The Magician's Assistant (14 page)

“Bertie’s marrying the nicest fellow in Alliance,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Finally, someone in this family has good taste in men.”

Sabine shrugged. “Parsifal had good taste in men.”

“Really?” his mother said.

“Nice guys, almost always, and Phan.” She pointed to the grave, as if they might have forgotten. “There was no one better than Phan. That was true love.”

The Fetters looked over at Phan’s marker, hoping to be able to tell for themselves. “I love Haas,” Bertie said.

“Haas?”

“Eugene Haas. But nobody calls him Eugene.” She ran the flat of her hands back and forth over the grass. “Maybe you’ll come to the wedding, Sabine. I know it’s a big trip, but you’d like Haas. And you could meet Kitty. Kitty would love you.”

Sabine smiled at the thought of Bertie in a wedding dress, how the dress would be shining white with mutton leg sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. How she knew that Bertie would be the type to cry at her own wedding. “I’ve never been to Nebraska.”

“Well, then, you have to come,” Mrs. Fetters said. “You’re the rest of the family now. It would be like Guy coming to the wedding. Can you imagine that?”

“What was your wedding like?” Bertie asked.

Parsifal had wanted to get everything in Sabine’s name so that she could avoid being crushed by inheritance tax. “We were married at the house in the late afternoon,” she said. “It was a beautiful day. Parsifal had figured out that the light hit the pool in just the right way at four-thirty. Parsifal was always worried about lighting. All the magicians were there, and the rug and antique people, and all the architects. It was a good party.”

“I love you,” Parsifal had said. “I want you to be my widow.”

“Did you serve dinner?” Bertie asked. “Was there dancing?”

Sabine nodded. She could smell the lilies from the graves. “We ate dinner outside and put a dance floor down on the lawn. There was a lot of dancing.” The people who loved them drank too much and cried.

“If you want to get married,” Sabine had told him, “it doesn’t mean we have to have a wedding.”

“I want to have a really great party,” Parsifal said.

When the last napkin was collected from the lawn, the host of handsome waiters took the rented dishes away, leaving the house, remarkably, as they had found it. Sabine and Parsifal recounted who was making passes at whom and who looked the best and who seemed not to be doing so well. He took her in his arms and they danced a few steps in the kitchen while Sabine hummed. “My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife.” And then he kissed her, one, two, three times, and they both laughed and said good-night and went down the hallway in different directions as they had at the end of any number of parties they had given over the years.

“Good night, Parsifal,” Sabine said.

“Good night, Mrs. Parsifal,” Parsifal said.

The light was good now in the cemetery. Parsifal would be pleased. He had been right about the wedding. It had helped Sabine. It was a strange piece of comfort he had given her.

“Did you have a minister?” Dot Fetters asked.

“A rabbi.”

The Fetters looked puzzled. They both had the same tilt of the head, which made them look like mother and daughter. “Why a rabbi?”

Sabine laughed because the question struck her as so strange. “Because I’m Jewish.”

There was a light wind coming down from the direction of the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, but the grass was too closely cut to be stirred. “Oh,” Dot Fetters said finally.

“Is that all right?” Sabine asked.

Her mother-in-law smiled. “Of course it’s all right,” she said. “I just don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who’s Jewish before.”

On the way home Sabine stopped by the downtown Sheraton Grand and the Fetters packed their bags and came home with her. She thought they might protest, but they smiled and nodded, said yes and thank you. They wanted to stay in the house, to be close to Sabine. Dot and Bertie Fetters wanted her attention. They wanted her love. It was not in their nature to shy away from what they wanted. She fed them dinner from Canter’s. She laid out their towels and folded extra blankets at the feet of their beds. She asked them what they needed, what they wanted. They all kissed one another good-night and while she was walking down the hall they called to her again, “Good night.” She left her door open so that she could hear the feint sounds of their voices. She thought she could hear water running through the pipes. The house was not empty. Rabbit came down the hall at a better than usual clip and stood up on his hind legs until Sabine reached down and brought him up into bed. Outside, the thick green magnolia leaves lost hold of their branches and floated like flat-bottomed canoes around the edges of the pool. A helicopter made a soft chop overhead. Everything was in its place.

A wedding, Bertie’s wedding, might be reason enough to go to Nebraska. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the state. She told herself there were cows, it was cold, they grew corn. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make the words into landscapes. It was a country she couldn’t imagine. What could be more foreign than Nebraska? It was farther away than Israel. It was farther than Vietnam. Finally she stopped trying in favor of sleep, and the sleep was long and deep and dreamless.

In the morning they sorted through pictures while eating bagels and eggs. There were a few albums, well organized and clearly marked with dates that Phan had put together; but pictures from the time before Phan and the ones taken after his death were dumped unceremoniously into a Bloomingdale’s box large enough to hold the fox-fur jacket Sabine had bought for her mother’s birthday in a year of largesse. Her mother had let her keep the box.

In the early years together, Sabine had asked to see pictures of Parsifal’s family, but he said there were none. She held her position that that wasn’t possible; if your family is killed in a car crash you don’t deal with it by throwing all their pictures away.

“I didn’t keep anything from that time,” he had said. “I told you that.”

“Nothing? Not even a sock? You stripped yourself naked and started over again?”

He looked at her, that special look reserved for conversations about his past that said, Drop it. No more. “There are no pictures,” he repeated.

Maybe Sabine could have believed this, but Parsifal was a fool for documentation. Look at the evidence on the kitchen table, the pictures sliding onto the floor in every direction. Eight rolls of film, thirty-six exposures each, from one trip to India. Sabine in the marketplace wearing a wide straw hat. Parsifal coming down a ghat to the Ganges, shirtless, laughing. There were pictures of the rug stores. Pictures of nameless magicians. Picture after picture of white rabbits doing cute things, sleeping on their backs, looking out the window, eating Cheerios from a bowl.

“Is this Rabbit?” Bertie asked.

Sabine looked at the picture, held it towards the light. “That was the rabbit before this one. Not such a good rabbit. Kind of stupid, God rest.”

Parsifal had kept the bad pictures, half a face out of focus, the blur of a tree taken from a speeding car, unflattering photos of friends with flame red eyes, their mouths open. “I have to throw these away,” Sabine said.

“Maybe later,” Mrs. Fetters said, taking the stack out of her hands. “There’s no sense in doing it now. Where was this?”

Parsifal in his camel overcoat, unshaven, looking serious. To his left there was a mass of dark wire that Sabine knew to be the Eiffel Tower. “Paris.”

“Really,” Mrs. Fetters said. “You two went everywhere.”

Sabine didn’t remember it that way, there were plenty of days spent at home, vacuuming, doing taxes, but confronted with so much proof she could only think that in the last twenty-two years she had seen a great deal of the world. She never thought about the trips, the dinners or days spent in museums. She only remembered his company now. Why had he always taken her? There were plenty of men, men at home and men whom he met while he and Sabine were gone; their pictures were on the table now, on the floor and in her lap, nameless, with such beautiful faces. But none of them had stayed on the way Sabine did, the way Phan would have.

“I like the ones of the two of you onstage the best,” Bertie said, and handed Sabine a picture taken at the Sands in Las Vegas.

“We’re both wearing too much makeup,” she said, and flipped it aside.

Mrs. Fetters grabbed the picture back. She studied their faces. “You’re beautiful,” she said, her voice nearly angry. “Both of you.”

Sabine thought the bright lights made them look sickly and she didn’t like to see herself in costume. But no one ever looked better than Parsifal on a stage. Tuxedos always made her think of the night they met.

“I’d like to have this one,” Mrs. Fetters said. “If you don’t like it.”

“Of course,” Sabine said, “take whatever you want. Clearly I have too many of them. And the negatives are all in here, too.” She shook the box for effect, though she could hardly imagine finding the negative for one particular photograph. The picture of Parsifal in front of the rug store slid by and then was reabsorbed. She had enough to remember Parsifal by, more than enough. The Fetters could take what they wanted. “If there’s anything else,” she said, looking up suddenly. “I don’t know what you’d like, clothes or books, furniture. Just tell me.” They deserved things. She would pack up boxes of memorabilia. She would ship things to them later. Anything.

Mrs. Fetters was going to say something, but a picture, just that moment revealed in the shift of paper, caught Bertie’s eye. “Well, hey. Look at this.” She reached into the box and plucked it up. The winning ticket. After looking at it herself for a minute, she gave it to her mother.

Of all the photos, this one seemed to please Dot Fetters the most. Sabine leaned in. It was a black-and-white picture of a dark-haired girl about eight or nine years old. She was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt. She was standing in front of a car, smiling, doing nothing but waiting to have her picture taken. The face was familiar, but maybe just because Sabine had sorted through those pictures so many times before. It was largely a box of strangers. It seemed perfectly reasonable that there would be a child in there that she didn’t know.

“That’s not me,” Sabine said.

“Of course it’s not,” Mrs. Fetters said, so happy to have the picture.

Bertie was the one who told her it was Kitty.

Sabine looked again. She had not seen a picture of Parsifal as a child and yet this was Parsifal as a child. Parsifal with long hair and a girl’s tip of the head. Parsifal’s other sister.

Mrs. Fetters fanned the picture slowly back and forth, holding it by the corner as if it were damp. “I knew it. I knew he wouldn’t have written us off altogether. Or at least he wouldn’t write off Kitty. He loved her too much. Those two were a pair, right and left. When he left he took a picture of Kitty. That’s proof. He leaves everything behind, but he takes a picture of his sister.”

The little girl had the sun in her face, but the sun, either early-morning or late-afternoon or hidden halfway behind a cloud, didn’t seem too strong for her, and she looked straight into it. Sabine wasn’t sure what it proved, one picture in a fur-coat box with a couple of thousand others. It wasn’t as if he’d kept it on his desk, or put her in a frame in the bedside table with the people considered family. But who could say? Maybe having it meant something, maybe it meant everything. She was certainly comfortable letting Dot Fetters think that it did.

“Do you want that?” Sabine asked.

Mrs. Fetters looked surprised. “No, no. This one’s yours. I have plenty of pictures of Kitty. This is the only one you’ve got.” She handed it to Sabine, who took it carefully and put it in the breast pocket of her blouse, not because she wanted it, but because she understood the gesture to be important.

Dot and Bertie Fetters made modest piles of pictures they wanted to keep for themselves. Mrs. Fetters liked the pictures in foreign places best, while Bertie preferred the ones from magic shows. Bertie took one of the ocean with no one in it at all. They both took as many pictures of Sabine as they took of Parsifal. Mrs. Fetters took one of Phan.

“I’m going to take one of you now,” Bertie said, pulling an Instamatic from her purse. “One of the two of you together.” She bit her lip thoughtfully. “We’ll go out back, by the pool.”

Mrs. Fetters touched her hair. The curls sprang around her fingers. “Just take one of Sabine,” she said.

“Both of you,” Bertie said. She looked around on the floor, then reached down and scooped up the rabbit with her other hand. She handed him to Sabine. “Him, too.”

They went out through the French doors in the dining room. Rabbit blinked and twitched in the sun. “Over by the purple flowers,” Bertie said, the camera making her suddenly confident. “Come forward just a little, I want to see the pool, too. That’s good.”

Mrs. Fetters put her arm around Sabine’s waist and pulled her close; with her other hand she petted the rabbit’s head. Sabine felt Mrs. Fetters’ soft midsection against her hip. Dot Fetters smelled like vanilla.

“Smile,” Bertie said.

Places were exchanged. There was a picture of Bertie and Sabine and then one that Sabine took of Bertie and her mother, Bertie holding the rabbit. There they were, in Parsifal’s yard, in Phan’s yard. Maybe Parsifal had done the best that he could, going on with his life without them, maybe the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility was something that no one could be forgiven for, but Sabine couldn’t help but think he would have liked these people. It was a shame that he had spent his life without this love that was available to him. “You’ll send me copies,” Sabine said.

“You bet,” Mrs. Fetters said.

Rabbit was tired of being held and he squirmed and kicked in hopes of being set down in the sweet dichondra. Sabine was always afraid he would find his way under the fence or fall into the pool and drown. It was only on the rarest of occasions, only when she was right there all the time, watching, that he was allowed in the yard.

After the dishes were put away and bags were packed, it really was time to go to the airport, although no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave. Mrs. Fetters saw that there was a bit more coffee left in the pot and decided to go ahead and drink it.