Petty Magic Page 3

  Now, I know what you’re thinking: vain, silly Evelyn, snatching at her bygone beauty! Why can’t she play with men her own age? After all, isn’t that what Viagra is for?

  First, all the men my age are taking dirt naps, so I’d have to raid the cradle at the local senior center over on Pitt Street. Nothing tickles my bits like a gent in diapers!

  And second, I have already tried it. It’s the most natural thing in the world, a libido at my age (assuming I am only as old as I look); but while these men consider their own undiminished concupiscence a sign of good health, they think a woman their age with the same impulses must be touched in the head. I arrived at the senior center one frosty Tuesday, not long after New Year’s ’82 it was. I challenged a certain gentleman in an argyle sweater-vest to a game of checkers, made some completely innocuous remarks about there being more snow in the forecast, and complimented the lemon meringue they were serving with the afternoon coffee. That was all it took: the rumors about “randy Miss Evelyn” spread faster than an outbreak of flatulence after a boiled turnip luncheon. Since then I’ve been to every faith-based and city-sponsored senior center on the island and was treated similarly each and every time. They’re downright afraid of me.

  These men aren’t terribly observant, are they? When they look in the mirror, to shave themselves or what have you, they think they still see a young buck of twenty-seven, a boy in blue who can boast a girl in every port. I’m really not so foolish in comparison, am I? Besides, these are my retirement years, to be spent however I please. Would you criticize the old man who spends every morning on the golf course or the ladies who pass their evenings crossing their fingers for a bingo?

  People think because they’re young and stupid and I’m old that that must make me wise. I’ll tell you something: you don’t get wise, you get greedy. You go out to some posh bistro on the Upper East Side and treat yourself to a filet mignon and a glass of Margaux, in solitude, so that young couples dining around you wonder aloud if you are someone they may have read about—an heiress, or a novelist perhaps. And because you sleep by yourself, you want only the nicest bedclothes: Egyptian cotton sheets, an abundance of down pillows, a quilted satin coverlet that reminds you of a certain Paris hotel room in 1932. You want fresh-cut flowers in every room, lilies preferably, because the older they get the lewder they smell. And yes, sometimes you do want desperately to look as you did once, when you never had to eat or sleep alone.

  But don’t go thinking I mind it so much—this body, I mean. After all, I’ve earned every wrinkle. And I must say I look quite well for my age: I dress as smartly as ever, I keep svelte because I don’t eat junk, I walk up four flights of stairs to my apartment so I’ve still got nice gams (for an old lady), and I wear an industrial-grade brassiere so my nips aren’t flapping at my ankles.

  I MIGHT AS well tell you I was in love once. They say I’m lucky he didn’t live long enough to let me loathe him, but I’d rather loathe a living man than mourn a dead one—and killed so cruelly!

  His name was Jonah, and he’d be a hundred and six now, had he lived. On those nights I pass in my own company I often dream of him, and when I wake my pillow smells like a rained-out chicken coop. I know it isn’t right, but sometimes when I’m in another man’s bed, his face only a pale smudge hovering above me in the darkness, I try my best to convince myself that face belongs to Jonah. And oh, how I wish then that I’d been born a few centuries earlier, back when a broken heart could do a girl in.

  Do-Goodery

  5.

  WHY DIDN’T I save him?

  One of the first things you learn from your mother is this: to save someone’s life we must lay down our own, and we may only take a life if ours is threatened. Mind you, I’d have given up my life for him without a second’s hesitation, especially since I knew full well we could never grow old together; but I wasn’t there when they killed him, and by the time I found him it was too late for magic.

  There is another common wisdom among us, and that is: a beldame should never become a nurse, because she feels so much more helpless than even an ordinary woman does to watch a man die in agony. A nurse of our kind may only numb his pain with the words she murmurs in the midst of his delirium. She may settle the nerves and sharpen the wits of the doctor as he enters his makeshift surgery, she may eliminate obstacles on the route so the medical convoy arrives in time, and she may bless the stretcher bearers—but she may not save the life of a man whose fate is already decided.

  This is common wisdom because I happen to be the one spreading it. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you, Evelyn—a nurse? You, who make yourself young again so you can seduce frat boys and out-of-work actors?

  See, it’s only in our twilight years we amuse ourselves with that petty magic. To begin with we must answer our calling just like anybody else, and we do feel we are endowed with a special responsibility to slow humanity’s mad decline in any way we can. So Auntie Emmeline ran the local chapter of the Red Cross, and Helena succeeded her; Uncle Hector fought for fair trade long before it was fashionable, while Heck’s twin brother was busy raising a crowd of pint-sized revolutionaries in a one-room schoolhouse in the mountains of Ecuador. Both my uncles flew bombers in the Second World War, though they’re too modest to speak of it much. And Dymphna who owns the wedding boutique ran a soup kitchen in West Philadelphia (the vats of chicken noodle never ran out) before she took up shopkeeping; and so on and suchlike.

  Other vocations were less humanitarian but just as necessary. Uncle Erskine, for example, was an agent with the Society for the Suppression of Supernatural Phenomena, and in the small hours he would scour the Pine Barrens in search of mutant bats, or the shores of Ocean County looking out for any mermaid skeletons that might have washed up overnight.

  But no matter what they did for a living, we were always fascinated by our uncles. We envied our cousins who had dads they could learn from and look up to—after all, they were at an advantage compared to the rest of us, who hardly knew what we were ’til after our fathers’ departure.

  That’s not to say their parents stayed married any more often than ours did; nine times out of ten they never bothered to marry at all. The Magi of old were Zoroastrian priests who studied the stars, and modern magi aren’t so different: above all, they are wanderers.

  At one hundred seventy-seven years of age, Uncle Heck has traversed six continents as a labor rights advocate and the seventh to show off his macho survival skills. In his retirement he has scaled Mount Everest, rafted the Amazon, and run a ring around the terrestrial South Pole in a dogsled, using magic only when expedient. He has built and inhabited tree houses larger than most Manhattan apartments. You see why the magi make lousy husbands? Not because no woman in her right mind would consent to live at the top of a towering redwood, but because he never pauses long enough for conversation.

  Which is not to say our uncles didn’t find the time to play with us when we were small—indeed, they were our greatest teachers, our mothers being too concerned with telling us all the things we mustn’t do. While our aunties showed us how to interpret our dreams and the dregs at the bottom of our teacups, how to recognize a portent (they’re different for everyone, but I learned early on that blind dogs, lightning in a snowstorm, and as I say, my father’s face, all bode ill for me), and how to view a snow globe at just the right angle for a clear picture of events unfolding thousands of miles away, the magi were teaching us all the fun stuff, a beldame’s stock-in-trade.

  For instance, there are five methods of altering one’s physical appearance: invisibility is first. It requires a tremendous supply of oomph to render oneself invisible, so much so that one usually cannot exercise any other power that would make the whole business worthwhile; and besides which, the novelty wears off soon enough. To make oneself invisible does not make one able to pass through matter like a ghost. All the rules of gravity and the material world still apply. I have always found transfiguration far more advantageous. A set of wings! Now,
a set of wings will get you someplace.

  Some beldames (or magi) find they are more at ease in the form of bird or beast and even choose to remain that way most of the time. The transformation takes half a minute or so (depends on the animal), but it feels like you’re teething all over—every bone shifting into new form, sinews stretching and contracting. Growing feathers, now that’s the really odd part: a thousand tiny needles poking you from within. Once transformed, you have all the new advantages, and perils, of your temporary form. Birds fly high but fall fast. It is also unwise to turn oneself into an insect, as one is liable to perish upon a windscreen.

  Yes, there are as many dangers as benefits in making oneself invisible and in the growing of wings or tails; a safer, more subtle option is the glamour. The art of glamoury is grossly misunderstood, for you have no doubt heard of the dabbler who plays with her mirror in hopes of entrancing a man. (Such foolery is likely to attract only the sort of men who are not worth having.) The most useful glamour is the inverse of that: to render oneself completely inconspicuous, to blend, all but literally, into the wallpaper. It was never a terribly exciting prospect when we were young, but the older we got, the more useful we found it.

  The fourth option is, of course, my favorite: making yourself appear younger (or older) than your natural age. It’s a simple matter, like moving the cursor up or down a slide rule.

  The last involves wearing somebody else’s face, and that takes the most oomph of all. Once the kiddies realize they fool no one when they don their sisters’ faces hoping to evade punishment for their mischief, this option generally falls by the wayside. I’ve only used it a couple of times myself, and only when necessitated by the most dangerous of circumstances. You can change someone else’s face as well, or turn an ordinary man into a wee furry thing, but that kind of trick can knock you out for days.

  Even more important than knowing how to change yourself is knowing which of the five options best serves the situation at hand, and that’s where our aunties took over. The magi shared in our exhilarated laughter as we grew scales and tails and vanished into the hedgerows, but it was the aunties who tempered our glee with cautionary tales of beldames killed in foxhunts. It was the aunties who subjected us to frequent lectures on the difference between wisdom and cunning and informed us time and again that it doesn’t matter where you are or what age you’re living in, the sad truth is that looks are everything.

  And yet mirrors are ordinary objects, quicksilver painted on a sheet of glass, and are easily fooled. The only hitch is this: if you’re working a glamour and another beldame catches sight of you in a mirror, she can see you as you really are.

  But in the beginning I had no notion of tricking mirrors and stealing secrets. Morven and I had grown up romanticizing the brave exploits of those medical pioneers of the gentler sex, Clara Barton and Flo Nightingale, and so we decided to devote our lives to that noble profession. We trained at the New York Infirmary, but because of our unchanging visages we could never work at any one hospital for very long.

  Later on, we served in the Army Nurse Corps from May 1917 until the Armistice. There were several of us extraordinary nurses at that field hospital at Ypres, and we each had our specialty. Morven’s was mustard gas burns, and mine was gangrene. Have you ever seen a man suffering from gangrene? They call it necrosis because death takes him nibble by nibble. Even the boys coming in with their limbs blown off wouldn’t turn your bile quite so much as a case of gangrene.

  I’ll tell you how I did it. A soldier would be brought in and he’d be so bad off the doctor would plan for an amputation early the next morning. Late that night I would kneel by the bed, lift the sheet, remove the bandages, and sprinkle a bit of sulfa powder onto the rot. This was part of the standard treatment, of course, and so far the infection would have shown no sign of retreat; but I would murmur a few words under my breath and tuck a calendula flower under his pillow, and in the morning the doctor would be astounded to find the patient’s foot on the mend. I could never heal it outright, of course, or somebody might have suspected.

  No sense denying I was a lousy nurse, though, at least in the eyes of the doctors. You couldn’t expect an ordinary doctor to understand that keeping a soldier entertained was just as important—nay, more so—than sterilizing his bandages or administering the correct level of morphine. The convalescents were sometimes in an even more precarious position than the freshly wounded, particularly if they had lost a limb, so I considered it just as much a part of my job to cheer them up, to get them hopeful for the future again.

  It was then that I learned to read palms. If I saw a soldier marinating in his megrims, I’d sit down on a stool beside the bed and take his hand without bothering to ask his permission. “Do you know a girl with auburn hair and a hearty laugh?” I’d ask. “No? Well, you will.”

  Then I’d leave him to think of all that I’d said, to trace her profile and conjure her laughter out of the darkness; and the next morning, more often than not, I’d find a whole new man. Over time I developed something of a reputation, and the men began seeking me out for a peek at their fortunes. In exchange, I made them take me out to a field near the medical tent for target practice. More than anything else, I wanted to learn how to shoot, and learn I did. We laughed and flirted in between taking aim at empty packs of cigarettes lined up along the fence posts.

  After the Armistice, while most of the other nurses were arranging for their passage back to New York (and cutting their hair short because their scalps were crawling with lice), Morven and I took the loo flue to London for a few days’ holiday before we returned home to Blackabbey.

  I KNEW THERE would be another war with Germany—we all knew it, the fact was plain as a tinker’s mistress—and I began preparing for a very different sort of work the next time around. It was a calling to which I could apply my gifts with greater efficacy, or so I hoped, and it was this ambition that eventually led me to Jonah.

  Welcome to Harbinger House

  6.

  But at evening she came all at once to the green lawn where the wretched little hut stood on its hens’ legs. The wall around the hut was made of human bones and on its top were skulls. There was a gate in the wall, whose hinges were the bones of human feet and whose locks were jaw-bones set with sharp teeth. The sight filled Vasilissa with horror …

  —From “Vasilissa the Beautiful,” Russian Wonder Tales

  BECAUSE THE house is haunted, Helena makes all her guests sign a waiver at check-in. The ghost is even older than we are; it seems he’s fascinated, still, with the concept of indoor plumbing. The toilets flush by themselves in the middle of the night, and when a guest gets out of bed to investigate, she spots no cat slipping through the open window, no other explanation for the water gurgling in the cistern. The ghost never shows himself, but before Helena instituted the waiver, the occasional guest would try to weasel out of paying for the night because of the phantom toilet-flushing.

  Of course, there are others who come here because of the so-called “toilet ghost.” Excited middle-aged men bring EVP recorders, infrared cameras, and other devices that beep frantically just before the flush, and Helena has been interviewed on cable television more times than I can recall. People find her delightfully peculiar for the way she speaks of our ghost with fondness, for her taste in art (on the foyer walls one finds medieval woodcuts of tubby monks making merry and bare-bottomed fiends discharging Satan’s deadliest weapon), and for her collection of marionette puppets scattered throughout the house.

  There is at least one marionette in every room apart from the baths. Each of the five lady puppets strung above the kitchen sink is dressed in a calico frock and sensible shoes, her hair—unnervingly lifelike—worn in a bob of brown frizz, her face kind in aspect. In the parlor four marionettes hang from the fireplace mantel; three are women and one is not. The lady puppets look like Gibson girls with their bouffants, swan-bill corsets, and pensive gazes, but their broad crimson mouths and spindly finger
s lend them a more sinister air than their creator had perhaps intended. The man puppet, as if for comic relief, wears wire-rimmed spectacles and a pink cravat. Come December Helena tucks each of them into a red-striped stocking, and they goggle at you like curious marsupials as you pour your whisky.

  Even at a distance one discerns the careful, even obsessive craftsmanship that went into each of these puppets. They wear hand-knit Aran jumpers in soft flecked wool, herringbone trousers and tiny leather wingtips, frothy lawn dresses and off-the-shoulder evening gowns. In their little wooden hands they carry golf clubs and croquet mallets, paintbrushes and knitting needles. Draw nearer and you’ll see the freckles on their noses and forearms, crow’s-feet, cleft chins, and liver spots. Their eyes are full of expression: some are wistful, others mischievous. The older puppets wear hats trimmed with dusty silk flowers, bustle skirts or crinolines, wimples and rough homespun; the men wear waistcoats, bow ties, spats, and what have you. One puppet in the dining room has a dime-sized pocket watch, and if you’re the first one up in the morning you can hear it ticking while you’re having your breakfast.

  The parrot is another subject of curiosity. Hieronymus is an African grey, a species known for its skill in mimicry. He resides mostly in the sitting room, on a perch of eucalyptus wood beside an antique lectern. Not only is our parrot literate, but his IQ is probably higher than yours (and you shouldn’t feel bad about that, really, because the bird is smarter than anyone in the Harbinger clan). But he doesn’t say much, since he’s too busy working his way through the metaphysical poets. After that he’ll be on to the Scottish romantics, and yes, he turns his own pages with a flick of his claw. The parrot takes most of his meals at the lectern—Helena spends a small fortune each month on organic flaxseed and sardines millésimées—and a couple of times a day he flies up two flights of stairs and through an attic window (always kept open for this purpose) for a bit of fresh air. He roosts up there, too, in a cage without a door.