The Girl in the Glass (3 page)

"Whatever you say," I said, and as Schell turned out onto the road and gunned the engine, I recalled a few years earlier, when I was in the process of becoming Ondoo. We had taken the train to New York City to visit the lepidoptera display at the Museum of Natural History. Along our route, from the train station uptown, Schell had regaled me, apropos of nothing, at least it seemed so then, with his opinions concerning bigotry.

"I hold no preconceived prejudice against anyone," he'd said, "because to do so is utter folly for someone in my line of work. It's only ignorance that causes individuals to label an entire race as either good or bad. These are generalities so broad as to be both worthless and dangerous. I deal only in specifics. God, as they say, is in the details. I must focus on the unique traits of the individual in order to tailor an illusion that will ultimately enchant. To see others in this manner is to never give in to labeling. To fail to do this is the equivalent of putting on a blindfold. Do you understand? The devil is in the details." I understood well enough, and although, thanks to the reading I'd done the terms he used were not foreign to me, even at the age of fifteen it struck me as troubling that he'd never once mentioned the immorality of it. Schell never seemed to operate out of a sense of morality but instead took his cues solely from what worked and what didn't. In his view, prejudice wasn't evil, it was merely bad business. I asked him what he had in mind for Parks.

"Parks has never left the nursery, one might say, so I think we should keep things light. I'm considering levitations, some butterfly effects, and to steal your idea from last night, I thought we could have Antony pose as his mother."

"He'll have to go about on his knees," I said, laughing.

"Precisely," said Schell, smiling at the thought of it. "And as the hoary old Mrs. Parks, what should she say to her son? Think hard now, how should she address him? What does he want to hear from her?" I thought for a moment and said, "A good scolding."

Schell beeped the horn. "You're getting frighteningly expert at this," he said.

"Did you get a good look at the old lady's photograph?" I asked.

"Her image is emblazoned on my memory. Al Capone with rouge and a wig, minus the cigar," he said.

"I think Ma Parks should suggest a raise for Isabel."

Schell nodded. "Antony will have to start practicing his falsetto." When we arrived home, we found the future Ma Parks sitting at the kitchen table. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, his mountainous tattooed biceps on display. Upon hearing us, he looked up, and it was evident that he'd been crying.

"I hate to tell you guys this," he said, "but I got a call a little while ago from Sally Coots. He wanted to let us know that Morty bought the farm. Blew a fuse. They found him in his apartment." I watched the air go out of Schell as it went out of me. He took off his homburg, laid it on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. I did the same with my turban, and took the other seat. He simply stared, but the tears came easily to my eyes. We all sat there in silence for a long time, as if about to begin a séance.

Eventually Antony spoke. "Morty was a fucking ace."

"A gentleman and a pro," said Schell. "Best rope trick I ever saw. This truly marks the passing of an era." I dried my eyes. "Who's got Wilma?" I asked.

"Sally said that the snake was dead too, must've died from a broken heart when Mort went. They were two peas in a pod. Sally said Mort had told him a while ago that if anything happened to him, he wanted you should get Wilma since you were his prodigy."

Antony obviously meant
protégé
and in this he was correct. I had learned everything I knew about being a swami from Morton Lester.

In 1929, when the economy was really starting to slip and things got uglier than usual for illegals in the United States, citizens perceiving them as stealing scarce jobs, Schell and Antony were worried they might lose me. By 1930, Mexicans were being rounded up by law officers and "repatriated" across the border. Schell considered adopting me, but to do so would have made it necessary to reveal my illegal status. The nasty tenor of the times made him uneasy with this move, so it was decided that another way had to be found.

Schell had told me that one afternoon he was in the Bugatorium, reading a treatise from 1861 he had recently acquired by a famous British naturalist, Henry Walter Bates. In it, Bates discusses the ability of certain Amazon species of butterfly to practice mimicry. According to him, in some cases, butterflies, specifically the yellow or orange
Dismorphia
, which predators find particularly tasty, are able to change their outward appearance to mimic the appearance of less tasty brethren, most notably,
Heliconia
. It was while Schell was in the midst of reviewing this essay that a brainstorm struck, and he hit upon the idea of changing my nationality. By that time, I'd been at him for a while to find me a role in his business, and so he conceived of a persona for me, that of a mystical assistant, whose very presence elevated spiritual possibility.

As he'd put it at the time, "We can't change your complexion, so we'll shift your point of origin. From this day forward, you'll be a Hindu."

"But I know nothing of what a Hindu is or does," I said.

"Yes," he admitted, "but neither does anyone else. They'll maybe think of Gunga Din, or perhaps a brown man atop the back of an elephant, or, if you can carry it off, a turbaned swami whose holy presence negates the border between life and death."

"People will be fooled?" I asked.

"Diego, there was once a very famous Chinese magician whose name was Chung Ling Soo. He was world renowned. Part of his act was a trick called Defying the Bullets. Two bullets, marked by audience members, were loaded into rifles. Two marksmen fired across the stage at Soo. Night after night, he would catch those bullets on a china plate. One night, after having performed the trick for eighteen years, one of the guns malfunctioned, and a bullet was actually fired. It passed through his body, and he fell to the stage mortally wounded. When he was rushed to the hospital, it was discovered that he wasn't Chinese at all, but a fellow by the name of William E. Robinson. No one had ever suspected this, for Soo often spoke Chinese. Or was it Chinese? For all those years, he might have been mouthing gibberish. But he had the Oriental costume, beautiful stage settings, the right makeup." I never really considered what it would take for me to become a swami, and to be honest, I didn't care, as I was hot to participate in the séances. But I'd had to admit to Schell, "I don't know where to begin."

"Leave that to me," he'd said and went straight to his office and made a phone call. Early the next day, Antony and I took the train from Port Washington into Jamaica, and from there boarded a train for Coney Island. We arrived at the gate to the Nickel Empire by the sea at midmorning. I'd never been there before, but Antony had. Upon taking a look around, he proclaimed, "This place is looking shabby. I remember the old days here. What a blast, the Drop and Dip, the Red Devil, the Ben Hur Race, Hula Hula Land, and dinner at Stubenbord's. Jeez Louise, this place is a dump now." We walked along The Bowery until we came to Sam Wagner's World Circus Side Show. Antony gave me two dimes and told me to go in and find Chandra. "He knows you're coming," said Antony.

"Aren't you coming in?" I asked.

"I'd come with you, kid, but I'm afraid of seeing those pinheads they've got in there." He shivered slightly.

"They give me the yips. I'll be over banging the high strikers when you're done." I found Chandra, Prince of Swamis, after having spent a little time gaping at Laurello, the man with the revolving head, and Pipo and Zipo, pinheads extraordinaire. Chandra was a small, severe-looking Hindu fellow, sitting cross-legged on a platform before a velvet curtain. He wore a turban and a kind of diaper and was playing a long flutelike instrument with a bulge at the end. As he blew on that pipe, the odd music caused an enormous, hooded cobra to rise straight up out of a wicker basket that sat a few feet in front of him.

There were no customers around, so I stepped up, giving the snake a wide berth and said, "Excuse me, Mr. Chandra, I've been sent by Thomas Schell to see you."

He removed the flute slowly from his lips, but didn't turn his head to take me in. Instead, his eyes merely shifted while he remained facing the snake. He laid down the flute and rose in one fluid motion. As he stood, the snake descended back into the basket.

"Follow me," he said with a distinct Indian accent, parting the curtain and leading me down a hall to a large dressing room. Once we were inside, he turned and looked me straight in the eyes with a penetrating stare that made me uneasy. He pursed his lips and breathed out, and as the air left him he changed. Before he inhaled again, it became obvious to me, as it hadn't been at all before, that he was definitely not Indian but a white man with some kind of dark makeup applied to his skin. Suddenly, he smiled.

"So," he said, "how's those two knuckleheads you live with?" In my surprise, all I could do was nod.

"Tommy wants me to make you a swami? No sweat, kid, we got it covered."

ACE OF HEARTS

T
he next evening, Antony, Schell, and I drove to Flatbush for the wake. Upon entering the viewing parlor at the funeral home, shouts of "Tommy" and "Henry" went up. In my time with Morty, I'd gotten the idea that Schell was something of a celebrity among the show folk at Coney and with magicians and con artists from around the city. A lot of the old-timers still called Antony "Henry," which was his real name, Henry Bruhl. Antony Cleopatra had been his stage name, taken more than twenty years earlier from a Broadway marquee announcing a play about the famous ancient lovers. He didn't care what they called him but smiled and hugged them all anyway. I was introduced as the kid, or Diego, or Ondoo, my perceived identity shifting madly from one to the other.

I knew some of the crowd—Sal Coots, a magician who went by the moniker Saldonica the Wizard; the dog man, Hal Izzle, who had been born with a rare disease, the effects of which had left him hairy from head to foot; Marge Templeton, the fat lady; Peewee Dunnit, a two-bit con man who ran shell games and card scams all over the five boroughs; Miss Belinda, a female magician whose act involved twenty pigeons; and Jack Bunting, the legless spider boy, who walked on his hands and could bite a silver dollar in half. There were others, too: Captain Pierce, the retired, doddering knife thrower, and Hap Jackland, part-time geek, part-time traveling shoe salesman.

The place was packed. Morty was laid out in a coffin amid bouquets and floral arrangements at the front of the room, but the mood was less than somber. The constant rolling sound of conversation was occasionally interrupted by outbursts of raucous laughter. Every now and then, one of the mourners would wander up to the coffin, spend a few moments, and then drift away, drying his eyes. After the initial introductions, Schell whispered to me, "First things first," and nodded toward the coffin. We approached it together, and as we drew near, I felt a tightening in my stomach. I had seen death before, when I was younger, living with my brother on the streets. I found the prospect of its finality frightening, and no manner of study, no intellectual ideal, could offset that response. Schell must have sensed the difficulty I had standing there so close to it, and he put his arm lightly around my shoulders. Morty was frowning as he never had in life. Even in the guise of Chandra, when a serious demeanor was an integral part of his role, he worked to never let that solemnity slip into negativity. As he once told me,

"Look, kid, nobody's paying to come here and see me sniff shit for a dime. A swami isn't usually gonna be cutting up, telling jokes, but you gotta be careful that your look never slides into the sad or the angry,

'cause then your audience is gonna think you're judging them. You're supposed to be a metaphysical conundrum, not God almighty, get it?"

He was dressed in a brown suit and was wearing his eyeglasses. His sparse hair was neatly combed over his balding head. Whenever I'd seen him without the turban, that hair was in a twist or a whirl, but never combed. I shook my head to see how death puts its own disguise on a person. Coiled up next to the pillow on which his head rested was Wilma, his close companion and best friend. Who would have thought that a man and a snake could be so close, but they were. The snake had even answered to verbal commands. Morty told me that a lot of times all he had to do was think something and Wilma would do it. The cobra carried the name of a girl who'd once broken his heart. Schell took his arm from around my shoulders and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, retrieving a playing card. From his pocket to the coffin, he rolled it from finger to finger, turning it over and over, and I saw that it was the ace of hearts. Just before he laid it facedown on the satin, he snapped it, and said, "Okay, Morty." He forced a smile, although I could see sadness on his face (Schell never cried), and then turned away.

I stood there uneasily, unable to reach that place in my mind where I could hold a mental discussion with the dead. Behind me the conversation swelled and ebbed, and at one point I heard someone say, "How's the kid doing?" and Antony answered, "I swear to Christ, the kid's a damn genius." From another quarter, I heard someone say, "I'm developing a trick where I pull a pig out of a hat. A big pig. Anybody can pull a rabbit out, I'm pulling a pig as big as a dachshund." In answer, I heard Sally say, "You couldn't pull your dick out of your pants." There was a burst of laughter, and then the conversation turned somber as it moved onto the topic of Coney and how it was failing. "Morty's in better shape than that joint," said Peewee. Someone recounted the story of Electro's demise. "Dreadful," said Marge. "I was there. His eyeballs caught fire and smoke came out of his ears." "Sounds like my ex," said the dog man, and then he howled.

I was about to turn back to the group, when in the back of my mind I felt the stirrings of a memory. Concentrating on it, it slowly blossomed into a full-blown recollection. It was from the last day of my weeks of instruction with Morty. We sat at the counter at Nathan's, eating hot dogs. It was midsummer, overcast, in the middle of the week. The crowds had stayed away in droves, and the park was almost deserted. There was a breeze rolling in off the ocean, and rain was imminent. Morty, still dressed in his swami getup, turban and diaper, fingered a pile of sauerkraut to his mouth and wiped his hands on a napkin.