My Life Among the Apes

Copyright © 2012 Cary Fagan
First ePub edition © Cormorant Books Inc. September, 2012

No part of this publication may be printed, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cataloguing information available upon request.

Fagan, Cary
My Life Among the Apes/Cary Fagan.

EPUB ISBN 978-1-77086-106-0 | MOBI ISBN 978-1-77086-107-7

I. Title.

PS8561.A375M88a 2012 C813'.54 C2012-900267-4

Cover design: Angel Guerra/Archetype
based on a text design by Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking

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To Rebecca,
for the best story

“He felt as a conjurer must who is all the time afraid that
at any moment his tricks will be seen through.”

— Tolstoy,
War and Peace

The Floating Wife

MY HUSBAND, ALBERT NATHAN ZARETSKY, was, until his retirement, a judge of the Supreme Court of Ontario. Before his bench were heard the most grave criminal and civil accusations in the province, while the most sensational cases were written about in the newspapers and reported on the television news. He was famous (or notorious, depending on one’s position) for allowing Charter arguments to be made and unusual precedents to be cited, and his decisions were appealed before the Supreme Court of Canada more often than most. He looked good on television, for he was a handsome man even in his late years when his hair was still full but absolutely white, and his slightly large features — his prominent eyebrows, his heavy pocked nose, his sensual lips — became more so as his face grew thinner. Actually, he was much more handsome as an older man; when I first saw him, a first-year law student, his head looked too big for his neck and his arms and legs too long.

But Albert had another life, one outside the legal profession. He belonged to a secretive world, what in other circumstances spouses most fear from their partners. In that world, my husband was known as Zardoff the Mysterious, not so much to the public but in magicians’ circles, here in Toronto and also in New York and Los Angeles and, to a lesser extent, London. As a judge he was a forward-thinking champion of individual rights, but as a magician he was a strict traditionalist, eschewing modern technology in favour of the older and, in his opinion, more elegant methods of misdirection and sleight of hand.

I myself am not an expert (far from it), but by all accounts he was a steady performer, skilful without being outstanding. Some praised his stiff, rather formal presentation, while others criticized it. Of course, he could only practise for an hour or so a day after supper, and he performed only as an unpaid amateur (he refused a fee when one was offered) for Boy Scout troops, in hospital wards, and at charity functions. Yet he had, at least as well as I can understand, a fame in the conjuring world equal to his fame in the legal profession. This fame was not for his performances, but for his collection of Victorian and early twentieth-century conjuring apparatus. These objects, acquired at auctions and estate sales, often with the assistance of an agent, he had begun to accumulate in the late fifties, when it was still possible to find important pieces at reasonable prices. He owned a cabinet built for the Davenport brothers, Heller’s secondknown black art table, a pair of pistols used by Anderson in his version of the bullet-catching trick, Chung Ling Soo’s miracle board vanish, and perhaps three hundred more effects, all stored in a museum-quality setting, in a special room built onto the back of the house, which had necessitated the removal of the original tennis court. My husband was famous not only for owning the collection, but for his knowledge of how the illusions were originally presented, and for his generosity in granting access. Magicians came from all over the world, strange men (they were almost always men) who would astonish our children by pulling watermelons out of their ears.

I remember one occasion in the early seventies when, by an accident of scheduling, the premier of the province, who wanted Albert to head a commission on payoffs in the building trades, arrived in a limousine at our house for tea at the same time that Robert Harbin, the creator of the zig-zag girl illusion, arrived by cab from the airport. I answered the door to the both of them and was highly embarrassed, but my husband simply introduced the politician and the conjurer to one another and, after the premier swore an oath of secrecy, the three of them spent several hours in the special wing.

What I thought, standing alone in my kitchen: boys, they’re still and always boys. You must understand that I hated magic. The ridiculous names (Zardoff, for God’s sake), the black capes and top hats and gimmicked canes, the hands that could never be still but always had to be producing cigarettes or “walking” coins over the knuckles. The arguments over the relative greatness of Le Roy and Devant, the inevitable shouting and finger pointing whenever Houdini’s name came up. It was all so childish. As if there could be anything of interest in seeing a man scatter four aces in a deck only to find them in a spectator’s pocket, or a woman in a leotard getting trussed up, shoved into a burlap bag, and locked into a trunk, only to appear a flashing moment later on top of the trunk itself, having changed places with the magician. Why did it matter that the magician had performed a false shuffle, or had used Maskelyne’s method for releasing the chains? It was all child’s play.

WHEN WE MET IN THE early fifties, Albert was not only attending classes but also holding down two jobs, one dipping ice cream bars at the Neilson plant on Spadina Avenue, the other shelving books at the law library. His parents had come from Galitzia and opened a small shoe store in Thunder Bay. Albert was living in a boarding house on Harbord Street run by a Mrs. Mossoff. He was so thin because Mrs. Mossoff put a small amount of the cheapest ground meat into her stews, which she poured over potatoes every night and which Albert often vomited up. In fact, on our first meeting, a blind date arranged by a mutual friend, we were walking down Yonge Street to see the Christmas display in the window of Eaton’s when he collapsed on the sidewalk. I took him home to my mother’s kitchen and fed him.

Back then, his head was full of ideas. He was in love with the law and revered the British legal system, which he saw as an antidote to the grotesque legal distortions enacted by the Nazis. We would go to Diana Sweets for coffee and pie and talk away the evening, Albert leaning forward, eyes aflame, a little spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth as his voice grew louder with excitement and I had to put my hand over his and gently hush him.

He was socially advanced for our time. He encouraged me to believe that, although he foresaw a future for us, he did not want me to restrict my life to that of a housewife. I was an undergraduate with some thought of becoming a nurse but half-expecting that my education and career would end in marriage. With Albert’s emotional and financial support, I became not just a nurse but a doctor, one of the few women M.D.s in the province. I returned to work after each of our three children was born, Albert assuring me that I could be a good mother even if we needed a nanny to pick up the children from school.

When I first met him, Albert’s interest in magic was a harmless pastime. He had become interested, he told me, upon discovering that an uncle on his mother’s side had been a professional magician in Hamburg, Berlin, Budapest, and Prague. He had found a book at Britnell’s (
The Amateur Magician’s Handbook
by Henry Hay) and had learned a few simple but effective sleights that he showed to me one evening: making a card rise out of the deck, changing a red handkerchief to green, and so on. This was, I think, the only time I enjoyed watching him perform, mostly because of the pleasure that he himself clearly got out of it. But I was less pleased when, about a month later, we met in the Hart House Library and from his beaten-up briefcase he drew out a wooden box with two little doors. He opened one of the doors and put in a block of wood painted with spots like a die. When he opened the door, the die was gone; apparently it had slid behind the other door. But it wasn’t behind that door either, for it had somehow jumped back into the briefcase. Three or four students in the library seemed to enjoy the little performance, but I was embarrassed and dismayed by it. Afterwards, Albert confided to me that he had just discovered a magic shop on Dundas Street and that he had spent a day’s pay for the trick. I was going to say something, that I wondered if magic was a suitable interest for an adult, or perhaps that it would be better if he saved his money, but I didn’t get the chance, because he suddenly got down on his knee, grasped my hand, and implored me to marry him.

ALBERT WAS NEVER, IN FORTY-THREE years of marriage, an unfaithful husband. He could easily have been, for women found him attractive even without the allure of his powerful position. I suspect that even if he had been tempted, he would have been too mindful of his robes to risk sullying the position he held. If he had been unfaithful, my leaving him would be more understandable, more justifiable to the outside world and to our children, who adored him.

I do not wish to spend a great deal of time recounting the details of his hobby-turned-obsession. The hours spent in the basement practising the linking rings, or donning his custom-made set of tails (tails!) to work at his silent dove act (he had a small aviary and, to the kids’ delight when they were young, a rabbit hutch). Every magician who passed through town was welcome in our house, no matter the time of day. Often they were alcoholic; one used his skills to steal silver. At night in bed, Albert pored over catalogues from magical supply dealers and auction houses.