Petty Magic (32 page)

And All That Happened Afterward

32.

Fifty years later

N
OTHING FOR
it but to bide my time, and mind you, I’ve taken extra-specially good care of myself. I still don’t look a day over eighty—a very
spry
eighty. But I don’t fool myself thinking I’ll live much longer, and I know I’m lucky to have this one last chance.

When Justin married a second time I began to think perhaps it was all in the past and I’d do well to leave it there. I almost never ventured into the mews anymore for fear of seeing him, but I still heard about everything that happened at Fawkes and Ibis. Harry and Emmet passed on within a year of each other, and then the shop belonged to Justin. Under his ownership Fawkes and Ibis prospered beyond the founders’ wildest dreams. There were profiles in all the big newspapers and magazines, Businessman of the Year awards—heck, they even gave him the key to the “city.” I was afraid all the success would turn him fat and complacent, but I needn’t have worried.

I’ve never forgotten him. How could I?

I saw him walking up and down Worth Street a few days after that horrible Halloween night. He was checking the numbers above all the bars and bodegas, frowning as he tried to recall just what address I’d given the cabbie the morning after the Astor ball. I stood just across the street in my overcoat with the ermine collar and sensible shoes and watched as he alighted upon the entrance to the warren. And when the gate opened and he peered hopefully inside, the man coming out of the ordinary alleyway gave Justin a dirty look before shutting the door behind him with a decisive clank.

He lingered a few minutes longer, trying to part the autumn-withered ivy with those slender pianist’s fingers of his so he might see something. But doubt overcame him; he couldn’t recall passing through that courtyard. He passed from gate to curb, glancing up and down the street with that same long face I’d first seen on a train through the Highlands so long ago. His gaze swept my way, I turned up my collar and peered into a dusty shop display of garbanzo beans and
jugo de piña
, and when I looked round again he was gone.

To cheer me up Morven went to Fawkes and Ibis and bought me the horned mermaid, and we hung it over the coffee table in Cat’s Hollow. Not that we’ve seen much of it this last long while. We’ve had midnight picnics on the cold marble floor of the Louvre, watched the marriages of ordinary couples from the eaves of old stone churches. And yes, I’ve still indulged in the occasional randy-view, though I’ve never broken my promise. Lucky for me, European men seem to like their women as they do their wine.

We’ve spent a fair bit of time in Deutschland too. I took Morven back to the Romanisches Café, where you still couldn’t see the ceiling for all the smoke. I kept jerking my head this way and that thinking I glimpsed faces from the old crowd, but nobody from the old crowd would pass through that doorway again.

And other evenings we would turn into ravens and fly to the top of the Berliner Dom, where the angels who passed the war at the bottom of the river have been restored to their rightful places. We sit on the ledge high above the Lustgarten, where all the punks and drunks are milling about among the potted fuschia, and when I snap my fingers a cold thermos and a pair of martini glasses appear on the ledge between us. The angels and cherubs loom over us, the copper gone corpse-green and black in the crevices, and from the shadows come the sounds of squeaking bats and cooing pigeons. We sit there sipping grasshoppers as we look down over the blinking lights of the new city, cranes paused at obtuse angles over every construction site. Whenever I open my mouth to speak of the past, Morven, in her gentle way, changes the subject.

We never stay away for long, though. We’re in Blackabbey often enough to watch our nieces fall in and out of love, and bring a few new nieces into the brood while they’re at it. Uncle Hy and Uncle Heck still come to all the coventions; we prop them up on armchairs by the fire so they can delight all the little ones, just as they used to, with their stories of war and adventure. We’ve got to oil their jaw-hinges regularly or else you can’t hear them for all the squeaking.

Life goes on in Helena’s absence. Morven decided we owed Lucretia an apology—one of those apologies contingent upon the other party doing likewise—and I grudgingly followed her lead. The truce isn’t friendly, civil is the best that can be said for it, but with the mend the tension left our circle and we’ve been able to go on as we always have. It will be at least a hundred years, maybe two, before another Harbinger leads this coven, but our nieces are not so proud as we were.

In fifty years we haven’t heard from Helena, not once. Her puppet doesn’t come to life with the others at covention times, and none of the aunties can say what has become of her. I can’t bear to think of our sister wandering endlessly through some cosmic wasteland, so much so that I’ve begun to imagine I can hear a solitary puppet traversing the darkened hallways in the middle of the night, limbs clonking softly, dragging the crossbar along the hardwood floors.

I want it to be more than just a groggy fancy of mine; I want to believe that her daytime silence is part of her penance. One of these coventions I’m going to catch that bespectacled puppet in the calico apron by surprise, and then I’ll know she’s all right. That’s what I tell myself.

Auntie Em and the rest of the elders couldn’t give much comfort. I’d go over and over it with Auntie, rehashing the details and playing “what if,” at every covention for years afterward—that is, until she finally stopped coming back and Mira had a baby girl. (Tetchiest kid I ever met.)

Anyway, I told Auntie before she left us that after all that had happened with Helena, I actually felt rather guilty that no one had ever punished
me
for what I did in the prison at Nuremberg. How could tinkering with a tin of ground coffee possibly be any worse than slitting a man’s throat?

“This is silly talk,” Auntie sniffed. “Henry wasn’t a bad man, and
you
weren’t the one who misused your magic.”

I only let myself ask her about Justin on one occasion, and she wasn’t any more help than she’d ever been before. “Why must you always insist upon asking the questions you can answer for yourself, when there are much more important ones you leave hanging?”

I’d cast a glance at the other Gibson girl still suspended from the mantelpiece—the one who had never spoken any scolding words to me because it had never spoken at all. “If you’ll recall, Auntie, I’ve asked you for the truth more than once. I know you know more than you ever let on.”

“I knew you didn’t really care to know.”

I rolled my eyes and threw up my hands. What tosh!

“Listen to me, Evelyn. A child’s regard for her parent is a delicate thing. I didn’t want to be the one to put the tarnish.” Auntie paused. “She was my niece, and I loved her. I would have overlooked it.”

“Overlooked
what?”

Auntie Em fixed me with her beady little eyes. “You weren’t the only one who saw your father in the carriage that day.”

“You’re saying … you’re saying Mother …”

“She asked that none of us ever tell you girls the real reason for her disappearance.” Auntie sighed. “But I think I’ve kept that secret long enough.”

So I shivered all over again in that icy moment of revelation. You see, Helena had only taken after our mother.

O
NE EVENING
at dinner Mira was regaling us with all the fresh gossip from the mews—the shopkeepers were organizing a protest of the town council’s plan to repave the old cobblestone alleyway, and there was talk of beldames from Little Hammersley opening a rival toy shop—and then my niece cleared her throat and said she’d heard something out of Fawkes and Ibis that might be of particular interest to me.

“Justin’s wife has left him,” Vega said excitedly, before her sister could continue. Mira kicked her under the table and all the glass and silverware clinked.

“It happened last week,” Mira said. “His son told me all about it. Off to ‘find herself’ on some mountain in India, he says.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Vega put in. “She always did seem like a bit of a frooty-toot.”

S
O THAT’S
how I find myself in front of the Fawkes and Ibis display window for the first time in who knows how long, heart thudding in my ears, all gussied up and trying not to look it. A man of thirty-five or so stands at the cash register—Justin’s son, obviously, but the resemblance doesn’t affect me as it did the evening I arrived with a toffee cake and a hefty appetite.

For a moment or two I pretend to examine a selection of mint-condition jazz records in the window, until I notice the back-room curtain moving out the corner of my eye. I haven’t seen any recent photographs of him, so his appearance startles me. He looks almost just as Jonah did in the shaving mirror all those years ago: the lines of his face grown more angular, more noble; bushy brows but nary a hair left on his head. Still has his teeth though, and good for him.

My second thought is that with the way he carries himself anyone could tell his wife’s just left him. He is seventy-five now, but his posture is terrible and there’s a leadenness to his movements that makes him look at least ten years older. He busies himself writing something at the counter for a moment, but his son has noticed how I’m staring and I hear him say a few words.

In that first second, as he’s looking up, I freeze in terror—what if he’s still angry? Or worse, what if he doesn’t recognize me and I have to go through the humiliation of reminding him? No, it won’t come to that. If he doesn’t know it’s me I’ll turn heel and never look back.

I needn’t have worried. His face is positively transformed at the sight of me, if I do say so myself. So now I’m inside the shop with no memory of putting one foot before the other, and he is clasping both my hands, kissing my cheek, telling me he’d have known me anywhere. At a time like this people always say the years melt away in an instant, and how true it is! He hasn’t even gotten a word out but I am back on the stairs at Harbinger House—dressed in white, and not so young as I looked—gazing down at him smiling broadly among the swarm of the coven. He’s back in that moment, too, I can tell. It pleases me to notice that his son, still standing behind the cash register, looks rather shocked.

He introduces me, briefly, and then he gets his coat and we walk to the Blind Pig Gin Mill. (Yep, still around, though it’s changed owners a hundred times since.) I order a whisky ginger and he says he’ll have the same, and he insists on buying my drink.

He keeps the conversation safe at first. I tell him little vignettes of the places I’ve been, and he gives me all the mundane details of his life. Has two children from his first marriage, his daughter’s in medical school in Boston, and his son is taking over the business.

“You’ve done very well,” I say. “I’ve heard about all your successes from my nieces. Blackabbey Business of the Year for the twelfth year running, eh? Well done!”

“Thank you.” He takes a pensive sip of his whisky. “Uncle Harry would have been pleased, I think.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he would have.” He gives me a curious sidewise look; I was always too familiar with the auld gents, and he could never figure out why.

It’s only a matter of minutes before he mentions the departure of Wife Number Two. “Married fifteen years and she up and decides she’s got to find herself.” He doesn’t sound bitter, only sad.

“Went to India, did she?”

“How did you know?” he asks, and I just laugh. He polishes off his drink, pauses, and I can tell by the look on his face he’s going to ask me something awkward. “How about you?”

“Me?”

“How many husbands do
you
have?”

I laugh again. “None.”

“Really? You never married?” Behind that mask of reflexive surprise, though, I can tell he might have predicted as much. He’s wondering how many other men got letters like the one I wrote him.

We finish our drinks in silence. He checks his watch and I feel a sharp stab of panic. “Tell you what,” he says. “Stephen’s gone home by now. What do you say we go back to the shop?”

The relief must be plain on my face, because he smiles and eyes me fondly for a moment before calling to the bartender. “Do you have any crème de menthe?”

The bartender smirks as he turns to fetch a dusty bottle from the top shelf. He goes to open it and Justin says, “That’s all right, we’ll take the whole thing.”

B
ACK IN
the ersatz parlor, the opera lights and red-velvet chaise lounge are long gone, but similar furnishings have taken their place. The flocked velvet wallpaper has been replaced as well, but the wall of door knockers is still there, and the room still has that queer homely air, as if some elderly eccentric actually lived here. No more clocks though. “All that ticking got on my nerves,” he says.

He goes upstairs for the glasses—they use the apartment for an office and storerooms now—and in that idle moment, when my fingers and toes start to tingle, I know it’s only the paresthesia flaring up again. It’s a load off, having nothing to hide anymore.