It was then, at that precise instant, that something in her countenance changed. Suddenly she was looking at him as though he were the one speaking an incomprehensible language. “I give you my word,” he said. “If the address on the will, Clemen—Miss Abend—if the address written there—the one on the Upper West Side—if it’s no longer good,” he blundered on, “is there a better one where I can reach you?”
“What?”
“If this address—if another one is better—one way or another, Miss Abend, I promise you—” Spurlock said, forcing back the certainty that he was speaking to himself only.
“Clementine Abend—” she said, but broke off.
“Yes, Clementine, if I could,” he said, unnerved by the insistence in his own voice, “all I would need—” He’d taken a pen from his pocket and, realizing he had no paper, began to write her name on the palm of his hand. “Clementine—Abend,” he said, pronouncing the name slowly as he wrote it out. But after muttering something about having to go, the girl had retreated from the counter toward her table under the Noah window and in what seemed like a single swift movement had shouldered her bag and passed out onto the street. The gimlet eye of the stained-glass crow met Spurlock’s. “What now, Father?” the crow seemed to ask.
—
That had been three weeks ago. For days afterward he would find himself wondering if Clementine Abend would appear again, to inquire once more if anything had been sent to her, in his care.
In his care, Spurlock thought.
Abend, thought Spurlock. The name had meant nothing to him.
He had consulted the parish records and had found no one by the name of Abend. He had even flipped through the parish visitors’ book to the day of Jessica Burke’s funeral three years earlier. Abend. Abend. But again, nothing, and he was confident in his memory for names and faces, whether of parishioners or visitors. If something did arrive, how would he find her? She had left nothing behind. He would simply have to continue to wait for her to appear again, though there had been no sign of her. The disquiet he felt, did it stem from the sight of his name, caught in the indecipherable toil of a stranger’s writing? Or was its origin—as he began to suspect—something quite different: the thought that he would not see that face, her face, ever again?
Three uneasy weeks had passed. She had not appeared. Nothing had arrived. Nothing until today. Spurlock blinked, willing himself awake. If this was sleep, he wanted none of it, this awful weight bearing down on him, cold and rigid, measuring its length to his. If he could just dislodge it, if he could rise from his cot, he could prove that the weight was not a weight. He could grope his way up to the church office, to his desk, where he would see that the package resting on it was still only a package, still was what it had been before he had, thinking of something else, torn open the seal. It was just another piece of the day’s mail, just another envelope on his desk, a package like any other sent by accountants, tax attorneys, auditors, or the diocesan offices, packages Mrs. Nickerson would date-stamp and shunt to the appropriate file or vestry committee. So what if this envelope, a slick, striated paper stamped with foreign postage, proved unshuntable, marked as it was PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL in painstaking block capitals? Were he to open it again, he would see that the envelope contained just a stack of pages, each one a weightless sheet of onionskin. Maybe he would discover that he had not in fact read them through in a single, paralyzed sitting, that they too were the tatters of a dream he’d shaken off and discarded. Maybe he would find himself once more a stranger to the voice that those pages relayed: rapt, patient, heated, and tempered, insistent as the bit of a rock drill drilling a rock face.
Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
A cry jerked him to his senses. Had it been his, or a cry from one of the sleepers? He tried to fasten his gaze to something, anything, in the darkness swirling above him, but he found no purchase in it, in the particular, total blackness of stained glass at night, the panes lightless now as the webs of lead they’d been set in, every figure as black now as Noah’s crow. He could hear, beyond the breath and rustle of the sleepers, the restless avenue (after all, the night could not be so far gone), but the black of the windows insisted that the church, like a cavern or coal-gallery, had no exterior.
I believe you may have something—something my father sent you—
—she had said, her face no longer the severe, etched profile but facing him as she spoke, as it faced him now, a perfect oval, the eyes a flat-bright nickel gray, with somewhere the glint of gold piercing her, because (Spurlock thought) the beauty of the young was intolerable to them—
—something for a Clementine Abend.
No, it was obvious she was no longer a girl, however clear the gray of her eye, however smooth the curve of her cheek. Something or someone had drawn down over that face an invisible, perpetual veil of care.
I believe you have something, something my father sent you—
He’d had nothing for her when she came three weeks ago, but then in this morning’s mail it had arrived, the heavy envelope containing that stack of weightless pages:
You will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
He had read it, bent over his desk, oblivious of Mrs. Nickerson’s departure, of the window’s failing light at his back, the world itself falling away and with it the substance of his own body, Spurlock a mere shadow bent over
