THE FIRST HYMN
POV: RONAN
Two years before.
My mother’s coffin is closed.
She asked for that. She asked for a lot of things at the end, in the white room at Mass General with the machines, and I wrote them all down on a legal pad because my father wouldn’t.
Closed coffin. St. Agnes, not the cathedral.
The little church on Adams Street where the nuns taught her to read.
No eulogy from Conrad. No flowers but white roses.
And a hymn at the end.
The In Paradisum, darling. When they carry me out. Sung by someone who means it.
I wrote that down too.
***
It’s raining. November. Adams Street is lined with black cars all the way down to the corner, parked two deep, with drivers standing beside them in the rain. Men in long dark coats on the sidewalk. Men who knew my father. Men who owe him. Men who are afraid of him.
Nobody here knew my mother.
I sit in the front pew with my back straight and my hands on my knees.
My father is beside me. Cane between his knees. He’s crying. He’s been crying since the car. People keep coming up to him and touching his shoulder and he keeps nodding and dabbing at his eyes with a white handkerchief.
He hasn’t looked at the coffin once.
I haven’t looked at anything else.
It’s plain oak. White roses on the lid. I picked it out. The funeral director wanted to sell me mahogany, bronze handles, a satin lining the color of cream, and I said, She wanted plain, and he looked at my face and stopped talking.
Behind me, the church is full. They cry. Men who never met her cry. Their wives cry. My father’s lawyer cries.
I don’t.
I’m thirty-three years old, and I haven’t cried since I was fourteen, since I sat at a piano bench with my hand over my face and blood running between my fingers, and I heard her on the stairs.
I sit in the front pew and look at her coffin and I don’t cry.
***
The Mass goes on. A priest I don’t know says things about her that aren’t true. Communion. Incense. The smoke drifts over the white roses and hangs there in the gray light from the windows.
Then it’s over.
They come to take her.
Six men in black. They lift the coffin off the stand. Onto their shoulders. They turn it toward the aisle.
And up in the choir loft behind me, a voice starts.
Alone.
A girl’s voice.
In paradisum deducant te Angeli—
It’s thin at first. Uncertain. Like she’s never sung in front of this many people. Like she’s afraid of the black cars outside and the men in long coats.
Then it steadies.
—in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres—
It fills the church. It goes up into the plaster ceiling and the stained glass and comes back down, warm. It sounds like someone who means it.
I turn around.
I shouldn’t. Nobody else does. Everybody’s watching the coffin go down the aisle. My father is watching the coffin. He’s finally looking at it.
I turn around in the front pew and look up at the choir loft.
She’s standing at the old black rail. Alone.
The rest of the choir is sitting behind her in the dark, in their good robes.
She’s in a white robe too, too big for her, the sleeves falling over her hands.
She has dark hair pinned up, coming loose at the neck.
She’s very thin. She’s holding the rail with both hands, like she needs it to stand.
She isn’t looking at the congregation.
She’s looking at the coffin. Only at the coffin. Singing it out of the church like it’s the only thing in the world, like she knew her.
She didn’t know her.
She’s singing for my mother like she knew her.
—et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.
I don’t look away.
The coffin goes past me down the aisle. My father rises to follow it. He puts his hand on my shoulder to make me get up.
I don’t get up.
I sit in the front pew with my head turned and look up at the loft, and the girl sings, and the men carry my mother out into the rain, and I don’t watch them go.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat—
Her voice goes up.
—et cum Lazaro quondam paupere—
Something in my chest that has been locked since I was fourteen years old turns over once, like a key in an old lock.
—aeternam habeas requiem.
The last note goes up into the ceiling and doesn’t come down.
She lets go of the rail.
She wipes her face with the back of her too-long sleeve. She’s crying. For my mother. For a woman she never met.
She’s the only person in the church crying for her who means it.
***
Outside, in the rain, while they load the coffin into the hearse, I find the pastor under the awning by the side door.
“The soloist,” I say.
He looks at me. At the coat. The car. My face. He knows who I am.
“Miss Holloway,” he says. “Magdalene. She sings for us on Sundays. She’s very good, isn’t she? Lovely voice.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty. Just.” He hesitates. “She lives up the street with her father. Frank. You may know him. He’s—” He stops. “He’s had a hard time.”
I know Frank Holloway.
Everybody in Boston who runs a card table knows Frank Holloway.
“Thank you, Father,” I say.
***
That night, I don’t go to the house on Louisburg Square.
I tell the driver to take me back to Adams Street.
Theo is with me. He’s thirty-one. He’s worked for me for nine years. He doesn’t ask. He sits in the front seat and looks straight ahead while I have the driver park across from a triple-decker three blocks up from St. Agnes, where a light is on in a kitchen on the second floor.
I sit there until the light goes out.
Theo finally turns around in his seat.
“Boss,” he says. “Who is she?”
I look up at the dark window.
A week from now, her father will sit down at Conor Kavanagh’s table and put her on a bar napkin for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and a bottle of Jameson. I don’t know that yet. Nine days from now, I’ll pay it. I don’t know that yet either.
Two years from now, she’ll stand at a window three blocks from here with the blind up, in a black veil I bought her, and put her palm on the glass.
I don’t know any of it.
I know I heard her.
I know she sang my mother out of the church like she meant it.
I know that she was singing for the dead, and that I’m sitting in a car in the rain outside her father’s apartment at one in the morning, and that I’m not going to stop.
“Mine,” I tell Theo.
He looks at me for a long time. Then he turns back around in his seat and looks straight ahead.
She was singing for the dead.
I decided she’d never sing for anyone else.