The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (169 page)

Esther turned eight years old, and the Hoffmans celebrated her birthday with a special party at the Pharaoh’s Palace. That night, there was a thief sitting in the cocktail lounge.

He didn’t look like a thief. He was dressed well enough, and he was served without any trouble. The thief drank a few martinis. Then, in the middle of the magic show, he leaped over the bar, kicked the bartender away, punched the cash register open, and ran out of the Pharaoh’s Palace with his hands full of tens and twenties.

The customers were screaming, and Hoffman heard it from the kitchen. He chased the thief into the parking lot and caught him by the hair.

“You steal from me?” he yelled. “You fucking steal from me?”

“Back off, pal,” the thief said. The thief ’s name was George Purcell, and he was drunk.

“You fucking steal from me?” Hoffman yelled.

He shoved George Purcell into the side of a yellow Buick. Some of the customers had come outside, and were watching from the doorway of the restaurant. Ace Douglas came out, too. He walked past the customers, into the parking lot, and lit a cigarette. Ace Douglas watched as Hoffman lifted the thief by his shirt and threw him against the hood of a Cadillac.

“Back off me!” Purcell said.

“You fucking steal from me?”

“You ripped my shirt!” Purcell cried, aghast. He was looking down at his ripped shirt when Hoffman shoved him into the side of the yellow Buick again.

Ace Douglas said, “Richard? Could you take it easy?” (The
Buick was his, and it was new. Hoffman was steadily pounding George Purcell’s head into the door.) “Richard? Excuse me? Excuse me, Richard. Please don’t damage my car, Richard.”

Hoffman dropped the thief to the ground and sat on his chest. He caught his breath and smiled. “Don’t ever,” he explained, “ever. Don’t ever steal from me.”

Still sitting on Purcell’s chest, he calmly picked up the tens and twenties that had fallen on the asphalt and handed them to Ace Douglas. Then he slid his hand into Purcell’s back pocket and pulled out a wallet, which he opened. He took nine dollars from the wallet, because that was all the money he found there. Purcell was indignant.

“That’s my money!” he shouted. “You can’t take my money!”

“
Your
money?” Hoffman slapped Purcell’s head. “
Your
money?
Your
fucking money?”

Ace Douglas tapped Hoffman’s shoulder lightly and said, “Richard? Excuse me? Let’s just wait for the police, okay? How about it, Richard?”

“
Your
money?” Hoffman was slapping Purcell in the face now with the wallet. “You fucking steal from me, you have no money! You fucking steal from me, I own all your money!”

“Aw, Jesus,” Purcell said. “Quit it, will ya? Leave me alone, will ya?”

“Let him be,” Ace Douglas said.

“
Your
money? I own all your money!” Hoffman bellowed. “I own you! You fucking steal from me, I own your fucking
shoes!
”

Hoffman lifted Purcell’s leg and pulled off one of his shoes. It was a nice brown leather wingtip. He hit Purcell with it once in the face and tore off the other shoe. He beat on Purcell a few times with that shoe until he lost his appetite for it. Then he just sat on Purcell’s chest for a while, catching his breath, hugging the shoes and rocking in a sad way.

“Aw, Jesus,” Purcell groaned. His lip was bleeding.

“Let’s get up now, Richard,” Ace suggested.

After some time, Hoffman jumped off Purcell and walked back into the Pharaoh’s Palace, carrying the thief ’s shoes. His tuxedo was torn in one knee, and his shirt was hanging loose. The customers backed against the walls of the restaurant and let him pass. He went into the kitchen and threw Purcell’s shoes into one of the big garbage cans next to the potwashing sinks. He went into his office and shut the door.

The potwasher was a young Cuban fellow named Manuel. He picked George Purcell’s brown wingtips out of the garbage can and held one of them up against the bottom of his own foot. It seemed to be a good match, so he took off his own shoes and put on Purcell’s. Manuel’s shoes were plastic sandals, and these he threw away. A little later, Manuel watched with satisfaction as the chef dumped a vat of cold gravy on top of the sandals, and when he went back to washing pots, he whistled to himself a little song of good luck.

A policeman arrived. He handcuffed George Purcell and brought him into Hoffman’s office. Ace Douglas followed them.

“You want to press charges?” the cop asked.

“No,” Hoffman said. “Forget about it.”

“You don’t press charges, I have to let him go.”

“Let him go.”

“This man says you took his shoes.”

“He’s a criminal. He came in my restaurant with no shoes.”

“He took my shoes,” Purcell said. His shirt collar was soaked with blood.

“He never had no shoes on. Look at him. No shoes on his feet.”

“You took my money and my goddamn shoes, you animal. Twenty-dollar shoes!”

“Get this stealing man out of my restaurant, please,” Hoffman said.

“Officer?” Ace Douglas said. “Excuse me, but I was here the
whole time, and this man never did have any shoes on. He’s a derelict, sir.”

“But I’m wearing dress socks!” Purcell shouted. “Look at me! Look at me!”

Hoffman stood up and walked out of his office. The cop followed Hoffman, leading George Purcell. Ace Douglas trailed behind. On his way through the restaurant, Hoffman stopped to pick up his daughter, Esther, from her birthday party. He carried her out to the parking lot.

“Listen to me now,” he told Purcell. “You ever steal from me again, I’ll kill you.”

“Take it easy,” the cop said.

“If I even see you on the street, I’ll fucking kill you.”

The cop said, “You want to press charges, pal, you press charges. Otherwise, you take it easy.”

“He doesn’t like to be robbed,” Ace Douglas explained.

“Animal,” Purcell muttered.

“You see this little girl?” Hoffman asked. “My little girl is eight years old today. If I’m walking on the street with my little girl and I see you, I will leave her on one side of the street and I will cross the street and I will kill you in front of my little girl.”

“That’s enough,” the cop said. He led George Purcell out of the parking lot and took off his handcuffs.

The cop and the thief walked away together. Hoffman stood on the steps of the Pharaoh’s Palace, holding Esther and shouting. “Right in front of my little girl, you make me kill you? What kind of man are you? Crazy man! You ruin a little girl’s life! Terrible man!”

Esther was crying. Ace Douglas took her from Hoffman’s arms.

The next week, the thief George Purcell came back to the Pharaoh’s Palace. It was noon, and very quiet. The prep cook was making chicken stock, and Manuel the potwasher was cleaning out the dry goods storage area. Hoffman was in his
office, ordering vegetables from his wholesaler. Purcell came straight back into the kitchen, sober.

“I want my goddamn shoes!” he yelled, pounding on the office door. “Twenty-dollar shoes!”

Then Richard Hoffman came out of his office and beat George Purcell to death with a meat mallet. Manuel the potwasher tried to hold him back, and Hoffman beat him to death with the meat mallet, too.

Esther Hoffman did not grow up to be a natural magician. Her hands were dull. It was no fault of her own, just an unfortunate birth flaw. Otherwise, she was a bright girl.

Her uncle, Ace Douglas, had been the American champion close-up magician for three years running. He’d won his titles using no props or tools at all, except a single silver dollar coin. During one competition, he’d vanished and produced the coin for fifteen dizzying minutes without the expert panel of judges ever noticing that the coin spent a lot of time resting openly on Ace Douglas’s knee. He would put it there, where it lay gleaming to be seen if one of the judges had only glanced away for a moment from Ace’s hands. But they would never glance away, convinced that he still held a coin before them in his fingers. They were not fools, but they were dupes for his fake takes, his fake drops, his mock passes, and a larger cast of impossible moves so deceptive they went entirely unnoticed. Ace Douglas had motions he himself had never even named. He was a scholar of misdirection. He proscribed skepticism. His fingers were as loose and quick as thoughts.

But Esther Hoffman’s magic was sadly pedestrian. She did the Famous Dancing Cane trick, the Famous Vanishing Milk trick, and the Famous Interlocking Chinese Rings trick. She produced parakeets from light bulbs and pulled a dove from a burning pan. She performed at birthday parties and could float a child. She performed at grammar schools and could cut and
restore the neckties of principals. If the principal was a lady, Esther could borrow a ring from the principal’s finger, lose it, and then find it in a child’s pocket. If the lady principal wore no jewelry, Esther could simply run a sword through the woman’s neck while the children in the audience screamed in spasms of rapture.

Simple, artless tricks.

“You’re young,” Ace told her. “You’ll improve.”

But she did not. Esther made more money giving flute lessons to little girls than performing magic. She was a fine flutist, and this was maddening to her. Why all this worthless musical skill?

“Your fingers are very quick,” Ace told her. “There’s nothing wrong with your fingers. But it’s not about quickness, Esther. You don’t have to speed through coins.”

“I hate coins.”

“You should handle coins as if they amuse you, Esther. Not as if they frighten you.”

“With coins, it’s like I’m wearing oven mitts.”

“Coins are not always easy.”

“I never fool anybody. I can’t misdirect.”

“It’s not about misdirection, Esther. It’s about
direction
.”

“I don’t have hands,” Esther complained. “I have paws.”

It was true that Esther could only fumble coins and cards, and she would never be a deft magician. She had no gift. Also, she hadn’t the poise. Esther had seen photographs of her uncle when he was young at the Pharaoh’s Palace, leaning against patrician pillars of marble in his tuxedo and cufflinks. No form of magic existed that was close-up enough for him. He could sit on a chair surrounded on all sides by the biggest goons of spectators—people who challenged him or grabbed his arm in mid-pass—and he would borrow from a goon some common object and absolutely vanish it. Some goon’s car keys in Ace’s hand would turn into absolutely nothing. Absolutely gone.

Ace’s nightclub act at the Pharaoh’s Palace had been a tribute to the elegant vices: coins, cards, dice, champagne flutes, and cigarettes. Everything was to suggest and encourage drinking, sin, gamesmanship, and money. The fluidity of fortune. He could do a whole act of cigarette effects alone, starting with a single cigarette borrowed from a lady in the audience. He would pass it through a coin and give the coin to the lady. He would tear the cigarette in half and restore it, swallow it, cough it back up along with six more, duplicate them, and duplicate them again until he ended up with lit cigarettes smoking hot between all his fingers and in his mouth, behind his ears, emerging from every pocket—surprised? he was terrified!—and then, with a nod, all the lit cigarettes would vanish except the original. That one he would smoke luxuriously during the applause.

Also, Esther had pictures of her father during the same period, when he owned the Pharaoh’s Palace. He was handsome in his tuxedo, but with a heavy posture. She had inherited his thick wrists.

When Richard Hoffman got out of prison, he moved in with Ace and Esther. Ace had a tremendous home in the country by then, a tall yellow Victorian house with a mile of woods behind it and a lawn like a baron’s. Ace Douglas had made a tidy fortune from magic. He had operated the Pharaoh’s Palace from the time that Hoffman was arrested, and, with Hoffman’s permission, had eventually sold it at great profit to a gourmet restaurateur. Esther had been living with Ace since she’d finished high school, and she had a whole floor to herself. Ace’s little sister Angela had divorced Hoffman, also with his permission, and had moved to Florida to live with her new husband. What Hoffman had never permitted was for Esther to visit him in prison, and so it had been fourteen years since they’d seen each other. In prison he had grown even sturdier. He seemed shorter than Ace and Esther remembered, and some weight gained had made him more broad. He had also grown a thick
beard, with handsome red tones. He was easily moved to tears, or, at least, seemed to be always on the verge of being moved to tears. The first few weeks of living together again were not altogether comfortable for Esther and Hoffman. They had only the briefest conversations, such as this one:

Hoffman asked Esther, “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I’ve got undershirts older than you.”

Or, in another conversation, Hoffman said, “The fellows I met in prison are the nicest fellows in the world.”

And Esther said, “Actually, Dad, they probably aren’t.”

And so on.

In December of that year, Hoffman attended a magic show of Esther’s, performed at a local elementary school.

“She’s really not very good,” he reported later to Ace.

“I think she’s fine,” Ace said. “She’s fine for the kids, and she enjoys herself.”

“She’s pretty terrible. Too dramatic.”

“Perhaps.”

“She says,
BEHOLD
! It’s terrible.
BEHOLD
this!
BEHOLD
that!”

“But they’re children.” Ace said. “With children, you need to explain when you’re about to do a trick and when you just did one, because they’re so excited they don’t realize what’s going on. They don’t even know what a magician is. They can’t tell the difference between when you’re doing magic and when you’re just standing there.”

“I think she’s very nervous.”

“Could be.”

“She says,
BEHOLD THE PARAKEET
!”

“Her parakeet tricks are not bad.”

“It’s not dignified,” Hoffman said. “She convinces nobody.”

“It’s not meant to be dignified, Richard. It’s for the children.”