by Mary Gordon
She would have done far better than her mother, who set out for the police station, her eyes apologetic and her posture cringing and came back having made the arrangements with an undertaker who was Presbyterian to have the simplest coffin and to send the bills to Des. She understood her mother's anger, and her shame, but her mother had got it wrong, she was angry and ashamed for the wrong thing, as Ag had died for the wrong thing, and left it to the wrong person to pick up all the pieces.
Kathleen said nothing about Ag when she came home from making the arrangements, and it was months before the family said a word about her. When Agnes's name came up in family conversation, Nora could see everybody take Des's part; it was easy, she thought with contempt, to know what they would say. They wanted to make a lesson from it, sew it up, as if it could be useful to their lives. Whereas the truth was only she had anything to learn of it. The lesson was not anything the women thought. It was much worse than anything they mentioned. The truth was that Ag was right to hang herself, except she should have done it earlier. The truth was women like that were better off not being born, and if you saw you had a girl child growing up like that you'd be best drowning it straight off, holding its head under the water till the breath went out of the doomed creature, so you'd save it all the pain and trouble later on.
The Magician's Wife
Unlike most of her friends, Mrs. Hastings did not think of herself first as the mother of her children. She was proudest of being Mr. Hastings's wife. So that in their old age it grieved her to see her husband known in the town as the father of her son, Frederick, the architect, who was not half the man his father was, for beauty, for surprises. Frederick had put up buildings, had had his picture taken with mayors outside city halls, with the governor outside office buildings. She ought to have been proud of Frederick, and of course she was, really, and he was very good to them; they would not be half so well-off without him. She valued her son as she valued the food she had cooked, the meals she had produced, very much the same since the day of her marriage.
Her husband had added to his salary by being a magician. Not that he hadn't provided perfectly well for them; still it was something else that life would have been meaner without, the money he had made on magic. How had it first started? That was one of the arguments she had with his mother. His mother said he had always been that way, putting on magic shows in the barn as a boy. But she knew it hadn't started that way; she remembered the way it had. It was on their honeymoon. They saw a vaudeville show in Chicago, and there was a magician, the amazing Mr. Kazmiro, whose specialty was making birds appear. That night on the way to the hotel, Mrs. Hastings could see her husband brooding over something. When he brooded his eyes would go dull, the color of pebbles, and she could see him rolling the idea from one side of his brain to the other as you would roll a candy ball from one side of your mouth to the other if you had a sore tooth. In the morning (it shocked her, how handsome he was in his pajamas) he said, “May, let's go shopping.” They went down to the area behind the theater where the shops sold odd things: white makeup in flat little tins, wigs for clowns or prima donnas, gizmos comedians used. It was in one of those stores that he bought his first trick; she remembered it was something with balls and hoops and wooden goblets with false bottoms. She never looked too closely at his tricks— not then, not ever. It had shocked her how much the trick cost, ten dollars, but she had said nothing. It was her honeymoon. She never said anything about the expense except to ask what it was about these things that cost so much money. Her husband said it was a highly skilled business, that each of his tricks was the work of craftsmen. But that was how he got started, she remembered, on the fourth day of their honeymoon. No matter what his mother said, it had nothing to do with his life before he got married, his magic.
Once he had performed for the Roosevelts. It was 1935 and one of the Roosevelt grandchildren was recovering from measles. The boy was crotchety and there was nothing you could do to please him, one of the servants had said, one who had seen Mr. Hastings entertaining at the county fair in Rhinebeck. It was a wicked night, she remembered. It thundered and flashed lightning so that the lights flickered on and off. When the telephone rang, they thought it was a joke, some lady calling to ask if Mr. Hastings would care to come over to Hyde Park and do a small performance for a sick child. Her husband and children had thought it was a joke, for one minute. Of course her husband would be called to entertain the President, of course the car, the big black car driven by a man in a uniform, would come for him. She remembered how her husband had talked to the chauffeur, as if he had been brought up to order servants about. She remembered what her husband had said, not looking at the man in the uniform, but not looking at his feet either, looking straight ahead of him. She remembered he had said, “Do you mind if I bring my wife?” and the chauffeur had said, “As you wish, sir,” and opened the door. That was the gallantry of him, so that she would get to meet Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor, who was as plain as she looked in her pictures and had a voice that was an embarrassment; but she was, as Mrs. Hastings said to the people whom she told about it, “Very gracious to us, and a real lady.”
All the vivid moments of her life had been marked by her husband's magic. Not only the Roosevelts— although how would she ever have met the Roosevelts if she had not married Mr. Hastings?— but the moments that heightened the color of everyone's ordinary life. There was a show for each of her birthdays and anniversaries, for each important day of each child's life. On one occasion Frederick had sulked and said, “It's my party and everyone's paying attention to him.’” And she had told him he should thank his lucky stars not to have a father like everyone else's, dull as dishwater, and that any other boy would give his eyeteeth to have a father who could do magic. And Frederick said— where did he get those eyes, those dull, brown, good boy's eyes, they weren't hers, or his father's— Frederick said, “Not if they really knew about it.”
Frederick was not nearly so handsome as his father, particularly when his father was doing magic. Mrs. Hastings remembered the look of him when he was all dressed up, with his hair slicked back and his mustache. He looked distinguished, like William Powell. She knew all the women in the town envied her her husband, for his good looks and his beautiful manners and his exciting ways. Once Mrs. Daly, the milkman's wife, said, “It must be hard on you, him spending all his spare time practicing in the basement.” It was well-known that Mr. and Mrs. Daly had had separate bedrooms since the birth of their last child. Mrs. Hastings wanted to tell Mrs. Daly about the trick her husband had played on her in bed one night, pulling a pearl from the bodice of her nightgown, putting it in his mouth and bringing out a flower. But that was exactly the kind of detail Mrs. Daly wanted, which Mrs. Hastings had no intention of giving her. So she turned to Mrs. Daly and said in her highfalutin voice— her husband said, “Okay, Duchess,” when she used it on him— “He always shows me everything while he's working on it,” which was partly true, although he would never show her anything until he was sure it worked. But it was true enough for someone like Mrs. Daly, who slept in a single bed near the window, true enough to knock her off her high horse.
How could she be lonely up in the kitchen with the knowledge of him below her doing things over and over with scarves and boxes and cards and ribbons. She could imagine the man she loved, alone, away where she could not see him, practicing over and over the tricks that would astound not only her but every person they knew. Why would she prefer conversations at the kitchen table about money or food or what who wore when? She thought it a great and a kingly mercy that he kept his job as a machinist, which he hated, instead of quitting to work full-time as a magician, which he sometimes talked about. When he talked about it, a little flame of fear would go up in her, as if someone had lit a match behind one of her ribs. But she would say, “Do whatever you want. I have faith.” What she liked really, though, was that during the day he went to his job, like anyone else's husband, but he spent his nights doing magic. He
would come up the stairs every night in triumph, and every night he wanted her because, he said, she was the best little wife a man ever had; and every night she wanted him because she could not believe her good fortune, since she was, compared with her husband, she knew, quite ordinary.
And the years had passed as they do for everyone, only for her it was different. Her years were marked not only by the birth and aging and ceremonies of children, but by the growth of her husband's art. After 1946, for example, he gave up the egg and rope tricks and moved into scarves and coins. His retirement was nothing that he feared. He did not go around like other men, taking a week to do a chore that could have been done in an hour. Nor did she go around like other women, saying, “I can't get him out of my hair; he doesn't know what to do with himself.” She loved being the wife of a retired husband as she had never loved being the mother of young children. She loved hearing him take long steps from one end of the basement to the other, loved the times she could hear him standing still, could hear, she thought, his concentration coming up to her through the ceiling, could see it seeping through the floorboards like waves of visible heat. She would never, never interrupt him, but she always knew when it was the last second of his work and she would hear his step on the stairway, would hear him say, “Got any beer?” And she would say, “I've had it waiting.” It was the happiest time of her life, the years of his early retirement.
But then his eyes began to go. At first it was rather beautiful, the way his eyes misted over. It was like, she said to herself, a lake the first thing in the morning. He wore thicker glasses with a pink tint which the doctors said were more restful. They would have made any other man look foolish, but not her husband, with his fine, strong head, his way of holding his shoulders. Even at his age his looks were something other women envied her for. She could see the envy in the way they'd look at her as she walked with him in the evening.
She began to notice how queerly he held things, the funny angle at which he held the newspaper. Now she would hear him in the basement, snorting with frustration, using words that she imagined he used only on the job, not words for her or the house. And worst of all, she could hear him drop things; sometimes she would hear things break. She would pretend to be sewing or reading when he came looking for the broom or the dustpan.
The doctors said nothing would reverse the process, so, as time passed, there were more and more things he couldn't do. But the miracle of it was that the losses did not enrage him as, she knew, they would have enraged her. He simply accepted the loss of each new activity as he would have accepted the end of a meal. Finally one night he said to her, “Listen, old girl, you're my only audience now. I'm blind as a bat, and one thing nobody needs is a half-blind magician.”
Did she like it better that he did his tricks only for her now, in the living room? Or had she liked it better sitting in the audience, watching the wonder of the people around at what he could produce from the most surprising places. On the whole she thought she liked it better watching the stupefaction, the envy. But it was in her nature, that preference. She had not as nice a nature as his. It was his nature to take her hand and say, after he had done a trick she had seen five hundred times, perhaps, and was not tired of, “I only make magic for you now.” Making his almost total blindness into a kind of gift for her, a perfect glass he had blown and polished.
On the whole she blamed Frederick for what happened on the Fourth of luly, although she knew the idea had come from the grandchildren. Sometimes her husband would take them down to the basement with him to show them some of the equipment. Sometimes he would do tricks for them, the simpler ones that he had done almost from the beginning and knew so well that he didn't have to see to do them. She understood the children's enchantment with him and his magic; he was a perfect grandfather, indulgent, full of secret skills. Of course she understood their pride— there was no one like him. But she didn't understand Frederick's going along with their damn fool idea. His great virtue had always been his good sense. Why did he put his father up to it, without even asking her?
It was tied up with the grandchildren and the way they were so proud. They wanted their friends to see that their grandfather was a magician, so they egged him on to give a show at the Fourth of July Town Fair. Finally Frederick got behind them.
At first she thought it would be all right because of the look on her husband's face when he talked about it, because she knew what gave him that look: the prospect of once again astonishing strangers. Nothing could make up for the loss of it, and it was something she could not give him. Sitting in that living room, honored as she was by the privacy of this intimate performance for her only, no matter how much she loved him, she had seen it all before.
And so she had to tell him what a good thing it was, how proud she would be, what a miracle he was in the lives of his grandchildren. At first she thought he would do only old tricks, and she felt safe. The audience would love him for his looks and because he was Frederick's father. She pressed his suit herself, weeks before; she pressed it several times just for practice. She looked through all her dresses to find the one that would most honor him. Finally she decided on her plainest dress, a black cotton with short sleeves. It was an old woman's dress but, being without ornament, the dress of an old woman who knows herself to be in a position of privilege. She would braid a silver ribbon into her long hair.
As the weeks went on, all ease was drained from her, a slow leak, stealing warmth, making the center of her chest feel full of cold air as if she had just walked into a cave. It was not the old tricks, the ones he almost didn't need eyes for, that he was doing. He was trying to do the newer, more complicated ones. She knew because of the household things he asked for: ribbon now instead of string, scarves instead of cotton handkerchiefs. When he showed her the act, as he always did before the performance, she saw him fumble, saw him drop things that he did not see so that the trick could not possibly go right. But she saw, too, that sometimes he was unaware that he had not done the trick properly. Sometimes the card was not the right card, the scarf the wrong color. All the life in her body collected in one solid disk at the center of her throat when she saw him foolish like that, an old man. But she would not tell him. It was not something that she could do, to say to him: your best life is entirely behind you— you are an old man. She could not even suggest that he do the simpler things. It was not in her; it had never been in her, and she understood what he was doing. He was risking foolishness to get from his audience the greatest possible astonishment, the greatest novelty of love.
She could not sleep the night before, looking at his sweet white body, the white hairs on the chest that still had the width and the toughness of the young man she had married. She poured boiling water over her finger so she had to go to the fair with her hand in a bandage. That annoyed Frederick, who said, “Today of all days, Mother.”
Frederick was looking very foolish. He was wearing red, white, and blue striped pants and a straw boater which, with his thinning hair, his failure of a mustache, was a grave tactical error. His father came down wearing his white suit, blue shirt, red bow tie and provided, by his neat, hale presence, all the festivity Frederick had worked so hard to embody.
They had set up a stage on the lawn of the courthouse. First some of the women in the Methodist choir sang show tunes. Then the bank president's daughter, dressed like Uncle Sam, did her baton routine, then somebody played an accordion. Then Frederick got up onstage. All his business friends whistled and stamped and made rude noises. She was embarrassed at the attention he was bringing to himself.
“Now I don't want to be accused of nepotism,” he said. (It must have been some joke, some business joke; all the men laughed rudely as she imagined men laughed at dirty jokes.) “But when you have a talent in the family, why hide it under a bushel? My father, Mr. Albert Hastings, is a magician extraordinaire. He had the distinction of performing before Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And as I've always said, what's good enough for the Ro
osevelts is good enough for us.”
The men guffawed again. Frederick stretched out one of his arms. “Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Hastings.”
Albert had been backstage all the time. She was glad he had not been with her to sense her fear, perhaps to absorb it. A woman behind her tapped her on the shoulder and said, “You must be very proud.” Mrs. Hastings put her finger to her lips. Her husband had begun speaking.
It was the same patter he had used for years, but there was a new element in it that disturbed her: gratitude. He kept telling the audience how good it was to allow him to perform. Allow him? He would never have spoken like that, like a plain girl who has finally been asked to dance, ten years ago, five even. She hoped he would not go on like that. But she could see that the audience loved it, loved him for being an old man. But was that the kind of love he wanted? It was not what she thought he was after.