"Maybe I should tell him," Jack said. He'd met the Reverend Parker only once. Parker was a young twit who'd felt excluded from Emma's memorial service; hence he was inserting himself in Alice's.
"I think I can negotiate with him, Jack," Miss Wurtz whispered. In the background, the organ was fainter now--the girlish voices from the boarders' choir were less and less distinct. The Wurtz must have been retreating from the chapel with her cell phone; Jack could hear the squeak of her shoes on the linoleum in the hall.
"What might be the terms of your negotiation?" he asked.
"Let him lead the congregation through the Twenty-third Psalm, since he evidently wants to lead us through something," Caroline said more loudly.
"Mom said nobody should say anything. Aren't psalms like prayers?"
"The Reverend Parker is the chaplain, Jack."
"I like the Twenty-third Psalm better than the Apostles' Creed," Jack conceded.
"There appears to be another small quandary," Miss Wurtz went on. Jack couldn't hear the organ or the choir at all. Caroline must have walked all the way down the hall to the main entrance, yet he was having trouble hearing her again; this time, it wasn't the organ or the boarders' choir that was causing the interference. "Goodness!" The Wurtz exclaimed over the throttling engines, a near-deafening sound. (Another quandary had presented itself--this one, Jack guessed, was not small.)
"What is it?" he asked, although he already knew. At the tattoo conventions, his mother used to tell him, the bikers always arrived early; perhaps they wanted to be sure they had a good place to park.
"My word, it's a motorcycle gang!" Caroline cried, loudly enough for Mrs. Oastler to hear her. "What on earth is a motorcycle gang doing at an all-girls' school?"
"I'll be right there," Jack told her. "Better lock up the boarders."
"Your mother has cursed us, Jack--this is just the beginning," Leslie said, still holding her head in her hands.
Caroline and Jack had already had a little talk about Miss Wurtz's correspondence with William. His dad had taken a particular interest in Jack's artistic or creative training. "Your development," as The Wurtz had put it.
"When I was at St. Hilda's?" Jack asked.
"Indeed, Jack--when you were in the earliest stages of your dramatic education."
"Your dramatizations, you mean--"
"Beginning with, but by no means exclusively, your remarkable success in female roles," Miss Wurtz informed him. "I thought that William would be especially pleased with how you and I, in conversation, arrived at the idea that he--your father--was your own special audience of one. If you remember--"
"How could I forget?" Jack asked her.
"But he was not pleased," Caroline told Jack, gravely. "Your father strenuously objected, in fact."
"He objected to being my audience of one?"
"To the very idea of an audience of one, Jack. William was opposed to the concept aesthetically."
"Why?" Jack asked. He'd noticed that she'd now said the name William twice.
Caroline sighed. (No more perishable beauty ever existed.) "Well," she said, "I think his theory more aptly applies to organs."
"Why organs?"
"Your father insisted that you should be taught to play your heart out, Jack. As for your audience--if only in your mind's eye--they were all the wretched, down-on-their-luck and hard-of-hearing souls in the hindmost pews of the church, and beyond."
"Beyond what?"
"He meant even the drunks, sleeping it off in the streets and alleys outside the church. That's what William said."
He meant even the prostitutes within hearing of the Oude Kerk, Jack was thinking; indeed, his dad must have meant that Jack should be reaching vastly more than an audience of one. (That is, if he was any good.)
"I think I get it," Jack told Caroline.
"I wouldn't call it a correspondence, Jack. We exchanged, at most, two or three letters. I wouldn't want you to think that I still hear from him."