The Christmas Cantata (The Liturgical Mysteries) (4 page)

Early in the evening, Emily had managed to fall into the swimming pool and, since she hadn't brought a change of clothes, remained in her wet, clinging, white silk charmeuse dress until the chill of the autumn air was too much for her to bear and she donned a full-length mink coat that just happened to be in the trunk of her car. Henry had gallantly offered her his tweed jacket after she had fallen in, but she had refused it repeatedly, preferring the warmth of the stares of the other young gentlemen at the party. The other girls were not amused.

One of the gawkers (really, who could blame him) was her own date, Rod Fontineau, a baseball player who played for the Asheville Tourists. She had no patience for such shenanigans, and soon gravitated to the quiet, introspective fellow who seemed unfazed by Emily's antics and obvious lack of undergarments. They sat by the pool, sipped summer wine, and discussed various topics including literature and poetry, two subjects that had always managed to stump poor Rod, while the rest of the party danced far into the night.

Henry had asked her out that very evening just before bundling a very inebriated Emily into her car, getting behind the wheel, and driving her home. During the weeks that followed, she'd discovered that Henry was a Yale grad and that his interest in music and poetry was well and truly grounded. He'd double-majored in English literature and business and, although he had no formal musical training, he'd sung with the Yale Glee Club for four years and had, in fact, been one of the Whiffenpoofs.

It was April when he proposed. April, 1942. They'd talked about their future together and she was over the moon when he practically begged her to give up her teaching job and go back to her first love, music. Money would not be a problem, he'd said. With a job waiting for him in the family business, they had a life to look forward to. He'd be back home in just a few months, a year at most.

They married at the Asheville courthouse, much to her mother's dismay. Two weeks later, he shipped off to the Army's 18th Infantry and left for North Africa.

* * *

"What are you playing?" asked Meg. I was in the den, seated at the grand piano, doing my best to read the open score which included two bassoons, oboe doubling on English horn, flute, clarinet, and organ. The den was an original log cabin and, if the sketchy provenance I'd been provided meant anything, had originally been constructed for Daniel Boone's granddaughter. The rest of the house had been built around the cabin and its old square-cut logs framed the one room that Meg hadn't the heart to put her feminine stamp on when we'd married a few years ago. Oh, I had no complaints. She didn't go crazy putting up lace, or country ducks, or ringlets, or flounces, or whatever you call that girly stuff that pervades home shopping networks, but one could certainly tell a difference in the decor since she'd moved in, and in a good way. Not only did her decorating skills suit my taste exactly, but on one memorable Christmas, she'd even given me a full-sized stuffed buffalo. Sure, it was relegated to the den, but a
buffalo!
How could you not love a woman like that? The rest of the house still had plenty of leather furniture, polished wood, some great art, books—all stuff that made you happy to come home. The house, the
cabin
, as we called it, although it was hardly that, was now no longer a work-in-progress. Meg had spent a pretty penny on it since we'd been married, but we could afford it.

Oh yes, we could afford it.

I'd made a whole bunch of money with an invention I sold to the phone company in the 1990s. I sat on the cash for a while, then let Meg invest it for me. This was before we were married, and Meg Farthing was quite the savvy broker. By the time we'd gotten around to getting hitched, she'd parlayed my small fortune into quite a large one. I didn't
have
to work. I
liked
to work and I enjoyed both of my jobs, police chief and organist. Meg kept her professional hand in as well, although now only for a few select clients. She was also finishing up her term as the Senior Warden of St. Barnabas, a post she was more than happy to relinquish.

A particularly unappetizing chord sounded from the piano. "It's something that Cynthia gave me," I said, struggling to transpose the clarinet part in my head, while keeping the twin bassoons going in the left hand and whistling the occasional flute interlude down an octave. "A Christmas piece. She found it in the basement of the courthouse."

"Sounds awful," said Meg, never one to mince words.

"It's not that bad," I said. "It doesn't help that I only have ten fingers and that this clarinet part is in A." I whistled a few more flute notes.

"How about a beer?" Meg said. "Your holiday beer shipment came today."

I stopped playing. "All of it?"

"I suppose so. There's quite a variety."

"My
Anderson Valley Winter Solstice
? My
Great Divide Hibernation Ale
?"

"I'll check. Shall I surprise you?" asked Meg.

"Absolutely!"

Megan Farthing Konig is a dark-haired beauty of singular loveliness and charm. She's a few years younger than I am and had been married once before, just after college. The union hadn't lasted. We'd met, a couple of decades later, on the afternoon she tore through St. Germaine in her late-model Lexus doing about sixty miles an hour. A few hours after I'd pulled her over, we discovered two important things: 1) we were quite compatible, and 2) I could be bribed into not issuing a ticket. We spent the evening listening to music and eating knockwurst and sauerkraut. That she'd listen to a Bach cantata all the way through was the first thing I liked about her. That she liked knockwurst and sauerkraut was the second. After that, I lost track.

Following a long courtship, and several proposals, Meg had finally decided that I was marriage material. That was three years ago, and we've never looked back. It was a memorable anniversary. We'd been married on the very night St. Barnabas Church had burned to the ground.

"Here's some refreshment," said Meg, putting a mug down on a table next to the piano. "Maybe this will help with all the wrong notes. Something called
Samuel Smith's Winter Welcome
."

"I'd forgotten about that one. And these are not wrong notes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yep. The beginning of this piece is in a style that was very hip in the late '20s and early 1930s. Hip, but pretty painful to listen to."

"How so?" asked Meg, sitting down on the piano bench beside me.

"Well, this school reflected the prevailing 'modernist' attitude among intellectuals: that they were a small vanguard leading the way for the masses. The rest of us would only come to appreciate their efforts over time."

"Really? How presumptuous! Speaking as one of the 'Great Unwashed,' I think I'm offended."

"As well you should be. According to their philosophy, music and the other arts need be accessible only to a select cadre of the enlightened. Everyone else would be doomed to listen to jazz or something equally pedestrian."

"Are we finished with that particular artistic view yet?" asked Meg.

"Not by a long shot," I said with a chuckle. I played a few bars at the beginning of the piece. "You know, although Elle de Fournier starts the cantata in this avant-garde style, within a few pages, she begins to break out of it. Almost as if she's turning her back on the sophisticated artistic scene she's spent years becoming part of, and deciding to reach instead for her roots. Listen to how this melody begins to develop."

I played the oboe line over top of a cluster of early 20th century polychords. Then slowly, over the next sixteen measures, the cacophony began to relax as the melody seemed to coerce the accompanying dissonance into submission. Not totally, mind you. Each instrument had its own agenda and the discord would swell occasionally, but the melody wouldn't relent. It pushed its way back into prominence and the other voices had to give way.

"I know that tune," said Meg. "It's a hymn, isn't it?"

"It is," I said. "And listen to what it does."

I continued playing and the hymn turned on itself, weaving in and out amongst the voices, first here, then there. It wasn't a well known Christmas hymn, but rather an old melody that had flavors of its Scotch-Irish heritage. A haunting, modal tune that may or may not have originated in the Appalachians, but that had certainly been embraced by them, echoing from their crags and hollows as it was sung by generations of mountain folk.

"I'm not convinced," said Meg. "It's not pretty. Christmas music needs to be pretty. Chestnuts roasting and snow falling and angels and
Ave Maria
and
O Magnum Mysterium
. Stuff like that."

"We need to do something different this year. I need something different."

"You're just in a bad mood. Crabby," said Meg, decidedly. "Like everyone else in town. Just today, I was having lunch at the Ginger Cat and when I asked politely for some
Pesto alla genovese
, Annie barked that there wasn't any, and why didn't I try to get some down at the Slab since I liked eating there so much."

"The Slab doesn't serve pesto, my pet," I said absently, continuing to concentrate on one of the bassoon parts which had inexplicably just changed clefs.

"Yes,
darling
. That's the point! Are you even listening?"

"Hey," I said, stopping in the middle of what sounded like a D-flat "demolished" chord and looking up at her. "Don't point your Christmas crabbiness at me. I don't even think I would like
Pesto alla
whatever."

Her eyes narrowed. "Oh, you'd like it," she said through clenched teeth. "You'd like it a lot!"

"I don't think I
would
," I growled back. "In fact, you could wrap it in bacon, deep fry it in hog fat, and top it with a pork chop, and I wouldn't even taste it!"

Meg laughed, a low, wonderful laugh that I loved to hear. "I'll take that as an apology for your inattentiveness," she said with a giggle. "How about if I put some John Rutter carols on the stereo to cheer us up?"

I grunted at her. "Bah," I said. "Humbug!"

Meg tapped at the music on the piano. "Well, Mr. Grumpy, if you like this thing, why not do it with the choir? If you're right, maybe it will improve everyone's mood. Lord knows, we don't have anything else to work on. You haven't given us anything but a couple of extra-gloomy Advent anthems."