Petty Magic (23 page)

“Sure I do.”

I watched him for a while more as he passed the blade over the contours of his face. “Would you like to see?”

He paused midstroke and turned to look at me. He looked positively boyish then, returned to the time in every person’s young life when one is desperate to know,
now now now
, how it will all turn out.

I bade him turn back to the mirror, and with a few words I began our transformation. I made myself, too: the skin round my eyes grew thin and fragile as rice paper, and the color faded from my hair until it was white as snow. I even sprouted a few chin hairs for good measure.

Jonah was giggling like a schoolgirl—the hair grew out of his nose and ears, and his eyebrows became thick as caterpillars. His face had changed, too: despite the sagging flesh, its chiseled lines were becoming even more so. Then he tried to bare his pearly whites and discovered he no longer had any. “Hey! What happened to my teeth?”

I laughed, and at that moment we both heard a board creak on the landing outside. I turned around to find the door ajar and Addie standing in the hallway staring at us. She had seen our faces in the mirror, and she was terrified.

“Don’t be afraid, Addie. Nothing has changed—I’m still your friend.”

She hesitated. Fear and wonder fought for mastery of her sweet little face. “Are you a fairy?”

I felt Jonah’s eyes on me as I knelt on the floor and grasped her hands. “Yes, dear,” I said gravely. “I’m one of many. We are trying to help end the war.”

Addie looked confused. “But fairies don’t live in
our
world,” she said earnestly.

“Who told you that?”

“Oma did. Oma says there’s a magic tree on the mountain with a little door at the bottom and that’s how you come here. Is that so?”

“No, dear.”

“Oh. Which world do you come from, then?”

“This one, same as yours,” I said, and when I glanced at Jonah I had to wonder what he was thinking. Addie was looking at me expectantly.

“You don’t believe me?”

She shook her head.

“I come from America,” I said. “I came across the ocean.”

“I knew it!” the little girl cried. I only realized later that she had probably never laid eyes on the sea. She pointed to the mirror. “Can you show me?”

“Show you?”

She paused. “Will I … will I be pretty?” As she said this she cast a quick glance at Jonah and turned back to me, blushing like a girl twice her age.

I laughed as I petted her hair. I couldn’t afford to indulge her—shouldn’t have been playing with the mirror to begin with. “Of course you will,
Schnuckelchen
. We don’t need to trick a mirror to see that.”

I
HAD SWORN
Adelaide to secrecy, but I ought to have known better; there’s a reason why children make the best spies of all. They’ve no inkling when it comes to the consequences of their rambling stories, their eagerness to share and be praised for it. Addie had been taught that the Nazis were bad men and that she should never speak to them—we could only cross our fingers and hope she’d never be tested—but she couldn’t help confiding everything in her Oma.

The next evening Addie arrived without the dinner basket. “Papa says you’re to come to our house for dinner tonight,” she said breathlessly. “He says to ask for your help. Oma is sick.”

“I knew it,” Frau Hoppe breathed as I ventured into her bedroom. The fug in the room was terrible. “I knew your pocket couldn’t hold so many bars of chocolate,” she said as I opened the window. “It was magic. I
knew
it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about, Frau Hoppe.” I turned from the window to look at her then and gasped. The candlelight flickered over her long pallid face. She’d had an outbreak of sores, and I could hardly see the whites of her eyes. It must have been unbearably painful just to open them.

I made her close her eyes and said I’d be back in a moment. Ten minutes later I sat down on the bed beside her with a jar of freshly made ointment.

She was agitated, fidgeting excitedly as I dipped a clean cloth into the mixture. “Is this the magic unguent which gives the fairy sight?”

They may have found me out, but I had no intention of satisfying their curiosity. After all:
I shall always practice discretion and make every effort not to reveal my true nature to persons ill equipped to understand
. “No,” I said shortly as I dabbed round her eyes. “It’s kitchen lard.”

T
HE HOPPES
passed their days in silent dissent, but many other German families were still living fully inside the illusion. The factory complex on the Baltic Sea had been entirely self-contained, with housing estates and schools for the families of the scientists and engineers employed there, but there could be no such arrangements made in the bowels of a mountain, so the wives and children of Mittelwerk employees were quartered in towns along the outskirts of the Harz. Many families were living in Wernigerode, a charming town of half-timbered houses painted in cheerful colors; it was as safe, or unsafe, a place as any. In Wernigerode we would carry out our most dangerous mission yet.

The Nazis had taken over the
Schloss
overlooking the town, mostly for administrative use, but now they were planning a soiree on New Year’s Eve for the engineers and their families. If we could infiltrate this party, locate the most important men, and open their heads as I had done to all those Jerries back on the Rue de Suffren, we had a shot at shutting down the complex and liberating all who were enslaved inside it. I felt sure, then, that the war in Europe would be effectively over.

Here is how we would do it. On the thirtieth of December the Allies would bomb the Nordhausen railway line, the primary supply route to Mittelwerk. There would be twenty-four casualties on that afternoon train, among them two Nazis from the Armaments Ministry, a Dr. Schafer and his secretary, who had been en route to Wernigerode. A beldame from Berlin would pass along their identity cards and documentation, and another Resistance member would send a telegram to Wernigerode SS headquarters explaining that Dr. Schafer and his secretary, Fraulein Gross, had been delayed in the capital and would arrive instead on the following afternoon. It would be two days before Wernigerode could be notified that the doctor and his assistant had actually died on that train. We would impersonate them at the New Year’s Eve ball at the
Schloss
, and if we carried it off it would be our biggest accomplishment yet.

Lord of the Slippy

23.

They baptized their toads, dressed them in black velvet, put little bells on their paws, and made them dance.

—Grillot de Givry,
Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy

O
NE MORNING
in early June I happen upon an advertisement in the
Little Hammersley Courier
for Nieuw Amsterdam’s 384th Annual Summer Solstice Masquerade. We’ve attended it only once, a very long time ago, and I wonder aloud if it isn’t time we blew the dust off our dancing shoes.

“Are you thinking of taking Justin?” Morven asks.

“I was thinking of taking
you.”

“Hah! Fat chance.”

“Come on, it’s only one night. Just think what a bunch of sad sacks we’ll be at the Peacocks’ house that weekend, with all the preparations and all the fun snatched out from under us. Won’t you be glad of a distraction?”

In the end I persuade her, of course, and then I ring Justin and tell him to rent a tux. These balls are always full of ordinary men—otherwise whom would we have to dance with?

J
USTIN MAKES
charmingly stilted chitchat on the cab ride uptown. “Funny how we’ve only just met, isn’t it, Morven? Eve’s told me hardly anything about you.”

“Oh?” She’s promised to say as little as possible tonight. I don’t want her letting on they
have
met before.

“How come you weren’t there at Christmas? I thought for sure I’d meet you then.”

“Oh, I was there. I think Eve was doing her best to keep us apart,” she replies with a not-so-convincing giggle.

Justin sidesteps that one. “So what do you do?”

My sister turns to me and whispers, “What do
you
do?”

“He knows I’m a lady of leisure,” I reply.

“She told me she’s retired,” Justin says, eyeing me warily.

“And you’re wondering if that’s a euphemism, eh?” Morven yelps when I pinch her bare arm. “I’m …” She pauses. “I work at an art museum. Human resources.”

“Really! That’s so cool. Which one?”

“Which one what?”

“Which art museum?”

I shoot her a look.

“Oh. Uh … the Frick.”

“I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve been meaning to go. Well anyway, I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about. I’m an antiques dealer.”

“I know,” says she.

The Astor mansion—Astor mansion number
two
, that is—is so ideally situated on Central Park East at Sixty-fifth Street that ninety years later the beldames of Boston Avenue still laugh at the folly of the men who tore it down.

These urban manors of the Gilded Age were built with the same degree of forethought that goes into the making of a sandcastle, and knocked down again with that same fickle impulse. They’ve thrown Nieuw Amsterdam’s Annual Summer Solstice Masquerade here since the mansion was demolished in 1926.

We get out of the cab a block from the manse, and I draw a blindfold out of my evening purse. “What’s this for?” he says as I tie it over his eyes. “Are we partying with the CIA?”

“Humor me,” I say as I kiss him on the cheek. “It’s more fun this way.” Temple Emanu-El currently occupies the site at 1 East Sixty-fifth Street, but we can’t have Justin thinking we’re going to a party at the synagogue. Morven and I lead him to a gated side entrance. A strange little man, suspiciously simian in appearance, silently takes our tickets and opens the gate for us.

In the foyer we can hear the strains of a six-piece orchestra, and once I’ve pulled off the blindfold Justin looks around him in awe. The place is a trove of oil paintings, oriental carpets, and figures in bronze—though of course all the great gilded mirrors have been removed for the occasion, so that nobody can spoil anybody else’s fun. But Morven manages to catch her reflection in a piece of tabletop glass and gives it a tiny disbelieving smile. “I feel so … 
exposed,”
she says, though her dress shows very little cleavage. It’s her own face she isn’t used to, all the lines and spots erased for the evening. Morven hasn’t looked so young since she
was
this young. I even had to show her how to lose the geriatric gait. My own frock is vintage, of course—a low-backed gown of luminous peacock-blue velvet—and round my neck is the Janus pendant Justin got me for Christmas. Arm in arm, the three of us stride into the ballroom, the hem of my gown rustling against the doorjamb.

Oh, how the chandelier shimmers and the wall sconces glow, and how slow and languid the movements of the dancers. I look at Justin, and for a moment a pang of sadness mutes my delight. I nearly have to bite my tongue to keep from asking if he can recall the last time we found ourselves in a ballroom. Better for him if he doesn’t.

Motes of glitter catch the light as they fall on the crowd. Justin eyes the hapless young men in codpieces and tricorn hats and murmurs in my ear, “Was I supposed to come in costume?”

“If I’d told you to wear stockings you’d never have come,” I reply as we follow Morven to the banquet tables.

And the food! Even I’ve never seen such a spread in all my life. There are so many platters of roast fowl—goose and quail and pheasant and even peacock, with feathers reattached!—that one can’t help wondering if the chef raided the aviary at the Central Park Zoo. Stranger still is the carnival grub: the illuminated signs above the popcorn and cotton candy machines, girls in satin corsets and pillbox caps handing out boxes of buttered popcorn and whirls of cotton candy on wooden sticks. There are brass fountains of champagne and dark chocolate and crystal bowls heaped with strawberries big as your fist, trays upon trays of canapés and bonbons and fancy Italian sausages, oysters dripping with white wine and butter, glistening slabs of braised beef in aspic. There’s even a three-foot Ferris wheel made out of carrot sticks and bell peppers—and it moves! Justin stares at it, openmouthed, the rest of the food forgotten in his childlike wonder. Eventually we heap a few plates high with hors d’oeuvres and find a half-curtained alcove from which to people-watch.

After a few minutes’ critical survey, I conclude that we look as well as anyone here. There are more than a few like us, of course, but at a party like this, where nobody knows you, it doesn’t matter what you look like during the day. I’m sure some of the loveliest girls here are past the two hundred mark, and lucky for them you can’t tell who’s who. It’s quite a thrill for us old birds, cashing in on chips we’ve lost long since.

At one point I leave the two of them chatting in the alcove so I can get some more munchies, and when I come back I linger behind the curtain so I can hear what they’re saying about me.

“Oh yes,” Morven is saying. “Eve always had a lot of beaux. You might well be one of the nicest. I wouldn’t know for sure, since I never get the chance to meet most of them. Yes,” she says with the disapproving sigh of a maiden aunt, which of course she is, “life is all a great drama to Eve. Want to know the first word she spoke as a child?”

I can’t make out Justin’s reply.

“ ‘Mine,’ ” Morven says. “That was her first word:
mine
. Then there was the time she sat on a wild turkey …”

Justin nearly chokes on his chicken skewer. “What?!”

“No. I just said that for the benefit of our Evesdropper.”

I part the curtain, plop down on the sofa between the two of them, and give Morven a piece of my elbow. That’s the last word she’ll say to him tonight, if I’ve got anything to do with it.

The hours pass in a blur of waltzes, hook-nosed masks, and trays of fizzing champagne flutes bobbing and weaving among the crowd. Justin tells me over and over how he’s having the time of his life, and he gives me another thrill of happiness every time he politely declines to dance with another girl. Morven dances a few, too, with borrowed partners, and I can’t help tittering when I spot her with a man in a foofy pirate blouse. We drink and we eat and we dance some more.

Sometime after midnight the buzz begins to subside, however, and we wrinkle our noses at the sounds and smells of excess. The food trays look picked-over, the cotton candy machine has gone dark, and the tablecloths are smeared with grease because the beldames who put on this party are more than likely using their magic for other purposes now. Even the carrot-stick Ferris wheel looks like someone’s been gnawing at it. I begin to notice the glazed expressions of the gay young men I laughed at a few hours ago, the awfully pointed eyeteeth of the girls leading them by the hand into those cozy curtained alcoves.

“You know something?” my sister murmurs in my ear. “This is hardly more dignified than a Roman orgy.”

“Or any other kind of orgy, for that matter.”

I am reminded of why we ordinarily never go to events like this. These balls are great fun, don’t get me wrong, and reveling in the opulence is always amusing for an hour or so. But I feel increasingly uneasy in the presence of these men, these hapless pretty-boy ninnies, because this party has turned into one tremendous joke at their expense. Every one of these men is going to wake up alone in his bed tomorrow afternoon with the most painful headache of his life and only the haziest memories of tonight’s revelry.

I decide I do not wish to know, do not like, the women who organize this ball every year; yet when I look at Justin, who has already consumed two full bottles of champagne and wears the court jester’s grin to prove it, I see I am no better.

“I’ve met the nicest girls just now,” he says as I begin the discreet process of pocketing various finger foods in paper napkins. (I tell you, a bottomless purse is a girl’s best friend.) Morven drains one last glass of punch, then rolls her eyes when she notices what I’m up to.

“Oh?” I say lightly as I slip a handful of
gougères
into my purse. “As nice as me?”

“Not nearly as pretty, but much more appreciative,” he says, and I freeze with my hand hovering over the mortadella.

“Justin, I think we’d better be going now.”

“But we only just got here!”

“We’ve been here four and a half hours,” Morven says patiently.

“Can we stay just a little bit longer? There are some girls over there who want to give me an award!”

“Oh, dear.” Morven leans over and points to where the hostesses are standing on the grand staircase holding a gaudy brass scepter and conferring among themselves. One of them points to us, and two others start down the stairs. “They want to crown him Lord of the Slippy!”

Each year as the ball draws to an end the organizers announce the winner of a sort of beauty contest, in which all the young male guests have been unwitting participants. The most desirable man among them is called up to the front of the ballroom and his many masculine virtues are volubly praised as tittering beldames bedeck him in a crown of olive branches and a long velvet cloak trimmed in ermine, and put that ridiculous scepter in his hand. Then he is pulled rather
un
ceremoniously in the general direction of the master bedroom, and
he is never seen or heard from again
.

The disappearance of a man no one would be seeing again in any event is not necessarily cause for alarm—no doubt he’ll quite enjoy whatever it is they plan to do with him—but it is still rather unsettling the way they drag him up the stairs.

“Lord of the Slippy?” Justin says dubiously. “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t think I want to be it.”

“Well put.” I take him by the hand and feel a thrill of anxiety as we hurry through the ballroom doorway and out into the hall. As far as we know, no one has ever refused to give up her date before. If we don’t hightail it out of here there could very well be blood.

“The park!” Morven says breathlessly as we hurry down the steps of the mansion. “They won’t follow us.” There were other boys nearly as good-looking as Justin, after all. Next year we’ll be blacklisted, of course, but I can’t say I’ll care much.

At the park entrance Justin turns and gapes at the cheerless façade of Temple Emanu-El. “We … we weren’t … we couldn’t have been in a party in the synagogue!”

“Of course not.” I take his hand and pull him away, into the park. “We were in a building behind the synagogue.”

“But we just came down the steps straight onto the street!” he cries, still glancing over his shoulder.

“I’ll explain it when you’re sober,” I reply, though naturally I haven’t any intention of doing so.

The surface of the duck pond looks like quicksilver in the moonlight. We clamber rather awkwardly over a wrought-iron fence and up one of those giant boulders overlooking the pond, and Justin stumbles up behind us.

We settle ourselves in a small circle on the rock, folding our legs beneath our swishing skirts. A warm wind rustles through the trees all around us, our view beyond hemmed by all those posh old high-rises with windows still lit here and there. Justin pulls off his bow tie and swings the white strip of fabric around and around, and he laughs when it slips from his hand into the darkness below. He looks at me with gleaming eyes. “Is this the meeting of a very secret society?”