A Bird's Eye (8 page)

My aunt was being instructed by the junior minister of the First Presbyterian Church. The minister, a very short Englishman who liked to wear his hair unusually long, complemented Hannah on both her pliancy and her quickness in learning. Hannah herself enjoyed these sessions, for the minister was kind and the need to apply herself gave her a purpose that she hadn't felt in years. It was true that when she wrote to her parents in Otwock, she couldn't get herself to tell them. Instead, she wrote that she was marrying a man named Tov Winkler.

What Hannah hadn't expected was the grief that Hayim was causing her. He was the one who had brought Tobias home, who had encouraged the relationship, who had assured Hannah that there was no disgrace in taking on the faith of her future husband. Yet when he found a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament in the sitting room, he had become mean and sarcastic and she had quickly removed it to her room. Tobias had given her a small gold cross on a chain, but she was careful to keep it under her clothing. Hayim stopped on the way home now to have a drink, and when he came in, he would brandish the newspaper at her and say that she was no better than those criminals in Europe. Then, in the morning, he would apologize, assuring her that he approved of her “new life.”

Tobias often stopped in during the evening to see her, and so it was no surprise when he appeared at the door one evening. Hayim had stayed in and they had enjoyed a rare harmonious time, and she told him not to get up from his chair when the bell chimed. But her usual anxious gladness on seeing Tobias gave way to alarm when she saw how agitated he was. He didn't take off his coat but marched straight into the sitting room.

“Toby,” said my uncle. “You look like someone who's been robbed. I'll pour you a drink.”

“You won't pour me a damn drink. That is exactly what you've been doing all these months. Soothing me, keeping me off guard, lulling me . . .”

“What are you talking about? Hannah, do you know what's going on?”

She could only shake her head, clutching her handkerchief to her lips. She hated male anger and wanted only to hide up in her room while the two of them worked whatever it was out, the way men did. “I will excuse myself,” she said.

“No you won't,” Tobias said. “The two of you! A conspiracy! That's what it is, a conspiracy.”

“Come on, now,” said Hayim. “You can't talk this way in my house. Can't you make sense?”

Tobias reached into his jacket, struggled, and at last pulled out an envelope. He smacked it with his other hand as if he were on stage.

“This is what I'm talking about!”

“So, a letter. Let me see it.”

Tobias waved it at him without giving it up. “You're trying to take advantage of me, to use my name in order to save your own. But I've caught on to you.”

“Tobias,” Hannah pleaded. She was already starting to weep. “What is it? This isn't right. It's cruel. Please don't behave this way.”

He looked at her, panting heavily. “All right,” he said, giving the letter to Hayim. “Go ahead and read it.”

Hayim took out the sheet of writing paper and unfolded it. His jaw worked back and forth as he read.

“Tell me what it says, Hayim.”

“This isn't for you.”

“I'd say it is. Give it to her. I insist.”

“If it concerns me, then I want to see it,” Hannah said, her voice trembling. He did not prevent her from taking the letter out of his hand.

T. Whitaker,

Are you aware that the woman to whom you are engaged has the mark of Satan on her? Surely you don't believe that that orthopaedic shoe hides a natural deformity. It hides something terrible — a cloven hoof. A foot like that of an animal, like Lucifer himself. If you marry Hannah Kleeman, you marry the devil's whore, sent to lead you to hell.

A Concerned Friend

She could hardly breathe. “What — what is this?”

“I'll tell you what it is,” said Hayim. “Some enemy of mine in business. Some envious son of a bitch. Does he think we're living in the Dark Ages? Nobody believes in such nonsense anymore. Toby, you aren't taking this seriously? You should laugh at it. Or be angry at the person who wrote it. You should already have torn it up.”

“Of course you think so.” He stepped over to Hannah and snatched the letter out of her hands, frightening her. “But I see what you're trying to do, how you want to use me and the name of my family.”

“Use you? You forget what your family name is worth these days? The money I loaned you? We bring far more to this marriage than you do.”

“I don't understand what I'm hearing,” Hannah said.

“The solution is simple,” Tobias said, crossing his arms. “All Hannah has to do is remove her shoe and stocking. Then I will see for myself. I should know exactly what I'm marrying.”

“Don't insult my sister. I've had enough of this. You're going to have to go.”

“No, I'll do it,” Hannah said. “Let him see.” Immediately, she sat down and began to slip off her shoes. She started rolling down her stockings.

“Hannah, you shouldn't do this. I'm sorry I ever brought Tobias home. Please stop.”

But she didn't stop. She presented her naked foot for Tobias to see. She wasn't crying now. Instead, she reached back to undo the button of her dress. She tugged it down, revealing the slip underneath, the straps of her brassiere.

“Hannah! Stop it! Get out of here, Tobias, get out!”

Hayim pushed Tobias towards the door. Hannah stopped undressing and pulled the diamond ring off her finger. She made as if to throw it at Tobias's receding back, but then she changed her mind and closed her fingers around it. It was her ring and she could do what she wanted with it.

It is not boasting to say that the men who hung about the Japanese Magic and Novelty Store said they had never seen a boy learn as quickly as I did. The more I could do, the more generous they became, teaching me what they knew, showing me the secrets of famous apparatus. The card frame. The spirit cabinet. I went to the shop as often as I could, being pulled away only when Corinne enticed me with an invitation to the shed. I could never refuse.

Even when I was out, I practised. With coins, balls, cards, and small gimmicks such as matchboxes or a fake mouse. There was always something moving in my hand. Of course, it wasn't enough to practise by myself, or in front of a mirror. If I saw a kid on the streetcar, holding his mother's hand and staring at me, I would produce the mouse from my pocket or lean over and pull a long ribbon out of his ear. From a couple of old men on a park bench I would borrow a dollar (which took convincing — they always thought I was going to run with it), cause it to disappear, and find it again inside a lemon that I sliced in half with a knife. Once, I entertained four women at a restaurant table through the front window with a small set of linking rings. Even when I didn't want to, when I was too tired or feeling shy, I made myself do it. I practised colour changes, transformations, vanishes — a black spade into a red diamond, a pencil into a cigarette, a rose into smoke.

It was the men who told me about Murenski. A true world-class conjuror who had toured Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia. His name was in the books I had read, with old photographs of a thin, dapper man in top hat and tails. The Great Murenski. Over twenty years ago, while performing in Toronto, his wife had died during the act. He never left the city, becoming a pauper and living in a shack near the cottages on the Island.

The deck vibrated beneath our feet. I had never been on any kind of boat or ferry before and it was thrilling to be moving over water, made even more so by our destination. It was almost dark and the Island only became visible by its scattered lights. They had told me that it was better not to go in the day.

Corinne said, “Are you sure about this Mureeny guy? That he even exists?”

“Murenski.”

“And if he does exist, is he going to be glad to see us? I thought those smarty-pants in the magic shop knew everything anyway.”

“Nobody knows everything.”

“They said he was a hermit.”

“Not a hermit. He just likes to keep to himself. On account of his wife dying right here, on the stage of the Royal Alexandra where he was doing a full evening show. It was during the bullet catch.”

“The what?”

“Someone fires a gun and the magician catches it on a plate. Or in his hand. Sometimes between his teeth.”

“Big surprise she died.”

“She didn't die from the trick. A sandbag dropped on her.”

The ferry cut its engines and drifted the last few feet into the dock. We waited with the other passengers to disembark, mostly women holding paper bags of groceries, whose families lived year-round in the summer cottages because of the Depression. Corinne followed me along a path covered in overhanging tree branches. We passed cottages with glowing windows. Somebody was stacking a woodpile. Faces under a lantern were eating dinner. Somebody was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again” on a ukulele. We passed the last cottage and passed through another thicket of trees, and then we got to the shore and, again, the dark lake.

I ignored Corinne nagging me to go back. She had always been the brave one, but it was as if she had lost her nerve suddenly. We came to a stand of birches on a crest above the beach. The trees shimmered with flashes of strange light. As we got closer, I saw little fans of tinfoil, made from the liners of cigarette packages, hanging from the branches. A shelter came into view, a patchwork of wooden boards and old doors and crate lids nailed together. The slanted tarpaper roof had a stovepipe sticking up.

“I can't find which door is real,” I said.

“Maybe there isn't one.”

“Here, this must be it.”

I knocked hard, waited, heard something inside, waited some more. At last the door opened — it was slanted and opened at a peculiar angle — and a man stepped out. I had been worried he might be crazy, but he didn't look it. He was tall and frail and neatly dressed in a suit shiny from wear. White hair neatly trimmed and a thin moustache. He looked at us with drooping eyes.

“And whom do I have the pleasure of finding at my door?”

“Mr. Murenski? The Great Murenski?”

“Not so great anymore.”

Corinne pointed at me. “He's a magician too.”

I blurted out, “I always use the Murenski finish on the rope and ring illusion.”

“I'm flattered. I only wish that I still could.”

I saw the tremble in his hands. “Did you really know Keller?” I asked.

“So first it's Murenski and now it's Keller?”

“I didn't mean it that way.”

“I'm joking. And yes, I knew Keller. He came to spy on my act. Of course, I'd already spied on his.”

Corinne said, “He wants you to teach him. He's got money.”

“Not a lot of money,” I said.

“I don't take money from children. It's getting chilly, isn't it? Would you two mind snitching some wood from the last woodpile you saw? We can get a fire started and make some tea.”

It was the beginning of many visits and even more hard work. But he was the real thing, an artist of the conjuring arts. And having a young disciple gave him a new energy for a while, a chance to relive his glory years and see, in my own face, the pleasure and excitement and ambition that he had once had.

My father did not like having to pay the streetcar fare for work. And too often there were delays — a delivery truck turned over, a horse dead in the street. So he bought a bicycle at a used-furniture dealer on Gerrard Street. It was a black Dawes model that must have been thirty years old. He strapped on his briefcase and began to cycle about the city, knees pointing out awkwardly.

This new job suited my father's temperament. A door would open and in that moment's view — children scrabbling at the table, or a man asleep on the sofa with a hat over his face, or piles of ancient newspapers everywhere — he would get a glimpse of other lives. It stimulated his imagination and at the same time it was as much information as he wanted.

He had cycled over the Bloor Street viaduct, the green valley and trickling Don River below, and was now working the streets off Pape Avenue. Wroxeter. Frizzell. Dingwall. In an apartment house on Bain, a door was slammed in his face; the man of the house didn't like his wife talking to people. But he had already got what he needed and, standing in the hallway that smelled of boiled eggs, he wrote up the entry on his clipboard.
Morgan, Howard, unemployed. Morgan, Mrs. Frances, attendant, House of Industry.

At the next apartment, a woman in her undone bathrobe, not trying to seduce him, just not caring if he saw her sagging tits. Next, a husband in an undershirt, the wife out and her sister reading a paperback detective novel.

A man with shaving cream on his face.

A blind man holding a miniature dog.

Elderly twin sisters dressed identically.

He walked outside and sat on the apartment step to eat a sandwich wrapped in wax paper that Bella had made for him. He'd never asked her to, but she'd started leaving a lunch by the door. He ate it as late as possible so as to delay the pleasure. As he chewed, he amused himself by thinking of the project he had begun to see in his mind: a miniature clockwork city, the roofs of the houses tilting back to reveal the figures moving within — a man tipping over a table, a child going to the toilet, a couple moving up and down as they copulated in bed. He imagined a tavern where two men sprang punches at one another. A garbage dump where a boy hit a dog with a stick. Even the mechanical parts he thought through, the little pulleys and wheels and drives.

With a pocket knife, he peeled the skin from an apple and ate one thin slice at a time. Then he brushed himself off and headed into the next building. It was better maintained, without the usual pile of undeliverable mail inside the door. He liked to start at the top and work his way down, and so he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.

The first door opened. He saw an unusually tall woman, glasses, large teeth. “Yes?”

“Excuse me for disturbing you. I am a representative of Might's Directory. You are Mrs. Goldsmith?”

“The Goldsmiths lived here before me. I'm Conover. Miss Daphne Conover.”

“Are you employed, Miss Conover?”

“I teach kindergarten at Withrow Avenue School. In fact, I've just returned.”

“And if I can confirm your telephone number.”

“May I ask your name?”

“Kleeman. Jacob Kleeman.”

“Like the pen. Mr. Kleeman, do you enjoy games?”

“I don't understand.”

“Are you familiar with backgammon?”

“I don't think so.”

“It's an ancient game, at least five thousand years old. A board, black and white pieces, dice. You can even bet, although I only play for pennies.”

“You don't say.”

“I have two cold beers in my icebox. Perhaps you'd care to learn.”

“That's very friendly, Miss Conover. And I'm sure it's the best offer I'm going to get today.”

He stepped in, looking for a place to put his hat.