Chapter 8: The Anniversary Clock

The anniversary clock sat under a glass dome that was chipped at the base, a small crescent of glass missing from the rim, and through the dome Henry could see the mechanism — the brass movement, the four rotating balls of the torsion pendulum, and the mainspring barrel — and everything was still, had been still for eleven years, the four balls frozen in whatever position they had occupied when the torsion spring broke and the pendulum stopped turning and the clock died, which is not the right word for what happens when a clock stops but is the word people use, is the word Sarah Halliday's son had almost used when he told Henry that his mother still wound the spot on the mantel where the clock had been.

Torsion spring broken. Glass dome chipped.

A torsion spring is different from a suspension spring. A suspension spring hangs vertically and flexes side to side as the pendulum swings, a thing bending. A torsion spring hangs vertically and twists, rotating clockwise and then counterclockwise, a thing turning, and the four balls at the bottom — usually brass, usually polished, usually arranged in a cross pattern — rotate with the spring, spinning one way and then the other, slowly, hypnotically, the kind of motion that you can watch for minutes without thinking, the kind of motion that empties the mind the way watching water or fire empties the mind, and this is why anniversary clocks are given as gifts, why they are placed on mantels and in china cabinets and on dressers in bedrooms — not because they are accurate (they are not, they are terrible timekeepers, prone to drift and variation) but because they are beautiful, because the motion is beautiful, because the slow turning of the four balls is a small mesmerizing performance that says time is passing in a way that is more felt than read.

Sarah Halliday's anniversary clock was German, a Schatz, the most common maker, the maker that produced millions of these clocks in the 1950s and 1960s, selling them through department stores and gift shops, marketing them as wedding gifts and anniversary gifts and retirement gifts, the clock you gave when you wanted to say this marks an occasion, this commemorates a moment, this is not just a clock but a monument to a particular day, and Henry thought about the particular day this clock commemorated — a wedding, Sarah Halliday's wedding, the day she married the man whose death in 2018 had left her winding the empty spot on the mantel every Sunday morning.

He lifted the dome. The chip at the base was small, aesthetic rather than structural, and he set the dome aside and looked at the mechanism. The torsion spring was broken, as the ticket said, snapped cleanly near the top where it attached to the suspension block, and the four balls hung from the broken spring like fruit from a cut branch, inert, unmoving, and Henry lifted them away and held the broken spring in his hand.

It was thin. Thinner than the suspension spring in the schoolhouse regulator, thinner than a human hair but not by much, a ribbon of spring steel so fine that it was nearly transparent, and it had broken the way thin things break — not with a dramatic snap but with a quiet giving way, the steel simply deciding, after eleven years of twisting and untwisting, that it had twisted enough, that the fatigue had accumulated to the point of failure, that the internal structure of the metal — the crystal lattice, the molecular bonds, the forces that held the steel together — had been stressed beyond their capacity and the spring was done.

Henry had torsion springs in stock. Alistair had kept them in the same drawer as the suspension springs, in a smaller compartment, labeled by length and thickness, and Henry found the right one — 0.002 inches thick, six inches long, the standard Schatz replacement — and he threaded it through the suspension block and attached the four balls at the bottom and gave them a gentle push and they turned, clockwise, slowly, the spring twisting, storing energy in the twist, and then they stopped and reversed, counterclockwise, the spring unwinding, releasing the energy, and they turned and stopped and reversed again, and the torsion pendulum was oscillating, was regulating, was doing its slow hypnotic dance.

He engaged the escapement. The anniversary clock used a different type of escapement than the other clocks Henry had repaired — not an anchor escapement, not a lever escapement, but a platform escapement, a small self-contained escapement mounted on a platform above the movement, and the platform had its own balance wheel and its own pallet fork and its own escape wheel, a clock within a clock, a mechanism within a mechanism, and Henry checked it and it was fine, the balance wheel oscillating, the pallet fork rocking, the escape wheel advancing, and the clock began to tick, a faint tick, barely audible, the tick of a clock that whispers rather than speaks.

He wound it. Anniversary clocks are called anniversary clocks because they run for a year on a single winding — 400 days, to be precise, which is more than a year, which means you wind it once and forget about it and remember it a year later when it stops, which is why they are also called 400-day clocks — and Henry turned the winding key slowly, carefully, because the mainspring in a 400-day clock is delicate, designed to deliver a tiny amount of energy over a very long time, and overwinding can damage it, can set it, can break it, and Henry counted the turns the way Alistair had taught him — thirty-three half-turns for a Schatz, no more — and at thirty-three he stopped and the mainspring was wound and the clock would run for four hundred days.

He set it on the bench and watched it. The four balls turned. The spring twisted and untwisted. The tick was barely there, a pulse, a heartbeat so faint you could only hear it if you held the clock to your ear, and Henry held it to his ear and listened and the tick was there, was real, was the sound of a mechanism that had been still for eleven years coming back to life.

He regulated it. The regulation of an anniversary clock is done by adjusting the position of the four balls — moving them in or out along their arms, changing the moment of inertia, changing the period of oscillation — and Henry adjusted them with a small screwdriver, a quarter-turn in, timing the clock against his watch, another quarter-turn, timing again, until the clock was keeping time, approximately, within the limits of what a 400-day clock can do, which is plus or minus five minutes a week, which is terrible, which is laughably bad by the standards of a Swiss chronometer, but which is good enough for a clock that sits on a mantel and turns its four balls and looks beautiful and reminds you of your wedding day.

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 11/2. New torsion spring (Schatz replacement). Platform escapement serviced. Wound (33 half-turns). Timekeeping: +/- 5 min/week (within spec). Glass dome chipped — cosmetic only, no replacement available.

Then he called Sarah Halliday.

Her son answered. "Hello?"

"This is Henry Osgood, from the clock shop. The anniversary clock is ready."

"Hold on. I'll get my mother."

A rustling. Footsteps. A woman's voice, distant, then closer.

"Hello? This is Sarah."

"Mrs. Halliday, your anniversary clock is repaired."

Silence. Then: "Oh."

"It's running. The torsion spring was broken. I replaced it. The glass dome has a chip, but it's cosmetic. I couldn't find a replacement dome."

"The chip was there when I brought it in. My husband knocked it with his elbow once, reaching for something on the shelf above. He felt terrible. He bought me flowers. I told him the chip gave the clock character."

"It does."

"My husband died," Sarah said, and the way she said it — flat, factual, the way you say a thing you have said many times, a thing that has been worn smooth by saying — told Henry that she had been saying it for eight years, had been saying it to doctors and lawyers and the woman at the bank and the man at the grocery store, had been saying it the way you say your address, a fact, a coordinate, a location in the geography of grief.

"I know," Henry said. "Your son told me. I'm sorry."

"He gave me the clock for our wedding. 1982. We were married at St. Augustine's. It was raining. He had the clock in the back seat of the car, wrapped in a towel. He gave it to me at the reception. In front of everyone. He was that kind of man — he liked to give things in front of people. He liked the audience."

"It's a good clock," Henry said, because he did not know what else to say, because what else can you say when a woman is telling you about her wedding day and her dead husband and a clock that he gave her in the rain.

"I'll come get it," she said. "Tomorrow. Is that all right?"

"Of course."

"Will you show me? When I come? Will you show me how to wind it? He always wound it. Every year, on our anniversary. February 22nd. He would wind it and I would make dinner and we would — it was our ritual. Like your father and Marion and the tea."

Henry paused. "You know about the tea?"

"Everyone knows about the tea. It's Montpelier. Everyone knows everything."

Henry smiled — his second smile in a month, which was an unusual frequency, which was an acceleration of the smile rate, and he thought about acceleration and deceleration and the anniversary clock's four balls turning faster and slower and the way time itself seems to accelerate and decelerate depending on what is happening inside it, how grief slows time and joy speeds it and boredom stops it and the clocks keep ticking regardless.

"I'll show you how to wind it," he said.

---

Sarah Halliday came the next day. She was in her seventies, a small woman in a blue coat, her hair silver, her eyes clear and watchful, and she carried a canvas bag, the same kind of canvas bag that Polly Arsenault had carried, and Henry thought that there must be a factory somewhere that made these bags, these sturdy practical bags that women of a certain age carried to shops and markets, bags that were not purses and not backpacks but something in between, something that said I am here to carry something home.

He brought the anniversary clock from the shelf. He set it on the counter. The four balls were turning, slowly, the spring twisting and untwisting, the motion hypnotic, and Sarah Halliday looked at it and her hands came up to her mouth and she pressed her fingertips against her lips and she did not speak.

Henry waited.

"It's turning," she said.

"Yes."

"It's been still for so long. I forgot what it looked like when it turned."

"The torsion spring was broken. I replaced it."

"Is it the same? The motion? Is it the same as it was?"

Henry considered this. The spring was different — a new spring, a replacement, not the original — and a different spring might have a slightly different elasticity, a slightly different period, a slightly different feel, and the motion might be fractionally different, imperceptibly different, different in a way that only a physicist could measure and no human could perceive. But the motion looked the same. The four balls turned at the same speed, in the same arc, with the same slow hypnotic grace.

"It's the same," he said.

Sarah touched the glass dome with her fingertip. She found the chip. She traced the edge of it, the crescent of missing glass.

"His elbow," she said. "He was reaching for a book. He loved books. He read three a week. History, mostly. He said history was the only subject that told you what happened, and what happened was the only thing worth knowing."

She looked up at Henry. "How much do I owe?"

Alistair had written no price on the ticket. Henry thought about the cost — the torsion spring, five dollars; the labor, two hours; the expertise, fifty years of accumulated knowledge passed from hand to hand across generations — and he said, "Seventy-five dollars."

Sarah paid. She picked up the clock and held it at arm's length and the four balls turned and the glass dome caught the light from the shop window and threw it across the counter in small moving patches, and she set the clock in the canvas bag, carefully, upright, the dome protected by a dish towel she produced from her coat pocket, a woman who had come prepared, who had thought about how to carry a glass dome home, who had planned for this.

"Show me how to wind it," she said.

Henry took the winding key from the drawer. It was a small key, brass, with a square socket, and he showed her: insert the key, turn clockwise, thirty-three half-turns, no more. He counted them for her. She counted with him, her lips moving silently, the way you count in church, the way you count the stairs, the way you count the things that matter.

"Thirty-three," she said.

"Every year. On your anniversary, if you like."

"February 22nd."

"February 22nd."

She took the key. She put it in her pocket. She picked up the bag with the clock in it.

"My son said I wind the empty space on the mantel," she said. "He told you that."

"He did."

"He thinks it's — I don't know what he thinks. Sad, maybe. Or crazy. Winding a space where a clock used to be."

"It's not crazy."

"I know it's not crazy. It's a ritual. It's the thing I do on Sunday mornings because that's when George wound the clock, on Sunday mornings, even though the anniversary was in February. He wound it on Sundays because he said Sunday was the day of rest and the clock needed rest too, which doesn't make any sense because winding a clock is the opposite of rest, it's storing energy, it's preparing for work, but George said it and I did it and now I do it without the clock because —"

She stopped. She was holding the bag with both hands. The four balls were turning inside the bag, inside the towel, inside the glass dome, invisible but turning, and Henry could hear the faint tick, the whisper, the heartbeat.

"Because the winding is the thing," she said. "Not the clock. The winding. The reaching for the key. The turning. The counting. Thirty-three. The putting back. That's the thing. That's what I miss. Not the clock. The winding."

She left. The bell rang. Henry stood behind the counter and thought about rituals and about the difference between the thing and the doing of the thing, between the clock and the winding, between the tea and the bringing of the tea, between the repair and the repairing, and he thought that maybe this was what Marion understood, what Marion had been trying to say about the two cups — that the ritual was the container, that the container preserved the shape, that the shape was what mattered, not the contents, because the contents were gone, the friend was dead, the husband was dead, the father was dead, but the shape remained, the ritual remained, the winding of the empty space, the pouring of the second cup, the sitting at the bench, the picking up of the tools, and the shape was enough, was all you had, was the thing that kept the ending from becoming the going.

---

That evening Henry did not go to Cal's. It was Thursday, beer night, but he did not go. He stayed in the shop. He sat at the bench in the lamplight and looked at the remaining clocks and thought about what was ahead.

The bracket clock. The travel alarm. The desk clock. The ship's clock. His mother's Ansonia. The last one.

Six. Plus the cuckoo clock, which was done, and the anniversary clock, which was done. Eight of fourteen finished. Six to go. The complications.

He reached for the bracket clock. It was English, mahogany, the case decorated with brass fittings and a carrying handle at the top, the kind of clock that sat on a bracket on the wall or on a mantel or on a desk, the kind of clock that English clockmakers had been making since the seventeenth century, the kind of clock that chimed the quarter hours, that announced not just the hour but the quarter-hour, that divided time into fifteen-minute segments and sounded each one with a sequence of notes, a melody, a small song, and James Okonkwo's bracket clock chimed the Westminster quarters — the same melody as Big Ben, the four-note phrase that everyone knows, the phrase that is so embedded in the culture that it has become the sound of time itself, the sound that means an hour has passed, a quarter has passed, time is moving, pay attention.

Quarter-hour chime out of tune.

Out of tune. The chime was there, the mechanism worked, the hammers fell on the bells, but the notes were wrong, the intervals were off, the melody was distorted, and a Westminster chime that is out of tune is like a word that is misspelled — you can still read it, you can still understand it, but you know it's wrong, it grates, it nags, it tells you that something is off, that the mechanism that produces the sound is not aligned with the mechanism that produces the expectation.

Henry would need to tune the bells. He would need to file them, carefully, removing material from the rim to raise the pitch or from the center to lower it, the way a piano tuner adjusts the tension of a string, the way a guitar player frets a note, finding the exact frequency, the exact vibration, the exact correspondence between what the bell produces and what the ear expects.

This was delicate work. This was the kind of work that required not just skill but hearing, the ability to distinguish between a note that was correct and a note that was almost correct, the ability to hear the difference between 440 hertz and 442 hertz, the difference between in tune and out of tune, and Henry had this ability, had always had it, had played piano as a boy, had had an ear, as the music teacher said, had had the kind of ear that could hear a wrong note in a chord the way most people could see a crooked picture on a wall, instinctively, immediately, without analysis.

He would start tomorrow. Tonight he would sit at the bench and listen to the clocks and think about tuning and about the anniversary clock turning in Sarah Halliday's canvas bag and about the winding of the empty space and about the rituals that preserve the shape of the things we have lost.

The cuckoo clock struck eight. The bird emerged and called eight times and retreated and the door closed and the shop was quiet. Henry turned off the lamp. He climbed the stairs. He lay in bed and listened to the clocks and the silence between the clocks and the night around the silence and the town around the night and the mountains around the town and the world around the mountains, and somewhere in the world Thomas Wren was living without his Elgin and D.K. was living without her carriage clock and Edith Calloway was in a room in Rutland and Sarah Halliday was placing an anniversary clock on a mantel and winding it, perhaps, winding it right now, counting thirty-three, placing the key in the drawer, standing back, watching the four balls turn, and the clock was keeping time again, was turning again, was doing the thing it had been made to do, and the chip in the dome was character, and the motion was the same, and the winding was the thing.