Miss Lizzie (4 page)

I explain how this trick was performed because it was the first such trick I had ever seen. It will also be the last such trick I shall explain. Over the years I have learned that most people do not want to learn how a magic trick is accomplished. They may say they do, may even believe they do; but almost invariably, when they do learn, they are disappointed. They know that they have been deceived (part of the pleasure of magic—and this is true of few other human activities—lies in the
certainty
that one is being deceived), but they wish for the deception to be something more than sleights of hand and gimmicked props. They wish for it to be less simple, less pedestrian; they wish for it to be truly magical.

But to me, to the girl I once was and whom, alas, I still carry about with me, the simplicity of the trick
was
truly magical.

I asked Miss Lizzie if she would show me another.

Smiling, she told me to wait a moment, and she left the porch.

When she returned she was carrying a flat, dark, wooden box. Sitting down opposite me again, she set it on the table. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. More and more now, one saw women smoking cigarettes in public, something that would, before the War, have been unthinkable.

Miss Lizzie lifted the lid of the box, took out another pack of cards, a small silver penknife, and a long black panatela. She put the cards down on the table and opened the knife. She cut off the panatela's tip, put the cigar in her mouth, took a kitchen match from the box, struck it cowboy-fashion on her thumb, let it flare for a moment, then held it to the cigar. She puffed for a moment, getting the thing going, then sat back and blew a cone of blue smoke off toward the screen, toward the sky and the sea. She sighed happily and looked down at the cigar in her hand with something like admiration. “It's a terrible habit,” she said, shaking her head, “but I don't know what I'd do without it.”

I nodded. I was astounded.

Leaning forward, she stabbed the cigar into the corner of her mouth. “Well now,” she said, picking up the deck, fanning it, holding it out to me. “Pick a card.”

Throughout that June and July I spent a part of nearly every weekday afternoon learning about magic from Miss Lizzie. We would sit out on the porch at the mahogany table, the ocean breezes gently rustling our hair as she explained and demonstrated the manipulation of cards. Sometimes her big fluffy white cat—whose name was Eliot, after a former president of Harvard—would condescend to join us, lying in a chair to himself, watching us with bored green eyes.

No one, or so I thought, ever knew about these afternoons. They were, I told myself, my secret, the first real secret all my own that I had ever possessed. Once in a while on the weekends, delighted with my new knowledge, my new skills, I almost told Father. Yet always I hesitated, telling myself that I would lose the secret. And, of course, without really admitting it to myself, I was afraid that he would not approve of his daughter's learning magic. Looking back on it now with hindsight's wisdom, I know he would not have disapproved, and I wish I had told him. If I had, perhaps things would have happened differently. But hindsight also teaches us, as Miss Lizzie once said, that there are no
ifs
in this world, that we cannot remake history. And, given the individual characters of the people involved, perhaps there was nothing I could have done to alter what was about to happen.

But I did learn magic. Every afternoon on Miss Lizzie's porch, she taught me something new. I learned about the Svengali deck, the marked deck, the stripper deck. I learned how to crimp a card, how to slick one with paraffin, how to make one sticky with diachylon. We spent a week on sleights: the false shuffle, the false cut, the glide, the jog, the palm. I learned how to deal seconds and bottoms; although I was never able, as Miss Lizzie was, to deal middles.

Few people were; few are. Since that summer I have met hundreds of card handlers, amateur and professional, and I think that of all of them only a handful begin to approach her level of expertise, and only one, John Scarne, might be said to have matched it.

Skill of that caliber requires an enormous amount of time to develop, and it was not until much later that I realized that Miss Lizzie had had that time precisely because she was Miss Lizzie; because she had lived, since the death of her parents, most of her adult life by herself. And it was only then that I understood that the skill might signify (by its practice having been used to avoid) a terrible lifelong loneliness.

But at the time, as we sat out on the porch, the cards before us, pale blue cigar smoke curling across the table, it did sometimes occur to me that, whether or not she was responsible for their deaths (and I could not then believe that she was), this woman had seen the battered and bloody bodies of her father and her mother. How had she felt then? How did she feel now? Was it something from which you ever truly recovered?

I was to learn the answers to some of these questions soon, for in August, with the awful heat, came the first of the murders.

THREE

IN THE THIRTIES, before World War II, my second husband and I lived for a while off the coast of Kenya on an island called Lamu. It was a beautiful place of palm trees and acacias and of sand dunes over two hundred feet tall parading back from a beach five miles long. For most of the year, the weather was perfect; the breeze off the Indian Ocean was so constant and firm that you could very nearly lean against it, like a wall. But just before the rainy season, sometimes a month before, sometimes less, the breeze would disappear, and from then until the rains finally arrived you knew that you were living within a hundred miles of the equator. The sunlight had a weight to it, oppressive, relentless, and the air took on substance, thickness; you could feel it slide apart to let you pass, and then close almost audibly behind you, like a jelly as the knife withdrew. In all my life this was the only weather that approached, in intensity and unpleasantness, the heat of that first week in August at the shore.

The wind that week, as it would do some fifteen years later in Lamu, simply died away. The sun hammered down upon the sand and the flat glaring silver sea, and unless you were actually bathing, the beach was unbearable: you could not walk across it, even in leather boots. In the town, everything seemed to stop. The streets were empty, their tar surface soft and spotted with shiny bubbles; the shops were shuttered. It was a time of long naps and short tempers.

On Tuesday morning, the second day of August, after a night of shallow sleep punctuated by breathless awakenings, I woke for the last time at eight o'clock.

I lay there for a while on the damp sheets, my hair pasted to my forehead, my skin oily with sweat. The air was still, the curtains at the open window limp. The room smelled of dampness and mold. I did not want to leave the bed, I did not want to move.

But finally I rolled over and pushed myself off the mattress, stood and peeled away my sodden nightgown. I sponged myself down at the wash basin; for an instant, the lukewarm water against my skin provided an illusion of coolness. I toweled myself dry, slipped into a chemise, brushed my hair at the dressing table, and then found a dress in the closet, a cotton wrapper, shapeless but offering in this heat at least the hope of comfort.

Downstairs the house smelled of last night's cabbage. My stepmother was in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast table with Mrs. Mortimer, her neighborhood confidante.

“Morning,” I said, nodding to them both.

My stepmother nodded curtly back and took a bite of toast. She wore her gray cotton housecoat, its loose sleeves rolled up along her fleshy arms.

Mrs. Mortimer, tall, brittle, birdlike, was wearing a navy blue frock printed with tiny red fleurs-de-lis. She smiled at me, blinking rapidly. “Hello, Amanda. And how are
you
this morning?” Childless herself, she was one of those women who spoke to children as though they were advanced housepets.

“Hot,” I said, “and awfully sweaty. How are you, Mrs. Mortimer?”

“Very well, thank you.” She bobbed her head.

Strictly speaking, as the wife of the local tavernkeeper, Mrs. Mortimer was not my stepmother's social equal; particularly not now, with the tavern, in this first year of prohibition, being operated illegally. But, strictly speaking, my stepmother had no social equals: She saw the world as divided into those above her—the very rich—and those beneath her—everyone else. What Mrs. Mortimer lacked in refinement she made up in subservience and availability.

“Horses sweat,” my stepmother announced, “and men perspire, but women glow.”

“Well, in that case,” said I, spiteful child, “I'm glowing like a pig.”

Mrs. Mortimer tittered.

I walked over to the stove and lifted the lid off the pot sitting there. Oatmeal. Again.

“Don't encourage her, Esther,” my stepmother said. “Amanda, why do you insist upon being disgusting?”

Obviously it was not a question that could be answered without starting a fight. I took a bowl from the cupboard and scooped into it some of the glutinous oatmeal. “Has William come down yet?” I asked.

“No,” said my stepmother. “And if he doesn't get himself down here soon I'm going to go upstairs and pin his ears back.”

I was careful not to snort: William, over six feet tall and weighing nearly two hundred pounds, was an unlikely prospect for ear pinning.

I opened the icebox door, lifted out a bottle of milk, pried off the cardboard cap, started to pour some over the oatmeal—

“Shake the bottle first,” said my stepmother.

“But I
like
the cream,” I said. This was in the days before homogenization, and at the top of the bottle there was always a small sweet conic section of cream.

“
You
like,
you
like. Don't you ever think about anybody but yourself?” She wanted the cream, of course, for her coffee.

Sighing, I put the cap back on and shook the bottle. I took the cap off again, poured the milk over the oatmeal, put the cap on once more and returned the bottle to the icebox. I carried the bowl to the table and sat down opposite my stepmother, with Mrs. Mortimer to my right.

Mrs. Mortimer asked me brightly, “Are you having a nice summer, Amanda?”

“I was until it got so hot.” I spooned sugar over the oatmeal. “How is Mr. Mortimer?”

She bobbed her head again. “Very well, thank you.”

“Can I have some coffee?” I asked my stepmother.

“
May
I have some coffee.”

“
May
I have some coffee?”

“No,” she said, “you may not.” Her face was expressionless; one of the differences between adults and children is that adults do not admit the pleasure they derive from petty triumphs. “If your father wants to let you have coffee on Sunday,” she said, “that's his business. He knows I don't approve. But as long as it's my responsibility, I refuse to damage your health. It's a medical fact that caffeine can stunt your growth. Look at your brother.”

“But William never
drank
coffee.”

She nodded, smug. “Exactly.”

A sudden loud clatter at the front of the house told us that William himself was hurtling down the stairs. A few seconds later he came rushing into the room, dressed all in dazzling white—shirt, slacks, shoes. His black hair slicked back with brilliantine, his smile agleam, he looked (to a sister at any rate) like a younger, taller version of Douglas Fairbanks. “Sorry, folks,” he said. “Can't stay. Hi, Mrs. Mortimer. Gotta run over to Andy's. We're taking his jalopy up the coast for a picnic.”

“Sit down for a minute, William,” said my stepmother.

“Gee, Audrey, I can't, I haven't got—”

“You sit down,” she said, and her mouth was grim, “or you'll regret it.”

She had never spoken to either of us that way before. William looked at me, puzzled; as surprised as he, I shrugged and shook my head.