The Commission

The letter had been sitting on the workbench for three days before she opened it, wedged beneath a half-finished languid pipe whose tin alloy she had been testing for the bright flatness particular to the four-foot Principal rank, and she had known from the envelope alone what it would contain because the Diocese of Dijon used a cream stock with the episcopal seal embossed rather than printed, and her father had kept seven such envelopes in the top drawer of his desk, each one representing a stage of the commission that had consumed the last four years of his life, and when this eighth envelope arrived bearing her own name rather than his she understood that the diocese had learned what the village of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain had known for eleven months, which was that Edouard Pelletier was dead and his organ was not finished.

She had placed the languid pipe on a strip of green baize and picked up the envelope and set it down again.

Three days was not avoidance. Three days was the time it took to voice the remaining pipes of the Nasard two-and-two-thirds rank she had promised to the parish church in Semur-en-Auxois, a job her father had quoted at four thousand euros and which she was completing at that price though the hours already exceeded what the fee would cover, because to change the terms of a contract her father had made would be to announce that his workshop could not honor its own word, and the workshop's word was the only inheritance she intended to keep solvent.

The Nasard is a mutation stop, which means it sounds not at the pitch of the key depressed but at the interval of a twelfth above, and this interval — the third harmonic of the fundamental — gives the sound a nasal color that the French builders of the seventeenth century cultivated with a precision that their German contemporaries found excessive and their Italian contemporaries found amusing. Marguerite's father had loved the Nasard above all other stops because it was, he said, the stop that proved the organ was not a piano. A piano gives you the note you ask for. An organ gives you the note and its ghost.

She thought of this as she opened the envelope on the third day, standing at the workbench with the late October light coming through the workshop's north-facing windows, which her father had specified when he built the workshop in 1987 because north light does not shift with the hours and a voicer needs consistent light the way a painter does, not for color but for the detection of minute irregularities in the mouths of metal pipes, the exact curvature of the upper lip over which the wind-sheet breaks and from whose geometry the pipe's entire character derives.

The letter was signed by Monseigneur Roux, the auxiliary bishop, and by a second name she did not recognize, a Monsieur Lessard who bore the title of president of the Association des Amis de l'Orgue de la Cathedrale. The letter expressed condolences in the formal mode. It acknowledged the loss to the world of organ building. It noted that the contract for the construction of a forty-two-stop mechanical-action organ for the Cathedral of Saint-Benigne, Dijon, remained outstanding, and that the diocese, in consultation with the Association, wished to inquire whether Mademoiselle Pelletier would consider completing the instrument her father had begun.

They used the word "completing" rather than "finishing," which Marguerite noted because the two words, in the context of organ building, do not mean the same thing. To finish an organ is to bring it to the point where it can be played. To complete an organ is to realize the builder's intention in every detail — the scaling, the voicing, the temperament, the regulation of wind pressure, the action's touch — so that the instrument, when played, speaks as the builder heard it in his mind before a single pipe was cut. Her father had used the word "completion" only twice in her hearing, both times about instruments by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, and both times with the reverence other people reserved for cathedrals themselves.

She folded the letter and placed it in the top drawer of the desk, beside the seven earlier envelopes, and then she walked out of the workshop into the courtyard where the October afternoon was turning the limestone of the old wall the color of raw beeswax, and she stood there for several minutes with her hands at her sides, feeling the cold come up through the soles of her work boots from the flagstones her father had laid when she was nine, each one cut from local Comblanchien stone and fitted without mortar because he believed that anything worth building should be held together by precision rather than adhesive.

The courtyard separated the workshop from the house, which was the house in which she had been born and in which her father had died and in which she now lived alone, a condition she had not chosen and did not resist because resistance implied that solitude was an opponent rather than a weather, and Marguerite had learned from twenty years of working inside churches that weather was something you adjusted to rather than argued with. Churches are cold in winter and cool in summer and damp in all seasons, and if you are going to spend your life inside them you must dress for the cold and carry cloths for the damp and accept that your hands will sometimes be too stiff to do fine work until you have held them over a portable heater for ten minutes, which is exactly the amount of time her father said it took for the blood to remember that it was meant to move.

She went back into the workshop and sat at the desk and took out the letter and read it again, this time more slowly, attending not to the content, which she had absorbed on the first reading, but to the spaces between the sentences, the things the letter did not say.

It did not say how far the organ had progressed, though the diocese must have inspected the workshop. It did not say whether they had contacted other builders. It did not say what they knew about the state of her father's drawings, his pipe scales, his voicing notes. It did not say whether they expected her to follow his design or whether she would have latitude to make her own decisions. It did not say how much of the original fee remained, or whether they understood that the work her father had completed represented perhaps forty percent of the total, and that the remaining sixty percent — which included all of the voicing, much of the wind system, and the entirety of the action mechanism — was the sixty percent that separated a collection of wooden and metal parts from an instrument capable of filling a cathedral nave with sound.

Forty-two stops. She wrote the number on the margin of the letter, though she knew it as well as she knew the number of rooms in this house or the number of steps from the workshop to the church in the village where she had learned to play. Forty-two stops meant roughly twenty-five hundred pipes, distributed across three manuals and a pedalboard, organized into four divisions — Grand-Orgue, Positif, Recit, and Pedale — each division housed in its own case, each case supplied by its own wind chest, each wind chest fed by its own channel from the main reservoir, which in turn received its air from an electric blower that replaced the hand-pumped bellows of earlier centuries but that her father had specified with a particular motor whose speed produced a wind pressure of seventy-five millimeters on the water column, a pressure he had calculated over the course of six months by studying the acoustic properties of the cathedral nave, the height of the vault, the density of the stone, the reverberant time measured at various frequencies, all of which he had recorded in a notebook she had found in his desk three weeks after the funeral, a notebook she had not yet been able to open past the first page.

The first page said, in his handwriting, which was the handwriting of a man who had been trained as a draftsman before he became a builder and whose letters therefore had the mechanical consistency of an engraving: "Saint-Benigne, Dijon. Notes pour le harmonisation." Notes for the voicing.

Voicing is the act of giving each pipe its specific sound. It is done by hand, one pipe at a time, by adjusting the geometry of the pipe's mouth — the width of the flue from which the air emerges, the angle and height of the upper lip over which the air-sheet breaks, the presence or absence of ears on either side of the mouth that help to stabilize the sound, the depth and shape of nicking on the languid, which is the flat plate at the base of the mouth against which the air strikes before it is directed upward toward the lip. A voicer works with a knife, a burnishing tool, a set of mandrels for widening or narrowing the flue, and ears that can distinguish between a pipe that speaks with the voice the builder intended and a pipe that speaks with almost that voice, a difference that a casual listener might not detect but that an organist will feel in the resistance of the sound to the architecture of the room, the way a well-voiced pipe seems to push against the stone and come back changed while a poorly voiced pipe simply fills space and dissipates.

Her father had voiced every pipe he ever built. He had refused to delegate the work even when his hands grew stiff in his last years and Marguerite, who had been voicing pipes since she was sixteen, could do the work faster and — she suspected but never said — with more sensitivity to the upper harmonics that gave the French Romantic palette its distinctive warmth. He had refused because voicing was, for Edouard Pelletier, the point of everything. The cases could be built by cabinetmakers. The action could be assembled by mechanics. The wind system could be installed by anyone with a good level and a knowledge of leather. But the voicing was where the builder's ear met the pipe's potential, and the meeting had to be solitary because two ears in the same room would produce compromise rather than conviction, and an organ built on compromise would sound careful rather than alive.

She wondered, sitting at the desk with the letter in her hand and the October light beginning to fail, whether her father had known he would not finish the voicing. Whether the notebook represented an intention or a bequest. Whether the notes were written for himself or for her.

The workshop was quiet in the way it was always quiet at this hour, when the compressor that fed the voicing machine had been shut down and the only sound was the tick of the metal pipes cooling in the rack along the east wall, contracting microscopically as the temperature dropped, each pipe adjusting to the evening with the patience of an object that has no opinion about time. Her father had hung the pipes on the rack in the order he had voiced them, so the rack was a chronology of his life's work, beginning with the crude early pipes from his apprenticeship in Rambervillers and ending with the last pipes he had cut for the Dijon organ, a set of spotted-metal Montre eight-foot pipes whose alloy — seventy percent tin, thirty percent lead — he had cast on the workshop's casting bench three weeks before he died, pouring the molten metal onto the heated marble slab and drawing it into a sheet with the iron rake in a single continuous motion that Marguerite had watched from the doorway without entering because the casting required a concentration she would not interrupt and because, she realized now, she had been watching him with the attention you give to a thing you are memorizing.

The pipes hung on the rack like stopped bells, their mouths open, their bodies dark with the patina of unpolished tin, and she looked at them for a long time before she picked up the telephone and dialed the number printed at the top of the letter, below the episcopal seal, and asked to speak with Monseigneur Roux.

The conversation was brief. She said she had received the letter. He said he was grateful. She asked when they would like to discuss the terms. He said at her earliest convenience. She said she would come to Dijon on Thursday. He said Thursday was suitable. She asked whether she might see the cathedral space where the organ would be installed. He said of course, and added that the gallery had been reinforced the previous year according to her father's specifications, and that the wind trunks had been roughed in, and that the main case — the Grand-Orgue case, built of Burgundian oak by her father's cabinetmaker in Beaune — had been erected on the gallery and stood now empty in the north transept like a wardrobe waiting for clothes, and she thought this was a strange metaphor for a bishop to use but did not say so.

She hung up and sat in the workshop until the light was gone and the pipes on the rack were visible only as darker shapes against the dark wall, and then she went into the house and made coffee and drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the courtyard where the flagstones were blue in the last light, and she thought about the number forty-two.

Forty-two stops was not the largest organ her father had built, but it was the most considered. He had spent two years designing it before he cut a single pipe. The specification had gone through fourteen revisions, each one documented in the correspondence with the diocese that filled the seven cream envelopes in the drawer. The stoplist was classical in foundation — Principal chorus on the Grand-Orgue from sixteen-foot to mixture, a Positif with complete Cornet decompose for the French repertoire, a Recit expressif with Romantic reeds behind swell shutters — but it contained decisions that were distinctly his, choices that another builder of equal skill and knowledge might not have made.

The Voix Humaine, for example. Every French organ of this size would include a Voix Humaine, the trembling reed stop that imitates the human voice in the way that a painting of a face imitates a face — not by replication but by the evocation of the essential quality, which in the case of the voice is its instability, the fact that it is never quite in tune with itself, that it wavers and corrects and wavers again in the endless negotiation between intention and breath. But her father had specified the Voix Humaine at four-foot pitch rather than the conventional eight-foot, which would place it an octave higher than expected, in the register of a child's voice rather than an adult's, and when she had asked him why he had said nothing for a long time and then said that the cathedral was built for the glory of God and a child's voice was closer to that glory than an adult's because it had not yet learned to be careful with itself.

She had not understood this then. She was not sure she understood it now. But the specification was in the contract and the contract was with the diocese and the diocese had written to her, and if she accepted the commission she would have to build a four-foot Voix Humaine and voice it so that it trembled in the way a child's voice trembles when the child is speaking to someone it trusts absolutely, which is to say with a nakedness that the child does not recognize as nakedness because it has not yet learned that speech is a form of concealment.

She washed the coffee cup and set it on the rack and went upstairs and did not sleep and at some point in the night she got up and went down to the workshop and opened the drawer and took out her father's voicing notebook and turned to the second page.

The second page was a list of the forty-two stops, written in his draftsman's hand, each stop followed by a set of numbers that she recognized as his scaling specifications — the diameter and length of the representative pipe in each rank, from which all other pipes in the rank could be calculated using the halving ratio that determines how quickly the pipes narrow as the pitch rises. These numbers were familiar to her. She had helped him calculate many of them. They were the architectural facts of the organ, as public as a blueprint.

But beside each stop, in a column to the right, her father had written a word or phrase in a shorthand she had never seen him use, a private notation that was neither French nor any standard organ-building terminology she recognized. Beside the Montre 8' he had written "la riviere." Beside the Bourdon 16' he had written "sous la terre." Beside the Trompette 8' he had written "le premier mot." Beside the Voix Humaine 4' he had written "M."

She closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer and went upstairs and lay in the dark and listened to the house, which spoke the way all old houses speak, in the language of settling wood and contracting stone and the passage of air through gaps too small to see but not too small to hear, and she thought about the letter M and what it meant and whether it was a note about the sound he wanted or a note about the person for whom the sound was intended, and she did not sleep until the first birds began in the walnut tree outside the window, at which point she slept for three hours and woke to find that the morning was clear and cold and that she had already decided to go to Dijon.

Thursday arrived with the directness of a day that has been chosen for a specific purpose, and Marguerite drove the sixty kilometers from Flavigny in her father's van, which was a white Renault Master that smelled of pipe metal and leather and hide glue and in whose rear compartment the padded racks where finished pipes were transported still held the impressions of the last pipes her father had delivered, a set of wooden Bourdon 8' pipes for a church in Nuits-Saint-Georges whose parish priest had wept when the organ was inaugurated because he had not believed his small church deserved something that sounded like that, and her father had said afterward that the priest was wrong, that every church deserved exactly that, because the purpose of an organ was not to reward a congregation for its size but to reveal to any congregation, however small, the size of the sound that existed in their space and had been waiting for someone to release it.

The road from Flavigny to Dijon follows the valley of the Ozerain before joining the D905, which climbs briefly over a ridge and then descends through the Ouche valley into the city, and Marguerite drove it with the attention of someone who has driven it many times and therefore notices not the landmarks but the changes — a field newly plowed, a barn roof replaced, a stand of poplars that had been there in September and was not there now, cut for timber or for the disease that was taking the poplars across Burgundy with the systematic patience of a thing that cannot be argued with.

The Cathedral of Saint-Benigne sits at the western edge of the old city, its spire visible from the approach road, a Romanesque crypt beneath a Gothic nave beneath a nineteenth-century restoration that had replaced the original timber roof with iron trusses, which was regrettable for aesthetic reasons but advantageous for acoustics because iron does not absorb low frequencies the way timber does, and the organ her father had designed was an instrument that depended on low frequencies in the way a building depends on its foundation, the sixteen-foot stops providing a floor of sound on which everything else stood.

Monseigneur Roux met her in the narthex, a man of sixty with the particular thinness of someone who fasts not for health but for principle, and he shook her hand and said he was sorry about her father and she said thank you and he said shall we look at the gallery, and they climbed the narrow stone staircase that led to the tribune where the organ would stand, and when they emerged onto the gallery Marguerite saw the case for the first time.

It was enormous. She had seen the drawings. She had seen the scale model her father had built from balsa wood and kept on a shelf in the workshop. But drawings and models operate by substitution, they stand in for the thing itself, and the thing itself was seven meters tall and five meters wide and built of Burgundian oak that her father had selected personally from a forest near Citeaux, each board quarter-sawn to minimize expansion, and the case stood on the gallery with its pipe openings empty and its towers and flats bare and its carvings — acanthus leaves and wheat sheaves and a pelican feeding its young from its own breast, the traditional symbol of sacrifice that organ builders have placed on their cases since the seventeenth century — catching the light from the north clerestory windows, and Marguerite stood at the gallery rail and looked at the case and at the nave below it and at the vault above it and said nothing for what must have been a long time because when she looked at Monseigneur Roux he had the expression of someone who is waiting and who understands that the wait is necessary.

She said it was beautiful.

He said her father had been pleased with it.

She asked when the last time was that her father had visited. He said March, seven months before he died, and that he had stood in this same spot and said that the acoustic of the nave was finer than he had expected, that the reverberation at middle C was six seconds, which was long but not too long, and that the stone — Burgundian limestone, dense and reflective — would return the sound of the organ to the listener with a clarity that softer stones would not, so that the organ would seem to be not on the gallery but everywhere, which was, her father had said, the proper condition of sacred music, that it should be everywhere and nowhere, surrounding the listener without a discernible source, the way belief surrounds the believer or the way weather surrounds a body standing in a field.

Marguerite looked into the empty case. The interior was clean. The wind trunk rose from below the gallery floor and terminated at the level of the main wind chest, which had not yet been installed. The pallet box — the frame into which the individual pallets would be fitted, each pallet a thin wooden valve that opens when a key is depressed, admitting wind to the pipes above — stood in the corner of the gallery, partially assembled, the trackers that would connect it to the keyboard console still coiled in bundles like tendons waiting to be attached to bone.

She asked about the fee. Monseigneur Roux said he would prefer to discuss that in his office, where Monsieur Lessard would join them, and they descended the staircase and crossed the nave and entered the diocesan offices, which were in the old chapter house, and there she met Lessard, who was a retired engineer with the manner of a man who understands contracts and budgets and who looked at Marguerite with the careful assessment of someone who is not yet certain she can do what she is being asked to do.

The meeting lasted two hours. The terms were these: the original fee was three hundred and eighty thousand euros, of which one hundred and forty thousand had been paid in installments to her father. The remaining two hundred and forty thousand would be paid to Marguerite in four installments tied to milestones — wind system complete, action mechanism complete, all pipes installed, voicing and tuning complete. The deadline for the finished organ was eighteen months from the date of contract, which was ambitious but not impossible if she worked alone, which she intended to do, because the workshop was a one-person operation now and she did not trust another voicer to read her father's notes.

Lessard asked whether she had reviewed her father's plans for the organ. She said she had the drawings and the scaling specifications and the voicing notebook. He asked whether the plans were complete enough to build from. She said they were, which was true in the sense that her father's drawings were meticulous and his scaling numbers precise, but not true in the sense that the voicing notebook contained a private language she had not yet deciphered, and the voicing was the difference between an organ that functioned and an organ that lived.

She signed the contract on the desk of the auxiliary bishop, in the room where the afternoon light came through a window depicting Saint Benigne himself, the second-century missionary who had brought Christianity to Burgundy and who had been martyred, according to tradition, by having a stone tied to his feet and being thrown into a well, which Marguerite had always thought was a peculiar way to silence a man whose power was his voice but which now seemed, in the light of the contract she was signing, to have a relevance she could not quite articulate, something about the relationship between weight and depth and the fact that the deepest sounds require the most air and the most air requires the largest pipes and the largest pipes are the heaviest and the heaviest things are the ones most likely to fall.

She drove back to Flavigny in the late afternoon, the van empty, the road unwinding behind her, and when she arrived at the workshop she went directly to the desk and took out the voicing notebook and opened it to the page where her father had written, beside the forty-two stops, his private words, and she began to read them again, slowly, as if they were a language she had once known and had forgotten, or a language she had never known but whose grammar she might infer from the shapes of the words and the order in which they appeared, the way a child learns to speak not by studying rules but by listening to the sounds the adults make and guessing, with the desperate intelligence of a creature that knows its survival depends on communication, what those sounds might mean.

La riviere. Sous la terre. Le premier mot. M.

She closed the notebook and placed it on the desk and placed her hands flat on the desk on either side of it and sat there in the workshop with the pipes on the rack and the tools on the bench and the smell of metal and glue and the silence that was not silence but the accumulated sound of a room in which someone had worked for forty years and in which that person's absence was as audible as any sound, a low continuous tone like the sound a building makes when the wind moves through it, not a note but a presence, not music but the condition from which music might emerge if someone were to open the right valve and let the air through.

She would build the organ. She would read the notes. She would give the pipes breath.

But whose voice would come out was a question she could not yet answer, and she understood that the answering would take longer than the building, and that the building was estimated at eighteen months, and that eighteen months was both a long time and no time at all, depending on whether you measured it in days or in the number of decisions that would have to be made, each one irreversible, each one a commitment to a particular sound that, once the pipe was voiced, could not be unvoiced without destroying the pipe and starting again, which was, she thought, not unlike the way a person's voice, once formed, cannot be unformed, only listened to with greater or lesser attention, greater or lesser love.

She locked the workshop and went into the house and made dinner and ate it and washed the dishes and went to bed and lay in the dark and listened to the house and thought about the organ in the cathedral, standing empty on its gallery like a body waiting for breath, and she thought about her father's hands, which had been thick and precise and stained with the gray of pipe metal, and she thought about his voice, which had been low and even and which she could no longer hear in her memory with perfect accuracy, a fact that frightened her more than the commission or the deadline or the voicing notes or the letter M, because if she could not remember his voice then she could not know whether the organ she built would sound like the one he had heard in his mind, and if she could not know that then the question of whether to follow his notes or her own instinct was not a question of fidelity but a question of faith, and faith, as she understood it, was the decision to act as if you knew something you could not possibly know, which was, when she thought about it, exactly what a voicer does when she places her mouth on a pipe and blows and listens to the sound that comes out and decides, on the basis of that sound, what the pipe wants to be.