The Magician (2 page)

By the time Ed was fifteen, he had the run of his father’s library as well as the libraries at school and in town, and questions were directed to Mr. Japhet much less frequently. Ed at that age was pursuing answers that couldn’t be looked up easily, and formulating school reports on such subjects as why were families necessary, were Americans too dependent on electricity, was patriotism useful, what was the difference between law and justice—questions that in the Japhet household usually resulted in a contretemps over dinner from which the parents learned as much as the son they were guiding.

“I have a feeling,” Mrs. Japhet said to her husband one night as they decided to go up to bed, “that Ed is headed for a fascinating career.”

Mr. Japhet, after a moment’s reflection, said, “I have a feeling we have provided him with the capability of getting into trouble.”

He proved right, of course.

* * *

COMMENT BY HIS FATHER

(Terence Japhet, age
46,
teacher)

I’ve been teaching at Ossining High for fourteen years. It’s awkward having your son a student in the same school. The rule is he can’t be in my class. We sometimes pass each other in the halls in the morning, and I say, “Hello, Ed,” even though I may have seen him over breakfast, and he usually waves, but he doesn’t say, “Hi, Dad,” even though the friends he’s with know who I am, of course.

When this thing happened at the prom, I mean the show itself, I wasn’t there and heard about it secondhand, from teachers, students, Ed himself; and not all the versions jibe. People always ask me how he does his tricks. I don’t have anything to do with his magic; he just started it as a kind of hobby when he was about twelve, bought a few mail-order tricks, built some equipment in my downstairs workshop, then started attending these magicians’ meetings in New York and getting better at it. The hobby seems to have had a constructive effect. A central interest is what I mean, something he fusses with every day, especially weekends.

But I can’t believe that the danger he found himself in was an accident. In a world that affects egalitarianism, the cardinal sin is to make yourself conspicuous.

COMMENT BY HIS GIRL FRIEND

(Lila Hurst, age
16,
student)

People think a girl notices first how a fellow looks. Well, Ed looks, you know, tall, blondish hair and all that, his face is okay even if his right ear sticks out a little, but lots of fellows have okay looks. I guess what I first liked about Ed was his manner. Most boys his age are elbows and knees, they don’t stand up right, but Ed stands and walks like he was somebody great, and I don’t mean pompous-ass, though I know inside he’s not that secure. Except when he’s doing his magic tricks.

We started dating, nothing special. We liked each other’s company more than we liked hanging around with the others. The grown-ups think we go off and bang all the time because we’re alone. Of course, everything has changed since the prom. I wish it had never happened.

COMMENT BY DR. GUNTHER KOCH

(Manhattan psychiatrist, age
57)

Since my wife died, it is my habit to go to the kitchen in my bathrobe, pour myself a large glass of orange juice, which I sip slowly instead of gulp down as the Americans do, and read
The New York Times
until the water comes to a boil and I can have my coffee. Then I take the cup into the living room and sit in my comfortable chair, as I did in the days when Marta was still alive, and finish the newspaper.

To read the newspaper thoroughly every morning is essentially a boring habit because you can get the full information of the news by skimming the headlines and maybe a first paragraph here and there. But what attracts me to the process of looking up and down the columns of each page is the little stories about people one occasionally finds: a mother who left four young children to go only to the corner and found the apartment burning when she came back; a taxi driver mugged for the second time in a month, who broke the mugger’s arm with a jack handle and then proceeded to kill him with the same jack handle; a colorless doctor I met once at a medical meeting who is accused of having performed more than two thousand abortions. All of this, which seems like little gossip of the world, enables me to go upstairs, shave, dress, and sit in a chair behind patients from eleven o’clock until seven listening to their troubles.

The Monday morning after I read about this boy Edward Japhet in the
Times,
I cut the item out of the paper and, in thinking about it, forgot to shave and went through the entire day with a stubble for the first time in my life. From the facts, it doesn’t seem like the boy needs analysis, and I have therefore been analyzing my own interest in the case. Is it my own interest in magic that leads me to this young magician? I have now been tempted for the first time in my career to do something considered unethical, that is, to solicit a patient. But I wonder whether the facts, if known, would really clear things up. Certainly his father must be as upset by the boy’s fame as by what happened after the show.

I wonder what his relationship with his mother is like.

I have caught myself wondering if there isn’t a way of looking into this case. Perhaps I could do a research paper on the psychology of children who take up magic as a hobby; then I could arrange, through the society, of course, to approach…

* * *

Chapter 2

The room was dark except for the thin sheets of moonlight coming between the slats of the Venetian blind. Ed Japhet lay atop the bedspread, his eyes closed, fully dressed in the tuxedo that had been rented for the occasion. One hour more and he’d be onstage. His arms at his sides, he had bade his muscles go limp, one limb at a time, the way some of the great magicians were reported to have done before every performance.

His body felt relaxed now, but the circus of his mind resounded with the orchestrations of rehearsal. Each trick had had its turn before the mirror in his parents’ bedroom, again and again. Much of the patter he was planning to use had fixed in his memory, though there was always the hazard of being in front of people with a suddenly blank mind. He ticked off the crucial gestures, the misdirections he would use to deflect the attention of the audience at each critical time.

Ed thought of himself as a part of a tradition he had come to know during the course of his thirteenth year; while browsing in the public library at the beginning of a ten-day Easter recess, he had found a shelfful of books he had not known existed. He discovered that the term “magi” went back to Babylon and Media, that it then meant “august” and “reverend” and was the word the learned priests used to describe themselves. Among the Persians, Ed found, the magis were the keepers of the sacred objects, and from these they divined the future, not through hanky-panky, but largely because these ancient magicians had a knowledge of the powers of nature superior to that of the people around them. They were the wise men, and their influence was unbounded.

Ed read of the struggle of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, good and evil, and how the ministers of old became in time the wandering fortune-tellers and quacks, the sleight-of-hand artists and conjurers who, instead of advising kings and princes about their most important transactions, entertained or merely fooled.

He pleaded successfully with the librarian to let him take the best of these books home, though they were only for reference, and he gorged himself the way a glutton consumes the meal of his dreams. He neglected the history paper he was supposed to complete because he kept thinking of Thomas Jefferson as a magus and the politicians of today as tired vaudeville performers, doing their thing for the thousandth time. Ed had hated the magicians he had seen at school and in shows. Having lost their sense of surprise, their hands darted gracelessly, their chatter became mechanical. A magician, Ed felt, needed to believe anew that each trick really worked, just as the audience did. Like life, in magic there was always the unpredictable.

*

His father, seeing no light under the door, came in on tiptoe. He turned on the small desk light rather than the overhead in order not to startle him.

“I thought you might have fallen asleep.”

“No,” said Ed, “just resting.”

“I feel awkward about this.”

“About what?” said Ed, raising himself from the bed.

“Well,” said Mr. Japhet, “I’d like to see the show.”

“You’ve seen all these tricks.”

“It’s just that it’s different in front of an audience.” Mr. Japhet examined his fingernails. “I mean, if you were playing football, you wouldn’t mind my coming to the games.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“All a player sees is the crowd. When I do a show, I see people’s faces. In fact, I fix on one or two and talk to them. If you were there, I’d see yours, and it’d make me nervous.”

“Doesn’t Lila’s being there make you nervous?”

“She’s going to sit way in the back.”

“I could sit back there, too.”

“Oh, Dad, the prom isn’t for parents.”

Mr. Japhet touched the inside corners of his eyes, then rubbed the bridge of his nose as if he had been wearing uncomfortable glasses. “Well,” he said, wanting to try again but not able to, “I’ll drive you down and pick you up afterward.”

Parents shouldn’t have feelings like that, thought Ed; they have a job to do.

Rescue came in the form of his mother, moving briskly through the door, saying, “Your tux’ll get all wrinkled.”

Ed got up from the bed and slowly turned around for her inspection. He had thought of the possibility of wrinkles and had lain down in a way that he thought would do no damage.

“I guess it’s all right,” said Mrs. Japhet. “I’m sorry I won’t be there to see your act. Are you going along, Terence?”

“They only need a few teachers as chaperons, and they’re all assigned,” said Mr. Japhet.

“You’ll drive him, won’t you?”

“I’ve been chauffeuring him for sixteen years,” said Mr. Japhet, leaving the room. “It’s too late to stop,” his voice trailed after him.

“
He’s
in a good mood,” said Mrs. Japhet thinly. “Never mind, are you all packed?”

Ed nodded, and glanced at his watch. Better get cracking.

*

It had snowed in Westchester that morning and all day long the day before. The main roads had been cleared, but the side streets were car traps, and now it was snowing again. Better allow plenty of time in case they got stuck. The school hired a professional orchestra for the prom every year, and two years ago had even had a professional magician, who was clumsy. This was the first time the main act would be performed by a student. He didn’t want to goof it. Or be late. There were two suitcases full of apparatus to unpack backstage, and he didn’t want any help from anyone who might see something he wasn’t supposed to see.

His father helped him get the heavy suitcases into the car. Ed himself carried the brown one, which had the big pitcher in it, the only thing that could break easily. He was glad he had thought to put his tux pants inside his boots because the snow was high.

The starter didn’t catch at first. It took a half-minute till it turned over in the cold. The waiting seconds brought back the stomach jump he had lain down to get rid of. His mouth felt dust-rag dry. He took the tiny breath sprayer out of his pocket and shot twice into his mouth.

“What’s that?” asked his father, now easing the car out of the driveway, which had not been shoveled out too well.

“Nothing,” said Ed, pocketing the spray.

Once they got on Route 9, everything was okay. He reminded his father to turn off to Holbrook Road so he could pick up Lila.

She was standing just inside the front door of her house, her face visible in the pane of glass. Ed got out of the car as she came down her walk, her dress buffeted by the swirling wind.

As she slid into the front seat next to his father,
she said, “Hi, Mr. Japhet. I appreciate your picking me up.”

His father just nodded. It wouldn’t have killed him to say something.

Ed got in. It was a tight squeeze. Lila seemed anxious not to sit too close to Ed’s father, as if she was afraid their legs might touch.

She and Ed therefore sat very close, but didn’t talk. The windshield wipers swept two half-moons out of the fast-falling snow. Through them they peered at the road and the white lawns on either side. The wind whistled through the right-front vent window, which had never once closed air-tight since they bought the damn Dodge. He wished his father would hurry some.

*

The grade leading to the lit-up school stretched for a quarter of a mile ahead of them, the road an almost continuous chain of cars moving slowly, each afraid to come to a complete stop in case it had trouble getting started uphill again in the hard-packed snow. The last quarter-mile of inching along seemed so slow. Ed kept glancing at his watch, hoping he’d have enough time to prepare.

“You’re making me nervous,” said his father.

It was hopeless to get out and walk the distance with the heavy suitcases. Now, however, the cars started moving at a somewhat faster pace, and they could see the tiny figure of the policeman at the head of the line, trying to keep the unloading cars moving. That was the bottleneck. Though their windows were raised, they could hear the good-byeing and helloing.