A Bird's Eye

by Cary Fagan

  The maid knew me by now and ushered me into the sitting room, where Hannah was looking through a leather-covered album of photographs. “Come and see,” she said, patting the space beside her. “These are your relatives too.”

  She showed me my grandparents. My grandfather was grim-looking, with a wide face and a heavy beard and deep lines about his eyes. He wore the traditional Orthodox garb, dark and heavy, with a bowler hat. My grandmother was a thickset peasant of a woman, squat and sturdy, beefy arms crossed, a kerchief on her head. Hannah spoke warmly of them both, her eyes becoming damp, but I couldn’t connect her words to the photograph.

  I saw aunts and uncles and cousins grouped around a table brimming with dishes of food. The shot had been taken by one of my cousins, who ran a photography business. He had taken formal portraits too, using a draped background painted like a Greek temple. Here was a teenage girl playing the violin, a small boy holding a prayer book, a young man in some sort of uniform. For each one Hannah told me the name, how old he or she was, and what she knew about the person from letters she received every week. I saw the front of the family hotel, which looked smaller than I had imagined, the plaster front chipped in several places, beside the entrance a three-wheeled cart with the name of the hotel in Hebrew letters.

  Hannah must have seen these photographs many times, but she looked at them again, thrilled to have someone to share them with. She told me that her father’s — my grandfather’s — letters had grown increasingly anguished and then had stopped. Another relative wrote to say that he’d fallen ill and had taken to his bed.

  “I would do anything to see them,” she said. I nodded, although I couldn’t imagine anything that I’d rather do less. I looked at my aunt, at the intense light in her eyes. After all these years, she still belonged more to that world than to this one.

  I did not let the stagehands carry my black art table or other props, but carried them myself off the stage and into the wings. An act called the Five Trelawny Sisters was on next. Only two of them were actually sisters. The older one never failed to find it amusing to rub her sequined breasts against me as she passed, assuming I was as innocent as I looked.

  My act had grown to twelve minutes. The scarf routine was more elaborate and now I produced three doves, which I otherwise kept in a cage in the backyard, having told my mother that I was raising them for money. I found a way to sell the cups and balls to the upper balcony, by moving downstage and using larger motions. I added the black art table, on which I grew flowers in a vase and then made the vase disappear, and a spirit slate where answers to questions from the audience appeared. I talked when I had to but otherwise kept my mouth shut. None of it was original and it would still be a long time before I had much stage presence and was able to make the audience believe they were part of something extraordinary. But I was getting better.

  “Hey, kid, Mr. Ludwig wants to see you.” The stage manager pointed his thumb over his shoulder. It wasn’t payday and I hadn’t messed up tonight, so I could not guess what Mr. Ludwig wanted. He had fired a comedy team and a girl singer to save money, so maybe it was my turn. I hadn’t really expected to last this long.

  The office door was open and Mr. Ludwig waved me in. “Come in, Ben, and close the door. Don’t look so spooked. Let’s talk a minute. How are you enjoying your spot?”

  “I like it.”

  “Good. You’re improving fast. The audience likes your fresh face. But I think it works better when you don’t say anything. Until you talk, half the people think you’re mute. I’m considering moving you to a better spot, just before the second intermission. You think you can get them to return to their seats?”

  “Sure I can, Mr. Ludwig.”

  “That’s the stuff. I’ve been thinking about you, Ben. I’d like to show an interest. You’ve got natural talent, still a little crude but coming along. And there’s something else you’ve got, something in your eyes that puts the audience on your side. Maybe we’ve got a chance at making something here. A strong act that might get you on what’s left of the circuit. Not just here but Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. Even New York.”

  “I want that, Mr. Ludwig.”

  “There are two things you need, Ben. One is a manager who will go to bat for you like a son of a bitch. That’s me. The other thing is something new in your act. A showstopper.”

  “A big illusion, you mean?”

  “That’s it. Not scarves or cards or balls or any of that stuff. A routine that fills the stage, that’s a real drama. A story that keeps them on the edge of their seats.”

  “Like Carter used to have. And Horace Goldin.”

  “You got it. Only more up to date. Now, I can come up with the story. But we need that big illusion. Have you got one?”

  “Well, I know of one. A really good one. But I’m going to need something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A lion.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “A real lion. With a big mane. The more fierce-looking, the better.”

  “Even supposing I could find one, it wouldn’t be cheap. And there’s the upkeep. I’d have to believe you’re a good investment.”

  “I am a good investment, Mr. Ludwig.”

  He leaned over the desk and stared into my eyes. I made myself look back and not even blink. He sat back again, grabbing a cigar and a lighter. “I get a certain feeling in my stomach,” he said, striking a flame, “when I’m right about something.”

  I knew what happened in the illusion, but I didn’t know how it was done. So Corinne and I went to Wasserman’s Poultry Shop in the market and I picked out a good chicken from the cages. Mr. Wasserman killed it himself and his wife plucked and gutted it before tying it up in brown paper.

  We took the ferry to the Island and presented the chicken to Murenski. He had a homemade spit over his fire and we turned the chicken, dripping fat crackling on the hot coals. The smell brought stray dogs into the surrounding trees. Murenski drew it off the spit, cut it into pieces, and fished some potatoes out of the coals. My lips burned from the hot skin of the chicken.

  “It isn’t an illusion for someone without experience.” He took a bite of chicken and then a swallow from a brown bottle. “For me to explain it is nothing. I can draw precise sketches of the apparatus. But performing it isn’t about nimble hands. It takes speed, strength, and confidence. It’s not a trick for a boy, even a talented one. And then of course there’s the animal. It has to be used to performing.”

  “Can’t he use a fake lion?” Corinne asked. “Stuffed maybe?”

  “Ralph Gelden tried that once. He got laughed out of the theatre.”

  I said, “I’ve brought paper and a ruler and a pencil. For you to do the sketches.”

  Murenski sighed. “May I at least finish my supper?”

  Corinne’s mouth shone with chicken grease. She said, “I don’t understand you magicians. Why you enjoy tricking people.”

  “It isn’t tricking people,” I said. “I don’t know what it is exactly. Making people see something they’ve never seen before.”

  “But they want to see it,” Murenski added.

  “Not just see it,” I said. “Believe in it.”

  Corinne shook her head. “I don’t know what you two are talking about.”

  I still didn’t absolutely know myself. We finished eating, and then Murenski made the sketches, drawing the cage from various angles, explaining to me how it worked and what problems to look out for. He had trouble getting the lines straight because of his tremor. When we were done, he shook both my and Corinne’s hands. “I think you should put these drawings away for a few years,” he said. “But I don’t think you will.”

  We took the ferry back. Corinne said that her aunt and uncle had gone to Buffalo for two days to visit relatives. She was supposed to be staying with neighbours, only she had neg
lected to tell them and so had the house to herself. We could be in a real bed for the first time.

  My plans for Corinne and myself were firming up, even if I wasn’t ready to share them with her. The two of us married and with beautiful coffee-skin children living in a fine city house, and my name and image on tall posters outside the theatre where I was performing each night to packed crowds. We walked to her uncle’s and, just as she said, the lights were off and it looked deserted. Happily, she pulled me up the steps to the front door, taking out a key that she kept on a string around her neck. But she frowned on finding the door unlocked, and when we went in, there was a figure standing in the dark.

  “Daddy?”

  “Corinne, honey. You never seem to expect me.”

  He turned on the lamp and I saw her father in his Pullman porter uniform, cap laid on the table. Corinne went up and kissed him on the cheek. “What are you doing home?”

  “I do get to come home sometimes,” he said. “And I have some news. Where’s your aunt and uncle?”

  “Visiting Louis in Buffalo.”

  “They left you all on your own?”

  “I’m supposed to be staying next door. I just haven’t gone over yet.”

  “I bet. And your friend — Benjamin, I believe — he’s going too? I don’t like you pulling the wool over your aunt and uncle’s eyes. Now I think it’s time to say good night to Benjamin.”

  “But what’s the news, Daddy?”

  “We’re going to be moving, Corinne.”

  “Again?”

  “The company wants me stationed in Chicago. I’ll be able to come home more often. You’ll like Chicago. It’s a big city and there are a lot of coloured people there.”

  “But Daddy —”

  “I’m tired, daughter. I’ve been on my feet for fourteen hours. We need to turn in. Can you get home all right, Benjamin?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You better be off, then.”

  All the way home, I thought about this problem of Corinne having to move to Chicago. Her father struck me as a reasonable man. He would learn to accept me if he saw that I was necessary for Corinne’s happiness. I took a bunch of quarters out of my pocket to practise while I walked. Never think you’re so good that your skills can’t get any better. Murenski taught me that.

  The lion came from a travelling circus marooned in Ithaca, New York. The city council had taken extraordinary measures, sending five police officers, to prevent the owner’s departure until some four dozen bills were paid to local businesses. The lion was an elderly male, half toothless and ratty-maned, that had been mauled by a new and bigger male so that it now refused to perform with the other lions. “Gentle and dumb,” the circus owner had assured Mr. Ludwig. Mr. Ludwig hired a horse trainer to take care of it in an empty warehouse at the foot of Frederick Street.

  Corinne and I went to visit it because, Corinne said, the lion and I needed to become friends. We didn’t talk about what her father had said. I didn’t know what Corinne was thinking, whether she wanted to go to Chicago or whether the thought of leaving me was too unbearable. I wanted it to be unbearable. She was sixteen and I figured could make her own decisions if she wanted to. I just didn’t know if she wanted to.

  The horse trainer came twice a day to feed it and muck out the cage, which could be divided in half. Most of the time it was alone in the dark. When we came in, the lion was usually lying flat on its stomach. It would open its eyes and look at us. Corinne would push me to the bars, telling me to coo to the thing and throw it treats — chicken heads that we got for nothing in the market. It sure was big, saliva dripping from the corner of its droopy mouth, and all it did with the chicken head was stare at it.

  “I feel sorry for him,” Corinne said.

  I answered, “I’m worrying more about me at the moment.”

  The lion yawned. I could smell the stink of its breath.

  Mr. Ludwig had his stagehands build the set and the equipment. It took two weeks. He had the whole act worked out. Several of the other performers had to be offered bonuses to participate, and I had to cut out of school for several afternoons in order to rehearse. We did everything exactly as we would in performance, except that we didn’t use the lion. Mr. Ludwig didn’t want the expense of moving him back and forth until the actual shows began and some money was coming in. Anyway, there wasn’t anything for the lion to learn. It was going to be like the lady who gets sawed in half and has to just lie there.

  At the rehearsals, the other actors complained of my wooden style, but otherwise things seemed to go all right. But I felt as if all of this had happened far too quickly, that it hadn’t been long ago that I was trying to keep Corinne from noticing a coin in my hand. I began waking in the night from recurring dreams of drowning.

  Mr. Ludwig had two thousand handbills printed up. I left one with a ticket for my mother at her stall in the market. Another for my father in the drawer where he kept his shirts. I left handbills and tickets for Corinne and her father, for my aunt, for Miss Pensler, even for Herr Eisler. I left one in the mailbox for my uncle Hayim. I took the ferry to hand one to Murenski, even though I knew he wouldn’t leave the Island.

  “In India,” Murenski said, “I learned the secret of out-of-body travel. So I do plan to send my spiritual essence.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And I really am the saviour of the Hebrews.”

  “Yes, you are.” Murenski pointed to the handbill. “Twice an evening, four times on Saturday.”

  Once she calmed down and began to feel like herself again, my aunt Hannah was glad that she was not going to marry Tobias Whitaker. The memory of trying to take off her clothes didn’t fill her with the slightest shame. But the effect was to make her see how small her life was, how unconnected to anything or anyone that mattered.

  Without her lessons to occupy her, she found herself thinking constantly of her family in Otwock — her mother and father, her aunts and uncles, her growing cousins. She always believed that someday she would see them again, and now, the letters said, her father was bedridden and hardly spoke. He had to be fed with a spoon. Two of her more adventurous cousins had decided to leave the country in the hope of getting out of Europe, but their whereabouts were unknown.

  When I came to visit, she asked for my help. She opened a cotton handkerchief to show the diamond ring inside. Where could she sell it? she wanted to know. I did not let her go to a pawnshop but took her to Scheuer’s, the diamond merchants on lower Yonge Street. These days there were too many people selling and not enough buying, but it was a good diamond, and after I told the man with the glass in his eye that we would take it somewhere else, she got a decent price.

  I was not with her after that, when she took a cab to the shipping office on Toronto Street and bought a train ticket to Montreal and passage to Antwerp for two days later. Hayim would be in Montreal on business. She went into the Imperial Bank and withdrew the rest of what her brother had deposited into her account. At home, she packed two large trunks, all the clothes she had, so that she might share them with the others.

  The crossing would be difficult, as would the train and then the wagon to Otwock. But she would kiss her mother again. She would stroke her father’s gaunt cheek. She would be with them, whatever might happen.

  Moses Ludwig said that he was trying to cash in on vaudeville before it took its last wheezy breaths, but I didn’t believe it. It could not possibly be dying the moment I arrived. I volunteered to change the three or four bulbs burned out in the marquee. The woman who sold tickets held the ladder.

  The handbills and some small newspaper advertisements did result in a larger house than usual for the first Friday night show. Single men who didn’t want to return to their fleabag rooms, women in pairs or with their whining children, couples out for a lark.

  Sigismond Eisler arrived twenty-five minutes before the first act. What did t
he boy mean, he thought, inviting him to the theatre? In Germany, he had gone to see the Berlin Modern Art Ensemble perform Woyzeck. He was not interested in clowns in slouch hats slapping one another. Nevertheless, he was here, perhaps because the boy reminded him of his own child. He purchased a bag of peanuts and tried to tip the usher a nickel as was done back home, but the surprised young man dropped the coin.

  Miss Pensler came in next, male heads turning to look, alerted by her unusual height. She took a seat on the aisle, removed her hat, and took from her purse a traveller’s edition of the poems of Thomas Hardy.

  My mother paused to let another, pushier woman enter first. She sniffed, detecting mildew, then chose a seat near the back, under the overhang of the balcony.

  Corinne came in accompanied by her father. He wore a neat suit and tie and a new fedora. Negroes were not required to go up to the balcony, but her father believed it best to do so and they took seats by the rail. Their possessions had already been sent ahead. They had only small bags for the train trip to Chicago, which her father had left in the porters’ lockers at Union Station along with his uniform. They would walk to the station as soon as the show was over. Corinne had told me that when the curtain came down she would run from her father, who would never be able to keep up, and that she would hide until he was forced to go to the station without her for fear of missing the train. He’d never missed a train in nineteen years. Once he was gone, he would have to agree to her staying with her aunt and uncle.

  My uncle Hayim stayed home. He could not get over his sister’s return to the old country. He sat in his shirt sleeves, a bottle of Seagram’s at his elbow, and he would spend the night in that chair.

  The house lights dimmed. My father groped his way to a seat.

  The opening act was a plate spinner, followed by a fake Siamese-twin comedy routine, a Shirley Temple look-alike, and a parrot act. The curtain closed for several minutes while the band played. A spotlight came on and the music turned ominous. The curtain pulled away to show the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, complete with swept hair and little moustache, uniform and boots, pacing back and forth before a trembling staff under a military tent.