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on a gust of wind. Soon she found herself in a neighborhood of very old, mostly abandoned buildings with part-collapsed roofs, and thistles and young trees growing everywhere in profusion; no one appeared to be living here now. Over the street was a curious carved archway across which monkeylike figures scuttled daringly, giggling; seeing Magdalena, they whistled and hooted at her, and vanished. Children?
    As Magdalena stared upward, a handful of pebbles fell at her feet. She hoped they hadn't been meant for her.
    Quickly Magdalena walked on, climbing a steep hill at the top of which was a very old church made of crude, weatherworn stone; the singing seemed to be issuing from the rear of this church, so Magdalena hiked into the churchyard, a tangle of wild rose and briars amid which grave markers tilted at crazy angles. On the markers were chiseled words too faint to be discerned but the numerals were clearer—1712, 1723, 1693. Magdalena stared. So long ago! She had been born in 1912. It made her feel dizzy to contemplate the emptiness before she'd come into being, like a geometry problem of incalculable complexity.
    The singer was close by, voice lifting in pure, heartrending sound. A tenor voice. Singing a church hymn, obviously a Protestant hymn, not known to Magdalena. Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh… There was a shadowy recess where the church walls formed a three-sided rectangle with the crumbling stone wall of the churchyard; or perhaps it was an actual entrance into the interior of the church; the singer stood just inside, oddly in the dark, practicing, rehearsing. A young man, Magdalena thought. She strained to see him without drawing too close, her heart beating quickly. Shadows of the evening… steal across the sky. There was a pause, and a sound of hoarse breathing, and again the song resumed, at the same pitch and in the same tempo. Now the day… This time there seemed to be a just-perceptible strain to the singer's voice, an undercurrent of agitation, though it was no less beautiful than before, and perhaps even more beautiful. Magdalena listened, transfixed. She seemed to know that the young tenor would be handsome, dark-haired like the men she'd been seeing in lower Edmundston, with bright dark eyes, thick-lashed eyes. Yet she was fearful of revealing herself to him, even to walk casually across the churchyard so that she could, by glancing sideways, peer into the church. He might abruptly cease his singing if he knew he was being heard. And Magdalena had no business in the churchyard of a Protestant church, after all.
    But she listened for a daringly long time, taking care to keep herself hidden, until at last she crept stealthily away, for it was nearing dusk.
    Thinking, as she made her way back to Charter Street, to the high, hilly residential neighborhood above Edmundston and to the massive front door of her aunt's house at which she had to ring the bell to be admitted, Who is he? What does he look like? Why didn't I try to see him, at least?
     
     
    4.
     
    So it happened that Magdalena Schön fell in love. Though she was never to acknowledge the fact.
    Hearing the singer's seductive voice not only as she stood leaning out her window lifting her face to the fresh, gusty air, but as she slept in her bed of white linens, white satin and wool; and during the day, at odd, unpredictable moments elsewhere in her aunt's house; sometimes even in Aunt Erica's presence as the old woman hoarsely, excitedly chattered. So faint as to be almost inaudible, yet unmistakable. Now the day is over… Shadows of the evening… She who had not once felt homesick for Black Rock, for the crowded rooms of her childhood, nor even for her parents, sisters and brothers she believed she had loved, now felt a heart-longing for lower Edmundston; for the Merrimack River and the Merrimack Bridge and the waterfront docks and the ancient weather-stained church with its crazily tilting grave markers and the faceless singer