Easter

The programme on the desk by the door had a new line at the top of it.

It was typed, as it had been typed since the Canyon, on the lounge printer, on a sheet of the plain white paper from the tray, and it was ticked down the left-hand side in pencil as far as 06.45. Water, and the pencil lay beside it exactly parallel to the edge of the desk. But above the first item, where every programme since August had begun with the date, there was a second line, in the same type, set a little to the right.

Potsdam +9.

“That’s new,” said Frederick, from the bed by the window.

“It is correct as of this morning.” Alexander was sitting on the end of his own bed in the linen jacket, buttoned, putting on his shoes, which he did in the same order every day, the left and then the right. “Every clock in Europe went forward an hour at two o’clock in the morning, Potsdam time. That was six o’clock last night, here.”

“Where were you at six last night?”

“In the lounge. Playing whist.” He tied the left shoe. “With Lena. We were losing.”

“So the whole of Europe changed while you were losing at whist.”

“Yes.” He tied the right. “Nobody in the lounge noticed. Felix noticed. He looked at his watch, and said jetzt, and then he played a trump.” Alexander stood up and looked at the programme. “London as well. Your mother is eight hours ahead now, not seven.” He picked up the pencil and put it down again, parallel. “I have adjusted the call.”

Frederick looked at the line below the clock. 07.30. London (F.). Garden.

“How do you know it’s the garden?”

“Your mother told me. She telephoned on Thursday, and said I was to see that you were in the light.” He considered. “She rings to ask after you. She says that you say okay, and that it does not count.”

He looked at his watch. “Seven twenty-one.”

---

There was a box on the shelf over the desk by the door, beside the jumper and the cricket hat, that had not been there on Friday.

It was round, and pale blue, and had come up the forty-five steps on Saturday in Kessler’s arms from the day desk, with Neuer Garten written on the lid in a hand Frederick knew from Christmas cards since he could read.

“Is that the hat?” said Frederick.

“It is the Easter hat.” Alexander took the box down and lifted the lid. Inside, in the tissue, was a straw hat, very fine, pale, with a narrow black band and a small brim, the kind of hat a man wears to a garden in Potsdam in April when the sun has just come back. There was a card tucked into the band. Für Ostern. Mama. “She has sent one every Easter since I was nine. This is the first she has sent to a desert.”

“Are you going to wear it?”

“I am going to carry it.” He put the lid back on and set the box on the desk, square to the edge. “As agreed.”

“Who agreed?”

“Mama and I. In August.” Alexander looked at the box. “She sends them. I carry them. Nobody has to say anything about it.” He looked at his watch again. “Seven twenty-four.”

---

The light in 312 was by the window, so Frederick sat on the end of his own bed with the blind up and the butte in the window beside his shoulder, brown and rough in the morning sun, with the A on it, and waited, and at seven twenty-nine the telephone rang, because she was always early, and he answered it, and there was a lawn.

It was a London lawn, small and very green, the green that only rain can make, with a wall of old brick at the end of it and a pear tree against the wall in white flower, and a bench, and on the bench a jug of birch twigs with small feathers tied to the ends, yellow and pink and green. The picture swung. And then there was his mother.

She was walking.

She was walking along the gravel path in a grey coat and a blue scarf, holding the telephone out in front of her in one hand, at her own pace, which had always been her own, and the picture went up and down a little with every step, and she was not out of breath, and she did not stop.

“Glad påsk, Fredde.”

“Glad påsk, Mamma.”

“I am in the garden.” She turned, on the path, so that he could see the pear tree. “I am walking round it. It is eleven times round to a mile, Ebba says, and I have done four, and I am not going to tell you how long it took, because it was not long.” She looked at him out of the telephone. “You are in the light.”

“Alexander saw to it.”

“I know he did. I asked him to.” She walked on. “Where is he?”

“Here.”

Frederick turned the telephone. Alexander was standing by the desk by the door, upright, with the hat box under one arm, and when he saw himself in the screen he inclined his head very slightly, exactly, the way he did to a flag.

“Good morning, Aunt Christina. Frohe Ostern.”

“Good morning, Alexander. Is that a hat?”

“It is a hat in a box.”

“Caroline sent it.”

“Yes.”

“Then carry it to church,” said his mother, “and give her my love, and tell her that I have done four times round the garden, and that I would like a hat.”

“I will tell her,” said Alexander.

---

“Your father is here,” said his mother. “He has been waiting since lunch. He would not sit down.”

The picture went round. It went across the gravel and the bench and the jug with the feathers, and up a step, to a door that stood open onto the house, and in the doorway, against the dark of the hall behind, with both hands on the top of his stick and his feet apart on the step, was his father.

Brannigan was beside him. He was standing at his father’s left elbow, not touching it, in a dark suit on a Sunday, with his hands behind his back, at the exact distance from which a man can catch somebody without looking as though he expects to.

“Pappa.”

His father looked at the telephone.

He looked better. That was the first thing, and Frederick saw it before he had decided to look for it: the right side of his face, which in January had gone a little way down and stayed there, had come back up, nearly all the way, so that his mouth was his mouth again, crooked in the old way and not the new one. He was standing straight. He was standing in a doorway in a jersey with his stick, in the afternoon sun, the way he had stood all his life on the steps of things, and Brannigan beside him was looking at the garden.

“Happy Easter, Pappa.”

“Fredde,” said his father.

“How are you?”

“Good.” A breath. “Good.”

He had had those since the winter. He had had Fredde and Hill on the day itself, and Good, which he used now for most things, since February; and every Sunday since there had been one more, or the same one said more easily, and Frederick had listened for each of them down the telephone the way he had listened last year for his mother’s breath.

“I wanted to come,” said Frederick. “In January. I had the box at the gate. Mamma said stay.”

His father looked at him out of the telephone for a long moment.

Then he lifted his chin. He took one hand off the top of the stick, the right, and put it flat on Brannigan’s arm, which was there, and stood a little straighter on the step, and Frederick watched him go into the house of himself, along the corridors, to the room where the words were kept; and he did not fill the space, because if you filled it the word went away; and in the garden in London a bird said something, and his mother, holding the telephone, said nothing at all.

“Go,” said his father.

He did not stop. That was the thing. He did not go back along the corridor to look for the next one. It was there, and he picked it up.

“To.”

And the next.

“Class.”

---

There was a silence in London, and in Tempe.

In the doorway his father put his right hand back on the top of the stick, beside the left, and looked at the telephone with the expression he had used all Frederick’s life for a paper that had been read to the end and initialled, and was finished.

“Three,” said his mother, very quietly, off the screen. “Did you hear, Fredde? Three. In a row.”

“I heard.”

“He has not done three since the fourteenth of January.” Her voice had gone. “He has done two. He did two on Tuesday, more tea, and Brannigan nearly dropped the tray.” She was quiet. “He has not done three.”

Brannigan, at his father’s elbow, did not move his face at all, in the way of a man who has been told not to move it and has decided to do as he is told.

“He’s had it since Thursday, sir,” said Brannigan, to the garden. “If you’ll forgive me. He’s been saying it to me with the coffee. So that it would be there.”

“Ready,” said his father, with great dignity.

Frederick put his hand over his eyes.

He sat on the end of the bed by the window like that, with the telephone in the other hand and the sun on the side of his face, and on the screen his father stood in a doorway in London and waited for him, because he had all the time in the world now and knew it; and Alexander, by the desk by the door, put the hat box down on the desk and stood beside it with his hands at his sides and looked out of the window at the butte.

“Pappa.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going. To class. Tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”

“Good,” said his father. And then, because there was one more, and he could: “Ink.”

Frederick took his hand away from his eyes.

“Not yet,” he said.

His father looked at him a moment longer, out of the telephone, from the step, and something happened at the crooked corner of his mouth, the old one, and stayed.

“May,” said his father.

---

Sam went to church at half past nine, to the brick church of 1889 on the rise south of the butte, and Alexander went with him, and so did Frederick, and so, at a distance of eleven yards, did Kessler.

He was in a dark suit, which Frederick had not known he owned, and he walked behind them under the palms in it at the distance from which he was never there; and at the door of the church, where a woman in a lilac hat was giving out the orders of service, he took one, and said “Thank you,” and went in, and did not sit at the back.

“He’s coming in,” said Frederick.

“He has come every Sunday since January,” said Alexander. “He sits on the right. Four rows behind.”

“Every Sunday?”

“Since my birthday.” Alexander took his own order of service from the woman in the lilac hat, and thanked her, and held it with the hat box under the same arm. “He said that he had stopped going some years ago, and that he had been meaning to start again, and that a church a mile from his duty was a church in which he could.” He considered. “That is more than he has said about himself in years.”

The church was full. It was a cool brick room with fans turning slowly in the roof and white lilies at the ends of the pews, so that the whole room smelled of them, sweet and heavy; and there were people standing along the walls under the windows, old men in jackets and girls in sundresses and a baby asleep against a shoulder, and the noise of a room that is glad to be full.

Sam went to the third pew on the left, at the end, as he always did, because it was his mother’s in Detroit; and it was empty, because the woman who sat in the second pew had put her handbag on it, and when she saw Sam she took the handbag off.

“I keep it for him,” she said to Frederick, as he went past. “Since Christmas before last.”

---

The vicar was the same small brisk woman in her sixties with her reading glasses on a chain, in white for Easter, and she said Christ is risen, and the room said it back, louder than Frederick had ever heard a room say anything in a church, so that one of the lilies at the end of the pew in front shook.

Then they sang.

It was the Easter hymn, the one every church in the Realm sings on Easter morning and that Frederick had sung in Columbia Cathedral every year from the age of six, standing beside his mother in the front pew with the whole Household behind them in rows; and the organ came in, and the room stood up, and began, a little ragged, the way a full room begins.

Four rows behind on the right, somebody began to sing the bass.

It came up under the room like a floor. It was not loud, exactly. It was low, so low and so steady and so sure of where it was going that the whole of the singing seemed to stand on it; and Frederick felt it come up through the pew and the stone and the soles of his shoes, and the room felt it too, because about halfway through the first verse people began, one at a time, to turn round.

The woman in the second pew turned round. The man beside her. A girl in a sundress along the wall under the window stopped singing altogether and stood with her mouth open and her order of service in her hand, looking for it.

Kessler sang. He sang standing straight in the dark suit four rows behind on the right, with the order of service held in front of him and his eyes on it, with a face like the end of a wardrobe; and he did not look up, and he did not look round, and he was not there, and the whole church could hear him.

Beside Frederick, Alexander did not turn round.

He stood with the hat box under his arm and the order of service in his hand, and sang the tune, quietly, correctly, in English, every word in its place; and his face did not change at all. But at the end of the second verse, where the tune goes up and the bass goes down, Frederick saw his hand, the one holding the order of service, and saw that it was holding it very tight, so that the paper had bent.

At the end of the last verse the organ stopped, and the room stood for a moment in the silence after it, with the fans turning, and nobody sat down.

Then the vicar, at the front, took off her reading glasses on their chain and looked down the length of the church, over every head, to a point four rows behind on the right.

“Thank you,” she said.

Kessler sat down.

---

She prayed in the book’s order. She prayed for the King, and the Governor-General, and the Lord Marcher, and the Diet, and Frederick sat in the third pew on the left and heard himself prayed for in a room in which he was sitting, which he had heard before in this pew, and which was still entirely unlike anything he had expected, and quieter.

She prayed for the sick, and read the list at the back, the names in a column, without titles. Frederick listened to it. He listened all the way down, past a Margaret and two Josés and a Bill in Flagstaff and a baby whose name he did not catch, and near the bottom she said Ernest, London, and went on, and he did not move.

Then she prayed for all who travel by land, or by water, or by air.

Frederick waited for it. He had seen it a year ago, in this pew, a head lowered at the word air, the way a man initials a paper; and he did not look, but he waited for it, with his own head down, the way you wait for the second of two notes.

Alexander did not lower his head.

He sat in the pew with the hat box on his knees and his hands folded on its lid and his eyes on the back of the pew in front, and the vicar said air, and went on to the next prayer, and he did not move at all.

On the other side of him Sam said amen, in the ordinary voice, at the ordinary volume, with everybody else.

---

“You didn’t take it,” said Frederick, afterwards, on the steps, in the sun.

The church was coming out round them, slowly, into eighty-four degrees, in its sundresses and jackets, with the lilies being carried out in armfuls by the woman in the lilac hat to people who had asked for them; and Alexander stood on the top step with the hat box under his arm and looked at the palms along the street and the butte at the end of it, and did not pretend not to know what Frederick meant.

“No.”

“Last year you said it was addressed.”

“Last year it was.” He considered the butte. “It seemed to me this morning to be addressed to somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Lukas, who is in Hamburg, and has an examination this week that he says he will win.” Alexander looked at the hat box. “And Jack, who is in Gloucestershire, and has no examinations, and is travelling nowhere, but is always, I think, about to.” He was quiet for a moment. “I am not travelling. I have a Charter examination in five weeks.”

Sam came down the steps behind them, with the order of service folded into four in his top pocket.

“You put him on the list,” said Frederick.

“January,” said Sam. “The fifteenth. Ernest, London. No title.” He took the order of service out and looked at it, as though checking. “They’ve read it every Sunday.”

“He said three words this morning.”

Sam stood on the steps for a moment with the paper in his hand.

“Which three?”

“Go to class.”

Sam considered it, with his whole face, the way he considered a column.

“That’s good advice,” said Sam. He took out his notebook, and a pencil, and wrote something in it, small; and Frederick waited for him to say that he would take the name off the list next week, because last year he had, and Sam put the notebook back in his pocket and did not say it.

“I’m leaving him on,” said Sam.

“He’s better.”

“He’s eighty-eight.” Sam folded the order of service again. “In Detroit that’s a reason.”

---

He rang Potsdam at eleven, which was eight in the evening there now, and not seven, from the desk by the door, with the pencil parallel and the hat box beside it and the window open an inch; and Frederick lay on the bed by the window with the History folder open on his chest and heard one side of it, in German, the low exact German Alexander used with his mother, which was not the German he used with Kessler, or Lukas, or the Chancellor.

He heard Kirche, and Hut, and Alexander saying nein, Mama, very patiently, in der Hand; and then something longer, at the end of which he heard Kessler, and Bass; and then a silence on the line from Potsdam that went on for some time.

“She says,” said Alexander, putting the telephone down on the desk, square to the edge, “that Kessler has never once sung in her hearing, in all the years she has known him, and that she would like to know why a church in Arizona has heard it first.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That nobody in Potsdam had asked him.” Alexander looked at the hat box. “She has asked him now. She would like to hear it, the next time he is at home.” He was quiet for a moment. “She says to tell Aunt Christina that four times round a garden is a great deal, and that a hat is coming.”

“What kind?”

“She did not say,” said Alexander. “She never says.”

---

Theo rang at seven, which was ten at night in New Westminster, and Frederick took it on the step under the narrow window on the landing, where the thermometer said seventy-nine, as it always did, with the window open an inch and the evening coming in off the car park, warm, smelling of hot tarmac and, very faintly, of orange blossom.

“The cherry’s out,” said Theo. “On the river basin. All of it. Kate put a chocolate egg in Desmond’s hand. He’s holding it.” He was walking; Frederick could hear his feet, and the warm noise of a city out late on Easter. “How is he?”

He told him: the garden, four times round, the doorway, Brannigan at the elbow, the hand on Brannigan’s arm, and then the three, one and then the next, without going back for them.

Theo did not say anything for a while. Frederick heard him stop walking.

“Say it again,” said Theo. “Exactly. The way he said it.”

“Go. To. Class.”

“Pauses?”

“A breath. Not looking. He didn’t go back for them.”

“And then ink.”

“And then May.”

There was a long silence on the line from New Westminster, under the cherry trees.

“Freddie,” said Theo, in the other voice, the one from the Hartigans’ kitchen, “that’s not three words.”

Frederick looked at the fire notice on the opposite wall.

“It’s a sentence,” said Theo. “That’s a verb, and a preposition, and an object, in the right order, and the subject’s understood, because it’s an instruction, and he knew it was an instruction, and he gave it to you.” His voice had gone. “That’s syntax. Two months after a stroke in the left hemisphere at eighty-eight, that’s syntax. I’ve got a textbook here that says don’t expect it.” A pause. “I’m going to write in the margin.”

“What are you going to write?”

“Go to class,” said Theo. “With the date.”

Up the stairwell, on the third floor, a door opened, and closed, and somebody went along the corridor whistling the Easter hymn, the tune, badly, and at the bottom of it, so low that Frederick felt it in the step before he heard it, somebody in 314 hummed the bass, once, and stopped.