Famous Builder (13 page)

A few weeks after my revelation, I start humming a tune while an old episode of
Bewitched
flickers on the TV. Before Aunt Clara has committed her third and final blunder involving Darren, I’ve written my own liturgical song. It’s in 3/4 time, in the key of C, and though I know it’s not very accomplished or original, it gives me a certain physical pleasure. Especially when I transfer it to paper. I love to copy the notes onto the staff. I love to sketch the clefs, even though my eyes hurt from the squinting. Such meticulous precision! I come home from a hard day at school to see the upright with the green-gold antique finish looming in the family room.
Oh, God, do I have to do that now? Can’t I have a life like other people?
But I fix myself a glass of chocolate Nestle’s Quik, sit, and soon enough my fingers are playing disconnected chords, attempting to find some pattern that’s pleasing, while my mother makes chow mien in the kitchen.

After two months have passed, I’ve filled my spiral music notebook with thirty songs, to the detriment of geometry, in which I have a D average. What is it about proofs and truth tables? My mind refuses to struggle toward finding the inherent patterns there. Is it that I don’t believe in a single Truth with a capital T, and I think the whole thing’s a sham?

I take the next test insouciantly, without bothering to study.

***

Mrs. Fallon has found out about my songs. Has Kate told her? Most likely, because she’s spending as much time with Mrs. Fallon as she’s spending with me, and I must be the topic of some of their exchanges. Lately I’ve been baby-sitting Holly and Sean, and though I don’t feel any particular connection to them (they seem bratty, needy, and out of control), I like to stay at Kate’s house. Last week, while sitting on the sofa to watch
The Carol Burnett Show
, the eight-year-old Holly pulled off my glasses and ran away with them. Frantic, defenseless, I lurched through the big rooms, bumping into the coffee tables, as Holly giggled behind a living-room chair. “No-neck monster!” I mumbled.

At any rate, the terrors of the job seem oddly worth it. On an upper shelf in the huge master-bedroom closet sits a stack of magazines that includes recent issues of
Playboy, Penthouse
, and
Playgirl.
I don’t come upon them through snooping. Kate, in fact, has mentioned casually, in conversation, exactly where they’re kept, so I think, of course, she
wants
me to take a look. After Holly and Sean have taken their baths and are soundly asleep, I tiptoe up the stairs and lock the bedroom door. I spot them right away: they’re stacked two feet high in a crisp pile atop a silver hatbox. They practically shimmer beneath the glare of the exposed bulb. And just as my hand reaches for the top issue, Holly pounds on the locked door. “I have a tummy ache!” she cries.

“Oh, sit on the toilet!” I answer, making sure the door’s still locked.

***

After Mass, after all the people have filed out to the parking lot, I play “My People,” my setting of a Good Friday response, for Mrs. Fallon. It’s probably my best composition to date. I’m shy and overly self-conscious as I negotiate the odd chord changes of the verses. Why are my fingers so sluggish? They feel as if they’re attached to someone else’s hands. I make a few mistakes in her presence. Still, my song sounds better than it does within the confines of my parents’ family room, and after it’s over, I sit there, sweating, swallowing.

A pause from Mrs. Fallon. I expect her to be proud, grateful that she’s had some sway over my efforts, but she doesn’t say a word. She seems tired, dull-eyed, a little blue. Why did I ever do this? I think. I’m just not good enough.

“We’ll use this for Lent,” she says finally.

Across the sanctuary the violets of the banners ripen and flourish. And before I’ve had the chance to process my excitement, she looks at me with a fatal gravity and says, “It’s time to introduce you to India Wills.”

***

India Wills lives in nearby Cinnaminson Township, in a barnlike house built around a pipe organ. It’s a good fifteen miles from Cherry Hill, and as I’m two years shy of seventeen, my mother must drive me to my Tuesday-afternoon lesson during rush hour, a task that must seem like a chore, even though she’s quite good-natured about it; she shops for dinner at the Clover around the corner, waits at the curb after ninety minutes have transpired. Like Kate and Mrs. Fallon, my mother, too, must inherently believe in my possibility, though she doesn’t tell me about it too frequently, lest I get a swelled head.

Mrs. Wills’s house is completely unlike the French Provincials and California Contemporaries of Cherry Hill. The vaulted living room is a veritable temple to the art of music: it’s virtually bare but for a harp, a music stand, and the alarming rosewood console, which shines beneath overhead spotlights, its pipes actually built into the walls. And of course, there’s the ironing board. It’s always left out, something I’m puzzled by, if only because Mr. and Mrs. Wills’s khakis are perpetually wrinkled. She’s set up a program of study for me that includes the Bach fugues and Hindemith’s theory lessons, both of which I undertake with a certain dutiful reluctance. What does this have to do with
my
music? In my naïve yet arrogant, fifteen-year-old way, I could not care less about tradition and the laws of composition. Laws. Who cares about laws? Laws are made to be broken. I want the new, I want to shake things up, and when Mrs. Wills points out and admonishes the parallel fifths and doubled thirds in my theory assignments, I bristle. To Mrs. Wills’s mind, the laws of composition are as indelible as the laws of quantum physics, and when I point out a doubled third in a piece by Brahms, she’s shocked to near speechlessness (even while I detect some admiration for my obsessive eye).

But I wish I could like Mrs. Wills more. I appreciate her, I guess, but she’s an awfully strange duck (even Mrs. Fallon has assented to that), standing beside me with a toasted sandwich and a cup of English Breakfast tea. And her breath’s a little funny, scented with chestnuts and patés and various organ meats, which I try desperately not to notice. In addition, she’s more than a little patronizing about the musical tradition I come out of. “You
Romans
,” she says, shaking her head, after I finish Lucien Deiss’s “Wisdom Has Built Herself a House.” She invariably finds unabashed fault with the Catholic liturgical songs I occasionally bring to my lessons and hopes to convince me of their compositional ineptitude. Bah! she says. Amateurs! She, on the other hand, is anything but a Roman. As music director for the First Presbyterian Church of Cinnaminson, she uses the music of Bach and Brahms, along with twentieth-century composers like César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, and Flor Peeters. All of this I find a little stodgy, even though I’m reluctant to admit it to myself. Frankly, I’m grateful to be Catholic.
We
use guitars and electric basses.
We’re
smart enough to know that the old forms are falling away.

“How did it go?” my mother says.

“Oh, fine,” I say, slumping down in the seat.

She puts the station wagon into gear. “You don’t sound too fine.”

I look at the dark gray house with its severe barnlike roof. “She’s so …
Presbyterian.
”

***

One afternoon Kate and I walk through Talk of the Town, a supermarket in our neighborhood. We load up the carrier with fruits and vegetables, preparing for a dinner to which both our families are invited, when, lo and behold, we spot a new magazine rack down the center aisle. The selection is various and thorough.
Paris Vogue
and fancy auction catalogs, publications we’ve never even seen in a regular supermarket. We pause beside the other browsers. Kate’s eyes intensify as she spots something on the lower shelf. “Ooh,” she says, leaning over to pick it up.

She flips through the latest issue of
Playgirl.
I try to divert my attention as she pauses at the snapshots of readers’ boyfriends. A bead of chilled sweat rolls down my side. I look from the page to the ardor and bemusement in Kate’s eyes. She pages forward. She stops at the centerfold, which features a muscular man in a caramel-colored leather vest. He’s buck naked in a hayloft with a weed between his teeth. His thick, sizable dick lazes against his furry left thigh as if it’s just waiting for someone to wake it up. Above the photograph, a name floats: WOODY PARKER.

I cannot stop shifting my weight from foot to foot. I scratch at my lower back. The Muzak goes sluggish for a long suspension.

“What’s the matter?” Kate says.

“Ew,” I say.

She looks up at me. “Ew?”

“It’s
disgusting
,” I say, without the authority I’d hoped for.

She laughs softly through her nose with affectionate exasperation. “Boys,” she says cryptically. She places the magazine back on the rack.

I cannot get the photo out of my head. Nights later I wake, wide-eyed, to see Woody Parker standing at the foot of my Early American twin bed. With a sexy smirk, he whispers gruffly that I’m a good for nothing runt. My pulse rate quickens; he’s going to wake up my brothers! And though I squeeze shut my eyes, I cannot fall back asleep.

Later, when I open my eyes again, he’s still standing in my room.

I wait a few more days. While my mom fills a bag with bagels, I wander off in the Talk of the Town by myself. I make my way down to the magazine rack, check to see if anyone’s looking, then gently pull the centerfold from its staples. I stuff Woody Parker underneath my shirt as the coolish paper singes my hot, hot skin.

***

I subscribe to a magazine called
Folk Mass Today.
It features articles on the liturgical renewal and cheerful bright drawings in the style of Sister Corita Kent. It’s all rather pleasant, but that’s not what really interests me. The center section of each issue includes new songs written by the major liturgical composers of the day (Sister Suzanne Toolan, Brother Howard Hughes, and Mike Joncas), and though it’s not their best work, I’m intensely, energetically interested in every acclamation and responsorial psalm, and I play their melodies over and over until I know them by heart.

One day I show the issue to Mrs. Fallon after choir practice.

“Why don’t you send them your songs?” she says.

Certainly, she can’t be serious. Certainly, I am no Sister Suzanne Toolan. I’m both honored and confounded by her suggestion. Still, it only takes me a few days to gather my nerve, and I pick out my five best pieces. My father Xeroxes the pages for me at Semcor, where he’s worked since he left RCA a few years ago. I staple the upper-left corners. I lay the beautifully brown envelope in the bed of the mailbox, watch from the front window, and wait for the postman to take note of the brilliant red flag.

I hear nothing for days. The mail is boring: electric bills, oil bills, tax statements,
Newsweek
, the weekly issue of the
Cherry Hill News.
Then weeks go by. I’ve assumed a funereal air; my schoolwork suffers. Truth tables are a disaster. I shouldn’t have done this; whatever possessed me? I’m far too young and inexperienced, far too clumsy. And just when I’ve given up on my wild, presumptuous, self-defeating dream, I get an envelope from Lawrence Nilsen, the music editor of
Folk Mass Today.
I’m far too agitated to read the whole message in its entirety, but one sentence leaps out from the page: “We’d like to use your song ‘Easter Acclamation’ for our January issue.” After some statements on copyright, this pronouncement: “You’re no doubt destined to be one of the major figures in modern liturgical music.”

I run through the house, leaping through the rooms like a deer with his feet aflame. I yell for my parents. I yell for my brothers. I kiss our dog, Taffy, the only sentient being in sight, upon her downy white forehead. My life is finally changing. Look at me now. Certainly, I’m well on my way to superstardom.

***

Our choir is playing the cathedral! It’s Holy Thursday, the Chrism Mass, and our choir, as one of the most accomplished in the Diocese, has been asked to participate along with other musical groups from as far away as Cape May. Mrs. Fallon, unfortunately, isn’t able to join us, having already committed herself to visiting her daughter, Shawna, in Long Island for the weekend. Instead, Jim Schaffer presides over the occasion. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by Mr. Schaffer. A former priest and former musical director for the Diocese of Trenton, he combines Mrs. Wills’s musicianship with Mrs. Fallon’s liturgical know-how. His reputation is impeccable. When I learn that I’m to be the sole accompanist for the occasion, I blanch, though I’m excited and honored to have been asked. There’s an emptiness in the pit of my stomach for days. “You’ll do just fine,” Kate assures me with a touch to my shoulder.

I sit before the behemoth of a pipe organ, which hasn’t been maintained in years. Some notes are out of tune; a few keys stay silent when pressed. We’re in downtown Camden, after all, one of the roughest small cities in the country (think of Gary or East Saint Louis), and the tiny faithful congregation can’t afford such luxuries. So it’s all grand, but a little sad. When a grizzled homeless man wanders up into the choir loft just minutes before the church bells ring, the ladies from Cherry Hill are put off by his awful stench. Puzzled, he makes his way back down the steps.

Someone signals from the front. Mr. Schaffer raises his baton, counting four beats. I begin the processional hymn, try to subdue the trembling of my shoulders. The choir sings:
Hail thee Festival Day. Blest day that art hallowed forever.
Through the rearview mirror above the organ, I can see the pink-faced bishop with his miter and fancy red robes advancing up the aisle with his many attendants. I am not going to make a mistake. I must be perfect for Mr. Schaffer. I must be perfect for the Bishop. Our choir’s reputation is at stake. When I make it through the hymn without so much as a missed note, I look over at Mr. Schaffer and see that he is just as relieved as I am. We’re going to be okay. He looks back at me with a formal but consoling smile.