Finding Magic

by Sally Quinn

  * * *

  Greece was a place where I became more open to certain moments of transcendence. I had experienced moments like these before, but hadn’t been able to give a name to them. In Greece, however, I began to recognize them for what they were—magical happenings beyond any explanation rooted in the physical world.

  Greek Easter is a red-letter day in the Orthodox Church. King Paul and Queen Frederika celebrated with a great party at the palace where whole lambs were roasted on spits and the king cracked eggs with all the guests, a traditional ritual. Each person has a hard-boiled egg and cracks it against one held by another guest. The one whose egg does not crack will have a year of good luck. I cracked eggs with the king. My egg did not break.

  We also went—as a family this time—to the Easter services at the Orthodox church. I couldn’t help but remember my first experience at the Catholic church with my friend. From the moment we walked into the church, this felt similar in many ways. The service was held at night, with the church completely lit up by flickering candles. All the priests were in extremely ornate robes with what appeared to be crowns on their heads. The chanting and singing were mystical. Rose petals were strewn everywhere. There seemed to be awe on the faces of the congregants. I was envious, wanting to feel that awe. I wanted to believe what they believed. I wanted to celebrate with them. It struck me that this was religion as community. Something about everyone praying and believing together was especially powerful, even overwhelming in a good way. It was different from being alone in a room trying to conjure up an elusive God. Church that evening included an inexplicable presence in addition to all those people and me. I felt something I had never experienced before, something I didn’t have a name for but knew it to be real and true.

  * * *

  Christmas that same year in Athens was another moment when I experienced some similar otherworldly feelings. I was always imbued with a sense of extreme anticipation on Christmas Eve—of expectation, joy, and magic. Even though I was thirteen now and had stopped believing in Santa Claus long ago, I had that sense again on this particular night. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen; I just felt as if I were about to jump out of my skin. Though I didn’t realize it, I might have been anticipating something spiritual. The birth of Christ is obviously a powerful story. For some reason I didn’t connect the story of Christ with my disbelief in God. I remember trembling with excitement all evening.

  Our family ritual was that we opened one present on Christmas Eve and saved the rest until the morning. We also had to perform for my parents. Every year, we did the same little playlet from The Little Match Girl, for which I wrote the script and produced and starred in the show. Donna played the rock against which the Little Match Girl leaned when she was bone-weary and weeping. Butchie played the tree in the background. I always gave a bravura performance, after which we opened our one present, had dinner, left out cookies, milk, and a note for Santa (Butchie still believed), and went to bed, knowing we would probably not sleep a wink.

  Of course I was looking forward to opening presents the next morning. I really loved surprising my parents and siblings with things I knew they wanted. What I didn’t look forward to was the letdown I knew would follow after it was all over. I never analyzed that familiar letdown until recently when it became clear that it also was a spiritual letdown. Whatever I was anticipating around the birth of Christ had not been fulfilled.

  I went to bed Christmas Eve and went to sleep right away. I woke about four A.M., not listening for the sounds of Santa’s reindeer on the roof but for something else. Our house was on a hill in Psychiko outside of Athens, and my room looked across the valley to the mountains on the other side. The light was beginning to dawn around the top of the mountain, the moon was beaming, and the stars were out by the millions. The outline of the terrain in front of me looked so like that of Bethlehem, or at least what I had seen in paintings and imagined.

  My mind went into paroxysms of fantasy and I saw the wise men on camels following the star, I saw the manger, I saw Joseph and Mary, and I saw the baby Jesus being born. If you had put me in front of a lie detector and asked if I had really seen it and I said yes, it would have registered that I was telling the truth. To this day it still seems absolutely true. I believe I saw it. I still have an ache in my heart when I remember this scene.

  I had been sitting up and I collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep. Everyone had a hard time waking me the next morning. I could barely concentrate on the presents. The whole idea of exchanging gifts now seemed silly and meaningless to me. I think I was in a state of transcendence. It wore off finally, and sadly. From then on I have been trying to recapture that feeling every Christmas but have never fully succeeded.

  * * *

  Shortly before we left Athens, after nearly two glorious years, to move to Germany, we were invited on the yacht of one of my parents’ friends. It was a day trip. We stopped at several ports, swam off the boat in the Aegean Sea, and had a sumptuous lunch. As we were heading back to Piraeus I slipped up to the bow of the boat and stood there for most of the return trip. The setting sun was on my face and the wind was blowing my hair. I felt truly happy. I wanted to stay right there for the rest of my life.

  Then I had the oddest sensation. As if I were watching flashbacks of my life, except I was seeing flash-forwards. My whole emotional future passed before me. I felt everything, good and bad, that afternoon that I have since felt. Exhilaration, devastation, fear, strength, pride, envy, despair, peace, love many times over, hate, fear, apprehension, need, lust, anticipation, guilt, excitement, shame, greed, uncertainty, ambition, insecurity, compassion, giving, nurturing . . . I could go on. The kaleidoscope in my brain just kept twisting and turning, showing me the various rearrangements of my emotions and experiences that were yet to come. I was at once terrified and thrilled. It was a true psychic experience. From then on, everything that has happened to me has been something that, no matter how joyful or painful, I have somehow anticipated. Since then, I haven’t had an emotional experience that did not seem already familiar to me. I realized that day that I would survive and thrive. That moment gave me enormous strength.

  Chapter 4

  I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.

  —R. A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver (The Legend of Drizzt series, Book V)

  While we were stationed in Göppingen, a tiny town outside of Stuttgart, Germany, my parents—after a short stint for me at Stuttgart American High School in Ludwigsburg for the children of diplomats and the military—decided to send Donna and me to a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. Donna was in the lower school and I rarely saw her. I was the youngest in the upper school, which was essentially my freshman year in high school. The other girls were all British and had completed their equivalent of high school in England. They were attending for one year to be “finished.”

  The school was in a tiny town, Château-d’Oex, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A Disneyland chalet right out of the movies, it was called “Le Torrent” for the torrent of water that flowed down the snow-covered hills above into a stream on the grounds of the school.

  Our headmistress was a crazy woman, middle-aged, with masses of wild dyed bright-red hair; she had a huge bosom and wore very high-heeled shoes. She was hysterical, literally, and shrieked a lot. The rumor was that her husband had hung himself in the basement years earlier.

  We were only allowed to speak French, and for each word of English we were overheard speaking we would lose one of the five francs of our precious weekly allowance. We learned very quickly to speak French. We had classes in the morning—typing, French, and French literature. After lunch we skied all afternoon, returned for late tea, had more classes, and then went to bed. Weekends we went to the tearoom for tea dances with the local boys and students from the exclusive boys’ school Le Rosey, in nearby Gstaad.

  It was one of
the most wonderful years of my life.

  The British girls were fun, rowdy, iconoclastic, and mischievous. I bonded with them immediately, and we were constantly looking for ways to get into trouble. Sundays were great because we had no classes and skied all day. I became an excellent skier. We returned to school, had tea, and then went to mandatory church or vespers. This time I looked forward to church. The minister, who spoke in whispers, was a weather-beaten cipher of a man, with stooped shoulders and a defeated mien. Every Sunday he gave a number of sermons, starting in Lausanne, then up the train route to Montreux, Vevey, and finally Château-d’Oex. We were his last stop at 6:00 P.M., and by then he had lost any juice he might have started out with that morning.

  We, the bad girls, sat in the back row and behaved appallingly throughout the entire hour while he intoned about sin and hellfire and damnation. There wasn’t a believer among us. Everything he said sent us off into gales of laughter, which we would try to stifle to no avail.

  One of our classmates, a slightly porcine girl with an unfortunate priggish personality, was not exactly Miss Popular. She always sat in the row in front of us. Much to our delight, she broke wind noisily all the way through the service. This undid us. The minute she began, we would be falling off our pews, biting our hands to keep from screaming with laughter, and inevitably wetting our pants—not exactly a spiritual reaction. We would stumble out of the church at the end of the service, exhausted from trying to contain ourselves and always in the most charitable mood. We loved those Sundays with the flatulence of our friend in front of us and the good father. If church had always been that much fun, I might have become a regular for life. As it was, after that, whenever I thought about religion, all I could think about was wetting my pants from laughing. That wouldn’t change for a very long time.

  * * *

  In those days there were very few ski lifts. We used the lift every day for regular skiing; however, several times we had the most fabulous excursions. One weekend we attached sealskins ( peau de phoques) to the bottom of our skis and spent an entire day climbing. It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. We would climb for an hour or so and then stop to eat an orange. Nothing could have been more beautiful than being in that pristine snow in the silence on a gorgeous, cloudless day overlooking the Swiss Alps. Our guide yodeled. It was too much.

  We slept that night in a public cabin at the top of the mountain. There was a wood-burning stove and mats on the floor. We made cheese fondue. Because you positively cannot drink water with melted cheese, we drank Kirschwasser, which was also in the fondue. There was no drinking age in Switzerland. I got totally smashed. We were all exhausted and sunburned and crashed as soon as we had finished eating.

  We woke the following morning to the sun blinding us as it poured through the windows, had a breakfast of meat and cheese, bread and oranges, put our sealskins in our backpacks, fastened on our skis, and prepared to ski down the mountain on perfect white sparkling untouched deep powder. We were all good skiers and we seemed to fly down the slopes. Sometimes when writers write, they say they don’t know where the words come from. It’s as if their thoughts are being channeled from some unknown source. That’s how I felt that day. My skis hardly touched the snow. I was completely fearless. I sailed over moguls, jumped ridges, and slalomed around logs and trees with a sense of freedom and abandon. I had never had such a thrilling sensation. I may as well have had a line from the sky that kept me aloft, safe from danger as I careered down the slopes. If I had been religious, I would have said that God was holding that line, allowing me to go beyond my own limits. But I was not religious.

  * * *

  One day a beautiful Scottish couple arrived at Le Torrent. They looked as if they had just stepped out of Balmoral Castle. She was sophisticated with a pile of burnished curls pulled up on her head, an elegant fitted suede coat trimmed with sable, patterned stockings, and smart pumps. He was dashing in a fitted bespoke suit and cravat, his shoes perfectly polished. They were charming and gracious to everyone, her ringing laughter carrying throughout the chalet, his deep voice commanding and reassuring. Both of them oozed self-confidence and an easiness in their own skins. They were the most social of animals. I thought they were incredibly glamorous.

  They were there to enter their daughter in the school. Just looking at the two of them, you could easily imagine the aspirations and expectations they must have had for their divinely beautiful daughter. In fact, the daughter was a different story. She was the saddest girl I had ever seen.

  Her face was mildly out of balance. Her nose was not aligned, and her eyes were too close together and slightly off-kilter. She didn’t look directly at people when she spoke, and her speech was so nasal it was hard to understand. She was gangly, not quite walking in a straight line. Today, we would identify her as a special needs child. The only problem was that there weren’t places for this kind of student then.

  Her parents were clearly loving and concerned, but seemed at a loss for how to handle the situation. No doubt they had high hopes that this school would work for their daughter. Unfortunately, the administration of Le Torrent wasn’t inclined toward any integration of outliers, and we—her classmates—were just as bad.

  The next few weeks must have been a horror for her. Nobody paid attention to her except to tease her. She didn’t speak French, and, besides, she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t keep up in class, couldn’t ski, sat alone at meals, and spent most of her time by herself in her room, crying, so I was told. I was not one of the perpetrators, but that doesn’t absolve me. I have to admit that I was uncomfortable being around her, so I avoided her. I didn’t know how to talk to her and she had a hard time carrying on a conversation, even in English. The teachers were frustrated and short with her. It was painful to observe.

  One day a couple of the girls raided her bedroom when she wasn’t there. They came back triumphant; they had found bloodied underpants and wads of bloody toilet paper. It seems that she had gotten her period for the first time while she was there and had told no one. Some of the girls thought it was funny; others, including me, were mortified for her. This was too much. Something had to be done. Finally a group of us went to see the frightening headmistress, a terrifying and unsympathetic woman, and told her what had happened. She didn’t say a word, just listened.

  Shortly after that, this poor girl disappeared from school. We never saw or heard about her again. She may have been gone, but the memory of her was forever seared in my brain. I couldn’t get over my shame and guilt. I may not have been directly responsible for her pain, but I didn’t do anything to stop it either. My behavior was despicable. It was unchristian in the largest sense of the word. I clearly had not had the Golden Rule uppermost in my mind. Years later, when my son was born with special needs, the memories of our mistreatment of that young girl came flooding back. So did the pain. I will never forget her.

  Chapter 5

  The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

  —Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

  Growing up in the military is a singular experience. We never lived in one place for much longer than a year and a half. I practically had to be pried out of Switzerland. I’ve rarely cried so hard as when we had to leave Le Torrent. Donna and I returned to Germany with our parents to pack up for our next assignment.

  On the move again, our family came back to the United States, first to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, then, six months later, to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma in Washington State, where my father was taking over as the commanding general. In Tacoma, my closest friend was Jeannie Schwartz. She was a year older than I and the smartest friend I’d ever had. She lived right next door on Generals Row. Her father, a doctor, was the commanding general of Madigan Army Hospital. We spent hours at her house talking about books and ideas. She had a great library and was always lending me books.

  I was intent on enlarging my vocabulary, partly to impress her because sh
e seemed to know every word in the dictionary. One day when we were hanging out, I was looking through the books on her shelves and came across a book with the word anti-Semitism in the title. I had encountered that word recently but hadn’t absorbed its meaning. Wanting to show off my newfound word, I turned to Jeannie and asked brightly, “Oh, are you anti-Semitic?” Of course, I didn’t know what it really meant and may not even have pronounced it properly, but she knew what I was asking. She looked at me, shocked. “Sally, of course not,” she said. “I’m Jewish.”

  I looked at her, shocked myself. I had no idea she was Jewish. How was I supposed to know? How could you tell? I always wondered that about the Nazis. How could they tell people were Jewish? I was shocked because I didn’t know. My parents had never said a word about the Schwartzes being Jewish. I was appalled and ashamed that I had offended her. I was also deeply embarrassed to have shown my ignorance. I wanted to sink through the floor. All I could think of was Granny in Savannah telling me not to touch anything in Sally Kravitch’s house, and all I could do was bow my head and say meekly, “I didn’t know.”

  Jeannie smiled and then actually laughed. She sat me down and gently explained what the word meant. I told her about my father and Dachau and the Holocaust albums and Granny. I certainly didn’t understand where anti-Semitism came from even when I knew what it meant.

  We hugged at the end of our talk. I went home and asked my parents if they knew the Schwartzes were Jewish. “Of course,” they said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. “Why would it matter?” my father asked. And of course, he was right. It didn’t matter. Not to us, anyway—or so I thought.