The Magician's Study. Tobias Seamon

      Ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Before we officially begin the tour, I would first like to ask all of you, please do not touch any of the objects in the room. I urge you to remember: this is not a tea-cozied library for the Forsythia Society, this is the study of Robert “The Great” Rouncival.

      Also, please be so kind as to turn off any cell phones, pagers, or any other such beeping apparatus. We ask this not only as a courtesy to your fellow tour members, but also because certain elements of the study are extremely sensitive to sound and may react to such mechanical intrusions in unpredictable ways.

      Before we open the doors—mahogany from darkest Africa inlaid with red marble quarried from a single, eight-foot bed located in the Italian Alps—a bit about Robert the Great. While I shall further explore, and perhaps even explain, the oddities of this great magician’s life during the tour, a few essentials are necessary first.

      Born on Midsummer’s Eve in 1896, Robert James Rouncival was raised very close to this estate, in Kingston, New York. The son of a modest watch repairman named Thomas Rouncival and his wife, Elaine, Robert was an eager, curious child who loved to explore the farms and fields surrounding the town. At the age of ten, however, Robert suffered a severe mishap. During a summer excursion on a day perhaps as glorious as today, Rouncival crossed a pasture to go swimming in a nearby creek. Passing through a seemingly docile herd of Holstein cows, he was suddenly kicked and had his left leg broken very badly. A local saw-bones botched the setting of the limb, and for the rest of his life Robert was hampered by a severe limp and terrible shooting pains up and down the leg. Perhaps the only saving grace of this injury was that it prevented him from service during the First World War. His younger brother William, only a year less in age, was not so fortunate.

      Confined by the injury and later by the agony of the misset bone, Robert became a child of the indoors, watching and learning as his father repaired broken timepieces. From that point on, the inner-tickings, the construction, the setting and resetting of the bones, if you will, of the universe always fascinated him. This period may also have set Rouncival on his path towards misanthropic cynicism, as attempts to play with other youths were met with scorn and abuse. The children of his neighborhood called Rouncival “Hobble” and far worse, and he was forever bitter regarding the torrent of shame he endured at such an impressionable age. After one particularly disastrous outing, where the children first threw dirt clods at Rouncival and then chased him away while parodying his limp, Robert came home and told his mother, “They think they can mock me, but they see nothing. I shall show them!” Mrs. Rouncival was understandably upset at the vehemence of her son’s feelings but there was little she could do to assuage his pain. With this in mind, that his entire career can be viewed as an act of vengeance perhaps as immature as the vitriol that inspired it, let us now enter the study.

      THE Traveling Extravaganza

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