The Magician's Lie (13 page)

And Madame always was a tiger in her way. She retreated to her railcar every night for a brandy, and it wasn't unusual, late after dark, to hear a glass breaking against the wall. She didn't share confidences with us, nor we with her.

As I became more intrigued by magic, it seemed Madame became more intrigued by me. In that first circuit, she added me to five more illusions, nearly half the act. She renamed me Vivi, and my name appeared in the program alongside the other girls'. Two months in, she gave me the coveted spot of handing her the first deck of cards for the first act of the evening. For this, I wore a gauzy, elegant white dress so beautiful I was terrified I'd ruin it with makeup or lampblack or the droppings that Madame's doves sometimes left just offstage. I made a beeline to Jeannie immediately after I stepped offstage to get it safely back into her care.

After my third successful performance in this trusted role, Madame summoned me to her railcar for a nightcap. Somewhat nervously, I went.

We sat ourselves on the comfortable velvet couches. Madame drank brandy. Not having much tolerance for alcohol, I asked for a cherry liqueur. If I disregarded the soft, regular thrum of the engine propelling us through the night, it wasn't like being on a train at all. There was carpet under my feet, Impressionist artwork on the walls in gilded frames, and an arched, dark blue ceiling painted with gold-white dots to give the impression of stars. It was like sitting in the front room of a fine hotel or a wealthy woman's parlor. It didn't have the grandeur of even the smallest room at the Biltmore, but it was elegant and plainly expensive, proving that things didn't need to be large to impress.

We made pleasant small talk for a while, and I waited to see if there was something she wanted to say to me. I thought she must have invited me for a reason. I was right.

“You're a smart girl, Vivi, aren't you?” she began.

“I can't rightly say.”

“False modesty will get you nowhere, girl. I expect better.”

I swallowed and said, “Then yes, Madame, I am the smartest girl currently in your employ.”

“That's better. And I know you're observant, and I know you watch the whole show every night. So I have a question for you. What could I be doing better?”

“You do everything well.”

“Hmph. Cut to Hecuba.”

“Pardon?”

“The point. Get to it, dear.”

“Okay.” I took the gamble that she meant what she said. “When you do the Dove Pan. You tend to turn to the right at a certain point in the patter, after you say ‘sweet music.'”

She nodded.

“It obscures your face for the left side of the audience. They can't see you, and they stop listening. You lose them.”

Nodding more and smiling, she said, “I suppose that's right.”

“It's still a wonderful illusion, and I wouldn't change anything else about it, but just make sure you're facing forward and you'll keep them all entranced.”

“All right then, Vivi. Another question. What's missing? What, in your opinion, should I add to the act?”

My answer sprang instantly to mind. “Why not the bullet catch?”

“Oh dear,” she said, clearly surprised.

“I mean, it would be a great addition. Bring the house down. It was amazing. You amazed me, amazed all of us.”

Madame poured half her drink down her throat, swallowed, and said, “Well, I hope you remember it well, because you won't be seeing it again.”

Made bold by the fear that it might be my only chance, I leaned forward and asked, “So how does it work?”

“How do you think it works?”

“They can't be firing real bullets, can they?”

“Yes and no. We have audience members come up and inspect the guns, and there are real bullets then. You remember only one man fired. He was talented enough to palm the bullet and replace it with a flash charge after the inspection.”

“But then your life was in his hands.”

“His, and the others', and the audience's,” she said grimly. “Because what if his flash charge was packed too solid? What if one of the other men fired? What if an audience member, suspicious and clever, slipped something solid into the barrel of that gun? People have died doing the bullet catch for all those reasons.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Before Alexander passed”—here she crossed herself—“he'd whipped some newspaperman into a frenzy, boasting that he could do the bullet catch though he never had before. The booking was made and the press set. Then he was taken from us suddenly, and what could I do? I needed to make a splash, to establish myself as a magician in my own right, and the opportunity was there in front of me. If I canceled, I'd have to claw my way up from nothing. I'd already lost what mattered most. I couldn't lose more. I kept the date.”

I asked, “Weren't you afraid you'd be killed?”

“Not afraid, no,” she said. “I knew it would be my answer one way or the other. If I did it successfully, I'd keep our slot on the circuit, and then I'd tour with Alexander's illusions and make my own name from there. If it killed me, it killed me. And I wouldn't have to worry about anything else, because I'd be dead.”

“Thank God you survived.”

“I doubt he had much of anything to do with it,” she said and drained her drink. “In any case, I won't be adding that to the act. But you'll tell me if you have any other ideas, won't you?”

“I will,” I said.

She raised her empty glass to me and grinned. “To good ideas, Vivi, wherever we can get them.”

***

From the beginning, I'd been favored by Madame—who I now thought of as Adelaide—but after that conversation, things became even clearer. I'd found my place. As we began our second circuit in the summer of 1897, Adelaide began to teach me the illusions, one by one. Not just the assistant's part, which I already knew, but the main action and all the little subactions that made it up. Our new circuit took us through the northern states, beginning in Western New York with Shea's Garden Theater in Buffalo, through Pennsylvania to Ohio and Indiana, then running northward through the entirety of Michigan, with a special performance to entertain the summering crowd at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

Another girl, a newer girl, took my place as the Odalisque, and Adelaide built a new showpiece around me, called the Slave Girl's Dream. She herself had played the Slave Girl in Alexander's act. Aerial suspension was not so unusual to see on the stage, but it was often done by lifting prone girls on tables, providing plenty of room for ropes and wires. This was a different approach. She had the proper equipment fetched from the storehouse, and I had to admit, I blanched the first time I saw it. It looked more like a torture device than a tool of magic.

I stripped down to stage undergarments—modest enough to cover me more than real undergarments would, but still clearly meant as intimate—and submitted myself to the preparations. The contraption was a large harness of steel and leather, and as I struggled to catch my breath, Adelaide strapped me in. A rigid, slightly curved bar of steel ran up the right side of my body from the armpit to the knee, with another thick bar encircling the waist. Two bands of leather strapped me to the metal, one running over my left shoulder, the other between my legs, looping back and attaching to the bar at the waist.

“This will be tight,” said Adelaide, grunting as she buckled the shoulder strap, “but take my word, you do not want it to be loose.”

Next she brought out a steel pole, painted black, that attached to the steel bar at a right angle. I was raised into the air by the pole, bearing the entire weight of my body on a cold three-inch piece of steel in my armpit, and it had never been clearer that the control I'd used in the Dancing Odalisque had been mere child's play.

When we performed the Slave Girl's Dream, the curtain came up on a simple pallet, where I lay as if sleeping. Adelaide, representing a goddess of sleep, danced around me, and as the music swelled, I began to hover in the air. She then whisked beautiful garments from nothingness, garbing me in several flowing costumes of glorious silk, as if I were dreaming of wearing my mistress's rich clothes.

The effect was amazing. I couldn't see it myself, but when I saw the faces of the audience beholding it, I knew what they were seeing. I appeared to float in air with no support whatsoever, the gauzy edges of my rich garments fluttering in the air currents, the onstage lighting carefully directed to highlight my outstretched body and not the black pole holding me up in front of a black backdrop.

I was amazed by the illusion and thrilled to take part, but I also felt it was badly misnamed. What I thought—but did not say to Adelaide for fear of insulting her husband's memory—was that no slave girl would dream herself draped in a series of lovely garments. She wouldn't waste her efforts on a fantasy of silk chiffon and ribbons. A slave girl, given the ability to dream without limits, would dream herself free.

Once I debuted in the Slave Girl's Dream and my billing in the program was second only to Adelaide's, my fellow dancers' attitude shifted from somewhat distant to downright hostile. Not that any of them truly envied my position. They weren't ambitious girls nor greedy ones. None of them felt the strong affinity for magic that I did, the thrill of the rare opportunity to learn from the best. They were just insulted not to be asked and annoyed that I would be somehow raised above them, in both senses of the word.

As a group, they never went too far—no pranks, no violence, no threats—but instead punished me the way they themselves would have hated to be punished: with silence. They didn't realize I didn't mind silence, and in many situations, preferred it. So they ignored me, and when new people were added to the company, they were quickly counseled not to associate with me. The new Odalisque smiled at me when she met me, for example, but then never again. And that was all right. Lonely, of course, but hardly upsetting, once I got used to it. I was a good ear for Madame and for Jeannie, in different ways and for different reasons. I was respected by the stagehands and prop crew, who recognized my appreciation for the machinery. I didn't feel the lack of other company.

Instead of socializing, I worked and I learned. In the same way I'd once followed the Cecchetti method to point the toes of my right foot over and over and over, I made a habit of practicing and repeating all the elements of the illusions I needed to know. I wasn't sure whether or not I had talent, but I knew I had discipline. Over and over, I palmed a coin; over and over, I shuffled a deck. Then I went beyond the bounds of the illusions, past those specific moments, to the moments between and around them. I perfected all the gestures. Gestures were the currency. More so than any other part of the illusion, the way you drew people's attention with a lifted hand or a swept arm would be responsible for the success or failure of the trick. Misdirection. This is where my dance training gave me an unusual advantage. I practiced long, graceful arcs that traced the sky and subtle, winking flicks of the wrist. I practiced, for hours, taking one long stride downstage. I practiced until I found the perfect way to peek over my shoulder, as if I hadn't meant to, so that the audience would be compelled to follow my eyes in that direction. In some way, it felt like Mother would be proud of me, if she'd known.

Another old ghost was on my mind, thanks to the other girls' constant obsession with men and boys. I thought of Clyde and the stolen moments we'd spent in the dark nighttime hallways of the Biltmore. How intensely delicious those kisses had been. How much I'd looked forward to his lips brushing softly against my neck, his fingers traveling up my thigh. How my whole body grew warm at the sight of his eyes closed in pleasure, seen dimly through the veil of my own lowered lashes. I thought of our journey up the coast, the betrothal and the betrayal, and how things might have been different if he'd warned me beforehand that his proposal would be false. If he hadn't told me, unprompted, that I could trust him, and then immediately demonstrated that I couldn't. Without that, and my lost faith that followed it, perhaps we would have continued to meet after our arrival in New York, and perhaps those meetings would have escalated to their natural conclusion. I might have let him possess me, consume me. But had it been love? I thought it was. I longed for him in every way. But whatever our feelings were, they had never truly been consummated, and even from what little I knew about love, I knew it had certain requirements.

In any case, Adelaide was showing me by example how to live without love. She mourned Alexander and never sought to replace him, yet her life was full. A wealthy former rail baron in Toledo attended three shows in a row and proposed marriage to her after the third, but all she did was laugh. She never spoke of love or marriage or companionship, except in reference to what she had lost. Perhaps I was a widow like her, only without the marriage to precede it.

That wasn't to say there weren't temptations and occasions here and there. After a matinee in Akron, a rather handsome young man presented me with a cluster of daisies and invited me to meet him for a cup of tea at a nearby shop two hours hence. I asked Jeannie for advice, and she insisted I go, just to have a story to tell. Unfortunately, the story I told her afterward was of the young man's very ungentlemanly attempt to grope me without prelude during a stroll along the river. He was easy to resist, especially when he declared petulantly that everyone knew girls who took to the stage were wanton strumpets, and who did I think I was kidding? Luckily he didn't press his case, but he did make me suspicious of every townie waiting by the stage door thereafter. No doubt some of them were decent enough chaps, whether they carried daisies or tulips or Queen Anne's lace, but I gave them all the cold shoulder. Sorting the wheat from the chaff was more effort than I cared to expend.