Travellers in Magic (3 page)

“Oh, I don't know,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual. “I was wondering about him, that's all. Do you have a picture of him?”

“What do you think—we were allowed to take photographs with us to the camps?” The bitterness was back in her mother's voice. “We lost everything.”

“Well, what did he look like?”

“He was—I don't know. A thin man, with black hair. He brushed it back, I remember that.”

“Did he wear glasses?”

Her mother looked up at that. “Yah, he did. How did you know?”

“Oh, you know,” Alison said quickly. “Laura's grandfather has glasses, so I thought.… What did he do?”

“I named you after him,” her mother said. “I wanted a name that started with A.” To Alison's great astonishment, she began to laugh. “He told that story about the attic all the time, when we lived in Holland. How crowded it was. He said my mother never threw anything away.” She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “He made it sound like the funniest thing that ever happened to him.”

Alison walked slowly through the park. It was Sunday, and dozens of families had come out for the last warmth of the year, throwing frisbees, barbecuing hamburgers in the fire pits. Joey held her hand tightly, afraid to let go.

She began to hurry, pushing her way through the crowds. Had she scared Alfred off by guessing his secret? She knew what he was now. He had drifted the way Laura's grandfather sometimes drifted, had forgotten his own time and had slipped somehow into hers. Or maybe this was the one wish the angel had granted him, the wish he hadn't known he wanted. However it had happened, he had come to her, singled her out. She had a grandfather after all.

But what if she was wrong? What if he was just a lonely old man who needed someone to talk to?

There he was, up ahead. She ran toward him. “Hey,” Joey said anxiously. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“Hi,” Alison said to the old man, a little breathless. “I've decided to tell you my name. My name's Alison, and I was named after my grandfather Alfred. And this is my brother Joey. Joey's afraid of things. I thought you might talk to him.”

A
FTERWORD

“Alfred” is in some ways sheer wish fulfillment. My grandfather's name was Alfred, and he looked like the man in the story; he escaped from Germany to Holland with his family, my grandmother and my father. He was a mechanic, though he didn't have the glamorous profession I gave him here. I find, reading the story over, that I even made the character who stands in for me a year younger than I am, though that was mainly to get in the reference to John Lennon glasses.

The pocket watch was my grandfather's and is now mine, the only thing I have of his. It sat on my desk while I wrote the story.

In another sense, of course, “Alfred” is not wish fulfillment at all. It's about the healing power of history and family and imagination.

C
ASSANDRA'S
P
HOTOGRAPHS

“The best car to smuggle reptiles in is a Subaru station wagon,” Aurora said at the wheel of the car. “Because it's got four-wheel drive, and great brights so you can see them on the road at night, and because the panels come out easy. So you can hide the snakes and stuff behind them. I'm gonna get one when I can afford it.”

I was sitting in the back seat of the car (which was, unfortunately for Aurora, only an old VW squareback) wondering how things had progressed this far. We had been on our way to get burgers when Aurora decided that, since it was such a nice summer day and everything, we should go down to Mexico and see if we could find some snakes to round out Aurora's collection. After all, she said, it was only a few hundred miles away. So we made a stop at the corner J.C. Penney's to buy pillowcases to put the snakes in, and headed out on Highway 5 to Baja California.

Cassie, Aurora's sister, was sitting up front next to Aurora. Cassie was the reason I was on this trip in the first place. I had noticed her the minute she walked into my class in beginning calculus at the college. Everyone says you shouldn't date your students, and everyone is probably right, but within a month we were going out two or three times a week. And since I was just the teaching assistant, and not responsible for grades, we had nothing to quarrel about at the end of the semester when Cassie got a C in the class. She didn't even seem to mind all that much.

I sat still and looked at Cassie's orange-red hair flying out the window and tried to figure out if there was something I needed to do in the next few days. School was over, so I didn't have classes. I badly wanted to take out my small pocket diary and flip through it, but I knew what Cassie would say if I did. “Stop being so responsible all the time,” she'd say. “We're on vacation. Put that book away.”

Lately all our arguments had been about how obsessive (her word) I was, and how childish (my word) she was. She was constantly late, not just once or twice but every single time. I hadn't seen the beginning of a movie since I started going out with her. So I didn't say anything when Aurora suggested going to Mexico. I wanted to prove that I could be as open to adventure as the rest of Cassie's crazy family. It occurred to me that Cassie had to go in to work tomorrow (she cleaned up at a day care center), but I said nothing and looked at her hair, brilliant in the sun. The sight of her hair made it all worthwhile.

“Did you bring the book?” Chris said. Chris was in Aurora's grade in high school and, like half the class (if the phone ringing day and night was any indication), found it impossible to resist Aurora's manic energy, her wild schemes. If Aurora was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles then she, Chris, was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles too. The book,
The Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians,
had become Chris's bible.

“No, it's at home,” Aurora said. “But don't worry. I know the ones we want.”

On the other side of Chris sat Alan. Alan had said nothing for the past ten miles. Later it turned out that he was deathly afraid of snakes. But he was in love with Aurora, so what could he do? Poor boy. I knew exactly how he felt.

We stopped just this side of the Mexican border for our last hamburger and fries. It was 7:30. “We're making good time,” Aurora said when we sat down to eat. “We should be at this place I know in a few hours. And we can spend the night driving up and down, and be back by tomorrow afternoon.”

“What about sleep?” I said. Immediately I cursed myself. Someone setting out on the grand adventure wouldn't think of sleep.

“Who needs sleep?” Cassie said. I thought she looked a little disappointed in me.

“Certainly not you,” I said, trying to make a joke of the whole thing. “Or the rest of your crazy family.”

“What makes you think we're crazy?” Cassie said.

I thought she was being reasonable. That was my first mistake. I looked across the table at her red hair and brown eyes, both tinted with the same shade of gold, and I started to relax and enjoy the trip for the first time. If I could be with her it didn't matter where we were going. Anyway her eccentricities were only part of her charm. “Well, you know,” I said. “Your great-uncle, what's-his-name, the one who thinks he's an Egyptian.”

“He doesn't think he's an Egyptian,” Cassie said. Alan was watching us glumly. Chris drew pictures of snakes on her napkin. “He's an Osirian. The cult of Osiris. He explained it all to you when you were over at the house.”

“He didn't explain anything,” I said. “He asked me questions. ‘Knowest thou the name of this door, and canst thou tell it?' And then the lintel, and the doorpost, and the threshold—”

“You weren't listening,” Cassie said. She still sounded reasonable. “If you know all the names you can get past the door into the land of the dead. And if you don't you're stuck. He's got to keep all that in his head. It's a long list.”

“And you don't think that's a little strange,” I said. “That he believes all this.”

“Well, what if he's right?” Cassie said. “I mean, millions of people used to believe in it. Maybe they knew something.”

“Well, what about your grandmother?” I said. “She stays in her room for weeks on end and then she comes out and makes these cryptic utterances—”

“Look, Robert,” Cassie said. Something passed between the two sisters then, something I was too much of an outsider to understand, and Aurora turned to Chris and started talking rapidly. The gold seemed to leave Cassie's eyes; they became flat, muddy. “Just because you came from a boring home doesn't give you the right to pass judgment on other people's families. Okay? I mean, I know your parents belonged to the right kind of religion and had the right kind of jobs and never said anything unusual or anything that would make you think, but that doesn't mean that everyone's family is like that. Some of us wouldn't want to be like that, okay? So you can just keep your stupid opinions to yourself.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean—I was just joking around. I'm sorry.”

Cassie turned away from me to talk to Aurora and Chris. Alan looked at me sympathetically, but I refused to catch his eye.

The rest of the trip was a nightmare. To my surprise we made it past the border guards with no problems. Sometime in the middle of the night we reached the place Aurora had heard about with two snakes we had picked up along the way. Aurora and Chris were ecstatic, I didn't know why. I'm afraid one snake looks like another to me. Alan, rigid and wild-eyed, was starting to look like a speed freak. We found one more snake, put it in a pillowcase, put the pillowcases in the trunk and headed back. Then Aurora fell asleep at the wheel.

The car swerved, bounced over a few rocks and stalled. Aurora hadn't woken up. “Aurora?” Cassie said, shaking her. “Aurora?”

“Hmm. Mf,” Aurora said.

We pulled her out and set her in Cassie's seat. I was hoping she didn't have a concussion. Naturally no one in the car was wearing a seat belt. Cassie drove a few more miles and then said, “God, I'm sleepy,” and came to a dead stop in the middle of the one lane road.

“I'll drive!” Alan said, a bright note of desperation in his voice. Then he looked over Cassie's shoulder and leaned back, but not too far back. Ever since we put the snakes in the trunk his body hadn't made contact with the back of the seat. “Oh. Stick shift. I can't do it.”

“Look,” I said. “There was a big city just a few miles back. We'll find a hotel or a motel or something and get some sleep. All right?”

No one said anything. “Do you want me to drive?” I asked Cassie. “Or can you handle it? It's only a few more miles, I think.”

“Sure, I can do it,” Cassie said. She never stayed angry at anything for long. This always confused me; I come from a long line of grudge-holders.

The city was more than a few miles away, but we made it. Aurora, wide awake now, cheerfully told us about a man who had been bitten by a cobra and was immobilized just as he picked up the phone and started to dial the hospital. In the street outside a seedy one-story hotel we counted our money and discovered that between us we had eleven dollars and ninety-two cents. Wearily I went inside and found to my absolute amazement that they would take my charge card. I motioned Alan inside. We had already decided that the two men would rent the room and we would sneak the three women in later. I wanted as little trouble as possible. As I was stretching out on the floor, prepared to offer someone else the sagging double bed, I noticed Cassie and Aurora come in. Cassie lay on the floor next to me. In my sleep-fogged mind I thought the sacks Aurora was carrying were her luggage.

Cassie and I were the last ones up. We went outside and found the others at a restaurant down the street. None of them, it turned out, knew Spanish, and they had ordered in gestures and pidgin English. Despite all the warnings and jokes, each of them was drinking a glass of Mexican water. I wondered how they thought they were going to pay for the meal.

Aurora picked up one of the pillowcases scattered around her and looked inside. “Damn,” she said. “One of the snakes escaped. I wonder if it's back at the hotel. Alan? Alan!” The poor kid's eyes had rolled up under his fluttering eyelids. “Well if you're afraid of snakes you should have said something when we started out.”

I hadn't had any water, but I was sick for a week after we got home. Lying in bed with a hundred-and-two-degree temperature I had time to think about the trip, go over the details, figure out how one thing led to another. I felt as though it had happened to someone else, someone who had far less of a grip on reality than I did.

That trip clarified things for me. Life just wasn't lived that way, the way Cassie and her family lived it. You didn't just jump in a car and drive to Mexico because you felt like it. What if I hadn't been there with my credit card? What if Aurora had gotten a concussion? I wanted something more for my life—order, sanity. I wanted to complete my studies, get my doctorate in math and get a job in industry.

I recovered, got busy with fall classes and stopped calling her. I didn't consciously think that we had broken up, but I'd think of her or her family from time to time with nostalgic regret. There was a guy who hung around their house—I don't know if he was part of the family or what—who had been in films as a saxophone player. The only thing was, he couldn't play the saxophone. He just
looked
like a saxophone player. So there'd be these close-ups of this guy and someone else on the soundtrack. I used to watch him practice, moving the saxophone this way and that without making a sound. It was eerie.

And I'd remember her great-uncle, asking Cassie to name some part of a doorway in ancient Egyptian. Sometimes she'd know the answer, and he'd beam with satisfaction. Other times she wouldn't, and he'd shake his head sadly from side to side and say, “Cassandra, my pet, what will become of you?” Once I caught myself shaking my head with regret just thinking of him.