The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  Instead of socializing, I worked and I learned. In the same way I’d once followed the Cecchetti method to point the toes of my right foot over and over and over, I made a habit of practicing and repeating all the elements of the illusions I needed to know. I wasn’t sure whether or not I had talent, but I knew I had discipline. Over and over, I palmed a coin; over and over, I shuffled a deck. Then I went beyond the bounds of the illusions, past those specific moments, to the moments between and around them. I perfected all the gestures. Gestures were the currency. More so than any other part of the illusion, the way you drew people’s attention with a lifted hand or a swept arm would be responsible for the success or failure of the trick. Misdirection. This is where my dance training gave me an unusual advantage. I practiced long, graceful arcs that traced the sky and subtle, winking flicks of the wrist. I practiced, for hours, taking one long stride downstage. I practiced until I found the perfect way to peek over my shoulder, as if I hadn’t meant to, so that the audience would be compelled to follow my eyes in that direction. In some way, it felt like Mother would be proud of me, if she’d known.

  Another old ghost was on my mind, thanks to the other girls’ constant obsession with men and boys. I thought of Clyde and the stolen moments we’d spent in the dark nighttime hallways of the Biltmore. How intensely delicious those kisses had been. How much I’d looked forward to his lips brushing softly against my neck, his fingers traveling up my thigh. How my whole body grew warm at the sight of his eyes closed in pleasure, seen dimly through the veil of my own lowered lashes. I thought of our journey up the coast, the betrothal and the betrayal, and how things might have been different if he’d warned me beforehand that his proposal would be false. If he hadn’t told me, unprompted, that I could trust him, and then immediately demonstrated that I couldn’t. Without that, and my lost faith that followed it, perhaps we would have continued to meet after our arrival in New York, and perhaps those meetings would have escalated to their natural conclusion. I might have let him possess me, consume me. But had it been love? I thought it was. I longed for him in every way. But whatever our feelings were, they had never truly been consummated, and even from what little I knew about love, I knew it had certain requirements.

  In any case, Adelaide was showing me by example how to live without love. She mourned Alexander and never sought to replace him, yet her life was full. A wealthy former rail baron in Toledo attended three shows in a row and proposed marriage to her after the third, but all she did was laugh. She never spoke of love or marriage or companionship, except in reference to what she had lost. Perhaps I was a widow like her, only without the marriage to precede it.

  That wasn’t to say there weren’t temptations and occasions here and there. After a matinee in Akron, a rather handsome young man presented me with a cluster of daisies and invited me to meet him for a cup of tea at a nearby shop two hours hence. I asked Jeannie for advice, and she insisted I go, just to have a story to tell. Unfortunately, the story I told her afterward was of the young man’s very ungentlemanly attempt to grope me without prelude during a stroll along the river. He was easy to resist, especially when he declared petulantly that everyone knew girls who took to the stage were wanton strumpets, and who did I think I was kidding? Luckily he didn’t press his case, but he did make me suspicious of every townie waiting by the stage door thereafter. No doubt some of them were decent enough chaps, whether they carried daisies or tulips or Queen Anne’s lace, but I gave them all the cold shoulder. Sorting the wheat from the chaff was more effort than I cared to expend.

  Closer to turning my head was one of the prop boys, a ginger-haired young man named Harry. He had merry brown eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, though he looked barely old enough to grow one. Harry told me he liked my eyes, a compliment of which I had fond memories. He kissed me one night, gently, in a dark hallway in the Bijou in Union City, after a sudden snowstorm canceled that night’s performance. The kiss was pleasant, but only just. I felt nothing a tenth as strong as what I’d felt before. Mild enjoyment was not the stuff of love. I told him I couldn’t entangle myself with anyone in the company, that I didn’t believe in romance on the road, but that I thought he was a wonderful young man that some other young woman would be lucky to have. He took it well enough. Eventually he left the company to marry his schoolyard sweetheart and go to work in her father’s feed store. I always imagined I’d been a bit of an adventure for him, given that these things are all relative.

  In our third season, midway through 1898, we were all forcibly reminded of the potential harm love, or its approximations, could do. The boys and girls of the company were resourceful in their way, always finding places to meet before, during, and after shows. More than once, I took a wrong turn in an unfamiliar theater and found my colleagues groping each other in a storage closet. More than once, I would see boys and girls alike wolfing down their dinner on departure nights, excusing themselves after only a few minutes, so they’d have the better part of an hour for other activities before the train pulled out.

  There was a particular romance between Chloris, who had replaced me as the Odalisque, and a boy named Jonah. Jonah was an athletic boy in his late teens, but with hooded eyes that made him look older. He often played the villain in illusions where innocent young girls were threatened, which was amusing, given that he was the youngest and most innocent among us. While many of the other boys would simply go around to every girl in turn, trying their chances, Jonah only had eyes for Chloris, and you could tell which days he was in her favor by the spring in his step.

  One night, he climbed out of the boys’ railcar and across the top of the moving train to the girls’. He lowered himself gingerly through the trap in the roof to land almost silently among our bunks. Chloris thought it was charming that he couldn’t wait until morning to see her, rewarded him with a few kisses, and sent him back before the other girls could wake and raise a fuss. On the way back across the roof of the cars, for whatever reason, he slipped. When he didn’t report to the theater the next morning, the truth came out. A search party was sent back to follow the track. We never saw his body, but his parents came to claim it, and I had never seen Adelaide so grave and sorrowful as when she received them. Chloris refused to set foot on the train again, sobbing uncontrollably just from the sight of it. We were due to play the Globe in Louisville, six hours away, that evening. I stepped back into my old role for a few shows until we could hire a new Odalisque. I didn’t dare refuse Adelaide when she assigned me the illusion, but it gave me a dark, nervous flutter in my belly. Every night as I waited on the stage, perfectly still, I thought of the bad ends both the Odalisque before me and the Odalisque after me had come to. I might be no luckier. We’d all shared the same costume, the same wig, the same abilities. I feared what else we might share.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1898–1900

  Second Sight

  Over the next few seasons of the Great Madame Herrmann’s show, I learned and grew and changed, building my confidence and knowledge, feeding on the energy of applause. We continued on through the rest of 1898, 1899, and the blazing festivities that welcomed the beginning of 1900. Other companies took a month or two off for summer break each year, but Adelaide didn’t believe in it; she spent two weeks in August sorting through the goods in her storehouse to refresh the year’s planned illusions, and then we were back on the road.

  We still toured the Middle West each year, but we added new circuits and extended our reach, even playing major theaters on the East Coast—Ford’s Grand Opera House in Baltimore, Low’s Opera House in Providence, the Howard Athenaeum in Boston, and a hundred other theaters. The company had grown larger, with more employees onstage and off. For music, we had previously depended on local musicians at the theaters we visited, but Adelaide decided we should travel with our own orchestra and hired capable players for brass, strings, and woodwinds. She selected both the players and the music carefully to make those five
players sound like twenty-five. Belladonna and Scarlett were still dancing girls, though Marie had gone home to Utica, and there were more than a dozen girls all told, in various roles. Jeannie had an assistant, a bright girl named Cecily, and three more prop boys joined the company, there were so many sets and illusions and apparatuses. The tiger was still with us, as well as the dogs and rabbits and most of the birds, though Madame had decided to part with a handful of doves and finches. She replaced them with a half dozen snakes. Five were small and bright green and lively, and the sixth was ink-black and huge, resting in a heap of coils that seemed to stretch in every direction. We were told none of them were venomous. Hector decided he was getting too old to travel around the country in the company of beasts, especially the hissing variety, so a man named Isham was hired to manage the animals, but we saw him only rarely. He didn’t seem to enjoy the company of humans, and they returned the sentiment. Isham smelled no better than his charges.

  From the window of our railcars we saw the world go by—flat grassland, bustling factories, heaped snowdrifts taller than a man, the mile-wide Mississippi, frozen lakes, ramshackle slums, the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, hillsides speckled with grazing sheep, and once, in Kansas, the heart-stopping beauty of a burning prairie at night. Our leader was always refining her act, of course, and as she became more famous, our audiences grew. Our skirts got shorter and our tickets more expensive. But the basic rhythm of the show itself was the same.

  The curtain came up on our most elaborate set, a facsimile of a Hindoo palace, backed by tall pale columns with bright banners of chiffon strung between them, a riot of color surrounding a golden throne. Five veiled girls swathed in those same bright colors spun onto the stage, swaying to Hindoo rhythms, each bearing a snake with a yellow blaze down the center of its flat head, and we spun quickly enough that the snakes seemed to writhe and hiss, though in fact they weren’t real snakes at all. We had rehearsed the dance once with the real snakes, but Adelaide decided they looked much less impressive from the audience, so we went back to the fakes, with some relief. Once the snake dance was complete, we struck the poses of jacks, queens, and kings, and then we vanished in a flurry of playing cards, just as Adelaide strode out regally to seat herself on the golden throne.

  The music swelled and then stopped. The hissing of the snakes faded away. And Adelaide began to perform the first of three sets of card tricks she claimed were taught to her by the Hindoo mystics themselves, in the dark alleyways of Calcutta. No matter where we were or how long we’d been at it, my breath always caught a little when she fanned out the thick flat cards in her long fingers. There was always such promise in that moment. I looked forward to it every night.

  There were songs and sights and more and more illusions. The Hindoo set was traded for a more feminine, abstract one, a kind of ladies’ dressing room, draped with pale lace, for a Night’s Alteration. Playing the role of an overly curious maid, I was folded into the sheets of a great bed and vanished inside it, then the next season when we changed the illusion to keep it fresh, three of us were folded up inside the bed and vanished and were replaced by a dove, a dog, and a peacock. The season after that, new girls were the dove and the dog and the peacock, and I was the one who turned the bed and waved the wand and made all the disappearances and transformations happen, at least as far as the audience was concerned. When the final transformation was complete and the peacock spread its tail wide, the audience always broke into gleeful applause, and I raised my arms to drink it in. For however long it lasted, mere seconds or much longer, I let the sensation pour over me like cool water on a hot day, delicious and welcome.

  Toward the end of the entertainment, all the sets were swept away until the stage was hung with only a dark scrim. A lone violin began to play in the darkness, a crooning, charming song. The evening’s final dancer, and the most accomplished—Adelaide herself, danced a graceful pantomime. What was most arresting was the effect of the robe she wore, a dark dress patterned in swirling, pale sequins, lit with lamps of shifting colors, first a royal blue, then sea-green, then a delicate pink, and so on and on. Every year, the robe was more ornate, the lamps more artistically arranged, the spectacle more riveting. Everything was the same and yet different, and that was how I liked it.

  I’d found a true home, even if that home never stayed in one place very long. I had settled into the pattern of Adelaide’s show, of my own expertise, of the rhythms of traveling, setting up, performing, breaking down, and traveling again. I slept far more soundly with the deep bass thrum of a moving train in my ears than I did without it. I took joy in the sameness of my conversations with Jeannie, and the way Belladonna stopped talking anytime I entered a room, and the little nod the prop master gave me each night when we put the last of the trick boxes away. We had our little rituals, and we held fast to them.

  Until Hartford.

  We were two nights at the Pope’s Palace in Hartford, and on the second night, one of the girls fell ill on bad oysters. As a result, Adelaide involved me in the show in a new way: the second sight act, which was her grand finale.

  “You understand, Vivi, it’s just this one night. No matter how good you are, you won’t be better than Miranda.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. I’d seen Miranda in the act, and she was very good, so I had no reason to think I could surpass her. But I would be better than she was tonight, when she couldn’t even rise to her feet without retching.

  The night was a disaster from the beginning. Nothing was quite right. In the opening dance, Scarlett tripped and stumbled so fiercely she literally fell off the stage. Adelaide waited for her in the wings, noticed that her slippers were too loosely laced, and slapped her across the face with one of the offending slippers before she herself went out onstage to start her cards and coins. The audience didn’t seem comfortable. This was sometimes the case, especially in the largest cities, where the crowds wanted to be impressed from the very first moment since they’d paid good money to come. Tonight, they were restless, and that made us restless, and Adelaide most of all.

  When it was time for me to assist with the second sight act, I stepped forward carefully and chose the woman in the seat I’d been told to choose. Third from the front, fourth from the left. She was undistinguished, in a dress the color of sand with a hat and gloves the color of mud, but when I pointed to her, a light of excitement came into her eyes.

  “Now concentrate on your thoughts,” I told her. “Think hard. What is your question? Don’t say it aloud. Summon it to your mind with a firm clear thought and keep it there. Then Madame will tell you your answer.”

  The woman screwed up her face in concentration, and I gestured elegantly up to Adelaide, who stood ramrod-straight in her blindfold.

  Then Madame said, “Yes, your answer is yes,” and the woman gasped in delight and clapped her hands together merrily, but the audience didn’t ease.

  “Will you tell us what your question was?” I asked, as I was told to.

  “I asked her whether her magic was real!” squealed the woman. “And it is! It is!”

  A man in the center of the theater rose and screamed, in a hoarse voice, “Charlatan!”

  I froze. This had never happened before, not anywhere.

  Adelaide’s voice rang out strong from the stage. “What do you mean by this, sir?”

  The man was impeccably dressed in a black suit and vest, as if he’d just left the haberdasher’s, but everything else about him seemed worn-out. He wore no hat, and though the back of his hair was thick and lustrous, the top was thin and bare. He strode up the aisle, approaching her. “Mind reader, my foot. You just stand up there guessing. If it hadn’t been right, you would’ve backpedaled, like women always do. Trying in vain to cover their lies like a dog covers his mess.”

  The audience was nearly silent, but I heard a woman or two gasp at his indelicacy.

  “You didn’t even know her question. She told
us herself!”

  Adelaide said, “Do you have a question of your own, sir?”

  “You bet your life,” he said in that worn-out voice, and I feared for her.

  My heart suddenly galloping, I looked wildly up at Adelaide, who gestured me back to her. I brushed past the man and walked out of the audience up onto the stage. He didn’t seem to take any notice of me. He was entirely focused on her.

  “Take my blindfold off,” she whispered to me.

  I aimed my mouth at her shoulder, turning my face so the audience couldn’t see, and said, “Should I do anything? Call the police?”

  “Just go,” she said. “Wings.”

  I did exactly as she said. I stole one more glance out at the man in the audience. Even from here, I could see how powerfully he glared at Adelaide. He was far enough away that she’d be able to see him coming, so I didn’t think he’d attack her. But oh, how he looked like he wanted to.

  “You can’t read my mind without looking at me?” he said.

  “I could,” answered Adelaide, “but the blindfold is window dressing, a put-on for show. You, you don’t want show. You want truth.”

  “Yes.”

  It was like the two of them were the only people in the world and the rest of us didn’t matter. The entire audience was dead silent. I huddled in the wings next to the trembling, nervous Scarlett, who was waiting for her cue with the other Hindoo dancing girls, and watched. I was afraid. It felt like the bullet catch all over again. A burning threat, an inescapable danger. For a moment, I wondered if this was a new part of the act, something she’d added without telling any of us. But why would she? And if the man was an actor, he was extremely convincing. His body fairly vibrated with fury. It was hard to watch but impossible to look away.