The Rules of Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  PART FIVE

  Gravity

  It came on the wind, the way wicked things must, for they are most often weighted down with spite and haven’t the strength to lift themselves. On the first day of December 1969, the lottery was held. Men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six would be drafted to fight in Vietnam according to their birth dates. Lives were interrupted and fortunes were exchanged. A cold drizzle hung down and flurries of snow fell in swirls. There were no stones thrown or drownings, no pillories or burnings. Those chosen were computerized, their fates picked at random.

  Life went on despite the lottery: traffic headed down Broadway, men and women showed up for work, children went to play. The world breathed and sighed and people fell in love and got married and fell out of love and never spoke to one another again. Still the numbers drawn had the weight of ruin and sorrow; they turned young men old in an instant. A breath in and a man was chosen to walk on a path he’d never expected to take. A breath out and he must make the decision of a lifetime. Some would leave the country, some went to jail, some were ready to take up arms and die for the country they loved despite the heartbreak of leaving families and friends. All were torn apart. It was said that fate could not be altered, except by one thing, and that was war.

  Because Vincent was born on the fourteenth of September, his was the first number drawn, the 258th day of the year. He was in a bar on the Lower East Side when it happened, a no-name place for lost men where the drinks were cheap and the company was rough. He hadn’t wanted to be with William or his sisters on this day and see their shock and fear because he knew this would happen. He’d always known this was to be his lot, and he’d wanted to be alone when they called his number. He’d seen his fate when he was fourteen and had been foolish enough to gaze into the black mirror in the garden shed. His aunt had warned him not to look, but he’d wanted to know what his future held, and then, like anyone who can see what will be, he regretted his actions. Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and the choices one will have to make are a burden, too heavy for most to know before their time comes.

  He came home plastered, nearly unconscious, dragged to the front door by two somewhat less drunken men, who had decided to help when Vincent was booted onto the street. They were veterans and they pitied him the war of his time. Theirs had been terrible, but it had also been just and worth fighting. Franny gave them each a five-dollar bill, thanked them, and let Vincent sleep it off in the parlor. He looked cold and alone, his skin a faint blue color. The next step after being called up would be an order for a physical, and then, if he passed, induction by May of that same year.

  Franny had little choice. After all this time, Haylin was still the only one to whom she could turn. She took a cab uptown, to Beth Israel, in a frantic state, urging the taxi driver to go faster, not caring as he skidded through changing stoplights.

  “You’re going to get us killed, lady!” the driver cried.

  Feeling guilty that she’d placed him in peril, Franny tipped the driver twenty dollars when he got her to the hospital in no time flat. In admissions she got the runaround until a nurse found her pacing outside the ER searching for Dr. Walker. Franny was clearly so distressed that the nurse pulled her aside in the corridor.

  “He’s not here anymore, honey.”

  The nurse handed Franny a tissue, for she clearly thought that tears were to come. “He did what a lot of our young interns and residents are doing. He joined the navy as a doctor in order not to be drafted.”

  “What does his wife have to say about that?” Franny asked. Emily Flood. She could call up her image in an instant, so cheerful and friendly and so damned good-natured.

  “The doctor’s not married,” the nurse informed her.

  “Yes he is,” Franny insisted.

  “I filed his records from personnel. Trust me, there’s no wife.”

  Franny called from a pay phone. He was not in, the housekeeper said, but she could take a message.

  “Tell him it’s urgent,” Franny pleaded, leaving her phone number and address. “I have to see him. Do you understand what urgent means?”

  “I do,” the housekeeper responded. “It means you want what you want.”

  Which was true, but for good reason. Franny went home and waited by the phone. When Jet came in with tea, Franny said simply, “We won’t let him go.”

  “Of course not,” Jet said.

  At dusk there was a knock at the door. The sisters exchanged a look. They knew who it was.

  “He’ll help you,” Jet said. “All you have to do is let him.”

  An icy drizzle was falling, but Haylin stood there without a hat or an umbrella. Franny threw open the door so swiftly she startled him, even though he was the one who had come to call. Harry had trotted after her and he now guarded the threshold protectively.

  “May I come in?”

  Hay was formal and he did not move to embrace her. It had been a long time, after all, and their last parting had been awful. When Franny nodded, he entered the vestibule and stomped the rain from his shoes, then took off his wet rain gear. Under his coat he was wearing a navy uniform. Stunned, Franny took a step backward. She knew he had joined up, yet the sheer reality that he was in the armed services threw her. The Hay she’d known would have fled to Canada, chained himself outside the Pentagon, perhaps even gone to jail. But this was a grown man before her, a doctor, and one she barely knew.

  “Don’t say how could you,” he said when he saw her expression. “It’s the better option. Better than being drafted at any rate. I go as a doctor, and maybe I get to do some good.”

  They went into the kitchen and Franny made her own recipe for Courage Tea, which they both needed.

  “You didn’t marry her,” Franny said in as offhand a manner as she could manage. Color was rising in her face, but she forced herself to sound calm. “That Emily.”

  Hay shrugged it off. “That Emily didn’t deserve marrying someone who didn’t love her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry about her. She married someone else. Someone better.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Do you want to discuss love and marriage? Is that why you phoned after all this time? Your message said it was urgent.”

  “I don’t mind if I have to beg for your help if that’s the way things are between us,” she said. Then she added, “Do you want a slice of chocolate cake?” She had made it that very morning and the scent was intoxicating. They both felt mildly drunk just from the smell.

  Hay laughed. “So it’s the kind of help that needs a bribe. Just tell me, Franny.”

  “It’s Vincent. He was the first number in the lottery.”

  “Shit.”

  “Of course he can’t go.”

  “Thousands of men are doing exactly that, Franny.”

  “Not Vincent. It would break him.”

  “Is he so different from everyone else?”

  “Yes,” Franny said. She thought of the day the nurse had tried to kidnap him. How quiet he had been when he’d been found, how wide his eyes were. That was the first night she sat by his bedside, keeping watch.

  “Because he’s a homosexual? Plenty of homosexuals serve this country, they’re braver than most.”

  Franny was taken aback.

  “Of course I know,” Hay said. “How could I not? You knew, so I knew, too. There was a time when I always knew what you thought. Or at least I believed I did.”

  “So you’re a mind reader?”

  “I’m a navy doctor with no power to help him.”

  “Well, that is not the reason he can’t serve. Vincent cannot do harm to another. It’s out of the question.” It was the very first rule of magic. “And if he goes he won’t come back.” Anyone with sight could tell that her brother was a man whose fate was a brief life. “You can help him, and I know how. If there was any other way, I wouldn’t ask.”

  “Will I wind up in jail if I
do what you ask?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so? That’s rich. This is the way it always is. Do you care about me at all or am I just some pawn?”

  She cried then, hands over her eyes.

  “Not that,” he said, taking little comfort in how agitated she had become. She so rarely wept. “All right, fine. I’ll dive in. I’ll drown if that’s what you want.”

  She went to sit in his lap. She didn’t care if she was supposed to stay away.

  “Franny,” he groaned, as if in pain. “Let’s not start this all over again.”

  “You’re still angry because I didn’t go after you into the pond. Because I wouldn’t steal you away from your engagement party.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said pointedly. “I’m likely going to wind up in jail doing whatever you want me to, so let’s not talk about the damned pond.”

  “I want to explain! I physically can’t go underwater. I can’t be drowned. None of my family can, not unless they fill our boots with stones.”

  Hay laughed. “You’re all witches?”

  He likely didn’t believe anything she’d told him, but still he kissed her and told her he didn’t care if they were witches or warlocks or zombies or Republicans. He was a rational man, a doctor, ready to throw his life and career away for her, so what did it matter? They were entitled to do as they pleased, at least in bed. Eyes brimming, she now told him that what they did mattered greatly, for her family was afflicted and whomever they loved would be brought to ruin unless she could figure a way to break the curse.

  “Is that why you were always running away?” Hay was moved to see her distress. “You should have told me, Franny. I have the answer. We’ll trick the curse. We won’t marry and we won’t live together. We’ll never speak of love. That’s how we’ll fight it. We’ll just outwit the damned thing. We’ll never say the word love aloud. We’ll never think or breathe it. If we do that, nothing can get in the way.” He shrugged then. “Well, almost nothing.”

  They went upstairs to her room. Haylin took his deployment orders from his inner coat pocket before he got undressed. He would be leaving for Germany in a few weeks. His specialty was surgery, and there, where the worst of the wounded would be airlifted from Vietnam, he would get his share of practice.

  Once in bed Franny knew that, despite the curse, she could no longer fight what she felt even if she never spoke of it aloud. She thought of one morning at Aunt Isabelle’s when she’d gone into the garden alone. The air was still and dark, the light just beginning to lift in the east. There was the rabbit in the grass. Franny went as close as she could to lay down a saucer of milk. I will never be you, she insisted. I won’t pretend to be something I’m not. At last it was true. It felt grand to be herself, a woman who knew how to love someone. They would simply pretend, to everyone except one another. Franny whispered to Haylin all that she ever was and had been. She told him that she had always known what the future would be, and he said that if what she said was true, then she should have known a very long time ago that this was meant to be.

  All that winter Vincent refused to tell William the date of his induction. He didn’t want an emotional scene, so he began pulling back. He took to leaving Charles Street right after sex. He didn’t speak much. He often looked out into the street as if memorizing the view, in case he should never see it again. He did not wish to fight in a war he considered to be unfair. He was not a warrior and he hadn’t the skills to be a soldier.

  “Are you angry with me?” William wanted to know.

  “Of course not.” But Vincent sounded angry even to himself. Angry to be in this situation where he felt he was a traitor with no courage at all.

  He began to slowly move his belongings out of William’s apartment. Each evening he went through the dresser where he kept his clothes and took a few shirts, a pair of jeans, some socks. He took a coffeepot, a hairbrush, his dog’s water bowl.

  “Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?” William asked.

  “I’m getting rid of things I don’t need. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “You’re getting ready to leave. I can tell when a man is in denial. I grew up with one. I’m an expert. You won’t even stay the night anymore. You’re thinking of leaving me.”

  Vincent leaned to kiss William, who backed away.

  “You don’t trust me,” Vincent said.

  “You have that so wrong,” William remarked. “It’s you who doesn’t trust me.”

  Vincent refused to discuss the situation any further. He would not allow William to be shattered by sorrow that belonged to him alone. Was this the curse, succeeding at last in breaking him? He went down to the Lower East Side, returning to the building where he’d once set up shop. He had The Magus with him, tucked inside his coat. It was as if he had two beating hearts, one his own, the other belonging to the book. All this time, the book had been his closest companion. He hadn’t really needed anyone since the day he had found it, until now. Back in the abandoned apartment covered with graffiti, he brought from his shirt pocket the photograph William had taken of them when they were first together. Some love magic was brutal and quick and didn’t give the other person a choice in the matter. It was dark and irrevocable, but in Vincent’s opinion it was for the best if it would save his beloved from pain and grief. He tore William out of the picture. He had brought along the ingredients necessary to undo their attraction. His own blood, black paint, pins, a bird’s broken wing, a thin strand of lead. He could fix it so that William would never even see him. It was emotional camouflage. Whom you had loved, you would no longer recognize. He would not know his voice, his touch, their history. Without knowing why, William would throw out anything that might remind him of Vincent, letters he’d written, the tape of “I Walk at Night.” He would open a book Vincent had given him and not know where it had come from. He would toss out the second pillow on the bed.

  But when Vincent imagined William no longer knowing him he found he could not proceed. What would he feel when they walked past each other on Bleecker Street and William gazed at him as though he were a stranger? What was this world without love?

  As Vincent passed a sewer he tossed the magical ingredients down through the grate into the watery depths below the city. Then he took out the book that had been with him since he was fourteen. He went to Washington Square and left The Magus on a bench for the next person in need to find. It was wrenching to do this. He had so treasured the book; it had spoken to the darkness inside him, it had been his true voice when he’d had none. But that time was over, and what magic there was, was inside him.

  Know yourself, Aunt Isabelle had told him. They had stood in the garden when he had been so lost. He hadn’t known how to reach the surface, all he knew was that he was drowning. Yet on the morning when his aunt tested him, he had chosen courage. So he walked on, to Charles Street, where William was waiting for him in his apartment, which overlooked the green plane trees and open sky right in the center of a city where anything was possible for those who were not afraid to try.

  Before his appearance at Whitehall Street, Vincent called his sisters into the kitchen. “There’s something I need to say in case anything happens to me.”

  “It won’t,” Jet assured him. “You’ll be fine.”

  “But if something does happen,” Vincent went on, “you should know about me and April.”

  Franny furrowed her brow. “Did you have an argument? I didn’t even know you were in touch with her.”

  “No one can argue with April. She’s always right.” He paused. “We’re in touch on and off. We have to be.” When Franny gave him a look, he added, “Jet knows what I’m talking about.”

  “Does she really?” Franny said, annoyed at having been left out. “She no longer has the sight, so you must have confided in her.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Jet was quick to say.

  “I didn’t confide in her,” Vincent told Fr
anny. “April did. It happened the summer we first went to Aunt Isabelle’s. When I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. For a brief moment I thought I wanted April.”

  “Seriously?” Franny shook her head. “That’s hard to picture.”

  “Well, picture that it ended up with Regina.”

  Franny was stunned. “Really?” She looked over at Jet.

  “Really,” Jet said.

  “Well, I think that’s wonderful,” Franny concluded. “That’s a gift. I thought you were going to tell us something terrible, but this is actually good news. I dislike children, but I liked her. I still have her drawing.”

  “Franny, I’m telling you about this now in case the worst comes to pass. April and I decided that if we should both die early, we want Regina to be with you.”

  Franny wouldn’t hear of it. “That’s a mistake. I wouldn’t be a good influence. Neither of us would be, really.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Jet said primly.

  “There’s no way out of it. April and I agreed on this some time ago. You’re Regina’s godmothers. You’ll be her guardians.”

  They sat at the table and he brought forth the legal papers he’d had the family lawyer, Jonas Hardy, draw up. He’d already sent the document to April for signing, and now the sisters signed as well.

  “This is all very official,” Franny said. “I happen to have something official as well, thanks to Haylin.”

  She handed Vincent a note that he then scanned.