The Magician
The Magician
By Sol Stein
Copyright 2013 by Sol Stein
Cover Copyright 2013 Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1971, 1980, 1991, 1999.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Renni Browne, Charles Brieant, Jr., and Patricia Day for reading the manuscript of this book and making literally hundreds of useful suggestions. I am also indebted for valuable help to Judge Harold Dittelman, Sandford Astarita, my editors Manon Tingue and Ross Claiborne, and Peter Van Ness, Kevin and Jeffrey Stein, and Leslie A. Fiedler, a friend whose trial gave me firsthand evidence of the disparity between the practice of law and the administration of justice.
That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of his own species. No other animal takes positive pleasure in the exercise of cruelty upon another of his own kind. We generally describe the most repulsive examples of man’s cruelty as brutal or bestial, implying by these adjectives that such behavior is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In truth, however, the extremes of “brutal” behaviour are confined to man; and there is no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other. The sombre fact is that we are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth; and that, although we may recoil in horror when we read in newspaper or history book of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts that each one of us harbours within himself those same savage impulses which lead to murder, to torture and to war.
—Anthony Storr,
Human Aggression
There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.
—Goethe
The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.
—Franz Kafka,
The Trial
The Magician
By Sol Stein
Chapter 1
It had been snowing off and on since Christmas. For nearly a month now, while the men of the town were at work, boys would come out in twos or threes with shovels to clear a pathway on their neighbors’ sidewalks. An occasional older man, impoverished or proud, could be seen daring death with a shovel in hand, clearing steps so that one could get in and out of the house, or using a small snow-blower on a driveway in the hope of getting his wife to the supermarket and back before the next snow fell.
At night mostly, when the traffic had thinned, the town’s orange snowplows would come scraping down the roads, their headlamps casting funnels of still-falling snow. Alongside these thoroughfares, the snow lay in hillocks, some ten or fifteen feet high, thawing a bit each day in bright sun, then refreezing, forming the crust on which it would soon snow again. It seemed impossible that spring might come, and that these humped gray masses would eventually vanish as water into the heel-hard ground.
Of course, it was beautiful to those who looked up at the huge evergreens dusted with snow, and above them the bare webs of leafless silver maples reflecting sunlight. In the fields at the outskirts of town, one could see, after twenty-nine days of snow, half-mile stretches of the untrampled season’s glory.
Young children enjoyed the marvelous fluff to tramp in or throw, but to their elders in the village of Ossining, the snow was nature’s trick, daily defeating the salt spreaders, snowplows, calcium chloride, studded tires, and the hopeless attempts to get rid of the garbage stuffed into cans outside the back door. The food scraps and containers crammed into huge plastic bags and other makeshifts alongside the overstuffed cans testified that through a month of relentless snowfall, human consumption continued day after day.
Unlike the neighboring village of Briarcliff Manor, which was almost entirely middle-class, and the small section called Scarborough, which was upper-middle-class, Ossining also had working-class neighborhoods, and a large black slum.
Located in the richest county in the United States, Ossining itself was not at all rich. Though Ossining had the highest tax rate in the county, the center of the village had numerous empty storefronts; nearby homes were run down, fled from. The biggest drain on taxes was, of course, the schools, in which violence was not unknown. Working-class family cars, like gunboats, displayed the flag. Parents suffered their children who succumbed to long hair. It was not an unusual town in a country on the decline after only two centuries.
Ossining had originally been named Sing Sing, after the Sinq Sinq Indians who inhabited the area from the Pocantico River to the Croton. But long before Hollywood made Sing Sing prison known throughout the world, the local inhabitants divorced themselves nominally from the men behind the walls and changed the name of their village to Ossining. The state eventually caused the prison to be renamed the Ossining Correctional Facility, but the townspeople did not have the will for a further change of name. They accepted it as they did all-numeral telephones, the inefficiency of public servants, the dearth of honest craftsmen, and the lack of a place you could take a car to be repaired by a good mechanic. It wasn’t the end of the world.
In Ossining this January day, an extraordinary young man of sixteen named Edward Japhet was practicing magic tricks in front of a large mirror in his parents’ bedroom. He had been performing tricks for three years. At thirteen he had started with the usual cards and thimbles and sponge-rubber balls, working his way up through black boxes and gadgets to stage-size illusions. At sixteen, because of his skill at legerdemain, a lightness of hand, and his ability to distract even sophisticated adults with amusing patter while his hands did their covert work, he could be fairly called an accomplished magician.
Ed’s touch with an audience was apparent also in the classroom. His social-studies teacher, Mr. Wincor, traditionally provided his students with a list of fifty subjects from which they were to choose one to talk about for five minutes in front of the class. Ed Japhet was the first ever to choose “The Difference Between a Republic and a Democracy,” and delivered such a precise, clear, and even witty comparison that Mr. Wincor found himself joining the students in spontaneous applause at the end. It was only later that he began to wonder if Ed had not cribbed his speech from some source unknown to Mr. Wincor, and at a suitable moment after class that week he called Ed aside when the others had left the room.
“How did you go about preparing your subject?” he asked.
“Well, I browsed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked up ‘republic,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘Jefferson,’ and ‘Jackson’ in the encyclopedia, read the Constitution, looked at my notes on
The Federalist
papers, and started de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
but I couldn’t finish it because I had a date last weekend.”
“You said some funny things.”
“That was for the kids. I hope you didn’t mind. The hard part was keeping it under five minutes. I timed it okay at home, but it ran over in class, because they laughed.”
“Did you get any help from your father?”
“My father and I have never discussed democracy or republics,” said Ed with a straight face. He didn’t tell Mr. Wincor that in his pursuit of perfection he had rehearsed his speech, as was his custom, before both his mother and father.
Mr. Wincor, who prided himself on giving
A’s
rarely, gave one to Ed.
The fact that Ed’s father taught at the high school was a source of embarrassment to them both. Terence Japhet was respected but not liked by the other teachers. He didn’t fraternize much with his colleagues, in part because he felt himself a captive in his vocation. A child of the depression, he had learned by the age of ten that teachers were secure in their jobs, and though he later realized that his interest was in research, and perhaps not even in biology, the subject he had elected to teach, he stuck to the job. He told himself that he was a prisoner of economic necessity, which was a lie. The fact is that Terence Japhet did not find in himself those qualities of initiative and leadership he so much admired. And so, like many men, he tried to encourage his son to be what he was not.
When Ed was just a little over a year old and had begun to walk, Mr. Japhet had watched him toddle across the room right up to the wall, but he could not as yet turn around without falling. And so Eddie would plop down, turn in a sitting position, then get up again and walk to the opposite wall, where he would repeat the performance. “Isn’t he agile?” Mrs. Japhet had said. Her husband corrected her, “It’s not his physical agility, it’s his mind. He’s just figured out how to overcome a problem.”
It was nearly a year later that Mr. Japhet began to notice a small piece of ragged cardboard stuck from time to time between the back door and the jamb. It was the Japhets’ practice not to lock the back door leading out to the yard except at night, but Eddie, whose hands would later be so dexterous, had difficulty turning its tight knob. And so when Mr. Japhet went out to the garage each morning that winter to warm up the car, he’d come back in to find Eddie at the back door, shivering a bit but ready to catch the door on its return swing and let it close on the piece of cardboard. Then, having breakfasted, he could run out to play simply by pulling the knob. Mr. Japhet, who believed children could be taught courtesy by being courteous to them, was careful to reinsert the piece of cardboard whenever he had to use the door, until Eddie learned to manage the knob some months later.
Such seemingly ordinary occurrences were to Terence Japhet momentous events in the life of his only child, noted with quiet pride.
Terence Japhet didn’t need to encourage Eddie to ask questions; all children do. But Mr. Japhet never sloughed off his answers. When Eddie, at four, asked, “Why does it snow?” he explained about rain freezing. And when Eddie went on to ask, “Why does it rain?” Mr. Japhet took the time to explain until Eddie seemed to understand.
It wasn’t easy. When Eddie entered kindergarten, Mr. Japhet, with Josephine Japhet’s help, taught him to read simple books and then to write sentences, not because he wanted to give his son a head start, but because it seemed necessary. It also turned out to be convenient, because Eddie wrote his questions down in his jagged stick writing, each letter its own size. This way the questions could be dealt with before dinner, carefully, instead of on the run. Eddie was six when he wrote, “Why is my peenee big when I wake up?” That evening Mr. Japhet tried to explain how urine accumulates during the night. It stored up in the bag called a bladder, he said, showing Eddie where it was, and said the full bladder caused a pressure that made the boy’s penis stiffen. He then tried a simplified explanation of Harvey’s conception of the circulation of the blood, relating that to the pressure of the bladder that dammed up the blood in the boy’s organ. It took a lot of careful repetition before Eddie understood and seemed satisfied.
