“I’ve seen it now. I’ve been initiated.”
Kitty shook her head, left the room, and returned with a box of lawn-and-leaf bags. “I’m just going to make a pile and you shovel it in. We can wash it when we get back to my mother’s house.” Kitty started throwing things in the direction of the single bed. Above the bed was a large black poster of the word PHISH, whose green letters formed into the shape of a fish. Sabine thought it must be some kind of inside joke she could not possibly understand.
Kitty bent over and started digging around on the floor. “When you’re young and you want to have a baby because babies are so cute and everybody else has one, nobody ever takes you aside and explains to you what happens when they grow up. Maybe they all think it’s obvious. I mean, if you know enough about biology to know where babies come from, then you should know that sooner or later they turn into teenagers, but somehow you just don’t ever think about it, then one day, bang, you’ve got these total strangers living with you, these children in adult bodies, and you don’t know who they are. It’s like they somehow ate up those children you had and you loved, and you keep loving these people because you know they’ve got your child locked up in there somewhere.” She stopped with two pairs of jeans in one hand and a windbreaker in the other and looked at the wreckage that she couldn’t seem to make a dent in. “You love them so much and yet you keep wondering when they’re going to leave.”
Poor Dot, Sabine thought. She’d had five whole days to herself after forty-six years and even then she had a house guest. Sabine nosed the butt-end of a joint safely under Guy’s bed with the toe of her boot. “I like your boys. But I’m glad they’re your boys, if you know what I mean.”
“Of course I know what you mean. I like them, too, but I wish they were yours.”
Sabine looked into the tumble of clothes in dark green plastic. “There are no socks in this bag.”
“Socks,” Kitty said. “Right.”
The point was never to take everything, just a cross section of the essentials, just enough to keep them from coming back to the house for a few days while everyone calmed down. This trip was for clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, things to meet immediate needs. Photographs, letters, the pretty blue glass vase shaped like an ostrich egg that had been her grandmother’s, stayed exactly where they were. Kitty and Sabine each tugged a lawn-and-leaf bag out to the car and slung it into the backseat. As soon as the weight was out of their hands, they felt better, freer. For a moment it was as if they were loading up the car to go on a vacation. They would find a map in the glove compartment and head due south, not stopping until they got to Mexico. In Mexico there was no family. Sons, husbands, mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers were the sole property of the United States. In Mexico there was only warm weather, only beaches, tequila, Kitty and Sabine.
When they got back to Dot’s house, Sabine made lunch out of what was left of last night’s chicken while Kitty sorted the laundry by color and type of fabric into huge piles on the kitchen floor.
“Every time I stick my hand in a pocket I hold my breath,” Kitty said, and slid her hand into a pair of jeans. She pulled out a folded paper napkin covered in phone numbers, held it for a moment up to the light, and then tossed it onto the counter. “Piece of cake.”
“Are the boys going to be very upset about this?”
“It’s a break for them, too, a couple days of peace. They don’t like to move around, have their routine upset, but the fighting wears them out. They’ll worry about their dad, Guy especially. He’s afraid of him, but he thinks Howard is basically misunderstood. Maybe he’s right.”
“You don’t understand him,” Sabine said, laying out four slices of bread. She had convinced Dot to switch over from white to whole wheat.
“I always thought if Guy had been around, my Guy, your Guy, it would have been easier for them. They could have had another man to watch, somebody else to try and be like. My father was dead, and thank God for that, and Howard’s parents have both been dead for years. I thought at first maybe Haas could fit the bill. They like Haas fine, but he’s so shy. It’s almost like he’s too small for them. But Guy could have taught them things, how to have a sense of humor for one.”
“You can teach them that.”
“It’s different when you’re a boy. It has to come from a man, preferably a father.”
“Well, it sounds like nothing came from Parsifal’s father, and he turned out fine.”
“Guy was different,” she said, her hands sorting in an automatic rhythm. “He had so much to him. Hell, he went off to California and rewrote his whole life history. He could be his own father. My boys aren’t like that. At heart they’re followers, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but they’ll stay exactly where they are for the rest of their lives unless somebody shows them what to do.” Kitty scooped up a bundle of white clothes with both arms. “I’m going to get started on this,” she said, and headed down to the basement.
Of course the father Sabine would pick as a general role model to all boys would be her own. How happy she had been on the days he picked her up from school as a surprise and took her with him to CBS to prepare for the nightly news. Sabine sat quietly in the darkened editing room, watching him slice away at world events and tape them back together. President and Mrs. Kennedy stepping off the plane in Paris, waving to the dark and boiling crowd below them. Her father ran that piece back and forth, back and forth, again and again because Sabine could not get enough of them, his handsome smile, her delicate wrist disappearing into a buttoned glove. Once Walter Cronkite was in Los Angeles on special assignment and while Sabine sat on her stool he peered around the door. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here!” he said to her. “We need you to read the news tonight.” He managed a look of such sincere desperation that Sabine wanted to say yes. His famous face was thrilling in person.
“I can’t read the news,” Sabine whispered.
“Are you sure? Plenty of good stories tonight.”
Sabine shook her head. Walter Cronkite wore the loveliest suit.
“What do you say?” her father asked her.
“No, thank you, Mr. Cronkite.”
“Well,” he said, his mustache spreading into a smile, “if you change your mind...” And then he waved good-bye and closed the door quietly behind him.
“That’s the boss man,” Sabine’s father said. “Maybe you should think it over.”
After the work was finished, Sabine’s father said good-evening to everyone, secretaries, newsmen, copyboys, janitors. She loved the giant cameras that watched them pass with their lone eyes. She loved the clicking of typewriters down every hallway. She held his hand all through the building and down onto Fairfax Street, where they walked the four blocks home. “Here, you can walk,” her father would say. “Here, the weather is always like paradise.”
It was years before Sabine realized that her father only picked her up on the days when the news was especially good, when the film he had to edit was beautiful, so that Sabine grew up believing that the evening news was a daily reflection on the world’s wonders. Her father did not speak of unhappiness. He did not brood late at night, alone in the living room. “What fortune,” he said to Sabine when she finished her dance recitals, showed her report card, walked into a room. “What fortune,” he said when her mother brought the Sunday brisket to the table on a wide oval platter. “What fortune,” he said on the day Parsifal married Sabine. Her father took Parsifal in his arms, kissed his cheeks. “Now I have a son.” They all laughed, but he stuck with it. “Let me speak to my son,” he would say to Sabine on the telephone.
“Forty-five years old and I have a father again,” Parsifal would say.
Now Howard Plate’s sons were moving two miles across town to live in their grandmother’s house.
Kitty and Sabine did the laundry and did more laundry. They stripped the beds, folded underwear. Kitty ironed a few shirts and hung them in the closet in Parsifal’s room while Sabine carried her clot
hes in neat stacks across the hall and laid them in Bertie’s dresser.
“I hate to kick you out,” Kitty said. “But you couldn’t put those boys in a double bed.”
“Of course not,” Sabine said. “Don’t even think about it.” She did not look back over her shoulder as she left, but she felt the loss. She would miss the terrible plaid carpet, the baseball trophies with his name etched into the small metal placards, the nights of lying in the little bed and thinking about Parsifal. She found the bag of building supplies she had bought at Wal-Mart and moved them out with everything else. “I should make the boys a house,” she said to Kitty. “I could make them a model, the White House or Monticello. I could even show them how to do it.”
“Make them your house,” Kitty said, dumping rolls of socks into a drawer. “That’s what they’d like to see.”
“Phan’s house?”
“Your house, Phan’s house. They’d be thrilled with that.”
Dot brought the boys home at three o’clock. The three of them crept through the back door silently, unlaced their boots, and slipped across the floor in their sock feet. She had told them in the car coming over. It was the only thing that could account for such quiet.
“Hey,” Kitty said, coming from Parsifal’s room where she had just finished making up the beds. “You’re home.”
“We’re home,” Guy said, his tone and manner completely devoid of a living pulse.
“So you know.”
How nodded his head while Guy slid towards the refrigerator, opened the door to shoulder width, and buried the upper half of his torso inside, looking for nothing in particular.
“They’re taking it real well,” Dot said, pulling off her mittens and then her scarf. “We had a good talk coming home, didn’t we, How?”
“Sure,” How said, his lovely hair flattened to the sides of his head from the stocking cap his grandmother had made him put on.
Guy stayed inside the refrigerator, his hips swaying back and forth as if he were thinking so hard about loud music he was actually able to hear it.
Kitty went over and hugged How. He was half a head taller than his mother and he rested his cheek against her forehead. When she let him go, she went to Guy and put her arms around his waist, pulling him both towards her and back so that he was forced to come out. “Aren’t you cold enough yet?”
“Not quite,” he said.
“Don’t be mad at me, Guy. I really couldn’t stand that right now.”
He stood up, red faced and sad. He had gotten taller in the last week. “All right,” he said, and put an arm loosely around her shoulder. “See?”
Kitty kissed his cheek hard. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll figure something out. Until we do, I’ve got your room all made up.”
“Where’s Aunt Sabine going to sleep?” How said.
“In Bertie’s room.”
“Then where’ll Bertie be?”
“Enough questions,” Dot said, not wanting to get into the matter of exactly where Bertie was sleeping. “There are plenty of soft surfaces and plenty of pillows. It’s my house and I promise you that every person in it wall get a good night’s sleep.”
“Sounds like a campaign promise to me,” Guy said.
Dot handed him a cookie and he took it like a child. “Then I want to know what I get if I win the election.”
“Sabine’s going to build us a house,” Kitty said. “A model of any house we want. I thought it would be nice if she built her house in Los Angeles.”
“I’ve seen the houses she builds,” Dot said, happy to take the subject beyond failed marriages and who got what bed. “Just exactly like real houses, only miniature.”
“You know how to do that?” How said.
“That’s what I do for a living,” Sabine said, “in California.”
“I thought you were a magician’s assistant,” Guy said suspiciously.
“You can’t exactly pay the rent being a magician’s assistant. I’ve been making architectural models for years. I mostly do it for fun now, to have something to do.”
“Magician’s assistant!” Dot said, and put a hand over her heart in a gesture of mock myocardial infarction. “Do you realize that we haven’t watched the tape since the night after Sabine got here?”
Sabine thought Dot was teasing her, but when all the people in the room held the same panicked look on their faces, she asked them, “So what?”
“We watch it almost every night,” Kitty said, her voice strangely nervous.
“We’ve never gone this long without seeing it,” How said. “Ever.”
They were guilty, Dot Fetters and the three Plates. For more than two weeks they had forgotten to touch the talisman that was their only connection to their dead son, dead brother, dead uncle. They had not paid him homage, their icon. They had forgotten.
“For God’s sake,” Sabine said, pushing Dot lightly on the shoulder. “Snap out of it. So you didn’t watch a video. It’s a relief. No one should watch the same piece of tape every night. It isn’t healthy.”
“You must think we’ve forgotten about him,” Dot said in a voice so small it was not her own.
“But you don’t need to watch it all the time. I’m here. I’m on the tape. You see me every day.” She put her face near Dot’s. “It’s the same thing.”
“Let’s watch it now,” Guy said.
Everyone looked at him. Guy wasn’t one for coming up with answers, especially not the kind that made people feel better. “I’m going to put the tape in,” he said, and went into the living room with crisp authority. The rest of them fell into line behind him, with Sabine at the back, going slowly to take her seat.
“I don’t understand this,” she said. “I know I should, but I don’t.”
“Sh,” Dot said.
Guy hit the button for Play and stretched out across the carpet.
And there was Johnny Carson, still in the same tan suit, still with the same short silver hair and knowing smile.
“When we come right back, we have a big treat,” How whispered. “For the first time on the show, Parsifal the Magician.”
“When we come right back, we have a big treat,” Carson said, balancing his pencil. “For the first time on the show, Parsifal the Magician.” The pencil flipped and he hit it two times, eraser end to desk.
“So don’t go away,” How said. No one stopped him or told him to be quiet. They understood. They wanted to say the words, too. It had been too long since they had seen Johnny Carson last, and the comfort of his familiar voice washed over them like a warm, enveloping breeze smelling of saltwater and lime blossoms.
“So don’t go away,” Johnny Carson said. The music came up and then the picture, the television and floor lamp running in their everlasting dance of love.
When the bull’s-eye came on counting down three, two, one, they counted along. Even Sabine formed her lips around the words, though she didn’t make a sound. She felt a strange sort of anxiousness, the way she would feel picking Parsifal up at the airport after some rare trip when she had not gone along. She would stand at the end of the gateway with all of the other lonely and longing souls and think, I’m going to see him again. She had to force herself to stand still, not push to the front of the line.
The great colored curtain parted like Moses’ sea and they were borne onto stage, onto television, Parsifal and Sabine.
When Dot began to cry quietly, Kitty followed her, and then Sabine. This time she did not think about the way the trick was done, she did not remember how it felt to be there. She cried because she saw the man she loved at the height of his life and she missed him terribly. She cried from the pleasure of having a chance to see him again, even like this, reduced to two dimensions, his whole body the size of her hand. It was right to see the tape again, because tonight it meant something else entirely. It was not a magic trick but a slow, deliberate tango. He took her hand and laid her down. He lifted her feet and ran his hands down her legs in a way that was both tender and
obscene. She was still, but not sleeping. She was still because he was making some sort of love to her on the stage, because he wanted her to be still so that he could dance around her. She was lifted by him, balanced on the point of the chair. Magic can seem like love. She was so far above them, her toes nearly scraping the colored gel from the lights. And then, from the very height of it, he brought her back, let her down gently, sweetly, and when it was over, he kissed her there on national television, and while everyone who saw it could feel what had happened in their bones, no one knew how to call it by its name. No small wonder that Johnny Carson would ask her out to dinner after that.
Carson came to them. He took Parsifal’s hand. “Great,” he said. “Just great. That’s one trick you wouldn’t want to blow.”
“I haven’t dropped her yet,” Parsifal said.
He turned to the woman wrapped in the smallest bit of red satin. “And I certainly hope you’ll come back to see us.”
All eyes were on Sabine now, wanting her. She parted her lips to speak, but nothing she said would matter. She owned them all. They would take anything. “Thank you, Mr. Carson.”
“Here’s the windup,” Guy said over Carson’s perfect smile.
“Right back,” Johnny Carson said.
“Lord,” Kitty sighed, happy for the first time that day. “I do love that show.”
How crawled towards the VCR on all fours and hit Rewind. “Oh,” Dot said, wiping her eyes against her sleeve. “Maybe Sabine was right. Maybe it was good to take a break. I felt like I was watching it for the first time again.” She looked at her daughter-in-law, who was mopping her own eyes. “Was he really like that? Was he beautiful like that all the time?”
“Every minute I knew him,” she said in all remembered honesty. “I swear to God.”
“Someday you’re going to have to tell us how you did that trick,” Guy said, but this time his voice was dreamy, full of patience. He would wait as long as it took.
“You never know,” Sabine said.
It was all easier now. The thing they hadn’t realized was missing was back again. The boys went to their homework, the women went to the kitchen to smoke and make dinner. Sabine sat at the kitchen table and sketched out a floor plan of her house to work from. Nothing had to be exact, so she drew without measuring lines. No one mentioned Howard Plate or this recent departure. They spoke of magic tricks, where to buy costumes like the one Sabine wore on television, and how Johnny Carson seemed like a very decent person in real life. Bertie came in and was there for nearly a half an hour before anyone mentioned to her that her room was gone and Kitty had moved back in with the boys.