The Christmas Cantata (The Liturgical Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

then that Miss Porkington saw the wisdom of relocating to another county.
    "How about some scrambled eggs with this?" asked Dave, taking two ham biscuits and reaching for the strawberry preserves.
    "No eggs," snarled Pete. "You'll get what you get." His voice dropped to a mumble. "...Bunch of fat-cat, freeloading city employees..."
    "Why the change in your yearly holiday curmudgeonry?" Cynthia asked me. "Pete's been acting like this for a week now."
    "Oh, I'm still embracing my inner Scrooge," I said, "but it sort of has to do with that music you gave me."
    "Really?" said Cynthia. "So it's good?"
    "It is good," I said, at the same time watching Meg catch Nancy's eye and soundlessly move her lips to form the words, "No, it's not."
    "Quite frankly," I continued, "I'm intrigued. If it was performed on Christmas Eve at St. Barnabas in 1942, someone must remember it."
    "So it's the mystery that woos you," said Nancy. It was a statement rather than a question.
    "Perhaps," I said, "but it's a attractive and interesting work by a pretty good composer. If the choir can learn it, we can go ahead and perform it on Christmas Eve."
    "No, we can't," mouthed Meg.
     

Chapter 4
     
    Moving to Henry's hometown in the mountains was not something that she wanted to do. At least not yet. But he'd asked her to do it, to be his link to his parents to whom he was not particularly close. He felt guilty about that, and she agreed to move into his small house in St. Germaine. She did not know his parents well, but they were pleasant enough to her, seeing as she was the "right" sort of person and her family was well connected to the Vanderbilts.
    She wrote to Henry everyday—sometimes twice—then sealed her missives inside a special armed forces envelope, addressed it carefully, walked the three blocks to the post office, and mailed it. She didn't know if he got them in a timely fashion, but suspected that he didn't. She didn't receive a letter every day, but then, didn't expect one. His letters to her came in packets. Maybe five, maybe twenty. There was no rhyme nor reason. She might receive a packet of letters on a Tuesday, then nothing for two weeks, then another packet on a Friday, then yet another the following Monday, and Monday's letters were actually written before the letters in the two earlier packets.
    She tore through them as quickly as she received them, devouring Henry's words as soon as they landed in her hands, then spent hours putting them in sequence and rereading them, trying to get a sense of chronology, but not only that. She wanted to, needed to, discern his mood, his level of anxiety, his sentiments about the war; but he only wrote about the weather, about army buddies, about North Africa and the cities he'd seen. He never mentioned the battles he fought, the horrific death she knew he must be witnessing, the inhumanity that was part of his everyday life. She understood that he didn't want to worry her, but this did not assuage her fretfulness.
    What she loved the most, and so read over and over, was when he wrote about their coming life together. He had plans, big plans. After he got back to the States, he'd work for the family for a few years to save money, then move into banking when the time was right. Henry Greenaway was going to open a bank. He had the connections from his Yale days and he already had investors. And he wanted her to follow her music career wherever her talent might take her. Children? Sure, but there was no rush. This was his dream...their dream...and he wrote about it often.
     
    * * *
     
    "Just what is this?" asked Marjorie suspiciously, thumbing through her copy of La Chanson d'Adoration. "Who is this Elle de Fournier? Some friend of yours?"
    Marjorie Plimpton was generally the first person to show up for choir rehearsal. She had been a soprano in her youth, but by middle age, cigar smoking and gin consumption had taken her voice down to alto, and now, as she approached her eighties, deep into the