Glissando

Joseph Harned

Mary died facing where the sun rose beyond the Adirondacks. 

I asked him, “Do you think she got to see the sun?”

“I don’t know,” Grigor Korovic said. “I woke up with it.”

“With her…?” 

“With the sun.”

Two old ladies who worked at the bakery were crying onto each other’s baby blue aprons behind the store. I think they were crying about Mary, or the state of it all. When they were done with their break they patted themselves off with their hand towels, and flour stuck to where the dampness was. 

I went back later that night. There was no one else on the road. It was dark and silent and the fog was thick and cold. The old hunter’s paths wound out from the road into the dark wood. When I got to Grigor’s house on the edge of the town there were footsteps shuffling through the dust on his floor and their echoes spilled through to me. There were a few old men who had come to pay their respects, and having done so were smoking cigarettes on the steps of the front porch. I recognized some so I stood around the corner of the house where I could see their shoes and the puffs of smoke. I heard a voice, a deep and magnanimous roll from the room. “Let us sing.”

The old church ladies were dressed in their modest black gowns and stood in a moon shape. Their faces were pale and they carried a slight frown pulled by the desolate air of the

room. Mary was laid under a thick oak lid, facing the ceiling between the singers and the old composer who sat leaning back in his corner chair. I watched through a square of an unfogged window. There were three candles lit on the stone mantle. With the raising of the priest’s great, cloth-draped arm there was a disturbance of air, extinguishing the closest candle. The priest paused his routine and produced a matchbox from the folds of his cloth. It took a few strikes for his shaking hands to produce a flame, and the women stood with their bodies facing Korovic and their eyes twisted to the scrape of the match. 

With the candle fixed, the priest stood further from the wall. I raised my fingers against the cool glass window and traced the shape of his body on the spreading condensation. He raised himself again, and the candle flickered. But the dust was still and the light persisted. With the gentle flicks of his wrist, he began the death hymnal. The weathered old voices roiled amongst themselves and their old tiredness. I looked through the wet lines of my window sketch at the face of Grigor. His eyes were closed tightly. In his grief and solemnity there was an air of dwindling greatness, as if he would at any moment reveal some lonely wisdom to himself in a whisper. He trembled slightly and winced, not in response to a sharp note but to some old buried memory of his hands rising to summon an orchestra or to brush Mary’s hair from her face. 

The letter fell from my pocket. I had not broken its gold wax seal. When its white corner was poking from under the door some days ago, I had picked it up with trembling hands. I knew it was from Mary. She was not long for this indifferent world, her melted wax eyes and curl lip smile, the decrescendo of her breaths when we were once just two notes. Was the same friction which diminished those notes in the clear air the friction which diminished her? If I knew, the years before, the night before, the seconds before. How it takes so many caught breaths before all tiresome withdrawals and childish cheek-blush earth-gripped moments turn into nothing. I would

throw myself upon her with no respect or care or thought of anything else in the world. Would her hand find its familiar rest on the top yes of my head, and mine yes on the small of her back, and would yes we dance to silence as we yes had done so many times so many times so many times. And yes we could yes find some kind of yes respite. 

The letter laid unfolded and opened in my hands. 

On the steps I heard them speaking in diminutive tones. 

“Do you think that it was done… because…”

“Well there were some circumstances…”

“Saint Michael is closer, much closer, and they are accustomed to this kind of thing. -Elizabeth was told to find him… she was told it was for a dire cause. In the middle of the night, nonetheless. The light was on atop the rectory, in the rectory attic.”

The man took a long drag of his cigarette and expelled his reservations into the night. “Well, she thought he might be up doing some duties for the church… Slow as death, she said. That’s what she said to me.”

He tapped his cigarette on the stairs and continued 

“Clayborn said something similar, he was waiting in the car. He was walking slow as death, genuflecting at every pew. And at the last one he fell, and they rushed in and lifted him back up. He was needed greatly, Beth said to him. And she had a car prepared for him… but first he ran to the rectory and the light was… extinguished.”

“There were other times…”

“He was a strange fellow… world full of them.”

“Mine was baptized at Magellan, yes I took him over to Magellan, or was it Saint Mary’s? Good man, Father Brown I think. Brown was a solid man, passed about three months ago.”

“He was late to the profession…”

“No, not Brown…”

Their conversation drifted into the gentle night breeze. I walked behind the house to get back on the path, as the singing had stopped and the talking had stopped and Grigor had gone to bed with the three candles dwindling. Draped elegantly over the edge of the Korovic house fence was Mary’s bridal dress, rising suddenly into my vision clear and white as the moon above me. Still bearing the veil and the silence and the extinguished brio, but as calmly graceful as ever. I stood transfixed by it, and I knew then that Mary had not lied to me and her letter was true. 

The singers ambled behind me, and I turned. In the corner of my eye Grigor stood before his window, looking down at the yard. Silhouetted by a faint light behind him, he raised his baton slowly in his palm. His other hand was holding a fold of curtain, and he imagined those trees were the stoic old concertgoers swaying imperceptibly in the dark. Slow as death, he unclenched his hand and dropped the baton back to his side. He turned away, and I stood waiting for the light to fade but it didn’t, so I turned and watched the hem of Mary’s dress billow in the breeze. He had some time yet, that silent man Korovic. 

I walked through the town to get home. The ochre autumn chill carried with it a memory of summer. The gas lamps shone like illuminated jewels down on the ebbing texture of humanity below. Absolution flowed from every constellation above, and as one murmur we moved gently

into midnight. Covering everything like a blanket was unspoken purpose, and it wasn’t until I had broken from the throngs that I realized I was walking. It dawned on me instantly: Mary Korovic is dead. I stopped. The crowds of people, faceless, storyless, nameless, forgotten, all weaved between us, between myself and my memory. I wanted to instill in just one of them life, I wanted to grab it like it were dandelion pappi and place it on their tongue and say “please, please, remember this.” 

At the end of the path, I wandered upon Saint Judes, where the priest resided. The hall was gothic and silent. The door was ajar, and I felt a hand pushing me. I slipped in through the crack, though I had no desire to pray. I recalled that this was where Grigor and Mary were wed, by the old priest himself. In my solitude, I found myself drawn to the votive candles. The coin box was hanging open and there were no matches left. I turned to leave, but faintly, just at the grasp where the last tendrils of a sound could be heard, whispers. Leaking from the confessional door was a faint glow, and his great, sonorous voice barely broke his lips.