A Bird's Eye (9 page)

The thing about magic is that it must be taken very, very seriously. If you don't, it can become a joke. This is why so many performing conjurors have an attitude of pompous gravity on the stage. They are, at heart, deathly afraid of being laughed at. They need to be believed in, like Tinker Bell in the famous play, or they will fade away. Even more, what a conjuror needs is for himself to believe. To believe that what he does has a deeper meaning.

Perhaps this is the most important thing that Murenski taught me in the weeks that I went to see him. But at the time, I was focused far more on the glides, shifts, and palms, the methods of misdirection, the uses of silk thread, secret pockets, black velvet, small mirrors. Every hour spent with Murenski meant days of intense practice afterwards. I had the natural yearning of the young and also the unexplainable confidence of someone who believed he was born with a divine gift. Still, I didn't think I was ready. I'm not sure that I would ever have felt myself ready without Corinne's big hands shoving me from behind. Shoving me right up to the frosted glass door with the letters etched into it.
Moses Ludwig, Manager
. It was my fault for telling her that the Brant didn't have a magician on the card anymore.

Through the floor, I could feel the vibration from the theatre below. I touched my hand to the door.

“Come on, big shot,” Corinne said. “Knock louder. Houdini could walk straight through that door.”

“Houdini was an escape artist.” I knocked louder.

“Who the hell is it?”

I opened the door. The man behind the desk was eating a pastrami sandwich with both hands. Jowly, with heavy-lidded eyes, wheezing between chews. The sort of man who would play a theatre manager in the movies.

“If you want free tickets, you can scram. I don't care if your ma's a cripple or your old man is on the dole. Those cheapskates across the street never put on enough mustard. Get out of here, kids.”

“Mr. Ludwig,” I said. “I want to audition.”

“I guess you're trying to make me laugh till I die.”

“He's serious,” Corinne said.

“You two do a midget version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
? I can get plenty of midgets if I want them, and believe me I don't.”

“Maybe I could leave you my card,” I said. I reached into my cotton jacket and pulled out a dove. Its head hung limp. “I think I suffocated it.”

“That's an original touch. Jesus, an animal-killing act.”

The bird shuddered, shook itself, and flapped upright onto my finger. “Are you all right?” I said. I threw the bird up into the air, only for it to become a shower of confetti.

“Hey, you're making a mess in here.” Mr. Ludwig brushed the paper bits off his sandwich. “What else can you do?”

“Mr. Ludwig,” I said, tugging at one sleeve to show nothing was hidden under my shirt cuff, and then the other. From the folds at my elbow I palmed a hidden roll of bills that I now fanned out with my fingers. “What I can do is make you money.”

The man half snorted, half chuckled. “I doubt it. But I'm the easiest mark in the world. A kid magician might be novel for a couple of weeks. Even if you screw up, you might get their sympathy. Can you do eight minutes?”

“Sure.”

“I've got to figure out some way to bill you. Youngest member of the Magic Circle in London, Blackstone's illegitimate kid, something like that. You'll work every night but Sunday, plus Saturday afternoons, ten bucks a week.”

“That isn't much,” Corinne said.

“He isn't much either. Listen, we're the last straight vaudeville house in town. Every other one is showing movies for half the night if it hasn't closed down. Here are the rules: Late for one show and you lose a day's pay. Show up intoxicated and you're suspended. Complaints from any of the girls and you're out. Bomb and you're out. I get in a bad mood and you're out. You can start two weeks from Thursday.”

“Thanks, Mr. Ludwig.”

“I'm going to need a letter from your parents. That they're okay with this.”

“I'm an orphan.”

“That's my good luck. What's your name, anyway?”

“Benjamin Kleeman.”

“We need one of those magician names for you. The Great Kidini. Nah. The Little Wonder. That might do. Listen, Benjamin. You want to get in my good books? Run across to the deli and get me some more mustard in a paper cup.”

The phone rang. I hurried out of the office, closing the door behind me. Corinne gave a little shriek. I felt the blood drain from my body. I had tricks, but I didn't have an act, not even eight minutes.

Daphne Conover, the woman who taught my father the game of backgammon, was the oldest daughter of a Methodist minister from Bracebridge. She was thirty-seven years old and had turned down a proposal of marriage when she was nineteen. Even then she knew that men did not attract her, that she did not want children of her own, that she was destined for university and a career. She had a woman friend, a private school teacher named Elspeth Watson, with whom she spent every Friday and Saturday evening.

My father, it turned out, was good company. He could be quite cynical and witty. He told her stories about the people he met during the day. He did not appear to want any sexual favours from her. Best of all, he was an excellent backgammon player. She would put
Tosca
or
Rigoletto
on the record player and they would drink beer and play.

For his part, my father enjoyed Daphne's company. He found himself more talkative than he had been in years. Backgammon intrigued him from the beginning, and soon became a passion. It was the only game he never tried to cheat at. He puzzled over the patterns and strategies of a game so simple and yet with such depth.

At home, his spirit was lighter. He found himself more kindly disposed towards my mother and me. In his free time he began to work on the house, stripping off the old wallpaper, caulking the drafty windows.

This reformed behaviour made my mother happier but also more guilt-ridden. She was having sex with the emotionally wrought Sigismond several times a week, usually in the morning before opening up the stand. She worried that Jacob suspected. In fact, my father still had not the slightest idea. She worried about me too, with more reason.

The act that I came up with was really just a series of unconnected tricks. First some colour changes with scarves, then vanishing a dove, then the lota bowls — three brass bowls emptied of water to the last drop that became full again. It was a simple trick, one only had to put a finger over a hole under the rim of the bowl, but it had to be done slowly and with a sort of hushed reverence. I finished with a cup and balls routine.

I also worked out my patter, but the words came out stiffly and if anything took away from the tricks. “I will now make this dove vanish,” I would say, giving away the effect.

Practising so hard, and being so afraid, I didn't have a lot of time for Corinne. I thought this was what a woman did, wait for you. I didn't see that she had ambitions of her own, even if she was less sure of where they might take her and was more realistic about the obstacles.

Of course, she came to my first performance. Corinne was the only one who knew besides Murenski, who never left the Island. The master of ceremonies came out and made some jokes and then began to introduce me. He said that I wasn't called the Little Wonder for the reason the audience thought. “You have such dirty minds.” For some reason the small band in the pit played “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” as I came onstage. The lights were hot and blinding and I couldn't see the audience scattered in the seats near the front and up in the balcony. I tried to speak, but my throat felt closed up and I couldn't get any words out. So I started anyway, pulling a red scarf out of the air. The scarf tricks went well enough, but I tried to be too careful with the dove, not wanting to hurt it, and I could tell by the titters that some people in front saw me change it for a dummy before collapsing the cage.

I carried out the table for the cups and balls. It hadn't occurred to me that the act was too intimate for a large theatre until someone in the balcony shouted,
“What are you doing down there, counting rice? We can't see!”
But I kept going through the routine to the end, when the curtain closed and the band played “Oh! Susanna.”

I hadn't gone to see my aunt Hannah for a long while, as I had better things to do these days. And besides, I was making money now and felt less need for the handful of dollars she always slipped me when I was leaving. But I knew of her failed engagement and for some time I had been worried about her, for she seemed the most delicate person I knew. So I went in the late afternoon, when I knew that Uncle Hayim would be at the factory. And besides, a few extra dollars wouldn't hurt.

The maid knew me by now and ushered me into the sitting room, where Hannah was looking through a leather-covered album of photographs. “Come and see,” she said, patting the space beside her. “These are your relatives too.”

She showed me my grandparents. My grandfather was grim-looking, with a wide face and a heavy beard and deep lines about his eyes. He wore the traditional Orthodox garb, dark and heavy, with a bowler hat. My grandmother was a thickset peasant of a woman, squat and sturdy, beefy arms crossed, a kerchief on her head. Hannah spoke warmly of them both, her eyes becoming damp, but I couldn't connect her words to the photograph.

I saw aunts and uncles and cousins grouped around a table brimming with dishes of food. The shot had been taken by one of my cousins, who ran a photography business. He had taken formal portraits too, using a draped background painted like a Greek temple. Here was a teenage girl playing the violin, a small boy holding a prayer book, a young man in some sort of uniform. For each one Hannah told me the name, how old he or she was, and what she knew about the person from letters she received every week. I saw the front of the family hotel, which looked smaller than I had imagined, the plaster front chipped in several places, beside the entrance a three-wheeled cart with the name of the hotel in Hebrew letters.

Hannah must have seen these photographs many times, but she looked at them again, thrilled to have someone to share them with. She told me that her father's — my grandfather's — letters had grown increasingly anguished and then had stopped. Another relative wrote to say that he'd fallen ill and had taken to his bed.

“I would do anything to see them,” she said. I nodded, although I couldn't imagine anything that I'd rather do less. I looked at my aunt, at the intense light in her eyes. After all these years, she still belonged more to that world than to this one.