Petty Magic (11 page)

Granted, when you throw a hundred people into one house for a weeklong shindig you’ve got to expect the occasional flare of temper; but while magic can smooth over a lot, it can’t make somebody likable. There’s a reason why the kiddies call her “Missus Shrew” (only “Missus” to her face, of course), and why she has a staff of part-timers to perform such distasteful tasks as interacting with the customers. Oh, she likes children well enough, but she speaks to them so condescendingly that even the smallest of babes regards her with a moue.

I’ve hardly had a chance to pour my coffee when Uncle Heck breezes out of the first-floor powder room, jolly as the Holly King, with a bulging rucksack full of goodies he’s picked up at markets all over the southern continent. He does this every December covention, arriving to great fanfare among the little ones, who are delighted with his exotic gifts no matter how quaint the plaything or itchy the pullover. The doorbell rings over and over but no one waits to be let inside, and soon every room in the gingerbread house is crowded with our candy golems. You can see a little nougat of a newborn boy child, a Jester, fast asleep in a dresser drawer in a third-floor guest room. He’ll be named tonight. Everyone’s crowding the coffee and cocoa dispensers on the dining room sideboard, and from the kitchen waft the tantalizing smells of roasting chestnuts and gingerbread cookies.

After brunch we put on the tableau vivant in the drawing room. The subject of this year’s tableau is Circe’s Petting Zoo, and most of the girls are wearing long-sleeved leotards and pig, goat, and cheetah masks that engulf the head. (They might all turn themselves into animals proper, but why risk the mayhem?) I’ve made myself a girl again for the occasion, because nobody wants to see a 149-year-old woman in strappy sandals and a palla made of flimsy cotton voile. They’ve decided I should be Circe, of course, since I have a special flair for this sort of thing. Uncle Heck is Odysseus and Uncle Hy is one of his soldiers, whom I’ve just turned into a pig. The backdrop is an Aegean paradise, expertly painted by Dymphna’s daughters.

After the tableau has disbanded it’s time for the puppet shows, and I hurry up the stairs to the bathroom to take off my face. I really ought to put my old hide back on if I’m to enjoy the rest of the festivities; delay much longer and I might collapse into an armchair and nap well into tomorrow.

But I stand there in front of the mirror for a while thinking of Justin, and Jonah, and how this smooth young face masks a silly old hag, primped and powdered. I sit down on the rim of the bathtub and wipe at my eye makeup with a tissue—and yes, I’ll admit, I do end up crying just a little. An unseen hand yanks the toilet lever and I shout, “Oh, for pity’s sake!” over the loud sploshing in the bowl.

I’m startled out of my brooding by someone knocking on the bathroom door. “Eve? You haven’t fallen in, have you?” It’s Morven. There’s a queer note of excitement in her voice, but I don’t think she has to take a pee.

“Go away!”

“What are you doing in there?”

I let out an exasperated groan. “I’m flossing my cooch. Now go away!”

“There’s someone here to see you,” she says—so that’s why she sounds so excited. “He’s waiting downstairs, dear.”

My heart gives a hopeful thump.
“He?”

“Yes, ‘he.’
That
‘he.’ Your what’s-his-name.”

“Justin?”

“Yes, him. Have you …?”

“Not yet.”

“Lucky for you. Now don’t keep him waiting any longer, the nieces look about ready to devour him.”

I glance in the mirror one more time and wipe away the runny mascara. Then I hurry down the hall, pausing at the second-floor railing to look at him.

He’s grown a beard, a real beard, full and black, and his perfect white teeth gleam between his perfect red lips. Vega is hovering behind him as he shrugs himself out of his coat; once it’s off she whisks it out of sight, and though she looks like a nymph and smells like a rose he scarcely notices her. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he is saying to Helena.

“Not at all. We were just about to sit down to dinner.” My sister pauses. “Would you care to join us?” This is not like Helena at all. She is so practical and proper that her hospitable nature doesn’t often benefit ordinary men, unless they’re B and B guests, that is.

There isn’t the slightest movement now within the gingerbread house on the hall table. Justin looks around him, in the foyer and through the doorways at our multitude of friends and relatives. “I doubt there’s room at the table,” he says with a nervous laugh, and this is when I start down the stairs. He glances up, does a double take, and suddenly everyone in the house is crowded around him, alternately staring at me and staring at him staring at me. This moment drags so thrillingly! I’m glad Auntie Em didn’t let on he’d be here today. It’s the most marvelous surprise I could have hoped for, though I don’t suppose she withheld it for happiness’s sake.

As my bare foot touches the first step he reaches forward and embraces me, languidly, like a romantic hero in a black-and-white film. Then he holds me at arm’s length and surveys me with shining eyes. “You look like a vestal virgin,” he says, and does not seem to notice the collective snigger among my assembled relations.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “Is Fawkes all right? Why aren’t you with your family?”

“Fawkes is fine. They’ve hired a nurse for him. My parents thought I’d be in Hungary over the holidays, so they went down to Florida for the week. Uncle Harry’s gone up for a nap now so I thought I’d come over.”

I glance through the drawing room doorway and see our young puppeteers standing behind the stage staring at him, marionettes dangling from their hands, our wimpled granny jujus gone limp just as if they were ordinary toys.

“But I’m afraid I’ve—”

“No, no, you haven’t interrupted anything,” I cut in. “They can finish the puppet show later.” Couldn’t go on with
The Trial of Goody Harbinger
with him here, that’s for certain.

“Your aunt was just telling me there’s room for me at the table, but somehow I doubt that.”

“We don’t all eat at once, silly,” I say as I pull him by the hand into the dining room, and I notice that someone has draped a sheet over the mirror above the sideboard. Justin can’t see me as I am in that mirror, but all the rest of them can. I catch Morven’s eye, smile a smile of gratitude, and she gives me a wink. Then I skip down the sideboard piling a plate with goose liver and sage stuffing and bid him sit, put the plate before him, ask him if he’d like a spot of bubbly.

Everyone else—or as many as can fit—follows us in to dinner. The air thrums with suppressed excitement and more than a little unease. It’s cruel, isn’t it? All of them watching him grow too fond of a woman six times his age. He’d be horrified if he only knew. Still, Helena couldn’t very well have turned him away at the doorstep, and it’s not as if there’s any malice in their interest. So they go on watching us, saucer eyed, wondering if the Omnipotent will take pity on poor lovesick Auntie Eve and make her as young again as she currently appears. Most of the children are too small yet to be looking at him with adoration, but they are picking up on their mothers’ giddiness, acting restless and talking among themselves more loudly than they ought.

The rime on our champagne flutes shimmers in the candlelight as Justin regales us with stories of all his adventures in Budapest. He’s been to a snow-globe-maker’s workshop and a waxworks, and visited every open-air bazaar in the city to root through dead people’s junk in search of treasure (he doesn’t put it quite like that, seeing as we are in the company of children, but we get the gist). He’s been to arcades with pitched-glass roofs and ridden in rickety wrought-iron elevators, gone to public baths crowded with fat men in Speedos, seen
Così Fan Tutte
at the Hungarian State Opera (
With whom?
I wonder darkly), and eaten hazelnut torte at the old café of the secret police. The little ones pepper him with silly questions and he answers them all with good cheer.

Helena puts out the ambrosia cake on a china pedestal—she hasn’t eaten with us; she’s always in the kitchen but you’d be hard-pressed to find her eating a morsel—and at the sight of the cake Justin’s eyes light up. “Ooh, what kind of cake is that?”

Emboldened by the bubbly, I lean in and pinch his knee. “What’s your favorite kind of cake?” He frowns, confused at first that I haven’t simply told him it’s a carrot cake, but then I say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it were the same kind of cake this is?”

He pauses for a moment. “My grandmother used to make the best cake in the world. A spice cake, for Hanukkah.”

“What kind of spice?”

“Nutmeg, I think. And a bit of cinnamon and ginger. There was chocolate in it, too.”

“Well, isn’t this a delicious coincidence! That’s exactly what this is. A nutmeg cake, with a chocolate crust.”

“You’re kidding me!” he says, and I cut him a slice as the children around us giggle at the secret to which he isn’t privy.

“Oh God,” he says as he takes the first bite. “This is amazing. Even better than my grandmother’s. Did you make it?”

This is one of the few times in my life I’ve wished I were domestically inclined. I have to shake my head. “Helena made it.”

“Helena?”

“Er—my auntie.”

Vega appears at his side, thermal jug poised above the china cup at the edge of his place setting. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please!”

“Milk? Sugar?”

“No, thanks. I take it black.”

He takes it black!
Justin smiles at me over his steaming cup as I gulp the rest of my champagne.

Once he’s finished his third slice of ambrosia cake he glances up at the doorway, where another load of curious relatives are still hanging around staring, and says, “Oh! I guess we’d better make way for the next sitting, eh?” He picks up his plate and silverware, the dear boy, but Mira takes them out of his hands on her way back to the kitchen, so we rise from the table and make our way through the hungry throng. I feel his breath hot on my neck as he murmurs, “Is there someplace we can go? To be alone for a little while?” and my heart skips three beats in a row. “But I don’t want to keep you from your family,” he says quickly.

I take his hand and we hurry up the stairs amid the whistles of the few adolescent magi present. They’re relishing this opportunity for an open display of impudence toward an elder (and I suppose I’d do the same in their place, so I can’t complain). Justin lets out a nervous laugh.

I close my bedroom door behind us and hastily stuff my discarded dress and pantyhose under the pillow as he pulls a small beribboned box out of his pocket. “Oh, Justin, I didn’t—”

“It’s all right,” he says as I tear off the ribbon. “You weren’t expecting me, anyway.”

The necklace inside the box is just what I would’ve wanted, had I known such a thing existed: a silver Janus pendant, with a face on either side. “Found it at one of the markets in Budapest,” he says. “Thought of you.”

I turn the pendant—heavier than it looks—over and over in my palm, grinning from ear to ear. It is the perfect gift. How did he know?

“Can I put it on for you?”

“Oh, please do!”

His arms encircle me and I feel his breath on my neck again, his fingertips tickling my nape.

“Do you have any idea how old it is?”

“It’s hard to say. Late Victorian, I think. Made in England.”

“I’ll treasure this,” I tell him, and his cheeks redden with boyish pleasure.

“I don’t want to keep you,” he says softly. “We should go back down.”

“I suppose we should,” I reply, but I make no move to the door.

“I was thinking …”

“Yes?”

“Maybe we could meet up in the city sometime soon?”

“I’d love to.”

“Great. Name the day.”

“Friday?”

“Oh. No sooner?”

“What day were you thinking?”

“How about the day after tomorrow? Maybe we could go to a museum. How about the Met?”

I nod. I’m smiling so hard my face might fall off.

We come down and when I say, “I’ll get your coat,” Mira and Vega protest most volubly. “Stay a while longer,” Mira says as Vega nudges him into the drawing room, where an alternate puppet show is about to take place for his benefit. The marionettes are still inert, of course, so the children are working their wires and putting rude words in their mouths. Auntie Emmeline proclaims herself a “big smelly meanie” and Goody Harbinger sings, “A noose, a noose! I’m bruised on my caboose!” They know they will be scolded for this once Justin’s left, but they’re having far too much fun to care.

“Those are the most amazing marionettes I’ve ever seen,” he says, and wants to know where they were made.

I plop down in the middle of the sofa to keep the girls from sitting beside him, and as he settles himself he glances at the photograph of Morven and me in our ANC uniforms on the end table. He does a double take.
Shoot!
I ought to have hidden that.

“Is this your grandmother?” he asks. “She looks a lot like you.”

I’m not pressed to lie, though, for the ongoing jollification distracts him: the naughty children are making Uncle Erskine tell Auntie Emmeline that her mother was a hamster and her father smelt of elderberries, pausing only to ooh and ahh out the drawing room window at the falling snow; in a nearby armchair Cousin Tabitha, having imbibed too much mulled wine, hiccups and giggles alternately, quite comical seeing as she’s even older than I am; the catnip mouse Uncle Heck draws from his rucksack sends the tabby into paroxysms of ecstasy on the oriental carpet.

Justin’s looking about the room in idle enjoyment, when suddenly he frowns and starts darting glances at the faces in the crowd. “How odd!”

“What is it?”

“Nobody wears glasses in your family. Not even your great-aunts … and I see a few who look like they could be in their eighties.”

I shrug. “Good genes, what can I say?” Morven rolls her eyes.

Night is falling and at last he thinks he’d really better be going now. I see him to the door and he kisses me full on the mouth, but my euphoria is short-lived. I reenter the drawing room and the ancestors launch into their reprimand:
For shame, Evelyn! You have no business—no right—oh, the indecency of it!
Clickety-clack go their little wooden jaws. The children take this opportunity to quit the drawing room en masse in search of further refreshment, and everyone else fidgets in their chair.