Then the sensation faded; and she couldn’t possibly have heard rich horns calling to her heart; and the tang was gone.
Baffled and sad, she resumed her sodden walk to work.
At the mission, her day was more full of drudgery than usual. In the administrative office, seated at her desk with the ancient typewriter crouching in front of her like a foul-tempered beast of burden, she found a message from Reverend Thatcher, the old man who ran the mission. It said that the mission’s copying costs were too high, so would she please type two hundred fifty copies of the attached letter in addition to her other duties. The letter was aimed at most of the philanthropic organizations in the city, and it contained yet another appeal for money, couched in Reverend Thatcher’s customary futility. She could hardly bear to read it as she typed; but of course she had to read it over and over again to get it right.
While she typed, she seemed to feel herself becoming physically less solid, as if she were slowly being dissolved by the pointlessness of what she did. By noon, she had the letter memorized; and she was watching in a state that resembled suspense the line of letters her typewriter made, waiting for each new character because it proved that she was still there and she couldn’t honestly say she expected it to appear.
She and Reverend Thatcher usually ate lunch together – by his choice, not hers. Since she was quiet and watched his face attentively, he probably thought she was a sympathetic listener. But most of the time she hardly heard what he said. His talk was like his letters: there was nothing she could do to help. She was quiet because that was the only way she knew how to be; she watched his face because she hoped it would betray some indication of her own reality – some flicker of interest or concentration of notice which might indicate that she was actually present with another person. So she sat with him in one corner of the soup kitchen the mission ran in its basement, and she kept her face turned toward him while he talked.
From a distance, he appeared bald, but that was because his mottled pink skin showed clearly through his fine, pale hair, which he kept cut short. The veins in his temples were prominent and seemed fragile, with the result that whenever he became agitated they looked like they might burst. Today she expected him to rehash his latest letter, which she had already typed nearly two hundred times. That was his usual pattern: while they ate the bland, thin lunch provided by the kitchen, he would tell her things she already knew about his work, his voice quavering whenever he came back to the uselessness of what he was doing. This time, however, he surprised her.
“Miss Morgan,” he said without quite looking at her, “have I ever told you about my wife?”
In fact, he hadn’t, though he referred to her often. But Terisa knew some of his family history from the previous mission secretary, who had given up the job in defeat and disgust. Nevertheless she said, “No, Reverend Thatcher. You’ve mentioned her, naturally. But you’ve never told me about her.”
“She died nearly fifteen years ago,” he said, still wistfully. “But she was a fine, Christian woman, a strong woman, God rest her soul. Without her, I would have been weak, Miss Morgan – too weak to do what needed doing.”
Though she hadn’t considered the question closely, Terisa thought of him as weak. He sounded weak now, even when he wasn’t talking about his failure to do better for the mission. But he also sounded fond and saddened.
“I remember the time – oh, it was years ago, long before you were born, Miss Morgan – I was out of seminary”– he smiled past her left shoulder – “with all kinds of honors, would you believe it? And I had just finished serving an assistant pastorship at one of the best churches in the city.
“At the time, they wanted me to stay on as an associate pastor. With God’s help, I had done well there, and they gave me a call to become one of their permanent shepherds. I can tell you, Miss Morgan, that was quite gratifying. But for some reason my heart wasn’t quiet about it. I had the feeling God was trying to tell me something. You see, just at that time I had learned that this mission needed a new director. I had no desire for the job. Being a weak man, I was pleased by my position in the church. I was well rewarded for my work, both financially and personally. And yet I couldn’t forget the question of this mission. It was true that the church called me to serve them. But what did God call me to do?
“It was Mrs. Thatcher who resolved my dilemma. Putting her hand on her hip, as she always did when she meant to be taken seriously, she said, ‘Now don’t you be a fool, Albert Thatcher. When Our Lord came into the world, he didn’t do it to serve the rich. This church is a fine place – but if you leave, they’ll have the choice of a hundred fine men to replace you. Not one of those men will consider a call to the mission.’
“So I came here,” he concluded. “Mrs. Thatcher didn’t care that we were poor. She only cared that we were doing what we could to serve God. I’ve done that, Miss Morgan, for forty years.”
Ordinarily, a comment like that would have been a prelude to another of his long discussions of his unending and often fruitless efforts to keep the mission viable. Ordinarily, she could hear those discussions coming and steel herself against them, so that her own unreality in the face of the mission’s need and his penury wouldn’t overwhelm her.
But this time what she heard was the faraway cry of horns.
They carried the command of the hunt and the appeal of music, two different sounds that formed a chord in her heart, blending together so that she wanted to leap up inside herself and shout an answer. And while she heard them, everything around her changed.
The soup kitchen no longer looked dingy and worn out: it looked well used, a place of single-minded dedication. The grizzled and tattered men and women seated at the tables were no longer reduced to mere hunched human wreckage: now they took in hope and possibility with their soup. Even the edges of the tables were more distinct, more tangible and important, than ordinary formica and tubed steel. And Reverend Thatcher himself was changed. The pulse beating in his temples wasn’t the agitation of uselessness: it was the strong rhythm of his determination to do good. There was valor in his pink skin, in the earned lines of his face, and the focus of his eyes was so distant because it was fixed, not on futility, but on God.
The change lasted for only a moment. Then she could no longer hear the horns, even though she yearned for them; and the air of defeat seeped slowly back into her surroundings.
Filled with loss, she thought she would start to weep if Reverend Thatcher began another of his discussions. Fortunately, he didn’t. He had some phone calls to make, hoping to catch certain influential people while they were taking their lunch breaks; so he excused himself and left her, unaware that for a moment he had been covered by glamour in her eyes. She returned to her desk almost gratefully; at her typewriter, she would be able to strike the keys and see her existence proven in the black characters she made on paper.
The afternoon passed slowly. Through the one, bare window, she could see the rain still flooding down, drenching everything until even the buildings across the street looked like wet cardboard. The few people hurrying up and down the sidewalks might have been wearing rain gear, or they might not: the downpour seemed to erase the difference. Rain pounded on the outside of the window; gloom soaked in through the glass. Terisa found herself typing the same mistakes over and over again. She wanted to hear horns again – wanted to reexperience the tang and sharpness that came with them. But they had been nothing more than the residue of one of her infrequent dreams. She couldn’t recapture them.
At quitting time, she put her work away, shrugged her shoulders into her raincoat, and tied her plastic bandana over her head. But when she was ready to go, she hesitated. On impulse, she knocked on the door of the tiny cubicle Reverend Thatcher used as a private office.