The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (170 page)

The next week, Hoffman bought Esther a large white rabbit.

“If you do the tricks for the children, you should have a rabbit,” he told her.

Esther hugged him. She said, “I’ve never had a rabbit.”

Hoffman lifted the rabbit from the cage. It was an unnaturally enormous rabbit.

“Is it pregnant?” Esther asked.

“No, she is not. She is only large.”

“That’s an extremely large rabbit for any magic trick,” Ace observed.

Esther said, “They haven’t invented the hat big enough to pull that rabbit out of.”

“She actually folds up to a small size,” Hoffman said. He held the rabbit between his hands as if she were an accordion and squeezed her into a great white ball.

“She seems to like that,” Ace said, and Esther laughed.

“She doesn’t mind it. Her name is Bonnie.” Hoffman held the rabbit forward by the nape of her neck, as though she were a massive kitten. Dangling fully stretched like that, she was bigger than a big raccoon.

“Where’d you get her?” Esther asked.

“From the newspaper!” Hoffman announced, beaming.

Esther liked Bonnie the rabbit more than she liked her trick doves and parakeets, who were attractive enough but were essentially only pigeons that had been lucky with their looks. Ace liked Bonnie, too. He allowed Bonnie to enjoy the entirety of his large Victorian home, with little regard for her pellets, which were small, rocky, and inoffensive. She particularly enjoyed sitting in the center of the kitchen table, and from that spot would regard Ace, Esther, and Hoffman gravely. In this manner, Bonnie was very feline.

“Will she always be this judgmental?” Esther asked.

Bonnie became more canine when she was allowed outdoors. She would sleep on the porch, lying on her side in a patch of sun, and if anyone approached the porch she would look up at
that person lazily, in the manner of a bored and trustful dog. At night, she slept with Hoffman. He tended to sleep on his side, curled like a child, and Bonnie would sleep upon him, perched on his highest point, which was generally his hip.

As a performer, however, Bonnie was useless. She was far too large to be handled gracefully onstage, and on the one occasion that Esther did try to produce her from a hat, she hung in the air so sluggishly that the children in the back rows were sure that she was a fake. She appeared to be a huge toy, as store-bought as their own stuffed animals.

“Bonnie will never be a star,” Hoffman said.

Ace said, “You spoiled her, Richard, the way the magicians have been spoiling their lovely assistants for decades. You spoiled Bonnie by sleeping with her.”

That spring, a young lawyer and his wife (who was also a young lawyer) moved into the large Victorian house next door to Ace Douglas’s large Victorian house. It all happened very swiftly. The widow who had lived there for decades died in her sleep, and the place was sold within a few weeks. The new neighbors had great ambitions. The husband, whose name was Ronald Wilson, telephoned Ace and asked whether there were any problems he should know about in the area, regarding water-drainage patterns or frost heaves. Ronald had plans for a garden and was interested in building an arbor to extend from the back of the house. His wife, whose name was Ruth-Ann, was running for probate judge of the county. Ronald and Ruth-Ann were tall and had perfect manners. They had no children.

Three days after the Wilsons moved in next door, Bonnie the rabbit disappeared. She was on the porch, and then she was not.

Hoffman searched all afternoon for Bonnie. On Esther’s recommendation, he spent that evening walking up and down the road with a flashlight, looking to see if Bonnie had been hit by a car. The next day, he walked through the woods behind the
house, calling the rabbit for hours. He left a bowl of cut vegetables on the porch, with some fresh water. Several times during the night, Hoffman got up to see whether Bonnie was on the porch, eating the food. Eventually, he just wrapped himself in blankets and lay down on the porch swing, keeping a vigil beside the vegetables. He slept out there for a week, changing the food every morning and evening, to keep the scent fresh.

Esther made a poster with a drawing of Bonnie (which looked very much like a spaniel in her rendering) and a caption reading: large rabbit missing. She stapled copies of the poster on telephone poles throughout town and placed a notice in the newspaper. Hoffman wrote a letter to the neighbors, Ronald and Ruth-Ann Wilson, and slid it under their door. The letter described Bonnie’s color and weight, gave the date and time of her disappearance, and requested any information on the subject at all. The Wilsons did not call with news, so the next day Hoffman went over to their house and rang the doorbell. Ronald Wilson answered.

“Did you get my letter?” Hoffman asked.

“About the rabbit?” Ronald said. “Have you found him?”

“The rabbit is a girl. And the rabbit belongs to my daughter. She was a gift. Have you seen her?”

“She didn’t get in the road, did she?”

“Is Bonnie in your house, Mr. Wilson?”

“Is Bonnie the rabbit’s name?”

“Yes.”

“How would Bonnie get in our house?”

“Perhaps you have some broken window in the basement?”

“You think she’s in our basement?”

“Have you looked for her in your basement?”

“No.”

“Can I look for her?”

“You want to look for a rabbit in our basement?”

The two men stared at each other for some time. Ronald
Wilson was wearing a baseball cap, and he took it off and rubbed the top of his head, which was balding. He put the baseball cap back on.

“Your rabbit is not in our house, Mr. Hoffman,” Wilson said.

“Okay,” Hoffman said. “Okay. Sure.”

Hoffman walked back home. He sat at the kitchen table and waited until Ace and Esther were both in the room to make his announcement.

“They took her,” he said. “The Wilsons took Bonnie.”

Hoffman started to build the tower in July. There was a row of oak trees between Ace Douglas’s house and the Wilsons’ house, and the leaves from these trees blocked Hoffman’s view into their home. For several months, he’d been spending his nights watching the Wilson house from the attic window with binoculars, looking for Bonnie inside, but he could not see into the lower floor rooms for the trees, and was frustrated. Ace reassured him that the leaves would be gone by autumn, but Hoffman was afraid that Bonnie would be dead by autumn. This was difficult for him to take. He was no longer allowed to go over to the Wilsons’ property and look into the basement windows, since Ruth-Ann Wilson had called the police. He was no longer allowed to write threatening letters. He was no longer allowed to call the Wilsons on the telephone. He had promised Ace and Esther all of these things.

“He’s really harmless,” Esther told Ruth-Ann Wilson, although she herself was not sure this was the case.

Ronald Wilson found out somehow that Hoffman had been in prison, and he’d contacted the parole officer, who contacted Hoffman and suggested that he leave the Wilsons alone.

“If you would only let him search your home for the rabbit,” Ace Douglas had suggested gently to the Wilsons, “this would be over very quickly. Just give him a half-hour to look around.
It’s just that he’s concerned that Bonnie is trapped in your basement.”

“We did not move here to let murderers into our home,” Ronald Wilson said.

“He’s not a murderer,” Esther protested, somewhat lamely.

“He scares my wife.”

“I don’t want to scare your wife,” Hoffman said.

“He’s really harmless,” Esther insisted. “Maybe you could buy him a new rabbit.”

“I don’t want any new rabbit.”

“You scare my wife,” Ronald repeated. “We don’t owe you any rabbit at all.”

In late spring, Hoffman cut down the smallest oak tree between the two houses. He did it on a Monday afternoon, when the Wilsons were at work and Esther was performing magic for a Girl Scouts’ party and Ace was shopping. Hoffman had purchased a chain saw weeks earlier and had been hiding it. The tree wasn’t very big, but it fell at a sharp diagonal across the Wilsons’ back yard, narrowly missing their arbor and destroying a substantial corner of the garden.

The police came. After a great deal of negotiating, Ace Douglas was able to prove that the oak tree, while between the two houses, was actually on his property, and it was his right to have it cut down. He offered to pay generously for the damages. Ronald Wilson came over to the house again that night, but he would not speak until Ace sent Hoffman from the room.

“Do you understand our situation?” he asked.

“I do,” Ace said. “I honestly do.”

The two men sat at the kitchen table across from each other for some time. Ace offered to get Ronald some coffee, which he refused.

“How can you live with him?” Ronald asked.

Ace did not answer this but got himself some coffee. He
opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk, which he smelled and then poured down the sink. After this, he smelled his cup of coffee, which he poured down the sink, as well.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Ronald asked.

“Is Richard my boyfriend? No. He’s my very good friend. And he’s my brother-in-law.”

“Really,” Ronald said. He was working his wedding band around his finger, as though he were screwing it on tight.

“You thought it was a dream come true to buy that nice old house, didn’t you?” Ace Douglas asked. He managed to say this in a friendly, sympathetic way.

“Yes, we did.”

“But it’s a nightmare, isn’t it? Living next to us?”

“Yes, it is.”

Ace Douglas laughed, and Ronald Wilson laughed, too.

“It’s a complete fucking nightmare, actually.”

“I’m very sorry that your wife is afraid of us, Ronald.”

“Well.”

“I truly am.”

“Thank you. It’s difficult. She’s a bit paranoid sometimes.”

“Well,” Ace said, again in a friendly and sympathetic way. “Imagine that. Paranoid! In this neighborhood?”

The two men laughed again. Meanwhile, in the other room, Esther was talking to her father.

“Why’d you do it, Dad?” she asked. “Such a pretty tree.”

He had been weeping.

“Because I am so sad,” he said, finally. “I wanted them to feel it.”

“To feel how sad you were?” she said.

“To feel how sad I am,” he told her. “How sad I am.”

Anyway, in July he started to build the tower.

Ace had an old pickup truck, and Hoffman drove it to the
municipal dump every afternoon so that he could look for wood and scrap materials. He built the base of the tower out of pine reinforced with parts of an old steel bed frame. By the end of July, the tower was over ten feet high. He wasn’t planning on building a staircase inside, so it was a solid cube.

The Wilsons called the zoning board, which fined Ace Douglas for erecting an unauthorized structure on his property, and insisted that the work stop immediately.

“It’s only a tree house,” Esther lied to the zoning officer.

“It’s a watchtower,” Hoffman corrected. “So that I can see into the neighbors’ house.”

The zoning officer gave Hoffman a long, empty look.

“Yes,” Hoffman said. “This truly is a watchtower.”

“Take it down,” said the zoning officer to Esther. “Take it down immediately.”

Ace Douglas owned a significant library of antique magic books, including several volumes that Hoffman himself had brought over from Hungary during the Second World War, and which had been old and valuable even then. Hoffman had purchased these rare books from Gypsies and dealers across Europe with the last of his family’s money. Some volumes were written in German, some in Russian, some in English.

The collection revealed the secrets of parlor magic, or drawing room magic, a popular pursuit of educated gentlemen at the turn of the century. The books spoke not of tricks, but of “diversions,” which were sometimes magical maneuvers but were just as often simple scientific experiments. Often, these diversions involved hypnosis, or the appearance of hypnosis, or would not be successful without a trained conspirator among the otherwise susceptible guests. A gentleman might literally use smoke and a mirror to evoke a ghost within the parlor. A gentleman might read a palm or levitate a tea tray. A gentleman
might simply demonstrate that an egg could stand on its end, or that magnets could react against one another, or that an electric current could turn a small motorized contrivance.

The books were exquisitely illustrated. Hoffman had given them to Ace Douglas back in the 1950s, because he had hoped for some time to re-create this lost European conjury in Pittsburgh. He had hoped to decorate a small area within the Pharaoh’s Palace in the manner of a formal upper-middle-class Hungarian drawing room, and to dress Ace in spats and kid gloves. Ace did study the books. But he found that there was no way to accurately replicate most of the diversions. The old tricks all called for common household items which were simply not common anymore: a box of paraffin, a pinch of snuff, a dab of beeswax, a spittoon, a watch fob, a ball of cork, a sliver of saddle soap. Even if such ingredients could be gathered, they would have no meaning to modern spectators. It would be museum magic. It would move nobody.

To Hoffman, this was a considerable disappointment. As a very young man he had watched the Russian charlatan and swindler necromancer Katanovsky perform such diversions in his mother’s drawing room. His mother, recently widowed, wore dark gowns decorated with china-blue silk ribbons precisely the same shade as the famous blue vials of Hoffman’s Rose Water. Her face was that of a determined regent. His sisters, in childish pinafores, regarded Katanovsky in a pretty stupor of wonder. Gathered in the drawing room as a family, they had all heard it. Hoffman himself—his eyes stinging from phosphorous smoke—had heard it: the unmistakable voice of his recently dead father speaking through Katanovsky’s own dark mouth. A father’s message (in perfectly accentless Hungarian!) of reassurement. A thrilling, intimate call to faith.

And so it was unfortunate for Hoffman that Ace Douglas could not replicate this diversion. He would’ve liked to see it tried again. It must have been a very simple swindle, although
an antique one. Hoffman would have liked to hear the hoax voice of his dead father repeated and explained to him fully and—if necessary—repeated again.