The Magician’s Assistant

  “Sabine,” the woman said. She dropped her cigarette in the saucer and rose from her chair. She came right to Sabine and took her in her arms. Sabine had been held minutes ago and it was like this and not like this. The woman smelled like smoke and salt, and beneath that she smelled like soap and powder. Sabine brought up her arms, lightly touched the woman’s back. Kitty held Sabine just a second longer than she should have and when she stepped back she was smiling and just beginning to cry.

  “What a good first impression I make,” she said. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and laughed. Parsifal always laughed when he cried. He laughed when he was embarrassed about anything.

  “I cry all the time these days.”

  “I’m so sorry about dinner. I thought I’d get over here fine and I didn’t get here until the middle of the night.”

  Did she know how much she looked like Parsifal? Could she see it in the photographs? “I wasn’t even hungry.”

  “I probably woke you up. Did I wake you up?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sabine said. Had she been awake? She had the distinct impression of having been outside and she wondered if she would ever walk in her sleep. The thought made her shiver and she peered out the window. In the light of a street lamp she saw two aluminum poles with no clothesline strung between them.

  “It’s still going like a son-of-a-bitch out there.”

  “I’m not entirely awake,” Sabine said.

  Kitty looked worried. Parsifal’s face, so completely his face that Sabine could look at it all night. She had watched that face for twenty-two years. She had seen that face in stage makeup, she had seen it with fevers and asleep. She would know it anywhere. “Go back to bed,” Kitty said. “You must be exhausted. I know I woke you.”

  Sabine yawned, shook her head, sat down at the table. “May I have one of these?” she said, picking up the pack.

  “You smoke? I didn’t think anybody in California smoked.”

  “I don’t, but I’m not in California.”

  Sabine tried three times to work the lighter and then Kitty reached over and took it from her. When she pushed the button down, a flame shot out of the blue plastic. “Childproof,” she said. The two women sat and smoked, each trying not to stare at the other.

  “I appreciate your being so nice to my mother,” Kitty said. “Looking after her when she was in Los Angeles and then coming out here to visit. It’s really helped her.”

  “Your mother’s great.”

  Kitty gave a small nod of halfhearted agreement. “She is, but still a lot of people wouldn’t have done it. They wouldn’t want to be bothered. We’re all way back there in the past.”

  There was a time when Sabine believed in keeping what was private to herself, but now everything that mattered to her felt spilled. It had all gotten away from her somehow. “I haven’t been doing so well with all of this,” she said. “Your mother and Bertie were good to me, too.”

  Kitty seemed to understand; maybe she wasn’t doing so well herself. “I’m sorry about not coming to Guy’s funeral. If there had been any way, I would have been there.”

  “You didn’t know,” Sabine said. “I didn’t know.”

  “I still feel bad about it.” She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to Guy’s wife.”

  Why did there seem to be such a difference between being Guy’s wife and being Parsifal’s wife? Sabine didn’t know Guy. She felt like she was lying, setting herself up for another evening of revelation like the one she’d had with Dot at the Sheraton. She was Parsifal’s wife. “Listen,” she said. “I just need to be clear about something.”

  “Guy was gay.”

  Sabine sighed. “Did your mother tell you?”

  “He was always gay,” Kitty said, blowing smoke towards the ceiling, her neck stretched back. “I think I may have been the one who told my mother. I can’t remember.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t care how you worked out being married. What I care about is that you knew him, you were there with him. You were with him all those years when I wasn’t. You were with him when he died.” Kitty stopped and considered this. “Were you?” she said. “Right there with him?”

  Sabine nodded. She went back to that room again, saw him there in the blank white light of the Cedars Sinai basement, laid out on the tongue of the MRI machine. She pushed the thought away.

  Kitty waited for something else. When nothing came she asked, “And it was...?” Kitty looked at her so hard. Sabine’s hand holding the cigarette stayed perfectly still, halfway between the table and her lips.

  “Very quick. He had a headache, the aneurism burst. That was it.”

  Kitty’s eyes filled up again, and she turned them away. Sabine would have said Kitty looked older than her brother, were it not for the fact that he had aged so much at the end. For years he was younger, for a while they had been the same age, and then, at the end of his life, he was older again.

  Kitty dabbed her nose on the cuff of her sweatshirt. “Did my mother tell you I have a son named Guy? My younger boy. My oldest is Howard, for his father, but my other boy is Guy. I wonder if I should change his name now. I think it’s harder to get a good spot on the football team if your name is Parsifal.”

  “Might as well leave it alone, then.”

  Kitty smiled so slightly, so quickly, that when it was over Sabine wasn’t sure she had seen it at all. “Parsifal is a good name for a magician. It’s a lot better than anything he had picked out when we were kids. He had a whole school notebook full of names. There were three categories.” She held up three fingers to make the point. “There was general alias, that was going to be his everyday name, then there would be a stage name, and then he would pick out a third name that would be his backup, so that if anyone ever found out he changed his name he would give his third name as his real name. The third name was the real genius of the plan. The third name was always deceptively dull. He practiced writing them all the time. He said he wanted his signatures to be convincing.”

  No one knew more about practice than Parsifal. Work a routine until it was inside you, until you could feel all fifty-two cards in the deck as separate pieces in your hand. Work it until it no longer looked like work. “You can’t always trust what you think, what you know,” he would tell Sabine. “But you can always trust your nature. You have to make the tricks your nature.”

  “Ted Petrie,” Sabine said. “That was the third name. There was no alias.”

  Kitty nodded. “That one was on the list. Ted for Ted Williams and Petrie for Rob Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke show. Rob Williams was on the list, too.”

  “He must have really wanted out of here,” Sabine said.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Sabine’s feet were getting cold and she pulled them up on the chair. In Los Angeles it had been hard not to take things personally: What reason did he have to lie to her? But in Nebraska, in this kitchen, it didn’t seem so much like lying. He had remade his life, and when he was finished it was the only life he knew. In Nebraska this seemed reasonable, smart, a wool coat with toggles. “What about you?” Sabine said. “Did you have a book of names?”

  Kitty shrugged. The gesture made her seem oddly girlish. “There were a few. I never had Guy’s imagination. He had real vision when it came to these things. Sometimes he made up names for me. Assistant names. Ophelia, Candy—we had a big range.”

  “Magician’s assistant?”

  “I was going to have your job, but that was only on the days he was going to be a magician. He was still thinking of a lot of things back then. If he’d decided to go with being a professional baseball player, there wouldn’t have been much of a spot for me. Batgirl, maybe.”

  When Guy was twelve years old, there was no Sabine. Sabine was a child in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, drinking orange juice her mother squeezed in their juicer, checking out books from the library on the great
castles of the world. No one in Alliance could have imagined Sabine. There was no need for her because her part would be played by Kitty, patient in instruction, diligent in practice. What was needed was a girl who could hold a hat and appear amazed every time a rabbit was extracted. A girl who knew how to smile and wave. Kitty was that girl. Spine straight, shoulders back. Kitty had thought, in the way that children think of such things, that this would be what she would do forever. In truth it was not such a great job, but all these years later Sabine felt she had somehow stolen it from this woman on the other side of the kitchen table. The life that Parsifal had left had come down hard on Kitty—marriage, two children, all that work and endless winters. Every day of it showed on her. But had she left with him at sixteen or seventeen, Sabine could see how she would have been the beautiful girl. Put her in lilac silk, wrap netting and beads around her bare shoulders. She would have done fine. She would have done well.

  It was past being late. Even the snow had given up. In every direction there was sleep and stillness and dark. There was no time like this in Los Angeles. It was never this late.

  “I’ll admit it,” Kitty said. “That night we first saw you on Carson, I thought, That was supposed to be me.”

  “But it could have been,” Sabine said, and the thought troubled her. “Just as easily you as me.”

  “My brother and I were very close when we were growing up,” Kitty said. Her voice was tired, as if she’d had enough of going over this. “The plan, our plan, was that we were going to wait out childhood as best we could and then go away together, maybe go to New York, change our names. I know there are kids all over the world who go to bed at night saying that they’re going to move to New York and change their names, but you get older and you forget about it, except Guy. He did that, exactly. He did everything he said he was going to do except”—she stopped and smiled to show that she had made peace with everything—“take me with him, and I understand that, you know, I really do. It’s like a prison break. There’s just a lot better chance of being successful if you go it alone.” She put out her cigarette with one clean twist and then lit another one. Her hands were perfectly steady. “That was all a long time ago. I don’t think about it now. I have two wonderful boys. I’m very close to my family.” She shook her head. “I’m talking too much,” she said. “I don’t think I’m making sense.”

  “No,” Sabine said, “I understand.” Children wanted to change their names and move to New York? She, who had been read to every night, whose hand was held at the crossing of every street, did not understand. Sabine in Los Angeles, where everything in the world was available to her, peaches in January, a symphony orchestra, the Pacific Ocean. It was not the city children dreamed of leaving. It was the one they dreamed of coming to.

  “There’s a real high price for getting out of a place like this.” Kitty smiled. “Alliance, Nebraska, doesn’t like to let go once it’s got its hooks in you. There aren’t any new people coming in to take your place. But Guy did it.”

  “How?”

  “He suffered,” Kitty said, making “suffered” sound like a bright word, a fine plan.

  “You mean reform school?”

  “I mean reform school, I mean killing my father. That’s creating a circumstance where you just can’t come back.”

  Sabine sat up in her chair. Her fingers fluttered in front of her face as if something cold and wet had touched her there, and the cigarette, smoked almost down to the filter but still glowing orange, dropped to the floor and rolled beneath the table. “What?”

  Kitty looked so startled one would think she had received the news, not given it. “My father,” she said.

  The words were somewhere in the catalog of words Sabine’s mind had memorized. “Your father.”

  “They told you this,” Kitty said, her voice neither a question nor an answer. Her voice was wishful.

  “Who?”

  “Guy told you, Mother told you, Bertie told you. Fuck.” Kitty reached under the table and retrieved the cigarette, which had burned a small black reminder into the green floor. “That mark on the floor,” people would say, “that was the moment that Sabine knew.”

  “No one told me anything.”

  Kitty stubbed out what was left of nothing and went to the sink to wash her hands. When she was through she dried them and washed them again. “Why would no one tell you that?”

  “Do you think I know?”

  Kitty wrapped her hands in the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door. Her face was pleading, guilty, and for an instant Sabine thought if there had been a killing, Kitty was the one who’d done it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to tell you. I never thought you didn’t know—I mean, that’s the story. That’s everything. If you know about this family at all, then that’s what you know.”

  “You’re saying Guy killed his father.” Because it was Guy.

  “He did,” Kitty said, her voice quiet.

  “And this is true. This is a known fact. Did someone see it?” She would not misunderstand this. She would not let him be accused of something impossible.

  Kitty raised her head, repeated the list of all in attendance. “I saw it. My mother saw it. Guy saw it. My father saw it.” She braced herself against the counter, as if Sabine might come at her.

  Was it still snowing? Did the wind still circle around the house? Shouldn’t the others be up by now? Shouldn’t they wake them?

  Sabine asked when.

  “New Year’s Eve, nineteen sixty-six. Guy was fifteen. Almost sixteen.”

  She asked how.

  “Hit him.”

  “With his fists?”

  Kitty shook her head. She had been the one to tell. It wasn’t a secret. Every paper for five hundred miles had printed the story, printed it again when Guy got out of Lowell. “A bat,” she said. “His baseball bat. One hit. He didn’t mean to kill him, he meant to stop him. He pulled him and slapped him but it was like he was just a fly, like Dad didn’t even feel it. And the bat was right there, right by the door, where he always left it. There wasn’t one second to think. He was just going to stop him but there was something about the way...” She stopped and waited and then tried again. “My father was moving very quickly. There was no time. Guy couldn’t get a good fix on where, and the bat came down on his neck. He broke his neck. In two minutes, in a minute, he was dead.”

  “Stop him from what?”

  “Kicking Mother on the floor,” she said, and then she repeated it because it was the part of the story that so many people would leave out later on. “She was pregnant with Bertie then.”

  On the night that Phan died, they knew it was over before it happened. Phan couldn’t speak anymore but there were sounds that he made, crying, infant sounds. Sounds from the back of his throat in a pitch unlike anything they had heard before. You could hear them no matter where you were in the house, even though they were soft, and they froze you to that spot and broke you there. Phan was blind by then; he could not sit up. All he knew for sure was pain and fear. And he knew that Parsifal was there. Parsifal was not beside the bed, but in the bed. He took off his shirt so that he could hold Phan against his skin. He held him all day that last day, through the stink and the sounds and the terrible fear of what he knew was coming for him, too. He held the man that he loved, rocked him and kissed his hair as he had rocked him and kissed his hair on the first night they were together. Parsifal was afraid of death but he was never afraid of Phan. He loved him. Every minute he loved him.

  “Why didn’t your mother tell me?”

  Kitty bit down on her lip harder than was thoughtful. She was trying to understand and trying to explain simultaneously. “I’m only guessing, but I imagine at first she didn’t want to scare the hell out of you. She wanted you to like her, to like us. She wanted you to come here. My mother does what she has to. She’s got experience in that. Then later, she let it slip her mind. Why think about it, you know? This isn’t something we talk about. Even then
we didn’t really talk about it.” Kitty closed her eyes, shook her head. “Would you have come if you’d known?”

  There, in that second, the exhaustion came, broke down like a wave the way it did on the nights Sabine worked so late. “Christ, I don’t know. I would rather have known about it when I was home. I wish I could go and get into my own bed now. I would rather have known about all of this a long time ago, mostly so I wouldn’t be hearing it now.”

  “Guy was the best man I ever knew, even when he was a boy. It was an accident, how he killed him. He didn’t mean to.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to,” Sabine said. Sure of what? Of nothing. She ran her hands up and down the sleeves of Phan’s white cotton pajamas, pajamas she’d picked out herself for him to wear in a hospital in Los Angeles.

  “When it happened, when he fell, I thought, God, let him be dead, because if he’s not dead he’ll get off that floor and kill us all. Mama and Guy, they were half out of their minds, but I went over to him, knelt down on the floor and touched his neck and I felt his pulse kicking away. His eyes were open, not that he was looking at anything. My mother propped up on her hand and she said, ‘Is he okay?’ And I said, ‘He’s dead.’ I believe those were the last words my father heard, me pronouncing him dead. I said it because I wanted that much for it to be true, so he wouldn’t kill Guy for hitting him. Then it was true. Just like that.”

  “Where,” Sabine said, but she couldn’t quite make it into a question.

  “Where what?”

  “Did this happen.”

  Kitty looked around the room as if trying to remember exactly, and Sabine felt something like a small hand, a child’s hand, creeping up the back of her throat. It laid a tiny finger against her tonsils. Kitty pointed, the nondescript corner of green linoleum near the back door. A broom stood in that corner, a pair of snow boots, one turned on its side. “There.”

  It must have made an excruciating sound, a hollow crack of contact that would have precluded anyone crying out. There would have been the sound that any man would make falling to the floor.... There was Dot, on the floor herself. And where was Guy then, the boy who Parsifal was? Standing above them? Was the bat still locked in both hands, raised above his head while he waited to see what would try to lift itself up, or did the bat swing limply at his side? Did he lean on it, drop it? Did he back away? Cry out? “Why did you stay?”