The Fall of the Year (21 page)

At noon the northern Vermont sky was still blue as blue, though the midday forecast predicted that a storm was on its way. An unusually early hurricane, the first of the year, was working its way up the eastern seaboard, and its tail was scheduled to swing inland and arrive in the village sometime the following day. High above the common, atop the courthouse tower, Blackhawk was beginning to shift toward the southeast; a storm was certainly possible.

At two o'clock the hotel lobby was empty. I climbed up to the third floor and tapped on the half-open door. There was no reply. Mr. Moriarity Mentality was right where I'd left him, lying fully dressed on his back on the bed. The reading light shone down on his pallid face, which, with its partly open eyes, looked like the face of a corpse waiting to be embalmed. He had kicked off one shoe, revealing a grayish big toe jutting through a hole in his sock.

“Mr. Mentality?”

Nothing. For a dreadful moment I thought the mind reader might actually have expired in his sleep. But thankfully no—his toe gave just the slightest twitch.

I reached out and tugged it gently. “Mr. Mentality. Wake up.”

“Whah!” the mentalist cried out in an astonishingly powerful voice and sat bolt upright, his topaz eyes terror-stricken. “Where am I? Who are you?”

“It's Frank Bennett. You're all right, Mr. Mentality. You're in Kingdom Common. Here's your newspaper.”

But Moriarity Mentality just looked at me blankly. “Why would I want a newspaper?” he said. “Let's head out, Bob.”

On the walkabout, Mr. Mentality did not seem especially interested in the town and didn't ask many questions. Instead he delivered a running monologue in his querulous southwestern drawl about the indignities of aging and the slings and arrows routinely encountered by a man in his embattled profession. From the hotel we walked up Anderson Hill past Judge Allen's place and the Big House. At the crest of the hill we stood looking down at the back of the long brick shopping block and the courthouse and Academy across the common. Framed by abrupt green hills rising to darker green mountains, Kingdom Common this sunny afternoon looked as free of strife and care as a Currier and Ives lithograph.

“Peaceful, isn't it?” I said.

“Appears peaceful from here,” Mr. Mentality said. “It does appear peaceful from here.” He pointed past the American Heritage mill, over the steep roofs of the bright row houses of Little Quebec, at the ridge east of town. “Who lives in that shack away up yonder in them piney woods?”

“Louvia DeBanville. The village fortuneteller.”

The mind reader reflected for a moment. “Can't say that I ever put a great deal of stock in fortunetellers and all such like that. Gal consults with them now and again. Let's have us a look-see at your town hall, Bob. Then we'll call it quits for the afternoon.”

The town hall was a long three-story brick houseboat of a building located at the north end of the village, just past the bank and catty-corner from the hotel. The auditorium took up the entire ground floor. A rickety balcony ran around three sides of the room, and a makeshift projection booth jutted out from the upper rear wall. The wooden floor slanted sharply down toward the stage like the deck of a ship sliding down a steep wave. Some of the thin plywood seats were missing.

Mr. Mentality sat down, looked around and nodded. “Well, Bob,” he said, “Carnegie Hall this is not.”

I laughed and sat down beside him.

“This hall holds what? Five hundred? So if we half fill her tonight at two dollars a head for grown folks, a buck a throw for kids, say half the audience is kids, split with the church sponsors sixty-forty my way, this old trouper's share of the take would be . . .” He began to figure on his fingers, got mixed up and started over, derailed himself again, looked up at the ceiling of the hall in exasperation.

In the meantime I did some quick calculations. “Two hundred and twenty-five dollars?”

The mentalist nodded and said, “Wonderment is that I can still work at all. Speaking of which, ain't that painting up there one?”

“One what?”

“A wonderment.”

He was pointing at the picture of the village painted on the backdrop of the stage, a mural I had seen so many times over the years that I'd come to take it for granted. Just during the five or so minutes since Mr. Mentality and I had arrived, the sun had gone behind a bank of clouds, and the scene in the mural had faded from mid- to late afternoon.

“Amazing effect, ain't it?” Mr. Mentality said. “Daylight fades, it fades. Interesting as anything you'll find in your big city museums, New York, over across, wherever. One thing we have to give these little one-horse towns, Bob.”

“What's that?”

“The wonderments ain't all been leached out of them.”

Mr. Mentality stood up. “Coming to the show tonight?”

“I wouldn't miss it.”

“Neither would I,” the mind reader said, heading up the aisle. At the door he stopped and gave me the very slightest grin that could still be called a grin. “Unless, of course, it should slip my mind.”

 

Father George and I walked down Anderson Hill to the town hall that evening at quarter after seven. “Mr. Moriarity Mentality, Mind Reader, Tonight Only at 7:30,” the announcement on the marquee said. Half of the dim string of silver lights around the border were burned out, and the others flickered as though about to expire at any moment. A disappointingly small crowd was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the hall for Roy Quinn, from the church committee, to open the ticket booth. Father George shook his head, no doubt thinking of former times, when a traveling showman would fill the hall to overflowing.

“Mind reader indeed,” said a harsh voice nearby.

Father George whirled around faster than I would have thought he could still move. “Louvia!”

“None other.” The fortuneteller, standing in line two places behind us, was so short that I had to peer out around a pair of twelve-year-old girls to see her. She was dressed to the nines for the show. A royal blue shawl, a former tablecloth, I thought, was draped over her shoulders, setting off the same red plush dress she'd worn for the citizenship swearing-in ceremony. Her hair, piled high on her head, was so dark it glinted. Her fingers glittered with rings, her tiny oval ears were adorned with blue glass sequins, and her homemade rouge gave off a macabre glow.

“I'm surprised you're going to let this charlatan impose on us tonight,” Louvia said to Father George. “He's no more than a licensed confidence man, and you and I both know it.”

The line moved a few steps closer as Roy Quinn opened the ticket booth. “Get back where you belong,” Louvia snapped at the two young girls. “Do you want me to cross your eyes and give you each a wart on the end of your nose?”

They shrieked with delight—none of the children in the village were at all afraid of Louvia—but she wasn't through with Father George yet. “You know this imposter works with a confederate, and that makes him a con artist. I work alone.”

“Who's his confederate?” I asked.

“Ask me something difficult. It's obviously that fat woman he lugs around with him. ‘The Petrograd Princess.' Well, the Petrograd Princess was snooping all over town this afternoon, gathering information for the fraud. She even paraded up to my place and pretended to want her fortune read. I read her something she won't soon forget.”

Louvia shot me a look over her gold-rimmed dress spectacles. “This so-called mentalist is nothing but a two-bit scam artist, Frank. Sit near me tonight. I'll have him reduced to tears long before the eggs and tomatoes start.”

We selected three seats two rows back from the stage, with me in the middle between Father George and Louvia, who insisted on taking the aisle seat.

A moment later the kids in the balcony began clapping and stomping their feet in unison for the show to begin. Sheriff White came down the aisle and held up his hands for silence. The stomping intensified. At its crescendo, the house lights went off and the Petrograd Princess wheeled a portable blackboard out onto the stage. In the footlights she looked dowdier than ever. Her lime chiffon evening gown was tattered and smudged. One strap had been mended by a safety pin as big as a bass plug. Her slip showed in back. Her hair was a washed-out shade of blond.

“Please, boys and girls,” the Princess called out. “Mr. Mentality will be with you momentarily.”

When at last the clamor had subsided somewhat, the Princess announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, just returned from a triumphal tour of Europe, Asia, and the subcontinent, the world-renowned mentalist, Moriarity Mentality. “

Except for a black frock coat and a green felt stovepipe hat caved in on top, the illusionist looked as seedy as ever. Slight as an underfed waif, his cloak hanging from his frame like an old coat on a scarecrow, his face and eyes positively cadaverous in the footlights, he looked old, out of place, far from well, and close to desperate.

“Here at last, the flimflam man!” Louvia shouted.

“Louvia, hush, or we'll have you removed from the hall,” Deacon Roy Quinn hissed from across the aisle.

“Try it, you hypocrite. I'll snatch your eyes out.”

For a moment the spotlight wavered on the fortuneteller. Then it jerked to the Princess, now dragging a card table out onto the stage in front of the blackboard. The light swung back onto Mr. Mentality, who stood stock-still in its dusty beam as if consumed by stage fright. “Look at him,” Louvia said loudly. “He doesn't even bother to polish his shoes. He looks more like a railroad tramp than a magician.”

“I never set myself up as that much of a magic-man,” Mr. Mentality said mildly. “More of a mentalist, you could say.”

Hurriedly, as though to cut off further dialogue with the audience, the Princess said, “Mr. Moriarity Mentality will begin by amazing the house with rapid arithmetical calculations. He will take any three-digit multiplication problem.”

“Eight hundred sixty-two times four hundred and twelve,” someone sang out from the rear of the hall.

As the Princess started to write the problem on the blackboard, Mr. Mentality said, “Four hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and forty-four.”

For a moment, while the Princess calculated, the hall was silent. The only noise was the tapping of her chalk. Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be
three
hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and forty-four.

The mind reader shrugged. “Missed her by a digit.”

“You missed her by a cool hundred thousand digits,” Louvia shouted.

Over the laughter, the Princess invited the audience to set Mr. Mentality another problem.

“Square root of six hundred and twenty-five,” Father George said, obviously trying to help him out.

Mr. Mentality frowned. He started to say something, hesitated, then stood beside the card table with his mouth slightly open as the Princess waited by the blackboard, chalk poised to write his answer. “Sometimes it's right there on the tip of my tongue but I can't spit it out,” he said.

Louvia whirled to face Roy Quinn. “Make the fraud refund our money.”

As the audience began to murmur agreement, the Princess swung the portable blackboard around. Scrawled in childish block numbers on the back side was the figure 25.

“Amateur sleight of hand,” Louvia shouted. “A cheap carnival trick. The woman scribbled it while we were distracted. If you're such a great mentalist, where's my Daughter? I misplaced her earlier today.”

“You misplaced your daughter?” Mr. Mentality said in an incredulous voice.

“See? He doesn't have the faintest clue what I'm talking about. My gazing stone, ninny. Where's my beautiful quartz gazing stone?”

Mr. Mentality peered up the left sleeve of his coat. “In here, maybe?”

To his consternation, instead of Louvia's rose quartz crystal, he produced three live doves, pink, yellow, and blue, which promptly became entangled in the ream of multicolored scarves he'd accidentally unraveled from his sleeve at the same time.

To a gale of laughter the Princess rushed offstage with the fluttering mess. Suddenly, amidst the laughing and catcalling, a fishbowl with a pinkish object suspended in it appeared on the card table beside the flustered mind reader. The Princess, returned from the wings, reached into the bowl and pulled out Louvia's gazing stone. She approached the footlights, made a small palms-up stage gesture, and the ball appeared in Louvia's hands.

“Aiee!” Louvia screamed out. “The fraud's paramour must have stolen it from my house this afternoon. Jail the thieves.”

“We purloin nothing,” the Princess said in her formal theatrical voice. “Please, fortuneteller. Rejoice in the restoration of your Daughter.”

“One affront follows another. Now the trollop patronizes me.”

But Mr. Mentality's success with Louvia's gazing stone had earned him a reprieve from the hall's ire. Over the next several minutes he was allowed to proceed with his show, giving, upon request, the exact populations of Brisbane, Amsterdam, and Vladivostok; quoting verbatim from the classified ads in that week's
Monitor
, and accurately reciting a column of names and numbers from the thin local telephone directory. And while anyone might have told him before the show that Ben Currier's best Jersey had given birth to a six-legged monstrosity last Thursday, how did he know that on the same day, Old Lady Winifred Blake's dead grandmother had manifested herself to Winnie while she was picking snap beans and reprimanded her for leaving too many beans on the bushes?

At the Princess's urging, the people scattered through the hall moved down closer to the stage while the reader answered their questions. And for a time the show had the comfortable hominess of a neighborhood get-together with an amateur entertainer.

Now that he had hit his stride, Mr. Mentality concluded the first part of his show by confidently releasing more doves from his hat, drawing a skein of rainbow-colored sashes from the glass fishbowl, and shooting a deck of cards high out over the audience to form a spiral staircase of cards to the hall's ceiling, then pulling them neatly back into a tight pack again.