around the nave of the church, the sanctuary. If there were such a thing as God, this would not be a bad place to meet Him. On each side of the long, resonant space, the cream-colored walls are punctuated by ribbons of lavender, gold, and orange stained glass, transposing the faint winter light from outside into a milky glow. At the point where the walls begin to arch towards the high central spine of the church, ribs of dark wood soar to the top of the vault, and as he looks at it from this vantage point, he sees why it is called a nave—it does look like the bottom of a large sailing vessel turned upside down and hoisted into the sky. Still, he can see a stain on the plaster there, another sign of leakage, decay, a roof in need of repair, neglected by an inner-city congregation dwindling in size and resources. This defect reminds him of the church his parents dragged him to when he was a boy, a less dramatic, modern building built in the plain, pedantic style of the sixties, which felt to him more like a cross between a supermarket and his elementary school, with its low flat roof, and its Sunday school lessons that felt like an unwelcome early intrusion of school work into his weekend.

As a boy, he would have liked to have believed the stories they were telling him about Jesus and about God—his mind had been certainly open to any kind of new knowledge—but the stories didn't seem to make sense, to hold together the same way the math and science lessons in his textbooks did. They seemed to be describing a world of magic and make-believe
more akin to the fairy tales his mother used to read him when he was very little—slightly frightening in a way, because they invoked things that could not be seen or touched and often seemed to have a dire, foreboding twist at the end. A dutiful student, he had recited all the prayers and creeds they taught him, had admitted that he was born a sinner—though he never felt as if he really did anything wrong—in order to complete the confirmation class. He recited the words, but never felt they had any meaning—in fact, they seemed to have less meaning than the formulas in the trigonometry class he was acing in school. At least those words and symbols represented something in the real world, and he could manipulate them and make them do things that related to observable phenomena. The prayers and creeds in church seemed to be more a way for the Sunday school teacher and the droning minister to convince themselves that their jobs were important.

So once the confirmation ceremony was over, he rarely thought again about God, and he stopped going to church, except on special family occasions such as Christmas and Easter. Of course, he found the spectacle these holiday services provided to be moving, but more as a moment for family togetherness and a bittersweet reminder of the fleeting passage of the seasons—another Christmas together, another year gone by.

Now the choir is signing again, their words lifted up to the stained, overturned keel of the boat.

For the instruments are by their rhimes.

For the shawm rhimes are lawn fawn
moon boon and the like.

For the harp rhimes are sing ring
string and the like.

For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll soul and the like.

Theodore closes his eyes and tries to feel the same sensation he had a few moments ago, the sensation of the light behind his eyelids converting into sound, but this time it does not work. He is thinking about it too much. The sound is still wonderful, still pours over him like a round, flowing liquid, but it does not last.

For the flute rhimes are tooth youth
suite mute and the like.

For the Bassoon rhimes are …

“Okay,
stop!
” The choirmaster has dropped his arms again in disgust. “Everybody. You are not
together
. Just … take a break. Take ten minutes and come back and we'll try it again.”

They file down from their pews that face the sanctuary from the altar, and the woman whose name he does not know heads down the aisle towards him, smiling to see him there alone in the big church with her.

“You came to see me!” Today, without the hats she was wearing and the green apron of the coffee shop, she seems smaller somehow, less aggressive. Her hair, which had been tucked up under the mesh of the one hat yesterday morning, drapes the sides of her head in a way that frames her face and softens it.

“You're good—I don't know why he keeps stopping you.”

“Here, come with me. We only have a few minutes, and I want to show you something.”

She takes his hand and leads him out the double doors at the back of the sanctuary, towards another door to the left as they enter the narthex, the large anteroom between the sanctuary and the front doors of the church. As she opens the door, he expects it will lead down, or into one of the many corridors he had been wandering earlier. Instead, it leads them directly to a small flight of stone stairs, no more than five or six, constricted within what must be the bell tower of the church. He follows her up the stairs and turns with her thighs just a few inches above him, turning and turning as they wind their way high up above even the peak of the roof of the church. He places his hand against the stone wall of the tower as they make each turn, to keep from slipping and tumbling down the stairs below.

At the top, there is a landing, and another small door to go through before they are out in the open on what feels like a platform high up in the sky, above the damp slate roof of the church, across from its green spire, above the blanket of black leafless trees spread out before them. They had climbed the steps in silence, and now, they stand next to each other, looking through the double stone archways at the view in silence. The amazing thing is how many trees there are even in this inner city neighborhood, filling the spaces between the woodframe houses, the black branches swaying gently, still months away from carrying their canopy of leaves.

“Isn't it wonderful?” The question she asks him does not require an answer. “I come up here sometimes after practice and just stare across the city for a while, close my eyes and feel the wind. I discovered the door was unlocked one day quite by accident—I thought it might have been a closet to hang up my
coat!” Her face, the smooth skin of her cheek, is very close to him.

“That music—what was the piece you were singing?”

“Oh yes, it's Benjamin Britten,
Rejoice in the Lamb
. Quite a difficult piece really, for a little church choir like us. But the director, as you saw, is very ambitious. I like him for pushing us to try new things, beyond the basic hymns and psalms that everybody sings.”

“It sounded like …” he has to search for the words, “a race to see who could sound more joyful.”

His description makes her smile. “It's based on a poem by Christopher Smart, from England, in the seventeen hundreds. He wrote it while he was in an insane asylum.” She turns her head to look at him. “They made him an outcast, put him in the asylum because he was falling to his knees in the middle of the streets of London, to worship God.”