The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  —Father George, “A Short History”

  THE POSTERS APPEARED in the village at the beginning of the third week of August. About two feet wide by three feet tall, they announced in blazing red, green, yellow, and blue:

  Mr. MORIARITY MENTALITY

  and

  His Ravishing Assistant

  THE PETROGRAD PRINCESS

  Will Present an Astonishing Exhibition of

  MIND READING and ILLUSIONISM

  on

  Friday August 22nd 7:30 P.M.

  at

  The Kingdom Common Town Hall

  Framing this bold announcement were two figures. On the left was a tall magician in an emerald top hat and a swallowtail coat with a crimson lining. The illusionist was staring over his shiny black mustache and goatee into the golden eyes of a lovely young woman wearing high-heeled silver slippers and a low-cut gold-colored gown.

  Under the announcement, in smaller type, the poster said: “The direct stage descendant of the celebrated Messrs. Washington Irving Bishop and Randall Brown, and the erstwhile student and protege of Mr. Harry Houdini, Moriarity Mentality will perform many astounding and unprecedented feats of mnemonic agility.” Then, at the very bottom: “Co-sponsored by the United Church of Kingdom Common and St. Mary’s, Queen of the Green Mountains. Adults $2. Children 12 and under $1.”

  I remembered seeing Mr. Mentality’s show once or twice when I was a boy. At the time I’d been mightily impressed by the mind reader, who multiplied large numbers in his head, memorized that week’s Kingdom County Monitor and several entire pages from the local phone book, and, in a question-and-answer exhibition at the end of the show, repeated private conversations between members of the audience he’d never met, told people where to find lost items, and even divined what they were thinking.

  Father George was sure that the mind reader used a stalking horse: a confederate, somebody posing as a salesman or an out-of-state fisherman, say, who drifted around the village a few days before the performance keeping his ears open. The stalking horse didn’t call attention to himself, Father George said. But all the while he was soaking up information like a human sponge. At some point before the show, this confederate passed his information along to the mind reader.

  “So who’s Mr. Moriarity Mentality’s stalking horse?” I said.

  “I’ve never been able to figure it out, Frank. Maybe you can. In connection with your next job. I want you to escort Mr. Mentality around town, son. Make sure he gets to the hotel and the town hall all right, look after him while he’s here. If you figure out who his stalking horse is, good for you. But I’ll make a prediction.”

  “What is it?”

  “You won’t,” Father George said. “Have fun with Moriarity. He’s due in Friday morning on the 7:14.”

  A run of bright warm days and cool mountain nights held all week, and Friday dawned clear as well. Mr. Mentality didn’t arrive on either the 7:14 or the 9:28 train. By 10:30, when I walked over to the station to meet the Combination bringing the morning mail up from White River Junction, I was beginning to wonder whether he’d appear at all.

  Today, besides the windowless mail car, the Combination was hauling five empty Quebec North Shore and Gaspe newsprint boxcars, two flatbeds, and one dusty Pullman coach. The train stopped just long enough to leave a single sack of mail and take on another. Only at the last moment did two passengers get off: a heavyset middle-aged woman with her hair in pink curlers and an older man in a shabby gray suit.

  The travelers looked nothing at all like the dashing figures on Mr. Mentality’s posters. The man’s suit was rumpled and baggy and hung limply from his emaciated frame. His gray hair was uncombed, his eyes a sickly yellowish hue and sunk far back in his skull. His face was sallow, as if a long illness was now fast gaining the upper hand. He was holding a frayed carpetbag with shiny wooden handles. His shoes looked as though he’d walked to Kingdom Common in them from his last engagement. The woman in hair curlers carried a large battered suitcase, far from new.

  As the train pulled away from the station, the strangers peered around. The man blinked rapidly several times, as if wondering whether they’d gotten off at the right stop.

  “Mr. Mentality?” I said. “I’m Frank Bennett. Father Lecoeur from the church committee sent me over to welcome you.”

  The stranger took my outstretched hand and gave it a single slack shake. His fingers were as cold as icicles, and he continued to look everywhere but at me as he said, in what I thought might be a slight Texas accent, “Moriarity Mentality. This would be the Princess. Princess, Bob Bennett, from the local sponsor.”

  The Petrograd Princess nodded. To Mr. Mentality she said, “It’s Frank. Frank Bennett.”

  The mind reader gazed at me with his amber-colored eyes. “Sorry, son,” he said at last. “But the sad fact is, once you commence to get along in years, your memory isn’t what it once was. Which, when you’re a mentalist by trade, is a crying shame.”

  Mr. Mentality was looking at me with an unmistakable air of satisfaction. “What can you do about it?” he said.

  “About—?”

  “Becoming forgetful?”

  The Princess rolled her eyes in my direction, an amused and indulgent expression, as if we were old friends who had affectionately relished Mr. Mentality’s idiosyncrasies together over the years.

  “I guess I don’t know,” I said.

  “Neither do I, Bob. Neither do I. Lodging’s this-a-way, right?”

  And, handing me his carpetbag, Moriarity Mentality struck off down the street in exactly the opposite direction from the hotel.

  Oh, the Common took it all in in a flash. Within scant minutes of the unprepossessing arrival of the vaudevillians, the hundred-eyed village knew exactly how tawdry and vulnerable and confused the little mind reader had become in the seven or eight years since they’d seen him last. And when the Princess and I finally did get Mr. Mentality turned around, as we passed the railway platform again I distinctly heard Harlan Kittredge say to Bumper Stevens, “Pathetic old bastard, ain’t he?”

  “Part of my trouble,” the reader was telling me as we headed back up the cracked slate sidewalk in front of the courthouse and the Academy, “is I have too long a memory for riprap.”

  “Riprap?”

  “That’s it. I mought, for instance, misremember to pull on my left stocking in the morning because I’m recollecting riprap. Numbers outen the 1942 Portland, Maine, telephone directory. Answers to multiplication sums set for me by ranchers in Tulsa. Numbers, names, dates from history, whole long columns in fine print from various hefty cyclopedias. No doubt it’s a given gift, but it clutters the mind.”

  Mr. Mentality had forgotten to make reservations at the hotel, but Armand St. Onge had two adjoining rooms on the third floor. Then the mind reader forgot which pocket he carried his money in, necessitating a fairly lengthy search, after which he forgot my name again as he handed me a lone tarnished dime out of his black snap purse.

  “Keep it,” the Princess whispered. “Makes him happy.”

  I put the dime in my pocket for a souvenir.

  Upstairs in his room, Mr. Mentality said, “Come back at, say, two o’clock, Bob. Right now I need me a little lie-down. Come two, we’ll meet in the lobby and go for a walkabout.”

  The mind reader sat down on the bed and unlaced his dusty shoes. Then he stared at them for some seconds, as if unable to muster the energy to pull them off.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Fetch along this week’s issue of your newspaper when you come back,” Mr. Mentality said. He switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and stretched out on top of the covers with his shoes still on.

  “If you want to read, I’ll get you a paper right now.”

  “That water spot on the ceiling up above? It puts me in mind of the state of Idaho.” Staring at Idaho, Mr. Mentality said, “I don’t want to read. I want a little shuteye. Can’t get to sleep with the light off. I’l
l meet you down in the lobby at two sharp. And Bob? Leave the hall door ajar on your way out. I don’t sleep good in a room with the door shut.”

  At noon the northern Vermont sky was still blue as blue, though the midday forecast predicted that a storm was on its way. An unusually early hurricane, the first of the year, was working its way up the eastern seaboard, and its tail was scheduled to swing inland and arrive in the village sometime the following day. High above the common, atop the courthouse tower, Blackhawk was beginning to shift toward the southeast; a storm was certainly possible.

  At two o’clock the hotel lobby was empty. I climbed up to the third floor and tapped on the half-open door. There was no reply. Mr. Moriarity Mentality was right where I’d left him, lying fully dressed on his back on the bed. The reading light shone down on his pallid face, which, with its partly open eyes, looked like the face of a corpse waiting to be embalmed. He had kicked off one shoe, revealing a grayish big toe jutting through a hole in his sock.

  “Mr. Mentality?”

  Nothing. For a dreadful moment I thought the mind reader might actually have expired in his sleep. But thankfully no—his toe gave just the slightest twitch.

  I reached out and tugged it gently. “Mr. Mentality. Wake up.”

  “Whah!” the mentalist cried out in an astonishingly powerful voice and sat bolt upright, his topaz eyes terror-stricken. “Where am I? Who are you?”

  “It’s Frank Bennett. You’re all right, Mr. Mentality. You’re in Kingdom Common. Here’s your newspaper.”

  But Moriarity Mentality just looked at me blankly. “Why would I want a newspaper?” he said. “Let’s head out, Bob.”

  On the walkabout, Mr. Mentality did not seem especially interested in the town and didn’t ask many questions. Instead he delivered a running monologue in his querulous southwestern drawl about the indignities of aging and the slings and arrows routinely encountered by a man in his embattled profession. From the hotel we walked up Anderson Hill past Judge Allen’s place and the Big House. At the crest of the hill we stood looking down at the back of the long brick shopping block and the courthouse and Academy across the common. Framed by abrupt green hills rising to darker green mountains, Kingdom Common this sunny afternoon looked as free of strife and care as a Currier and Ives lithograph.

  “Peaceful, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Appears peaceful from here,” Mr. Mentality said. “It does appear peaceful from here.” He pointed past the American Heritage mill, over the steep roofs of the bright row houses of Little Quebec, at the ridge east of town. “Who lives in that shack away up yonder in them piney woods?”

  “Louvia DeBanville. The village fortuneteller.”

  The mind reader reflected for a moment. “Can’t say that I ever put a great deal of stock in fortunetellers and all such like that. Gal consults with them now and again. Let’s have us a look-see at your town hall, Bob. Then we’ll call it quits for the afternoon.”

  The town hall was a long three-story brick houseboat of a building located at the north end of the village, just past the bank and catty-corner from the hotel. The auditorium took up the entire ground floor. A rickety balcony ran around three sides of the room, and a makeshift projection booth jutted out from the upper rear wall. The wooden floor slanted sharply down toward the stage like the deck of a ship sliding down a steep wave. Some of the thin plywood seats were missing.

  Mr. Mentality sat down, looked around and nodded. “Well, Bob,” he said, “Carnegie Hall this is not.”

  I laughed and sat down beside him.

  “This hall holds what? Five hundred? So if we half fill her tonight at two dollars a head for grown folks, a buck a throw for kids, say half the audience is kids, split with the church sponsors sixty-forty my way, this old trouper’s share of the take would be . . .” He began to figure on his fingers, got mixed up and started over, derailed himself again, looked up at the ceiling of the hall in exasperation.

  In the meantime I did some quick calculations. “Two hundred and twenty-five dollars?”

  The mentalist nodded and said, “Wonderment is that I can still work at all. Speaking of which, ain’t that painting up there one?”

  “One what?”

  “A wonderment.”

  He was pointing at the picture of the village painted on the backdrop of the stage, a mural I had seen so many times over the years that I’d come to take it for granted. Just during the five or so minutes since Mr. Mentality and I had arrived, the sun had gone behind a bank of clouds, and the scene in the mural had faded from mid- to late afternoon.

  “Amazing effect, ain’t it?” Mr. Mentality said. “Daylight fades, it fades. Interesting as anything you’ll find in your big city museums, New York, over across, wherever. One thing we have to give these little one-horse towns, Bob.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The wonderments ain’t all been leached out of them.”

  Mr. Mentality stood up. “Coming to the show tonight?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Neither would I,” the mind reader said, heading up the aisle. At the door he stopped and gave me the very slightest grin that could still be called a grin. “Unless, of course, it should slip my mind.”

  Father George and I walked down Anderson Hill to the town hall that evening at quarter after seven. “Mr. Moriarity Mentality, Mind Reader, Tonight Only at 7:30,” the announcement on the marquee said. Half of the dim string of silver lights around the border were burned out, and the others flickered as though about to expire at any moment. A disappointingly small crowd was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the hall for Roy Quinn, from the church committee, to open the ticket booth. Father George shook his head, no doubt thinking of former times, when a traveling showman would fill the hall to overflowing.

  “Mind reader indeed,” said a harsh voice nearby.

  Father George whirled around faster than I would have thought he could still move. “Louvia!”

  “None other.” The fortuneteller, standing in line two places behind us, was so short that I had to peer out around a pair of twelve-year-old girls to see her. She was dressed to the nines for the show. A royal blue shawl, a former tablecloth, I thought, was draped over her shoulders, setting off the same red plush dress she’d worn for the citizenship swearing-in ceremony. Her hair, piled high on her head, was so dark it glinted. Her fingers glittered with rings, her tiny oval ears were adorned with blue glass sequins, and her homemade rouge gave off a macabre glow.

  “I’m surprised you’re going to let this charlatan impose on us tonight,” Louvia said to Father George. “He’s no more than a licensed confidence man, and you and I both know it.”

  The line moved a few steps closer as Roy Quinn opened the ticket booth. “Get back where you belong,” Louvia snapped at the two young girls. “Do you want me to cross your eyes and give you each a wart on the end of your nose?”

  They shrieked with delight—none of the children in the village were at all afraid of Louvia—but she wasn’t through with Father George yet. “You know this imposter works with a confederate, and that makes him a con artist. I work alone.”

  “Who’s his confederate?” I asked.

  “Ask me something difficult. It’s obviously that fat woman he lugs around with him. ‘The Petrograd Princess.’ Well, the Petrograd Princess was snooping all over town this afternoon, gathering information for the fraud. She even paraded up to my place and pretended to want her fortune read. I read her something she won’t soon forget.”

  Louvia shot me a look over her gold-rimmed dress spectacles. “This so-called mentalist is nothing but a two-bit scam artist, Frank. Sit near me tonight. I’ll have him reduced to tears long before the eggs and tomatoes start.”

  We selected three seats two rows back from the stage, with me in the middle between Father George and Louvia, who insisted on taking the aisle seat.

  A moment later the kids in the balcony began clapping and stomping their feet in unison for the show to
begin. Sheriff White came down the aisle and held up his hands for silence. The stomping intensified. At its crescendo, the house lights went off and the Petrograd Princess wheeled a portable blackboard out onto the stage. In the footlights she looked dowdier than ever. Her lime chiffon evening gown was tattered and smudged. One strap had been mended by a safety pin as big as a bass plug. Her slip showed in back. Her hair was a washed-out shade of blond.

  “Please, boys and girls,” the Princess called out. “Mr. Mentality will be with you momentarily.”

  When at last the clamor had subsided somewhat, the Princess announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, just returned from a triumphal tour of Europe, Asia, and the subcontinent, the world-renowned mentalist, Moriarity Mentality. “

  Except for a black frock coat and a green felt stovepipe hat caved in on top, the illusionist looked as seedy as ever. Slight as an underfed waif, his cloak hanging from his frame like an old coat on a scarecrow, his face and eyes positively cadaverous in the footlights, he looked old, out of place, far from well, and close to desperate.

  “Here at last, the flimflam man!” Louvia shouted.

  “Louvia, hush, or we’ll have you removed from the hall,” Deacon Roy Quinn hissed from across the aisle.

  “Try it, you hypocrite. I’ll snatch your eyes out.”

  For a moment the spotlight wavered on the fortuneteller. Then it jerked to the Princess, now dragging a card table out onto the stage in front of the blackboard. The light swung back onto Mr. Mentality, who stood stock-still in its dusty beam as if consumed by stage fright. “Look at him,” Louvia said loudly. “He doesn’t even bother to polish his shoes. He looks more like a railroad tramp than a magician.”

  “I never set myself up as that much of a magic-man,” Mr. Mentality said mildly. “More of a mentalist, you could say.”