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