The Immortalists(9)
Today, Arthur brings three deli platters and a tray of smoked fish. He bends his long, swanlike neck to kiss Gertie’s cheek.
‘What will we do, Arthur?’ she asks, her mouth in his coat.
‘It’s terrible,’ he says. ‘It’s horrific.’
Tiny droplets of spring rain perch on Arthur’s shoulders and on the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, but his eyes are sharp.
‘Thank God for you. And for Simon,’ Gertie says.
On the last night of shiva, while Gertie sleeps, the siblings take to the attic. They’re worn down, washed out, with bleary, baggy eyes and curdled stomachs. The shock hasn’t faded; Simon cannot imagine it ever fading. Daniel and Varya sit on an orange velvet couch, stuffing spurting from the armrests. Klara takes the patchwork ottoman that once belonged to now-dead Mrs. Blumenstein. She pours bourbon into four chipped teacups. Simon hunches cross-legged on the floor, swirling the amber liquid with his finger.
‘So, what’s the plan?’ he asks, glancing at Daniel and Varya. ‘You’re heading out tomorrow?’
Daniel nods. He and Varya will catch early trains back to school. They’ve already said goodbye to Gertie and promised to return in a month, when their exams are finished.
‘I can’t take any more time off if I’m going to pass,’ Daniel says. ‘Some of us’ – he nudges Klara with his foot – ‘worry about that sort of thing.’
Klara’s senior year ends in two weeks, but she’s already told her family she won’t walk at graduation. (‘All those penguins, shuffling around in unison? It’s not me.’) Varya is studying biology and Daniel hopes to be a military doctor, but Klara doesn’t want to go to college. She wants to do magic.
She’s spent the past nine years under the tutelage of Ilya Hlavacek, an aging vaudevillian and sleight-of-hand magician who is also her boss at Ilya’s Magic & Co. Klara first learned of the shop at the age of nine, when she purchased The Book of Divination from Ilya; now, he is as much a father to her as Saul was. A Czech immigrant who came of age between the World Wars, Ilya – seventy-nine, stooped and arthritic, with a troll’s tuft of white hair – tells fantastic tales of his stage years: one he spent touring the Midwest’s grimiest dime museums, his card table mere feet from rows of pickled human heads; the Pennsylvania circus tent in which he successfully vanished a brown Sicilian donkey named Antonio as one thousand onlookers burst with applause.
But over a century has passed since the Davenport brothers invoked spirits in the salons of the wealthy and John Nevil Maskelyne made a woman levitate in London’s Egyptian Theatre. Today, the luckiest of America’s magicians manage theatrical special effects or work elaborate shows in Las Vegas. Almost all of them are men. When Klara visited Marinka’s, the oldest magic shop in the country, the young man at the register glanced up with disdain before directing her to a bookshelf marked Witchcraft. (‘Bastard,’ Klara muttered, though she did buy Demonology: The Blood Summonings just to watch him squirm.)
Besides, Klara is drawn less to stage magicians – the bright lights and evening clothes, the wire-rigged levitations – than to those who perform in more modest venues, where magic is handed from person to person like a crumpled dollar bill. On Sundays, she watches the street magician Jeff Sheridan at his usual post by the Sir Walter Scott statue in Central Park. But could she really make a living that way? New York is changing. In her neighborhood, the hippies have been replaced by hard-core kids, the drugs by harder drugs. Puerto Rican gangs hold court at Twelfth and Avenue A. Once, Klara was held up by men who probably would have done worse if Daniel had not happened to walk by at exactly that moment.
Varya ashes into an empty teacup. ‘I can’t believe you’re still going to leave. With Ma like this.’
‘That was always the plan, Varya. I was always going to leave.’
‘Well, sometimes plans change. Sometimes they have to.’
Klara raises an eyebrow. ‘So why don’t you change yours?’
‘I can’t. I have exams.’
Varya’s hands are rigid, her back straight. She has always been uncompromising, sanctimonious, someone who walks between the lines as if on a balance beam. On her fourteenth birthday, she blew out all but three candles, and Simon, just eight, stood on his tiptoes to do the rest. Varya yelled at him and cried so intensely that even Saul and Gertie were puzzled. She has none of Klara’s beauty, no interest in clothing or makeup. Her one indulgence is her hair. It is waist length and has never been colored or dyed, not because Varya’s natural color – the dusty, light brown of dirt in summer – is in any way remarkable; she simply prefers it as it has always been. Klara dyes her hair a vivid, drugstore red. Whenever she does her roots, the sink looks bloody for days.
‘Exams,’ Klara says, waving a hand, as if exams are a hobby that Varya should have outgrown.
‘And where do you plan to go?’ asks Daniel.
‘I haven’t decided.’ Klara speaks coolly, but her features are tense.
‘Good lord.’ Varya drops her head back. ‘You don’t even have a plan?’
‘I’m waiting,’ says Klara. ‘For it to be revealed to me.’
Simon looks at his sister. He knows she’s terrified about her future. He also knows she hides it effectively.