Speaker 1: Us studious the choir at midnight. Grace had worked late again,
the kind of late that made the walk home feel
longer than it was. The office building on Fourteenth Street
was empty when she locked the door behind her, and
the streets were nearly deserted except for the occasional taxi
drifting past with its light on. It was just past midnight,
and the air was cool, and the city had that
particular quality of quiet that only happens in the deep hours,
when even the loudest places have finally settled down to
a low murmur. She had walked half a block when
she heard it, music somewhere ahead of her, drifting out
into the night from a doorway she could not yet see.
It was not loud. It was not the kind of
music that called attention to itself. It was the kind
of music that you could easily walk past without noticing,
except that Grace had grown up in a house where
music was always playing, and she had trained herself to
listen for it. She followed the sound for two blocks,
past a closed bakery and a closed book shop, until
she came to a small stone church with a wooden
door propped open, a strip of warm yellow light fell
across the sidewalk from inside, and the music was coming
from there. It was voices, she realized, many voices, singing
together in a harmony so perfectly blended that it sounded
like a single instrument. She stopped at the door and
looked inside. The church was small, with wooden pews arranged
in two sections facing a central aisle, and at the
front there was a modest altar and a small organ,
and a poire of perhaps twenty people standing in two rows.
They were singing something old, a hymn she half remembered
from her childhood, something with the word mourning in it.
Their eyes were mostly closed, and their faces were tilted
slightly upward, and they swayed very gently in time with
the music. Grace stood at the door for a long moment,
unsure whether she should go in. The church was not
her church, and the choir was not her choir, and
the music was not for her. But the music was
so beautiful, and the night was so long, and she
had not slept well in days, and the door was open,
so she slipped inside and sat down in the last pew,
near the back, where the shadows were deepest. She did
not know how long she sat there. The first hymn ended,
and there was a moment of quiet while the choir
members looked at their music and the organist adjusted a page.
Then they began again, a different piece, something slower and
more melancholy that Grace did not recognize at all. The
notes hung in the air like the smell of incense,
subtle and pervasive, and the small church seemed to vibrate
gently with each chord. She closed her eyes and listened.
The voices rose and fell around her, sometimes in unison,
sometimes in parts that wove together in ways that should
have been complicated, but were actually simple, the kind of
simple that only comes from long practice and deep familiarity.
She could hear individual voices within the larger sound, a
soprano with a clear, bright tone, a bass that anchored
the harmony, an alto that floated somewhere in between. The
music moved her in a way she had not expected.
She had come to the church tired and distracted, thinking
about the e mail she had forgotten to send, and
the breakfast she had skipped, and the apartment she would
return to empty. But the music swept all of that aside.
It filled the space where her worries had been replacing
them with something quieter and more patient, something that did
not demand anything of her except that she listen. After
a while, she stopped trying to identify individual songs and
simply let the sound wash over her. The harmonies built
and resolved and built again. The organ provided a soft
foundation beneath the voices. The wooden pews were cool beneath
her hands. The night outside the open door continued its
slow passage, but inside the church time had become a
different thing, soft and unhurried and without edges. She thought
about all then night she had walked home late and
not stopped. All the time, she had been too tired
or too distracted to pay attention to the sounds around her.
The city was full of music if you knew how
to listen for it, But most of the time she
did not know how, or did not have the patience,
or was simply too caught up in her own small
concerns to notice. Tonight, she had noticed, and the noticing
had brought her here. The choir sang for perhaps another
half hour. Grace did not count the songs or mark
the time. She sat in the back pew with her
eyes closed and listened to every note, and when the
music finally stopped and the choir members began quietly putting
away their folders and gathering their coats, she stood up
slowly and slipped out the way she had come in.
No one stopped her, No one asked who she was
or why she had been there. She was simply a visitor,
a tired woman who had walked into a small church
at midnight and had sat in the back pew and
had listened. The church did not need to know more
than that, and she did not need to give more
than that. Outside, the air was cooler than it had
been when she arrived. The rain had stopped, and the
clouds had thinned, and a few stars were visible between
the buildings. Grace stood on the sidewalk for a moment,
breathing deeply, feeling the music still echoing somewhere inside her.
Then she turned and began the walk home slower, now
less distracted, taking the time to notice the small sounds
of the night, the hum of a street light, the
distant bark of a dog, the soft click of her
own shoes on the wet pavement. When she reached her
building and climbed the stairs to her floor. She unlocked
her door and stepped into her quiet apartment. The kitchen
light was on a timer. The kettle sat on the
counter where she had left it. Everything was exactly as
she had left it, but she felt different, as if
she had brought something home with her from the church,
something she could not name but did not want to
let go of. She put the kettle on, even though
it was past one in the morning, and sat at
her kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a warm mug,
and let the music in her head play on. She
knew she would sleep well to night. She knew she
would dream of harmonies and warm yellow light and the simple,
beautiful sound of people singing together in a small church
at midnight. She knew these things with a quiet certainty
that asked nothing of her except that she close her
eyes and rest