Walking the Labyrinth (17 page)

Samuel smiled. “Read the book,” he said.

January 2, 1935. Thorne gave me this book for Christmas. I think she intended for me to draw costumes and stage settings for our shows, but I’ve always wanted to keep a diary. Our life seems very unsettled, compared to the lives of the people we play for—we move constantly from place to place, from theater to auditorium to county fair. After a while the cities and towns seem as alike as the rows of planted corn we see from the train, each succeeding the other in fanlike waves. I hope this book will give me a way of fixing places in my memory.

My father Verey thinks this is a bad idea. We shouldn’t leave traces for anyone to follow, he says. He’s become almost obsessed as he’s grown older, thinking constantly about the old business with Dorothy Westingate and the Order of the Labyrinth.

I tell him not to worry. All that happened in another country, and before I was even born. He looks at Grandmother Neesa, but she is busy playing pool and says nothing.

I’m glad for that. If she’d joined in, my diary would have become the subject of another loud and argumentative family meeting, what Verey and Lanty call a row. They pronounce it to rhyme with “how”—it was years before I realized that this was a British expression and not an American one.

January 3, 1935. The words I wrote yesterday were prophetic. Today at the family meeting there’s another row, this one brought on when Thorne and I broach the subject of making a motion picture. The live theaters are disappearing one by one, we can all see that. Only a remnant is left of the old vaudeville circuits Verey and Lanty knew. But Aunt Lanty says that no one would believe in magic on film—there are too many tricks that can be done with a camera. We need that excitement from the audience, their gasps and shouts of surprise. But what will we do when there are no more live theaters? Thorne asks. Even the Palace in New York has started showing motion pictures. Verey tells us not to worry.

It’s strange to watch the family from the point of view of an outsider, of someone who is recording their actions in this book. Thorne and I were on the same side, with Fentrice supporting us. Our father and Aunt Lanty were against the whole thing. But ten minutes later, when we began to rehearse, Fentrice had a long and heated argument with Thorne over whether she was being given enough to do. Neesa did not express an opinion either time, and Corrig, of course, said nothing.

January 7, 1935. Boston. It’s snowing and we saw several breadlines as we came into the city, but there’s a crowd at the theater nonetheless. Maybe Lanty was right—maybe nothing will keep people away from a good magic show, not the Depression or motion pictures or the bitter cold. We’re an escape for these people, a way to get beyond their limited lives.

The show went well, I think. Corrig did his new trick, the one where he takes a violin from his coat pocket and plays it while the violin grows smaller and smaller. The music continues as the violin disappears, and then suddenly changes to the sounds of a jazz piano. The audience cheered and applauded. Someone audible even from the stage said, “Must be a phonograph.” Corrig just grinned.

Then it was my turn. I asked for a volunteer from the audience. Many people raised their hands eagerly, but I picked someone who hadn’t, a man with worried brown eyes and a mouth just beginning to turn down. I saw that he was working ten or twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. He was afraid of losing his job like so many others, but I knew he was invaluable to his boss, who would never fire him.

When he came on stage I opened our box and had him step in. I left it open, turned it around once. When the box faced the audience the man was gone. I turned it again and he reappeared.

“What did you learn?” I asked him, repeating Verey’s old formula.

He blinked. “I was outside, in the falling snow. But there was some kind of room, with a fire burning in the grate, and I went in. I had nothing to do there but sit by the fire and read the Sunday paper. A memory, I think. Or a dream.” He brushed snow from his shoulders absently.

I took his hand and led him to the front of the stage—quickly, before the audience became restless. I bowed, still holding his hand. He bowed as well—very few of them can resist the spotlight—and then left the stage to loud applause.

Would he change now? Would he begin to spend more time with his family? I studied him as he returned to his seat, saw a future where his second son died in the coming war.

It’s strange, this talent for glimpsing the future. Strange, and in a lot of ways unpleasant. I see bits of things, and most of the time not at all what I want to know. Will motion pictures drive us from the stage? Are Verey’s fears of pursuit from England justified? Grandmother Neesa knows, I think—Neesa’s the most powerful of all of us. But she says little since Grandfather Harry died, just smiles and lines up her shots on the pool table.

Anyway, as I said, the show went well, though a few things still need to be worked out before we open at the Palace in New York. For the first time we’ll be sharing the bill with a motion picture. Can we compete? Does the sophisticated New York audience still respond to magic and wonder?

January 8, 1935. Reading over what I wrote yesterday I see that my father, for once, might have been right. If anyone were reading this book he would now know a little about what we do, the ways we use our magic and power. We cause people and objects to appear and disappear, we show people dreams, we foretell the future—all things my father and my aunt warned us against revealing.

Well. On the other hand this book is mine and mine alone, one of the few things that is in our crazy communal life. When I write in it I can finally hear my thoughts over the din of Thorne’s arguments with Fentrice, Fentrice’s arguments with Verey. And who am I kidding? No one will ever read it. I’ll keep writing, and keep it out of my father’s sight.

January 14, 1935. Philadelphia. Show went badly. Thorne was supposed to reappear on stage but Fentrice appeared as well. With the two women on stage everyone in the audience was certain he understood how the earlier tricks had been done—we had simply substituted one for the other. Coughs and restless murmurs from the audience—the sounds every performer dreads hearing. I made a few predictions, settled them down. After the show Fentrice complained once again that she did not have enough to do.

January 15, 1935. Philadelphia. Show went well. When Fen trice appeared on stage again Corrig turned her and Thorne into golden statues. Afterward Fentrice was furious, but Thorne wants to use it in the act. She’s already arranged to have several statues made. It’s hard to tell what Corrig thinks, or even if he’ll do it again. I said earlier that Neesa was the strongest of all of us, but now I wonder if that could be Corrig. Perhaps fortunately, though, he’s the one least interested in power.

I once talked to Aunt Lanty, Corrig’s mother, about him. Even she doesn’t understand him, she said. He never speaks, though the doctor she took him to could find nothing wrong with him. When we were children, moving from town to town, our parents tried to give us lessons over the long train trips. Corrig never showed the least interest. I don’t even know if he can read or write. But we’ve never had a problem understanding him.

January 22, 1935. Philadelphia. The statues came today, mannequins painted gold. All week we’d been rehearsing the new bit that would feature them. Tonight, with the props finally here, we tried it for the first time in front of an audience.

The curtain rises to show five golden statues grouped in a semicircle. Corrig walks on and sees them. Greed shines in his eyes. He goes up to them carefully, knocks on the one closest to him (the audience hears the ring of solid gold), takes it and puts it over his shoulder. As he walks off the statue (who is of course Thorne) comes to life and breaks away from him.

Corrig takes a clarinet out of his pocket and begins to play. The woman moves toward him—it seems that she is giving in, charmed by the music. She resists, goes forward another step. Suddenly she realizes that Corrig has trapped her, that he is turning her back into a statue. She freezes in the act of pulling away, joins the other four around her once again. Corrig reaches for her.

The others come alive now and surround Corrig. His music grows faster and faster, more and more frantic. Suddenly there is silence. The five women step back to show that Corrig is gone. They freeze into immobility as the curtain drops.

The audience applauded wildly. I was watching from the wings and it seemed to me that every detail worked, everything went perfectly. The audience thrilled to the idea of so much gold in the middle of a depression, was just a little shocked by the suggestion of lust as Corrig moved toward Thorne. I felt very proud. This is what our family does best, despite all our arguments.

After the show a man came back to the greenroom with an offer for us to play in London. Thorne and Fentrice and I were excited, Verey and Lanty cold. Poor man—he had no idea of the kind of wounds he’d opened. We told him we’d think about it.

“Look,” Fentrice said when he’d gone. “Our dates in Chicago have been canceled—the theater there went over to motion pictures like everyone else. We have a month free. And if we get good notices in England we’ll really draw them in when we open at the Palace.”

Verey was shaking his head. “No,” Aunt Lanty said. “Far too dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Thorne said. “What kind of danger? From whom?”

“You know what kind,” Lanty said. “The members of the Order of the Labyrinth haven’t forgotten us.”

“The Order—” Fentrice said scornfully. Her face had gone very white, the tip of her nose pink, the way it does when she gets angry about something. “The Order died when Grandmother and Grandfather came to America.”

“You’ve heard the rumors, the same as I have,” Verey said. “There’s a new group calling itself the Order of the Labyrinth in London, and the children of some of the old members are part of it. They’ve even gone so far as to buy our father’s old flat in Camden Town and turn it into a meeting place.”

“Well, what of it?” Fentrice asked. “We’ve got power and they don’t.”

“I agree with Fentrice,” I said. “What on earth can they do to us? And it would be fun to go to England, an adventure.”

“You can show us the village where you grew up, Grandmother,” Fentrice said. “And Grandfather’s house, and Lady Westingate’s.”

“Don’t you dare, Mother,” Verey said quickly.

“Why not?” Fentrice asked.

Neesa said nothing. She studied us as if we were brightly colored balls on a pool table, each of us bouncing and colliding into the other. “Because we’re on very shaky legal ground here,” Verey said. “They could take us to court. Certain things might come out.…”

“After twenty-five years?” Fentrice asked.

“You don’t know these people,” Verey said. “They’re very bitter. They were promised power and didn’t get it—they still think they’re owed something.”

“All right, we won’t do any sightseeing,” Fentrice said. “Though I don’t see why—you told me yourself that Lady Westingate lost the house, that a stranger lives there. But I still think we should go to England.”

“I agree,” Thorne said.

“There!” Fentrice said triumphantly. “Three to two.”

“Mother hasn’t voted yet,” Verey said. “Or Corrig.”

“Corrig never votes,” Fentrice said. In fact, as we now realized, Corrig was no longer in the greenroom. None of us had seen him go.

We all looked at Neesa, who nodded. “Four to two,” Fentrice said. “We’re going.”

I should explain something here about my family. Maybe putting it down will give me new insights, the way writing down our arguments helped me understand a little how our family works.

Our mother Edwina doesn’t travel with us. She stays at the family house in California with Lanty’s smaller children while we tour. Lanty, like Grandmother Neesa, had never married. Unlike Neesa, however, she has several children by different fathers.

(It’s funny. I’m sure that my father would not object to my revealing the family skeletons like this, even though I’ve just called him a bastard. His greatest worries are about things that happened decades ago.)

Thorne, the oldest of us, will take over when Verey and Lanty decide they are too old to tour. Fentrice, the second oldest, resents this. I know how she feels. As the baby my opinion is almost never asked. I have a lot of ideas about improving the show—I even have some thoughts about a motion picture we might do. They let me design stage sets because they know I’m good at it, but I don’t do too much else.

When Fentrice said “Three to two” she was being ironic, I think. We’re not a democracy. The younger members suggest things, but the older generation makes all the final decisions. It was when Neesa nodded that we knew we were going to England.

After the meeting Thorne, Fentrice, and I stayed in the greenroom and talked about how fearful the older generation is, how threatened they feel about things that can’t possibly hurt them. Grandmother Neesa came back to pick up a shawl she had forgotten. I’ll swear she didn’t hear what we said, and I’ll swear she smiled exactly as if she did. Worse, her smile said, clearer than words, that she knew something we didn’t.

January 25, 1935. Now that we have a commitment in England we’re working harder, rehearsing more. Everyone comes to rehearsals except Neesa and Corrig. Neesa no longer performs, of course, but I hope Corrig hasn’t lost interest in the act, something he’s done once or twice before.

In last night’s performance, when we did the bit with the statues, Fentrice came alive and held her hands out to Corrig, and he froze her again. It happened very quickly, but one man in the audience had noticed and began to heckle us. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s see that dame again, the one on the left. Does she do anything else? Come on, baby, shake that body.”

People on either side hushed him, but he wouldn’t shut up. Finally I quieted him. He watched the rest of the performance with an expression of perfect idiocy.

I don’t like to put people to sleep this way. For one thing, their companions might notice and begin to talk. But for another it seems like cheating. We’re troupers—we should be able to handle an audience without resorting to our powers. But he was his old belligerent self after the show—I have no way of influencing people if I can’t see them.