A Bird's Eye

by Cary Fagan

  “Go turn on the lamp and I’ll get Professor Hoffmann for you.”

  After she left us, Corinne said, “I saw it.”

  “What?”

  “In your hand. The coin. It caught the lamplight.”

  “Ah, damn.”

  “How long have you been doing it?”

  “Maybe half an hour. Passing it back and forth.”

  “Pretty good. Anything else?”

  She never asked to see what I had been practising and I suspected she was trying to get on my good side. But I opened my hand to show her the quarter. Then passed my other hand over it and the coin was gone. Corinne nodded solemnly.

  Miss Pensler returned. “Here you go. We can’t stay too long, I have an engagement this evening. Would your friend like something to read? I’ve got a lovely illustrated book of Aesop’s fables just in. They’re very short.”

  “I’m a good reader,” Corinne said, sounding more herself. “I just read Daphne du Maurier, and before that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.”

  “I see. Then I’ll point you to our latest fiction.”

  I watched them go off. Corinne looked back at me and stuck out her tongue.

  I see my father walking home, not with his usual stroll but hunched over from a pulsing headache. Maybe it was from all the smoke in the back of the coffee shop on Dupont when he’d lost his last five dollars on dice. He stopped to look at a window display of artificial limbs and, in spite of the headache, roll himself a cigarette. He could never roll them as clean and tight as I used to do for him, and the thought of it made him aware for a moment of my frequent absences.

  Maybe a nap would do him good. At least the house would be quiet in the afternoon, with Bella at the market and the tenants out. Maybe Herr Eisler wasn’t what he said he was. Maybe he was a spy in search of the mechanical inventions that existed only in Jacob’s head.

  When he reached the front porch, he noted the newspaper pages blown all over the porch but didn’t pick them up. He unlocked the door, hung up his hat, and climbed the stairs.

  If they had been listening, my mother and Mr. Eisler would surely have heard him, for every step squeaked or groaned. But they were breathing too hard, whispering in each other’s ears, feeling the rise of their desire.

  My father went into the bedroom, removed his shoes, and lay on his back with his hands on his stomach. He closed his eyes. The room smelled pleasantly of talc.

  And opened them again. What was that stupid Kraut doing in his room? Calisthenics? He was making the wall shake; the light fixture’s loops of coloured beads trembled. He heard a muffled word. A cry.

  So the Kraut had a woman in there. Guests were against the rules, but still — the lucky bastard. Of course, she was probably old and ugly as sin.

  My father closed his eyes again.

  To me it looked like a building that might be in London or New York, a stone arch entrance and two great plate-glass shop windows on either side, four storeys of more windows and roman pillars, and then three ornate pointed roofs. It was called an arcade because inside there were rows of shops. It was Miss Pensler who had told me about it, and at first I thought she was teasing me because such a place couldn’t possibly exist. But here it was, with a window on Yonge Street straight across from Temperance Street, in large letters Whitlam’s Magic Tricks on the sign across the top of the window and in smaller letters Japanese Magic and Novelty Store. I couldn’t see in because there was a drape pulled with just some dusty paper lanterns hanging in front.

  “Are we going in or not?” Corinne asked, impatient as usual. I hesitated still, feeling a loss of nerve, and so she opened the door and pushed me inside. It was a much smaller shop than the spectacular place I had imagined, narrow and with some party supplies — paper hats, balloons, that sort of thing — on otherwise bare shelves. A counter at the end with a brass cash register sitting on it. Three men, one behind the counter. The other two — fat and skinny like Laurel and Hardy — ignored us and went on talking.

  “And that’s how Leipzig came up with it.”

  “I hear he’s on death’s door.”

  “Probably started the rumour himself.”

  Corinne gave me another shove. I stumbled forward and then walked up to the counter. All three men turned to look at me. Although I hadn’t known what to expect, I was surprised by their ordinariness, three men I wouldn’t have noticed in a bus station or at a lunch counter. They didn’t look hostile so much as vaguely curious, and the man behind the counter said “Yes?” and stroked his bald head as if he had a nervous tic.

  “I want to buy a hand box.”

  “A hand box?”

  “For vanishing a handkerchief.”

  The three men burst into laughter. “Yes, Joe,” said the fat one, “I’ve just got to have a hand box too.”

  “And how about an egg bag while you’re at it?” the skinny one said.

  “I already made one.”

  More laughter. Corinne came up and yanked me by the back of my jacket. “Show them,” she said.

  I shushed her, but the fat one said, “Show us what?”

  I took a deep breath. “Please bend down,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  I motioned with my finger. The fat man bent over. “I guess this is why you couldn’t hear me,” I said, pulling an egg from his ear.

  “Well, well,” said the skinny man.

  “Let me see that.” The fat man snatched the egg from me. “Hey fellas, it’s a real egg, not a shell. Good job, kid. That’s a sizable item for your age. Joe, serve the gentleman.”

  “I certainly will. What’s your name, son?”

  “Benjamin Kleeman.”

  “Okay, Benjamin. First of all, I don’t know what you’ve been reading. Erdnase? Hoffmann?”

  “Both.”

  “Fine. But there’s more recent material that’s a lot easier to follow. Second, don’t waste your money on a gimmick that’s going to give you a twenty-second effect. Get something that you can really work up and that will improve your skills. You’ve got good hands, how about something classic? A nice set of chop cups.”

  He reached under the counter and brought out a set of silver cups and four small red balls made of rubber. “You can hold an audience for a good five, six minutes with a full routine. If you finish off with something like lemons, whammo, you’ve got them in the palm of your hand. Five bucks and I’ll throw in the literature.”

  “Joe, you’re giving something away?”

  “Young talent has to be nurtured. I wouldn’t want the art to die with the likes of you two.”

  I picked up the shining cups and held them in my hands. Real magician’s props, the first I ever owned.

  If I didn’t have deliveries to make for the drugstore and Corinne didn’t have church choir, we would head for the shed as soon as we were sprung from school, dumping our books on the dirt floor and leaping at each other. We made love in the shed behind the house the way children play games, always changing the rules, insisting, refusing, sulking, laughing. Finding ourselves unable to stop, no matter how sore or satiated. We would lose all track of time and then I would hear my mother calling for supper and we would hastily put our clothes back on. Everything good in my life had happened through knowing Corinne, which gave her a power over me that, when I was alone, made me wary. But my wariness melted away again when I saw her.

  I would think about asking Corinne to come in, but something always held me back — not shame of her, I told myself, but of my parents and how they might look down on a Negro girl. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that Corinne and I still belonged to each other. And while I couldn’t see my own future, I was starting to feel that it was out there, waiting for me and Corinne both.

  In the meantime, I practised with the cups and balls. The cups themselves, it turned out, weren’t gimmicked
in any way, but when stacked they nestled together just so, and their rounded rims made it easier to slip a ball underneath. Making a ball jump from underneath one overturned cup to another was easy to do, but longer and more elaborate routines required finger palms, vanishes, holding two balls so they looked like one, fake drops and pickups from a pocket, etc. It was somehow calming to practise these sleights, and I could lose myself for an hour or more. I also worked with handkerchiefs and scarves from my mother’s drawer, pieces of rope, metal slugs if I didn’t have any coins.

  One evening I sat at the dinner table as always while my mother served baked cuttlefish, a dish I hated worse than anything. She served a double portion to Herr Eisler. Miss Kussman began telling some story about an acquaintance who worked in women’s clothing at Eaton’s and was caught wearing seven pairs of underwear beneath her skirt.

  My father, chewing slowly, said to no one in particular, “I have a new job.”

  My mother stopped serving. “A job? What sort of job?”

  “A good one.”

  “Don’t play games, Jacob.”

  He forked up some potatoes. “I am now an employee of the Might’s Directory Company.”

  “The big telephone book?”

  “That is correct. Their office is on Church Street. I had a successful interview. I am now a client information officer. I ask people questions and the answers get printed in the directory.” He smiled unpleasantly.

  “You go door to door?”

  “That’s right. Believe me, such a job wasn’t easy to get in this day. There were plenty of people ahead of me, educated people. But the man was impressed because of my languages. Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German, French. A lot of people don’t speak English.”

  “But you don’t speak Russian. Or French.”

  “I can manage well enough,” he said with annoyance.

  My mother sat down. “That’s good, Jacob.”

  Yes, my father thought, now she speaks nicely to me. But he smiled with satisfaction.

  The city’s main rail line ran east-west along the waterfront, but a second track turned upwards to join a third that followed the rise along Dupont Street and then Dundas West. A neighbourhood defined by converging tracks. Small houses stood next to welders’ shops, factories making linoleum and pianos, the clanging of the train yard. When the wind turned, the smell from the slaughterhouses was carried in from just north. Here my father had his first assignment. He carried his official Might’s Directory Company briefcase, a Kleeman pen in his breast pocket, and a clipboard in his hand holding the printed forms. My mother had mended and brushed his jacket and trousers.

  He approached the first house on his list. On the porch was a broken accordion sitting in a galvanized tub with a clothing winger attached to it. He knocked with authority.

  “Who is it?”

  “A representative of Might’s Directory. We require some information for your listing.”

  The door opened and he saw a woman of middle age in a faded housedress, hair held up by pins. “Do you know my husband, George? George Lafferty?”

  My father took the pen from his pocket and wrote down the name. “Occupation?” he asked.

  “Do you know where he is? Is he drinking? Can you bring him home?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I only take down the information. Is your husband employed?”

  “If you find him, tell him to come home. It’s been three days.”

  She closed the door. He heard soft weeping. He thought to knock again, but instead he turned and went back down the steps, catching his trouser leg on a metal screw.

  My aunt was being instructed by the junior minister of the First Presbyterian Church. The minister, a very short Englishman who liked to wear his hair unusually long, complemented Hannah on both her pliancy and her quickness in learning. Hannah herself enjoyed these sessions, for the minister was kind and the need to apply herself gave her a purpose that she hadn’t felt in years. It was true that when she wrote to her parents in Otwock, she couldn’t get herself to tell them. Instead, she wrote that she was marrying a man named Tov Winkler.

  What Hannah hadn’t expected was the grief that Hayim was causing her. He was the one who had brought Tobias home, who had encouraged the relationship, who had assured Hannah that there was no disgrace in taking on the faith of her future husband. Yet when he found a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament in the sitting room, he had become mean and sarcastic and she had quickly removed it to her room. Tobias had given her a small gold cross on a chain, but she was careful to keep it under her clothing. Hayim stopped on the way home now to have a drink, and when he came in, he would brandish the newspaper at her and say that she was no better than those criminals in Europe. Then, in the morning, he would apologize, assuring her that he approved of her “new life.”

  Tobias often stopped in during the evening to see her, and so it was no surprise when he appeared at the door one evening. Hayim had stayed in and they had enjoyed a rare harmonious time, and she told him not to get up from his chair when the bell chimed. But her usual anxious gladness on seeing Tobias gave way to alarm when she saw how agitated he was. He didn’t take off his coat but marched straight into the sitting room.

  “Toby,” said my uncle. “You look like someone who’s been robbed. I’ll pour you a drink.”

  “You won’t pour me a damn drink. That is exactly what you’ve been doing all these months. Soothing me, keeping me off guard, lulling me . . .”

  “What are you talking about? Hannah, do you know what’s going on?”

  She could only shake her head, clutching her handkerchief to her lips. She hated male anger and wanted only to hide up in her room while the two of them worked whatever it was out, the way men did. “I will excuse myself,” she said.

  “No you won’t,” Tobias said. “The two of you! A conspiracy! That’s what it is, a conspiracy.”

  “Come on, now,” said Hayim. “You can’t talk this way in my house. Can’t you make sense?”

  Tobias reached into his jacket, struggled, and at last pulled out an envelope. He smacked it with his other hand as if he were on stage.

  “This is what I’m talking about!”

  “So, a letter. Let me see it.”

  Tobias waved it at him without giving it up. “You’re trying to take advantage of me, to use my name in order to save your own. But I’ve caught on to you.”

  “Tobias,” Hannah pleaded. She was already starting to weep. “What is it? This isn’t right. It’s cruel. Please don’t behave this way.”

  He looked at her, panting heavily. “All right,” he said, giving the letter to Hayim. “Go ahead and read it.”

  Hayim took out the sheet of writing paper and unfolded it. His jaw worked back and forth as he read.

  “Tell me what it says, Hayim.”

  “This isn’t for you.”

  “I’d say it is. Give it to her. I insist.”

  “If it concerns me, then I want to see it,” Hannah said, her voice trembling. He did not prevent her from taking the letter out of his hand.

  T. Whitaker,

  Are you aware that the woman to whom you are engaged has the mark of Satan on her? Surely you don’t believe that that orthopaedic shoe hides a natural deformity. It hides something terrible — a cloven hoof. A foot like that of an animal, like Lucifer himself. If you marry Hannah Kleeman, you marry the devil’s whore, sent to lead you to hell.

  A Concerned Friend

  She could hardly breathe. “What — what is this?”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” said Hayim. “Some enemy of mine in business. Some envious son of a bitch. Does he think we’re living in the Dark Ages? Nobody believes in such nonsense anymore. Toby, you aren’t taking this seriously? You should laugh at it. Or be angry at the person who wrote it. You should already have torn it up.”
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br />   “Of course you think so.” He stepped over to Hannah and snatched the letter out of her hands, frightening her. “But I see what you’re trying to do, how you want to use me and the name of my family.”

  “Use you? You forget what your family name is worth these days? The money I loaned you? We bring far more to this marriage than you do.”

  “I don’t understand what I’m hearing,” Hannah said.

  “The solution is simple,” Tobias said, crossing his arms. “All Hannah has to do is remove her shoe and stocking. Then I will see for myself. I should know exactly what I’m marrying.”

  “Don’t insult my sister. I’ve had enough of this. You’re going to have to go.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Hannah said. “Let him see.” Immediately, she sat down and began to slip off her shoes. She started rolling down her stockings.

  “Hannah, you shouldn’t do this. I’m sorry I ever brought Tobias home. Please stop.”

  But she didn’t stop. She presented her naked foot for Tobias to see. She wasn’t crying now. Instead, she reached back to undo the button of her dress. She tugged it down, revealing the slip underneath, the straps of her brassiere.

  “Hannah! Stop it! Get out of here, Tobias, get out!”

  Hayim pushed Tobias towards the door. Hannah stopped undressing and pulled the diamond ring off her finger. She made as if to throw it at Tobias’s receding back, but then she changed her mind and closed her fingers around it. It was her ring and she could do what she wanted with it.

  It is not boasting to say that the men who hung about the Japanese Magic and Novelty Store said they had never seen a boy learn as quickly as I did. The more I could do, the more generous they became, teaching me what they knew, showing me the secrets of famous apparatus. The card frame. The spirit cabinet. I went to the shop as often as I could, being pulled away only when Corinne enticed me with an invitation to the shed. I could never refuse.