Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

It’s only a matter of minutes before he mentions the departure of Wife Number Two. “Married fifteen years and she up and decides she’s got to find herself.” He doesn’t sound bitter, only sad.

  “Went to India, did she?”

  “How did you know?” he asks, and I just laugh. He polishes off his drink, pauses, and I can tell by the look on his face he’s going to ask me something awkward. “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “How many husbands do you have?”

  I laugh again. “None.”

  “Really? You never married?” Behind that mask of reflexive surprise, though, I can tell he might have predicted as much. He’s wondering how many other men got letters like the one I wrote him.

  We finish our drinks in silence. He checks his watch and I feel a sharp stab of panic. “Tell you what,” he says. “Stephen’s gone home by now. What do you say we go back to the shop?”

  The relief must be plain on my face, because he smiles and eyes me fondly for a moment before calling to the bartender. “Do you have any crème de menthe?”

  The bartender smirks as he turns to fetch a dusty bottle from the top shelf. He goes to open it and Justin says, “That’s all right, we’ll take the whole thing.”

  BACK IN the ersatz parlor, the opera lights and red-velvet chaise lounge are long gone, but similar furnishings have taken their place. The flocked velvet wallpaper has been replaced as well, but the wall of door knockers is still there, and the room still has that queer homely air, as if some elderly eccentric actually lived here. No more clocks though. “All that ticking got on my nerves,” he says.

  He goes upstairs for the glasses—they use the apartment for an office and storerooms now—and in that idle moment, when my fingers and toes start to tingle, I know it’s only the paresthesia flaring up again. It’s a load off, having nothing to hide anymore.

  Justin comes back with ice cubes in the cordial glasses, and for a moment we sip in silence. Then he notices the pendant round my neck. “You kept it?” He glances up, his face a mix of incredulity and pleasure. “All this time?”

  I give a little nod, and the look on him now—I don’t even want to describe it. A thrill of anxiety leaves me trembling so bad I nearly spill the crème de menthe in my lap.

  “I looked for you for years,” he says quietly.

  I just sit there, saying nothing because I’m afraid of saying too much. I can’t very well tell him that the lies I told are the same sort of lies that get the play written, acted, and applauded, that we’d have had no fun without them. No, Evelyn. No more excuses.

  He reaches for the crème de menthe and refills my glass. “I need to tell you why my wife left me.”

  “No—Justin—honestly, I wouldn’t want you to go upsetting yourself—”

  He shakes his head, his mouth set in a grim line. “I wasn’t sleeping well. That’s how it started. Caroline said I thrashed around and cried out like I was dreaming of being tortured”—I wince as he says this—“and when she tried to wake me, she wasn’t able. It got so bad I had to start sleeping in the guest room. That went on for a few months, until she had the notion to drag me to a hypnotist. Oh, he was a doctor and all, called himself a psychoanalyst specializing in hypnotherapy, but I only went because Caroline wouldn’t leave me alone about it.

  “The therapist, doctor, whatever—he asked what made her think I could be remembering things from a past life, and she told him that whenever I had these dreams I was calling out another woman’s name … not once or twice, but over and over throughout the night. She’d never told me any of this, she just sprang it on me in the doctor’s office. So I turned to her there—I was none too pleased with her, as you might well imagine—and I asked her whose name it was.”

  “Whose?” I breathe, my heart thudding in my ears.

  “She wouldn’t tell me at the time. Anyway, I went along with the ‘regression’ only because the doctor told me Caroline would have to wait outside. After she left the room he put me through a bunch of relaxation exercises, and at the end of it I was back in the middle of one of those dreams … except it was much clearer than any dream I’d had so far. It had all the details of a real memory—faces, voices, rooms, textures—you know what I mean?”

  I nod. “And … what did you see?”

  “A lot of things. I was seated in front of one of those old-fashioned radio transmitters, in a dark little room with black curtains on every side … I saw places that I knew were in Paris but weren’t at all like what I remembered … once I was on the roof of a barn looking out over mountains as the sun came up … once I was in a banquet hall wearing a uniform with a swastika armband, but I knew it didn’t belong to me—I wasn’t really a Nazi … and I saw myself in prison more than once. I couldn’t feel anything sitting in that chair in the doctor’s office, but I knew—I knew it had been horrible.

  “But in almost every other place, you were there too. Just as you were when I knew you. You were beside me on the barn roof, and when I was packing up the radio you came up behind me, wrapped your arms around me, and … well. I told the doctor it didn’t make any sense, that you were a girl I’d known as a young man, and that I was probably just mixing up old memories with scenes from movies I’d seen a long time ago. He didn’t say much at the time, just said he wanted to schedule me for a second session the next week.

  “In the second session he told me to go backward, to a time before I was in any danger. I found myself in an apartment, I couldn’t tell where, but then he had me examine the ordinary objects around the room. I put my hand in my inside jacket pocket and pulled out a silver flask. It had a set of initials on it—JAR. And then I woke up, came straight home, and spent all afternoon looking for this.”

  Justin draws out the old pocket watch and holds it so the smooth gold lid catches the light: JAR. He looks at me. Then with shaking fingers he flicks open the lid and pries the watch-face out of its setting. The little folded bit of paper is still there, and he plucks it out from between the gears, hands me the watch, and unfolds the paper. “It’s a cipher, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  “I wasn’t remembering scenes from an old movie, was I?”

  I shake my head. “How long ago was this?”

  “Two months.”

  “Why didn’t you contact me, Justin? Why didn’t you come to Harbinger House?”

  “I thought about it. Thought about it a lot. But how could I, after the way your family froze me out?”

  “That was fifty years ago!”

  “I could say the same for you and me, though, couldn’t I? Fifty years can go by but it doesn’t matter any less.”

  Oh, but it’s been well over a century now, by my count. I’ll tell you this—a gal’s never too old to blush.

  He takes the open watch from my palm, lays it carefully on the end table, and clasps my hands in his. “Tell me everything, Eve. Start at the beginning.”

  Deep breath, Evelyn. “First off,” I say, “I’m a great deal older than you think.”

  But a woman should look for a man her junior. We live longer, you know.

  Acknowledgments

  I TURNED INTO a bit of a magpie while I was taking notes for this novel. Whenever anyone said something particularly funny, I told them on the spot that I was going to appropriate it—so thanks to Anjuli Fiedler, Diarmuid O’Brien, and Cathy Szalai for their witticisms. And Brendan O’Brien inspired me more than I can say.

  Magic, Witchcraft and Alchemy by Grillot de Givry, The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, and To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting by Philipp Blom were all books that stoked my imagination. The shipwreck at Jersey is supposedly a true story, which I discovered by way of Anne Hartigan’s play La Corbière. It was Schopenhauer who declared that marriage halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties, George Santayana who said that “sanity is madness put to good use,” and the novelist Thomas Wolfe who characterized the stranglehold of National Socialism on the Germa
n psyche as “some dread malady of the soul.” And of course, I owe all the penis-snatching references to those sadistic monks (Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger) who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting treatise first published in Germany in 1487.

  Most inspiring of all were, of course, the real-life spies of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Many smart and courageous women served as couriers and radio operators behind enemy lines, and their stories aren’t quite so well known today as they ought to be. I loved reading The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive by Marcus Binney; Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra by Shareen Blair Brysac; A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America’s Most Important Spy in World War II by Lucas Delattre; and A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII by Sarah Helm. Joseph Persico’s Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II was especially useful.

  A million thanks to my good friends and faithful readers: Kelly Brown (my partner in crime in Germany), Seanan McDonnell, Ailbhe Slevin, and Christian O’Reilly. Kate Garrick is the best agent a girl could ask for. Thanks to Sarah Knight for making this book all that it could be, and to Brian DeFiore and Shaye Areheart for their continued support. I am grateful to Sally Kim for believing in me, to Rico Zimmer for correcting my German, and to Mike McCormack and Adrian Frazier at NUI Galway for their ongoing inspiration and encouragement.

  Thanks to my family most of all.

  About the Author

  CAMILLE DEANGELIS is the author of Mary Modern. She received an MA in writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2005, and her first-edition guidebook, Moon Ireland, was published in 2007. She lives in New Jersey.

  Visit her at www.CamilleDeAngelis.com.