Anna scribbled away. Up front, Gracie craned her neck to hear me better.
“When Charlie launched his own business, I did everything I could to help him succeed—hiring workers, writing contracts, keeping the books. Everything.”
“Is building organs difficult? Did you help with that part too?”
“Charlie could have built airplanes, printing presses, grandfather clocks. That’s what it means to be a mechanical genius. But he chose organs. They require many crafts and skills, none of which I possess. My value was practical—billing, payroll, supplies. When those tasks were done, my job was to help with voicing.”
“Voicing?” Anna asked. “What’s that?”
“Making the instrument sympathize with itself, and with the room where it will live. My part was to sit at the console, playing a note over and over, while Charlie worked deep inside the pipes, making refinements.”
“Can you explain that more?” Gracie asked.
Anna gave her a scowl, then tipped her pen at me. “Please.”
“Voicing takes two people: one to play the organ, one to adjust it. No one wants to sit for two solid days playing a middle C with the coronet stop open, while someone else listens and tinkers. Other technicians said it was deadly tedious. But I didn’t mind.”
The car was quiet, except for the blinker as Gracie turned off 101 and headed toward the university.
I surrendered to an impulse. “Stop taking notes and I’ll tell you the whole truth.”
Anna considered my offer, then put her pen down.
“Charlie was making sacred instruments—for weddings, funerals, moments of the soul. The work was about saving his conscience. And because we were a team, about restoring mine too. So in a voicing? Every time I pressed a key, it was an act of love.”
The girls were not so young, really. They looked to be about the age I was when I met Charlie. I hoped they would understand.
“How was all of this for you as a woman?” Anna asked. “Participating and contributing, but without undermining—and never pursuing your performing career.”
“Please understand,” I answered. “I did not abandon my aspirations for Charlie’s. It was more like the time we sang the toccata together in the church: We merged our dreams. Each of us needed the other to make it happen. Each of us helped the other to find redemption.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “You sang in a church together?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Let me say it another way. Our lives together were like voicing an organ. Everything else goes away. There is no outside world. Only one person, playing a note over and over, and one person refining the sound. It’s a universe of two.”
In the silence that followed, I thought the interview was over. But Anna picked up her pen again. “In all your travels, was there a favorite moment?”
“Oh, a thousand. But I’ll share one. It concerns the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a piece I’ve always struggled with. Charlie and I were touring German organs, and we stopped in Thuringia. The man who was supposed to meet us was late. To pass the time while Charlie investigated the pipes, I decided to play. Well, I was making a perfect mess of the toccata when he popped up like an imp beside the console. I snapped at him not to startle me, but he laughed. Then he told me this was probably the instrument Bach wrote the piece on, and definitely one he had played it on. Bach himself.”
“Wow,” Anna said. “Cool.”
“We’re here,” Gracie called from the front.
Charlie was clever when it came to pleasing customers. He would complete an organ at his factory, for example, then invite whoever was paying for the instrument to come play it. They always did, even nonmusicians, pressing the keys with a mix of awe and delight at the giant sounds that resulted. Likewise, when he shipped an organ to the church or college or wherever it was going, he made a point of saying that his fee did not include unloading. The people receiving the instrument would have to remove it from the trucks themselves, and carry it inside. It belonged to them now. Sometimes the choir would perform outside during an unloading. Then Charlie’s team would assemble the instrument, he would perfect the voicing, and there would be a debut.
Stanford was no different. The chapel entry was crowded with students, faculty, well-heeled folks who’d written checks for the organ. The building’s exterior had a handsome mosaic, images of saints or apostles I suppose, but there was a hurry to introduce me around, and I didn’t have time for a proper look. I smiled, shook hands, thanked people, and in general felt my husband’s absence as though I’d come without my left arm.
Inside, the place was handsome: a floor of some unique wood, stained-glass windows, a lofty dome. Mosaics decorated the side walls, too, and I realized how accustomed I had become to the plain, forthright churches of New England.
The speeches were dull, until the university organist, a portly fellow with Ben Franklin glasses, took the podium. “This is the last instrument designed by Charles Fish,” he said. “It is an exemplary piece of work—so responsive, so powerful, you feel a direct connection between your finger and the pipe.”
He paused to adjust his glasses. “Please understand, I say this not to boast but to explain: We have here, in our chapel, an object as rare as an original of the Declaration of Independence. In the long arc of Fish’s life, he managed to become one of the finest organ builders in human history. This university is immensely fortunate to share in the final act of his exemplary career.”
The audience applauded. Career. I would have bet not two people in that place knew what Charlie did before he started making organs.
“We are grateful to Mrs. Fish for joining us today on his behalf,” the man continued. I raised a hand and the clapping was polite. “Now, for the performance . . .”
He introduced the musician, whom I’d never heard of. To judge by the crowd’s response, though, you would have thought he was the ghost of Harry Truman. Cheers, whistles, applause. I confess I felt a buzz of electricity.
My enthusiasm cooled, though, when the organist placed one hand on the console for balance, and bowed so low I wondered if he was joking. He straightened, making an odd flourish with one hand, and I thought, What a dandy. Then he slipped out of his shoes, showing everyone plainly that he was barefoot, a sign of respect for the pedals but so contrived I snorted behind my hand.
With a backward flip of his coattails, the man took his seat at the bench. It was all rather cloying, and I prayed he would not be playing Pachelbel’s Canon. He opened stops, straightened his posture, cleared his throat.
Begin already, I thought.
And he did: It was the Widor. The Fifth Symphony by Charles-Marie Widor, that is, a complete flambé of technique, and this musician was made for it. Minimum substance, maximum show. He had a way of swaying his head, of rising on his buttocks. If he had been my student in 1942, I would have smacked him with a ruler.
The man had chosen a piece to display himself, not the organ. He was impressive, yes, but mostly impressed with himself. When his right hand played primary melody, he would lay his left hand on the bench—calling attention to the music he made with only five fingers. I was annoyed, disappointed, then annoyed all over again.
But the piece is six minutes long. I used that time to examine the instrument. A lovely console, red poplar. Three manuals. Stops in four rows on either side of the keys. I couldn’t see how many pedals there were, but I certainly heard them. Charlie would have been proud of his crew.