Extreme Magic (12 page)

Herder’s dairy was warm, insulated from the transit of the day by bright, particolored shelves and a smell of breads and peppercorns. She and Kinny ate slowly, served absent-mindedly by Mrs. Herder, who stood behind the counter, talking to a woman customer.

“Ja,
that’s the way it is,” said Mrs. Herder, nodding her head, smoothing together the crumbs and poppyseed on the cutting-board with her raw, boiled-looking hand. “That’s the way it is.”

“Comes to everybody,” said the customer, grasping her bundle stolidly before her.

“Sooner or later,” said Mrs. Herder, still nodding. Looking past them all into some mournful middle distance, she let out her breath in a long, confirming sigh. The nodding, like the last effort of a pendulum, quivered into ever shorter arcs, and stopped.

To Hester, reared among so many elderly and middle-aged of both clans, these sad conversational cul-de-sacs of the grown had a sound both familiar and elusive. Though unable to define that central foreboding which, lurking always under the oblique talk, was acknowledged and propitiated by all, she recognized that some hovering bird, whether of time or death or doom, circled over all the grown, and that even while they confirmed its presence with this rallying of voices, each hoped secretly that this would forestall the moment when it would notice
him
in his cranny of safety—and pounce. Each said to himself cannily: “As long as I can speak of it to others, it is not yet here for me.”

Kinny had darted out of the store, but Hester, chewing speculatively, stared at Mrs. Herder until the woman looked at her, inquiring.

“Th—thank-you,” muttered Hester, and left, closing the door behind her with special care. As she stepped outside, the streetlamps went on, with their succinct “Now!” and the night was there.

Far down the block of small old-fashioned shops still bare of neon, Kinny was peering into the weakly shining window of Pachmann’s jewelry store on the corner.

“Looka here!” he called.

She ran over and knelt down next to him. Against the darkened inner store, a single bulb in the window burned over rows of square cards spaced on humped-up red velvet, each card holding a single, gleaming nugget of lure. Behind them, a row of clocks told various times of day, all false except the large moving one in the center.

“Keep looking in sideways!” Kinny knelt in front of the window, hooking an arm around its side. She knelt beside him. Through the glass corner she saw, refracted and shimmering, an airy replica of the whole display. Kinny’s plump fingers, exaggeratedly curved, poised over a man’s watch, dipped recklessly through it and alighted again, this time over a heart-shaped locket with an enameled American flag blowing in its center.

“Want it?” Pinching the image between thumb and forefinger, he tossed it to her. She cupped herself, almost expecting to receive it. The locket remained. If she shifted her head past a certain angle of interception, it blinked out, on. In the window, the real one had a solidity almost disappointing. Outside it, very slightly double-edged, the other bloomed with an added shine. She stretched out her own hand.

“Holy mackerel!” said Kinny. “Will we catch it. Look at the time!”

Grabbing up their skates, they scurried down a sidestreet into the doorway of their own apartment house. Its lobby had the deserted look of dinnertime. Far above them, the elevator hummed dispiritedly in its shaft, and came to a jouncing stop on some upper floor.

“Wish we didn’t have to go in.” Kinny kicked glumly at the carpet, his ruddy face chapfallen and aggrieved under the jaundiced tan light here. Against the Oriental splendor of the lobby, his rotund figure in its eternally battered clothes caught at her sympathy like a humpty-dumpty version of herself.

“Let’s walk up,” he said at last.

Toiling up the stairs in front of him, past each hallway, past the closed doors of the Shoemakers, the Levys, the Kings and other residents she didn’t know, she visualized each family, unchanged and comfortable at their white-draped tables, behind them the maids serving unhurriedly from massive sideboards on which were ranged, permanent and secure, the tureens, the candlesticks, and the bowls of fruit. Only at the Elkins’ was there distortion beyond repair but not yet complete, where one groped absently for the displaced chair, the drawer that had been “there,” caught in the painful torsion of contexts not quite yet shelved into retrospect.

“Wish we were leaving here altogether,” she said, as they reached their own floor. She put a hesitant hand on the bell.

“Go on. Ring.” Kinny goosed her from behind. Swatting back at him, she was almost comforted, half convinced that behind the door everything would be unchanged. At this hour, her father would open it, crying, “Good God in heaven, where have you two been!” and even before they got their jackets off, her mother’s honing recitative against dirt would be at them to wash their hands. Hester, once she had slipped into the place at table marked by her own dented napkin ring, could then slip into her childish role of culprit permanently arraigned, in which, comfortably abraded, suspended between her parents’ personalities, she could regress into her revery with herself.

Hester’s mother opened the door. Against the grotto welter of piled goods looming behind, her head, covered with a white hand-towel pinned at the nape, had an air of heroic resolve, coifed for the worst, like the nurses in the recruiting posters that hung on the walls at school. She snapped on a brighter light, as if to bring their lateness into surer focus.

“No consideration whatsoever—none at all!” she said. She shook her head, but her face had an abstracted look, and her hands, whose usual cleanliness in the midst of the grimiest task was to Hester half an attractive riddle, half a reproof, were dusty, and left a smear on the head-towel as she patted it irritably.

“Daddy home?” asked Kinny.

“Yes,” said his mother, looking at him sternly. “He came home early.” Kinny slipped past her.

“Where’s Josie?” asked Hester.

“You know Josie went to find a room in Yorkville,” said her mother. “We won’t have room for a sleep-in girl in the new place. Can’t you get it through your head that—?” She broke off in the long, exasperated sigh that was almost a reversion to her native
Ach!
To Hester, her mother’s face, formed with a beautiful inevitability of bone, much resembled a head of Venus in her Latin book, or would have, had it not had also the lurking contour of a plaintiveness ever-ready for some disaster sure to occur. Tonight, as always in time of crisis, her face had the triumphant look of disaster confirmed.

For a moment she looked at Hester significantly, searchingly, in a way she had been doing of late, as if the fact of Hester’s being a girl, almost a woman, should make her rise to the stature of confidante. Then, as if what she saw only confirmed the impossibility of such an alliance, she threw up her hands and went back toward the kitchen.

Hester went into the dining room. The polished table shone emptily.

“’Lo, darlin’,” said her father. He was bent over the sideboard, tussling ineffectually with the rope bound around its doors in preparation for tomorrow’s moving. He patted her absently.

“Where’s the sherry, Hattie?” he called.

“Sherry!” Her mother reappeared at the door to the kitchen. Behind her Kinny lounged, already munching a roll. “Table’s set in the kitchen!”

They had never before eaten in the kitchen, too small except for scratch lunches or the solitary, clinking meals of the maid.

“Look, Hattie,” said her father, frowning, “why don’t I take you all out to dinner?”

“Hmmph!” said her mother. “Delmonico’s, perhaps?”

“No need to grind it in,” said her father, flushing. His teasing account of their engagement dinner—when he, the so much older man of the world, had found himself at Delmonico’s with a girl made tipsy by one glass of champagne—was known to all.

Mrs. Elkin sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat. Set out were cheeses still in their cartons, cold sliced meat in butcher’s paper, everything haphazard and at odds, as if she, normally a heckler of maidservants on table detail, would forcibly show her family the ugly pattern of tomorrow.

“Get your father some coffee,” she said to Hester, pointing to the pot on the stove.

Hester waited, warily. Her mother had a habit of urging her to activity, then stopping Hester’s clumsy efforts midway.

“Let the child alone. I’ll get my own coffee,” said Mr. Elkin, his face red and miserable above a dandified tie and jeweled stickpin which contrasted queerly with the stove, as he bent over it.

“Time they realized their father isn’t a millionaire,” said Mrs. Elkin. Kinny had already tiptoed away.

“Now look here, Hattie…” said her father. He brought his cup to the table and sat down, sighing. Suave after-dinner raconteur, he was completely lacking in the vocabulary of dissension. Time after time, Hester had watched his superior verbal elegancies falter and dry up before the thrust of his wife’s homely tongue.

“They’ve never wanted for anything so far,” he said. “And neither have you.”

Mrs. Elkin’s lips tightened. Large-boned, calmly moving, she had few fussy mannerisms; it was only her voice that fiddled. “Time they realized their father isn’t getting any younger.”

In the silence, the percolator chortled on the stove. The cup shook in her father’s veined hand, and a drop fell on the waxy linen of his cuff, near the lion-headed cuff link. He set the cup carefully down.

Mrs. Elkin’s cheekbones and eyelids reddened. It was known that she lived among dreamers who could be educated for the worst only by her savage ability to get under the skins of those she loved and must awaken; this was why she was compelled first to tear down the self-deceptive veils with which they wreathed themselves and only afterwards could poultice up their wounds with love—with the tray of food brought to the banished boy, the party dress ironed to perfection for the girl who had given up going. All this was known, and now contemplated.

“Joe…” said Mrs. Elkin.

Raising his head, Mr. Elkin took off his noseglasses and rubbed at the inflamed prints on either side of his nose. The luxuriant up-twirl of his dated moustache looked suddenly too jaunty for his exposed face. He slid the glasses into their case, which popped shut with a snap, and looked at his wife. “For God’s sake, Hattie, take that damn
thing
off your head!”

Hester, chewing a soda cracker, heard the sound twice: the dry champing heard by their ears, at the same time magnified in her head. Wishing that she might melt from the room, carrying her dislocation with her, she started to tiptoe from the table.

“Come on back now, and finish your supper,” said her father, pleading, anxious as always to deny the ugly breach, to cover it over with the kindness that bled from him steadily, that he could never learn not to expect in return.

“I’m sleepy.” With the word, sleep fell on her like a blow. Seeing herself already in a mound of blankets, folded impervious in her own arms until tomorrow, she turned away, down the hall to the haven of her room.

She was halfway into the darkened room before she felt the alteration in it. Thinking that some of the furniture must be ranged along the walls, she moved confidently toward the island of the bed. Her body passed through its image with the ease of fingers passing through a locket. A moving reflection from the headlights of a car going by in the street below traveled up one wall, trembled watery on the ceiling, and swept down the other wall, leaving a scene fanned into an instant’s being, and gone. There was nothing in the room.

She turned and ran back down the hall, cracking a knee against chairs stacked one-over-one, as in restaurants in the early morning. Lumpily shrouded barriers extended all along the walls. She felt down them, hunting a cream-colored bed with insets of caning, the surely discoverable scallop-shape of a mirror, the bureau with bow-front swagged in wooden roses, in a pattern that was like a silly friend.

Holding onto the bruised knee, she limped back to the kitchen and confronted her mother. “Where’s all my room?” she said.

“What?” asked her father, puzzled.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” answered her mother, composedly. “You’re to sleep in Grandma’s old room. Your nightgown’s there on the bed.”

“But where’s my furniture?”

“You’re to have Grandma’s old set. You know that. How many bedrooms do you think we’ll have, in the new place!”

“What have you done with the child’s things!” Mr. Elkin’s face was already shrunken with a warding-off of the answer.

Mrs. Elkin hesitated, but only to trim a note of triumph. “I—sold them.”

“I might know you’d start dramatizing,” he said. “There’s no need to act as if we were down to our last penny.”

“Are we?” Hester saw it, copper-bright and final, in the linted seam of his pocket.

For answer, he pulled her onto his lap. She perched there awkwardly, conscious of her gangling legs, but savoring the old position of comfort. “Almost forgot what I brought you from downtown,” he said, fumbling in the pocket and bringing out two objects. “New compass for Kinny,” he said, laying it on the table. “And this—for you.” In his palm, he held a tiny, round vanity-case of translucent, rosy enamel and painted flowers, its cover fitted with a golden latch.

“Fellow brought it in the office,” he mumbled.

Mrs. Elkin, for whom the extras of life had a touch of the dissolute, turned her head aside.

Hester, warming the pink gift in her hand, stood up between them, in the gap between her mother, immovable on her plateau of the practical, and her father, wavering curator of intangibles he could assert but not protect. All this was known, yet there was never a way to say it. She aligned her free hand on his shoulder. “I wonder what I would have looked like,” she said in a hard voice, “if you had not married her.” Without waiting for an answer to what was not after all a question, she left the kitchen again.

In the doorway of her room, she stopped, waiting until she could half-see in the darkness. The nude walls poured from ceiling to floor, regarding her. Refracted in her mind, she saw the room as it had been, its objects spaced with the exact ruler of remembrance but already blurred with the double-edge of the past. Wading carefully into its center, she set the gift down on the bare floor. She knelt over it a moment. Then she walked out and closed the door.