Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

But Toby knew he could not give enough time to that, and having trained Emily and Jacob as to how to watch and handle their drunken mother, he was out on the French Quarter streets all Saturday and Sunday, the lute case open at his feet as he played, earning every cent he could to supplement his father's meager pension.

Fact was, there was no pension, though Toby never told anyone that. There were just the silent stipends of the family and the regular handouts of other policemen, who had been no worse and no better than Toby's father. And Toby had to bring in the money for anything extra or "nice," and for the uniforms his brother and sister required, and any toys they were to have in the miserable apartment that Toby so detested. And though he worried every moment as to the condition of his mother at home, and the abilities of Jacob to keep her quiet should she go into a rage, Toby took great pride in his playing, and in the attitudes of the passersby who never failed to drop large bills in the case if they lingered.

Even though the earnest study of music went slowly for Toby, he still dreamed of entering the Conservatory of Music when he came of age, and of landing a job playing in a restaurant where his income would be steady. Neither plan was beyond possibility by any means, and he lived for the future, while struggling desperately through the present. Nevertheless when he played the lute, when he made enough money easily to pay the rent and buy the food, he knew a joy and a sense of triumph that was solid and beautiful.

He never ceased trying to cheer and comfort his mother and assure her that things would be better than they were now, that her pain would go away, and that they would someday live in a real house in the suburbs, and have a backyard for Emily and Jacob and a real front lawn and all the other things that normal life offered.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that someday, when Jacob and Emily were grown and married and his mother had been cured by all the money he would make, he would perhaps think again about the seminary. He couldn't forget what it had meant to him once, to serve Mass. He couldn't forget that he had felt called to take the host in his hands and say, "This is My Body," thereby making it the very flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. And many a time as he played on a Saturday evening, he turned to liturgical music that delighted the ever-shifting crowd as much as the familiar tunes of Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra that so delighted the audience. He cut a sharp picture as a street musician, hatless and trim in a blue wool jacket and dark wool pants, and even these traits gave him a sublime advantage.

The better he became, playing requests effortlessly and pulling the full range out of the instrument, the more the tourists and the natives grew to love him. He soon came to recognize regulars on certain nights, who never failed to give him the largest bills.

He sang one modern hymn,"I am the bread of life, he who comes to Me will not hunger ..." It was a rousing hymn, one that used his full range, and his full ability to forget everything else as he played, and those who clustered around him always rewarded him for it. In a daze, he'd look down and see the money that could buy him a little peace for a week or even more. And he'd feel like crying.

He also played and sang songs that he made up, variations on themes he'd heard in the records his teacher gave him. He wove together the airs of Bach and Mozart and even Beethoven, and other composers whose names he couldn't remember.

At one point he began to jot down some of his compositions. His teacher would help him to copy them outright. Music for the lute wasn't written like ordinary music. It was written in tabulature, and this he specially loved. But the real theory and practice of written music was hard for him. If only he could learn enough to teach music someday, he thought, even to little children, that would be a workable life. Soon enough, Jacob and Emily were able to dress themselves, and they too had the grave look of little adults as did he, riding alone on the St. Charles car to school, and never bringing anyone home as their brother had forbidden it. They learned how to do the wash, to iron the shirts and blouses for school, and how to hide the money from their mother, and distract her if she became maddened and started to tear the house to pieces.

"If you have to pour it down her throat, then do it," Toby told them, for in truth there were times when nothing but the drink would stop his mother from raving.

I observed all these things.

I turned the pages of his life and raised the light to read the finer print.

I loved him.

I saw theDaily Prayer Book ever on his desk, and beside it another book, which he read from time to time for pure delight, and sometimes read to Jacob and Emily.

This book wasThe Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente. He'd found it in the same Magazine Street shop where he'd found his books on crime and bloody murder, and he bought it, along with a life of St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton, which he struggled from time to time to read to himself though it was difficult.

You might say that he lived a life in which what he read was as important as what he played on the lute, and these things were as important to him as his mother, and Jacob and Emily.

His guardian angel, always desperate to guide him on the right path in the most chaotic of times, seemed perplexed by the combination of loves that gripped Toby's soul, but I didn't come to observe that angel, but only to see Toby, not the angel who labored so hard to keep faith blazing in Toby's heart that Toby would somehow save all of them.

One summer day, as Toby read on his bed, he turned over on his belly, clicked open his pen, and underlined these words:

As of faith we need only hold that the Angels are not endowed with cardiognosis (knowledge of the secrets of the heart) nor with a certain knowledge of future acts of the free will; these being exclusively divine prerogatives.

He had loved that sentence, and he had loved the atmosphere of mystery that enveloped him when he read this book.

In truth, he didn't want to believe that angels were heartless. Somewhere once he'd seen an old painting of the crucifixion in which the angels above had been weeping, and he liked to think that the guardian angel of his mother wept when he saw her drunken and despondent. If angels didn't have hearts or know hearts, he didn't want to know it, yet the concept enthralled him, and angels enthralled him, and he talked to his own angel as often as he could. He taught Emily and Jacob to kneel down every night and say the age-old prayer:

Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.

He even bought a picture of a guardian angel for them. It was a common enough picture, and he'd first seen a print of it himself in a grade school classroom. This print he matted and framed with the materials he could buy in the drugstore. And he hung it on the wall in the room the three of them shared, he and Jacob in the bunk bed and Emily against the far wall on her own cot, which could be folded up in the morning.