Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  “He’s visiting Mrs. Shimkus right now,” I said. “She’s dying again. But he ought to be back pretty soon.”

  “Very efficient,” Sheila Olsen said. “Well, just tell him I called back, so now it’s his turn.” She paused for a moment. “And Joseph?” I waited. “Tell him I’ve looked all through my father’s files, all of them, and come up empty every time. I’m not giving up—there are a couple of other possibilities—but just tell him it doesn’t look too good right now. Can you please do that?”

  “As soon as he gets back,” I said. “Of course I’ll tell him.” I hesitated myself, and then blurted, “And don’t worry—I’m sure you’ll find out about her. He just needs to find the lock she fits.” I explained about the rabbi’s key collection, and expected her to laugh for a third time, whether in amusement or disbelief. But instead she was silent long enough that I thought she might have hung up. Then she said quietly, “My dad would have liked your rabbi, I think.”

  Rabbi Tuvim, as he had predicted, returned sooner than I could have wished—Mrs. Shimkus having only wanted tea and sympathy—and I relayed Sheila Olsen’s message promptly. I hoped he’d call her right away, but his sense of duty took us straight back to study; and at the end of our session we were both as pale, disheveled and sweating as Hebrew vowels always left us. Before I went home, he said to me, “You know, it’s a funny thing, Joseph. Somehow I have connected that Evening model with you, in my head. I keep thinking that if I can actually teach you Hebrew, I will be allowed to find out who that girl was. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I’m not sure. But I know there’s a connection, one way or the other. There is a connection.”

  A week later the rabbi actually called me at home to tell me that Sheila Olsen had come across a second Evening with what—she was almost certain—must be the same model on the cover. “She’s already sent it, airmail special delivery, so it ought to be here day after tomorrow.” The rabbi was so excited that he was practically chattering like someone my age. “I’m sure it’s her—I took a photo of my copy and sent it to her, and she clearly thinks it’s the same girl.” He slowed down, laughing in some embarrassment at his own enthusiasm. “Listen, when you come tomorrow, if you spot me hanging around the mailbox like Valentine’s Day, just collar me and drag me inside. A rabbi should never be caught hanging around the mailbox.”

  The magazine did arrive two days later. I used my lucky nickel to call Rabbi Tuvim from school for the news. Then I ran all the way to his house, not even bothering to drop my books off at home. The rabbi was in his little kitchen, snatching an absent-minded meal of hot dogs and baked beans, which was his idea of a dish suitable for any occasion.

  The Evening was on a chair, across from him. I grabbed it up and stared at the cover, which was an outdoor scene, showing well-dressed people dining under a striped awning on a summer evening. It was a particularly busy photograph—a lot of tables, a lot of diners, a lot of natty waiters coming and going—and you had to look closely and attentively to find the one person we were looking for. She was off to the right, near the edge of the awning, her bright face looking straight into the camera, her eyes somehow catching and holding the twilight, even as it faded. There were others seated at her table; but, just as with the first cover photo, her presence dimmed them, as though the shot had always been a single portrait of her, with everyone else added in afterward.

  But it was just this that was, in a vague, indeterminate way, perturbing the rabbi, making him look far less triumphant and vindicated than I had expected. I was the one who kept saying, “That’s her, that’s her! We were right—we found her!”

  “Right about what, Joseph?” Rabbi Tuvim said softly. “And what have we found?”

  I stared at him. He said, “There’s something very strange about all this. Think—Abel Bagaybagayan kept very precise records of every model he used, no matter if he only photographed him or her once. Sheila’s told me. For each one, name, address, telephone number, and his own special filing system, listing the date, the magazine, the occasion, and a snapshot of that person, always. But not this one.” He put his finger on the face we had sought for so long. “Not this one girl, out of all those photographs. Two magazine covers, but no record, no picture—nothing. Why is that, Detective Yossele? Why on earth would that be?”

  His tone was as playful as when he asked me some Talmudic riddle, or invited me to work a noun suffix out for myself, but his face was serious, and his blue eyes looked heavy and sad. I really wanted to help him. I said, “She was special to him, some way. You can see that in the photos.” Rabbi Tuvim nodded, though neither he nor I could ever have explained what we meant by seeing. “So maybe he wanted to keep her separate, you know? Sort of to keep her for himself, that could be it. I mean, he’d always know where she was, and what she looked like—he’d never have to go look her up in his files, right? That could be it, couldn’t it?” I tried to read his face for a reaction to my reasoning. I said, “Kind of makes sense to me, anyway.”

  “Yes,” the rabbi said slowly. “Yes, of course it makes sense, it’s very good thinking, Joseph. But it is human thinking, it is human sense, and I’m just not sure….” His voice trailed away into a mumble as he leaned his chin into his fist. I reached to move the plate of baked beans out of range, but I was a little late.

  “What?” I asked. “You mean she could be some kind of Martian, an alien in disguise?” I was joking, but these were the last days of the pulp science-fiction magazines (and the pulp Westerns, and romances, and detective stories), and I read them all, as the rabbi knew. He laughed then, which made me feel better.

  “No, I didn’t mean that.” He sighed. “I don’t know what I meant, forget it. Let’s go into the living room and work on your speech.”

  “I came to see the magazine,” I protested. “I wasn’t coming for a lesson.”

  “Well, how lucky for you that I’m free just now,” the rabbi said. “Get in there.” And, trapped and outraged, I went.

  So now we had two photographs featuring our mystery model, and were no closer than we’d ever been to identifying her. Sheila Olsen, as completely caught up in the quest as we two by now, contacted every one of her father’s colleagues, employers, and old studio buddies that she could reach, and set them all to rummaging through their own files, on the off-chance that one or another of them might have worked with Abel Bagaybagayan’s girl twenty or thirty years before. (We were all three calling her that by now, though more in our minds than aloud, I think: “Abel’s girl.”) Rabbi Tuvim didn’t hold much hope for that course, though. “She didn’t work with anyone else,” he said. “Just him. I know this.” And for all anyone could prove otherwise, she never had.

  My birthday and my Bar Mitzvah were coming on together like a freight train in the old movies, where you see the smoke first, rising away around the bend, and then you hear the wheels and the whistle, and finally you see the train barreling along. Rabbi Tuvim and I were both tied to the track, and I don’t know whether he had nightmares about it all, but I surely did. There was no rescue in sight, either, no cowboy hero racing the train on the great horse Silver or Trigger or Champion, leaping from the saddle to cut us free at the last split-second. My parents had shot the works on the hall, the catering, the invitations, the newspaper notice, and the party afterward (the music to be provided by Herbie Kaufman and his Bel-Air Combo). We’d already had the rehearsal—a complete disaster, but at least the photographs got taken—and there was no more chance even of postponing than there would have been of that train stopping on a dime. Remembering it now, my nightmares were always much more about the rabbi’s embarrassment than my own. He had tried so hard to reconcile Hebrew and me to one another; it wasn’t his fault that we loathed each other on sight. I felt terrible for him.

  A week before the Bar Mitzvah, Sheila Olsen called. We were in full panic mode by now, with me coming to the rabbi’s house every day after school, and he himself dropping most of his normal duties to concentrate less on te
aching me the passage of Torah that I would read and comment on, but on keeping me from running away to sea and calling home from Pago Pago, where nobody gets Bar Mitzvahed. When the phone rang, Rabbi Tuvim picked it up, signed to me to keep working from the text, and walked away with it to the end of the cord. Entirely pointless, since the cord only went a few feet, it was still a request for privacy, and I tried to respect it. I did try.

  “What?” the rabbi said loudly. “You found what? Slow down, Sheila, I’m having trouble…. When? You’re coming…. Sheila, slow down!…. So how come you can’t just tell me on the phone? Wait a minute, I’m not understanding—you’re sure?” And after that he was silent for a long time, just listening. When he saw that that was all I was doing too, he waved me sternly back to my studies. I bent my head earnestly over the book, pretending to be working, while he tried to squeeze a few more inches out of that phone cord. Both of us failed.

  Finally the rabbi said wearily, “I do not have a car, I can’t pick you up. You’ll have to…. oh, okay, if you don’t mind taking a cab. Okay, then, I will see you tomorrow…. What? Yes, yes, Joseph will be here…. yes—goodbye, Sheila. Goodbye.”

  He hung up, looked at me, and said “Oy.”

  It was a profound oy, an oy of stature and dignity, an oy from the heart. I waited. Rabbi Tuvim said, “She’s coming here tomorrow. Sheila Olsen.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Wow.” Then I said, “Why?”

  “She’s found another picture. Abel’s girl. Only this one she says she can’t send us—she can’t even tell me about it. She just has to get on a plane and come straight here to show us.” The rabbi sat down and sighed. “It’s not exactly the best time.”

  I said, “Wow,” for a third time. “That’s wonderful.” Then I remembered I was Detective Yossele, and tried to act the part. I asked, “How did she sound?”

  “It’s hard to say. She was talking so fast.” The rabbi thought for a while. “As though she wanted to tell me what she had discovered, really wanted to—maybe to share it, maybe just to get rid of it, I don’t know. But she couldn’t do it. Every time she tried, the words seemed to stick in her throat, like Macbeth’s amen.” He read my blank expression and sighed again. “Maybe they’ll have you reading Shakespeare next year. You’ll like Shakespeare.”

  In spite of that freight train of a Bar Mitzvah bearing down on us, neither the rabbi nor I were worth much for the rest of the day. We never exactly quit on the Torah, but we kept drifting to a halt in the middle of work, speculating more or less silently on what could possibly set a woman we’d never met flying from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to tell us in person what she had learned about her father and his mysterious model. Rabbi Tuvim finally said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have to drink a gallon of chamomile tea if I’m to get any sleep tonight. What do you do when you can’t sleep, Joseph?”

  He always asked me questions as though we were the same age. I said, “I guess I listen to the radio. Baseball games.”

  “Too exciting for me,” the rabbi said. “I’ll stick with the tea. Go home. She won’t be here until your school lets out.” I was at the door when he called after me, “And bring both of your notebooks, I made up a test for you.” He never gave up, that man. Not on Abel Bagaybagayan, not on me.

  Sheila Olsen and I arrived at Rabbi Tuvim’s house almost together. I had just rung the doorbell when her cab pulled around the corner, and the rabbi opened the door as she was getting out. She was a pleasant-faced blonde woman, a little plump, running more to the Alice Faye side than Lauren Bacall, and I sighed inwardly to think that only a year before she would have been my ideal. The rabbi—dressed, I noticed, in his second-best suit, the one he wore for all other occasions than the High Holidays—opened the door and said, “Sheila Olsen, I presume?”

  “Rabbi Sidney Tuvim,” she answered as they shook hands. To me, standing awkwardly one step above her, she said, “And you could only be Joseph Makovsky.” The rabbi stepped back to usher us in ahead of him.

  Sheila—somehow, after our phone conversations, it was impossible to think of her as Mrs. Olsen—was carrying a large purse and a small overnight bag, which she set down near the kitchen door. “Don’t panic, I’m not moving in. I’ve got a hotel reservation right at the airport, and I’ll fly home day after tomorrow. But at the moment I require—no, I request—a glass of wine. Jews are like Armenians, bless them, they’ve always got wine in the house.” She wrinkled her nose and added, “Unlike Lutherans.”

  The rabbi smiled. “You wouldn’t like our wine. We just drink it on Shabbos. Once a week, believe me, that’s enough. I can do better.”

  He went into the kitchen and I stared after him, vaguely jealous, never having seen him quite like this. Not flirtatious, I don’t mean that; he wouldn’t have known how to be flirtatious on purpose. But he wasn’t my age now. Suddenly he was an adult, a grownup, with that elusive but familiar tone in his voice that marked grownups talking to other grownups in the presence of children. Sheila Olsen regarded me with a certain shrewd friendliness in her small, wide-set brown eyes.

  “You’re going to be thirteen in a week,” she said. “The rabbi told me.” I nodded stiffly. “You’ll hate it, everybody does. Boy or girl, it doesn’t make any difference—everybody hates thirteen. I remember.”

  “It’s supposed to be like a borderline for us,” I said. “Between being a kid and being a man. Or a woman, I guess.”

  “But that’s just the time when you don’t know what the hell you are, excuse my French,” Sheila Olsen said harshly. “Or who you are, or even if you are. You couldn’t pay me to be thirteen again, I’ll tell you. You could not pay me.”

  She laughed then, and patted my hand. “I’m sorry, Joseph, don’t listen to me. I just have…. associations with thirteen.” Rabbi Tuvim was coming back into the room, holding a small tray bearing three drinks in cocktail glasses I didn’t know he had. Sheila Olsen raised her voice slightly. “I was just telling Joseph not to worry—once he makes it through thirteen, it’s all downhill from there. Wasn’t it that way for you?”

  The rabbi raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as though I never did get through thirteen myself.” He handed her her drink, and gave me a glass of cocoa cream, which is a soft drink you can’t get anymore. I was crazy about cocoa cream that year. I liked to mix it with milk.

  The third glass, by its color, unmistakably contained Concord grape wine, and Sheila Olsen’s eyebrows went up further than his. “I thought you couldn’t stand Jewish wine.”

  “I can’t,” the rabbi answered gravely. “L’chaim.”

  Sheila Olsen lifted her glass and said something that must have been the Armenian counterpart of “To life.” They both looked at me, and I blurted out the first toast that came into my head. “Past the teeth, over the gums / Look out, gizzard—here she comes!” My father always said that, late in the evening, with friends over.

  We drank. Sheila Olsen said to the rabbi, clearly in some surprise, “You make a mean G&T.”

  “And you are stalling,” Rabbi Tuvim said. “You come all this way from Grand Forks because you have found something connecting your father and that cover girl we’re all obsessed with—and now you’re here, you’ll talk about anything but her.” He smiled at her again, but this time it was like the way he smiled at me when I’d try in every way I knew to divert him from haftarah and get him talking about the Dodgers’ chances of overtaking the St. Louis Cardinals. For just that moment, then, we were all the same age, motionless in time.

  I wasn’t any more perceptive than any average twelve-year-old, but I saw a kind of grudging sadness in Sheila Olsen’s eyes that had nothing in common with the dryly cheerful voice on the phone from North Dakota. Sheila Olsen said, “You’re perfectly right. Of course I’m stalling.” She reached into her purse and took out a large manila envelope. It had a red string on the flap that you wound around a dime-sized red anchor to hold it closed. “Okay,” she said. “Look what
I found in my father’s safety-deposit box yesterday.”

  It was a black-and-white photograph, clipped to a large rectangle of cardboard, like the kind that comes back from the laundry with your folded shirt. The photo had the sepia tint and scalloped edges that I knew meant that it was likely to be older than I was. And it was a picture of a dead baby.

  I didn’t know it was dead at first. I hadn’t seen death then, ever, and I thought the baby was sleeping, dressed in a kind of nightgown with feet, like Swee’Pea, and tucked into a little bed that could almost have fitted into a dollhouse. I don’t know how or when I realized the truth. Sheila Olsen said, “My sister.”

  Rabbi Tuvim had no more to say than I did. We just stared at her. Sheila Olsen went on, “I never knew about her until yesterday. She was stillborn.”

  I was the one who mumbled, “I’m sorry.” The rabbi didn’t bother with words, but came over to Sheila Olsen and put his arm around her. She didn’t cry; if there is one sound I know to this day, it’s the sound people make who are not going to cry, not going to cry. She put her head on the rabbi’s shoulder and closed her eyes, but she didn’t cry. I’m her witness.

  When she could talk, she said in a different voice, “Turn it over.”

  There was a card clipped to the back of the mounting board, and there was very neat, dark handwriting on it that looked almost like printing. Rabbi Tuvim read it aloud.

  “Eleanor Araxia Bagaybagayan.

  Born: 24 February 1907

  Died: 24 February 1907

  Length: 13½ inches

  Weight: 5 lbs., 9 oz.

  We planned to call her Anoush.”

  Below that, there was a space, and then the precise writing gave way to a strange scrawl: clearly the same hand, but looking somehow shrunken and warped, as though the words had been left out in the rain. The rabbi squinted at it over his glasses, and went on reading:

  “She has been dead for years—she never lived—how can she be invading my pictures? I take a shot of men coming to work at a factory—when I develop it, there she is, a little girl eating an apple, watching the men go by. I photograph a train—she has her nose against a window in the sleeping car. It is her, I know her, how could I not know her? When I take pictures of young women at outdoor dinner parties—”