Petty Magic (24 page)

“This is the Very Secret Society of the Late-Night Snack.” (Which, we hope, will sober him up
tout de suite.
)

I start drawing folded grease-spotted napkins out of my little black bag and each time Justin giggles like a small boy, then devours whatever’s inside without further ado. At some point he remembers himself and asks, “Want some?”

As if on cue, my stomach gurgles ominously, and Justin laughs. “It’s nothing,” I say. “Mild dyspepsia.”

“Or a bellyful of lies,” Morven mutters. I pinch her arm and she stifles a shriek.

Justin turns to her. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” she replies meekly.

“Did you have a good time tonight, Morven? Eve tells me you aren’t really the partying type.”

“This right here is my idea of a good party,” she says, gazing out over the trees and high-rises. Absently she runs her fingertips over her face and throat and smiles to herself.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” he says with a happy sigh. “A midnight picnic.”

“Oh, but it’s
well
past midnight, dearie,” I reply.

When Justin wrinkles his nose he looks uncannily childlike. “Don’t call me ‘dearie.’ ”

“Why not?”

“It makes you sound like an old lady.”

“So?” I watch him gobble up the last sausage
en croûte
. “We’d better get you on a train back to Blackabbey soon.”

“Why can’t you just take me back to your place?”

“We’ve been over this before, Justin.”

“But I’ve met your sister now. She likes me, doesn’t she? Don’t you like me, Morven?”

“Of course I do,” Morven yawns.

“Then why can’t we just take a taxi back to your apartment and I’ll go home in the morning when I’m sober?”

“When you’re
hungover
, more like.”

“Answer the question, Eve.”

“Has anyone ever told you what an aggravating drunk you are?”

“Come on, answer the question.”

Morven puts her lips to my ear. “Look, I’m not sure if we really have a choice at this point. There are no more trains back to Jersey until a quarter past five, and it’s only half past one now.”

“Good point, sis,” Justin says loudly.

“Fine
then. We’ll take a cab. But I’m putting you on the train first thing in the morning.” I snap open the clasp on my evening bag and pull out another grease-stained napkin.

“Feta tartlets!” He pops one and is still chewing as he exclaims, “I thought they’d run out of these!”

“They did,” Morven replies drily. He polishes off the rest in seconds flat.

“I managed a partial bottle of Grey Goose as well,” I whisper to my sister. “He’s too drunk to wonder where it came from, don’t you think?”

“Are you cracked?” she says. “Why would you want to give him any more alcohol?”

“Hair of the dog,” I reply as I pull out a can of V8.

“That purse is bigger than it looks,” Justin remarks as I produce the vodka.

“Sorry,” I say. “Forgot the celery stick. And the hot sauce. And the black pepper.”

“It will do,” he replies as he reaches for the bottle.

“Better save it for the morning,” says my sister—who has never had a hangover in all her life—so I pull out a bottle of Evian instead.

Once Justin has fully refreshed himself, we clamber down the rock, toss the rubbish in a wastebasket along the path, and hail a cab off Fifth Avenue.

“Worth and Baxter, please,” Morven tells the cabbie.

Justin nuzzles my neck. “You didn’t tell me you lived in Chinatown.”

Morven and I exchange a glance over his head and she looks positively frightful with anxiety. Playtime is fast running out—we’ve got to get home and get Justin to sleep before our faces can betray us.

W
E DO
it, but barely. Drag him through the courtyard and up the four flights to our flat, and no sooner have we dumped him on the sofa and locked ourselves in the bathroom than we are made prunelike as ever.

“What if he wakes up before you’re restored?” Morven asks as we smear on the Pond’s side by side in the mirror above the sink.

“I’ll just lock the door and sleep as late as I please. The fridge is full and the TV works. And if he asks why I didn’t let him sleep with me”—I gaze at my wizened face in the glass and can’t help a wry smile—“I’ll tell him I was afraid he’d heave on the sheets.”

“Wouldn’t be a lie,” Morven remarks as she pops the cap off the toothpaste.

“What’ll you do in the morning?”

“As to keeping up the illusion for the benefit of our houseguest? Tut tut. I don’t think so. No, Elsie and I are going to the museum tomorrow. I’ll be gone long before he gets up.”

I
PAD INTO
the sitting room at a quarter past one the following afternoon, face in place and Bloody Mary in hand, and what do I find but a dozen cats crawling all over him! He’s still sleeping, and when they lick his face he stirs, smiles, and murmurs gibberish. I grab yesterday’s newspaper off the coffee table, roll it up, and thwack as many feline bottoms as I can.

“Scat!” The cats make for the window as Justin jerks up.

“What? What is it?” He puts his hand to his cheek. “Why is my face all wet?”

I point to the open window, where a brazen black cat sits on the sill gazing at Justin and licking a white forepaw. “Scat!” I cry again, and it gives me one last resentful look before it leaps out onto the fire escape and away.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have left the window open.”

“Why did you leave me on the couch?”

“I was afraid you’d puke in the bed.”

“Oh,” he says, considering this. “Fair enough.” I hand him the Bloody Mary and he takes a grateful drink.

Then he notices the double doors that open into my bedroom are ajar. “Can I see your room?”

“What for?”

“You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom.”

“Hah! That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He stands up and makes a move for it, but I hold out my arm. “Just give me a minute, okay? I don’t want you to see my dirty underthings all over the bed.”

“Don’t see why it matters,” he replies. “I’ve been seeing a lot of your dirty underthings lately.”

I close the doors behind me so I can hide pretty much every photograph on my dresser, including my two stolen pictures of Jonah. I’m just about to head for the nightstand to hide his pocket watch when Justin opens the doors and pokes his head in. “Hey, what’s the big deal? I wish you’d have let me sleep in here. I’ve always wanted to sleep in a four-poster.” He hops onto the unmade bed, picks up a pillow, and buries his face in it. “Smells like you,” he says with a smile. Then, just as I was afraid of, he notices the pocket watch on the table beside him and picks it up. “Where did you get this?” He pops the clasp and examines the clock-face, then shuts it again and stares at the initials engraved on the lid:
JAR
.

“Found it at a junk shop in Paris,” I reply rather too casually.

He looks at the watch, then at me, then back at the watch. “What?”

“Nothing.” He places it back on the nightstand, hesitates, and picks it up again, holding it to his ear so he can better hear the ticking. “It’s still keeping perfect time.”

I want to tell him he can keep it, but sentiment wins out. If I give it back to him now, I’ve got one less thing to remember him by.

We decide to go out for brunch, but there’s still the sticky question of how to get him out of the warren without his noticing the cockfight ring or that old shack with
MRS. PRIGG’S FRESH HOT FISH PIES
above the doorway.

In the end I’ve got to blinker him, which is to say I give him memories to fill in for the things he shouldn’t see. Once we’re out the front gate, all he’ll remember is the dingy tenement stairwell and the crooked cobblestones of an ordinary courtyard.

In Which Evelyn Resolves to Make a Decision

24.

E
VERY BELDAME
needs a circle. We are gregarious by nature, but more to the point, we require comrades to support us in times of trouble, to rein us in lest our baser impulses get the better of us. A dame without a coven is a suspicious character, like a knife sharpener with all ten of his fingers. We have a name for a beldame like that: a hysterix, after the porcupine genus. Porcupines are solitary creatures, after all, and little wonder, but there’s no hide of quills to keep their witchy counterparts from socializing with their neighbors. Who knows why they forgo the comfort and safety of the warrens?

Anyway, when we meet again to discuss Helena’s case it is universally agreed that proof is impossible to come by, but the elders are unwilling to leave it at that.

“Fine!” I cry in exasperation. “Hold the bloody séance then. It doesn’t matter. She’s got nothing to hide.”

“It is a very serious undertaking,” says Dymphna, “and one that will probably cause considerable distress for each of us. But I see no other way.”

We generally take dirty business like this outside the coven, and that’s where the hysterix comes in. Our regard for one another is strained by default: the hysterix is polite but perceptibly disgruntled at having her psychic stores thus intruded upon, and we are rather sniffy toward her since we can’t help taking her decision not to join our cadre as a personal affront. What’s in it for her? Some dark and stormy night she’ll be needing
our
help, and as they say, life is long and memory is longer.

So Dymphna rings the only hysterix in Blackabbey, a woman named Clovis who’s moved here in the last few years, and we arrange to pay her a visit. The hysterix mentions no restriction on the number of callers, so we decide that Morven and I plus all of Helena’s daughters will also be in attendance. This is a meeting of introduction and preparation only.

The hysterix lives in one of those awful condominiums built recently on the edge of town, a little purgatory of numbered parking spaces and balconies furnished with white plastic patio chairs.

I have a definite idea of what the hysterix will be like, though it bears little resemblance to those few I encountered years ago in Germany. I’m expecting a hag straight off the Scottish moors, or at least a straggle-haired hippie with a parlorful of hookahs, but I am disappointed on both counts. Clovis is astonishingly young and as ordinary looking as the complex in which she lives. The interior of her apartment betrays the life of a beldame in only the most subtle ways—the candles on the end tables crusted with drips of dried wax but tall as when first lit; an apothecary’s chest in the kitchen labeled with names of rare herbs—but she has not bothered to replace the wall-to-wall carpeting or the vertical blinds that go clackety-clack when the air conditioning kicks on. The furniture is mod in style, probably inherited, and the pictures on the walls don’t quite appeal to the imagination. It’s not at all like
our
house, or the houses of the Jesters or Peacocks.

Marguerite proffers an ambrosia cake wrapped in wax paper and Clovis offers us each a glass of iced tea. The subject is broached after a brief interval of sipping, compliments, and inquiries as to the brand of tea and ratio of sugar used. “All I ask,” says Clovis, “is that you do not question my methods.”

“Of course, of course,” says Dymphna.

“We won’t have to exhume him, will we?” I ask.

Helena sniffs. “Don’t be absurd, Evelyn. I’d never allow it.”

“But, Mother, your reputation!” Deborah cries.

“Certain things are more important than one’s reputation, respect for the dead being first among them.” Helena pauses. “Clovis?”

“It really won’t be necessary.”

My sister sighs in relief.

“But I will need two or three of your husband’s possessions, the dearer or more frequently handled the better. Do you have a lock of his hair, by any chance?”

Helena raises her hand to her neck and lifts the glass locket so Clovis can see it.

“Good. And the last thing I need is a handful of grave dirt. Will that be a problem?”

My sister shakes her head. “He’s buried in town.”

“Good. But don’t bring it to me in Tupperware or plastic of any kind, understand? Use a tin cup.”

W
E G
o home again so Helena can gather a couple gardening tools and a tin measuring cup from the kitchen cupboard, but they all leave again without me. As I say, I never set foot in a graveyard if I can help it.

Vega’s left a pitcher of lemonade and a quarter of an ambrosia cake on the porch table, bless her heart, and I sit on the swing with the daily Sudoku sipping the sweet stuff and occasionally writing down a number. After a few minutes I look up and see Justin coming down the street. It’s too late—he’s already seen me. I glance down at myself as if I don’t already know I’m not the Eve he knows. But he can’t have found me out—he’s
waving!

“Mrs. Harbinger!” he calls as he comes up the front walk. “How are you?”

Confusion gives way to relief. He’s mistaken me for Helena! That’s fine, that’s just fine—so long as they don’t come back from the graveyard before he leaves.

“Hello, Justin.” I’ve assumed my most grandmotherly intonation. “Would you like a glass of lemonade?”

“That’s very kind of you, thanks,” he says as I pick up a clean drinking glass that wasn’t there a second ago and fill it to the brim.

He seats himself on a wicker chair opposite me and I expect he’ll ask if I’m home, and if not, where I am, but he throws me for a loop. “I’d like to talk to you about Eve,” he says.

“What about Eve?”

“What I want to say is—I think she’s
it.”

“Pardon me?”

“Well. You know,” Justin says, growing considerably red in the face.
“The one.”

Oh dear. Oh
no
.

“I was hoping you could give me some advice, Mrs. Harbinger. And maybe you could arrange for me to meet her parents?”

“Her parents are dead.” As I say these words I wonder for the first time what my mother might have thought of him. She’d never have approved, I know that much—just as she’d never have approved of Jonah. What surprises me most is that he’s given me no inkling this was coming; he’s never expressed any desire for me to meet
his
parents.

“Oh. I guess I should have known,” he says slowly. “She never mentions them.”

I steel myself for the words I wish I didn’t have to say. “Will you take my advice, Justin?”

He nods.

“I know that you and Eve have been enjoying each other’s company very much over these last few months—”

“Nearly a year.”

“Pardon?” (He’s been keeping track! There’s a thrill.)

“We’ve been dating nearly a year. That’s a lot more than a ‘few.’ ”

“Just so. But, Justin, you mustn’t talk of marriage.”

“But she loves me. I know she does.”

“It isn’t a matter of love. She simply isn’t free to marry.”

“Not free to marry?” He stares at me. “What, is she married already?”

“It isn’t that.” I’m growing rather exasperated here. “But you must trust me, Justin. Enjoy her company, but don’t ask for any more than that.”

“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Harbinger. I thought you approved of me.”

“My
dear
boy, it has nothing whatever to do with you. But you must understand: oftentimes there are obstacles in life that we simply cannot surmount, no matter how determined we may be to live a happy life. I regret that I cannot explain further.” I reach for the pie knife with trembling fingers. “Now. Would you care for a slice of cake?”

J
USTIN LEAVES
soon afterward, hurt but trying not to show it. I wander inside and pour myself a dram at the parlor sideboard, though I can’t bring myself to drink it. I just stand there for a few moments, trembling and teary. Uncle Hy has moved on to the Irish Renaissance and is too engrossed even to notice I’m in the room. Nor does he notice that one of the jujus hanging from the mantelpiece is struggling to get down.

“I
told
you it would all end in tears, didn’t I?” The summer covention is technically over, but Auntie Em does tend to stay longer than the others.

I plop into the armchair by the fireplace and hide my face in my hands. “Kick me while I’m down, Auntie—that’s real classy.”

“Oh, Evelyn,” she says, now with a bit of sympathy. She’s managed to free herself from the hook, and with a considerable amount of clonking and squeaking of hinges, she seats herself beside me in the chair and pats me on the knee. “You know I only ever want what’s best for you, don’t you?” I glance up at the fireplace, where my mother’s juju has hung lifeless since the day we put it there, and a wave of despair leaves me in full-blown tears.

“I know you
think
you know what’s best for you,” Auntie Em is yammering on, “but you don’t and you never have. Never in my life, nor after it, have I known a girl so reckless as you. No, you’ve only known what’s best in the present moment—but as a wise dame once said, ‘The ephemeral pleasures of life grow more fleeting by the hour.’ ”

I shake off her little wooden hand. “Oh, shove it.” Then I pretty much lose it, and to her credit Auntie says no more. I’ll take her tiny wooden shoulder over none at all.

B
Y THE
time the girls have returned I am back on the porch swing and more or less recovered. Helena clasps the tin measuring cup full of grave dirt in both hands as she comes up the steps. If you didn’t know better you’d think she’d just hit up a neighbor for some extra coffee grounds. (Ugh, coffee grounds! This whole business makes me want never to drink another cup as long as I live.) Dymphna says she will return at a quarter past nine for our rendezvous with the hysterix.

“Wouldn’t we all be more comfortable doing it here at home?” Rosamund asks as they file through the front door. “Her sitting room could hardly fit us all.”

“It isn’t a matter of comfort, dear,” Morven explains as they disappear into the house. “It’s just that unwanted company is harder to get rid of when it’s your own kin.”

Someone takes the cup from Helena to stow for safekeeping, and she sits down beside me on the porch swing as Vega pours her a glass of lemonade. Once we’re alone, I consider asking her why she told us she never used that spellbook when everything we saw in the View-Master proved she had.

But truth be told, I don’t really want to know. So instead I say, “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not looking so good. You don’t
have
to go, you know.”

“All will be well,” she replies, though it seems like she’s only trying to convince herself.

All is not well, as it turns out: when Dymphna arrives at a quarter past nine, mad-cow Lucretia is with her. Morven puts a restraining grip on my arm. “With all due respect, Dymphna, I’m not sure Lucretia’s presence is appropriate,” she says. “This matter is so sensitive that I would be afraid any tension among our group would have an adverse effect on the outcome tonight.”

“That is a fair point,” Dymphna replies. “But I am willing to risk it. You all should know that I asked Lucretia to be here. This way the matter can be thoroughly laid to rest.”

Some of us walk and some of us take the loo. “Oh,” says Clovis as we file first out of her powder room, then through her front door. “There are even more of you this time. It may be a little snug.” She leads us into her dining room, where the candles are already lit. There aren’t enough seats around the table so Lucretia has to sit in a spare chair in a corner, half-hidden by the bulk of a china cabinet, and her scowl would put any gargoyle to shame.

Helena’s daughters place Henry’s belongings at the center of the table—comb, cuff links, fountain pen, grave dirt—and Helena unfastens the glass locket and lays it down with exaggerated care.

“Are we ready to begin? Now. I want you all to close your eyes and fix in your mind the face of Henry Dryden. If you did not know him, just visualize any photograph of him that you may have seen.”

After a minute I open an eye. I haven’t been to many of these, I’ll admit, but this first part never gets any less boring. Clovis jerks her head and looks at me and I quickly shut it again.

“I summon the spirit of Henry Dryden,” she intones in that very old language, “from the far reaches of the Unknown, so that we may learn the truth of his demise. In this way, we hope to lay his spirit to rest at last.”

From the darkened sitting room beyond come a mechanical-sounding pop and a blue flash of light, as if the television has been switched on. We open our eyes. A shadow approaches the doorway between the rooms, and when it reaches the dining room threshold it grows lighter, comes into focus.

“Hallo, Henry,” I say. Everybody gasps. He gazes at Helena and she looks positively terrified. There are soft cries of “Daddy!” and more than one of us begin to weep.

His physical presence is a little hard to describe. Let’s just say he looks like a bad photocopy, only three dimensional. We can see straight through his waistcoat and tie.