Yet To Be Sung

This is a story about parallel love affairs separated by nearly a half century. The first is between Larry Martin and his former high school girlfriend, Deirdre Montgomery, now married with children. The second is between a conflicted American priest, Jean-Pierre Frechette, and a patriotic British lady named Sybil who, at the onset of World War II, lost her dearest friend to the Nazis. Years later, Larry is drawn into an existing tension between his new friend, Rebekah Goldstein, and her beautiful young daughter, Sara. Rebekah doesn't remember and is afraid to know anything about her past because of what she once discovered it is likely to mean. But Sara feels her grandmother's presence every time she plays a certain classical piece on her violin, and she wants to know everything. In different ways, they solicit Larry's assistance in confronting the stress that it is causing between them; but he needs Deirdre's help, and she can't provide it unless the two of them are able to resolve the issue that caused their own breakup thirty years before. While they attempt to do so, Deirdre helps Larry connect certain things he remembers seeing back then in the mountain cabin of an old woodsman, Joe Pete, regarding Joe Pete's fantasized involvement with a Native American dancer, Molly Spotted Elk, with what Larry begins to think may have been a part of Rebekah's past. Related clues came later in the sanctuary of a troubled and solitary priest Larry met after his own college indiscretion with another girl. Deirdre's novel solution now provides the vehicle for Larry's attempt to put it all together, but it also brings the two of them to the question of their own highly challenged ability to rebuild the relationship they both crave.

-- Richard L. Begin