The Magician's Assistant (34 page)

Dot stopped the car, but they weren’t at the house and they weren’t in town. They were up on a knoll, a swell of land no more than ten feet high with nothing on it. “This is where all the kids come to neck,” Dot said. “Not in the winter, though, only the really hardy kids come here in the winter. There are all sorts of stories about people leaving their engines going to keep the heater on and then running out of gas and freezing to death. But in the summer you have to take a number and wait in line. In the summer this is all corn as far as you can see in any direction. My father had been to the ocean once when he was a young man and he said that the ocean looked exactly like this corn, only blue. He probably said it just to make me feel better about being here.”

Even without the corn it was like the ocean. The ocean on some impossibly calm night when the water looked white in the moonlight. The ocean in every direction, as far as anyone could see; which made the knoll an island, which made them shipwrecked. “I did some necking here myself in my day,” Dot said dreamily. “I love it here. I come by myself now and people think I’m crazy. I come up here to think things out. When I can see everything like this it gives me perspective.”

“So what’s the perspective?”

“That everything is pretty much the same no matter where you are. That everyone has their problems, everyone has a couple of things that make them happy, and that if I went someplace else or knew other people it wouldn’t really change. Of course now I don’t want it to change, now I like where I am, but when I was younger, that used to give me real comfort.”

There was never any point in taking someone else’s comfort away, even if it was comfort from another time, but Sabine did not agree with Dot’s assessment of the view. Things were better in other places. People had different lives. Many suffered less. Many were happier. Sabine knew without question that Parsifal must have come to this spot. What he saw was not a life that was the same in all directions. He saw New York when he faced east, Montreal when he faced north and when the sun came down over the never-ending yellow ears of com, he faced south and west and looked towards Los Angeles. This was the very spot Nebraska youth would come to re-imagine their lives. Even if his father had dodged the bat and the Nebraska Boys Reformatory had remained nothing but an idle threat, he would have found Los Angeles. And yet surely Kitty came here with him, looked out at the flatness and dreamed about the west, so why didn’t she get to go along? Why did she have to stay behind and marry some fool who slipped off a train? Kitty could have been the magician’s assistant. She had all of her brother’s potential, his humor and beautiful bones. Looking out at the flatness until it folded down against the earth’s natural curve, Sabine thought it was the one thing Parsifal had done wrong. He should have taken his sister with him.

“It’s getting late,” Sabine said. “We should be getting home.” We should be getting home before Kitty leaves.

“I’m just sorry that there was no one here to see us. Old Dot Fetters finally got somebody to ride out to Park Place with her. Imagine what the talk would have been.”

The windows were dark and the driveway was empty when they returned. Without someone inside, the house could not possibly distinguish itself and Sabine looked down the street, trying to remember which one was home. Sabine had been so sure they would still be there. Howard was at work, there was no reason for them to leave. Wouldn’t Kitty have waited to hear about her sister? Wouldn’t she have waited?

“Looks like we have the place to ourselves,” Dot said cheerfully.

But Sabine didn’t want the place. She was tired, the hospital had done that. She was used to spending her days at home now. Sabine took the nightcap Dot poured, their secret ritual, formerly saved until Bertie was safe in bed; but even without the ice the bourbon failed to warm her. She took the rest down in a clean sweep, some tedious dosage of medicine, told Dot good-night, and went to her room. Sabine stood at the door and looked at the twin beds for a long time before choosing the one by the window. It was hard for her to imagine now, such a little bed holding two people.

“Mother?” It had been well over a week since Sabine called home.

“What a relief to hear someone call me that. Your father has been trying to teach the rabbit to say it, just to make me feel better, but the poor thing just isn’t getting it.”

“How is the rabbit?”

“Fat. Fatter-than-usual fat. You know, your father peels him grapes. It takes him half the morning. You can’t buy peeled grapes anywhere.”

“So give them to him with the peels on, that’s what I do.”

“He says the peels upset the rabbit’s digestion.”

“I never noticed.”

“Then maybe your father is right, maybe it is happier with us. Tell me something, does this poor creature have a name?”

“His name is Rabbit. Parsifal named him. He thought it was minimalist.”

“Minimalist,” her mother said. “That’s good. We thought maybe he had some sort of racy name you didn’t want to tell us.”

A dirty name for the rabbit. What a thought. “Nothing so interesting.”

“So, Sabine, we love the bunny, we do. He’s a lot of company for your father, but we’d be much happier if you came home and took him back.”

“Is he bothering you?”

“Not the point. We want you to come home now. We miss you. We worry about you. Everyone at Canter’s asks, ‘Where is Sabine, when is she coming home?’ What do we tell them? What in god’s name is keeping you so long out there in cow-land?”

Sabine took a sip of her coffee and stared at the empty kitchen where one man had been murdered and poor Bertie had had the back of her head split open. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

“Well, give us a hint. Are you finding out everything about Parsifal you ever wanted to know?”

“I am, really. He had a bad time of it. A whole lot worse than anything he could have made up. He and his sister, Kitty, were very close. She’s told me stories. At least I can understand now why he wanted to change everything about the past, give himself a new background and start over again. I don’t feel like he was lying to me anymore. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“So what is so bad about these people that he had to completely reinvent himself?” Her mother’s voice had the tense edge Sabine knew. It came over her just before she started making demands.

“It’s not these people. It’s not anything that’s going on now. There were a lot of problems with his father, and his father is dead.”

“Come home, Sabine.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Bertie’s getting married next week. I addressed the invitations. I feel like I need to stay for the wedding. After that I’ll come home. I promise.”

Her mother kept the line silent for a minute to let her daughter know it was not the answer she was looking for.

“Mother?”

“Hum?”

“There was something else I wanted to ask you. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. The days out here have been incredibly long.” Sabine couldn’t seem to get any further in her line of questioning.

“What is it you want to know?”

“Where did you and Daddy meet?”

“You already know that. We met in Israel.”

“You didn’t know him before that? You never knew him in Poland?”

“Why are you asking me this long-distance? We live five miles away from each other. You can ask me when you get home.”

Sabine twisted the phone cord. Because Parsifal had never told her anything all the years when he was right there, either. “I’ve got no problem paying the bill. You were both from Poland.”

“It’s a country, Sabine. It would be like saying, You were both from California.”

“Did you meet him in Poland?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know him when you were young?”

“I didn’t know him. I met him. I met him in a train station. That was all.”

“That was all? You didn’t know him, but you remember meeting him in a train station. Did you speak to him?”

Her mother coughed, maybe to let Sabine know that such conversations were detrimental to her health. She would be in her own kitchen. Sabine’s mother always answered the phone in the kitchen. She would lean against the counter, stare out the window, and wait for the hummingbirds that dipped into the red syrup in her hummingbird feeder all year round. “It was the first time we were moved, not later. I had dropped the sack with my lunch in it. There was a large crowd and I hadn’t held on to the bag tightly. Your father saw me sitting in the waiting area and he gave me half his sandwich. Then we were put on separate trains. That was all.”

“That was all? You met him that once and then you didn’t see him again until you were in Israel?”

“Correct.”

“And then what? You recognized him, all those years later?”

The line was quiet again and then she heard her father’s voice in the background. “Ruth?” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said. She must have put her hand over the receiver. When she came back her voice was clear again. “That sandwich meant a great deal to me,” she told Sabine. “It was the last truly nice thing anyone did for me for a while. That, and your father had a very nice face, so I thought about him some. It was like your Nebraska in that way, there was plenty of time.”

He did have a nice face. It was her own face. She knew what he would have looked like then. She knew how kind he would have been, how he could offer something without it seeming at all like charity. He would have convinced her that he had never eaten a whole sandwich in his life. That she would be helping him, truly, by taking half.

“So where did you see him again?”

“In Jaffa. You know this story. He was working on a road crew and I was at a strawberry farm.”

“And he saw you walking down the street and he asked if you were from Poland, and you said, ‘No, I’m from Israel.’”

“We each knew who the other one was, but we never said anything about it. Things were different back then. People weren’t so big on talking everything out. We had dinner together that night.”

“You must have been so happy to see him.”

“I was very glad your father was alive.”

Glad that her father was alive, that he had given the sandwich, that she had accepted, that they were somehow reunited, that because of that Sabine was in Nebraska now. “Do you ever talk about it with him, that time?”

“Not now. Not anymore at all.”

“Do you think about it?”

Her mother considered this for a moment. “Only enough not to forget it completely. The trick is to almost forget it, but not completely. So now I’ve told you that.” She cleared her throat. “The fascinating story of my life. Do you want to tell me why you asked?”

“I want to know everything.” Suddenly Sabine longed for her mother, longed to be with her, to hold her and be held by her. “I don’t want to be outside anymore.”

“You have never been outside,” her mother said kindly. “You were born in the center of the world. No one has ever left you out for a minute. Now do you want to say hello to your father?”

“Yes.” Sabine told her mother good-bye. She wished she could tell her other things, but she had embarrassed her enough for one day.

There was a pause, the handing off of the receiver. “Sabine-Love,” her father said. “You’ve made your mother cry. Did you tell her you were staying out there with the cowboys?”

“I was asking her questions about you.”

“Then I should assume these are tears of joy?”

“Exactly,” Sabine said.

Bertie wore her hair down and did not mention the twelve neat stitches in the back of her head. If anyone inquired about them she would say only that they itched occasionally. She didn’t bring up Howard Plate’s name or complain that any wrong had been done to her. She sat at her same chair at the kitchen table and made a specific point of reminding Sabine that she said she would come to her classroom and show off her shuffling skills, as if to make clear Bertie harbored no ill feelings towards certain chairs or shuffling. If anything, Bertie appeared happier after Howard pushed over the table that sent her head cracking into the wall. She spoke of nothing but the wedding now, hemming her dress or checking back in with the soloist. She was thrilled by the envelopes Sabine had addressed for the invitations. In this new life in Nebraska, where time had not only stopped but occasionally seemed to creep backwards, Sabine was happy to pour herself into the job and made every letter in every word a tiny piece of art. Bertie said she wanted to ask everyone to give the envelopes back to her so that she could put them in her wedding album.

But no one thought that the impending wedding or the sharp blow to her head were the cause of Bertie’s sudden happiness. Since the accident she had not spent another night at home. She was there every day, picking up her clothes, sometimes staying for dinner, but by the end of the evening she had made her furtive departure, never exactly saying that she was leaving, so that Dot inevitably spent five minutes looking for her before realizing that she was gone.

“Did you see where Bertie went to?” Dot would ask Sabine.

Within a matter of days Bertie’s room had metamorphosed into a guest room, neat and anonymous. The bedspread was folded over the pillows with the smooth regularity of a Holiday Inn. The closets were empty except for some summer dresses pushed down hard to the far end of the bar; a few pairs of sandals, stacked one on top of another, sat beneath them as if they knew to stay close to the dresses they belonged with. Her bottle of perfume and three tubes of lipstick were no longer on the dresser top next to the picture of Haas, which was not there itself the day after. Items began disappearing from the bathroom: shampoos and conditioners, dental floss, Nivea, hairbrushes, a vast assortment of headbands, hair clips, and ponytail holders, until the tile countertops appeared nearly bare. Bertie went quickly, considering it had taken her almost thirty years to go.

Howard Plate was also noticeably absent in the Fetters house, no longer dropping by for sandwiches and beers when he had a few minutes. He was not sitting in Dot’s recliner, watching television with the volume up high, when they came home from trips to the market. Whatever message Haas had tried to get across to him had clearly arrived. What was surprising was that the lack of Howard meant considerably less of Kitty, who had been scarce since they had driven off to the hospital that night. She was around, picking up the boys, dropping them off, but she seemed to hang by the back door and excuse herself quickly. She was quieter then, distracted, as if she were late for someplace and could not exactly remember where it was she needed to go. Sabine was worried about her, but Kitty begged off conversation. Sabine, for one, missed her terribly.