Petty Magic

  ALSO BY CAMILLE DEANGELIS

  Mary Modern

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Camille Marjorie DeAngelis

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeAngelis, Camille.

  Petty magic: being the memoirs and confessions of Miss Evelyn Harbinger, temptress and troublemaker / Camille DeAngelis.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Older women—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Magic—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.E159P47 2010

  813′.6—dc22 2009034348

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45425-6

  v3.1

  For Kate

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”

  Chapter 2 - Blackabbey

  Chapter 3 - On Fidelity

  Chapter 4 - How, as it were, We Deprive Man of his Virile Member

  Chapter 5 - Do-Goodery

  Chapter 6 - Welcome to Harbinger House

  Chapter 7 - The Warrens of New York City

  Chapter 8 - The Mission

  Chapter 9 - Nibble, Nibble, Little Mouse

  Chapter 10 - The White Witch

  Chapter 11 - Legerdemain

  Chapter 12 - The Melancholy Knight

  Chapter 13 - Covention

  Chapter 14 - Schemes and Counterschemes

  Chapter 15 - The Devil’s Snuff

  Chapter 16 - The Fine Art of Troublemaking

  Chapter 17 - Good Juju

  Chapter 18 - A Spot of Black Magic

  Chapter 19 - Effing the Ineffable

  Chapter 20 - Maxwell Faust

  Chapter 21 - Curious Kitties

  Chapter 22 - Some Dread Malady of the Soul

  Chapter 23 - Lord of the Slippy

  Chapter 24 - In Which Evelyn Resolves to Make a Decision

  Chapter 25 - The Goblin Ball

  Chapter 26 - A Night in Connemara

  Chapter 27 - String ’er Up

  Chapter 28 - Night and Fog

  Chapter 29 - Madness, Put to Good Use

  Chapter 30 - The Shadow at the Foot of the Bed

  Chapter 31 - Pumpkin Day

  Chapter 32 - And All That Happened Afterward

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”

  1.

  WITCH, n. 1. Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. 2. A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  THERE ARE many misconceptions of which I must disabuse you, but the most offensive concerns the wands and warts and black pointed caps. Some of us may be wizened and rather hairy in unfortunate places, but we’re certainly no uglier than the rest of you lumps.

  I look grandmotherly enough myself though, for it’s a rare morning I don’t nab a seat on the uptown 103—and when I am compelled to stand, the respectable citizens around me will grouse on my behalf at the bad manners of those buffoons claiming knee injuries or feigning deafness. As I disembark I wish the respectable ones a pleasant day, and I can see I remind them of their dear great-aunties. Don’t I look like the sort who bakes oatmeal cookies by the gross, slips a fiver into your birthday card? Nobody ever has an inkling, do they?

  Some nights I ride the bus a third time, but you wouldn’t recognize me then. I’ll tell you how I do it. First I run a crooked forefinger over these travertine teeth, so when I look into the mirror over the mantel I can flash my old Pepsodent smile. Then I kick off my orthopedic shoes, say the right words to shrug off this sagging elephant hide, and in a moment I’m lithe as a teenager again. Thus liberated (and three inches taller besides), I take a long hot bath with bubbles and candles, draw concentric hearts in the steam on the mirrors, and spend an hour or more lounging about my bedroom with party clothes strewn across the unmade bed and the contents of my makeup case all over the vanity table. When I’m finally dressed, perfumed, and done up, I survey myself once more in the mantel mirror. Can’t help grinning like a feline at what I see. The beldame has sharpened her knives!

  So I go out and avail myself of some delicious little boy I’ve found at a bar I’ve never been to before and will never visit again. Some nights it’s cinnamon vodka in china teacups and other times I’ll settle for a two-dollar draft—not that I ever pay for my own drinks, mind! I don’t just go for the pretty ones, either; he’s got to sustain my attention for the hours it takes for three or four rounds and a scintillating tête-à-tête, a cab ride home (his place, always his), and a lively tussle in the sack.

  You ought to know I never go for the ones who’re already taken, no matter where their eyes might wander. Wouldn’t be right. But I watch how men and women alike guard their lovers: he spots another man eyeing his girlfriend’s cleavage, drapes his arm over her shoulders, and looks daggers at the interloper; she sees a single girl like me merely glancing at her man, shoots me a glare, and kisses him midsentence. How primitive it is, the way they lay claim to one another.

  Not me, though. I’m only asking for the night. Not even, because I leave as soon as he falls asleep. At daybreak I find the city is at its bleakest: through the window of a speeding cab I see the flickering neon of a twenty-four-hour diner peopled with insomniacs, raccoon-eyed girls teetering home on broken heels, men too sauced to bother ducking into alleyways to relieve themselves. Even at this ungodly hour the taxi driver is on his mobile. I lean my still-smooth forehead against the frosted window, the ghosts of his hands roving under my evening garb.

  My taste varies by the night. Sometimes I set my eye on a playboy and revel in my triumph when he loses sight of every other girl in the club. (Aren’t I doing them all a favor? And doesn’t he deserve the shame and indignation he’ll feel when he rings the number I’ve left him and the woman who answers says, “Good afternoon, Greenacres Funeral Home”?) On other occasions I mark the loneliest boy in the room and take a purer kind of pleasure in alleviating his melancholy.

  There are other things you ought to know. We don’t even use our broomsticks for their ostensible purpose, let alone as a means of nocturnal transport. We do not shoot craps with human teeth. We do not thieve the peckers of men who’ve spurned us and squirrel them away in glass jars. Think of us as sibyls or seraphs: fearsome, oh yes, but more or less benevolent. I may use magic to retrieve my youth, but when these boys climb into bed with me, they do so unenchanted.

  Blackabbey

  2.

  MY FATHER lasted longer than average, and so I have two sisters. We are evenly spaced at eleven months: Helena is the eldest; then Morven, who lives with me on the Lower East Side; and then me. Helena is 151 but she still runs a B and B in the house we inherited from our great-auntie Emmeline, the house we grew up in. HARBINGER HOUSE, says the sign beneath the porch light; rather ominous, I’ll admit, but the most traumatic thing that ever transpired there involved a holiday turkey that broke out of the oven. Featherless
and terrified out of its last wit, our would-be dinner rampaged through the downstairs rooms and sent all the family shrieking for cover before Helena could put an end to it. Good thing our china never breaks.

  Blackabbey, the town’s called now: a spurious name for a place off the Jersey turnpike. There was a community of Franciscans there at some stage, but who knows why they named it Blackabbey—after all, no plague ever decimated their number. But Blackabbey is a far better name than Harveysville, which is what the town was called up until the First World War. “Harveysville” sounds like a hamletful of inbreds.

  Harvey was the name of the innkeeper who supposedly put up George Washington two nights before that great man crossed the Delaware. The inn is still there, stodge central, every wall covered with plaques boasting of its one famous guest who only stopped in for a pint of ale, if he stopped at all. Even in the eighteenth century, on the surface at least, it was a dull little town full of ordinary people.

  Since the mid-1950s, however, Blackabbey has been rather renowned for its antiques. Interior designers, ladies of leisure, and middle-aged friends-of-Oscar make the two-hour bus ride south from Manhattan to peruse those quaint and cozy shops, and it’s the moneyed sort who fill Helena’s B and B every weekend.

  This little shopping mecca wasn’t there while we were growing up, of course. Back then the mews was known as Deacon’s Alley, and there were a bookbinder, a pharmacist, and a few other stores with dust-filmed windows that seemed to be open only one day a week for a quarter of an hour at a time and sold things nobody would have wanted to buy anyway. The streets were unpaved and we walked knee-deep in horse dung.

  But our town has more of a sense of humor now than it did in Washington’s day. The Blind Pig Gin Mill, which is almost as old as the inn, has a very official-looking plaque by the front door that reads:

  HERE AT THE BLIND PIG GIN MILL, ON THE 21ST OF FEBRUARY 1783, UPON THE SECOND STOOL FROM THE END, ALEXANDER HAMILTON GOT PISS-ASS DRUNK.

  Seems we’re the only ones who appreciate the change, living as long as we do.

  Signposted from the main street is Blackabbey Mews, where all the shops are. If you turn the corner just after the Harveysville Inn, you’ll enter a narrow cobblestone alley with cheerily painted row homes on either side, the first-floor windows full of typewriters, gramophones, and landscapes in gilded frames. White geraniums tumble from the second-floor window boxes. The alley hasn’t been paved since the Revolution, so watch out for rogue cobblestones. At the end of the lane is a confectionery-café, my niece Mira’s place actually. There are outdoor tables where the aforementioned city folk sip bowls of chilled carrot-ginger soup under an oak tree that is even older than I am.

  One store specializes in antique and collectible toys (a set of shiny tin soldiers lined up inside an elliptical railroad track, red painted sleds for decoration only), and others carry racks of moth-eaten theatrical attire and vintage wedding gowns; there’s even a tiny haberdashery full of trilby hats. Other stores deal in fine and costume jewelry, rings and earbobs of clear green glass that throw bright spots on the walls in the afternoon light.

  But there’s only one spot along this row where you can find a seventeenth-century alchemy kit alongside a pack of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, only one place where you might prick your finger on a stuffed porcupine. FAWKES & IBIS, says the hand-painted sign that swings above the door. EST. 1950. ANTIQUES, COLLECTIBLES, CURIOSITIES. And beneath, in much smaller lettering: ASK NO QUESTIONS. This one is my favorite.

  Fawkes and Ibis was the first antiques store here. Harry Ibis is an Irish Jew who hasn’t boarded an airplane since the close of the Second World War, and Emmet Fawkes is an Afroed malcontent who hobnobs with grave robbers and maintains an extensive collection of Victorian smut. You’ll generally find Fawkes seated on a low stool out on the sidewalk, either chatting with prospective patrons or grumbling to himself about the rodent problem. When you greet him he may answer you, or he may not, and either way you mustn’t take it personally. You open the door and part a heavy velvet curtain with dust bunnies flecking the hem, and as you enter the front room you’re hit with the smells of stale incense, mothballs, and old men.

  The window display never quite typifies the wonderland within: there might be a gilded birdcage full of Christmas ornaments, a Deco tea set, maybe a concertina or a hurdy-gurdy. Venture in, and above your head is the strangest chandelier you’ll ever see, a Leuchterweibchen, a wooden mermaid with an enigmatic expression and antlers sprouting from her shoulder blades. I hope nobody ever buys it. The shelves behind the counter are cluttered with molting taxidermies and various items pilfered from med school labs, eyeballs and eardrums lolling about in crusty glass jars, and cork-stopped medicine bottles full of sticky brown gook (FIG CANDY LAXATIVE or HONEY-CHERRY-BALSAM COMPOUND typewritten on the yellowed labels). There are old leather-bound books in languages neither owner can read, heavy ornate keys to doors that may never be locked (or unlocked) again, gargoyles salvaged from the rubble of architectural progress. Fawkes takes especial pride in a bird he claims is the penultimate dodo.

  The place is chockablock, all right, and you might even call it cluttered, but don’t dare call it a junk shop. Every object in the room has a history worth knowing, if you only know how to read it. Sometimes the people who’ve owned the books in this shop leave little clues between the pages, and not just love notes or pressed flowers. You might come upon an unused Amtrak ticket tucked between the pages of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or a sprinkling of crumbs along the gutter inside The Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer. Makes you wonder what kind of person noshes on a salami sandwich over The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Browsing Fawkes and Ibis always gets me feeling a little melancholy, though I suppose that’s part of why I adore the place. No, I’ll never again wander through the cobbled lanes and crowded markets of the cathedral cities, never sip another green chaud in some Nouveau café with chandeliers knotted in cobwebs and flies in the sugar pots. Our psychic stamina is not without limit, you see. I could poof in and out of public loos from San Francisco to Samarkand, go antiquing to my heart’s content, but then there’d be no oomph left over for taking the wrinkles out on a Saturday night. Crooked fingers, crooked priorities; what can I say?

  * * *

  ON THIS particular afternoon I’m on no particular errand, only that I’m home for the weekend and haven’t been to Fawkes and Ibis in a while. It’s the twenty-third of June, and the air is alive with the scent of honeysuckle and the excitement of children newly sprung from the classroom. The little hellions race one another down the avenue, their smooth limbs and happy faces dappled by the sunshine through the maples, and the sound of their laughter puts a smile on my face.

  Mira is out clearing tables, and she gives me a peck on the cheek as I make my way down the alley. There are other cries of “Auntie Eve! How do you do?” though not all the girls who greet me are among Helena’s granddaughters. (Helena has three daughters—Rosamund, Deborah, and Marguerite—and six granddaughters in all, and though they are all delightful it’s Vega and Mira, daughters of Marguerite, whom I hold most dear.)

  As usual, Emmet Fawkes is on his stool muttering to himself—“Satan’s foot soldiers are on the march!”—and on cue a squirrel scurries loudly across the roof tiles and an acorn pings off the gutter spout. I hear voices through the heavy velvet curtain, and when I step inside I spot several things on the table beneath the Leuchterweibchen that weren’t here last time: a phrenology model, a pair of golliwogs (it’s here you’ll find the playthings Lucretia Hartmann of Hartmann’s Classic Toys won’t touch), an armillary sphere with silver contours glinting in the sunlight.

  There’s another man in his eighties behind the counter, with its bronze crank-model cash register and apotropaic doodads arranged under the glass. He wears a bow tie and gray suspenders over a short-sleeved dress shirt, and you’d know from his coloring that his wispy white hair was red once. On th
is side of the counter there’s a younger, heavier man drumming his fingers on the glass. I can tell by the tone of his voice and the tattered Macy’s bag that he’s come to make a return. Make an attempt, that is.

  “Hello, Evelyn,” says Harry Ibis in his usual placid tone, which seems to agitate the man even further. “Lovely day, isn’t it?” I murmur my agreement, Harry gives me a wry look over his customer’s shoulder, and the man glances at me nervously before continuing his plea.

  “My wife is a wreck, Mr. Ibis. She’s terrified! Every time she picks up the mirror she sees someone staring at her over her shoulder. Someone who isn’t there when she turns around.”

  Mr. Ibis points to the sign tacked to the shelf above his head:

  ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

  “But surely—”

  Harry points again, to the line at the bottom of the notice:

  NO EXCEPTIONS.

  “You were aware of our policy before you made the purchase, Mr. Vandersmith. Buyer’s remorse is commonplace in a shop like this. It’s the nature of our inventory.”

  “You aren’t going to give me my money back?”

  Harry Ibis shakes his head. “I do apologize, Mr. Vandersmith, but if I gave a refund to every customer who changed his mind we’d go out of business.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with it then? I can’t bring it back into the house. My wife has already had to go on antianxiety medication!”