Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

  “Look at it carefully,” she said, shuffling the deck. The cards clicked and whirred between fingers that were, despite their plumpness, remarkably nimble. “Don’t let me see what it is, but you memorize it.”

  It was a seven of clubs. I had played gin rummy with Father and knew the names of the suits.

  “Will you be able to remember it?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, pique putting an edge along my voice.

  Miss Lizzie smiled. “No insult intended, Amanda.” She squared the deck on the table, left it there, sat back, and said, “Right. Put the card back in the deck. Anywhere you like.”

  I slipped the card back into the deck about a third of the way up from the bottom, and then made quite certain, proud of my caution, that all the cards were carefully aligned.

  Miss Lizzie took a sip from her teacup. She said, “Right. What we’re going to do now is make that card move through the deck, and then all the way through the table so it comes out underneath.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that it’s going to go through the wooden table.”

  “Exactly,” said Miss Lizzie, with a single crisp nod.

  I was too polite to express my disbelief out loud (like most people I was rude and cruel only to those I knew well), but my expression must have revealed it.

  Miss Lizzie smiled. “It takes a good deal of concentration, and you’ll have to help, but I think we can pull it off. Notice, now, that there’s nothing up my sleeves.” She held up her hands, turned them back and forth for me to see that they were indeed empty. I nodded. She placed her left hand under the table and said to me, “All right, you press down on the deck. And concentrate.” She closed her eyes.

  Warily, watching her closely, I pressed my fingertips against the deck.

  After a moment, Miss Lizzie opened her eyes. “Hmmm,” she said. “It’s not working.”

  I laughed.

  She looked at me sternly. “Patience, Amanda. Here, try pressing the deck like this.” She put her hand flat atop the deck in demonstration, pressed, and then sat back. “And try to concentrate more.”

  “I am concentrating.” Hardly my fault if a silly playing card refused to violate the laws of nature.

  “Well,” she said, “try it again, then.” Closing her eyes, she reached under the table again with her left hand. “Don’t forget, press hard.”

  I pressed hard, still suspicious, still eyeing her.

  Suddenly she smiled, sat back, and moved her hand up above the table. “There we are,” she said. She was holding the seven of clubs.

  I frowned at her. It was a trick, I knew that; the card had not actually passed through the table. But I had no idea how she had worked it. “Do it again,” I demanded.

  And Miss Lizzie laughed.

  I had stood there on the front porch for a few minutes before Miss Lizzie opened the door. When she did, she seemed harried, slightly out of breath and slightly out of focus. Her pince-nez was a shade askew and a few fine strands of white hair had escaped her chignon. She ran her right hand back over her scalp, smoothing them into place, exhaled elaborately with her left hand to her breast, and smiled at me. Once again, the smile transformed her face. “I’m sorry, dear, I was out back.” She looked around the porch, looked back at me, raised her eyebrows. “Your friend didn’t come?”

  “She had a previous engagement,” I explained.

  “Ah,” she said, smiling again. “Well, come in, come in.”

  She stood back to let me enter. She was wearing the same clothing she had worn earlier, or its duplicate, a full-length black dress with buttons climbing up the bodice to her neck. With more presence of mind now, I noticed that the cut of the dress was very fine, and that the material was brocaded silk. As before, she wore no jewelry and no makeup.

  She led me down the hallway and through the house. (“And this,” I remember saying to myself behind her, with a strange but very real sense of accomplishment, as though I were somehow responsible for her existence, “is Lizzie Borden.”) Passing the parlor, I caught a glimpse of a dark polished mahogany coffee table, a large wall mirror, a Persian carpet, three red plush chairs, and a red plush sofa, all of them antimacassered, and the sofa supporting a very large fluffy white cat who was either fast asleep or quite dead. Everything (including the cat) looked a great deal more substantial and expensive than any of the things in our cottage next door, or, for that matter, in our house in Boston.

  “I thought we’d have our tea out here,” Miss Lizzie said as we reached the rear porch. “There’s a nice breeze today.”

  Like ours, her porch was enclosed with screening, but unlike ours it had at its center a square mahogany table. The table was set with enough food to feed a small battalion. There was a Wedgwood teapot, a Wedgwood platter heaped with sandwiches, a silver salver piled high with scones, a small porcelain crock of strawberry jam, another of marmalade, and a plate of brightly colored petit fours. If Miss Lizzie had prepared all this by herself, in the time since I had seen her last (and I knew, from my surveillance, that she had brought no servants with her to the shore), she had good reason to look harried.

  “Sit, sit,” she said, sitting down herself and directing me to the chair opposite her. “Tell me all about yourself.”

  “Where shall I start?” I asked. I sat down, watching her so as to learn what to do next. This was my first Afternoon Tea, and I was not entirely sure of the Rules.

  She lifted the damask linen napkin from the placemat before her, unfolded it, draped it across her lap. I did the same. “Well,” she said, “tell me where you’d like to be ten years from now.”

  “In an airplane,” I said.

  “An airplane?” She smiled.

  I nodded. “I want to be a flyer.”

  “An aviatrix.” She nodded. This was the first time I had heard the word, which would not, and then only because of the remarkable Miss Earhart, come into common usage until the next decade. Pouring tea into my cup, she said, “Would you be carrying the mail?”

  “Passengers,” I said. “Father says that one day airplanes will carry more passengers than the railroads do.”

  “Cream or lemon?” she asked me.

  “Which one are you having?”

  “I’m having cream.”

  “I’ll have cream too. He says that one day it’ll be possible to go from New York to California in a single day.”

  “I’m sure he’s right,” she said, “but whyever would one want to?”

  Caught off guard for a moment—why indeed?—I frowned. “Well,” I said finally, “they might be in a hurry.”

  “No, dear, I meant why would anyone want to go to California at all. From everything I’ve read, it’s a dreadful place. All cowboys and oranges. Sugar?”

  “Yes, please. He says they’ll cross the Atlantic too. People will be able to fly from New York to London and Paris.”

  “Now that would be nice,” she said. “I’d love to see Paris again.”

  “You’ve been there, you mean?” This summer’s trip to the shore had been my farthest journey away from Boston.

  She waved a hand dismissively. “A lifetime ago.”

  Somehow I knew immediately that, despite her easy dismissal, the trip to Paris was something about which she would enjoy talking. Certainly it was something I would enjoy hearing. “What was it like?”

  “It was,” she said, and smiled, “very French.”

  We talked for over an hour, sipping at our tea and nibbling at the sandwiches (cream cheese and watercress, the bread crusts neatly manicured away), and she told me about Paris, about strolling down the sun-dappled Champs-Elysées and sitting at a sidewalk café and talking, through a drunken and probably unreliable interpreter, to a bearded red-haired painter from Holland who reeked of absinthe and despair. Miss Lizzie had expressed, in passing, a liking for the work of Constable; the painter, furious, indignant, had leaped from his chair, knocking it over in the process. In a few raging moments he had dashed off a sketch
of her, torn it from his notebook, and hurled it spinning to the table. Then, scowling and mumbling, his arms conducting an invisible orchestra, he had staggered off toward the river. As a memento of her Grand Tour, she said, she had kept the sketch with her ever since.

  She left the porch to fetch it, returned with it in a small but elegantly wrought silver frame. The hair was darker and fuller; and the smile, slightly bemused by the antics of this mad Dutchman, seemed more an integral part of the younger face than, as it was to the older, a pleasant afterthought. But she was recognizable, this other Miss Lizzie; the artist had gotten the large gray expectant eyes exactly right. He had been a talented man: despite the manic swiftness of the pencil he had captured a quality that was at once innocent and mischievous. Down in the right-hand corner he had scrawled his name and underlined it with a flourish that had nearly rent the paper: Vincent.

  We were eating the scones, and very good they were too with the Irish marmalade and the English jam, when all at once Miss Lizzie leaned forward and asked me, “Do you like card tricks, Amanda?”

  I had never once seen a card trick. I said, “Of course.”

  She smiled, sat back, reached into the side pocket of her dress, and pulled out a deck of playing cards. With a practiced thumbnail she split the cellophane wrapper, flicked open the package. She adjusted her pince-nez, shook out the deck, held it up, riffled it with her thumb so that I could see the cards’ faces and know that the deck was normal, then fanned it with one hand and held it out to me. “Pick a card,” she said.

  “Do it again,” I said.

  Miss Lizzie laughed. “A magician should never repeat a trick, Amanda.”

  “But how’d you do it?” I felt stupid and clumsy. Everyone said I was smart, I knew I was smart, and yet here, now, something had happened that I could not explain.

  She shrugged, smiling slyly. “Just magic, I suppose.”

  “One more time?” I pleaded. I could hear the whine in my voice, and I hated it; and so, deliberately, calmly, I added, “I’d be very grateful.”

  “All right,” she said, nodding. “Once more. But only once.” She fanned the deck once again, held it out across the table. “Pick one.”

  I did. It was the six of hearts. Hawklike, I watched her shuffle the cards. So far as I could see, she used, but more smoothly and quickly, the same shuffle Father used when we played together.

  She set the deck on the table and said, “Right. Put the card back in.”

  I did so, making certain, as I had last time, that the edges of all the cards were aligned.

  “Right,” she said; “Now press on them. And remember, concentrate.”

  Frowning, I pressed on the cards as Miss Lizzie moved her left hand beneath the table.

  After a moment she shook her head. “Here, Amanda, remember? Press on the cards like this.…”

  She was moving her right hand to the deck when suddenly I called out, “Wait a minute!”

  Her hand stopped in midair and I slapped my own hand down upon the deck and shouted, “You did that the last time!” Quickly, before she could stop me, I flipped over the top card of the deck.

  The six of hearts.

  But she had not touched the deck since I had returned the card to it.…

  I looked up at her. She was watching me intently, eyes narrowed and a smile growing.

  I said, suddenly understanding, “There’s more than one of them.”

  With an explosive laugh, almost a bark, Miss Lizzie rocked back in her chair and clapped her hands together, delighted.

  I picked up the deck, turned it over, examined the cards. Immediately I saw that this was not a standard deck.

  This particular deck, as Miss Lizzie told me later, is called the Mene Tekel deck. Magic supply houses sold it (and still do), but you can make one yourself easily enough by selecting twenty-six identical pairs of cards from two separate decks, and shortening one card of each pair by shaving from it about a sixteenth of an inch. Arrange all fifty-two cards so that the short card is the top card of each pair. Now, wherever the pack is cut, the cut will always be made at one of the ordinary cards, and its duplicate will lie directly above it. When the deck is riffled, only the long cards appear, and the deck seems perfectly normal.

  When I selected the seven of clubs, Miss Lizzie, knowing that the card above it was identical, brought that card to the top of the deck and kept it there with a series of false shuffles. Then, under the pretext of demonstrating the proper way for me to handle the deck, she palmed the second seven and dropped it into her lap. It was from there that she produced it after it had “passed through” the table.

  I explain how this trick was performed because it was the first such trick I had ever seen. It will also be the last such trick I shall explain. Over the years I have learned that most people do not want to learn how a magic trick is accomplished. They may say they do, may even believe they do; but almost invariably, when they do learn, they are disappointed. They know that they have been deceived (part of the pleasure of magic—and this is true of few other human activities—lies in the certainty that one is being deceived), but they wish for the deception to be something more than sleights of hand and gimmicked props. They wish for it to be less simple, less pedestrian; they wish for it to be truly magical.

  But to me, to the girl I once was and whom, alas, I still carry about with me, the simplicity of the trick was truly magical.

  I asked Miss Lizzie if she would show me another.

  Smiling, she told me to wait a moment, and she left the porch.

  When she returned she was carrying a flat, dark, wooden box. Sitting down opposite me again, she set it on the table. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. More and more now, one saw women smoking cigarettes in public, something that would, before the War, have been unthinkable.

  Miss Lizzie lifted the lid of the box, took out another pack of cards, a small silver penknife, and a long black panatela. She put the cards down on the table and opened the knife. She cut off the panatela’s tip, put the cigar in her mouth, took a kitchen match from the box, struck it cowboy-fashion on her thumb, let it flare for a moment, then held it to the cigar. She puffed for a moment, getting the thing going, then sat back and blew a cone of blue smoke off toward the screen, toward the sky and the sea. She sighed happily and looked down at the cigar in her hand with something like admiration. “It’s a terrible habit,” she said, shaking her head, “but I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

  I nodded. I was astounded.

  Leaning forward, she stabbed the cigar into the corner of her mouth. “Well now,” she said, picking up the deck, fanning it, holding it out to me. “Pick a card.”

  Throughout that June and July I spent a part of nearly every weekday afternoon learning about magic from Miss Lizzie. We would sit out on the porch at the mahogany table, the ocean breezes gently rustling our hair as she explained and demonstrated the manipulation of cards. Sometimes her big fluffy white cat—whose name was Eliot, after a former president of Harvard—would condescend to join us, lying in a chair to himself, watching us with bored green eyes.

  No one, or so I thought, ever knew about these afternoons. They were, I told myself, my secret, the first real secret all my own that I had ever possessed. Once in a while on the weekends, delighted with my new knowledge, my new skills, I almost told Father. Yet always I hesitated, telling myself that I would lose the secret. And, of course, without really admitting it to myself, I was afraid that he would not approve of his daughter’s learning magic. Looking back on it now with hindsight’s wisdom, I know he would not have disapproved, and I wish I had told him. If I had, perhaps things would have happened differently. But hindsight also teaches us, as Miss Lizzie once said, that there are no ifs in this world, that we cannot remake history. And, given the individual characters of the people involved, perhaps there was nothing I could have done to alter what was about to happen.

  But I did learn magic. Eve
ry afternoon on Miss Lizzie’s porch, she taught me something new. I learned about the Svengali deck, the marked deck, the stripper deck. I learned how to crimp a card, how to slick one with paraffin, how to make one sticky with diachylon. We spent a week on sleights: the false shuffle, the false cut, the glide, the jog, the palm. I learned how to deal seconds and bottoms; although I was never able, as Miss Lizzie was, to deal middles.

  Few people were; few are. Since that summer I have met hundreds of card handlers, amateur and professional, and I think that of all of them only a handful begin to approach her level of expertise, and only one, John Scarne, might be said to have matched it.

  Skill of that caliber requires an enormous amount of time to develop, and it was not until much later that I realized that Miss Lizzie had had that time precisely because she was Miss Lizzie; because she had lived, since the death of her parents, most of her adult life by herself. And it was only then that I understood that the skill might signify (by its practice having been used to avoid) a terrible lifelong loneliness.

  But at the time, as we sat out on the porch, the cards before us, pale blue cigar smoke curling across the table, it did sometimes occur to me that, whether or not she was responsible for their deaths (and I could not then believe that she was), this woman had seen the battered and bloody bodies of her father and her mother. How had she felt then? How did she feel now? Was it something from which you ever truly recovered?

  I was to learn the answers to some of these questions soon, for in August, with the awful heat, came the first of the murders.

  THREE

  IN THE THIRTIES, before World War II, my second husband and I lived for a while off the coast of Kenya on an island called Lamu. It was a beautiful place of palm trees and acacias and of sand dunes over two hundred feet tall parading back from a beach five miles long. For most of the year, the weather was perfect; the breeze off the Indian Ocean was so constant and firm that you could very nearly lean against it, like a wall. But just before the rainy season, sometimes a month before, sometimes less, the breeze would disappear, and from then until the rains finally arrived you knew that you were living within a hundred miles of the equator. The sunlight had a weight to it, oppressive, relentless, and the air took on substance, thickness; you could feel it slide apart to let you pass, and then close almost audibly behind you, like a jelly as the knife withdrew. In all my life this was the only weather that approached, in intensity and unpleasantness, the heat of that first week in August at the shore.