The Magician’s Assistant

  Sabine thought for a minute, scanned back over conversations. “God, Bertie, I don’t even know what you do.”

  “I teach first grade. They got a sub for Friday, but Monday I have to be back.”

  Swarms of children, pots of thick white paste and snub-nosed scissors, construction-paper leaves in red and yellow taped to the windows. “First grade,” Sabine said.

  “Oh, Bertie’s the best,” Mrs. Fetters said. “She got the teaching award for the whole school last year.”

  Bertie shrugged. “It’s a good job.”

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Fetters said, “Kitty counts on me to help her with the boys, and we’ve got this wedding to plan for. But it won’t be that long till we see you. You’ll come to the wedding?”

  The last wedding Sabine had been to was her own, and she couldn’t tell the Fetters her best memories from that day. Parsifal danced with the rabbi, who was a remarkably good dancer, while the band played “Girl From Ipanema.” Architects lined up to kiss the bride and one by one brushed their lips to her ear, begging her to meet them later in the evening. There was talk in the crowd of putting Parsifal and Sabine into chairs and lifting the chairs above their heads and dancing out onto the street, but people were drunk by then, their train of thought was easily lost. “Maybe I’ll come to the wedding,” Sabine said.

  What they accomplished by their dallying was the elimination of time for long good-byes. All the way to the airport they looked at their watches, wondering if they would make the plane. They were silent in the car. There was too much left to say and not enough time. There was no one place to start. Sabine wanted to ask what subjects Parsifal had liked in school as a boy. Had he done well, was he interested in magic? And what about his father? Did Parsifal ever say what had happened at the boys’ reformatory? Had they ever gone to visit him there? Sabine wanted to say that even if Mrs. Fetters wasn’t in the market for forgiveness, Sabine forgave her anyway, because as they took the San Diego Freeway towards the airport, she knew with sudden, utter clarity that his mother had not understood what she was doing, and, if she had, she never, never would have done it. But Sabine said none of this. She parked the car, checked their bag, and led them through the snaking concourse without a word. The Fetters no longer seemed interested in LAX.

  At the gateway, in clear view of so many strangers, Mrs. Fetters began to cry.

  “Don’t,” Sabine said. “You have to go.”

  “You were so sweet to us.”

  “You’ll come back,” Sabine said. “You’ll come back and stay for as long as you want.”

  “You shouldn’t be by yourself.” Mrs. Fetters slid her fingers beneath her glasses. “I’ve got my girls and the kids. I don’t want you to have to be alone.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Sabine said.

  The crowds moved around them, pressing them closer together. From overhead came an endless stream of information: If stand-by passengers would please ... Rows twenty-nine through seventeen ... announcing the arrival ... final boarding ... Ladies and gentlemen, there’s been a delay...

  “That’s us,” Bertie said, but Sabine didn’t know which part she was referring to.

  Mrs. Fetters stepped back, stepped directly onto a five-year-old girl with lank yellow hair, who shot out from under her foot and ran away for all she was worth. Mrs. Fetters did not notice. “You’ll come with us,” she said, her voice filled with wonder at her own good idea. The plan that would solve everything. Sabine would come with them.

  “Now?”

  “Get on the plane. You have the money. We can get some clothes, whatever you need. Come home with us.”

  Bertie looked at them, interested.

  “I can’t come with you. I have to go home.” She held Dot Fetters in her arms for a moment and then let her go. “Who would feed Rabbit?”

  “Mama, we’re boarding,” Bertie said.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Even if it’s not right now.”

  A tall black flight attendant in a tight blue suit stared at them from her podium and then gestured with her head towards the door. All the other tickets had been collected. Everyone was onboard, ready to go.

  “Good-bye, Sabine,” Bertie said, and kissed her quickly. “I hope you come. I really do.” She took her mother’s arm and guided her towards the door, making Dot Fetters appear older than she was. When they handed in their tickets Dot blew a kiss and waved. Sabine felt sure they would come back, one more idea, something else to tell, but they turned around and then they were gone, down into the tunnel that would take them to the plane that would take them to Nebraska.

  Sabine stayed to watch the plane take off, and even after it left she stayed. All around her people were crying in the wake of arrivals and departures. They clung to one another as if a plane had nearly crashed or was about to crash. They held their children, kissed their lovers. She heard their voices all around her—It’s so good to see you ... What will I do when you’re gone ... I thought you would never get here ... Good-bye. The good-byes wore her out. She’d had enough of them.

  In the days after the Fetters left, Sabine slipped back into bed, back into the deep nest of dark sheets and king-sized pillows. A late Santa Ana wind howled around the house and loosened the ivy from the gate. Low waves crested and broke in the swimming pool. The half-constructed mall sat in her studio, no walkways, no roof, the windowpanes sealed in polyurethane bags. Salvio called from the rug store and even before he asked his question, Sabine told him he would have to decide himself. She told him to decide everything. Most of the calls she didn’t return, including a nervous message from Sam Spender, the magician. On television the local news focused on murder, suspicion, prosecution. What would that be like, to have someone to blame death on, to stand across the courtroom from that person and point them out, say, You, you took everything I had. Little did they know that everything they had would be taken anyway. The thought of accusation exhausted Sabine. There wasn’t any order. There wasn’t any sense in trying to find it. On the day she was due to go back to the hospital to have the stitches taken out of her hand, she sat on the bath mat and cut them with cuticle scissors and then pulled the stiff thread out with tweezers. They lay scattered on the white floor like the spiky legs of a disembodied insect. The scar was pretty, dark red and thin. It didn’t hurt.

  Eight days after they left there was a letter from Dot Fetters. Four pictures fell out when Sabine unfolded the paper. Three had been taken in her own backyard, but it was the fourth one that interested her. It was of a boy, thin chested and bright faced, maybe eight or nine years old, but Sabine was a bad judge of children. He wore a band around his forehead with a lone feather jutting up from the back, his eyes damp with pleasure. A sweet-faced, dark-haired boy who was her own boy. She would know him anywhere, in an instant. His jeans were faded and loose, his T-shirt striped. Sabine could barely make out the freckles that had left him long before they met. She studied his neck, his delicate shoulders. She memorized the gate behind him and the scalloped white border of the photograph. On the back, written in ink, were the most basic facts: “Guy, 1959.” 1959. Sabine wished she had known him then, when she was a girl in Los Angeles. What had been wasted when she was only a well-loved daughter, her mother walking her to school in Fairfax every morning, lunch in a brown-paper sack, her father taking her to CBS, telling her she was sitting in Walter Cronkite’s chair, even though Cronkite delivered the news from New York. What had happened to this little boy while she was sitting in Canter’s after Hebrew school on Sunday, drinking cream soda and reading the funny papers while her parents divided up the Los Angeles Times? What had she lost that she could never account for? She reached over and pulled open the drawer on the bedside table where the picture of Kitty sat, faceup. Sabine lay on her back and held the two side by side. It was the same sun, the same scalloped edges; on the back there was the same handwriting, which said, “Kitty, 1959.” Maybe the pictures were taken on the same day, or at least during the same summer.
It was true, what Mrs. Fetters said: They were nearly twins; except, of course, for the wonderful feather. That was Parsifal’s alone.

  She looked at the pictures, one and then the other, for nearly an hour. She would buy a twin frame and put them with the family pictures on the table. She was just beginning to see the edges of a hunger she didn’t know she had. When Parsifal died she lost the rest of his life, but now she had stumbled on eighteen years. Eighteen untouched years that she could have; early, forgotten volumes of her favorite work. A childhood that could be mined month by month. Parsifal would not get older, but what about younger?

  So much time passed that she forgot completely that there was a letter. She didn’t find it, half covered in the tumble of sheets, until she was ready to go to sleep.

  Dear Sabine,

  Many thank-you’s for our very good time in Los Angeles. Bertie and I have not stopped telling stories about all our fun. I am sending you copies of the pictures we took. I look awful, but the one of you and Bertie is very nice, I think. Do you ever take a bad picture? I am also sending one of Guy, which I have always thought was sweet. I thought that you might like to have it.

  I am still thinking that you should come to Alliance. There’s no need to wait until Bertie’s wedding. Come now and stay, we have plenty of room. I think that you are maybe sadder than you think and that being alone right now may not be the best thing. Maybe I’m not the person to be giving advice, but I feel like you are one of my own girls, and I know that this is what I would say to Kitty and Bertie and it would be right.

  So now you know that you are welcome. In the meantime, thanks again for your time and generosity and for the pictures, which Kitty was so glad to see.

  Love from Bertie and from me,

  Dot

  The handwriting was schoolgirlish, all the heights and curves evenly matched. It was the handwriting on Parsifal’s postcard at the reformatory, it was the handwriting on the backs of the pictures. Had they had a minute of fun in Los Angeles? Sabine could not remember it.

  “They only made things worse for you,” Sabine’s mother said at Canter’s on Sunday. They were sitting near the counter. Sabine stared at the fruit in the display case, fruit salad in parfait glasses next to halved grapefruits. The cavities of the cantaloupes were clean and hollow, everything sealed in Saran wrap. The waitress came by and Sabine’s mother mouthed the word “Horseradish” to her. She nodded in complicity and went on. “You’re more depressed now than you were before.”

  “I’m not more depressed,” Sabine said. “I am depressed, same as before.”

  “They had no business coming.”

  Sabine’s father sat in silent agreement, stirring his black coffee to cool it down.

  “I should have brought them over to meet you. I wish I had. You would have liked them. No one was more surprised than me, but I’m telling you, they are very decent people.”

  “Decent mothers don’t send their sons to some children’s prison for being homosexual.” Before Parsifal’s death, Sabine’s mother had always dropped her voice on the word homosexual, but now that she saw it as the source of his persecution, she spoke it clearly; even, Sabine thought, loudly. “I will admit it, I think it is easier to have a child who is not a homosexual, but if I did I would have loved that child, not tortured him. What happened to poor Parsifal was sheer barbarism. A loving mother does not send her son off to be tortured.”

  Sabine sighed. It was not her intention to argue in favor of the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility. “It’s awful, I know that. I just think it was a different time. I know that doesn’t excuse it, but I don’t think she understood what she was doing, what it meant.”

  “Nineteen sixty-six was not the Dark Ages. We were all alive in 1966. We are all held accountable for our actions.”

  They sat together in a family silence, listening to the sounds they understood, heavy china cups against white saucers, forks against plates, ice ringing against the sides of glasses, and everywhere, everywhere, voices. No one could make out a whole sentence; but words, every one a free agent, fell against the sound of the cutlery and made a kind of music. A hand swept over the table, depositing a silver cup of horseradish beside Sabine’s mother’s plate.

  “I was thinking,” Sabine said, her eyes cast down, “of maybe going to visit.” She had not been thinking of it exactly, but the minute she said it, it was true.

  Sabine’s father put down his knife, which had been raised in the act of putting jam on his bread. “Nebraska?”

  “There’s a lot I want to know. Things about Parsifal. There’s so much I don’t know.” Sabine was speaking quickly, quietly, and her parents leaned forward from the other side of the orange booth. “You think you know someone, one person better than anyone else, and then there’s all this.” She spread her hands as if to indicate that what she didn’t know was the food on the table. “What if you found out that Daddy wasn’t who you thought he was? What if he’d been married before, had children you knew nothing about. Wouldn’t you be curious?”

  Her father looked startled and then confused. When he opened his lips, her mother spoke. “I know everything about your father. You shouldn’t even think such a thing.”

  “I want to know what happened,” Sabine said.

  “He didn’t want you to know,” her mother said.

  “But I do now. I know part of it.”

  “You never should have seen them.”

  Sabine closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “I did see them, there’s no use in going over that.” Even in her frustration, Sabine felt sorry for what she was doing to her parents.

  Her mother pushed her plate away so as to put both hands flat out on the table. “Listen to me, Sabine. You had a long and very unusual relationship with a good man, but that’s over now. Parsifal’s death was a tragedy and we will all miss him, but you’re no girl anymore. There are no more years to waste. Don’t pursue dead men.” She slapped the table gently, as if to say, enough. “Don’t pursue dead men. I don’t think I have any advice clearer than that.”

  Sabine didn’t think of the boy who Parsifal had been as dead. That boy was in Nebraska, waiting for her. He was there with his mother.

  The house got bigger. Every day the staircase grew by ten steps. In another week it would be impossible to climb. Sabine didn’t go into most of the rooms anymore. When the firemen came on Tuesdays they ran the vacuum over old vacuum marks, picking up only the most subtle layer of dust and rabbit fur generated by life. What had possessed Phan to buy such a big house? Coming to Los Angeles alone, not knowing a soul, hadn’t he rattled around in there? Didn’t he find that loneliness was exacerbated by space?

  Sabine tried to think about Parsifal’s life, but all she seemed able to remember was the nagging infection in his heplock. In her mind, he was always thin. He was already deep inside his spiral of aging. She wanted to think about him in Paris or in the backyard in summer or up onstage in the flattering light, but the thoughts were always crowded out by that last headache.

  In the place where they did the MRI testing, Parsifal had barely opened his eyes. The machine was big enough to be a room itself, solid enough to have its own center of gravity. They must have built the hospital around it. Even broken into pieces, it could never have come through doors, down stairwells. Tiny beads of sweat began to surface on Parsifal’s ears. He stayed on his back, on his gurney, next to the sliding tray they would move him onto.

  “It looks like a clothes dryer,” Parsifal said to her, and shuddered. “They’re going to put me in the dryer.” Parsifal was a magician, but magic wasn’t escape. Parsifal could make Sabine disappear down to the heel taps of her shoes, but he had no interest in restraining himself. He would not get into the disappearing closet, nor would he lie down in the saw box, even to see what Sabine had to do to make the blades miss her stomach. He was never once padlocked and chained. It was all he could do to see a film of Houdini hanging upside-down over Fifth Avenue in a straitjacket. Magic for
Parsifal did not include being stuffed into a milk can filled with water or being buried in a coffin six feet underground. He could not speak of such illusions. Sabine never minded a tight squeeze. Despite her height she could tuck herself into whatever small corner Parsifal requested.

  “I got locked in a refrigerator when I was a kid,” he told her once, when they were looking at some equipment that a retired magician was selling. The attic was hot and the ceiling low. Sabine had slipped in between two panels in a magic box that were so close she had to turn her face to the side. “I was playing and the door slammed shut.” He sat down for a minute on a stool. When Sabine asked him if he wanted a glass of water, he shook his head.

  At the end of his life, Parsifal was trussed like a mental patient, stuffed, terrified, into a narrow tube so that the doctors might find the source of his crushing headache.

  “You’re not wearing a watch. Do you have any metal on your body?” the black nurse said, his voice low but clear, nearly musical. “Do you have a pacemaker?”

  “I really don’t want to go in there,” Parsifal said. His closed eyelids fluttered from the headache.

  “Nobody wants to go in there,” the technician said. He was a Filipino who wore a gold cross on the outside of his blue cotton scrub suit. “Some people don’t mind and some people hate it, but nobody wants to go.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” the nurse said.

  “Doesn’t hurt at all,” the technician said. “We’re going to lift you up, get you over onto the table. The pretty lady here is going to hold your head.” He looked at Sabine.