The Rules of Magic (24 page)

“Oh, no,” Jet said. “You'll always hold that title.”

“Will I?” Franny said thoughtfully.

Jet went to her sister and sat beside her. “Franny, that was a joke. You have the softest heart of any of us.”

“Untrue,” Franny shot back, though she was near tears. She had hated seeing her mother's clothes hung on wire hangers in the thrift shop.

“Very true. This just means I know you better than you know yourself,” Jet said. “But what else is a sister for?”

Posters were affixed to every lamppost in the neighborhood and Franny took a small ad in
The Village Voice,
the alternative newspaper whose offices were right around the corner in Sheridan Square. On the day of the grand opening, the shelves were stocked with cures and Edgar the heron was set in the window and festooned with ribbons and bows. By noon, only a smattering of people had showed up, a huge disappointment. Two teenage girls with long straight hair in search of true love sneaked in, giggling, afraid of the stuffed heron, nervous about magic, eyeing the bones and teeth set out in jars.

Franny threw up her hands, preferring the drudgery of cleaning the storeroom, but Jet found she enjoyed dispensing cures, and was happy to offer the girls the most basic potion: rosemary leaves, anise seeds, honey, and red wine. Since the Plaza Hotel,
she had retained a deep empathy for those in love. She told the girls about a home remedy they could use when their money ran out, not wise for a shopkeeper to give away free advice, but true to Jet's nature. To grow a lover, she told them, they must plant an onion in a flowerpot and add plenty of sunlight and water. The girls were amused to hear that such a plain, smelly thing as an onion could bring love to them.

“That's all we have to do?” they cried, delighted.

Jet told them yes, an onion and a pure heart were the best ingredients. She'd had a pure love too once upon a time. These girls were too young and innocent for doves' hearts or spells written in blood. They hadn't the faintest idea of what love could do. Jet, on the other hand, knew only too well, and should she ever forget, should she wake up in the middle of the night and not know where or who she was, there was always the scar on her face to remind her. You had to squint to see its delicate outline, but it was there. Jet could run her hand over her face and feel it and then she thought about the glass breaking and the sound of the thud as the taxi had hit Levi. That was when she would phone Rafael, who at this point knew her better than anyone. It wasn't love, not at all, but he'd been right. He'd saved her from what she had intended to do at the Plaza Hotel that night and now he felt responsible for her. In some way she was his. He'd known what she'd planned to do. She'd brought along a tincture of belladonna that night, a mixture that quickly induces dizziness and nausea, then weakness and breathing complications. She had planned to ingest it, then get into the bath, and when she passed out she would drown, which seemed only fitting. No one could float after partaking of this tincture, not even her. Rafael had derailed her plans when he came into
the room and lay down beside her. He'd reminded her that she was alive.

The last time they'd met she'd showed him the Alchemy Tree. They'd brought along a six-pack of beer, and after the second bottle, Rafael admitted that he had guessed her plan when she'd said she didn't need help getting to her room, yet tipped him five dollars anyway. In return he had saved her life. He was her secret, one she kept close. It wasn't love, but for her it was something more. He was someone she trusted.

Vincent had stopped bringing random women home, which was a relief to both sisters. They'd never known whom they might find in the kitchen when they went to fix their morning coffees. A teenager from Long Island in her T-shirt and nothing else, a waitress from the Kettle of Fish, a college girl from NYU, all wandering through the house with spellbound, confused expressions.

“Why do you bother?” Franny had asked once. She was at the table eating toast. Some woman had just made herself scrambled eggs before leaving, without even bothering to introduce herself.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Vincent snarled, defensive, brooding over why he could never feel anything for the girls he brought home.

“Fine. Never mind.”

“Why do
you
bother?” Vincent tossed back at his sister.

“I don't!”

They were not the sort to discuss their emotions, or even admit they had them, so Franny kept her insights to herself.

“I think we have a disorder. Maybe we should have read Dad's book,” Vincent wondered. “We might have been more normal.”

Actually, Fanny had been reading it. She'd expected to find it preposterous, filled with crackpot theories about genetics. But as it turned out,
A Stranger in the House
was a love letter to Dr. Burke-Owens's children, something none of them would have ever guessed. Certainly, Franny was shocked by her father's warm, loving attitude.

They may be nothing like you,
he had written,
they may surprise you, they may even repel you when their behavior is out of control, when they climb out their windows and drink underage and break every rule, but you will love them in a way you had not thought possible before, no matter who they turn out to be.

All that year Vincent had earned cash by busking on corners and in subway stations. His exceptional voice made people cluster around, especially when he sang of the troubled times. He felt connected when he performed; he found that if he put away his guitar, there was nothing inside him. It was as if when he had been stolen as an infant, he had come back as a changeling, as if someone had reached inside him and grabbed his heart to keep under lock and key.

He had always been a night owl, but now he had found a coterie of late-night rovers. He frequented the clubs on Eighth Street—Cafe Au Go Go, The Bitter End, the Village Gate—and often dropped by the San Remo, the hangout of poets, both unknown and great, including Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, and
Dylan Thomas. Vincent listened to the poets who had no hope of ever making it, and those who were on the cusp of changing the meaning of what poetry was and could be. Whenever possible he caught Bob Dylan at Gerde's. Dylan was making his mark as a poet and musician with a voice that was unmistakably his own. That was true beauty. That was the map of one's soul. To do so meant to reveal some inner part of yourself, and that Vincent was unable to do.

By now he was known in the clubs. Some people knew him from the Jester, and when they called him the Wizard the nickname stuck. When he spoke his voice was so soft that whomever he was addressing had to lean in to hear, and then some sort of enchantment happened. He was more handsome than ever, but that was only part of the spell he cast. Rumors began. People said he could pick your pocket without ever touching you. He could swipe a song lyric right out of your head; he seemed to know what you were thinking or maybe you'd blabbed a chorus to him and when he added a few words he made it so much better than anything you could ever dream up, that in the end you wouldn't even recognize your own music. He carried a book of spells with him, and for the right payment he could make things happen for you. The unexpected became real before your eyes. A girl who never looked at you before would follow you home. A job for which you weren't qualified would be yours. A letter would arrive informing you of an inheritance from a relative you hadn't known existed.

Vincent worked briefly as a waiter at the Gaslight, where he gratefully ate for free from their quirky menu: date-nut bread and cream cheese, grilled cheese, beefburger, pink lemonade, and a series of sundaes he sneaked home for Jet. Mint, brandy,
rum, chocolate, and vanilla. He'd have to run all the way home to Greenwich Avenue so the ice cream wouldn't melt and leave sugary puddles on the sidewalk. Eventually, the management fired him when a ticked-off waitress he had rejected ratted him out as being underage.

On the weekends he usually made a quick stop in Nedick's, a hot dog place on Eighth Street and Sixth Ave, before heading down to Washington Square Park, where folk musicians gathered on Sunday afternoons. He still had his same old Martin guitar he'd bought when he was fourteen, an instrument that seemed to feel and emote in a way that eluded him. He was inspired when he performed, his voice blessed with a soaring grace. And then he would stop and feel empty all over again, a hollow reed the wind blew through, another young man in a black jacket hanging out on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker.

“Are you sure you're seventeen?” the best guitar teacher in New York, Dave Van Ronk, asked after Vincent sat in to play with a group of older men at the park. Van Ronk was known as the mayor of MacDougal Street, a pal of Dylan's, and a legend himself.

“I'm not really sure about anything,” Vincent said, shaking the big man's hand, making sure not to run his mouth for once in his life.

“Well, keep playing,” Van Ronk said. “That's one thing you should be sure of.”

These were the times when children dreamed about nuclear testing and falling stars. There was an undercurrent of unrest,
like a wave, racial division in the cities, the war halfway around the world blooming with blood. When Vincent walked through Washington Square Park he could hear the thoughts of the people he passed by, such a ragged outcry of emotion he sometimes thought he would go mad. He understood why Jet seemed not to care that she had lost her gift. It was awful to hear the voices of dead paupers buried in unmarked graves beneath the cement paths. All but forgotten, they cried out to anyone who might hear them. For them the world had been a veil of tears. The murdered, the abandoned, the ill, the ruined, victims and criminals alike all cried out to him. He wished he'd never had the sight. What had been a game when he was a boy had become an affliction. He had no desire to tap into other people's pain, to know them better than they knew themselves.

He took to wearing a black cap woven out of metal thread in an attempt to shut out his clairvoyance. He'd found the cap on the Lower East Side, where he'd bought his first book of magical instructions. He'd never admitted the truth to Franny, but he'd first read about
The Magus
in a book he'd found on a shelf in their father's office, for Dr. Burke-Owens had studied folklore and ancient magic and Jungian archetypes. Vincent had been a kid, but one who knew what he wanted. He wanted to be the best at what he did, no matter the price. He searched for
The Magus,
but in every bookstore the clerks laughed at him and told him all of the copies had been burned long ago. Then he had come upon a shabby vendor strung out on drugs who peddled magic from a makeshift room in an abandoned building. There, hidden in a wheelbarrow, beneath a threadbare blanket, Vincent found the book. In exchange for the text, Vincent had handed over a fifty-dollar bill filched from the coat pocket of
one of his father's patients and a strand of his mother's pearls, stolen from her jewelry box. He'd assumed the vendor had no idea of the true worth of this treasure, but then the old man had said to Vincent, “I've been wanting to get rid of that. It will lead you down the wrong path if you're not careful. It's a burden.”