ROBERTO OF THE SEA
The sea brought Roberto to us, though he was as good as dead. A limp and lifeless child he was when deposited at our back door by a sea that had raged the evening before. On his behalf, most certainly, but more peculiarly in the interest of my miserable, lonesome self, has the roiling Atlantic shown an uncharacteristic magnanimity. Mercy. Charity.
I have never known a man yet I have become a mother, that without the attendant discomforts that ultimately culminate in the travail of birth. Roberto, once awake, latched onto me as though I were his true mother and was loath to leave my side. At first. By degrees, he weaned himself away from a comforting, protective embrace. The draw was not so much from without, that of a young man's being lured to high adventure - surely it had been adventure sufficient for a lifetime to be cast unwittingly into the drink - but the natural curiosity of a guileless young man who simply needed to explore his new world.
Roberto's nascent world - one of miraculous rebirth and subsequent discovery - was in a parallel course with the old and comfortable world inhabited by two lonely but amiable spinsters ...
Whose life has been irrevocably upended....
I live with my sister, Magda, in a stone cottage by the sea. That said, I am, nevertheless, alone. Alone in my thoughts and taunted mercilessly by unspoken passions. How can I express what has lain dormant within my bosom since youth's first natural, but unsettling, bloom? This is not to say that I am a morose and brooding old hen.
No, I am a fairly companionable woman when I permit myself to come out of my shell and enjoy the coral bells swaying briskly in the salt breeze and the motionless gull suspended in flight (whose only erratic movement is that produced by the buffeting offshore wind).
I envy that winged one his freedom, his clear, unchallenged view and his uncluttered mind. Since the Sea has sent her gift, Roberto, my mind has been cluttered with thoughts long abandoned. Accordingly, I am much too old to have my heart beat a tattoo and come bursting forth from my chest.
Magda Thurston-Page had her feet planted firmly upon the ground and her nose to the grindstone. That should prove a rather remarkable sight if one were compelled to take the old cliches literally. Magda - a true English lady though, queerly enough, named after an old Hungarian mistress of her father - remained, minus the colorful but overworked metaphors, a sensible and hardworking woman. Whereas her somewhat more ethereal sister, Lucille, could readily be found tracing patterns in the sky whilst perched languidly upon a slow-moving cloud. In a manner of speaking, naturally.
When Roberto became their unwitting guest (after all, the sea had spat him out upon the strand adjacent the base of the escarpment terminating the cottage property) both Magda and Lucille sought to make him comfortable, each in her own way. Ever the practical and no-nonsense facilitator, Magda prepared hearty meals to build up the emaciated lad, whereas Lucille saw the absolute necessity of placing a small vase of wildflowers on his tray. Each in her own way. After all, what is the benefit of a filled belly when the soul is wasting away?
Dr. Warner's initial disposition toward the water-logged Roberto was kindly, borne of his professional oath, firstly, and basic humanity, secondly. Any bruised and battered soul landed in a heap at your sandy back doorstep deserves and receives immediate first aid, no questions asked. Particularly so when his unconscious self is presently ill-disposed to pass the time in idle chat. As the gangly sea whelp gradually recovered his health, the doctor continued his ministrations on Roberto's behalf, but with less frequency. Magda and Lucille, his hostesses, were all too willing to provide his every need in the way of good Christian hospitality.
During his convalescence, Roberto received a number of visitors, some merely curious, others genuinely interested in making the stranger feel at home. A young lady by the name of Miranda, whose resident family went many generations back, came calling of a morning, a clutch of wildflowers in hand. An otherwise disconsolate Roberto (he was beginning to feel both restless and homesick) looked up at the fetching lass as she, announced by Lucille, walked toward him, bathed in the cheery sunlight giving into the open room. If ever gloom were dispelled in a flash, well then, this was that particular moment in time. Roberto sat bolt upright in his bed and, surely without any apparent conscious thought, hastily commenced doing his toilet.
The innocent though potentially impassioned message sparking from Miranda's eyes to those of Roberto did not go unnoticed. Dr. Warner's boat of dreams was about to be rocked. He had no remedy in his doctor's bag for an impending shipwreck of the heart.
ADAM'S SON
"The Lord has given us back our Clem, Adam ... He's given us back our Clem," rattled the glassy-eyed mother, bereaved of both her son and her reason. Laura Withers was fairly rocking back and forth in her ladder-back chair as she stared out the bay window toward an Atlantic alternately beneficent and cruel. Though Adam Withers stood at his deluded mate's side, his large, work-gnarled hand on her bony shoulder, steadying her, he could not look upon the ravenous sea that had taken their son, Clement Charles Withers.
A given name could not have been more wrongly assigned a newborn. Clem was anything but mild or merciful, a difficult child and even more difficult young man. No thought for his good-hearted, simple parents, he ran off to sea at age sixteen without a word or written note of farewell. Two years later, frantic worry and grief having metamorphosed into numb resignation, the Withers read in The Shipping News that the schooner Clem had boarded and signed onto had foundered in the China Sea during a typhoon. No survivors.
Upon learning but clearly misinterpreting the miracle of Roberto's reinstatement into life from a sea unwilling to claim him for her own, Laura rallied momentarily from her comatose state, though it's not certain she actually claimed that Roberto was her revivified Clement. Adam knew Roberto was Roberto, not his son Clem. But his grief, unspoken and subdued, nonetheless keened inwardly as he perceived, in visiting one day with the recovered Roberto, that this was truly the son he had never had.
ROBERTO, THE MUSICIAN, RECOVERED
A thousand pairs of eyes were fixed intently upon Roberto and as many ears attuned to what lush tones were presently to surge forth from his violin. There was talk, fervid speculation and scarcely bridled anticipation over what would surely become the musical sensation of the decade.
The timid and unassuming young man, who had long since captured the hearts of his peers as well as those uninitiated into the music of the spheres, was ready. His nervousness, certainly typical for many a young musician making his or her debut, was not evident to the expectant patrons in the now darkened music hall.
The opening orchestral accompaniment provided a brief, measured entrance into the elegant fantasy for the stringed instrument whose soulful voice sings with a true heart of human emotion. It goes without saying that, in less skilled hands, the resultant caterwauling of bow to strings would have a horrified audience running for the door and demanding a refund. Surely, that rarely happens. Bad musicians - or simply the mediocre - do not make their entrance into the music world with The Fontanne Theatre their stage.
Roberto, on cue, began his dialogue with the orchestra, employing his cherished violin as spokesman. The audience, falling upon the instrument's every word, was entranced into breathless silence. The young wizard, melding his heart and soul with the plaintive, the throbbing, the climactic crescendi of the four strings over which he possessed total but loving dominion, had his emotionally enthralled and incapacitated listeners silently begging for more exquisite pain.
Under the conductor's baton, the final cadence of Fantasy would momentarily declare rest and harmonic resolution for the elegant piece to which Roberto and his violin gave supernal voice. Not rest - and no peace - for all in the vast audience, however. Dr. Warner, along with numerous neighbourhood guests invited to the Thurston-Page home for the evening, listened to the programme broadcast over the wireless from The Fontanne Theatre.
As Roberto raced on nimbly, masterfully in E-flat minor toward the closing chord progression, he up bowed strongly upon a plangent and suspended high D-flat set in heart-rending dissonance against the surging F dominant seventh inflection of the complete string section. At rest, tutti, in B-flat minor.
That soaring, protracted D-flat brought the jubilant audience en masse to its knees but procured the doctor a broken heart. The stunned look on his face was the only palpable indicator that his heart had stopped beating. Only Dr. Warner could feel that physical constriction upon his literal heart during the plaintive cry of suspended dissonance; the aforementioned stunned look upon his stricken, immobilized visage went largely unobserved.
Largely, yes, but neither completely unobserved nor totally unacknowledged. An individual's simple gesture or his few words casually tossed off are generally quickly forgotten. Perhaps, yet nonetheless recorded in the minds of all listeners present for possible future recall. Guilt written all over a malefactor's face when a seeming random but fateful moment of truth comes knocking is what some call the dead giveaway that all but the most out-of-touch observe.
One person, herself reacting with high but untainted emotion to the impassioned closing minute of Fantasy, saw Dr. Warner's glazed-over eyes and slackened jaw. The high-strung young woman saw and she knew. She figured in, albeit innocently, with the "good" doctor's breach of conduct.
Adam Withers, likewise, had a look upon his face whilst Roberto played away upon his own four strings and the so many more of his audience's collective heart. Rather than a facial expression displaying a stricken conscience, however, his eyes and countenance spoke a wonder and spiritual elevation most infrequent in an existence so tied into the mundane. If one could only know the personal benefit derived from peering into the windows of such a humble man's soul, one would cast off as refuse all the tinsel of the world to learn at the feet of this unlikely master.
When Roberto first met and talked with the middle-aged farmer, he sensed a comforting and nurturing presence. On the other hand, there are many insensitive individuals about who are scarcely in tune with unadorned worth. In their haste to use and abuse, they would scurry on past the likes of Adam and his shapeless hulk.
The older man, though cruelly bereaved of a son, became a father again. No words were spoken as to an unofficial adoption, but Roberto - very much in need of a fatherly presence at this crossroads of his young life - saw into Adam's soul.
This coupling of souls were links forged of an uncommon mettle.
Roberto's recent, uncharacteristic silence was not unlike that of the grave, into which he had a vague sense of falling in slow but unstoppable motion. He was not unable to speak in a literal sense, but his cheerful willingness to pour out his heart unabashedly was, strangely and without apparent notice, severely curtailed. Most particularly was the spontaneity of his musical expression abruptly arrested. Roberto was too confused, perhaps even to the point of utter distraction, to calculate in some logical, calm fashion what was chewing away at his insides.
Surely, after his heroic performance at The Fontanne Theatre, he could justifiably glide over mundane care and daily preoccupation, held by the hand of Muse, for a little while longer. Realistically, however, there proceeds an inevitable crash after the gifted performer has ascended artistic heights through the total divestment of self onstage. An audience, gasping in disbelief at what their incredulous ears are telling their uncomprehending minds, can become inadvertent bane to the musician, who is taken for a god. Roberto knew that he had to get away - if only briefly - from those who lusted after both his music and his romantic attentions.
Art and destiny have another captive soul in their thrall ...
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