Mallory was not given to small talk. She couldn't ask an offhand innocent question; it just wasn't in her. Well, if he never learned anything from her responses, there might be something to be had from her questions.
"She's still in mourning for her husband." And now he noticed the pastrami with mustard and mayonnaise, and he was torn between the two sandwiches.
"Nobody mourns for thirty years, Charles." One corner of Mallory's disbelieving mouth slipped into a deep dimple of skepticism, and Louis's coffee machine sputtered. "Maybe there's a little more to it?" She set the plate of sandwiches on the checked tablecloth. "Something to do with her husband's accident?" 'She told you about that?"
"Sit," she said, pointing him to a chair by the kitchen table while she turned back to the coffee-maker where Louis abided.
He had shared many meals with her, and not one of them had been in a kitchen. As he recalled, her father had been a kitchen-sitting person – but to a purpose. In Louis's opinion, conversation was greased by a kitchen atmosphere and hampered by a more formal setting.
It occurred to him that the poker-players had steered him wrong. Her behavior might be more predictable if he concentrated on what she had learned from Markowitz and not Helen.
"Thirty years," said Mallory. "It's like jail time."
"I guess it does seem like a penance." He picked up a sandwich and suddenly forgot his appetite. Penance. Why had that never occurred to him before? Memories were surfacing, but still vague yet. "She might feel responsible for the accident."
"Because…" Mallory prompted him.
"I'm not sure. I was only nine when Max died."
"You have a memory like a computer. Now give."
"Eidetic memory doesn't work that way. I can recite chapters from books and even tell you if I spilled any coffee on the pages, but I'm not good at recalling conversations that went over my head when I was a child."
"I don't think much has gone by you since you left the womb, Charles. These conversations you can't remember, did they happen close to the day your cousin died?"
"Probably. Max lived with us for the last three days of his life."
"Only Max? He left his wife?"
"Yes, I think so. Oh, right. They'd had a quarrel. It was something to do with the new act. Edith thought it was too dangerous. I think she wanted him to give it up. But he couldn't. You see, the're was a time when he'd had top billing as Maximilian the Great. Then later, he became the husband of the great Edith Candle. All of his brilliant illusions, his own gifts had gotten lost somewhere."
"So this was his comeback? He was taking another shot at it?"
"Yes. He created a fantastic new set of illusions for this act. I remember all of us, Max and my parents, sitting around the table reading the reviews the morning after his opening." His photographic memory was calling up the newspaper column which had so impressed him as a child, it had remained with him for thirty years. "The New York Times called him a maestro." Now he was on familiar ground as he called up the printed word from another newspaper column and read the lines as though he held the paper in his hand." "The master is incomparable at the height of his creative powers", they said. His star was on the rise again."
The following morning, after the second performance had ended in tragedy, the newspapers had been kept out of his sight.
"So Max's career was on the rise. What about Edith's act?"
"Well, she still had a certain stature in psychic circles, but in one night, Max had eclipsed her, quite literally with his hands tied. It was amazing. There were lots of reviews. New York had more newspapers in those days. They all used the words death-defying and dangerous to describe the act."
"Dangerous? It was all a sham, wasn't it?"
"Oh, no. The new tricks were very dangerous. The finale required all his skill and mental discipline. While he stayed with us, he refused to give interviews. He wouldn't take any phone calls or messages."
"Not even from Edith?"
"Especially not from Edith." Why had he said that?
"Must have been quite a fight between those two."
"Well, the illusion required great concentration, no distractions."
"Like Edith predicting his death?"
The writing on the wall. What had his mother said about that?
"Yes, I suppose that was it. A few days before the opening of the new act, he found a message scrawled on the wall of his apartment. It was red lipstick."
"What did it say?"
"No idea. I'm putting this together from what I overheard. No one ever spoke to me about it. It was odd. Trance writing had never been part of the old routine."
"Trance writing?"
"Yes, something written without conscious thought, while in a trance. She never denied having written it, she only said she had no memory of doing it."
"Did you believe her? Whose side did you take?"
"I don't know. I was only nine years old then. I'm sure I loved them both." No, that was not true. One was loved and one was adored. "Perhaps I was closer to Max. He spent a lot of time with me. He had other things to do, I know. It was a busy period for him. But he took time out to play with me. I loved him very much."
He picked up an olive from his plate and closed it in the palm of his hand. When he spread his fingers again the olive was gone. He reached up and appeared to pull the olive from his eye socket, handing it to her with one eye closed. She laughed. Though the trick played on the simple humor of a small child, the love of all things gross and gory, she laughed as he had done all those years ago when Max was alive and beloved.
"Max died on the second night he performed the new routine with the water tank. The next day, when my parents told me about the accident, I wouldn't believe them. I just knew it had to be a trick. Edith went into seclusion after Max died. She didn't even go to his funeral. I did. The services were held in the cathedral. Magicians came from all over the world. They came in uniform, but not magician's black. They all wore white top hats, white capes and suits. The women wore white satin dresses. All the flowers were white. And later, at the cemetery, when the casket was lowered into the ground, a thousand doves flew out from under the magicians' capes. The sky was white with doves' wings. I will never see anything like that again."
"Edith must have been in pretty bad shape to miss the funeral."
"I'm sure she was."
"You don't know?"
"My parents never took me to visit her after that. My mother told me we were respecting her seclusion. The next time I saw Edith was after my mother's funeral."
The coffee-maker spat.
Edith Candle was staring at the wall but not seeing it. Looking beyond the twining roses on the wallpaper, she was probing old memories which predated the death of a magician. Her chair rocked with unconscious effort.
One could always point to a time, a choice, an act that set the tone for a life and changed a personal destiny. Her moment had come in a desolate corner of the flat Midwestern landscape. The sky had been deep purple, and she recalled stars like blazing cartwheels in the triangular flaps of the tent which had been pulled back to catch the breezes of a hot summer night. Maximilian had been at the back of the tent with the mark. By code of words, he fed her the details of the watch in his hand.
"I can't see anymore," she had cried out suddenly, "the image is being drowned out by other thoughts." The other thoughts had been gleaned by eavesdropping in the line for admission. Max had overheard a woman talking about her sister Emaline's heart problem and how it worried her night and day.
"Tell us these thoughts," said Max, cuing her to remove the blindfold and ask if the name Emaline meant anything to anyone in the audience. She removed her blindfold and looked out over the silent, tense sea of faces.
She was transfixed by the boy in the front row, far from the mark at the back of the tent. The boy stared at her. He shivered and then looked away. His soft eyes shamed down to his shoes. She stared at him until the boy's eyes met hers again. He had the look of a drowning animal. The sense that he was waterbound was strengthened as the boy began to rise from the wooden bench, moving in slow motion as though the atmosphere had killing weight and pressure. An older companion, wearing the same gas-station uniform as the boy's, put a hand on his shoulder to bid the boy sit down again. The boy's terrified eyes looked back to hers. He sloughed off the old man's hand and began to make his way down the aisle with the gait of too much drink, though she knew the boy was not intoxicated.