Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  I was at his house regularly that spring, because we were studying for my Bar Mitzvah. The negotiations had been extensive and complicated: I was willing to go along with local custom, tradition and my parents’ social concerns, but I balked at going straight from my regular classes to the neighborhood Hebrew school. I called my unobservant family hypocrites, which they were; they called me lazy and ungrateful, which was also true. But both sides knew that I’d need extensive private tutoring to cope with the haftarah reading alone, never mind the inevitable speech. I’d picked up Yiddish early and easily, as had all my cousins, since our families spoke it when they didn’t want the kindelech to understand what they were talking about. But Hebrew was another matter entirely. I knew this or that word, this or that phrase—even a few songs for Chanukah and Pesach—but the language itself sat like a stone on my tongue, guttural and harsh, and completely alien. I not only couldn’t learn Hebrew, I truly didn’t like Hebrew. And if a proper Jew was supposed to go on studying it even after the liberating Bar Mitzvah, I might just as well give up and turn Catholic, spending my Sunday mornings at Mass with the Geohegans down the block. Either way, I was clearly doomed.

  Rabbi Tuvim took me on either as a challenge or as a penance, I was never quite sure which. He was inhumanly patient and inventive, constantly coming up with word games, sports references and any number of catchy mnemonics to help me remember this foreign, senseless, elusive, boring system of communication. But when even he wiped his forehead and said sadly, “Ai, gornisht helfen,” which means nothing will help you, I finally felt able to ask him whether he thought I would ever be a good Jew; and, if not, whether we should just cancel the Bar Mitzvah. I thought hopefully of the expense this would save my father, and felt positively virtuous for once.

  The rabbi, looking at me, managed to sigh and half-smile at the same time, taking off his glasses and blinking at them. “Nobody in this entire congregation has the least notion of what Bar Mitzvah is,” he said wearily. “It’s not a graduation from anything, it is just an acknowledgment that at thirteen you’re old enough to be called up in temple to read from the Torah. Which God help you if you actually are, but never mind. The point is that you are still Bar Mitzvah even if you never go through the preparation, the ritual.” He smiled at me and put his glasses back on. “No way out of it, Joseph. If you never manage to memorize another word of Hebrew, you’re still as good a Jew as anybody. Whatever the Orthodox think.”

  One Thursday afternoon I found the rabbi so engrossed in one of his old magazines that he didn’t notice when I walked in, or even when I peered over his shoulder. It was an issue of a magazine called Evening, from 1921, which made it close to thirty years old. There were girls on the cover, posing on a beach, but they were a long way from the bathing beauties—we still called them that then—that I was accustomed to seeing in magazines and on calendars. These could have walked into my mother’s PTA or Hadassah meetings: they showed no skin above the shin, wore bathing caps and little wraps over their shoulders, and in general appeared about as seductive as any of my mother’s friends, only younger. Paradoxically, the severe costumes made them look much more youthful than they probably were, innocently graceful.

  Rabbi Tuvim, suddenly aware of me, looked up, startled but not embarrassed. “This is what your mother would have been wearing to the beach back then,” he said. “Mine, too. It looks so strange, doesn’t it? Compared to Betty Grable, I mean.”

  He was teasing me, as though I were still going through my Betty Grable/Alice Faye phase. As though I weren’t twelve now, and on the edge of manhood; if not, why were we laboring over the utterly bewildering haftarah twice a week? As though Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne and Lizabeth Scott hadn’t lately written their names all over my imagination, introducing me to the sorrows of adults? I drew myself up in visible—I hoped—indignation, but the rabbi said only, “Sit down, Joseph, look at this girl. The one in the left corner.”

  She was bareheaded, so that her whole face was visible.

  Even I could tell that she couldn’t possibly be over eighteen. She wasn’t beautiful—the others were beautiful, and so what?—but there was a playfulness about her expression, a humor not far removed from wisdom. Looking at her, I felt that I could tell that face everything I was ashamed of, and that she would not only reassure me that I wasn’t the vile mess I firmly believed I was, but that I might even be attractive one day to someone besides my family. Someone like her.

  I looked sideways at Rabbi Tuvim, and saw him smiling. “Yes,” he said. “She does have that effect, doesn’t she?”

  “Who is she?” I blurted out. “Is she a movie star or something?” Someone I should be expected to know, in other words. But I didn’t think so, and I was right. Rabbi Tuvim shook his head.

  “I have no idea. I just bought this magazine yesterday, at a collectors’ shop downtown where I go sometimes, and I feel as though I have been staring at her ever since. I don’t think she’s anybody famous—probably just a model who happened to be around when they were shooting that cover. But I can’t take my eyes off her, for some reason. It’s a little embarrassing.”

  The rabbi’s unmarried state was of particular concern in the neighborhood. Rabbis aren’t priests: it’s not only that they’re allowed to marry, it’s very nearly demanded of them by their congregations. Rabbi Tuvim wasn’t a handsome man, but he had a strong face, and his eyes were kind. I said, “Maybe you could look her up, some way.”

  The rabbi blinked at me. “Joseph, I am curious. That’s all.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Me too.”

  “I would just like to know a little about her,” the rabbi said.

  “Me too,” I said again. I was all for keeping the conversation going, to stall off my lesson as long as possible, but no luck. The rabbi just said, “There is something about her,” and we plunged once more into the cold mysteries of Mishnaic Hebrew. Rabbi Tuvim didn’t look at the Evening cover again, but I kept stealing side glances at that girl until he finally got up and put the magazine back on the bookshelf, without saying a word. I think I was an even worse student than usual that afternoon, to judge by his sigh when we finished.

  Every Monday and Thursday, when I came for my lessons, the magazine would always be somewhere in sight—on a chair, perhaps, or down at the end of the table where we studied. We never exactly agreed, not in so many words, that the girl on the cover haunted us both, but we talked about her a lot. For me the attraction lay in the simple and absolute aliveness of her face, as present to me as that of any of my schoolmates, while the other figures in the photograph felt as antique as any of the Greek and Roman statues we were always being taken to see at museums. For Rabbi Tuvim…. for the rabbi, perhaps, what fascinated him was the fact that he was fascinated: that a thirty-year-old image out of another time somehow had the power to distract him from his studies, his students, and his rabbinical duties. No other woman had ever done that to him. Twelve years old or not, I was sure of that.

  The rabbi made inquiries. He told me about them—I don’t think there was anyone else he could have told about such a strange obsession. Evening was long out of business by then, but his copy had credited the cover photograph only to “Winsor & Co., Ltd., Newark, New Jersey.” Rabbi Tuvim—obviously figuring that if he could teach me even a few scraps of Hebrew he ought to be able to track down a fashion photographer’s byline—found address and phone number, called, was told sourly that he was welcome to go through their files himself, but that employees had better things to do. Whereupon, he promptly took a day off and made a pilgrimage to Winsor & Co., Ltd., which was still in business, but plainly subsisting on industrial photography and the odd bowling team picture. A clerk led him to the company archive, which was a room like a walk-in closet, walled around with oaken filing cabinets; he said it smelled of fixatives and moldering newsprint, and of cigars smoked very long ago. But he sat down and went to work, and in only three hours, or at most four, he had his man.

  “His nam
e is Abel Bagaybagayan,” he told me when I came the next day. I giggled, and the rabbi cuffed the side of my head lightly. “Don’t laugh at people’s names, Joseph. How is that any stranger than Rosenwasser? Or Turteltaub, or Kockenfuss, or Tuvim, or your own name? It took me a long time to find that name, and I’m very proud that I did find it, and you can either stop laughing right now, or go home.” He was really angry with me. I’d never before seen him angry. I stopped laughing.

  “Abel Bagaybagayan,” Rabbi Tuvim said again. “He was what’s called a freelance—that means he wasn’t on anyone’s staff—but he did a lot of work for Winsor through the 1920s. Portraits, fashion spreads, architectural layouts, you name it. Then, after 1935 or so…. nothing. Nothing at all. Most likely he died, but I couldn’t find any information, one way or the other.” The rabbi spread his hands and lifted his eyebrows. “I only met a couple of people who even remembered him vaguely, and nobody has anything like an address, a phone number—not so much as a cousin in Bensonhurst. Nothing. A dead end.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked. The old magazine lay between us, and I marveled once again at the way the mystery-girl’s bright face made everyone else on the cover look like depthless paper-doll cutouts, with little square tabs holding their flat clothes on their flat bodies. The rabbi waggled a warning finger at me, and my heart sank. Without another word, I opened my Hebrew text.

  When we were at last done for the day—approximately a hundred and twenty years later—Rabbi Tuvim went on as though I had just asked the question. “My father used to tell me that back in Lvov, his family had a saying: A Tuvim never surrenders; he just says he does. I’m going to find Abel Bagaybagayan’s family.”

  “Maybe he married that girl on the cover,” I said hopefully. “Maybe they had a family together.”

  “Very romantic,” the rabbi said. “I like it. But then he’d probably have had mouths to feed, so if he didn’t die, why did he quit working as a photographer? If he did quit, mind you—I don’t know anything for sure.”

  “Well, maybe she was very rich. Then he wouldn’t have to work.” I didn’t really think that was at all likely, but lately I’d come to enjoy teasing the rabbi the way he sometimes teased me. I said, “Maybe they moved to California, and she got into the movies. That could have happened.”

  “You know, that actually could,” Rabbi Tuvim said slowly. “California, anyway, everybody’s going to California. And Bagaybagayan’s an Armenian name—much easier to look for. I have an Armenian friend in Fresno, and Armenians always know where there are other Armenians…. thank you, Detective Yossele. I’ll see you on Monday.”

  As I left, feeling absurdly pleased with myself, he was already reaching for the old Evening, sliding it toward him on the table.

  In the following weeks, the rabbi grew steadily more involved with that face from 1921, and with the cold trail of Abel Bagaybagayan, who wasn’t from Fresno. But there were plenty of people there with that name; and while none of them knew the man we were looking for, they had cousins in Visalia and Delano and Firebaugh who might. To my disappointment, Rabbi Tuvim remained very conscientious about keeping his obsession from getting in the way of his teaching; at that point, the Fresno phone book would have held more interest for me than halakha or the Babylonian Talmud. On the other hand, he had no hesitation about involving me in his dogged search for either photographer or model, or both of them. I was a great Sherlock Holmes fan back then, and I felt just like Doctor Watson, only smarter.

  This was all before the Internet, mind you; all before personal computers, area codes, digital dialing…. that time when places were further from each other, when phone calls went through operators, and a long-distance call was as much of an event as a telegram. Even so, it was I, assigned to the prairie states, who found Sheila Bagaybagayan, only child of Abel, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where she was teaching library science at the university. I handed the phone to Rabbi Tuvim and went off into a corner to hug myself and jump up and down just a bit. I might not know the Midrash Hashkern from “Mairzy Doats” but, by God, I was Detective Yossele.

  Watching the rabbi’s face as he spoke to Sheila Bagaybagayan on the phone was more fun than a Saturday matinee at Loew’s Tuxedo, with a double feature, a newsreel, eighteen cartoons, Coming Attractions and a Nyoka the Jungle Girl serial. He smiled—he laughed outright—he frowned in puzzlement—he spoke rapidly, raising a finger, as though making a point in a sermon—he scratched his beard—he looked suddenly sad enough to weep—he said “Yes…. yes…. yes….” several times, and then “Of course—and thank you,” and hung up. He stood motionless by the phone for a few minutes, absently rubbing his lower lip, until the phone started to buzz because he hadn’t got it properly back on the hook. Then he turned to me and grinned, and said, “Well. That was our Sheila.”

  “Was she really the right one? Mr. Baba…. uh, Abel’s daughter?” The passing of weeks hadn’t made me any more comfortable around the photographer’s name.

  Rabbi Tuvim nodded. “Yes, but her married name is Olsen. Her mother died when she was practically a baby, and Abel never remarried, but raised her alone. She says he stopped working as a photographer during the Depression, when she was in her teens, because he just couldn’t make a living at it anymore. So he became a salesman for a camera-equipment company, and then he worked for Western Union, and he died just after the war.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Rats!”—which was his strongest expletive, at least around me. “We could have met him, we could have asked him…. Ach, rats!” I used to giggle in shul sometimes, suddenly imagining him saying that at the fall of Solomon’s Temple, or at the news that Sabbatai Zevi, the false Messiah, had turned Muslim.

  “The girl,” I asked. “Did she remember that girl?”

  The rabbi shook his head. “Her father worked with so many models over the years. She’s going to look through his records and call me back. One thing she did say, he preferred using amateurs when he could, and she knows that he sneaked a lot of them into the Evening assignments, even though they ordered him not to. She thinks he was likely to have kept closer track of the amateurs than the professionals, in case he got a chance to use them again, so who knows?” He shrugged slightly. “As the Arabs say, inshallah—if God wills it. Fair enough, I guess.”

  For quite some time I cherished a persistent hopeful vision of our cover girl turning out to be Sheila Olsen’s long-gone mother. But Abel Bagaybagayan had never employed his wife professionally, Sheila told us; there were plenty of photographs around the Grand Forks house, but none of the young woman Rabbi Tuvim described. And no magazine covers. Abel Bagaybagayan never saved the covers.

  All the same, Sheila Olsen plainly got drawn into the rabbi’s fixation—or, as he always called it—his hobby. They spoke on the phone frequently, considering every possibility of identifying the Evening girl; and my romantic imagination started marrying them off, exactly like the movies. I knew that she had been divorced—which was not only rare in our neighborhood then, but somehow exotic—and I figured that she had to be Rabbi Tuvim’s age, or even younger, so there we were. Their conversations, from my end, sounded less formal as time went on; and a twelve-year-old romantic who can’t convert “less formal” into “affectionate” at short notice just isn’t trying.

  No, of course it never happened, not like that. She wasn’t Jewish, for one thing, and she really liked living in North Dakota. But her curiosity, growing to enthusiasm, at last gave the rabbi someone besides me to discuss his hobby with, and fired up his intensity all over again. I wasn’t jealous; on the contrary, I felt as though we were a secret alliance of superheroes, like the Justice Society of America, on the trail of Nazi spies, or some international warlord or other. The addition of Sheila Olsen, our Grand Forks operative, made it all that much more exciting.

  I spoke to her a couple of times. The first occasion was when a call from old Mrs. Shimkus interrupted my Monday Hebrew lesson. I was always grateful when that happened, b
ut especially so in this case, since we were doing vowels, and had gotten to shva. That is all you’re going to hear from me about shva. Mrs. Shimkus was always calling, always dying, and always contributing large sums for the maintenance of the temple and scholarships for deserving high-school students. This entitled her, as the rabbi said with a touch of grimness, to her personal celestial attorney, on call at all times to file suit against the Angel of Death. “Answer the phone, if it rings. Go back to page twenty-nine, and start over from there. I’ll be back sooner than you hope, so get to it.”

  I did try. Shva and all. But I also grabbed up the telephone on the first ring, saying importantly, “Rabbi Tuvim’s residence, to whom am I speaking?”

  The connection was stuttery and staticky, but I heard a woman’s warm laughter clearly. “Oh, this has simply got to be Joseph. The rabbi’s told me all about you. Is this Joseph?”

  “All about me?” I was seriously alarmed at first; and then I asked, “Sheila? Olsen? Is this you?”

  She laughed again. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Is Rabbi Tuvim available?”