Magic Words Read online

  Doris, however, liked to say that he was very much like most of the wildlife back home in Stanley County: dangerous only when provoked. The rest of the time, he would go to great lengths to please a customer, especially one he considered a friend. And so, as he did every morning except Saturday, he gathered up the special meal he had so carefully prepared and entered the Dime’s dining room.

  To the unknowing eye, the big breakfast looked the same as any other: eggs, steak, cornpone johnnycake, and biscuits. But instead of frying the eggs in bacon grease, Doris had swirled them in butter. Rather than fry the steak in a pan that was also home to pork and crawfish, he cooked it in a fine Dutch oven that was used for no other purpose. Neither the biscuits nor the johnnycake contained even a teaspoon of lard, but were made instead with heavy, clotted cream.

  The tray held high above his head, Doris swept toward the table by the window, the one he reserved for Mr. Eli Gershonson every day.

  “Here you are, Mr. Eli,” Doris said, “and there’s not so much as a pig’s whistle in it.”

  Eli Gershonson saluted with his coffee cup and looked down at the enormous breakfast. “But Doris, this is too much. How can you expect one man to eat all this?”

  Doris gave a girlish laugh. “Oh, Mr. Eli, you say that every morning, and every morning we ain’t got to wash the plate because you make it so clean. Anyway, she’ll want to pick at it. She don’t help much, but she help.”

  Gershonson and the chef both laughed. At each breakfast, as the lady and Mr. Eli would converse, she would dip a fork into his eggs or break off a piece of johnnycake the size of a thimble and make it last an hour. Doris liked to believe she couldn’t resist; that hungry or full, his food could tempt even an iron will or a starvation diet.

  Doris gave Eli a wave and walked back into the kitchen. Gershonson looked down at his eggs and reached for his pocket watch.

  Two minutes to eleven. She would be on time. She always was.

  He straightened his tie and wondered how long he would be able to afford this luxury.

  After all, the hour he spent with her each morning was prime for business. There were customers waiting on farms and at mining claims and in outlaw redoubts. They needed what he sold: the pots and pans, the tea and coffee pots, the yarn and needles and bolts of cotton and gingham. And yet here he sat, a perfectly respectable businessman of marriageable age, dressed in his finest suit and waiting to receive a whore as though she were a duchess.

  She descended the stairs at exactly eleven.

  Eli had seen this costume before and was pleased, as it was one of his favorites. The full, billowing skirt was of wine-colored silk brocade in a rose-and-vine pattern. Every step down the balustrade caused it to catch the light in a different place so that its flowers would by turns appear either a deep scarlet or a milky pink. Above it, she wore a short jacket in iridescent blue satin with pagoda sleeves double-piped in white. From beneath this peeked a modest shirtwaist, gathered at the throat and topped with Irish lace, its whiteness only serving to highlight the deep red of her skin and the blackness of her eyes. The whole was in perfect taste for the time of day. Only the color and amount of paint applied to her high cheekbones and wide mouth gave any hint of her chosen career.

  Eli Gershonson rose from the table. “Miss Lady-Jane,” he said with a bow.

  “Mr. Eli. Hello. You’re looking especially handsome this morning.”

  She greeted him in this way (or with the equivalent compliment) every morning. Even so, her words made him blush; and he was grateful to hide his red face by stepping behind her to pull out her chair. When they were both seated, Eli placed his napkin in his lap and began to eat.

  “So, my darling,” Lady-Jane said, “how is your business?”

  This first bit of small talk was always hard for him. Even though they had been meeting like this for a year, he still needed the first few minutes just to drink her in. This morning, for instance, he delighted to see that she had dressed her hair away from her face; it lay against her proud head flat and tight, terminating in a coal-black chignon. Her eyes were large and sloped up slightly at the corners. Unlike some black eyes whose beauty depended on mystery, hers could be read easily: mirth, doubt, pleasure, and worry were as plain as a Sunday headline. Perhaps it was because her mouth gave them so much help that he could see so well in their darkness.

  “Well, I can’t complain. After four years in this wilderness, it seems I’ve built a little clientele. They tell me they trust me. They tell me to come back. They ask me to bring things they need. So? What else can a peddler ask for besides a healthy horse?”

  Lady-Jane picked up the coffee pot and refilled his cup. She took a morsel of johnnycake from his plate and popped it in her mouth.

  “I’m only glad that you’re doing well enough to continue our mornings,” she said. “I really do look forward to them. And my offer still stands. After all, you’re paying me enough to buy all of my services.”

  Eli blushed again, this time in her full view.

  “You know it isn’t personal, my darling. But my faith frowns upon such things.”

  Lady-Jane quoted the verse to herself: “Thou shall not offer the hire of a strumpet … nor the wages of a dog.” Not very flattering; but her job was to make him feel good, not remorseful; and such a sensitive soul as his needed no more guilt upon it. Still, there was no harm in teasing him; that was very much within the parameters of their arrangement.

  “I notice it hasn’t kept other gentlemen of your religion from a good time. And I like you much better than any of them.”

  Eli’s smile tightened. “So, if you like me so much, you couldn’t eat something? I suppose it wouldn’t make any difference if I asked you for the millionth time to take a roll and butter?”

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and added three lumps of sugar. “I never have an appetite in the morning, my dear. You know that. Now. What adventure are you off on today?”

  With a shift in posture and that single question, she was no longer the whore forbidden by the Torah, but a creature beloved of God: the Dutiful Wife, buttering a biscuit for him and enquiring after his most mundane of goals. Such questions were as much a part of her tool kit as her lip rouge and tightly cinched corset. Did you take a scarf? Are your horses due for shoes? Do you have a clean handkerchief?

  “My nephew arrives from the East today,” Eli said, his mouth filled with yellow egg. “He is only a little younger than you. Three or four years. He is coming to help out at the tobacco store. His name is Julius. Mr. Max is his brother, my sister’s husband, may she rest in peace.”

  Lady-Jane’s mouth turned down.

  “I wish him the best of luck,” she said. “Of course I won’t be able to do it at the store. My kind’s not welcome in there.”

  “Be patient with him, my darling. I know he is not a nice man. There are only a handful of us Hebrews in this place, and even me he treats like a stranger. But in keeping you out, he isn’t different from anyone else in this town. The treaty isn’t going well. The Sioux are attacking the Ponca from the east and people are getting caught in the middle. The man is only doing as his neighbors do.”

  Lady-Jane reached for his cup and filled it again. “And I suppose they think that if I walk in to buy a bar of soap or drink a cup of tea, I’ll walk out with a scalp? Trust me, dear Eli; my schedule is a little too full for me to spend time spying for Standing Bear. Those upright merchants should know that. They’re the ones keeping me busy.”

  Eli blushed from his neck to his bald pate. This time Lady-Jane knew she had embarrassed him, crossing the line that separated her reality from his fantasy. Perhaps it was only because he had earned her trust that she had allowed her anger to appear; but that was not what he was paying for. She took his hand and smiled into his face. He brightened and his color returned to its usual paleness. He squeezed her hand and then dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

  “If it was up to me, my darling, you could walk everywhere in this wor
ld with respect. But I only sell people pots and pans and tea kettles, not new brains.”

  The remainder of the conversation was happier: gossip, weather, the finer points of the winter fashions. Finally, Eli Gershonson set his napkin neatly to the right of his empty plate and rose. It was part of their understanding that she remain seated until after their closing pleasantries. She handed him his rough wool scarf as he put on his coat.

  “Miss Lady-Jane, I sometimes think this breakfast is what keeps me alive in this wilderness. I thank you so much for sharing it with me. In my mother’s tongue we would call this a mechayah … a pleasure.”

  She offered her hand. “The pleasure is mine. And I don’t think it will surprise you to learn that other ladies of my acquaintance are envious that I get to spend my early hours with such a gentleman. Until tomorrow, Mr. Gershonson.”

  “Tomorrow,” he replied with a bow and then walked toward the double doors and out into the cold.

  Once Eli was out of sight, Lady-Jane called for Kevin Flatley, the busted gold miner who sometimes served as the Dime’s maitre d’. She ordered a rare steak and a shot of Scotch whiskey and asked for that morning’s newspaper. Kevin nodded as if the motion would imbed her words in his brain and headed toward the kitchen, shouting for Doris.

  Lady-Jane placed her napkin in her lap and lifted her plate. There, as it did every day, lay a ten-dollar gold piece. She appreciated such subtlety, counting it yet another measure of her client’s respect. After all, there were certain things even a whore shouldn’t let her john see her do. Tucking into an enormous breakfast was one; accepting payment in her palm was another.

  Lady-Jane took the coin from the tablecloth and placed it carefully inside her bodice between whalebone and breast, shivering at its temperature. Cold cash, she laughed to herself. Enough of these, and age eighteen will see me off my back and on my feet.

  5

  COMPARS HERRMANN WAS ALWAYS FOND OF SAYING HE WAS happy he had built in the City of Brooklyn.

  Manhattan, just across the river, was so filthy and congested, it had become nearly impossible to walk the streets without fear of approach. Costermongers sold everything: toys, periodicals, books. One had even offered up a skull he insisted belonged to William Dorsey Pender, the rebel general mortally wounded at Gettysburg. Beggars were even more numerous. Most were veterans, some still in their bedraggled uniforms, begging alms while pointing to missing limbs and holes where eyes had been. With the rise of the moon, men of every station screamed in drunkenness or lay prostrate in the gutter from laudanum. After ten, whoremasters ruled the streets, offering the services of sisters, wives, even mothers. In the past year, it had gotten so even a Vanderbilt or a Van Den Heuvel couldn’t walk abroad without a bodyguard or at least a strapping footman.

  Compars had visited Brooklyn many times to perform. In its hills and farms he saw his longed-for Prussia; and its row homes and sleek ferries recalled his beloved Vienna and London. In 1862, he recruited every workingman not at war and began construction of a great house situated on the bluffs overlooking the East River. Built to his specifications, it contained all things dear to him. The halls and foyers held his collection of diaries, posters, and handbills, meticulously documenting every engagement of his long career. The vast parlor was dedicated solely to the display and preservation of over two hundred portraits of the magician, rendered in all media from charcoal to oil, plus photographs. A great library dominated the ground floor. It held not only a huge compendium of tomes on every subject, but also his prized collection of miniatures: over a hundred tiny painted images detailing the highlights of his life from birth through his first triumphs in magic. Below the street, an entire wing had been constructed for the fabrication of new illusions. Here, using the newest steam-powered machinery, the magician and three assistants labored day and night over the complex and delicate apparati by which the Great Herrmann presented new thrills to his public.

  It had not been easy for Alexander to persuade his brother to allow him to work in the shop. Compars had told him that there was no need. His assistants maintained his equipment—and once he retired to Austria in a few years’ time, all of the miracles of his brilliant career would become the boy’s inheritance, making any of Alex’s own inventions unnecessary. In order to persuade the great man, Alex presented a set of detailed diagrams illustrating an illusion he was preparing. The drawings indicated such elements as where a trapdoor would be, how it would operate, and how large a sack would be required for his assistant. Compars finally agreed to let Alexander take the northwestern corner of what he always called his “laboratory”; and even this only became possible when an insubordinate ironworker was dismissed for failing to address the Great Herrmann without the required honorific, “Herr Docktor.”

  Yet within a month, Alexander’s joy at a place to work turned to frustration, and the device he had taken weeks to build became a mocking Frankenstein.

  From the outside, it looked like a normal high-class steamer trunk of brown morocco, with customary straps and hardware in brass. On this rainy afternoon, he had crouched inside it four times, pushing out the false panel at its rear. On the first attempt, the trap made too much noise, enough for an audience to hear over the orchestra. His second and third attempts were simply too slow, indicating that he had made the panel too heavy.

  Now, as he again rolled through the trapdoor he watched as, instead of swinging shut, it followed him toward the floor. Looking up, Alex could see it hanging from a single hinge, the other one broken by the speed of his exit. His eyes filling with tears, he stood up, snatched the door from its twisted bolts and hurled it across the room.

  “Crying is for women and children.”

  Alexander turned toward the cellar doorway. Compars stood on the last step in shirtsleeves, a slight smile visible beneath his devil’s handlebar.

  “Of all our sainted mother’s sixteen children you, my dear Alex, are the most stubborn. Perhaps because you are the youngest, nature waited until you were born to forge a will into iron. But I tell you once again—our mission here is to do the undoable, not the impossible.”

  Alexander wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His face burned with shame.

  “It will work,” he said.

  Compars walked from the stairway into the cluttered shop. He picked up the trap door from the spot where it had landed and examined it.

  “Let me see if I understand. A trunk is carried onstage. You have an assistant—a female, no less!—deposit you into a great canvas bag and padlock it. You get in the trunk, she straps it shut and then stands atop it—a position so unladylike that half your audience will bolt. She is then concealed to her neck by a cloth screen. She drops behind it and begins counting. In what—ten seconds?—the screen falls to reveal not her, but you atop the trunk. You jump to the stage, unlock the trunk, a figure inside the bag stands up, the padlock is removed, and the woman is inside.”

  Alex nodded, his expression now changed from humiliation to defiance.

  “Poor Alex. I tell you once again that this trick, even if you can make it work, will do little for our reputation. Such a simple substitution will be seen by the public for what it is—the work of a mere apprentice. And this plan to use a woman assistant dressed like a harlot will offend the very people you hope to entertain.”

  “She will not be dressed as a harlot, Compars.”

  “What else will the ladies in the parquet circle call a girl clad only in tights and slippers: an acrobat?”

  Alexander took the broken hinge from his brother’s hands. Carrying it to a nearby workbench, he picked up a hammer and began banging at the mangled brass. He wondered if his motive was to repair the hinge or drown out his brother’s words. Compars came up behind the boy and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “In only a few years’ time, I will retire and return to the civilization of Europe. I will personally name you as my successor and my secrets will become yours. Alexander! Successor to the Great Herrmann! Through you, I wi
ll never be forgotten. The public that adored me will flock to see you do all the great things I have done. In this way you will have a good life—and the audience that has been so good to us for so long will not be cheated of the artistry they have come to expect.”

  Alexander’s eyes filled with rage. “And would you be the Great Herrmann if you had only performed the act that our father left you? Silks and doves and rabbits from hats? You, who left medical school for magic? You, who invented The Suspension by Ether? You, who even now, God help us, wish to perform the Bullet Catch with a real slug? You have never stopped creating. Why do you deny this tradition to me?”

  Compars sighed and turned on his heel toward the doorway. He stopped at the entranceway and looked back into the vast room. His brother looked small in the corner.

  “There is an old saying, boy: when a woman does not love you, she will not accept your gifts. I have lived now forty-six years; and I am not boastful when I say that many women have performed miracles greater than my own simply to be in my company. But even so, I have found that, with a woman of real character, the adage holds true. No bauble, diamond, or ruby will move her once her affection is gone.”

  He paused on the second stair and turned down the gas lamp at its landing.

  “So, I believe it is with all love, my Alex. Those who do not love you spurn the good you have to offer. But you are young. Therefore, I will grant you the time to do what the whole world has done—fall in love with the Great Herrmann. Only then will you know the wonders that await you when you become the Great Herrmann yourself.”