“This is my—uh—” he stammered, seeing the look of mistrust in Mr. Spiegelman’s mild blue eyes grow keener. “My—” He was just about to say “cousin,” and was even considering prefixing it with the melodramatic novelty of “long-lost,” when a far more interesting narrative possibility occurred to him: clearly Cousin Joe had come looking especially for him. There had been that moment when their eyes met across the counter at Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop, and then, over the next few days, somehow or other, Joe had tracked Tommy down, observed his habits, even followed him around, waiting for the opportune moment. Whatever his reasons for concealing his return from the rest of the family, he had chosen to reveal himself to Tommy. It would be wrong and foolish, Tommy thought, not to respect that choice. The heroes of John Buchan’s novels never blurted out the truth in these situations. For them, a word was always sufficient, and discretion was the better part of valor. The same sense of melodramatic cliché prevented him from considering the possibility that his parents knew all about Cousin’s Joe’s return and had merely, as was their habit with interesting news, kept it from him. “My magic teacher,” he finished. “I told him I’d meet him here. The houses all look alike, you know.”
“That is certainly true,” Joe said.
“Magic teacher,” said Mr. Spiegelman. “That’s a new one to me.”
“You have to have a teacher, Mr. Spiegelman,” Tommy said. “All the great ones do.” Then Tommy did something that surprised him. He reached out and took hold of his cousin’s hand. “Well, come on, I’ll show you the way. You just have to count the corners. The houses don’t really all look alike. We have eight different models.”
They started past the racks of comics. Tommy remembered that he had meant to pick up the Summer 1953 issue of Escapist Adventures, but he was afraid that to do so might offend or even anger his cousin. So Tommy just kept on going, pulling on Joe’s hand. As they walked past it, Tommy glanced at the cover of Escapist Adventures #54, on which the Escapist, blindfolded and bound to a thick post with his hands behind his back, faced a grim-visaged firing squad. The signal to fire was about to be given by, of all people, Tom Mayflower, leaning on his crutch, one arm raised high, his face diabolical and crazed. “HOW CAN THIS BE?” the Escapist was crying out in an agonized, jagged word balloon. “I’M ABOUT TO BE EXECUTED BY MY OWN ALTER EGO!!!”
Tommy felt powerfully teased by this provocative illustration, even though he knew perfectly well that, in the end, when you read the story the situation on the cover would turn out to be a dream, a misunderstanding, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie. With his free hand, he stood fingering the dime in the pocket of his dungarees.
Cousin Joe gave his other hand a squeeze. “Escapist Adventures,” he said, his tone light and mocking.
“I was just looking at it,” said Tommy.
“Get it,” Joe said. He plucked the four current Escapist titles from the rack. “Get them all. Go ahead.” He waved at the wall, his gesture wild, his eyes flashing. “I’ll buy you any ones you want.”
It was hard to say why, but this extravagant offer frightened Tommy. He began to regret his buccaneering leap into the unknown plans of his first cousin once removed.
“No, thank you,” he said. “My dad gets me them free. All except for the Empire ones.”
“Of course,” said Joe. He coughed into his balled fist, and his cheeks turned red. “Well then. Just the one.”
“Ten cents,” said Mr. Spiegelman, ringing it up at the cash register, still eyeing Joe carefully. He took the dime Joe offered him and then held out his hand.
“Hal Spiegelman,” he said. “Mister …”
“Kornblum,” said Cousin Joe.
They walked out of the store and stood on the sidewalk in front of Spiegelman’s. This sidewalk, and the stores that fronted it, were the oldest built things in Bloomtown. They had been here since the twenties, when Mr. Irwin Bloom was still working in his father’s Queens cement concern and there had been nothing around here but potato fields and this tiny village of Manticock, which Bloomtown had since overwhelmed and supplanted. Unlike the blinding fresh sidewalks of Mr. Irwin Bloom’s utopia, this one was cracked, grayish, leopard-spotted by years of spat-out chewing gum, trimmed with a fur of Island weeds. There was no oceanic parking lot in front, as there was at Bloomtown Plaza; State Road 24 rumbled right past. The storefronts were narrow, clad in clapboard, their cornices a ragged mess of telephone wires and power lines overgrown with Virginia creeper. Tommy wanted to say something about all this to his cousin Joe. He wished he could tell him how the churned-up sidewalk, the hectoring crows on the bare Virginia creeper, and the irritable buzzing of Mr. Spiegelman’s neon sign made him feel a kind of premonitory sadness for adult life, as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns, and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself, from which this senescent hunk of the village of Manticock protruded like a wayward dark island. He felt as if there were a thousand things he wanted to tell Cousin Joe, the history of their lives since his disappearance, the painful tragedy of Eugene Begelman’s departure for Florida, the origin of the mysterious Bug. Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness, but there was a look of forbearance in Cousin Joe’s eyes that made him think it would be possible to tell this man things.
“I wish you could come over tonight,” he said. “We’re having Mexican chili.”
“That sounds good. Your mother was always a very good cook.”
“Come over.” Suddenly, he felt that he would never be able to keep Joe’s return a secret from his parents. The question of Joe’s whereabouts had been a worry to them for Tommy’s entire life. It would be unfair to hide the news from them. It would be wrong. What was more, he had an immediate sense, seeing his cousin for the first time, of the man’s belonging to them. “You have to.”
“But I can’t.” Every time a car went by, Joe turned to looked at it, peering into its interior. “I’m sorry. I came out here to see you, but now I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because I—because I am out of practice. Maybe next time I will come over to your house, but not now.” He looked at his watch. “My train is in ten minutes.”
He held out his hand to Tommy, and they shook, but then Tommy surprised himself and put his arms around Cousin Joe. The smell of ashes in the scratchy fabric of his jacket swelled Tommy’s heart.
“Where are you going?” Tommy asked.
“I can’t tell you. It would not be fair. I can’t to ask you to keep my secrets for me. After I go, you should tell your parents that you saw me, okay? I don’t mind. They won’t be able to find me. But to be fair to you, I can’t tell you where I go.”
“I won’t tell them,” said Tommy. “I swear to God, honest, I won’t.”
Joe put his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and pushed him back a little so that they could look at each other.
“You like magic, eh?”
Tommy nodded. Joe reached into his pocket and took out a deck of playing cards. They were a French brand of cards called Petit Fou. Tommy had an identical deck at home, which he had bought at Louis Tannen’s. The continental cards were smaller in size, and thus easier for small hands to manipulate. The kings and queens had a lowering, woodcut air of medieval chicanery, as if they were out to rob you with their curving swords and pikes. Joe slid the cards out of their gaudy box and handed them to Tommy.
“What can you do?” he said. “Can you do a pass?”
Tommy shook his head, feeling his cheeks grow warm. Somehow, his cousin had managed to cut directly to the center of Tommy’s weakness as a card manipulator.
“I’m no good at them,” he said, shuffling morosely through the deck. “Whenever it says in a trick that you need to make a pass, I just skip that one.”
“Passes are hard,” Joe said. “Well, easy to do. But not easy to do well.”
This was far from news to Tommy, who
had devoted two futile weeks at the beginning of the summer to the spread, the half, the fan, and the Charlier pass, among others, but never had been able to finesse the various halves and quarters of the deck quickly enough to prevent the central deception of any pass—the invisible transposition of two or more portions of the deck—from being patent even to the least discerning eye, in Tommy’s case that of his mother, who, during his final attempt before he abandoned the pass once and for all in disgust, had rolled her eyes and said, “Well, sure, if you’re going to switch the halves like that.”
Joe lifted Tommy’s right hand, examined the knuckles, turned it over, and studied the palm, scrutinizing it like a palmist.
“I know I need to learn it,” Tommy began, “but I—”
“They are a waste of your time,” Joe said, letting go of the hand. “Don’t bother until your hands are bigger.”
“What?”
“Let me show you this.” He took the deck of cards, opened them into a smooth, many-pleated fan, and offered Tommy his choice of them. Tommy glanced instantaneously at the three of clubs, then poked it resolutely back into the deck. He was intent on the movements of Joe’s long digits, determined to spot the pass when it came. Joe opened his hands, palm upward. The deck seemed to tumble in two neat sections from the left to the right, in the proper order, and as Joe’s fingers rippled with magicianly flair, there was a baffling suggestion of a further tumble, so brief as to leave Tommy questioning whether he had imagined it or been fooled into seeing more than was there by the artful anemone flutter of his cousin’s fingers and thumbs. It seemed, on balance, as though nothing at all had happened to the cards beyond a simple lazy transfer from left hand to right. Then Tommy was holding a card in his hands. He turned it over. It was the three of clubs.
“Hey,” Tommy said. “Wow.”
“Did you see it?”
Tommy shook his head.
“You didn’t see the pass?”
“No!” Tommy could not help feeling slightly irritated.
“Ah,” Joe said, with a faint bass hint of theatricality in his voice, “but there was no pass. That is the False Pass.”
“ ‘The False Pass.’ ”
“Easy to do, not so very hard to do well.”
“But I didn’t—”
“You were watching my fingers. Don’t watch my fingers. My fingers are liars. I have taught them to tell pretty lies.”
Tommy liked this. There was a sharp yank on the cord that kept his impatient heart tethered in his chest.
“Could you—?” Tommy began, then silenced himself.
“Here,” said Joe. He walked behind Tommy and stood over him, arms reaching around, the way Tommy’s father had once done when showing him how to knot a necktie. He notched the deck into Tommy’s left hand, arranging his fingers, then took him slowly through the four simple motions, a series of flips and half-turns, that were all one needed to get the bottom of the deck onto the top, with the dividing line between portions, naturally, being the chosen card, invisibly marked with the tip of the tip of the left pinky. He stood behind Tommy, watching him imitate the movements, the vapor of his breath billowing steadily and bitter with tobacco around Tommy’s head as the boy struggled to produce the effect. After the sixth try, though it was sloppy and slow, he could already sense that, in the end, he was going to get hold of it. He felt a softening in his belly, a feeling of happiness that was hollowed, somehow, with a small, vacant pocket, at its center, of loss. He laid his head back against his cousin’s flat stomach and looked up at his inverted face. Joe’s eyes looked bewildered, regretful, troubled; but Tommy had once read in a book on optical illusions that all faces looked sad when viewed upside down.
“Thank you,” Tommy said.
Cousin Joe took a step backward, away from him, and Tommy lost his step and nearly fell over. He caught himself and turned to face his cousin.
“You really do have to know how to do a pass,” Cousin Joe said. “Even if it’s only a false one.”
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Tommy went swimming at the Bloomtown Community Swimming Pool and Recreation Center, which had just reopened following a polio scare. When he came home on his bike, he found a letter waiting for him, in a long business envelope whose printed return address was Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop. He did not often receive mail, and he felt his mother watching him as he opened it.
“They’re offering you a job,” she guessed. She stood by the kitchen counter, pencil poised over a grocery list that she was making out. Sometimes it took his mother as long as an hour and a half to compose a relatively simple shopping list. He had his father’s stoical tendency toward bullet-biting, but his mother was never one to hasten a task that she despised. “Louis Tannen died and left you the shop in his will.”
Tommy shook his head, unable to smile at her jokes. He was so excited that the sheet of foolscap, with its typed mishmash of grandiose and exotic terms, rattled in his hands. He knew that the letter was all part of the plan, but for an instant he forgot what the plan was. He was baffled with delight.
“So what is it?”
Boldly, his stomach twisting, Tommy thrust the sheet of paper toward her. She lifted to the bridge of her nose the reading glasses she wore on a silver chain around her neck. These were a recent development, one that his mother hated. She never actually settled the glasses onto her nose, but merely held them up before her eyes, as though she wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.
“Garden of Blooming Silks? Empire of Pennies? Haunted Fountain Pen?” She squinted a little as she read the last word.
“Tricks,” Tommy said, pulling the paper back from her lest she study it too closely. “It’s a price list.”
“I see that,” she said, eyeing him. “Pen is spelled wrong. Two N’s.”
“Hmm,” Tommy said.
“How many tricks do you need, honey? We just got you that demonic box of yours.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s just for wishing.”
“Well, wish away,” she said, lowering the glasses once more. “But don’t take your coat off. We’re going to the A&P.”
“May I please stay home? I’m old enough.”
“Not today.”
“Please.”
He saw that she was probably going to accede—they had been experimenting lately with leaving him by himself—and that the only thing giving her pause was her detestation of grocery shopping.
“You’re going to make me go into the heart of darkness alone?”
He nodded.
“You’ll be all right?”
He nodded again, afraid that if he said anything more, he would somehow give it all away. She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged one shoulder, picked up her purse, and went out.
He sat, holding the paper and envelope in his hands, until he heard the muttering of the Studebaker’s engine and the scrape of its rear bumper as she backed out of the driveway. Then he got up. He got the scissors from the kitchen drawer, went to the kitchen cupboard, and took out a box of Post Toasties cereal. He saw that his mother, as she always did, had left without the grocery list. It was written, he noticed, on the back of a strip torn from a page of artwork—it looked like it might have been from Kiss—that she had given up on. A pretty blond girl hid behind an old beached rowboat, spying on something that was making her cry. It was probably her doctor boyfriend kissing her best friend the nurse, or something like that.
Tommy carried the scissors and the cereal to his room. There was half an inch of mostly crumbs left in the wax-paper bag, and he munched them dutifully. As he had done every morning for the last week, he studied the text printed on the back panel of the box, which described the scientifically formulated merits of the cereal in sober tones and which he now knew by heart. When he was through, he balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He picked up the scissors and carefully cut the back panel off the box. He laid it flat on his desk. With a pencil and a ruler, he drew a box around every instance o
f the words “Post Toasties.” Then he took the scissors and cut on the lines he had marked. He took the panel, with its eleven rectangular holes, and fit it over the purported list of magic tricks from Tannen’s.
That was how he learned that he was to catch the 10:04 train at the Bloomtown LIRR station on December 3, wearing an eye patch that would be supplied, under cover of constituting part of a spurious trick called Pieces o’ Eight, in a second letter from Joe. Tommy was to sit in the last car, at the back, transfer at Jamaica, disembark at Penn Station, then walk the two long blocks to, of all places, the Empire State Building. He was to ride the elevator to the seventy-second floor, go to Suite 7203, and rap out his initials on the door in Morse code. If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, “Ophthalmologist.”
Every Thursday for the next seven months, Tommy followed the routine established by that first secret letter from Joe. He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade. At the corner of Darwin Avenue, however, he turned left instead of right, slipped through the Marchettis’ backyard, crossed Rutherford Drive, and then took his sweet time (unless it was raining) ambling across the half-built east side of Bloomtown toward the bland new cinder-block-and-steel structure that had replaced the old Manticock station. He spent the day with Cousin Joe, in his strange digs nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, and left at three o’clock. Then, again following Joe’s original prescription, he stopped outside Reliant Office Supplies on Thirty-third Street and typed out an excuse to hand to the principal, Mr. Savarese, the next morning, on a piece of paper that Joe had already furnished with a perfect simulacrum of Rosa Clay’s signature.