Carter Beats the Devil (11 page)

“Hello, little men! I hear you’ve had an adventure.”

He went down on one knee while James and Charles fell on top of him, explaining everything all at once. Mr. Carter put on a concerned face when listening to the most awful parts, but his underlying smile told Charles his father in no way understood what they were saying.

“Jenks tried to kill us. Where were you?” Charles asked, and the heat of his tone made his father stare at him.

“I was surveying our new vineyard,” Mr. Carter explained. He had more to say: the purchase had been phenomenal, far more complex than he’d anticipated, they would appreciate it when they were older, there was nothing wrong with the servants’ watching them for a few days.

“But Cook and Patsy—” Charles started.

“Did you know they’re heroes?” Mr. Carter interrupted. “The tent at their revival meeting collapsed in the snow, and they’ve been tending the injured. It even made the newspaper.”

“Why didn’t they come back for us?” Charles asked.

Mr. Carter looked disappointed. “These were poor people. The most wretched. You boys had Mr. Jenks to look after you.”

“You have to let Jenks go,” Charles said. “He put us—”

“He already told me and I gave him a piece of my mind.”

“You have to let him go!” Charles touched his face, where the deep scratches from the brank ached.

“He shouldn’t have taken you into my collections room.” Mr. Carter wet his thumb and rubbed roughly at Charles’s cheek. “That place isn’t for young eyes, and you could have damaged some valuable pieces.”

Charles quaked, choking against his father’s misunderstanding. “No, he put me into the brank, and—”

“He put you in your place, didn’t he?” The corners of Mr. Carter’s mouth turned up.

“He hit James and put him in the pillory—”

“You teased him, and you know you’re not supposed to.”

“We didn’t!” Charles cried, nudging James. “Tell him.”

But James only held on to their father’s hand silently. He was staring beyond their father, and Charles followed his eyes; Jenks was approaching.

“You’re in trouble,” Charles hissed. Jenks ignored him.

“Mr. Jenks, I apologize for the boys’ behavior,” Mr. Carter said, taking out an envelope. “Boys, before you wash up, I think you have something to say.”

Charles teared up. His father wasn’t listening.

James whispered, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jenks.”

Jenks didn’t move. His eyes were on Mr. Carter’s envelope.

Mr. Carter said, “You’re a big boy, James. Now go wash up. And take care with my nightshirt.”

James limped up the back stairs and into the house.

Charles spat it out: “I’m not apologizing.”

His father grabbed him by the collar. “Young man, you live a life of privilege and when called upon, you will behave with respect and humility and self-control.”

It was in the words his father used that Charles found a swell of unexpected freedom. He wasn’t just a rich man’s son; he was a master conjurer. Though it made his mouth tremble, he forced himself to say it. “Mr. Jenks, I apologize to you.”

He awaited acknowledgment, but there was none. Jenks watched Mr. Carter pull bills from the envelope. Mr. Carter said, “The storm caused a run on gold, I’m afraid. So I hope silver certificates will be all right.”

Jenks nodded. Mr. Carter passed a one-dollar bill to his son. “Look what the Treasury is up to. They call this the Educational Series.” There was a movement to edify the masses, to promote classical civilization in all governmental pursuits. “So the architecture from now on will be Greek Revival, and the greenbacks, the ones, twos, and fives, they’ll depict important scenes from historical, scientific, and mythological viewpoints, the creation of the steam engine, and so forth.”

For once, Charles didn’t listen. He didn’t even bother to look at the bill between his fingertips. Instead, he focused on his father: the brilliantly polished surface of his shoes, the neat pressing and starch to his
shirt, the easy smile on his face as he counted a stack of five-dollar bills into Jenks’s palm.

“And here, just for watching the boys,” Mr. Carter dropped a final bill onto the stack.

When he became aware that Charles was still there, Mr. Carter waggled his fingers at him. “Go wash up,” he said.

Charles watched the money slip into Jenks’s pocket. He wished he could vanish it. Instead, he entered the house. He walked up the staircase, holding the banister tightly, feeling that he was more tired than he had ever been.

In the bathroom, steam was rising, clouding the windows. James sat on the rim of the bathtub as it filled with water. The remains of his costume were on the floor, including their father’s soiled nightshirt. Charles removed his own clothing; when he was done, he saw that James was holding the white rock, the egg rock, between his fingers.

“Here,” James said. “You can be the magician.”

Charles took the rock, and covering it with his fingertips, made it disappear. James made no response, so Charles pulled the rock out from behind James’s ear. “Father was right, you are dirty,” Charles said.

James snorted. Then he was quiet.

“I’ll need an assistant sometimes.”

Their eyes met, and James’s watered. He looked away.

“It’s all right,” Charles added. “I can do it alone.”

James slipped into the tub, under the water, and then resurfaced.

Later, Charles, too, would get into the tub, but for now he stood alone and held the rock in his hand, because it had already started for him: his hands felt naked without something in them—a card, a coin, a rope—and whenever they held something secretly, they felt educated.

CHAPTER 6

Mrs. Carter returned to San Francisco after two years of therapy, glowing with the wonders of psycho-analysis. In her first months back, she encouraged her boys to lie eyes closed on the chaise longues in the parlor, her hands extended to their foreheads, and tell her how they’d felt about her while she was gone, and how they felt about her now that she was back. She declared aloud “that’s a breakthrough” so many times that James and Charles often asked to be excused early to go to bed.

She encouraged her husband to write down and interpret his dreams. She was disappointed—so much so that she secretly considered divorcing him—that they were almost always about stock market hunches.

But the Carters were allies, regardless, and Mr. Carter took seriously his wife’s suggestion that their elder son was in the grip of an interesting passion; they should let Charles find his way in the world.

He passed quite unexpectedly from amateur to professional magician when he was a fifteen-year-old student at the Thacher School, a private academy in Ojai, California. Thacher was both rural and academically challenging: in addition to the regular slate of courses to prepare for Yale—all Thacherites went to Yale—the boys were each given a horse to care for, as Sherman Day Thacher had declared there was something about the outside of a horse that was good for the inside of a boy.

Carter later claimed he had entered Thacher on a “wizardry” scholarship. There was of course no such thing. Thacher was a cradle for future politicians and captains of industry. As a lower lower, or
smut,
the term used for boys who were so hopelessly green they came back from camping trips covered in soot, he practiced his card effects in his room in the hour between supper and study hall.

He was an indifferent student, excited by Shakespeare, better than anyone expected at physical sciences, hopeless at economics, mediocre in debate, and excellent (as was any Pacific Heights boy raised under the influence of stocks, bonds, and notes) in the areas of deportment and social hygiene. That Thacher was a gateway to Yale meant little to him, for college meant preparation for banking, and Carter, unlike his classmates, lacked the soul of a banker. He made no lasting friends. His horse, a gelding he spoiled on apples and licorice, loved him very much.

Instead of burning the midnight oil with other students, Carter romanced the arcanae of physiology and self-improvement. He filched anatomy books from the library and studied the architecture of his palms, the bones like irregular cobblestones packed together under sheaths of muscle and fibrous ligaments. He was hypnotized by certain etchings, such as the bands of muscles around the thumb: the abductors, the adductors, the saintly flexor ossis metacarpi pollicis, the muscle of the opposable thumb, which separated man from the animals and, when exercised, the magician from his fellow man.

Success, it was said in Ottawa Keyes, and in many other books (he now learned), hinged upon the application of will against the physical body. Great challenges to his willpower would come soon
enough—more immediately, Carter learned about the tools he had: skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones.

The palm bones were named in times that respected mysteries: here was the cuneiform bone, the unciform, the semilunar, the pisiform, which sounded as if they’d been discovered by candlelight and recorded on papyrus by hooded men with long-quilled pens. The fingers radiated action, intelligence, deviousness. “This is no longer the shaft of my thumb,” Carter thought, “but my abductor pollicis, and my fingertips are flexor sublimi capped by flexor profundi.” He felt like he could shoot sparks off them.

One night in the spring of his sophomore year, there was a lecture on moral instruction that no one wanted to miss. The speaker was Borax Smith, whose wealth, it was said, exceeded even the imaginations of boys who’d had their own fair taste of money.

Smith took the podium in the faculty chapel, looking as old and plump and simple and kindly as a grandfather. Born and quickly abandoned near the Erie Canal sometime around 1840 (he never knew how old he was or where his parents went), Francis M. Smith matured into a hoodlum, but not a very good one. After many abominable exploits—he admitted he’d stolen linen from churches, forged cheques, rolled the intoxicated, and poured spiked drinks in a thieves’ den—he drifted to Nevada, with a mule and a stake of fifty acres of worthless land—Teel’s Marsh. Here he prospected hopelessly for gold. He dug alone in the blazing sun for many days, and then saw a single raincloud, which he prayed would cross over him. In the midst of a downpour that lasted only seconds, he heard the voice of God, which commanded him:
“Be good.”

When Borax reached this part of his lecture, there were suppressed snickers all around, as the voice of God was a silly old chestnut. But the rest of the story left the boys silent, for that cloudburst had pounded away the sand at Borax’s feet, revealing the top layer of a white vein of a curious substance, a scouring agent that could clean glass or metal. Smith told them he was disappointed—gold or silver would have been nice—but still he thanked God.

As it turned out, Teel’s Marsh contained 98 percent of the world’s supply of borax. Smith started a company, Twenty Mule Team Borax; within a year, he became a millionaire, and within ten years, wealthy beyond calculation, for he allowed the women of America to drive away dirt and grime, achieving a domestic sheen their mothers could never dream of.

Carter, who had arrived late to the lecture, was unimpressed with the speaker—the idea of the richest man in the America reminded him,
faintly, of the tallest man in the world, and the only other prospector he’d known was Jenks. He spent the lecture practicing looking attentive; in fact he was thinking about cryptic shuffling illustrations deep in Professor Hoffman’s
Modern Magic.

Borax told the boys that he still listened daily for the voice of God, which had told him to
be good,
and that was why he had come to live in Oakland. He had built there, on the grounds of his great estate, a first-class home for unfortunate women. His theory was that with the feeling of luxury under their feet, these women would go forth and
be good
themselves, and not abandon their fatherless children. Borax slowed down here, explaining that a man could have a thousand interesting investments but what counted in this life and the next was good works: his was the rehabilitation of lost women.

He asked for questions. Immediately a dozen boys in succession asked him in various ways how rich, exactly, he was. He admitted he didn’t know, no, he was sure he didn’t know, and they asked, well, compared to Morgan, for instance, are you richer than he is, and he had to admit he didn’t know that, either, nor compared to Hearst, nor Rockefeller, and gradually his answers grew shorter, and then he said “Thank you,” and there was some applause.

The boys disbanded, most striding immediately to the dormitory for tea and debates of how much Borax must have netted in his lifetime. Carter, however, did not follow; he hesitated on the patio outside the chapel, under the pepper tree. After a moment of consideration, he opened a deck of cards and squinted at them as if they were ill-behaved children. He might have found an avenue for bottom-dealing Professor Hoffman had inadequately explored. He couldn’t tell if the effect would be transparent to an audience, and he was cursing himself for not having brought a mirror as he flexed his thumb—which was over the deck—and at the same time fired cards out with his ring finger.

He realized he was being observed. Borax Smith watched him with lucid brown eyes. Carter looked around; they were alone on the patio.

“I have been watching you for two, three minutes,” Borax said, raising his bushy eyebrows. “You been involved.”

Carter put the cards away. His ability to dismiss Borax as yet another prospector vanished. Man-to-man, he felt intimidated to be alone with him. “I’m sorry. I . . . I wasn’t gambling, sir.”

“That’s all right. I done worse things.” Borax dug in his pocket and pulled out a quarter dollar. “Show me what else you do.”

Carter looked blankly at the coin, making no connection between it
and what he’d been doing. Borax misunderstood, and with a deep sigh of “Thacher boys,” pulled out a dime. “There,” he said, “thirty-five cents. I want to see a private show for thirty-five cents.”

“Oh!” He almost handed the money back, for he had no routine and no particular idea of constructing one. But it was late in the month and he’d torn through his allowance, and thirty-five cents would carry him through nicely. So he did a series of fans and ruffles, then asked to borrow Borax’s handkerchief, which he vanished and then found wrapped around a deck of cards in his pocket. He had recently heard much about the coin techniques of T. Nelson Downs, and so he pretended to double and triple and quadruple the thirty-five cents Borax had given him. Finally, he grew bolder, shaking money out from under Borax’s shabby straw hat.