Brandon climbed the stairs of the Grand Hall two at a time, with the radio bouncing on his belt, and I heard his footsteps ring on the iron treads and then go silent on the landing under the clock. There was a long pause. The family from Iowa and the school group craned their necks. Then his voice came down from the gallery, thin and shaking. “Oh, my God. It says, This clock was restored to service on Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty four, by Augustus Fenn, age twenty one, after standing silent for eleven years.” I am Augustus Fenn, eighty three years old, and I stood at the foot of the stairs with my hand on the old oak railing, which I was never supposed to touch.
In 1953, the great clock above the Grand Hall stopped, and nobody in the city knew how to start it. For eleven years, travelers looked up at silent hands. In 1964, I was twenty one, an apprentice to a watchmaker on Cherokee Street, and the railroad quietly asked if the boy might try. I spent forty nights in the dust of the tower with a lantern and a bag of tools, and on Christmas Eve, as the last train left, I wound the brass key, and the clock began to tick. I repaired watches for thirty years afterward, and told almost nobody.
The museum director, Eleanor Dunn, walked across the marble floor with her reading glasses swinging on their chain and took my hands in both of hers. “Mr. Fenn,” she said, with her voice breaking, “I have run this museum for nineteen years. I have always wanted to meet the man who started the clock. We thought you had passed.” The school group had gone quiet. A teacher took off her glasses and wiped them. The family from Iowa stood with their hands clasped, and a small boy in a Cardinals cap tugged his mother sleeve and asked what a winding key was.
A brass winding key on an old watch chain gave one retired watchmaker the length of a Saturday to bring a young guard back to the clock in St. Louis.
I gave my terms when Brandon came down the stairs with his face wet. “Young man, I am not angry. You are twenty four, and you were doing your job, which is guarding an old building from a hundred years of careless hands. I have three small requests. Take me up the stairs, because I have not been inside that tower in sixty years. Let me wind the clock, once, with my own key, in front of these children. And learn how it works, every wheel and spring, so that someone in this building will always know how to start it again.”
Brandon stopped on the bottom step and took off his blue blazer, as if its weight were too much to bear. “Mr. Fenn, I have worked here two years,” he said. “I give a tour twice a day. I tell people that the clock was restored by a team of railroad engineers in the sixties.” He swallowed. “I never climbed the stairs. I read that line in a brochure, and I never checked.” His voice shook. “I told you to wait outside for your tour bus. You built the heart of this hall, and I told you to leave it. I am so sorry, sir.”
But a young man in the grip of shame will sometimes do an impulsive thing. Brandon reached out, unhooked the brass winding key from my watch chain, and ran across the hall for the staff stairway, shouting that he would take it up and check the number on the clock mechanism himself. He reached the first landing. The museum director stepped across the foot of the stairs with her reading glasses flying. The teacher with the school group put out an arm. And the boy in the Cardinals cap, who had darted past everyone, wedged himself in the doorway like a cork.
Brandon stopped at the landing with the brass key in his fist, looking down into the faces of thirty schoolchildren, the director, the family from Iowa, and me, the old man in the vest. He seemed to see the whole hall at once, the vaulted ceiling, the oak counter, the light coming down in bars from the high windows. He lowered his arm and came down the stairs very slowly, one at a time, and stopped in front of me. He held out the key on both palms. “Mr. Fenn,” he said, “would you please show me how to use it?”
The consequences were wonderful and a little dusty. That afternoon, in front of two hundred people, Brandon and I climbed the three hundred and twelve steps to the clock tower, and I wound the clock with my own key, one slow turn at a time, while he held the lantern. The great hands trembled and began to move. Brandon cried, and so did the director. The museum rewrote the plaque beneath the clock with the full story, and Brandon, who knew the tower now like a book, led the tours of it himself on Saturdays.
In the name of my wife Dorothea, who passed in 2020, I started the Dorothea Fenn Fund. It pays for apprenticeships in clock and watch repair and for restoration of old public clocks that have gone silent, in St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson counties. In the first year we placed nine apprentices with master watchmakers and restarted five town clocks. One was a seventeen year old from Soulard, the son of a bus driver, who bent over a pocket watch with a loupe at his eye and said he had never heard anything so beautiful as the sound of it ticking.
On a bright Saturday in the fall, I stood in the Grand Hall with a cup of coffee and watched Brandon lead a group of schoolchildren up the stairs, talking about gears. When they reached the landing under the clock, he stopped and pointed. “Who can read the name on that plaque?” he asked. A hand shot up, small and sticky with candy. “It says Augustus Fenn,” the girl said. “And he is right there!” Thirty heads turned. I lifted my cup to them. The big hands of the clock, which I had wound with my own key, ticked quietly onto the hour.
