Carter Beats the Devil (12 page)

When he was through, he took a shallow bow, and Borax applauded thoughtfully. He asked if Carter had considered taking his act on the road. Carter hadn’t, but he knew the right thing to do was nod. “You can meet plenty interesting folk out there,” Borax continued. “Play on the same bill as the Barrymores, or the divine Sarah Bernhardt, or la Loie Fuller. There are plenty magicians in vaudeville who aren’t half as good as what you could do.”

Carter had been brought up well, and so he said “Thank you, sir,” and he timidly accepted Borax’s card, and promised to keep him posted as to how his career advanced.

He had no plan to perform onstage, but a seed had been planted. By that night, shoots and leaves and flowers erupted: he could be
paid money,
night after night, to do his
magic.
This was far superior to tallying numbers in a ledger. If he did well enough onstage, he needn’t go to college at all.

But the thought of performing for an audience unnerved him. Though he preferred being alone, on some Sunday afternoons, when the rest of the fellows had ridden their horses into town, Carter often felt a desire to be among a population of people who were like him. Being onstage would be a grand way to meet people. The thought was a tremendous attraction, like an open window.

He wrote a letter to his parents, mentioning to his mother what an adventure it might be and to his father the financial possibilities and asking them both if they knew how one joined a vaudeville troupe.

. . .

The idea of Charles touring as a magician for a summer amused his parents, who imagined it like packing off to sea as a cabin boy, though
safer, landlocked, and temporary. Mr. Carter was actually well equipped to help: a man from Albee’s Keith-Orpheum circuit, the best of all vaudeville shows, had recently solicited his aid in securing a loan to build the San Francisco Port, a small, refined theatre that would feature European performers only.

So, rather quickly, Charles Carter was given an audition at the Keith-Orpheum’s United Booking Office, where he sweated through a ten-minute scarf-and-coin act cobbled together with bits and pieces of patter from his magic books. It failed to impress the United Booking Office much. They gave him a letter of recommendation to the lesser circuits, the dustier venues that were more desperate for acts. Three auditions and three rungs down the ladder later, he had his first paying job.

During the summer break of 1906, between his junior and senior years at Thacher, Carter toured the shoddy Lyceum circuit, and played halls in the Deep South, where the playbills shaved five years off his age and claimed he was “nature’s prodigy.” On what the troupers called Lyceum time, Carter was devoured by fleas, his earnings were regularly stolen, and he returned to California smelling like a smoldering cheroot. He loved every moment of it.

His senior portrait in the 1906
Highwayman,
the Thacher yearbook, showed him in school tweeds standing on the same riverbank where all senior portraits were taken. Below his name was written “Destination Yale,” as was written below all the senior names that year. However, close inspection revealed his true destination. Though some of his classmates distinguished themselves in their photographs by affecting a pipe or consulting a railway watch, Carter simply fanned a deck of cards in each hand, all of them aces.

Contrary to vaudeville’s claims, he wasn’t a prodigy. He had a workman’s undistinguished face, lacking all suggestion of precocious brilliance. In the sepia tone of the
Highwayman
photograph, the full effect of his ice-blue eyes was muted. His hair was a midnight black, and his features had not sharpened yet. His contemporaries had trouble describing him, and he was difficult to pick out in group photographs.

His anonymity appealed to him. “Because I am so plain faced, the audience at first expects little of me,” he wrote to James. “Were I handsome, I should not be so much in control, as they would expect such great things.”

. . .

The summer of 1906, Charles Carter, age eighteen, moved up in rank to the nine-week Redpath Chautauqua Circuit, which had been
founded by revivalists. Though the circuit no longer had a religious slant, its reputation remained, and the crowds were well behaved and the shows exuded an air of moral order. He made twenty a week, which was standard. He did well enough with his cards, coins, scarves, and paper flowers that a scout for the Keith-Orpheum circuit asked if he might join their circuit at, say, twenty-five a week.

Now that his physiological abilities had been appreciated, just a little, Carter began to work on his application of willpower. At a welcome-home dinner, he broke the news to his parents carefully, phrasing it as not just a tremendous opportunity but a financial advancement. He told them he was postponing Yale, but just for a year, to build “character.” He’d read that Pierpont Morgan valued this above all else. His father protested, but hesitantly, for he, too, had read what Morgan valued.

“But just for a year,” his father confirmed.

“Of course,” Carter nodded, delivering his most rational smile. “Just a year.”

A year later, at the next welcome-home dinner, the conversation was repeated, more or less as before, the element most changed being Mr. Carter’s squint when his son said he was postponing college for just another year.

At successive annual dinners, 1908 and 1909, Carter was increasingly declarative about his intentions: some performers, he said, made five thousand a week. None of them had gone to college, not one of them. Even if he did only a tenth as well, five hundred a week, which he could manage with enough experience, he could establish a profitable career.

In September 1910, when Carter was twenty-two and his fifth annual tour was about to leave San Francisco, his rhetoric began to fall apart. His father invited him to the study for a glass of wine, a Semillon grown from grapes harvested at their Napa property. Then: “How is your progress toward that five hundred a week going, Charles?”

“It’s coming along,” Carter said. In fact, it was: he was making thirty-five a week, up from the previous year by four dollars. Conversation foundered, as it often did, and then his father produced from his jacket a letter from one of Carter’s former teachers at Thacher. For long minutes, Mr. Carter read aloud, as the chatty missive described how many young men from the class of ’06 had already made senior clerk or junior auditor. This recitation became a lecture, then an argument, then, rather abruptly, silence, for, though he would rather die than admit it aloud, Charles Carter was starting to agree with his father. Magic could be a career for certain talented men, but its potential was passing Charles Carter IV by.

After a dispirited dinner with his parents, Carter walked through the city alone late that night. He was almost twenty-three years old. He had worked his way up to thirty weeks of continuous employment on the Keith-Orpheum, almost respectable for show business. But he had stalled. For four years, he had been Karter the Kard and Koin Man. His billing was mediocre—he appeared smack in the middle of the program, presenting his eighteen minutes of effects between Laszlo and His Yankee Hussars, a musical group who imitated famous band conductors, and Fun in Hi Skule, antic sketch comedy with jokes stolen from better acts.

He ached to be better than he was, but he didn’t know how. Though he had ideas for spectacular illusions, he had no chance to implement them, as his contract specified that he would stick with small tricks—close-up magic. When he met other magicians, or when his parents inquired as to his progress, he had to say that he was still performing in-one, on the apron of the stage, curtain down, no large-scale work.

Mysterioso would change that.

Carter had been walking aimlessly for an hour or two before the noises from a carnival attracted him. Though it was late, the midway was still open, and he was pulled toward the familiar smell of kerosene burning in the pan lamps that lighted the grounds. As when viewing any entertainment, he tried to notice everything in hopes of improving himself. He quietly watched a shell gamer work the suckers. There was a Find the Lady booth and a dozen gaffed pitch-till-you-win contests for men to compete for stuffed animals while a steam calliope played “Turkey in the Straw” and “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.” Finally, he took his place in line for the palm reader, Madame Zinka, who complimented his Head and Heart lines, tutted at his rascettes, and told him he worked with his hands, he was about to take a long journey, and he was a fool not to get into his father’s business.

He produced a dollar bill for her; when she reached for it, he vanished it with a frown.

She put her hand on her forehead, sighing. “Oy! Every rich kid knows a magic trick. Next!”

“No, wait. You felt my palm, so you could tell I worked with my hands, and you saw my suit and realized I couldn’t afford this myself. You’re right about the long journey, but what’s the gimmick?” He handed her a dollar, and another when her expression didn’t change. Finally, he added, “I’m on the Keith-Orpheum time. A magic act, in-one. It’s not like I’m going to Europe on my father’s nickel.”

“Everyone wants a long journey, kid. That’s all. Next!”

“That’s it?”

“What did I just say?”

Carter left her tent, hands in pockets, as the next person in line sat down at Madame Zinka’s table. A dozen paces away, he heard her voice over the calliope music.

“Hey!” Madame Zinka had pushed aside a tent flap, and leaned out. “You’re gonna get married this year. Her name is Sarah.”

“Excuse me?”

But the tent flap dropped down, and Carter knew he would get nothing more. He continued alone across the grass, and out of the gates, and to the streets, where he wondered what in heaven’s name was going on.

Over the last five years, while investigating all types of performance, he had also had a dozen Gypsy women read his palm, give him tarot card readings, look into crystal balls. He learned he would take long journeys, make huge sums of money, should avoid rough seas, and was desperately interested in contacting the spirit world, which could be done, it turned out, for a modest fee. He also learned the trick was to hold his hand, look him right in the eye, and see how he reacted to information, with a twitch or raised eyebrows. This was fantastic for forcing cards on people.

There was a complication he could not explain. Among generalities and flatly wrong guesses, more than one prophecy had said that when he was twenty-three years old, he would marry a woman named Sarah.

Returning to his parents’ house, he didn’t sleep. He could never sleep the night before a tour, but this night was particularly hard. James was enrolled at Yale and no longer lived at home, so there was no one to talk to now. He wanted to ask someone why he was so different than anyone he knew, and why he wasn’t in some essential way different enough. Why were some people headliners and others rather forgettable? And, most importantly, was he about to marry someone? He wrote in his journal, “It could be: the laws of chance; a cabal among fortune-tellers; that there is more to this physical world than I yet understand.” As he was approaching twenty-three (his birthday was in November), he believed all of these, sometimes simultaneously.

He opened his palm. Head line, Heart line, the mount of Venus and the four fingers that Gypsies—real Gypsies—called Mercury, Apollo, Saturn, Jupiter. He ran a finger over his skin and imagined beneath this romance and mystery the hard anatomy, just as romantic: the deep palmar fascia that could clutch silver dollars, the adductor obliquus pollicis that
allowed the thumb’s flexion away from the hand, small in most people but growing each day he shuffled cards past it.

About four in the morning, he brought out a new trunk, and transferred all of his props into it. The old Kard and Koin stencil seemed like an admission of failure, but he wasn’t yet ready to add “the Amazing” or “the King” to his name. He stencil-cut a new title—simple, direct—and painted it on the side of the trunk: Charles Carter, Magician.

CHAPTER 7

The next morning, his parents took Carter to the train station. His father asked him no questions and his mother made no encouraging comments. It was only when they presented him with going-away presents—
Capital Thoughts,
the latest pamphlet attributed to J. Pierpont Morgan, from his mother, and Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams,
from his father—he realized that other than a white flag, there was no clearer sign they had reached some compromise about him.

“So, dear, your weekly salary is what, now?” his mother asked sweetly.

“Thirty-five.” Carter halted the porter, who had his single trunk on a rack. “I’ll take that.” It was unwise to start a tour by having the company see a porter carrying your luggage. He wished he’d thought to distress his new trunk.

“How do you make out on that?” His father showed some teeth.

“It’s just right, if I’m thrifty.” In fact, his mother sent him a secret extra fifteen a month, allowing him to break even.

“That’s—nice,” his father said. “Listen, Son, I know we’ve had some words, but I realize you have to follow your heart, too.” He spoke the way an actor might read a text for the first time.

“But we hope you make some progress,” Mrs. Carter added, looking back at Mr. Carter, who nodded appreciatively, as if he hadn’t thought of that himself.

“Of course,” Carter said quickly, having survived this implied threat for several years now. He stepped up his pace, toward the farthest platform, where trains for performers always ran.

“In other words,” his mother continued, “I think this should be your last tour.”

That it was she saying it stopped him in his tracks. He could see the other performers ahead, some women with boas, men struggling with heavy bags. He looked from them to his parents, who were, he saw, united in a way they never had been before. He heard the click of a purse snapping shut.

“We love you,” she added.

Carter nodded nervously. The turnover from his parents to his fellow vaudevillians was never easy, and the added pressure today made it worse. “Yes,” he said, “I understand. The train—let’s go to the train.”