Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

He thought about her after he'd shot her, lying there, still, like his brother and sister had lain in the bathtub.

He got up, put on his clothes and his overcoat, keeping the gun in his pocket, and he went down the steps of the big house, past the two men playing cards in the living room. The room was like a great cavern. There were groups of gilded furnishings everywhere. And plenty of dark leather. It was like one of those old elegant private clubs in a black-and-white movie. You expected to see gentlemen peering at you from wing chairs. But there were only the two playing cards under a lamp, though a fire did burn in the grate giving off a cheerful flicker in the darkness.

One of the men got up. "You want something, a drink maybe?"

"I need to walk," Toby said.

No one stopped him.

He went out and he walked around the house.

He noticed the way the leaves looked in the trees that were nearest the lampposts. He noticed how the branches of barren trees were gleaming with ice. He studied the tall steep slate roofs of the house. He looked at the glint of light in the diamond-paned windows. A northern house, built for the heavy snow, built for the long winter, a house he'd only known from pictures, perhaps, if ever he had noticed them.

He listened to the sound of the frozen grass under his feet, and he came to a fountain that was running in spite of the cold, and he watched the water erupt from the jet and fall down in an airy white shower into the basin that boiled under the dim light.

Light came from the lantern in the porte cochere. The black limousine stood there gleaming under this lantern. Light came from the lamps that flanked the many doors of the house. Light came from small fixtures that lined the many garden paths of pea gravel. The air smelled of pine needles and of burning wood. There was a freshness and a cleanness he had not experienced in the city. There was a deliberate beauty.

It made him think of a summer when he'd gone for the holidays to a home across Lake Pontchartrain with two of the richer boys at Jesuit. They were nice boys, twins, and they liked him. They liked to play chess, and they liked classical music. They were good in the plays at school, which were so well done that everybody in the city came to see them. Toby would have been friends with those two boys, but he had had to keep his own life at home a secret. And so he never really became friends with them at all. By senior year, they hardly spoke.

But he had never forgotten their beautiful house near Mandeville, and how handsome the furnishings had been, and how their mother spoke perfect English, and their father had several records of great lutists that he had let Toby play in a room he called his study that was actually lined with books.

This house in the country here was like that house in Mandeville.

I watched him. I watched his face and his eyes, and saw those images in his memory and in his heart.

Angels don't really understand human hearts, no. That's true. We weep at the sight of sin, at the sight of suffering. But human hearts we have not. Yet theologians who write down observations like that do not really take into consideration our full intelligence. We can string together an infinite number of gestures, expressions, changes in respiration, and movements and draw from all this many deeply moving conclusions. We can know sorrow.

I formed my concept of Toby as I did this, and I heard the music he'd heard in that long-ago Mandeville house, an old recording of a Jewish lutist playing themes from Paganini. And I watched Toby standing under the pine trees until he was near frozen with cold.

Toby made his way back towards the house slowly. He couldn't sleep. The night meant nothing to him.

Then a strange thing occurred as he drew near the ivy-covered stone walls, which was wholly unexpected. From within the house he heard a subtle stirring music. Surely a window was open to the cold for him to hear something of such tenderness, and subtle beauty. He knew it to be a bassoon or a clarinet. He wasn't certain. But there was the window up ahead, tall and made of leaded glass and opened to the cold. From there the music was coming: a long swelling note, and then a cautious melody.

He came closer.

It was like the sound of something waking, but then the melody of the lone horn was joined by other instruments, so raw, they were like the sound of an orchestra tuning up, yet held together by some fierce discipline. Then the music lapsed back to the horns, before once again an urgency began to drive it, the orchestra swelling, the horns soaring, becoming more piercing.

He stood outside the window.

The music went mad suddenly. Violins strummed and the drums beat as if a locomotive were roaring through the night made up of sound. He almost put his hands to his ears, it was so fierce. The instruments squealed. They wailed. It seemed crazed, the crying trumpets, the dizzying torrent of the strings, the pounding of the kettledrums.

He could no longer identify what he was hearing. At last the thunder stopped. A softer melody took over, grounded in peace, in musical transcriptions of solitude and an awakening.

He stood at the very windowsill now, his head bowed, his fingers at his temples, as if to stop anyone who would come between him and this music. Though soft random melodies began to intertwine, a dark urgency beat under them. Again the music swelled. The brass rose unbearably. The shape of it was threatening.

Suddenly the whole composition seemed full of menace, the prelude and recognition to the life he had lived. You couldn't trust the sudden descents into tenderness and quietude, because the violence would erupt with rolling drums and violins shrieking.

On and on it went, dying to melody or near quiet and then erupting into a surge of industrial violence so fierce and dark it paralyzed him.

Then the strangest transformation took place. The music ceased to be an assault. Itbecame the governing orchestration of his own life, his own suffering, his own guilt and terror.

It was as if someone had thrown an all-encompassing net over what he had become and how he had destroyed all things he held to be sacred.

He pressed his forehead to the icy-cold side of the open window.

The guided cacophony became unbearable, and when he thought he could not endure any more, when he almost reached to cover his ears, it stopped altogether.

He opened his eyes. Inside a deep dark firelit room, a man sat in a long leather chair, looking at him. The fire glinted on the edge of the man's square silver-rimmed glasses, and on his short white hair, and on his smiling mouth.

He beckoned with a languid motion of his right hand for Toby to go around to the front and, with his left hand, he motionedCome in to me.

The man at the front door said, "The Boss wants to see you now, kid."

Toby walked through a string of rooms that were furnished in gilt and velvet, with heavy draperies. The draperies were tied with golden tasseled ropes. There were two fires going, one in what seemed a vast library, and just beyond it, there was a room of white-painted glass that contained a small steaming pool of ice blue water.