Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(74)

Maria laughed. “That is none of your business,” she told Abraham in a firm, gentle voice.

“Love is my business,” he insisted. “Long ago I was an artist. You didn’t know that, and why should you? You don’t know everything about me. That was what I did before I went to sea. I made the most beautiful marriage contracts that could be had. A bride-to-be would have her family pay any price for my work. I constructed them from a single piece of parchment that I cut into shapes and words with a small pair of shears. When the brides-to-be saw the documents, they wept. The grooms fell to their knees, grateful to be alive in the world. Believe what I say. I know about love.”

Maria was forced to lean close, for she could hardly hear him. His voice was a whisper; it was leaving him now. The light inside him was rising up. She opened the windows so his spirit would be free once it left his body. We are birds, Hannah had once told her. They sit inside of us waiting to fly away.

“No one can fall in love with me,” Maria told Abraham. “Don’t wish that on your son.”

“I know love when I see it,” Abraham Dias insisted. “I see it in you.”

He gave her his ring and told her the secret that he had learned about love during his time on earth. Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing more to say; he wasn’t even in the room anymore, not in Manhattan, not in the year of 1691, not in a house on Maiden Lane. He was with his wife when he first met her. How beautiful she was, with her straight black hair that was so long she could sit on it, or wear it wound atop her head so that she looked like a queen who wore a dark crown. When you fall in love like that, time doesn’t matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.

What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.



* * *



Abraham Dias was buried in the First Shearith Israel Graveyard near Chatham Square, wound in white linen, as he’d wished to be, placed into his grave without a coffin so that he might become a part of the earth without delay. He had belonged to a congregation of Sephardic Jews who had wandered the globe, searching for a safe place in which to live and die. They had found what they were searching for in Manhattan. The burial took place on a blue June day, and the achingly beautiful weather made the loss cut more deeply. It would have been more fitting had there been rain or hail or black storms blowing in from the sea, a world from which a man wished to escape, not this perfect day. The women stood on the fringes of the gathering, their heads covered, and the men wore prayer shawls that their wives and daughters had stitched. The men joined in the mourner’s Kaddish, the ancient Aramaic prayer Jews recited to honor the dead. Samuel Dias did not practice his religion, but with a borrowed prayer shawl over his shoulders, he, too, recited the Kaddish and sang laments in Portuguese, as his father had done on the night of their family’s murder. Then he got down on his knees at the gravesite and wept. He had refused to shave and his hair fell to his shoulders; he looked rough, but he cried more than any man the congregation had seen before.

The unmarried women watched him, so moved by his raw emotion they felt their feet lift off the ground. How could a man feel so much? What else was inside of him? If only they could find out, if only they knew, a great mystery would be revealed to them. The married women gazed at their own husbands with disapproval, for the men looked away from Samuel’s passionate display. It was too much for them, it was a story they had forgotten a long time ago, when they were thirteen and became men and locked their emotions away so they might navigate the cruelty of the world.



* * *



That night the house on Maiden Lane felt much too empty. Samuel had torn his clothes, as mourners are commanded to do. For seven days he sat outside, even when it rained. He wept until his dark, handsome face was swollen; he had stopped talking, as his father feared he might. Instead, he began to drink rum and he didn’t stop, growing more silent and moody with every drink. When he finally came inside, Maria brought him his father’s wedding ring, hoping it would start him talking. Samuel held it up to the firelight, squinting to see it more clearly.

“There’s a reason my father left this with you,” he said.

“Because he wanted you to have it.”

Samuel Dias shook his head. He knew the way his father approached the world and he knew the meaning of the gift. This ring was a message, one he was grateful to receive. One he hoped Maria would accept. “No. He wanted you to have it.”

Maria shook her head. “It’s a family treasure. I couldn’t possibly.”

“If he wanted to give it to me, he would have placed it on my hand,” Samuel said. “No. It should belong to you. We should do as he wished.” Dias knelt before Maria and slipped the ring onto her finger. “This is what he wanted. For you to be mine.”

She didn’t wish to hurt him. “It cannot happen if I don’t agree to it, and you know I can’t.”

“But you have agreed. See! It won’t come off. We’re married in my father’s eyes,” Samuel insisted. He was making a fool of himself, but he didn’t care. “That’s why he gave you the ring. That’s our tradition.”

Maria attempted to slide the ring off, but it was stuck; even when she took a bar of soap to the band, the ring would not move past her knuckle. It seemed impossible, her hand was so much smaller than Abraham’s.