Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  “Hello,” says the young man.

  The leering witch beckons him inside with a flick of a razor-sharp fingernail. “Come in then, love, and give us a kiss!”

  “I’ll skip the kiss, if you don’t mind,” he replies with only the ghost of a smile. “Is Eve home?”

  Vega sighs, stands up straight, and whips the mask from her lovely face in a single motion.

  “You Harbingers are really into Halloween, aren’t you?”

  She shrugs. “We try.”

  He stares at the mask hanging limp in her hand. “So—is Eve …?”

  “She’s not here,” Vega says with another sigh. This time, when she beckons him with a plastic claw still stuck on her finger, he follows her in. “You’d better sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  I HAVE BEEN sitting in the gloomy kitchen all afternoon alternately weeping into my hankie and helping myself to far too much of the children’s loot. I know he’ll come tonight, but I just can’t stomach the prospect of saying good-bye to him once and for all.

  “At least there’s this way,” Morven says reasonably. “You can have your good-bye but he’ll never know it’s you.”

  I don’t want to say good-bye. I want to keep on going as we are. But they tell me a girl’s got to grow up sometime and that I’m lagging just a bit in doing so at the age of a hundred and fifty.

  “Besides, someday he’ll want to settle down,” says my sister, “and the longer you let it go the worse you’ll feel in the end.”

  “I can’t imagine feeling much worse than this,” I mumble into my teacup.

  “I know how to cheer you up! We’ll go to London tonight! You can travel all over the world again, just like you used to. We’ll have the time of our lives.”

  I am fairly certain the time of our lives has passed long since, but I manage to refrain from saying so.

  In good time night falls, the doorbell rings, and Vega answers it wearing that grotesque face that’s only a mask when she takes it off. I can hear Justin’s voice over the kiddies squealing on the lawn. Morven squeezes my hand before she gets up to brew us a fresh pot of tea. I hear two sets of footsteps coming through the dining room and I draw a deep breath.

  To my surprise, his eyes light up when he sees me. “Mrs. Harbinger! How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you for asking, Justin. Will you—will you have a cup of tea?”

  “Do sit down, Justin,” Morven says as she cuts a slice of ambrosia cake. “Vega has made your favorite. You did say chocolate spice cake was your favorite?”

  “Oh yes, thanks very much,” he says, and tucks in with enthusiasm.

  “It isn’t as good as Granny’s,” Vega says, blushing, and while this is true the cake is still awfully good.

  With eyes sore and stinging I watch him eat, and a change comes over his face as he remembers his original purpose. “You said Eve isn’t here?” he asks once he’s swallowed. “Where is she?”

  My sister puts a steaming cup in front of him. “There’s nothing in the world a cup of tea can’t make right. Drink up, dear. It’s cinnamon tea, very good for the digestion.” The teacup Morven gives him is the cup Helena used to give all the girls who came here looking for solace in the midst of their crumbling marriages, but it has no such effect on him.

  “Thank you,” he says, “but you aren’t answering my question. Where is Eve? I’ve been calling her for weeks.”

  “She’s … she’s gone away for a while.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “We—we’re not sure, exactly.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure? She just took off?”

  “I—” I start to say, but Morven stomps on my toe.

  “I’m very sorry, Justin, but she’s always been a capricious girl. We can only hope that in time she’ll grow up a bit.”

  He stares at the floor. “I just don’t understand it. She’s—she’s broken up with me, without so much as an e-mail? Oh,” he says, laughing bitterly. “I forgot. Eve doesn’t have an e-mail account.”

  “Not an e-mail,” I say as I push a small envelope across the table. “A letter.”

  Dear Justin,

  You may be quite angry with me for taking off like this, and I suppose you have every right to be. We’ve had a lovely time together over the past year, but it couldn’t possibly have lasted and I thought it best to end, as they say, on a high note. I’m not going to try to explain my reasons. All I can do is wish you a long and happy life and hope that when you do think of me on occasion, it’s with as much fondness as I will remember you.

  Love,

  Eve

  It took me three hours to compose that letter, and by the time I was finished I had fulfilled that classic cliché: a wastepaper basket brimming with crumpled stationery.

  He tosses the letter aside and kneads the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Suddenly he looks very tired. “How can she say she loves me and then do this? Explain it to me. You all know her better than anybody.”

  “She also left you this.” I pull out a small box wrapped in brown paper and slide it across the table.

  Without looking at me Justin tears off the wrapping, opens the box, and stares at the pocket watch. Then he drains his cup, sets it on the saucer, and fixes me with bright eyes. It’s a queer look, a deliberate look, almost as if he knows that I am hiding something. Oh, he knows we’re all hiding something; he’s a smart boy, after all. But it’s me he’s staring at, me he’s looking to for an answer. “Is she all right?” he asks me. “Is she safe, and happy?”

  Happy—hah!

  Every Harbinger holds her breath, and for one long moment the kitchen is still as a morgue. Finally I manage a nod, and in a blink his demeanor has shifted from imploring to angry. We are the aiders and abettors of the only girl who has ever hurt him.

  “Thank you for the cake,” he says stiffly as he tucks the letter and the box containing the watch into his inside coat pocket. Then he rises from his chair, pushes it neatly under the table, and walks out of the kitchen for the last time.

  Once the front door has slammed behind him I lose all composure. I cry as if I’ve lost Jonah all over again. I cry and cry, and as they pat me on the shoulders my sister and nieces look at me with frightened eyes. Aren’t I supposed to be the fearless one, the one to whom all sentiment is a show of weakness?

  Never mind what might have been.

  Carry on and carry out.

  Nostalgia poisons the present.

  What a load.

  And All That Happened Afterward

  32.

  Fifty years later

  NOTHING FOR it but to bide my time, and mind you, I’ve taken extra-specially good care of myself. I still don’t look a day over eighty—a very spry eighty. But I don’t fool myself thinking I’ll live much longer, and I know I’m lucky to have this one last chance.

  When Justin married a second time I began to think perhaps it was all in the past and I’d do well to leave it there. I almost never ventured into the mews anymore for fear of seeing him, but I still heard about everything that happened at Fawkes and Ibis. Harry and Emmet passed on within a year of each other, and then the shop belonged to Justin. Under his ownership Fawkes and Ibis prospered beyond the founders’ wildest dreams. There were profiles in all the big newspapers and magazines, Businessman of the Year awards—heck, they even gave him the key to the “city.” I was afraid all the success would turn him fat and complacent, but I needn’t have worried.

  I’ve never forgotten him. How could I?

  I saw him walking up and down Worth Street a few days after that horrible Halloween night. He was checking the numbers above all the bars and bodegas, frowning as he tried to recall just what address I’d given the cabbie the morning after the Astor ball. I stood just across the street in my overcoat with the ermine collar and sensible shoes and watched as he alighted upon the entrance to the warren. And when the gate opened and he peered hopefully inside, the man coming out of
the ordinary alleyway gave Justin a dirty look before shutting the door behind him with a decisive clank.

  He lingered a few minutes longer, trying to part the autumn-withered ivy with those slender pianist’s fingers of his so he might see something. But doubt overcame him; he couldn’t recall passing through that courtyard. He passed from gate to curb, glancing up and down the street with that same long face I’d first seen on a train through the Highlands so long ago. His gaze swept my way, I turned up my collar and peered into a dusty shop display of garbanzo beans and jugo de piña, and when I looked round again he was gone.

  To cheer me up Morven went to Fawkes and Ibis and bought me the horned mermaid, and we hung it over the coffee table in Cat’s Hollow. Not that we’ve seen much of it this last long while. We’ve had midnight picnics on the cold marble floor of the Louvre, watched the marriages of ordinary couples from the eaves of old stone churches. And yes, I’ve still indulged in the occasional randy-view, though I’ve never broken my promise. Lucky for me, European men seem to like their women as they do their wine.

  We’ve spent a fair bit of time in Deutschland too. I took Morven back to the Romanisches Café, where you still couldn’t see the ceiling for all the smoke. I kept jerking my head this way and that thinking I glimpsed faces from the old crowd, but nobody from the old crowd would pass through that doorway again.

  And other evenings we would turn into ravens and fly to the top of the Berliner Dom, where the angels who passed the war at the bottom of the river have been restored to their rightful places. We sit on the ledge high above the Lustgarten, where all the punks and drunks are milling about among the potted fuschia, and when I snap my fingers a cold thermos and a pair of martini glasses appear on the ledge between us. The angels and cherubs loom over us, the copper gone corpse-green and black in the crevices, and from the shadows come the sounds of squeaking bats and cooing pigeons. We sit there sipping grasshoppers as we look down over the blinking lights of the new city, cranes paused at obtuse angles over every construction site. Whenever I open my mouth to speak of the past, Morven, in her gentle way, changes the subject.

  We never stay away for long, though. We’re in Blackabbey often enough to watch our nieces fall in and out of love, and bring a few new nieces into the brood while they’re at it. Uncle Hy and Uncle Heck still come to all the coventions; we prop them up on armchairs by the fire so they can delight all the little ones, just as they used to, with their stories of war and adventure. We’ve got to oil their jaw-hinges regularly or else you can’t hear them for all the squeaking.

  Life goes on in Helena’s absence. Morven decided we owed Lucretia an apology—one of those apologies contingent upon the other party doing likewise—and I grudgingly followed her lead. The truce isn’t friendly, civil is the best that can be said for it, but with the mend the tension left our circle and we’ve been able to go on as we always have. It will be at least a hundred years, maybe two, before another Harbinger leads this coven, but our nieces are not so proud as we were.

  In fifty years we haven’t heard from Helena, not once. Her puppet doesn’t come to life with the others at covention times, and none of the aunties can say what has become of her. I can’t bear to think of our sister wandering endlessly through some cosmic wasteland, so much so that I’ve begun to imagine I can hear a solitary puppet traversing the darkened hallways in the middle of the night, limbs clonking softly, dragging the crossbar along the hardwood floors.

  I want it to be more than just a groggy fancy of mine; I want to believe that her daytime silence is part of her penance. One of these coventions I’m going to catch that bespectacled puppet in the calico apron by surprise, and then I’ll know she’s all right. That’s what I tell myself.

  Auntie Em and the rest of the elders couldn’t give much comfort. I’d go over and over it with Auntie, rehashing the details and playing “what if,” at every covention for years afterward—that is, until she finally stopped coming back and Mira had a baby girl. (Tetchiest kid I ever met.)

  Anyway, I told Auntie before she left us that after all that had happened with Helena, I actually felt rather guilty that no one had ever punished me for what I did in the prison at Nuremberg. How could tinkering with a tin of ground coffee possibly be any worse than slitting a man’s throat?

  “This is silly talk,” Auntie sniffed. “Henry wasn’t a bad man, and you weren’t the one who misused your magic.”

  I only let myself ask her about Justin on one occasion, and she wasn’t any more help than she’d ever been before. “Why must you always insist upon asking the questions you can answer for yourself, when there are much more important ones you leave hanging?”

  I’d cast a glance at the other Gibson girl still suspended from the mantelpiece—the one who had never spoken any scolding words to me because it had never spoken at all. “If you’ll recall, Auntie, I’ve asked you for the truth more than once. I know you know more than you ever let on.”

  “I knew you didn’t really care to know.”

  I rolled my eyes and threw up my hands. What tosh!

  “Listen to me, Evelyn. A child’s regard for her parent is a delicate thing. I didn’t want to be the one to put the tarnish.” Auntie paused. “She was my niece, and I loved her. I would have overlooked it.”

  “Overlooked what?”

  Auntie Em fixed me with her beady little eyes. “You weren’t the only one who saw your father in the carriage that day.”

  “You’re saying … you’re saying Mother …”

  “She asked that none of us ever tell you girls the real reason for her disappearance.” Auntie sighed. “But I think I’ve kept that secret long enough.”

  So I shivered all over again in that icy moment of revelation. You see, Helena had only taken after our mother.

  ONE EVENING at dinner Mira was regaling us with all the fresh gossip from the mews—the shopkeepers were organizing a protest of the town council’s plan to repave the old cobblestone alleyway, and there was talk of beldames from Little Hammersley opening a rival toy shop—and then my niece cleared her throat and said she’d heard something out of Fawkes and Ibis that might be of particular interest to me.

  “Justin’s wife has left him,” Vega said excitedly, before her sister could continue. Mira kicked her under the table and all the glass and silverware clinked.

  “It happened last week,” Mira said. “His son told me all about it. Off to ‘find herself’ on some mountain in India, he says.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” Vega put in. “She always did seem like a bit of a frooty-toot.”

  SO THAT’S how I find myself in front of the Fawkes and Ibis display window for the first time in who knows how long, heart thudding in my ears, all gussied up and trying not to look it. A man of thirty-five or so stands at the cash register—Justin’s son, obviously, but the resemblance doesn’t affect me as it did the evening I arrived with a toffee cake and a hefty appetite.

  For a moment or two I pretend to examine a selection of mint-condition jazz records in the window, until I notice the back-room curtain moving out the corner of my eye. I haven’t seen any recent photographs of him, so his appearance startles me. He looks almost just as Jonah did in the shaving mirror all those years ago: the lines of his face grown more angular, more noble; bushy brows but nary a hair left on his head. Still has his teeth though, and good for him.

  My second thought is that with the way he carries himself anyone could tell his wife’s just left him. He is seventy-five now, but his posture is terrible and there’s a leadenness to his movements that makes him look at least ten years older. He busies himself writing something at the counter for a moment, but his son has noticed how I’m staring and I hear him say a few words.

  In that first second, as he’s looking up, I freeze in terror—what if he’s still angry? Or worse, what if he doesn’t recognize me and I have to go through the humiliation of reminding him? No, it won’t come to that. If he doesn’t know it’s me I’ll turn h
eel and never look back.

  I needn’t have worried. His face is positively transformed at the sight of me, if I do say so myself. So now I’m inside the shop with no memory of putting one foot before the other, and he is clasping both my hands, kissing my cheek, telling me he’d have known me anywhere. At a time like this people always say the years melt away in an instant, and how true it is! He hasn’t even gotten a word out but I am back on the stairs at Harbinger House—dressed in white, and not so young as I looked—gazing down at him smiling broadly among the swarm of the coven. He’s back in that moment, too, I can tell. It pleases me to notice that his son, still standing behind the cash register, looks rather shocked.

  He introduces me, briefly, and then he gets his coat and we walk to the Blind Pig Gin Mill. (Yep, still around, though it’s changed owners a hundred times since.) I order a whisky ginger and he says he’ll have the same, and he insists on buying my drink.

  He keeps the conversation safe at first. I tell him little vignettes of the places I’ve been, and he gives me all the mundane details of his life. Has two children from his first marriage, his daughter’s in medical school in Boston, and his son is taking over the business.

  “You’ve done very well,” I say. “I’ve heard about all your successes from my nieces. Blackabbey Business of the Year for the twelfth year running, eh? Well done!”

  “Thank you.” He takes a pensive sip of his whisky. “Uncle Harry would have been pleased, I think.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure he would have.” He gives me a curious sidewise look; I was always too familiar with the auld gents, and he could never figure out why.