The Sleepwalker(81)

My mother hadn’t been speaking to a client as she had stood on the college quadrangle before Johnson Chapel. She had been talking to Gavin. If she had been firing anyone, she had been—and I knew these weren’t the right words, but they were the ones I heard in my head that Thanksgiving weekend—firing him.



All young parents watch their children sleep. We stand over the crib, the bed with rails, and then the bed without rails, and we smile at the utter miracle and welcoming innocence that is a child asleep. We watch them dream, wondering what they are seeing as they stretch out their small fingers or pedal their knees once or twice. We savor the aroma of baby shampoo or strawberry shampoo. We adjust a blanket. We kiss a forehead or cheek. Before we leave, we check the thermostat.

I do all that now, decades removed from the summer my mother disappeared.

But you can bet that I also watch my own children for any signs of parasomnia. I watch for arousal disorders and night terrors and sleepwalking. I think more than any parents I am likely to meet at my children’s elementary school about—and here is a technical term that many husbands (though not mine) would find baffling—sleep-stage transition impositions.

So far there have been none. There have been no parasomnias at all. Both of my children seem fine. I pray—and I pray with a self-taught and childlike innocence, the way I learned when I was twenty-one and would roam alone through the red Victorian—that they have been spared that part of their family history. The odds still are against them.

They have their grandmother’s eyes and their grandmother’s lush yellow mane. A boy and a girl. Someday, they will be knockouts.



On Saturday morning, over Thanksgiving weekend, while Paige was asleep in the guest room we shared at our grandparents’ and my father was grading papers, I drove to Somerville to have breakfast with Rowland the Rogue. I had suggested any old diner or bakery, but he insisted on having me to his home, and that meant we ate in his pleasantly retro kitchen: the dining room, after all, was cluttered with old magic tricks. But the kitchen was perfect, even though I always felt when we sat there that I was visiting the set of a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950s. The appliances were from the Eisenhower administration, and one time he had shown me the warranties with pride to prove it. The knobs and handles were chrome, and looked like they were from a spaceship in a low-budget science fiction film, and the white siding on the stove and the refrigerator was badly chipped. Though he had traveled for much of his career and lived on second-rate room service at second-rate hotels, he was a very good cook: rather effortlessly he made me eggs Benedict that morning and served the two English muffins on rose-colored china that had once belonged to his mother. For a while he regaled me with tales of tricks that had failed or illusions that had bombed, and how he had responded onstage. I had a sense he was exaggerating: he would not have had the career that he did if he were flubbing routines as epically as he was suggesting in his stories. He would not have been on prime-time television shows.

“Tell me more about the Sleepwalker—that illusion you performed on Sonny and Cher,” I said, dabbing with a napkin at the hollandaise sauce that I feared was on my lips. “Were you a good enough hypnotist that you could have done the trick without using an audience plant?”

He folded his arms across his chest and rocked back on the two hind legs of his chair. “I could have hypnotized a person and convinced her to walk to a platform and wind up doused in a dunk tank. But you know how the levitating woman works. I need an accomplice. I need a mesh form roughly the shape of her body under the sheet. I need a secret escape from the couch, so she can get offstage.”

I did know the secret behind the illusion, but somehow hearing it spoken aloud made me a little sad. On some level, I had wanted to believe there was more hypnosis involved than elaborate stagecraft. “But you called it the Sleepwalker,” I said.

“I did.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, still tipped back on the legs of his chair. “It conjured dreams. It conjured a lack of control. It conjured the undead: zombies and vampires and ghosts. And, of course, a lot of magicians have levitated their assistants. But what’s really the fun in that? It screams ‘trick.’ It seemed to me that it was far more dramatic to levitate a person from the audience. Yes, I am sure some people knew she was a plant or suspected she was a plant. But, still, the idea that she was being moved by me like a marionette? Far more interesting.”

“You had her dunk Sonny Bono on TV that night. How did it normally end? Most of the time you didn’t have a foil like that.”

“No. Most of the time? I would whisk off the sheet and she would be gone. Vanished. The audience would gasp. A moment later, with a great splash, she would break the surface of the water tank, and I would help her out rather gallantly.”

Years earlier I had told Lindsay about my mother’s sleepwalking and about the night I had walked her in from the bridge. “Of course, if you really wake up underwater, I imagine you’re likely to drown. You’ll take in a great gulp of water and the rest won’t be pretty,” I said.

“No. But many of our illusions are like that. It’s also not pretty if you actually saw a woman in half—I imagine.”

He was right, of course. “Thank you for coming to my mother’s funeral,” I said.

“You’ve already thanked me. You don’t need to keep thanking me.”