Hearts Unfold

by Karen Welch

  There by the fireside, in the absolute stillness of the night, the simple words of wisdom came stealing into her thoughts. Have faith, be still and let God be God.

  Chapter Two

  Crawling into the back of the limo, Stani huddled in a corner, closing his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses. If he could only be still for a bit, he told himself firmly, he might yet avoid being sick. His head was exploding now and waves of nausea threatened to ultimately humiliate him. Robert, his dark face devoid of expression, gently closed the car door and slid in behind the wheel. Turning back to his passenger, he offered a bottle of mineral water and a hairbrush. “Young sir,” he said softly, “you'll be needing these I think.”

  Stani opened one eye to accept them, pressing the cool bottle against his burning cheek. “Thank you, Robert. And thank you for waiting.” He was relieved that it had been Robert, and not one of the car service drivers, who had been asked to wait. Officially Milo's chauffeur, Robert had been with them since their arrival in New York. He was by now a member of their already irregular family, although Stani knew that idea would have been resisted by both Milo and Robert. But just as he relied on Milo and Jana to keep his days and nights from running to chaos, he also depended on Robert, who had gone far beyond his assigned duties on more occasions than Stani liked to recall. Laying the hairbrush aside, he mused that Robert would never permit him to exit his car looking like something picked out of the gutter. As soon as his head stopped pounding, he would try to bring some order to his still damp hair.

  The car began to gain speed on the freeway and he tried to relax, hoping to fall asleep. Five hours to DC should be long enough to see him back on his feet. If only he could get Milo's voice out of his head. Never in all their years together had he shouted like that. Oh, Milo might get very angry with him at times, but his voice tended to be ominously soft on those occasions.

  When the phone had rung, Stani had been sprawled on the floor, having apparently fallen just short of the bed on his return home. He had no idea what time that might have been, but he was sure he had only been asleep for a few minutes. He had stared at the phone, unable to convince his body to respond. But it had gone on ringing until the pain in his head had prompted him to at least attempt to make it stop.

  He tried to force a normal greeting; one never knew who might be calling. But Milo had known, as he always knew, the nature of Stani's condition. He'd gone off immediately, demanding to know if Stani realized the car was waiting downstairs. Of course he didn't know! How was he to know what his day's schedule might be? That was what Milo saw to every day of his life. It was then that he remembered. Milo wasn't there. He was in Aspen. He and Jana had taken their first vacation together in ten years, leaving Stani to go to Washington alone.

  Milo was still shouting over the phone, “Stani, you must pull yourself together! Do you understand me?” As always when upset, his accent seemed more pronounced, clipped and authoritative.

  “All right! I understand! Can you call the driver back, ask him to give me ten minutes? Ask him to wait. Please!” Suddenly afraid he might start to cry, he bit his lip, hard.

  Dropping the receiver, Stani ran his hands through his hair, twisting his fingers into the curls and pulling. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but it might help him to focus. He took a deep breath, smelled the stench of cigarette smoke—and maybe vomit?—in his sweater, and bile rose in his throat. Struggling to his feet, he stripped off his clothes, stumbling toward the bathroom. Somehow, in the next few minutes, he managed to shower, brush his teeth and dress. Grabbing his bag, packed by the ever-thoughtful Jana before her own departure yesterday, he had nearly reached the door when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the violin case. With a muttered oath, he snatched it up, slinging the strap over his shoulder, and jerked open the door, coming face to face with Mamie, her key in hand, a look of supreme disapproval in her knowing brown eyes.

  With a sputtered apology, he pushed past her. “So sorry, Mamie. I'm late, of course!”

  “You're right about that, Young Stani. Robert is standing at the curb.” He was aware of the slow shake of the housekeeper's head as she watched him race toward the closing elevator doors. As he stood impatiently waiting for the next car, he turned back with what he hoped was a winning grin. “Don't worry about the mess I left. I'll take care of it when I get back.” The effort of the words and of bending his face into a smile had been too much. He tasted bile again as he got on the elevator, thankful that it was unoccupied. Mamie would clean his room, he knew, but at least he had made the gesture. Like Robert, Mamie could be counted on to cover his tracks, although she rarely let him off without a mild scolding.

  When the elevator doors opened on the lobby, he was blinded by the blaze of sunlight, and groped for the sunglasses he could only hope were still in his pocket. They might be considered part of his celebrity disguise, but they were essential protection after the kind of indulgence he'd enjoyed last night. The banging in his head escalating with every step, he sped past the waiting doorman and dashed gratefully for the car, aware of Robert's solicitous nod.

  Stani shifted his position, stretching his legs across the seat and trying to find a more stable resting place for his head. No longer panicked and angry with himself, now he was overwhelmed with shame. He was sure Jana would have been standing there by the phone, would have heard their conversation. His pathetic idiocy had spoiled their much anticipated vacation. It seemed he always understood, after the fact, how destructive his behavior had become. He just couldn't seem to remember by the next time he'd had a drink or two.

  He'd fallen in love in recent months. Fine Scotch whisky had become his passion, the object of his obsession. He adored everything about it, from its amber glow in the glass, to the slow warmth that spread through his body as it went down. And of course, he loved the release of tension that followed soon after. Whisky made the clubs and parties he frequented seem so much friendlier; made him friendlier, more at ease around people with whom he had nothing in common. The only drawback to this relationship was that he never felt completely comfortable until he'd had too much to drink. He was dedicated to finding just the right balance between having a pleasant time and falling down drunk, but in the process, he seemed to always go too far.

  Stani knew he had inherited this love of whisky from his father. It was probably the only thing they had in common. He seemed to recall his father also having been some sort of musician, but that might just be something he'd made up as a child. He'd at various times invented stories about his father and mother, which he kept mostly to himself. Since he had so few memories of his early life, he had to fill in the details as best he could. His parents had been real at some point he knew, but he suspected the people he invented were much more interesting than they had ever been. A schoolmaster's secretary and an absent drunkard hardly measured up to the fantasy parents he had given himself.

  Again, Stani made a conscious effort to relax. He should feel right at home sleeping in the back of a car. He did it often enough. His life was one long line of endless cars, trains and airplanes, all going to or from equally endless concert halls. But somehow he never felt at home anywhere anymore. Only when he was standing before the lights, sensing if not seeing the faces turned up in anticipation, did he feel anything like his old self, that shy little boy who could make people like him just by playing his violin.

  It was legend now, the discovery of that little boy's talent. He suspected that just as he had made up stories about his first few years of life, some of the details now printed in liner notes had been embellished over time. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that day very clearly. It had, after all, been a day of many firsts for him. The first time he held a violin, the first time his teachers seemed to take notice of him, and most of all the first time his mother seemed pleased with something he had done.

  When he was five years old, his mother had enrolled him at the school where she worked as secretary to the headmaster
. It was one of those elite schools popping up all over England, designed to attract upwardly mobile young parents in search of a more modern sort of education for their children. Eileen Moss could never have hoped to enroll little Stanley in such a school, had her position not allowed for a sizable break in the tuition.

  A quiet, obedient child, Stanley received little attention or encouragement from his various teachers. In such an unstructured environment, it was the more lively students who commanded the most attention. Naturally shy, and well aware that he was only there because his mother was just down the hall working, Stanley felt much of the time as if he were invisible. And he preferred it that way. He knew very well how to avoid drawing attention to himself. He had learned that trick early on, literally at his mother's feet.

  Then one morning his class had been taken to the orchestra room. Too young to begin that type of instruction, they were merely on a field trip to see what they could look forward to in years to come. As the teachers fought to maintain order, protecting the instruments and music stands from their eager charges, Stanley caught sight of a violin. He knew its name because he’d seen a man playing one on a television screen in the furniture shop window near their flat. When he’d asked his mother what the man was doing, she had explained pointedly that he was a very smart man who had studied hard and now made a great deal of money playing his violin.

  He remembered clearly the lightness of the instrument when he'd picked it up, the coolness of the wood as he'd tucked it under his chin. He had drawn the bow over the strings several times, then handed the violin to the nearest instructor, saying in his shy, soft voice, “It's wrong.”

  “That's only because you don't know how it works.” The teacher had smiled, he recalled, and he'd been afraid she might laugh at him. Instead, she had tuned the violin and handed it back to him. “Try that now. See if you like it better.”

  He had indeed tried again, proceeding, after a few peremptory notes, to play several measures of a song he had heard over the radio. When he finished, he looked up timidly to see if the teacher had been listening. There was an astonished look on her face; he wondered for a moment if she'd been struck by one of the children racing about among the music stands. “Stanley, can you do that again?” She was motioning to the other teachers in the room, urging them to come over. Always eager to please, he'd repeated the song note for note, and was even inspired to add a little flourish at the end.

  Suddenly, it seemed, although it must have been at least a few minutes, for even his mother and the Master had been called to the room, he found himself in the center of a circle of smiling adults, all talking in hushed voices. Never mind that the other children were tearing about, yelling and screaming, sending music stands and chairs crashing to the floor. Everyone that mattered was hovering over him and talking, if not exactly to him, at least about him. His mother had a peculiar look on her face, almost as if she might cry. For the first time in his life, he sensed he had done something to make her proud of him.

  From that day on, his young life had centered on the violin. He was taken from one instructor to another, never staying with one for very long. It seemed that after a few months, each one admitted to his mother that he had learned all they had to teach him. Finally, his mother had plucked up the courage to make an appointment with a prominent concertmaster. When he saw that she had brought her little boy and his violin, he seemed about to leave the room without even talking to her. But after some pleading, he agreed to hear the boy play. After that day, Stanley began to study with a lady who had, his mother explained, taught many of the great violinists he heard playing over the radio. He learned quickly that she was not so easily impressed as the others had been. He had to work hard for even the faintest praise. And he did work, learning and practicing more and more music, until he could play for hours without playing the same piece twice.

  At some point during this time, Stanley had changed his name. He had really done it himself, with his childish inability to pronounce his name properly. His mother had begun to call him Stanny, like Danny, because that was what he called himself. When his mother had seen a concert bill featuring a pianist named Stanislav, she’d been inspired to change the spelling in an uncharacteristic moment of imagination. Little Stanley Moss from East London had become Stani Moss, a violin prodigy who might have been from anywhere, she said.

  When he was eight years old, his mother took him to meet a man recommended by his teacher. An agent, his mother said, would help him learn how to make money playing his violin. Milo Scheider, by that time, had already built a modest reputation in London. He had assembled a small stable of artists, including his wife Jana, an accomplished pianist. Several of his flock had achieved notice with a recording of chamber music and toured the British Isles. Milo was in search of a soloist, someone young, who might attract the attention of a wider audience. What he found was Stani Moss. The pale, solemn boy, small for his age, with the perpetual curl of red hair falling over his eyes, was hardly what he had envisioned, but after hearing him play, Milo had known this child was precisely what he needed to ensure a comfortable future. Not that he would ever exploit the boy strictly for his own gain. Milo was not without ethics. He talked gently with Stani about what would be expected if he chose to come to work with him. He explained that he wanted only what would be best for Stani and his mother. And Stani seemed to understand that Milo would be easily pleased if he just did as instructed. He had never had a male figure in his life, and he was especially eager to win over this man, with his elegant clothes and his strange accent. They shook hands, the little boy and the man, and agreed to form a partnership. Each would work hard for the other, and together they would be able to make many people happy, just by letting them listen to Stani play his violin.

  Before many months had passed, Milo and Jana sat down with Stani's mother and persuaded her that it would be more convenient if Stani were living with them. He could be tutored at home; his life would be more easily structured, rather than having to be rushed from school to lessons and back each day. It hadn't been difficult to convince her. After working all this time for what she hoped might turn out to be a good thing for them both, she was tired and ready to have a little less structure in her own life. She was proud of Stani’s talent, but he was still someone she was required to feed and care for. While she wanted what was best for her son, she understood that she was not the person to get it for him. With only a little regret, she signed the documents that gave Milo Scheider legal guardianship of her son.

  She never really explained to Stani why she was letting him go to live with someone else. She assumed he would be happy anywhere, as long as he had his music. It never occurred to her to think he might miss her, or wonder why he had been abandoned by his only parent. She had promised to visit him, to have him come to the flat on Sundays, but before long his schedule allowed for less and less free time. Milo was planning to take him to Europe, maybe even New York, to meet some of the great conductors who had heard recordings of Stani playing and wanted to see him for themselves.

  Milo was marketing Stani very carefully, just enough to arouse the curiosity of the classical music community. There would be plenty of time in the next few years for wider exposure. Meanwhile, he and Jana were enjoying having a child in the house; a child who responded to his new-found stability by emerging as a bright, sweet-tempered and very loving member of the family.

  Stani was secure for the first time in his life, sure of what to do to be loved. He missed his mother, but did not miss the feeling of always falling short, of never being quite what she wanted. Now with Milo and Jana, he felt an important part of something. He would never have asked to go back to live with his mother. He liked it when people mistook him for Milo's son, and he would gladly have lied and said that he was indeed Stani Scheider.

  Stani woke as the car began to merge into the heavy DC traffic. He tapped Robert on the shoulder, giving him the OK sign in the rear view mirror, which he would understand to mea
n that he was ready to go straight to the rehearsal hall. Spotting the hairbrush, he attacked his hair, trying to bring the tangled waves under control. He was hungry, but knew there would be fruit and juice backstage for the musicians. He felt stronger, his head clearer now. He could still prove to Milo that he was capable of doing something on his own. He wasn't a child anymore. At some point he would need to learn to fend for himself, without Milo always there to point him in the right direction.

  As soon as Robert wheeled the car up to the stage door, Stani jumped out and bounded up the steps. As if by magic, the door opened, he was ushered inside and relieved of his overcoat. He gulped down the requested glass of orange juice and unpacked his violin. He knew they had been waiting for him, he was over an hour late; but he was greeted with applause when he strode onto the stage. He saluted the assembled musicians with a flourish of his bow, flashing a smile, and firmly shook the extended hand of the conductor, who fondly clapped him on the back. It was all part of the ritual, the acknowledgment, the greeting and finally the tap of the baton. Shaking his hair from his eyes, he tucked the violin, took a deep breath and waited.

  Every thought in his mind fell away, leaving only the music, the swirl of energy from the musicians behind him, the gentle swaying of the conductor as he glanced his way, drawing him into the tempo. At last he was home, the place in which he would find the greatest joy and the sweetest peace. Every performance was an intensely spiritual experience; for though he had no formal religion, Stani had early come to recognize a force outside himself, profoundly present in music. It seemed to surround him, lift him away from the small, ugly places in his life. In the midst of music, he found the assurance of communion with his better self.