The Rules of Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  Madame Durant was the one who made the funeral arrangements, acting swiftly so no questions would be asked. She had placed a very old disappearing spell over Vincent as he’d lain prone. L’homme invisible. From that moment on no one would ever figure out the private details of his life. All the same, the newspapers were filled with reports of his strange death. There were insinuations, with some convinced he had taken his own life and others vowing there had been foul play. A small vigil had begun outside the hotel where he had stayed in the Marais, with flowers deposited in a fragrant muddy pile and white candles lit so that wax flowed into the gutter. The radio stations played “I Walk at Night” and people who didn’t know Vincent’s name found themselves singing the lyrics as they walked home from work.

  The burial was at Père-Lachaise, the cemetery opened by Napoleon in 1804. Jet and Franny’s plane was hours late, delayed by a storm in New York. William had traveled with them, wearing a black suit, carrying only a leather backpack. He spoke very little, and seemed so distant the sisters wondered if because he had the sight he had known this was to be his fate all along, to be traveling to France for a funeral.

  They took a taxi to the main entrance of the cemetery on Boulevard de Ménilmontant, with William telling the driver that if he ignored stoplights they would pay him double his fare.

  “We must be there,” William said.

  “We will,” Jet assured him.

  Franny simply stared out the window. She had barely spoken since the news had come. She was meant to protect him, and she had failed. Her plans had gone awry, and now he was lost to them. Once at the cemetery, they had soon become disoriented among the angels and monuments until a young man sent by Agnes Durant to search for the missing Americans guided them to the freshly turned grave.

  “It can be very confusing here,” the young man said, as he led them down the gravel paths.

  “Yes,” the sisters agreed. They had never been more confused in their lives. Why did their thoughts become blurry when they tried to think of their brother?

  “This place is very old, and there are so many dead people,” explained their guide, who dressed much as Vincent might have, in a dark coat, with black Levi’s from America and suede boots.

  For Vincent to have had a heart attack at such a young age was unthinkable, but such was the doctor’s report. The sisters could not conceive of a world in which he was gone. They had decided to wear white dresses that Jet had found in the resale shop next to the Chelsea Hotel. They refused to wear black on this day. It was only now that Franny realized what Jet had chosen.

  “These are wedding dresses!” she whispered, annoyed.

  “You said white. These were all they had on the rack,” Jet said apologetically.

  Though it was November and chilly, they slipped off their shoes out of respect. The other guests were friends of Agnes’s and, as it turned out, of their mother’s. The brevity of the service was fitting. Vincent did not like an excess of emotion, unless it was real love, and then nothing was too much. Agnes hugged the sisters, then kissed William twice. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said to him warmly. “I’ve heard so much about you and now here you are.”

  The mourners went to a restaurant nearby for a light dinner. The place was small, lit by candles even in the daylight hours, decorated with trompe l’oeil wallpaper and velvet couches to sit on while they dined.

  “Susanna and I came here often when we were young,” Agnes Durant said. “And we often went to the cafés in the Tuileries, where I first met Vincent. Susanna and I looked so alike people thought we were sisters.”

  “Well, we look nothing alike and we are sisters,” Jet said, taking Franny’s hand in hers. She felt as though they had somehow lost Vincent to this stranger who gazed at them with curious dark eyes.

  “I only meant, I feel that I’m family to you,” Madame Durant said, trying to soothe Jet’s ruffled feathers.

  “Thank you,” Franny said. “Please understand we have lost an actual member of our family.”

  “Of course. I would never intrude. I have your best interests at heart.”

  Franny found that difficult to believe but she was distracted by the presentation of their supper, which included hors d’oeuvres of oysters and cheeses. The restaurant owner had a little dachshund that lounged on one of the velvet couches.

  It was only then Franny realized that William wasn’t among them. She imagined he was still at the cemetery, unwilling to leave his beloved. How horrid they had forgotten him in his hour of need.

  “I’ll be right back,” Franny told Jet as she dashed out, hoping she would find her way back to the burial site. The hour was late and night was falling. She felt panic rising in the back of her throat as she darted along the streets in the evening light, finally finding the pedestrian gate of the cemetery at Porte du Respos and hurrying inside.

  There was ice on the paths and her breath came out in cold puffs and the white dress was much too sheer and flimsy for the chill of the day. Gravediggers were flinging clods of earth over the open grave. Franny stopped. Her heart felt too heavy for her chest.

  There was the shadow of a tall man.

  “William!” she called, but if it was he, he did not respond.

  Franny held one hand over her eyes as the sun went down, and the orange light made it difficult to see. The leaves on the trees were rustling and swirls of earth rose up from the ground.

  “Is it you?” Franny cried.

  She couldn’t tell if she saw one man’s shadow or two. And then she knew. She felt her brother near, just as she had when they played hide-and-seek in the basement and their mother could never find them. She followed the path, but the orange light was blinding, and she bumped into a woman bringing flowers to a grave and had to apologize. She didn’t realize that she was crying until she spoke to the other mourner. Her apology was accepted with a shrug, and then she was alone. She stopped and watched as the light grew darker and the shadows longer, and then, when it was clear she would not find her way, she returned the way she’d come.

  She went back to the restaurant, arriving as Haylin was getting out of a taxi. He’d flown from Frankfurt, where he’d been stationed, and now he embraced Franny on the sidewalk. He kissed her and could not stop. It was Paris so no one looked at them twice.

  “I should have been here sooner,” he said.

  “You’re here now.” Franny seemed more in shock than grief-stricken.

  She barely spoke that evening. As the dinner was ending, with aperitifs and small cakes, Franny went to Agnes and asked if she could call on her the next day. “I want to thank you and perhaps get to know you better, as my mother did. I was rude before, and I apologize.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Agnes demurred. “I’m closing up my apartment. I really won’t have time. I’m going out to my country house.”

  “So that’s it? Vincent is gone and we don’t speak about it?”

  Agnes shrugged. “How can we understand life? It’s impossible. To the world, Vincent is dead and buried. Let’s leave it that way, my dear.”

  “And we don’t speak of William either? I’m not even sure where he is. What do I do when his father calls me and asks where he is?”

  “William is where he wants to be. How many among us can lay claim to that?”

  Franny rushed back to the hotel and Jet’s room.

  “William lied to us,” she told her sister. “He let us go through that charade of a funeral. All the while, that Madame Durant had placed a disappearing spell on Vincent so we wouldn’t know the truth. He’s alive, Jetty.”

  “If William lied, he did it for Vincent. You knew we were going to lose him. I suppose this was the best way.”

  “To make us think he had died?” Even for a few hours it had been horrible.

  “He has died. For us. And we must keep it that way if we want him to be safe.”

  At the hotel, Jet was happy to leave Franny and Haylin to each other. She preferred to be alone to grieve. T
he loss of her brother affected her deeply. She went to her room and when she took off the hat she’d been wearing all day, she found that her hair had gone white all at once. It had happened at the funeral. Her best feature, her long black hair, gone. She gazed into a mirror above the bureau and spied the woman she had seen in their aunt’s black mirror. She wondered what Levi would have thought if he was with her. Perhaps he would have lain down beside her and told her she was still beautiful, even if it wasn’t true. He would have read to her from a book of poems, then perhaps planned where they would go for a drink, someplace somber, but warm, where they could sit close together. But now, without him, she had stepped into her future, and, like it or not, this was who she’d turned out to be. He was a boy, and she was now a woman who had lost nearly everyone she’d ever loved. She thought of what she’d told April once. This was what happened when you were alive. She called the desk and asked for some coffee, since she already knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Paris was too noisy, the room was too cold, the injury of losing Vincent too fresh. She did not mind being alone. She sat beside the window and wrote a postcard to Rafael. She always wrote him postcards, even when they were both in New York City, and then when they got together they would read the postcards in bed. She wished he were here with her now. Just as a friend, of course. The friend she wanted to be with more than any other.

  It had begun to rain, a thin green drizzle that made the sidewalks shine.

  Paris is sad, she wrote, but beautiful enough to make you not care about sadness.

  Franny fell asleep beside Haylin, exhausted. When she woke he was sitting on the edge of the bed watching the rain falling. They were supposed to stay away from each other, but their pact didn’t need to apply yesterday, nor today. The sky outside was thick with rain clouds. Paris was so gray in November. Wood doves were gathering on the small balcony. Franny held out her hands to them and they pecked at the glass. She wished they never had to leave this room, but they did. Haylin had told her he was being transferred to the field. He would be leaving in less than eight hours for Vietnam. They spent those eight hours in bed, telling each other they didn’t love each other; they did so for luck and to do their best to ensure they would one day see each other again.

  The sisters packed up and called a taxi. They went to the Tuileries and walked down the gravel paths. The leaves were turning brown. They had their suitcases with them, so they stopped at the first café they came to in the park. They ordered white wine, but they didn’t drink much. They were thinking about their mother when she was young, and the rules she’d made up to protect them. They had their own rules now. Franny cast a circle in the gravel beside their table. Then she took one of Lewis’s feathers that she had in her pocket. She let the feather fall. Outside the circle, and their brother was gone. But it landed inside, right in the center. Jet let out a sob. Franny reached for her hand. It was good news. He was somewhere close by, but when the feather blew away they knew the other side of the truth. He was lost to them now.

  When the sisters returned to New York, Franny took to spending the night in Vincent’s room. From here she could hear the echo of children in the school yard in the mornings. She let the crow remain inside. He was aging and he liked to perch on the desk near the heater, where he dozed in fits and starts. The dog followed Franny around, but she was a poor substitute for Vincent, and he began sleeping at the front door, waiting for his master to reappear.

  Both sisters slept uneasily upon their return, disturbed by sounds of the city, the rumble of buses, the shrill sirens, the ever-present traffic on Seventh Avenue. When Franny opened the window she found that New York City had only one scent now and it never changed. It was the sharp tang of regret. She longed for something darker and greener, for a silence that might allow her to find some peace.

  One night she dreamed that Isabelle was sitting on the window seat of the old house in Massachusetts.

  You know the answer, Isabelle said. Fate is what you make it.

  When Franny awoke, she realized she was homesick. She was at the kitchen table when Jet came downstairs. To Franny, Jet seemed even more beautiful with her white hair, for her beauty was rooted inside of her now.

  “I’m ready to go,” Franny told her sister. In fact, she had already packed up her room.

  Jet looked at her surprised. “Go where?”

  “The place we feel most at home.”

  “All right. We’ll shut down the store.”

  “I’ll call the attorney. He can manage selling this place. It was temporary for us. Now the rightful tenant can have it.”

  Jet understood her sister’s wish to leave New York. 44 Greenwich Avenue was already becoming the past as they sat there. It was disappearing in front of their eyes. It had been a home for the three of them, but they were three no longer. She thought of Vincent playing “I Walk at Night” for the first time, of April visiting with Regina and eating chocolate cake in the kitchen, of the plumber who did work for them in exchange for a love spell, and of the night when Vincent came home and told them he was in love. As for Franny, what she remembered most was standing outside on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows, knowing that lilacs grew here and that she would buy this house and that for a while they would live here and try to be happy, and, in a way, they were.

  During the course of two years Franny collected 120 letters from Haylin, all wrapped in string, kept in the bureau in the dining room. The house on Greenwich Avenue had been sold and divided into offices. A literary agent had taken the rooms on the third floor, and her desk was now in the space where Vincent’s room had been. She was a lovely woman with a beautiful smile who filled up her bookshelves along the wall where his bed had been. For a while the shop was a mystery bookstore and occasionally the owners found red thread and wishbones in unexpected places. The ramshackle greenhouse Vincent had built was pulled down and carted away, but some of the seeds scattered through the neighborhood so that foxgloves and sunflowers grew in the alleys for several seasons. They took the tilted kitchen table that had been in their family house on Eighty-Ninth Street, and they took Edgar, the stuffed heron, whom they kept in the parlor of Aunt Isabelle’s house and decorated every Yule with silver trimmings and gold tinsel.

  The sisters settled into the Owens house on Magnolia Street. It felt like home in no time. Franny took Aunt Isabelle’s room, where Lewis, now so aged his feathers had begun to turn white, nested on the bureau. Jet was happy to have the guest room where April Owens had stayed when they refused to share a room with her. The attic, where they’d spent their first summer, was a place for young girls, not for grown women who needed more comfortable beds, so they used it for storage. Harry still slept by the door, waiting for his master, while Wren kept to the garden, where she chased off rabbits and mice.

  They had an entire winter in which to restore everything that had been ignored for so long. Charlie came to clear out the gutters, cut back the vines on the porch, and deliver a cord of wood for the fireplace. He said it was grand to see people in the house again.

  “I miss your aunt,” he told the sisters. “She was one of a kind for certain.”

  On days when the sky was spitting out snow, Jet took possession of the window seat to read from one of her beloved novels. Magic came back to her slowly, like a long-forgotten dream that hovered nearby.

  Now that she lived in town, she visited the cemetery every Sunday. She walked no matter the weather. Some children called her the Daffodil Lady, because she always carried a bunch of the blooms. Sometimes the Reverend gave her a ride home, especially if it was raining hard. He was there every Sunday as well. In nice weather he brought two lawn chairs, and when the sky was overcast he brought a large black umbrella.

  They didn’t talk very much, although the Reverend noticed that Jet still wore the moonstone ring Levi had given her, and Jet saw that the Reverend kept one of Levi’s swimming medals pinned to his jacket. When they talked, they talked about the weather, as people in Massachusetts often
do.

  “Cold,” he would say.

  And she would agree with a word or two, and then one day she brought mittens she had knitted for him out of soft gray wool. The next time he brought the scarf she had made for Levi, which made her cry. She ducked her head so that the Reverend wouldn’t see, although he could tell all the same. He carried a handkerchief, and gave it to her, and gently said, “This comes in handy.”

  In the spring he handed her a new business card he’d had printed. He had gone back to work and was now a justice of the peace. He had already married six couples. He told her that one couple had phoned him in the middle of the night, desperate to marry, so he had performed the service in his living room dressed in his pajamas.

  One day he said, “Maybe you should move on with your life.”

  Jet was grateful for his kind thought. Years had passed. She still met Rafael in the city several times a year. For a while he saw another woman, and thinking he wanted a family, he was married briefly. But in the end he divorced. His wife didn’t know him the way Jet did. They could talk with each other in a way they couldn’t with anyone else, and so they began to see each other again.

  Rafael was the principal of a school in Queens and several times a year they went to the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel for old times’ sake. They often spent the night together in his apartment. Once he had suggested marriage, but Jet told him she thought it was a bad idea. It would get in the way of things. The truth was she still worried about the curse; even though she hoped such things could be broken, she didn’t want to chance its ill effects. She thought it best if Rafael was only a dear friend. He agreed to this, even though he was in love with her. He didn’t tell her so, but she knew, just as he knew what her intentions had been that night at the Plaza Hotel. They didn’t need the sight to know how one another felt.

  “I’m fine,” she told the Reverend on the day he told her to get on with her life.

  And she was. She did not discuss her grief with anyone, but she could share it with the Reverend. But then one Sunday, Jet failed to appear. The Reverend scanned the field, waiting for her to arrive, but she didn’t. It felt strange without her there, not right somehow, so he drove over to Magnolia Street and parked outside the house. He sat there in his idling car, until Franny came outside. The Reverend rolled down his window. He’d never spoken to Franny, he’d only see her walking through town in her black coat, her red hair piled on top of her head. People were afraid of her. They said she was not one to cross. Up close, she was taller than he had expected, and prettier.