Famous Builder (14 page)

I play through the Responsorial Psalm, the Preparation of the Gifts, the acclamations of the Eucharistic Prayer, and the Communion hymn. The choir has never sounded better; they perform with a bracing grace and precision that takes us all aback. We have become something else, something elevated and other, transcending our limitations. We’re celebrating all that’s good and right about the world, all that’s possible. The stakes get even higher with each new piece. And the assembly joins us with a full-blooded vitality that would win even Mrs. Wills’s respect. When the Bishop—aloof and curmudgeonly, not especially known for his personal warmth—gazes up at us as he processes out of the candelit cathedral, we know that, together, we have made a beautiful thing.

Already it’s gone from us, our well-wrought notes drifting off into the ether.

“Thank you very much,” says Mr. Schaffer to me as he packs up his octavos. And I am too humbled and shy to say anything back to him. I nod, just once. Then he makes his way down the steep, dangerous steps.

Two days later Mrs. Fallon, Kate, and I meet at the Country Club Diner over bagels and quiche to discuss how it all went. Mrs. Fallon says she’s heard nothing but wonderful things from her priest friends; she’s disappointed to have missed it. And more than a little jealous. She discusses Mr. Schaffer, how he can’t find a decent church job in order to support himself, how he’s thinking of leaving the music ministry altogether. “I don’t understand why he’s moving in with that
guy
,” says Kate about the gentle black fellow who sat in the corner of the loft, who looked up at Mr. Schaffer with something like awe. Kate and Mrs. Fallon trade knowing glances. Mrs. Fallon says, “It’s time he settled down.”

I knock into my coffee cup. The thin blond liquid washes over the lip and pools inside the saucer.

***

On an unseasonably cold April afternoon, with periods of sleet and driving rain, an envelope with a Santa Clara, California, return address arrives. I shiver beside the huge black mailbox. I stick the envelope inside my coat, protecting it from the elements, and sprint down the narrow black driveway. Inside I sit at the kitchen table while my mother, father, and brothers hover at my back. Even Taffy gets into the spirit of things. She lies beside the sink on her small braided rug, which she thumps with her big plume of a tail.

The issue is beautiful. I pause briefly at the cover, a sketch of an angel over brilliant blue splashes, then page forward to my “Easter Acclamation.” It’s on page 47, alongside a piece by Sister Maria of the Cross. I’m still excited, though I can feel my intense connection to it already diminishing, if only slightly. It’s already itself in the world, a child I’ve sent off toward kindergarten on its thin, hobbling legs.

My eyes graze over the notes of the third measure. “Oh, no.”

“What’s the matter?” says my mother.

“There’s a mistake.” I tug on my finger. “There’s a mistake in measure 3.”

My whole family looks nervous. They don’t know what I’m going to do. I leap up from the table, then page through my music notebook on the piano. To my shock, there’s an error on my own staff paper: How could I have missed this for so long? An A natural instead of a G sharp! To make matters worse, the editor has changed the chord symbol above the melody to jibe with this unlikely cadence, to make it look like the whole thing was
my
idea.

They have bought and published my song with a mistake in it!

“You stupid,” I say, wagging my fist at the overhead light fixture. “You stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Play the mistake,” demands my father.

“No!”

“Play it, dear,” says my mother with a softer voice.

I play the refrain once through, then play it again. They all look edgy. I wait for somebody to say something. “
Say
something.”

“Now play it the right way,” says my father, with a solemn nod.

I do as I’m told. As I finish, my father says, “I like it the wrong way.” Although he doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

“It’s not so terrible,” my mom assures.

When I bring it to choir practice, I’ve all but forgotten the high drama of the afternoon. By this time I’ve played the printed version over and over so many times that I’ve gotten quite used to it; I’ve convinced myself I even like it that way. The choir members are as excited as I am. “Let’s do it next Sunday,” cries Mrs. Kapischke. And as the whole choir concurs, Mrs. Fallon falls silent, blinking behind heavy black glasses. She clenches her forehead. She tries to smile through her tension, but she fails to conceal her true feelings. She’s never seemed more false or less assured. “Okay,” she says, tapping the top of the piano. “We have a lot to do. Page 23, ‘Where Charity and Love Prevail.’”

Rehearsal wraps up. Kate strolls across the church classroom and takes the magazine from my hand. Mrs. Fallon laughs finally, immersed in a conversation with Mrs. Martone, whom she privately can’t stand. Is she trying to avoid me?

“What did I do?” I whisper to Kate.

My mother joins us. “I don’t like what just happened tonight.”

“Oh, don’t take it so seriously,” says Kate. “She had an argument with Shawna.” She stops paging. “Oh, God, isn’t this
rich?
” She almost hoots, pointing to an ad for a new music collection.
Announcing Antoinette Napolitano: The Bright Gleam of a New Star.

***

Antoinette Napolitano lives in a rural town outside Cincinnati that I imagine to be dominated by the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. She plays a Gibson 12-string guitar and directs an inner-city folk choir comprised of about fifty teenagers. According to the ad she has extensive performing experience, having played for “church, concert hall, and cabaret,” in countries as distant as the Netherlands and Brazil. But that’s not quite what compels me about her. I’m especially attracted to the brochure of her collection, which arrives in the mail two days later. It’s a curiously clumsy affair printed on dark orange paper, featuring all sorts of inept pictures of Antoinette. There she is, standing before the dismal stone front of the Saint Thomas à Becket Church, with glasses, stringy, unconditioned hair, and a horsey overbite. There she is, all four foot ten of her, hunched over her huge guitar, dwarfed by the gargantuan folk choir behind her. She looks like a female version of me, actually, albeit shorter, and when my dad laughingly points this out a few weeks later, I’m outwardly insulted, but silently grateful. Kate and I make raucous fun of Antoinette, analyzing her awful taste in clothing (those checked leisure suits, those slacks), though I’m reluctant to tell Kate I’m looking forward to hearing Antoinette’s work. It’s the first album from UIA in almost five years—they’ve recently been rescued from bankruptcy by a missalette company—so it must be something extraordinary.

One night I show up at Kate’s house for another baby-sitting assignment. It’s not so rough anymore. Holly and Sean have settled down a bit, and they’re far less likely to steal my glasses or to bang on the locked door. Just as Kate and John are ready to head out to the garage, she hands me a flat package wrapped in silver paper with a gray-green bow.

“For you,” she says, watching what must be the puzzlement on my face.

Tearing off the paper, I see the now-familiar cover of Antoinette Napolitano’s album. Kate laughs with a naughty glee as I turn it over to scan the liner notes. My palms moisten. She has no idea how genuinely happy I am. She kisses me lightly on the lips, winks, and glides on her black pumps out the door.

With an immeasurable care, I bring
Together We Sing
to the turntable and sit before the speakers. Antoinette’s voice is surprisingly good, a rich, controlled contralto, that makes up for the silly songwriting. (What a gap between the performance and what’s performed!) The lyrics are especially clumsy and unsophisticated, even cornball at times. “Watch for those who share. Who care … for the lowly ones.” Or something like that. Still, there’s something appealingly eccentric about its particular fusion of liturgical folk music and slick Nashville pop, and though I know I should have better taste, I’m swept away by Antoinette’s undeniable individualism.

In only three weeks the grooves of the record will be so worn out that I’ll have to send away for another copy.

I walk up the stairs. Holly and Sean have taken to their respective beds, and they’re both fully dressed on top of their covers, fast asleep, mouths parted. I head back for the stairs, hoping to catch the opening of
Saturday Night Live
, my favorite new show (how I love that Laraine Newman: another skinny person, just like me), when I stop at the master bedroom. The closet door’s ajar. I shut my eyes. I shouldn’t do it, I
know
I shouldn’t do it, I am a runt, I am a dirty good-for-nothing boy, but before I can harness my surging faculties, I lock the door. I stumble toward the closet, reach for a
Playgirl.

I lie on Kate and John’s king-size bed. Trembling, I open the magazine, stop at the page featuring the readers’ boyfriends, and indulge in a little self-gratification. It takes all of ninety seconds. When I’m finished, I’m hot and chilly at once. My breaths stick like a crust of bread in my throat. Is that knocking?
Holly?
Oh, God.
Please don’t tell on me, Holly. Please.
I wipe off my stomach with a Kleenex. I put the magazine back exactly where I found it, then, to my relief, find her snoring softly on her Marimekko bedspread.

After church the next day, Kate seems cheerier than ever. She and John have had a lovely dinner in Center City with John’s new boss, Tom Pacquin, who has huge plans for the firm. There’s even talk of a new office outside Princeton, though that’s a couple of years in the future. Kate gazes at me for an exceptionally long time. There’s a peculiar sheen in her eye. I look away.
“What?”

“So how was Antoinette?”

“Good,” I say. “It’s kind of awful, but the production’s good, very good.”

More silence. A few feet away my mother is chatting with Mrs. Fallon. Although Mom’s decided that she doesn’t trust her anymore, she’s outwardly polite and jovial. Kate takes a step closer to me. She smiles. Her eyes narrow slightly. “I know what you did,” she whispers.

My forehead tingles and numbs. I smell her perfume.

“You looked at the magazines. You looked at the dirtiest one and left it out on the bed.”

Instantly I blush from the tips of my toes all the way up to the roots of my hair. Do tears spring to my eyes? Why don’t I have the wits about me to deny it?

She smiles now, warmly, genuinely, reaching out to touch my face as if she’s sorry she’s embarrassed me. She’s sorry. Over and over she tells me that she’s sorry. When I find out later that day that this was all a prank, I can’t help but wonder whether I did indeed leave the magazine out. Did I want to be caught? Did I just
imagine
putting the magazine back? I thought I’d placed it four issues from the bottom, but who knows?

***

(Years later, what I want to know is this: Was I more distraught than I knew? There was the day, of course, when after fantasizing about my next-door neighbor, Mr. Aslanian, a short hairy bull of a man old enough to be my father, that I stated to myself, quite directly: “Your desires are homosexual.” I sat still for a second and pondered its implications. I could live with that. Then I strolled out into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

It would take me almost two decades to make sense of that self-definition. But how could I fault my younger self for my initial, glib embrace? I was Catholic, after all. The church was changing; the world was changing. If priests someday could marry, if, in fact, women could someday be priests, then couldn’t I be understood and loved by the world around me?)

***

I write weekly to Antoinette Napolitano. I send long handwritten letters to her office at the Diocese of Cincinnati, where she manages an office called Folk Liturgies Express. These messages are full of gushing admiration for her work and for her willingness to expand the form. I have convinced myself she is to be the next Ray Repp, and I bring her name up incessantly to Mrs. Fallon, who’s clearly not so impressed. No one has yet thought to hybridize the forms, to create something both contemporary and classical, high and low, at once; at this particular moment, there’s a vast schism between traditional church music (organ) and folk music (guitar). In spite of her friendships with Joe Wise and Lucien Deiss, Mrs. Fallon clearly posits herself in the former camp, and though I appreciate the complicated harmonic structures of the organ-based music, I’ve decided that organists and traditional choir directors are stuffy, conservative, and just plain old. All the forward-thinking types play guitars, and here I am stuck behind this blowsy old organ like a middle-aged matron who’s broad through the beam.

To my surprise, Antoinette sends me long letters in which she talks about her folk choir and an upcoming engagement at a downtown nightclub. In only a few short weeks she’s traveling to Nashville to record a demo tape of what she calls her “secular” music. She wants to break into the country field, or “hip country,” as she calls it. She’s just joined ASCAP. She’s started a publishing company and has begun work on her own four-track recording studio in her elderly parents’ basement. I love the idea of attracting a larger audience for my music—maybe “church” just isn’t enough anymore. Clearly, Antoinette Napolitano is determined to broaden her world.

When she tells me she’s using one of my songs for an upcoming Lenten Mass, I’m more than a little moved. I tack up her letter above my desk and stare at it at least twenty-seven times a day.

I wish Mrs. Fallon would be as appreciative of me. She seems to have deliberately stopped using my music, though we’ve never spoken directly about her decision. My feelings are hurt, and I’m tense and uneasy in her presence, perpetually making statements that she takes the wrong way. What is her problem? Why can’t she be like Mrs. Wills? Thrilled by the spate of my recent publications, she’s taken up the folk guitar, of all things, and has scheduled my song “Let All the Earth Cry Out with Gladness” for the service this coming weekend at the once-stodgy First Presbyterian Church of Cinnaminson. Parallel fifths? Doubled thirds? Bah!