Anyway, whether it was a haunting or a confidence job, we was having a harder and harder time concentrating on the food with all that rattling and banging, and other parties around the place was taking notice, too.
The old woman—in her widow’s weeds just like she was back in New York City—she weren’t fazed none and didn’t look up from her cup of tea, though I saw her eyes slide sideways once. Her face under the little black pill cap was kind and velvety, the way some older women’s faces get, and her expression never shifted. One fellow—a colored man I thought was probably a traveling businessman of some sort because he was wearing a bottle green suit and eating alone—signed his check quick and made for the inside entrance that led deeper into the hotel. A couple, locals I thought, man and woman out for a nice dinner, had been respectively dawdling over soup, eating daintily with a napkin in hand (her) and trenchering through a tray of oysters (him). They both quit their work and stared.
The biggest and rowdiest party had been three Yukon miners fresh back in civilization. You could spot ’em by their pink cheeks where the beards had been scraped off—on the two white ones anyway—and the fingernails still black with ground-in dirt despite the sea voyage and the hot baths they must have bought before they slipped on their new ready-made suits. One of ’em was still wearing his down-at-the-heel boots, but they’d obviously done pretty well in the goldfields. Most of the other kind don’t come back at all. Either they die up there, or they stay in Anchorage and take up with the fishery or they sell stuff to the next crop of would-be millionaires at six or seven markups. They barely looked over at the ruckus the girls was causing—or barely more than they had been, since they’d been staring a bit to begin with, and possibly trying to impress the girls with their loud talk about sled dog disasters and borglums.
I may have been eavesdropping on the borglum talk a little, too, if you can call it eavesdropping when the speaker aims to be overheard. I ain’t from no mining town originally, and Rapid ain’t so much a mining town as a way station—but ain’t almost nobody talk like miners, and rumors get around. The borglums, so they call ’em—the little people as live in mines—they’re supposed to be pretty friendly mostly. They knock and warn about poison gas and mine cave-ins and such. But you can make ’em angry, or so these lot were claiming.
Priya, as if noticing my attention had wandered, said, “Do you think those young women are planning to four-flush the restaurant?”
Priya’s diction is so perfect; her accent—except the little musicality that I guess comes from growing up speaking Hindi or Tamil or whatever—is so English and precise that it never fails to make me giggle when she spouts some bit of terrible local color she’s picked up from living around me.
I said, “Well, unless all them gems is paste, they’ve got some money on ’em. But I know some chiselers make it a point of pride never to pay an honest sum even if they have it. I’d go ahead and finish your dessert.”
Priya poked the tart with her fork and lifted her eyebrows suggestively and I had to push my own finger against my knife point to keep from braying with laughter in the most undignified manner.
We settled back down and set in with our forks to lay a serious siege on that peach tart. We hadn’t hardly got four more bites in, though, when the rattling silverware and rocking top switched to a big, heavy, hollow knocking like somebody banging on a log drum, like some of the Indians use. Our own American Indians, I mean, not Priya’s kind.
* * *
The girls still sat on either side of the table, eyes wide and arms by their sides, seemingly frozen in their places. The candles in their silver sticks guttered. The restaurant’s expensive Chinese carpets were not as nice as the one Priya’s ma had shipped us all the way from India for our new house, and—I would bet a good filly colt—with Priya’s da, who didn’t approve of us none, none the wiser. But between the carpets and the legs of the girls’ two-top, a gap of some eight inches had developed and was rapidly widening to near a foot.
Now it so happens that regular john I used to have, the one who was a stage magician—an illusionist, they call themselves—had a side job as a medium, cheating Spiritualists when the stage bookings was slow. Well, you might know this already, but it just so happens men will tell you just about anything at all when they’re relaxed enough, no matter if it’s a professional secret or a personal one. You just got to catch ’em in the right mood, if you take my meaning. Also, ten times out of ten men who pay for all night is paying for it to impress other men with their virility. Maybe one in a hundred will really make you lose much sleep. And for the rest, talk is as pleasant a way as any to pass the time.
This trick was one of the ones who was really more paying for somebody to listen to him tell his life story than somebody to roger blue in both sets of cheeks. But he made a fine living as a Spiritualist, if a shabby one as a prestidigitator, and since he was paying me for my time and the talk was interesting, I didn’t mind at all. He told me that the way they lifted the tables like that—levitated, he called it—with their hands on top and their feet in plain sight on the floor, was one of two ways. Either they used fake feet and shoes, visible under the edge of the tablecloth or their skirts and flounces, or they used extensible poles that they wedged with their legs, and balanced the tables on that. His take was that most Spiritualists was dishonest illusionists, though some were right fine ones.
He probably saw my face fall when he told me all about the tricks they use, though—because he also told me that he didn’t know but some of ’em was on the up-and-up, or at least thought they was. It griped him that he could make more money pretending to work real magic than amazing people with his illusions, but the way he saw it, well, most people want to be fooled and will pay you to do it, especially if you make them feel good about themselves along the way.
I see it a little differently. Men own almost all of everything in the world, and white men moreover, and they don’t scruple how they get it. If the rest of us have to engage in a little trickery now and again to get by, well, if they didn’t want us to cheat they should have made the rules fair in the first place.
Not that I judge, though there’s plenty as would judge me. There’s a lot of make-believe in the profession I used to follow, don’t get me wrong. And I don’t know too much about most people, but I know a lot about the men who come to parlor houses. They sure do want an illusion, about you and about themselves. But it seems to me, and maybe it’s not surprising, that a lot of wives and lady friends provide that same illusion, and they don’t get Sundays off and they got to clean as well.
It’s funny, ain’t it, that nobody holds giving men the illusion they want about themselves against wives, though they hold it against the Sisters. And nobody holds it against illusionists, though they do against Spiritualists. I’m not quite sure how to explain what I’m driving at, except it seems to me that these things is all linked.
Especially as most of them Spiritualists is women. Near as I can tell the only three ways for a lady illusionist to make a living is by pretending to be a medium operating under the control of a spirit guide, pretending to be a lovely assistant, or doing what Mrs. Horner is doing and performing as her husband’s relict.
I guess everything a woman does is more respectable if the world can see that she’s owned by some man as can take credit for it.
Anyway, I tapped Priya’s hand and pointed just a little without lifting my fingers away from the table. She turned—I figured it was okay now, since the sister act was so manifestly looking for attention—and gawped when she eyeballed what was going on. She clamped her mouth shut, lips in a thin line for a second before she snorted and said, “Sleight of hand.”
“Sleight of knee, more like.”
“What do you think the flash lay is?”
“It’s a long way to go for a free lunch.”
Everybody seemed plumb frozen in place. A stream of coffee was dribbling from that silver pot’s spout as it sagged in the hand of the bu
sboy, whose fingers was nevertheless paled at the knuckles from clutching it. The drunken gold miners had even simmered down and was just staring.
And then the most surprising thing of all happened. The lady in the widow’s weeds, the one with the velvety face, folded her napkin in precise and irritated folds, laid it down beside her plate, and stood her up and turned her about and marched over to the sister act and said, in a clear grandmother voice, “Miss Arcade, I never knew you had a sister.”
And you know, that woman was old enough to be their grandmother, and those rude girls did not even look up at her. The name, though—Arcade—that tickled a bell. There was, indeed, a pretty well-known pair of Spiritualists who went by that handle.
I was distracted from thinking about that because the little one started speaking in tongues, and it weren’t no easy thing to listen to. It weren’t so much like what I heard in this revival tent one time when I was a little girl (Da hustled me out of there, he told Ma later, “before the snake handling could begin”), which had been all chanted sounds and babble. This was more like that hyperbole such as is printed down the side of a patent-medicine soft-soap label that you read to entertain yourself while you’re washing your hair.
It’d been such a real nice supper, too. Stayed real nice even through the table levitation.
Stayed real nice right up until our table decided to join in the fun. After five shatteringly loud knocks I would have sworn I felt up through my silverware, it hopped into the air and flipped over, seemingly all by its lonesome. It landed with a crash of crockery and spilled my peach tart with brandied cream all over my girlfriend’s good new trousers. I was pretty put out about that, despite it being made with canned fruit, seeing as how I hadn’t gotten around more than a quarter of it because I was taking tiny, proper lady bites that would have made Miss Francina proud of my table manners.
What I should have done is, I should have dropped money on what was left of the table, grabbed Priya’s hand, and walked out of that hotel dining room and kept on walking. But I had just about managed to get Priya to cheer up and really smile and I didn’t want to give that up. And—I got to admit it—I was curious as a damned cat. And I was a little taken aback that our table had gotten into the action, because I’d thought I had the situation figured and that was some kind of contrary evidence right there.
That’s what I should have done. What I did do was, I flinched back against the wall beside the window, which I had my back to, as was proper for a lady, and I wound up half-tangled in those expensive curtains. So there weren’t nothing I could do about it when Priya leaped out of her chair and sent it over with a second crash. She spun around on her toe to confront the noise, her fists up to fight, and I saw the moment in the set of her shoulders when that whirl of self-defense turned into shame.
She held her hand up to cover her face, embarrassed by how she’d started, but nobody in the restaurant except me was looking at her. They wasn’t even looking at our spilled dessert. Because, as I found out following their gazes, they was all looking at the confrontation between the woman who made me miss a grandmother I’d never met and the two young ladies I was coming to unexpectedly admire. The old woman was standing over them, waving a bottle of something under the little one’s nose. Smelling salts, and if she weren’t really in a trance I admired her self-control, because those things stink something awful.
I couldn’t figure how they’d managed to flip my table. They hadn’t walked anywhere close enough to get a line around one of the legs. The best I could come up with was that maybe the busboy was in cahoots, but I didn’t have no evidence of that, you understand. It was just a speculation that fitted the evidence, as my friend Marshal Reeves would have said.
Alexandre the maître d’ was moving over to break up the altercation as smooth as if he were on caster wheels, but I noticed that the waiter had vanished. That might have been suspicious, and I was finding it so when I got distracted by another act in the play.
The short girl was still babbling, and the tall one was gripping the arms of her chair, crowded back into the caning like a snake was reared up before her. Her eyes was wide and her hair had slipped into disarray, and she was staring at her sister with what looked like genuine shock and fear.
The grandmotherly woman sighed, marched back over to her own table as the nearest one that weren’t overturned nor levitating, picked up a goblet with water in it cold enough to frost the cut glass, marched back in a sweep of black organza, and dashed the contents right into the face of the shorter girl.
The girl stopped short, spluttering. Her eyes flew open. It looked like some of the water had gone up her nose, and that ain’t pleasant nohow.
The table came crashing down, and by some wonder nothing on it spilled—possibly because most of it was et up already—though some white wine slopped out onto the tablecloth. The shorter girl’s hands flew to her collarbones and her charmingly exposed décolletage, and she gasped, “My silk dress!”
“Don’t you worry your head about it. A little steam and a white cotton handkerchief and those water spots will come right out. Your maid can do it for you, Miss Arcade. I’m sure that she knows how.” The grandmotherly lady spoke kindly, but you could tell from the crinkle in her velvety cheek that she didn’t think the young woman had a maid to sort her wardrobe for her.
At that moment, the waiter came back in with Constable Waterson, and I felt right sorry for having come over all suspicious of him. The waiter, I mean. Not Constable Waterson, who was an all right sort of a lawman for a stick-in-the-mud. He arrived as the young ladies was standing up and fussing their skirts and possibly hiding some paraphernalia in there.
“All right, then,” the constable said to the maître d’. “Set me straight.”
“These young ladies,” Alexandre said in his furry-sounding accent, “are causing a disturbance, as you can see. The hotel should like them removed from the premises.”
“A disturbance!” said the taller one. Her face was a study in wounded innocence. She had big eyes without too much kohl around them, and she widened them convincingly. “That’s likely! There was a disturbance indeed, in that our supper table assaulted us, and this creature assaulted my sister.”
“Her sister,” said the widow, “used to work for my husband. And me.”
The tall girl talked right over her. “But it was none of our doing. We have done absolutely nothing to deserve this . . . bum’s rush. If anything, this woman should be paying to replace my sister’s gown, which is ruined.”
“I see,” said the constable. “I suppose you don’t think you should be paying for your dinner, either?”
The smaller one said, with dignity, “Would you?”
Waterson sighed and pulled out his notebook. He had a pencil stub and a put-upon expression and appeared ready to make a night of it if he had to. “Names, ladies?”
“I’m Miss Hypatia Arcade,” the smaller and older one said. “This is my sister, Hilaria.”
Some parents do cruel things to their children, and ain’t no mistake, but something about the ring of pride in her voice as she said it made me wonder if it was the older generation that had inflicted that particular unlikelihood or if they had selected it for themselves. It ain’t on me to judge, though, and I once knew a fellow rejoiced in the moniker of Tribulation Goodenough. Came by it honestly, too, though I suspect Captain Minneapolis Colony got a little help along the way.
“And I’m Mrs. Micajah Horner,” the velvet-faced woman said. A little thrill went through me as she pronounced her name. “And I contend these two are mountebanks, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
She probably knew a mountebank when she saw one, too. I recognized that name. Her husband’s name, I mean, and not the missus part. It was the magician’s widow. Priya and me was here tonight in part because I’d been obsessed with her late husband ever since I was a little girl. I saw his red and yellow traveling posters when Da took me into the city to trade horses. I’d read ne
wspaper accounts and magazine descriptions of his performances and I’d pined after the chance to see him myself someday. When I’d read he’d died, I’d felt a real grief.
He was famous—honest famous, like Sarah Bernhardt or Mark Twain or Wild Bill—too, and not just possessed of some local notoriety. There was a huge fuss when he died: it was a fortnight scandal, and all the papers said he and his widow had set up a special password by which he could prove it was really him talking if he contacted her from beyond the grave. His widow was demonstrating a number of her dead husband’s illusions at the opera house next door tonight, the Riverside’s auditorium being too small for the crowd expected. Priya’d got tickets as her moving-in-together gift to me.
Priya had sorted herself all right. I came around the table and put my shoulder next to hers like we was in harness. I could tell she was itching to squeeze my hand, and if we’d just been friends I would have grabbed hers in a heartbeat. But we had to observe the proprieties in public, seeing as how we was illegal and immoral and probably fattening, too, and even if the mayor was a friend of ours we were as subject to the full weight and fury of the law just for existing as these two young ladies was for scamming.
If they was scamming. I shot a sideways look back at our flipped table. I still couldn’t figure out how they might have managed that. I wondered if Mrs. Horner had a theory. She was frowning at the mess like she just might.
Those girls had drawn a crowd. The couple stayed at their table, heads bent together, stealing occasional glances sideways at the fun. But the little gang of fresh-scrubbed returning miners, well, they got right up and gathered round, helping to quiet matters just as enormously as you might expect.
“My husband,” said Mrs. Horner, who had an upright patrician posture that I might have found damned intimidating if Miss Bethel hadn’t taught me the trick of it herself, “was an illusionist. He devoted his life to entertaining people, and to debunking Spiritualist nonsense, and I tell you right now that there are any number of ways to create the illusion that a table is levitating itself.”
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