The Vanishing Violinist Read online

  “Good catch!” Andrew said.

  But the Frisbee rolled down the steps and Uwe lay still. Then he began to scream.

  3

  Fred reached him first. This is the violinist Joan spoke German with, he thought, but he couldn’t remember the name of the stocky young man who lay curled into a ball, hugging his body with both arms.

  “Don’t try to get up, son,” Fred said. “Where are you hurt?”

  Already blond and fair-skinned and with no summer tan, the German was even paler now. He had stopped screaming, but his breath came in gasps.

  “My hand!” he choked out. “I think I broke my hand!”

  “Arms and legs okay?” As far as Fred could see, nothing was displaced.

  “I don’t know—it doesn’t matter. I tell you, it’s my hand!” Cradling his left hand in his right, he began a rhythmic rocking and keening. Fred looked closely at his left hand. The fingers were already beginning to swell.

  “I’m going after Dr. Osborne,” Bruce said. “And some ice.” He loped off toward the grill. Andrew ran after him.

  “Oh, Oo-veh, I’m so sorry,” Joan said. Her hand reached toward his shoulder, but she didn’t touch him.

  Oo-veh? Fred thought. Oh, Uwe. If you’re right about that hand, Uwe, my boy, you’ve just missed this year’s competition.

  “I’m too old,” Uwe mourned.

  Too old? “You’re not too old to heal,” Fred said. “You’ll be back for the next competition.”

  “I can’t! Four years from now I’ll be thirty-one.” Uwe’s careful “th” degenerated into an “s.”

  Fred raised an eyebrow at Joan.

  She nodded. “He’s right, Fred. There’s an age limit. He won’t be eligible again.”

  “This was my last chance! And now, nothing. I can’t even earn my ticket home doing program in the schools!” Uwe began rocking again. “God, it hurts!” Tears streamed down the white face, whether from the pain or the lost opportunity, Fred couldn’t tell.

  While they waited for the doctor to reach him, Uwe worked himself into a state, trembling, weeping, and generally carrying on, as Fred’s mother used to say. Fred couldn’t blame him. These kids—they were scarcely more than kids—had worked intensely for this opportunity. For Uwe to have it snatched away before he could even begin to compete had to be a severe blow.

  The rest of the competitors and their host families crowded around when Andrew brought Dr. Osborne, still wearing his denim apron. Fred automatically shooed them away.

  “Come on, folks, stand back. Give the doctor room to work.” The people yielded to his natural authority, although many of them stayed to watch and listen from a few feet away.

  Bob Osborne knelt beside Uwe, checked him over quickly, and helped him sit up, with his feet resting on the first step below the patio and his arms resting on his knees.

  “I’m pretty sure only your hand is injured,” he said.

  “Only my hand!” Uwe’s voice was shrill. “My hands are my life!”

  “We have excellent hand specialists right here in Indianapolis. But first”—he forestalled another outbreak from Uwe—“first I want to get some ice on it.”

  “Here you go.” Bruce was at his elbow with a plastic bag filled with ice cubes and closed with a twist tie.

  Bob looked up, nodded, and placed it on Uwe’s hand. He smiled at Bruce. “I don’t suppose you brought splints.”

  “A couple of magazines? Best I could find.” Bruce held them out, and the doctor nodded.

  “Good enough.” With the adhesive tape the resourceful Bruce pulled from a back pocket, Bob Osborne wrapped the injured hand, ice bag and all, in a firm cylinder of slick pictures. “That ought to help,” he told Uwe. “I’ve sent my wife next door for my bag. Soon as it comes, I can give you something for the pain.”

  “You can’t give me my hand. You can’t give me my life!” Uwe flailed out with the magazine-wrapped hand as if oblivious to the physical pain.

  “Calm down, son. You don’t want to make it worse.”

  “How can it be worse? Don’t you understand anything?” And he flailed again.

  He’s falling apart, Fred thought. The gathered crowd, which had been relatively quiet, had begun to murmur. He saw Cindy Lloyd approaching. Not now, he thought. He glanced down at Joan. She shook her head and Andrew rolled his eyes.

  But Cindy was nothing like the stage mother they’d met earlier. “Bob, would this help?” she said quietly. She climbed the steps and held out a prescription bottle. He took it and read the label.

  “Lorazepam? It probably would calm him down, but it might get him in trouble with any other sedation.” He returned the bottle.

  Cindy nodded her understanding. “I’d be happy to drive him. My car’s just across the street.” She gestured to a white wagon with the logo of her firm on the front door.

  “Thanks, but Polly’s already bringing ours. You stay here with him,” the doctor told Bruce. “Send someone after me if there’s any problem. I’m going to call one of those hand specialists.” He disappeared into the next yard.

  Bruce sat down beside Uwe, who had buried his head in his good hand. He was speaking to him, too softly for Fred to hear. Uwe nodded a couple of times, but didn’t raise his head. With nothing more than eye contact and a shake of the head, Fred restrained a couple of young people who looked as if they were planning to run over. Uwe was too unstrung for visiting, he thought. Bruce was doing fine all by himself.

  Bob Osborne was back in only a few minutes, this time with his medical bag. After he gave Uwe an injection, he and Bruce helped him into a dark blue Volvo wagon that had pulled into the driveway beside the house. Fred saw Polly Osborne at the wheel. This host family got more than they bargained for, he thought. Then he remembered that Bruce, not Uwe, was their violinist. Bob climbed into the car beside Uwe, and Bruce closed the door behind them.

  “That’s some fella Rebecca found herself,” Fred said to Joan.

  “He is, isn’t he? I won’t worry who will take care of her.”

  Bruce came over to them. “Sorry I had to ignore you.”

  “Heavens, Bruce, don’t worry about us,” Joan said. “We were just talking about what a good job you did with Uwe.”

  “Where’d you learn all that?” Andrew waved at the steps, as if Uwe and his makeshift splint were still there.

  Under his freckles, Bruce’s fair skin reddened. “Dad says anyone can do first aid in an emergency room, but that’s not where people get hurt. He taught us to improvise.”

  “I guess he did,” Joan said. “How’d you improvise that tape?”

  “That was the one thing I got out of their medicine cabinet.” Bruce smiled. “Any strong tape would have worked, but the bathroom was right there. I didn’t have to poke around much. I know the Schmalzes said to make ourselves at home, but they probably didn’t want someone going through their desk drawers.”

  “But you would have?” Fred said.

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to.” He would have, that was plain.

  With the need to protect Uwe now past, Fred stood back out of the crowd while the other violinists surrounded Bruce. They were subdued, even as they pumped him for more than he could know. If their worst nightmare had happened to one of their number, it could happen to them.

  Joan picked up the photo album and shook her head. Fred could read her mind. Their chance to meet Rebecca’s intended had gone sour. Or had it? he thought. The young man had showed himself to be compassionate, calm, and resourceful in an emergency. An evening’s chitchat would hardly have drawn that kind of information out of him.

  “It’s too bad,” Joan said.

  Fred nodded. “Poor kid.”

  “Oh, Fred, I’d already blocked Uwe out of my mind—isn’t that awful? I was just thinking how sorry I am we didn’t have a better visit with Bruce. I’ll come up to hear him play, but it won’t be the same.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “How can you help it? And to s
ee him helping one of his rivals like that says good things about his character.”

  “Not anymore,” Andrew said.

  “What do you mean?” Joan asked.

  “Uwe stopped being a rival the minute his hand hit that planter. Bruce could afford to be nice to him.”

  “Andrew!”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I like him, too.”

  Joan’s eyes were begging Fred to take her side.

  “He seems like a fine young man,” he said, and wondered whether he should tell her he was planning to run a check on him Monday.

  Eventually they visited a little more with Bruce, who even remembered to take a quick look at Rebecca’s baby pictures. But darkness was falling, and the party had broken up. In the end, they settled for promising to come back to hear him play as often as they could manage.

  I’m acting like a father already, Fred thought on the drive home to Oliver. But why not? Joan’s kids are all the family I ever expect to have. We could do lots worse. She’s never mentioned wanting more, but her biological clock doesn’t have a lot of years left. Is she waiting for me to bring it up, or would she be upset if I did?

  4

  Joan had to miss hearing Bruce play his first round of competition. When the violinists had drawn numbers for the order in which they would appear throughout the competition, Bruce’s high number had put his first round on Wednesday, the last night of the preliminary phase. But Wednesday was orchestra rehearsal night in Oliver, when Joan not only played in the viola section but had duties as the paid manager and librarian of the Oliver Civic Symphony.

  Occasionally, she could arrange for someone to take her place, but not for this first rehearsal of the season. She wanted the first rehearsal to run as smoothly as possible, and she especially wanted people to sign out their rehearsal folders. If they didn’t, she’d have a hard time tracking down the music that didn’t make it back after the concert. At best, that would mean extra work for her. At worst, the orchestra would pay substantial fines for lost or late rental music.

  She would call Bruce afterward, she told Nancy Van Allen during the break on the stage of the Alcorn County Consolidated School. Nancy, who played trombone, was the only sixth-grade classmate Joan had remembered from the long-ago sabbatical year when her professor father had taken his family to Oliver.

  “You really think your daughter’s going to marry this violinist?” Nancy asked. “Just like that? How long has she known him?”

  “Not long. Rebecca doesn’t say much, except how wonderful he is.”

  “What did you think, when you met him?”

  “He seemed like a very nice young man.”

  Nancy laughed. “You sound a million years old!”

  “That’s how I feel sometimes.” And then there are the times with Fred, Joan thought. Why don’t I tell Nancy about us?

  But she knew why: Telling Nancy anything was tantamount to telling everyone in Oliver. Even though Bruce had announced their plans freely up in Indianapolis, where they were strangers, she and Fred hadn’t made a general announcement at home yet. Nancy could wait.

  Snacking on the cookies and punch served by the orchestra board during the break, most of the players were exchanging news and greetings after a summer apart. For Joan and the others who had played in the pit orchestra for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore during the summer, September had come all too soon. Joan hoped that meant she wouldn’t be as tired at the end of this rehearsal as she often was after too long a period of little practice and even less extended playing. What must it feel like, she thought, to be in the shape Bruce and the other violinists at the competition had to be in? Not only would the music flow more easily out of your fingers, even if you weren’t a virtuoso, but your back and shoulders wouldn’t ache after an ordinary rehearsal.

  At the end of the break, Joan introduced and welcomed the new players, some of them Oliver College students who might or might not stick with the orchestra when they began feeling pressured by papers and exams. A few always did, though, and there was no way to predict who they would be. She made her plea about signing out the music. Then she turned the rehearsal back to the conductor. Alex Campbell, a pudgy woman with a fuse as short as she was, hadn’t blown up at anyone yet tonight. A good beginning, Joan thought.

  A couple of the pieces they’d be playing in this concert were real warhorses: Nicolai’s Overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor and one of Joan’s all-time favorites, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Alex was actually smiling when she invited them to take out the Schubert. Maybe it was her choice.

  But Alex’s benevolent mood didn’t survive the Unfinished. The cello section sounded ragged in that most familiar of lush cello passages. She gave them a second crack at it, but when they failed again to achieve the lyrical lines she wanted, she lit into them.

  “How can you call yourselves cellists if you don’t already have this in your fingertips?” she railed. They don’t call themselves cellists, Joan wanted to say. They’re amateurs, and they know it. But she knew better than to interrupt the tirade. Alex finally wound down and ordered them to “practice as you’ve never practiced in your lives between now and when you come back next week.”

  I hope they even bother to come back next week, Joan thought. We’re already short in some sections for this concert, and maybe for the whole season. If the cellos start giving up, we’ll be in real trouble. But Alex thinks that’s the manager’s problem. Mine. She looked at her partner on the second stand of violas. Bald, middle-aged, and feisty, John Hocking was far more likely than she to fight back, but he was hunched over his viola, half dozing. Tired? or just tired of this nonsense? she wondered.

  By the time Alex finally released them, the orchestra’s mood had darkened. Joan’s mind was already wandering to Bruce, who should have finished his first session by now. Would he have gone back to the Osbornes’ right away, or would he stay to hear the others? She hoped he wouldn’t stay so late that he’d hesitate to call her.

  Did she care for Bruce, or for Rebecca’s future husband? Both, she thought. Of course she wanted only good for the man Rebecca loved, especially if he was going to be part of her family. But after watching him cope with Uwe’s injury and soothe his outbursts, she was sold on this redheaded fiddler for his own sake.

  She carried her viola into the house about ten o’clock and returned to the car for the awkward boxes of folders, now considerably lighter without the ones people had taken home to practice. Rebecca called almost immediately.

  “Mom, did you hear from Bruce?”

  “I just got home. Has he called you?”

  “Yes. He said it went well. He won’t know till tomorrow morning, but he thinks he made the first cut. Well, not really. They made the first cut from a couple of hundred audition tapes. But this will be the first cut of the fifty or so who are competing live. He’s feeling pretty sure he’ll be in the semifinals.”

  “Oh, Rebecca, I hope so.”

  “So, can you hear him then?”

  “Any night but Wednesday.”

  “Then you can! The semis are from Friday to Monday. Bruce will probably play Sunday or Monday. I’ll ask him to get you tickets. Should he get three? Do you think Andrew and Fred would go hear him?”

  “If they can. We all like him.”

  “And he likes you.”

  5

  Bruce did make the semifinals and, to Joan’s relief, was scheduled to play on Sunday afternoon. Nice, she thought, not to have to rush up to Indianapolis after work. When Fred and Andrew both turned out to have conflicts, she decided to attend the evening session as well. This time she drove directly downtown, left her old Honda in a parking garage, and walked to the Indiana Repertory Theatre, on Washington Street near Monument Circle.

  On this bright blue day, jet trails were diffusing slowly overhead. Top-hatted drivers from several different companies offered carriage rides behind matched white teams outfitted with manure catchers.

  Joan went in to pick up her ticke
t. Opposite the ticket windows of the restored movie palace, posters and cast photos announced upcoming plays. Then she saw one of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, with photos of the famous violinists who would judge it and a painting of the gold medal.

  A matronly African-American woman in a black skirt and white blouse, wearing a diagonal sash with the violin scroll and name of the competition in gold, told her she could sit wherever she liked.

  “Aren’t some of the seats reserved for the judges?”

  “Don’t you worry about the judges. They’re up in the balcony, where the rest rooms are. Nobody else sits up there but the big donors.”

  “You’d think the judges would be right down front.”

  “I guess they are, some places. Here’s your program.” The usher handed her a glossy book of at least a hundred pages. “It’s for the whole competition.”

  “I don’t know whether I’ll get to come back after today,” Joan said, wondering whether Bruce would survive this round.

  “I’m usually at home with the kids, but I wouldn’t miss any of this!” The woman’s dark face shone. “That’s why I usher!”

  After paying a quick visit to the elegant ladies’ room on the balcony level, where a sash-draped dragon guarded the door to the reserved balcony seats, Joan walked back down the long staircase and picked a spot in the center of the small theater, about a third of the way down.

  The seats were beginning to fill up. In front of her, a visibly pregnant woman was speaking French, slowly, with a couple who rattled it back like native speakers. Joan wondered whether they were related to a competitor. Hadn’t Bruce said the family of a violinist from Montreal would come? But these people could be from Paris; she knew she wouldn’t be able to hear the difference. For this afternoon’s concert, at least, most people were casually dressed. Many were middle-aged or older, but there were a few children. Joan hoped they wouldn’t disturb her, or the violinists.