Petty Magic (2 page)

A few moments later I follow the man out onto the sidewalk, where Fawkes is grousing about the myriad inadequacies of Medicare Part D to two passersby too young to care. I touch Mr. Vandersmith lightly on the elbow. “Your wife isn’t crazy,” I tell him in a low voice. “I thought it might ease your mind if I told you so.”

He looks at me, flabbergasted, but I venture back through the velvet curtain before he can ask me why in God’s name I bought the mirror from him.

“I
’M GLAD
you’ve come today, Evelyn,” Harry says as I reenter the shop. “I’ve made a rather life-changing decision.”

I gasp. “Tell me you’re not selling!”

“Not exactly. I’m retiring, at last.
Semi
-retiring. My sister’s grandson is coming down to manage the shop for us from now on.”

“What! Emmet’s retiring too?”

“Emmet leaves for Europe at the beginning of August—he’ll be gone at least three months, I’d say—and I was on the phone with my sister last week, and she was telling me how her grandson, Justin is his name, he has a philosophy degree but he’s been working in a secondhand record shop. It seemed like the right time all around. Invite the boy down, give him a chance at a proper career. I have no one else to leave the shop to, anyhow.”

“Your nephew’s still quite young, then?”

“Only twenty-four, twenty-five. Haven’t seen him in yonks. I expect he’s grown through the ceiling by now.”

Hmmm. The prospect of a little summertime fling isn’t exactly disagreeable, now, is it?

So I ask Harry what he’ll get up to once he commences this so-called semi-retirement—fly-fishing, tai chi, might even have a go at writing his memoirs—but it’s his nephew I really want to hear about. What’s he like?
Smart kid, always remember him in a black nylon cape and plastic moustache practicing his magic tricks. Went to Brown and fraternized with all the other green-haired dope-smoking hooligans squandering what little brains they were born with. Philosophy. Pah!

Will Harry mind having him around the house?
Not a bother, he’ll be staying in the upstairs apartment while Fawkes is gone
.

Now for the most important question: and when will your nephew be arriving? Tomorrow afternoon, he says. So soon! I say. Isn’t that nice. I’ll send over a toffee cake to welcome him. One of Helena’s granddaughters will bring it over. My sister has so many, you see, that it’s a rare man who can tell them apart; nor would he notice if there’s one more Harbinger girl hanging about the place from time to time.

I
CAN’T IMAGINE
living any other kind of life. Never an abscess or fever; never a worry about a bursting bladder on a long bus journey; never short on gentlemanly affections or womanly wiles; to be, truly, only as old as you feel. Getting older is just getting wiser, so they tell me anyway. How women can live with matchstick bones and menstrual cramps, I’ll never know—though I always wonder whenever I brush elbows with the ordinary shoppers in the Blackabbey mews.

When I come out of Fawkes and Ibis I see the window display’s being changed at the vintage wedding dress boutique across the way. The new gown is from the early forties, with a Peter Pan collar, and the mannequin’s torso is turned so we can see a line of dainty oyster-shell buttons from nape to small. The sleeves are bishop-style—full in the forearm and gathered at the wrist—and the cuffs are fastened with buttons to match. You aren’t a full-grown woman ’til you’ve worn sleeves like that.

Dymphna—a dear old girl; she owns the shop—arranges the frilly bits and bobs atop the lid of a rosewood hope chest, then adjusts the train so it looks like a pool of creamy silk on the velvet-covered platform. She looks up, gives me a little wave, and comes out the front door to greet me properly. “Lovely, isn’t it? Found it at an estate sale in Perth Amboy last week.” In silence we admire it together. “Funny thing, though—”

“It’s never been worn,” I murmur, still gazing up at the dress on the blank-faced mannequin.

“How could you tell?”

“No strained seams or discoloration under the arms, for a start. No sign of wear at the back hem either. An estate sale, you said?”

Dymphna nods. “Bought, but never worn.”

It’s a certain type of girl who’s out for the gowns Dymphna sells—the kind of girl who’d choose an engagement ring at Fawkes and Ibis—and this bride-to-be adores the self-conscious modesty of such a dress. Purity, propriety: they long for it, and not merely the impression of it, though no magic on earth will fashion a dress that can recover all it stands for. There’s no tailor in the back, no taking in or letting out when the merchandise is this old: the dress either fits you, or it doesn’t. Yet it
is
only a dress, is it not? To be worn once, then hung in the back of the closet and mostly forgotten about.

Worn twice, more like—for it wasn’t so long ago a bride would save her veil for a winding sheet.

On Fidelity

3.

 … who’s to know

Where their feet dance while their heads sleep?

—Ted Hughes, “Witches”

H
ERE
is how it goes. Girl meets boy, mutual infatuation ensues, and when boy proposes marriage girl disregards the lessons of family history. For her father left her mother when she was still too small for any firsthand memories of him, and it was the same with her grandfather before that, and her great-grandfathers too. Hardly any of her friends have ever known their fathers either. Still, there are occasional stories of long and happy marriages with ordinary men, though she disregards the common wisdom that a dame in want of a faithful husband must go candy-striping at the local madhouse. Girl also disregards the dilemma of mismatched life expectancies, for she will live at least twice as long as an ordinary woman and will age half as quickly.

Visions of a golden-anniversary soirée amid copious offspring eclipse the warnings of her mother, grandmother, and aunts, and so girl marries boy. Boy still knows nothing of her underlying nature. There may be a brief period of contentment, a domestic idyll of lie-ins and leftover wedding cake. The young bride has temporarily forgotten that she is no ordinary girl—no matter how fervently she might long to be—and for now, her only ambition is to keep a cozy home for a happy husband.

But things are
too
perfect, you see, and her man becomes distracted by vague suspicions. The house is always immaculate, his dinners delicious and served on time with a smile, yet his wife never seems to do any cooking or cleaning. She spends her afternoons in the backyard, tending the kitchen garden she’s cultivated from scratch, but he cannot content himself with the homegrown tomatoes and cabbage she puts on the table. When she goes out on an errand he ventures into the garden and feels a nameless panic at all the strange herbs thriving there, plants with hard black berries, intoxicating scents, and silvery leaves.

For Christmas she might knit him a sweater, a perfect woolen pullover in his favorite color, but whenever he puts it on he feels her love closing in like a vise. And yet, for all his claustrophobia, his wife seems uncannily independent; she does not need him to amuse or console her. He might pass a long evening at a bar in town, return home expecting a shrewish tirade, and feel no relief when he finds her poring over recipe books or knitting another sweater, utterly content in her own company (and indeed, hardly aware of his absence).

The real trouble starts when she tells him she is pregnant. He is overjoyed, of course, celebrates with brandy and cigars and busies himself converting the spare room into a nursery; but when his wife offers names like Hester and Morgana and diplomatically suggests the child bear her surname as well as his, he pretty much blows his lid, and the marriage begins its inexorable decline. It rankles him, her certainty that their child will be a girl. (There is a boy child born among us every now and again, but it’s not a common occurrence.)

In the end it will be something seemingly innocuous that sets him off: he might overhear another bizarre bedtime story, this one populated by sewer goblins, gnomes who live on a golf-course periphery, good-natured witches who use magic to scour the stove and take out the garbage. Those stories about Baba Yaga and her yardful of bones were vile enough, but
this!
The overwrought husband stomps off in search of his suitcase.

So it is that every few months we must ease one of our own out of a disastrous marriage. She’ll arrive at Helena’s house looking fairly distraught. My sister will usher her in, settle her into the coziest chair in the parlor, and venture into the kitchen to brew a cup of cinnamon tea. Helena returns with steaming mug to find our poor friend crumpled in her chair, fists full of sodden Kleenex. Helena calls the guard and we all drop whatever we’re doing. Morven and I poof home for the night. We descend upon the house and listen to her stories of preposterous accusations and icy silences, how he says that when he goes he ought to take their daughter with him. (He will leave alone, though, and when he’s gone his daughter will finally take her mother’s name.)

We tell her we’ll bind and gag him, drag him from the house, put him on a boat, and motor out for miles before dumping him overboard. But he won’t drown right away, we tell her, because we want him alive while the fanged mermaids are feasting on his entrails.

She’ll cringe at this, of course, and say she still loves him and wants no harm to come to him. Gently we remind her that she can now teach her daughter properly, no longer hindered by some sad little man forever passing judgment from the reclining armchair in front of the television. It doesn’t matter how enlightened he might have seemed during their courtship; this devolution was inevitable.

You can believe everything I just said apart from the bit about the fanged mermaids. Not that fanged mermaids don’t exist, or that we don’t threaten to feed the traitorous wretch to them. We’d never actually follow through on it, is what I mean. From time to time you do hear tales of husbands gone missing, but there’s always a rational explanation—stupid man went night-fishing in January or some such. And there are, of course, those stories of husbands falling in alarmingly quick succession, like dominoes, and a frequently widowed woman growing in wealth and vitality with each fresh loss. Dame Alice, the Irish sorceress, was the most infamous practitioner of such dark magic, but her power went unchecked only because her coven had no teeth.

In our coven we take a lifelong oath in girlhood—
By magic I shall do no harm, except in defense of myself or another
—but I’ve never heard any tales of violence in these otherwise-disastrous marriages. There may be an abundance of spite at the close of this generic tale of boy meets dame, but in no case does her husband ever raise a hand to her. She may behave foolishly when in love, but she’d never be fool enough to choose a wife beater; and besides, underneath that bravado of anger and suspicion, isn’t he more than a little afraid of her?

I
T MUST
have happened much the same way with our parents. Our mother, Lily, had met our father at the county library, where he was a reference clerk. He had no family here, no connections whatsoever, and thus it seemed natural that he should have his family at Harbinger House just as every ordinary husband had before him. I came tumbling into the world the very day the Civil War broke out, and he left in blue uniform within days of my birth. Helena has only the haziest memories of him, and Morven none at all. I have no idea how much he knew of my mother’s nature; she had ceased to speak of him by the time I was old enough to wonder.

After Antietam there were no more letters, and for months my mother lived in fear of the doorbell. The strange thing was the utter absence of portents. No puddle of spilled milk indicated his misfortune, nor robin red-breast hopping on the windowsill to inflame her dwindling hope. She could have looked into a snow globe, but she was afraid to, as any loving wife would be.

We had only one photograph of him, a family portrait taken the day of his departure—my mother holding me in swaddling, Morven in his lap, and Helena standing with her tiny hand on his knee—and I spent so many hours staring at that daguerreotype on the drawing-room mantelpiece that I would have known my father’s face anywhere. He had fine and noble features that belied his humble background and the same pale cat’s eyes I saw whenever I stood before the looking glass.

By the end of the war we still had no news of him, and Mother began making weekly visits to the local veterans’ affairs office to lodge her inquiries. His name did not appear on any casualty list, but they presumed the worst, and she received a widow’s pension.

Fast-forward a decade, to the very day I would make my oath, a bright and frosty morning. I stood at the parlor window idly watching the milkman flirt with Auntie Emmeline on the front walk, when something on the road caught my eye. A carriage was stopped on the far side of the street, and I could clearly see a man inside looking up at our house. He gazed at me with great interest, and I realized with a creeping sense of horror that the man in the carriage was none other than my dead father. I wanted to call out for my mother, for anybody, but I was frozen where I stood.

After what seemed like an eternity, I made the slightest movement away from the window. The stranger immediately put a gloved hand on the carriage door and spoke a few words to the driver, and in a moment they were gone.

That morning at the parlor window wasn’t the end of it. Every few years he would reappear, always at a watchful distance, and as far as I knew it was only I who ever saw him. I couldn’t tell Mother, of course, and something prevented me from speaking of it to either sister. If Morven or Helena had seen him, surely I would have known.

Once I saw him on Fifth Avenue, at the library’s grand opening, but he disappeared in the crowd before I could follow him. Later on I saw him in places he couldn’t possibly have been, years upon years after his life should have ended had he lived its full length; and so I came to understand that the sight of my father’s face was, for me, the most sinister portent of all. Sadists, child molesters, violent drunks: I can spot them all from half a mile off.

But that wasn’t the most disturbing consequence of the whole business. The notion that my father could have found in the war an opportunity to slough his old life—wife, daughters, and all—was a revelation to me. If it was true, it was utterly despicable, and yet that word did not occur to me until many years afterward. I was overcome with a new feeling, a horrified fascination:
this
was the nature of men. I had no doubt the man in that carriage was my father; I knew his face and saw the recognition in it. He knew me, too.

I came of age that day in more ways than one.