With Susan it was different.
Susan and Tom lived one house away from each other, and had been born only a week apart, so they had splashed in wading pools, stroked wooly bear caterpillars, picked up toads and climbed trees together. A certain distance had grown between them as they approached their teens, but they had never stopped being friends, and now that they were sophomores they were quite comfortable with each other again. They often walked home together from church, or after glee club practice.
Tom had begun piano lessons when he was six and added organ in junior high. Mr. Inglis, his organ teacher, was the music minister at the Congregational Church. He convinced Tom to sing in the choir, since they were always short of men’s voices. There were plenty of women’s voices. Besides the old (to Tom) married women in their twenties and thirties, there were some high school girls, most of whom sang in the glee club that Mr. Inglis directed. Starting in his freshman year, Tom would sometimes play a hymn or a voluntary during the service. Tom began to think a lot about how pretty many of the girls were, but he didn’t say anything to them about it.
The trouble started one afternoon in September when Tom and Susan were walking home from school. Susan reached out and took Tom’s hand. He didn’t know what to do. He controlled his first impulse (to snatch his hand away) because he thought that would be mean. He didn’t know whether to squeeze back or just pretend it wasn’t happening. He ended up doing his best dead fish imitation until they got to their houses, where he gave her hand a quick squeeze before saying “Goodbye.” That was the only word spoken on the entire walk.
Glee club practice was on Tuesdays and at the end of September Mr. Inglis added extra practices on Thursday afternoons, to prepare for the Fall concert. Tom would often take Susan’s hand now, or she would take his as they walked from church or school, talking about TV shows and teachers and the books they were reading in school.
Organ lessons were on Wednesday afternoons. At the end of one lesson, Mr. Inglis asked Tom if he’d like to play the entire service next Sunday. “You have eight or ten solid pieces to choose from for the processional and recessional,” he said. “And Mr. McKnight has agreed to let me choose hymns that you know well. What do you say?”
Tom was so saturated by equal parts elation and dread that he was only just able to squeak out “Yes.”
The next day, on the way home from glee club, he told Susan.
“Oh, that’s great, Tom!” She paused and, since she knew Tom well, added, “Don’t worry, you’ll be perfect.”
Tom smiled his thanks. Susan took his hand and turned him to face her.
“Would you like to kiss me?” she asked.
“Now?” Tom blurted, before he could think.
“Okay, not now. But sometime?”
“I don’t know. Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”
She released his hand, and they walked in silence for a moment.
“Let me know what you decide.”
That night Tom had a dream where everything he opened revealed something wonderful. In his father’s study he opened the rolltop desk, and it was a three-manual organ console. He opened a toolbox to find a cluster of tierce pipes, like little metal mushrooms singing shrilly. He opened his closet and was faced with the polished wood of thirty-two-foot bourdons, stretching away up into the attic and down into the basement and thrumming like a giant humming to himself. When Tom pulled open a drawer of his dresser, it revealed a manual that played an antiphonal rank way off in the kitchen. He turned on a faucet and en chamade reeds blared a fanfare. He went from room to room, and everywhere he went was filled with music and more music, the uninterrupted cascades of sound that fall from the wind instrument that never pauses to breathe. He woke up happy.
The Sunday service went well. Tom played Bach’s “Air on the G String” for the processional, which was a little slow and subdued but appropriately solemn. He did not rush the hymns, played clearly to lead the choir at the start of each line, and built up the registrations nicely from verse to verse, ending with full organ. The recessional was a Purcell trumpet voluntary. He missed a couple of notes, but there were no gaps or pauses. At after-service coffee, Mr. McKnight was very enthusiastic, and just about all the adults came over to praise Tom before they left.
Tom and Susan helped put away the folding chairs as usual, then put on their coats to walk home through the chill October noontime. Susan took Tom’s arm, which was somehow even nicer than holding hands.
“That was great, Tom,” she said quietly.
“Thanks,” he said. “You know, I had a dream that really helped. It made me sure it was going to be all right. I mean, not just all right, but beautiful, and fun.”
“What was the dream?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. But first, would you like to kiss me?”
Susan stopped and turned to face him.
“Right now?”
Walter Lawn writes poetry and short fiction. His work has been published at On the Run Press, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and Lily Poetry Review. Walter is a disaster recovery planner, and lives outside of Philadelphia.
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